RUTHFULLY YOURS

I’ve written frequently about how the West’s obsession with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians helps perpetuate global misery by diverting attention from people in far greater distress (think Syrians or South Sudanese). Yet this obsession also perpetuates suffering among the one group it’s ostensibly supposed to help–the Palestinians. Three Jerusalem Post reports over the last week show why.

One warned that a leading Palestinian hospital is at risk of closure because of a $30 million debt. A major reason for this debt is that for years, the Palestinian Authority has failed to pay Mokassed Hospital for many of the patients it treats. This isn’t because the PA lacked money; it has ample funds to pay generous salaries to thousands of terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Rather, it’s a matter of priorities: On the PA’s scale of values, paying terrorists for killing Israelis is evidently more important than paying doctors for healing Palestinians.

The world has always been dangerous. However, as much as we all would like to live without war, as long as there are men and women driven by passion rather than reason the possibility is unlikely. Following World War I (the war to end all wars!), Europeans desired nothing more than to live in peace. Their families, their homes, places of business, their churches, synagogues and mosques had been destroyed. Woodrow Wilson proposed a League of Nations so that men could discuss differences without resorting to bloodshed. It failed; though was ultimately reborn as the United Nations, but not until another war killed millions more. Vera Britain, author of Testament to Youth and who had lost both her brother and fiancé in the Great War, typified that desire when she wrote a plaintive letter to students at the University of Minnesota in 1934 urging them not to join the army. As a nurse in France, she knew first hand the horrors of war.

Yet just over twenty-years after the guns along that “Great White Line” were silenced, Europe found itself enmeshed in an even bloodier conflict. The Left persists in the myth that when the Right stipulates they want a strong military, it means they are anxious to go to war. It does not. They want peace; but they believe that strength is more conducive to peace than appeasement. It was preparedness and resolve that were needed in the 1930s. While his intentions may have been noble, Neville Chamberlain did not bring “peace in our time.” A well-educated friend of my wife’s recently asked what I thought of Benjamin Netanyahu speaking before a joint session of Congress. I told her I thought it was important that the American people hear from a man for whom Iran getting nuclear weapons is not an academic exercise, but would represent a mortal, existential threat. She responded: “But why does he want to go to war?”

Rudy Giuliani & King Canute By Roger Kimball

So White House spokesman Josh Earnest “feels sorry [1]” for Rudy Giuliani. Save your sympathy, Josh: you’re going to need it closer to home as America wakes up to the rude truth of Giuliani’s recent comments about your boss.

Everyone now knows that “America’s mayor” created a firestorm with his off-the-record-but-nevertheless-reported remarks at a “private” (Ha!) dinner for Scott Walker in New York last week. Barack Obama, Giuliani suggested, didn’t “love America,” not really. He hastened to add that he was not questioning the president’s patriotism. Oh, no, never that. It’s just that Obama’s habitual denigration of America (he believes in American exceptionalism in the same way that the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism, he once said [2]) led him to conclude that Barack Hussein Obama was not viscerally connected to this country in the same way that, for example, Ronald Reagan was.

The MSM sure didn’t like that. And they liked it even less when Giuliani decided to underscore his comments in the following days. Not only did Obama not really love America, Giuliani said, but also he was deeply influenced by America-hating Communists growing up, from his parents to Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers, and the “Reverend” Jeremiah (“God Damn America [3]”) Wright.

Imagine Obama as an American president in 1939.

“The United States has made significant gains [2] in our struggle against violent extremism in Europe. We are watching carefully aggressions in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and in Eastern Europe. My diplomatic team has made it very clear that aggression against neighbors is inappropriate and unacceptable. We live in the 20th century, where the 19th century practice [3] of changing borders by the use of force has no place in the present era.

“Let me be perfectly clear: Mr. Hitler is playing to a domestic audience. He adopts a sort of macho shtick, as a cut-up in the back of the class who appeals to disaffected countrymen. Our task is to demonstrate to Mr. Hitler that his current behavior is not really in his own interest, and brings neither security nor profit to Germany.

“As for acts of violence in Germany itself, we must express our worry to the German government over apparent extremism, but at the same time we must not overreact. As far as these sporadic attacks on random civilians, as, for example, during the recent Kristallnacht violence, we must keep things in perspective, when, for example, some terrorists randomly targeted [4] some folks in a store. My job is sort of like a big-city mayor, to monitor these terrorist acts that are said to be done in the name of the German people. Let us not overreact and begin to listen to radio commentators who whip us up into a frenzy as if we were on the verge of war. We must not overestimate the SS, a sort of jayvee organization [5] that remains a manageable problem.

“Here let me just say that we must never fall into the trap of blaming the German people abroad, but especially our German community here at home. National Socialism by no means has anything to do with socialism [6]. These terrorists are desperate for legitimacy, and all of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like the SS somehow represent socialism because that is a falsehood that embraces the terrorist narrative. It is true that America and Germany have a complicated history, but there is no clash of civilizations. The notion that the America would be at war with Germany is an ugly lie.

