RUTHFULLY YOURS

To mark the reopening of the Cuban Embassy in Washington, D.C. (O frabjous day), The Spectator has reprinted a letter from May 4, 1961, penned by the late historian Robert Conquest (who served as The Spectator’s literary editor from 1962 to 1963, and whom Jay mentions below). Conquest was responding to a letter of protest against the Bay of Pigs invasion, written by a coterie of British “intellectuals” and published in the Times. It is, in both style and substance, devastating. A few excerpts:

The round robin on behalf of some supposedly Leftist cause is a well-established little nuisance which we should all have got used to by this time. . . . [But] in spite of the arguments against paying any attention to such stuff, I feel impelled, just, to give some expression to a distaste which is not only my own. . . .

There is something particularly unpleasant about those who, living in a political democracy, comfortably condone terror elsewhere. Mr. [Kenneth] Tynan [an English theater critic, and one of the Times letter signatories] complains of martyrdom when he was ham-handedly questioned by a senatorial committee in America about his pro-Castro activities; but as a breach of democratic rights it seems rather less dreadful than some of the things he appears to admire in Cuba. And what has Mr. Tynan to say about the democratic rights of Cubans under Castro’s new no-election policy? . . .

What Obama is pursing in Iran and Cuba isn’t peace.
Republicans don’t talk about peace as much as they used to, or as much as they should. President Dwight Eisenhower, whose unflashy élan masked the difficulty and danger of the serial crises he managed, put “waging peace” at the center of his agenda, even as circumstances obliged him to wage war. President Reagan famously described his agenda as “peace through strength,” a formulation that goes back at least as far as Hadrian. Since then, Republicans have been relatively good on the “strength” part — they have rarely encountered a line item on the military budget that did not enrapture them — but, with the notable exception of Senator Rand Paul, the “peace” side of the equation is something of a stepchild for the Right.

Democratic presidents have more enthusiastically embraced the role of “peacemaker,” and by “role” I mean just that: Democratic peacemaking has amounted to very little more than political theater. From Carter to Clinton to Obama, the Democrats have not been peace-makers but peace-fakers.

There are two kinds of evil-doers: those who kill, rape, beat, and brutalize others, and those who let this happen.

The story of American and British indifference to the fate of Jews during the Second World War still makes for disturbing reading. It’s worth revisiting the subject for three reasons:

1) The abandonment of the Jews — the title of David Wyman’s comprehensive study — is the ultimate rationale for the creation of the state of Israel. There will be no second Hitler in Europe — though he has many apprentices in the Middle East. But when the West turned its back on Hitler’s victims (with exceptions discussed below), many Jews who were not committed Zionists were persuaded that the survival of their people depended on its having a state of its own, and an army to defend it. “There are two sorts of countries in the world,” Chaim Weizmann had concluded in the late ‘30s, “those that want to expel the Jews and those that don’t want to admit them.”

2) America’s response to the Holocaust helps explain the seemingly perverse attachment of American Jews to open borders — a policy that permits an influx of immigrants who are considerably more antisemitic than European-Americans, apart from other consequences that negatively impact all Americans. (Even second-generation Hispanics are twice as likely as whites to have strong Judeophobic beliefs.) It helps explain also the seemingly irrational attachment of Jews to a party with a significantly less favorable attitude toward them and which is far less supportive of Israel than its rival. Fully 83% of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians; only 48% of Democrats do so.

3) The most important reason, though, has to do with the Iran nuclear agreement. A lot of things were taken off the table at Geneva: a renunciation of terrorism (responsible for 1,100 American combat deaths in Iraq), an effective means of verifying Tehran’s compliance, even the return of four American hostages — a token gesture on the mullahs’ part. Never on the table was regime’s determination to annihilate Israel, its chief objective in acquiring a nuclear arsenal. The fact that the administration’s new Middle Eastern ally is bent on genocide was irrelevant. The Obama administration’s abandonment of the Jewish state in 2015 was prefigured by the abandonment of European Jews in the ‘40s.

Public concern about illegal immigration, particularly among older native-born Americans, as well as the the rising voting power of Latinos, all but guarantees that immigration is an issue that will remain at the forefront in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Nor is this merely a right-wing issue, as evidenced in the controversy over “sanctuary cities”; even the progressive Bernie Sanders has expressed concern that massive uncontrolled immigration could “make everybody in America poorer.”

Yet despite the political heat, there is precious little dispassionate examination of exactly where immigrants are coming from, and where in the U.S. they are headed. To answer these questions, we turned to demographer Wendell Cox, who analyzed the immigration data between 2010 and 2013 for the 52 metropolitan statistical areas with populations over a million.

One would think listening to the likes of Donald Trump that the country is awash with hordes of unwanted newcomers from Mexico and Central America. But sorry, Donald, the numbers show a changing picture in terms of who is coming, as well as the places that they choose to settle.

