RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Boston Was the Frontier Colonists thought the New World was a place to be discovered. It was also a place where they discovered themselves as Americans.More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a long-standing version of American self-explanation that went back at least to the 18th century, when John Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in his “Letters From an American Farmer” famously asked: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”

Migration to a strange land inevitably changes people, but “American exceptionalism” insists upon a stark, indeed a complete, transformation in which Americans became the utter inversion of Europeans. Shades of gray will not do. In his lively “Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans,” Malcolm Gaskill seeks to qualify, but not forsake, the exceptionalist story by applying a shiny coat of ambiguity and contradiction.

First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?
It’s hard to know who had most to gain—and the least to lose—from the death of Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. I’d say it’s Iran.

Nisman was scheduled to testify last week to the Argentine Congress about his investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85. In 2006 he indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the crime. None have been captured, though the Lebanese suspect was killed in 2008 in Syria.

Earlier this month Nisman filed a criminal complaint in an Argentine court, alleging that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had crafted a secret agreement with Iran to let the terrorists off the hook in exchange for Iranian oil largess and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Nisman claimed he had a solid case against la presidenta and her alleged co-conspirators, and he released a summary of a 300-page report on his investigation. He promised to reveal more at the hearing.

Argentina is a lovely country if you forget all the dictators, juntas, strongmen, and assorted socialists, fascists, and communists who have run the country ragged, or that Fidel Castro’s favorite killer, Che Guevara, was an Argentine. It’s a far nicer country than is Saudi Arabia. I have been to Argentina, stayed in Buenos Aires and visited the Alpine-like resort town of San Carlos de Barilochi on Nahuel Huapi Lake in the west near the Chilean border.

Argentina is a country settled and populated by people from a variety of European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, and by Jews from the same nations. It is as nearly a “melting pot” as is the U.S. From the late 19th century until the early 20th Argentina was an industrial nation that rivaled the U.S. and Great Britain in GNP and productivity and wealth. Then, around 1930, it caught the European collectivist/nationalist disease that was half Fascism and half Marxism, spiced with Latin American passion, and it has been in decline ever since.

But then the U.S. caught the same bug just a little earlier than that.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is an arid, hot country. Or is it an inflated tribal fiefdom in thrall to a Wahhabist theocracy? Was the Vito Corleone crime family ever recognized as a nation? Go figure. I would never set foot in Saudi Arabia even had I been forgiven all the critical things I’ve written about Islam. Saudi Arabia is a country that thrives on loot extorted from industrialized nations. It has been doing so since the end of WWI.

Saudi Arabia is not a “melting pot” populated by people from other nations. It is overwhelmingly Arab in population. Immigration to the place is severely limited, if not outright prohibited. Non-Muslim foreign nationals residing there, such as diplomats, engineers, and the like, are there on sufferance, and are restricted in where they can go and what they can do, confined to kaffir ghettoes. Freedom of speech does not exist there. The slightest squawk about Islam or the slightest infraction of Sharia law earns one horrific punishments. The 1,000 lashes “earned” by Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger who offended the theocrats on the Internet, is a measure of the utter irrationality and barbarity of Islamic “justice.” It hangs gays, amputates the hands of thieves, and strives to keep women under wraps, literally, not to be seen, nor even heard.

Saudi Arabia is not a “republic,” nor a “democracy,” nor even a “people’s state.” It is Saudi property, lock, stock and barrel.

Days before the opening of the a long-anticipated public inquiry into the circumstances of the murder of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, in London, the Telegraph UK reported that “American spies” of the NSA had intercepted communications between London and Moscow, fingering those involved in his murder in November 2006, which they provided to British authorities. The inquiry itself, much of which will be held in secret and will hear evidence inadmissible in a trial, is scheduled to last for two months.

Litvinenko’s murder by poisoning with a difficult to detect, rare and highly radioactive isotope, polonium-210, was described by many as a “Russian-backed” state execution. The Russians did not hesitate to use this radioactive weapon on British soil, perhaps because they knew they could get away easily.

So much for the Islamist “Lone Wolf” nonsense. ISIS propaganda is finally getting some attention. Even the New York Times published First Amendment litigator, Martin London’s op-ed “Why Tolerate Terrorist Publications?” citing “Patrick Henry’s famous liberty-or-death choice “in the short run, one cannot enjoy freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom of the press unless one first enjoys the freedom to live.”

