RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If European countries accept a wave of migrants, there will be terrorists among them. … By accepting the migrants, we strongly facilitate the Islamic State’s expansion to Europe.” — Czech President Miloš Zeman.

“We are committed to being active participants in our society, but it has to be on Islam’s terms, without compromising our own principles and values. Democracy is antithetical to Islam… The way forward for Muslims in Denmark is to resist the anti-Islamic integration policy and the aggressive foreign policy pursued by successive governments in this country.” — Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

“If you talk about immigration, you are a xenophobe. If you talk about security, you are a fascist. If you talk about Islam, you are an Islamophobe.” — French MP Henri Guaino.

“We cannot lose this war because it is fundamentally a war of civilization. It is our society, our civilization that we are defending.” — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Irrespective of Western attempts to portray Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt as supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, leaders of these countries, and especially the House of Saud, consider the accord a colossal, lethal threat, resulting from a reckless, short-sighted and self-destructive policy, which will initially plague the Arab World, and subsequently the Western World, including the USA, “the Great Satan” according to the Ayatollahs.

While Saudi leaders are restrained in their official reaction to the Iran nuclear agreement, they voice their authentic concerns and assessments via the House of Saud-owned media, which have traditionally served as a convenient venue, providing the element of deniability, sparing diplomatic inconvenience.

During a recent visit to Capitol Hill, I was told by legislators in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle: “While Israel is concerned about Iran’s nuclearization, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are panicky.”

1) The moderators did not delve into the core beliefs of the candidates. The Constitution itself was only raised in one question. Where’s the beef?

Perhaps it is naive to think that this matters in a world in which identity politics, sound bites and snark frequently trump all else, but I found the debate sorely lacking when it came to giving candidates the opportunity to expound upon their political philosophies.

As a proxy for this point, guess how many times the Constitution was raised during the debate?

In the case of the moderators, only once, on a question from Chris Wallace to Gov. Mike Huckabee regarding his belief in Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and abortion.

Only Senators Cruz and Rubio even invoked the Constitution.

I understand we are living in the Roberts/Pelosi era, in which the Constitution is selectively applied when not treated as a mere piece of parchment, but come on.

I also understand that the moderators were likely more concerned with drilling the candidates on perceived weaknesses and/or questions that would elicit compelling and/or viral responses.

And it’s not lost on me that voters care most about how they are going to put food on the table, education and national security.

But for GOP primary voters, philosophy matters too.

In President Barack Obama’s defense of his nuclear deal with Iran Wednesday, he said there are only two types of people who will oppose his deal – Republican partisans and Israel- firsters – that is, traitors.

At American University, Obama castigated Republican lawmakers as the moral equivalent of Iranian jihadists saying, “Those [Iranian] hard-liners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal… are making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

He then turned his attention to Israel.

Obama explained that whether or not you believe the deal endangers Israel boils down to whom you trust more – him or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And, he explained, he can be trusted to protect Israel better than Netanyahu can because “[I] have been a stalwart friend of Israel throughout my career.”

The night the Iran nuclear deal was announced was a sleepless one for Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, utterly distraught by the terms of the agreement. “I got up and emailed my eBook publisher and said I have an idea. What if I do an eBook that could be out in time for the congressional debate? He thought it was a great idea,” Dershowitz explained in an exclusive interview with the Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought. “He gave me two weeks to write it. He got it in eleven days.”

Fears of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon have haunted supporters of Israel and advocates of Middle East peace for over a decade, stoked by frequent public reminders by back-to-back regimes of the Islamic Republic that their goal is the annihilation of the Jewish State. “This book took me less than two weeks to write and ten years to research, so I’ve been thinking about and writing about this potentially for ten years,” explained Dershowitz. “I wrote my first long article about this in 2005. I had my ideas and I’ve been following the deal very closely.

“This use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives. Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

The White House and its allies shouldn’t need to smear American Jews–and a sitting senator–as dual loyalists to make their case.

Chuck Schumer is a politician—a skilled and successful one. Which means that today’s announcement, following months of wildly uncharacteristic silence, that the senior Senator from New York is opposing the Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran is first and foremost a reflection of his calculations as to where his own self-interest lies. It does not take an electoral genius to imagine why a Senator from New York State might oppose a deal that keeps many Jewish voters—and an even higher percentage of non-Jewish voters—up at night. Keeping your base happy is generally the first rule of political survival.

Many years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Dutch businessman in a hotel in China. In the course of our discussion, I learned that he had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today known as Indonesia. I quickly calculated that he was old enough to have been alive during World War II, so I asked what happened to him?

He told me that he and his parents spent the entire war in a Japanese prison camp.

“What was that like?” I asked.

