RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration’s efforts to defend its controversial nuclear deal with Iran have turned ugly.

In a speech at American University last week, the president portrayed domestic opponents of the nuclear agreement as partisan Republicans in common cause with “death to America”-chanting Iranian hardliners.
The speech went too far for former Ambassador Nicolas Burns. He told MSNBC after the speech:

I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. I have great respect for the president but frankly I think that speech — the tone of it was ill-advised because what’s really happening here as Congress prepares to vote just after Labor Day is really a battle within the Democratic Party.

To suggest that the opponents of the deal are all in effect Iraq War supporters or warmongers, to suggest if the deal is disapproved than war is inevitable — I don’t think the facts support those contentions.

There is no “Palestinian” people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term, not in the Bible, not in other ancient records, not in the 19th century – only since Yasser Arafat.

They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War I.

Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey’s empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.

But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history — let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.

Tablet, which describes itself as “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture,” has not taken an editorial position on President Obama’s deal with Iran. “Some of us support the deal,” the editors explain, “because—like a majority of American Jews—we support the president, and we sympathize with his aims of ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons while keeping America out of another Middle Eastern war.” Others oppose it as unlikely to achieve those goals, while still others “are less concerned with the specifics of the deal than with the prospect of an American alliance with the theocratic Iranian regime.”

Last week New York’s Chuck Schumer became the first Senate Democrat to oppose the deal. That complicated the president’s campaign to push it through Congress, which, as we noted last week, has been characterized by a partisanship vicious even by his standards. (The deal is structured in such a way that Congress will “approve” it if it sustains a veto, something Democrats are numerous enough to do on their own.)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-presidents-certitudes-1439250088

In a withering 1957 review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” for National Review, Whittaker Chambers wrote that he could “recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.” Of the author’s mentality, he observed:

“It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.”

Which brings me to Barack Obama and his case for the Iran nuclear deal.