RUTHFULLY YOURS

Very few people can look back on their lives and say that they managed to build an institution of lasting and widespread influence. Fewer still can say, as Robert L. Bernstein can, that they built two.

With his boundless energy and optimism, Mr. Bernstein has succeeded over the course of his lifetime in turning Random House into the world’s biggest publisher—bringing the works of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison and Dr. Seuss to the world—and Human Rights Watch (originally Helsinki Watch) into the leading international NGO in its field. His memoir, “Speaking Freely,” is a flowing account of the people with and against whom he worked on these two great projects. Mr. Bernstein, now 93 years old, tells his stories with great detail and good humor, finding ways to laugh at life while communicating his deep love for the friends he made along the way.

Even more remarkable than the life Mr. Bernstein recounts, however, is how he chooses to portray himself—not, as many autobiographers do, by emphasizing his role in various events but if anything by understating his own significance. At least this is very much the case with respect to the events I know well, those surrounding the struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, in which he played a much more central role than he in his modesty is willing to let on.

Mr. Bernstein vividly recounts his visits to the Soviet Union in the early 1970s with delegations from the Association of American Publishers. The official purpose of these trips was to meet with leaders of the Soviet publishing industry, but Mr. Bernstein made a point of meeting Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents while he was there. He explains that afterward he was haunted by the thought of what it would be like to be a writer behind the Iron Curtain and of what happened to anyone who crossed the government’s “tight and arbitrary” party line. He became convinced of the importance of supporting those whose voices were suppressed under Soviet tyranny, and he proceeded to do so in meaningful ways, from making repeated visits to dissidents, to mobilizing prominent authors such as Robert Penn Warren and Arthur Miller to speak on their behalf, to becoming the publisher of Sakharov’s books and essays.

Rhodes even acknowledges that there is nothing “moderate” about Rouhani, Zarif or Khamenei.

The dates and facts conflicted with the narrative, so they were finessed, rewritten and sold to the public with different plot-lines and different themes. Outside Washington, D.C. this behavior is sometimes called lying.

At best Ben Rhodes is the author of a Pyrrhic victory, ensuring that the next president will face the same choice Obama faced but against an Iran armed with nuclear bombs.

This is what happens to foreign policy when it is entrusted to the unqualified and undereducated.

That the Obama administration’s Iran deal is a work of fiction has been known all along, but now Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, is taking credit as its author. In a long interview with New York Times reporter David Samuels on Sunday, the world learned that Rhodes is “the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign policy narratives” who “strategized and ran the successful Iran-deal messaging campaign.” Samuels lauds Rhodes as “a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda packaged as politics.”

Welcome to the post-modern techno-presidency where everything is a text, easily manipulated by skilled writers and disseminated in 140 or fewer characters. Don’t like the facts? Change the narrative. What really counts is “the optics.”

In the midst of his fawning profile, Samuels exposes a number of lies behind the Iran narrative, or rather quotes Rhodes himself doing so. For instance, the first outreach to Iran came 2012, not in 2013. I’d bet it came even earlier. Rhodes even acknowledges that there is nothing “moderate” about Iranian leaders Rouhani, Zarif or Khamenei. But these dates and facts conflicted with the narrative, so they were finessed, rewritten and sold to the public with different plot-lines and different themes. Outside Washington, D.C. this behavior is sometimes called lying.

The Rhodes narrative, at its core, is a simple tale in which a hero, armed with special skills and weapons, goes on a quest that requires a fight against the forces of evil. It incorporates elements of the ancient epic, the medieval romance and the eighteenth-century novel, with elements of drama splashed in here and there.

The hero, of course, is Rhodes’s real-life hero, Barack Obama (with whom he “mind melds,” as he apparently tells anyone who will listen). The hero’s special weapon is diplomacy — in the case of Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a.k.a., “Iran Deal.” But Rhodes himself is also the hero of his tale. As he tells Samuels in one particularly dewy-eyed moment: “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

This is appalling….an endorsement of Hillary Clinton?…..How thoughtless at this stage of the game….rsk

The best hope for what’s left of a serious conservative movement in America is the election in November of a Democratic president, held in check by a Republican Congress. Conservatives can survive liberal administrations, especially those whose predictable failures lead to healthy restorations—think Carter, then Reagan. What isn’t survivable is a Republican president who is part Know Nothing, part Smoot-Hawley and part John Birch. The stain of a Trump administration would cripple the conservative cause for a generation.

This is the reality that wavering Republicans need to understand before casting their lot with a presumptive nominee they abhor only slightly less than his likely opponent. If the next presidency is going to be a disaster, why should the GOP want to own it?

In the 1990s, when another Clinton was president, conservatives became fond of the phrase “character counts.” This was a way of scoring points against Bill Clinton for his sexual predations and rhetorical misdirections, as well as a statement that Americans expected honor and dignity in the Oval Office. I’ll never forget the family friend, circa 1998, who wondered how she was supposed to explain the meaning of a euphemism for oral sex to her then 10-year-old daughter.

