RUTHFULLY YOURS

Taken for slave labor from the lines that led to the ovens at Auschwitz, he travels through the infernal archipelago of the work camps.

Over the course of two years in the early 1940s, my grandparents (a former city magistrate and a nurse) were forced into three progressively smaller apartments in Munich and then herded into wooden shacks strewn with straw in the city’s northern reaches—from which, on the eve of Passover 1942, they were marched to the local freight station, jammed into cattle cars and dispatched to Piaski. This Polish town was a holding pen for the gas chambers of Belzec and Sobibór; it is where my grandparents vanish from official vigilance with a note in the record that says “Tod unbekannt”—death unknown.

I have often wondered what they thought and experienced as the Nazi regime stripped them of every bit of their existence for the sole reason of their Jewishness. Göran Rosenberg, a Swedish journalist, had a similar curiosity, though in a far more intimate way, as it was his parents who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. His father, David, was born in Lodz in Poland and made the rare journey not just to Auschwitz but from it in the final, desperate year of World War II.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-m-stanton-evans-1425513197

On Sept. 11, 1960, a group of young conservatives who met at the home of William F. Buckley Jr. in Sharon, Conn., issued what became known as the Sharon Statement; written by M. Stanton Evans, who died Tuesday at age 80, the statement asserted these beliefs:

That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;

That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

That the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;

That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;

That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;

That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;

That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and

That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?

Benjamin Netanyahu ’s speech to Congress Tuesday has garnered praise from some unusual corners, including Saudi columnists, liberal pundits and even former Obama Administration Iran czar Dennis Ross, who acknowledged in an op-ed that the Israeli Prime Minister “made a strong case” against a prospective nuclear deal with Iran.

But Nancy Pelosi is not impressed.

The House Minority Leader did not join the 50 or so of her Democratic colleagues in boycotting Mr. Netanyahu’s address. But she let it be known that she was “near tears throughout the Prime Minister’s speech,” saying she found it “an insult to the intelligence of the United States” and that she was “saddened by the condescension toward our knowledge of the threat posed by Iran.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s horror at an ally addressing Congress reminds us of her rather different reaction during her most significant foray into Mideast politics. Shortly after becoming House Speaker in 2007, Mrs. Pelosi led a Congressional delegation to meet Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. “We were very pleased with the assurances we received from [ Mr. Assad ] that he was ready to resume the peace process,” she reported after shaking hands with the dictator and adversary of America.

Members of Congress send inquisitorial letters to universities, energy companies, even think tanks.

Research in recent years has encouraged those of us who question the popular alarm over allegedly man-made global warming. Actually, the move from “global warming” to “climate change” indicated the silliness of this issue. The climate has been changing since the Earth was formed. This normal course is now taken to be evidence of doom.

Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn.

As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98—which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions—have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Kerry Visiting Saudi Arabia to assuage concerns

DUBAI—It isn’t just about Bibi. The Israeli prime minister’s public confrontation with President Barack Obama over the U.S. administration’s pursuit of a nuclear bargain with Iran may have drawn all the spotlight this week.
But America’s other key allies across the Middle East—such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—are just as distraught, even if they lack the kind of lobbying platform that Benjamin Netanyahu was offered in Congress.

These nations’ ties with Washington have already frayed in recent years, dented by what many officials in the region describe as a nagging sense that America doesn’t care about this part of the world anymore.

Now, with the nuclear talks nearing a deadline, these allies—particularly in the Gulf—fret that America is about to ditch its long-standing friends to win love from their common foe, at the very moment that this foe is on the offensive across the region.

“A lot of the Gulf countries feel they are being thrown under the bus,” said Mishaal al-Gergawi, managing director of the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi and a prominent Emirati political commentator. “The Gulf thought it was in a monogamous relationship with the West, and now it realizes it’s being cheated on because the U.S. was in an open relationship with it.”

In an interview on the PBS television ‘Charlie Rose’ program, President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to accept the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress on the issue of Iran’s looming nuclear threat had “injected a degree of partisanship, which is not only unfortunate, I think it’s destructive of the fabric of the [U.S./Israeli] relationship.”

Nothing can further from the truth: it’s Mr. Obama’s partisanship which has produced a crisis in relations between the White House and Jerusalem, not Mr. Netanyahu’s –– and the record shows it.

Mr. Obama doesn’t mind foreign leaders speaking to Congressmen –– as long as they support his policy. That’s why he was happy for British Prime Minister David Cameron to do just that. But he deeply objected to Mr. Netanyahu critiquing his Iran policy to Members of Congress. It is not hard to see why: in his address to Congress, Mr. Netanyahu demolished the Obama claim that negotiations with Iran are going to lead to a deal that stops Iran going nuclear.

Sorry Peter Beinart: Young Americans Still Haven’t Turned Against Israel
This summer, toward the end of Israel’s Gaza offensive, Peter Beinart found something to smile about in an otherwise hard time—an apparent drop in support for Israel among young Americans. Beinart had been predicting since 2010 that U.S. opinion would grow less tolerant of Israel, but American support for Israel in 2013, as measured by Gallup, matched an all-time high. Now, though, a Gallup poll was showing that only 25 percent of younger U.S. respondents considered Israel’s actions in Gaza justified. Fifty-one percent considered them unjustified. Israel was losing America’s millennials, and so we could expect that, with each new conflict, “the American mood [would] incrementally shift.”

As I pointed out, previous dramatic declines in American support for Israel, as indicated by this poll or that poll, had been followed by recovery. But Beinart was nonetheless confident that this time the anti-Israel cake would bake at last, at least for the young. And Beinart was far from the only commentator to take this position.

It is therefore of some interest that Gallup is out with a new poll. Here is Lydia Saad, a senior editor: some “six months [after the poll on Gaza], young Americans’ broad sympathies toward the Israelis vs. the Palestinians are the same as a year ago.” Approximately 57 percent of 18-29 year olds surveyed both years said that they sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians in the conflict. Sympathy with the Palestinians has also held steady at about 23 percent.

Whatever happens, Binyamin Netanyahu wrote his name in the history books. In capital letters.
Guy Millière – I wrote here that the speech by Binyamin Netanyahu in Congress would be the most important speech since the Second World War. The speech was delivered. It was what I expected.
Binyamin Netanyahu has not a single second damaged the friendship and alliance between the United States and Israel. Quite the contrary. He addressed, through Congress, the American people, values, that have continued to embody the United States of America since birth. He showed masterfully why the US and Israel were bound by much more than friendship and alliance.

I was in the House gallery when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a logical and compelling critique of the deal now on the table regarding Iran’s ambitions to obtain nuclear weapons. He laid out a new fact-based proposal that has shifted the burden of persuasion to the White House.

His new proposal is that “If the world powers are not prepared to insist that Iran change its behavior before a deal is signed, at the very least they should insist that Iran change its behavior before a deal expires.” His argument is that without such a precondition, the ten-year sunset provision paves, rather than blocks, the way to an Iranian nuclear arsenal, even if Iran were to continue to export terrorism, to bully nations in the region and to call for the extermination of Israel.

“House Minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was present for Netanyahu’s address but did not greet him as he came into the chamber nor as he left. Afterwards, she released a statement saying that the speech was “an insult to the intelligence of the United States.”
On his return to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that as a result of his March 2 speech to a joint session of Congress in Washington, “many around the world heard what Israel has to say about the bad deal with Iran.” President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and 60 Democrats of both chambers of Congress were absent at the speech where Netanyahu spoke amidst standing ovations and cheers. Pushing back against critics of the speech (including Obama), Netanyahu said that there are indeed practical alternatives to the current negotiations between the US and Iran over the latter’s nuclear weaponization program.