RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran is racing forward with its nuclear-bomb making effort. The Obama administration is racing forward with its effort to get the ayatollahs to sign a piece of paper promising peace in our time. The only thing Secretary of State Kerry’s diplomacy is missing these days is the same kind of hat that Neville Chamberlain held in his hand as he met with Herr Hitler in Munich and begged him to be reasonable.

What alternatives exist for stopping Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon? Several years ago, U.S. and Israeli intelligence attempted to derail Iranian nuclear progress by introducing the Stuxnet virus into Iran’s uranium processing facility at Natanz. If the operation’s objective was to stop Iran in its nuclear tracks, it failed. But it might have temporarily slowed the Iranians down. A fascinating new book, Countdown to Zero Day, has assembled what is known about the cyber-attack. You can read my review of it in the Wall Street Journal . G.S.
Hacking the Ayatollahs
The Stuxnet virus opened and closed valves on Iranian centrifuges and adjusted their power supply as false readings were fed to operators.

In early 2010, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed a problem at Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz, Iran. The centrifuges employed to separate enriched uranium—the precursor to bomb-grade material—from uranium hexafluoride gas were breaking down at a startling rate. What the inspectors did not know was that the facility was under attack by Stuxnet, a computer virus designed by American and Israeli intelligence agencies under the code name Operation Olympic Games. “Countdown to Zero Day” by Kim Zetter, a reporter for the technology magazine Wired, gives a full account of this “hack of the century,” as the operation has been called. Exhaustively researched, the book goes well beyond its ostensible subject to offer a hair-raising introduction to the age of cyber warfare.

What about Mohammedus Vespuci, And Mohammedo Magellan, and Mohammed Leif Ericson???? rsk

President Erdogan also claims that Columbus reported on a mosque on a hill in Cuba.

From our “Some Muslims Believe the Craziest Things” department comes words of wisdom from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Giving a speech before some Latin American Muslims, Erdogan decided to give a little history lesson. He claims that America was discovered by Muslims in the 12th century — there’s even proof via none other than Christopher Columbus, who supposedly wrote in his journal about a mosque on a hill in Cuba.

AFP reports:

“Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus,” the conservative president said in a televised speech during an Istanbul summit of Muslim leaders from Latin America.

“Muslim sailors arrived in America from 1178. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast,” Erdogan said.

Erdogan said that Ankara was even prepared to build a mosque at the site mentioned by the Genoese explorer.

“I would like to talk about it to my Cuban brothers. A mosque would go perfectly on the hill today,” the Turkish leader said.

History books say that Columbus set foot on the American continent in 1492 as he was seeking a new maritime route to India.

A tiny minority of Muslim scholars have recently suggested a prior Muslim presence in the Americas, although no pre-Columbian ruin of an Islamic structure has ever been found.

Driver’s licenses for illegals is defeated by a 2-1 margin.

Little noticed after the midterm vote, which saw the GOP take control of the Senate and increase their majority in the House, was a referendum in sky blue Oregon to repeal the law that granted illegal immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license.

Even though the Democrats increased their majority in the state legislature and a Democratic governor was reelected, the measure for repeal passed by a 2-1 margin.

This is a stark warning to President Obama and the Democrats that if he acts alone to amnesty 5 million illegals, his march to irrelevancy will be complete, and the party he leads could pay an awful price in 2016.

The Associated Press reports:

The state law had seemed to be popular. It easily passed last year with bipartisan support in the Democratic-controlled Legislature and was signed Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber, who was re-elected Nov. 4.

Opponents barely gathered enough signatures to put the repeal question on the ballot. Immigrant rights groups outspent their opponents 10-1.

Still, the measure failed in every county but the state’s most liberal one, Multnomah, home to Portland. Even there it trailed significantly behind other Democratic candidates and causes.

“It was really the epitome of a grassroots effort,” said Cynthia Kendoll, one of the activists who led the campaign against licenses. “There’s such a disconnect between what people really want and what’s happening.”

Obama made his postelection pledge on immigration despite the drubbing that Democrats took across the country. He said he had to act because Congress has deadlocked on immigration for years.

A bipartisan Senate bill to provide citizenship to many of the 11 million people in the U.S. illegally died in the Republican-controlled House, and with the GOP now holding a majority in the Senate, many believe it is unlikely any broad immigration measure could make it to Obama before the end of his term.

As Jonathan Gruber knows, the health-care law is a tax machine. The ‘Cadillac’ levy will hit the middle class.

Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, is making himself a household name, and not in a good way. A series of videos have emerged in recent days showing Mr. Gruber—an architect of the Affordable Care Act—telling college audiences that major parts of the law were designed purposely to mask its true cost to individual Americans.

