RUTHFULLY YOURS

The departing senator’s final oversight report shows a DHS that’s wasteful, prone to corruption, and unable to keep us safe.

Only three in every 100 illegal immigrants will ever face deportation. That’s one of many shocking revelations found in the final oversight report of Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn. Coburn, who was the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has exposed some glaring problems at the Department of Homeland Security. Coburn’s report, released on Saturday, details DHS’s failure to fulfill any of its five core functions: securing the border, enforcing immigration law, preventing terrorism, safeguarding cyberspace, and strengthening national preparedness.

While the federal government continues to increase spending on border security, more than 700 miles of the nation’s southern border and thousands of miles of its northern border remain unsecured, according to the report. “With these broad gaps in coverage of both our Southern and Northern borders, the problem of people and goods illegally entering our country remains a significant concern,” the report states. “DHS has not succeeded in its efforts to secure U.S. port facilities, infrastructure, and incoming cargo from potential terrorist attacks, despite spending upward of $5 billion on these initiatives since 2002.” One of the reasons for its failures, as the report goes on to point out, is that the DHS lacked a department-wide border-security plan until late last year.

President Obama welcomed the 114th Congress Tuesday with an Obama-as-usual gesture: The White House said he will veto a bipartisan bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline if it gets to desk, as seems likely.

The House is expected to approve the pipeline again this week, while John Hoeven (R., N.D.) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) have introduced a Senate bill with 60 co-sponsors that is poised to overcome a liberal filibuster. Mr. Obama’s threat is an attempt to peel off enough Democrats so he doesn’t have to veto.

Mr. Obama claims to want more spending on infrastructure, but apparently not if the financing is from private business rather than taxpayers. The President says Keystone won’t matter to the economy because it will create “maybe 2,000” temporary jobs. But his own State Department reported last year that the project would employ some 10,000 construction workers, and that the $3.3 billion investment would support another 16,000 providing the pipe, tools, trucks and services (insurance, hotel rooms) for the project. There are another 26,000 indirect jobs that come from Keystone workers spending their wages on the likes of food, rent or vacations.

Congress is finally acting in bipartisan fashion because Mr. Obama has delayed his Keystone decision for six years. Members of both parties should move ahead despite the veto threat and call his bluff. At least the country will see who is the real obstacle to faster growth and job creation.

Joan was a respected author and commentator and friend. She was beautiful, smart, witty and and a staunch supporter of Israel. We spoke and exchanged e-mails for decades.

On December 7th I received the following message:

“Joan Peters, our dear friend, is extremely ill and in palliative care at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago.
She asked that I contact you and it would be a real mitzvah if you would call her. She had a stroke following a lengthy illness due to infection that began post surgically back in October. The infection has spread and is untreatable. ”

Alas, my last call to her, she was failing and I was unable to convey my affection and admiration for her.

On Monday she succumbed. May she rest in peace.

Shunned by cops, llied with Al Sharpton, incensed by criticism: New York’s mayor begins his second year.

As demonstrations over the grand-jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and New York’s Staten Island gathered momentum, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt herself obliged on Dec. 9 to issue a campus-wide apology. Her offense? Having said, in a message of support for the protests, that “all lives matter”—for which she became a target of enraged rebukes charging her with insensitivity and with minimizing the concerns of blacks.

What President McCartney’s instant apology said about the moral spine and leadership on the nation’s campuses today needs no spelling out. It wouldn’t be long, however, before the impact of two nonblack lives snuffed out with murderous deliberation would come blasting into the continuing carnival of staged “die-ins,” blocked highways and chanting marchers, including the contingent shouting “What do we want? Dead cops.”

PARIS—Armed men stormed the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday morning, killing 11 people and injuring more, French President François Hollande said.

The men opened fire inside the magazine’s offices using automatic AK-47 rifles before fleeing, a police officer said.

In November 2011, Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters were gutted by fire, hours before a special issue of the weekly featuring the Prophet Muhammad appeared on newsstands. The weekly has often tested France’s secular dogma, printing caricatures of the prophet on several occasions.

Since the arson attack, the weekly has moved to a new location, which was guarded by police. Two of the victims in Wednesday’s shooting were police, an officer on the scene said.

The 2011 fire caused no injuries but spurred debate over press freedom and religious tolerance in France, which is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population.

David Isaac is director and pubisher of Zionism-101- a comprehensive and indispensable series on the history of Jews in Palestine and early Zionism. Zionism 101www.zionism101.org

He received the following note and speech from the grandson of Lt.Colonel John Henry Patterson

Dear Mr. Isaacs:

Perhaps you would be interested in the short attached “speech” that I delivered at the reinternment ceremony of my grandfather last month in Moshav Avichaiyil. By the way, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed your Herzl productions. Sincerely, Alan Patterson

“Thank you for that kind introduction. And my thanks to all those who have made today’s event possible – Prime Minister Netanyahu, son of my grandfather’s close colleague, Ben Zion Netanyahu, whose office coordinated things at the national and international level, and Ezequiel Sivak of Moshav Avichayil, who has wonderfully led activities here at the local level.

