RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001563.html

I don’t have time to write a longer dispatch today but for those who haven’t seen it, I recommend watching this video of a sermon from four days ago by a leading Imam in Gaza in which he brandishes a knife in the mosque and urges Arabs everywhere to stab Jews.

This is not the kind of reporting you will see on the BBC and other anti-Israel news media.

The sermon is not an isolated incident and similar incitement to kill Jews is appearing in the Western-funded Fatah media and Fatah controlled mosques.

In “The ‘Steve Jobs’ Con” (NYT 8/13), Joe Nocera does an excellent job of revealing the discrepancies between the Jobs whose career he followed closely and the mostly fictional character created for the movie. As an unwitting audience member who knew much less than Nocera, I too felt that the fast-talking, stubborn and abrasive character was a familiar stereotype found in other Sorkin films and tv shows and therefore, an un-inflected portrayal of this particular man.

Against a stylized framework of showing Jobs at three of his famous product launchings, we are meant to glean the essence of his character through his relationships with key figures in his professional and personal life. There is the rejected, neurotic former girlfriend, mother of Lisa, the “illegitimate” and unacknowledged daughter. Both are mostly stick figures who reappear to keep asking for money and recognition. There are the three male colleagues who have their grievances of varying legitimacy. And there is Joanna Hoffman, the maternal work-wife who understands everything about the business as well as the boss’ major character flaws. As played by Kate Winslet with an irrelevant Polish twang (competing with Meryl Streep’s superior Sophie), she is perpetually anxious, devoted and insightful, and if we are believe the screenplay, the one most responsible for forcing Jobs to reconsider his hurtful and intractable behavior towards Lisa. As Nocera points out, we never learn that this girl actually lived with Jobs throughout her high school years. A bigger surprise that is totally excluded from the film is that Jobs was married with three other children by this time in the film. Presented as a loner who has difficulty getting along with everyone, the truth of that last piece of information is crucial to our understanding of what appears to be a thaw in his icy intransigence and far more logical as an explanation for his softening temperament. Similarly, Kate Winslet’s character, presented as a woman with a single-minded purpose of taking care of Steve Jobs, was also married with a family of her own.

In its continuing humiliation of President Obama – who clings to his Iran deal despite Iran’s continuing to call for “Death to America,” banning of further negotiations with the U.S., convicting of one of its American hostages of bogus espionage charges, joining with Russia to prop up Assad by bombing America-backed insurgents, and contemptuously asserting that it will ignore provisions of the deal to which it objects – the jihadist regime in Tehran tested a ballistic missile over the weekend in blatant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 2231, which codifies the Iran deal.

The Obama White House response to Iran’s brazenness today is astonishing, even by delusional Obama standards. The president’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, acknowledged there were “strong indications that those missile tests did violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that pertain to Iran’s ballistic missile activities.” Nevertheless, he maintained with a straight face that “this is altogether separate from the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the rest of the world.”

What? The resolution that implements the said nuclear agreement directs Iran, for approximately the next eight years,