RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine: you are window-shopping on a quiet street, perhaps in London or Paris or New York. Something remarkable catches your eye: an ancient coin, a gold chain, a tiny figurine. Impulsively, you enter the shop, where the owner explains to you that the sculpture comes originally from Mesopotamia, that the necklace is Byzantine. It isn’t inexpensive, but the shopkeeper has guaranteed its provenance and the price seems fair; and besides, you quite love it. You say yes, and leave the shop with your new treasure tucked safely in a bag.

You may have just handed your money over to the Islamic State.

According to antiquities experts and members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the plundering and sale of ancient artifacts from Syria and Iraq has become big business for the Islamic State (ISIS), contributing significantly, as the Guardian reports, to the income stream that has “made it the most cash-rich terror group in the world.” Indeed, according to NBC News, “Antiquity plundering – particularly from violence-riddled Syria and Iraq – fuels a $7 billion black market, and some of that money lands in the pockets of terrorists.”

Adam Andrzejewski is the Chairman of American Transparency and founder of the transparency website OpenTheBooks.com. This editorial reviews information collected via FOIA from the IL Attorney General. Read our Forbes profile: IL Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s ‘Friends and Family’ $1 Million Patronage Pay Problem(s).

She’s allowed felons to serve in municipal office; out-of-towners to serve as city alderman; many politicians to hold multiple – and conflicting – offices; a junior college to award more than $4 million in compensation to its president without a lawful board vote; and much more…

Lisa Madigan – daughter of power Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan – first ran for attorney general in 2002 vowing, “It’s time that Illinois’ highest legal official takes an active, hands-on role in cleaning up government. And I will not let them down.”

Madigan said she’d even prosecute her father if he were corrupt. It was tough language and a high promise.

Our organization, American Transparency (OpenTheBooks.com) fact checked her campaign promise. After ten years in office, Lisa Madigan had prosecuted only fourteen public officials for corruption: half were for DUI, reckless driving, or substance possession and she lost close to half of those cases. That’s an appalling record in a state with 7,000 units of government.

The ink has not yet dried on the nuclear agreement with Iran, and European leaders are already knocking on Tehran’s door, waiting patiently to be welcomed by the leaders of the Islamic republic.

Not, heaven forbid, to protest against the cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” that were heard in the streets of the Iranian capital only a week ago, and not even to urge the Iranians to end their support for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. No, they are hurrying to Tehran to ensure their places in Iran’s re-emerging market, as hundreds of billions of dollars are expected to be injected into the country’s economy with the lifting of international sanctions.

Last week, the German vice chancellor and economy minister visited Tehran. Next week, the EU foreign policy chief is expected to visit. In the meantime, the French president had a telephone conversation with his new friend, the president of Iran, in which the two decided to work on strengthening ties between their respective countries. Presumably, at least a few European politicians will dutifully express their regret to the Iranians about the repeated calls for the destruction of Israel that ring through Tehran. But the regret will rapidly be brushed aside as they resume talking business.

There have been several notable cases of racial fakery. Years ago, then-law professor Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren falsely claimed that her great-grandfather was Cherokee Indian. A diversity-starved Harvard University jumped at the opportunity to hire her. She was so good at the racial fakery that a 1997 Fordham Law Review article lauded now-Sen. Warren as Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color.”

Racial fakery for private gain has been going on for decades. In 1990, there was a highly publicized case of outright racial lying. Two white men, twins Philip and Paul Malone, took the Boston Fire Department test. They failed. It turned out that the Boston Fire Department was under a consent decree mandating racial preferences, back then euphemistically called affirmative action but today called diversity. The Malone brothers retook the test, this time identifying themselves as black. Again their scores weren’t high enough to be hired as whites, but they qualified under the lower standards for blacks and were hired. They worked for 10 years, until their racial fakery was discovered during a promotion proceeding. They were fired.

As we learn more about the Iran deal — the side agreements, the lifting of the arms and missile embargoes, the loophole-ridden inspections regime — the more apparent it is that only people so enamored of their own work, so gullible to embrace the Iranians’ soothing words and so desperate for glory could have negotiated this deal. Rather than acknowledge the criticisms on the merits, the administration sinks lower and lower, casting aspersions on critics. When Secretary of State John Kerry announces that the world will blame Israel if the deal fails, we have left the realm of dignified debate. When he warns Israel not to act militarily in its own defense, he suggests that the United States won’t back up the Jewish state. (“That’d be an enormous mistake, a huge mistake with grave consequences for Israel and for the region, and I don’t think it’s necessary.”)

