RUTHFULLY YOURS

How has the tumult in the Middle East affected the debate over Israel’s territorial requirements? For an answer, Mosaic approached Dore Gold, head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who has long promoted the concept of defensible borders primarily as a means of meeting Israel’s security needs in the West Bank. Our exchange was conducted by email.

Q. Before we get to the idea of “defensible borders” itself, can you begin by telling us about your involvement in it?

A: I became immersed in this issue when I was serving as foreign-policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in the late 1990s. I was tasked with converting the IDF’s “Interests Map” for the West Bank into a form that could be presented to President Bill Clinton; I joined the prime minister for that presentation in the White House Map Room. Four years later, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked me to condense the work for his meeting in the Oval Office with President George W. Bush.

This formed the nucleus of what, starting in 2005, would become a series of monographs on the subject published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Copiously illustrated with maps and photographs, they featured essays by such prominent authors as Moshe Yaalon, now Israel’s defense minister, Yaakov Amidror, until recently Israel’s national security adviser, and Major General (ret.) Uzi Dayan. The latest edition in the series was released this year, by coincidence just prior to the Gaza war. [Mosaic linked to a number of chapters here— Eds.]

Q. What was the original idea, and has it changed at all in light of regional developments over the years?

A: The idea was first put forward by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon after the Six-Day War of 1967. As commander of the pre-state Palmah, Allon was one of the architects of Israel’s national-security doctrine, and had also been a mentor of Yitzhak Rabin. His essential point was, and is, simple enough: Israel must retain certain territories on the West Bank for its security.

Q: What about the Palestinians? That land, after all, is increasingly referred to as occupied Palestinian territory.

It’s a sign of how far America has been corrupted by political correctness, subjectivism in ethics, and relativism in the arts that a shoddy opera that romanticizes murdering terrorists can be put on by a major cultural institution, the Metropolitan Opera of New York City.

I am not an aficionado of heavy weight opera. I won’t go into my esthetic tastes here, because those are irrelevant. What is relevant is the obscenity of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera last night (October 20th), whose libretto is a long-winded, atonal propaganda piece for the Islamic jihadists who hijacked a cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger because he was a Jew. Listen to the sing-song screeching here and also a trailer.

But even the discordant singing and jumbled orchestral score are irrelevant. Even had Adams’s opus been written in the disciplined and original style of Georges Bizet or Giacomo Puccini or Giuseppe Verdi, Klinghoffer remains a sucker punch to all standards of moral decency and civilized taste.

More importantly, staging The Death of Klinghoffer is in conformance to the prescriptive steps for “cultural jihad” promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood in its 1991 memorandum for “transforming” America from a free republic into a bastion of totalitarian Islam. The Brotherhood’s “master plan” calls for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, composer John Adams, and director Tom Morris I guess don’t mind lending their hands to the PLO, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic gangs.

The Death of Klinghoffer is fundamentally a U.S. State Department and New York taxpayer-funded exercise in malodorous agitprop for anti-Semitism and Islam. John Adams and the Met may as well have staged an adaptation of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as a musical with dialogue. Better yet, he could have turned “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers into a serious, Wagnerian style opera, with no dancing and no plumbing for laughs. Why not?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/not-destroying-the-islamic-state-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie came on the show to discuss Not Destroying the Islamic State, analyzing why Obama does not really want to defeat ISIS and why we don’t see any “moderate” Muslim armies killing ISIS terrorists (starts at 14 minute mark). The dialogue was preceded by Nonie focusing on Tricking and Dividing the Muslim World, shedding light on the best strategies to confront and outsmart our enemy in the terror war.

Last August 14 the Wall Street Journal reported that, in July, after Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, Washington had surprised Israel by turning down an Israeli request for “a large number of Hellfire missiles.” Hellfires are an important air-to-surface precision weapon, suited to the kind of warfare Israel was waging against Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza.

But as Amir Rapaport, a veteran Israeli military-affairs writer and editor of the Israel Defense site, now reports:

The full truth…is much more severe: apparently, during Operation Protective Edge, the USA had completely stopped all connections with Israel’s defense procurement delegation based in the USA. For days, no item whatsoever could be shipped. The expected airlift of US ammunition had never even arrived at its point of departure.

The crisis began about ten days into Operation Protective Edge, pursuant to allegations that the percentage of uninvolved civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip was extremely high (IDF admitted that about one half of all Palestinian deaths were probably civilians who had not been involved in the fighting).

At that stage, the Israeli defense establishment submitted to the USA a request for various types of munitions, including Hellfire missiles, to replenish the dwindling inventories of IDF….

