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March 2016

How to force Donald Trump to release his taxes: To figure out what he’s hiding, the press must start playing hardball with the Republican frontrunner by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Donald Trump is a lying liar. His fabrications and confabulations are too numerous to tally. At the same time, his falsehoods do not halt his progress. The press dutifully records them. The public dutifully reads about them and absorbs them. And Trump and his loyal followers march forward to the Republican presidential nomination and possibly the White House.

It need not be this way. Take one of the more important matters in the presidential vetting process: personal tax returns.

In January, just before the Iowa caucuses, Trump suggested to NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the release of his returns was imminent: “We’re working on that now. I have big returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very beautiful and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time.”Subsequently, Trump told CNN that he couldn’t release his returns because he is being audited, suggesting that perhaps he’d been singled out by the IRS because he is “a strong Christian.”

On yet another occasion, Trump has promised that “I will absolutely give my return, but I’m being audited now for two or three years, so I can’t do it until the audit is finished, obviously.”

On another occasion, he has explained that he can’t release his returns because “four or five years” of them are under audit.

Rating the ‘final four’ on defense None of the candidates meets the Reagan standard By Jed Babbin

Now that the Republican field has been winnowed down to the final four, it’s time to judge what they’re saying about how to repair our nation’s military and intelligence community. To do that, we have to measure how well they meet the standard established by Ronald Reagan.

Each year the Reagan administration did a study that resulted in the “Defense Guidance” report. In simplest terms, Defense Guidance took the best intelligence information available and determined the threats that our military had to deter or defeat. Then, on the basis of a stated national defense strategy, it derived a defense budget to meet those threats.

On the surface, there appears to be very little difference among the defense plans offered by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. They just want to throw money at the Pentagon to expand our forces. (John Kasich calls himself a “cheap hawk,” about which more later.) Simply put, none of the four meets the Reagan standard.

Under President Obama, our intelligence agencies have been substantially weakened. In the absence of current, accurate intelligence and expert analysis, policymaking is mere guesswork. Despite this, none of the four candidates has said why or how the capabilities of our intelligence community must be restored, modernized and better integrated.

Of the four, Donald Trump has said the least about rebuilding the military. He’s said, “I will make our military so big, powerful and strong that no one will mess with us,” adding that he’d get rid of ISIS quickly. How he would achieve that is left to our imagination.

Mr. Trump evidences no knowledge of and gives no opinion analyzing the threats America faces or what means we need to deter or defeat them. His worldview, at least what we know of it, is not reassuring. Take the apparent mutual admiration he shares with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Thought of the Day “Liberal Arts Under Attack…Consequences” Sydney Williams

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Allen Bloom (1930-1992)

American philosopher, classicist

and author of Closing of the American Mind

In a message to Congress on internal security in August of 1950, Harry Truman said: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

President Truman was speaking at a time when Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy was coming to prominence with his attacks on “perceived” Communists in government. (Not all of his accusations were false, but his tone and manner were venal.) While Mr. Truman did not approve of Senator McCarthy’s harangues, he knew the Wisconsin Senator was free to bloviate. Silencing him would prove more dangerous to democracy than letting him spout off. Mr. Truman’s counsel has applicability in the corridors of our politically correct colleges and universities where demands to censor those who are seen as purveyors of “hateful” messages have gained approval of presidents and deans. “Inclusiveness,” with these folks is okay, as long as it does not include those who offer ideas outside accepted norms.

Student disruptions regarding conservative speakers is not the problem. It is the acquiescence to their demands by faculty and administrators that risks upending a free society. Students have always had a juvenile streak. I know I did. But professors, deans and college presidents are expected to act and respond like adults – to be the keepers of Mr. Truman’s precept for freedom.

Those who argue that “hateful” speech should be censored cite Adolph Hitler, a demagogue and master of invective. He spewed venom. It was not his words of hate that made him a monster. It was his shutting up of his critics. Hitler took the extreme measures of imprisoning or murdering those who disagreed or he thought inferior. But it was the silencing of critics, no matter the means, that was wrong. Keep in mind Voltaire’s admonishment: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it.”

