RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nick, who is a regular contributor to The Commentator, blogs at cmewonline.com

Fatah, like Hamas, would like Israel to somehow disappear, but (being “moderate”) they are prepared to wait a bit longer to see it happen. The EU is still no friend of Israel, but in its recent vote it gave Fatah and Abbas a well-deserved snub.

Yesterday’s long-awaited EU Parliament motion on recognition of a Palestinian state became a tussle between the trendy lefties of the EU and the moderate right wingers. To everyone’s advantage, the centre-right grouping of MEPs negotiated a revision that has brought some common sense to the ongoing debate.

The EU Parliament was originally asked to pass a motion that would have asked for unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state that does not yet exist, and may never do so if the Palestinian Authority does not stop inciting its people to hate and kill Israelis.

Unsurprisingly, this emphasis on unconditional recognition was pushed hard by the left-wing party grouping of MEPs, emulating Sweden’s recent official definitive recognition of “Palestine”. Two groups which together command a large majority in the Parliament (the European People’s Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) used their combined weight to foce a compromise motion.

The final motion that was voted on yesterday afternoon revived the tired concept of the “two-state solution”, saying that the Parliament “…supports in principle recognition of Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution, and believes these should go hand in hand with the development of peace talks, which should be advanced.”

Jeb Bush has announced the formation of a committee to explore a run for the Presidency. He therefore becomes the first official all-but-candidate of Campaign 2016, ahead even of the designated President-in-Waiting, Hillary Clinton. So this March headline appears to have come true:

Influential Republicans Working To Draft Jeb Bush Into 2016 Presidential Race

For a while now I’ve told interviewers that I doubt Hillary will be the Democrat nominee – because she’s a terrible candidate and eventually even she will know that. But I made one exception way back in March: If Jeb Bush jumped in, Mrs Clinton “would be insane not to run”. Now that Jeb has indeed jumped in, I have nothing to add to what I wrote nine months ago:

Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton now and forever, at least until George P Bush marries Chelsea Clinton and the two ruling houses are consolidated into one House of Bush-Clinton-Rodham-Coburg-Gotha. I’ve nothing against Jeb Bush. I happen to disagree with him on “immigration reform”, but he was a competent executive of Florida and he’s a thoughtful and (on his game) gifted speaker. But there are over 300 million people in this country, and, granted that 57 per cent or whatever it’s up to by now are fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community, what is it about the Bush family that makes them so indispensable to the Republic as to supply three presidential candidates within a quarter-century? Say what you like about actual monarchy but at least you get a non-hereditary political class: this may seem incredible to Americans but neither Canada’s Stephen Harper, Australia’s Tony Abbott, New Zealand’s John Key nor Britain’s David Cameron is the previous Prime Minister’s brother or wife.

Jeb is campaigning “to restore the promise of America”. A Bush has been on six of the last nine presidential tickets, but the smart money in the GOP thinks they’re so indispensable to the Republic that they should now be given a shot at a third presidency. One man and his sons will have supplied three-fifths of America’s presidents within a quarter-century – in a republic of over 300 million people. I don’t think that’s any way “to restore the promise of America” – and, in fact, like the unconstitutional amnesty, the hideous CRomnibus and the bipartisan debt mountain, it’s another sign of the seedy dysfunctionalism of America’s political institutions.

An unsavory connection that will not endear the man to Republican primary voters.

Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in January of 2007, after eight years of service. Three months later, he joined the board of a hospital company that had been pillaging government health programs and abusing patients, in Florida and around the country, for most of the years he sat in the governor’s office.

Apart from a very generous compensation package, why did Bush sign on with such a tarnished company? And will whatever explanation he now offers hold up under the microscope of a presidential campaign?

Tenet Healthcare Corp. is a national for-profit hospital company with a sordid history. In the middle 1990s, operating under a previous name, the company pled guilty to seven federal felonies, paid a record fine for health care fraud and kickbacks, and was placed under special government scrutiny for five years (in what is called a Corporate Integrity Agreement). That deal was arranged by Eric Holder, then U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and by Charles Ruff, representing the company and later to become President Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.

As soon as that five-year review ended, the same company, now operating as Tenet Healthcare, launched a program to increase profits by gouging Medicare. It took a while for everyone to catch on to the new schemes, but starting in 2002 and running on into 2007, the company faced allegations of fraud, Medicare false claims, patient abuse, overcharging federal health care programs, kickback violations, falsely inflating hospital charges, unnecessary heart operations, unnecessary patient deaths, and SEC violations. Again, the company bought its way out of these charges, paying around $1.7 billion to settle government investigations, government lawsuits, and private lawsuits. And the government signed Tenet up for another five years of special scrutiny, another Corporate Integrity Agreement.

