RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sorry to break the good news to some of our conservative friends, but it turns out that most immigrants to America are assimilating as their forebears did. That’s the gist of a new 400-page report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which looks at everything from English proficiency, education levels and family structure to health, crime and employment.

Here’s the money sentence: “Across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than their parents were.”

Across all measurable outcomes. That bears repeating, especially when so many are painting immigrants who come here to work as criminals or welfare mooches. To take one example, the Donald Trump brain trust at the Center for Immigration Studies recently found “significantly higher welfare use associated with immigrants.”

There are few more outspoken proponents of conservative ideas in North American Jewry today than Ruth Wisse: pioneer of the academic study of modern Jewish literature, longtime professor of Yiddish and Yiddish literature at McGill and Harvard, essayist, political commentator and author of a dozen books. In works such as If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Wisse argues that Jews must stop blaming themselves for the hatred, past and present, of Judaism and Jews. Rather, she says, Jews must first demand from others acknowledgment of the right of the Jews to exist as a people and a nation-state. Anything short of that is racism, she says, which undermines not only Jewish rights but democratic values in America and abroad. Unsurprisingly, Wisse often finds herself at odds with mainstream liberalism on issues including Israel, feminism and American politics.

A bombshell report by the Washington Times reveals that fecklessness in the face of terror isn’t a condition exclusive to the Obama administration. “Bill Clinton’s administration gathered enough evidence to send a top-secret communique accusing Iran of facilitating the deadly 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing,” the Times states, “but suppressed that information from the American public and some elements of U.S. intelligence for fear it would lead to an outcry for reprisal, according to documents and interviews.”

Nineteen American servicemen were killed in that attack and another 372 people were wounded when a tanker laden with plastic explosives was driven into the parking lot and detonated next to the eight-story dormitory used for U.S. Air Force personnel assigned to the Gulf. A U.S. indictment was issued in 2001 charging 13 Saudis and a Lebanese man with the crime for which then-Attorney General John Ashcroft blamed Iran, stating they “inspired, supported and supervised members of Saudi Hezbollah.” Yet no Iranian officials were named or charged, nor was the Iranian government accused of any legal responsibility for the atrocity.

According to memos obtain by the Times, the intelligence demonstrating Iranian involvement in the attack was characterized as extensive and credible. It included interviews by the FBI of a half-dozen Saudi co-conspirators who told the agency their passports were provided by the Iranian embassy in Damascus. They further revealed they reported to a top Iranian general, and received training from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), according to FBI officials.