RUTHFULLY YOURS

Facts Go Begging in Oxfam Fundraising

Feeding the hungry is a laudable goal, no doubt about it, but filling the bowls of the Third World’s poor is but a minor aspect of the organisation’s agenda. Hobbling development, decrying capitalism and fighting global warming seem more pressing priorities.
I’ve had a mail-out from Oxfam Australia asking for $75 to help “Tereza” grow a garden in the Mozambique desert so she can feed her baby and three children. Tereza tells me, “The little ones may cry because they don’t know that I don’t have money. They just carry on crying.”

I’d cough up (maybe) if I wasn’t so annoyed about Oxfam using donations to finance its attacks on Australia’s coal and petroleum industries, under the rubric of global warming scariness. Also, my bovine scatology detector is vibrating about this “Tereza” lady in Mozambique. “Right now, she’s raising an axe above her head, wielding it with the kind of strength that mothers show when their children’s lives are in danger,” Oxfam says, I assume rhetorically.

Reading on, it becomes unclear whether my $75 would “save her children’s lives” (third para) or actually, nourish “a mum like Tereza” (p2) or indeed, “Tereza’s neighbour Marta” who suffers agonising hunger (p2).

“As a supporter of our work, I know you already know what that means, Mr Thomas,” writes Dr Helen Szoke, Oxfam Australia chief executive. Actually I’m not an Oxfam supporter. Who knows how came to be on the charity’s mailing list, with a 27-digit identifier no less?

Through adroit marketing like the “Tereza” campaign, Oxfam raised $52m last year from the public, up $9.5m in the previous year. The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade kicked in an additional $23m, oblivious to Oxfam’s anti-export agenda.

“But closing our eyes to the connections between the anti-Semitic and apocalyptic roots of both Hitler’s Nazi movement and the phenomonenon of the Islamic State serves no useful purpose. On the contrary, Tony Abbott’s deep moral sense that the Nazis and the Islamic State are somehow cut from the same evil cloth – notwithstanding their obvious differences – should not be lightly dismissed, if not out of respect for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, then for the sake of the six million Jews who presently dwell in the State of Israel.”

Where would we be without the smart alecks of the press stretching and embroidering the words of a PM they detest in order to convict him of things he didn’t say and doesn’t mean? As demonstrated by the latest eruption of misrepresentation and confected outrage, a lot better off.

The leftist journalists’ narrative is that Tony Abbott might be prime minister but he is not as cerebral or scholarly as the leftist journalist. The latest mocking of the PM for equating the Islamic State with the Nazis is a case in point. What Tony Abbott said was this:

“The Nazis did terrible evil but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it”.

This is such an incontrovertible truth that I have no idea why anyone would contest it. Thus, Holocaust deniers exploit the fact the Nazis covered their genocidal tracks at almost every turn in order to give credence to their “case”. Because the Nazis were relatively furtive in their evil endeavour, we must rely on an overwhelming convergence of evidence, rather than 100 percent, slam-dunk proof to corroborate the claim that 6 million Jewish people were slaughtered during the time of the Holocaust. That’s not Tony Abbott claiming that or this writer saying that – that’s the teaching staff at the education wing of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

The left loathes the concept of IQ — especially the claim that it helps to determine socio-economic status, rather than vice versa — because of a near-religious attachment to the idea that man is a piece of clay that can be moulded into any shape by society
In 1958, my father, Michael Young, published a short book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2023: An Essay on Education and Equality. It purported to be a paper written by a sociologist in 2034 about the transformation of Britain from a feudal society in which people’s social position and level of income were largely determined by the socio-economic status of their parents into a modern Shangri-La in which status is based solely on merit. He invented the word meritocracy to describe this principle for allocating wealth and prestige and the new society it gave rise to.

The essay begins with the introduction of open examinations for entry into the civil service in the 1870s—hailed as “the beginning of the modern era”—and continues to discuss real events up until the late 1950s, at which point it veers off into fantasy, describing the emergence of a fully-fledged meritocracy in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of being semi-fictional, the book is clearly intended to be prophetic—or, rather, a warning. Like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), The Rise of the Meritocracy is a dystopian satire that identifies various aspects of the contemporary world and describes a future they might lead to if left unchallenged. Michael was particularly concerned about the introduction of the 11+ by Britain’s wartime coalition government in 1944, an intelligence test that was used to determine which children should go to grammar schools (the top 15 per cent) and which to secondary moderns and technical schools (the remaining 85 per cent). It wasn’t just the sorting of children into sheep and goats at the age of eleven that my father objected to. As a socialist, he disapproved of equality of opportunity on the grounds that it gave the appearance of fairness to the massive inequalities created by capitalism. He feared that the meritocratic principle would help to legitimise the pyramid-like structure of British society.

