RUTHFULLY YOURS

As is often bemoaned by scholars, genuine classical education in American schools is virtually non-existent. Whereas 100 years ago, university students learned Greek and Latin, today, remedial math and English instruction is the norm.

Yet, if people had a glimpse of Solon who lived approximately from 640-560 BCE, they would take to heart his warning about the “Signs of Dictatorship.”

The power of hail and snow springs from a cloud,

and thunder from the fire of lightning.

Strong men destroy a city, and a tyrant

enslaves a people through their ignorance.

A ship once out of port is hard to capture:

know this now before it is too late.

Near the end of his life, Solon warned the citizens that Peisistratus, the general in the final war for Salamis and leader of northeastern Attica, was becoming tyrannical. Yet Solon’s warnings were ignored — in fact, the people dismissed them as the ravings of a madman. Solon responded with “[a] little time will show the citizens my madness. Yes, will show, when truth comes in our midst.” And, indeed, he was proven correct when Peisistratus did show his true tyrannical colors.

Barack Hussein Obama consistently flouts American law, disregards the separation of powers, and seemingly could not care less about the swirling scandals surrounding him. As of May 2014 there have been 23 executive alterations of Obama’s own Affordable Care Act. Chris Conover at Forbes highlights the egregious and unilateral changes to Obamacare when he explains that “[t]he Constitution and its carefully crafted system of checks and balances matters. If President Obama disagrees with a statutory provision enacted into law (and that he signed!), the proper course of action is to go back to Congress and get the law changed.”

All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border.

“In Columbia [sic], Rising Violence Breeds New Doubts” (New York Times); “Guatemala Seen Slipping Into a Haven For Drugs” (Los Angeles Times); “Democracy Jeopardized as New Wave of Violence Sweeps Guatemala” (AP); “The Volcano That Is Guatemala” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); “A New Dark Age for Latin America?” (Miami Herald); “Murder Soars in El Salvador” (Washington Post); “Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala” (Washington Post); “Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala Raise Stake of Central American Drug-Addled Violence” (States News Service); “Drug Cartels Take Toll on Guatemala’s Politics” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

No wonder we have so many refugees at our door.

Except there’s one hitch: All of these headlines are very old. The first is from 1987, the last from 2007. And yet, over those two decades, we never saw anything like what we are seeing today.

Something else is going on. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the children at the border aren’t fleeing horrible conditions, violence, and poverty. But horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.

President Obama has gotten a lot of grief from his base for being the “deporter-in-chief.” But the basis for this charge is rooted in some statistical sleight of hand that he uses on the stump to show that he’s tough on illegal immigration. President Obama likes to claim that he’s deported a lot of people. But he hasn’t. What he’s done is count people caught and turned around at the border as “deportations.” If previous administrations had counted thwarted illegal immigrants that way, Obama’s number of “deportations” from the border would likely still be much lower than that of other recent presidents. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” John Sandweg, the former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told the Times.

As a defender of the nation’s borders, President Barack Obama is a hell of a pool player.

The president enjoyed a game at a bar in Denver with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Tuesday, without the noir atmosphere of his furtive visits to pool halls with his grandfather as a kid, when he felt “the enticement of darkness and the click of the cue ball, and the jukebox flashing its red and green lights.”

Obama’s game the other day was bright and cheery, as one would expect of a president who didn’t have any depressing visits to frightened ranchers, overwhelmed border agents or desperate migrants on his future itinerary.

The first rule in a crisis for any executive is put on your windbreaker and your boots and get out on the ground. President George W. Bush didn’t do it soon enough after Hurricane Katrina and, politically, could never make up for it, no matter how many times he visited New Orleans subsequently. Obama’s bizarre resistance to visiting the border on his fundraising swing out West fueled talk of the influx as Obama’s “Katrina moment.”

The Katrina analogy is both over the top and too generous. It is over the top because the border influx isn’t a deadly catastrophe swallowing an American city. It is too generous because Bush didn’t do anything to bring on Hurricane Katrina, whereas Obama’s policies are responsible for the influx of immigrants from the border. It is, in the argot of his administration, a “man-caused disaster.”

According to The Los Angeles Times, the number of immigrants younger than 18 who were deported or turned away from ports of entry declined from 8,143 in 2008 to 1,669 last year. There were 95 minors deported from the entire interior of the country last year. This occurred as the number of unaccompanied alien children arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras exploded from less than 4,000 several years ago to 40,000 since last October.

