RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Friday the European Parliament, amid a major migration crisis, zeroed in on Europe’s real problem: it voted to start labeling goods that come from “occupied” Israeli territory in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

The measure passed by a vote of 525 to 70 with 31 abstentions. Although it’s nonbinding, it follows earlier EU resolutions on prohibiting contacts with Israeli “settlements,” and is seen as threatening enough that the Israeli Foreign Ministry has scheduled an emergency meeting on the issue later this week.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said the move was discriminatory and “had the smell of a boycott.” Europe has an inglorious modern history of boycotting Jews and Jewish businesses leading to the Nazi boycotts beginning in 1933.

Europe’s concern about Israel’s “occupation” is highly specific and even unique. As commentator Evelyn Gordon notes, drawing on work by international-law scholar Eugene Kontorovich, the same EU officials who treat the Israeli occupation as criminal “happily facilitate Turkish activity in occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan activity in occupied Western Sahara, Chinese activity in occupied Tibet, and much more.”

Eastern Europeans are responding very differently to the mass migration of Muslims into Europe than are Western Europeans. Westerners who encourage mass, unvetted Muslim immigration insist that they are compassionate, tolerant, and ethical. They insist that Eastern Europeans and anyone else who resists immigration are bigots, xenophobes, without compassion and unethical, if not outright Neo-Nazis. Westerners are stereotyping Eastern Europeans as bigoted thugs whose opinions must be demonized, whose choices must be overruled, whose borders must be penetrated and whose demographics must be altered through coercion.

In this article I focus on three signs at the Warsaw anti-immigration rally of Saturday, September 12, 2015. Full understanding of these protest signs illuminates how many Poles and other Eastern Europeans view the current immigration. These protest signs will help to illuminate why many people, not just Eastern Europeans, oppose this immigration for and against mass Muslim immigration. The press estimates several thousand people took part in an anti-immigration demonstration in Warsaw. An estimated one thousand people marched in favor of immigration.

Not all government institutions tend inexorably toward decline. Corrupt and ineffective for much of its history, the New York Police Department has within the past two decades become quite possibly the premier domestic public-safety agency in the nation. Former police commissioner Ray Kelly’s memoir, Vigilance: My Life Serving America and Protecting Its Empire City, is partly an attempt to take credit for this administrative miracle — credit that Kelly richly deserves. Between 1990 and 2013, New York City went from accounting for about 10 percent of American homicides (more than three times its share of the U.S. population) to only 2.4 percent (slightly less than its share). Kelly led the NYPD for more than half this span, under Mayors David Dinkins and Michael Bloomberg. Kelly pushed the murder rate down to record lows while also, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, broadening the NYPD’s mission to encompass fighting terrorism in addition to street crime. He is the longest-serving police commissioner in city history.

The College Board set off a firestorm last year by issuing what many saw as a left-biased curriculum framework for its Advanced Placement U.S. History course. This summer’s much-discussed revisions to that framework amount to less than meets the eye. The underlying bias remains, and few of the vaunted changes will filter down to the classroom.

The controversy, moreover, points to what will likely be our next great education debate. The College Board’s determination to issue detailed curriculum frameworks for all of its AP exams, in combination with the expansion of the AP program over the past decade or so, has brought the United States to the threshold of something nobody claims to want: a national curriculum.

Emerging around the time of the 1957 Sputnik launch, the early AP program highlighted the national interest in cultivating the very best students. In the 1980s and ’90s, worries about failing schools and an interest in maximizing opportunity for all spread AP courses from a few elite institutions to schools across the country. Initially, the focus was rightly on finding and educating talented students, regardless of income, ethnicity or race. Gradually, however, AP came to be seen as a method for quickly overcoming the achievement gap between poor and minority students and others, regardless of preparation.

In 2012, when Senator Lieberman retired, Murphy, who was a Congressman in Ct. ran against Linda MacMahon who outsmarted him on every single issue…Tells you more about Connecticut which has not one single Republican national legislator…truly the NUTmeg state…..rsk

‘If we want credibility in the region, then we have got to be seen as a partner in trying to solve this humanitarian crisis’

If America is to stop ISIS’s expansion, we must ensure the migrants flooding into Europe receive some social welfare benefits, said Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) on Fox News Sunday.

“The fact is, is that when there isn’t help for these refugees from the United States or our partners, they turn to others that are offering help, like ISIS, like al-Qaeda, to give them the paycheck, to give them nutritional benefits for their kids,” Murphy argued.