I must be thick. The very many official assurances we keep hearing that Islam is the religion of peace just don’t seem to ring true, not to my ill-educated ears, not with so much bloody hate being spewed and perpetrated in its name

Is it believable? Is it happening? I am afraid it’s true. A former great nation, the birthplace of the civilised modern world, is in the throes of having any remaining shreds of greatness and integrity stripped away by the latest in a succession of weak-kneed, mediocre at best and traitorous at worst, political leaders.

David Cameron is standing in the British Parliament — where giants have stood who must surely be weeping – rightly deploring the latest, most God awful, atrocity committed by Islamists. Is it possible to imagine anything worse than rampaging through a school, deliberately killing 132 children, as happened in Pakistan? How low can human beings sink? Under this destructive Islamic ideology there appear to be no limits.

But apparently, according Mr Cameron, none of this is down to Islam proper. Islam he tells us is a ‘great religion’. It is, he says, a ‘religion of peace’. What we are seeing is a ‘perversion’ of Islam.

So let me get this straight because I didn’t go to a fancy public school or undertake the kind of deep study of Islam that Mr Cameron has evidently undertaken. Each of the now-thousands of modern-day atrocities committed by those loudly claiming that Allah is great are all the result of those owing allegiance to a Mr Hyde version of Islam. The Dr Jekyll version is the true faith.

Here is the pattern as observed in 2006:

… Above all else, understanding jihad and dhimmitude is crucial to understanding what we call the war on terror.

Jihad, of course, means “holy war.” Many Muslims will tell you that it also means “inner struggle,” which is nice and everything, but it’s “holy war” that we, in the non-Muslim world, have to deal with.

Dhimmitude is what follows every successful jihad–if, that is, you happen to be a non-Muslim “dhimmi” who finds himself living under Islamic rule. The term, coined by historian Bat Ye’or, defines a culture of fearful inferiority – legal, social and religious –inhabited by non-Muslims according to sharia, or Islamic law. What is particularly alarming about dhimmitude, as Bat Ye’or has also chronicled, is that this same pattern of deference to Islam has imprinted itself even in non-Islamic countries. Just think back to the craven reaction to Cartoon Rage when most Western media outlets submitted to Islamic religious law (dhimmitude) out of fear of attack (jihad) by not publishing the Mohammed cartoons. …

We can now watch as a new progression of jihad-to-dhimmitude potentially unfolds by taking a look at what’s going on this week [August 2006] in Great Britain.

Last week, we had the disrupted Airplane Plot–an act of jihad averted. We had the ensuing police round-up of Muslim Britons. We had, and have, intense public panic, and an ongoing rupture in “normal” life–in a way, almost as if the plot had gone off as planned.

Then what? I would argue that what’s going on in GB today may be seen as an attempt by British Muslim leaders to use the ongoing threat of jihad by British Muslim terrorists to intensify Islamic influence, which necessarily deepens non-Muslim British dhimmitude.

The Dutch public prosecutor announced today that legal proceedings will begin against Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders “on charges of insulting a group of people based on race and incitement to discrimination and hatred.”

“The decision to prosecute me is incomprehensible,” Wilders has said in a statement.

Yes it is; but only in a moral, rational Judeo-Christian — i.e., Western — world.

In our world, circa 2014, the decision is perfectly comprehensible. In our world, powerful global elites seek to destroy the indigenous cultures of Europe (and their descendants here) through “multicultural” — read: Marxist and anti-nationhood — policies that ride the pressure plates of expansionist Islam and, additionally in our hemisphere, Hispanic south and central America and beyond.

In a statement released by PVV, Wilders said, “I have said what millions of people think …. For the second time, [the state] apparently wants to deal with someone who speaks the truth. It is a travesty that I have to defend myself in court for this. The Public Prosecutor would do better to devote his time to prosecuting jihadis instead of me. The Party for Freedom is the largest party in the polls. Apparently the elite does not like that.”

PBS, who operates partly on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer, just ran a one-hour special on the terror-sponsoring dictator who shrieked that “war with the U.S. is my true destiny!” and who came within a hair of nuking millions of PBS’ involuntary donors during the gravest military threat against the United States in modern history.

