RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that somebody like Jesse Ventura is also a major fan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara? (Or claims to be for the publicity value among the “hip”?)

Recalling his visit to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro in 2002 Ventura grew misty-eyed: “Fidel Castro looked into my eyes and told me I was a man of great courage…Maybe he (Castro) saw a little of him in me.”

Recall the Cowardly Lion’s reaction when the Wizard grants him “the NERVE.” Well, Jesse Ventura’s moronic gloating outdoes even the lion’s (“Shucks, folks, I’m speechless..ha-ha…Ain’t it the truth! Ain’t it the truth!”)

And this imbecile and buffoon (or is it master fraud and expert showman?) was elected governor of a populous and prosperous state, and honored by Harvard University with the title of “Visiting Fellow,” to say nothing of his career as media host and author.

“And I’ll tell you another thing that shows me a little bit more about Castro” also revealed Ventura in an interview. “The main downtown building in Havana has this huge flat wall and it has got a huge portrait on it. It’s not Castro. It’s Che Guevara. The biggest photograph in downtown Havana was a mural on a wall of Che. Now if Castro was such an egomaniac and all this, wouldn’t he put himself up there instead of Che?”

For a man with Ventura’s (mostly self-) vaunted “street smarts,” Fidel Castro’s blandishments of (the conveniently dead) Che Guevara should be a cinch to plumb. Didn’t Don Barzini send the biggest and fanciest flowers to Don Corleone’s funeral?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported how on his Cuba visit Ventura spoke at the University of Havana where he “exhorted students to dream big and work hard to achieve success!” Here one blinks, looks again—and gapes. You long to believe otherwise, you grope for an extenuation, you hope you misread—but it’s inescapable: A man elected as governor of a populous and prosperous U.S. State (and a “Harvard Visiting Fellow”) cannot distinguish between the subjects of a Stalinist police state and the attendees of an AmWay convention.

Ask anyone familiar with Communism. To achieve “success” in such as Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom, you join the Communist Party, you pucker up and stoop down behind Fidel and his toadies and smooch away. (Either that or jump on a raft.)

So come to think of it, Jesse Ventura indeed had much to teach those Havana U. students. On his Cuba visit he performed brilliantly.

During WW2 our understanding of a moral war was not a war in which we did not kill any civilians (we killed a lot of civilians), it wasn’t even a war in which we did not kill any civilians on purpose (we killed a lot of civilians on purpose), it was a war in which we did not kill civilians without having a good reason.

We might carry out mass bombings of entire cities to destroy the enemy’s wartime production capabilities and demoralize his population.

Until recently, those were considered good reasons for killing civilians.

The moral context for these actions, snipped away from anti-war works such as Slaughterhouse-Five or Grave of the Fireflies which reduce the American bombings of Dresden or Kobe to the senseless acts of brutal monsters, is that we were fighting Germany and Japan using their own tactics against them.

It was Germany which introduced the bombing of cities to Europe during WW1 and WW2. In 1917, after German bombings, Premier Lloyd George shouted to a working class London crowd, “We will give all back to them and we will give it to them soon. We shall bomb Germany with compound interest.”

WW2’s Blitz was repaid with compound interest over Germany. Japan’s firebombing of Chinese cities was repaid with compound interest with the firebombing of Tokyo. This wasn’t mere vengeance. The rules of war are set by mutual consent. The humanitarian protections that we have come to take for granted as if they were natural laws are really mutual agreements between two sides.

On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush stood at Ground Zero and offered the working class New Yorkers amid the rubble an echo of Lloyd George. “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

Since then we have been mired in an extended debate which presumes wrongly that any laws of war ever applied to those men. The entire existence of terrorism is eloquent evidence that treating fighters who have placed themselves outside the social contract as if they were within it is foolishly destructive.

What is it about the weather that compels our government to ineptly dictate how we produce electricity and consume energy? This a worthwhile question to ask on August 4, the anniversary of the day in 1977 that President James Earl Carter signed legislation creating the brand-new, Cabinet-level Department of Energy.

When it comes to energy fecklessness, which was very costly to the Democratic party in the revolutionary election of 1980, Barack Obama’s policies are in Mr. Carter’s league. With global warming at the top of the president’s agenda and at the bottom of the electorate’s, a similar result may be brewing.

A trip back to 1977 reveals remarkable similarities between then and now, and some remarkable symmetries. Three consecutive winters, starting with the winter of Carter’s inauguration, were the coldest trio since comprehensive instrumental records were first kept in 1895. To show his new administration’s environmental sanctity, Carter had a solar-heated reviewing stand built for his inauguration. Wind chills were even lower than they were at Obama’s first inauguration. The stand was so cold that very few people stuck around after the ceremony.

