RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Daesh of hope at the Obama-Hillary-Kerry State Department.

After last week we must conclude that not everyone in the State Department is an idiot. That conclusion — guarded, reluctant, and certainly temporary — is based on a truly earth-shattering event.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, fifty-one State Department officials, all of whom are or were advisors on the State Department’s policy on Syria, authored a “dissent channel cable” (State’s grandiose term for an email) petitioning for military strikes against Bashar Assad’s government and urging regime change in Damascus as the only way to defeat the ISIS terrorist network.

The petition, in part, says, “Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh [ISIS], even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield.”

There is no modern equivalent to that petition. One can only imagine such events. The Harvard faculty could endorse Donald Trump. Al Gore could admit that global warming is a hoax. Or Hillary Clinton could confess to the federal crime of intentionally mishandling top secret information. Nothing else would come close.

Can it be that, after nearly eight years of gladly helping sell America’s national security down the river that a few of the State Department’s bureaucrats have seen the error of Obama’s, Kerry’s, and Clinton’s ways? That’s one way to read it.

It’s entirely appropriate to view the petition with skepticism. It could easily be that a bunch of these folks, coming near their retirements, want to pave their way into the book world. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect a whiff of opportunism in it as well as a healthy dose of unreality.

Some or all of these people must have participated — with Hillary Clinton and Vichy John Kerry — in crafting the disasters of foreign policy we and our allies have endured since 2009. As “experts” on the Middle East, they must have aided Obama’s and Kerry’s dogged efforts — over almost two years — to bully Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians on terms that would have sacrificed Israel’s national security to false promises.

They must have been there through Obama’s negotiations with Iran, helping craft the nuclear weapons agreement that is everything Obama and Kerry assured us it was not, guaranteeing Iran will have nuclear weapons and the intercontinental missiles to deliver them, as soon as it wants them.

And these same people must have been there, helping Obama and Kerry craft the Syria policy that willfully ignored the facts on the ground and assured that Russia and Iran can control the outcome in the so-called Syrian civil war.

I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read ‘Down with Israel.’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible….why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya’ and leave Israel alone.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)

While reading Alvin Rosenfeld’s formidable, encyclopedic, and terrifying collection of essays entitled Deciphering the New Antisemitism, I kept wondering what Hannah Arendt would make of it. Her classic study of the subject, called simply Antisemitism, was written in the late forties and published in 1951 as the first volume of her three-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. She ended Antisemitism with this remarkable statement:

Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result [of the Dreyfus Affair] was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.

Were Hannah Arendt to publish this statement today, she would immediately disqualify herself for employment in most American or European universities. Can one imagine Vassar College, in which even the Jewish Studies faculty is knee-deep in the muck of Israel-hatred, hiring the Arendt of 1951 to teach about Zionism, or even to give a lecture on campus? Would she be allowed to set foot on the grounds of Brandeis University? And what about Rutgers, which long ago established a Hannah Arendt Professorship of Sociology and Political Science but now hires semi-literate crackpots like Jasbir Puar, who travels about the country lecturing at elite colleges on how Israelis “shrink” Arab children and steal organs from dead Palestinians in order to carry out their bloodthirsty program of “weaponized epigenetics.”

When Arendt wrote Antisemitism—a book whose effect on him Norman Podhoretz (in Ex-Friends) likened to that of a great poem or novel—her vision was as yet unclouded by the haughtiness towards established Jewish institutions and “those coarse Israelis” which her research assistant at Schocken in 1947 (a young literary critic and socialist named Irving Howe) had already noticed when he worked for her. Neither had it been distorted by what a German-born Israeli named Gershom Scholem called the “heartlessness” that permeated her Eichmann book of a decade later, in which she accused Jewish leaders of collaboration with the Nazis.

She would not have been surprised to learn that the “new antisemitism” is largely a left-wing enterprise, or that it flourishes openly on university campuses in student organizations (Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, BDS) and in those academic departments and programs, based on nothing more than the revolution du jour, which threaten to turn many colleges and universities into Goshens of mediocrity. Neither would she have been shocked to learn that “progressive” Jews (examined in Doron Ben-Atar’s essay in this book) play a huge role, as modern “apostates,” in “kosherizing antisemitism.” But she would have been surprised to learn that, in an anachronistic reversal of cause and effect that now permeates progressive thought, the single movement in which Jews took antisemitism seriously is held to be the sole cause of “worldwide hostility” against them, of Middle Eastern chaos, and indeed, in such bogus (if not demented) academic enterprises as “intersectionality,” the cause of every evil on the planet, ranging from race riots in Missouri or underpaid teaching assistants in Manhattan, to man-made global warming and avian flu. This is especially the case in Middle East Studies, where, as Martin Kramer long ago pointed out, if you expect to acquire wisdom from the majority of its professors, you should also try warming yourself by the light of the moon.

Last Friday I took a really long train trip to the South. I had a seat next to a nurse from Baltimore who was bound for Chicago. We chatted about many things including politics. She told me that she had goose bumps at the election and presidency of Obama and goose bumps at the potential election of a woman- namely, Hillary Clinton. She asked what I thought. I told her that my answer might anger her – I do not admire President Obama, and I will be voting for Donald Trump.

Her response was immediate….verbatim: “Honey….Why would I be angry? This is not Russia and you are entitled to your opinion.” It sounded like music after the political rancor among my friends in the Northeast.
And in magnificent Albemarle county in Virginia, we came upon:

TRUMP VINEYARDS

Planted in 1999 and nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Trump Winery is situated on a 1,300-acre estate just a few miles from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the birthplace of American viticulture, and James Monroe’s Ash Lawn-Highland in Charlottesville, VA. Planted with nearly 200 acres of French vinifera varieties, Trump Winery is Virginia’s largest vineyard and the largest vinifera vineyard on the East Coast.

Is there any doubt that ISIS is or can be placing terrorists among the Syrian refugees entering this country, and that the entry into this country of such terrorists “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”? And further, that our government has no means of vetting all such refugees to eliminate those who are terrorists.

Section 212(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (still the law):

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. ”
Mr. Walpin is the author of ” The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution- You Don’t Have to be a Lawyer To Understand How Supreme Court Justices Have Substituted Their Own Elitist Views for Constitutional Guarantees That Protect the Average American’s Security and Values”