RUTHFULLY YOURS

Places of sanctuary date to Biblical times. When the twelve tribes of Israel were sent to the Promised Land, the Levites were the one tribe not given a specific area. Instead their people were distributed throughout the land, in forty-eight cities that would become part of their heritage. Six of those cities were designated as places of refuge – principally for those who had committed murder unintentionally. That concept of forgiveness and protection in the Jewish faith descended to Christianity, where sinners are told they can find refuge in Christ. Consequently, churches and synagogues have long provided sanctuary.

In the United States, sanctuary cities (formed in the 1980s) were to shelter illegal immigrants from federal immigration laws. Like so many ideas coming from the Left, this one, while well intentioned, has in practice served to protect criminals as well as hapless illegal immigrants who are otherwise innocent.

Readers following the way that Israel is discussed abroad these days might be aware of two intertwined and mutually reinforcing tropes. According to the first trope, the story of Israel is not about complicated events with multiple players but about the moral character of Israel alone. Israel’s opponents generally appear as bystanders or corpses. Arabs don’t make decisions: they are merely part of the set upon which the Jews perform.

According to the second trope, Israel has dirty secrets that it is trying hard to keep under wraps. Thus, the claim that Israel “crushes dissent” has become common among the country’s critics, leading to expressions of the need to “tear off the mask,” “end the charade,” or “break the silence.”

Both tropes are on display in the new movie Censored Voices, to which Martin Kramer, in “Who Censored the Six-Day War?,”has skillfully applied his historian’s toolkit. (Kramer did the same last year in his detailed deconstruction of Ari Shavit’s account in My Promised Land of the Lod battle of 1948, which played to the same tropes.) The movie is about 1967, but it’s a product of the present moment. Like the work of the NGO Breaking the Silence, whose recent report on the 2014 Gaza war dominated international press coverage a few months ago, it is of the popular genre we might call the “moral striptease.” In this genre, introspective Israeli veterans—of whom Israel has many, a fact of which it can be proud—publicly undress, confessing their failings and those of their countrymen. These accounts are taken at face value and presented as disembodied truths, without details of the environment in which they occurred or the assumptions under which the soldiers operated, and without information that would allow corroboration.

Remote village now an ISIS base in Europe.

Anybody who knew anything about the Balkans knew that Bill Clinton’s extra-legal intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Christian Serbs was a terrible idea; the area’s ancient, tripartite (the western Christian Croats are also part of the mix) religious divisions date back to the schism within Christianity and the invasion of large swaths of eastern and central Europe by Muslim Turks. The Turks were eventually thrown back and out of almost everywhere in Europe, with the exception of what became Albania and in Kosovo. To this day, Bulgarians, Romanians and Hungarians celebrate their deliverance from Islam — and know exactly why it must be resisited, tooth and nail. Allowing the Serbs to crush the Muslims of Yugoslavia — especially Muslims occupying one of Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites — would have been merely the final touches on a long war against darkness and brutality. So, thanks, Bill Clinton, for leaving this dagger in the heart of Europe:

Thirteen years ago, Samantha Power made a name for herself with her Pulitzer prize-winning book, “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.” In this book, she explored the history of America’s reluctance to intervene to stop or prevent genocides. Prescribing American intervention as justified on grounds both “moral” and in service of “enlightened self-interest,” Power asked how something so clear in retrospect as the need to stop genocide could “become so muddled at the time by rationalization, institutional constraints, and a lack of imagination.”

It appears that on Monday morning, Power herself is going to demonstrate exactly how such muddling takes place.

Power is now President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. On Monday morning, the UN Security Council is scheduled to vote on a resolution endorsing the Iran nuclear deal announced July 14 in Vienna, and adopting the terms of this deal, including the lifting of UN sanctions on Iran, sunset clauses for the main restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, and so forth. This deal, a byzantine tome officially titled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is a gift to Iran’s terror-sponsoring tyranny, crammed with concessions offered up by Secretary of State John Kerry and lead negotiator Under Secretary Wendy Sherman, in their desperate quest to satisfy President Obama’s desire for an agreement with Tehran. Columnist Charles Krauthammer sums up some of the worst of it in his latest column: “Worse than we could have imagined. [1]” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday warned yet again [2] that this agreement “paves Iran’s way to arm itself with nuclear weapons within a decade, if Iran decides to honor the agreement, and before then if it decides to violate it, as it usually does.”

There are no “lone wolves,” the latest politically correct neologism invented to explain (and explain away) the spread of single actor terrorists proliferating across the world and now the US, notably with the latest murder of our unarmed military in Chattanooga by Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez.

“Love wolves,” like “Islamophobia” before it, is a bogus term of distraction, designed to take focus off the reality that a solid percentage of the billion plus Islamic world is at war with the West, seeking to take it over, militarily and/or ideologically. These may be solitary individuals (or often not, as in Boston and Garland) but they are all acting from the same playbook – the Koran and Hadith. They are simply soldiers in a massive global army. They all know their instructions, which are in front of their eyes and couldn’t be simpler.

