RUTHFULLY YOURS

We know what ISIS believe, what they do, where they are, and what they want. Do we really need to waste another ounce of breath debating what proper nouns or acronyms best describe those who march under the black flag? Just send in the drones already
In the July 4 Spectator, Rod Liddle wrote a typically amusing little piece on the interminable row over what to call the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant/Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Islamic State/Daesh. Advocates of the various names have highly suspicious reasons for doing so. President Obama refuses to use ISIS, because it would inevitably draw attention to the fact that the Syrian opposition his administration funded was largely assimilated into ISIS. Center-right establishment politicians prefer Daesh, arguing that the Islamic State is neither Islamic, nor a state.

What authority Tony Abbott or David Cameron has to adjudicate what’s authentically Islamic, we’ve yet to determine. So, for the sake of cogency, Liddle has thrown a fifth alternative into the mix: ‘Really Horrible People Who Have Nothing to do With Islam’. Though, understanding that it’s a bit of a mouthful, Liddle suggests that we stick with the Islamic State, rather than jumping through loops to protect Muslims’ feelings or defend the honor of the Islamic religion.

The ritualistic rally-cries of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” — and the burning in effigy of the leaders of Israel, America, and Saudi Arabia — underscore the basic lie that underpins Quds Day: the Iranian regime is focused on Iran’s revolutionary extremist agenda, not on the welfare of Palestinian Arabs.

Quds Day has become a day in which Iran and protestors in other societies attack the legitimacy of the state of Israel (“The Little Satan”) and continue to threaten the United States (“The Big Satan”).

“Muslims in Sweden will become more and more degraded … so instead of putting on a T-shirt and going to the most hated place for Allah just to stand there and do dawah [missionize], you should go there with a bomb instead. … Now is the time to show who the earth belongs to!!! … Save yourself from narr [hellfire] by killing a kafir.” — Mikael Skråmo, Swedish convert to Islam.

If the 18-year-old had been a Swedish citizen, the Security Service would not have been able to stop him from going to Syria: it is not yet illegal in Sweden to travel to join ISIS or any other terror group. They would have had to be content with seeing him off, and perhaps politely asking for an interview if and when he came back.

“Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.”

In formal rhetoric, prolepsis means the anticipation of possible objections to an argument for the sake of answering them. So let’s be proleptic about the Iranian nuclear deal, whose apologists are already trotting out excuses for this historic diplomatic debacle.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971—a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

WASHINGTON—With the signing of a historic agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

Now comes another hard part.

He must turn to selling the deal to a skeptical Congress, and to managing relationships in a volatile Middle East, where the notion of an emboldened Iran has rattled longtime U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Some of the core milestones for the implementation of the agreement, sealed in Vienna on Tuesday, will overlap with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the one that will choose Mr. Obama’s successor, ensnaring them in an unpredictable political dynamic. And after more than three decades of hostility and mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, American officials are uncertain how compliant Tehran will be over the deal’s time frame.

Desire for agreement “stronger than anything else,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says.

TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the agreement between Iran and six world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program is a “historic mistake.”

“Wide-ranging concessions were made in all of the areas which should have prevented Iran from getting the ability to arm itself with a nuclear weapon,’’ Mr. Netanyahu said. “The desire to sign an agreement was stronger than everything else.”

The comment reflects the Israeli leader’s long-standing public criticism of the U.S. and European negotiators in the talks with Iran.

Would a true Islamic state respect universal human rights? Pakistani-British Anglican Bishop Michael Nazi-Ali would like to believe so – but history has cautioned him otherwise. His presentation “Freedom and a Culture of Intolerance: Will Religious Minorities Survive in the Middle East?” at the Washington, D.C. Heritage Foundation grimly determined that there is precious little evidence of tolerance in the global Islamic faith.

To begin his foray into the exploration of Islamic prejudice, Nazir-Ali explained how much a recent visit to northern Iraq opened his eyes to the pervasiveness of religious intolerance. The “radically disordered society” of Iraq is home to political parties that represent only the sectarian interests of the country’s ethnic and religious groups. In the bishop’s opinion, to continue on as a unitary state, Iraq must seek the “confederal future” of its Shiite and Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions.

The latest United Nations indictment by its so-called Human Rights Council of the Israeli Defense Force for its self-defense in the summer 2014 should not surprise. The record of the United Nations on the world’s only Jewish state, expressed in simple numbers, convicts the UN itself of suffering from a serious obsession with that tiny country.

In 1991, following the Gulf War, known in Israel as the “Scud War,” this writer was hired by the Office of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to do a statistical analysis of voting patterns at the UN some of whose discoveries were jaw-dropping.

The vast preponderance of recent news coverage on Donald Trump has been on his remarks about Mexican illegal aliens, but he also made statements on outsourcing jobs, saying that if he were president, those U.S. automakers who move their manufacturing facilities south of the border would be slapped with a 35 percent tariff on every vehicle they imported into the U.S.

But in my view, the best way to prevent manufacturing jobs from going elsewhere is not to build a tariff fence around the United States. The best way is to examine the forces that make it so much cheaper to manufacture elsewhere. Its not just labor costs. Germany has higher labor costs than we do, but a 2011 Time Magazine article says this:

One of the miracles of the nation of Israel is that Jews from all over the world, with different mentalities and cultures, arrived to the nation state of the Jewish people, Israel, unified and created a modern Jewish-Israeli culture.

Bashert is a word in Yiddish, its meaning destiny, fate. There are times in life when something happened and one can only relate to it as bashert. My meeting Vanessa Paloma Elbaz at a fundraising event in Los Angeles was simply bashert.

What fascinated me about Vanessa is the project she took upon herself to accomplish. She is documenting the Moroccan-Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) music, Haketia*, which is part of the big story about the Moroccan ancient Jewish community colorful and rich history and culture.