It’s not hard to do the math and understand the incentives. “Deportation data won’t dispel rumors drawing migrant minors to the U.S.” is how the L.A. Times headlined its story.

The White House brushes off criticism that Obama is avoiding the border as mere “optics,” in contrast to its highly substantive focus. But it is still not taking the crisis seriously.

Dear God save me, but it’s started again: the puerile body-counting and mindless moralizing that eventually worms its way into nearly every news report whenever fighting breaks out between a Palestinian faction and the Israel Defense Forces.

Here it is — I call it the dueling-body-count cliché — in yesterday’s Guardian. It is clear, says the author, “that Israeli life is deemed by the western media to be worth more than a Palestinian life.” There is “a hierarchy of death,” he contends. (White-skin privilege and all that.) His evidence? The numbers. “According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, 565 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces since January 2009, while 28 Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli security personnel have been killed. The asymmetry of this so-called conflict is reflected in the death toll . . .”

After reviewing the tallies, the MSM types, like this Guardianista, always arrive at the same conclusion: Israel is somehow taking unfair advantage, and the international community must immediately intervene to stop it. The usual term is “disproportionate response.” (It never seems to occur to them that by their logic, a cop trying to stop a rape would have to drop his handgun and radio and attempt to pry the rapist off the victim with his bare hands in order to even the contest.)

But here’s the heart of the problem — and, when Jews are concerned, it has ancient, ugly echoes: The media love victims, and the Jewish state is done with being a victim. Jews simply don’t go quietly to their deaths any more. They insist — arrogantly, selfishly, piggishly — on living. They do brutish things like create great hospitals and great civil-defense systems, and train great soldiers, all in this greedy quest for life.

The main reason the Israeli civilian casualties are always in the single digits is that Israel maintains a huge network of bomb shelters; folks know where to run for protection (though they have on average only 15 seconds to get there). Israel has developed an early-warning system and deployed many of its best minds to work on the paradigm-changing “Iron Dome” for in-air rocket interception.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, both Hamas and PA, have gone in the opposite direction. At a minimum, the Hamas government, the recipient of millions in foreign aid, could have set up a shelter system for its civilian population. Instead it has simply chosen not to because, as a Palestinian journalist I know puts it, “They don’t care.” Dead civilians are more useful than live ones.

Obama Talks to Netanyahu—Did Bibi Tell Barry to Stuff It?Posted By Roger L Simon

Well, maybe not stuff it, but finally someone may be standing up to America’s ultra-reactionary, fumbling, paleo-narcissistic and now hugely unpopular president — and his name is Benjamin Netanyahu. If we are to believe the Jerusalem Post, Bibi should be the leader of the free world. Arrivederci, Barry. Take your favorite nine iron and head off to Maui or the Vineyard or wherever you want to be with our blessings — as long as you stay there.

From the JPost [1]:

The United States is prepared to facilitate a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas [2] in the Gaza Strip, US President Barack Obama told Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu by phone today.

In the call, Obama “reiterated the United States’ strong condemnation of continuing rocket fire into Israel by Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza and reaffirmed Israel’s right to defend itself against these attacks,” the White House said in a readout of the conversation.

But Netanyahu has ruled out a ceasefire with Hamas in the short-term. On the contrary, the Israeli leader has vowed a series of additional stages to Operation Protective Edge [3]—his government’s response to continued rocket fire on Israeli towns and cities, after Hamas, a terrorist organization, stockpiled tens of thousands of rockets in the coastal territory over the last several years.

A ceasefire is “not even on the agenda,” Netanyahu told members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, just hours before his call with the US leader.

Let’s hope Netanyahu does not fall prey to pressure and keeps on keeping on because someone sometime has to stand up to Islamofacism or it will continue its unstopped march across the Middle East and beyond. It certainly won’t be Obama, who has allowed violent jihadists to flourish across Iraq, Syria and Iran — not to mention North Africa, Nigeria, the Sudan, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and now the Islamic State (aka ISIS) installing their own caliphate. Obama previously tried to help shore up Islamofascism in Egypt (Morsi) and Turkey (Erdogan). And all the while he has been chasing a nuclear deal with the monstrous mullahs of Iran who want nothing more than the extinction of the West and a caliphate of their own to compete with the Sunnis of ISIS.

