RUTHFULLY YOURS

All manner of people are giving commencement speeches to students graduating from colleges and universities these days. It is doubtful that any will be remembered because the prospects of students depend in large part on the economy into which they are entering, the majors they pursued, their individual ambitions, and capacity for hard work. Then, too, there’s dumb luck which often plays a role.

For those graduating this year, my profound sympathy because the economy could not be much worse short of being declared an official Depression. Out of a total of 330 million Americans, there are currently 93,194,000 Americans who are not in the workforce because they can’t find a job or have given up looking. Even in the field of manufacturing—not something you studied for—the number of jobs have declined by 7,231,000, some 37% since manufacturing peaked in the U.S. in 1979.

U.S. economic growth rate has slowed to 0.2%. In short, it is virtually non-existent. So, with your diploma in hand, unless you majored in the sciences, math or engineering, you are not likely to join the workforce any time soon. Those of you who majored in social work, theatre arts, elementary education, and something called parks and recreation, are going to be at the bottom of the salary scale for the rest of your life.

Of the previous graduates from 2008 to the present who voted for Barack Obama, just 14% have real jobs. You have had the vast misfortune of being born just in time to live through the worst presidency in the history of the nation. If, in fact, you even know the history of the nation.

Character assassination. A simplistic moral universe in which the U.S. is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. Far-out conspiracy theories. Con men as sources. Reputable sources misquoted. These constitute the decades-long modus operandi of Seymour Hersh, the man now serving as star investigative reporter of the New Yorker.
That modus operandi is clearly in evidence in Hersh’s only book-length assault on Israel, The Samson Option (about Israel’s nuclear deterrent), published in 1991. Typically for Hersh, he even gets the Biblical account wrong. Explaining the book’s title, Hersh writes that “Samson, according to the Bible, had been captured after a bloody fight.” 1 What the Bible records – as any literate person knows — is that Samson became helpless after Delilah seduced him into telling her that the secret of his strength lay in his long hair, and she summoned one of the Philistines to cut it off as he slept in her arms.
Anyone who had followed Hersh’s career as a 1960s style “Movement” journalist would have expected Hersh to take up cudgels against Israel sooner or later. His books and articles are permeated by the theme of America-the-enemy; indeed The Samson Option was his first book without that theme. Here the U.S. government is the innocent, deceived victim of Israel and the nefarious Jewish lobby. It took Israel to purify (however briefly) America.

Seymour Hersh has courted controversy with his false narrative of how Bin Laden was killed and has met proper opprobrium….but he has a cult of readers and admirers such as Trevor Timm who do not wish to be upset by real facts. I am posting one of several investigative columns exposing his lies and agenda…..by Rael Jean Isaac…..rsk

SEYMOUR HERSH HAS DONE THE PUBLIC a great service bybreathing life into questions surrounding the official narrativeof the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration hasrepeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we didget, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

While there’s no way to prove or disprove every assertion Hersh makes without re-reporting the whole story, let’s look at the overarching criticisms one by one:

Delegitimization provides the sociopsychological rationale, the moral and discursive basis to harm the delegitimized group, even in the most inhumane ways… Delegitimized groups are rhetorically constructed as worthy targets of violence.

The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, 2012

The above is what we Israelis, as this volatile region’s most relentlessly delegitimized group, must keep uppermost in mind every mid-May.

Whereas we celebrate our state’s Independence Day according to the Hebrew calendar, the Gregorian anniversary, May 15, is annually commemorated by Arabs as a day of lamentation for the Nakba. It’s the catastrophe according to their loaded terminology, which renascent Jewish sovereignty supposedly inflicted on the supposedly indigenous people of this land – the Palestinians.

The notion that Israel was born in sin is delegitimization in the most extreme sense.

The Vatican has just concluded a treaty to recognize “Palestine” as an independent state. Nonetheless, under governing international law, primarily the 1934 Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (aka the Montevideo Convention), “Palestine” will still remain outside the community of separately sovereign states. This exclusion will be proper, moreover, despite the United Nations’ earlier action on November 29, 2012. On that day, a General Assembly resolution had merely upgraded the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the substantially limited status of a “Nonmember Observer State.”

There is more. Jurisprudential limitations of the Vatican treaty on “Palestine” are evident “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The authoritative criteria of statehood are long-standing, fixed, explicit, and readily identifiable. More precisely, under plainly recognizable legal rules, a state must possess the following very specific qualifications: (1) a permanent population; (2) a defined territory; (3) a government; and (4) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Crosses in every room at Washingon D.C.’s Catholic University of America are a human rights violation that prevent Muslim students from praying.
That’s the complaint to the Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights filed by a professor from rival George Washington University across town.
GWU Law School Professor John Banzhaf takes the Catholic institution to task for acting “probably with malice” against Muslim students in a 60-page complaint that cites “offensive” Catholic imagery all over the Catholic school, which he says hinder Muslims from praying.
Baffled Catholic University officials say they have never received a complaint from any of the schools Muslim students.

In May 2014, Zochrot—a radical Israeli nongovernmental organization (NGO)—was the focus of widespread mainstream media coverage featuring its iNakba mobile application (app). Articles on the app and Zochrot were published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Haaretz, The Christian Science Monitor, Time Magazine, and several prominent blogs. Most, including The New York Times, promoted Zochrot’s agenda while others, such as The Washington Post, included some criticism.

Designed and promoted as a vehicle for drawing attention—particularly among journalists—to the Palestinian narrative of the 1948 war, iNakba features an interactive map and photos of pre-1948 Arab villages and encourages the “right of return” narrative through crowd sourcing. As stated by The New York Times, “Perhaps the app’s greatest promise is its social component—users can upload photos and videos, or ‘follow’ villages to virtually recreate lost communities.”[1] Small wonder that the release of the app was timed to coincide with Israel’s sixty-sixth Independence Day (May 15) and the Nakba (catastrophe) as Palestinians and Arabs call this event.

Let’s begin by doing something we don’t often do, and that is quoting the New York Times at some length. We do this because David Sanger’s report of Thursday, May 14, makes clear how mistaken are the premises underlying President Obama’s forthcoming Iran deal:

When President Obama began making the case for a deal with Iran that would delay its ability to assemble an atomic weapon, his first argument was that a nuclear-armed Iran would set off a “free-for-all” of proliferation in the Arab world. “It is almost certain that other players in the region would feel it necessary to get their own nuclear weapons,” he said in 2012.

Now, as he gathered Arab leaders over dinner at the White House on Wednesday and prepared to meet with them at Camp David on Thursday, he faced a perverse consequence: Saudi Arabia and many of the smaller Arab states are now vowing to match whatever nuclear enrichment capability Iran is permitted to retain.

“The boys want to be like them [jihadists] and the girls want to be with them. That’s what they used to say about the Beatles… [Muslim teenagers] see their own lives as poor by comparison, and don’t realize they are being used.” — Nazir Afzal, Britain’s leading Muslim prosecutor.

“The extreme views of a ‘racist, homophobe and anti-Semite’ who supports killing non-Muslims and ‘stoning adulterers’ are being made available to prison imams and prisoners…with the blessing of [prison] authorities.” — Newsweek magazine.

“Mohammed was selling me for £250 to paedophiles from all over the country. They came in, sat down and started touching me… Sometimes, I would be passed from one pervert to another… Mohammed’s defense was laughable… His barrister, a woman, implied I was a racist because all the defendants were Muslim.” — Excerpts from Girl for Sale, by Lara McDonnell.