RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sometimes a speech is just a speech. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech about Iran policy on March 3 will not be his first address to Congress. It will make familiar, if important, arguments. One might assume that, like the vast majority of speeches, it would soon be overtaken by events in Israel and the United States and the world.

But the Obama administration’s reaction to the Israeli prime minister’s appearance suggests Netanyahu’s is more than just another speech. An administration that disdains the use of disproportionate force has been, to say the least, disproportionately forceful in its efforts to undermine Netanyahu’s message and discredit the messenger. What is Obama so worried about? What is he, if we may put it indelicately, so scared of?

We can get a clue from the almost equally disproportionate reaction of Obama’s surrogates to Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country. Why, really, should anyone care about Giuliani’s comment? We have no crime of lèse majesté in this country. But Obama defenders did care. Did they suspect Giuliani had struck a nerve?

In February, Harvard University’s Hillel center for Jewish students co-sponsored an event entitled “From Selma to Ferguson,” purportedly aimed at addressing aspects of the civil rights movement in America. The event’s featured invitee was Dorothy Zellner, a harsh critic of the Jewish State and more importantly, a proponent of the anti-Semitic “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement.

Zellner’s inclusion in the event violates Hillel International’s own guidelines pertaining to partnering with groups or individuals associated with BDS. These guidelines state explicitly that Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice:

•Deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders;

•Delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel;

•Support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel;

•Exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.

The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes.

Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old School journalistic standards of factuality and objectivity (and why should she? The mainstream media long ago decided that the aim of journalists should be, not fair and balanced reportage, but social justice activism). The daughter of leftist journalist Marc Cooper, her writing has been featured in all the usual media outlets from The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly to HuffPost and Salon.

Think of a mistake that we made in international affairs. At the time that we were making it, a phalanx of foreign policy experts was standing behind it. It might be a lonely orphan idea today, but last year you could have thrown a rock at a roomful of PhDs without hitting a single person who disagreed with it.

When the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt were in their heyday, I had trouble finding any foreign policy people who would even entertain the idea that we should continue backing Mubarak. Back then the revolution seemed inevitable. But I correctly predicted Islamist takeovers and counterrevolutions that would topple them because I didn’t see international relations through the lens of a grand theory.

Scott Walker’s claim that foreign policy is about leadership, not expertise, is being mocked now by media types who were relentlessly regurgitating all the expert truisms about the Arab Spring. But he’s right. Foreign policy expertise does not translate into foreign affairs competence. Leadership does.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/03/01/wapo-walker-hit-piece/
Scott Walker Accurately Remembers History, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! Ed Driscoll

Another day, another hit piece on Walker, this time from Philip Rucker of the Washington Post. (Link safe; goes to Hot Air; I’m not rewarding attack articles with extra traffic):

Walker responded by ticking through his recent itinerary of face time with foreign policy luminaries: a breakfast with Henry Kissinger, a huddle with George P. Shultz and tutorials at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution.

But then Walker suggested that didn’t much matter.

“I think foreign policy is something that’s not just about having a PhD or talking to PhD’s,” he said. “It’s about leadership.”

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta [1] against a foreign head of state.

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter [2]. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.

It seems hyperbolic to say that Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran — if Ayatollah Khamenei, in his “wisdom,” allows it to happen — will be the worst deal ever made. But if what we have been learning about it is true, it almost certainly will be.

To begin with, the agreement is said to have a sunset clause of 10-15 years. Whatever the number turns out to be, that tells us that Iran is free to do anything it wants in the nuclear weapons field after a set amount of time, assuming that it hadn’t disobeyed the strictures of the agreement before then — a monumental assumption given past history. (Ironically, in this one way Iran is not unlike other states, all of which, to my knowledge, do their best to hide their nuclear programs, including the U.S.)

The idea — if it can be called that — behind this sunset clause is a kind of bet that Iran will turn into a normal country during the time frame, abjuring the fanatical religious doctrines (global war bringing about the twelfth Imam/Mahdi, etc.) inherent in Khomeinist Shiism that would make allowing Iran the bomb equivalent to giving a loaded gun to a two year old, only with global implications. Of course the more modern view of the world is true for many Iranians now, but will it be true in the future for all or even most? Who will be in power? The ayatollahs — almost all, from what we know, true believers in this apocalyptic ideology or willing to pretend they are — seem to have a stranglehold for now. And what about the Revolutionary Guard, evidently a universe unto itself in Iran, with expansionist goals that already have been largely successful across the Middle East through Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and now into Yemen?

The administration has decided to send two officials to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy ‎conference this week.

One is Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, ‎who once called for a U.N. military operation to drive Israel out of the West Bank. ‎The other is Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser. Rice is best ‎known for lying on five Sunday network news shows in the same morning about ‎who was responsible for the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, blaming it on ‎a video no one in the region had seen. This lie was needed to preserve the ‎mythology of the Barack Obama re-election campaign, that al-Qaida was defeated and on ‎the run. Rice, ever the loyal trooper (a good explanation, really the only one, for ‎her continual advancement up the ranks), made her contribution to ‎the current impasse between Israel and the United States this week by blasting the ‎government of Israel, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be a ‎‎”destructive force” in U.S. Israel relations. As Jennifer Rubin has accurately ‎described it, sending Rice to AIPAC is sticking a finger in AIPAC’s eye.‎

Why are tens of thousands of young Muslims leaving the safety of their homes to join Islamic State and wage jihad in Iraq and Syria? We’ve heard any number of excuses, including the view that it’s a result of poverty, a lack of educational opportunity and the absence of participatory government. But it’s hard to beat the explanations now offered for Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John” for his videotaped beheadings of Western captives.
The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, now in his mid-20s, grew up in London and attended the University of Westminster. As early as 2009 British authorities suspected him of attempting to wage jihad abroad. In a 2009 email exchange with Cage, a U.K. advocacy outfit that campaigns against “state policies developed as part of the War on Terror,” Emwazi complained of rough treatment he allegedly received at the hand of interrogators from MI5, Britain’s domestic-security agency.

Boris Nemtsov threw his big body, big voice and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia.

Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in the middle of Moscow on Friday night. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin ’s deputy prime minister. Photos showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation to come.

Vladimir Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting that the Russian president’s enemies are murdering one another to bring shame upon the shameless. He then brazenly sent his condolences to Boris’s mother, who had often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.