RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest incident in the Golan’s Quneitra border illustrates the security challenges Israel faces in the year ahead. Last week six Hezbollah operatives were killed, including an Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRG), General Muhammad Ali Allah-Dadi. The presence of an Iranian IRG general and top Hezbollah operatives on the Golan points to an Iranian attempt to build a missile base on the border of Israel.

The al-Manar website (Hezbollah’s mouthpiece) acknowledged that six Hezbollah operatives were killed in Sunday’s (January 18, 2015) Israeli air strike, among whom was senior Hezbollah commander Muhammad Issa and Jihad Mughniyeh, son of former Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008.

Israel’s northern border is expected to heat up in the coming months and years, both in the Golan Heights facing Syria, and on the Lebanese border where Hezbollah is in control. The real existential challenge to Israel however remains Iran. The question of whether to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is bound to rise again, especially around July, 2015, when P5+1 negotiations with Iran are expected to end following two extensions. Iran can be counted on violating the interim agreement which called on the Iranians to freeze their nuclear project in exchange for western powers easing sanctions on Iran. The Obama administration is eager for further extensions despite Iranian history of cheating in its nuclear program.

The National Interest (December 1, 2014) article, by the head of the Arms Control Program at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) at Tel Aviv University, Emily Landau, and Shimon Stein, Senior Research Fellow at the INSS, former Deputy Director General of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Israeli ambassador to Germany, wrote “The interim agreement enabled Iran to dangerously move forward on R&D, into more advanced generations of centrifuges, which offset the significance of the dilution and oxidization of Iran’s stockpile of 20% enriched uranium, the centerpiece of the interim deal. Both activities relate to the speed in which Iran could breakout with weapons-grade uranium – one route was stopped by the deal, but a second route was enabled and granted legitimacy.”

ISIS has released a horrifying video showing a captured Jordanian pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, being burned alive inside a cage. Below is a multiple choice quiz about this evil act perpetrated by the Islamic State.

ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive because:

[a] They are a very tiny minority of extremists who misunderstand the peaceful message of the Koran.

[b] They are mentally ill.

[c] They lived in the West and were made to feel unwelcome by white racists who didn’t let them assimilate.

[d] They were forced into desperation and violence by American imperialism.

[e] The Crusades.

[f] Timothy McVeigh.

[g] Brain damage from boxing.

[h] Rap lyrics.

[i] They worked in the West and are very upset about the dental plan they had – or didn’t have.

[j] Islamophobia.

[h] The Israelis/Jews were behind it.

[i] Capitalist hegemony and exploitation.

[j] They were influenced by the Gospel of John in the New Testament, as well as by Buddhist and Amish teachings — and all religions are equal.

[k] All of the above.

[l] Because Islamic theology inspires this heinous act, just like it inspires and sanctions everything else that they do, as David Wood explains in the Glazov Gang episode, Top Ten Qur’an Verses to Understand ISIS, below:

President Obama said today that the fiery murder of a 27-year-old Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot by ISIS “just indicates the degree to which, whatever ideology they’re operating off of, it’s bankrupt.”

Obama briefly commented on the grisly, expertly produced ISIS video when prompted at the end of a previously scheduled White House event intended to highlight Obamacare success.

“I just got word of the video that had been released. I don’t know the details of the confirmations. But should, in fact, this video be authentic, it’s just one more indication of the viciousness and barbarity of this organization. And it, I think, will redouble the vigilance and determination on the part of a global coalition to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated,” he said.

“…We’re here to talk about how to make people healthier and make their lives better, and this organization appears only interested in death and destruction.”

The White House later released a more crafted statement, with Obama saying Americans “join the people of Jordan in grieving the loss of one of their own.”

A man deported from Turkey back to France less than a week ago under suspicion he was trying to join ISIS attacked three police officers standing guard outside a Jewish center in Nice yesterday, in what is yet another example of what I have termed “known wolf” syndrome.

I coined that term here at PJ Media back in October following two separate terror attacks in Canada within a week of each other by two separate individuals who were already known to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I noted here that this was also the case with the Sydney hostage taker, Sheikh Haron, in December. Haron had already been convicted of harassing the widows of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and was out on bail in two other separate cases. This was true yet again with the two Kouachi brothers responsible for the massacre at the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo last month, one of whom had already been in jail on terrorism charges.

What do “right” and “left” mean in the Jewish world when it comes to Israel?

“Right” means the view that Israel has no choice but to cope with hostility from the Arab and Muslim world, and from Europe, that it does not cause except by existing, along with criticisms and pressures from U.S. administrations that are excessive and unfair. “Left” means the view that Israel itself does much to cause the hostility, criticisms, and pressures, and could become a much more accepted country by correcting its behavior.

In the current Israeli election campaign, the left-wing parties—mainly Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni’s Labor/Hatnuah or “Zionist Camp” and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid—have been sounding the theme that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has caused Israel’s “isolation” and has soured relations with the United States, creating a rift for which, in their reading, President Barack Obama is blameless.

Although Labor/Hatnuah and Yesh Atid also harp on the theme of Israel’s high housing and food prices, so far they’ve been long on populist complaints and short on coherent proposals for remedies. Public discourse on economic issues in Israel rarely goes beyond slogans—in part because, in the end, almost invariably, security issues take precedence.

