RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over the past two decades Israel has managed to destroy its regional reputation.

With our own hands, we have twice shown our neighbors they have little reason to tie their fates to ours. We are unreliable.

In 1994, Israel betrayed the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza who had helped us fight against PLO terrorists for decades. Open season on our Palestinian allies officially began in July 1994 with the entrance of thousands of PLO terrorists – led by Yasser Arafat – into Gaza and Jericho. Arafat’s henchmen did not limit their murderous wrath to the Palestinians who saved countless Israeli lives by working with the Shin Bet and the IDF. They killed Palestinians who sold their lands to Jewish buyers. Palestinians who simply enjoyed normal work relations with Israelis found themselves targeted as suspected “collaborators.”

Perfection is not found in economics and governing. Reality interferes. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a case in point. The President and Congress may still find a way to pass this important piece of legislation (they have until July 30), but on Friday they failed – a set-back for President Obama. The House did, narrowly, pass the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), commonly known as “fast-track” trade authorization, 219-211, but failed to pass a related and linked bill, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) that would have extended a decades-old training and income-support program for workers dislocated because of trade. Because the two bills were linked, both were aborted. TPA must precede passage of TPP. Other nations will not provide concessions, if they believe Congress can re-write the Treaty.

With the news that a woman will be added to the $10 bill — not to the exclusion of founding father Alexander Hamilton, as originally feared, but in addition to him — plenty of people have wondered why the $20 bill wasn’t the one that came in for revision instead. Hamilton, as an author of the Federalist papers, the first Treasury secretary, and essentially the father of the American currency system, seems like he deserves his own bill.

Meanwhile there were calls for a woman to replace Andrew Jackson, who may be a member of President Obama’s party but is a rather controversial figure these days, and was not an especially well-regarded president in the first place. (His signal accomplishments were making America more populist, democratic, and focused on the western frontier — all questionable moves in a way, really.) So why is the ten getting changed?

Oregon’s Gresham-Barlow school district spends $100,000 each year on a white-privilege conference that teaches its faculty that they’re racist and should therefore blame themselves for student misbehavior.

The week-long “Coaching for Educational Equity” conference is mandatory for all administrators (and optional for teachers) in the Portland-area K–12 school district each year, according to the Education Action Group Foundation, a national non-partisan, non-profit education reform organization headquartered in Michigan.

EAG reports that school-board member Dan Chriestenson recently obtained the conference materials after a long battle with the Oregon Center for Educational Equity, the private nonprofit that presents the conference.

‘Trigger Warning’ Professors Aren’t Compassionate; They’re Co-Conspirators in Campus Censorship
Last fall, my friend Wendy Kaminer appeared on a Smith College panel — held in New York City, not on Smith’s campus in Northampton, Mass. — called “Challenging the Ideological Echo Chamber: Civil Discourse and the Liberal Arts.” From the transcript, it appears the panel discussion proceeded as the better academic panels do, with spirited, civil disagreement. Kaminer led the charge — as she always does — for free speech, challenging the audience to speak (and think) freely. And when it comes to free speech, Kaminer practices what she preaches. She self-censors for no one.

When the Smith College newspaper published the transcript, however, it contained the following, absurd statement: “Trigger/Content Warnings: Racism/racial slurs, ableist slurs, antisemitic language, anti-Muslim/Islamophobic language, anti-immigrant language, sexist/misogynistic slurs, references to race-based violence, references to antisemitic violence.” As Kaminer pointed out in her Washington Post piece about the incident, the paper then went on to edit the transcript itself by removing the allegedly “triggering content.” For example, it replaced Smith president Kathleen McCartney’s joking comment, “We’re just wild and crazy, aren’t we?” with “We’re just wild and [ableist slur], aren’t we?”

Adolf Hitler started World War II by attacking Poland on September 1, 1939. Nazi Germany moved only after it had already remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria, and dismantled Czechoslovakia. Before the outbreak of the war, Hitler’s new Third Reich had created the largest German-speaking nation in European history.

Well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese government had redrawn the map of Asia and the Pacific. Japan had occupied or annexed Indochina, Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, in addition to swaths of coastal China. Attacking Hawaii, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Indonesia was merely the logical 1941 follow-up to more than a decade of Japanese aggression.

Fascist Italy, by the outbreak of World War II in Europe, had already been remaking the map of the Mediterranean region in imitation of ancient Rome. Strongman Benito Mussolini had annexed what is now Ethiopia, Albania, and most of Libya. He promised Italians that the Mediterranean would soon be mare nostrum, “our sea.”

Although Hillary Clinton prefers to describe Sidney Blumenthal as nothing but “an old friend,” NR has obtained an exclusive copy of one of the now-infamous e-mails he sent Clinton on the war in Libya, and it suggests otherwise. The e-mail, which Blumenthal provided to Benghazi Committee investigators earlier this week, shows him advising Clinton on a most delicate matter: How she should respond to the fall of Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi.

Blumenthal e-mailed a list of talking points to Clinton the day after rebel forces captured Tripoli, prefaced by a congratulatory statement exhorting the former presidential candidate to make sure she received credit for the U.S. intervention in Libya. The message was only recently provided by Blumenthal to the congressional panel investigating the Benghazi terrorist attacks, despite Clinton’s previous assurance that she had turned over “all” her correspondence pertaining to Libya.

Rival governing groups of Fatah and Hamas disagree over how to rebuild war-battered Gaza

The fragile Palestinian unity government teetered on the verge of collapse on Wednesday amid an escalating conflict between the secular Fatah party and its Islamist rival Hamas.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s office said the unity government formed last year to reunite the two Palestinian factions had resigned on Wednesday after he held an emergency meeting with Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on the government’s fate. But shortly after, Abbas aides said a final decision wasn’t yet made.

After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.

Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.

The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.

So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.

A pattern of criminality has been in progress for decades with more Americans falling victim to this crime each day. The crime is “theft by deception.” Because of this, millions of Americans are losing their thin sliver of the American Dream, their security and their peace of mind

In order to understand the crime we first need to know and understand the elements of the crime.

To provide a starting point and specific language, we will use the definition of “theft by deception” as defined in one state in particular: Georgia. However, this crime, of using deception to steal, is codified in virtually every state and city. This crime is defined in the Georgia Code [2], in part, as:

a) A person commits the offense of theft by deception when he obtains property by any deceitful means or artful practice with the intention of depriving the owner of the property.

(b) A person deceives if he intentionally:

(1) Creates or confirms another’s impression of an existing fact or past event which is false and which the accused knows or believes to be false;

(2) Fails to correct a false impression of an existing fact or past event which he has previously created or confirmed;

(3) Prevents another from acquiring information pertinent to the disposition of the property involved