RUTHFULLY YOURS

The multi-faceted essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian war is territorial, political, ideological, and religious – a convulsive confrontation between the mutually exclusive claims of Judaism and Islam.

But a fifth dimension of the conflict is culture – popular culture – embodied in a code of identity that differentiates one human community from another.

Culture is not negotiable or alterable: it is the texture of the life people live, and the local rhythm of things they know from their earliest memories. It is an inbred code of behavior and, as for all peoples, precedes and precludes morality, thought, and judgment.

The reason why the cultural component of the conflict is ignored stems from the fact that in order to appreciate a culture, you basically have to know it from the inside; and outsiders, non-Arabs, are ignorant of Arab culture, and haughtily assume that it has no value.

Add to this obstacle the fact that a native always behaves differently when he is with a foreigner than with a fellow-native. Surface-like conversations between people from different cultures can reveal very little. To call the Arabs rhetorically flexible is a kind way to infer their masterful command of deception.

It is Arab culture in particular, atavistic and organic, encased in the old binding from its historical origin, which must be addressed in order to better explore the intractability of the long Arab-Israeli rivalry

On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 500-page executive summary of the report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees. Democrats, the media and Republican Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are using it as an opportunity to hammer the CIA and the Bush administration, while American embassies, military units and other U.S. interests are preparing for possible reprisals. But adding further threats to Americans already in harm’s way matters not. Beleaguered congressional Democrats are desperate for a political boon and have turned to an old standby: sabotaging national security and sacrificing American lives.

Since their betrayal of the Iraq war, Democrats, particularly in the Senate, have panned the techniques used by the CIA to garner critical information in the days following 9/11 as “torture,” and have claimed that they yielded no useful intel. Though the use of these techniques was long known to Democrats — with virtual indifference toward them at the outset — many Democrats have since claimed they were unaware of what was occurring, which explains their lack of opposition to their government supposedly engaging in “torture.”

Leading the way on the latter fabrication was then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Her ongoing denials regarding knowledge of the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorists were ultimately undone by Pelosi herself in 2009, when she finally admitted she had known about the program since 2003. Yet even as she admitted it, she continued to promote the “Bush lied, people died” lie, insisting that “the C.I.A. was misleading the Congress and at the same time the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction.”

Those would be the same weapons of mass destruction whose existence was acknowledged by the New York Times last October.

Harvard law students have been taught to think like spoiled children

If there were a First Rule of our present penchant for victimhood, it would presumably be that everything unpleasant that happens in the world must, in some way, eventually be about you. Today, the National Law Journal reports that:

The push to delay law school final examinations in light of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases has spread to Harvard Law School, as administrators at Georgetown University Law Center said students could seek delays on a case-by-case basis. Columbia Law School was the first to allow students to ask to postpone their exams.

Those Harvard students have produced an open letter, in which they demand that their examinations be delayed. “Like many across the country,” its authors claim, students “are traumatized” and “visibly distressed” — to the extent that there is now a “palpable anguish looming over campus.” The “national crisis” that has been provoked by the cases of Garner and Brown, they argue, has left them with no choice but to “stand for justice rather than sit and prepare for exams.” And, like their brethren at Columbia, they contend that their “being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment” amounts to their “being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation” — requests, which taken together, have led them “to question our place in this school community and the legal community at large.” The bottom line? That students must be given “the opportunity to reschedule their exams in good faith and at their own discretion.”

Ugly as the Brown and Garner cases were, one can’t help but feel that what constitutes a “National Emergency” or a “personal crisis” is being rather dramatically defined down here — possibly to the vanishing point. In the course of their missive, the vexed students claim that “because this national tragedy implicates the legal system to which we have chosen to dedicate our lives, it presents us with a fundamental crisis of conscience and demands our immediate attention.” This, I’d venture, is an effectively irrefutable claim — and not in the good sense. Rather, it is the Interstate Commerce Clause of dog-ate-my-homework pretexts: an unlimited, self-serving, and infinitely malleable rationale that can be used at any time and for any reason. If our law students are to insist upon special dispensation each and every time the justice system fails to live up to its promise, our exam halls will be empty in perpetuity.

They ignore America’s tremendous strides toward racial equality.

How does one explain liberals’ relentless obsession with race? Democrats and left-wing activists clutch the notion of racism as America’s defining characteristic just as streetcorner drunks cling to their fifths of cheap booze. No matter what, neither community can unhand those bottles.