The bloodthirsty barbarity of ISIS has reached a new low. A video released by the Islamic terror group shows captured Jordanian pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, inside a cage. A trail of lit gasoline eventually engulfs him in flame, burning him alive.

Yesterday, this exercise in brute savagery was confirmed by the Jordanian government. They revealed that al-Kasasbeh was killed more than a month ago on Jan. 3, less than two weeks after his F-16 fighter jet went down over northern Syria on Dec. 24.

This reality put a full stop on ISIS’s attempt to exchange al-Kasasbeh and remaining Japanese hostage Kenji Goto for Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi women who worked for al Qaeda. Al-Rishawi spent her honeymoon planning a 2005 terrorist attack ultimately carried out by her husband, who killed 27 guests at a Jordanian wedding when he detonated an explosive vest he was wearing. Al-Rishawi has spent the last nine years in self-imposed solitary confinement in Jordan’s Juweidah Women’s Prison. ISIS demanded her release, using an audio clip from Goto to deliver the message. “This is a voice message I’ve been told to send to you,” Goto stated. “If Sajida al Rishawi is not ready for exchange for my life at the Turkish border by Thursday sunset, 29th of January, Mosul time, the Jordanian pilot Muadh al Kasasbeh will be killed immediately.”

Likely Presidential Candidate Proposes a $300 Million Cut to State’s University System

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011 fight with public-sector unions sparked huge protests—and elevated him into a national figure in conservative politics. Now, as he eyes a run for president, he is targeting another group on the public payroll: university professors.

Mr. Walker, a Republican, has proposed a two-year tuition freeze and a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System’s budget—about a 13% drop next year from current funding levels. Under the plan, Mr. Walker would shift control of the university system from the state to a new independent authority. He has also said that he thinks faculty needs to work harder.

The Constitution’s various provisions protecting individual liberty must at times give way to government control in response to health hazards.

From legal scholar Richard A. Epstein ’s “Measles: Misinformation Gone Viral” for the Hoover Institutiononline,

This entire episode was fueled by fraudulent studies published by Dr. Andrew Wakefiel d in 1998 in Lancet magazine, which twelve years later the journal eventually retracted, but only after much of the damage was done. Those studies, which had been funded in part by plaintiffs’ lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, purported to find a (nonexistent) link between vaccines that were manufactured using a mercury-based compound, Thimerosal, and autism. Unfortunately, Lancet’s forthright retraction of the article did not quell the uneasiness about vaccines in either Britain or the United States. Indeed, it may well have fueled populist concerns of an ever-wider conspiracy among establishment figures. . . .

The current struggles over sound vaccine policy raise a tension between public health on the one hand and competing versions of individual liberty on the other. This conflict was, if anything, more acute a century ago when infectious diseases cut a wide path for which vaccines and other treatments provided only a limited response. The main constitutional lens through which these issues were viewed at the time was one of police power. This all-pervasive notion has no explicit textual authorization in the Constitution. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that the Constitution’s various provisions protecting individual liberty must at times give way to government control in response to health hazards.

On Tuesday we rapped Chris Christie for his odd doubts about public vaccines amid a dangerous outbreak of measles in California. But it seems this is something of an epidemic among potential GOP presidential candidates, so perhaps it’s time for some facts about science, liberty and public health.

Rand Paul joined the vaccine follies Monday in an interview with CNBC. While acknowledging vaccines are a “medical breakthrough” and it is a “great idea” to raise “public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids,” Mr. Paul then gave credence to the conspiracy theories that have frightened parents. He suggested there is a health concern in giving “five and six vaccines all at one time” and explained that he had delayed his own child’s immunizations.

In an editorial titled “Reckless Rejection of the Measles Vaccine,” the Times argues that it is “shockingly irresponsible” for “misguided parents to put other children and adults at risk of catching measles from their unvaccinated children. Public officials and pediatricians need to restrict where unvaccinated children are allowed to go if the parents refuse to do so.” (NYT 2/3/15) The total number of people infected this year is 102 in the 14 states that have reported outbreaks.

Compare this to the Times’ attitude towards quarantining health care workers returning from ebola-stricken countries in Africa. In that case, the individual’s rights trumped the rights of other children and adults who might have come in contact with someone incubating and spreading a potentially fatal disease. And compare the concern for public safety with the information regarding HIV/AIDS a few years back. In 2008, the Times reported that HIV was spreading in NYC at three times the national rate. 4,762 New Yorkers contracted it in 2006, with gay minority men leading the population at risk; for the population under 30, 77% were Black or Hispanic (NYT 8/27/08). Yet, a few years later, the Times editorial urges that Gay Men Should Be Allowed to Give Blood (11/27/14) They protest that the rules governing blood donations date back to the 1980’s when little was understood about how the virus spreads. Although it is true that significant progress has been made in managing HIV, there is as yet, no cure for the virus. The Times’ objection to the F.D.A’s consideration of a one-year deferral instead of a total ban is that it stigmatizes gay men as well as limiting the pool of donors.