RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: A version of this article appeared in the June 22, 2015, issue of National Review.

The 950 residents of King Cove, Alaska, have been trying to build an emergency road to nearby Cold Bay. They have been trying to build the road for 40 years.
King Cove is near the western tip of the Alaskan Peninsula; a few miles west begin the Aleutian Islands. King Cove has a school and two churches and a Chinese restaurant, and its economy is buttressed by the presence of PeterPan Seafoods, one of the largest commercial fishing operations in North America, whose seasonal employees constitute about one third of the local population. But like most towns in the Alaskan bush, it has only a small clinic and no full-time physician. For everything from minor surgeries to delivering a baby, residents must venture to a proper hospital — 625 miles away, in Anchorage.

Rarely can that be done directly from King Cove. The town’s 3,500-foot gravel airstrip, built in 1970 in the Delta Creek Valley north of town, cannot accommodate large aircraft, and the single- and twin-engine aircraft that use it are particularly vulnerable to King Cove’s weather and geography — which are, to put it lightly, forbidding. The airstrip is situated between two volcanic peaks, which funnel into the valley winds that regularly reach 70 mph. And while clear, calm days do visit King Cove, bad weather — thick fog, lashing rain, driving snow — is Mother Nature’s curse on King Cove a third of the year, sometimes more.

So getting to Anchorage requires first getting to next-door Cold Bay, a hamlet of 100 people, mainly transient state and federal employees, that happens to be home to a 10,000-foot, all-weather airstrip capable of handling the long-distance flight to the state’s largest city. (Why tiny Cold Bay has such an outsized role in King Cove’s story is something of a historical accident: Cold Bay Airport was built in World War II, when this distant patch of the Alaska Territory became a strategic outpost against a possible Japanese invasion. The site chosen, Army engineers agreed then, and locals agree now, was the only one in the area suitable for an airstrip of such size.)

To this day, the Obama administration mourns the fall of Egypt’s Islamist President Morsi, and turns a cold shoulder to forward-looking President el-Sisi, who is (sometimes) trying to take Egypt into the 21st century and extricate Egypt from its economic and societal crisis.

Muslim Brotherhood terrorism against the Egyptian regime is a perfect example of how this “political movement” is in reality a terrorist movement whose objective is the violent overthrow of Egypt’s government. The White House, fully aware of the facts, continues hosting senior Muslim Brotherhood officials and shows them respect during consultations about the American Islamic community and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Events in Sinai prove there is no such thing as “political Islam.” There is a radical Islamist leadership that represents itself to the gullible West as “moderate,” preaches violence from mosques, cloaks itself in ideological-religious tradition, and employs Islamist terrorists to attack civilians and Egyptian government targets.

It is hard not to conclude, looking at President Obama’s record (ignoring protesters of 2009 in Iran; “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”; the dictatorial way the Iran deal is bypassing the democratic process) that in his heart-of-hearts, he is far more committed to supporting extremist Islamist regimes — whether the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood — than to supporting democracy, individual freedoms or human rights.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/09/giving-anti-semites-a-free-pass/

Jeremy Corbyn—a frontrunner for the leadership of Britain’s Labor party—has fond words for Hamas and Hizballah, and considers some of their leaders his friends. Why, asks Brendan O’Neill, don’t these associations earn him opprobrium from within his own party?

http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-anti-zionists-are-not-as-different-from-anti-semities-as-theyd-like-to-think/

THERE’S NO evidence Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. But the storm over his dodgy associates has thrown up ample evidence that the modern left doesn’t take anti-Semitism seriously.

It’s extraordinary. Ours is an era of super-sensitivity towards race and prejudice. A politician who cracks a less-than-PC gag about black people can expect a thorough Twittershaming. Criticise Islam and you’ll be diagnosed as suffering from the mental malaise of Islamophobia. Share a platform with a BNP nutjob or Christian evangelical who hates gays and you’ll be frogmarched out of polite society.

Yet what has been the left’s response to revelations that Corbyn rubbed shoulders with anti-Semites? In a nutshell: “Chill out. Stop making a fuss over nothing.”

All of 21st-century Britain’s racial sensitivities seem to fly out the window whenever Jews are involved. Corbyn, far from facing expulsion from the dinner-party set for having mixed with racists, is being protected from criticism by the dinner-party set. They’ve erected a moral forcefield around him.

So Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who frequently frets about Islamophobia and the white observers who apologise for it, described the criticisms of Corbyn as “political trickery”. She even peddled a dodgy-sounding theory for why Corbyn is facing attack. An “unholy alliance” of “the right, Blairites and hard Zionists” has clearly set out to besmirch his good name, she wailed. Those bloody Zionists and their pesky alliances. All this from an observer who normally treats shoulder-rubbing with racists as a scourge.

With Congress due to vote by Sept. 17 on the Iran nuclear deal, there’s a warning worth revisiting. It goes like this: The president is pushing a historic nuclear agreement, saying it will stop a terror-sponsoring tyranny from getting nuclear weapons. And up pipes the democratically elected leader of one of America’s closest allies, to say this nuclear deal is mortal folly. He warns that it is filled with concessions more likely to sustain and embolden the nuclear-weapons-seeking despotism than to disarm it.

