RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today’s New York Times editorial on the Garland, Texas affair protests a bit too much. One might expect liberal journalists to express solidarity with their murdered colleagues at Charlie Hebdo. Instead, the Times offers outright condemnation:

“Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.”

Not to quibble, but a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, like the 2005 Mohammed caricatures in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the 2014 Charlie Hebdo depictions, only reached a large Muslim audience because Muslim organizations chose to make an issue of images that appeared in obscure publications with a small circulation. The cartoonists did not cause the anguish of millions of Muslims: Muslim authorities of various sorts elicited the anguish of their constituents by denouncing them. If Muslim leaders had ignored the cartoons, the millions of devout Muslims cited by the New York Times would have gone about their daily lives suffering anguish from another source: the cruel and inevitable encroachment of modernity on traditional life.

The Hillary Clinton campaign is now “coqueteando,” or flirting, with Hispanics. It must be part of a strategy to revive the Obama 2008 and 2012 voter turnout. It is also another sign that this campaign wants to avoid the media or answer questions about the Clinton Foundation.

According to Alexis Simendinger, Hillary is courting Hispanics with another scripted meeting:

In Clinton’s narrative, immigration reforms are a key plank in her family-centered economic agenda, as well as evidence of her enthusiasm for Obama’s controversial interpretations of his executive authority in the absence of congressional action.

It’s interesting, because she promises to use executive authority to accomplish her objectives.

There are a couple of problems with the latest Clintonian pandering.

First, a judge in Texas has already halted the latest executive order. So is Hillary Clinton planning to challenge another federal court?

“Ruffians, delinquents, hoods, punks, rioters, hooligans, bullies, culprits, scofflaws, hoodlums, lawbreakers, muggers — use whatever synonym you choose are being given a patina of respect by political charlatans.”

As I expected, a number of the college students I instruct took exception to the use of the word thug as applied to the individuals who created mayhem and madness in Baltimore last week. That “their” president used the term was of little import to these students.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word thug is “[o]ne of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who strangled their victims; phansigar.” In “1810 in Hist. & Pract. Thugs (1837) xxi. 329 [one reads] . . . that ‘Thugs’, [who robbed and murdered] infested the . . . the Upper Provinces.” In “1839 T. De Quincey 2nd Paper on Murder in Blackwood’s Mag. Nov. 668/2 [wrote] [a]t length came the toast of the day — Thugdom in all its branches.”

Robert Weissberg is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois. He is the author of twelve books on politics and pedagogy. He has published numerous papers in leading journals in political science.

Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East. No Arab state would launch a 1973-style attack and those that do take up arms know full well that a traditional military victory in beyond reach. Nevertheless, you would never sense this intimidating power if one visited today’s university. Beating up Israel—calls for boycotts, disinvestments (the BDS movement) burning the Israeli flag, vandalism and the like have become a way of life and even repeated failure to accomplish anything hardly cools the hatred.

As one who has spent four decades teaching political science and observing Jewish life more generally, let me explain why this powerful nation is the campus punching bag.
The answer is quite simple: at least in the US, nobody physically fears Jews. The disjunction between Israeli military strength and campus weakness is breath-taking. Worse, the campus docility seems virtually hard-wired into American Jewish life. Jackie Mason tells of visiting Israel and for the first time in his life seeing tough Jews. His instinctive reaction: they had to be Mexicans.

Let’s talk about the Garland, Texas, attack by enforcers of Islamic law. Not the physical attack by two Muslim enforcers of Islamic law, but rather the figurative, hardly less virulent attacks by mainly Christian enforcers of Islamic law on cartoon contest organizer Pamela Geller, free speech activist and head of American Freedom Defense Initiative. Judging by the intensity of these ongoing attacks, Geller, a person of exceptional courage, is also extremely effective.

As with all things jihad, the physical attack on Geller’s day-long Mohammed cartoon event, which temporarily secured a small piece of the public square where Americans who so desired could exercise their speech free from Islamic law, followed patterns as old as Islam and as current as the latest news cycles all over the globe. For this reason, it is hard to imagine anyone was shocked by this characteristically Islamic attempt to kill rebels against Islamic law — surely not in the way that earlier, pre-Islamic generations of Americans might have been shocked, perhaps as late as 1989.

That was the year the great Western powers accepted and accommodated Iran’s “fatwa” — Islamic death sentence — against a British citizen named Salman Rushdie for publishing a novel mullahs in Tehran deemed “blasphemous” to Islam. (“Blasphemy” is a crime punishable by death, according to mainstream Islamic law. Remember Obama’s 2012 admonition: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”) People forget, but not only did Rushdie then enter into a state-provided, hidden security bubble in England, but riots ensued, books were burned, bookstores were bombed, translators and publishers were assaulted and even killed — and that’s in the West, a.k.a (once upon a time) Christendom.