Colleges are usually at the forefront of radical politics, but when it comes to their own privileges they become feudal empires. Behold the revolt in the Wisconsin state university system over Governor Scott Walker ’s appeal for modest accountability.

In Mr. Walker’s recent biennial budget proposal, he joined the national debate on higher education. The Governor and potential presidential candidate wants to extend a 2013-2015 tuition freeze at the University of Wisconsin for two more years, and then slightly reduce state aid in exchange for more independence for the system.

UW is now a formal state agency, which operates under the same regulations that apply to the rest of the bureaucracy on worker compensation, bonding for building projects, procurement, contracting and much else. Mr. Walker would spin off UW as a quasi-public authority that is out of this government saddle. He would also convert state aid that is now filled with earmarks for specific programs into a clean, inflation-adjusted block grant that UW could spend at its discretion.

Whether you agreed with me or not, I hope this can be the basis of a real conversation about national leadership.

There has been no shortage of news coverage—and criticism—regarding comments I made about President Obama at a political gathering last week in New York. My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart. My intended focus really was the effect his words and his actions have on the morale of the country, and how that effect may damage his performance. Let me explain.

The role of an American president is unique. It is not simply that he or she is vested with the executive power of just any national government. Rather, the president heads the government of the one country with an unequaled record of promoting and protecting human freedom—and the only country in the world that is in a position to continue doing so if properly led.

Our leaders’ best efforts have combined intelligence, compassion, strength and perhaps most notably a strong sense of optimism. Leading this country well means being able to capture the unlimited possibilities before us. Those possibilities exist because we have political and economic freedom that unleashes the potential in each of us. American values, worn with pride, give our nation a unique moral authority that can help achieve foreign-policy and security goals while fostering the consensus necessary to address thorny domestic issues.

Despite heightened security, recruits find alternate routes to join Islamic State fighters

Along the southern frontier of the European Union, a small but growing number of aspiring jihadists are blazing trails by road and ferry to Syria’s battlefields, sidestepping heightened airport security and slipping through the holes in Europe’s intelligence dragnet.

Some fighters follow meandering bus routes through several countries en route to the more loosely guarded border of Bulgaria to Turkey. Others engage in what authorities call “broken travel,” using family visits or holiday destinations as an initial leg to mask their final destination.

That was how the wife of Paris terrorist Amedy Coulibaly slipped into Syria days before her husband killed four people at a kosher grocery last month. The woman, Hayat Boumeddiene, drove from France to Spain, then flew to Turkey before joining Islamic State in Syria. She later called for others to join her, in an interview with the militant group also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Western diplomats and intelligence officials say most aspiring European fighters still try to fly directly to Turkey, which borders western Syria.

While British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond was paying homage to Iran’s passive foreign policies, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels were, in fact, busy overthrowing Yemen’s government.

Ali Shirazi, a representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader, said in January that: “The Houthi group is a similar copy to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and this group will come into action against enemies of Islam… The Islamic republic directly supports the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the popular forces in Syria and Iraq.”

A peaceful Middle East and a nuclear-free Iran, some British politicians claim, is only achievable if the “moderates” in Tehran can be won over.

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, in The Times, declared:

“New sanctions legislation, which some in America are calling for, would undermine Iranian confidence in the negotiations and irreparably damage the chances of a deal. Hardliners in Tehran, who oppose any deal in principle, would be strengthened.”

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was on official business in Morocco when informed of the jihad attack against a free speech meeting in Copenhagen. He immediately flew to Denmark where he joined his personal friend François Zimeray, French ambassador to Denmark. Zimeray, who attended the “Art, Blasphemy, Freedom of Speech” event at the Krudttønden Café organized in reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, put it succinctly: “I went to the meeting by bicycle and left in an armored car.”

All- news channels BFM TV and I Télé went into Special Edition, reporting on the attack non-stop from Saturday afternoon to Sunday night, and then some. Frequent zaps to other available stations—CNN, SkyNews, BBC, France24—yielded low to negligible interest in the story…aside from the BBC recording of Inna Shevchenko’s speech. The Ukrainian Femen, commenting on the current state of press freedom in the West, asked “Why do we say we have freedom of speech, but…?” As she repeated for emphasis the “freedom but” her words were brutally punctuated by the sharp crackle of gunfire.

A week from Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will address a joint ‎session of Congress. He will find some empty seats as a few dozen Democrats, ‎almost all them either members of the Congressional Black Caucus or the ‎progressive caucus (the most left-wing members of the U.S. House of Representatives), plus a very ‎small number of senators, take the day off. These elected officials will boycott the ‎presentation to express their displeasure with the fact that Netanyahu’s invitation by ‎House Speaker John Boehner was “disrespectful to the president” and violated ‎established protocol. The disrespectful charge came naturally to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who have formed a blocking and tackling operation to protect the first elected ‎black president from the time of his inauguration. The protocol issue relates to ‎the timing that the White House was informed, when the invitation was extended, and the ‎timing of a speech by a foreign leader so close to the date of their country’s ‎national election (though the initial date was one three weeks earlier and less in ‎proximity with the Israeli election date, and more in line with other visits by foreign ‎leaders before their nation’s election dates). ‎