This critic has more incentive than most to weigh the full implications of the deal, because his country is most immediately in harm’s way — though it has not been included in the nuclear talks. He notes that the nuclear negotiators have sidelined such glaring issues as human rights, and warns that Washington is naive, and the U.S. is allowing itself to be manipulated by a ruthless dictatorship.

No, the critic I’m referring to is not Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he has warned of precisely such dangers in the Iran nuclear deal. I am citing the warnings voiced 21 years ago by the then-President of South Korea, Kim Young Sam, as the Clinton administration bargained its way toward the 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea known as the Agreed Framework.

It’s a longstanding truism of international relations that “everyone knows” the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet today, after more than two decades of negotiations under several different Israeli, Palestinian, and American governments have repeatedly failed to produce the two-state agreement whose terms “everyone knows,” it is past time to put this false idea to rest. In fact, what the talks have shown is that even when there’s agreement on general principles, the remaining gaps are insurmountable—and often there isn’t even agreement on principles. What this means is that, for now and for the foreseeable future, a final peace is not achievable.

To most Israelis, this isn’t news. Repeated polls have confirmed that while a stable majority still favors a two-state solution, an even larger majority doesn’t believe an agreement can or will be signed anytime soon—or that the Palestinians are serious about reaching one.

In working through some of the 7,000 Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department yesterday, I came across one curious one sent from aide Huma Abedin to the then-Secretary of State regarding a Koran-burning in the U.S.

Here is another intriguing email:

It is noteworthy that this message on a sensitive subject — presumably about a meeting between then-Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Sec. of State Clinton on weapons collections in Libya — would be left unredacted, while many other emails in the Clinton trove are redacted in toto.

Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon is in hot water with parents over a civics lesson he gave to second- and third-graders last week. The parents are objecting to the congressman’s presentation where he mentioned Palestinian child suicide bombers and nuclear weapons.

CBS5:

Several parents are demanding answers from Congressman Matt Salmon, saying they cannot believe what the lawmaker said to young school children during a visit to a Gilbert school.

“It should have probably just been a good civics lesson for kids who initially were excited to meet their congressman,” parent Scott Campbell said.

That excitement, however, turned into fear.

That fear, according to Campbell, was spawned by something Salmon said during a presentation he made Thursday about how bills become laws. The audience? Second- and third-graders at San Tan Charter School.

Campbell said the lesson took a dark turn when it came time to talk about vetoes.

Hillary Clinton’s defense that the emails she received were not “marked” as classified is great news for anyone accused of any crime with email evidence.

For example, Jared Fogle of Indianapolis may reopen his child porn case, and defend himself by saying he didn’t know the photos he received via email were child porn since they were not marked as “child porn.”

The IRS may have to adopt different enforcement policies, since they could no longer use anything not marked as “taxable income” as income. The IRS should soon come out with new regulations backing up this idea. Those paid by cash or who work as independent contractors would no longer have to declare any of this as taxable income, since it is not “marked” as taxable income. How were they to know?

Those who violate the 1996 Immigration Act and hire illegal immigrants can defend themselves by saying that the illegal immigrants’ job applications did not mark them as “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants.

Yusef is a five-year-old United States citizen. His parents aren’t U.S. citizens. He speaks no English. He doesn’t dress or act like an American. He doesn’t remember America.

Abdul is Yusef’s brother and also a U.S. citizen. He understands very little English. He speaks, reads, and writes in Arabic. At age 14, he obsesses about football, but not American football. He has no memories of Georgia.

Around 1999, their father attended Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia on a student visa. Abdul was born while the family lived in Georgia. Nine years later, on a short ‘visit’ to the U.S., Yusef was born.

Yemen is the only home the boys know. Yemen is the center of their national identity, interest, and memories. Although born to Yemeni parents — with no loyalty or ties to the United States – both boys became U.S. citizens.

If you are bent on re-making society, first change or undermine long-held norms and values. Under a transforming officialdom, and with the police enlisted to serve as The Guardian’s paramilitary auxiliaries, the very concept of respectability is decried as “middle-class privilege”, a stigma in and of itself.
(editor’s note: Below, the edited text of an address by John O’Sullivan, editor of Quadrant, to the Samuel Griffiths Society)

As science has established, the human brain starts working from birth and continues doing so right up to when someone rises to make a public speech. But I look forward, having survived tonight, to enjoying the debates of tomorrow without reserve. Those debates are very necessary—if sadly so. In all the nations of the Anglosphere, with the partial exception of the United States, law was, until recently, a political battleground mainly at the stages of electoral debate and parliamentary law-making. There was usually a general understanding that decisions of the court that made law, rather than merely interpreting it, could be reversed by the legislature. And the legislature’s decision, like that of the editor, was final.

All that has changed in recent years with the Human Rights Act in the UK, the Mabo decision in Australia, and the growing power of Supreme Courts in Canada (where the Court recently rejected the government’s nominee on grounds that seem constitutionally dubious and politically biased) and in the United States (where the Court has taken to discerning constitutional rights founded solely in the musing of its members on the meaning of life.) In the great majority of these decisions, the political direction of change has been leftwards, and their political content has been supplied in great measure from ideas and values floating in the cultural atmosphere. That cultural atmosphere is not drawn, however, from the beliefs of the whole of society, or even of a majority of its citizens, but as the late Robert Bork used to complain, from the mindset of the academic-media-philanthropy complex that has metastasized since the Sixties and replaced the military-industrial complex as the dominant ideological force in political life throughout the Anglosphere.