RUTHFULLY YOURS

On December 17, 2008, in response to the financial crisis, the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) lowered the Fed Funds rate to essentially zero. (The rate, which had been coming down for more than a year, had been 2% in September.) When Fed Funds were set at zero the financial crisis, which had reached its perihelion in late September-early October, was already on the mend. The recession, which had begun in December 2007, was two-thirds past. Nevertheless, Fed Funds have been kept at this unprecedentedly low level for almost seven years. The Federal Reserve has become entrapped in its own snare, with no clear exit.

On September 16-17 the FOMC will meet. It had been expected that, finally, the process toward normalization would begin. (Historically, Fed Funds generally ranged between two and five percent.) Expectations had been that the rate would be raised by 25 basis points. But, with China’s economy and markets in free-fall, with our economy chugging along in second gear, with inflation seemingly tamed, and turmoil in equity and commodity markets over the past several weeks, there are doubts as to whether they will act. Eminent economists, like Larry Summers, have warned (incredulously) against the Fed being too hasty, citing the fragility of the recovery, as well as risks to speculative markets.

While August unemployment dipped to 5.1%, the lowest since April 2008, labor participation remains stuck at 62.6%, the lowest since October 1977. Most of the jobs added, as has been true for the past six years, were part-time. The unemployment number of 5.1% is based on the 157,065,000 people in the workforce – those working or actively looking for work. It does not include the 94,031,000 (the rest of the population above the age of 16) that are not counted as being in the labor force. Annual U.S. GDP growth, since the recovery began in June 2009, has averaged about 2%, the lowest of any recovery since the end of World War II. If the Federal Reserve wants an excuse from walking away from a rate increase, there is ammunition.

I hate to disagree with my friend Elliott Abrams but the so called peace process and two state (dis)solution is defunct, dead, and worthless…it was never an option for Israel…any map avers it….and there is no point in pretending it is still an option…..rsk
Israel’s allies won’t support an out-and-out renunciation of the two-state solution.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he maintains a blog, Pressure Points.

Like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, the “peace process” may die unless we all clap loudly and say we believe in it. In “The Two-State Solution Is in Stalemate,” Evelyn Gordon tells us to keep our hands down and embrace that terrible danger. In fact, she argues, we’d all be better off acknowledging that, whatever the fate of Tinkerbell, the “peace process” is already defunct.

As she rightly says, the notion that the parties are an inch apart, and that all the outlines of a final status-agreement are well understood, is nonsense. There is no chance of a comprehensive peace in the foreseeable future—because the issues are too hard and the disagreements too deep, and because today’s Palestinian leadership is illegitimate and unable to make the difficult decisions and compromises peace would require.

What then should Israel do? Gordon outlines some steps, especially in the realm of economic development, that would make life better for the Palestinians regardless of the nature and timing of any future agreement. I’m in agreement with most of these, but not with one she mentions but does not explain: “even the resettlement of some Palestinian refugees.” Starting down that road would be a mistake. But there are other practical steps Israel can take to make life easier (and Netanyahu has already taken quite a few, though he gets no credit for them), and Israel should allow more Palestinian economic activity and political control in substantial parts of the West Bank.

How it is that the nation’s diplomatic corps has become an arm of the Clinton presidential campaign?

Whatever the Clinton campaign is paying Mark Toner, it ain’t enough. Oh, wait; it isn’t anything. Which is interesting.

Mark Toner, you see, is a federal employee. Technically, he’s a spokesman for the State Department. This isn’t always clear, though, especially when the nimble Mr. Toner takes to the podium to ferociously defend the putative Democratic nominee six ways from Election Day. Hillary Clinton’s communications gurus Jennifer Palmieri and Nick Merrill—they do a fine job. But Mr. Toner? He’s the bomb.

And he’s not alone. Since the dawn of the Clinton email scandal, the entire State Department has been vigorously protecting Hillary Clinton. Whatever the motivation (and more on that later), what we are witnessing is an extraordinary all-hands government assist for a presidential candidate.

This was supposed to be the Era of No Fences. No walls between blocs. No borders between countries. No barriers to trade. Visa-free tourism. The single market. A global Internet. Frictionless transactions and seamless exchanges.

In short, a flat world. Whatever happened to that?

In the early 1990s, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book called “The New Middle East,” in which he predicted what was soon to be in store for his neighborhood. “Regional common markets reflect the new Zeitgeist,” he gushed. It was only a matter of time before it would become true in his part of the world, too.

I read the book in college, and while it struck me as far-fetched it didn’t seem altogether crazy. The decade from 1989 to 1999 was an age of political, economic, social and technological miracles. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. Apartheid ended. The euro and Nafta were born. The first Internet browser was introduced. Oil dropped below $10 a barrel, the Dow topped 10,000, Times Square became safe again. America won a war in Kosovo without losing a single man in combat.

It is hard to understand why some Westerners believe that Abbas’s departure could boost the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. To many Palestinians, it is clear that the PLO or Fatah official who replaces Abbas will not be able to make any concessions to Israel. Any Palestinian leader who dares to make the slightest concession to Israel will be denounced as a traitor and will be lucky if he stays in power or stays alive.

The West needs to understand that no Palestinian leader is authorized to make concessions to Israel for the sake of peace. Neither the PLO nor the Fatah leaderships would ever approve of such concessions. And, of course, Hamas also will never accept any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, except one that leads to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire in the region.

Saeb Erekat has been negotiating with Israel for the past two decades and his position has never changed. Like Arafat and Abbas, he too will never sign a peace agreement with Israel that does not include 100% of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Erekat is not authorized to make any concessions on Jerusalem or the “right of return” for Palestinians to their former homes inside Israel.

Abbas’s successor will undoubtedly declare that he intends to follow in the footsteps of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas may go, but his legacy, like that of Arafat, will not.

