RUTHFULLY YOURS

Contrary to Western conventional wisdom, the nature of Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority – which is burdened by a mere 17% favorability in the US, compared with Israel’s 70% – has turned most Palestinians against Mahmoud Abbas, has led most Jerusalem Arabs to prefer Israeli sovereignty, and catapulted Hamas to prominence on the Palestinian Street.

The nature of the KGB-graduate Mahmoud Abbas regime has been defined by a rare combination of endemic corruption, kleptomania (“Mr. 20%” is Mahmoud Abbas’ nickname), nepotism, hate-education, incitement, terrorism, anti-US and pro-Venezuela, Russia and China worldview, non-compliance with internal and external agreements, and egregious violations of civil liberties, which has fueled Muslim emigration and the flight of Christian Arabs from Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Ramallah.

One of the best biographies I ever read is “Alexander Hamilton” by Ron Chernow. Now that controversy swirls around the idiotic decision to change the ten dollar bill might be a good time to read about the man…..rsk

“In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is “a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all.”
Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.

Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804.

Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans. “

Leave it to the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief to jump on former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren about his not-even-yet released book narrating the history of Obama’s repeatedly throwing the Jewish State and its elected leader under the bus.

Oren also offended Jodi Rudoren by writing a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal providing, in advance of the book’s official publication, some of the story of Obama’s “abandonment” of Israel.

Who better to recount what was going on than the man who was actually there and actually involved as the American president found myriad ways to disrespect Israel and scorn its prime minister?

By the summer of 2013, President Obama had convinced several key Israelis that he wasn’t bluffing about using force against the Iranian nuclear program. Then he failed to enforce his red line against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad—and the Israelis realized they’d been snookered. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, recalls the shock inside his government. “Everyone went quiet,” he said in a recent interview. “An eerie quiet. Everyone understood that that was not an option, that we’re on our own.”

Reading Oren’s new memoir Ally, it’s clear that Israel has been on her own since the day Obama took office. Oren provides an inside account of relations between the administration of Barack Obama and the government of Bibi Netanyahu, and his thesis is overwhelming, authoritative, and damning: For the last six and a half years the president of the United States has treated the home of the Jewish people more like a rogue nation standing in the way of peace than a longtime democratic ally. Now the alliance is “in tatters.”

I have started Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s newly release papal encyclical on global warming, and it’s something of a slog. As one of my colleagues put it, popes never seem to use one word when 500 will do.

I feel somewhat free to take things slowly when analyzing these documents. There’s something about an institution that’s been around for 2,000-odd years that makes you feel less beholden to the 24-hour news cycle (or the 5-minute news cycle of the Twitter era). But I’m ready to make one preliminary observation, which stands out with particular clarity in the early sections of Laudato Si.
These are the sections in which Francis lays out what he sees as the facts about a global environmental crisis, and it is a series of blatantly one-sided errors and exaggerations, including many which have been well-discussed and refuted, even in the New York Times.

President Barack Obama responded to the horrific shooting at a historic black church in Charleston that left nine dead with an earnest statement—well, other than that contention that was completely untrue.

Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.

Let’s set aside the assertion that it’s too easy to obtain guns in America and deal with the implication that we are somehow uniquely violent or that “mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” The president has made this claim in various ways and with various qualifiers.*

Parlez vous Hebdo? Because surely the president recalls that in January of this year two gunmen entered the office of a satirical magazine in France with an assortment of guns and murdered 11 people (and injured 11 more). After leaving, they killed a police officer. And in a marketplace catering to Jews another five were murdered and 11 wounded. France is, allegedly, an advanced country, is it not? Perhaps if Obama had attended the anti-terror rally in Paris like every other leader of advanced countries did, his recollection would be sharper.

Bill Nye, most notably of children’s television fame, is now taking his personal insight to the millions populating the social media world. Take this recent pearl of disciplined scientific speculation on Twitter:

“@BillNye: [Tropical storm] Bill floods Texas. Alaska is on fire. Just a little global warming and climate change. Nothing to worry about…”

Honestly, the anthropogenic global warming peddler’s ease in promoting his doctrine would make Egyptian priests, Native American shamans, and voodoo witch doctors sick with jealousy. Nearly everything can easily be blamed on the “global warming” gods’ wrath, it seems — and the devoted flock will buy the narrative, and assume a position of shame and guilt with little or no genuine thought. The devoted just require blind faith that the smart guys comprising the supposed scientific “consensus” have done the heavy lifting of analysis for them, and are telling them what they ought to be doing to save themselves and the world.

He could hear from inside his room where he was hiding the gunmen opening doors and inquiring if the people inside were Muslims or Christians.

“The motorbike riders got down from their bike and started beating [Christian journalist] Shamim Masih and… warned him that if he did not stop reporting on Christian issues, they knew his family and home and would teach him and his family a lesson.” — Nazir S. Batti, Pakistan Christian Congress Party.

“The city of Mosul alone had 45 churches. Now there is not a single one. The buildings have been destroyed. Four hundred churches have been destroyed in Syria. … The same is happening in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Northern Africa.” — Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia

“What happened to Christians in Iraq and Syria… does not receive Arabic media coverage that befits human beings, whatever their religion.” — Hani Naqshabandi, Saudi writer.

The British don’t need your advice any more than they needed your DVDs.
In the course of his recent European tour, President Obama decided to intervene in the domestic politics of the United Kingdom — and not on a minor matter. A referendum on whether the British should remain in the European Union is scheduled to be held by the end of 2017 under legislation now being debated in the British Parliament. This question goes to the heart of the U.K.’s democratic sovereignty, and opinion polls suggest that the electorate leans towards staying in, but by a modest margin. For the British it is a massive constitutional battle& on the order of the Glorious Revolution or, well, 1776.

Killing off military commissions has been an obsession of the Lawyer Left for over a dozen years. It may, at long last, be “Mission Accomplished” thanks to last week’s ruling by a deeply divided federal appeals court.

In al-Bahlul v. United States, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit threw out the terrorism conspiracy conviction of Osama bin Laden’s personal aide and propaganda director, an al-Qaeda jihadist who bragged about his Goebbels-like role in the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

The court, nearly a year ago, had already thrown out Suliman al-Bahlul’s other convictions for providing material support to terrorism and soliciting terrorism against the United States. Sitting en banc on that occasion, the Circuit’s seven judges ruled that al-Bahlul had an American constitutional right against prosecution on ex post facto crimes. These findings, consistent with recent Circuit precedent, were a remarkable measure of the Lawyer Left’s progress in expanding judicial protections for America’s enemies given that (a) the jihadist is a Yemeni whose only connection to our nation and its Constitution is to make war against them, and (b) congressional statutes criminalizing material support and solicitation of violence long predated al-Bahlul’s commission of those offenses.