RUTHFULLY YOURS

(New York Observer columnist Lisa Schiffren is one of the smartest journalists I know. A one-time Republican speechwriter, Lisa has written widely for conservative publications. I’m honored to offer this gem as a guest essay — DG).

Scene: A wood paneled room, no windows, the late hour at which posh N.Y. fund raising dinners end. Hillary Clinton enters to find three middle aged, intelligent looking women seated at a long table. Tea and cookies are proffered.

Good evening Secretary Clinton. May we call you Hillary? Thank you for coming to see us. You are wondering why we have summoned you. We dislike intervening in domestic politics. But…things are a bit dire at the moment. We believe that we can help you, and you can help us.

We see that your support is down. Voters don’t trust you. They don’t think you understand their problems. That nasty piece of work, the Grand Vizier Valerie Jarrett, has leaked information about forthcoming indictments for your transgressions at the State Department. She has boxes of evidence. The accusations of financial corruption are piling high.

We know this is upsetting. But you must be coming to understand that you are not going to be President of the United States. It is possible that you will not even win your primary.

For the record, it was always going to be an uphill struggle. Your presidency seems to cycle between your two parties every eight years. We wanted you to have it in ‘08. We expected you to win your primary and the general. We were shocked to see a great party nominate someone whose disdain for America was on full display.

To adapt BuzzFeed, 10 ways Hillary tried to buy young voters.

Hillary Clinton has something for everyone in President Obama’s political coalition, and this week her target is millennial voters. On Monday the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, er, candidate rolled out a $350 billion proposal that she says will make college more affordable. The irony is that she plans to ramp up the federal subsidies that have for decades driven up the cost of a higher education.

Her campaign is selling the New College Compact as ground-breaking, but you’ll recognize the path: debt-free public education for all as a taxpayer entitlement. The plan would ladle federal money on states whose public universities guarantee loan-free education and community college. Mrs. Clinton would also expand a program that allows borrowers to cap repayments based on what they earn, among other ideas. She’ll pay for this frat party the only way Democrats know: taxing the wealthy.

The speech was mean-spirited and dishonest — and may have been counterproductive.

President Obama’s speech last week advocating congressional approval of the Iran deal was mostly made-up history mixed with invective. Indeed, he talked far more roughly about his congressional partners than he did about our Iranian enemies, who have worked so hard to kill Americans over the last 35 years.

Obama assured us that in the past a “nonproliferation treaty . . . prohibited nations from acquiring nuclear weapons.” One wonders, then, how India, China, North Korea, and Pakistan ever obtained them, given they were all forbidden to do so under “new agreements” forged by Democratic and Republican presidents. Is there much logic in the assertion that the intelligence was flawed when we went to war with what proved to be a non-nuclear Iraq, but that we can trust the same intelligence agencies to apprise us precisely of the nuclear status of Iran?

“After two years of negotiations,” Obama went on, “we have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb.”

‘My name . . . comes from the word shomer, guardian, watcher. My ancestors were guardians of the ghetto wall in Chortkov, and I believe God actually gave me that name. One of my roles, which is very important in the United States Senate, is to be a shomer — to be Shomer Yisrael [guardian of Israel]. And I will continue to be that with every bone in my body.”

These are the words of Senator Charles Schumer, soon-to-be minority leader of the United States Senate, the most powerful Democrat in Congress. Senator Schumer has given this speech, or some iteration of it, hundreds of times at synagogues, Jewish community centers, and media outlets across the country. Many of my friends were at a similar gathering at the Aventura Turnberry synagogue in Miami in 2008, when Senator Schumer used his Hebrew name, shomer, to assure the congregants, many of whom were wary of voting for Senator Barack Obama, that President Barack Obama would be a friend to Israel. As he often is, Senator Schumer was persuasive and magnetic, leaving most of the voters who walked out of Turnberry that night feeling safe and secure — sensing themselves, in a word, shamur, that is, protected by their shomer.

Now, years later, Senator Schumer, self-proclaimed shomer of the Jewish people, is our only remaining hope to defeat a nuclear agreement with Iran that would, if ratified, alter the balance of power in the Middle East, condone the Islamic Republic’s nuclear-weapons program, infuse the Iranian terror machine with hundreds of billions of dollars with which to finance its proxies, and, for all practical purposes, prevent the United States from castigating the ayatollahs for future violations of their nuclear obligations.

If what senior Iranian officials are saying is true, the Obama administration’s duplicity in explaining its nuclear negotiations with Iran is even more staggering than we realized.

In a new report, MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) reveals that, according to Iranian officials, the Obama administration initiated secret negotiations with Iran not after the 2013 election of President Hassan Rouhani, but rather in 2011 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still Iran’s president.

That means the administration did not wait to reach out until Iran was governed by Rouhani, the purportedly “pragmatic” moderate the Obama administration contrasts with Iranian “hardliners” who supposedly oppose the Iran deal. It reached out when Ahmadinejad, an unapologetic “Death to America, death to Israel” hardliner, was running Iran’s government.

