RUTHFULLY YOURS

Unless definitions are narrow, rigid and clear, any attempt to limit freedom of expression because some opinions are deemed intolerable inevitably leads to the suppression of free and frank discussion. Unfortunately, our world is not made for narrow, rigid and clear definitions
As is by now clear, the Society for the Suppression of Vice was not entirely successful in its endeavours, but attempts to reform the behaviour of mankind nevertheless continue, yet another triumph of Man’s hope over his experience. And since virtue is now thought to consist mainly of the expression of the right opinions and eschewal of the wrong ones, it is hardly surprising that strenuous efforts are now made, by means of speech codes and even by laws, to suppress the latter and make them inexpressible. The hope is that what cannot be said will soon become unthinkable also, and everyone will be nice.

There are occasions when such attempts seem to be motivated by common human decency and are almost justified. In Romania, for example, a law has been proposed to make it illegal to indulge publicly in apologetics for anyone who has been convicted, or was guilty, of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. The law will also make it illegal publicly to promote by any means whatever ideas, concepts or doctrines that are deemed to be fascist, racist or xenophobic.

Romania as a country has many charms, but during the twentieth century political virtue was certainly not one of them. During the 1920s and 1930s, its intelligentsia was almost entirely enthralled and enthused by nationalism of the most virulent and xenophobic kind, viciously anti-Semitic, and did not confine its support entirely to words. The careers of two of the Romania’s greatest literary ornaments of the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, might be interpreted by the morally rigorous as attempts to cover up (rather than atone for) their fervent support for figures such as Codreanu and Hitler. The Romanian occupation of Odessa and the surrounding territory during the war was brutal even by the standards of the time. Half of the Jews under Romanian jurisdiction during the war were killed (fewer as a proportion than in, say, Holland, but many more in number). After a brief intervening period following the war, the king was deposed and a communist regime installed by the usual means of eliminating enemies, real and supposed, intimidation and suppression of any but its own shifting doctrines.

PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly last week contained a concoction of half-truths and outright lies that everyone listening to him should question.
Here are some prize porkies:

1. “The question of Palestine was one of the first just issues brought before the United Nations from the time of its inception, and yet it remains unresolved until this moment”

Abbas failed to mention that it has remained unresolved since then because:

(i) The Arabs did not accept the 1947 UN Partition Plan to partition western Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State – whilst the Jews did.

(ii) The Arabs – instead – unsuccessfully sent six Arab armies to invade Palestine in May 1948 to rout the newly declared Jewish State – Israel – and drive its Jewish population into the sea

(iii) Jordan and Egypt successfully drove out and permanently expelled the Jewish population living in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (later termed “the West Bank”) – keeping those areas Jew-free from 1948 until 1967

The terrorists did not need permission from Hamas leaders to murder the first Jews they ran into. The inflammatory rhetoric of Abbas and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials and media outlets was sufficient to drive any Palestinian to go out and murder Jews.

Instead of condemning the murder of the Jews, the PA denounced Israel for killing the two Palestinians who carried out the Jerusalem attacks.

The Palestinian Authority and its leaders are in no position today to condemn the murder of any Jews, simply because the PA itself has been encouraging such terrorist attacks through its ceaseless campaign of incitement against Israel.

The PA is playing a double game: it tells the world that it wants peace and coexistence with Israel; meanwhile it incites Palestinians against Israel, driving some to set out with guns and knives to murder Jews.

As the world faces the rising threat of Islamic supremacy, the number of leaders speaking the whole hideous truth about this evil can be counted on one hand. If GOP presidential candidates are our future, will any of them rise to the occasion and be a bold voice for truth when speaking about this force that seeks to destroy us? I decided to find out. Below is a snapshot of where the top six candidates stand on the threat of jihad, with a focus on four sub-topics noted below:

Islamic law (sharia)
Immigration jihad (hijra), addressed in the context of the current “Syrian refugee crisis”
Response to Ben Carson’s statements on Muslims, sharia law, the Constitution, and the presidency
Miscellany (additional noteworthy points that vary from one candidate to the next)

The summer of 2015 will be remembered as the season when water—or the lack thereof—finally broke through into Americans’ political consciousness. Devastating droughts in the American West and predictions of worse to come have created a sense of crisis with no obvious solutions. And the problem isn’t just domestic: From Brazil to South Africa, water shortages are a growing cause of economic stress and social upheaval.

One of the few places where we might look for solutions is a country with seemingly insurmountable water problems: Israel. Since its founding in 1948, Israel, which is 60% desert, has become a water superpower. This is the unlikely story recounted by Seth M. Siegel in his insightful “Let There Be Water.” He argues that Israel’s example of making the desert bloom through a mixture of grit, smart regulation, technology and free-market incentives can offer a model for the rest of the world.

While Republicans are busy deciding who will represent the party in next year’s presidential election, Gary Franks is contemplating how the eventual nominee could do a better job of attracting black support.

If his name sounds familiar, Mr. Franks is a former congressman from Connecticut and a bona fide racial pioneer. Upon winning his House seat in 1990, the Waterbury native became the first black Republican in Congress in nearly six decades and the only one ever elected from Connecticut. Over the next six years, Mr. Franks fought for welfare reform, backed lower tax rates, opposed the racial gerrymandering of voting districts and tested the tolerance of Congressional Black Caucus progressives.

