RUTHFULLY YOURS

Round the Bend is a series of tales from the days when Britain ruled India and the Gulf, told with documents newly digitised by the British Library. You can explore the archive yourself.

The Jews may have originated in the Middle East but they were long ago scattered far and wide – to the Gulf, among other places. Few now remain, except in Iran. But a century ago, writes Matthew Teller, there was even a proposal to found a Jewish state at an oasis near Bahrain.

In 1859 Griffith Jenkins, a senior British naval officer in the Gulf, wrote to a subordinate named Hiskal.

Hiskal – or Yehezkel – ben Yosef was a minor official representing British interests in Muscat. And, like his predecessor in the post in the 1840s (a man named Reuben), he was Jewish.

Jews had been living in Muscat since at least 1625. In 1673, according to one traveller, a synagogue was being built, implying permanence. British officer James Wellsted also noted the existence of a Jewish community on a visit in the 1830s.

Jenkins’s letter talks obliquely about the Imam (a Muslim ruler who held sway in Oman’s interior) and the arrival of a man from Persia. He ends by asking Hiskal to explain the matter in private – and then, remarkably, had his letter translated into Hebrew.

“A group of more than 300 hundred [sic; it’s 300, not 30,000] former Obama staffers have written an open letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president of the United States,” reports the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper. These are former staffers from Barack Obama’s campaigns (and their successor organization, Organizing for Action), not his White House, and the letter calls attention to the ostensible parallels with 2008:

We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance.

We worked for him—and against all odds, we won in Iowa.

We organized like no campaign had organized before—and won the Democratic primary.

We built a movement—and the country elected the first-ever African American president.

We know that the improbable is far from impossible.

Unstated but obvious is one more: We beat the inevitable Hillary Clinton.

Beijing abrogates the 1984 treaty it signed with Britain to guarantee the city’s autonomy.

Before Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, a popular way to glimpse the sealed-off mainland was by peering across the border from Hong Kong. Decades later, that remains a great vantage point. The 75 days of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protest, broken up last week, showed how far Beijing officials go to suppress demands for political accountability.

Protests began when Beijing announced it would not honor its promise of universal suffrage for the people of Hong Kong. The Communist Party declared that the next leader would again be selected by a small group of Beijing appointees, a system that has produced successively less popular Hong Kong chief executives lacking legitimacy. The pepper-spraying of peaceful student demonstrators led 100,000 Hong Kong people to join the protests.

Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. In 1962, 11-year-old Carlos Eire was one of thousands of children airlifted out of Cuba and sent to Florida to escape Fidel Castro’s regime.
News of Fidel’s brush with death brought the news media to my door, literally and figuratively. The journalists were not alone. Even long-lost friends suddenly surfaced, eager to hear what I had to say about this turn of events.
Among those who came knocking, was the New York Times, asking if I would like to write an Op-Ed piece. It was an odd request. Out of all of the things that a Cuban exile might be asked to comment upon, such as the ailing Maximum Leader’s disdain for human rights, or the total ruin of the Cuban economy, I was asked to pass judgement on those fellow countrymen down in Little Havana who were celebrating Fidel’s demise by dancing in the streets. The way the essay was pitched to me could not have been more offensive, or more revealing of deep-seated prejudices. “I can’t help but wonder if this is appropriate,” said the newspaper editor about the dancing in the streets, “since many of them were likely allowed to leave Cuba in the early 60’s with Castro’s blessing.” The ignorance and insensitivity revealed in that pitch was so staggering and appalling–so much in the same league as the Holocaust deniers or the clueless socialites in William Hamilton’s cartoons– that it caught me off guard.
But that was not all. The editor wanted to know what I would say, a priori. My opinion would have to be approved before I would be allowed to voice it..
Given the bigotry already revealed in the editor’s pitch I knew that anything I could say would probably be rejected, but I made the effort anyway, much like a man who is given a chance to duck by a firing squad.
“Yes, “ I replied. “The celebrations in Miami would make a good subject, especially because those who are out on the street are definitely not from the first refugee wave of the 1960’s, as you suggest. The celebrants I’ve seen on television are all genuine children of the revolution, much younger folk who have arrived in the 80’s, 90’s, and the present decade. I can definitely write about the celebrations.”
Once again, the editor pressed me to be more specific about what I would say.

Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of ‎Government and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago like to ‎call themselves foreign policy realists. Realists are, in their minds, people who can ‎assess international situations without any ideological blinders or bias. Walt and ‎Mearsheimer co-authored “The Israel Lobby,” originally as a lengthy article in the ‎London Review of Books in 2006, and then as a much longer book version in 2007. In both ‎the article and book, the professors argued that America’s very tight relationship ‎with Israel was strategically unsound for the United States. The authors claimed ‎that the closeness between the two countries was a product of the behavior of the ‎Congress of the United States, which they believe had been unduly influenced by ‎the political power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and ‎other supporters of the Jewish state, such as evangelical Christians. ‎

In less academic, and blunter terms, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman ‎welcomed Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his address to a joint session ‎of Congress in 2011, writing that the applause for Netanyahu reflected the fact that the ‎Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”‎

Of course, Friedman had been out ahead of Walt and Mearsheimer, with a similar ‎themed comment in a column in The New York Times in February 5, 2004:‎

‎”Israel’s prime minister has had George Bush under ‎house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. ‎Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded ‎by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice ‎president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. ‎Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the ‎president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election ‎year all conspiring to make sure the president does ‎nothing.”

