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2014

RUTHIE BLUM: CORRUPTION COMES CHEAP

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7911

Corruption comes cheap

In the fall of 2008, I went to see then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to propose a book project. A couple of months earlier, he had announced that he was going to resign his post to fight mounting allegations of corruption against him.

“I will step aside properly in an honorable and responsible way,” he had said in a press conference. “And afterwards I will prove my innocence. I want to make it clear: I am proud to be a citizen of a country where the prime minister can be investigated like a regular citizen. It is the duty of the police to investigate, and the duty of the prosecution to instruct the police. The prime minister is not above the law.”

Other than gossip over the years and a couple of cases against him that closed before they opened, I had no reason to assume he was guilty of any crimes — other than political ones, that is.

Indeed, Olmert’s ideological shift to the Left was not to my liking one bit. Nor did I make a secret, in person or in print, of my aversion to his ideas about how to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

But I had always found Olmert to be both intelligent and personable. This is in spite of an altercation we had had over an interview in The Jerusalem Post. During the interview, which I conducted jointly with political affairs correspondent Gil Hoffman a few weeks before the disengagement from Gaza in 2005, then-Vice Prime Minister Olmert called settlers “stupid” for fearing that a withdrawal from Gaza would lead to a concession of Israeli sovereignty over east Jerusalem, as well.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE WORLD’S COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

War is what Obama does best.

The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.

Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.

“Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.” Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.

As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama isn’t out to unite Americans. He isn’t even out for tolerance. His game is divide and conquer, playing on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.

It’s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.

The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.

While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.

Judaism, Christianity, Environmentalism In Chronological Order, These Are the Three Main Religions of the West: By Dennis Prager

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374672/print

As I have often noted, the most dynamic and influential religion of the past hundred years has not been Christianity, let alone Judaism, the two religions that created the Western world. Nor has it been Islam. It has been Leftism.

Leftism has influenced the literary, academic, media, and, therefore, the political elite far more than any other religion has. It has taken over Western schools from elementary through graduate.

For most of that time, various incarnations of Marxism have been the dominant expressions, and motivators, of Leftism: specifically, income redistribution, material equality, and socialism. They are still powerful aspects of the Left, but with the downfall of most Communist regimes, other left-wing expressions have generated even more passion: first feminism and then environmentalism.

Nothing comes close to environmentalism in generating left-wing enthusiasm. It is the religion of our time. For the Left, the earth has supplanted patriotism. This was largely inevitable in Europe, given its contempt for nationalism since the end of World War I and even more so since World War II. But it is now true for the elites (almost all of whose members are leftists) in America as well.

This was most graphically displayed by the infamous Time magazine cover of April 21, 2008, which altered the most iconic photograph in American history — Joe Rosenthal’s picture of the Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima. Instead of the American flag, the Time cover depicted the Marines planting a tree. The caption on the cover read, “How to Win the War on Global Warming.” In other words, just as German and Japanese Fascism was the enemy in World War II, global warming is the enemy today. And instead of allegiance to the nation’s flag, now our allegiance must be to nature.

This is the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian view of the world that has dominated Western civilization for all of the West’s history. The Judeo-Christian worldview is that man is at the center of the universe; nature was therefore created for man. Nature has no intrinsic worth other than man’s appreciation and moral use of it.

Worship of nature was the pagan worldview, a worship that the Hebrew Bible was meant to destroy. The messages of the Creation story in Genesis were that:

Obama’s Enlightened Foolery :He views Putin, the 21st Century, and Himself as in a Fun-House Mirror. By Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374665/print

President Obama talks about Vladimir Putin as if he were a Pennsylvania “clinger” who operates on outdated principles, who is driven by fear, and whom unfortunately the post-Enlightenment mind of even Barack Obama cannot always reach. Deconstruct a recent CBS News interview with President Obama, and the limitations of his now-routine psychoanalyses are all too clear. Consider the following presidential assertions:

Obama said in the CBS interview that Vladimir Putin was “willing to show a deeply held grievance about what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union.”

Is that any surprise? Why would Putin not “show a deeply held grievance” — given that Russians enjoyed far more pride and influence when they had far more territory and power than they do now? Just because elites in the West might consider Denmark and Luxembourg model societies, given their per capita incomes, ample social services, high-speed mass transit, and climate-change sensitivities, does not necessarily mean that the grandchildren of Stalingrad and Leningrad would agree.

What exactly does Obama mean when he says, of Putin, “what he considers to be the loss of the Soviet Union”?

“Considers”? Did we miss something here?

Did not the Soviet Union disappear from the map? Did not it leave in its ruin a much smaller Russian Federation — one perhaps far less dangerous and with more potential to get along with the West, but with far less likelihood of regaining the glory and influence that many Russians had come to appreciate?

