RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ministers wallop Kerry for linking stalled peace talks to rise of Islamic State
Naftali Bennett says ‘someone will always blame the Jew’; Gilad Erdan accuses US secretary of state of not understanding region

US Secretary of State John Kerry came under fire from right-wing Israeli politicians Friday after saying that the Israeli Palestinian conflict was fueling the spread of Islamic terror in the Middle East.

Economy Minister Naftali Bennett indicated that Kerry was using an anti-Semitic canard and Communications Minister Gilad Erdan accused the top US diplomat of showing an unprecedented lack of understanding of the Middle East.

Speaking at an event marking the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha at the State Department Thursday, Kerry said it was “imperative” to restart stalled Israeli-Palestinian talks, since the conflict was helping the Islamic State recruit new members.

“There wasn’t a leader I met with in the region who didn’t raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt –- and I see a lot of heads nodding –- they had to respond to,” he told gathered diplomats.

“People need to understand the connection of that. And it has something to do with humiliation and denial and absence of dignity,” he added.

Writing on Facebook, Bennett, who heads the nationalist Jewish Home party, a major coalition member, linked to an article about Kerry’s remarks, commenting in Hebrew that “Even when a British Muslim beheads a British Christian, someone will always blame the Jew.”
Gilad Erdan on July 8, 2013. (photo credit: Flash 90)

Gilad Erdan on July 8, 2013. (photo credit: Flash 90)

Likud minister Erdan, thought to be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pick to become Interior Minister, also blasted Kerry on Facebook, asking sarcastically whether anybody truly believes Islamic State fighters would put down their arms if Israeli-Palestinian talks were restarted.

We worry what people are being taught in madrassas and mosques. We should also be worried what people are being taught at Harvard and Yale.

On TV, Joe College was stopped on some campus. He was asked what year was it when Columbus discovered America. This took some thinking. Hmmm.

“1942?” he guessed.

“Right,” shrugged the what-the-heck interviewer.

We laugh. But this is not funny. On the Harvard campus students were asked their views on America. They responded that the United States is responsible for more terrorism than ISIS. This type of spiteful ignorance may not be typical. But it is not unusual, either. These are voters, or soon to be voters.

Their older brothers and sisters likely voted already…which is why we have Obama…and why soon we will have Hillary…and why we are doomed.

The United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP] not only managed to halve the Conservative vote, but also the Labour Vote and the Liberal Democrat vote.

UKIP stands for small government, low taxes, and preservation of Britain’s identity and sovereignty, values that appeal to Conservative voters; and it wants to pull the United Kingdom out of the European Union. UKIP also stands for strong policies on law and order and immigration, which appeal to the traditional old Labour heartlands.

Strategically, to pick up Labour votes, UKIP would need to move to the left, but examples in France, Switzerland, Denmark and Geert Wilders’s PVV in the Netherlands, show that it is possible to attract voters from both the left and the right.

Last Thursday, the United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP] won its first ever seat in the British House of Commons. For years, UKIP, led by the flamboyant Nigel Farage, has been a major party among the British contingent in the European Parliament, but winning a seat in the British national parliament had so far never succeeded.

Democratic evolution in China was being seriously considered. The failures of U.S. support for democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Libya gave new food for thought to those opposed to democracy. Lastly, the United States did not strongly oppose the anti-democratic coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected government in Thailand.

On the other hand, Russia — dominated by Vladimir Putin, a new autocrat determined to stifle democracy in Russia — provided a new model.

The whole of Eastern Europe and most of Latin America, formerly in the clutches of dictatorships, are now efficient democracies. This seems to indicate that while democracy cannot be parachuted into a country, there is a broader, longer-term global trend toward democracy and that its growth depends on local conditions.

As economic development needed careful planning, political reforms need even greater planning. The question remains: is China preparing for these political reforms?

The current difficult situation and predicament in Hong Kong is not just about what is happening now or has been happening for the past decade in the territory, but also calls into question the future and overall political direction of China.

Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes is running for U.S. Senate in the great state of Kentucky. She is a woman of conviction, of substance, of principle. “I’m not an empty dress,” she insists, “I’m not a rubber stamp, and I am not a cheerleader! I am a Clinton Democrat.”

I’m old enough to remember when “Clinton Democrat” had a fairly specific meaning. Back when Bill Clinton first ran for president, he did so as “new kind of Democrat.” He decried the “brain-dead policies of both parties.” He was so determined to dispel the image of the Democrats as being soft on crime, he took time off from the campaign trail to approve the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled that when he ate his last meal, he left some of his pecan pie on his plate and told guards he was saving it “for later.”