One way the young learn is by questioning conventional thinking. Socratic methods abet the self-examined life, critical to a liberal arts education. Inquiring minds seek answers, and most students are in college to learn. But they do not do so when they are pampered, when “safe” places are substituted for difficult lessons. Consider: Would the provision of a “safe” place help students at Bowdoin because they were offended by other students wearing sombreros to a tequila party? Were they truly upset, or were they pushing the administration because they knew they could? Were Cornell students really offended by the word “plantation,” that it evoked images of slavery? If so, where does political correctness end? There are 600,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, many of which are sure to be disparaging to someone somewhere. Should we rely on college administrators or government bureaucrats to determine which words to use? Who will police us and what punishments will be forthcoming? Such control smacks of the “thought police” in George Orwell’s nightmarish novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

JED BABBIN: RATTING OUT HILLARY

Will Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, and Jake Sullivan join Bryan Pagliano in an immunity plea?
Former State Department employee Bryan Pagliano was the person paid separately by Hillary Clinton to set it up and maintain her private “clintonmail.com” email system. The announcement last week that the Justice Department granted Pagliano immunity from prosecution is the most important development in the case since it began.

Clinton’s defenders have searched the dictionaries and encyclopedias to find a way to spin the FBI’s investigation of her conduct as secretary of state. They’ve said it was an investigation into her private email system, but not of her. They’ve said it’s not a criminal investigation and that it’s nothing more than a “security review.”

What nonsense. The FBI doesn’t investigate email systems, it investigates what people communicated while using them. The FBI only investigates people’s conduct to determine if they have violated federal criminal law. (The FBI doesn’t do security reviews except when they concern the conduct of FBI employees.)

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto wrote last week about the odd lack of dissent among pols and pundits from the assumption that the Justice Department wouldn’t allow Clinton to be indicted purely on political grounds. As I have written before, that assumption is almost certainly false. Pagliano’s immunity agreement is a strong indication that several people, almost certainly including Clinton, will be indicted.

Let’s not let anyone kid us. Ask yourself when was the last time one hundred and fifty FBI special agents spent many months on an investigation only to conclude that there wasn’t anything to prosecute, that they’d just sigh deeply and go home?

Andrew Harrod “LetThere be Water” shows how the once-parched startup nation Israel has developed technology solutions for an increasingly thirsty world.

“Israel is a water superpower.” So wrote Renaissance man and entrepreneur-commentator Seth M. Siegel in his recent bestselling book “Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World.”

This fascinating volume analyzes the amazing pioneering story of how a once-poor, parched Israel became a prosperous, high-tech startup nation, offering solutions unto the countries of an increasingly water-starved world.

Siegel presented Israel as a laboratory for a growing global population endangered by impending socioeconomic and national security water crises examined by official top-secret American studies. “Sixty percent of Israel is desert, and the rest is semiarid,” he noted, adding that Israel’s “annual rainfall, not generous to begin with, has dropped by more than half.” Nonetheless, this former third-world country at its independence in 1948 “now has one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Middle-class life is the norm in Israel.”

Siegel said that “despite its challenging climate and unforgiving landscape, Israel not only doesn’t have a water crisis, it has a water surplus.” Prior to World War II, British economists gloomily predicted that the territory of the British Palestine Mandate on which a Jewish national home was to emerge could sustain no more than 2 million people. By contrast, the “geographic area of Palestine today is home to more than 12 million people” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and Israel exports annually water-intensive produce worth billions of dollars.

Sweden: Sexual Assaults at Swimming Pools by Ingrid Carlqvist

Young male asylum seekers have turned Sweden’s public swimming pools into ordeals of rape and sexual assault.

Swedish politicians seem convinced that some education on “equality” will change the ways of men, who, since childhood, have been taught that it is the responsibility of women not to arouse them — and therefore the woman’s fault if the man feels like raping her.

More and more Swedes are now avoiding public pools altogether.

Staff at Malmö’s Hylliebadet family adventure pool were given strict instructions not to report certain things, and above all, never to mention the ethnicity or religion of those who cause problems at the pool.

“What the Afghans are doing is not wrong in Afghanistan, so your rules are completely alien to them. … If you want to stop Afghans from molesting Swedish girls, you need to be tough on them. Making them take classes on equality and how to treat women is pointless. The first time they behave badly, they should be given a warning, and the second time you should deport them from Sweden.” — Mr. Azizi, manager of a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan

Men and women, in a Swedish tradition, have swum together in public pools for over 100 years. Many people are now wondering if we will be forced to give up this practice — because young male asylum seekers have turned public swimming pools into ordeals of rape and sexual assault.

