RUTHFULLY YOURS

So far, Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s peace ruse is still bearing some fruit. President Obama was eager to talk with him at the United Nations — only to be reportedly rebuffed, until Mr. Obama managed to phone him for the first conservation between heads of state of the two countries since the Iranian storming of the U.S. Embassy in 1979.

Mr. Rouhani has certainly wowed Western elites with his mellifluous voice, quiet demeanor and denials of wanting a bomb. The media, who ignore the circumstances of Mr. Rouhani’s three-decade trajectory to power, gush that he is suddenly a “moderate” and “Western-educated.”

The implication is that Mr. Rouhani is not quite one of those hard-line Shiite apocalyptic theocrats like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who in the past ranted about the eventual end to the Zionist entity.

Americans are sick and tired of losing blood and treasure in the Middle East. We understandably are desperate for almost any sign of Iranian outreach. Our pundits assure us that either Iran does not need and thus does not want a bomb, or that Iran at least could be contained if it got one.

No such giddy reception was given to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In comparison with Mr. Rouhani, he seemed grating to his U.N. audience in New York. A crabby Mr. Netanyahu is now seen as the party pooper, who barks in his raspy voice that Mr. Rouhani is only buying time from the West until Iran can test a nuclear bomb and that the Iranian leader is a duplicitous “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Why does the unpleasant Mr. Netanyahu sound to us so unyielding, so dismissive of Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to dialogue, so ready to start an unnecessary war? How can the democracy that wants Iran not to have the bomb sound more trigger-happy than the theocracy intent on getting it?

Virginia’s Democrats want to preserve ineligible-voter rights

Democrats in Virginia are stopping just short of opening polling places in the graveyards to make sure every ineligible voter is counted. The state Democratic Party last week asked a federal judge in Alexandria for an injunction to block state and local election officials from deleting the names of ineligible voters. When the roll is called up yonder, in the updated hymn, the dead Democrats will still be here.

Election officials have compiled a list of 57,000 names of Virginians thought to have moved and put down roots elsewhere in the country. Election officials want to cross-check the names of nonresidents against the voter-registration lists and cross off the names of everyone who shouldn’t be voting in Virginia.

Terry McAuliffe is obviously polling well among the dearly departed because his party tells the court that “the need for relief is urgent.” The lawsuit argues that “the [State Board of Elections] is rushing to complete the purging in time to have the desired effect on the upcoming election.” The appropriate “desired effect” is to make sure that those who no longer live here don’t vote here. Every vote cast illegally cancels a legal vote.

The 13-page lawsuit warns on several pages that “the harm to the [Democratic Party of Virginia] and its members,” if the purge is allowed to continue, would be “irreparable.” This suggests that Democrats can’t win without the help of the temporarily dead.

IS THIS “CUP”ITALISM? RSK

This is hardly the lunch lady of Adam Sandler lore.

A former Rialto, Calif., school district accountant with access to kids’ lunch money was reportedly captured on video stuffing her bra with bills and charged with ultimately racking up $1.8 million of stolen food fees over the span of eight years.

San Bernardino County prosecutors filed 16 felony counts, from embezzlement to falsifying records, against Judith Oakes, 48, CBS reported. She was initially arrested in August and released on $50,000 bond.

Ms. Oakes is now due for an arraignment hearing on Thursday.

She was responsible for depositing the students’ lunch money into the school’s bank account. School officials because suspicious when they noticed the account balance seemed a little low — by about $3.1 million. Ms. Oakes is suspected of being responsible for about a third of that, CBS said.

If found guilty, Ms. Oakes could be sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Legendary English rocker Roger Waters, born in 1943, cofounded the iconic group Pink Floyd in 1965 and stayed in it until 1985. Since then, while sometimes reuniting with other Pink Floyd members, he’s mainly pursued a solo career.

Waters is a pop star on a gigantic scale. Pink Floyd, for which he was the main songwriter, has sold over 250 million albums across the globe. Waters’s worldwide tour The Wall Live, which he began in 2010, sold over 1.4 million tickets in the first half of 2012, making it the international leader for all categories of concerts.

Like many pop stars, Waters has taken up causes. In 2009 he called the Israeli security fence in the West Bank an “obscenity” that “should be torn down.” He never got around to criticizing the waves of Palestinian suicide bombings and other terror attacks, which killed 1500 Israelis and wounded many thousands more, that prompted the building of the fence in the first place.

In 2011 Waters announced he had joined the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Consisting of Palestinian NGOs and leftist supporters, BDS favors a “one-state solution” whereby Israel would cease to exist.

