RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pentagon is ready to upgrade Kiev’s radar, but White House authorization isn’t forthcoming.

Russian proxies in occupied eastern Ukraine shelled Ukrainian-government positions over the weekend and on Monday. The artillery barrage killed two civilians and wounded several others in Sartana, near the Sea of Azov. It’s one of the larger-scale escalations of the conflict since a winter cease-fire. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration continues to withhold a radar upgrade that would allow Ukrainian forces to protect against shelling.

Hillel CEO tries to speak about common position against BDS, J Street U students want him to say “occupation” is the reason for BDS.

Lots of campus organizations have their retreats in the summer. It’s a time for energizing the members before they return to campus in the fall.

J Street U, the campus arm of J Street, is having its Summer Leadership Institute this week, just outside of Washington, D.C.

On Monday, Aug. 17, Hillel International’s CEO Eric Fingerhut addressed the organization that claims to be pro-Israel. Fingerhut was looking to stake out common ground. The only issue the J Street U students wanted Fingerhut to discuss, however, was the Israeli “occupation” of the Palestinian Arabs.

Fingerhut was invited to address J Street’s SLI back in June, when he met with J Street’s leadership to discuss ways the two organizations could work together. The June meeting took place after Fingerhut, who originally agreed to speak at J Street’s annual conference, pulled out of that commitment.

The only way a Democrat can defeat Mrs. Clinton is by making an issue of her Nixon-like character.

At least since 1968, Democratic campaigns for the party’s presidential nomination have been loud and raucous affairs. This is in marked contrast to the Republicans, who have traditionally operated more like the Elks, bestowing their nomination on some distinguished elder whose “turn” it is to run—whether Bob Dole in 1996 or John McCain in 2008.

Today the parties appear to have switched. Now it is Democrats who look set to nominate their elder, Hillary Clinton, in what has so far been the wimpiest nomination fight in history.

The switch is particularly baffling given that each new day brings new headlines quoting Democratic insiders panicked by what the growing scandal over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information means for the party. Thus the whispering campaign, here floating Joe Biden or Al Gore or John Kerry as an alternative; there noting the turnout for Bernie Sanders; here again watching the FBI seize Mrs. Clinton’s email server and fretting about a nightmare scenario where she enters the 2016 election under federal indictment or investigation by a special prosecutor.

An an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer said Prime Minister Netanyahu has more support from Israelis in opposition to the Iran deal than Moses had from Israelites during the Exodus.\Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said on Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has more support in the Jewish state for his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal than Moses had when he led the Israelites out of Egypt.

Dermer’s comment was made in an interview with CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria in response to a question on whether it was prudent policy for Israel to oppose the Obama Administration on the Iran deal, given the importance of Washington’s support for Israel’s security.

Among the lamentably small coterie of Jewish intellectuals and academics who defend Israel against the anti-Zionist tirades of its legions of liberal and leftist Jewish critics Edward Alexander ranks high. His new collection of essays, Jews Against Themselves (Transaction Publishers), displays sweeping intellectual range and abiding Jewish passion as he hones in on the targets of his analytical scrutiny. A proud and committed Jew who spent years teaching in Israel, Alexander writes with insight, precision and, at time, scathing scorn.

Amid the rising waves of anti-Semitism that course through Europe and surge in the Middle East, Alexander focuses on “the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.” Comprising those who hate Israel, defame other Jews for supporting the Jewish state, and “Israelis against themselves,” they join the roster of Jews, stretching back into the Middle Ages, who have “defamed, abandoned, and harmed their own people.” He exposes and eviscerates Jewish self-hatred, the liberal betrayal of Zionism, the “moral failure of American Jewish intellectuals,” and – as only an academic could – the rampant anti-Semitism that infests American universities and how it came to lodge there.

“Oren reminds us that upon taking office, the newly elected president removed the statue of Winston Churchill from the White House. Oren does not need to explain the act. Churchill saved the West precisely because he was committed, as he said so famously, to defending “our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.That commitment to protecting the West and its values at all cost, Obama implied by removing the statue, would be anathema to his administration.”

The coming weeks will reveal whether the American Jewish community still has a sense of historic responsibility.

Some dramatic historic events have the capacity to remain stunning even if they are not surprising. This week’s accord between Iran and the P5+1 is a case in point. It is a stunning error, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has correctly noted, but it is not a surprising one.

The agreement was unsurprising not only because the parties were so close to a deal for so long, but because the United States was hell-bent on reaching a deal. President Barack Obama wanted a deal no matter what compromises he had to make, no matter how much danger the deal represented for Israel, ostensibly the US’s ally.