RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama has again extended a jaw-dropped reaction to news of yet another scandal in what has become a parade of scandals scaring his administration. This time the President is trying to convince the American public that he learned of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account during her time as Secretary of State through…wait for it…the news media. It’s curious how every time someone in his administration fails at spinning his or her way out of a career-ending scandal he just happens to find out about it through the news media, as if he were as innocuous as the average American citizen.

When asked by CBS News’ Bill Plante about when he learned about the unethical – and most likely illegal – use of a private email account, complete with home-based servers, for official government correspondence, Mr. Obama replied, “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” He continued, “the policy of my administration is to encourage transparency…and that’s why my emails, the BlackBerry that I carry around, all those records are available and archived.”

What is it that compels the hundreds of millions of Muslims who slavishly accept Koranic injunctions to so eagerly be willing to destroy and desecrate all ancient and priceless artifacts of non-Muslims.

We hear during every ghastly atrocity committed by Muslims the Islamic war cry – Allahu Akbar – which doesn’t mean “God is Great” as most folks think it does.

No, it is the Muslim triumphalist cry that, “Allah is Greater.” This is the Islamo-Nazis, “Allah uber alles” supremacist pronouncement to the world just as it was the German Nazis, “Deutschland uber alles.”

Happening now throughout those parts of the Middle East under ISIS occupation or influence, Muslim hordes in Syria are destroying archaeological treasures, including Byzantine mosaics and Greek and Roman statues. In Iraq, ISIS has destroyed several Jewish Biblical tombs such as those of Ezra and Jonah.

Hillary Clinton’s trouble with her email account is only a symptom of what ails the lady. Like Bubba, she suffers from terminal arrogance.

Hillary and Bubba — or should that be Bubba and Hillary? — think rules don’t apply to them. When he gets caught in a jam, which is often, he winks, smiles, crooks his crooked pointing finger, and asks one and all: “Whatcha gonna do with a good ol’ boy like me?”

That always worked. Hillary knows better than to try that anywhere but at home. When the heat is turned up under her, as when the telephone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning with news of catastrophe at Benghazi, she disappears.

There is land of wonder where magic princes and princesses rescue humble folk from the malignant spells of wicked sorcerers. Call it the Kaganate of Nuland: I refer of course to Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Victoria Nuland and her spouse Robert Kagan, respectively the source of the silliest statement on record about US foreign policy (“F— the Europeans”) and the worst book on foreign policy in a generally dismal decade.

I reviewed Kagan’s awful tome when it appeared three years ago, with its fairy-tale thesis about the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy. “It is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history,” Kagan wrote. Nuland got her 15 minutes of fame when someone, presumably Russian intelligence, leaked her expletive-adorned 2013 conversation with America’s ambassador Ukraine to YouTube.

The American Jewish community, united to Israelis by bonds of the heart, has, through this tie, been facing terrorist onslaughts for years. Israel suffered the per capita equivalent of 250,000 Americans dead and wounded during the “peace process” when arch-terrorist Yassir Arafat was installed in power. Yet the rise of Palestinian and Arab-style Nazism has been ignored and tolerated by the majority of Jews, who at times appear deficient in basic human capacities for self-defense and reality testing. I will propose the thesis that American Jews display the faulty reactions typical of trauma victims.

American Jews do not see themselves as victims, but as winners, and they are right. Most victimized groups are dysfunctional. Societies who have suffered two thousand years of oppression and assault could be expected to disintegrate into social pathology — murder, violence, alcoholism, family breakdown, neglect and abuse of their children — but the Jewish community, in every country, is to the contrary marked by the lowest levels in all these social symptoms.

Republican candidates were invited to speak at the Agriculture Summit in Iowa, sponsored by Bruce Rastetter. Rastetter is the Darth Sidious of ethanol, who wants all the candidates to kiss his ring and promise to keep subsidizing ethanol, also called the “Renewable Fuels Standard.” For the most part, the candidates complied.

Here now are my ratings of the candidates who came to Iowa.

Jeb Bush: F

“At some point, we’ll see a reduction of the (federal Renewable Fuels Standard) need because ethanol will be such a valuable (product) for our country,” Bush said. Why do I feel that “some point” will be in his son’s George P’s third term?But Jeb Bush primarily came to Iowa to talk about an act of love:

“Imigrants [sic] that are here need to have a path to legalized status,” Bush said at the Iowa Agriculture Summit. “What we need to do is make sure people pay fines,” Bush said. “That they learn English. That they work. That they don’t receive government assistance.

You know, like the current “immigrants” who learn English, and work, and don’t go on welfare.

That they earn legalized status over the long haul. That they come out from of the shadows[.]

Is there any way we can get Bush to go back into the Shadows?

