RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of State John Kerry explained at the State Department’s Climate and Clean Energy Investment Forum today why climate change is “certainly one of two of the defining issues of our generation and perhaps the defining issue of our generation, because of the stakes.”

“The other being the rise of radical extremism, sectarianism, and the failure of states simultaneously surrounding it, and vast populations of young people needing jobs instead of mind-bending theories of false assumptions about Islam and other things. Both are gigantic challenges,” Kerry acknowledged.

But “thankfully,” he said, “the solution to this particular challenge, climate change, is actually just as simple as the realization that it is the challenge that it is.”

COP-21, the 21st Conference of the Parties (to the Global Climate Treaty) is convening in Paris (November 30 to December 11, 2015) to try to impose global restrictions on the emission of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide. The usual cast of characters will show up — delegates from nearly 200 nations, who have made a lifetime career out of the climate business, plus some 15,000 hangers-on. We think they will fail to reach an effective international agreement — for a variety of reasons: Important developing countries have other priorities; scandals are brewing and may flare up; and the climate itself is not cooperating. But the media will portray Paris as a huge success, trying to burnish the environmental-climate legacy of President Barack Obama.

Paris will be a big “nothing-burger”

Do you remember Anne Gorsuch, who may have coined this pungent term? She was the first female administrator of EPA, and rather different from both Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy. Gorsuch served for a couple of years in the Reagan administration, during which time she managed to cut the EPA budget and slim down the agency. She proved that a determined administrator can do something to rein in the regulatory excesses of the EPA. [Actually, one of the most effective ways of achieving that goal might be to expand the EPA office in Alaska, and then transfer most of the Washington activists to that office.]

Supporters of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar Assad are truly rare among that country’s Christian minority, yet Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Christian-Muslim Understanding (ACMCU) found one. Hartford Seminary Professor Najib George Awad’sSeptember 28 presentation (audio) before six people in ACMCU’s boardroom continued a longstanding, surreal ACMCU pattern of never locating Christians with any fears of Islam.

With ACMCU professor and fellow Syrian Christian expatriate Yvonne Haddad moderating, Awad drew upon his previous writing to recast minority in Syria’s context away from a numerical concept. Referencing French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Awad discussed “minoratization as a verb,” a process in which oppressive circumstances create for disfavored groups a status “qualitative in nature…something people transform into.” During decades of Syria’s Assad family dictatorship in particular, regime opponents endured “radical and merciless minoritization,” even though they were Syria’s “dominant majority” across ethnic and sectarian divisions. “In the Arab world today, secularism, democracy and liberalism are the real minority,” he wrote in 2014, including in Syria the “majority of the Syrian public rebelling against the systematic suppression and criminality of the regime.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity during his speech to the 37th World Zionist Congress, to speak from his Zionist heart to the hearts of Zionists everywhere.

Netanyahu used the occasion to rally supporters of Israel and to call upon them to spread the truth about Zionism and Israel. He spoke during the midst of a wave of terror in Israel unlike any in recent time. The stabbing, shooting, car-ramming attacks on Israeli citizens just during the month of October alone has unnerved many. Once again the media and the outside world uses moral equivalency or worse to condemn Israel for the terror unleashed against its citizens.

Netanyahu’s rock steady speech enlisted all supporters of Israel in the battalion of truth tellers about Israel. The physical attacks are being endured solely by Israelis, but the fight against the vilification of the Jewish State is something in which everyone can and must participate.

The ammunition Netanyahu provided the troops he enlisted consists solely of truth. The truths that can and will deflate the myths perpetuated by so many against the Jewish State.

In all, Netanyahu summarized into Ten Big Lies being told about Israel, and he provided answers to all of them. The entire speech can be found here.