RUTHFULLY YOURS

Today marks the 26th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The horrible events in Paris on January 7 serve as a brutal reminder that the obscurantist spirit of the fatwa lives on. Modern societies must therefore grapple with the meaning and consequences of the irreconcilable differences between those who demand protection for religious feelings and those who insist that nothing in public discourse should be sacred.

One narrative insists that, while violence is never acceptable, free speech should not be “abused” to insult the religious convictions of minorities. In his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, President Obama said that “modern, complicated, diverse societies” require “civility and restraint and judgment” and that, when “we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such insults and stand shoulder to shoulder with religious communities, particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks.”

The concern for minorities represents important progress in human rights. Without empathy for those whose religion or skin color differs from that of the majority, we would be in danger of repeating some of the worst injustices of the past, from slavery and segregation to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. However, regarding the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the attempt to view it through the lens of a conflict between an oppressive majority and a beleaguered minority reveals a deeply ethnocentric and misguided view of what is at stake.

A recent demonstration in London (appropriately gender-segregated, of course) by more than a thousand British Muslims protesting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons showed very clearly that just because a person can claim minority status does not necessarily mean he favors tolerance. While the protesting British Muslims were perfectly happy to exercise their right to free speech and association, their core message was that those very rights should be denied to those with whom they disagree, and that insult to religious feelings is a kind of extremism not too dissimilar from that of the murder of cartoonists. Standing “shoulder to shoulder” with these demonstrators and “condemning” Charlie Hebdo would be a shameful act of intolerance no matter how good their intentions.

Teacher with Pedophobia Loses Lawsuit She claimed forcing her to be around children was discriminatory. Katherine Timpf

Why she wanted to be a teacher in the first place is not clear.

On Wednesday, an Ohio teacher lost her appeal to a 2013 discrimination lawsuit in which she had claimed that her district had failed to provide “reasonable accommodations” for her debilitating fear of children.

Maria Waltherr-Willard had worked as a French and Spanish teacher in Cincinnati for 35 years but was eventually diagnosed with “pedophobia” — a fear of children, particularly those in elementary school.

According to an article in FindLaw, Waltherr-Willard had originally taught the languages in high school — until the district didn’t need her there anymore because it had started teaching French online and already had another Spanish teacher. She then told her boss that she couldn’t teach in elementary school because of her phobia, and that the Americans with Disabilities Act demanded that the school district accommodate her.

The Proposed Resolution is more about what he won’t do against the Islamic State than what he will.

The authorization for the use of military force against the Islamic State that the Obama administration sent Congress this week is not worthy of the name. Its language is far more about what the president won’t do against the terrorist army that controls much of Syria and Iraq — limits on ground troops and a sunset provision for the authorization after three years — than what he will do. Congress should reject it.

If the threat of ISIS is as dire as the president says it is in the preamble of his resolution, if ISIS really does pose “a grave threat to the people and territorial integrity of Iraq and Syria, regional stability, and the national security interests of the United States and its allies and partners,” if ISIS really does “intend to conduct terrorist attacks internationally, including against the United States, its citizens, and interests,” then not only does the president already have the authority to strike granted to him by Article II of the Constitution and the 2001 and 2002 war resolutions, he also should not cavil or hesitate in unleashing every means at his disposal to confront and defeat the enemy. Making war is exactly what Obama should have been doing at least since last June when ISIS raised the black flag over the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Yet the urgency and drama with which the president and his advisers describe the actions and intentions of ISIS is remarkably disproportionate to their campaign against it so far: 2,600 U.S. troops in Iraq to act as advisers to the Iraqis and Kurds, a rather desultory campaign of airstrikes that has failed to degrade ISIS seriously, an admission from the vice president that ISIS probably won’t be dislodged from its redoubt in Syria because “there are no boots on the ground,” and a dispiriting, academic, wishy-washy attempt by U.S. defense bureaucrats to figure out “what makes the Islamic State so dangerous,” as well as the typical self-congratulation and smarm for assembling and maintaining an “international coalition” of allies most of whom do nothing.

His proposed resolution would upend the Constitution’s national-defense framework.
On Wednesday, President Obama proposed for Congress’s consideration an authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). The jihadists are already being fought — albeit not nearly vigorously enough — under existing AUMFs. So Obama’s proposal, which would gratuitously repeal one of the prior AUMFs, is unnecessary. It is, in addition, so pathetic a concoction of lawlessness and aimlessness that, in a healthier political climate, Congress would not give it the time of day.