Mixed bathing in Sweden started in the small southern fishing village of Mölle. Around 1890, the “Sin of Mölle” gained notoriety. Men and women were swimming together! Out in the open and shamelessly flaunting their striped bathing attire. It was a sensation that echoed all over Europe, and people came from everywhere to partake in the exciting new activity. Danes poured in, and even the German Emperor Wilhelm II made his way to Mölle in July 1907.

It should come as surprise to no one that men from the Middle East and North Africa have quite a different view of women than Swedish men do. The only mystery is why Swedish politicians have got it in their heads that everyone who sets foot on Swedish soil will immediately embrace our values, our view of women and our traditions.

Now that it is finally beginning to dawn on them that many Afghan, Somali, Iraqi and Syrian men (the largest immigrant groups coming to Sweden now) think that women who run around scantily clad are fair game, the politicians are dumbfounded. Of course, they cannot admit that this — to Swedes — completely alien view of women has anything to do with Islam, because then they would become victims of their own claim that everyone who criticizes Islam is an “Islamophobe.”

David Singer: Rubio Challenges Clinton’s Support For Israel

Marco Rubio has directly challenged Hillary Clinton – and every other Presidential candidate – to honour the commitments given by President Bush to Israel on 14 April 2004.

Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition Presidential Forum Rubio said:

“I will revive the common-sense understandings reached in the 2004 Bush-Sharon letter and build on them to help ensure Israel has defensible borders”

President Bush’s letter – overwhelmingly endorsed by the Congress – supported Israel’s proposed unilateral disengagement from Gaza – stating:

“As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who succeeded Sharon, had neither forgotten nor overlooked the critical significance of Bush’s commitments when agreeing to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority before an international audience of world leaders at Annapolis on 27 November 2007:

“The negotiations will be based on previous agreements between us, U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the road map and the April 14, 2004 letter of President Bush to the Prime Minister of Israel.”

It didn’t take too long thereafter for these Presidential commitments to be downplayed by Bush himself and his advisors.

Judge Hopes Muslim Who Shouted “Kill the Jews” Isn’t Prejudiced Daniel Greenfield ????!!!!

I certainly hope so. Calls for genocide are bad enough. But prejudiced calls for genocide are even worse.

After getting stuck in London traffic, Rashal Miah got out of his Mercedes and started shouting that he would “kill all the Jews” at an Orthodox Jewish school-bus driver in front of a bus full of young children.

During Miah’s sentencing, Judge Murray Shanks in the UK called the driver’s behavior “horrible.”

“I accept this was mainly driven by you being wrongly angry and suffering from road rage, as well as being arrogant about what you were entitled to do on the road,” Shanks told Miah. “I hope it doesn’t indicate some underlying prejudice.”

Surely shouting “Kill all the Jews” because you’re angry at a Jewish bus driver in no way indicates some underlying prejudice.

“If this was the other way around and Muslims were being insulted, I have a good feeling you would feel strongly. You need to understand that before you open your mouth,” the judge said.

Well of course he would feel strongly. But that’s different. Because Muslims are the Master Race.

These condescending liberal lectures are great, but Muslims don’t see themselves as a minority. Our friend Rashal has been informed by the Koran that Jews are accursed by Allah. He recites this every day in his prayers. His preachers tell him the Hadiths that the apocalypse won’t come until Muslims kill all the Jews.

Lawyers For Illegals Getting Taxpayer Dollars? Two opposing bills just introduced. Dale Wilcox

Republicans and Democrats introduced clashing bills last week related to the provision of taxpayer-funded legal services for Unaccompanied Alien Minors. Fortunately for Republicans we already have similar laws in place that deny such funding. Fortunately for Democrats, it’s riddled with loopholes.

Coinciding with last Tuesday’s Senate Homeland Security hearing on the continuing Unaccompanied Minors-surge, Chairman Ron Johnson and committee member Jeff Sessions introduced the Protection of Children Act (S. 2561), a bill that, among other things, promises to “ensure[] that taxpayer dollars do not pay for attorneys for these individuals, consistent with decades of precedent.” Meanwhile, House Democrats, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, introduced a bill on Friday that seeks to “protect children and other vulnerable groups in immigration proceedings by ensuring access to counsel, legal orientation programs, and case management services.” Lofgren’s bill tracks closely with a similar bill introduced by Sen. Harry Reid a fortnight ago.