“EPA’s science is shoddy, and its scientists and administrators routinely manipulate it to fit their radical policy agendas. Moreover, transparency is less important in government regulation than the content of decisions. Putting it another way, transparency is desirable, but arriving at the right decisions about public health and environmental protection is what is paramount.The EPA has long been intellectually, scientifically and ethically bankrupt, arguably the worst regulatory agency in the history of the world. But perhaps I understate.”

An EPA cleanup crew on August 5 accidentally caused a breach in an abandoned gold mine in the southwestern part of Colorado, spilling three million gallons of highly toxic mining waste that contaminated waterways in Colorado and New Mexico. Then the agency failed to notify downstream jurisdictions whose drinking water and recreational waterways were threatened.

To veteran EPA watchers, such monumental screw-ups are not surprising.

When I began my fifteen-year tenure at the FDA during the Carter Administration, I had been a lab scientist and had little knowledge of government. I soon discovered that there were foibles of various kinds at the numerous regulatory agencies I interacted with, but EPA made by far the biggest impression. Their bureaucrats regarded science not as the basis for policy and decisions on individual products, but as a tool to be tortured to achieve ideological ends.

To my astonishment, I found that there were entire groups within EPA whose function it was to lie to the Office of Management and Budget and to Congress about the rationale for and impacts of their proposed regulations. And over the years, I discovered that there is a kind underground railway that conveys the most incompetent, disaffected and anti-industry employees from other regulatory agencies to EPA, creating a miasma of flawed governance.

There is a very old and rare book called Palestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, written by Hadriani Relandi, a mapmaker and scholar from Utrecht, and published in 1714. It documents Redlandi’s trip to Palestine in 1695/96. On his travels he surveyed around 2,500 places that were mentioned in the Tanakh and/or Mishnah, and he carried out a census of the people who resided in such places. He made some very interesting discoveries. For a start, he discovered that not a single settlement in Palestine had a name that was of Arabic origin. Instead the names derived from Hebrew, Roman and Greek languages.

Another interesting discovery was the conspicuous absence of a sizeable Muslim population. Instead, he found that most of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jews, along with some Christians and a few Bedouins. Nazareth was home to less than a thousand Christians, while Jerusalem held 5,000 people, mostly Jews. Gaza was home to around 250 Jews and about the same number of Christians. The only exception was Nablus where around 120 Muslims lived, along with a handful of Samaritans, whose ancestors belonged to the northern tribes of Israel.

thanks to Joan Swirskyfor this…..rsk-
William Francis Lynch (1801-1865) was a naval officer who served in both the U.S. Navy and the Confederate Navy. In the 1840s he proposed to the United States Government to undertake a voyage to the Holy Land to explore and map the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.

Lynch conducted his mission with a crew of 16 sailors in 1847 and published his findings in his book, Narrative of the United States’ Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea. Lynch did not include a photographer in his entourage, but a crewman did provide illustrations for his book.

Lynch’s motives appeared to be part patriotic, religious, and scientific. He wrote, “We [Americans] owe something to the scientific and Christian world, and while extending the blessing of civil liberty in the south and west [otherwise known as “Manifest Destiny”], may well afford to foster science and strengthen the bulwarks of Christianity in the east.”

Lynch was also a strong adherent of “restorationism” (a precursor to Christian Zionism) — a belief that the Jewish people must return to the Holy Land to fulfill their biblical prophecy of the “Second Coming.” The belief drove many Americans, including American presidents, to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

Along the route, Lynch described raging rapids in the Jordan River, difficult terrain, strange flora and fauna, warring Arab tribes, and suffering Christian and Jewish communities.

“What are Western policymakers frequently talking about when they are talking about religion? Islam.”

So wrote Transatlantic Academy Senior Fellow Michael Barnett in his report “Faith, Freedom and Foreign Policy: Challenges for the Transatlantic Community,” which was presented during a recent Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs panel that focused on Islam while unconvincingly minimizing that religion’s fundamental differences with other faiths.
Elaborating on Barnett’s report, George Mason University professor Peter Mandaville spoke about the globally popular opinion that religion is superfluous in world affairs, and pointed to a “secular bias” in modern bureaucracies, noting that the American Constitution’s establishment clause often raises questions about the government’s involvement in religion. Berkley Center Senior Fellow Jocelyne Cesari cited Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin’s famous quote, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”

“For all their talk about Middle East peace, Obama and his advisors are not at all interested in achieving it.”
The US has striven to achieve peaceable relations between the states of the Middle East for nearly 70 years. Yet today, US government is disparaging the burgeoning strategic ties between the Sunni Arab states and Israel.

In a briefing to a delegation of visiting Israeli diplomatic correspondents in Washington last week, a senior Obama administration official sneered that the only noticeable shift in Israel-Arab relations in recent years is that the current Egyptian government has been coordinating security issues “more closely” with Jerusalem than the previous one did.

“But we have yet to see that change materialize in the Gulf.”

If this is how the US views the state of Israel’s relations with the Arabs, then Israel should consider canceling its intelligence cooperation with the US. Because apparently, the Americans haven’t a clue what is happening in the Middle East.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.
American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test.

If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.