The document defies the reality of war. Phrased as a license for the “limited” use of force, it suggests that lawmakers should delegitimize combat even as they authorize it. The president would have Congress limit the duration of combat (to three years), as if war came with an end-date. He’d have Congress limit the means of combat (no ground forces), as if war could be scripted to suit the Left’s anti-war sensibilities.

Generation Xers mourning Stewart’s departure ought to be thanking the man who made the awkward comedian’s long tenure of pulling faces while making snide remarks possible; President Bush.

George W. Bush made Jon Stewart. Even Stewart has admitted that his show came into its own when Bush did. A world in which a President Gore spent eight years sonorously lecturing Americans about his love for the trees is also a world in which Jon Stewart would be out there doing pizza commercials.

It was Bush’s victory that took a flailing cable show hosted by an irritating little standup comedian with more neurotic tics than a flea-bitten Woody Allen and turned him into the voice of liberalism. Stewart’s nervous smirk and his passive aggressive mockery became the zeitgeist of urban Democrats nervously responding to Bush’s popularity and the rise of American patriotism after September 11.

Ruthie Blum is the editor of Voice of Israel radio (voiceofisrael.com).

During the 51st Munich Security Conference last weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was busy conducting one-on-one “hallway diplomacy” with a number of his counterparts, among them U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz.

What emerged from these meetings was renewed optimism on the part of the West that a deal with the Islamic republic was imminent.

Kerry reported back to his boss in the White House that everything was under control: All the P5+1 powers (the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and Germany) would have to do is accept the Iranian regime’s assertion that its nuclear program is peaceful, and an agreement could be signed well before the July deadline.

Kurz indicated that Austria would be happy to hold the next round of talks in Vienna, telling reporters that his government was satisfied with all the previous ones that have taken place there.

US President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.

This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.

Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a bunch of violent vicious zealots,” who “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just “a bunch of folks in a deli,” presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.

In full-page ad in N.Y. Times and Washington Post, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor supports Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress “on the catastrophic danger of a nuclear Iran”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel is lending his support to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to Congress on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program.

Popular New Jersey Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach announced on Thursday he would place a full-page advertisements in two of the leading U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, featuring Wiesel’s endorsement of Netanyahu’s speech.

Blindsided by the invitation that Republicans in Congress extended to Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama has declined to meet the Israeli leader, citing what he has said is U.S. protocol not to meet world leaders before national elections. Israeli elections are scheduled for March 17, two weeks after the slated speech.

The advertisement quotes Wiesel as saying he plans to attend Netanyahu’s address “on the catastrophic danger of a nuclear Iran.” Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986, Wiesel asks Obama and others in the ad: “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?”

Obama changes the subject
It has become fairly clear to anyone who takes the time to examine the facts, that the invitation by House Speaker John Boehner to Prime Minister Bienjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress was neither a breach of established protocol, nor any kind of snub or slap in the face. The process was, in fact, identical to what occurred the last time Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2011 — the speaker informed the White House, hearing no objection, he then invited Netanyahu. Of course, as soon as the invite became public this time around, all hell broke loose.

The extremely nasty White House propaganda campaign directed against John Boehner, but even more at Israel and its Prime Minister, took three forms. The first argument was that the White House had not been informed. This was blatantly false, and the New York Times, which could not have been more excited to highlight the growing tension between the two countries (all Netanyahu and Boehner’s fault of course), was forced to issue a correction on its initial reports stating the White House had not been informed. Of course, the news source of record then went right back to misreporting the chain of events soon thereafter. It is still widely believed that Boehner disrespected the president, and surprised him with the invitation, though this is not what happened. The White House is well aware it is nonsense. Score one for the president and his propagandists.

Remembering the Shanghai Ghetto, Home to 20,000 Jewish Refugees
They arrived soon after Hitler’s rise to power, only to be imprisoned by Japan
Last week, JTA reported that the neighborhood in Shanghai that was home to approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees during World War II may be added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
While the Nazi-fleeing refugees who settled in Shanghai certainly fared better than the family and friends they left behind in Europe, life in the so-called “Pearl of the Orient” was nonetheless turbulent.
Things in Shanghai looked bright initially, when the first German Jewish refugees, many of them doctors and dentists, arrived soon after Hitler’s rise to power. The local community was apparently so grateful for the professional skills these refugees brought that JTA headlined a 1934 article “German Jewish doctors cause China to be grateful to the Nazis.”
In that article, JTA reported that an American journalist working in China said approximately 100 Jewish doctors had set up practices in Shanghai:
… during the short time they have lived in the city they have come to be regarded as “Hitler’s gift to the Far East” by virtue of the medical skill they have contributed to a territory which has long suffered from inadequate medical attention.