The recent talk about Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s intention to quit political life has left many wondering whether his departure would bring about real changes for the Palestinians and the “peace process” with Israel.

The latest example of absurdity masquerading as principle is the election of Amna Farooqi as the leader of J Street U, the campus adjunct to the supposedly liberal “pro-Israel” organization, founded and run by radical leftists of Jewish origin.

Farooqi is a Muslim, pro-Palestinian, Hamas-supporting woman of Pakistani descent, whose claim to Jewish identity is growing up in Potomac , Maryland, home to many wealthy and successful Jewish business people and professionals. In this article, the World Zionist Organization details how Farooqi can in no way be considered pro-Israel, supporting Palestinian “resistance” to Israeli “occupation,” calling for boycott and divestment of Israel, labeling Israel a racist state, and defaming Israeli leaders.

But one has to ask: why even detail such an argument against someone who is admittedly a devout Muslim and Palestinian sympathizer – and who ran for her J Street office not hiding these things, but celebrating them? Incredibly, J Street’s Jews voted her in because of her positions and background, not in spite of them.

Watch this bizarre video, in which Farooqi describes her journey from being a Pakistani pro-Palestinian Muslim to a “Zionist,” including a visit to Israel. What she learned there is that her pre-existing ideas about Israeli “occupation” and discrimination against the Palestinian Arabs were absolutely true. She announces this to the cheers of her (presumably mostly Jewish) leftist audience.

Kids Get School Supplies from Groups Associated with Terrorism Broward School Board Member Ann Murray helps expose children to Islamist outreach.

It’s back to school time for kids. New teacher, new friends and new costs for school supplies – something parents know can be fairly expensive! To exploit this financial concern, this past July, Islamist groups, including ICNA, CAIR and Emerge USA, along with Broward County School Board Member Ann Murray, participated in a program at Miramar Elementary Public School to give away school supplies to children in need. While the children weren’t old enough to understand who they were accepting gifts from, parents should be alarmed to discover the tainted favors came from groups associated with terror and bigotry.

The flyer for the event reads, “A Project of ICNA Relief. BACK2SCHOOL GIVEAWAY. HELP US HELP THE CHILDREN IN NEED.” The sponsors listed on the flyer include: the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Florida Islamic Association (FIA).

ICNA Relief is the main charity of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the American affiliate of South Asian Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Jamaat-e-Islami’s militant wing, Hizbul Mujahideen, owned the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in. ICNA has been linked to terrorist financing and has used the web to promote a number of terrorist groups, including Hamas, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and the Taliban. ICNA conducts annual functions along with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a group that was recently named to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government list of international terrorist organizations.

Raymond Stock, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a Middle East political analyst and scholar. A resident of Cairo for two decades, he has written extensively about Egypt and the Middle East in the Middle East Quarterly, The Financial Times, and International Herald Tribune, among many other venues. Dr. Stock briefed the Middle East Forum in a conference call August 27, 2015.

The Islamists have enabled Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Sisi to consolidate his domestic standing and gain widespread international legitimacy.

Though no more tolerant of political dissent than his predecessors, Sisi is a liberal in the sense that he wants a more open, tolerant, and religiously equal Egypt as evidenced by his uncompromising fight against Muslim Brotherhood violence. The only Egyptian president to demand that Al-Azhar clerics end their militant interpretation of Islam and societal discrimination of non-Muslims, Sisi made overtures to the Coptic Christians and toned down religious extremism in the education curriculum.

Pro-Sisi demonstrators celebrate the third anniversary of Mubarak’s overthrow, January 2014.

The president’s success in restoring order has been eroded by the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the resurgence of Muslim Brotherhood violence, and spreading lawlessness in Sinai. The recent opening of the new Suez Canal and encouragement of foreign investment are attempts to revive Egypt’s economy and boost its international standing.

It has been said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” The vacuum created by the administration where the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws were concerned motivated Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her state’s legislature to enact an immigration law, SB 1070, that largely paralleled sections of the current federal immigration laws.

On April 23, 2010 Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Arizona’s immigration into law SB 1070.

You might think that the law and the controversy that surrounded it are hardly newsworthy today, more than 5 years after SB 1070 was enacted. However, today that law is back in the news. On September 6, 2015 the Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S. judge dismisses challenge of Arizona’s SB 1070 immigration law.”

It is that headline and the report on the decision rendered by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton on September 5, 2015 that makes this issue worthy of consideration today. Furthermore, on a personal note, the court’s decision is one I find personally satisfying. I assisted the law firm that defended Arizona and SB 1070 by providing a declaration in support of that important law.

The “Arab Spring”—a wave of mayhem—began late in 2010 and soon included, by the spring of 2011, the civil war in Syria. By now that war has cost over 200,000 lives, seen Syria’s disintegration into zones controlled by various, mostly radical factions, and sparked a refugee crisis that is now affecting not only surrounding countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey but Europe as well.

Just two years before Syria’s version of the “Spring” broke out, in 2009, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was still engaged in indirect talks with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad aimed at returning all of the Golan Heights to Syria. The payback was supposed to be a Syrian commitment to peace and to exiting its alliance with Iran and Hizballah.

By now, no one in Israel—right, left, center, even far left—is heard lamenting that those talks did not lead to such a deal. In 2012, prominent left-of-center columnist and author Ari Shavit wrote:

I couldn’t help but think what would be happening today if the ideological position I had long held—peace in return for the Golan—had been accepted…. I have to admit that if the worldview I had championed had been applied, battalions of global jihadis would be camping near Ein Gev [beside the Sea of Galilee] and there would be Al-Qaida bases on the shores of [the lake]. Northern Israel and the country’s water sources would be bordering…on an armed, extremist Islamic entity that could not be controlled.