RUTHFULLY YOURS

The federal Restoration of Freedom Act was an unfortunate response to a Supreme Court decision. Back when there was more wisdom in the practice of law, meaning back when the profession had more humility, there developed a sage doctrine: Courts should resist ordering “specific performance” when a personal service contract is breached. The idea is that when a provider, especially one of small scale, breaks an express or implied agreement to provide a service to a consumer, it is not sensible for a judge to direct that the agreement be carried out as written.

The doctrine leapt to mind during this week of manufactured controversy over the state of Indiana’s near-verbatim replication of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The “no specific performance” doctrine recognizes that, while our law is capable of many things, it cannot force people to get along. To try to do so, especially with people embroiled in a bitter disagreement, would more likely lead to additional strife, not calm resolution. What’s more, there are other, better ways to make a wronged party whole. In most instances, for example, a court can order money damages. That leads us to another quaint bit of prudence:

“The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out.”

So wrote Benjamin Netanyahu in a Facebook post on March 17, the day of Israel’s elections. Since then the words have been a cause célèbre among critics of Israel—and not least, American Jewish liberals.

The Jerusalem Post reports that a “yawning divide has opened between liberal US Jews and the right-wing Jewish Israeli majority that reelected…Netanyahu,” and that:

More than any of the prime minister’s other statements—which included skepticism about the feasibility of the two-state solution and complaints about foreign influence on Israeli politics—Netanyahu’s fear-mongering against Arabs touched a deep nerve among US liberals who voted for Obama.

Among many other responses, Netanyahu’s words have sparked calls by American Jewish liberals Peter Beinart and Jeremy Ben-Ami (president of J Street) for the Obama administration to “punish” Israel and boycott its presence in lands captured in the 1967 Six Day War.

Thomas Jefferson, Patron Saint of American Liberals, would not recognize his spiritual offspring in today’s liberal President Obama and his handling of the Middle East.

Jefferson, as a trade commissioner and then ambassador in Paris for six years (1784-90), faced almost daily the tragedy of American hostages enslaved by violent Muslims and his own frustrating inability to liberate them.

However, what he learned served him well as the leading hawk for war a decade later when he became president and went to war against belligerent Islam.

In May, A.D. 1784, immediately after America’s Continental Congress, gathered in Annapolis, had signed the final draft of the treaty with England that formally ended the American Revolution, Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson as “trade commissioners” in an effort to open European markets to American commodities — not an easy mission with Europe’s traditionally closed, mercantile economic system.

But when Jefferson reached Paris in August 1784 to join the other two already there, he discovered that one unanticipated reality posed the greatest and most immediate threat to their fledgling United States. Every state was swamped in Revolutionary War debt and the way to pay it off would be shipping to European markets their great natural wealth, e.g. lumber from their endless forests, the produce of their fertile soil, the skins of animals for clothing, etc. But with the thirteen ex-colonies now independent of England, when their merchant ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean now, they would no longer be protected by the Royal Navy, the greatest in the world and by the “tribute” that the King of England paid to the pashas of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and the Sultan of Morocco. This was basically protection money given to North Africa’s so-called “Barbary Pirate” states to keep them from preying on British shipping.

This from Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post on April 3:

… we are now facing the unfolding disaster that Obama has wrought. … the US has just given the Iranians a green light to behave as if they have already built their nuclear umbrella. … [T]he US and its partners have just removed all significant obstacles from their path to nuclear capabilities. The Iranians know it. Their proxies know it. Their enemies know it.

… The surrounding Arab states led by Saudi Arabia are pursuing nuclear weapons.

Don’t look now, but North Korea is a nuclear power today, with missiles able to strike Japan, and soon Hawaii and California.

The Norks got a free pass, because Bill Clinton’s SecState, Madeleine Albright, faked an agreement with Kim Jong-il in 2000, supposedly to stop uranium enrichment and missile development.

Then the Norks violated it, as everybody knew they would. Today North Korea has nuclear bombs and missiles.

Naturally, the media celebrated Albright’s “accord” with Kim Jong-il, and said nothing about the North Korean breakout.

Islamic State’s appeal for American women can range from the prospect of romance to idea of joining a meaningful religious movement
The arrests this week of women in New York and Philadelphia who prosecutors say were plotting terrorist attacks or trying to provide support to the Islamic State is focusing attention on jihadist efforts to recruit American women.

From Denver’s suburban sprawl to Chicago’s immigrant enclaves, nearly a dozen young American women have been enticed over the Internet by extremist groups to join their ranks in the past year, authorities say, with promises of marriage, humanitarian efforts on behalf of Muslims and martyrdom.

The arrests of the American women come as law-enforcement officials and U.S. Muslim leaders struggle to counter the jihadists’ social-media savvy and the increasing number of young Western women who have joined groups such as Islamic State, or ISIS. These women, in turn, have become a critical part of ISIS’s recruitment, offering advice to fellow Western women contemplating joining the group and cheering on its attacks via the Internet, experts say.

Officials didn’t lie, and I wasn’t fed a line, writes Judith Miller

I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.

To stamp out cultural dissent, the left is willing to stomp on religious liberty.

The political delirium over Indiana’s law protecting minority religious beliefs doesn’t seem to be abating, and the irony is that it may be illustrating why such statutes are necessary. Much of the modern political left has abandoned the American tradition of pluralism in favor of an all-or-nothing social model that brooks no dissent.

Netanyahu Nuclear pact and White House spat with Israeli prime minister unnerve many Jewish leaders
Many U.S. Jewish leaders are unnerved both by the new Iran nuclear agreement and the public falling out between President Barack Obama and his Israeli counterpart, developments that are creating a rift in the durable alliance between Jews and the Democratic Party in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

Worried that Iran might still develop a nuclear weapon despite the accord announced Thursday, the Jewish leaders say they feel torn between an Obama administration that has pressed hard for a deal and an Israeli government that has repeatedly warned that Iran is a grave threat to the Jewish state and can’t be trusted to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

A group of Jewish Democratic House members met with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough in his office last week and cautioned that for them to help “sell a very unpopular [Iran nuclear] deal to our constituents,” Mr. Obama must “increase his popularity with our constituents,” said a Democratic congressman involved in the meeting.

“Patriotic Betrayal advertises itself as having the “aura of a John le Carré novel.” That is a mischaracterization. The subject of intelligence is intrinsically fascinating; but reading Karen Paget as she traces the comings and goings of dozens upon dozens of long-forgotten student activists (the book comes equipped with a guide to its extensive “cast of characters”) is only slightly more invigorating than reading the white pages of a telephone book.”

A REVIEW OF “Patriotic Betrayal The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism” By Karen Paget

Some 60 million people perished in World War II. Before the embers of that terrible conflagration could cool, a new conflict loomed. Joseph Stalin’s Russia was imposing a cruel dictatorship on the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe and threatening Western Europe by subversion and force of arms. By 1949, the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons in its arsenal. In the event of a clash between the superpowers, many millions more would die.
Patriotic Betrayal The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll Amer

The United States and its allies began to check Soviet expansionism by following George Kennan’s prescription for containment: The “application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” One such shifting political point involved student politics. Here in the United States, student politics had seldom been important. But in some of the embattled countries of Europe, very different traditions prevailed, and student politics were at the center of events.

The Kremlin was ready and quick to exert influence in this arena. Its operatives seized effective control of various international student organizations, set up chapters in the satellite states, and tried to draw in young people from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere around the world. As in other aspects of the Cold War conflict, the United States sought to counter. Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services—our wartime intelligence body, incorporated by 1947 into the fledgling CIA—began to channel funds to (and influence) the international activities of American student groups, preeminently the National Student Association (NSA). The funding and controlling continued into the 1960s, until the operation was blown in a spectacular leak—the first of its kind—in an exposé published in Ramparts magazine.

President Obama’s stories haven’t held up before. How is the Iran deal any different?
President Obama strode to the lectern in the Rose Garden Thursday to announce a “historic” agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The preliminary deal made in Lausanne, Switzerland, the president said, “cuts off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” I hope he’s right.
But I’m not counting on it. The president has a terrible record of initial public pronouncements on national security. He has a habit of confidently stating things that turn out not to be true. Three times in the last four years he has appeared in the Rose Garden and made assertions that were later proven to be false. He and his national security team have again and again described a world that does not correspond to reality. No reason to assume these concessions to Iran will be any different.