RUTHFULLY YOURS

A candle is a brief flare of light. A wick dipped in oil burns and then goes out again. The light of Chanukah appears to follow the same narrative. Briefly there is light and warmth and then darkness again.

Out of the exile of Babylon, the handful that returned to resettle and rebuild the land faced the might of new empires. The Jews who returned from the exile of one evil empire some twenty-six hundred years ago were forced to decide whether they would be a people with their own faith and history, or the colony of another empire, with its history and beliefs.

Jerusalem’s wealthy elites threw in their lot with the empire and its ways. But out in the rural heartland where the old ways where still kept, a spark flared to life. Modi’in. Maccabee.

And so war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations.

The caption under the lead photo in last Monday’s New York Times spoke volumes: “Worldwide rallies on Sunday, demanding a halt to climate change…” As if any person or group of people can halt the climate from changing! Were it so simple!

Despite words that will be uttered and proclamations that will be issued by those attending the UN Climate talks in Paris, they will have little lasting effect. There are myriad reasons: This is the 22nd conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, yet little, if anything, has been accomplished. Thousands of UN employees and tens of thousands of others in government have a vested interest in the perpetuation of these conferences, which incur huge costs. There are, for example, 40,000 people from 190 countries attending this conference. (President Obama had 500 in his retinue.) Bjorn Lomborg (author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”) recently noted in the Financial Times, that if one ran all the pledges through the UN climate model, one would find that by 2100 temperatures would be cut by just 0.05 degrees centigrade. On a cost/benefit analysis, does this make sense? China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, does not have to comply with standards until 2030. Developing nations see an opportunity for an enormous wealth transfer – in their favor. Despite allegations by those on the Left, man’s exact contribution to climate change is unknown. We do not even know if he is the principal cause. This would not be a treaty in the usual sense. Mr. Obama may unilaterally sign an agreement, but it could be nullified by his successor. He will not seek the advice and consent of the Senate. Apart from the $20 billion R&D fund announced by Bill Gates, the talks are heavy on talk and demands and light on action and innovation.

However inadvertently, the father of San Bernardino jihadist Syed Rizwan Farook has demonstrated an inconvenient truth to which Washington, in its bipartisan infatuation with “moderate Islamists,” is willfully blind: All Islamists, regardless of whether they are violent jihadists or non-violent “moderates,” have the same goals, which are driven by dictates of sharia.

As reported in the Times of Israel, the father, whose name is also Syed Farook, told the Italian daily La Stampa, that Farook the younger subscribed to the Islamic supremacist ideology of Islamic State (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, including the creation of a caliphate, the sharia governing system.

While Washington would have you believe that the goal of creating a caliphate is an “extremist” position not shared by “moderates,” the fact is that sharia makes the caliphate and the designation of someone from the Islamic community to be the governing caliph obligatory. See, e.g., my column on the sharia manual Reliance of the Traveller in connection with the Charlie Hebdo massacre (sec. o25 explains “The Caliphate”). The controversy in Islamist circles is whether Baghdadi is a suitable caliph and whether he has established a caliphate in accordance with sharia strictures; but there is no denying that Islamists support the establishment of a caliphate … except in the Beltway haven of fantasy Islam.

Last week a Palestinian terrorist named Mazen Aribah shot two Israelis, just north of Jerusalem. What made this incident especially noteworthy was that Aribah was also a Palestinian Authority police officer.

How does the PA react to such a terrible event, where one of its own officers commits an act of terror? By honoring him. On Saturday, Saeb Erekat visited the home of Aribah’s family to pay his respects to Aribah, who had been killed by Israeli police at the scene of his attacks.

Erekat is in fact the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel as well as a high PLO official, so one may say the path to peace is in the hands of a man who thinks it appropriate to honor terrorists. The PA and PLO do this all the time, naming parks and schools after killers, but this occasion was especially remarkable. While John Kerry, in Washington, was lecturing Israel about peace in a speech in Washington on Saturday (“But while saying that ‘I understand why Israelis feel besieged,’ Kerry directed most of his cautions toward Israel,” said the Washington Post), there were three more terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Israelis on Friday.

Recently, PBS-TV aired a “travel documentary” by travel writer Rick Steves titled “The Holy Land.” For all intents and purposes it appeared to be a political statement slanted to elicit sympathy for the Palestinians, albeit, it was presented with debased moral equivalency, leaving the narratives devoid of substantive facts. The hour-long special, Steves explained, “weaves together both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives. In Israel, we go from the venerable ramparts of Jerusalem to the vibrant modern skyline of Tel Aviv. In Palestine, we harvest olives near Hebron, visit a home in Bethlehem, and pop into a university in Ramallah. We also learn about security walls, disputed settlements, and persistent challenges facing the region.”

While Israel is an existing state, Palestine is not. Steves reveals his sympathies by conferring the attributes of a state to Palestine. Moreover, Steves failed to provide historical background beyond shallow and superficial comments. Had he delved into the history of the Holy Land in the last hundred years, he would have discovered that during the British Mandatory era, (1922-1948) Jews rather than Arabs were called Palestinians.

Seeming to give proof to Orwell’s observation that some ideas are so stupid they could only have been thought of by intellectuals, yet another academic association—this time the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—has followed the lead of the American Studies Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Asian Studies Association, and several others by ignobly voting to approve another academic boycott of Israel.

With the characteristic pseudo-intellectual babble that currently dilutes the scholarly relevance of the social sciences and humanities, the NWSA’s recommendation to approve a boycott announced that, “As feminist scholars, activists, teachers, and public intellectuals we recognize the interconnectedness of systemic forms of oppression,” that “interconnectedness,” no doubt, justifying the singling out of Israeli academics for their particularly odious role in the oppression of women in the Middle East. “In the spirit of this intersectional perspective,” these moral termagants continued, “we cannot overlook the injustice and violence, including sexual and gender-based violence, perpetrated against Palestinians and other Arabs in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, within Israel and in the Golan Heights, as well as the colonial displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba.”