RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to legend, if not actual historians, Harold Macmillan was once asked what he most feared could derail his agenda. The British prime minister allegedly said, “Events, my dear boy, events.”

Macmillan may never have actually said it, but the quote endures because it gets at a fundamental truth of politics (and life). Facts on the ground can deliver a fatal blow to one’s most cherished plans.

The line kept coming to mind as I listened to President Obama’s remarkable news conference Monday from the G-20 meeting in Turkey. Asked again and again whether he underestimated the threat from Islamic State, a group he once dismissed as a “JV team,” the president said, in effect, “no.”

Of course, he used a lot more words, but that was the gist: “It’s important for us to get the strategy right, and the strategy that we are pursuing is the right one.” He added that “the terrible events in Paris were obviously a terrible and sickening setback.”

Critics who disagree, he said, shouldn’t “pop off” with their half-baked and ill-considered opinions. He’s “not interested” in what he sees as mere sloganeering about “American leadership or America winning” that distract him from his strategy.

As I listened to French president Francois Hollande over the weekend, I was struck by the familiarity of the ritual phrases he used to signal the French response to the well-orchestrated terror attacks that swept through my old neighborhood in Paris on Friday the 13th like a moveable feast of impotence and death.

“France will be merciless toward the Daesh barbarians,” the president declaimed, referring to the Islamic State by its Arabic-language sobriquet. “France will act with all the legal means at its disposal.”

As I recall, that’s the same thing Hollande said in January after another group of jihadi Muslim terrorists assaulted the editorial offices of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, murdering journalists, cartoonists, and a security guard.

And it was the same language he used a few days later when yet another group of jihadi Muslims hit a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Ten months later, what “merciless” steps have the French government taken against Daesh. Have they done anything to staunch the flow of young French Muslims traveling to Syria who plan to continue their jihad against the “infidel” West after they return to Europe?

I know we Israelis are supposed to endure whatever we suffer in guilty silence. Apparently, we deserve the violence in our streets and against our kids because of “the occupation,” which justifies any Palestinian crime, no matter how tangential, evil, counterproductive, or aimed at destroying us rather than at solving our problems. I know that after years of Israelis negating the exile (shlilat hagolah), we now have shlilat zion, negating Zion, with many American Jewish liberals bashing Israel while resenting the slightest Zionist critique offered the supposedly perfect, thriving, untouchable, American Jewish community.

And yes, I know that Benjamin Netanyahu stumbled when blaming the Palestinian hero, the pro-Hitler Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, for Hitler’s Final Solution, and shouldn’t have appointed the undiplomatic Ran Baratz to head public diplomacy. But wandering Jerusalem with a can of pepper spray in my left pocket, an extra pair of eyes in the back of my head and numerous new holes in my heart, for all the innocents killed, wounded and traumatized, I wonder: were Netanyahu’s missteps really the last month’s biggest outrages? This isn’t aimed at you if you tweeted or emailed about Bibi’s boo-boos while also objecting to Mahmoud Abbas’s inflammatory lies, to the murdering of Israelis, to stabbing a 13-year-old Jerusalemite in the neck forcing him to fight for his life instead of preparing for his bar mitzvah, to Gideon Levy’s absurd claim in Haaretz that “even Gandhi” would turn violent if he were a Palestinian, or to any of the misleading headlines obscuring Palestinian violence yet blaming Israel.