He explained that because his family entered the camp when he was 3 years old and were liberated when he was 8, he really had no basis of comparison to anything else.

“That’s all I knew,” he said. “That was really my whole life up until then.”

They got by. They survived. As a child, he even found ways to play with some simple toys his mother made for him. He didn’t appear scarred in any way, and I thought our conversation had ended. But after a long pause, for some reason he opened up and began to tell me a story that I have never forgotten. It is a story that actually said more about my own country, its singularity and its values.

“When we were liberated,” he said, “these soldiers came into the camp. They were different. They looked like giants and they were all smiling.”

One of these giants quietly sat down next to him and gently lifted him on his knee. The soldier reached into his pack and took out a tin can, which contained a piece of bread, something the boy had never seen. Then he reached back and opened another can with a strange, colorful paste.

“I watched the soldier as he slowly spread jam over the bread and then he gave it to me.”

The man stopped there for a moment as his voice choked up, and then he turned and looked straight at me. “I travel all over the world.” He said. “I eat in very expensive restaurants .  .  . and I will never, ever, eat anything again that tasted so good.”

I didn’t realize that I was nodding in agreement and I said, “I know,” to which he quickly corrected me: “No, you will never know .  .  . and that’s a very lucky thing.”

Seventy years ago this summer, as World War II came to its climactic end, the world became a vast arena of liberated humanity. People came out of prison camps and attics, forests and cellars. Whole countries and populations were freed as the Nazi army crumbled and Japan surrendered. Millions of human beings, many of whom had been slaves for years, most of them starving, were suddenly released.

Their liberators included, along with our allies, a vast army of millions of young Americans—for some reason everyone referred to them as boys or “our boys.” Paul Fussell, the late writer, who was a young lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry, accurately titled his war memoir The Boys’ Crusade.

When the history of United States in the 21st century is written, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency will loom large in its early chapters. Two of the spy agency’s mistakes had terrible consequences for the future of the country. First, it failed to detect the September 11 plot. Second, it issued a faulty estimate that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which led to a major war. What went wrong?

Not long ago, Michael Morell hung up his trench coat after a 31-year career in the agency that took him from an entry level position to an array of high-level postings, ending up as CIA deputy director under Barack Obama. His memoir, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism–From al Qa’ida to ISIS, offers a tour of agency successes and failures and also explores a number of other highly controversial matters, including the “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists, and the agency’s convoluted role in the 2012 Benghazi imbroglio.

The Western world is facing an unprecedented threat from a global eclipse of reason.The Western world is facing an unprecedented threat from a global eclipse of reason.

Deranged falsehoods about Jews and Israel pour out of the Arab and Muslim world. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, asserts that the Jews are a “cancerous tumor.” Sunnis tell each other that the Jews are a global conspiracy of evil.

Jews recognize such murderous and paranoid lunacies from the ravings of last century’s Nazis and communists and, before them, Christians in thrall to medieval and apocalyptic conspiracy theories.

It would be natural to suppose that all those civilizational trauma have left the Western world sadder but wiser. Alas, that is not the case.

For all their horrors, fascism and communism were confined to particular regimes, in Nazi Germany and its fascist allies or the Soviet Union and its satellites.

First, let me say I am proud to be a Conservative Republican…. All the candidates in both debates , are patriots and have a vision and dedication to restoring our security, freedom and purpose…some more eloquent and knowledgeable than others.

Second: I was right about Trump. He is an ass, crass with no class and has not a single policy or principle that he can discuss without insult. I found his most repellant answer to be his boast that he supports all candidates of both parties so that he can call in favors. He is boorish and people will soon tire of him.

Third, I was wrong about Carly Fiorina who is beyond impressive…calm, in control and knows all the facts on both domestic and foreign policy. She is clearly in fighting form and deserves a place at the top even though it is hard to overlook her past (as advisor to John McCain) positions on immigration reform and cap and trade, and renewable energy and climate change.

Fourth: And what about Ben Carson? His instincts are perfect and his comments on race, and his closing comments were perfection. Not really presidential but a solid 10 on the likeability.

Fifth: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio both did really well- the best in my opinion…polite, concise, and bless Cruz for stating that he would move America’s embassy to Jerusalem.

Sixth:Christie and Huckabee were fine and Huckabee provided a great line with contrasting Reagan’s “trust but verify” with Obama’s “trust and vilify” and he did scorch Hillary but his tax plan is very wobbly. Walker was colorless but made no glaring error. Kasich and Jeb Bush were boring and I am sick of hearing how the latter wants to “lift our spirits.” My spirits are soaring but thanks anyway. Rand, Jindal, Santorum, Pataki, Graham and Perry? Bye, bye.