RUTHFULLY YOURS

Peggy Noonan joined the crowd that turned on George W. Bush in what I thought was (in Noonan’s case) a grossly unfair manner in 2008. I wrote critically about one of Noonan’s weekly Wall Street Journal columns in which she identified with the public disapproval of Bush that April in “Season of the witch.”

Having turned on George W. Bush, Noonan moved on to support the election of Barack Obama later that year. Noonan all but endorsed Obama in her 2008 column “Obama and the runaway train.” The anti-Bush and pro-Obama columns fit neatly together. She wrote of Obama just before the election:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

In a sense, Obama delivered, but in another sense Noonan got everything wrong. Obama has changed the direction and tone of American foreign policy, alright, yet the change hasn’t yielded the results Noonan anticipated.

Noonan has now turned on Obama. She actually turned on him a while ago. In a recent column — “The unwisdom of Barack Obama,” behind the Journal’s subscription paywall but accessible via Google — Noonan condemned Obama on one of the grounds she had supported him in 2008: “His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment.”

Now you tell us.

The Jewish state must respond to Palestinian unilateralism with unilateralism of its own.

À la guerre comme à la guerre (In war, as in war) – A French maxim

The dispute between the Arabs and Jews is an “agrarian dispute,” over the question of who puts who in the ground first – Attributed to Yisrael Galili (1911-1986), head of National Staff of the Hagana, and an iconic figure in the Labor Party

Over the last two decades, Israel has inexorably painted itself into a perilous corner. By blunder after debacle, it has allowed itself to be corralled into a political cul-de-sac that threatens to undermine its very ability to survive as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Arrogance and indolence

With a lethal blend of arrogance and indolence, it has surrendered card after crucial card in the deadly high-stakes Middle East poker game. It has maneuvered itself into a situation where, seemingly, its only strategic initiative is capitulation.

Predictably, years of neglect of (even, disdain for) public diplomacy, and an enduring refusal (even, inability) on the part of successive governments to acknowledge the critical strategic function it has in the defense of the nation, have precipitated inevitable diplomatic disaster.

And indeed, recent weeks have produced dire political outcomes for Israel.

Brandeis students demand free speech for police-, ‘amerikka’- and Zionist-hater, but none for student merely quoting the hater.

There’s an ugly tempest brewing at Brandeis University and it’s based, at least in part, on free speech, tolerance and student safety. The storm grew out of a more generalized anger with the state of public discourse and of the safety of individuals in our society at large.

But at this point, one black self-described revolutionary and one Jewish conservative journalist, both Brandeis students, are the figureheads in a battle for the soul of an institution.

That institution, Brandeis University, was founded so that Jews, barred from most colleges by anti-Semitism, could find an open door to attain the education they desired. The school was named after the Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, whose distillation of the essence of freedom of speech has stood for decades as the lynchpin for America, and, in turn, much of the western world.

It was also Louis Brandeis, in an earlier incarnation as a lawyer, who brought humanity into the justice system. His famous “Brandeis Brief” for the first time opened the way for courts to consider human facts, not just legal doctrine, when making decisions about the lives of those people.

On Christmas morning, a man drove up to the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno, threw rocks through the windows, and then entered the center and destroyed things inside. The local ABC outlet, KFSN, reported Friday that “Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.” But on Saturday, it turned out that the incident was not an “anti-Muslim hate crime” at all: the vandal was Asif Mohammad Khan, a Muslim. The destruction at the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno was yet another in a long series of fake hate crimes designed to prop up the fiction that Muslims in the U.S. are routinely targets of discrimination and harassment.

According to Khan’s sister Samia, the vandal is (like the recent French attackers who screamed “Allahu akbar” while trying to kill infidels) mentally ill. She also said that he was a devout Muslim who prayed five times daily. Dyer revealed that Khan had in recent days written that Osama bin Laden was the most inspirational person in his life. Dyer explained that Khan’s vandalism of the mosque “was not geared towards the Islamic community, it was not geared to the Islamic faith or any of those things and was simply to get back at a few people at the center who had belittled him and in his eyes bullied him.”

Dyer and other law enforcement authorities were extremely unlikely to consider it as they investigated Khan’s crimes, but the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslims have on many occasions in the past not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating “hate crimes,” including attacks on mosques. CAIR and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

Has the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement succeeded in bringing Israel to the point of South Africa when it ended apartheid and reformulated itself into a non-racist state? Despite the egregious falsity of the historical comparison, the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University recently held an informal debate on this question titled, “Palestine’s South Africa Moment? The Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement.” The audience of approximately 140 people—a mix of students, self-described Palestinians, activists, and fellow travelers—filled the Columbia Law School lecture hall.

Rashid Khalidi, Columbia’s Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies, restated a point often made by political interlocutors, in an intonation that fully communicated his contempt:

If you’re Palestinian and you live in certain places, say New York City, like myself . . . you are lectured that the Palestinians should be non-violent. . . . What usually follows that is . . . “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”

To the supportive audience, Khalidi provided the confrontational answer from which, he claimed, he would normally “manfully refrain”:

Well, the Palestinian Gandhi may well have been shot down in cold blood by an Israeli sniper during a demonstration like the two children per week who are killed. . . . Maybe the Palestinian Gandhi is in prison. Maybe the Palestinian Gandhi had something else happen to her or to him.

In other words, who knows whether this paragon ever existed, but surely Israel’s to blame for his non-appearance.

White House and Department of State officials contend that – irrespective of Congress – President Obama can apply effective diplomatic, commercial and national security pressure, coercing Israel to repartition Jerusalem, and retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria to the 9-15 mile wide pre-1967 sliver, surrounded by the violently turbulent and unpredictable Arab Street.

That inaccurate underestimate of the power of Congress – which has traditionally opposed pressure on Israel, echoing the sentiments of most constituents – was recently expressed by US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro: “what is unmistakable about our foreign policy system is that the Constitution provides the president with the largest share of power….”

The assertion that US foreign policy and national security are shaped by presidential omnipotence is refuted by recent precedents and the US Constitution. The latter was created by the Founding Fathers, who were determined to limit the power of government and preclude the possibility of executive dictatorship. They were apprehensive of potential presidential excesses and encroachment, and therefore assigned the formulation of foreign policy and national security to both Congress and the president. Obviously, the coalescing of congressional policy among 535 legislators constitutes a severe disadvantage for the legislature.

According to the Congressional Quarterly, the US Constitution rectified the mistakes of its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, upgrading the role of Congress to the primary branch of the US government. “Hence, the first article of the Constitution is dedicated to Congress. The powers, structure, and procedures of the national legislature are outlined in considerable detail in the Constitution, unlike those of the presidency and the judiciary….”

Whether the fourth quarter 5% growth of the U.S.gross development product [GDP] is a fluke, another wave of the troubled sea of the longest recovery in recent American history, it is evidence of the miraculous strength of the U.S. economy.

Some are predicting it means a return to 3% annual growth rates next year, still not what is required to reduce both cyclical and the new digital revolution induced structural unemployment, but back to “normal” trends..

The war the Obama Administration has been waging against business, private initiative, and historical American innovation hasn’t been able to stifle the basic American entrepreneurial spirit. Nowhere is that more apparent, of course, than in energy.

For the energy revolution which has come about as a result of the private sector pursuing new technologies to develop shale gas and oil, of course, are at the center of the miniboom. And, the chutzpah of the Obama Administration’s claiming credit for something it fought as vigorously as its amateur planners could – promoting higher energy costs to encourage their vaunted shift to new fuels — is even by the standards of this Administration, outrageous. It remains to be seen whether a new administration in 2017 might open government including offshore lands and reinforce the U.S.’ position already as the number one oil producer in the world and a potential major gas exporter.

Whether it is recreational drivers enjoying the new, lower gasoline prices, or the petrochemical industry moving back from overseas to use as throughput cost a price for gas a quarter of deliveries in East Asia, the domestic economy is getting a shot in the arm. Not even the threat of an unconstitutional Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency all-out attack on all American electrical production and manufacturing can stymie the trend.

The international impact of this remarkable and relatively sudden development is still playing out.

The world energy price, however much markets are segregated by political concerns, is still in the throes of being threshed out. But lower energy prices, even in the fickle oil market, are obviously with us for several years. That’s the result of the American shale revolution, but also – despite all the feuds and guerrilla in the Mideast – the coming on market of more and more production. Boycotts and sanctions have only increased the black-markets nipping and tucking through all the back alleys of the world economy to market more oil.

It’s hard to know where to begin with what we already see as the immediate results of the world energy goldmine:

Saudi Arabia, hoping to impede the American and foreign shale revolution with its higher costs, is pumping more oil than ever from its low-cost resources. It hopes not only to have an effect on a possible competitor as the U.S. moves to becoming, again, a gas [liquefied natural gas, LNG] and oil exporter, but to deal a blow to its Mideast rivals.

Venezuela’s two-bit caudillos are in trouble with their heavy oil. [They will have new competition as the Keystone XL Pipeline finally overcomes Obama’s opposition to deliver similar Canadian tar sands oil to the Houston where one of the few refineries which can handle Caracas’ goo exists]. Nor can the collapsing Venezuelan regime continue to feed subsidized energy to its leftwing anti-America playmates. It remains to be seen if Obama’s life preserver thrown to a Castro regime, the first victim of such a shutoff, can save that crumbling dictatorship which has brought infinite misery to its people.

