RUTHFULLY YOURS

Spain’s center-right government under Mariano Rajoy continues to pursue policies that are antagonistic towards Israel — policies that are virtually unchanged from the government of former Socialist Prime Minister of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero — policies that largely coincide with the objectives of the BDS movement.

Although Spain’s Foreign Minister has repeatedly said that the government does not support a boycott against Israel, under his watch the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the Foreign Ministry’s primary aid-giving agency, has continued to subsidize organizations that work to delegitimize Israel.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Zapatero government funneled more than €15 million of Spanish taxpayer funds to Palestinian and Spanish non-governmental organizations that are among the leaders in campaigns aimed at delegitimizing Israel via BDS, lawfare and other forms of demonization, according to a comprehensive analysis published by the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor.

The Rajoy government continues to fund NGOs that are involved in anti-Israel activities.

According to the Official Gazette of the Spanish State, for example, NOVA-Centre per la Innovació Social, a Barcelona-based NGO with a history of anti-Israel activism, is slated to receive more than €200,000 in 2015… AECID awarded €200,000 in 2014 to the Catalan Association for Peace, a group that has co-organized a three-year project to “raise awareness” for the BDS movement against Israel.

“The EU calls our ambassadors in because of the construction of a few houses? When did the EU call in the Palestinian ambassadors about incitement that calls for Israel’s destruction?… They don’t tell the Palestinians that they have to make their peace with a nation-state for the Jewish people. They just give the Palestinians a nation-state.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

U.S. policymakers who hope that the nuclear deal will help nudge the Islamic revolutionary state into becoming a normal member of the international community seem to forget the past. Policymakers, journalists, and intelligence analysts had all predicted that the era of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was a sure sign of the evolution of the revolution. Khatami was replaced by the even more hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It seems clear that despite the American political establishment’s failure to recognize that a state of war already exists between Iran and the United States, the Islamic Republic has no doubt with whom it is at war.

Iran has been at war with the “Great Satan” (USA) since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Its opening move was the regime’s seizure of the American Embassy and its taking U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days in 1979-1980. Technically, the move was an internationally recognized casus belli, legitimate cause for war.

In addition, the Iranian regime’s proxy terrorist group, Hezbollah, engineered the murder of 241 U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines in Lebanon on October 23, 1983. Iran also sponsored the truck bombing that murdered 19 US Air Force personnel at the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996,[1] in an attack allegedly executed by a Bahrain-based cell of Hezbollah, with the cooperation of a Saudi-trained Hezbollah cell.[2]

The U.S. Department of Justice recently argued before an Idaho federal court that a law prohibiting sleeping on the streets violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Justice Department’s expressed reasoning: “Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity — i.e., it must occur at some time in some place.” Hence, “If a person literally has nowhere to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.”

Let’s take that reasoning to its logical extension: Another life-sustaining activity is that human beings must get rid of waste, whether by urination or defecation. Would our Justice Department also pontificate that enforcing laws against such natural human activity on city streets is unconstitutional because these laws most directly affect the homeless, who have no readily available bathroom to use?
And what about laws against fornication in public? That, too, is a natural and much-desired activity for most human beings who have reached puberty. Shall that activity also be allowed in public because a homeless couple has no home in which to make love? This is no improbable hypothetical; MSNBC pictured a husband, wife and their 18-month-old son living under the 16th Street bridge in Boise.

The new twist in the controversy surrounding the nuclear agreement is an argument over the veracity of a report on a side deal giving Iran the right to inspect its own nuclear facilities for potential violations. The idea is so preposterous that it must be true, judging by the rest of the top-secret document on which the U.S. Congress is going to vote in September.

But as the debate heats up over whether the deal furthers or hinders Iran’s nuclear weapon capabilities, an equally serious issue keeps being marginalized. This is the more immediate and tangible danger posed by Iran’s terrorist proxies, and the sudden financial and ideological boost the deal is providing them.

The reason it is crucial to keep an eye on their activities is that they constitute Iran’s global army — the boots on the ground, so to speak — who perform the legwork necessary for the ultimate aim of regional and global jihadist hegemony. Their role is to set the stage for that time in the not-so-distant future when Iran’s power and reach are so extensive that its leaders won’t need to waste their nuclear warheads by firing them.

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Hillary Clinton may think those creatures making wide, gentle circles over her campaign are bluebirds of happiness, but they’re looking more and more like buzzards. They look hungry.

The news gets grimmer with every news cycle as she revises and extends everything she has said about her email machine and the classified information that may be on it. She says she can’t remember, and we can believe that much. Sir Walter Scott got it right: “O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

Hillary even upends the famous Washington dictum that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Sometimes it’s both.

We’re hearing the first hints, some of them not so subtle, that the FBI is investigating more than a security situation, defined as a simple matter of learning whether classified information leaked from the State Department when she was the secretary of State, and if so, who it was leaked to. National Public Radio, which usually feeds only the bluebirds of Democratic happiness, reports that it learned from “two lawyers familiar with the inquiry” that a formal criminal investigation is under consideration, presumably at the Justice Department, and it could happen “soon.”

Hillary might not be the first target. She can always find somebody else to throw under the bus or feed to the alligators.