Perhaps unknown to either side is that open-borders legal advocates representing Unaccompanied Alien Minors (UAMs) and illegal immigrants in general have been receiving taxpayer dollars for years although the practice is indeed a prohibited one. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a government entity created in 1974 that distributes federal grants to non-profit law firms, has been blocked since the eighties from providing funds for the use of representing illegal aliens. Congressional appropriations law as it relates to LSC is clear: “LSC funds cannot be used to engage in litigation and related activities with respect to a variety of matters including… representation of illegal aliens.” Due to gaping loopholes, however, taxpayer dollars continue to flow to these groups.

Very Original, Very Unusual, Very Grotesque—The Problem with “Son of Saul” by Dan Kagan-Kans

The Oscar-winning new film aims to take us right into the heart of the Holocaust. But what does that experience amount to? And what do this movie and its reception portend?

Since the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II just over seventy years ago, a seemingly ceaseless parade of filmmakers has gone after the Holocaust in search of meaning. Their searches have been well rewarded. As the critic J. Hoberman noted last year, of the 23 Holocaust films ever nominated in any category for the Academy Awards, fully twenty have won at least one. To their number we can now add Son of Saul, the new Hungarian film that on February 28 garnered the award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015. It did so, moreover, after already being showered with greater acclaim than any Holocaust movie since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List more than twenty years ago.

Last May, Son of Saul won second prize at the Cannes Film Festival; in January of this year, it was named Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards. And that’s hardly all. Not only have 96 percent of reviewers liked Son of Saul, according to a website that tracks such things, but many have liked it extravagantly, and some have compared it favorably with such commonly accepted masterpieces of the genre as Alain Resnais’s 32-minute essay-film Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour documentary Shoah (1985). Lanzmann himself has praised it as “very original, very unusual.” (The very fact that one can now speak of a work of Holocaust art in such blandly comparative terms may suggest that the genre has reached a certain ripeness, if not senescence.)

But Lanzmann is right: Son of Saul manages to find, if not a new story, then a new way of telling it. The question worth considering, thus, concerns not its originality but the nature, and the worth, of its achievement—what its example and its reception portend for the future of art about the Holocaust.

I. The World of the Sonderkommandos

Son of Saul follows Saul Auslander, a Hungarian Jew imprisoned in an unnamed death camp resembling Auschwitz. Upon arrival at the camp four months before the film begins, Saul, in his thirties, not large but strong enough, had been spared immediate murder and was put to work as a Sonderkommando, a slave in the camp’s death-machinery. His job since then has been to guide newly arriving transports of Jews from the trains to the camp; to convince them once inside to remove their clothes in an orderly way; to usher them to a shower with promises of soup afterward; to wait impassively outside the chamber door while the screams rise and then fall; to drag out their bodies and deliver them to others who will take them to be burned; and to sort for valuables through the clothes they’ve left behind. Saul does this work with other Jews, each of whom lives in a world of his own; sometimes they exchange whispers, but since they don’t all speak the same language they don’t always understand what others are saying. Besides, what is there to say, and who can be trusted in a place where survival depends on looking out for oneself?

One day, a boy, weak from the gas but still alive, is found in the chamber. He’s carried to a nearby bench and a Nazi doctor is alerted. Saul watches at a distance as the doctor suffocates the boy by hand. Bring the body up to my office for study, he orders—and the movie’s plot kicks into motion.

Saul watches at a distance as the doctor suffocates the boy by hand. Bring the body up to my office for study, he orders—and the movie’s plot kicks into motion.
Saul, claiming that the boy is his son—it’s left open whether or not this is true—decides he must be given a proper Jewish burial. For that he needs to rescue the body and find a rabbi, who will know the rituals and prayers of which he’s ignorant. Saul’s efforts over the course of the film’s two days lead him ever deeper into the camp’s “production” process, from gas chamber to crematorium to ash disposal and on. At each stage he must complete two tasks, one for the Germans—removing bodies, shoveling ash into the river—and one for himself—finding a rabbi amid the shovelers.