RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

July 11, 2015 The following is a faux memo, although its contents are based upon my interviews with people close to Hillary Clinton, including some I’ve known since my years covering the Clintons in Arkansas. These sources spoke on condition of anonymity because attempts to make their case directly to the Democratic front-runner and her campaign team were icily received. Like my December 2013 memo titled “You’re the Problem,” this represents their point of view.

To: Hillary

From: A few of us

Subject: We love you, but you’re still the problem

The last time we wrote as a group, you were deciding whether to run for president. Conventional wisdom pegged you as a dead-certain candidate; we knew better. We knew you were worn from a lifetime of service, personal tension, and the getting-vaster Right Wing Conspiracy. We knew you truly wanted to devote the rest of your years to charity and Charlotte. We also knew you wanted to be president—and we’re not embarrassed to say we thought you’d be a good one.

We had qualms. To review, we warned that an American public buffeted by socioeconomic change has lost faith in Washington, the U.S. political system, and virtually every social institution. We said that would be a particular problem for you in 2016, because you are viewed as a creature of Washington, a calculating politician, and an institution (“not just because of your age,” we wrote, “The Clinton family itself is an institution, one freighted with baggage.”)

People ask me if I ever lack ideas for opinion pieces. Au contraire: Like a Malibu firefighter encircled by blazing brush, I can’t decide where to aim my hose. I spent most of Wednesday trying to pick which of that day’s Obama-fueled infernos to douse.

I awoke to the news that Obama has fallen way behind on his promise to train moderate Syrians to fight ISIS. After budgeting some $500 million to instruct and equip 3,000 anti-ISIS troops by year’s end, Obama, in fact, has unleashed 60 such combatants. That’s 2 percent down, 98 percent to go. But, hey, what’s the rush?

Even before the advent of ISIS, Obama originally touted this effort as a bulwark against the brutality of Bashar Assad, the dictator of Damascus. “We are particularly interested in making sure that we are mobilizing the moderate forces inside of Syria,” Obama declared at a presidential debate on October 22, 2012. Thirty-two months later, Obama’s moderate Syrian force boasts a whopping five dozen members.

Few in the odd coalition of Left and Right pushing for reauthorization of the 81-year-old Export-Import Bank have been louder than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“It’s wrong that candidates for president, who really should know better, are jumping on this bandwagon,” she said at a May 22 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing. . . . The idea that we would remove this relatively small but vital source of funding for our businesses to compete is absolutely backwards.”

Clinton’s defense of Ex-Im may be motivated by more than mere concern for American businesses. Critics have argued that her family’s byzantine network of political and business interests benefits tremendously from the bank’s low-interest loans, and previous investigations have raised questions about the bank’s independence from the Clintons’ political pressure.

Trump is an oaf, a distraction and a joke who has latched on to a vein of American discontent with illegal immigration…And he once favored amnesty for illegal aliens..Even Bernard Sanders is more suited to enter the most serious election of our time……..rsk

Las Vegas — It’s the height of political fashion to bash Donald Trump, and I’ve done my share. It’s harder to understand his appeal, but it’s absolutely necessary if we are to come to terms with the political times we live in.

Anyone who watched Trump’s speech to 2,000 attendees of FreedomFest in Las Vegas on Saturday could easily lampoon his bizarre, meandering, and egomaniacal delivery. But by the time he left the stage, a big chunk of the audience approved of him, and many expressed a willingness to vote for him.

“Trump was upbeat, and, unlike other candidates, he’s a man of action,” Barbara Carter, of Las Vegas, told me after the speech. She is considering voting for Trump. A former resident of Wasilla, Alaska, she was a fan of Sarah Palin’s when Palin was mayor there. She says that both Palin and Trump cut through the politically correct rhetoric of our day and speak plain truths. When I pointed out that Trump never presents any evidence for his charges that the Mexican government deliberately sends rapists and killers to the U.S., she agreed that both Palin and Trump “may have been pushed onto the national stage before they were ready.”

Readers keep asking me about the presidential race, and to be honest my heart sinks. Yes, yes, I know it’s important to elect a Republican candidate because, if nothing else, as we’re always told, they get to nominate strong candidates to the Supreme Court – like, er, Anthony Kennedy and, um, John Roberts. So that said:

Because for many years the only TV station I could get in my corner of New Hampshire was Channel 3 Vermont (with its excellent local news show anchored by the late and much missed Marselis Parsons), I’ve been watching Bernie Sanders since he was Mayor of Burlington. His rise from mayor to congressman to senator embodies what one might call the Ben&Jerrification of a once great and rock-ribbed Republican state. A New York Jew with a very urban accent, Bernie started in the latte enclave of Chittenden County, expanded to other semi-flatlandered quartiers of the state, but eventually conquered the plaid-clad hold-out of the North-East Kingdom. He did all this as an “independent socialist” without any party machine.

So he’s not just an attractive gadfly but an extremely well organized one. Which is why a man who is largely unknown to the national media is pulling the largest crowds of this campaign – 10,000 in Wisconsin, 8,000 in Maine. And he’s being very positive – it’s all about Bernie, very little about Hillary. He would be the oldest man ever elected president and 83 years old at the end of two terms – which we won’t have to worry about because the entire country will have slid off the cliff long before then. But he’s enthusing the base, and any base wants to be enthused.

Hillary, by contrast, is in trouble not because she’s a sleazy, corrupt, cronyist, money-laundering, Saud-kissing liar. Democrats have a strong stomach and boundless tolerance for all of that and wouldn’t care were it not for the fact that she’s a dud and a bore. A “Hillary rally” is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in. To vote for Bernie is to be part of a romance, as it was with Obama. To vote for Hillary is to validate the Clintons’ indestructible sense of their own indispensability – and nothing else. Hillary is a wooden charmless stiff who supposedly has enough money to be carefully managed across the finish line. But that requires Democratic electors to agree to be managed, too, and the Sanders surge is a strong sign that, while they’re relaxed about voting for an unprincipled arrogant phony marinated in ever more malodorous and toxic corruption, they draw the line at such a tedious and charisma-free specimen thereof.