A week later, the lights went out in Ohio and Pennsylvania, thanks to a shortage of natural gas. The Ohio River froze so completely that people walked across from Cincinnati to Kentucky.

Less than 90 days after his inaugural, Carter addressed the nation wearing a sweater and called the “energy crisis” the “moral equivalent of war” (wags soon acronymed it MEOW). He told the American people he was convinced that the nation faced “the impending crisis of energy shortages” as we ran out of natural gas and oil. It was in this speech that Carter proposed the new Department of Energy, which was intended to guide the nation to energy abundance and independence, shifting us to an energy mix of coal, nuclear (which he regularly pronounced “noo-kie-er”), and — despite everyone’s freezing at his inaugural — solar.

During the election campaign Carter’s handlers had sold him as a “nuclear engineer” who had an M.S. from Union College in New York. He wasn’t and he didn’t (although he did take some classes at Union College in Schenectady), nor did he serve on the USS Seawolf, the nation’s second nuclear sub. He never set the record straight, and he used the inflated biography to bolster his credibility on energy matters. (The myths still stand. According to the American Experience website, “A trained nuclear engineer, Carter worked under famed Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the Navy’s nuclear program, on the ‘Sea Wolf,’ an atomic submarine. He also studied nuclear physics at Union College in New York.”)

A telling omission in what’s meant to be a rebuke of Obama’s lawlessness

House speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit against President Obama strikes a high-minded blow for the rule of law. Gamesmanship? Perish the thought. “This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats,” the Speaker thundered on the House floor. “It’s about defending the Constitution we swore an oath to uphold.”

Well, that’s a relief. For a moment there, I was worried that it might be a “political stunt,” which is what the soon-to-be defendant sloughed it off as.

In urging the House to approve the resolution authorizing the suit, which it did in a party-line vote Wednesday, Boehner asserted that Congress needed to act — er, well, let’s try that again. He asserted that Congress needed to plead with the judiciary to act because President Obama has overstepped his constitutional bounds. It takes a lawsuit, we are told, to check what the resolution describes as certain “actions by the President and other executive branch officials inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution of the United States.”

Good to know it’s all about duty and constitutional propriety, not tactical considerations. But I do have one question: If the lawsuit is really about vindicating the Constitution, why didn’t the Speaker include the president’s immigration lawlessness?

Have a look at the resolution, here. It authorizes Boehner to sue Obama and his underlings for actions inconsistent with their “duties under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” But read on through the fine print — the gobbledygook of statutory citations — and you find that the lawsuit will be narrowly limited to executive overreach with respect to Obamacare.

Don’t get me wrong: The president’s implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is, inarguably, a solid example of his lawlessness. In Faithless Execution, I outline the dozens of executive diktats: waiving this provision, amending that one, manufacturing taxes and criminal penalties, and generally usurping congressional power.

But what about the president’s other serial statutory violations and unconstitutional usurpations? His systematic dismantling of federal immigration law outstrips even Obamacare in its brazen illegality. Yet, though this fact is well known to Boehner, a reference to immigration is nowhere to be found in his resolution or his lawsuit.

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The Hispanic share of the American population (over 16%) and registered voters (over 10%) is increasing rapidly. Barack Obama’s decisive win over Mitt Romney among Hispanic voters in 2012 — by about 73% to 27%, if the exit polls are to be believed — was a far wider margin than Obama achieved in 2008 and John Kerry or other Democrats won with this voting group in earlier presidential election cycles.

An attempt to reverse that trend was one reason why several Republican senators were part of the Group of 8 that attempted to draft a comprehensive immigration reform bill, and why more than a dozen Republican senators signed on to the bill [1]that passed the Senate in 2013 by a vote of 68 to 32. Several Republican congressman participated in a similar effort in the House, though with less success.

The Senate bill stalled in the House, where a large majority of Republicans were opposed to what they viewed as amnesty with a path to citizenship for illegals in the United States and a continuation of chained immigration policies that would lead to a mix of new immigrants favoring family unification over skilled immigrants.

There was support for immigration reform from some major Republican financial contributors, the K Street crowd, and many businesses and Chamber of Commerce types who were happy to make low-wage labor legal and more widespread. Silicon Valley supported immigration reform, but really cared mainly about expanding the number of skilled workers they could hire.

President Obama attempted to apply pressure to House Republicans to get on board by stripping off “dreamers” as a separate group who would not be deported (in other words, for whom immigration laws would not be enforced). The dreamers are a group of illegals who were brought here as children and either served in the military or attended college.

