RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces, has made it his personal goal to strike peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

A former top adviser to the Saudi government, Eshki raised eyebrows in June when he appeared alongside Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General and longtime confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Dore Gold at a conference held by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC, espousing desires to build a Saudi-Israel peace, especially to counter the regionally destabilizing expansion of Iran.

“The main project between me and Dore Gold is to bring peace between Arab countries and Israel,” said Eshki.

The former general noted that while the initiative is “personal,” Riyadh “knows about the project” and “isn’t against it, because we need peace.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423003/print

Donald Trump is the king of the superlative. To The Donald, things are always the best, the worst, the greatest of all time. Love him or hate him, we know Donald Trump’s opinion on many topics. Even if those topics mostly have to do with himself.

We present the top, the biggest, the greatest of The Donald’s superlatives:

1. “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”

America needs jobs. The Donald will deliver.

2. “I’m really rich! I’ll show you that in a second. And by the way: I’m not even saying that in a brag.”

Trump is richer than you. And more humble, too.

3. “I’m the most militaristic person ever.”

Is that actually a good quality? I would have gone with Genghis Khan . . .

4. “I will build a great wall . . . and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.”

We will probably have to take The Donald’s word on this one.

5. “Hillary Clinton was the worst secretary of state in the history of the United States. Hillary was the worst. In the history of the United States there’s never been a secretary of state so bad as Hillary.”

Whoa now. Don’t sell John Kerry short.

6. “I would use the greatest minds. I know the best negotiators. I’m in New York – I know the good ones, the bad ones. I always say: ‘I know the ones people think are good.’ I know people you’ve never heard of that are better than all of them.”

The man behind The Apprentice will stock his cabinet with the best of the best.

7. “If you really love this country you have a very, very hard time convincing people that what you’re doing is right and that you’re really smart. And, like, a lot of us are really smart. I’m really smart – I went to the Wharton School of Finance.”

Trump attended an Ivy League school, so he’s not like those bozos George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

8. “I would hit [ISIS] so hard your head would spin.”

Trump is probably right about this one. He has, after all, been inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment’s Hall of Fame.

— Mark Antonio Wright is an intern at National Review.

This month, the Environmental Protection Agency released its new guidelines for the states to follow in reducing emissions from the power plants that provide reliable electricity for our homes, schools, offices, and hospitals. These regulations will do little to improve the environment, but will significantly increase our monthly electric bills, cause frequent power outages, destroy millions of jobs, and shut down entire companies at a time when the economy needs a boost, not a brake.

The EPA’s “Clean Power Plan for Existing Power Plants” requires states to cut carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants by almost a third from what they were in 2005 — and to do it in just 15 years. Coal-burning power plants and even the cleaner-burning natural-gas-fired plants are the targets, and the Obama administration intends for “green” energy sources like wind and solar to replace them.

How could Hillary Clinton’s staff let her get away with it?

It’s one of the most perplexing questions surrounding the massive scandal over Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private e-mail server when she served as secretary of state. How could it be that no one in the State Department pointed out that Clinton was violating government policy and putting sensitive information at risk? Why didn’t her closest advisers warn that the move could torpedo her resurgent presidential ambitions?

State Department staffers aren’t talking — not yet, at least. But the thousands of Clinton e-mails reluctantly released by the State Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit are illuminating. They reveal a Secretary of State heavily insulated from her agency’s rank-and-file by a devoted inner circle, one which relentlessly lavished praise on Clinton and sometimes functioned more like receptionists than top strategic advisers. Many of the same confidantes appear set to take high-level jobs in a future Clinton White House, meaning her “yes-man problem” is likely to persist should she become president.

Leftwingers’ taunts in 2008 and 2012 have come back to haunt them.
In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.”

For Democratic progressives, Hawaiian Barack Obama could not be of mixed ancestry and decidedly middle class, but simply “black” or “African American” — as if he had shared the Jim Crow experience of Clarence Thomas. Nor was there any allowance that race itself had become hard to sort into neat categories in a nation of immigration, intermarriage, and assimilation, in which millions of Americans were one-half this and one-quarter that. Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King proved that well enough by successfully constructing themselves as white for quite a long time.

It has been a while since I’ve contributed anything meaningful to Wikipedia. My last encounter there ended badly and resulted in an “indefinite topic ban,” Wikipedia jargon for the Siberian gulag. Essentially, an anti-Israel administrator decreed that I can no longer contribute or edit the Arab-Israeli topic area and if I attempted to do so, my account would be blocked. An appeal proved to be an exercise in futility, drawing on the same swarm of malcontents who made their appearance in the initial proceeding clamoring for a ban. I thus joined the lot of countless other editors who have tried and failed to insert a modicum of balance into Wikipedia’s Arab-Israeli topic area.

The rise and continuing popularity of Donald Trump reminds us that “class warfare” is an eternal constant of democracies, for as Plato said, every city is in fact two cities, “one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” But possession of wealth is not the only factor in this eternal conflict between the few and the many. The masses of course resent the elites’ greater wealth, but even more they dislike the assumption of superior wisdom and virtue that elites have always claimed as justifications for their status. It is this galling assumption and the anger it arouses in people that Donald Trump has brilliantly exploited.