Feinstein’s Torture Charade — on The Glazov Gang
Why the Democratic Senator chose to humiliate her country and endanger its citizens’ lives.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/feinsteins-torture-charade-on-the-glazov-gang/

Peter Oborne’s claim, that “it is almost impossible not to deal with Hamas… if you’re a charity working [in the Gaza Strip],” is demonstrably untrue. First, scores of British charities operate there, but very few of their trustees find themselves starring in Hamas photo-shoots. Second, does having to “deal with Hamas” really include visits to the family homes and shrines of Hamas terrorist leaders?

Muslim charities in Britain today, writes journalist and broadcaster Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph, “risk being reviled, smeared and branded a terrorist organization.”

Oborne, the Telegraph’s chief political commentator, believes one charity in particular, London-based Interpal, has bore the brunt of such mistreatment. Interpal, in Oborne’s eyes, is a scrupulous humanitarian charity that has been relentlessly and unfairly targeted by Western governments, media outlets and Jewish groups.

In a lengthy puff-piece, Oborne decries “media speculation and a series of unsubstantiated and vicious allegations,” which have led to Charity Commission inquiries, libel cases and financial restrictions — “all of which have cleared [Interpal] of wrongdoing and misuse of funds.”

War is never pretty. In fact, as General Sherman (who would have known) once declared, it was Hell. In the history of the 87th Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division, the regiment in which my father served in World War II, Captain George F. Earle wrote that after Nazis pretended to surrender and then killed their intended captors, “Company C (my father’s company) took no further Prisoners of War.”

In an act of war on September 11, 2001, a group of nineteen Islamic terrorists killed three thousand people in three strikes against the U.S. Further attacks were widely expected. Americans responded, including the CIA, which was charged with interrogating captured enemies to gather intelligence on what else was being planned. Senator Diane Feinstein said at the time, “We have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do, to protect ourselves.” When 9/11 mastermind Khalid sheik Mohammed was captured, and it was suggested turning him over to nations known to use torture, vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Jay Rockefeller replied: “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned.”

I have had the pleasure of meeting and hearing Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina- two intelligent, conservative and articulate Americans who whisper hints of presidential ambition. Stop now! The last thing conservatives need is a pre primary folly like we had in 2012 where all the wannabes spent more time criticizing and destroying each other until the last man standing- the honorable Mitt Romney was tarred by the gibes of the other “contenders.”

If we are to win we should politely tell people like Dr. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, gifted and credentialed as they are that they have no chance and no hope. A President, as we have learned, cannot be someone without the experience of governing- of controlling the national guard, a legislative agenda, a budget, and a fractious state legislature. Think of governors….Mike Pence, Scott Walker, Susana Martinez. And, for that matter, maybe Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. It’s true they lost but remember that Richard Nixon was in a political exile until he ran against a national icon like Hubert Humphrey- and won.

Carson and Fiorina would make great cabinet members….but they won’t be nominated if they throw their hats into the ring and muddy the candidate that will emerge….rsk

“Diaspora communities in Europe, Australia and South Africa are caught up in a maelstrom of violent hate. It is obvious that Jews, try as they might, can please or appease no one. Retreat is the beginning of all defeat. Consideration for the enemy means ultimate cruelty to kith and kin.National suicide is the final cost for being too clever.”

Israel and the cost of being too clever.Oslo marked a quick and extreme conversion from old beliefs to a new faith in miraculously turning enemies into friends by giving land away. But Israel is never thanked for it, indeed it is hated more, in the MidEast and the West. Surely there’s a lesson?

“Be not over righteous, nor too clever,” Solomon, a profoundly righteous and clever king, warns Israel for all time. His words speak cogently to modern Israel, at liberty to act for the good of its people, not least with regards to land.

If only Israel took the wise king’s early warning to heart. Echelons of Israeli leaders and society chose to be exactly what Solomon warned them not to be: over-righteous and too clever.

Can anyone dispute that more ingenuity has gone into schemes to give away territory won against the odds than into schemes to keep territory for the benefit of Israel’s own people. Magnanimous is hardly the word. Foolhardy might be.

I’m sure one could turn up some example, but you’d have to dig pretty deep to come up with another nation that gave away parts of a tiny country to a well-disposed neighbour. To come up with another nation that handed its land on a platter to implacable foes you’d have far deeper to dig. Foolhardy is hardly the word. Nihilistic might be.

Like a child craving attention, Israel looked about for compliments only to have to ward off cudgels. “Barbaric barbarians” a celebrity called Israel for the way it conducted the last of three mini wars in Gaza, the strip it had made a gift of to a rocket-firing, tunneling enemy. “Systematic murderers” a British documentary maker called Israel for the way it stemmed waves of suicide attacks rolling in from the ‘West Bank’, Israel’s gift of real estate to bombers in human disguise.

The world forgets Israel’s open-handed sharing, yet remembers her every ‘disproportionate’ attack. You’d have to dig pretty deep to come up with another people universally maligned after giving away land for nothing but the holy grail of peace. Ungrateful is hardly the word. Perverse might be…Or contempt, even from Israel’s big-brother ally.