RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most Americans, if they think about our role in World War I at all, likely think we entered the conflict too late to claim much credit, or maybe they think our intervention was discreditable. Some might say we had no compelling national interest to enter the Great War; or worse, our intervention allowed Britain and France to force on Germany an unjust, punitive peace that made inevitable the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. Had we stayed out of the war, they might argue, the Europeans would have been compelled to make a reasonable, negotiated peace, and postwar animosity would have been lessened.

Americans are easily forgetful of history, but we should not forget the First World War or our far from discreditable role in it. American intervention was decisive in the Anglo-French victory, a victory that deserves celebrating.

The war shaped the lives of some of America’s greatest soldiers and statesmen — including George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman — and was hugely consequential. Without exaggeration one can say that it was the war that made the modern world.

It was the war that set the boundaries of the modern Middle East out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. It was the war that saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had held together Mitteleuropa. It was a war that rewarded nationalism, which, perversely, had been the war’s original cause. It was the war that ended the Second Reich in Germany and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. It was a war that moved into the skies and under the seas. Men were set alight with flamethrowers and choked by poison gas. Infantry officers wore wristwatches to coordinate attacks. Trench coats became a military fashion accessory. And a Europe that could still see angels hovering over battlefields in 1914 was shell-shocked by 1919, full of doubts about the old chivalric ideals, prey to callow superstitions and pagan political movements.

It was the apparent collapse of the old ideals that helps explain what has become the popular view of the First World War — that it was a senseless, stupid struggle, the ultimate charnel house, the watchword for the obscenity and absurdity of war. The casualty lists were indeed horribly long. The victory that was won was indeed horribly mismanaged. But such casualty lists were inevitable in a modern war of European empires; and the mismanagement of the peace was not the soldier’s folly.

‘He is at once God and their intimate friend,” wrote journalist Martha Gellhorn back in the 1930s of President Franklin Roosevelt. The quote comes from The Roosevelts, the new Ken Burns documentary that PBS airs this month. But the term “documentary” doesn’t do The Roosevelts justice. “Extravaganza” is more like it: In not one but 14 lavish hours, the series covers two great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, who served in the first decade of the last century, and Franklin Roosevelt, who led our nation through the Great Depression and to victory in World War II. In his use of the plural, Burns correctly includes a third Roosevelt: Eleanor, who as first lady also affected policy, along with her spouse.

The contention of The Roosevelts is a plausible one: that this New York family altered the presidency forever, converting the office from a near-ceremonial post into one of near-regal responsibility for domestic policy. The Roosevelts both favored active progressivism and denied that any other presidential posture could do the trick. What “26” and “32” hoped, as one of the commenters in the film, George F. Will, notes, was that “the role of the central government from now on [would be] to secure the well-being of the American people.”

The Roosevelts got what they wanted. With the partial exception of Ronald Reagan, no chief executive since has dared to suggest that the economy might simply run itself. As the years have passed, the demand for progressive reform and federal oversight has only increased, especially when financial markets have turned. Citizens now expect, even demand, economic rescue from any chief executive. To demur and call for a reduced presidency would be to invite ridicule or worse.

The Roosevelts commences by establishing a pathetic picture of the presidency pre-Roosevelt: a timid office in which passive politicians served through “mere negation,” as Theodore Roosevelt referred to it, busying themselves with post-office oversight and coming out to lead as chief executive only for war. Then came the fateful day anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot William McKinley and his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, came to the office. “Get action” was the new president’s motto. The change in style first became apparent at the White House: The Roosevelts and their six children did not so much move in as occupy the place in a loud clatter of toys and ponies.

Extremists’ rhetoric heats up as their case falls apart.

The United Nations Climate Summit will begin in New York this Tuesday, but environmental activists didn’t wait. All day Sunday, they filled the streets of Manhattan for a march that featured Al Gore, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and various Hollywood actors.

But they certainly didn’t act like a movement that was winning. There was a tone of fatalism in the comments of many with whom I spoke; they despair that the kind of radical change they advocate probably won’t result from the normal democratic process. It’s no surprise then that the rhetoric of climate-change activists has become increasingly hysterical. Naomi Klein, author of a new book on the “crisis,” This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, said, “I have seen the future, and it looks like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.” In her new book she demands that North America and Europe pay reparations to poorer countries to compensate for the climate change they cause. She calls her plan a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” and acknowledges that it would cost “hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.” But she has an easy solution on how to pay for it: “Need more money? Print some!” What’s a little hyperinflation compared to “saving the planet”?

Nor is Klein alone in her hysteria. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a new film in which he warns that the world is threatened by a “carbon monster” that is treated like a kind of Godzilla that must be killed off by ending the use of carbon-based fuels.

One reason the rhetoric has become so overheated is that the climate-change activists increasingly lack a scientific basis for their most exaggerated claims. As physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute puts it: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea-ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.” He points out that there has been no net new global-warming increase since 1997 even though the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 25 percent since then. This throws into doubt all the climate models that have been predicting massive climate dislocation.