Conservatives still play the character card against Hillary Clinton, citing her disdain for other people’s rules, her Marie Antoinette airs and her potential law breaking. It’s a fair card to play, if only the presumptive Republican nominee weren’t himself a serial fabulist, an incorrigible self-mythologizer, a brash vulgarian, and, when it comes to his tax returns, a determined obfuscator. Endorsing Mr. Trump means permanently laying to rest any claim conservatives might ever again make on the character issue.

These remarkable essays by Edward Alexander bring intellectual precision, moral fearlessness and literary elegance to bear on a syndrome that could be called “Jewish suicidalism.” That is almost the right name for it, save that the leaders of this trend – portraits delineated by Alexander – exempt themselves from the condemnations they rain down on their fellows. The motivational patterns that Alexander exposes cannot, as is sometimes claimed, reduce to self-hatred. Rather, shown in vivid detail are the workings of opportunistic self-love.

Alexander is professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of books that span literary, cultural and Jewish worlds. In his latest book (Transaction Publishers, 2015), Alexander’s contemporary survey is a wide one, though it does not pretend to exhaustiveness.

In “Michael Lerner: Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin,” we meet the founder of the magazine Tikkun, “the omnipresent, gentile-appointed voice of the Jewish community,” but meet him at an earlier career stage, back when he incited mob violence and threatened lawsuits to intimidate his opponents.

In “Antisemitism Denial: The Berkeley School,” we meet Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight antisemitism but thinks it “wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning antisemitism.” Alexander compares Butler’s puzzlement to that of Dickens, who did not know what to make of Fagin, the villainous Jew he had created in Oliver Twist. “The reason for Dickens’s puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did indeed not ‘make’ Fagin, and therefore didn’t know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young—to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add ‘Zionist imperialist and occupier.’”

The type described in Jews Against Themselves is not new. Drawing on recent research into this phenomenon, by Sander Gilman, Ruth Wisse and others, Alexander traces the genre historically to its medieval prototypes. Throughout the era of triumphalist Christianity, there were Jewish informers – my term not his – who converted to the dominant religion. Innocent themselves, they deflected attacks onto other, also innocent Jews, thereby becoming actually guilty, this time of towering betrayals.

Pope Gregory IX, who ordered the Talmud publicly burned in Paris and Rome, was acting on the seemingly expert, vilifying “explications” of Talmud presented to him in 1239 by Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert and member of the Dominican Order. A few years later, Pablo Christiani made his coming out as a Christian credible and deadly by orchestrating the celebrated public “disputations” (really show trials) of 1263, in which Nachmanides was forced to defend Judaism against Christiani’s accusations, under intellectually disabling rules of engagement. So also, it may have been another convert, Johannes (Josef) Pffefferkorn, who gave Martin Luther the inspiration and precedent for his destructive campaigns against the Jews of Germany. Luther justified his lootings and burnings in The Jews and Their Lies, which ended up a favorite on Hitler’s bookshelf.

Does the United States need nuclear weapons? What role do they play? And if they are valuable, how much should we spend supporting such a nuclear deterrent? In addition, what level of nuclear weapons should we aim to achieve to maintain stability and deterrence? And finally, does the type of nuclear deterrent maintained by the United States bear a relationship to whether nuclear weapons proliferate in the world, especially in Iran and North Korea?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies held a day long conversation on these questions on May 5th. Joe Cirincione, the President of the Ploughshares Fund laid out a four part narrative that the US was (1) maintaining a vastly bloated nuclear deterrent, (2) unnecessary for our security, (3) unaffordable, and (4) in need of at least an immediate unilateral one-third reduction in American nuclear forces to jump start efforts to get to zero nuclear weapons world-wide.

Cirincione further claimed that such an initiative was perfectly sensible because President Ronald Reagan had supported in his second inaugural the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons and had put such a proposal on the table in negotiations with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986. The implication being of course that if such a proposal was made three decades ago by the leaders off the two nation’s with the largest nuclear arsenals during the height of the Cold War, then why not make it again especially in that President Barack Obama in his Prague speech in 2009 called for nuclear abolition as well.

Let first start with getting the history right. President Reagan repeatedly called for getting rid of “nuclear dangers” and considered that central to his defense policy. This was reflected in three areas: support for 50% reductions in ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads; building a missile defense against nuclear attacks; and keeping a strong nuclear deterrent that emphasized stability which was the basis for the proposal to eliminate multiple warheads from being deployed on land based missiles.