In fact, this debilitating liberal addiction deserves a name: raceaholism.

Raceaholics like President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, overexposed circus barker Al Sharpton, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, their allies, and their media enablers cannot stop talking about race. They refract almost every issue through that prism. According to them, we shall not overcome our long history of racial injustice — or at least no time soon. If you believed these people, you would think “whites only” and “colored” water fountains were just one roll-call vote away in the GOP House of Representatives. The raceaholics want Americans to fear that the burning crosses and lynchings will return as soon as the evening sun goes down.

Raceaholics wear fact-proof vests, which facilitate their addiction.

Less than a month after becoming this country’s first black attorney general, Eric Holder harshly scolded the American people: “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder told Justice Department employees on February 18, 2009. He claimed that “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.” He added, “If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

Holder’s comments echo those of then-President Bill Clinton, who, in June 1997, said he wanted to start a “national conversation on race.” Likewise, Mayor de Blasio, on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, said, “We have to have an honest conversation in this country about a history of racism.”

The UVA rape story was the perfect outrage to further feminist activists’ ideological agenda.

Nine males were accused of being part of a heinous rape. The alleged injustice fomented a mob mentality. An enraged community wanted to skip any talk of a serious investigation, never mind a trial, and go straight to the punishment.

I’m not talking about the now-discredited allegations against fraternity members at the University of Virginia, but of the legendary case of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. Despite testimony from one of the women that she had made up the whole thing, the Scottsboro Boys were convicted in trial after trial. All served time in either jail or prison.

Scottsboro is a landmark case in the history of the civil-rights movement and the American justice system. Sadly, it was hardly an outlier. There’s a long, tragic history of African-American men being wrongly accused and convicted of rape. The most notorious recent example is the 1989 case of the Central Park Five, in which four African-American teens and one Latino were wrongly accused and convicted of brutally raping a white woman in New York.

Clearly, the injustices involved in these cases are far greater than what transpired at UVA. No one at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity faced the death penalty or went to jail. But the lessons learned and principles involved are timeless and universal; everyone deserves the presumption of innocence.

Apparently, Zerlina Maxwell disagrees. She writes in the Washington Post: “We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”

As Bruce Thornton has titled his column today…It is the end of Feminism.

The pseudofeminists were riding high after the last presidential election gave Sandra Fluke, the abortionista her twenty minutes of fame. Women’s rights, the right to choose, it’s my body my choice, equal pay etc. were the rallying cry of the women and their legislators, including many Democrat men who felt their pain.

How insulting to think that women don’t care about major issues- energy, immigration, the economy, Obamacare, the military, foreign policy, resurgent militant Islam,the overreach of the EPA, the “politically correct” driven agenda of the academies, the decline of our national culture and patriotism….I could go on and on.

New senators and representatives, both men and women, won elections because of their tough stand on the foregoing issues.

It’s time to sing farewell to the old guard of faux feminism..and their grievance committees:

“Goodnight ladies, ladies goodnight
It’s time to say goodbye
Let me tell you, now, goodnight ladies, ladies goodnight
It’s time to say goodbye”

“Goodnight, Ladies” is a folk song attributed to Edwin Pearce Christy, originally intended to be sung during a minstrel show. Drawing from an 1847 song by Christy entitled “Farewell, Ladies”, the song as known today was first published on May 16, 1867

The laws of supply and demand have brought relief to regular Americans.

The old Republican rallying cry “drill, baby, drill” was supposed to be simplistic sloganeering masquerading as policy.

It turns out that it represented transformative wisdom. The fall in the price of oil — about 40 percent in the past several months, down to less than $70 a barrel — is largely the result of the U.S. drilling, and then drilling some more, baby.

Big drops in the price of oil usually accompany recessions and are caused by declining demand. Not this one. Lackluster demand from Europe and China is a factor, but the driver is the American shale boom that is perhaps the most wondrous national achievement of the past decade.

No one would have predicted it. To the contrary, experts predicted the opposite. In 2008, the International Energy Agency was projecting U.S. production would decline or remain flat for decades. Prior to the recession, the price of oil peaked at nearly $150 a barrel, and with global demand rising, it looked like it would remain at an elevated level forevermore.

But now the U.S. is producing over 3 million barrels a day more than it did several years ago. As Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute points out, this is like adding another Kuwait to world oil production. The Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania alone, he writes, has added another Iran to world natural-gas production.

