RUTHFULLY YOURS

Originally published by Defining Ideas.

Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.

One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the Schuette decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 Bakke decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, Bakke legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.

Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in Fisher vs. University of Texas last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.”

Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administration is talking about is something different.

“Tolerists, far from being the nice, kind, fair, tolerant people they think they are, in fact are the enemies of freedom and the enablers of totalitarianism.”

The acuteness of Howard Rotberg’s book Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed [1], now in its second, updated edition, lies in the ease with which readers will grasp his coinage. We know what he is referring to as soon as he begins to identify its salient features, as if the word has been around for a while. Indeed, the phenomenon is so widespread and so bizarre that it deserves its own term — and Rotberg’s bracing dissection.

Tolerism is a worldview in which the tolerance of cultural “otherness” — the more violently anti-Western the better — has become Western elites’ most celebrated (perhaps their sole) value, before which all other values, of justice, freedom, intellectual inquiry, or political dissent, have given way. Rotberg posits that it is precisely the abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian principles and the adoption of a pernicious, unmoored moral relativism that have enabled tolerance (though it is not very tolerant) to assume its unchallenged status as the absolute virtue. The particular focus and defining example of tolerism in our post-9/11 world is Western accommodation of radical Islam: the more violent and hateful the jihadists show themselves to be, the more insistent the tolerists are about the need to empathize with them.

Tolerism is not the same as simple tolerance, Rotberg explains, referring to the history of religious and political toleration as an enlightened recognition of reciprocal accommodation under which tolerance is only one among other, guiding, values. Once elevated to the status of an ideology in itself, however, tolerism is a belief system that requires the uncritical embrace of otherness not for some rational social benefit but as a proof of the tolerists’ moral rectitude; as such, it spells the end of proper discrimination and judgement, and results in the self-contradictory acceptance and encouragement of terrorists and rogue states that are themselves murderously intolerant.

Under the reign of tolerism, the so-called tolerant lose the ability to recognize or appraise evil, believing that fanatics can be placated if only westerners are willing to understand their point of view. Efforts on the part of the committed few to resist Islamic triumphalism are decried as “intolerant,” the mere charge thought sufficient to end all argument. As a result, the betrayal of traditional liberal institutions and rights — through press censorship, the suppression of academic freedom, selective blindness about abhorrent cultural practices — becomes acceptable, even mandatory, and Islam makes steady inroads upon its host culture.

The response to the murder of the three abducted Israeli teens, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, has been predictable in its call for restraint and moderation. Left-wing organizations [1] like the Israeli political party Meretz, the New Israel Fund, and J Street, wedded to nebulous and self-serving concepts like “social justice,” [2] ramble on about calm, measure, reconciliation, and the larger interests of communal peace — as if avowedly vicious and homicidal entities like Hamas and its offshoots will feel humbled and ashamed of their murderous practices and will experience a benign change of heart.

In fact, they are busy celebrating what they regard as a revanchist victory — indeed, candies were handed out to mark the abduction and the ambulance ferrying the bodies of the slain teens was pelted with stones [3] and spray-painted by Palestinian villagers — and will not be deterred from carrying out further atrocities in the future if they are allowed to get away with them. Perhaps the principals of our conciliatory organizations would feel differently if their own children had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed. But one thing is certain: for all their “prayers for the suffering families” and “calls for peace,” they are incapable of imagining what their own people endure and are barren of genuine feeling, while full of empathy and concern for their assailants, who wish only for their speedy death and the subsequent extinction of the Jewish state. There is only one word for such flaccid, self-righteous and ultimately self-immolating appeasers: idiots.

As for the Israeli leadership, it’s a mixed bag. Outgoing president Shimon Peres is a grande fromage who over the years has grown gamy and rancid, with a soft European rind. Benjamin Netanyahu should be cut a little slack given the intense pressures, domestic and international, that he labors under — but he is not his father, who was cut in the mold of the pragmatic and unyielding patriot Ze’ev Jabotinsky. (See Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism [4].)

With only a few exceptions, like Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, the Israeli leadership comprises a motley crew best left to their often lucrative but generally undistinguished careers, prone to log-rolling and corruption, devoid of segulah (Hebrew for virtue or inner treasure), more preoccupied with their American holdings and European vacations than with the security of their beleaguered nation.

The theory, of course, that presumably governs their behavior is that diplomacy and treating with perennial enemies or political adversaries — e.g. acceding to American bullying, glad-handing Turkey, subsidizing the PA, victualing Gaza, engaging in outrageously disproportionate prisoner swaps, giving a hostile and often traitorous Israeli media and academy a free pass, etc. — is a way of ensuring the ultimate security of the country. On the contrary, Israeli citizens are rendered increasingly unsafe by the prosecution of such measures.

”

“Again, Hobby Lobby’s health plan pays for birth-control pills, vaginal rings, contraceptive patches, and other items to help female employees plan their pregnancies. The Left’s arguments to the contrary are — surprise, surprise — lies.