Nazi Germany signed its instrument of surrender on May 8, 1945, but the Pacific War dragged on. General Douglas MacArthur warned that an invasion of Japan could cost over a million lives. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945 with the threat of “prompt and utter destruction”. Japan vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur and other top military commanders, who counseled a conventional weapon invasion of Japan, advised Truman that such an invasion would result in U.S. casualties of up to 1 million. Truman, who had only been president since the Spring of 1945, decided–over the moral reservations of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb. On August 6,2015 the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945 bringing World War II to an end.

Ask yourselves, as I will, which of the assorted GOP contenders would have the guts of Harry Truman now that America is faced with an existential threat that could, in the estimates of many analysts, claim more than a million American lives….RSK

A crescendo is building for raising the federal minimum wage by 107%, from $7.25 an hour to $15.00. To be against it, according to those who support such a move, is to favor inequality and unfairness – it is to show one’s Simon Legree side. The $7.25 wage has been in place for six years; so it is understandable why this tidal wave has been developing. But its implementation will have negative consequences that are surely unintentional. Some perspective is needed.

The income gap has widened during the six years since the recession ended in mid 2009. That fact has little to do with the minimum wage and a lot to do with government policies regarding taxes, regulation and interest rates. A front-page article in Saturday’s New York Times detailed the gloomy news. While employers have added 200,000 jobs a month and the official jobless rate is at a post-recession low of 5.3%, the labor participation rate (62.6%) is at the lowest level since the Carter years. Six years into economic recovery there are fifteen million Americans on Social Security disability insurance, more than when the recession ended. Forty percent more people are on food stamps than six years ago. Work requirements, which were part of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, were waived in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. And for the first time in the nation’s history, or at least during a time of economic recovery, more small businesses are closing than opening. And now government wants to fuel this fire by mandating a doubling of the minimum wage?

As Censored Voices makes its American debut, my advice to American Jews is this: save your tears—the Six-Day War was decently waged and morally just.

In a recent interview, Daniel Sivan, the producer of Censored Voices (and partner of the director Mor Loushy), describes the effect of their film on pro-Israel American Jews who saw it at Sundance in January:

From their point of view, even to murmur the word “occupation” is treason. But they couldn’t rage against our film, because we didn’t invent the questions within it. They were posed by young soldiers, days after the battles of 1967. So we opened up something with these pro-Israeli Jews. Older people came out crying, they said they’d always been proud of that great victory, but now they feel confused, undermined, and embarrassed.

Yes, Censored Voices will provide fodder for Israel-haters (it already has). But as Sivan rightly points out, such people don’t need Censored Voices to hate Israel. Its more significant effect outside Israel will be to demoralize a generation or two of American Jews for whom the Six-Day War was a source of pride, and who will now be told that it really comprised wanton murder and dispossession.

Conrad Black’s defense cannot undo the damage Henry Kissinger has done.
This controversy between Conrad Black and myself on Henry Kissinger’s legacy to American statecraft will have been worthwhile if it leads anyone to the Claremont Review of Books, where my review of Kissinger’s latest book, World Order, treats that legacy at due length. Regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of my or Black’s writings, they have not shaped American statecraft. Kissinger’s have, and continue to do so.

My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.” Black construes this as an “attack” on him, of “extreme belligerence.” Who am I to disagree? Black then joins himself to Kissinger — “admiring of his talents as both an academic theorist and a practical executant of foreign policy . . . He is a friend . . . ” — as well as to others who write “civilly.” These, Black says, have been victimized by a “malignant outburst of Codevilla’s love for psychoanalytic imputations of motives to others,” manifested by my “shock-and-awe carpet-bombing.” Black does not quote me. But, forswearing “animus,” he is surprised that my “virulently accusatory” writings, which I “don’t substantiate,” appear “in reputable places like the Claremont Review and National Review.” Why try to disagree? As Casablanca’s Rick said to Ilsa: “The problems of [such as ourselves] don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Kissinger’s problems amount to a lot.

Never mind the atomic ayatollahs, it’s a trans/drag girl fight!

Somewhere in Iran, a team of very studious, serious, and likely bespectacled men is working, diligently and tirelessly, to build a nuclear weapon. Perhaps it will be detonated in Jerusalem. Perhaps it will be detonated in New York City, and perhaps these men describe their work, with grim humor, as “the Manhattan project.”

Meanwhile, in Glasgow, the West is not concerned with men strapping on their armor, but about whether some men who strap on wigs and brassieres are offensive to other men who strap on wigs and brassieres. Our Kat Timpf reports that Glasgow’s biggest gay-pride festival banned and then unbanned performances by some drag queens (but only some! A bit more on that in a bit) from its annual march.