RUTHFULLY YOURS

How ironic that, with all the offensive things Donald Trump says, something he did not say is breaking the outrage bank.

Trump is under fire for failing, at one of his campaign events, to refute an overheated audience member who asserted that President Obama is a Muslim and was not born in the United States. Trump did not make these claims or concur in them. He simply decided it was not his job to defend Barack Obama from claims that Obama himself has played no small part in provoking. Trump, instead, ignored the allegations and went on with what he wanted to say: blather about how he was looking into the possibility that radical Muslims are training inside the United States to conduct terrorist attacks here (something that is not merely possible, but has been proved in terrorism prosecutions about a zillion times since I first did it 20 years ago).

As one would expect, our Islamophilic political establishment is in high dudgeon: demands for Trump to apologize have come from Trump competitors with troubling records of cuddling up to Islamists – e.g., Hillary Clinton, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham – and from Obama’s slavish media, which has never judged worthy of examination either the president’s misrepresentations about his background or his extensive personal ties to Islam, notwithstanding his seven-year record of lies about policy objectives and extensive appeasement of Islamic supremacists.

Hard on the manufactured controversy over what Donald Trump did not say about President Obama and Islam, we now have a controversy over what Ben Carson clearly did say about Islam – namely, that he does not believe it is consistent with the U.S. Constitution and that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” These assertions would not be nearly as hotly debated if the political class and the media had not sought for decades to suppress all discussion of Islam – other than mindless blather about its being a “religion of peace.” If we had been having the adult discussion we should have been having, it would be well understood by now that Islam is not merely a religion but a comprehensive societal framework with its own legal system. Why is that important to grasp? Because in the West, we recognize a division between the spiritual realm and political life – a division reflected in our Constitution.

During the course of publishing many of my articles, features and books, I have had the privilege of meeting and corresponding with several exceptional human beings whose work transcends the ordinary.

One such person is Jane Kiel, a young Danish Christian woman whose love for embattled Israel comes from growing up within a deeply religious family in Denmark. Jane’s parents cherished the Bible and showed a deep and abiding appreciation for the Jewish people.

Ms. Kiel has been reporting for some time from Jerusalem, Israel, and especially from the Temple Mount. This is where the two ancient Jewish Temples stood and is Judaism’s holiest religious site.

Jews have been living continuously in Jerusalem under successive alien occupations since they lost their ancient sovereignty in the city to the Romans in AD 70. But since the 1840s they have constituted the largest population in what is now Israel’s ancient and modern capital city.

It’s a myth that the left is opposed to fascism – it has always been drawn to power and violence

It reads like satire. Jeremy Corbyn has appointed a convicted arsonist to his team. Lord Watson of Invergowrie was jailed in 2005 by a Scottish court for drunkenly setting hotel curtains alight. The sheriff said Watson presented a “significant risk” of reoffending. Corbyn has now made him spokesman for, of all things, education.
Should one laugh or cry? As a metaphor for the grotesque and incendiary Corbyn ascendancy, this could hardly be bettered. Such is the alarm in security circles about Corbyn that the intelligence services reportedly will censor the information they provide to this opposition leader and putative privy council member. An anonymous serving general has warned that the army “would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country”.
At the weekend, Corbyn stepped down as chairman of the Islamist-linked Stop the War Coalition, which also has ties to the Socialist Workers party. The coalition’s website attacks the Queen as someone who “profits from the arms trade” and “lubricates Britain’s wars”.

The trickle-down effect: Palestinian with terror links speaks to third graders in Ithaca, NY about ‘Israeli oppression.’Anti-Israel propaganda has long been a problem on US university campuses – but now it has trickled down to the elementary school level as well, it seems.

Infamous Palestinian Arab “activist” Bassem Tamimi spoke at an Ithaca, NY elementary school on Friday to present to third-graders a presentation on the “suffering” of Palestinian Arab children in Israel.

Tamimi’s visit to Beverly J. Martin Elementary was arranged via anti-Israel activist Ariel Gold, the current head of the North American branch of Sabeel International – an anti-Israel Christian organization actively working to skew Christian dominations toward divestment resolutions against the Jewish state.

Gold and Tamimi met in late 2014, during the former’s visit to the Palestinian Authority (PA) town of Bil’in; she has since then become Tamimi’s official agent for international trips to hawk anti-Israel propaganda. Gold proudly posted a photo from his visit to the school on Facebook.

1. Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) is a major Jewish holiday of individual self-enhancement spiritually and perpetually, transforming acrimony and vindictiveness into forgiveness, peace of mind and peaceful coexistence between God and human beings, but especially between fellow human beings. While Yom Kippur prayers request forgiveness for sins committed against God, it is customary to dedicate Yom Kippur’s eve to repentance for sins committed against fellow human beings.

2. Yom Kippur constitutes a cement of the highly diversified Jewish people, inviting criminals and sinners to participate in Yom Kippur services. It emphasizes soul-searching and underscores humility and tolerance as the key features of one’s character. It commemorates God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and God’s forgiveness for the sin of the Golden Calf.

3. Maimonides, the 12th century preeminent Jewish philosopher, Torah scholar and physician, whose bust features in the chamber of the US House of Representatives, considered genuine repentance (walk and not mere talk) a central axis of Yom Kippur, in particular, and life, in general. Moreover, repentance is one of the 613 statutes of Moses – a derivative of inherent human fallibility, which produces transgressions. The recognition of one’s fallibility requires humility.

Israeli journalist Amira Hass has finally explained a mystery that long puzzled me: how the European Union manages to reconcile its policy on the Middle East with its self-image as a champion of morality, human rights, and compassion. In one short sentence, she neatly encapsulates the moral rot at the heart of the modern multicultural left: “We don’t rate suffering.”

The great European mystery is the fact that the Syrian conflict remains far below the Palestinian-Israeli one on Europe’s foreign policy agenda, even though on both moral and practical grounds, the Syrian crisis clearly deserves precedence. Not only has it killed more than 10 times as many people in four years as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has in seven decades, but it’s currently flooding Europe with refugees and creating, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted, an even greater threat to European unity than the euro crisis. Nor can this order of priorities be excused by claiming Western helplessness in Syria: Pundits as ideologically diverse as COMMENTARY’s Max Boot and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof agree that no-fly zones could enable most Syrians to remain safely in their homeland.

Enter Hass, a Haaretz columnist, red-diaper baby, and disciple of hard-left theory who is best known for her radical pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel views. Two weeks ago, she published a column that compares and contrasts the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba, a term she uses to mean everything Palestinians have suffered due to their conflict with Israel for the last 70 years. She graciously acknowledges that the two aren’t equivalent, inter alia because the Nazis perpetrated genocide while Israel has done no such thing. But then she explains why this non-equivalence doesn’t really matter:

Editor’s note: Cuban police arrested leading Cuban dissidents on Sunday in an attempt to prevent them from meeting Pope Francis while he was celebrating his first mass in Havana. On this occasion, we are re-publishing below Jamie Glazov’s article from Frontpage Magazine’s December 25, 2014 issue, as it provides an in-depth examination of the Castro regime’s vicious and sadistic brutality.

*Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

During the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jews have the chance to alter our fate. Through a combination of repentance, prayer and good deeds, we can make a last bid to God to give us a better deal before He seals the books in which the quality of our lives in the upcoming year are determined.

This is why Israelis of all stripes, regardless of religious stream or practice, wish each other, on the street and in shops as a matter of course, to be sealed in the Book of Life. It is a kneejerk greeting, not given any thought; at the same time, it is an acknowledgement that we’re all in the same boat — about to be given a genuine and significant grade by a higher power than the yentas in the neighborhood, whose judgments about our daily lives are merely part of the scenery of the Jewish state.

In the long-term absence of peace with the Palestinians, better to cease pursuing the unattainable and adopt policies that can strengthen the country at home and abroad.

Many thanks to Elliott Abrams and Amnon Lord for their thoughtful responses to my essay. Drawing on his own extensive experience, Abrams aptly highlights how the endless pursuit of an unattainable Israel-Palestinian agreement entails costs for the United States as well as for Israel, and also how the chaos currently sweeping the Middle East underlines the importance of preserving the region’s one remaining island of stability—and the folly of embarking on yet another destabilizing grand experiment. Lord, for his part, correctly emphasizes the need to maintain Israeli morale and “the national sense of justice and self-confidence,” a crucial addition to my own list of what Israel must do on the home front. He also reminds us of the hopeful significance of Israel’s burgeoning relations with both Asia and “moderate” Arab states.

Lord points out that Israel’s own early history, before and after the state’s establishment, was characterized by strategies somewhat akin to the “cold war” model I propose in my essay. I agree, and I’d be delighted to see someone draw up a Hebrew-language version of such a strategy for Israel along the same lines, with examples drawn primarily from the country’s own Zionist experience. As Lord suggests, such an exercise, by providing a needed corrective to the course adhered to by Israel’s government in recent decades, might help persuade today’s Israelis that a change is actually feasible.