PBS, who bills itself as America’s “most-trusted source for news and public affairs programs,” aimed their documentary on the “turbulent life” of the “controversial Cuban leader” at a U.S. audience and titled it, The Fidel Castro Tapes.

But PBS pulled off its documentary without mentioning the apparent trivialities cited above. That the subject of their program came closest of anyone to blowing up the world seems to strike PBS as a real snoozer.

Now when it came to their one-hour program on a freely-elected and immensely popular U.S. lawmaker (Senator Joe Mc Carthy) PBS shuddered with fear and loathing. In fact the program was titled, “Politics of Fear.” “His zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics,” gasped the documentary. “These proceedings remain one of the most shameful moments in modern U.S. history.”

Apparently for PBS the term “controversial” seemed too mild when more villainous ones were handy for describing one of America’s most popular elected lawmakers during his time (lest we forget.) But the mild term served amply to describe a megalomaniacal, blood-lusting, war-mongering, missile-rattling dictator who jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than did Stalin during The Great Terror and murdered more of them in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered during his first six.

Oh, forgive me for an oversight. PBS also uses the term “contentious” and “provocative” to describe Fidel Castro.

‘It’s a sad day for freedom,” Marco Rubio told Bret Baier after President Obama announced he would normalize relations with Cuba. Not a sad day, senator: a sad year.

If there was a theme to 2014, it was Obama’s persistence in bailing out dictators and theocrats from political scrapes and economic hardships, his tenacity in pursuit of engagement with America’s adversaries no matter the cost to our strength, principles, credibility, or alliances.

In this president the thugs in Havana and Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, Moscow and Naypyidaw and Beijing have no better friend. For these bullies, these evildoers, these millenarians and sectarians, Barack Obama is more than a dupe. He is an insurance policy.

Cuba is but the latest example of this president’s failing to exercise leverage in the pursuit of American strength, security, and prestige. Here are the Castro brothers, decrepit and spent, their revolution a joke, their economy in peril thanks to the collapse in oil prices brought on by a strong dollar and increased U.S. supply.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (including you feckless, sniveling crapweasels hiding under your desks at Sony),

Freedom makes a lot of things harder. It is more difficult to raise children of good character in a society that tolerates and often celebrates bad character. It is often harder to build big and important things in a society where everybody gets a vote. That’s why so many people of a “pragmatic” bent have always looked longingly at evil countries where the people are less of an impediment to “getting things done.” Fighting climate change, if that’s your thing, is much tougher when everyone has private property rights. Fighting a war is more difficult when dissenters get to have their say. Maintaining a guild and the wages that go with it is harder when you have free competition.

The true lover of liberty acknowledges these things. He doesn’t say freedom is always more efficient or always yields superior outcomes (though it usually does). The true lover of liberty acknowledges that freedom has costs — cultural costs, economic costs, political costs, national-security costs. And then, do you know what he says?

“I don’t care.”

Well, sometimes I care. At home, when arguing with other Americans, there’s a lot of room to debate how liberty should be used and how it can be abused. A government grounded in protecting liberty depends on self-government and self-government requires restraint. Remember the line from “America, the Beautiful”?

Republican leaders don’t want them to derail Obama’s amnesty.

Last weekend, Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee forced every senator to vote, on the public record, regarding the constitutionality of President Obama’s unilateral decree of effective amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. The resulting Republican establishment hissy fit further confirmed something I’ve been arguing here for some time: Republican leaders in Washington endorse President Obama’s amnesty policy.

Their stated opposition to the imperial manner of the policy’s imposition is poseur stuff. When push comes to shove, when the time comes to do something about presidential lawlessness, what do we get? Childish tantrums over being forced to work on a mid-December weekend — the poor dears having spent a whopping 135 days in session this year . . . and, by last Saturday, facing the crushing burden of another two or three days’ waltzing between the Hill and the nearest studio before their next three-week vacation.

We get party leaders who, despite having decried Obama’s lawlessness during the recent midterm-election campaign, actually whipped against a legislative rebuke of executive lawlessness. We get 20 mindboggling Republican votes in favor of the president’s usurpation of Congress’s legislative authority . . . even as GOP leaders look voters in the eye and promise to persuade the courts that the president has overstepped his constitutional bounds. (I don’t know how many of these guys have ever appeared before a federal judge. “Your Honor, I rise today to urge that this court condemn the president of the United States for taking actions I have voted to endorse and pay for with public funds.” Good luck with that.)