It would be possible for me to talk extensively about my grandfather, Lt Col John Henry Patterson. Perhaps knowing that, the event organizers have asked me to speak briefly, and to enforce that request they have required me to actually write out my words so that they can be translated. A very effective ploy.

It has been many years since my mother mentioned to me that it had been one of JHP’s wishes that he be buried with his soldiers in Israel. I learned of this some 50 years after his cremation and disposition in a dreary cemetery building in Los Angeles, California. And for quite a few years the idea lingered at the back of my mind without anything to move me to attempt to fulfill that wish. And then when I began to consider how to accomplish it, and all the difficulties and bureacratic steps involved, I felt that his reburial might well be a case of “next year in Avichayil.” Happily we are here together this year in Avichayil and the Colonel, together with my grandmother, Francie, are now resting under the bright sky and fresh air of Israel, freed from their dusty corner of Rosemont Cemetery.

How this came to pass has relied on two people who you probably never have heard of, William Goldman and Jerry Klinger. Jerry is head of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, a US non governmental organization dedicated to helping record and memorialize Jews and their history around the world. In an afterword to a bibliography of JHP, I wrote that one of the tasks ahead of me at that time was the reinternment of my grandparents. Jerry contacted me as soon as he read that and offered his services. At first I was reluctant to accept, feeling that this was something that I needed to do personally. Pondering all the bureaucratic work involved in both Israel and the US, with consideration I decided that Jerry’s offer was too good to turn down. And here we are.

On Friday, the host of a political program on Al Tahrir TV in Egypt delivered an oral editorial on Tzipi Livni, who served as Israel’s justice minister and chief negotiator with the Palestinians until early last month, when the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu collapsed.

Before delving into the content of the editorial, and receiving a dose of sorely needed comic relief from the tragedies around us, let us first review what Livni has been up to these days.

Clearly worried about her future prospects in politics, Livni, the head of the Hatnuah party, joined forces with Labor leader Isaac Herzog. The two reached the conclusion that a merger would give the “peace camp” a better chance of beating Netanyahu in the March elections. So desperate were they not to be left in the dustbin of Israeli history that each agreed to a rotation as prime minister (Herzog for the first two years, and Livni for the remainder of the term), in the event that their “Zionist Camp” bloc garners enough votes to form the next coalition.

CONTENTS

1. Israeli NGO files war crimes charges against Palestinian leaders at ICC
2. Fatah: Netanyahu will hang “soon”
3. Fatah distances itself from latest “genocidal, anti-Semitic” Facebook post
4. Why June 13? Because they kidnapped the teens on June 12
5. “Palestine to join Interpol”
6. Iran claims to “builds world’s first missile-evading drone”
7. Egypt threatened to arrest George Clooney’s wife
8. Saudi Airlines reportedly plans to segregate sexes
9. Ayatollah compares Ferguson, Gaza; 50 women arrested for “un-Islamic” dress
10. Hamas condemns shooting of Gazan teen by Egyptian guards
11. “Female slavery the biggest honor for non-Muslim women, says jihadist”
12. Santa chased out of Turkish town in anti-New Year’s celebration

Number of suicide bombings worldwide doubles in 2014 but none in Israel (& The Guardian hails Israeli president) –

CONTENTS

1. Wide-ranging poll finds both Jews and Arabs “proud to be Israeli”
2. The Guardian chooses Israeli President Rivlin as a “hero” of 2014
3. Despite Gaza war, tourist numbers to Israel fell only 1% in 2014
4. Egypt Chamber of tourism: Hotel occupancy reached only 12% by New Year
5. Number of suicide bombings around world surged 94% in 2014 but none in Israel
6. U.S. academic group votes against further anti-Israel resolutions
7. Norwegian NGO funds exhibit of children’s maps replacing Israel with Palestine
8. Jews flee France in record numbers to escape anti-Semitism
9. Dieudonne’s supporters turn against him
10. Anti-Semitic acts in UK at 30-year high; BDS activist makes Nazi salute
11. Jewish groups condemn pro-Nazi rallies in Croatia, Ukraine
12. Nazis’ vast, secret “nuclear weapons facility” uncovered in Austria

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North Korea’s attack on Sony Pictures reminded us we live in a cyber world. Chet Nagle’s latest novel, LAZARUS MAN, takes hacking to another level — banks are cyber-attacked and billions are stolen. Identity theft morphs into identity change, and then a cyber-dead man returns to life. This fact-based thriller will give cyber geeks some dark ideas. See the 5-star reviews, order it on Amazon and take time for a great read. I promise that it will not disappoint! http://amzn.to/1G6S0iQ