Is the wave of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) activity on U.S. campuses, directed at Israel, essentially a protest movement aimed at getting Israel to withdraw from some disputed lands?

As scholar and author Ruth Wisse recounted in an article last May:

In February, a Jewish college student was hospitalized after being punched in the face at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus in upstate New York…. [O]ther such incidents, some caught on camera, include a male student punched in the face at Temple University, a female student at Ohio University harassed for defending Israel, and a male student at Cornell threatened physically for protesting anti-Israel propaganda. On three successive days last summer, the Boston police had to protect a student rally for Israel from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau!”… Every year, some 200 campuses now host a multiday hate-the-Jews fest [called] “Israel Apartheid Week.”

Indeed it sounds like something that goes beyond “protest” or attempts to achieve a “two-state solution.” A 2013-2014 survey by the Washington-based Louis D. Brandeis Center, founded in 2011 to counteract such intimidation, reported that “more than half of Jewish American college students [have] personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.” Jewish students at UCLA and Stanford who wanted to run for the student government were challenged on the basis of “strong Jewish identity”—as evidenced by having traveled to Israel.

The modern-day progressive’s abiding hatred of the United States of America and the eternal principles for which it stands is what animates the Left’s efforts to cripple and destroy this one-of-a-kind nation.

It is fair to say that support for America’s enemies abroad and criminals at home are the twin pillars of progressivism today. Since in the real world left-wing social engineering schemes inflict great damage on the human beings selected for experimentation, progressives’ most effective tactic is the smear, which they deploy day in, day out, when they run out of arguments, or increasingly nowadays, as their opening argument.

Two recent events illustrate the dual tracks on which progressivism operates in its never-ending campaign to bring down America.

The first major news event is the bizarre, outrageously generous settlement that the public learned last week will be paid out to the late Eric Garner’s family.

New York City’s ultra-progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio (D), is behind the settlement that comes on the anniversary of career criminal Eric Garner’s unfortunate death in Staten Island. He died because he unlawfully resisted arrest by the NYPD and his body, weakened by years of disease, could not handle the stress.

Now that President Obama has secured peace in our time by striking a nuclear deal with Iran, he might have some spare moments for catching up with news and videos. This one, however, he might prefer to skip. Those who rate Islamic terror as a greater threat than a colourless trace gas will find it hard to disagree.
Tomi’s Red, White, Blue & Unfiltered Final Thoughts the Slaughter of 4 Marines by Another “Mohammad”

Radical Islamists, have brought the fight right here to the Red, White and Blue and it’s about time we bring it to them. Full force. Let’s show them what the U.S. of A looks like up close and personal. Show ’em what a B1 bomber looks like flying overhead. Show ’em what they’re messing with. Put the fear of OUR God in their desert. Because clearly our lack of strategy isn’t working..

Remember when Rajendra Pachauri was the wholesome and much-quoted champion of a clean, green, low-carbon planet? UNSW certainly does because it lavished an honorary doctorate on the then-IPCC chief — an honour sexual harassment charges have called into question
In 2008, University of NSW Chancellor David Gonski awarded the university’s highest honor to a sexual predator and perjurer. Concurrently, the sexual predator and perjurer became the ‘godfather’ to the university’s Climate Change Research Centre, having been awarded the honor of opening the facility. Who was that man?

Answer: Dr Rajendra Pachauri, 75, the disgraced former head (2002-2015) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose sexual predator status was confirmed in May by a three-person Internal Complaints Committee of the TERI think-tank, of which Pachauri — amazingly – continues to be Director-General, albeit on leave.

The TERI committee upheld the complaints of a 29-year-old female researcher who was subjected to Pachauri’s hundreds of inappropriate messages, propositions and grabbings between September, 2013, and December, 2014. He is now separately arraigned on police charges that include molestation, stalking, sexual harassment and criminal intimidation. If convicted, he could spend seven years in jail. Other women from TERI also have come forward with allegations strongly suggesting his predatory ways date back a decade or more.

Clinton happily executed Obama’s vision of encouraging second-tier states like France and Britain to supplant U.S. leadership.

White House staffers have summed up Barack Obama’s foreign-policy doctrine as “Don’t do stupid s—.” Six years and change into his presidency, however, the stupid stuff has piled up so high—in Ukraine, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq and beyond—that some Team Obama alumni are now trying to subtly dissociate themselves from this charming formulation and its legacy.

Chief among these is Hillary Clinton. “Great nations need organizing principles,” she told the Atlantic last August. “ ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Translation: Don’t blame me for the stupid stuff or hold it against me as I seek the presidency. Through leaks and interviews, the Clinton camp has tried to portray the former secretary of state as an administration dissident, pushing for tougher measures against Iran and greater support for the moderate Syrian opposition.