RUTHFULLY YOURS

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (a salutation that was gender neutral before gender neutral was cool),

I’m going to try to write this blogger-style, which is not a variant of Kung Fu whereby you distract your opponent with a cloud of Cheetos-dust and then pummel him with couch cushions. No, what I mean is that I think I need to get back to a more “news”lettery format with more items and fewer stream-of-consciousness essays. Don’t worry, I remain devoted to keeping this “news”letter news free.

Fowl Play

It was reported earlier this week that ISIS is morally opposed to raising pigeons. Among their problems with the practice is that it somehow exposes good Muslims to avian genitalia. Where to begin? First of all, bird junk is arguably the least offensive in the entire animal kingdom. They’re pretty much the only animals that can be drawn as cartoon characters without having their kibbles and bits bowdlerized. Foghorn Leghorn (the inspiration for Hillary Clinton’s Southern accent, I’m told), has not been castrated by an eraser. You can’t say the same about poor Porky Pig.

The point is, if you were a psychotic sex-phobic fanatic, you’d think pigeons would be one of the few acceptable animals precisely because they have the most G-rated crotches in the whole vertebrate phylum. I mean, have you seen the bait and tackle on a camel?

At Powerline this week, Steve Hayward penned a post aptly entitled “The Insincerity of Rand Paul.” The senator’s legal arguments against the Patriot Act, he posits, mimic papa Ron Paul’s 2003 calls for a formal declaration of war against Iraq: mere “constitutional punctilio to cover his real feelings.”

Steve is right. Congress statutorily authorized the use of military force in Iraq. Nothing more was constitutionally required. The real reason for Representative Ron Paul’s formalistic nattering about a declaration of war was his opposition to American intervention in Iraq. That, in turn, was driven by his theory that it was American national defense policies that cause anti-U.S. animus.

Senator Rand Paul’s overwrought constitutional claims against the Patriot Act similarly camouflage his real objection: He is anti-government even with respect to national security, one of the few things for which we actually need the federal government.

In the wake of CNN’s Wednesday revelation [1] that journalist/activist Pamela Geller was targeted for beheading by slain Boston area jihadist Usaama Rahim, CNN’s Chris Cuomo interviewed [2] Ms. Geller Thursday. Most attention to the interview has been focused on Geller’s understandable reaction [3] to Cuomo’s suggestion that non-profane, free-speech cartoons of Muhammad — for example, ex-Muslim artist Bosch Fawstin’s thoughtful drawing [4] below, which was awarded first prize at the recent Garland, TX exhibit [5] – were somehow too provocative.

Said Geller to Cuomo:

Drawing a cartoon … warrants chopping my head off? That’s too far? I just don’t understand this. They’re going to come for you, too, Chris. They’re coming for everybody and the media should be standing with me.

The New York Times has revealed what some of us already knew: billionaire convicted felon George Soros is bankrolling attacks on election integrity laws in advance of the 2016 election. He is funding efforts to attack laws designed to aid election integrity in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and perhaps elsewhere, according to the New York […]

A press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists recently hit our desk titled “Science Leaders Decry Congressional Attacks on Science and Science-Based Policy.” It flagged an op-ed in the journal Science that laments “a growing and troubling assault on the use of credible scientific knowledge.” Hmmm. Is this about science, or politics?

Since the scientists brought it up, which is the greater threat to their enterprise: the Republicans who run Congress, or the most spectacular scientific fraud in a generation, which was published and then retracted by the journal Science?

Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professor Michael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.

An immigrant businessman explains his legal challenge to racial quotas that keep Asian-Americans out of elite colleges.

Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.

“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”

Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions.

On April 18, 2015, nearly two years after my book American Betrayal was published by St. Martin’s Press, National Review Online published its fifth piece attacking it. The article is by Ron Capshaw. It is also Capshaw’s fifth attack on my book. Aside from a previous attack in passing also appearing at NRO (which brings NRO’s tally to six attacks in all), Capshaw has published three other attacks on my book at three different outlets.

Capshaw is not alone in having written multiple attacks on American Betrayal. (I will explain below why these attack-pieces do not constitute reviews.) Ronald Radosh has published at least five. Conrad Black, four. David Horowitz, four. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes have weighed in on three occasions in ancillary fashion. In this quite peculiar fraternal order, the motto seems to be: “One is not enough.”

“Testament of Youth,” the movie based on the memoir by Vera Britain who served as a volunteer nurse during World War I, might have been made in the ’50’s – so dated are its characters, its setting, its cinematography and its music which never fails to swell. In glorious Technicolor, there are more close-ups of the lovely Alicia Vikander than a family album – most with that same determined look that signals she is a person to be reckoned with. The dialogue is replete with such trenchant and insightful lines as ‘I want to write,” and “You must write!” uttered to our heroine after reading one of her youthful poems. The personal conflict consists of whether this feisty young Edwardian woman will get to go to Oxford and whether she will allow herself to fall in love after proclaiming that she has no wish to marry – ever. You will guess the answers to both without bothering to buy a ticket but in fairness, the movie draws us into the beautiful English countryside, the comfortable world of the affluent and the extremely photogenic actors with their perfectly clipped British accents. It then zeroes in on the newspaper headline of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination and we know where we are headed.

This week Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz have posed a challenge for would-be presidents and all Americans: if the United Nations criminalizes Israel’s exercise of the right of self-defense it will pay a heavy price. The organization has no right to expect billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to be doled out every year when they are spent undercutting our deepest values and our national security.

Graham and Cruz’s comments come after learning that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is now weighing whether to sign off on a report emanating from an Algerian U.N. “human rights expert” that analogizes Israel to ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. Leila Zerrougui’s rights expertise includes eight years (2000-2008) as legal advisor to Algeria’s President-for-life Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Moreover, in the coming weeks, the U.N. will issue another report on Israel’s “criminal” response to Hamas genocidaires in Gaza, commissioned by UN Human Rights Council authorities like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.

EMC, Oracle, Lockheed and others open offices near future home of cybersecurity command

BE’ER SHEVA, Israel—A global tech hub is sprouting in the Israeli desert.

Over the next decade, Israel’s army is moving a large portion of its offices—including those of many of its key technology commands—out of the greater Tel Aviv area and relocating them some 60 miles south, to this city in Israel’s rock-strewn Negev desert. Many of the world’s biggest tech companies are following, eager to stay close to the Israel Defense Forces’ tech-savvy workforce.

EMC Corp. , the U.S.-based data storage and cloud computing giant, set up shop in a new industrial park on the outskirts of town last year. It was one of the first big firms to open offices in Be’er Sheva, anticipating the long-planned army move.

“The main reason EMC wants to be in Be’er Sheva is for access to talent,” said Maya Hofman Levy, the company’s site manager here. “It’s a place the company looked at and thought it would be good to be at [for] the long run, seeing what is being formed here.”

Neighbors now include Deutsche Telekom AG , Lockheed Martin Corp. , Oracle Corp. , and International Business Machines Corp. In March, eBay Inc. ’s PayPal unit bought cybersecurity startup CyActive Ltd., which is based in Be’er Sheva.