Clinton broke with his party’s racial politics by deliberately picking a fight with the deservedly forgotten rapper Sister Souljah. He vowed to reform welfare (though it took a Republican Congress to get him to follow through) and end the era of “something for nothing” government handouts.

The Clinton Democrats were the spawn of the Democratic Leadership Council, a proudly centrist, pro-business, and hawkish (by liberal standards) outfit within the Democratic party, which is why left-wing Democrats often distrusted and occasionally despised it. Jesse Jackson said DLC stood for “Democrats for the Leisure Class” and ridiculed it as a “Southern white boys’ club.”

The DLC closed up shop in 2011, in large part because the Democratic party had moved far to the left, a fact repeatedly confirmed by Pew and Gallup surveys showing that Democrats favor activist government more than they used to and are much more comfortable calling themselves liberals than they were even a decade ago.

So it’s interesting that Grimes, and a number of other Democrats, are calling themselves “Clinton Democrats.” Grimes goes so far as to insist, “I’m not Barack Obama.” She won’t even say whether she voted for Obama in 2008 or 2012, invoking her right to ballot secrecy — a right she eagerly waives to tell people she supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

So why did his administration sit on the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs?

New media accounts — including coverage by NRO’s Patrick Brennan — confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism.

As I explained on July 17, 2006:

While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses.

“Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” states a June 21 declassified summary of a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center. “Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”

It turns out that — based on open sources — I vastly underestimated the size of Hussein’s stockpiles of deadly devices.

In this story’s first outrage, it now transpires that Hussein had some 5,000 tank shells filled with sarin nerve gas, mustard gas, and other lethal agents. This is roughly ten times the arsenal that I reported that he possessed. Had I access to more accurate information back then, my pieces would have reflected the depth of Hussein’s supplies of these munitions.

These recent news stories overlook another discovery from 2004: The U.S. Department of Energy and the Pentagon removed 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium from Iraq “that could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program,” according to a DOE press release. This development was almost totally overlooked by the entire press corps, absent The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, author Richard Miniter, and yours truly.

Lockheed’s nuclear-fusion project sounds promising, but remember: It is the federal government’s largest contractor.

Lockheed Martin thinks it may just about have a handle on this nuclear-fusion thing, but the U.S. government cannot manage to keep Ebola patients off a flight to Cleveland. Sometimes, you simply must hate the 21st century.

Lockheed’s announcement about its ambitious fusion project, which if successful would represent a fundamental economic and technological shift for the entire world, is the sort of thing that makes one pause to consider the possibilities. The end product would be a relatively compact (small enough to haul on a semi) reactor that could with a few pounds of fuel and no emissions power aircraft and spacecraft that effectively never need refueling, transform and decentralize power grids, and do much more. The libertarian in me is tempted to say, “Aha! There’s your private sector in action!” and to prepare my soul to enjoy the spectacle of people who are terrified about carbon dioxide emissions prostrating themselves before Lockheed’s research team. But Lockheed Martin isn’t really the private sector; it is year in and year out the federal government’s largest contractor, and federal contracts account for about three-fourths of its revenue. It relies on a government-dominated enterprise, the universities, for its most important input, raw brainpower.

But if one is willing to let up on the ideological rigidity, the Lockheed outcome is a pretty good one: The firm is largely engaged in helping the federal government provide a legitimate public good — defense — and it does so in a competitive market, throwing off a raft of profits and some very cool innovation in the process. If everything that government had a hand in looked like MIT, DARPA, and Skunk Works shenanigans, it would not be a perfect outcome, by any measure, but it would be a pretty good one. For all of the waste and excess in defense appropriations and contracting, and despite the occasional outbreak of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper–ism in the commanding echelons, there is a sense that this represents government doing what it is intended to be doing, and doing it relatively well.

While much has been written and said of Islamic violence in recent months, the opposing views of professors Clive Kessler and Sahar Amer distill that debate to its erudite essence in this podcast. As a primer on the topic, their discussion is without equal

In late September, amid ASIO raids and media images of a small boy holding aloft a severed head, Quadrant Online contributor Clive Kessler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, addressed Islam’s penchant for violence and the stock-standard response of defenders and apologists that terrorism, beheadings and calls to wage bloody war on unbelievers do not represent the true spirit of “the religion of peace”.

Kessler wrote:

“The question is not, as the apologists offering this approach always suggest, “Who is behind this misappropriation of Islam?” It is not a matter of finding a puppet-master or evil operator who, by misrepresenting the faith, is constantly manipulating good and decent people within the local Muslim community or worldwide ummah.

One must ask, and be brave enough to ask, a different question: What is it, within formal, doctrinal Islam and then, on that (perhaps selective but still identifiable) basis within the Islamic tradition and in Islamic history from which that powerful tradition is “sedimented”, that underpins and drives—and perhaps, as some see it, validates—this kind of gruesome, barbaric action: by Muslims, acting as committed Muslims, and in the name and in the “defence” or “promotion” of Islam?