I’m confused. Weren’t “progressives” supposed to be for religious freedom and opposed to misogyny, homophobia and theocracy? Oh, well. Maybe I was misinformed.

California Dem Blasts Al-Jazeera on Al-Jazeera: ‘The Owners of This Network Fund Hamas’ Posted By Bridget Johnson

Bradley James “Brad” Sherman has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1997, representing California’s 27th, and 24th congressional districts. At present he represents District 30. A poster boy for all Obama policies and a fave of the environmentalists, he did stand up to the Al Jazeera crowd…..rsk

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) may not get an invitation to reappear on Al-Jazeera America, but he sure gave the network an earful in the segment he did get this week.

“Every one of those rockets is a war crime… every rocket that is not aimed at a military target but is aimed at a city,” Sherman said on a live feed from Capitol Hill. “The owners of this TV network help fund Hamas.”

He went on to call the Hamas offensive launched against Israel “open season on those of the Jewish faith.”

“The idea that you would have a TV clear effort to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible and then you on this TV station say, ‘well, maybe it’s not a war crime because it’s not successful — the rocket didn’t hit a kindergarten. It was aimed at a kindergarten but it didn’t hit a kindergarten. So then it’s not reprehensible.’”

Sherman defended Israel’s response to the Gaza rockets as “proportionate.”

“I don’t think there are always two sides to every story. Those who are trying to kill as many babies and children and women as possible, who rejoice in their death… no, you have one side in this conflict that is doing everything it possibly can to reduce and avoid civilian casualties and to prosecute those who engage in acts against civilians,” the congressman said.

“And then you have the Hamas side… which of course Qatar supports, which rejoices in how many babies they can kill, how many children they can kill. They name squares and provide subsidies to those who are able to kill civilians and they aim their rockets at civilian targets. That’s not two equal sides.”

Sunny with light missile cover in Tel Aviv this morning. I awoke to muffled thuds in the distance, Iron Dome shooting down Syrian-made missiles launched from Gaza, according to news reports. I attended the obligatory morning mixer for hotel guests at the bomb shelter, which fortunately lasted only five minutes before the all-clear sounded. I’ll write something more comprehensive on this soon — Tablet is scheduled to run my essay next Monday — but the thumbnail version is that Hamas is making a demonstration out of weakness. Money is tight, 44,000 Gaza civil servants haven’t been paid for weeks, and the IDF did significant damage to its infrastructure on the West Bank after the kidnapping-murder of the three yeshiva boys. Netanyahu will look indecisive and confused, because he has to deal with an openly hostile U.S. administration on one side and his nationalist camp on the other. Time, though, is on Israel’s side: economically, demographically, strategically. The proportion of Jewish births continues to soar. The fruits of a decade of venture capital investing are ripening into high-valuation companies. And the Arab world is disintegrating all around Israel’s borders.

I have no idea whether the IDF will go into Gaza on the ground, or what they will do if they do so: that’s a tricky cost-benefit calculation, and no-one outside the government has relevant information. But the broader point is that Israel will win a war of attrition. Hamas has shot off hundreds of rockets (including one that landed a few kilometers from me up north in Zichron Yaakov while I had lunch there yesterday) without causing a single injury. Iron Dome has worked brilliantly. Traffic was a bit lighter than normal last night, but there wasn’t a free table at any of the hundred or so cafe terraces on Dizengoff St., Tel Aviv’s main drag.

Unknown to each other, President Barack Obama and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas walk into a bar, and meet, well, at the bar. Obama is there for a secret Marlboro and his favorite martini. Abbas is there to escape Hamas gunmen after his head and maybe order a beer with lemonade. After sitting on adjoining stools and exchanging “high fives” “fist-bumps,” and playing a half-round of scissors-paper-rock, they notice each other’s lapel pins.

Abbas is wearing one of the Palestinian flag. Obama is wearing a “Hope and Change” pin, which he alternates with an alleged American flag pin with diagonal red and white stripes. Or no pin at all.

Abbas cheerfully offers to trade pins with Obama. Obama says that’s a great idea. Abbas fixes the Hope and Change pin to his lapel, and Obama fixes the Palestinian one to his lapel. Then they laugh and exclaim together, “Now we are truly on the same side!”

And together they retort, “Haven’t we always been?” They laugh again in the knowledge that they’re in such perfect sync.

