RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite an express ban on his employment by the Obama White House, newly released e-mails show how Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal operated as a shadow State Department employee during the first year of her term as secretary of state, sending her a steady stream of diplomatic memos and media advice even as her staff fretted over his possible discovery.

The professional relationship between Clinton and Blumenthal already has come under fire in the wake of leaked e-mails revealing extensive correspondence between the two on the 2011 Libyan revolution. In addition to the White House prohibition of his employment, concerns were raised over the sensitive nature of the intelligence being shared and the conflicts of interest regarding Blumethal’s employment at the Clinton Foundation and his business dealings in Libya. In May, Clinton said Blumenthal’s frequent communications had been “unsolicited.”

New Hillary Clinton e-mails released late Tuesday night by the State Department reveal that, despite denials to the contrary, top Obama-administration officials were aware, within the first nine months of President Obama’s first term, of then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business.

The White House has not said when President Obama and his lieutenants first learned of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, noting only that they became aware in August 2014, after Republican lawmakers got hold of the information, that it could become a political problem.

But e-mails from 2009 show that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod understood at the time that Clinton used a private e-mail account and server for official business. Indeed, top officials were forced to explicitly ask Clinton aides for her e-mail address.

“Axelrod wants your emails,” read the subject line of an e-mail from Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills on June 8, 2009. “Can you send it to him or do you want me to?”

Clinton replied from her e-mail account HDR22@clintonemail.com. “Does he know I can’t look at it all day so he needs to contact me thru you or Huma or Lauren during work hours.”

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=CULTIVATIN+CANAAN+BY+ALEX+GROBMAN

By design, Israel’s enemies have created confusion about her right to exist as a Jewish State. Among the many lies fostered are:

*Jews have no legal, moral or historical right to the land of Israel;

*Jews have no right to national self-determination;

*Jews have no historical or religious connection to the Holy Land;

*Jews either stole Arab land or purchased property at very low prices;

* The Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are an impediment to peace and are illegal;

* Israel is Jewish, but not democratic.

Cultivating Canaan exposes these fabrications used against Israel in the international media, the U.N. and governmental forums.

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former senior director of the National Security Council. He is finishing a book on President Eisenhower and the Middle East. He tweets @doranimated.
The new memoir by Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington, tells all—except for one thing.

“More than [about] policy…, Barack Obama was about ideology and a worldview often at variance with Israel’s.” These words constitute the thesis statement of Ally: My Journey across the American-Israeli Divide, the new memoir by the historian Michael Oren, who served as Israel’s ambassador in Washington from 2009 to 2013. Given the grave urgency of the regional and international challenges facing the Jewish state, and given what is widely perceived today as a severe crisis in America-Israel relations, the book couldn’t be timelier—as the instantaneous media ruckus attending its publication amply testifies.

While the date may be extended slightly, today marks the official deadline for concluding a U.S.–Iranian atomic-weapons deal. One might think that Obama’s supposed partners in peace would use conciliatory words befitting the occasion. Instead, top Iranians keep kicking hot gravel in his face.

• Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently declared that America “is stubborn, difficult to deal with, breaks promises, and is a backstabber.”

• “I will not allow foreigners to come and talk to the nation’s dear scientists and children and interrogate them,” Khamenei said last month. “Our rude and brazen enemy expects us to let them talk to our scholars and scientists about a fundamental national and domestic [achievement], but such permission will never be issued.”

• When a crowd that Khamenei addressed early this month chanted “Death to America,” he got swept up in the excitement. “Yes,” Khamenei chimed in. “I, too, say death to America!”

I loved reading the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie books to my daughter.

The somewhat Aesopian theme is that if you give the mouse what it wants – a cookie – it will just want more: a glass of milk, a straw, etc.

The story came to mind last week, a week that began with many vowing to inter the Confederate flag and that ended with the Supreme Court mandating that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As far as culture-war victories go, the flag news was big, but the marriage ruling was tantamount to VE Day.

It might be too much to think that progressive activists and intellectuals would demobilize after such a “Mission Accomplished” moment. But a reasonable person might expect social-justice warriors to at least take the weekend off to celebrate.

But no. Even when the cookie is this big, the mice want something more.

Michael Oren, the widely respected historian who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. from 2009 to 2012, blasts The New York Times in his soon-to-be released book, “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.”

“Most malicious was the op-ed page of The New York Times, once revered as an interface of ideas, now sadly reduced to a sounding board for only one, which often excluded Israel’s legitimacy,” he writes. “The page’s contributors accused Israel of ethnic cleansing, brutal militarism, racism of several stripes, and even ‘pinkwashing’ — exploiting its liberal policy toward lesbians and gays to cover up its oppression of Palestinians.”

There are obvious shortcomings in the British government’s demand that all “beliefs” deserve “mutual respect.” While it is important in a free society to tolerate beliefs we dislike, we should not be required to “respect” them.

If the government would stop funding and backing religious separatism, and start using existing laws to prosecute preachers who incite violence and promote terrorism, these measures would go a long way to preventing extremists from operating with impunity. Censorship, on the other hand, will harm everyone.

On May 27, a few weeks after the elections, Queen Elizabeth II addressed the British parliament with a speech that laid out a number of important proposed bills, including changes to immigration and the welfare system; a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, and, most importantly, a series of new measures to tackle Islamic extremism.

The “Extremism Bill,” the government has announced, will “unite our country and keep you and your family safe by tackling all forms of extremism.” It will also “combat groups and individuals who reject our values and promote messages of hate.”

Sister Hatune Dogan might seem like your sweet, quiet, little nun at first glance, but she packs dynamite under her habit like that of a righteously indignant crusader dedicated to rescuing the innocent from slaughter.

She has traveled the globe, pleading with governments to allow her to speak on the atrocities she’s witnessed under ISIS. But instead of excusing that the terror group is not following true Islam, she has a message for the armchair activists, whose main focus is to defend so-called moderate Islam.

The death of Tariq Aziz has affected people in different ways. George Galloway — an old friend of the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq — naturally mourned him. Channel 4 newscaster Jon Snow felt that Aziz had been a “nice guy in a nasty situation”. Nobody much seemed to recall that Aziz had been at the heart of a regime which killed more Muslims than any other in modern times. But apart from that, his death brought only one other thing to mind — an object lesson in misreading your opponents.

After his capture Aziz was questioned by both coalition and Iraqi representatives. Segments of these sessions were released years ago and included a nugget of Aziz’s surprise at the UK joining the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. One reason for his surprise was that he knew the Archbishop of Canterbury had opposed the war. You can see how he got there. Leading cleric of the established church: how could any government ignore such a force? Everyone now knows how much the US and UK misread the Iraqi regime in 2003. But the misreading was regrettably mutual.

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I recently signed up to Netflix in the hope of finding things to watch when wishing to relax. Inevitably I go straight to “documentaries” and watch a newish film called The Last Nazis. The filmmakers — youngish men and women — are ostensibly in search of the few remaining Nazi criminals and on their “journey” find one old man who tells them that he can remember nothing while plying them with drink and another who gives them a meal while playing a sweet old man act. They fail to discover anything about their subjects and — ill-briefed and apparently unwilling to ask any probing questions — they plainly cannot do their job. The film is a dud, a wash-out: they didn’t get the story.

Except that then you realise that in their view they did. For this is not about the Nazis, it is all about them.