Then came the recent flood of Central American young people crossing into Texas, and to a lesser extent California and Arizona. The supporters of immigration reform have argued that the new wave is attributable to terrible conditions in the migrants’ home countries (high murder rates among them), which presumably would argue for Chicago’s South Side and West Side youngsters to be fleeing north to Canada, seeking asylum to avoid the gang murderers in their midst.

When Everything Is a Lie

Everything we are told about illegal immigration is mostly a lie, and a self-serving one at that. Remember that fact, and the current debate over the border becomes comprehensible.

Fleeing to an Oppressive Society?

Most of the advocates for open borders agitate from a position of criticism of the U.S. By that I mean we rarely hear La Raza activists explain why they want amnesties for millions of illegal aliens, at least in the sense of why millions have left Mexico to risk their lives to arrive in the U.S.

What is it about America that attracts patriotic Mexican nationals to abandon their own country en masse? That is not a rhetorical question, given much of the immigration debate is couched in critiques of the U.S. The pageantry of an open-borders demonstration is usually a spectacle of Mexican flags. How odd that almost no advocate ever says, “We want amnesty so that our kinsmen have a shot, as we have had a shot, at an independent judiciary, equality under the law, the rule of law, true democracy, free speech, protection of human rights, free-market capitalism, and protection of private property. For all that, millions risk their lives.” But instead there is either nothing, or a continual critique of the U.S. If we were to take a newly arrived illegal alien, and enroll him in a typical Chicano Studies course, he would logically wish to return across the border as soon as possible.

Unemployment Is Too Low?

Do we really need millions of new workers in a supposedly worker-scarce America [1] from Latin America? The unemployment rate in the American Southwest is still high. Floods of illegal immigrants only drive down wages in agriculture, the hospitality industry, construction, landscaping, and social services [2]. The influx enriches employers, dumps the resulting medical, legal, educational, criminal justice, and social costs on the taxpayers, and undermines the viability of U.S. workers, many of them, for example, Mexican-Americans. If one wished to hurt American maids, nannies, gardeners, plum pickers, roofers, cooks, and janitors, one could do no worse than flooding the border with illegal immigrants. Elites benefit from cheaper entry-level wages, and then brand all others as nativists and xenophobes who object to the hypocrisies involved (e.g., so the Menlo Park techie must sigh, “Juanita is the best maid I ever had; but I had to put our Connor and Ashley into prep school because with all these immigrants coming into our area, they watered-down the AP curriculum at the local high school”).

The UN is going bonkers because they say another one of their schools in Gaza was shelled. Ten people were killed and dozens injured, but read this account carefully from The Guardian:

A deadly attack on a school in the city of Rafah in the south of Gaza has been denounced as a “moral outrage” and “criminal act” by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon.

At least 10 people were killed and dozens more wounded after a projectile struck a street outside the school gates on Sunday morning.

The school was sheltering more than 3,000 people displaced by fighting in the area. It has been the scene of heavy bombardment by the Israeli military and fierce clashes following the suspected capture by Hamas fighters of an Israeli soldier, later declared killed in action.

In a statement, Ban called on those responsible for the “gross violation of international humanitarian law” to be held accountable. He said the “Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have been repeatedly informed of the location of these sites.”

At the time of the strike – about 10.50am local time – dozens of children and adults were clustered around the gates buying biscuits and sweets from stalls set up by locals.

The missile struck the ground eight to 10 metres from the open gates. Witnesses at the scene less than an hour after the explosion claimed it had been fired from one of the many unmanned Israeli drones in the air above Rafah.

United Nations officials in Gaza described a “shelling incident” or an air strike.

The attack was not on the school. The bomb hit the street outside the gates of the school and killed and injured people standing at the gate — not in the school itself which was being used as a shelter.

In fact, look at the background of this Guardian video and note that the school appears to be untouched by the explosion:

When I was a kid, I mean a little kid, my favorite nurse in my father’s office — he was a doctor — was Mrs. Mindus. I’m not sure how old she was or even how she spelled her name — I was about six and the year was 1950 — but she was a sweet woman and very welcoming to me when I visited the radiology office. She used to bring me crayons and a coloring book and sometimes candy as if I were her own child. The only other things I remember about her were that she spoke with an accent and she had a string of numbers tattooed on her arm.

I wondered what the numbers were. I had never seen anything like that on a grownup’s arm. She explained to me she had been in a concentration camp — Auschwitz — and felt lucky to have gotten out, maybe guilty as well, because the rest of her family had been gassed. My father told me about it too — about Mrs. Mindus’ dead husband and their dead children and so forth. I think he wanted me to know about it.

