RUTHFULLY YOURS

During the fall of 2005—my sophomore year at Columbia—I took a lecture course on the history of the Middle East taught by a then untenured professor named Joseph Massad. One of my classmates, whom I’d met the previous year in a freshman literature seminar, was a Californian and a genuine Valley girl—naturally blonde and thin, but without the attendant ditziness. On one of my frequent weekend forays downtown, I ran into her in the subway. She had gotten to know me fairly well in that small freshman seminar, but now she confessed she had a question. You’re a reasonable, good person, she said. So how can you be a Zionist?

Her question was entirely sincere. The farthest thing from an activist or rabble-rouser, she was simply curious how I, certainly no obvious racist, could support the last bastion of white, racist colonialism in the Middle East—which was what she was now learning about Israel. We certainly heard nothing from Massad himself to suggest that, contrary to the infamous 1975 resolution of the UN General Assembly, Zionism was not racism. Nor did we encounter any text to that effect. Our one assigned book on the Jewish state was Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? by the French Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson. Suffice it to say that the question mark in the title was superfluous.

In his 2004 book, The Case for Democracy, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician Natan Sharansky argues that the West can win the long struggle with the Middle East’s authoritarian and Islamist states by promoting liberalism and freedom in the region’s closed societies. Sharansky and co-author Ron Dermer, now Israel’s ambassador to the United States, also address the role Israel plays in this conflict and the accusations and claims against the Jewish state that are intended to turn Western opinion against it. Sharansky and Dermer argue that the United States and Europe cannot help open up the “fear societies” of the Mideast if they accede to the warped and anti-Semitic claims they make about Israel, a fellow Western country. These claims constitute a significant part of the pathologies that consign those societies to violence and failure. Because some Western liberals have a tendency to give credence to these claims, and because their credence sows much moral and political confusion in the West, identifying and rejecting anti-Semitic attacks on Israel should be a central test of the larger struggle, argue Sharansky and Dermer.

They point out that “whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people and Jewish religion, the new anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish state.” Since this new anti-Semitism “is much more difficult to expose,” they propose a test. They call it the 3D test—the three D’s being demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. If a criticism of Israel checks all three boxes, it’s safe to say that it is anti-Semitic.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from one that ran in the June 1, 2015, issue of National Review.

We live in a legal culture besotted by the myth of judicial supremacy. According to this myth, the Constitution means whatever five Supreme Court justices claim it means, and all other governmental actors are duty-bound to abide by that supposed meaning.

This mistaken concept of judicial supremacy is often confused with the power of judicial review — the ability of courts to review the constitutionality of laws and regulations that they are asked to apply. It is one thing for the Supreme Court to decline to apply a law that it deems to be unconstitutional; it is quite another for it to maintain that presidents, members of Congress, and state officials must likewise regard the law as unconstitutional and, further, must accept and follow the rationale of the Court’s decision.

Thus, Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, famously defended his rejection of the Dred Scott ruling: “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Lincoln’s actions as president were faithful to his words. In defiance of the dual holdings of Dred Scott, he signed into law a bill that outlawed slavery in the federal territories, and he instructed the State Department to issue passports to free blacks (thus recognizing them as citizens). Lincoln also refused to obey Chief Justice Taney’s order, in Ex parte Merryman, to release a prisoner from military custody.

By now everyone has had their say about Jeb Bush’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. The consensus is that Bush misheard Megyn Kelly’s “knowing what we know now” question about the Iraq War. I’m not convinced.

Politicians routinely answer the question they wish they were asked rather than the question they were actually asked. Indeed, those are the only kinds of questions some politicians — particularly ones with the last name Clinton — ever answer. The question Fox News’ Kelly asked is the tougher one, at least for Bush, so perhaps he opted to answer in a way that let him take a shot at Hillary Clinton, who also supported the war?

The international community and the media often ignore the fact that Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah has a number of armed groups. Their fight is to destroy Israel, eliminate the “Zionist entity” and achieve the “right of return” for millions of descendants of refugees.

The Palestinian Authority leadership has never distanced itself from the rhetoric and actions of these groups. Fatah’s militias will be the first to reject any peace agreement that includes the slightest concession to Israel.