To be clear, these distinctions are nonsensical. In Iran, the president is not in charge; the president is subordinate to the nation’s sharia jurists, the chief of whom is “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As I observed last week, Khamenei is a hardliner through and through. So is Rouhani — a protégé of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s jihadist regime. Rouhani, a close friend and adviser of Khamenei, has been a staunch advocate of Iran’s nuclear program and a leader in crushing dissident protests.

Seventy years ago first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, were obliterated. Three generations later the grand-strategic consequences of those events can be discerned with reasonable clarity. They are by no means uniformly bad.

The claim that the destruction of two large cities and the killing of over two hundred thousand humans was justified in order to prevent an even greater carnage on both sides, resulting from the putative U.S. invasion of Japan in late 1945, is historically disputable and morally unsustainable. The horror itself—including the unexpected effects of radiation and fallout—has had a salutary impact on the great and minor powers alike in the ensuing decades, however. It is arguable that its deterrent effect has spared the world a major war costing millions of lives.

In most bipolar confrontations known to history—from Assyria versus Egypt, Persia vs. Greece, Athens vs. Sparta, and Rome vs. Carthage onwards—coexistence (peaceful or otherwise) was not an option. In a classic bipolar model, America and the USSR likely would have gone to an all-out war some time 10-15 years after 1945, a war probably no less destructive than the one preceding it. The constraints against first use of nuclear weapons, and the related fear of escalation leading to their inadvertent application, introduced an element of caution and moderation on both sides—the “nuclear taboo.” A complex system of informal checks and balances within the political, military and bureaucratic apparata operated in different ways on different sides of the Iron Curtain, but its effects were broadly similar. It was in evidence in the U.S. for the first time in the critical Korean winter of 1950-51, when President Harry Truman overruled General Douglas MacArthur. President Eisenhower did say in 1955 that nuclear weapons could be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else,” but during the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis he admitted that, with the bomb, “you cross a completely different line.” That line was in Central Europe and in the homeland then, and it had remained there until the fall of the Wall. Restraint was notably present on both sides during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: ideological differences and divergent strategic interests were transcended by mutually compatible rational calculations. Neither side seriously considered the possibility of preemptive attacks thereafter, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s fleeting “madman” threats to Hanoi notwithstanding.

IATA, the largest international airline group, will work with Tel Aviv University to improve on- and off-line security for its members.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has signed an agreement with Tel Aviv University under which a new joint center for innovation in aviation will be established in order to develop technologies to protect airline reservations systems, authentication for security purposes, and financial systems, as well as to develop ways to run airlines more efficiently using big data and advanced intelligence.

Dozens of scientists are heading to Israel next week, including 15 Nobel Prize winners. According to the Foreign Ministry, the upcoming World Science Conference Israel (WSCI) will see the participation of Nobel laureates along with over 400 young scientific prodigies from 70 countries.

The WSCI was originally set for August of last year, but with Israel otherwise engaged in Operation Protective Edge, sponsors – including Hebrew University, the Science Ministry, and the Foreign Ministry – decided to postpone the event. It was rescheduled for August 15-20 of this year, giving students from Israel and abroad a first-hand opportunity to meet some of the top minds in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics.

The event will take place at the Hebrew University campus, with festivities open to anyone interested in hearing some of the world’s top minds discuss and debate esoteric concepts in the physical and social sciences. Besides the discussions, a number of other events will take place during WSCI week, including a mini-conference in which entrepreneurs will discuss the roots their tech products and services have in “hard science.”

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/08/10/victim-of-muslim-groomingrape-gangs-speaks-out-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by Toni Bugle, the founder of M.A.R.I.A.S. (Mother’s against Radical Islam and Sharia).

She came on the show to discuss her victimization at the hands of Muslim Grooming/Rape Gangs — and her efforts to help victims and to protect future potential victims of a barbaric ingredient of Islamic Jihad.

And make sure to watch the special episode of The Glazov Gang that was joined by Steve Emerson, the Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism.

He came on the show to discuss “Obama vs. US Victims of Palestinian Terror?” — unveiling how the Obama administration is considering intervening in a landmark court case against Palestinian terrorists. He explains why the administration would plot to thwart justice for US victims of Palestinian — as well as Iranian — terrorism.

Don’t miss it!

After a lot of arm twisting, the Gulf Arab states publicly backed the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran. On the surface, this appears as a diplomatic victory for the president as he seeks to build support for his signature foreign policy initiative. But is this true?

The positive response from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) composed of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain emerged after months of intense lobbying by the White House. What the administration gave up to achieve its goal is a matter of some speculation.

There isn’t any doubt that the U.S. will offer advanced military material, intelligence-sharing and training. However, from the outset Saudi Arabian officials have said that whatever capability Iran obtains from the deal should be offered to their country as well.