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Originally finished in 1992, but not published until 2012, The Head of Athena, the second Cyrus Skeen detective novel, addresses in this chapter the issue of freedom of speech, in which a notorious atheist, Enoch Paige, attempts to deliver an address in San Francisco in May 1929. The scores of people who attend the event go not out of agreement with or even curiosity about what he has to say or about what they expect him to say, but to silence Paige. His speech, they are certain, will “offend” their religious or moral sensibilities. Paige is awaiting trial for the murder of his ex-wife; his attorney has asked Skeen to investigate the crime and produce evidence that will exonerate Paige of the crime.
Skeen, who has not yet met Paige, attends the lecture to assess the man’s character. Here he encounters Sgt. Robert Hoile of the SFPD, a homicide detective with a special animus for Paige; his fiancé was murdered in much the same horrific way as was Paige’s ex-wife, and believes that Paige is guilty. He is looking for any excuse to lock Paige up again for violating his bail and for disturbing the peace.
In lieu of another column on the importance of freedom of speech (I have written a few dozen), and the May 3rd attack n the The American Freedom Defense Initiative’s Draw Mohammad Contest in Garland, Texas, I chose to excerpt this chapter from the novel. It dramatizes much of what I would have said in a regular column. The Garland police officer nullified two barbarisms when he shot and killed the two Muslim gunmen.

The most visible teaching moment from Baltimore was the unrehearsed scene of a mother chasing after her son whom she had seen on television throwing rocks at police. It was important because it manifested the hurt and determination of a mother for a son whom she loved and who was at risk of destroying his life. She was not angry at the Baltimore police. She did not look upon herself as a victim. She understood right from wrong: that no matter the provocation, it was wrong for her son to cover his face and throw rocks at the cops.

The immediate source of the riots, as we all know, was the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. But the violence that followed had little to do with reasons suggested by the media and those like Al Sharpton: Black youth alienation, police violence toward African-American teens, poverty, White racism and economic inequality. Those are real and/or perceived consequences, not antecedents to the root causes that divide a nation by race, wealth and social status.

Commenting on the rioting in Baltimore, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger was almost to the end of his April 30 text when he said “On Wednesday morning, the year’s first-quarter GDP growth rate came in—0.02%. Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 40%. That’s the real powder key, not the police.”

Commemorating the 132-135AD Jewish War of Independence

1. Jewish fighting capabilities were well known in ancient times, as documented by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the Chief Political/Intelligence Officer of the British Mandate in Palestine, who studied ancient Jewish wars, including the 132-135AD rebellion against the Roman Empire. In 1923, he stated (Middle East Diary 1917-1956): “When a Jewish state will be established, Britain shall benefit from air force, naval and land bases… as well as Jewish fighting capabilities… which will secure its long-term regional interests.”

2. Lag Ba’Omer is celebrated on the 33rd day following Passover (May 7, 2015), commemorating the short-lived Jewish victory over the Roman Empire, as well as the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (who commanded his disciples to rejoice on his memorial days) and the end of a plague, which consumed the lives of 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples.

3. The 132-135AD Jewish revolt – led by Bar Kokhbah – against the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, is known as the Third Jewish-Roman War, which exacted a toll of 600,000 Jews killed (per capita – worse than the Holocaust!) . It followed the 66-73AD Great Revolt, which led to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70AD and the fall of Masada in 73AD, and the 115-117AD Second Jewish-Roman War (the Kitos War), when Jewish warriors destroyed Roman garrisons in Creta et Cyrenaica Cyprus, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Second Rebellion was crushed by General Lusius Quietus (Kitos).

4. The Bar Kokhbah revolt erupted in response to the desecration of Jerusalem by Hadrian, who was determined to annihilate Judaism and erase any connection of Jews to the Land of Israel. Therefore, he destroyed Jerusalem, expelled and enslaved most Jews, prohibited the performance of Jewish rituals, and erected a new city on the site of Jerusalem – Aelia Capitolina (the new city), top heavy with statutes of Roman paganism. Hadrian renamed Judea Syria-Palestinae, borrowing the name from the Philistines (who migrated from the Greek Aegean islands – not from Arabia…), who were the arch enemies of the ancient Jews.

I am a Zionist.

I believe that the Jewish people established itself in the Land of Israel, albeit somewhat late. Had it listened to the alarm clock, there would have been no Holocaust, and my dead grandfather – the one I was named after – would have been able to dance a last waltz with grandma on the shores of the Yarkon River.

I am a Zionist.

Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator, and also to swear on the road. The Bible does not only contain my history, but also my geography. King Saul went to look for mules on what is today Highway 443, Jonah the Prophet boarded his ship not too far from what is today a Jaffa restaurant, and the balcony where David peeped on Bathsheba must have been bought by some oligarch by now.

I am a Zionist.

The first time I saw my son wearing an IDF uniform I burst into tears, I haven’t missed the Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony for 20 years now, and my television was made in Korea, but I taught it to cheer for our national soccer team.

I am a Zionist.

I believe in our right for this land. The people who were persecuted for no reason throughout history have a right to a state of their own plus a free F-16 from the manufacturer. Every display of antisemitism from London to Mumbai hurts me, yet deep inside I’m thinking that Jews who choose to live abroad fail to understand something very basic about this world. The State of Israel was not established so that the antisemites will disappear, but rather, so we can tell them to get lost.