We have had some fine foreign-affairs thinkers in our time: Henry Kissinger, Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz. But as a feckless European leadership tries to figure out what to do about a flood of Middle Eastern refugees (at least some of whom probably are not refugees but ISIS infiltrators), take a minute to appreciate that underrated American foreign-policy guru, Robert Frost:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down. I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

One has to admire the Burkean conservatism at work there: Confronted with the poet’s idealism, the flinty atavistic old farmer, ever mindful of the proverbs of his fathers, sets about rebuilding the damaged stone fence because it is there. Frost, it is worth noting, wrote “Mending Wall” some years before G. K. Chesterton (both men were born in 1874) published his famous advice to never knock down a fence until you understand why it was put up in the first place.

A new poll released Monday shows just how fast Hillary Clinton’s star has fallen within her own party: The once-presumptive front-runner has lost a full third of her support among registered Democrats since July.

The poll, conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post, shows a precipitous drop in Clinton’s polling numbers from two months ago, when 63 percent of Democrats supported her. An ongoing e-mail scandal, questions about her trustworthiness, and the general anti-establishment fervor of the American electorate have combined to lower that number to just 42 percent today.

The drop is particularly pronounced among women, once seen as Clinton’s key constituency. Though 71 percent of women Democrats supported Clinton in July, just 42 percent back the former secretary of state today.

Socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s victory to become the new leader of Britain’s Labour party doesn’t have an exact parallel in the United States.

But just imagine if the nominee of the Democratic party was selected by a vote of party members. Say that Bernie Sanders decided to run, but he needed the backing of 35 of his fellow Democrats in Congress to be considered. He was so extreme, though, that he didn’t have their support. Then 14 Democrats — either out of pity or a desire to broaden the debate — “lent” him their names so he could get on the ballot. Sanders then shocks everyone by riding — all the way to victory — the surge of new, left-wing members. A raft of moderate party officials then refuse to work with him, and the threat of civil war suddenly hangs over the party.

That’s what just happened in Britain. After Labour’s stunning defeat at the hands of the Conservatives last May, many Labour supporters came to the conclusion they hadn’t been left-wing enough. They pointed to Scotland, where Labour was wiped out by the Scottish National party, a group of nationalists even more left-wing than them. So why not go with Corbyn? After all, many of his Labour supporters actually make the argument that none of his opponents for the leadership could have won the next general election in 2020 anyway.

Last Friday, the British Labour Party introduced an “assisted dying” bill into parliament. The following day, in an attempt to demonstrate that they stood squarely behind the measure, the party’s members elected Jeremy Corbyn as their new leader.

Since 1974, Labour has won only three elections — all of them under the moderate stewardship of Tony Blair. By selecting a rabble-rousing socialist to lead it into the future, the British Left has sent a clear message to the public at large. That message? That it is happy to lose in perpetuity if it can moan and emote along the way. In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell worried aloud that his coveted socialist agenda would never be realized if its implementation were to remain in the hands of the “prigs.” “It would help enormously,” Orwell concluded, “if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled.” “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly,” then — and only then — would the Left have a shot at power. Combining the mien of a burned-out geography teacher at a third-rate comprehensive school with the speaking style of a self-satisfied undergraduate Trotskyite, Jeremy Corbyn is precisely the kind of socialist Orwell feared. One can only imagine how he’d suffer if he were alive to watch his rise.

The next president and Congress will inherit what President Obama left behind. Whether Democrat or Republican, the president will have no choice other than to try to undo much of what Obama has wrought. But can he or she?

THE MIDDLE EAST
The policy of “leading from behind” and the crudity of “We came, we saw, he [Qaddafi] died” have left a human tragedy in Libya. Backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was an inexplicable choice, and it almost ruined the country. The United States did not need to hound and jail an innocent video maker in order to concoct a myth to cover up the culpable lax security in Benghazi. Yemen was strangely declared a model of our anti-terrorism efforts — just weeks before it ignited into another Somalia or Congo. ISIS was airily written off as a jayvee bunch as it spread beyond Syria and Iraq. There is little need to do a detailed comparison of Iraq now and Iraq in February 2009 (when it was soon to be the administration’s “greatest achievement,” a “stable” and “self-reliant” nation); the mess in between is attributable to Obama’s use of the aftermath of the Iraq War for pre-election positioning. Ordering Assad to flee while ignoring the violence in Syria and proclaiming a faux red line has now tragically led to a million refugees in Europe (and another 4 million in the neighborhood) and more than 200,000 dead. Israel is now considered not an ally, not even a neutral, but apparently a hostile state worthy of more presidential invective than is Iran. We have few if any reliable friends any more in the Gulf. Iran will become a nuclear power. The only mystery over how that will happen is whether Obama was inept or whether he deliberately sought to make the theocracy some sort of a strategic power and U.S. ally. The Middle East over the next decade may see three or four additional new nuclear powers. The Russia of kleptocrat Vladimir Putin is seen in the region as a better friend than is the U.S. — and certainly a far more dangerous enemy to provoke.