RUTHFULLY YOURS

The mother of 16-year-old Naftali Frenkel — one of three ‎Israeli teens abducted nearly two weeks ago by Hamas terrorists — addressed the U.N. ‎Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

Rachel Frenkel, who holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, was invited to make an appeal on ‎behalf of her son (as well as 16-year-old Gil-ad Shaer and 19-year-old Eyal Yifrach) by ‎U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. Neuer gave Frenkel his slot in Tuesday’s ‎‎”debate” on Israeli aggression against Palestinians.‎

‎”We think the world needs to hear her voice,” Neuer told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. ‎‎”It is a chance for [a] mother of [one of] the kidnapped boys to speak to the world and to ‎ask them to do whatever they can. … This heinous act violates international ‎humanitarian law, which prohibits targeting civilians and the taking of hostages.” ‎

As much as Neuer is to be lauded for his amazing and thankless job in general and for his ‎summoning of Frenkel in particular, we frogs should not get our hopes up about receiving any ‎assistance from the scorpions at the U.N. They don’t even bother pretending that they will ‎give the Jewish state a fair shake before dealing it a lethal sting. ‎

Indeed, since the June 12 abduction of the Israeli teenagers, the U.N. has been focusing ‎solely on the response of the Israeli government to the kidnapping.‎

Considering that time is of the essence when searching for captives — who might be ‎wounded or undergoing torture — the behavior of the Israel Defense Forces and the public ‎at large has been exemplary, if not mild. This is particularly the case since Operation ‎Brother’s Keeper has uncovered an extensive network of tunnels and explosives labs ‎throughout the West Bank.‎

Yet in a phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday evening, U.N. ‎Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed “concern” about the restrictions on movement ‎and mass arrests of Palestinians.‎

It is safe to assume that Netanyahu did not slam down the receiver or tell Ban ‎where to stick his “concern,” and instead explained that the only way to locate the boys is ‎through house searches and interrogations. But to no avail. ‎

U.N. Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry also put his ‎two cents in about what he and others are now calling “collective punishment” against ‎innocent Palestinians. Israel, he said, should “seek to minimize the impact of security ‎operations on individuals who have committed no offense and investigate allegations of ‎excessive use of force, including the killing of civilians.” ‎

Ronnie Osburn was preparing to talk to National Review Online Thursday about lawlessness in his border community when his home was broken into.

Osburn, a rancher who lives just south of a Border Patrol checkpoint in Brooks County, Texas, says he stepped away for about 45 minutes, and when he returned somebody had trashed his house. The trespassers shattered his gun case, leaving a trail of blood throughout the house, but dropped the guns near the kitchen before scattering out the back door. They had searched through the house, opened drawers, and even left a heap of uncooked bacon in a frying pan on the stove.

Ranchers in South Texas say they are seeing a greater criminal element among illegal immigrants trespassing through their property. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers responded to the situation. Although no arrests have been made, a Brooks County sheriff’s deputy tells National Review Online the break-in involved “undocumented crossers.” At one point a Border Patrol agent said he thought the trespassers had been spotted about a half-mile north of the ranch, headed in the same direction as the Border Patrol checkpoint near Falfurrias.

Border Patrol agents carrying AR-15s and 12-gauge pumps searched the property with Osburn, who also had an AR-15, looking for any sign of the trespassers. After scanning his backyard, Osburn discovered three shoes left behind, and Border Patrol agents said they expected the burglars were less than a mile away.

“Welcome to South Texas,” Osburn tells me while extending his hand.

“This is not the first time this has happened,” he says. “I have Border Patrol in here every day chasing groups, just about.”

As daylight faded, a Border Patrol agent gave the order to leave the ranch, saying he did not want to send his guys into the brush after an unknown number of illegal immigrants who could be waiting for him with weapons. The Brooks County Sheriff’s Department is now leading the investigation, but it has turned up no more leads days after the break-in occurred.

Eleven years ago, a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, I drove from Amman through the eastern Jordanian desert and into Iraq, where I stopped in the westernmost town, Rutbah, an old refueling stop for Imperial Airways flights from Britain to India, and had a bite to eat at a cafe whose patron had a trilby pushed back on his head Sinatra-style. (It was the first stop on a motoring tour that took me through Ramadi and Fallujah and up to Tikrit and various other towns.)

In those days, the Iraqi side of the border post was manned by US troops. An “immigration official” from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment glanced at my Canadian passport, exchanged a few pleasantries, and waved me through.

That same border post today is manned by head-hacking jihadists from ISIS:

Fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaeda breakaway group, took all the border crossings with Jordan and Syria, Hameed Ahmed Hashim, a member of the Anbar provincial council, said by telephone yesterday. Militants took Rutba, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) east of the Jordanian border, Faleh al-Issawi, the deputy chief of the council, said by phone. Anbar province in western Iraq borders both countries. The Jordanian army didn’t immediately respond to a request for information about the situation on the border.

I should think not. The Jordanian official I met was charming if somewhat bureaucratically obstructive, and wound up asking me about how difficult it was to emigrate to Canada. More difficult than emigrating from Syria to Iraq:

Rutba gives ISIS control over a stretch of highway to Jordan that has fallen into infrequent use over the past several months because of the deteriorating security situation. The town has a population of 40,000, but it has recently absorbed 20,000 people displaced from Fallujah and Ramadi.

The Obama Administration’s abuse of executive power is emerging as this Supreme Court term’s defining theme, and on Monday the Justices applied some basic constitutional law to the White House’s anticarbon agenda.

In Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, the Justices feed several major climate regulations into the wood chipper. “When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy,” the majority observes, “we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism.”

The ruling amounts to an overdue correction to Massachusetts v. EPA, the 5-4 ruling in 2007 that held greenhouse gases can be “pollutants” under clean air laws that were written decades before the carbon panic. That decision wrongly rewrote the Clean Air Act, but it was also always narrower than liberals made it out to be and never the license for policy rewrites that became the EPA’s interpretation.

The problem for the agency is that the Clean Air Act sets precise emissions thresholds for “major sources” of a given pollutant, defined as more than either 100 or 250 tons annually. Congress had in mind traditional industrial byproducts like SOX or ozone, but the ceilings make no sense for ubiquitous carbon. Any CO2 rule would thus reach well beyond power plants and factories to millions of small carbon sources like hospitals, grocery stores, shopping centers, farms and churches, with penalties of $37,500 per day for violations.

To obey the law as written, the EPA estimated, permit applications under one program would have climbed to 6.1 million a year from 15,000 today, while administrative costs in another would have exploded to $1.5 billion from $12 million. The agency conceded that such a regime would be “unrecognizable” to Congress. Yet in 2009 the EPA regulated anyway and asserted unilateral power to “tailor” the law. It baldly increased the thresholds by as much as a thousandfold to avoid having to supervise elementary schools the same as cement mixers.

Amid a tangle of partial concurrences and dissents, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the controlling 5-4 opinion striking down this tailoring as illegal. He writes that it is “patently unreasonable—not to say outrageous—for EPA to insist on seizing expansive power that it admits the statute is not designed to grant.”

Justice Scalia catches the EPA climateers selectively citing statutes, claiming that they are compelled to regulate by the Clean Air Act but uncompelled to abide by its text. The act is “not a command to regulate,” and neither is Mass. v. EPA, he reiterates. More to the point, “An agency has no power to ‘tailor’ legislation to bureaucratic policy goals by rewriting unambiguous statutory terms.”

Fouad Ajami would have been amused, but not surprised, to read his own obituary in the New York Times. “Edward Said, the Palestinian cultural critic who died in 2003, accused [Ajami] of having ‘unmistakably racist prescriptions,'” quoted obituarist Douglas Martin.

Thus was Said, the most mendacious, self-infatuated and profitably self-pitying of Arab-American intellectuals—a man whose account of his own childhood cannot be trusted—raised from the grave to defame, for one last time, the most honest and honorable and generous of American intellectuals, no hyphenation necessary.

Ajami, who died of prostate cancer Sunday in his summer home in Maine, was often described as among the foremost scholars of the modern Arab and Islamic worlds, and so he was. He was born in 1945 to a family of farmers in a Shiite village in southern Lebanon and was raised in Beirut in the politics of the age.

“I was formed by an amorphous Arab nationalist sensibility,” he wrote in his 1998 masterpiece, “The Dream Palace of the Arabs.” He came to the U.S. for college and graduate school, became a U.S. citizen, and first made his political mark as an advocate for Palestinian nationalism. For those who knew Ajami mainly as a consistent advocate of Saddam Hussein’s ouster, it’s worth watching a YouTube snippet of his 1978 debate with Benjamin Netanyahu, in which Ajami makes the now-standard case against Israeli iniquity.

Today Mr. Netanyahu sounds very much like his 28-year-old self. But Ajami changed. He was, to borrow a phrase, mugged by reality. By the 1980s, he wrote, “Arab society had run through most of its myths, and what remained in the wake of the word, of the many proud statements people had made about themselves and their history, was a new world of cruelty, waste, and confusion.”

It is hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher complaining, as Mrs. Clinton did, that ‘it was all about my hair.’

The past few weeks of Hillary Clinton’s book tour have given Americans more than a modest whiff of what a future Clinton presidency would bring. Nothing has brought home with more immediacy the role we can expect gender to play in that administration—or more to the point, the focus on anti-women bias about which we would evidently be fated to hear a great deal.

That would come as a change, after what will by then have been eight years of a different ruling focus in the White House—that being, of course, the president’s race. Years in which Obama administration staff members, congressional allies and advocates in the political culture regularly nurtured the view—when they weren’t making outright accusations—that vociferous opposition to this president, and his policies, was largely fueled by white racism. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) just last month declared that opposition to ObamaCare came from people who don’t like the president “because maybe he’s the wrong color.”

Attorney General Eric Holder in turn delivered himself of bitter complaints to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in April about the lack of respect accorded him by a House committee. “What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?” Barack Obama had barely taken office, which he could not have won without the vote of white America, when his attorney general charged that the American people were “a nation of cowards” in their dealings with race. Mr. Holder would go on to attack states attempting to curtail voter fraud, to refuse prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party who had menaced white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, and to become, in all, the most racially polarizing attorney general in the nation’s history.

A Hillary Clinton administration would bring change, yes, but much about the change would feel familiar. We were given a small foretaste last week in a statement by Lanny Davis, former special counsel to Bill Clinton and indefatigable Hillary supporter. Mr. Davis had taken offense at the press description of Mrs. Clinton’s performance on a National Public Radio program—one that had not gone smoothly for her. He was offended at certain language that had been used to describe Mrs. Clinton’s reactions when the NPR interviewer questioned the consistency of her support for gay marriage. Reporters had described her as “testy,” “contentious” and “annoyed.” Mr. Davis opined that “had it been a man, the words ‘testy’ and ‘annoyed’ would not have been used.”

After the end of the Vietnam War and the abrogation of the draft, the radicals of the New Left of the sixties turned their attention to careers in academia, law, journalism, and “community action” projects in religious, environmental, anti-nuclear energy, and social service institutions. Stanley Kurtz in his book “Radical in Chief- Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism” writes that on April one 1983… a twenty one year old senior at Columbia University named Barack Obama attended the “Socialist Scholars Conference” in New York City’s Cooper Union, which had been touted as a meeting “In honor of Karl Marx’s centennial (1818-1883).” This conference became the catalyst for Obama’s future political agenda. The opening remarks of the 1983 Conference were tellingly delivered by City University’s radical professor Frances Fox Piven, described by the author as “…..preeminent theorist, strategist, and historian of community organizing, with a keen sense of the roots of community organizing in America’s early communist and socialist movements.”…rsk

The Obama administration-driven calamity at this nation’s southern border is no naiveté-caused accident. Instead, it’s the latest manifestation of what clear-eyed observers must recognize is just one of many concerted attempts to overwhelm this nation’s institutions and its social, psychological and physical infrastructure for the apparent purpose of leaving it permanently weakened and fundamentally changed.

Conscious or not — and I would argue in most cases that it is quite conscious — what we’re seeing is a comprehensive application of the left’s long-championed Cloward-Piven strategy.

The folklore behind the strategy claims that its enunciation by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven “only” involved collapsing the welfare system to create a political climate receptive to the idea of a “guaranteed annual income,” and — presto! — “an end to poverty.” [1]

The idea advanced in the couple’s May 1966 column [2] in The Nation was to have those whom they saw as naively self-reliant recognize that they were legally entitled to receive benefits and to have them apply for public assistance en masse. This would “produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments,” thus requiring a federal solution which would, in their fevered minds [3], “eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”

The folklore also contends that the strategy didn’t work. That’s not really true. It really did collapse the system in one city, and it permanently changed national attitudes towards public assistance. As James Simpson observed [4] at American Thinker in September 2008 (still-working links are in the original):

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target.

Act Locally, Wish Globally-Proposed carbon-emission cuts would hobble the U.S. economy but do nothing for global levels.

The Environmental Protection Agency has won a victory at the Supreme Court, with a solid majority of the justices, including Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, signing off on its regulation of greenhouse gases emitted by power plants and other entities already subject to its permitting process. In a separate ruling, the Court forbade the EPA from extending its scope to entities not currently under its jurisdiction based solely on expected greenhouse-gas emissions. President Barack Obama’s plan to issue a presidential fiat requiring that states reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent will not affected by the rulings. Justice Scalia warned the EPA not to get ahead of itself: “Our decision should not be taken as an endorsement of all aspects of EPA’s current approach,” he wrote, “nor as a free rein for any future regulatory application” of the so-called Best Available Control Technology (BACT) rules. Instead, “our narrow holding is that nothing in the statute categorically prohibits EPA” from implementing its contemplated greenhouse-gas controls.

So, a limited victory, but a victory nonetheless on the fundamental matter of using the Clean Air Act — a piece of legislation intended to fight air pollution in the form of ground-level ozone, sulfur, lead, particulate matter, and the like — to empower the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on the theory that doing so will help prevent or reduce global warming, an issue that is separate from the questions of smog and industrial toxins that the Clean Air Act was written to address.

When the administration’s emissions-reduction rules were announced, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy described the issue in the habitual progressive language of crusade: “We have a moral obligation to act,” she said.

Do we?

Global warming, or global climate change, if you prefer, is, as the name indicates, a global phenomenon. The United States is, according to the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, responsible for about 14 percent of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions, not bad for a country that produces 22 percent of the world’s economic output. The generation of electricity, according to the EPA, is the source of just under one-third of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions — 32 percent, to be precise. Given the trends in the rest of the world, especially in China and India, this reduction, if achieved, would be minuscule by global standards, 30 percent of 32 percent of 14 percent of global emissions, or about 1.3 percent.

The world’s organized hostility to Israel would be kind of funny if it didn’t have such serious consequences, or potential consequences. There are some 200 nations in the world. Many of them are very bad actors: dictatorships, terror states. And it is tiny, democratic Israel that is the focus of the world’s hostility.

The latest is that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — not to be confused with the Presbyterian Church in America — has voted to divest from Israel. Thus does a major American church join the worldwide BDS movement. (“BDS” stands for “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” — against one country, Israel.)

If Israel did not exist, the United Nations might not have much to do. Last year the General Assembly adopted 25 resolutions against particular countries. Twenty-one of those resolutions were against Israel; the other four were against Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Burma. Not since the apartheid regime in South Africa has a country been so stigmatized by the world. And foes of Israel, of course, promote the lie that Israel is an “apartheid state.”

Consider a few steps in the effort to delegitimize Israel. Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous scientists in the world, joined the academic boycott of that country. He has been happy, however, to go to Iran and China. The American Studies Association voted to boycott Israel. In Scotland, the West Dunbartonshire Council forbade local libraries to carry books printed in Israel. Israeli athletes are often harassed, and prevented from playing; same with Israeli musicians.

It used to be that, when a performer refused to perform in Israel, it made news. Now it makes news when a performer has the nerve to show up in Israel. A few years ago, Elton John shouted from an Israeli stage, “Shalom! We are so happy to be back here! Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us from comin’, baby!”

One consequence of anti-Israel boycotts is that they harm Arabs. They do so by perpetuating two myths, related. The first is that the Arab–Israeli conflict is Israel’s fault, instead of the fault of people who refuse to coexist. The second is that the Arabs’ lamentable condition is Israel’s fault, instead of the fault of people who refuse to reform, liberalize, or democratize.

By the way, one opponent of anti-Israel boycotts is Yasser Arafat’s successor as the PLO chairman, Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe he could have a word with the Presbyterians?

When IRS Commissioner John Koskinen arrogantly told Congress that he had no apologies for an agency that has targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny, had a top-ranking bureaucrat take the Fifth Amendment, and destroyed its own correspondence, he meant it. Nor did Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA, offer any apologies for concocting a fake persona, replete with false e-mail identity (“Richard Windsor”), to hide her own communications. Kathleen Sebelius was likewise unapologetic after presiding over the ruined initial implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Nor did she pay any consequence for campaigning for Democratic candidates while a cabinet secretary, in violation of the Hatch Act.

Government always grows, sometimes even more rapidly under Republican than under Democratic presidents. But under President Obama we are seeing something a little different — the creation of a partisan, semi-autonomous government that seems to exist for the benefit of its employees and the larger ideological agenda of the present administration.

The common theme of many of the Obama scandals is that expansion of government is a good thing (e.g., more employed constituents, more redistributive regulations on individuals, higher taxes to pay for it all), that government employees should be partisans of those politicians who favor more government, and that what a government agency was constituted to do is not necessarily what it will do.

Take the Veterans Affairs scandal. Delays in providing care were covered up by false record keeping. This criminal fraud contributed to the death of several veterans. The falsification of records also meant both that the scandal would not quickly come to light and that veterans would continue not to receive needed care. No matter: 65 percent of VA executives nevertheless received merit bonuses, among them those at the dysfunctional Phoenix VA Health Care System, where the largest number of veterans died. Overall, 80 percent of VA executives received very high performance rankings for overseeing a scandal-plagued agency. An outsider might conclude that the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy existed not so much for its client veterans as for the fossilized bureaucracy that so poorly runs the hospitals.

That would not be an unreasonable deduction. The General Services Administration, which provides supplies, office space, and so on for federal agencies, supposedly to ensure that they conduct operations efficiently, is likewise out of control. In 2012, videos emerged of lavish GSA junkets to Las Vegas and bizarre government-funded amateur skits and movies. It appeared that federal employees were not only exempt from the law, but sneering about their immunity from accountability.