What Hobby Lobby will not cover are four contraceptive methods that its owners fear are abortifacients:

Plan B (“The Morning After Pill”)
Ella (a similar type of “emergency contraception”)
Copper Intra-Uterine Device
IUD with progestin

Rather than simply prevent sperm and ova from uniting, Hobby Lobby’s owners believe that these medications either kill human beings when they are fertilized eggs or prevent them from implanting themselves in utero, whereupon they die.”

Hobby Lobby does not prevent its female employees from using any of these four types of contraceptives. However, since they believe these innovations kill babies, they simply require that any employees who want to use them buy them with their own money.

The Left is foaming at the mouth over the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision this morning.

“This is going to turn the dial back,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz warned on MSNBC. The Democratic party’s national chairwoman added: “Republicans want to do everything they can to have the long hand of government, and now the long hand of business, reach into a woman’s body and make health care decisions for her.”

“Today’s Supreme Court decision unfortunately jeopardizes basic healthcare coverage and access to contraception for a countless number of women,” said Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

In Obama’s most recent — and embarrassing — public whine, he lashed out at the once-obsequious press. In his now customary first-person I/me/my/mine lament (e.g., “They don’t do anything, except block me and call me names. . . . If they were more interested in growing the economy for you and the issues that you are talking about instead of trying to mess with me, we would be doing a lot better. . . . The critics, the cynics in Washington, they’ve written me off more times than I can count.”), he lambasted the partisan culture of Washington. He lashed out at the Tea Party, the House Republicans, his opponents in general, and all those who would unreasonably oppose his blanket amnesties, his climate-change taxes and regulations, the shutdown of the Keystone-pipeline project, Obamacare, and $9 trillion in new debt.

Apparently someone other than Obama is in charge when the IRS goes rogue, the VA implodes, the Justice Department goes after Associated Press reporters, the consulate in Benghazi is overrun, the NSA taps the phones of allied leaders, Iraq is torn apart, the Middle East melts down, or we trade five terrorist kingpins for an American deserter. Obama’s impromptu adolescent moaning was bizarre and reminds us again why he would be wiser to stay close to his teleprompter.

Obama also seems oddly to forget that when he promised to use his pen and phone to run things by his lonesome, nearly everyone took him at his word. And so he tried just that. What Obama is now angry about is not partisanship per se, but that his own partisanship and subversion of settled law have been repudiated consistently by both the Supreme Court and the American public. Were Obama’s poll ratings at 60 percent, and were the Supreme Court upholding his pen-and-phone governance, and were the Democrats on the verge of winning back their long-lost supermajority in the Senate and taking back the House, then Obama would hardly be decrying partisanship, the media, the Tea Party, or Republicans in general. “Messing” with Obama means not being convinced that his record has helped America.

So there is an increasingly desperate strain to the Obama Left, the more so in that the scandals pile up and any idea of a legacy vanishes into Carteresque caricature. One unfortunate result of the end of the “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” agenda is a sour-grapes nihilism — a sort of “the scandals are your problem, not mine” attitude. In each case, those worried about the mounting chaos are flippantly dismissed with the assumption that they themselves are at fault for worrying about it.

A rogue IRS? Obama smiles that there is not a “smidgen” of corruption as the new IRS commissioner says the agency owes the American people no apologies.

The VA scandal? Too many wars have meant too many veterans needing treatment.

The Presbyterian Church Marginalizes Itself By Jeff Carter

I was born and raised a Presbyterian. Presbyterians and the US have a very close history. The history books glorify Sam Adams and his efforts in Boston. But, the kindling and initial fire for the American Revolution was made in the pulpits of the Presbyterian churches of New Jersey. The pastors in those pulpits gave both a spiritual, and academic base to rally upon.

The American Constitution is patterned after the documents that formed the Presbyterian church, and a lot of the signees of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterians. I don’t think any one church has a monopoly on worship, a relationship with God, or can guarantee a path to heaven.

Traditional organized religious organizations are losing members in droves. The Presbyterian Church has lost 30% of its membership in the last 13 years. This weekends action to divest itself from Israel will hasten the decline.

Why have traditional churches lost members? It’s because they have lurched to the far left when it comes to official church policy. They are only preaching to one side of the choir. The thing is, if you look at demographics, left wingers attend church in less numbers than right wingers. Traditional churches have made a business decision to go after a market decreasing in size.

One of my local pastors, John Vest, has been blogging about it. John is a progressive member of the church, but was against divestment. He signed this letter, The Things That Make For Peace. Among the points made this one stands out,

It is telling that one of the earliest and loudest affirmations of Zionism Unsettled was by David Duke, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist and anti-Semite in the United States today, who said:
In a major breakthrough in the worldwide struggle against Zionist extremism, the largest Presbyterian church in the United States, the PC(USA), has issued a formal statement calling Zionism “Jewish Supremacism” — a term first coined and made popular by Dr. David Duke.
The reality that David Duke would endorse a Presbyterian study guide available for purchase on the PC(USA) website is sickening to us, and should give all Presbyterians great pause in considering the arguments and language of this document and Zionism Unsettled’s ideological relationship to the overtures coming before the General Assembly.

