RUTHFULLY YOURS

Walter Lippmann began writing The Public Philosophy in 1938 and completed it in 1955. His words have particular relevance today when the Obama administration tries to “discredit stories and sources and reporters that the powers-that-be don’t like.”

In Chapter IX, Section 3, Lippmann explains why freedom of speech is a necessary component in a society. It is “a principal method of attaining truth” because of “the ability to raise searching difficulties on both sides of a subject [that] will make us detect more easily the truth and error about the several points that arise.” Thus, freedom of speech is not merely the “pleasure of [an] utterance” by an individual; it is more essential than that. Freedom of speech is the” ability to confront ideas with opposing ideas in order that the pro and the con of the dispute will lead to true ideas. But the dispute must not be treated as a trial of strength. It must be a means of elucidation.”

A week ago, New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were murdered in an act of premeditated assassination by a man who was patently inspired by — indeed, was a documented participant in — a radical movement that has brazenly called for cops to be murdered.

To be sure, not every radical in the movement is down for the cop killing, no more than every Islamist thinks jihadist terror is the best route to imposing sharia. But cop killing is undeniably an aim of a not insignificant part of the movement’s hard core, and a good many more members applaud it even if they would not carry it out themselves. Cop killing is thus a foreseeable, if not inexorable, consequence of tolerating the movement as a well-intentioned display of our commitment to free speech.

Thoughtful commentators, including several at National Review, have been quick to assert that responsibility for the murders lies solely with the triggerman. As a narrow proposition, and in a strictly legal sense, that is true.

Republican Indiana Governor Mike Pence spent Christmas with his family in Israel, part of a nine-day trip that includes a three-day jobs mission to meet with government and business leaders to discuss expanding economic ties between Indiana and the Jewish State.

According to a Facebook post by Caroline Glick, senior contributing editor of The Jerusalem Post:

As a visiting dignitary, Pence and his family were invited to PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s annual Christmas dinner, where he was notified that a car would be sent to fetch him to Abbas’s office for an unscheduled and unsolicited meeting at 10:45pm.

Governor Pence in his inimitable wisdom, politely and firmly declined the summons.

Pence’s support for Israel is not new.

During his tenure as congressman, representing Indiana’s 2nd and 6th Districts, Pence was regarded as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters.

“His support for Israel and the safety and security of her people is genuine, not politically motivated in the least,” said Protect Our Heritage PAC Co-Chair, Peggy Shapiro. “I have always been impressed with his knowledge of the region and the threats against Israel’s existence. He is a truly genuine friend of the Jewish people.”

In 2010, then-Congressman Pence revealed his disgust with the way the Obama administration was treating the Jewish State. As reported in The Hill, he told the Christian Broadcasting Network:

I believe the Obama administration is the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel and our relationship with her. Israel is our most cherished ally. The American people support Israel’s right to self-defense. The American people support the Jewish state of Israel, and the American people expect the American president to unambiguously do the same.

He added, “I’ll be honest with you: I never thought I’d live to see the day that an American administration would denounce the Jewish state of Israel for rebuilding Jerusalem.”

According to the official Indiana government website, Mr. Pence is being accompanied by his wife and three children, along with three members of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and two members of the governor’s security detail. Private donations and personal funds are covering the cost of the trip, with the exception of the security detail paid for by Indiana taxpayers.

A call and email to the governor’s press secretary went unanswered.

A request for comment via phone and email to the Palestinian ambassador in Washington was also unanswered.

Europe is leading the way on a path to oblivion.

My background is basically European—and more specifically, Western European. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately—from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice, Sicily in the south. I have also spent several months in Moscow and in Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.

Economic Suicide

The economic suicide story is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters.

One of the most serious accusations against Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is that Israel systematically steals or “seizes” private Palestinian land.

One of the most serious accusations against Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is that Israel systematically steals or “seizes” private Palestinian land. Not only would that be illegal, it would also be immoral. The source for this charge is not only the Palestinian Authority/Hamas, anti-Israel media and Arab propaganda, but an agency of the Israeli government: Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT).

COGAT, a unit of the Defense Ministry, is responsible for “implementing government policy in Judea and Samaria.” But COGAT not only “implements,” it also makes policy. And, as separate, independent military-legal administration, it is virtually unaccountable to anyone except the defense minister and the prime minister.

They are responsible for this misrepresentation of fact.