Many Republicans correctly see that this popular anger is usually directed against progressives. The typical Democrat reflexively assumes that he is smarter and better educated, thinks more “scientifically,” and has more cultivated tastes than the masses in flyover country who cling bitterly to their guns and religion, as the President once said. All true, but many in the Republican elite often display the same attitudes. We saw this in some of the responses to Trump’s remarks on immigration. Lindsey Graham called Trump a “wrecking ball,” and Jeb Bush said Trump’s remarks were “unfortunate” and advised, “We must have a more civil policy debate in this country.” In other words, it wasn’t the truth of Trump’s remarks that mattered, but their déclassé tone. Similarly, John McCain has called Tea Partiers and Trump followers “crazies” and “wacko-birds.” The implication is that social inferiors and ignoramuses are meddling in the business of their betters.

Senator Markey has announced his support for the Iran deal that will let the terrorist regime inspect its own Parchin nuclear weapons research site, conduct uranium enrichment, build advanced centrifuges, buy ballistic missiles, fund terrorism and have a near zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb.

There was no surprise there.

Markey had topped the list of candidates supported by the Iran Lobby. And the Iranian American Political Action Committee (IAPAC) had maxed out its contributions to his campaign.

After more fake suspense, Al Franken, another IAPAC backed politician who also benefited from Iran Lobby money, came out for the nuke sellout.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Iran Lobby’s third Dem senator, didn’t bother playing coy like her colleagues. She came out for the deal a while back even though she only got half the IAPAC cash that Franken and Markey received.

Britain’s problems with Scotland and the EU have a common origin: an ancient constitution ill-adjusted to our democratic age. The solution: federalism at home, intergovernmentalism abroad and, most of all, the manifestation of a national will to effect much-needed change
During last year’s Scottish referendum, a shocking 45 per cent of voters showed themselves in favour of independence from the United Kingdom, whilst during the recent general election Britain’s first-past-the-post system ensured that the Scottish National Party won almost all of Scotland’s seats at Westminster. That is not a sign of a happy, healthy polity.

Abroad, in its relations with Europe during the last sixty years, Britain has vacillated. On the one hand, it has been a largely reluctant participant in the supranational, confederal project of European political integration represented by the European Union (EU) and its forerunners; on the other hand, before finally joining this project it had set up its own intergovernmental institutions focused on free trade rather than political integration, notably in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which it subsequently abandoned but has never quite forgotten. This, too, suggests unhappiness, as well as an inability to shape events and uncertainty as to how to proceed.

It has become increasingly clear that these questions are intertwined. Not, as frequently said, because an allegedly pro-EU Scottish population would be more likely to exit the UK if the UK voted to exit the EU, but because many who support Scotland leaving the UK are not in favour of Scotland actually going it alone, but of swapping one union for another. They wish to cut out the UK “middle man”, anchoring an “independent” Scotland to the EU instead. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, pulling this off would be far easier if the UK stayed inside the EU than if it left, since far less would be at stake. Survival of the UK and British membership of the EU are hence likely mutually exclusive in the long run. All of this raises profound questions of identity in a country (or a nation?) consisting of four home nations (or countries?) in which it is still not uncommon to speak of Europe as the Continental Other (as in “Australia, Britain, and Europe”).

Within two weeks of the July 14, 2015 announcement of the dangerous and destabilizing [1] Iran nuclear deal, expatriate Iranian journalist Amir Taheri revealed [2] the recent publication of a 414-page tract, largely a compendium of speeches delivered over the past 25 years by Ayatollah Khamenei.

Despite the publication of the Iranian Ayatollah’s vitriolic tract entitled Palestine, Khamenei was recognized by the avatar of moderate Islam, the Jordanian Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre’s [3] 2014/15 “World’s 500 Most Influential Muslims” (issued annually), as the third most important international Muslim figure [4].

Shortly after Taheri’s revelation, my colleague Daniel Akbari — a former leading Iranian Sharia lawyer credentialed [5] to argue potential death penalty cases in the Islamic State, and now an intrepid human rights activist — procured the full Farsi text (posted here [6]), and translated extensive excerpts [7].

Although unabashedly targeting both Israel and the U.S. — on p. 40 [7] he calls for “Breaking the Back of the Oppressive Americans and Their Zionist Servants (i.e., Israel)” — Khamenei’s opprobrium rivets upon destruction of the Jewish State.

Khamenei elucidates [7] why Israel must be destroyed:

The centrality of Palestine for the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim world is undeniable. Even before to the Islamic Revolution, Palestine, the Palestinian people, and the injustice they were experiencing were important issues for [his theocratic predecessor, and leader of the retrograde [8] 1979 “Revolution”] Imam Khomeini and the movement he led. We cannot observe and tolerate the existence and presence of the [Israeli/Jewish] enemy who has occupied the land …

While this foul wound and infected gland called “the Israeli Government” remain in the heart of Islamic territories, we cannot feel we have won. … Palestine is the most important issue of the Islamic world. Palestine is the most important issue of the world of Islam. There is not any other international issue in the world of Islam more important than the issue of Palestine.

Citing an authoritative, traditionalist interpretation of jihad [9] — as applied with broad, modern jurisprudential consensus to the issue of “Palestine” (i.e., all of modern Israel within the 1949 armistice borders, Gaza, Judea and Samaria) — Khamenei, explaining why “Jihad is the answer,” further declared [7]: