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May 2016

SALUTING THE ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCE: RUTHIE BLUM

Certain tough choices that the Israeli military regularly faces have been overlooked lately, and it’s no wonder. As the government ironed out its coalition agreements to make way for the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as defense minister — and in the wake of statements made by top brass over the past few months — the focus of discussion has been the “morality” of the IDF.

Though “purity of arms” is not a new topic of debate in Israel, it recently became a particularly hot bone of contention, after an IDF soldier shot and killed a subdued Palestinian terrorist in Hebron. Though the soldier is on trial for manslaughter, and his guilt or innocence will be established in court, his action has been used as an example of what’s wrong with Israeli ethics in general and the dangers of such turpitude infecting the army in particular.

Since this is what the world’s BDS advocates and other anti-Semites have been trying tirelessly to convey in word and deed, they couldn’t have been more pleased to be given unwitting legitimacy by the likes of the IDF chief of staff and his deputy. The former handed them the utter fallacy that poverty leads to terrorism. The latter virtually likened the atmosphere of the Jewish state to that of 1930s Germany. And the now-former defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon, defended both of them, while offering his own warnings about the perils of abandoning societal and military morals.

Meanwhile, although Israelis have been forced to contend with a surge in Palestinian terrorism that came to be called the “lone-wolf intifada,” the international onslaught — from the corridors of the United Nations to the British Labour Party to university campuses across the world — do not restrict their criticism to what is currently going on in Israel. No, they continue to raise the issue of IDF behavior during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza.

Never mind that the war itself was not only justified, but late in coming, as the bloodthirsty terrorist organization fired rockets, missiles and mortars into Israeli population centers without let-up. Forget that an extensive network of tunnels for the smuggling of weapons and kidnapping of Israelis was revealed prior to and during the incursion. Ignore the fact that the many millions of dollars and euros provided for the subsequent rehabilitation of the Hamas-controlled enclave have been spent on rebuilding tunnel-and-rocket capabilities. And dismiss the glorification of terrorists — as well as the continued calls for the killing of Jews — by Palestinian leaders. In the eyes of the Israel-bashers, all of the above pales in comparison to the ills inherent in and perpetuated by the Jewish state’s flawed democracy.

Blaming the victim, Part I How Israel is blamed, instead of praised, for not capitulating to Arab demands.Dr. Alex Grobman

“I told him that peace in the Middle East was in his hands, that he had a unique opportunity to either bring it into being or kill it….” (U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) [1]

Blaming Israel is a common practice in the media and in the West. In a conversation with Professor Graham Allison, at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attributed the escalation in violence in Israel in 2016 to the “massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” He feared that “unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody.” [2]

Kerry’s public rebuke provides the Palestinian Arabs with the justification to pursue their random stabbings, stoning and car-rammings, which they consider to be an inalienable right. The Palestinian Authority is even seeking international recognition for the “right” to kill Israelis. Itamar Marcus, founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch, reports that the PA asserts “it has the right to kill Israeli civilians, and they quote UN resolution 3236 of 1974 which ‘recognizes the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means.’ The PA interprets ‘all means’ as including violence and killing of civilians.”

Marcus points out the PA deliberately ignores the rest of the resolution that declares “the use of ‘all means’ should be ‘in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations…’ The UN Charter forbids targeting civilians, even in war. [3]

For Kerry, Netanyahu and Israel are the problem. Only pressuring the Israelis will bring about a resolution to the conflict. That the Arabs have never accepted a two-state solution for religious and political reasons has not deterred American administrations from pursuing this fantasy. So long as they deny the independent nation-state status of Israel as a Jewish state, they are the root cause of a dispute that they make inherently impossible to be international in nature, thereby unresolvable under international auspices. Only when the Palestinian Arabs are willing to recognize the right of the Jews to their ancestral homeland, can there be any hope of resolving this dispute.”[4]

Kristol’s Betrayal Gets Serious David Horowitz

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” Kristol tweeted.

He also said, “Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier, a “Never Trump” diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa … He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year-old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right. Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a left-wing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

The Twisting Noose Joan Swirsky

When I think about the slow and inexorable––but, of course, inevitable––political demise of Hillary Clinton, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” which ends with this haunting refrain:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Hillary’s whimper, it seems clear, will come with an impotently furious last gasp, as the noose that Barack Obama has placed around her neck tightens and tightens and tightens until all we hear is her spasmodic cough, a few hoarse protestations, and a final pitiful bleat––and not the ear-splitting assault of “that voice,” which I described in a previous article.

How could this happen to the woman who former Democrat House Ways and Means Committee Chairman and convicted felon Dan Rostenkowski called “the smartest woman in the world”?

No doubt it started at Wellesley College where Hillary, born to a family of Republicans and an avid supporter herself of the1964 arch-conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, as well as the president of the Wellesley College chapter of College Republicans, was irresistibly attracted to the writings of radical leftist Saul Alinsky, of Rules for Radicals fame, who she wrote her thesis about and also kept in close touch with for years after she graduated.

At her graduation in 1969, Republican Senator Edward Brooke delivered a stirring and enthusiastically received commencement address. Hillary––whose graduation speech followed––exhibited a shocking display of rudeness when she slammed the first black senator to be elected to the U.S. Senate. It would not be the last time she displayed a remarkable aptitude for alienating an audience.

