RUTHFULLY YOURS

All is not quiet on the northern front between Israel and Syria/Lebanon.

The recent Hezbollah attack on an Israel Defense Forces convoy in the Har Dov area close to Israel’s border with Lebanon, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed, was the latest move in a dangerous and high stakes game that is now underway on Israel’s northern frontier. Israel and Hezbollah are not the only players. The Islamic Republic of Iran, which the U.S. defines as the leading state-sponsor of terrorism, is also a key presence as Hezbollah’s strategic partner.

The attack at Har Dov was the second move by Iran/Hezbollah in response to the Israeli operation on the Syrian Golan Heights on January 18th. In the Israeli operation, a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer, Mohammed Allahdadi, was killed, as was Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of a famous Hezbollah commander.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had an offer for President Obama at today’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” Jindal said in his early evening speech while talking about Obama’s references to the Crusades. “I’ll keep an eye out for the medieval Christians. Why don’t you do your job and go after the Islamic terrorists?”

The potential 2016 candidate referenced his recent trip to London, where he irked critics by citing no-go zones in Muslim neighborhoods and called out clerics for not doing enough to stop extremism. “They didn’t like it,” the governor said, adding that he stressed Islamic extremists aren’t martyrs but “these individuals are going to go straight to hell exactly where they belong.”

Jindal also took issue with recent words from the State Department about the nature of the ISIS fight. “How have we won victory in any war other than killing our way to victory?” he said.

“We don’t need a war on international poverty; we need a war on the evil that is radical Islamic terrorism,” he said.

With the Republican surrender on President Obama’s amnesty decree that I predicted over a month ago now taking shape, an appeal to duty may be futile. Nevertheless, it is still worth being blunt about this. The Beltway GOP’s retreat would be a profound dereliction of duty – specifically, the duty that Congress owes to the states.

The federal government, very much including Republican lawmakers and conservative judges, has systematically disarmed the states of their capacity for self-defense. The power to defend one’s territory – including the power to remove aliens who have no legal right to be present – is an ineliminable component of sovereignty. The preservation of state sovereignty, in turn, is part of the core guarantee that induced the states to ratify the Constitution.

Dissenters from approved thinking are the subject of menacing inquiries. Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers who harbor impure thoughts about climate change. One of the targets is Steven Hayward, an author and academic now at Pepperdine University. As Hayward puts it, the spirit of the inquiry is, “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?” Grijalva’s letters were prompted by the revelation that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a skeptic, didn’t adequately disclose support for his research from energy interests.

Soon’s lapse aside, the assumption of Grijalva’s fishing expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy is a greedy tool of Big Oil and must be harried in the name of planetary justice and survival. Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself. In fact, for people who claim to champion science, they have the least scientific temperament imaginable. Their attitude owes more to Trofim Lysenko, the high priest of the Soviet Union’s politicized science, than, say, to Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, whose work was shunned by Lysenko for ideological reasons. Consider the plight of Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder, who has done work on extreme weather.

There’s nothing unpatriotic about challenging Obama on Iran. The Obama administration values a future relationship with Iran more than it values the historic relationship it has with Israel. Unless there’s a reversal in the reported deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all the superficial talk about this extraordinary friendship between Israel and the United States isn’t going to mean much. And the histrionics surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech in front of a joint session of Congress only confirm that there are plenty of people who are happy about it.

First, Americans were supposed to be outraged because Netanyahu engaged in a breach of protocol. Then we were supposed to be outraged because the speech would be given too close to the upcoming Israeli elections. (Senator Tim Kaine [D., Va.] is still using this excuse for his own boycott.) But if the Israeli elections — and President Barack Obama has done about everything possible to weaken Netanyahu’s position — are so problematic, then the controversy should be centered on the behavior of the prime minister, not the substance of his argument. But that’s not the case, is it? Administration mouthpieces warn us that the once-special relationship between the nations will collapse under the weight of a single speech — and some of those warnings have come with a hint of anticipation.

From the very first moments of the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her top aides were advised that the compound was under a terrorist attack. In fact, less than two hours into the attack, they were told that the al-Qaeda affiliate in Libya, Ansar al-Sharia, had claimed responsibility. These revelations and others are disclosed by a trove of e-mails and other documents pried from the State Department by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The FOIA litigation focuses on Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the government actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attack, in which Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was murdered by terrorists.

Also killed in the attack were State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who were contract security employees and who had fought heroically, saving numerous American lives. At least ten other Americans were wounded, some quite seriously. At 4:07 p.m., just minutes after the terrorist attack began, Cheryl Mills, Secretary Clinton’s chief-of-staff, and Joseph McManus, Mrs. Clinton’s executive assistant, received an e-mail from the State Department’s operations center (forwarded to her by Maria Sand, a special assistant to Secretary Clinton). It contained a report from the State Department’s regional security officer (RSO), entitled “U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi is Under Attack.”

Imagine if Benjamin Netanyahu swaggered like King Abdullah; But what’s exhorted in some is unthinkable for others.

Jordan’s King Abdullah may be barely hanging in there – thanks mostly to Israel’s tacit support – but there are times when we Israelis must envy him. His PR is peerless. We see him posing in camouflage combat gear and the entire civilized world can’t applaud the machoman loudly enough.

In a photo circulated by his palace, Abdullah strikes a daunting figure – the great hope of the world’s democracies. Their hype/hope is that Abdullah will fight their fight against Islamic State (ISIS a.k.a. ISIL). To boot, Abdullah is a Muslim which is awfully handy for the spin that IS barbarities shouldn’t color our attitudes toward Islam.

But Muslims have always been fighting Muslims in numerous internecine wars between rival factions of Islam. Abdullah, moreover, isn’t the only Muslim headliner who today wages war – such as it is – on IS.

“There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other peoples in all the provinces of your realm, whose laws are different from those of any other people….If it please Your Majesty, let an edict be drawn for their destruction….”

Every Jewish child recognizes that miserable request as the whiny voice of Haman, the voice of doom for Jewry were it not for Queen Esther, who, when told, said, “How can I behold the destruction of my people?” thus setting in motion instead the destruction of Haman—and giving us the festival of Purim.

Now, by fate or coincidence, on the day before Purim, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is scheduled to address the United States Congress. Like Esther, he will plead for Israel, threatened this time by the modern Haman in the modern Persia, busily assembling the very latest tools of destruction. For as an Iranian computer engineer said not long ago, according to YNet News, the Islamic Republic “could destroy the Jewish state in less than nine minutes.” Apprised of that potential, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, approvingly said, “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.”

On addressing Congress: Netanyahu shouldn’t go – but he must.

Over the past few days, jotting notes on paper napkins, I had it figured why Benjamin Netanyahu shouldn’t go.

By the time I got to the computer and then started reading what others were saying, I completely changed my mind.

When even momentarily I find myself on the same side as Haaretz and The New York Times, on anything, I know something’s wrong.

They’re against Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Congress and bypassing the White House on the perils of a nuclear Iran.

Israel’s Prime Minister, they say, ought to terminate the trip that was extended by Speaker of the House John Boehner. Netanyahu says he’s going.

Watch out, they say. There will be hell to pay for antagonizing President Barack Obama. Better to heed Democrat Obama who is willing to give Iran all the time it needs to act sensibly, rather than heed Republican Boehner who, like Netanyahu, favors heavier sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

Boehner and Obama are at odds on practically everything, and now that Republicans run the show in the House and Senate, it’s each man to his corner.

In a vote along party lines, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved what amounts to a government takeover of the Internet. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his fellow Democrats, Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, approved placing the Internet under Title II regulations. They will reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, and regulate Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like utility companies, or “common carriers,” rather than “information services” that remain outside the agency’s regulatory power. Republican commissioners Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly dissented, with Pai explaining that net neutrality is “a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.”
The arrogance of Wheeler and his allies has been evident for some time. The 332-page proposal they approved was never made available to the public or Congress prior to the vote, even as Wheeler ignored pleas by Pai and O’Rielly to do so. “We respectfully request that FCC leadership immediately release the 332-page Internet regulation plan publicly and allow the American people a reasonable period of not less than 30 days to carefully study it,” they said in a statement released Monday.