Perhaps President Barack Obama can be forgiven for not understanding the consequence of this, given his attenuated understanding of complex market forces — like supply and demand. As recently as 2012, he was confidently asserting that “we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” Drivers enjoying the $1 drop in the price of gas since May might beg to differ.

Radical feminists seek out accusations to prove a theory; innocent young men pay the price.

The Rolling Stone story about the University of Virginia frat gang rape has fallen apart. Now come the recriminations.

Those who care about stopping campus sexual assault, as I do, are outraged by the Rolling Stone story for all the right reasons. The shoddy journalism and questionable complaint will damage true victims of sexual assault, who may be more hesitant to come forward, and less likely to be believed.

There also are those standing up for journalistic standards and the rights of innocent fraternity members, individually and collectively, accused of a horrific sex crime. But there is another strain of reaction, which refuses to acknowledge that the Rolling Stone story is a symptom of a larger problem of radical feminism on campuses, where agenda trumps evidence and individual rights.

That strain of reaction holds that it is more important than ever for even questionable accusations of sexual abuse and rape to be presumed true regardless of the evidence and not be questioned. In that view, the Rolling Stone story’s falling apart reinforces the belief that the burden should be on the accused male to prove innocence, even if campus quasi-judicial systems provide few procedures to do so.

Increasingly, university administrations under pressure from the federal government take that attitude of presumptive guilt based on a mere accusation.

The dubious, if not completely discredited, statistic that one in five college women is a victim of rape or sexual assault feeds the frenzy. What are a few ruined young male lives if it serves the greater good of fighting “rape culture” and the patriarchy?

Blackstone’s famous formulation of justice has been turned on its head. No longer is it “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Now it is “better ten innocent men suffer, than one guilty man escape,” as Amy Miller wrote of the current state of campus affairs.

The ObamaCare lies keep coming. In two highly publicized announcements last week, top Obama health officials claimed the Affordable Care Act is slowing health-care spending and improving hospital safety.

The media parroted these boasts, but the evidence shows they’re bogus.

Even as administration figures — from President Obama down — distance themselves from Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare adviser caught calling the public stupid, they’re still relying on his playbook: They assume we’re not going to check their facts.

On Dec. 3, federal actuaries released data showing that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013.

Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, boasted that it’s “evidence that our efforts to reform the health-care-delivery system are working.” Sorry, not true.

That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair.

The real slowing of health-care spending started way back in 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, long before ObamaCare even passed. Health spending slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent rise that year, and stayed at that slow pace in 2010.

Not that the president acknowledged that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half century.

To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were “skyrocketing,” spending was “spiraling” out of control and health needs would gobble up ever more GDP unless Congress quickly passed the Affordable Care Act.

If myths do more for social progress than facts — then why worry?

Well aside from “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is a special category of progressive mythology. Or rather a particular cast of “truth tellers,” victims, supposed whistle blowers, and popular liberal icons who spin tales for a supposedly higher good, on the premise that untruth for a cause makes it sort of true.

From the details of Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir, to Tawana Brawley’s supposed rape, to the O. J. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” myth, to the open-and-shut case of the hate-crime crucifixion of Matthew Shepard by savage homophobes, to Dan Rather’s fake but accurate National Guard memo, to the Duke lacrosse team’s supposed racist raping, to Barack Obama’s autobiographic interludes with his girlfriend, to Scott Beauchamp’s “true” stories of American military atrocities in Iraq, to Lena Dunham’s purported right-wing sexual assaulter at Oberlin College (home of the 2013 epidemic of pseudo-racist graffiti), to the pack of University of Virginia fraternity rapists on the loose, to “Hands up, don’t shoot,” we have come to appreciate that facts and truth are not that important, if myths can better serve social progress or the careers of those on the correct side of history.

The new generation of progressive mythmaking has taken up where prior generations left off. In the old progressive mythology, Alger Hiss never passed on U.S. secrets. Instead, he was a tortured idealist, intent on preventing the descent of America into dangerous know-nothing McCarthyism. The Rosenbergs really did not spy for the Soviet Union — or if they did, it was to help a wartime ally with a similar anti-fascist agenda. JFK and RFK were gunned down by right-wing conspirators, fueled by a larger culture of reactionary hatred. Rigoberta Menchú wrote her own factual autobiography — or at least wanted to.

Why is there this overarching need to fabricate iconic race, class, gender, and political victims when Western capitalist society supposedly should offer enough pathologies without having to invent any? Many reasons come to mind.