RUTHFULLY YOURS

In A HISTORY LESSON FOR RICK STEVES Exposing PBS’s biased documentary on the Holy Land.
The author, Joseph Puder, omitted the fact that OF the original British Mandate for Palestine (Israel), 78% of it was given away by Churchill to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (Jordan). Palestine (Israel) was left with a mere 22% of its promised traditional homeland, where the Jews had lived continuously for over 3,700 years – even after the Romans destroyed their state of Judea in 70 A.D.
Not only was this land grab for Transjordan a violation of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (Israel) but it went against the San Remo Conference of 1920, the Treaty of Lausanne and the Treaty of Sevres.
All of this occurred following World War I when the Turkish Ottoman Empire was being divided to create Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan.
Shame on Rick Steves!

Janet Levy,
Los Angeles

op-culture has never seen anything like this: Unprecedented ratings, a cult-following without a rival and the kind of events no other show has ever pulled off,” gushed Troy Smith in Cleveland.com on October 13th. “This past Friday night, ‘The Walking Dead’ drew more than 13,000 zombie-crazed fans to Madison Square Garden in New York City for a special premiere of Season 6.” This degree of enthusiasm for what barely counted as a B-movie genre a generation ago is one of the strangest, and most revealing, features of American popular culture.

In the 1930s, when Universal Studios brought out its classic monster films, one out of 300 features was a horror film. Monsters were different back then: exotic imports, party-crashers who clearly did not belong. We humans always guessed their hidden weaknesses, then drove a stake through their hearts. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, though, the monsters began to win for the first time. Satan successfully begat an heir in “Rosemary’s Baby,” and the devil’s child wiped out the competition in The Omen.

Ten years ago the horror genre, thrillers with an expressly supernatural element, supplied one out of 25 film industry products. By 2013 the proportion had risen to one in eight. Horror films touch a number of sore points in the American psyche. Vampires embody a perverse eroticism, which Anne Rice was tasteless enough to make explicit. Satanic apocalypse stories address a more generalized fear. The Frankenstein monster and his emulators speak to our fear of technology. Intelligent scripts and artful acting occasionally have found their way into these themes.

Whatever else was accomplished, the congressional hearings on Benghazi last month were a reminder that the Obama administration’s Libyan expedition failed. Libya has been in turmoil since the beginning of the Libyan civil war in 2011. American airstrikes and a no-fly zone helped a mix of moderate and Islamist groups topple Moammar Qaddafi’s brutal regime in 2011, but the country is no more stable. Libya descended into civil war again in 2014, with the internationally recognized government fighting for control of the country against Ansar al-Sharia and the Islamist New General National Congress.

The situation is much worse today. As of October 2015, the Islamic State (IS) has taken military control of the area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace. Sirte lies along the Libyan coastline, positioned between the major ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Islamic State now has full control of a strategically positioned coastal area in an unstable country that has become a proxy battlefield for Middle Eastern powers, and through which millions of refugees from Africa might be allowed to pass on their way to Europe.

On November 19th, Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain and Senator Ben Cardin expressed concern over what they fear is an apparently weakening relationship between the U.S. and Taiwan. The letter noted the Obama administration’s lack of arms transfers to Taiwan for the past four years, particularly as the PRC’s power rises on the high seas. With Chinese aggression increasing, especially in the South and East China Seas, and Obama’s term drawing to a close the time is right to restate the case for American support of Taiwan, and to chart a wise course of action for invigorating the ROC’s ability to defend itself.

The relationship between U.S. and Taiwan dates to the 1930s, when Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalist Kuomintang controlled the mainland. The U.S. supported the Nationalist Chinese in their war against Imperial Japan. The U.S. imposed an embargo on Japan in 1940 because of its invasion of mainland China, and some of the first U.S. combat operations in World War II supported the Nationalists. The U.S. unofficially sponsored an air wing called the American Volunteer Group to support the Nationalists in the summer of 1941. Known as the Flying Tigers, this unit was critical to the Nationalists’ defense in late 1941 and early 1942, and gave the U.S. and its allies critical breathing room to respond to Japanese offensives in the Western Pacific.