The interpretation of Islam that is provided by the militants is not the only possible construction of the Islamic inheritance and agenda. And it may not be the preferred version of the moderates and the liberals and of Islam’s well-meaning apologists. But it is a version, and one that can be constructed on grounds that are indisputably internal to Islam, not some external intrusion or imposition implanted by the ignorant or the ill-intentioned.

The militant and fundamentalist versions of Islam are forms or variants that can be “sourced” and derived directly—dare one even say “authentically”?—from Koranic writ, from early formative Islam as recorded in the traditions and practices (hadith and sunnah) of the Prophet in his own lifetime and worldly career, and within historical Islam as it developed on that foundation. The militant version is a reading or construction of direct intellectual lineage and identifiable descent within historical Islam. It has its foundations—genuine, not spurious or fictive or prejudicially confected foundations—in what, from the outset in the Prophet’s own time and career, Islam is and has been in its worldly history and evolution.”

Those thoughts and others prompted the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report to match Kessler with Professor Sahar Amer, chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Sydney University, in a discussion about the Koran’s advocacy of violence. Their debate went to air on October 15, but can be heard by clicking the link below.
Does Islam promote violence

While much has been written and said of Islamic violence in recent months, Kessler and Sahar in their opposing views distill that debate to its erudite essence.

Ebola is a nasty piece of work, no doubt about it. But if President Obama really wants to combat the disease, he should spend less time ringing global alarms and a lot more denouncing the ignorance and corruption that have made the virus Africa’s most notable export
I have given up on myself. Since everyone I know accepts that my views are to the right of Gengis Khan, I no longer have to make the pretense of drinking soy milk or eating tofu and pretending to enjoy it. I am what I am and happy to be that way, even if my children’s faces go red when I open my mouth in polite company. They look pleadingly at others present, trying telepathically, I think, to transmit the thought that every family has its own dotty uncle who, in their case, happens to be their own, beloved and sometimes moderately useful, but very barmy, two-cans-short-of-a six-pack dad.

I know that look of theirs very well indeed. It says, ‘What do you expect? Dad remembers those weird days when steam engines were used to pull trains, people were paid only for working, kids ran around playgrounds largely unsupervised, and men could grow older, and little more portly, without attracting universal ostracism.

Well, being portly and dotty has its compensations, let me tell you. Nobody is surprised when you ask stupid questions or say things that are sooo politically incorrect they would be beyond the pale for everyone except yours truly. This is fun – looking at the same pictures on the TV screen as everyone else and seeing things differently.

Here’s an example of how liberating it can be to embrace dottiness. Take as a given that a considerable body of ill-informed opinion regards President Obama as just the world’s most wonderful leader. But what I see is a middle aged man who seems tired, careworn, prematurely grey and, quite often these days, somewhat unsettled. To my eyes the revered Mr President brings to mind a precocious kid who has bitten off more than he can chew, created an awful mess and is now scared to tell his parents about it.

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a telephone press briefing Wednesday that you cannot get Ebola by sitting next to someone on a bus, but that infected or exposed persons should not ride public transportation because they could transmit the disease to someone else.

Gotcha. You can’t get Ebola on a bus or a plane, you can only give it. Good to know. Thanks, Doc.

The Centers for Disease Control is one of those elite federal agencies that people hitherto assumed was, so to speak, immune to the pathologies of less glamorous government bureaucracies. It turns out it’s the DMV with test tubes – just the usual “Sorry? Did we say you need two copies of the green form? We meant you need three copies of the pink form” routine with extra lethality. The Protocols of the Elders of Druid Hills have proved to be boundlessly mutable and mostly honored in the breach:

~Don’t worry, the Protocols are in place – except that Thomas Duncan, the original Ebola patient, was left in an open area of the Dallas emergency room for hours and the medical staff treating him did not have protective clothing for the first two days.

~Don’t worry, they did eventually get fully sealed, protective clothing – well, except for their necks, which remained exposed.

~Don’t worry, exposed medical staff aren’t supposed to fly – except that Nurse Amber Vinson got on a flight to Cleveland with a fever.

~Well, okay, but that was totally in breach of the Protocols – except that Nurse Vinson called the CDC to check and they said, “Sure, get on the plane. What’s the worst that can happen? And make sure you share the bag of mini-pretzels…”

~Well, okay, but the next time Nurse Vinson got a flight, everyone followed the Protocols and wore hazmat suits – except for the guy with the clipboard, who works for the CDC and so can’t be expected to know all this Protocol stuff…