COGAT and the IDF legal advisor, in cooperation with the attorney general’s office, the state prosecutor’s office, the Justice Ministry and the High Court, routinely decide that land claimed by Arabs are valid. These claims, however, based on massive distributions of state land throughout Judea and Samaria during the Jordanian occupation, lack supporting evidence of ownership. Nevertheless, COGAT recognizes the claims as valid, thus supporting charges that Israel steals private land.

Based on COGAT’s decisions, which are not reviewed by district courts – the only judicial body mandated to determine matters of land ownership – NGOs supporting Arab claims appeal to the High Court, which relies heavily on COGAT as the government’s authority. COGAT defends its decisions by citing the land registry (taba) for Judea and Samaria, which lists names of “owners,” mostly villages and tribes who were given state land during the early 1960s. None of the land was purchased, most of the land was never used, no taxes were paid and the original Arab recipients of land are no longer alive. To whom does this disputed land belong? According to Ottoman and British Mandate law, gifted land could not be inherited without approval by the sovereign.

Moreover, land that was given by the sovereign could be claimed as private only if the land was used continually (usufruct) for 10 years and taxes were paid.

Otherwise, unused land reverts to the sovereign by law. Jordan changed this law and registered the land as privately owned, permanently, without conditions.

But since Jordan was never acknowledged as the legitimate sovereign over this territory, its occupation and anti-Jewish laws – including prohibiting non-Jordanian citizens from owning land and incurring the death penalty for selling land to Jews – have no validity.

COGAT disagrees.

The status of land in Judea and Samaria was further confused by former High Court chief justice Dorit Beinish who, at the end of her term, decided unilaterally that hazakah, the right to claim title to land by working it and paying taxes, applied only to Arabs, not Jews.

Since COGAT considers the land registry for Judea and Samaria “confidential,” it restricts access to it by Jews, making it nearly impossible to challenge Arab claims of private ownership or for Jews to acquire land. COGAT’s secretive procedure is backed by the High Court which defends COGAT’s rule as a government agency. COGAT refuses to explain why its rules prevail exclusively and why access to public documents is forbidden. Regavim, an NGO, challenged the legality of COGAT’s position specifically with regard to land surrounding the Jewish community of Psagot.

In the 19th century, Wilhelm Marr, known as “the father of modern anti-Semitism,” coined the word “anti-Semitismus.” But the pathological hatred of Jews has a long history. In the antiquity, the Pharaoh who ‘didn’t know Joseph” decreed to kill all the Jewish newborn males; and Haman, centuries later, convinced his Persian king Ahasverus to exterminate this “people whose religion and language are different.” Christian anti-Semitism, while benign in its beginnings when the early followers of the Jew Jesus were themselves a persecuted minority in the Roman world, became ferociously violent after the Council of Nicaea, in the year 325, adopted the dogma, then very controversial, of the divinity of Christ. With Emperor Constantine embracing Christianity, the whole Roman world, especially in Europe, followed suit, and the minorities of Jews dispersed among them were soon accused of being “the people deicide,” the killers of God, an anathema that have persisted for almost 17 centuries, until Vatican II, in our times, erased it.

Napoleon’s conquest of Europe brought with it the end of the ghettoes and the emancipation of the Jewish communities. The Jews could now attend universities, enter the liberal professions and commerce and excel in them, which added a new layer to the traditional religious anti-Semitism. The Jews now “dominate the trade, the media, the banks, etc.” They became more hated and despised and the vile objects of the infamous blood libels and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the Dreyfus Affair, and the pogroms, which paved the way for the eventual advent of Hitler and culminated in the Holocaust. And, in the greatest irony of history, they also led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

The Winner is New York University!!

It’s a close contest, and there is a bit of 2014 left, but this year’s award for higher education hypocrisy surely must go to eight signatories of the latest anti-Israel petition to emerge from our universities. The petition itself, signed by members of the faculty of New York University, is the standard call to punish corporations that can be connected in some way to Israel’s activities in the West Bank or Gaza. What’s striking about this one is that eight of the signatories, more than ten percent of the present total, are affiliated with NYU’s satellite campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU’s Abu Dhabi outpost, “wholly bankrolled by the oil-rich Abu Dhabi government,” opened in 2010, and its permanent campus, located alongside an “idyllic resort” under development on Saadiyat Island, was completed in 2014.

So I wonder when these eight faculty members, who pompously stand on NYU’s “long and proud tradition of demanding that the university live up to its professed values,” will be renouncing their affiliation with the government of the United Arab Emirates. As Freedom House observes in its 2014 report, the UAE bans political parties, and “criticism of the government, allies [and] religion” is prohibited by law.