I have long said, if you want to understand exactly who and what the Progressive Movement is, simply listen to what they espouse to hate. That is who and what they are. Frighteningly, it really is that easy. The movement that proclaims “tolerance,” “inclusion,” “acceptance,” and “equality for all,” is actually a movement that embraces intolerance, exclusion, opposition and oligarchic elitism. And no matter how much they espouse the former, their actions confirm the latter.

The Progressive Movement, which now controls not only the federal government and the government apparatuses in most of the failing, debt-ridden, deficit spending urban centers in the United States (and in many “enlightened” locales across the globe), but the education system and the mainstream media, is tolerant to only those who agree with their world view, include only those who will advance their cause, accept only those who tow the Progressive line ideologically and call for equality to apply for only those with which beg their favor. If you have an opposing viewpoint on culture, government or society, you are smeared, demonized, castigated and otherwise openly and veraciously hated.

So much for all that “hate crime” talk oozing out of the Progressive’s collective “pie hole.”

The Examiner reports:

“While speaking at the Texas Democratic Party convention in Dallas on Friday, state Rep.Trey Martinez Fischer told fellow Democrats that GOP doesn’t stand for ‘Grand Old Party,’ it stands for ‘gringos y otros pendejos.’ In addition to the racist slur, Martinez Fischer’s office handed out a set of six Lotería cards to delegates, one of which depicts a red-faced Abbott as ‘El Diablito.’

“A Google search found that other than the Houston Chronicle and a few other sites, the racist profanity…”

http://www.truthrevolt.org/israel-revolt/arabs-throw-stones-ambulance-carrying-bodies-murdered-boys

Arabs Throw Stones at Ambulance Carrying Bodies of Murdered Boys

According to multiple reports, Arabs stoned the IDF ambulance that was carrying the bodies of the murdered Israeli teenagers. The ambulance was forced to stop, its windshield shattered. According to The Algemeiner:

Palestinian Arabs attacked an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance humvee on Monday that was transporting the recently discovered bodies of three murdered Israeli boys who were kidnapped on June 12, an Israel source told The Algemeiner.

The Muqata blog posted an image of the damaged vehicle on Facebook writing, “8:44pm IDF Ambulance humvee transporting the bodies of the boys attacked by arabs….windows smashed.”

In the picture, the ambulance’s windshield is smashed and splattered with paint.

When the mothers of the Israeli boys kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in the area of Gush Etzion, in “Israeli occupied” Judea, spoke before international bodies, many of the diplomats referred to them in their comments and questions as “settlers.” One is given to understand that, in their eyes, inclusion in that category means that they have no human rights and the world’s indifference to their fate is justified. In fact, the boys are not “settlers” but attend schools in Jewish towns in Judea, two of them in kibbutz Kfar Etzion and one in Kiriyat Arba. But let’s leave that aside and cut straight to the core of the issue of the legality of Jewish settlements outside the 1949 Armistice Lines.
There is only one International law concerning Israeli settlement that is binding and has never been superseded. The League of Nations, on July 24th, 1922, established the Mandate for Palestine, by unanimous vote, which included two Islamic states, Persia and Albania. The resolution stated, in part, “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country….”
Note “reconstituting” their national home. The Jewish people was explicitly recognized as the long-exiled indigenous people of that land.
Moreover, Article 6 of the Mandate directs the Administration of Palestine to facilitate … “close settlement by Jews on the land….”
And Jews settled. And it was not contested that those settlements were legal under international law.

Large-scale fighting raged in Iraq on Monday, following Sunday’s proclamation of an Islamic caliphate over large areas of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The jihadist group declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as leader of the new entity and its caliph, theoretically combining religious and state authority in the tradition of Muhammad’s early successors, across Iraq and Syria and beyond.
This development should not be dismissed as mere propaganda. For the first time since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in the aftermath of the Great War, there is a substantial state-like entity presuming to revive the mantle of Sunni Islamic universalism.
First of all, it is worth examining what exactly makes a state a “state.” Traditional international law postulates the possession of population, of territory, and the existence of a government which exercises effective control over that population and territory. To put it more technically, a state exists if it enjoys the monopoly of coercive mechanisms within its domain.
Some authors also postulate the prevalent loyalty of the population to the government, but recent legal practice does not support the assertion. In April 1992 the U.S. recognized “Bosnia and Herzegovina” in its Yugoslav federal boundaries, although its nominal government – led by the dedicated jihadist Alija Izetbegovic – commanded the loyalty of only two-fifths of its citizens who happened to be Muslims, and controlled at most a third of the territory. On the other hand, unrecognized state entities such as Transnistria, Abkazia, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh (like them or hate them) command their denizens’ overwhelming loyalty and exercise effectively undisputed control over their entire territory.
Finally, there are international jurists who cite the ability of the self-proclaimed state’s authority to engage in international discourse, but that is a moot point. The capacity to control a putative state’s territory and population almost invariably leads to such ability, regardless of the circumstances of that state’s inception: South Sudan is a recent case in point, and the creation of Israel in 1947 also comes to mind.