Jewish time is not measured in years. It is measured in space; the transitions from one age to another continually merge with each other. Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon casting a merciful last rite on his Roman executioner who chose to die with his victim juxtaposed against teacher Janusz Korczak who went with his orphan charges to the extermination camp. All escaped the misery of this world. Is it Jewish fate to leave the world rather than to live in it? How many times does the energy of Satan need to be destroyed? Is this the unrelenting rhythm of Jewish life? Yet there is “Next Year in Jerusalem” under the safety of the Iron Dome!

Fire, the source of life, is fire, the beacon of death, for nameless children whose only crime is that their parents wish to believe in an ineffable unseen force. The pagans worship images as if from a void but cannot accept the essence of a spiritual sustenance of a different order — a force of thirteen attributes.

Edward Alexander, author of the forthcoming Jews Against Themselves, reports on a program at the University of Washington that, even by the relatively low standards of contemporary humanities scholarship, is a travesty of scholarship.

The Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington supports “cross disciplinary understanding, collaboration, and research.” In the service of that goal, it funds “cross disciplinary research clusters,” which “seed new collaborations between faculty and graduate students who share research interests.” Among the clusters presently funded is Palestine and the Public Sphere.

One notices right away that the project was chosen because of its cross disciplinary character, as it takes in a professor from the Department of English, another professor from the Department of English, and a third professor from the Department of English. So far, so good.

But there are further indications that the project will elevate our level of discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, only two of the three professors involved, Anis Bawarshi and Eva Cherniavsky, have signed on to the 2009 “Dear President Elect Obama” letter, which describes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians as “one of the most massive, ethnocidal atrocities of modern times” and opines that a one state solution—that is the erasure of Israel as a Jewish state—is “almost certainly” the only hope. They do not straightforwardly say, as University of Pennsylvania professor and one-stater Ian Lustick has, that such a solution is almost certainly bound to entail “ruthless oppression, mass mobilization, riots, brutality, terror [and] Jewish and Arab emigration” before Israel is brought to its knees. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Good manners should deter us from insulting other people over their faiths, but the right to offend and be offended remains an important right. Even if we are reluctant to admit the fact, it frees us from the prison of unconsidered opinion and the prejudices of our own religious-cum-ideological communities

Exactly eight weeks separate the Sydney siege in which the gunman and two of his innocent victims died and the Copenhagen shootings, occurring as we go to press, in which the victims so far number two dead and five injured (including several policemen). A lone gunman was apparently the murderer. He fled. Police have since killed him in a gun-battle.

In between these two events there have been at least fourteen other major terrorist attacks by Islamists accounting for approximately 1000 dead and many more wounded in countries including France, Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Pakistan. All these murders are horrifying, but some more so than others. The murder of 132 children of army personnel in a Peshawar school by the local Taliban was unusually vicious, but the mass killing of 150 women by ISIS for refusing to marry their captors more or less matched it in cruelty.

What makes the Copenhagen murders, like the murders at Charlie Hebdo, stand out from the general ruck of Islamist massacres is neither the number of their victims (relatively few) nor the cruelty of their methods (shootings in the main) but their explicitly ideological and anti-liberal character. They belong to a mini-series of threats and murders, starting with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the stabbing of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, that are justified by the murderers and their religious superiors as necessary to limit free speech and, in particular, to outlaw what Islam regards as blasphemy. These murders even aim to elevate blasphemy—long a dead-letter in Western societies (which smugly provide blasphemous art with state subsidies)—into a capital crime.

There has been some discussion about the D-word recently. The Science of Doom blog considered the historical implications of the word, and argues that its use in the climate debate trivialises the deaths of millions, and urged people to stop using it. Keith Kloor agreed, saying that the use of the word was needlessly ‘emotionally and politically charged’ and inflammatory. Lastly, Richard Betts has a guest post at And Then There’s Physics’ blog, urging the readers there to ‘Label the behaviour, not the person‘, which fell on deaf ears. More about those articles shortly.

I have never been particularly upset by the epithet, ‘denier’, for the simple reason that it says much about the person who utters it than it says about the putative ‘denier’. I don’t know who made the observation that ‘once you give something a name, you don’t have to argue with it’ (I think it was Lenin), but it seems to me to explain the use of the word. Once you call someone a denier, you don’t have to explain what it is they have denied. Anti-deniers deny debate.

For instance, climate scientists who have slightly lower estimates of climate sensitivity than the IPCC are called ‘deniers’. I’m thinking especially of scientists like Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen here. Rather than looking at the arguments about how and why Lindzen and Michaels’ analyses come out at the lower end of the spectrum (and it is a spectrum) of estimates of warming, many have chosen to see the expression of denial as a phenomenon in need of explanation. The likes of Naomi Orkeskes have sought to chart a history of a conspiracy of deniers and their strategies. Others, like psychologists such as Jon Krosnick and Stephan Lewandowsky, have sought to establish the pathology of denial. Building on this, Researchers in Cardiff University have sold their insight into ‘denial’ to the government, to suggest strategies for confronting sceptics’ influence in the public sphere.