The former commissioner says the mayor won City Hall by propagating a false narrative that the police were discriminating by race.

Is New York under “progressive” Mayor Bill de Blasio descending into the scarifying old days of rampant murder and rape, with homeless people using the streets as toilets and Times Square reverting to a casbah of hustlers and worse? Or are the ingenious tabloids with their startling front pages of urinating vagrants and topless painted ladies stampeding New Yorkers into a false sense of insecurity?

Ray Kelly, the Irish bulldog who served as police commissioner longer than any top cop in New York City history, diplomatically doesn’t commit himself on that question in “Vigilance.” But that’s about the only law-enforcement issue he sidesteps in this blunt, proudly unapologetic memoir.

Mugged in Central Park as a third-grader, Mr. Kelly has spent a half-century protecting Americans, first as a Marine officer, then as a New York cop with two stints as a federal security official in the mix. He is a champion of imaginative and aggressive policing, especially the tactic known as “stop-and-frisk,” which has become a flash point in the current furor over police conduct in New York and around the country.

Mr. Kelly has indelible memories of the bad old days. His first stint as police commissioner came in the waning months of David Dinkins’s term as New York’s first (and so far only) African-American mayor. Fueled by the crack plague, murders in New York hit 2,245 in 1990—three times the toll in 1967. With Mr. Kelly devising the strategy, City Hall found the money for more cops, changed tactics and the crime wave began to ebb.

The photograph of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who drowned trying to flee to Greece with his brother and mother, has focused the world on Europe’s Middle Eastern refugee crisis. Demands for compassion are easy, but it’s also important to understand how Europe—and the U.S.—got here. This is what the world looks like when the West abandons its responsibility to maintain world order.

The refugees are fleeing horror shows across North Africa and the Middle East, but especially the Syrian civil war that is now into its fifth year. Committed to withdrawing from the region, President Obama chose to do almost nothing. Europe, which has a longer Middle Eastern history than America and is closer, chose not to fill the U.S. vacuum.

The result has been the worst human catastrophe of the 21st-century. What began as an Arab Spring uprising against Bashar Assad has become a civil war that grows ever-more virulent. Radical Islamic factions have multiplied and Islamic State found a haven from which to grow and expand. More than 210,000 Syrians have been killed, and millions have been displaced inside the country or in camps in neighboring countries.

On December 17, 2008, in response to the financial crisis, the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) lowered the Fed Funds rate to essentially zero. (The rate, which had been coming down for more than a year, had been 2% in September.) When Fed Funds were set at zero the financial crisis, which had reached its perihelion in late September-early October, was already on the mend. The recession, which had begun in December 2007, was two-thirds past. Nevertheless, Fed Funds have been kept at this unprecedentedly low level for almost seven years. The Federal Reserve has become entrapped in its own snare, with no clear exit.

On September 16-17 the FOMC will meet. It had been expected that, finally, the process toward normalization would begin. (Historically, Fed Funds generally ranged between two and five percent.) Expectations had been that the rate would be raised by 25 basis points. But, with China’s economy and markets in free-fall, with our economy chugging along in second gear, with inflation seemingly tamed, and turmoil in equity and commodity markets over the past several weeks, there are doubts as to whether they will act. Eminent economists, like Larry Summers, have warned (incredulously) against the Fed being too hasty, citing the fragility of the recovery, as well as risks to speculative markets.

While August unemployment dipped to 5.1%, the lowest since April 2008, labor participation remains stuck at 62.6%, the lowest since October 1977. Most of the jobs added, as has been true for the past six years, were part-time. The unemployment number of 5.1% is based on the 157,065,000 people in the workforce – those working or actively looking for work. It does not include the 94,031,000 (the rest of the population above the age of 16) that are not counted as being in the labor force. Annual U.S. GDP growth, since the recovery began in June 2009, has averaged about 2%, the lowest of any recovery since the end of World War II. If the Federal Reserve wants an excuse from walking away from a rate increase, there is ammunition.

