RUTHFULLY YOURS

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Hillary Clinton may think those creatures making wide, gentle circles over her campaign are bluebirds of happiness, but they’re looking more and more like buzzards. They look hungry.

The news gets grimmer with every news cycle as she revises and extends everything she has said about her email machine and the classified information that may be on it. She says she can’t remember, and we can believe that much. Sir Walter Scott got it right: “O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

Hillary even upends the famous Washington dictum that “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” Sometimes it’s both.

We’re hearing the first hints, some of them not so subtle, that the FBI is investigating more than a security situation, defined as a simple matter of learning whether classified information leaked from the State Department when she was the secretary of State, and if so, who it was leaked to. National Public Radio, which usually feeds only the bluebirds of Democratic happiness, reports that it learned from “two lawyers familiar with the inquiry” that a formal criminal investigation is under consideration, presumably at the Justice Department, and it could happen “soon.”

Hillary might not be the first target. She can always find somebody else to throw under the bus or feed to the alligators.

When President Obama signed the Obamacare bill into law, Vice President Joe Biden said, sotto voce, “this is a big (expletive deleted) deal.” So it was. Hillary Clinton’s private email system, on which she trafficked in many of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets, is just as big.

Start with the purpose for which Mrs. Clinton established the system. It was to prevent the government — and any historians, journalists and the public — from knowing of and archiving her emails in order for her to evade accountability. The emails to hdr22@clintonmail.com would only be revealed if she agreed, and whatever corruption — remember the Clinton “pay-to-play” Foundation — would never be revealed.

Mrs. Clinton still says she never sent or received classified information on her private nongovernment email system. That more than 300 emails with highly classified information are now identified bothers her not at all.

“This book is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.”

Thus begins professor emeritus Edward Alexander’s latest work, “Jews Against Themselves” (Transaction Publishers). Published last month, the book is comprised of 18 essays penned over the last 30 years with titles like “Noam Chomsky and Holocaust Denial,” “Michael Lerner: Hillary Clinton’s Jewish Rasputin,” and “Choose Your Side: The New York Times or Judaism.”

Before his retirement in 2004, Alexander taught English at the University of Washington. His previous works include “The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies,” “Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew,” and “The Holocaust and the War of Ideas.”

The Jewish Press: Why do you think so many Jews continue to support the Democratic Party and President Obama when it is almost undeniable that the Republican Party is far more pro-Israel?

Alexander: That’s a very tough question. It’s at least a decade since Gabriel Schoenfeld demonstrated in his book The Return of Anti-Semitism the extent to which blatant anti-Semitism had found a home within the Democratic Party. But Jewish voters have continued in their old habits nevertheless.

At the national conventions of the Democratic Party, the only thing that gets more cheers from the crowd than abortion without limits and other forms of forbidden fruit is hostility to Israel. Again, this has raised no alarm bells for the majority of Jewish voters. Jewish life in America is worm-eaten with a debased liberalism unequalled even in Great Britain.

Can you elaborate?

One of the main reasons – perhaps the main reason – David Cameron won an unexpected victory in the recent British election is that British Jews in marginal districts turned massively against their beloved Labor Party due to its fanatical Israelophobia.

Good question. Why is the Red Cross holding seminars for Hamas?

..The Times article goes on to describe the three-day seminar that the Red Cross conducted for Hamas last month. It included role-playing and case studies, noting that “one exercise involved an armed group firing on an invading tank from the garden of a civilian home near a hospital.” How educational! Mamadou Sow, head of Red Cross operations in Gaza, breezily noted to the Times that earlier this year, when he presented Hamas leadership with a critique of their conduct during last summer’s Gaza war, they “welcomed it” and “indicated that they are a learning organization.” The article does not indicate whether Sow was able to maintain a straight face while uttering such inanity.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
19 August ’15..

This past Sunday, The New York Times ran a story encapsulating all that is wrong with the Western world’s approach to extremist Islamic fundamentalism.

In a report appearing in its first section, the paper revealed a startling bit of news: “Red Cross offers workshops in international law to Hamas.”

That’s right. The global institution, which claims that it works “to prevent suffering by promoting and strengthening humanitarian law and universal humanitarian principles,” is busying conducting seminars for terrorists in Gaza on how they can be, umm, more humanitarian when attacking Israel.

When I was a poor boy in Brooklyn, I read as many biographies of great people as I could, in order to learn what character traits led to their accomplishments so I could learn how to raise myself in the world. Now, many decades later, I live content that I have lived my dreams and fantasies and along the way have marked up a few signal accomplishments that made a real difference. There was a character trait that I don’t recall showing up in the bios I devoured, one which has given me satisfaction, being content with living on one’s own terms, regardless the prices. That is the character trait that you, the reader will see in the memoir written by one of my oldest friends, Sol Sanders, PEOPLE!: Vignettes gathered along the way through a long life.