In Iceland, the American President did not support getting rid of all nuclear weapons. Reagan supported getting rid of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads which were the most dangerous. They were termed “fast flyers” which because of their speed were considered the most destabilizing in a crisis. Soviet President Gorbachev countered with a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons but also ban the deployment of missile defenses, which led to the collapse of the negotiations. In reality, Gorbachev had no intention of giving up all of Russia’s nuclear weapons especially the smaller tactical and shorter range nuclear weapons the Russian maintained by the many thousands which they have never agreed to limit or reduce in any arms control deal concluded with the United States.

Stephen H. Balch is the Director of the Texas Tech Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Lubbock, Texas

Moral one-upmanship lifts the preacher and lowers the congregation, and while secularisation has reduced sin’s potential to incite a pulpiteer’s scolding that has not prevented the emergence of new rebukes. Think here of the many PC “isms” said to signify indelible wickedness.
Rarely has so much changed within a lifetime. Yesterday’s outré and outcast recast as inquisitors; great nations in demographic collapse; primal human practices like marriage, veritable specie constants, condemned as iniquitous and beyond rational defence, and most surprisingly, all happening peaceably, with little alteration in surface political forms. No wonder elders scratch their heads, as do those few historically literate young. This essay proposes to settle their confusions by revealing the deepest drivers of these astonishing and revolutionary changes.

Most revolutions have been sudden and explosive—this one is more a continuing burn. One might thus be tempted to mistake its passages for normal cultural evolution—if at an accelerated pace. But they’re not. Their relatively incremental nature does, however, contain the reason why the revolution has been so thoroughgoing, why it has ground so exceeding small. Abjuring the turbulent savagery of its predecessors, it has spared bodies for the sake of a more protracted and promising labour—the remake of souls.

The revolution’s transformations have certainly not just been the cumulative “Hayekian” outcome of individuated choice, social evolution’s signature. Rather, they’ve been substantially managed and top-down; judicial command, legislative rescript, bureaucratic dictate, and, most of all, incessant, intense and self-conscious preachment, indispensable to their unfolding. The revolution has doubtless taken advantage of spontaneous changes, especially those arising from the hedonic culture of mass affluence, but it has channelled their energies, steering rather than drifting on their currents, and by so doing has shifted the weight of social and political power in a unique and decisive way.

Nor is the direction of its changes resulting in a more reality-tested world, as disaggregated, evolutionary choice might be expected to do, but—typical of top-down impositions—one increasingly remote from experiential anchorage; one in which common sense is supplanted by fantasies delusive in most every respect but their correspondence to the interests of the cadres who weave them.

How We Advocated for the Iran Deal

In recent years, few things have been as exhaustively debated or written about than the Iran deal.

That debate reignited this week after a long article about me included a section about the Iran deal. There are many issues raised in an article of this length, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to respond to those topics in the weeks and months to come.

However, given the importance of the questions raised about the Iran deal over the last few days, I want to make several points about one issue: how we advocated for the deal.

First, we never made any secret of our interest in pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. President Obama campaigned on that position in 2008. We pursued several diplomatic efforts with Iran during the President’s first term, and the fact that there were discreet channels of communication established with Iran in 2012 is something that we confirmed publicly. However, we did not have any serious prospect of reaching a nuclear deal until after the election of Hasan Rouhani in 2013. Yes, we had discussions with the Iranians before that, but they did not get anywhere. After the Rouhani government took office, our confidential negotiations with the Iranians accelerated, and quickly led to public negotiations within the P5+1 process that began at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013. Whatever your analysis of the relative weight of moderates or hard-liners in the Iranian system, there is no question that we were able to achieve a deal only after a change in the Iranian Administration.

Second, we did aggressively make the case for the Iran deal during the congressional review mandated by statute last summer, as it was imperative that the facts of the deal be understood for it to be implemented. Opponents of the deal had no difficulty in making their case — through commentary, a paid media campaign, and the distribution of materials making a variety of arguments against the deal. Tough and fair questions were raised; sometimes, there were also inaccuracies about the nature of the deal.‎ Given our interest in making sure that any misinformation was corrected, and that people understood our policy, we made a concerted effort to provide information about the deal to any interested party, including to outside organizations and any journalists covering the issue. This effort to get information out with fact sheets, graphics, briefings, and social media was no secret — it was well reported on at the time. Of course the objective of that kind of effort is to build as much public support as you can — that’s a function of White House communications.

‘So the Obama administration lied about the nuclear deal with Iran. We knew that already.”

That’s the message several conservative friends e-mailed me in response to David Samuels’s New York Times article on May 5 profiling Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.

Although Samuels’s article confirms what many Iran experts have said about the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, his profile of Rhodes is important because it explains the unprecedented incompetence, deceitfulness, and extreme partisanship of Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), and it further reveals that the president has allowed his NSC staff to run his foreign policy.

I have three main observations about the Rhodes profile.