As Mr. Gruber put it, speaking last year at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

One example cited by Mr. Gruber is the so-called Cadillac tax, as the ObamaCare excise tax on high-value employer health plans is known. The tax, which he helped devise and will take effect in 2018, imposes a 40% levy on individual health plans worth more than $10,200, and on family plans worth more than $27,500. As Mr. Gruber’s remarks were unearthed last week, economist Mark Wilson and I released a study of the excise tax that shows he is right about its deceptive design. The tax is likely to hit many people who don’t have high-end coverage.

Mr. Gruber says in one video that his real aim was to reduce the tax break available to those who get employer-sponsored insurance, about 170 million Americans. He lamented that it would be hard to persuade Congress to reduce people’s tax breaks: “You just can’t get through. It’s politically impossible.” True enough—the excise tax does the job instead. It is a stealthy way to reduce the tax preference for health care without taking it away from employers.

If the White House press corps wants to keep government honest, here’s a question to ask as President Obama prepares to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by executive order: Has he sought, and does he have, any written legal justification from the Attorney General and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for his actions?

This would be standard operating procedure in any normal Presidency. Attorney General Eric Holder is the executive branch’s chief legal officer, and Administrations of both parties typically ask OLC for advice on the parameters of presidential legal authority.

The Obama Administration has asked OLC for its legal opinions on such controversial national security questions as drone strikes and targeting U.S. citizens abroad. It was right do so even though the Constitution gives Presidents enormous authority on war powers and foreign policy.

But a Justice-OLC opinion is all the more necessary on domestic issues because the President’s authority is far more limited. He is obliged to execute the laws that Congress writes. A President should always seek legal justification for controversial actions to ensure that he is on solid constitutional ground as well as to inspire public confidence in government.

Yet as far as we have seen, Mr. Obama sought no such legal justification in 2012 when he legalized hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. The only document we’ve found in justification is a letter from the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time, Janet Napolitano, to law enforcement agencies citing “the exercise of our prosecutorial discretion.” Judging by recent White House leaks, that same flimsy argument will be the basis for legalizing millions more adults.

It’s possible Messrs. Obama and Holder haven’t sought an immigration opinion because they suspect there’s little chance that even a pliant Office of Legal Counsel could find a legal justification. Prosecutorial discretion is a vital legal concept, but it is supposed to be exercised in individual cases, not to justify a refusal to follow the law against entire classes of people.

The truth is that there has never been an Israeli genocide against Palestinians, and that Israel has done everything in its power apart from not going to war at all — that is, apart from surrendering — to spare innocent lives, including the lives of people trying to destroy it.

Israel simply became a safe haven for a persecuted religious minority who sought statehood after having concluded that no state could guarantee their safety except for a Jewish state.

That Israel is not even any kind of player in this Muslim Sunni-Shia “ISIS War” apparently did not occur to Wijenberg.

As is so often true when vilifying Israel, “Israel” is, at bottom, most likely just a transparent fig-leaf for again vilifying “Jews.”

An increasingly popular argument, when certain Dutch officials and Muslim commentators discuss Islamic State [IS] jihadists from Europe, is that these jihadists are really no different from European Jews who choose to serve in the Israel Defense Forces [IDF].

In The Netherlands this trend seems to have started when an op-ed, entitled, “Jihad for Israel,” written for Al-Jazeera by Columbia University PhD. candidate Hanine Hassan, was translated into Dutch for the website “Wij Blijven Hier,” which means “We Are Here To Stay.” The website is hugely popular among Dutch youths from a Muslim background.

The main thesis of the op-ed was that serving in the IDF should be as punishable as joining IS, as the IDF, too, is a genocidal regime, just like IS.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered what is being described in media reports as top-to-bottom changes in how the nation’s nuclear arsenal is managed.

Largely unreported in the coverage of the possible nuclear forces shakeup is that until his appointment as defense secretary, Hagel served on the board of a George Soros-funded group that advocates a nuclear-free world.

Ploughshares opposes America’s development of a missile-defense system and contributes funds to scores of anti-war groups highly critical of U.S. foreign policy and military expansion.

The fund identifies itself as a “publicly supported foundation that funds, organizes and innovates projects to realize a world free from the threat of nuclear weapons.”

On Friday, the Associated Press reported Hagel was slated to announce actions to improve nuclear force management, vowing to invest billions of dollars more to fix what that the agency described as a force suffering from leadership lapses, security flaws and sagging morale.

Senior defense officials speaking to the AP said Hagel would propose an amount between $1 billion and $10 billion in additional investments to the nuclear forces, including the replacement of a dated helicopter fleet.

