RUTHFULLY YOURS

On a New Yorker panel nearly a dozen years ago, in the wake of the publication of his novel Snow, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk set forth an emphatic credo. “Our moral duty,” he said, “is to pay attention to the humanity of everybody.” And since the subject of the panel was “Literature and Politics,” this comment was altogether in keeping with Pamuk’s remarks elsewhere, on the responsibility of the novelist: “I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it is a limited capacity, to be able to identify with the ‘other.’ .  .  . It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us.”

But in 2004, this anodyne and conventional literary conviction, addressed to the New Yorker’s loyal audience, rang out with an unexpectedly unsettling force. The motivations and influences and inmost desires and doubts and dreams and fevered schemes of invented characters in a novel, however pleasing or villainous, make up the very essence of what we derive from storytelling. We want to understand Isabel Archer and Mr. Kurtz (who are so different from us), we want to know them to the deeps of their marrow. The glory of literary modernism especially— the revelatory dazzle of Joyce and Proust and Woolf — turns precisely on this psychological probing into hidden consciousness. It was a shock, then, to learn that Pamuk’s “everybody,” his requirement of imagination, his “goal of understanding this person who is different from us,” his vaunted “humanity” — all this was meant to reach well beyond his primary literary argument. It was meant to include terrorists. Are not terrorists a portion of humanity? A challenge came from a fellow panelist: What about suicide bombers, are they to be similarly understood by the humanely embracing imagination? Pamuk’s response was quick and sharp and dismissive: “We have to base our judgment on moral essential things rather than on what we see on TV the other night.”

We have recently started a not for profit resource site http://militarybases.co that displays all the U.S. military bases on an interactive map.

Militarybases.co is a novel resource for interactive maps that display military bases operated by the U.S. either locally or abroad conveniently along with data points such as: historical info, base facilities, housing, weather, driving instructions and pictures of the bases involved.

Militarybases.co cover different army branches such as air force, navy, marine, coast guard and regular army installations. We aim to be a resource for elementary, secondary and college students who want to learn and absorb information regarding our countries military infrastructure and for families of service men and woman as well as those on active duty to get more information on their next deployment location.

The site is useful in many ways as it can be used for research for geopolitical issues in terms of arms deployment of the US forces accross the globe, it can also be used by families of service men and woman to find their way around the bases where their loved ones serve to protect our country. It can also be used as classroom material for elementary, secondary or even college eductation.

The site is a resource for data points on housing, weather, driving directions, base facilities and even historical information of ALL U.S. military bases either on our soil or abroad. We currently have over 500+ bases listed and expanding day by day.

‘We see growing efforts by terrorists to poison the minds of people like the Boston Marathon bombers and the San Bernardino killers,” President Obama said while addressing the nation in the wake of the latest homegrown massacre at the hands of Muslims.

But is that really what’s poisoning their minds?

FBI investigators are now operating on the belief that San Bernardino terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were individually “radicalized,” and for “quite some time,” possibly starting as early as 2013 — before the rise of ISIS and its Internet propaganda machine. So it wasn’t ISIS poisoning their minds, as the president suggests.

So what was it? The feds are still scratching their heads, willfully blind to the obvious religious factor.

Who are today’s racists?

A “March for Dignity” recently assembled outraged “anti-racists,” who shouted insults in the name of universal love.

It was in the name of anti-racism that the progressives chanted “death to Jews” at the UN’s Durban conference against racism in 2001.

Every week, the Place de la République has seen the roaring processions of the Sheikh Yassin Collective, inciting the hatred of Jews. Did anyone even care?

These “progressives” were strangely silent while a quarter of a million people were killed in Syria, while Yazidi women were sold into slavery, or when a new Caliph ordered the massacre of thousands in the name of Allah, or the mutilation and murder of Christians who refused to convert. Is that kind of behavior nothing more than bad taste?

AndrewCMcCarthy.com
ANDY’S NOTE: As most readers know, the columnist usually does not write the headlines on the column. That is the case this weekend. Contrary to what the headline on my column says, my proposal is that our immigration laws should screen out ALL Islamists, not “radical” Islamists. I do not use the term “ radical Islamists” because it is redundant — and, indeed, I have written several columns grousing about Washington’s infatuation with “moderate Islamists” because the term is self-contradictory. As the column contends (and as I have contended elsewhere many times), and Islamist is a Muslim who desires to impose sharia’s law, system of governance, and societal framework. That, in and of itself, is radical enough for me.

I appreciate being held in “(otherwise) . . . considerable esteem” by Charles Krauthammer. Not only is the feeling mutual; from my end, I would even omit the “otherwise.” That said, I am dismayed by his specious response to my legal analysis of Donald Trump’s proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration to the United States. I am personally disappointed that Charles has distorted my position, portraying me as a Trump apologist. But that is almost beside the point. His rebuke is counterproductive to the defense of our national security — about which Krauthammer and I both care deeply — because it makes solving a vexing problem that much more difficult.

Dr. Krauthammer fails to address the substantive legal points I made. Instead, I get the back of his hand for explaining that I focused mainly on the “final form” of Trump’s moratorium proposal — the retreat to a temporary ban on foreign Muslims, after Trump initially suggested such a ban on all Muslims. Charles finds this “hilarious” because, he concludes, I am taking Trump’s policymaking process seriously – “as if Trump’s barstool eruptions are painstakingly vetted, and as if anything Trump says about anything is ever final.”

Sigh.

As Dr. K must know (since it is quite apparent from the post he attacks), I am not a Trump supporter, much less a Trump apologist. I confess to not being Trump-obsessed: I just don’t think he is going to be the nominee and life is too short to get that whipped up about him. As I’ve pointed out, I don’t believe even the Republicans are daft enough to nominate a man who has donated more money to Hillary Clinton and the racketeering enterprise also known the Clinton Foundation than most Democrats have combined.

There’s a demagogue loose in the land. He uses immigration and the war on terror to drive a wedge into the American populace. He traffics in absurd conspiracy theories about foreign influence, he mocks his political opponents, and he inspires friends and allies to lash out, lawlessly, against them. He compares patriotic Americans to jihadists, and he endangers our national security with his reckless rhetoric.

I’m speaking, of course, about the President of the United States. It’s been amusing to watch the media hyperventilate over Donald Trump’s comments when it has largely cheered or ignored our own president’s rhetoric — rhetoric that’s inspired serial violations of First Amendment freedoms, and been used as justification for executive overreach and deadly mistakes at home and abroad.

We knew of Barack Obama’s contempt for his political opponents in 2008, when he famously mocked Hillary Clinton’s blue-collar supporters, calling them “bitter” and saying they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” But this was small potatoes compared to the rhetoric he’d employ once he was elected.

Obama’s Chanukah parties have had issues in the past. But this time it teetered over into full-blown violently offensive territory. Obama’s own remarks were boilerplate inoffensive stuff. Israel’s President Rivlin, a political hack who desperately sucks up to the media, was equally insipid.

But the White House chose Susan Talve to light the Menorah. Talve is a member of the anti-Israel group T’ruah which is currently promoting assorted “soft BDS” programs. She’s also a Ferguson activist. Her behavior was deeply insulting to the religious Jewish community and made it clear that the White House was determined to hijack even a Chanukah party to promote an anti-Jewish agenda.

So the general conviviality of the Chanukah party was disrupted by a crazed rant from Susan Talve in which she seemed determined to jam as many leftist talking points as possible in her limited time. Instead of talking about Chanukah, Talve blathered on about getting, “guns off our streets” and to “clean up the fires of toxic nuclear waste”.

Talve screeched, “I stand here with my fierce family of clergy and black lives matter activists who took to the streets of Ferguson”.

Our country lost a hero last Saturday (December 5), a hero it acquired along the way, when Tibor Rubin—“Ted,” as he liked to be called because that was his “American name”—died. His birth certificate said he was 86, but by his own calculation he was actually a little younger than that since he believed that he had a second birthday when he arrived in America 67 years ago.

Ted’s story is one of the most remarkable in U.S. military history. It is a story of daring and determination not quite like any other. It is a story given flesh and bones by simple human decency.

Voluble and mordantly funny, Rubin, a thick and powerful man even in old age and still speaking an immigrant’s eccentric English, told me about it a few years ago during a couple of interviews I conducted with him for a book I was doing on the Medal of Honor.

The story begins in Hungary where he was born in 1929 in the small town of Paszto. His family were Jews, but this didn’t matter to their neighbors—not yet, anyhow. “We have a beautiful life there,” Rubin said. “We didn’t bother nobody and nobody bothered us.”

As World War II approached, things changed as the Hungarian government, Hitler’s ally, passed a series of anti-Jewish measures imitating those the Nazis had used in laying down a foundation for the Holocaust. When he was 13 and they sensed that night was falling, Rubin’s parents sent him to Budapest in the hope that he would be absorbed by the big city. He survived on his own for a couple of years, but when the round up came, he couldn’t hide. He was arrested and packed with hundreds of others into cattle cars headed for the Mauthausen camp in Austria. He never forgot the German commandant’s chilling greeting upon their arrival there: “You Jews, none of you are going to get out of here alive.”

In 1983 when I was the U.S. attorney in New York, I used the word “Mafia” in describing some people we arrested or indicted. The Italian American Civil Rights League—which was founded by Joe Colombo, one of the heads of New York’s notorious five families—and some other similar groups complained that I was defaming all Italians by using that term. In fact, I had violated a Justice Department rule prohibiting U.S. attorneys from employing the term Mafia. The little-known rule had been inserted by Attorney General John Mitchell in the early 1970s at the behest of Mario Biaggi, a congressman from New York.

I had a different view of using the term Mafia. It reflected the truth. The Mafia existed, and denying what people oppressed by those criminals knew to be true only gave the Mafia more power. This hesitancy to identify the enemy accurately and honestly—“Mafia” was how members described themselves and kept its identity Italian or Italian-American—created the impression that the government was incapable of combating them because it was unable even to describe the enemy correctly.

Similarly, you may hear about ISIS or ISIL or Daesh, but make no mistake: The terrorists refer to themselves as members of Islamic State. Just as it would have been foolish to fail to use the word Mafia or admit its Italian identity, it is foolish to refuse to call these Islamic terrorists by the name they give themselves or to refuse to acknowledge their overriding religious rationale.

The Radio Television Digital News Association recently presented its new First Amendment Defenders Award to Tim Tai, a student journalist who was hired by ESPN to cover the anti-racism protests at the University of Missouri.

“Tai was confronted by University students, faculty and staff, threatening him with violence if he did not abandon his efforts,” the award citation reads. “Instead, he stood his ground and patiently asserted his First Amendment Rights to stand in a public place and report on the events around him.”

One would hope that the ACLU of Missouri issued a statement of support for Tim Tai at the time the video of this highly publicized event went viral on the Internet. But the ACLU of Missouri didn’t even acknowledge that the incident occurred. Instead, they issued a statement that “the ACLU of Missouri honors the University of Missouri students and faculty who displayed courageous and creative leadership …”

The next day, when MU’s student body vice president suggested on national television that the exercise of First Amendment rights creates a hostile and unsafe learning environment, the ACLU of Missouri remained silent. Two days later, when a Christian street preacher was physically assaulted by anti-racism protesters while speaking inside MU’s designated “Free Speech Circle,” the ACLU of Missouri remained silent.