The order to stop the processing of all Israeli requests came from a senior echelon—probably the White House, among other reasons, because Israel had ignored the initiatives of Secretary of State John Kerry and preferred to end the operation through a direct channel with the Egyptians. The State Department had been annoyed with Israel for several months, since it was revealed that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had referred to Kerry as “Messianic” in closed sessions.

No less than three reasons are given here for Washington’s ire toward Israel. Regarding the first—the allegedly high Palestinian civilian casualties—an ongoing study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Center has found, so far, that the death rate was indeed about 50%-50% between Palestinian combatants and civilians. This compares favorably with ratios of three civilians killed for every one combatant in Afghanistan, and four civilians for every one combatant in Iraq and in Kosovo.

The Obama administration may be planning to issue 34 million work visas and green cards in coming weeks without the required legal authorization from Americans’ elected representatives in Congress, according to a recently uncovered government procurement order.

If 34 million individuals were amnestied the U.S. population would grow by more than a tenth. The U.S. Census Bureau currently estimates the nation’s population at a little over 319 million. There is no official count of illegal aliens present in the United States but 11 million is one widely circulated estimate. Some studies put the figure as high as 38 million.

The procurement order is a smoking gun suggesting that President Obama intends to plunge the nation into a grave constitutional crisis after Election Day by using executive orders to unilaterally enact an amnesty affecting millions of undocumented aliens now unlawfully present in the United States. The prospective amnesty could also impact aliens who have yet to arrive in the country.

Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the amnesties that Obama seeks, but the president refuses to take no for an answer, pressing on regardless of how much damage he inflicts on the country.

A large-scale amnesty would be a profoundly cynical move that would reward lawbreaking and beget future immigration amnesties. It would also spell electoral death for the Republican Party in coming years because Latinos, who are believed to comprise the bulk of the illegals, have traditionally shown a strong preference for the Democratic Party and its left-of-center public policies.

The amnesty that Obama promised his radical political base had been widely expected to take place after Labor Day last month but in the summer the president took significant political heat over the plan and the still-ongoing invasion of the southern border by illegal aliens –many of them unaccompanied minors and gang members — from Central America. Obama then apparently decided to delay the executive action until after next month’s elections in hopes of not sabotaging Democrats’ efforts to hang onto control of the U.S. Senate.

Obama’s scheme came to light when Breitbart News uncovered a draft request for proposals that appears to provide broad outlines of the president’s extra-legal amnesty scheme two weeks before congressional elections that may place both chambers of Congress in the hands of Republicans.

Oil Rigs Support Biodiversity
Ironically, it is the “green” technology of wind and solar farms that helps wipe out endangered species.

Never let it be said that Mother Nature doesn’t appreciate irony. A new study led by researchers at Occidental College and the University of California at Santa Barbara has found that the oil platforms dotting the California coast are fantastic for sea life.

In a 15-year study, researchers found that the ecosystems that build up around artificial rigs host 1,000 percent more fish and other sea life than natural habitats such as reefs and estuaries. The California rigs outstripped even famously rich ecosystems such as the coral reefs of French Polynesia.

Now, as a big fan of artificial reefs, I think this is exciting news. There are many who oppose the idea of improving on God’s — or, if you prefer, Gaia’s — design. This strikes me as crazy, given the fact that virtually all of the food we eat and the clothes we wear are the products of human innovation. When humans ran out of gazelles or bison to hunt, they had the great idea of catching a few and raising a renewable supply. When picking wild seeds and berries no longer fed the tribe, it dawned on humans to plant their own.

Fish pose a special problem, however, because many species are difficult to farm. And even when fish are adaptable to aquaculture, there are special risks and costs involved. As a result, the oceans are still being overfished, thanks in no small part to the tragedy of the commons. (Since no one owns the ocean, fishing fleets often grab as much as they can.)

According to Jeremy Claisse, the lead author of the study, the reason rigs are particularly beneficial stems from the fact that they’re so tall. A skyscraper from seafloor to surface apparently lends itself to a very rich ecosystem. The fact that it’s an oil rig is, of course, irrelevant.

The recent questionably unconstitutional moves by the Houston city council to subpoena the sermons of five area ministers, as well as internal correspondence dealing with social issues, should have the American Civil Liberties Union and everyone else who believes in free speech and religious freedom up in arms.

We as Americans must guard every aspect of our Constitution and recognize when it is being threatened. One of the great dangers in America today is extreme intolerance in the name of tolerance.

For example, in this Houston case, it is presupposed that the pastors in question may have said something that was objectionable to the homosexual community. In order to prove that we are tolerant of the homosexual lifestyle, we as a society allow gays to be intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them in any way.