At Yale Law School, she hooked her wagon to the star of fellow student Bill Clinton, and when the roguish good ole boy became governor of Arkansas, Hillary served 12 years as the state’s First Lady, racking up an impressive list of scandals of her very own. The short list includes:

A $100,000 windfall from cattle futures after a $1,000 investment (all the money she had in her account at the time).
The Castle Grande real estate scam.
Her role as attorney for the Rose law firm in what would become the putatively criminal Whitewater affair that would follow her to the White House.
The serial philandering of her husband in which she was either a willing collaborator or, as Donald Trump has said, an “enabler.”

THE SCANDAL QUEEN MOVES UP

Within months of taking up residence in the White House as First Lady of the United States, Hillary put her scandal expertise to work. In May 1993, she was accused of having a central hand in firing several long-time employees of the White House Travel Office in order to give the pricey travel business to her Hollywood pals. A couple of months later, in July 1993, White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was said to have committed suicide, although the case for this murder has been made persuasively by, among others, Newsmax.com founder Christopher Ruddy, in his 1993 book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation.”

The Liberal Blind Spot Nicholas Kristof

CLASSIC liberalism exalted tolerance, reflected in a line often (and probably wrongly) attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

On university campuses, that is sometimes updated to: “I disapprove of what you say, so shut up.”

In a column a few weeks ago, I offered “a confession of liberal intolerance,” criticizing my fellow progressives for promoting all kinds of diversity on campuses — except ideological. I argued that universities risk becoming liberal echo chambers and hostile environments for conservatives, and especially for evangelical Christians.

As I see it, we are hypocritical: We welcome people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

It’s rare for a column to inspire widespread agreement, but that one led to a consensus: Almost every liberal agreed that I was dead wrong.

“You don’t diversify with idiots,” asserted the reader comment on The Times’s website that was most recommended by readers (1,099 of them). Another: Conservatives “are narrow-minded and are sure they have the right answers.”

Finally, this one recommended by readers: “I am grossly disappointed in you for this essay, Mr. Kristof. You have spent so much time in troubled places seemingly calling out misogyny and bigotry. And yet here you are, scolding and shaming progressives for not mindlessly accepting patriarchy, misogyny, complementarianism, and hateful, hateful bigotry against the LGBTQ community into the academy.”

Mixed in here are legitimate issues. I don’t think that a university should hire a nincompoop who disputes evolution, or a racist who preaches inequality. But as I see it, the bigger problem is not that conservatives are infiltrating social science departments to spread hatred, but rather that liberals have turned departments into enclaves of ideological homogeneity.

Sure, there are dumb or dogmatic conservatives, just as there are dumb and dogmatic liberals. So let’s avoid those who are dumb and dogmatic, without using politics or faith as a shorthand for mental acuity.

How PC culture and safe spaces facilitate the rise of conservatism By Trevor Louis

College is a time for intellectual curiosity, or at least it used to be. As liberals have increasingly dominated the academic profession, college has been transformed from a thinking space into a safe space and its culture from politically open into politically correct. While on the surface it may seem that liberal professors have accomplished their goal of indoctrinating college students, the work of the professors has had an unintended consequence: young conservatives now know how to fight back against political suppression, and they are in a position to succeed.

In case after case, colleges have instituted a culture that has removed political discourse from campus altogether. From claiming that the use of the word “American” is “problematic” to banning the use of the word “mankind,” colleges have created a culture that forces students to live in a bubble of liberalism, whether students like it or not. George Orwell was not far off in his assessment of the future if these professors were the thought police he was talking about.

Efforts by the left to remove political discourse from college campuses have been met with strong resistance from the right. Conservative speakers such as Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder have been traveling to college campuses across the country to share their message with young people, to the ire of campus liberals and progressives.

The left’s response has been to repeatedly protest these speakers and prevent them from speaking at all. This has not stopped the speakers from continuing to fight back, and Shapiro has even helped file a lawsuit against the notorious California State University, Los Angeles for preventing him from speaking in February.

The Shame of Rep. Zoe Lofgren By Eileen F. Toplansky

On January 12, 2016 House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) “announced the creation of a Task Force on Executive Overreach to examine the historic breakdown of the separation of powers and checks and balances that has led to the unprecedented increase in presidential power and executive overreach.” Part of the Task Force’s mission is to “study the impact the increase in presidential and executive branch power has had on the ability of Congress to conduct oversight of the executive branch, the lack of transparency that furthers unchecked executive power, and the constitutional requirement of the President to faithfully execute the law.”

Which is why it is so painfully ironic that this Task Force on Executive Overreach shut down a reasoned legal argument about the very behavior it is supposed to rein in.

On May 24, 2016 law professor Gail Heriot gave testimony to the U.S. House Taskforce on Executive Overreach describing the latest Obama edict on transgender guidance. In her 21-page testimony, Heriot spoke “as an individual member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and not on behalf of the Commission as a whole” stating that “Congress has succumbed to the temptation to confer more discretion on executive branch agencies” and this has severely damaged the separation of powers so integral to America’s governance.

Furthermore, Heriot describes the many administrative agencies that grab power that was never conferred to them via the Constitution. Thus, “the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has . . . managed to transform what was supposed to be a limitation on its power into a greater power . . . by issuing ‘guidances,’ which are devilishly difficult to challenge in court.” Consequently, “resistance by employers is usually futile.”