RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rand Paul’s Cuba Meltdown
His mockery of Marco Rubio as “isolationist” reveals Paul as a joke in the foreign-policy arena.

With his enthusiastic support for Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) again shows that his foreign-policy views are wrongheaded. With his bizarre mislabeling of his views and of those who disagree, Paul shows himself (yet again) to be truly ignorant about foreign affairs. And with his juvenile, nasty, strangely personal attacks on fellow Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Paul shows himself temperamentally unsuited for the presidency.

Rand Paul is no conservative; he’s a quack.

First, as for Obama’s policy change, the in-depth arguments against normalizing relations right now have been superbly laid out by the Washington Post, Andrew McCarthy, Rich Lowry, the National Review Online editors, Elliott Abrams, and Mark Krikorian, among others. This column won’t rehash all the arguments. Suffice it to say that while there might be some good arguments for asking Congress to modify the economic sanctions against Cuba, establishing “normal” diplomatic relations sends the horrendous message that human rights and liberty are irrelevant — and that we will ignore (or even reward) a half-century of active hostility 90 miles from our shores even though Cuba has never made amends.

Sony brass might be cotton candy, but they are iron men compared with the American college student.

In ten days about 1 million Americans will be gathered in Times Square waiting for a ball to drop, a strange spectacle indeed for a country that seems to be waiting on both of them.

If 2014 had a grand theme, it was testicular absence.

In science fiction, corporations are deathless juggernauts imposing their will on governments and galaxies, but in the real world Sony, one of the most powerful business entities in the world, got cowed into submission by the release of some embarrassing e-mails and threats from hackers acting on behalf of the Evil Kingdom of the Hermit Midgets. Hollywood is forever congratulating itself on its courage for banging on, e.g., the American suburban bourgeoisie, because bourgeois American suburbanites don’t generally resolve disagreements by sawing off heads. But let Kim Jung-un take offense at your dopey Seth Rogen movie and Sony is suddenly a wounded kitten.
You think the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would put up with that nonsense?

After a fiery speech to Congress, Britain’s leader suffered a heart attack his doctor kept secret.

n Washington, D.C., for Christmas 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill felt a bit lonely and not very well. This yuletide far away from home would be very different from the last, spent contentedly with his whole family in London. Yet looking out at the tree-lighting ceremony on the White House lawn, he knew he’d been given the best gift of all.

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, the U.S. had declared war against the Axis powers, a decision Churchill had been waiting for since 1939. Finally, Great Britain would be joined in a grand alliance with the U.S. and all its might. To plan the war, both Churchill and his old friend Lord Beaverbrook, who he’d appointed as his minister of supply, rushed across the ocean for strategy meetings with Franklin Roosevelt and his military advisers.

“This is a strange Christmas Eve,” Churchill said from the White House in a speech broadcast internationally. “Almost the whole world is locked in deadly struggle, and, with the most terrible weapons which science can devise, the nations advance upon each other.”

Churchill had been dining at his Chequers country retreat with Averell Harriman, the president’s special envoy in London, when news of Pearl Harbor arrived. The prime minister immediately called the White House to voice his support. “We are all in the same boat now,” Roosevelt told him.

A democracy must allow for the frank discussion of the problems it faces.

The Hague

Four years ago I was taken to court in the Netherlands on hate-crime charges. After a trial that lasted almost two years, I was finally acquitted. But the case cost me a lot of time and energy that, as an elected politician, I would rather have devoted to my parliamentary work.

Now, just as my Party for Freedom (PVV) is taking the lead in the polls and the Dutch government is facing serious political difficulties, the public prosecutor is again bringing me to court, this time for asking my party supporters, during a PVV electoral meeting in March, whether they want more or fewer Moroccans in the country.

This question needs to be understood in proper context.

In the Netherlands, as in many other Western European countries right now, problems arise when Muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate and integrate into the wider community. In our case I referred specifically to the Moroccans not because I have anything against them generally but because they are one of the largest immigrant groups here and are overrepresented in our crime and welfare statistics.

The Castros already welcome foreign trade and investment. Fat lot of good it’s done for Cubans.

On a trip to Havana in the late 1990s, I toured the restoration of a 17th century convent with a Cuban architect. He told me the project was having trouble getting replacement floor tiles because of the U.S. embargo. I smiled and told him there was no blockade of the island and that the tiles could be sourced in Mexico. He grinned back at me.

“Well, OK,” he said. “The real problem is that we don’t have any money to buy them.”

Cubans are programmed from an early age to complain to anyone who will listen that “el bloqueo” is the cause of the island’s dire poverty. They know it’s a lie. But obediently repeating it is a survival skill. It raises the odds that the demented dictator won’t suspect you of having counterrevolutionary thoughts, boot you from your job, kick your children out of school and haul you off to jail.

President Obama appeared to be trying to prove his own revolutionary bona fides when he announced on Wednesday new diplomatic relations with the military dictatorship and plans to make it easier for Americans to travel to the island and engage in commerce with Cubans. He repeatedly linked the isolation of the Cuban people to U.S. policy, as the regime teaches Cuban children to do. He complained that the embargo strives to keep “Cuba closed off from an interconnected world.” In a reference to the limited access that Cubans have to telecommunications, he said “our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe.”

“WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT As Shakespeare wrote, there is special providence in the fall of a deli. Mr. Weiss and Mr. Happel took measure of the city’s loss. “It’s an amazing place with an amazing interior,” Mr. Happel said, “and once again, it’s incredibly sad to watch these old establishments that are part of New York disappear and just become another slick establishment that has no history and who knows what kind of character.””
Let’s do this quickly and without tears: After clogging arteries in the theater district for 34 years, Cafe Edison on West 47th Street will serve its last bowl of matzo ball soup on Sunday. Landlord, rent, upscale, etc. — you know the story, no need to drag it out. Diners started a petition to save the institution, with its incongruously grand vaulted ceilings and decorated columns, noting its importance to the theater world, not to mention its use as the setting for Neil Simon’s “45 Seconds From Broadway,” but to no avail. Time marches on, at a pace unslowed even by the Edison’s kasha varnishkes, which could slow an army. On Tuesday night, regulars returned for a cheap meal and an elusive sense of home, and left a little heavier. Tears? No, those were just allergies, really. Sniffle.

IN THE SEATS Harvey Weiss, 60, and Marc Happel, 59, have been a couple for 34 years, and regulars at Cafe Edison for about 30. Mr. Weiss is an artist and decorative painter, with an eye for the Edison’s irreplaceable textured walls and ceilings, accented in white and an otherworldly pinkish brown. Mr. Happel is the costume director at the New York City Ballet and has designed costumes for numerous theatrical events over the years. Which has meant a lot of pre-Broadway meals at Edison. “If you’re going to the theater at 8 o’clock, you can walk in here at 7:30 and have a decent bowl of soup and a sandwich and be out of here and walk into that theater at five to eight and be filled and be quite content,” Mr. Happel said. On Tuesday they were seeing “It’s Only a Play.”

The amateur ideologues of the Obama Administration have fallen into another snakepit with their tacit endorsement of the notorious Cuban dictatorship. That’s despite all the nonsense about a blossoming Cuban economy if Washington just relents.

In reality, Washington is buckling in its opposition to one of the world’s most hideous regimes. Now its death throes will be perpetuated for Cuba’s 12 million people with the help of such deep thinkers as Sen. Rand Paul who dreams despite all the evidence in China and Vietnam to the contrary that contagious capitalism will bring down a police state.

Even more shameful is the helping hand – which Pres. Barack Hussein Obama acknowledged – of Canada and the Vatican in this new Obama enterprise. For half a century Canadian nickel interests and the always anti-American wheat lobby have blackened Ottawa’s reputation with its support of the Castros. At the Vatican, whose help Obama also acknowledged, there are echoes of the Church’s tacit support of Franco and other cruel dictatorships, as well as Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s ambiguous relationship with Argentine totalitarians as Jesuit Father Provincial in his native country before mounting the papacy. [Nor is this gesture likely to help stave off the growing influence of Evangelical Christians on the old Roman Catholic monopoly of Christian believers throughout Latin America.]

Despite all the talk of the regime moderating , Raúl Castro holds more than 57,000 political prisoners. And his dungeons have sucked in more new victims in the past year than the five previous years. Conditions are as bad as in the worst days of the Soviet Union and the East Eruopean Communist Bloc, producing hunger strikes in a noble if feeble effort against solitary confinement, beatings, restricted family visits and denial of medical care. There is no redress except for American citizens like the naïve and very lucky Alan Philip Gross who had maximum U.S. support for his release on trumped up charges, but only after five years..

It is that not Israel is being judged by criteria different to those applied to the region’s gory tyrannies, but that it is being judged by standards different to those that the EU judges itself.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4,

Israel should insist that we discriminate [against it], that we apply double standards [to it], this is because you are one of us. – Jesper Vahr, Danish ambassador to Israel, at The Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference on December 12

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits. – Albert Einstein

Last Thursday, the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference took place in the capital with an impressive lineup of prominent public figures – including the present and the previous presidents and the US ambassador.

The real fireworks, however, took place in the panel discussion dealing with relations between the EU and Israel.

At least 11 people were wounded Sunday when a motorist rammed his car into a number of crowds in the city of Dijon in eastern France.

The driver was arrested by police after targeting passersby at five different locations in the city, a police source said.

The driver, who authorities believe to be mentally unstable, was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) and “that he was acting for the children of Palestine,” a source close to the investigation said.

“The man, born in 1974, is apparently imbalanced and had been in a psychiatric hospital,” the source told AFP, adding that “for now his motives are still unclear.”

The source said nine people were lightly injured while two more were severely wounded.

The incident was reminiscent of a series of vehicular attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank over November that left several dead and over a dozen injured.

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the terrorist attack in Sydney, Australia, in which two of more than 17 hostages were killed by an Islamic extremist. Referring to “lone wolf terrorists,” he said this was a reminder of danger that Britain faces. It would seem to me that we have had enough Lone Wolves to constitute a substantial wolf pack, and enough “extremists” to consider them “conventional.” How many people must die before heads of state concede that the crimes worldwide are not extreme, not unusual, and not lone wolf? This is Islamic-style warfare against the West, without the sophisticated weaponry, khaki uniforms or tanks. It is time to connect the voluminous dots between the burnings and beheadings in 624 AD and those executed today.

We so naively call them self-starters or lone wolves when daily thousands of individuals are inspired and encouraged by an imam in a mosque to be a Soldier of Allah, eagerly awaiting his turn to immerse himself in the blood of infidels. Perhaps the designation helps the West cope with the 1.3 billion Muslims who have unleashed their millions into the world. Perhaps the singular terminology keeps the West from considering war against the multitudes, or courageously declaring the Qur’an and Sharia antithetical to Western beliefs, or fear of inciting the so-called moderates to reach their full barbarous potential.