Interview: Andrew Bostom on Iran’s Final Solution for Israel- Ed Driscoll

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2014/03/31/irans-final-solution/?singlepage=true

“Iran has named a member of the militant group that held 52 Americans hostage in Tehran for 444 days to be its next ambassador to the United Nations,” Bloomberg News reported on Saturday, a reminder that the totalitarian mindset that fueled the Iranian revolution of the late 1970s is still very much a factor in that radical Islamic state.

As is the desire to obliterate Israel off the map via nuclear weapons — and as the above Bloomberg story highlights, the incandescent uselessness of the United Nations.

All of these topics come together in frequent PJM contributor Andrew Bostom’s new book, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran, which he has self-published for the Kindle format and in traditional “dead tree” format.

● Who are the members of United Nations’ P5+1 group, and what are the odds they will successfully cause Iran to disarm?

● Trusting Khomeini was of course perfidy. Why does the Obama administration think it can trust Khamenei?

● Can we trust the so-called Iranian Green Movement?

● What has Israel done proactively to fight the threat from Iran?

● What is involved in self-publishing for the Kindle?

● How did Andrew acquire endorsements for his book from conservative luminaries such as Angelo Codevilla, Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, and Diana West?

Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

MR. DRISCOLL: This is Ed Driscoll for PJ Media.com, and we’re speaking today with Andrew Bostom. Andew is a frequent contributor to PJ Media, and the author of the new book, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran. It’s available for the Kindle from Amazon.com. And Andrew, thank you for stopping by today.

MR. BOSTOM: Thanks, Ed. I just wanted to update, it just went online in the print version at Amazon as well.

MR. DRISCOLL: Oh, okay, terrific.

Andrew, your book has to say the least quite a provocative title, though one that shouldn’t come as too much of a shock for anyone who’s been reading PJ Media on a regular basis.

I think I can guess what Iran’s ultimate goal is, but in your estimation, how will they achieve what you describe as their final solution for Israel?

MR. BOSTOM: Well, this seems to have been the goal of their nuclear program for a long time now. And whether they would actually use a ballistic missile to deliver a nuclear weapon to Israel, [or] turn it over to proxies, who could do something that would be akin to a mass suicide operation, it’s pretty clear from their own rhetoric, which now spans really the entire Khomeini era, even to some extent the pronouncements of Khomeini before he assumed power, that it’s something to be taken quite seriously.

And when you also consider the regime’s willingness to withstand sanctions and all kinds of international pressure not to develop nuclear weapons, you again have to take them at their word.

MR. DRISCOLL: Andrew, let me quote from your book’s preface, which begins, “With great fanfare, and giddy expectations of continued diplomatic success, the so-called ‘P5 +1’ interim agreement was announced on November 24, 2013. Ostensibly, these negotiations were going to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and constrain the regime’s hegemonic aspirations, including its oft-repeated bellicose threats to destroy the Jewish State of Israel.”

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, who are the P5+1? And how did they propose disarming Iran, which has long been hell-bent, seemingly literally so, to acquire the Bomb?

MR. BOSTOM: The +1, which I’ll give you first, is Germany.

MR. DRISCOLL: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about the +1 when you’re done.

MR. BOSTOM: It’s the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, since the U.N.’s founding; the major powers, the major post-World War One powers: Russia [from back when it was still the] Soviet Union; China; Britain; [America]; and France, plus Germany.

And the idea was that you could create a monitored enrichment program for Iran. Now, the fundamental flaw in this premise is that serious nuclear experts understand that the only way to guarantee, particularly with a regime like Iran, because it’s the same processes; whether it’s enrichment to so called, you know, only nuclear fuel grade of five percent or, you know, twenty percent to eighty percent and well into the high enrichment range for weapons, it’s the same exact processes.

The Definition of Insanity How a Federal Agency Undermines Treatment for the Mentally Ill……must read see note please

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303491404579391464047274826?mod=Opinion_newsreel_2

Rael Jean Isaac presciently wrote on this issue in 1990

Product Details
Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill by Rael Jean Isaac and Virginia C. Armat (Sep 1990)

Every time a mass shooting happens in the U.S.—Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Aurora—we have the same national discussion: Why can’t we identify and treat the dangerously mentally ill before they kill? Here is one infuriating answer.

Inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sits an agency whose assignment since its creation in 1992 has been to reduce the impact of mental illness and target services to the “people most in need.” Instead the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as Samhsa, uses its $3.6 billion annual budget to undermine treatment for severe mental disorders.

Health professionals agree on the need to provide medical intervention for serious psychiatric disorders—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression. The National Institute of Mental Health does evidence-based research and promotes medically driven models of care, including early intervention, intense psychiatric treatment and drugs. Doctors have promoted reforms such as “need for treatment” standards in civil-commitment laws, or assisted-outpatient laws so courts can require the mentally ill to receive treatment to avoid hospitalization. These reforms help the mentally ill and reduce crime, incarceration and homelessness.