Waters has been quite active in BDS. In a November 2012 speech to the UN he accused Israel—a member of the exclusively democrat OECD and rated a “Free” country by Freedom House—of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “international crimes.” Last August he published an open letter calling on other musicians to “declare a cultural boycott on Israel,” citing Stevie Wonder’s cancellation of a concert in Israel as a success story.

Waters, it goes without saying, does not call for a boycott of any other country on the globe. He has recently played concerts in human rights beacons like Russia, China, and Turkey without raising a peep of protest. Does all this—not least the scurrilous claim of “apartheid”—qualify him as an antisemite? In general, the Jewish world gave him the benefit of the doubt and refrained from making that charge.

Even in today’s interconnected world, a lot of news is bundled by region — and so it often works with rogue states and their neighborhoods. The past few months have been an especially lively period for wayward states in the Middle East, where by diplomatic sleight-of-hand the regimes of Damascus and Tehran have been transformed from terrorist-sponsoring WMD proliferators into erstwhile or potential partners of the U.S. in nonproliferation. In August the big focus was on Syria, the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons and the ensuing deal — in which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin translated Assad’s nerve gas into a bargaining chip for re-expanding Russian influence and a dwindling role for the U.S. in the Middle East (in which Secretary of State John Kerry is now praising Syria’s President Bashar Assad [1]).

September brought the Iranian regime’s “charm” offensive, in which President Hassan Rouhani traveled to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, snubbed President Obama’s offer to meet in person, and lectured the world on Iran’s right to enrich uranium. He was rewarded with a presidential phone call, the return to Iran of a million dollar griffin-shaped silver drinking cup [2] and plans for nuclear talks next week in Geneva.

While that’s been going on, Americans have had plenty of distractions on their home turf, between news of the federal shutdown, debates over what’s actually been shut and footage of news anchors trying unsuccessfully to log onto the new government healthcare web sites.

Amid all this, there hasn’t been a lot of focus on North Korea. It’s been eight long months since Pyongyang’s third nuclear test — way back in February. It’s been three years since North Korea advertised to the world that along with its plutonium path to the bomb, it had installed at its Yongbyon complex a uranium enrichment facility (which on satellite imagery appears to have since doubled in size). Given the tempo of the modern news cycle, that’s prehistoric.

In The Grand Jihad, my book about the Muslim Brotherhood, I noted the Brothers’ affectation of non-violent moderation when, in reality, their ideology preaches, prepares for, and practices forcible jihad. How, I rhetorically asked, does the Brotherhood pull this trick off? Well, it is pretty easy in the West, where the Brothers have the fortuity of dealing mainly with appeasers who are desperate to believe their lies. But for the most part, I argued, “the answer, very simply, is extortion.”

When not pretending to distance themselves from flat-out terrorist outfits like al Qaeda (the better to have Kool-Aid gulpers at the White House regard them as “moderates”), the Brothers leverage the atmosphere of intimidation created by violent jihad to advance the stealth jihad. Where necessary, the Brothers — while piously disavowing violence — will stoke the violence themselves. Remember, the Hamas terrorist organization is the Muslim Brotherhood — the global organization’s self-proclaimed Palestinian branch whose support has been a top priority of the Brotherhood’s international franchises (very much including in the United States) since Hamas’s inception.

For the most part, though, the Brothers exploit the mass-murderous proclivities of other Islamic supremacist organizations, essentially finishing the job for them. The job? Yes, it is all one job — sharia.

We would grasp this if we were not so mulishly uninformed about the enemy’s ideology. Islamic supremacists do not engage in wanton violence; they brutalize in order to advance sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal code. Even if they occasionally disagree on tactics, al Qaeda and the Brotherhood are in complete harmony on the ultimate goal of imposing Islam on societies. To focus myopically on the tactical disagreements, as the West’s moderate-mania does, is to miss the forest for the trees. The Brotherhood is like the well-dressed mafia capo who knocks on your door — and whom you pay the loan-shark vig in the hope that the next visitor won’t be the al Qaeda button-man who breaks your knees before torching the place.

Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book,’Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, 2012). His articles and blogs are published in several foreign journals and his new work, ‘How the West was won’ is due out next year

The Independent (laughable name, we know) is a very poor UK leftist relation to the Guardian. Talk about defensive over Israel and anti-Semitism…

The Independent, refuting claims that it demonized Israel as a matter of policy, scored a hapless ‘own goal’. You don’t select your blatant game spoiler, your serial offender if you want to hoodwink referees that you play a clean game.