I hate to disagree with my friend Elliott Abrams but the so called peace process and two state (dis)solution is defunct, dead, and worthless…it was never an option for Israel…any map avers it….and there is no point in pretending it is still an option…..rsk
Israel’s allies won’t support an out-and-out renunciation of the two-state solution.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he maintains a blog, Pressure Points.

Like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, the “peace process” may die unless we all clap loudly and say we believe in it. In “The Two-State Solution Is in Stalemate,” Evelyn Gordon tells us to keep our hands down and embrace that terrible danger. In fact, she argues, we’d all be better off acknowledging that, whatever the fate of Tinkerbell, the “peace process” is already defunct.

As she rightly says, the notion that the parties are an inch apart, and that all the outlines of a final status-agreement are well understood, is nonsense. There is no chance of a comprehensive peace in the foreseeable future—because the issues are too hard and the disagreements too deep, and because today’s Palestinian leadership is illegitimate and unable to make the difficult decisions and compromises peace would require.

What then should Israel do? Gordon outlines some steps, especially in the realm of economic development, that would make life better for the Palestinians regardless of the nature and timing of any future agreement. I’m in agreement with most of these, but not with one she mentions but does not explain: “even the resettlement of some Palestinian refugees.” Starting down that road would be a mistake. But there are other practical steps Israel can take to make life easier (and Netanyahu has already taken quite a few, though he gets no credit for them), and Israel should allow more Palestinian economic activity and political control in substantial parts of the West Bank.

How it is that the nation’s diplomatic corps has become an arm of the Clinton presidential campaign?

Whatever the Clinton campaign is paying Mark Toner, it ain’t enough. Oh, wait; it isn’t anything. Which is interesting.

Mark Toner, you see, is a federal employee. Technically, he’s a spokesman for the State Department. This isn’t always clear, though, especially when the nimble Mr. Toner takes to the podium to ferociously defend the putative Democratic nominee six ways from Election Day. Hillary Clinton’s communications gurus Jennifer Palmieri and Nick Merrill—they do a fine job. But Mr. Toner? He’s the bomb.

And he’s not alone. Since the dawn of the Clinton email scandal, the entire State Department has been vigorously protecting Hillary Clinton. Whatever the motivation (and more on that later), what we are witnessing is an extraordinary all-hands government assist for a presidential candidate.

This was supposed to be the Era of No Fences. No walls between blocs. No borders between countries. No barriers to trade. Visa-free tourism. The single market. A global Internet. Frictionless transactions and seamless exchanges.

In short, a flat world. Whatever happened to that?

In the early 1990s, Israel’s then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres published a book called “The New Middle East,” in which he predicted what was soon to be in store for his neighborhood. “Regional common markets reflect the new Zeitgeist,” he gushed. It was only a matter of time before it would become true in his part of the world, too.

I read the book in college, and while it struck me as far-fetched it didn’t seem altogether crazy. The decade from 1989 to 1999 was an age of political, economic, social and technological miracles. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union dissolved. Apartheid ended. The euro and Nafta were born. The first Internet browser was introduced. Oil dropped below $10 a barrel, the Dow topped 10,000, Times Square became safe again. America won a war in Kosovo without losing a single man in combat.

It is hard to understand why some Westerners believe that Abbas’s departure could boost the prospects of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. To many Palestinians, it is clear that the PLO or Fatah official who replaces Abbas will not be able to make any concessions to Israel. Any Palestinian leader who dares to make the slightest concession to Israel will be denounced as a traitor and will be lucky if he stays in power or stays alive.

The West needs to understand that no Palestinian leader is authorized to make concessions to Israel for the sake of peace. Neither the PLO nor the Fatah leaderships would ever approve of such concessions. And, of course, Hamas also will never accept any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, except one that leads to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire in the region.

Saeb Erekat has been negotiating with Israel for the past two decades and his position has never changed. Like Arafat and Abbas, he too will never sign a peace agreement with Israel that does not include 100% of the territories captured by Israel in 1967. Erekat is not authorized to make any concessions on Jerusalem or the “right of return” for Palestinians to their former homes inside Israel.

Abbas’s successor will undoubtedly declare that he intends to follow in the footsteps of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas may go, but his legacy, like that of Arafat, will not.

The recent talk about Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s intention to quit political life has left many wondering whether his departure would bring about real changes for the Palestinians and the “peace process” with Israel.