That’s the punch line. Something of a downer, isn’t it? Not funny at all?

Nevertheless, it’s true.

Now, Barack Obama is a jihadist on many fronts: In his domestic policies, and in his foreign policies. For example, he is now proposing that Congress appropriate $3.7 billion in “humanitarian” aid for sub rosa amnesty to thousands of illegal immigrants who have been bussed up to the U.S./Mexican border. About 95% of this aid will not go directly to the illegals, but to federal agencies. The Washington Post’s David Nakamura and Wesley Lowery, in their July 8th article, “White House requests $3.7 billion in emergency funds for border crisis,” noted that this exorbitant amount won’t benefit the illegals, but bureaucracies, foreign and domestic:

Under the White House proposal, most of the emergency funds would be split between the Department of Health and Human Services — which would receive $1.8 billion to provide shelter and care to the immigrants — and the Justice and Homeland Security departments, which would get a combined $1.6 billion to handle enforcement.

The State Department would receive $300 million to help the Central America

A stranger named Dr. Alpert entered my dentist’s waiting room this morning and sat down. The answer to your obvious question of how I knew this stranger’s name is that as soon as she sat down, she pulled out her cell phone and listened to her voice mail messages on speaker. One was from a woman who sounded distraught and wanted Dr. Alpert to call back immediately; two others were less distinct. Dr. Alpert did not return the first call but she did call someone else- perhaps an adult child or a close friend – to chat cozily and loudly about how the play was coming along. As she did, the other woman in the waiting room and I faced each other with increasing discomfort, neither of us brave enough to say what we wanted: Lady, there’s a sign on the wall asking you to please turn off your phone – dammit, just do it!

There was more that I wanted to tell Dr. Alpert – that people who need other people to know they are doctors are revealing their own insecurity, like Dr. Jill Biden who insists that she always be announced in that way. She’s a doctor at an inauguration, at a charitable event or spotted in the audience at a dog show. Curious to know what Dr. Jill got her degree in, I asked google who informed me that Jill Tracy Jacobs has a Ph.D. in the topic of “Student Retention At the Community College.” Next to physical education, that has to be the least impressive topic for such an advanced degree but we’re living in times when a 51% graduation rate from high school is deemed success instead of abject failure.

I wanted Dr. Alpert to know that her loud monologue was not equivalent to a quiet chat between two people; that only one door separated her from the great outdoors on a beautiful day; that her insistence on subjecting everyone (staff included) to her boring ruminations was a form of hostage taking; that instead of sounding cool, she sounded as if she might be talking to herself or her voice mail. I know that Dr. Alpert won’t be dismayed by my using her name since she was the one who broadcast it to begin with.

Dr. Alpert may have some patients or students who are reading this and who will now know that she doesn’t respect confidentiality and actively insists that others listen to her messages containing other people’s names and problems. Dr. Alpert is a caucasian female of indeterminate age and average height; she is moderately overweight with a brownish pony tail and a really arrogant face just begging to be punched. If you know her, please do that for me or at least please forward this.

Ever since President George W. Bush said “Islam is peace” on Sept. 17, 2001, it has been politically shielded from any debate about its effects on its adherents or on the rest of the world. Muslim nations and pressure groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations have used political correctness as a weapon to punish anyone who dared to begin any debate on Islam by calling them “Islamophobes,” an accusation of racism.

That era was ended by the lead editorial in the July 5 edition of The Economist, the prominent liberal British news magazine. Titled “The Tragedy of the Arabs,” the article began by wondering why after the glories of past centuries the Arabs are in a “wretched state,” why the fruits of the Arab Spring “rotted into renewed autocracy and war.”

It concludes that, “Islam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted development of independent political institutions.” The Economist correctly assesses the problem by finding that economic stagnation is an inevitable product of these problems and that “only the Arabs can reverse their civilizational decline and right now there is little hope of that happening.”

For a respected liberal media outlet to write these things is literally a revolution in media thinking. Gone is the consistent narrative that every cause of terrorism is the fault of the United States. It is now permissible to ask the questions that the politically correct media has refused to ask for almost 13 years.

To begin with, one of the features of Western and Far Eastern religions is that they encourage introspection. Americans take great pride in their habit of challenging established beliefs be they in government, religion or other aspects of society. Islam prohibits introspection largely because the Quran is believed by Muslims to be the actual words of God and not subject to debate.