The NSC Was Engaged in Systematic Lying to Ram Through the Iran Nuclear Deal

I have long argued that just about everything the Obama administration has said about the nuclear talks with Iran and the nuclear agreement have been exaggerations or outright falsehoods. Rhodes confirmed one of the most important of these deceptions.

According to Samuels, the Obama administration was “actively misleading” Americans by claiming that the nuclear deal came about because of the rise in 2013 of a moderate faction in Iran, with the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Samuels says this claim was “largely manufactured” by Rhodes to sell the nuclear deal to the American people even though the “most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012.”

Rhodes confirmed what most experts have long known: Rouhani did not represent the rise of a new moderate government in Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei, a hard-liner, handpicked him to be on a slate of presidential candidates. Rouhani answers to Khamenei.

In November 2013, I wrote at National Review Online that the U.S. had made a major concession in May 2012 to allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium, and that this concession led to the November 2013 interim nuclear agreement with Iran. The White House made this concession before Rouhani won the July 2013 Iranian presidential election. Rhodes has now confirmed this. The Obama administration invented the moderate-Rouhani-faction story to create the illusion that it was taking advantage of a sudden opportunity to get a nuclear deal with a new moderate Iranian government. The White house’s story succeeded in distracting attention from the huge concessions it was offering to Tehran.

The Samuels article also contradicts recent accounts by aides to John Kerry and Hillary Clinton about what roles the two secretaries of state played in forging the Iran deal. In a September 2015 Politico article, Kerry and his aides attributed the deal to two years of intense U.S. diplomacy that included 69 trips across the Atlantic. In a May 2, 2016, New York Times article, journalist Mark Landler described former secretary of state Clinton’s reported leadership and caution on the nuclear talks with Iran; Landler contrasted this with a much more aggressive approach by Kerry while he was still in the Senate.

A recent book in the Yale University Press series on “Jewish Lives,” a biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, opens provocatively: “Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?” Perhaps not, a reader of the book might well conclude. Disraeli has always been a challenge, to Jews and non-Jews, contemporaries as well as biographers. But rereading the man himself, I was reassured that he was entirely worthy of a place in “Jewish Lives” (and justified the significant space I gave him a few years ago in my The People of the Book).

Though formally Anglican—his father had him baptized when he was 12, before the rite of bar mitzvah—Disraeli identified himself, and was generally identified, as a Jew. He bore a conspicuously Jewish name, changing his father’s D’Israeli only by removing the apostrophe. He made no secret of his heritage in his speeches and writings, and flaunted it in his person, deliberately cultivating a Jewish appearance. And his novels dramatized a politics imbued with Judaism and a “New Crusade” that would restore Christianity to its Jewish origins. All of this in mid-Victorian England, when Jews were the villains of novels and the butt of satirists, when they could not even have a seat in Parliament let alone climb to “the top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli put it. (Not one has since climbed it; there has been no Jewish prime minister in the nearly century-and-a-half since his death.)

While climbing that pole, Disraeli wrote no fewer than 15 novels, his first in 1826 at the age of 21 and his last the year before his death in 1881, with another, unfinished one published posthumously. His father, Isaac D’Israeli, a writer, scholar, and man-about-town (who never converted), once cautioned his son: “How will the Fictionist assort with the Politician?” But assort they did. In 1833 in a private journal, Disraeli implicitly responded to the familiar charge that the novels were frivolous, unrealistic fantasies. Vivian Grey, he said, “portrayed my active and real ambition”; The Wondrous Tale of Alroy “my ideal ambition”; Contarini Fleming “my poetic character.” The trilogy was “the secret history of my feelings.”

The federal government has a fundamental responsibility to provide for the nation’s defense. Until recently, the government has fulfilled that role almost exclusively through nuclear deterrence and conventional military forces. But a new type of warfare—in cyberspace—is emerging as a top threat to America.

In recent years, foreign actors have used sophisticated technologies to acquire the personal files of millions of federal employees, to gain access to the private information of multibillion-dollar U.S. businesses, and to tap into the control center of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York, among many other known cyberattacks.
Yet Washington has no clear policy for responding to a cyberattack. If an attack against the U.S. occurs through conventional military means, the policies are clear. These guidelines must be broadened to include the cyber domain.

Current U.S. policies permit the Defense Department to respond to a cyberattack against military forces and infrastructure. But the U.S. doesn’t have a clear policy governing the Pentagon’s response to a similar attack against critical civilian infrastructure.

If an attack occurs today, would the U.S. be able to respond in a timely manner? In the cyberworld, an attack can occur in mere milliseconds, requiring an appropriate response in real time. That might not be possible if explicit policies are not in place.

During a Feb. 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, I asked Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whether it would be helpful to have a definition of what constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. He replied that if the military had a “much fuller definition of the range of things that occur in cyber space, and then start thinking about the threshold where an attack is catastrophic enough or destructive enough that we define it as an act of war, I think that would be extremely helpful.” CONTINUE AT SITE