While the exact nature of the investment is unclear and Hagel’s proposed top-to-bottom changes have not yet been specified, the defense secretary’s long-time association with the Ploughshares Fund may be cause for concern.

The fund calls itself “the largest grant-making foundation in the U.S. focusing exclusively on peace and security issues.”

The Ploughshares Fund has a long history of anti-war advocacy and is a partner of the Marxist-oriented Institute for Policy Studies, which has urged the defunding of the Pentagon and massive decreases in U.S. defense capabilities, including slashing the American nuclear arsenal to 292 deployed weapons.

The world has not stopped to contemplate the snowballing results of creating a “Palestinian” state.

“Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea. We must not cede this narrative. From the River to the Sea….Palestine belongs to the Palestinians; and the heart of the matter is the right of return, our cause is the right of return.” (Palestinian PA Parliament Member, Khalida Jarrar, April 16, 2014)

At a moment when supremely civilized countries all over the world seem eager to support Palestinian statehood – Germany is the latest – few have taken the trouble to examine precisely what this support could actually mean. To be sure, the expected impact of a 23rd Arab sovereignty would be most immediately injurious to Israel, although, over time, even enthusiastic European advocates of “Palestine” would likely suffer their own consequent harms. This is because a Palestinian state – any Palestinian state – would quickly become yet another dedicated launching site for Jihadist terrorism.

Oddly enough, nothing could be more obvious.

“Hamas is ISIS, and ISIS is Hamas,” correctly explained Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu before the U.N. General Assembly last September: “They all have the same ideology; they all seek to establish a global militant Islam, where there is no freedom.”

Also in September, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, now working together with his “brothers” in Hamas, asked the U.N. Security Council to set a deadline of November 2016 for a full Israeli withdrawal from Judea/Samaria (West Bank), including East Jerusalem. His draft resolution vaguely accepts a “Two State Solution” for the disputed areas, but all major Palestinian media continue to speak, officially, of Israel itself as “Occupied Palestine.” The “moderate” PA “solution,” therefore, exactly like the “radical” Hamas “solution,” calls for a single Arab state, in all of the land now defined as Israel, West Bank, and Gaza.

“What if the Jews themselves were Nazis?,” mused French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1986. “That would be great. We would no longer have to feel sorry for them; they would have deserved what they got.” The recasting of Israelis, and, by extension, Jews as Nazis has, in fact, taken place, just as Jankélévitch envisioned. This summer’s Israeli incursion, Operation Protective Edge, provided anti-Semites and loathers of the Jewish state with resurgent justifications for assigning the epithet of Nazi on the Jews yet another time, together with oft-heard accusations of “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, according to recent comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis — and by extension, Jews — is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity. It is, in the words of Boston University’s Richard Landes, “moral sadism,” a salient example of Holocaust inversion that is at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy. In reflecting on the current trend, he perceived in the burgeoning of anti-Israelism around the world, Canadian Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler once observed that conventional strains of anti-Semitism had been masked, so that those who directed enmity towards Jews were now able to transfer that opprobrium to the Jew of nations, Israel. How had they effected that? According to Cotler, they did so by redefining Israel as the most glaring example of those human predations, what he called “the embodiment of all evil” of the Twentieth Century: apartheid and Nazism.

You wouldn’t guess that Stephen Hawking’s inspiring and dramatic life would need embellishment by withholding pertinent information and distorting facts, yet that is precisely what occurs in the film “The Theory of Everything.” Based on his first wife’s book (”Travelling to Infinity”), Jane Hawking is portrayed as a fresh-faced, forever young martyr who manages to take care of a completely paralyzed man and three children while working on her Ph.D and vacuuming the house – all unassisted. Since we have already witnessed that once Stephen required a wheelchair, he needed to be lifted and carried to his next location, we know that it just isn’t possible that they lived without additional help yet we don’t see a nurse enter until the children are fairly grown. In truth, as of 1974, a student always lived and traveled with the Hawkings to help with Stephen’s extraordinary health care needs.

For unexplained reasons, we are never told that after Stephen’s tracheotomy, he was cared for by three shifts of nurses, including Elaine Mason, the woman who caused the breakup in his marriage and whom he eventually married in 1995. Also not revealed is that those two divorced 11 years later after nasty rumors that she had been abusing him. Did the filmmaker think that the brilliant and helpless Hawking would be less sympathetic with some character flaws? Would his wife Jane appear less noble if the nurses who helped to care for him were acknowledged for their help? And why the omission of the fact that all of his care was paid for by a private American foundation since the National Health Service would only pay for him in a nursing home.