The use of the media to call for jihad in the name of the prophet Mohammad and Allah is nothing new. The Palestinians, long before ISIS, have perfected it. Yet, neither the New York Times nor any major publication in the United States, not to mention Europe, has made the logical leap of acknowledging that the Palestinians are no different than ISIS. See for yourself:

My friend and e-pal novelist, commentator Chet Nagle writes…”Jewish outrage? Where just a little goische outrage? The largest ship in the world is named for an SS officer — a Nazi but a “good businessman” — by a son stamped from the same mold, and is arranged to arrive in Europe at this time of remembrance? So it may be time for Jews to ease out of Europe, taking their brains, their talents, their assets, and their courage to Israel. Armageddon is coming. ”

Jewish outrage as ship named after SS war criminal arrives in Europe

As Holocaust day nears, anger erupts at arrival in Rotterdam of the Pieter Schelte, the world’s largest vessel

Leaders of Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups in Britain and the Netherlands have reacted with rage and despair at the arrival in Rotterdam of the world’s biggest ship, the Pieter Schelte, named after a Dutch officer in the Waffen-SS.

It is a few weeks past 140 years since a boy christened Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was delivered at England’s Blenheim Palace. He survived the trenches of France, political reversals, and even being struck by a New York City driver to lead Britain from its greatest peril in May 1940 to victory over Nazism five years later. This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of his death. In the age of radical Islam, can we draw inspiration from his career?

Yes, but only, it seems, from his finest hour. Until his moment arrived in 1940, Churchill was frequently dismissed even within his own party as an imperialist adventurer with baroque ambitions, a throwback to an earlier epoch, an author of military debacles, out of touch with a supposedly emergent world of international comity. In short, he was regarded then as most contemporary liberals might view Ted Cruz or Benjamin Netanyahu today.

If Iran wanted to make a nuclear deal with the West, they would have made it by now. It doesn’t take years and years to do a deal. The leaders of the West and the whole “Progressive” movement are delusional to even think Iran wants a deal.

When Iranian demonstrators chant “Death to America” (and, of course, “Death to Israel”) they are not singing a love song. It is a song of death: the death of individuals and the death of our culture.

In the 1930’s, Europe allowed Germany to rearm contrary to the Treaty of Versailles. Germany built combat air planes, tanks, battleships and submarines. It is different this time. Now, the Jihadists are building rockets and nuclear bombs which cause more destruction and kill more people for less money than old-fashioned conventional weapons.

Iran’s new rocket said to be inter-continental – able to hit the United States

Op-ed: The time has come for Israel to throw off the constraints of adhering to politically correct policies that are clearly detrimental to its continued existence and start fighting for its survival. With Israeli elections quickly approaching, it’s a near certainty based upon historical precedents that we’ll soon be hearing assorted domestic and international voices emphasizing the need to restart negotiations with the Arabs as soon as the next government is formed. Still further and based upon a 20-year old broken record that never seems to stop, we’ll once again be told that in the face of the growing uncertainty in the region a breakthrough in the talks with the Arabs is vital for the continued existence of the Jewish state.

Therefore, in order to prevent needless resources being devoted to yet another attempt at advancing the two-state track, it’s long overdue that the obvious is publicly stated: The king, otherwise known as the two-state solution, has no clothes. In other words, there is no diplomatic solution.

In a recent op-ed in one of the Hebrew dailies, titled “Why I called on Europe to recognize Palestine,” revered novelist A. B. Yehoshua offered explanations for his joining some 1,000 other Israelis in supporting European parliamentary resolutions recognizing a Palestinian state with borders along the pre-1967 armistice lines.

Yehoshua declared, “The first reason stems from the desire to signal to the moderate Palestinian camp not to give up on the peace process. … The second reason stems from the growing fear … that the road to the two-state solution is being blocked because of Israel’s unceasing settlements in the territories.”

But neither rationale holds up under even minimal scrutiny.

No doubt there are moderate Palestinians that would be happy to live in peace alongside Israel, but polls of Palestinian opinion demonstrate that they are a dwindling minority. In part this is due to the actions of Yehoshua and his associates in what he characterizes as “the peace camp,” who, two decades ago, pushed Israel to embrace Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization as its peace partner. After two decades of indoctrination by the media, mosques and schools controlled by Arafat and his heirs, indoctrination declaring that the Jews are merely colonial usurpers, that the Zionist state is illegitimate, and that it is the duty of Palestinians to dedicate themselves to its demise, moderates are a much rarer phenomenon.