RUTHFULLY YOURS

Under questioning from a Senate Democrat today at a Banking Committee hearing on the Iran deal, the lead State Department negotiator said they never bothered to ask Iran if there are any other side deals floating around out there.

Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman came under intense bipartisan questioning about Iran’s agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry told lawmakers that he thought the only administration official who might have seen the agreement was Sherman.

Today, Sherman had a few explanations.

“I did see the provisional documents, I didn’t see the final documents,” she told Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).

The United States Supreme Court has been asked to end a political subsidy to aliens through the use of alien population in allocating legislative seats. In a case arising out of the decision by Texas to count aliens — illegal and legal — in drawing legislative districts, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether using aliens violates the principle of “one person, one vote.”

The case is Evenwel vs. Abbott.

Currently, many states count aliens when establishing the population of legislative districts, therefore diluting the legislative clout of citizens. Legislative districts — whether for Congress, a state legislature, or a county council — must be more or less equal in population.

The case before the Supreme Court will decide what population must be used to calculate that “population.” If Texas prevails, illegal aliens and noncitizens may be counted. This means areas with high alien population will dilute the legislative clout of areas where the residents are almost all citizens.

A child of immigrant parents, in the nation that invented the idea that your status at birth is no limitation on your ultimate altitude, Rubio never forgets America’s exceptionalism.

The presidential primary process doesn’t help us to decide who’s qualified to bear the party standard, and to serve as chief executive. It’s just our way of crushing the hopes and dreams of anyone who dares poke head from hole. Because you already know all of the reasons why every candidate, and potential candidate, has no right to expect the nomination, I’m going to write an utterly one-sided series on why each one should get it.]

Today’s nominee: Senator Marco Rubio. (If you’re concerned that I’m not providing fair and balanced analysis, I’m sure the folks in the comment section will compensate for my deficiency.)

I just read Sen. Marco Rubio’s American Dreams: Restoring Economic Opportunity for Everyone, which combines stories of struggling Americans with often-innovative proposals to address our most besetting challenges in education, social welfare, health care, immigration, Social Security, Medicare and more. The book is worth the brief time it takes to read, even if you favor some other candidate for president.

Why Marco Rubio Should Be the Republican Nominee

1. Positive Vision for “A New American Century”: Republicans should not underestimate the value of a voice that stirs the human heart and reminds us of what we’re all about, and what we can be.

There is a myth promulgated by “Orientalists” including Bernard Lewis of a great golden age of comity between Moslems and the Jews…..this addresses the question…. “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraqrsk does it best….rsk
Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors? Lessons from Medieval Interfaith Relations – By Alex J. Novikoff

In Neighboring Faiths, a recently published collection of essays, the historian David Nirenberg explores the relationship among the three religions during the Middle Ages. Alex Novikoff writes in his review:

Medieval Iberia has often been held up as a mirror to our own society, and for quite understandable reasons. For some, this bygone era represents a beacon of interfaith tolerance and cultural exchange of the sort we might learn from today. Convivencia (“living together”) has long been the descriptive term of choice, a word that over the years has achieved a sort of sublime meaninglessness. . . .

For others, medieval Iberia is best seen as a harsh and unrelenting mill that, through the grating and grinding of competing cultures and hostile takeovers, churned out some of the worst templates of religious intolerance: jihad and crusade, forced conversions, torture and inquisition, racial exclusion, wholesale expulsions, and more. . . . Yet other scholars . . . favor a more nuanced middle ground of [simultaneous] conflict and coexistence. . . . In this stimulating and deeply learned collection of essays . . . David Nirenberg reaffirms his mastery as an original and challenging expositor in this third category of historical interpreters.

After decades of wariness, the two nations are being drawn together by common interests and shared fears.

alk down a side street in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol and you may came across a group of students chatting loudly in Hebrew as they review their Bible lessons of the day. Hardly an extraordinary sight in Israel—except that these aren’t Israelis. They’re young Japanese on student visas who have assumed hybrid names like Asher Sieto Kimura and Suzana Keiren Mimosa. And they’re Makuyas: members of a Japanese religious group that’s been fervently supportive of Israel since 1948.

The movement’s founder—“Makuya” is Japanese for ohel moed, the biblical tent of meeting or tabernacle—was Ikuro Teshima, a Christian businessman who adopted the name Abraham in the belief that the birth of Israel marked the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. His dream, finally realized in the 1960s, was to send groups of young Japanese to Israel, there to study Hebrew and Jewish thought and to volunteer in hospitals, schools, and senior centers. Since then, over 1,000 Makuyas have attended the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the University of Haifa, the Technion, and other institutions of higher learning. In Japan itself, the Makuya newsletter reaches more than 300,000 subscribers.

The Obama administration recently made changes to the Oath of Allegiance to the United States in a manner very conducive to Sharia, or Islamic law.

On July 21, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced some “modifications” to the Oath of Allegiance that immigrants must take before becoming naturalized.

The original oath required incoming citizens to declare that they will “bear arms on behalf of the United States” and “perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States” when required by the law.

Now the USCIS says, “A candidate [to U.S. citizenship] may be eligible to exclude these two clauses based on religious training and belief or a conscientious objection.”

The GOP in 2016 can consolidate five years of historic election victories—or blow it.

How many Republican presidential candidates can dance on the head of an elephant? The answer arrives Thursday evening as Fox News stages the party’s first primary debate. In fact, so many people have piled into the GOP primary that Fox has divided them into Medallion Gold, lifting off in prime time, and Medallion Silver in afternoon economy.

Trivia question: When is the first Democratic primary debate? Answer: The party hasn’t scheduled one yet.

President Obama’s Iran deal has been losing support in the polls and on Capitol Hill, and so on Wednesday he tried to reason with his critics. “It’s those hardliners [in Iran] chanting ‘death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal,” he said in a speech at American University. “They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

So Republicans in Congress equal Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. Nice. Name-calling and immoral equivalence are always the best way to win over skeptics.

In truth, Mr. Obama isn’t trying to persuade anyone. He’s trying to keep enough partisan Democratic support across the country so he can hold one-third of the House and Senate. That’s all he needs to implement his deal. This explains his other rhetorical tactic Wednesday, which was to equate opposition to his deal with a vote for war in Iraq in 2003 and a lust for war generally. He’s essentially banking on the Senate’s Elizabeth Warren wing to save him from what is building into a bipartisan majority repudiation of the deal.

Stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into suspected nuclear-military program

WASHINGTON—Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday.

Iran’s stance complicates the International Atomic Energy Agency’s probe into Tehran’s suspected nuclear-military program—a study that is slated to be completed by mid-December, as required by the landmark nuclear agreement forged between world powers and Iran on July 14 in Vienna.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest’s tremendous body of work — and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the “intelligentsia” — has been and will remain a guiding inspiration. In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.

Some relevant passages from the book follow.

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46