Other scientists caution that climate models must be regarded with great care and skepticism. Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Obama’s first term, wrote a pathbreaking piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which he concluded:

Bill Clinton Spins His Haiti Intervention
Amid a probe of Aristide, the former president offers a new version of events.

It’s tempting to try to forget about all the misery that Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Democrat friends have inflicted on Haiti. But like perpetrators who cannot resist the urge to return to the scene of the crime, the Clintons keep reminding us.

At an Iowa “steak fry” last week, Mr. Clinton bragged about his Haiti record. That was strange: Two decades after using the U.S. military to restore deposed Haitian tyrant Jean Bertrand Aristide to power, five years after becoming the U.N.’s special Haiti envoy, and three years after taking charge of the post-earthquake Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, Mr. Clinton is persona non grata in much of the country due to the dismal results of his involvement.

Yet bringing up Haiti now, even in such an unlikely venue, may come to serve a purpose. Mr. Aristide was put under house arrest in Port-au-Prince earlier this month in connection with an investigation into allegations of money laundering and corruption. If he decides to talk and remembers things differently than Mr. Clinton, the former U.S. president will be out in front with his version of events.

Tens of thousands of environmental protestors paraded through New York City on Sunday, in a “people’s climate march” designed to lobby world leaders arriving for the latest United Nations climate summit. The march did succeed in messing up traffic, but President Obama won’t achieve much more when he speaks Tuesday at this latest pit stop on the global warming grand prix.

Six years after the failure of the Copenhagen summit whose extravagant ambition was to secure a binding global treaty on carbon emissions, Mr. Obama is trying again. The Turtle Bay gathering of world leaders isn’t formally a part of the international U.N. climate negotiations that are supposed to climax late next year in Paris, but the venue is meant to be an ice-breaker for more than 125 presidents, prime ministers and heads of state to start to reach consensus.

One not-so-minor problem: The world’s largest emitters are declining to show up, even for appearances. The Chinese economy has been the No. 1 global producer of carbon dioxide since 2008, but President Xi Jinping won’t be gracing the U.N. with his presence. India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi (No. 3) will be in New York but is skipping the climate parley. Russian President Vladimir Putin (No. 4) has other priorities, while Japan (No. 5) is uncooperative after the Fukushima disaster that has damaged support for nuclear power. Saudi Arabia is dispatching its petroleum minister.U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon excused these truancies at a press conference last week: “In any event, we have other means of communications, ways and means of having their leadership demonstrated in the United Nations.” In that case, why not do a conference call?

To understand the coldness of this brush off, global CO2 emissions increased to 35.1 billion metric tons in 2013, a new record and a 29% increase over a decade ago. Of the year-over-year carbon climb, China at 358 million metric tons jumped by more than the rest of the world combined and is responsible for 24.8% of emissions over the last five years. Over the same period, developing nations accounted for 57.5%.

What this means is that regardless of what the West does, poorer countries that are reluctant to sign agreements that impede economic progress hold the dominant carbon hand. No matter U.S. exertions to save the planet from atmospheric carbon that may or may not have consequences that may or may not be costly in a century or more, the international result will be more or less the same, though U.S. economic growth will be slower.

In the headline, the “T” that precedes the BS in TBS stands for “Total.”

The BS stands for what it usually stands for.

TSS is the increasingly common acronym for the “two-state solution.”

Time to remove kid-gloves

The aftermath of Operation Protective Edge leaves little room for niceties in the conduct of the public debate on Israel’s security and on the measures it should adopt to preserve its security. This is no time to call a spade as a manually operated device whose principle function is to create elevation differentials in the surface of the Earth.

We can no longer afford to recoil from the unpleasant necessity of calling a spade a spade.

The recent – and likely-to be-repeated – round of fighting in Gaza should have driven home to anyone with a smidgen of common sense and common decency that conceding territory to Arab control is both futile and fatal.

The revelations of the terrorist capabilities developed in the wake of the 2005 abandonment of Gaza – in terms of overhead missiles and underground tunnels – underscored just how dangerous, detrimental and dysfunctional it is to exchange Jewish land for some wisp of hope of peace with the Arabs. The truth is so glaringly apparent that this nefarious, nonsensical notion can no longer be excused or condoned by assuming well-intentioned naiveté.

It is imperative, therefore, to conduct an open public debate – however heated and blunt, even brutal – about the motives of obdurate adherents of this disproved dogma and the reasons for them clinging so doggedly to it.

Resolute refusal to recognize reality

Elucidation of these issues is becoming increasingly urgent, for it is becoming ever more difficult – if not impossible – to reconcile concern for the security of Israel, and its survival as the nation-state of the Jewish people, with continued support for a doctrine of territorial concessions and political appeasement – and the resolute refusal to abandon belief in the need for Palestinian statehood, given all the evidence conflicting with it.

The urgency of the debate is heightened by the fact that an indisputably failed formula still enjoys strong support from prominent public figures in Israel, who have served the country with great distinction both as diplomats and as warriors.