This was, as you might imagine, hard for a six-year old boy to wrap his mind around. But those macabre numbers on Mrs. Mindus’ arm had a profound effect on me. I thought of them frequently growing up and I think they had some influence on what I did in life, joining up with the civil rights movement at the age of twenty and then later making some movies about the Holocaust.

Often, however, as with many memories, Mrs. Mindus faded from my mind as I enjoyed my life, living la vida artistica, writing novels and films, traveling abroad. Those horrifying events were in the past. It could never happen again. Even when Israel was at war in 1967 and again in 1973 I never really worried. (Later histories by Michael Oren and others have taught me otherwise.) Anti-Semitism was, for the most part anyway, a thing of the past, of concern only to the Anti-Defamation League and similar organizations. They could take care of the rare outbreaks.

How naive I was!

Now more than ever in my life I am haunted by Mrs. Mindus. The tatooed numbers spook me, not because I expect to see friends and family being carted off to the camps, but because I see a world of anti-Semitism metastasizing so quickly across the globe there might not be time for that. From Paris to Caracas, from Brussels to Bangkok we hear chants of Jew-hating as loud, ugly and perhaps even more wide-spread than we did in the 1930s. Paris has even had a new Kristallnacht. And in dear old Blighty, “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!” goes the cry on the London streets with Jewish Labor Party leader Ed Miliband [1] for all intents and purposes leading the band himself!

Aaron Rothstein is a third-year medical student at the Wake Forest School of Medicine.
Hamas launches rockets from hospitals. Israeli hospitals treat the family of Gaza’s ruler. The Lancet, true to form, publishes an attack on Israel.
“Here is a hand-to-hand struggle in all its horror and frightfulness,” wrote Henri Dunant, a nineteenth-century international activist, in his book A Memory of Solferino. The book concerns the Battle of Solferino in June of 1859 between the Austrians and the French. Dunant describes the combatants “trampling each other under foot, killing one another on piles of bleeding corpses, felling their enemies with their rifle butts, crushing skulls, ripping bellies open with sabre and bayonet.”
An 1897 illustration depicting ambulance corps from
Russia (left) and England (right).
Image via Shutterstock
But amidst these horrors, Dunant gives us at least some hope in the form of the field hospitals. As a volunteer there, he points out that French surgeons did not rest for more than twenty-four hours, amputating legs and taking care of soldiers, eventually fainting from exhaustion. And this was not just done for French soldiers. Dunant observes that many wounded Austrians and Hungarians were “given the same food as the French officers, and their wounded were treated by the same doctors.” In the hospitals only the soldiers’ uniforms on the shelves above their beds, not the quality of the care they received, indicated which side they fought for.

After witnessing this, Dunant proposed that the international community establish relief societies composed of volunteers and sanctioned by a convention that would govern the treatment of the wounded during wartime. His proposal drew huge international support and on August 22, 1864, 16 countries signed onto the first treaty of the Geneva Conventions which, in its first article, reads that “Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognized as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick. Neutrality shall end if the said ambulances or hospitals should be held by a military force.”

Implied in this law is a principal far more ancient, one embodied in the physician’s Hippocratic Oath. In it, the doctor swears, “in every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself from all intentional ill-doing….” The physician, therefore, is responsible only for the good of the patient no matter what uniform that patient may wear. The Oath makes no exception for wartime or for the treatment of an enemy. Even if physicians disagree about who be

Is the U.S.-Israel alliance and special relationship coming to an abrupt end thanks to the Islamophile American president?

My growing concern that the U.S.-Israel alliance may be on the verge of strangulation was underlined in a recent article by Carol Brown, which contained an embedded video of Caroline Glick’s recent superb and deeply moving talk given at the Center for Security Policy.

Ms. Glick is the Senior Contributing Editor at The Jerusalem Post, author of The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, as well as an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

The proof may exist in what took place just over a week ago. Apparently acting on orders from the White House, the FAA banned all U.S. airlines flying to Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport because shrapnel from an intercepted Hamas rocket had landed a mile away.

This arbitrary decision, without any consultation with the Israeli government, was imposed despite the fact that no such similar ban was put in place for U.S. airlines flying over Ukraine or into Pakistan, Afghanistan and other locations where civil aircraft have been shot out of the sky.

Only with the principled actions of Senator Ted Cruz was this outrage abruptly ended. But the fact that it occurred and was aimed only against America’s strongest and most loyal ally in the Middle East, and that the source of its implementation may well reach back into the White House, is deeply disturbing.

Will Obama now begin an arms embargo against the embattled Jewish state, including not re-supplying anti-missile missiles for the Iron Dome or spare parts for the weapons used in the war against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza?