RUTHFULLY YOURS

“There will be bloodshed but Israel is strong.”

“Israel has been, and should be, operating under the assumption that Iran is going for and will probably acquire nuclear weaponry; there’s no doubt in my mind that this is what is happening,” former Israeli defense minister Moshe Arens told The Algemeiner on Wednesday, following the Obama administration’s securing of the support it needed to prevent a veto override in Congress over the nuclear deal.

“Whether the Iranians actually use this weaponry — or when — is a different question,” said Arens, who served several years as a Knesset member, three terms as defense minister, once as foreign minister and a stint as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. “The probability is small, but not zero.”

What is certain, he said, is that the Islamic Republic’s proxies in the region, such as Hezbollah, Hamas and other terrorist groups, have been empowered.

As we approach Rosh Hashana, the people of Israel need to recognize how lucky we are. True, today, we find ourselves largely alone, set apart from our traditional partners in the Western world. But standing alone isn’t always the worst option. Today it is certainly not the worst option. Over the past several years, we have witnessed the growing radicalization and fragmentation of the societies of neighboring lands. Sunnis fight Shi’ites and one another. Minority populations are slaughtered, enslaved and oppressed. Regimes fall, rise and fall again. Today, every Arab society is either in danger or at war. And in almost every case, it isn’t good fighting evil but varying degrees of evil and barbarism fighting one another. From the PLO to Islamic State, through Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Assad regime in Syria, the ayatollahs of Iran, Hezbollah, the Erdogan regime in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and every single actor in the region resorts to some degree of torture and oppression.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s national lead over her rivals for the Democratic nomination has shrunk, and she is in a statistical tie with leading Republicans in head-to-head surveys, a new CNN/ORC poll released Thursday evening showed.

Mrs. Clinton is getting support from 37 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, with Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is running in the Democratic contest, getting 27 percent, the survey found. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is considering a run of his own and who has been included in several recent public surveys, received 20 percent support.

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, is at 3 percent, while Jim Webb, the former Virginia senator, received 2 percent, and Lincoln Chafee, the former governor of Rhode Island, is at less than 1 percent.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/09/ny-times-launches-its-jew-tracker.php

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/09/us/politics/lawmakers-against-iran-nuclear-deal.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The New York Times today offers up a table examining the Democratic (but not Republican) Senators and House members opposed to Obama’s Iran agreement, noting whether they are Jewish and the proportion of Jewish constituents in their state or district. Like this:

Senators Schumer and Cardin are underline in yellow.

How Democrats will blame the GOP for Iran becoming a nuclear power.

The Iran nuclear deal is presented as an international agreement between the major powers and Iran. But the fact is that there are really only two parties to the agreement – President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party on the one hand, and the Iranian regime on the other.

Over the past week or so, more and more Democrats have fallen into line behind Obama. At the same time, word is getting out about what Iran is doing now that it has its deal. Together, the actions of both sides have revealed the role the nuclear pact plays in each side’s overall strategies for success.

On the Iranian side, last Wednesday the National Committee of Resistance of Iran revealed that North Korean nuclear experts are in Iran working with the Revolutionary Guards to help the Iranians prevent the UN’s nuclear inspectors from discovering the scope of their nuclear activities.

The NCRI is the same opposition group that in 2003 exposed Iran’s until then secret uranium enrichment installation in Natanz and its heavy water plutonium facility in Arak.

According to the report, the North Koreans “have expertise in ballistic missile and nuclear work areas, particularly in the field of warheads and missile guidance.”

“Over the past two years the North Korean teams have been sharing their experiences and tactics necessary for preventing access to military nuclear sites,” NCRI added.

Although, as The Washington Times reports, NCRI’s finding have yet to be verified, it is unwise to doubt them.

Demonstrating her profile in cowardice, Hillary Clinton waited to explain in detail her support for President Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran until it no longer mattered politically what she said. She held back until Obama had secured enough support from Democrats to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval of the deal and possibly enough votes in the Senate to filibuster the resolution to death. “By now, the outcome of the deal in Congress is no longer in much doubt,” Hillary declared in her remarks at the Brookings Institution on September 9th.

A real leader aspiring to be president and commander-in-chief should have weighed in with her opinion while “the outcome of the deal” was still up in the air. But that’s not the way the presumed front runner for her party’s presidential nomination operates. Everything she does is calculated to enhance her own image. To make up for her procrastination in explaining why she endorsed the deal and how she would implement it as president, Hillary used her speech to pose as a tough commander-in-chief should Iran dare to test her.

“I support this deal. I support it as part of a larger strategy towards Iran,” Clinton said. “We have to say ‘Yes – and.’ ‘Yes, and we will enforce it with vigor and vigilance.'”

The phrase “Only a Clinton” entered our lexicon in the nineties. Ever since then the unsinkable Clintons have continued spewing outrageous lies and ridiculous ploys that only a Clinton could get away with.

Hillary Clinton tried campaigning for the White House without actually taking positions on anything. Iran was a particularly touchy subject because the Democratic Party has two constituencies that are sharply divided on the issue. Jewish voters oppose the deal while left-wing voters back it.

Hillary Clinton couldn’t pander to both at the same time. Or could she?

Hillary Clinton endorsed the deal while in true “Only a Clinton” style running against it. She endorsed the deal using militant rhetoric that threatened Iran with war. Her message is that she endorses a deal that gives Iran near zero breakout time to the bomb and lets it self-inspect and fund terrorists, but that she’ll be the toughest terror deal supporter you ever saw. No one will be tougher on that deal than her.

Memories of the day, twenty-two years ago, when the Oslo Accords were signed—and of the price Israel paid for that “terrible mistake.”

As happens every year at this time, I can’t help dwelling on the events of the day, twenty-two years ago, when the Oslo Accords were signed by Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of the state of Israel, and the PLO chieftain Yasir Arafat, thereafter to be known as president of the new Palestinian Authority. This year, my memories of September 13, 1993 have been triggered by a passage in Ally, Michael Oren’s recently published account of his term as Israel’s ambassador to the United States between 2009 and 2013.

The most important parts of Oren’s book recount his dealings—fraught, frequently contentious, even abusive—with the Obama administration and the American president. That Oren is a professional historian and trustworthy witness only underlines the significance of what he reveals about this agonizing period in America-Israel relations. But along the way he also tells his own personal story: the story of how an American Jewish boy fulfilled his adolescent dream of moving to Israel and entering a life of service to his people.

That there is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions in refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous African nations for Europe cannot be denied. That the causes of these flights are an insurgent, ISIS-run Islamic Caliphate that now controls territory In Syria and Iraq larger than Great Britain, ruthless dictators like Bashar al Assad in Syria and Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Sudan, and Islamic terrorism throughout the region is also undeniable. And we know that Islamic terrorist organizations will not let this crisis go to waste. They will insert terrorists and martyrs among the fleeing refugees, thereby increasing risks to the West.

The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) have said there were 14.4 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2014, a 25% increase from 2013. Almost all have come from the Middle East and Africa, chased out by fear, famine and pestilence. Additionally, the number of internally displaced persons is put at 38.2 million. The situation has worsened in 2015.

The photograph of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach near the town of Bodrum this past week tore at the heart strings of those in the West. It brought a personal element to one of the greatest human tragedies in recent times. This boy, with his Velcro sneakers and red shirt, could have been our son or grandson. In fact he was Syrian, trying to reach Europe when the boat he was on capsized, drowning him, his five-year-old brother and his mother. His father, Abdullah, alone of the family survived. But will that knowledge effect they way we treat the causes of this migration from Hell? Will we finally admit that those being tortured, killed and chased from their homes are not a consequence of “violent extremism,” but are victims of Islamic terrorism? Will we reconsider the role we have played in abetting this horror?

It’s time to give preference to immigrants who are unlikely to use welfare programs.
Two new reports from the Center for Immigration Studies show very high rates of welfare use by immigrants. The first, released last week, looked at all immigrant households, legal and illegal, and found that 51 percent accessed one or more welfare programs.

This week we released a second report, looking at the same data but separating out legal and illegal immigrants. While we found that illegal-immigrant households make significant use of welfare, here I want to focus on the far bigger problem of legal immigrants’ welfare use. Three-quarters of all immigrant households using welfare are headed by legal immigrants. Legal immigration is a discretionary policy that is supposed to benefit the country; we can allow in or keep out anyone we want. Yet our current legal-immigration system has produced a flow of immigrants in which a large share cannot support themselves or their children.

To study immigrant welfare use, we used the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Like other researchers, we identified legal and illegal immigrants based on various questions in the survey. We estimated that 49 percent of households headed by legal immigrants used one or more welfare programs in 2012, compared with 30 percent of households headed by the native-born. Legal immigrants have significantly higher use rates than native-born households overall and for cash programs, food programs, and Medicaid; use of housing programs is about the same as for natives. Among legal-immigrant households with children, the rate of welfare use is an astonishing 72 percent. There is no evidence that these numbers represent fraud; instead, they represent a profound problem with the selection criteria we use to admit legal immigrants.