RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am writing to you to express my support for Professor Andrew Pessin.

Prof. Pessin is being demonized by students with a very specific and incendiary agenda, the destruction of any person who defends the State of Israel. These students intentionally presented Prof. Pessin’s Facebook post from August 2014 during the Hamas-Israel war, in which he defended the Israeli defensive blockade on Hamas, out of context, to both local and global audiences. They then constructed lie upon lie to misrepresent it as a racist post against Palestinians, in an attempt to intimidate him, silence him, attack his character, and destroy his career. Their actions generated a wave of hate mail and threats directed toward him and his family.

Connecticut College’s Administration has succumbed to this intimidation and completely failed to take action to protect Prof. Pessin from these malicious attacks which violate the appropriate norms of free speech.

Fittingly, the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse fell on the sixth day of Passover, “the season of our freedom,” when Jews celebrate God’s eruption into human history to free them from Egyptian slavery. Appomattox denoted the end of the American Civil War, which claimed 750,000 lives. The equivalent number proportionate to today’s population would be 7 million. Understandably, Americans remain obsessed with the conflict, by far the bloodiest in our history.

The American Republic which the Civil War renewed, purged with blood of the stain of slavery, arose from a biblical vision of governance in the English Revolution of the 17th century, as Harvard’s Eric Nelson, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and others have shown.

The Cuban fiasco

In that simplistic jargon characterizing Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s worldwide “transformation” of U.S. foreign policy, the chief argument for his Cuban shift has been “[T]hese 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked.”

In the facts of history, in this as in so many other instances, Obama is wrong.

The fact is that U.S. policy toward Cuba, with its ups and downs, has been generally successful.

First, of course, the outcome of the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962 prevented the Soviet Union from obtaining an advanced offensive weapons base just off the U.S. southern coast. The confrontation was a turning point in the Cold War. Moscow’s victorious march through control of Central and Eastern Europe and its threat to Western Europe began to be reversed when JFK back off Nikita Khrushchev’s gamble.

Secondly, the Soviet Union’s Cold War effort, using the Castros’ regime, to infiltrate and create other Communist states in Latin America was beaten back – in Costa Rica, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Colombia. Indeed almost every Latin American government at one time or another was a target, if unsuccessfully.

That is not to say, of course, that American policy toward Havana was a string of unbroken successes, or that, in fact, it was always clear-headed.

What would you do if you read a book that predicted the end of your country…and, in effect, the end of your life and those you love? You’d probably cry a bit…I did. You’d probably reject it…I do.

But you’ll think about what the author wrote…I am.

You’ll want to dismiss it as nonsense…I wish…more, I believe he is wrong.

Tuvia Tenenbom has written a book, “Catch the Jew”. He’s a fantastic writer – more, he’s a journalist…and I can tell you I say that about very few people today. Most so-called journalists, certainly the ones who work for BBC, CNN, and sad to admit, even the “friendly” media like Fox News, are more interested in shaping the news, rather than reporting it. They “frame” it, they will tell you, but the frame is faulty because it comes with a predetermined conclusion. Tenenbom’s book doesn’t. You aren’t quite sure where he’s going to end up – at varying points, you wonder whether someone else will be finishing it because he ended up getting murdered upon discovery that he isn’t the Aryan Christian he pretends to be. He goes among the right and laughs at them; he meets with the left and finds them moronic. He meets with Druze, Bedouin, Muslim, Christian and Jew…and pretty much every denomination among them. I wish I could have met with him because what he considers the “center” of Israel, really isn’t; what he calls the “extreme right”, isn’t either. There are two things I think he got wrong. Considering how long the book took, how much time he spent in Israel…that’s really not too bad. What he got right is placed before you with sharp, insightful and even sarcastic sentences thrown out there for you, the reader. As he meets with some politician, it is as if he turns his head and speaks to you, explaining that you, like he, should not be fooled by the hot air in the room.

Oy vey when Ayatollahs are more reliable than the Gray Lady.
I can’t imagine what it’s like when the top editors at The New York Times get together to further glorify Obama at the expense of Israel, only to find themselves a laughingstock. Or maybe I can:

Tom Friedman: “We made a mistake.”

“Mistake? We’re Liberals. We never make mistakes. Friedman, you’re fired.”

If only…

What happened? On Wednesday the wizards at the Times’ “editorial board” sought ways to put lipstick on a pig to sell it as kosher. The editorial, written under the spell of gobbledygook, declared that the Iran Nuke agreements were a win for the United States over the ayatollahs and that Israel ought to know better than to second-guess President Obama.

So shut up, the Times explained. We know what’s good. Iran has agreed to everything, even the gradual lifting of sanctions.