Several Fatah leaders, in fact, often speak in English about the need for reviving the peace process, while in Arabic they praise and endorse the Fatah gunmen.

Many in the international community often refer to the Palestinian Fatah faction, which is headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, as a “moderate” group which believes in Israel’s right to exist and the two-state solution.

Senator Lindsey Graham says really dumb things from time to time, but when I read this profile of the apparently soon-to-be GOP presidential candidate by the Federalist’s Ben Domenech, I assumed that he must have been misquoted. Sure enough, though, Mr. Domenech provides a supporting link to a Washington Post news account which reports that, this past weekend, Senator Graham asserted:

If I’m president of the United States and you’re thinking about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL [Islamic State], I’m not gonna call a judge. I’m gonna call a drone and we will kill you.

Even for those of us who recognize the government’s necessary national security powers, the question of killing Americans is an excruciatingly difficult one. It is not fit for bombast.

This month the left lost its mind over Ayelet Shaked [2]. The daughter of an Iraqi Jewish immigrant, Ayelet Shaked was an infantry instructor who worked for Israel’s elite Golani Brigade and a computer scientist who worked for Texas Instruments. Now she’s a mother of two married to a former fighter pilot.

She’s also Israel’s new Justice Minister.

The New York Times compared her to Michele Bachmann and had her quoting Ayn Rand. The Financial Times compared her to Sarah Palin. So did Italian, Spanish and Norwegian media outlets.

These analogies are not based on anything except the gender and politics of all three women. They are shorthand signals, telling liberal readers to hate Ayelet Shaked just as they hated Palin and Bachmann.

Georgetown’s Bridges Initiative is a highway to Sharia.

Nothing bad happened in the West after the publication of the Danish cartoons in 2006. Nobody died.” “There is no more anti-Semitism in the West anymore. The ‘Jewish Question’ has been settled with equality.”

These are just some of the lies spewed forth by “esteemed panelists” at the launch of Georgetown University’s Bridges Initiative [2], which embodies a new approach and stepped up efforts for the Islamist propaganda campaigns waged by the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).

On April 30, 2015, in Jesuit Georgetown University’s Healy Hall, amidst paintings of priests and Christian imagery, The Bridges Initiative was launched. The event was titled, “A Conversation on Islamophobia” [3]. The motto of the campaign is “Protecting Pluralism – Ending Islamophobia.”

“Given the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001, the historic date of September 11, 1683 also comes clearly into focus. That was a turning point in human history: the defeat of the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic caliphate by Christian forces at the gates of Vienna. From that moment until the recent times, Christian or Western powers would dominate the Muslim world. Radical Islam seeks to violently overturn that arrangement through modern savagery and continuous warfare.”

Those that assume that radical Islam is a modern phenomenon that became prominent during Bill Clinton’s tenure as president in the 1990s merely scratch the historical surface of America’s complicated political entanglement with the Middle East’s supposed “religion of peace.” In truth, the tentacles of radical Islam go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.

Historically, Thomas Jefferson was the first U.S. president to go to war against belligerent Islam. The American Revolution from English imperialism had left the fledgling republic deeply in debt. Trade of America’s vast natural resources of lumber, animal skins and crops with Europe was the economic answer. However, European markets, a traditional mercantile system, were not open to American commodities.

William Kilpatrick is the author of Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West. Visit his website, turningpointproject.com, for more about his work and writings.

Contrary to reports in the mainstream press, Pope Francis did not call Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas “an angel of peace.” The correct translation [2] of the pope’s words is “I have thought of you: that you could be an angel of peace.”

Why, then, was it so easy to believe the initial reports? Perhaps because the initial reports seemed to align with previous papal overtures to Palestinian leaders. Pope Francis had previously called Abbas a “man of peace,” he has shown sympathy for Palestinian grievances, and other popes have given the appearance of lending legitimacy to the Palestinian cause. For example, Pope John Paul II is reported to have received PLO leader Yasser Arafat on twelve different occasions.

Arafat was a terrorist. One would think that the Vatican would have wanted to limit its contacts with him. The same goes for Abbas. He has repeatedly honored and praised Palestinian “martyrs” who have slaughtered innocent Jews. There is evidence that he helped fund the 1972 operation that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. Why is he accorded such a cordial reception at the Vatican?