On his 89th birthday. Sol’s life and anecdotes are a testament to full tilt living a “Forrest Gump” existence as an
international journalist. I and everyone who knows him delight in his behind the curtain tales of history being made or bungled, of personal insights into the mighty and often their salacious private lives. For years, I nudged Sol to get it down in a book. There are so very few such very revealing autobiographies. Sol includes me in his dedications, writing that I “made the original suggestion for this memoir but who bears no responsibility for its metamorphosis.” That’s right, because Sol has crafted a unique memoir beyond what I had in mind as a standard chronology that emphasized the magnitude of the events he witnessed and the inside stories of the events and those who made the history of the latter half of the 20th century.

While New York Senator Chuck Schumer came under withering, anti-Semitic attack as soon as he informed President Barack Obama that he would vote to reject the president’s nuclear deal with Iran, his New York colleague, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, has been largely immune from criticism of any kind.

Gillibrand announced her support for Obama’s deal on August 6, the same day Schumer announced his opposition.

Her decision has been a critical asset for the administration’s campaign to secure the support of other Democratic lawmakers torn between their duty to their constituents and their loyalty to Obama.

Gillibrand is a young senator who reportedly harbors aspirations for higher office. So her explanation for her support as well as her apparent determination that her interests are best served by facilitating the deal’s passage are important to consider.

In her online statement defending her decision, Gillibrand explained that while Iran’s support for terrorism and its regional aggression are serious threats to the US and its interests, “No issue matters more than ensuring that the Iranian regime does not have a nuclear weapon at its disposal.”

Parroting the administration’s talking points, Gillibrand argued that the deal, while imperfect, is the only means, short of war, for preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

It would accomplish this task first by curtailing Iran’s nuclear activities.

Perhaps we should thank Spain’s Rotodom Sunsplash reggae festival organizers. They just provided us with a textbook case both of the nature of today’s anti-Semitism and of how to defeat it.
Last weekend, the festival organizers canceled their invitation to Matisyahu, the American-Jewish reggae artist, because he refused to bow to the organizers’ demand that he publicly support “Palestine.”

Matisyahu was the only known Jew in the festival line-up and the only performer asked to produce such a statement.

Rather than take this lying down, on Monday Matisyahu recounted the episode on his Facebook page, writing, “It was appalling and offensive that as the one publicly Jewish-American artist scheduled for the festival they were trying to coerce me into political statements.”

Matisyahu’s disinvitation prompted a worldwide Jewish outcry. The Foreign Ministry registered a complaint with the Spanish government.

Every major American Jewish organization and several European Jewish organizations condemned the blatant discrimination against Matisyahu.

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/150821 President Obama made a false statement among many when he claimed that the only choice is to accept his Iran deal or face war. The opposite is true. The deal dramatically increases the very prospects of war. Iran immediately receives $150 billion dollars, which will bolster its support for terrorism and regional conflicts, requiring […]

Analysis of the nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs
Senator Menendez (NJ-DEM), opposed the Iraq War and supported President Obama 98% of Capitol Hill votes
Seton Hall University, Aug. 18, 2015, http://bit.ly/1MBXnNn (excerpts)

MILITARY OR PEACEFUL NUCLEAR

. “Why does Iran – which has the world’s 4th largest proven oil reserves and the world’s 2nd largest proven natural gas reserves – need nuclear power for domestic energy?…. if Iran is to acquire a nuclear bomb, it will not have my name on it….

FROM “ROLL-BACK” TO “ROLL-ON”

2. “We thought the agreement would be rollback-for-rollback: you rollback your infrastructure and we’ll rollback our sanctions…. At the end of the day, what we appear to have is a rollback of sanctions and Iran only limiting its capability, not dismantling it or rolling it back…. We have now abandoned our long-held policy of preventing nuclear proliferation and are now embarked – not on preventing nuclear proliferation – but on managing or containing it…. This deal grants Iran permanent sanctions relief in exchange for only temporary limitations on its program, not a rolling-back, not dismantlement…. The stated purpose of our negotiations with Iran was to dismantle Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure… to ensure that it would not have nuclear weapons capability at any time. Not shrink its infrastructure. Not limit it, but fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear weapons capability….

FROM ELIMINATION TO COMPLICITY

3. “This agreement leaves Iran with the core element of a robust nuclear infrastructure…. It failed to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear weapons state at a time of its choosing. In fact, it authorizes and supports the very road map Iran will need to arrive at its target….

4. “This deal does not require Iran to destroy, or fully decommission, a single uranium enrichment centrifuge. In fact, over half of Iran’s currently operation centrifuges will continue to spin at its Natanz facility. The remainder, including more than 5,000 operating centrifuges and nearly 10,000 not yet functioning , will merely be disconnected and transferred to another hall at Natanz, where they could be quickly reinstalled to enrich uranium…. Iran will be allowed to continue R&D activity on a range of centrifuges, allowing them to improve their effectiveness over the course of the agreement….

TIME OUT