BRET STEPHENS: THE DISSING OF THE PRESIDENT-

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579473241738635168?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion&mg=reno64-wsj

The world is treating Obama like another failed American leader.

I’ve never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I’m beginning to see its uses.

Diss: On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Hasan Rouhani named Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani is the Iranian president the West keeps insisting is a “moderate,” mounting evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Aboutalebi was one of the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Here’s the kicker: The State Department—the very institution whose diplomats were held hostage and brutalized for 444 days—will have to approve his visa to come to New York. Considering how desperate John Kerry is not to spoil the nuclear mood music with Tehran, the department probably will.

Diss: On Friday, Vladimir Putin called President Obama to discuss a resolution to the crisis in Ukraine. The Russian president “drew Barack Obama’s attention to continued rampage of extremists who are committing acts of intimidation towards peaceful residents,” according to the Kremlin, which, as in Soviet days, no longer bothers distinguishing diplomatic communiqués from crass propaganda.
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President Jimmy Carter, announcing an agreement to release Americans held hostage in Iran on Jan. 19, 1981. Associated Press

Mr. Kerry was immediately dispatched to Paris to meet with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Mr. Lavrov—who knows a one-for-me, one-for-you, one-for-me deal when he sees it—is hinting that Russia will graciously not invade Ukraine provided Washington and Moscow shove “constitutional reforms” favorable to the Kremlin down Kiev’s throat. And regarding the invasion that brought the crisis about: “Mr. Kerry on Sunday didn’t mention Crimea during his remarks,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “giving the impression that the U.S. has largely given up reversing the region’s absorption into Russia.”

CHARLES MURRAY: DOES AMERICA STILL HAVE WHAT IT TAKES?

http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2014/04/does-america-still-have-what-it-takes/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=29d187ca02-2014_4_1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-29d187ca02-41165129
Why the American spirit of innovation is in trouble, and what culture has to do with it.

By Charles Murray

Some years ago, I conducted an ambitious research project to document and explain patterns of human accomplishment across time and cultures. My research took me from 800 BCE, when Homo sapiens’ first great surviving works of thought appeared, to 1950, my cut-off date for assessing lasting influence. I assembled world-wide inventories of achievements in physics, biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and technology, plus separate inventories of Western, Chinese, and Indian philosophy; Western, Chinese, and Japanese art; Western, Arabic, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese literature; and Western music. These inventories were analyzed using quantitative techniques alongside standard qualitative historical analysis. The result was Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences (2003).

My study confirmed important patterns. Foremost among them is that human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs.

In what follows, I want to conduct an inquiry into the ways in which the environment of achievement in early 21st-century America corresponds or fails to correspond to the patterns of the past. As against pivotal moments in the story of human accomplishment, does today’s America, for instance, look more like Britain blooming at the end of the 18th century or like France fading at the end of the 19th century? If the latter, are there idiosyncratic features of the American situation that can override what seem to be longer-run tendencies?

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

1. Wealth, Cities, Politics

I begin with enabling conditions. They don’t explain how the fires of innovative periods are ignited—we’ll come to that later—but they help explain how those fires are sustained.

Accomplishment in the sciences and technology is facilitated by growing national wealth, both through the additional resources that can support those endeavors and through the indirect, spillover effect of economic vitality on cultural vitality.

What is the relation between innovation and economic growth? The standard account assumes that the former is a cause and the latter is an effect. To judge from past accomplishment in fields other than technology, however, the causal arrow points in the other direction as well. Growing wealth encouraged a competitive art market in Renaissance Florence, providing incentives for the young and talented to enter the field. Growing wealth in 18th-century Europe enabled patrons to support the work of the great Baroque and classical composers. Similarly with technological innovation: growing wealth is not only caused by it but helps to finance the pure and applied research that leads to it.

Growing national wealth also appears to have a more diffuse but important effect: encouraging the cultural optimism and vibrancy that accompany significant achievement. With only one conspicuous exception—Athens in the fourth century BCE, which endured a variety of catastrophes as it produced great philosophy and literature—accomplishment of all sorts flourishes in a context of prosperity.

In assessing contemporary America’s situation from this angle, the big unanswered question is whether the upward growth curve that has characterized the nation’s history will continue or whether our present low-growth mode is a sign of creeping economic senescence. It is too soon to say, but if the latter proves to be the case, innovation can be expected to diminish. No society has ever been economically sluggish and remained at the forefront of technological innovation.

Streams of accomplishment become self-reinforcing as new scientists and innovators build on the models before them.