THANKS TO E-PAL….B.PINSKY

The category is Jewish baseball stars. Which of these is the correct Jeopardy! question?

Which player hit 6 home runs in a single game?
Which player has the 2nd highest batter-to league home run percentage? A record that lasted 48 years and was bested only by Babe Ruth?
Which player is widely acknowledged as the first “professional” in the history of baseball, setting the stage for the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NA) in 1871 and the evolution of the game into a professional sport?
Which player led baseball’s first professional league in home runs for the first three years of its existence?
Who was the first Jewish manager?
Which Jewish superstar is NOT in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

THE ANSWER IS LIPMAN PIKE

Yes, all of these questions are correct. Though you are forgiven if you thought the answer to question #2 was Hank Greenberg, who has the third highest Homer to League ratio (two Jews and the Babe in the top three spots). And you are excused if you are asking, who is Lipman Pike, and why haven’t I heard of him? Most people, even baseball fans, haven’t.

It’s not as if Pike didn’t capture headlines during his lifetime. Known for his power, his good looks and his bushy mustache, Pike was not only a slugger (nicknamed “The Iron Batter”), but he was also one of the fastest base runners of his day, and quite a showman. In 1873 he challenged a racehorse named Clarence to a hundred-yard sprint, and the hundreds of fans who paid 25 cents each watched Pike win by a nose, and collect the $250 purse ($5,000 in today’s money). Pike’s funeral, on October 10th, 1893, was one of the largest public events of his day, attended by teammates, fans, politicians and much of Brooklyn’s Jewish community.

The Labour hopeful for Woking said Israel is “evil” and said it was learning from Hitler

A Labour party candidate has been suspended after launching a tirade against Israel on social media, calling it “evil” and questioning why the Islamic State (Isis) hadn’t yet attacked it.

According to the Sunday Times, Labour’s candidate for Woking, Vicki Kirby, also said Hitler might be the “Zionist God”, in a series of comments made on her Twitter account.

She is reported to have posted: “We invented Israel when saving them from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher,” while another said: “I will never forget and I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is!”

Another tweet read: “Apparently you can ask IS/ISIS/ISIL questions on ask.fm. Anyone thought of asking them why they’re not attacking the real oppressors #Israel?”

The veracity of these tweets was confirmed to The Independent by Labour.

British MPs to vote on motion calling for Palestinian state
The debate will offer the MPs the first-ever opportunity to vote on the vexed issue.

LONDON – British MPs will have an unprecedented opportunity to vote on whether there should be a Palestinian state when the House of Commons resumes after its current party conference break on October 13.

A group of MPs from all major political parties, headed by Labor’s Grahame Morris – including Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, Liberal Democrat Sir Bob Russell, and Green Party former leader Caroline Lucas – have secured a debate under a relatively new procedure for a full-scale, whole day’s debate in the Commons chamber.

The motion reads: “This House believes that the government should recognize that state of Palestine alongside the State of Israel.’’ With those proposing the motion appearing determined to push the issue to a vote, seasoned Westminster observers fear a vote in favor of immediate recognition of a Palestinian state could cause a substantial shift in public opinion and lead to added pressures on the government to change its current policy, which favors securing an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians before considering granting Palestinians recognition.

The debate will offer the MPs the first-ever opportunity to vote on the vexed issue. As the topic for debate has been chosen by backbenchers, it is very unlikely party whips will order MPs to attend or advise them how to vote, so predicting any possible outcome is virtually impossible.

However, The Jerusalem Post understands that the pro-Palestinian lobby will not have it entirely its own way. Several pro-Israel MPs from across the political divide in the Commons have just tabled an amendment that in effect insists that any call for establishing a Palestinian state should come about only “on the conclusion of successful peace negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.”

Many of the UK’s estimated 300,000 Jews will observe with concern, after having lurched from proclaimed friendship with the Jewish State to criticism.

LONDON – Ed Miliband’s Labor Party started its four-day annual conference in Manchester on Sunday, the last showcase opportunity prior to next May’s general election, with serious question marks about its leader’s approach to Israel Miliband, a self described “atheist Jew,” has long had what he once called a complicated relationship with Israel.

He will walk a tightrope of his own making, one that many of the UK’s estimated 300,000 Jews will observe with concern, after having lurched from proclaimed friendship with the Jewish State to criticisms, especially during the recent Gaza war, that have sorely tested the friendship and support of Jewish voters.

Miliband has never been shy of referring to his family’s history, with constant reminders of how his parents survived the Holocaust, and – from time to time – praise for Israel for providing a safe haven for his grandmother.

Jewish communal leaders have made strenuous efforts to engage with him, and when he spoke at the Community Security Trust’s annual Dinner in the spring, he went out of his way to praise their efforts and spoke of his journey to his Jewish roots.

Even then, however, Israel hardly got a mention.

When he chose to make Israel the destination of one of his first trips as opposition leader, there was optimism he might begin to understand Israel’s dilemmas better, and so it appeared when he spent four days with his wife visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories in the days before Passover.