RUTHFULLY YOURS

Feminism originated as a struggle for equal rights. It started with voting rights, then expanded to include the dismantling of laws and customs that assumed women were incapable of running their own lives, and so had to be subjected to male overseers. The goal was to achieve for women their autonomy in world with a level social-economic-political playing field. In short, feminism was about achieving the liberal democratic good of individuals with autonomy, human rights, and the equality of opportunity to rise according to their abilities.

Shifting social mores, technological innovations, and an expanding economy laid the groundwork for the triumph of what is called “equity feminism” starting in the 1960s. But that was the same time feminism took a sharp turn away from classical liberalism into the illiberal precincts of cultural Marxism, identity politics, grievance-mongering, progressive political advocacy, and New Age silliness like the mythic “women’s way of knowing.” The result today has been the transformation of equity feminism into a subsidiary of a progressive ideology that cares more for political and personal power than equal opportunity for all women. Hillary Clinton’s career exemplifies this change.

A federal court has struck a blow for the First Amendment by ordering Philadelphia’s public transit system to accept an eye-opening ad that spotlights Islamic Jew-hatred and urges the United States to cut off foreign aid to Muslim countries.

The hard-hitting public service announcement, which contains a photograph of a real-life meeting between Adolf Hitler and Muslim leader and Nazi collaborator Hajj Amin al-Husseini, is sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), which was co-founded by conservative leader and blogger Pamela Geller. AFDI sued and placed the ad in New York City and Washington, D.C. public transit systems after litigating the matter in court. It has also attempted to place ads in transit systems in Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

It’s just the latest in a string of legal victories for Geller.

For example, in 2012 Geller won her legal fight to post an anti-Islamist ad in the New York City subway system. Quoting Ayn Rand, the ad read, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” The ad was a response to ads in the NYC subway promoting Islam and others accusing Israel of a number of things including being an obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

American novelist and foreign correspondent Anderson intertwines T.E. Lawrence’s well-worn, but never boring, story with those of three other intriguing personalities—Curt Prüfer, a German Orientalist and spy; William Yale, an American patrician, oilman, and spy; and Aaron Aaronsohn, a Jewish agronomist of pre-Mandate Palestine and spymaster. The result is a highly original and absorbing—but also troubling—account of an extremely familiar subject. Anderson likewise delves into imperial rivalries—British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian (as well as the bungling, neophyte Americans)—and their tragic consequences during and after World War I.

Anderson is not the first scholar to link Lawrence and Aaronsohn. Ronald Florence’s T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict[1] thoroughly covered the rather scanty—and mutually rude—relations between the British Arabist and the Romanian-born Jew who laid the scientific basis for the “desert bloom” of Palestine. Similarly, correspondence between Lawrence and Yale has been noted both by Florence and by Harold Orlans in T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero[2] although their fleeting, sporadic, but still momentous interactions are handled much more substantively here.

The Congressional Democrats trying to smear climate skeptics are betting that the threat of a federal investigation will muzzle academics and companies that question their climate-change agenda. So a round of applause for those pushing back, providing the bullies a public lesson in the First Amendment.

“It surprises nobody that you disagree with CATO’s views on climate change—among a host of issues—but that doesn’t give you license to use the awesome power of the federal government to cow us or anybody else,” wrote Cato Institute President John Allison in a letter last week to Senators Barbara Boxer,Ed Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse.
He was responding to their February attempt to intimidate climate apostates by sending 107 letters to think tanks, trade associations and companies demanding information about their funding. This follows an inquiry by House Democrat Raul Grijalva into seven academics who have questioned President Obama’s climate policies, an attack recently described in these pages by one of the targets, distinguished climate scientist Richard Lindzen, who is now associated with Cato.

So John Kerry wants to “re-ignite” Syrian peace talks that have already blown up twice, telling CBS News that he is prepared to meet with Bashar Assad in person because “we have to negotiate in the end.” What a non-surprise. The secretary of state always had a terrific soft spot for the Syrian president-for-life. Sooner or later Mr. Kerry was bound to seek a fresh opening, the way liberals always do with the brutality artists who never quite disenchant them.

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire . . .

That’s Kipling. As for Assad, he wasted no time treating Mr. Kerry’s hopeful overture with lordly contempt: “Talks about the future of the Syrian president are for Syrian people alone,” he said, responding to the suggestion that he might be prepared to negotiate his departure from the palace. Rejection, Assad knows, typically ignites attraction.

The fact that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private server in her home, rather than a secure government server, to send emails during her four years as secretary of state has raised many questions. She now says that it was a mistake but also emphasizes that she broke no law. News reports typically describe her offense as not following “policy.”

Whether or not Mrs. Clinton violated a State Department rule, her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails sure looks like obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. Let’s consider some of the basic, undisputed facts, and then the law.

First, Mrs. Clinton was worried that communicating through email would leave a trail that might be subject to subpoena. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that,” she said in 2000, “why would I ever want to do email?” But when she became secretary of state, she didn’t have much choice. So she set up a private server in her house. That way, in the event of an investigation, she could control which emails would be turned over.

We can believe Ed Klein’s sources claiming Valerie Jarrett is the White House point woman for the destruction of Hillary Clinton. Evidence:

It was the New York Times which broke the story. The Democratic press does not eat its own, ever. Yet here was the Gray Lady, setting the headlines for Drudge.

People asked how Hillary could have been so stupid. The answer is that in the normal course of mainstream reporting, there is no Democrat crime too large for the press to cover up. She knew she was perfectly safe. Bill Clinton raping women? That story had no legs. President Obama’s bizarre secrecy and lies about his past — no interest. Obama’s radical record as a community organizer? President Obama attending a black supremacist church led by a Louis Farrakhan clone who hates whites and Jews? No story there, move along. Obama working day and night to promote the hegemony of Iran in the Middle East? Nothing to analyze. Hillary lying to our faces about Benghazi? The IRS abusing its power to hobble the Tea Party before the 2012 Presidential election? Not news worthy.

So it was perfectly normal for Sect. Hillary Clinton to break security rules and think she could get away with it.

“Between acts of abuse sometimes stretching over a number of days, the Oxford men ensured girls were guarded so that they could not escape. In addition to being abused in various locations in Oxford, some of the girls were taken to other towns and cities such as London and Bournemouth for the same purpose.” — Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“I turned up at the police station at 2/3am, blood all over me, soaked through my trousers to the crotch. They dismissed it as me being naughty, a nuisance.” — Victim’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“I made a complaint about a man who trafficked me from a children’s home. He was arrested, released and trafficked me again.” — Victim’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“Police wouldn’t tell us addresses so we could go and bring her home.” — Victim’s parent’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“She was a minor but we were told it wasn’t our business.” — Victim’s parent’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

When I found myself hoping that my college-bound granddaughter will not “come out” as Jewish, I realized I had time-traveled back to the Germany of the 1930s—and I wasn’t singing “Willkommen.”

My fears were only heightened this week as I watched the film “Crossing the Line 2,” at its Boston premiere. (http://www.campusintifada.com) The film details the spreading infection of anti-Israel (read anti-Semitic) activity on American college campuses. Guest of honor and speaker at the showing was the noble and beautiful Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who said that watching the film was like “having a bucket of ice water” dumped on her head.

In “Crossing the Line 2” (the second film on the same subject by the producers, Jerusalem U/Step Up For Israel) we see raucous, scary mobs of students (and obvious non-students) in kafiyahs and hijabs, bellowing and bullhorning “We support the intifada!” “F– you, Zionist scum!” Nazi pigs!” and more. We see “die-ins,” apartheid walls, guerrilla theater, mock eviction notices, and other pro-Palestinian antics. And, by contrast, we meet Jewish students facing, and even facing down, the obscenities and bullying. Perhaps they were screened by the producers at central casting, but they all seem fresh-faced, sensible, and mannerly.

But their task is formidable. For instance, Becky Sebo of Ohio University is shown attempting to read a statement in support of Israel to the student senate. Appallingly, in the midst of her remarks, the campus police arrive and she and three others are arrested and taken away in handcuffs. Sarah Abonyi of the University of New Mexico correctly identifies the sources of the hatred: the group called Students for Justice in Palestine, and most important, faculty, particularly tenured faculty. As Aviva Slomich, a CAMERA campus director, says, “Students come and go, but professors stay.”

Before I explain what it was like to become friends with the pre-eminent McCarthy scholar of our time, M. Stanton Evans, I’d like to point out some of the pitfalls of the territory, starting with the anti-McCarthy tripwire.

This relic of the Cold War, circa 1950s, is used to bring down anyone even thinking about stepping out of line to reconsider the place of Sen. McCarthy in our nation’s history (hell). The anti-McCarthy tripwire is the first trigger. Tripped once, maybe twice, it activates the anti-McCarthy force field, which I will get to below.

“You know that you are going to be attacked,” Stan said to me in the fall of 2012 on reading the manuscript of American Betrayal, which, building on the research in Blacklisted by History, takes as a given that McCarthy is the most demonized man in American history to whom the nation now owes plaudits and apologies galore — and moves on from there. It is not an exaggeration to say that American Betrayal is first an homage to Blacklisted by History. Not surprisingly, I think it reads as a companion piece to the 2012 book Stan and the late Herbert Romerstein wrote as a follow-up to the McCarthy book — Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government. For these reasons, this Amazon “Frequently Bought Together” box is very pleasing to the junior author.