RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a resounding victory at the polls on March 17th. His party Likud will have an expected 30 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, compared to 24 seats for its closest competitor, the Zionist Union. As a result, Mr. Netanyahu is in the strongest position to form a new right-of-center coalition government.

After seeing their hopes for regime change in Israel go up in smoke, Obama administration officials have been attacking what White House spokesman Josh Earnest called Mr. Netanyahu’s “divisive rhetoric” during the election campaign. They did not like that the prime minister rejected a two-state solution as they envision it should be designed. They were unhappy with likely plans by a new Netanyahu government for more settlement construction. And they objected to the prime minister’s last minute efforts to rally his supporters to come to the polls by telling them, in a video posted on social media, that they could lose the election because “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” Finally, Obama is still smarting from Mr. Netanyahu’s historic speech before a joint session of Congress warning about the perils of the bad nuclear deal with Iran that may be in the offing.

The Islamic Society of Santa Barbara (ISSB) is determined to construct a 10,000-square ft. mosque in Goleta, CA. Their effort to do so began in 2001 when they purchased a parcel of land in Goleta, CA, a recently incorporated town in Santa Barbara County. That was followed by an application for construction filed by developers in 2003. In December 2013, the the Goleta City Council unanimously approved the project. “All of us made history today,” ISSB Chairman Jamal Hamdani said at the time. “I am truly proud to be an American, a Muslim, and a member of this community.”

The ISSB was founded in 1984 and according to its website it is a 501(c)(3) independent organization. Their ideological commitments include teaching the Qur’an and the customs of the Prophet Mohammed, and they insist their approach to Islam is one in which they will “educate and remind,” rather than “compel, dictate, judge, or classify.”

Yet there is a bit of disingenuousness attached to one of their statements: “Islam is a set of philosophical and spiritual outlooks; ISSB does not engage in political activities.”

As the saying goes, “to err is human, to forgive is divine,” to which I’d add: “to ignore” is even more human, and the results rarely divine. None of us would be human if we did not occasionally get so wedded to our wishes that we failed to notice — or outright ignored — the facts on the ground that make a laughingstock of our hopes. Only when the gap gets too wide to ignore does policy change. This is where a lot of U.S. policy is heading these days in the Middle East. Mind the gaps — on Iran, Israel and Iraq. We are talking about our choices in these countries with words that strike me as about 10 years out of date. Alas, we are not dealing anymore with your grandfather’s Israel, your father’s Iran or the Iraq your son or daughter went off to liberate.

Let’s start with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party pretty well trounced the Labor Party leader, Isaac Herzog, in the race to form Israel’s next government. Netanyahu clearly made an impressive 11th-hour surge since the pre-election polls of last week. It is hard to know what is more depressing: that Netanyahu went for the gutter in the last few days in order to salvage his campaign — renouncing his own commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians and race-baiting Israeli Jews to get out and vote because, he said, too many Israeli Arabs were going to the polls — or the fact that this seemed to work.

Reza Aslan, the religion writer who claimed that his academic credentials include a Ph.D. in the history of religions (his Ph.D. is in sociology, not history; he teaches creative writing) and two decades’ study of Christianity, will have his own show on CNN, the network that invented cable news but which has lately seen its ratings plummet.

Aslan rose to fame on his 2013 book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, about which the genuine religious scholar Allan Nadler wrote in the Jewish Review of Books:

Aslan’s entire book is, as it turns out, an ambitious and single-minded polemical counter-narrative to what he imagines is the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus Christ.

And

Whichever [New Testament] verses fit the central argument of his book, he accepts as historically valid. Everything else is summarily dismissed as apologetic theological rubbish of absolutely no historical worth.

Nadler’s conclusion nails the real point behind Aslan’s efforts: the ahistorical claim that the three great monotheistic religions share equally violent pasts:

Finally, is Aslan’s insistence on the essential “Jewishness” of both Jesus and his zealous political program not also a way of suggesting that Judaism and Jesus, no less than Islam and Mohammed, are religions and prophets that share a similarly sordid history of political violence; that the messianic peasant-zealot from Nazareth was a man no more literate and no less violent than the prophet Mohammed?