Of course, gays should be able to live in any manner they choose as long as it does not infringe on the rights of anyone else. And of course, ministers should be able to preach according to the dictates of their conscience as long as they are not forcing others to listen. This concept of “live and let live” is an essential ingredient of harmonious living in a diverse society. We cannot single out the side we want to castigate for intolerance while letting the other side get away with it without comment.

Perhaps it is time for Americans to take an honest look at what it means to live peacefully in a diverse society composed of people with many different points of view. This requires true tolerance, which includes being capable of listening to people with views that might differ from yours.

Black-ish, and the never-ending “honest conversation.”

‘A long-awaited invitation to begin an honest, calm national dialogue about race,” was how the Chicago Tribune described President Barack Obama’s speech in response to the Jeremiah Wright scandal. “Can an honest conversation about race be inoffensive?” Conor Friedersdorf wondered in The Atlantic. A recent book from the University of Virginia Press promised “an honest conversation on race, reconciliation, and responsibility.” Whitney Dow, the documentarian behind “The Whiteness Project,” also desires “an honest conversation about race.” Sensing the moment with its usual acuity, the Onion reported: “Open Dialogue Two Americans Having about Race Pretty Hilarious.” In that intellectual environment, Black-ish, Kenya Barris’s new ABC sitcom — just not a sitcom but a “black sitcom,” according to Wikipedia — has about it a feeling of inevitability. And of course it raises “more serious conversations about race,” according to CNN.

Black-ish is the story of Andre Johnson Sr., a successful Los Angeles advertising executive who with his mixed-race physician wife, Rainbow, is determined to give his children all of the advantages and opportunities that he himself did not enjoy growing up, but who is worried that his family’s life of affluence and security has somehow rendered them less authentic. “I’m going to need my family to be black, not black-ish,” he declares over the dinner table at his “spectacular” Southern California home. He is unhappy that his elder son is going by “Andy” rather than “Andre” and wants to play field hockey rather than basketball, that his young twins do not identify with the only other black child in their class or even consider her blackness relevant, and that his popular elder daughter does not seem to have any sense of uniquely black identity.

There have been many moments in recent American history at which it has been undeniably obvious that black Americans and white Americans in the main inhabit separate emotional and intellectual universes. This divide is not as dramatic as the O. J. Simpson verdict or the Rodney King riots, but another brick in that wall of racial separateness is the fact that it has never occurred to me, a conservative, white, middle-aged man from Texas, to meditate for a moment on the question of whether I am living a life of sufficiently authentic whiteness. I have of course been aware that the issue is a pertinent one among black Americans, aware at least in the vague and seldom-considered way that whites tend to be aware of those things. I was skeptical about whether the premise could sustain a single episode of a sitcom, must less provide the organizing basis for a series.

If Hillary Had a Daughter She Would Look Like Monica Lewinsky By Paula Bolyard

Monica Lewinsky spoke recently to young entrepreneurs and achievers at Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Summit in Philadelphia about her sex scandal with the President of the United States and about how her life was forever altered by the experience.

Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, a 22-year-old intern in the White House — and more than averagely romantic – I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way. It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States. That probably happens less often.

Now, I deeply regret it for many reasons. Not the least of which is that people were hurt. And that’s never okay.

But back then, in 1995, we started an affair that lasted, on and off, for two years. And, at that time, it was my everything. That, I guess you could say, was the golden bubble part for me; the nice part. The nasty part was that it became public. Public with a vengeance.

Lewinsky, now 40, wrote in Vanity Fair in May that although the affair was consensual, nothing could have prepared her for the aftermath, when attacks came from seemingly every direction:

Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. . . . The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me. And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.

Monica’s bad and immoral decision – every salacious detail of it – was published on the internet:

Now, my brother – and all his fraternity brothers – were privy to my most intimate details. As were my dad and his fellow doctors. And my stepdad, and his World War 2 war buddies. My stepmom and her knitting circle. Even both my grandmothers, then in their 80s, knew about the internet. My whole family. My friends. My friends’ parents. My parents’ friends.

The Democrat mantra that voting fraud is rare takes another blow today with the stunning story of a GOP candidate unable to vote for himself in Cook County Illinois. The Illinois Political Review reports:

Admitting his confidence in Cook County ballot integrity is shaken, State Representative Candidate Jim Moynihan (R-56), was shocked today when he tried to cast a vote for himself and the voting machine cast it for his opponent instead.

“While early voting at the Schaumburg Public Library today, I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” said Moynihan. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race. It is unknown if the machine in question (#008958) has been removed from service or is still in operation.

Well, they don’t call it Crook County for no reason.