Muslim Terrorism has become as much of a Christmas tradition for Christians in the West, as it already was for Christians in the Muslim world, where Somali Muslim gunmen attacked a Christmas party at an African Union base.

A Somali Muslim attempted to bring terrorism into the United States by bombing a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland in 2010. Mohamed Osman Mohamud (twice the Mohammed for twice the mayhem) had a simple goal, “I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave dead or injured.”

Mohamed Mohamud was just following up on the work of Christmas Day flight bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab over from Nigeria who stuffed his underwear full of plastic explosives and tried to detonate it on Flight 253.

Islamic “lone wolves,” together with their many Islamic wolf packs here and abroad, wish to unmake a world they never made with murder and mayhem and conquest.In his December 25th “Christmas” column, “Every Christmas Now Comes with Muslim Terrorism,” Daniel Greenfield observed about the average, unassuming Muslims in our midst:

They may lapse at times. They may get through a university education, attend nightclubs, listen to the same music all the other kids their age do– but there’s still a ticking time bomb inside their heads. And that bomb is the same one that appears as the lit fuse on the turban of the cartoon Mohammad.

An average and unassuming Muslim next door or down the street can douse the fuse himself by repudiating Islam. He can convert to Christianity, to Judaism, to Buddhism, to Scientology, or even become an atheist. Apostasy is absolutely imperative, but comes with some risk because Islam, the “religion of peace,” decrees the death of an apostate.

Honor killings of girls and women who are “seduced” by Western cultural and social norms are a result of a partial or full repudiation of Islam by their victims. The killings are committed by average and unassuming Muslim parents and relatives. The perpetrators preserve their ethereal “honor”; the victims lose their lives.

Exposing the ‘pinkwashing’ lie

On Wednesday, thousands of tourists from around the world arrived in Israel for the Nonstop Gay Festival, a joint venture of the Tourism Ministry and the Tel Aviv Municipality. From Dec. 24 to Jan. 7, members of the lesbian-bisexual-gay-transgender communities of North America, South America and Europe are being offered an array of activities and entertainment across Tel Aviv.

The ostensible draw of and impetus for this two-week celebration of LGBT life in the Holy Land is the relatively warm weather, which is why its logo is a snowman made out of sand, wearing a rainbow scarf and holding a flag with the temperature of 20°C (68°F) written on it.

And though it is true that tourists escaping freezing weather elsewhere are happy to bask in the sun along the shores of the Mediterranean, the real reason that this particular tourism campaign was a shoe-in for success has to do with Israel’s reputation as one of the most gay-friendly places in the world.

This is but one aspect of the Jewish state that illustrates its openness and pluralism, something that would be less striking if the tiny democracy were not surrounded by barbaric regimes. Naturally, it is the very freedom of Israeli society that most irks those regimes, which aim to destroy Western civilization as a whole and to wipe out Zionism in particular.

That they oppose all forms of human rights makes perfect sense. It is impossible to wield the kind of power required to subjugate the masses when individuals have a say in how they lead their lives.

What makes no sense at all, however, is the phenomenon of leftist apology for those regimes, and simultaneous bashing of Israel, in the name of human rights. Because it is now indisputable that Israel is LGBT-friendly, a convoluted tactic has been employed by the Left to attack the Jewish state on this score. This involves accusing Israel of “pinkwashing.” According to the accusers, Israel boasts about its LGBT-rights record in order to obfuscate its abuse of Palestinians, even gay and lesbian ones.

Canadian Member of Parliament and international human rights warrior Irwin Cotler, the architect of the 2005 law which legalized gay marriage in Canada, considers the spread of the “pinkwashing” lie to be both worrisome and worsening. Cotler was Canada’s justice minister and attorney-general at the time of the passing of the Civil Marriage Act, which was organized around two principles under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Quality Rights and Freedom of Religion. The first gave gays and lesbians the equal right to civil marriage. The second gave rabbis, priests and imams the right not to conduct or sanction a gay marriage, if doing so would violate their beliefs.

When asked on Thursday about Israel (where marital rights are still governed by the Orthodox Rabbinate, which means that any couples ineligible to wed under a strict interpretation of Jewish law are not able to marry in Israel, but are recognized by the state if they tie the knot abroad), Cotler was unequivocal.

“There’s only one country in the Middle East in which gay rights are protected, and that’s Israel,” he said.

This sentiment was echoed in a New York Times ad that ran this week. Sponsored by “America’s Rabbi” Shmuley Boteach, in conjunction with This World: The Values Network and Stand with Us, the ad shows a photo of a man, under the rhyming headline: “Hamas, ISIS [Islamic State] and Iran kill gays like me. In Israel I am free.”

The accompanying text, in smaller print, says it all:

“My name is Rennick Remley. I’m a gay American and I support Israel. If I lived in Gaza or Israel’s neighboring states, I would be thrown in jail, mutilated or killed.