CONTENTS
1. Obama happy to congratulate Russian, Chinese, Iranian despots for their rigged elections
2. Indian PM congratulates Bibi in Hebrew; leaders of other democracies send goodwill messages (but not Obama)
3. Netanyahu’s choices for Israel’s next coalition
4. Netanyahu and Israel’s Arab population
5. “White House: It is wrong to encourage non-Arab Israelis to vote to offset foreign bankrolled encouragement of Arab-Israelis to vote”
6. Haaretz’s bitter post-election coverage
7. “Obama loses his bid to defeat a U.S. ally” (Wall St Journal, March 18, 2015)
8. “The role of the Palestinian Authority in Israel’s election results” (By Alan Dershowitz, Gatestone Institute, March 18, 2015)
9. “Why the media always get Israeli elections wrong” (By Jonathan Schanzer, Politico, March 18, 2015)
10. “Israel chose Bibi over Barack” (By Eli Lake, Bloomberg, March 18, 2015)

Initially I was going to start with the line, “It is stunning to think,” but then I remembered I was opining about the Obama Administration, of which I have come to expect the unexpected, especially when it comes to nefarious doings meant to advance his agenda. To be certain, all of the actions (and inactions) taken (and not taken) by this administration – without exception – have been executed to advance his ideological agenda, chief among them the handling of the IRS’s targeting of the administration’s political adversaries.

TheHill.com reports that Ronald Machen, the US attorney for the District of Columbia –an Obama appointee – has not acted on a Contempt of Congress charge for former IRS official Lois Lerner even though the contempt citation has been in his hands since May of 2014. Manchen is set to step down next month.

Search the mainstream media headlines and you find this item far down the list if, in fact, you find it at all. Yet the issue is no less important than that of the Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteed rights themselves; to both “peaceably assemble” and to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Abbas has chosen to align himself with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, thus facilitating these two organizations’ dreams of taking over the West Bank. These two radical groups seek to destroy Israel and are opposed to any peace process in the Middle East.

These threats are primarily aimed at getting the international community into providing the Palestinian Authority with more financial and political support.

This alliance could also result in renewed terrorist attacks against Israel, because Hamas and Islamic Jihad will interpret Abbas’s anti-Israel moves and rhetoric as a green light for such actions.

Abbas’s rapprochement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad will only confirm the fears of many Israelis that the West Bank will fall onto the hands of Islamists once Israel withdraws from that area.

The two-state solution started the day Hamas kicked Abbas out of the Gaza Strip and turned it into an Islamist emirate. In the end, the Palestinians got two states that are even at war with each other.

Guess who is the number one violator of women’s rights in the world today? Israel. Violating the rights of Palestinian women.

At least that is the view of the UN’s top women’s rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). CSW ends its annual meeting on Friday, March 20 by condemning only one of the 193 UN member states for violating women’s rights – Israel.

Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Where in 2014 the Assad regime starved, tortured and killed at least 24,000 civilians, and three million people – mostly women and children – are refugees.

Not Saudi Arabia. Where women are physically punished if not wearing compulsory clothing, are almost entirely excluded from political life, cannot drive, cannot travel without a male relative, receive half the inheritance of their brothers, and where their testimony counts for half that of a man’s.

It is the morning after in Israel, and there are a few developments worth noting. As ‎Bill Kristol joked on Twitter:‎

‎”BREAKING: British PM Cameron, in close re-election ‎contest, has called WH to ask that Obama intervene ‎against him.” ‎

David Cameron might be the first in a string of elected ‎international leaders calling for help for their ‎opponents given U.S. President Barack Obama’s track record since ‎he took office.‎

For if there is one consistent political story that has ‎emerged about Obama, it is his unique ‎ability to destroy his political allies. After his ‎landslide victory in the presidential contest following ‎the financial collapse in 2008, the Democratic Party ‎held 60 Senate seats (after one party switch) and ‎‎258 House seats. Today, after two disastrous mid‎term routs, the Democrats have fallen into the ‎minority with 46 Senate seats and 188 House seats. ‎The House total is the lowest for the party in nearly ‎a century. ‎

Following the horrendous terrorist attack in Tunis, it is inevitable that I am reminded of my week-long Chronicles assignment to Tunisia in September 2012. In view of the carnage that left 20 Western tourists dead on March 18, it is worth revisiting my notes posted in the immediate aftermath of that trip.

“I covered some 2,000 miles by rental car, bus, SUV, and a powered hang glider, The tour has confirmed that of faraway places we often assume to know more than we do. The first country affected by a wave of popular discontent known as the Arab Spring was full of surprises.
?“To start with, the country is safe for foreign visitors. There have been no attacks on tourists, either at the time of the [2011] ‘Jasmine Revolution] or during the periodic eruptions of street protests since then… Even in dusty provincial towns, where no foreigners venture, gas station attendants and cold drinks vendors invariably greeted me with a smile and a polite “ bonjour, Monsieur, ça va?” This is in contrast to the barely concealed hostility I have encountered on my recent trips to the West Bank, or – over a decade ago – in Libya.