When President Obama signed the Obamacare bill into law, Vice President Joe Biden said, sotto voce, “this is a big (expletive deleted) deal.” So it was. Hillary Clinton’s private email system, on which she trafficked in many of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, is just as big.

Start with the purpose for which Mrs. Clinton established the system. It was to prevent the government — and any historians, journalists and the public — from knowing of and archiving her emails in order for her to evade accountability. The emails to hdr22@clintonmail.com would only be revealed if she agreed, and whatever corruption — remember the Clinton “pay-to-play” Foundation — would never be revealed.

Mrs. Clinton still says she never sent or received classified information on her private nongovernment email system. That more than 300 emails with highly classified information are now identified bothers her not at all.

“This book is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.”

Thus begins professor emeritus Edward Alexander’s latest work, “Jews Against Themselves” (Transaction Publishers). Published last month, the book is comprised of 18 essays penned over the last 30 years with titles like “Noam Chomsky and Holocaust Denial,” “Michael Lerner: Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin,” and “Choose Your Side: The New York Times or Judaism.”

Before his retirement in 2004, Alexander taught English at the University of Washington. His previous works include “The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies,” “Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew,” and “The Holocaust and the War of Ideas.”

The Jewish Press: Why do you think so many Jews continue to support the Democratic Party and President Obama when it is almost undeniable that the Republican Party is far more pro-Israel?

Alexander: That’s a very tough question. It’s at least a decade since Gabriel Schoenfeld demonstrated in his book The Return of Anti-Semitism the extent to which blatant anti-Semitism had found a home within the Democratic Party. But Jewish voters have continued in their old habits nevertheless.

At the national conventions of the Democratic Party, the only thing that gets more cheers from the crowd than abortion without limits and other forms of forbidden fruit is hostility to Israel. Again, this has raised no alarm bells for the majority of Jewish voters. Jewish life in America is worm-eaten with a debased liberalism unequalled even in Great Britain.

Can you elaborate?

One of the main reasons – perhaps the main reason – David Cameron won an unexpected victory in the recent British election is that British Jews in marginal districts turned massively against their beloved Labor Party due to its fanatical Israelophobia.

Good question. Why is the Red Cross holding seminars for Hamas?

..The Times article goes on to describe the three-day seminar that the Red Cross conducted for Hamas last month. It included role-playing and case studies, noting that “one exercise involved an armed group firing on an invading tank from the garden of a civilian home near a hospital.” How educational! Mamadou Sow, head of Red Cross operations in Gaza, breezily noted to the Times that earlier this year, when he presented Hamas leadership with a critique of their conduct during last summer’s Gaza war, they “welcomed it” and “indicated that they are a learning organization.” The article does not indicate whether Sow was able to maintain a straight face while uttering such inanity.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
19 August ’15..

This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a story encapsulating all that is wrong with the Western world’s approach to extremist Islamic fundamentalism.

In a report appearing in its first section, the paper revealed a startling bit of news: “Red Cross offers workshops in international law to Hamas.”

That’s right. The global institution, which claims that it works “to prevent suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles,” is busying conducting seminars for terrorists in Gaza on how they can be, umm, more humanitarian when attacking Israel.

When I was a poor boy in Brooklyn, I read as many biographies of great people as I could, in order to learn what character traits led to their accomplishments so I could learn how to raise myself in the world. Now, many decades later, I live content that I have lived my dreams and fantasies and along the way have marked up a few signal accomplishments that made a real difference. There was a character trait that I don’t recall showing up in the bios I devoured, one which has given me satisfaction, being content with living on one’s own terms, regardless the prices. That is the character trait that you, the reader will see in the memoir written by one of my oldest friends, Sol Sanders, PEOPLE!: Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life.

On his 89th birthday. Sol’s life and anecdotes are a testament to full tilt living a “Forrest Gump” existence as an
international journalist. I and everyone who knows him delight in his behind the curtain tales of history being made or bungled, of personal insights into the mighty and often their salacious private lives. For years, I nudged Sol to get it down in a book. There are so very few such very revealing autobiographies. Sol includes me in his dedications, writing that I “made the original suggestion for this memoir but who bears no responsibility for its metamorphosis.” That’s right, because Sol has crafted a unique memoir beyond what I had in mind as a standard chronology that emphasized the magnitude of the events he witnessed and the inside stories of the events and those who made the history of the latter half of the 20th century.

While New York Senator Chuck Schumer came under withering, anti-Semitic attack as soon as he informed President Barack Obama that he would vote to reject the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, his New York colleague, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, has been largely immune from criticism of any kind.

Gillibrand announced her support for Obama’s deal on August 6, the same day Schumer announced his opposition.

Her decision has been a critical asset for the administration’s campaign to secure the support of other Democratic lawmakers torn between their duty to their constituents and their loyalty to Obama.

Gillibrand is a young senator who reportedly harbors aspirations for higher office. So her explanation for her support as well as her apparent determination that her interests are best served by facilitating the deal’s passage are important to consider.

In her online statement defending her decision, Gillibrand explained that while Iran’s support for terrorism and its regional aggression are serious threats to the US and its interests, “No issue matters more than ensuring that the Iranian regime does not have a nuclear weapon at its disposal.”

Parroting the administration’s talking points, Gillibrand argued that the deal, while imperfect, is the only means, short of war, for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

It would accomplish this task first by curtailing Iran’s nuclear activities.