RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even visionary calls for Islamic reform by Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, were not publicly welcomed by a single Western leader.

An ideology that encourages its adherents to engage in deadly rioting, burn down embassies, and kill people over cartoons, but that shows no great signs of sorrow as little girls are sold and raped, most likely does not have much to contribute to advancing civilization.

An ideology that treats women as property, that murders or imprisons intellectuals and that sentences a blogger to 1000 lashes and ten years in jail — if he survives — has no right to blame troubles on the West or anyone else.

This view has nothing to do with the West or any kind of Western intervention.

One hundred twenty-one illegal immigrants now facing murder charges were previously released by federal officials from 2010 to 2014, despite President Obama’s previous assurances that his administration is focusing its resources on the deportation of violent criminals.

The Obama administration released the figures to Congress in a May 28 letter. “Between FY 2010 and FY 2014, there were 121 unique criminal aliens who had an active case at the time of release and were subsequently charged with homicide-related offenses,” Sarah Saldaña, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Commitee chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.).

Hillary Clinton “re-launched” her floundering campaign Saturday on Roosevelt Island, formerly and fittingly known as Welfare Island. Clinton’s desperate effort to associate herself with “everyday Americans” contrasts starkly with the crooked elites with whom she and Bill normally cavort.

In fact, the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary’s elaborate slush fund, includes numerous donors and even one-time board members with dodgy backgrounds, shady dealings, and even criminal convictions that should repel rather than lure a once and perhaps future president of the United States. Peter Schweizer’s meticulously researched new best-seller Clinton Cash (complete with 635 endnotes) delineates this ultimate power couple’s sordid circle.

The last time Jeb Bush ran for office, it was 13 years ago. Barack Obama was serving in the Illinois state Senate. No one had heard of Obamacare or the tea party, and wouldn’t for years. It was before the invasion of Iraq, before Hurricane Katrina, before the financial meltdown. We had just invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq. It was a political epoch ago.

If timing is everything in politics, Bush has, among other things, a timing problem. He had an exemplary record as a conservative reformer in Florida almost a decade ago, but the achievements and fights of the other Republican governors running for president have been the stuff of contemporary headlines. He is a gifted politician, but his father and brother preceded him to the presidency, giving his campaign an inevitable dynastic air as the vehicle of “the third Bush.”

His pitch is that he can reform Washington as he did Florida.

Jeb Bush formally launched his presidential campaign on Monday, and no candidate needed it more. The former Florida Governor’s non-campaign so far has been curiously defensive, but now he has a new opening to make the case for why he can beat Hillary Clinton and be a worthy President.

Mr. Bush’s drawn-out pre-campaign allowed him to help his Super PAC raise money, and fundraising has been his biggest success to date. Money is an important measure of support, especially in a GOP field that is larger and more formidable than any in memory. Mr. Bush’s cash hoard will give him staying power to make it to the Florida primary or the later regional contests in an extended race.

But Mr. Bush’s long launch fuse has also made his candidacy seem more hesitant than dynamic, more biographical than about leading a larger cause. He has spent more time answering questions about his family name, and his brother’s foreign policy, than he has laying out his own campaign principles.

The focus on biography is especially harmful because many Republicans are instinctively averse to nominating the third Bush in 30 years. This does not mean Jeb should take the media bait of trying to explain how he is different than either his brother or his father. It does require offering a vision and agenda that are bold enough to set the terms of the debate, and then show that he can sell them.

Jeb Bush (with or without last name) made a fine debut speech at Miami Dade College Monday, right up there with Marco Rubio’s several weeks ago. Must be something in the Florida water. (Manatees?) They were both far better than the stultified, rigid Hillary, who can’t even quote The Beatles without sounding like a schoolmarm teaching Wordsworth to third graders. (Talk about “Yesterday”!)

Problem is, as I wrote in late May, I still wish Jeb wasn’t running. I had reasons then and they haven’t gone away — and this is with no offense to the former governor who, for all I know, could be the best potential president currently running from either party.

The overwhelming issues for me are democracy itself and defeating Hillary Clinton. Enough already with royal families. Are we Argentina? This is the USA (still… maybe…). Sure politics can be a family business like anything else, but there are limits. And the presidency is one of them, indeed the most important of them.

Twenty miles west of London, in Surrey, lies a quiet meadow along the Thames River. It is a centuries-old place deep in the heart and soul of England, though no formal memorial to it was placed there until the middle of the last century by (ironically) the American Bar Association. Almost a century ago, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem [1] about it:

At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers.
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.

That charter, the so-called “Great Charter” (or Magna Carta in the Latin used by the Norman rulers of the time), signed under duress by the tyrant King Jacques (we now call him “John”), reined in the power of his capricious reign, 800 years ago today. The event will be commemorated this evening [2] at the site (morning in the U.S.) by Daniel Hannan, southeast England’s representative to the European Parliament, and fierce critic of the EU and defender of the principles of the Anglosphere.

Appeasement defined the global conflicts of the 20th century. Time after time, America and other forces for freedom and democracy withheld their power in efforts to appease the most evil regimes in recent history. Over and over again, the policy of appeasement has ended in disaster. Now, conservative giant Victor Davis Hanson asks: why is appeasement so seductive and where will it take us in the 21st century?

In this collection of Hanson’s best columns from the last four years on the policy of appeasement today and in history, the path becomes clear. If America continues down the road of appeasement with radical Islamic groups and aggressive regimes in Russia and North Korea, the world will see a conflagration rivalling World War II.

A copy of the book can be purchased here.

‘Nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.” When I was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to the end of 2013, that was my standard response to reporters asking who bore the greatest responsibility—President Barack Obama or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for the crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.

I never felt like I was lying when I said it. But, in truth, while neither leader monopolized mistakes, only one leader made them deliberately.

Israel blundered in how it announced the expansion of Jewish neighborhoods and communities in Jerusalem over the border lines that existed before the Six Day War in 1967. On two occasions, the news came out during Mr. Netanyahu’s meetings with Vice President Joe Biden. A solid friend of Israel, Mr. Biden understandably took offense. Even when the White House stood by Israel, blocking hostile resolutions in the United Nations, settlement expansion often continued.

The text of Magna Carta of 1215 bears many traces of haste, and is the product of much bargaining,” the British Library website surprisingly states to individuals examining this iconic document for the first time. Yet Magna Carta, which turns 800 today, richly deserves being called, in the words of British Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan, the “most important bargain in the history of the human race.”

Driven to rebellion by abuses of royal taxation power, nobles imposed the Magna Carta (“Great Charter” in Latin) upon England’s King John at Runnymede on the Thames on June 15, 1215. The name merely reflects the document’s length, not any contemporary understanding that Magna Carta would become the “greatest constitutional document of all time,” as described by Britain’s most renowned jurist, Lord Denning. “Most of its clauses deal with specific, and often long-standing, grievances rather than with general principles of law,” the British Library notes. “Some of the grievances are clear; others can be understood only in the context of the feudal society in which they arose. The precise meaning of a few clauses is still uncertain.” Certain Magna Carta articles, for example, regulate borrowing from Jews, reflecting the money-lending role this people played in a medieval society that forbade Christians from earning interest.