The caucus failed the test, of course, voting to limit their GOP colleague’s access to meetings. Former Missouri Rep. Bill Clay Sr., a veteran of the caucus and father of the current congressman, took matters even further and in 1996 issued a six-page letter that referred to “Franks’ foot-shuffling, head-scratching ‘Amos and Andy’ brand of ‘Uncle Tom-ism.’ ” Mr. Franks, ever the jolly warrior, did not respond in kind. “Obviously Bill Clay is not a supporter of mine,” he deadpanned, “but I wish him Godspeed.”

“The goal of American Transparency’s project, Open the Books, is to put every dime of government spending—on all levels—online, in real time. It’s an ambitious and audacious mission to map government’s role in our lives.”

Dr. Coburn, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, is the honorary chairman of American Transparency.

Citizen activists can now monitor online how elected federal and state officials are spending their money.

With the rise of supposed outsider candidates, pundits are calling the coming presidential election a referendum on the establishment. They’re missing a more profound story, which is the rise of new elites. These are the citizen activists using technology to reshape the status quo in ways neither the traditional establishment nor today’s antiestablishment pretenders understand.

The rise of citizen activism became apparent to me during the GOP’s struggle over earmarks. As a member of the House of Representatives, where I served from 1995 to 2001, I had fought against earmarks unsuccessfully. By the time I was elected to the Senate in 2004, I was confident that a David vs. Goliath strategy would succeed.

While the establishment thought we were outgunned, the balance of power had shifted. We had the support of the “blogosphere”—an army of citizen journalists. Anyone with a laptop could be an investigative reporter and publish his or her findings. In the end we were nimbler and more effective than the lethargic, pork-addicted congressional appropriators.

No fight better illustrated the power of these elites more than the debate about the “Bridge to Nowhere” earmark. On Oct. 21, 2005, I offered an amendment to eliminate the bridge planned for Ketchikan, Alaska. We lost the vote 15-82 in the Senate but won the argument among the electorate. Thanks to the public outcry expressed through the blogosphere the vote put earmarks on the road to extinction. Congress banned them in 2010.

The power of these new elites in action made me want to pave the way for more. Not long after the bridge vote I teamed up with a freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who was eager to burnish his bipartisan credentials around “good government” initiatives.

The central bank needs to try something different—and has serious options to get median income rising.

Last week’s dismal jobs report for September will throw an indecisive Federal Reserve deeper into paralysis. For months the central bank hinted that it would end its near-zero interest rate policy, before backing down amid fears of soft growth and opposition from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. That leaves Fed officials with no plan, as worrying economic news mounts.

After seven years of emergency policies, it is vital that the Fed try something new. If not a rate increase, it should consider other growth-oriented options: tapering its huge bond reinvestment program to free up collateral for credit markets; shifting some of its borrowing away from banks to encourage bank lending; or shortening the maturity of its bond portfolio to relieve some of the illiquidity in bond markets.

Carly Fiorina took the stage at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to introduce a new camera from Hewlett-Packard Co., joined by singer Gwen Stefani, who shot a selfie with the beaming chief executive.

“I can’t believe I’m on stage with this woman,” said Ms. Stefani, who was introduced by Ms. Fiorina as H-P ’s “hippest product engineer” for the singer’s help designing the camera’s case and accessories.
The moment celebrated a marriage of technology and popular culture that Ms. Fiorina had cultivated through 5½ years at the helm of H-P. “What is our ambition for 2005? To be at the intersection of simplicity, innovation, personalization at affordable mass-market prices,” she told the crowd.

Ms. Fiorina wasn’t around long enough to see the camera ship to stores. She was fired a month later by the H-P board of directors.

As Ms. Fiorina campaigns for the Republican Party nomination, she presents her tenure at H-P from July 1999 to February 2005 as evidence of a business-based competence she would bring to the White House.

Interviews with former employees and board members, as well as an examination of H-P’s financial performance during that period—which included a $25 billion deal to acquire Compaq Computer Corp.—suggest Ms. Fiorina’s vision and marketing talent overshadowed her ability to deliver results.

“Carly is a brilliant sales person, and she did an exquisitely good job of selling the Compaq merger to a cynical market,” said George Keyworth, a former H-P board member. “But what she could not do was execute.”

H-P’s stock price fell 55% on Ms. Fiorina’s watch, more than peers in the technology industry, even those hammered by the 2001 downturn. Dell Inc.’s stock dropped 5% over the same period; Cisco Systems Inc. ’s fell 45%; IBM dropped 31%. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell by 27%.

Sometimes, distance is good for perspective. For Angela Merkel, that perspective came in New York.

The week before last, the German chancellor flew to the Big Apple to address the United Nations summit on sustainability, women’s rights and climate change. But what she took home with her was the surprising realization that Horst Seehofer actually has a lot in common with Ahmet Davutoglu and Nawaz Sharif.

Seehofer is the governor of Bavaria and the head of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU); Davutoglu is the prime minister of Turkey; Sharif the prime minister of Pakistan. All three have recently conveyed the same message: Merkel must get tougher in the refugee crisis.

Davutoglu asked Merkel in New York for her support for a buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border, where anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 refugees from the civil-war torn country are to be accommodated. Sharif, for his part, engaged the chancellor about the escalating situation in his country and in neighboring Afghanistan. He demanded that the chancellor send Pakistani refugees back home.