RUTHFULLY YOURS

Expiring Section of Law, Targeted by Critics of NSA Phone Program, Underpins Requests for Hotel, Credit-Card Bills

WASHINGTON—U.S. officials and some lawmakers are worried that key tools used to hunt down terrorists and spies could fall victim to the fight over the government’s controversial phone-surveillance program.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, using authority conveyed by a soon-to-expire section of the 2001 Patriot Act, is currently allowed to seek “tangible things’’ to aid in terrorism or intelligence probes, such as hotel bills, credit-card slips and other documents. Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI, with a court order, to take “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.’’

The authority is often used as a way to secretly collect evidence on suspected foreign spies operating in the U.S., according to current and former officials. Unlike a grand-jury subpoena, a person or company receiving a Section 215 order to provide documents is barred from revealing to anyone that they received such a request, these people said.

Canadian law professor William Schabas resigned this week as chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry into the 2014 Gaza conflict. He did so after Israeli diplomats revealed he was paid by the Palestine Liberation Organization to render an opinion on the legal consequences of a U.N. General Assembly resolution upgrading “Palestine” to a nonmember state. Now there’s a nonsurprise.

When the conflict of interest came to light last week, Mr. Schabas insisted his 2012 work for the Palestinians was purely “academic.” But by Monday he had resigned his U.N. post. In his resignation letter, he blamed his departure on “Israel’s campaign against the Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza Conflict” rather than his own failure to disclose a material conflict of interest.

Please watch the 6 minute bullet video: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

Conventional wisdom suggests that US-Israel ties constitute a one-way-street: The US gives and Israel receives. However, in recent years the one-way-street has been transformed into a two-way-street, mutually-beneficial, win-win set of ties:

1. US special operations units trained in Israel before arrival to Iraq and Afghanistan;
2. Israel armor plating technology protects US soldiers;
3. Israel is a cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory for the US defense industries;
4. Israel provides the US more intelligence than all NATO countries combined;

If several alarming media reports are true, US President Barack Obama
is moving perilously closer to a nuclear deal with Iran that will
endanger Israel and all of Western civilization.

Far away from the glare of the cameras, it appears that the
commander-in-chief and his colleagues are swiftly caving in to the
ayatollahs, hoping to buy some short-term quiet by allowing Iran to
remain a threshold nuclear state.

Is Annexation a Near Term Option?

By Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis). 5 February 2015

On February 3, 2015, Bayit Yehudit (Israeli political party) distributed a short video describing Naftali Bennett’s plan to annex Area C, the area where Jewish communities are located, while leaving the remainder as a Palestinian autonomy with Israel making great efforts to facilitate improved conditions in the autonomy. Palestinians in Area C would each have the choice of full Israeli citizenship or permanent resident status.

Minister Bennett’s Facebook page introduced the video with the line “Give us 20 mandates”

The end of the video has the line ”Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria today”.

The clip didn’t get much media attention or discussion.

And Bayit Yehudi itself doesn’t seem to have initiated any follow up (at least as of now).

I hope it does. Because annexation deserves serious consideration. And not just for some far off time.

In 2002, a group of Harvard students and faculty circulated a petition calling for the university to divest from corporations that do business with Israel. Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, rejected the petition. In response to today’s renewed calls to boycott Israel on college campuses, including Harvard, and the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities, Summers addresses the issue once more:

January 29, 2015
I am delighted to help inaugurate this forum on academic freedom. Academic freedom is essential if universities are to succeed in their missions of creating and disseminating knowledge. Universities excel when they are governed by the authority of ideas rather than the idea of authority. And more perhaps than at any other moment in history, the work of universities–transmitting knowledge and values from one generation to the next, and creating new knowledge — determines the future of nations.
It speaks to the importance of universities in the life of nations that George Washington very much wanted to devote his farewell address to a proposed American national university until he was dissuaded from the idea by Alexander Hamilton, not because Hamilton did not like the idea but because he thought the farewell address was the wrong occasion for its presentation. So Washington instead bequeathed a substantial part of his not inconsiderable fortune to the proposed university.

In a column for NRO earlier this week, we wrote about the tax proposal currently being put forward by Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah). We admire both senators and think their plan has some great components — particularly the reforms to the corporate tax code. But, as we wrote in our column, the plan fails to do enough to promote economic growth, instead emphasizing “pro-family” initiatives such as a greatly expanded child tax credit. People are inherently entrepreneurial and need to be offered the same hope that corporations would get under the Rubio-Lee plan.

Responding to our column with two blog posts, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru defends the expanded child credit and accuses us of being inconsistent in our criticism of the Rubio-Lee plan. The core of Ponnuru’s criticism is that we call for a much lower top marginal tax rate while opposing the child credit and wanting to “keep a bunch of tax breaks.”

In remarks at the Detroit Economic Club on Wednesday, Bush, a top-tier candidate in the early presidential going, offered an answer: Maybe.

The former Florida governor laid out the contours of what he called “the defining challenge of our time” — a growing “opportunity gap” and six years of economic stagnation — and called for the Republican party to turn its attention to the middle class and the poor. Detroit itself, mired in bankruptcy, is a symbol of that decline.
Bush was himself — serious, sober, and stiff — as he pledged to offer a “new vision” and a “plan of action” that departs from the one that’s been on offer the past six years from the White House — and mainstream Washington Republicans.
But the speech was heavy on lofty phrases and light on specific details. Those will have to wait: He promised “a mix of smart policies and reforms” in the coming months.
“I’m not sure the average person listening to that speech would’ve thought wow, this person is a really different kind of Republican,” says Jim Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to National Review Online. “There wasn’t anything startling there in substance.”

The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else.

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.

What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?

The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions.

But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one.

The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.

The courage and sacrifice of today’s Christian martyrs should not go unnoticed and unappreciated. One such heroic figure, the 94-year-old Roman Catholic bishop Cosma Shi Enxiang, has recently died in Chinese custody, according to an official government statement, reported on February 2 by an independent Catholic news service focusing on Asia. His generation felt the brunt of Chinese Communist cruelty, but his death as a religious prisoner reminds us that religious repression in China is far from over.

Altogether, since 1954, Bishop Shi was held captive for over 40 years by the Communist government for his religion, making him one of the longest serving political prisoners of our age. (I intend in no way to minimize the suffering of Nelson Mandela and Alexander Solzhenitsyn by pointing out that Mandela was imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid government for 27 years, and that Solzhenitsyn was forced to spend eleven years in the Soviet gulag.)