“Our coverage of Israel is led by our multiple award-winning Middle East Correspondent, Robert Fisk. Mr Fisk, in three decades reporting on that region, understands it better than most of those who slander him, and has been at pains to distinguish between opposition to Israeli policy and anti-Semitism.”

Oh, their man has been at pains all right. But the devil is in the detail, and when Fisk’s record is a mile long the detail scuppers the best laid plan to cast your dirtiest player as a model exponent of clean football.

To what pains did he go to distinguish between someone who is an opponent of Israeli policy from another who simply can’t stick the Jews? Let the eloquent Fisk tell, in his own characteristic style, of the pains he went to.

“Don’t (speak badly of Israel) or you’ll be an anti-Semitic Nazi”.
“How to shut up your critics up with a single word”.
“… filth and hate mail designed to end any glimmer of truth emerging from the Middle East.”

Fisk has gone to a lot of pain; but for what gain? Do the sample writings (there are more of the kind) distinguish an honest critic from a blind hater of Israel? Who can see the difference?

As scepticism grows across the European Union and debate thickens in Britain, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus says the EU is in any case doomed, like empires of the past, including communism

The architect of formerly communist Czechoslovakia’s economic transition from communism has called for his country (now the Czech Republic) to quit the European Union.

One time finance minister, prime minister and president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus made his appeal at the launch of his new book in Prague, the Czech capital. Mr. Klaus caused ructions within the EU during his time as a senior politician but he has rarely been so bold as to compare the European Union with his country’s former imperial masters, including the Soviet Union.

The Czech news agency CTK quoted Mr. Klaus, the country’s leading voice on the political centre-Right, as saying: “It would be a great victory for our country if they did not control us from Moscow, Vienna, Berlin or Brussels.”

Echoing the views of eurosceptics in Britain, which is due to hold a referendum on quitting the EU in 2017, he said:

“Absolutely nothing”, would happen if the Czechs gave up their EU membership,” CTK reported. Mr. Klaus added, in remarks that will cause consternation in Brussels:

“The whole Europe will leave the EU sooner or later and it will leave (European Commission President) Jose Barroso and (European Council President Herman Van) Rompuy sitting alone in Brussels. And the continent would develop in a different way.”

Vaclav Klaus is among the last of the generation of political intellectuals that inaugurated and then saw through the transition from Communism to Capitalism. He is an avowed supporter of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

He is also a professor of economics, and he is regarded in Brussels as a trouble maker, a description which he openly acknowledges. His book has not yet been translated into English.

His remarks will cheer eurosceptics in Britain.

Rep. Darrell Issa must be at the top of the White House’s enemies list. His House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has released copies of emails from former IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram indicating exchange of information with White House officials that is by law confidential.

The Daily Caller has broken the story:

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials – including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew – contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

The emails released by the committee contain numerous redactions of the names of specific groups, containing the notation “6103” which refers to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Service code, which:

forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.”

That means that Ingram was discussing specifics with the White House that she was forbidden by law to disclose to anyone.

The exact content of the redactions remains unknown at the moment, but Rep. Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, “citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 ‘for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry,'” according to the Daily Caller.

During her testimony, Ingram claimed she couldn’t remember the contents of the redacted portions, as opposed to taking the Fifth Amendment, like her former colleague Lois Lerner.

This scandal has explosive potential. Disclosure of confidential taxpayer information is a felony.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520704579125580451142834.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Charter-school parents march in New York to secure a civil right: education.

It’s too bad every New Yorker who plans to vote in the city’s mayoral election Nov. 5 couldn’t be at the Brooklyn Bridge Tuesday morning. They would have seen the single most important issue in the race between Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota. It’s not stop-and-frisk.

Thousands and thousands of charter-school parents with their young children—most looked to be in the first to fourth grades—marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to save their schools.

When Bill de Blasio won the Democratic nomination for mayor, the first question many asked was whether Mr. de Blasio’s intention to heavily regulate the police department’s stop-and-frisk program would put the city’s years of low-crime calm at risk.

But this big Brooklyn Bridge march of mothers, fathers and kids alters the calculus of next month’s vote. The crime issue, though important, is ultimately about self-interest.

By contrast, most New York voters—especially better-off white voters who’ve already made it here—have no direct stake whatsoever in New York City’s charter schools. They do, however, have a stake in the integrity of their political beliefs.

For decades, New York’s inner-city schools sent wave after wave of students into the world without the skills to do much more than achieve a minimal level of lifetime earnings, if that. This failure, repeated in so many large cities, remains the greatest moral catastrophe in the political life of the United States.