“If you want an accurate in-depth biography of Jabotinsky, written long before Halkin’s screed on Jabotinsky, read:“Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’Ev) Jabotinsky,” Two Volume magnificent record of the founding of the state Israel, written March 1, 1996 by Shmuel Katz, Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s right hand man up until Jabotinsky’s death in 1940”

Redacted from a review by Hillel Halkin of the book: THE RECKONING By Patrick Bishop Harper, 299 pages, $26.99

Halkin’s review appeared in The Wall Street Journal December 20-21, 2014

Freedom Fighter for Zion

Avraham Stern imagined (believed) the Jewish people compelling God to be the zealous warrior-deity of the Bible once again.

In 1942, ‘The Stern Gang’ (F.F.I. Freedom Fighters for Israel) were the most wanted men (by the colonialist-building British in Palestine). Hardly anyone talks anymore about “the Stern Gang.” In Israel, the militant group has not been known by this name for decades. It is called by the name it called itself, “The Lechi” (with the “ch” as in “Bach”), an acronym for Lochamei Cherut Yisra’el, or Freedom Fighters of Israel.

The smallest and most extreme of the three fully or partly underground Jewish military organizations that began in Palestine during the last years of the British Mandate. It accomplished little in reality but much in the realm of myth-making. To this day it lives in Israeli memory as a symbol of ardent patriotism, romantic self-sacrifice and the cult of idealistic violence—and also as a form of political lunacy that would reappear in a new guise long after the group’s demise. (again Halkin’s left wing evaluation.)

White police officers encounter black miscreants and the latter come off second best. Cue protests, riots, calls for vengeance and the cold-blooded murder of two New York City policeman after a deluge of inflammatory rhetoric from the likes of Al Sharpton and, to his shame, President Obama.

What duty do we owe each other during the Festive Season and at other times? If asked, many people might respond by saying that we should respect one another. That seems fine to me; though it is not something that can be pinned down necessarily. People are likely to have different views about how it finds expression in different circumstances. However, beneath this subjectivity an objective duty is ever present. That is a duty to seek and tell the truth. Peddling lies is the antithesis of respecting others.

Eric Garner, a black man, dies at the hands of police officers in New York. A grand jury convenes and decides not to indict the cop who grabbed Mr Garner around his neck. Disgracefully, President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio jump to conclusions and make racially charged statements about the police. Inevitably, Obama’s and de Blasio’s buddy, race-hustler Al Sharpton is part of the mix.

Protests break out on the streets replete with hateful signs directed at the police. Two NYPD cops (Wenjian Lu and Rafael Ramos) are subsequently assassinated, while sitting in their squad car, by a black criminal. Apparently he was ‘deranged’, as if anybody capriciously killing others isn’t. Police officers turn their backs on de Blasio as he visits the hospital where the two cops have been pronounced dead. How these events are linked exactly is a matter of conjecture.

What we know is that in another time Obama, Holder and de Blasio would have been investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, long before being elevated to high office and given the chance to wreak havoc on American values. But, beyond that, where is the truth hiding?

Nutritional standards used by Michelle Obama’s school lunch program are worse than useless.

Do you think you know how to eat healthy? Your friendly neighborhood federal government doesn’t think you do. And they’re here to help.

Buried deep in the ObamaCare law, the gift from the Democrats to the nation that keeps on giving, chain restaurants are required to start labeling calories on all of their menu items. The law applies to vending-machine items as well. It’s proven to be a nightmare [1] for small business and franchises, adding cost (which will have to be passed on to the diner, if they choose to pay it). In the case of things like “order your own” sandwiches or pizza, it is almost impossible to implement. As with much of the poorly written misbegotten law, it is unclear whether it applies to things like food trucks, or what the penalty is for non-compliance. Despite the uncertainty, overall cost has been estimated to be half a billion dollars, which will be “eaten” by consumers.

Meanwhile, over in the public-school cafeterias, food is being wasted, and money is being lost by the school districts [2], because kids refuse to purchase or eat what Michelle Obama thinks is good for them. The goal of her Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, passed in 2010, was to wage war on childhood obesity. But unsurprisingly, the children, obese and otherwise, find the high-fiber, low-fat, low-salt fare unappetizing, and when they don’t brown bag to avoid having to buy it, they throw much of it away. Worse, and particularly insanely, the law makes no distinction between different kids’ dietary needs, and completely fails to take into account physical activity — the football player gets as many (or few) calories as the chess champ.