Statistically, one of the strongest predictors of creativity in a given generation is the number of important creative figures in the two preceding generations. By itself, the correlation tells us only that periods of creativity tend to last longer than two generations. The reasons are unknown, but one specific causal factor has been noted by writers going all the way back to the Roman historian Velleius Paterculus in the first century CE. Explaining the improbable concentration of great accomplishment in Periclean Athens, Paterculus observed that “genius is fostered by emulation, and it is now envy, now admiration, which enkindles imitation.” In the modern era, the psychologist Dean Simonton has documented the reality underlying Paterculus’s assertion: a Titian is more likely to appear in the 1520s if Michelangelo and Leonardo were being lionized in the 1500s; a James Maxwell is more likely to turn his mathematical abilities to physics in the 1850s if Michael Faraday was a national hero in the 1840s.

By this standard, American culture would seem to be going downhill. It’s likely that individuals within most technological industries still have heroes, unknown to the public at large, who serve as models. People within the microchip industry know about Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore; people within the energy-development industry know about George Mitchell. But such local fame is not what inspires members of one generation to emulate members of the preceding generation or generations.

In part, the declining visibility of outsized individuals reflects the increasingly corporate nature of technological innovation itself. Insiders may be aware of the steps that led to the creation of the modern microchip or the development of slickwater fracturing, but those steps have no counterpart to the moments when Samuel Morse telegraphed “What hath God wrought” and Alexander Graham Bell said “Mr. Watson, come here,” or to the day when Thomas Edison watched an incandescent bulb with a carbon filament burn for 13.5 hours after hundreds of other filaments had failed. Even Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, the most famous people involved in the development of the personal computer, didn’t actually invent anything themselves.

In part, too, the decline I’m tracing here reflects a larger cultural shift. In America, inventors once loomed large in the popular imagination. In the classroom, schoolchildren throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries grew up on the stories of Bell and Morse and Edison, of Eli Whitney, Robert Fulton, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, and more—as well as on stories of awe-inspiring technological achievements like the building of the transcontinental railway and the Panama Canal. Popular fiction celebrated inventors and scientists—Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith provoked a surge of interest among young people in becoming medical researchers—and Hollywood made movies about them. There are still occasional exceptions (the movies Apollo 13 and The Social Network come to mind), but they are rare. The genre is out of fashion, as is the ethos that supported it.

The Way to Peace: EMET vs. J Street By Andrew Harrod

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/andrew-harrod/the-way-to-peace-emet-vs-j-street/print/

Some policymakers “shape policy while intoxicated” when it comes to the Middle East, former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger recently observed at a Capitol Hill briefing. Ettinger’s remarks emphasizing Israeli power undergirding Middle East peace unwittingly contrasted with other speakers the following day who place hardly substantiated hopes in diplomatic agreements.

Ettinger addressed issues of Israel’s Jewish demography and Iran’s nuclear threat at a March 25, 2014, briefing at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center sponsored by the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET). Drawing upon past research by him and others, Ettinger in particular rejected a “demography of doom” consigning Jews to a minority status in the Holy Land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. A “maxim oft-cited on Capitol Hill” is a longstanding prediction of an ultimate Arab ascendancy in this area, according to EMET President Sarah Stern.

Yet Ettinger calculated that Jews in the combined Israeli and Palestinian territories excluding Gaza formed a 66% demographic majority. This majority would only grow through what Stern described as “Jewish demographic momentum” and Arab “demographic fatalism,” as measured by birthrate and immigration. Confidence in such a Jewish majority significantly affected Israeli willingness to make territorial concessions for the sake of an oft-invoked Two State Solution (TSS) to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“The number one interest must not be peace, the number one interest must be security,” Ettinger argued when discussion turned specifically to a peace settlement with Israel during audience questioning. “There is no such thing as peace-driven security” in the Middle East he elaborated, only “security-driven peace.” Demanding a “realistic” approach to the “two state delusion,” Ettinger declared that in any Middle East peace process the “aim should never be the production of a document.” While Western society views contracts as binding, in the Middle East “agreements are not carved in stone; they are signed in ice.”

An agreement might last ten, 15, or even 60 years, but can easily fall victim to political turmoil, as events in Egypt and elsewhere indicated during the “Arab Tsunami.” Particularly in Israel’s case, if “you’ve lost the Golan Heights, the piece of paper you have is worthless.” A “disastrous impact” would also come from Israeli abandonment of the Jordan Valley heights.

Islamic Human Slaughterhouses for Christians — on The Glazov Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islamic-human-slaughterhouses-for-christians-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood terrorist who turned to love and Christianity. He is the author of his most recent book The Case for Islamophobia and heads the organization RescueChristians.org.

He joined the program to discuss Islamic Human Slaughterhouses for Christians: