No new dawn in Iran: Ruthie Blum

For the past three years, the West has been tricking itself into seeing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a country undergoing a gradual process of reform. The outcome of Friday’s two elections — one for the Majlis (parliament) and the other for the Assembly of Experts — is serving as the latest mirage in the delusion.

In 2013, when Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, the United States and Europe took it as a sign of a new dawn. Even Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the chief mullah controlling Iran’s “elected” leader, came to understand that Rouhani was preferable to the volatile and fanatic Ahmadinejad, whose repeated pronouncements about wiping Israel off the map before attending to America were not serving Tehran in good stead.

Rouhani’s appearance on the international stage provided particular fantasy-fodder for supporters of a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s race to obtain nuclear weapons and to guarantee its regional, and eventually global, hegemony.

Those people today feel vindicated for two reasons. The first is that world powers finally did reach a nuclear deal with Iran. The second is that Rouhani’s “pro-deal” camp emerged victorious in the latest parliamentary election, and two of the most hard-line ayatollahs were voted out of the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with appointing the supreme leader. And considering Khamenei’s advancing age and questionable health, this clerical assembly, which sits for eight years, is likely to end up selecting his successor.

To understand why the above is no cause for celebration, two crucial things need to be kept in mind: the only thing the nuclear deal accomplished was to enable Iran to step up its nuclear program, but with lots more money at its disposal; and Rouhani is no moderate.

Indeed, Iran continues to assert its right to nuclear power, while flexing its military muscles nearly daily by testing missiles and threatening the West not to intervene. In addition, celebrations less than three weeks ago marking the anniversary of the 1979 revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic state included chants of “death to America,” “death to Israel” and a reenactment of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy’s humiliation of U.S. sailors who had strayed into Tehran’s territorial waters.

A review of Rouhani’s record also leaves little room for optimism. Though the Shiite cleric was not Khamenei’s preferred choice, he would never have been approved as a candidate in the first place if his revolutionary credentials had not been impeccable. And they certainly were.

MY SAY: DONALD GOLDENLOCKS AND THE ART OF THE HEEL

Is the GOP now the Gone Old Party? Donald Goldenlock’s book “The Art of the Deal” only reveals how the lout inherited money from his father the real entrepreneur, and went on to “negotiate” by suing, bullying, deceiving, and bending rules in real estate.

How a vain, boastful, narcissistic, serial adulterer, liar, know nothing, con man got as far as he has in the political arena will be the subject of many columns and books.rsk

Rubio Is Already Uniting the GOP By Deroy Murdock

‘I’m as conservative as anyone in this race, but I’m the conservative that can unify the Republican party,” Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) often says on the campaign trail. This is not just an empty slogan. Rubio already is keeping this promise.

The first indication that Rubio is welding together the disparate wings of the GOP came when he united two sons of the same state. Within hours on February 3, Rubio won the endorsement of both Senator Pat Toomey – the unassuming, easygoing free-marketer and former head of the economics-focused Club for Growth — and former senator Rick Santorum, a stalwart social conservative and sometimes strident opponent of gay marriage. While Toomey and Santorum are both Pennsylvanians, they epitomize different wings of the GOP. Toomey is an economic libertarian. Santorum is a cultural conservative.

Rubio also has gained supporters from the GOP’s third wing: foreign-policy conservatives. (In this vividly mixed metaphor, the Republican elephant is a three-winged bird. Also, the average Republican combines these elements, although typically with one of these three wings being first among equals.)

Rubio has scored an array of endorsements across the party’s philosophical spectrum. From roughly the center-right to the right-right, these include — among many others – liberal to moderate Republicans such as former governor George Pataki of New York, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee, and Representative Peter King of New York, a national-security hawk. “Most important of all for me,” King said, “Marco has a thorough knowledge of foreign policy and fully understands the true nature of the terrorist threat.”

Moderate Republicans for Rubio include senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Orrin Hatch of Utah; former senators Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Bob Dole of Kansas; and former governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota. Hatch said, “Marco has a unique ability to effectively communicate detailed, conservative plans in a way that attracts people who do not normally vote for Republicans.”

Prominent economic/libertarian Republicans in Rubio’s corner include senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Tim Scott of South Carolina, Representative Matt Salmon of Arizona, former senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and past president of the Club for Growth and former Indiana congressman Chris Chocola. “I am proud to support Marco Rubio, a strong fiscal conservative and living testament to the American Dream,” Chocola said.

Among social conservatives, Rubio counts Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas, former governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby, the company that sued to stop Obama from forcing it to include free abortifacients in its employee health plan. “Marco Rubio has impressed us with his preparation and the way he carries himself,” Green said. “But most importantly, Marco regularly exhibits humility and gives the glory to God.”

Some of Rubio’s most fervent detractors will point to Rubio’s appeal across the Republican party as proof that he is the reincarnation of Nelson Rockefeller. This charge is utterly preposterous, given Rubio’s 100 percent legislative-vote ratings from the American Security Council, the National Tax Limitation Committee, and the National Right to Life Committee and his 0 percent approval from Peace Action West, Americans for Democratic Action, and NARAL/Pro-Choice America. Nonetheless, this accusation is virtually antibiotic resistant in some circles, largely due to lingering suspicions over Rubio’s membership in the Senate’s informal Gang of Eight comprehensive-immigration-reform task force.

Still, it’s important for Rubio’s fans and foes alike to remember that fighting the general election with the Republican party in splinters is a splendid way to lose to socialist senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont or socialist crook Hillary Clinton of New York. Party unity will be key to defeating the Democrats and their standing army of activists, street thugs, union volunteers, and loyal cheerleaders in show business and the old-guard news media.

The Rats Are Scurrying: Republican Officeholders Who Endorse Trump Are Sellouts By Ian Tuttle

The arch-villain in Donald Trump’s storybook account of American politics is the Republican party. The malign forces of progressivism may have been on the march for the past several years. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have been hovering like Nazgûls over the bucolic expanses of middle America. Barack Obama has wielded vengefully the One Pen to Rule Them All. But it’s Republicans who are the real problem. The Grand Old Party has aided and abetted the country’s leftward lurch, proving themselves quislings and cowards all the way down, from John Boehner to John McCain. Breitbart.com hath surveyed the nation, and, lo, there was not a conservative to be found among them!

It turns out that Trump fans were right all along — just not in the way they thought.

On Friday, New Jersey governor Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump in what was surely the most transparent display of affection since Judas Iscariot’s Gethsemane smooch. Not only had Christie spent the last several months blasting his tri-state opponent on the campaign trail — for, among other things, his absurd promise to make Mexico pay for a wall on the United States’ southern border, his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country, and his refusal to address entitlement reform — he reportedly told the New Hampshire Union Leader’s publisher, Joe McQuaid, that he would “never” endorse Trump. Christie says McQuaid is misremembering.

Presumably, Christie thinks an endorsement will increase the likelihood of his securing a position in a Trump administration (and given Trump’s financial history, that is a likelier prospect than his receiving 30 pieces of silver). But he has agreed to be, for the next several months, willingly at the end of Trump’s leash, evidence of which was Trump and Christie’s brief exchange after Christie’s speech in Arkansas: “Get on the plane and go home,” Trump said, caught on a hot mic. “It’s over. Go home.” There are pimps and prostitutes with more equitable relationships.

Of Time and Trump : Victor Davis Hanson

Both Donald Trump and his opponents are up against the constraints of time.

Trump wants to run out the clock; Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want overtime. Trump does not want any more Texas-debate–style fights with Rubio and Cruz, and yet he still has four more debates on his schedule. In each one, we will see a geometric increase in attacks on Trump — all the more so if Carson or Kasich, or both, drop out, and the allotted debate time is split just three ways.

For the first time in the already too long series of debates, candidates descended to Trump’s brash style of street fighting. And they wounded him — not enough to seriously injure his candidacy, but enough for us to see how more of the same certainly might (and how more far earlier might have done so already).

The problem for Trump is not just that he cannot score points on ideas and so he monotonously strikes back with ad hominem slurs, but also that, off the cuff and in passing, he is capable of saying almost anything. Over two hours, those anythings — especially when they are windows into his past and his present values — finally add up.

So far Trump’s supporters have put up with his hypocrisies, self-contradictions, and unhinged statements — as if all that is felt to be a small price for hearing him pulverize Washington careerists, media flunkies, hypocritical grandees, and Republican sellouts. Americans are sick and tired of Black Lives Matter careerists and abject racists calling them racists, of wealthy apartheid liberals lecturing them about their white-privileged middle-class status, of crony green capitalists with huge carbon footprints, of hypocritical multimillionaire Malibu scolds, of the media hectoring the 52 percent who pay income taxes and canonizing the 48 percent who do not, of illegal aliens laying down to them a set of ultimatums while praising the country they were glad to leave and ankle-biting the one they want to stay in, of elites worrying more about the feelings of Islamic radicals than the terrorism that jihadists commit, and of our elected representatives borrowing more money for more government programs that make things far worse for everybody except those who run them.

BARRY SHAW: BDS FOR IDIOTS

http://www.amazon.com/BDS-IDIOTS-BOYCOTT-ISRAEL-honestly/dp/152372157X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456832008&sr=8-1&keywords=barry+shaw

Shaw humiliates the cretins who ignore all human rights violations, and all the carnage and savagery in the world to condemn the only democracy in the world…rsk

From Reviews:

“BDS (“Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment”) is the name of the umbrella organisation for all those people who want to shelter their antisemitism under the guise of ‘only seeking’ the destruction of the State of Israel. As the author says: “BDS is a three letter metaphor for negativity. In their practice their initials stand for Bias, Deception and Slander. We need to out them, to name them, and shame them. They need to be exposed for the fraudsters they are. It’s time to humiliate them. This book does that with facts, anecdotes and humor”. And indeed that is exactly what the book does. It contains a combination of the author’s own thoughts and anecdotes along with contributions from others who have been active in combating the wave of antisemitism dressed up as anti-Israel sentiments (Mitchell Bard, Pat Condell, Edgar Davidson, Alan Dershowitz, Bassem Eid, Matti Friedman, Caroline Glick, Howard Jacobson, and Denis Prager). There does not seem to be a kindle version available yet, but the book is well worth the £7.”

“An amazing book. Funny and fighting the right fight. It is time to expose BDS supporter for what they are. At best, a bunch of uneducated dreamers, but mostly, anti-Semites, pro-dictatorships, anti-West, anti-basic human values. BDS supporters are criminals and, certainly, the worst enemies to Palestinians, since their action affect Arabs living in Judea Samaria much more than it affect Israel’s economy.”

Time to Draw Lines and Defend Them Caroline Glick

At a certain point, you just have to know when draw a line in the sand.

Sloan and Guy Rachmuth, Jewish parents in Durham, North Carolina, reached that point in 2014 when they opted to walk away from their local Jewish day school and home school their two children.

The Rachmuths pulled their children out of the Lerner School when they concluded the school would not abide by its commitment to assist “all students in developing a positive Jewish identity and pride in their Jewish heritage.”

As committed Zionists, the Rachmuths were dismayed to see that far from fulfilling its commitment, the Lerner school was cultivating a learning environment that questioned the legitimacy of the Jewish national liberation movement and of the State of Israel.

Perhaps the turning point was when the school took down all the maps of Israel from the classroom walls. Perhaps it was when their five-year-old son came home and asked them why the map of Israel hurt some people’s feelings.

Perhaps it was when they discovered that the school had employed a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activist as a Hebrew teacher. Perhaps it was when they discovered that the school’s development director and former president of the board was an anti-Israel activist whose group, Jews for a Just Peace, had joined forces with the anti-Semitic and rabidly anti-Israel BDS groups Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement.

Perhaps it was when the school refused to back Israel during Operation Protective Edge during the summer of 2014.

Or perhaps the Rachmuths felt obliged to draw their line and walk away when they got the sense that the school rejected not only their Zionism, but vigorously opposed their right to defend their values.

According to Andrew Passin’s two-part report on the Rachmuth family’s ordeal published by JNS, in internal memos, the current school board president Tal Wittle referred to Sloan Rachmuth’s repeated complaints about the school’s diffident position on Israel, and the dominant role BDS supporters played at the school as “bigotry.”

The Mullahs Execute Every Man in an Entire Village While the world’s human rights watchdogs continue their romance with the Iranian regime. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Where is the professional journalism the mainstream media keeps talking about? While they have been focusing on Iran’s artificial democratic elections, the mainstream liberal outlets seem to have intentionally ignored one of the most heinous and egregious acts that the ruling mullahs of Iran committed during the elections.

The Islamist henchmen of the Islamic Republic executed every man in a village in the province Sistan-Baluchestan, according to the latest report coming from Iran. Shahindokht Molaverdi, the vice president for women and family affairs, called for increased protection for the families of the executed as she claimed to a Persian news outlet that “We have a village in Sistan-Baluchestan (province) where every single man has been executed.”

In addition, while liberal journalists often report on the mass executions that are being carried out by the non-state militia — the Islamic State — they have chosen to ignore larger scale of human rights violations by a powerful Islamist state, Iran.

Iran has surpassed China in the number of executions being carried out per capita, now ranking at the top. The number of executions of juveniles, women, and political prisoners has significantly increased under the government of the so-called moderate president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.

Teaching Antisemitism at Vassar—and Beyond by Rael Jean Isaac

The anti-Semitic hysteria on many elite American campuses (the veil of anti-Zionism now thrown off) is belatedly becoming the subject of major concern in the Jewish community. As well it should. The young people of this community, in what should be idyllic years, are being exposed, often for the first time in their lives, to unreasoning hatred. Moreover what starts on campus does not stay there. Those whose opinions are shaped in our colleges and universities move on to become the opinion shapers of the broader culture: the journalists, the academics, the professionals, the entertainers, the politicians.

While their children may not be subject to the intimidation and bullying Jews encounter, non-Jews should also be deeply worried. Most would be horrified to see our colleges descend into what Victor Davis Hanson calls places “as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic.” Parents hope their children will be introduced to what Matthew Arnold called the best that has been thought and said, not mired in impenetrable thickets of verbiage, behind which lie ignorance, falsehoods and malice.

Take the lecture on Feb. 3 by Rutgers Associate Professor Jasbir Puar at Vassar College. Under the title “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters,” the invitation declared: “This lecture theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine….If Gaza, for example, is indeed the world’s largest ‘open air prison’ and experimental lab for Israeli military apparatuses, infrastructural chaos and metric manipulation, what kinds of fantasies (about power, about bodies, about resistance, about politics) are driving this project? ”

Ignoring for the moment the verbal sludge, what are Puar’s credentials to hold forth on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs? She teaches Women’s and Gender Studies and “has written widely” (so says the invitation) on such subjects as gay and lesbian tourism, bio and necropolitics, queer theory disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect and assemblage ; homonationalism etc. etc. Equally mysterious, why should American Studies, the Vassar department which invited Puar, find the Middle East a topic that fits into its bailiwick? The answer lies in a word the reader probably didn’t even notice in the mind-blowing flood of jargon: intersectionality. Richard L. Cravatts, author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel and Jews, explains that intersectionality conflates seemingly unrelated instances of oppression so that to know one victim group is to know any victim group. As a result, says Cravatts, “someone who is a gender studies professor, or queer theorist, or American studies expert can, with no actual knowledge or expertise about the Middle East, readily pontificate on the many social pathologies of Israel, based on its perceived role as a racist, colonial oppressor of an innocent indigenous population of Arab victims.”

The Paranoid View of History Infects Oberlin Promoting classic anti-Semitic tropes goes unchecked at one of America’s finest liberal arts institutions. Richard L. Cravatts

“Anti-Semitism,” wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About The Jews, “is the stupid answer to a serious question: How does history operate behind our backs?” For a wide range of ideological extremists, anti-Semitism is still the stupid answer for why what goes wrong with the world does go wrong. It is a philosophical world view and interpretation of history that creates conspiracies as a way of explaining the unfolding of historical events; it is a pessimistic and frantic outlook, characterized in 1964 by historian Richard Hofstadter as “the paranoid style” of politics, which shifts responsibility from the self to sinister, omnipotent others—typically and historically the Jews.

Long the thought product of cranks and fringe groups, Hofstadter’s paranoid style of politics has lately entered the mainstream of what would be considered serious, and respectable academic enterprise. Witness, for instance, the Facebook posts of Joy Karega, an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oberlin College, who wildly claimed that Jewish bankers control the world economy and have financed every war since Napoleon, that Israelis and Zionists were not only behind the 9/11 attacks in New York but also orchestrated the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, and that Israeli fingerprints could be found in the downing over Ukraine of Malaysian Air Flight 17 and also in the rise of ISIS.