RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ruthie Blum is the Web editor of Voice of Israel radio (voiceofisrael.com).

While the brouhaha in the United States and Israel over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled address before Congress on March 3 continues to gain momentum, the mullahs in Iran are having a field day.

There is nothing that Islamists cherish more than watching the West implode. They especially enjoy seeing sparks fly between Washington and Jerusalem, the power centers of the “Great Satan” America and the “Small Satan” Israel. Their joy knows no bounds when the animosity of U.S. President Barack Obama toward Netanyahu flares up with the spin of each new centrifuge.

The deadline for a deal on their nuclear program — extended each time the P5+1 countries (the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and Germany) hit an impasse with representatives of the Islamic republic — is currently slated for July. But, like Obama and his European partners in the negotiation charade, the regime in Tehran is anxious to get the documents on a treaty signed before then.

This is because the parties are nearing an agreement that would allow for the mass production of atom bombs on the one hand, and enable all concerned to perpetuate the myth that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes on the other.

Media manipulation is often direct, but more often it is subtle enough to get to everyone.
He lied? Yes he lied. Wait a minute. Maybe Brian Williams simply embellished. Guys do that all the time. We all want to be heroes.

We enhance the truth particularly as we behaved in war.

That’s where Brian Williams met his disgrace. “That’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite used to say. Well, no. Not quite, these days.

There too, in Israel, some are catching on to the deceptions from “news you can trust.” Leading journalist Kalman Liebeskind on Arutz Sheva upbraids (leftist) Big Media for their volley of lies and half-truths especially as they go gunning for Benjamin Netanyahu through torrents of abuse.

Onto our own Brian Williams, did his Army helicopter really come under enemy fire 2003 in Iraq? No. He’s come clean, partly. But he was there in Iraq. Did he really suffer terribly during his coverage of Katrina? Apparently not. But he was there in New Orleans during that terrible hurricane.

Get the point? To sell a lie successfully, it must be based on some truth. Moreover, he is no coward.

To believe and accept any part of President Obama’s new national security strategy requires the willing suspension of disbelief. It’s a statement of bold leadership, in almost Churchillian terms, but it bears no relationship to the president’s actions or the current state of the world.

The “strategy” blueprint, released by the White House on Friday and outlined by national security adviser Susan Rice during a speech at the Brookings Institution, promises we will “lead with strength,” “lead by example,” and “lead with capable partners.” That sort of leadership is nowhere in evidence, and has not been in Mr. Obama’s entire presidency. Allies such as Saudi Arabia have renounced American foreign policy and have gone their own way. Ukraine, which the strategy promises to defend not with arms shipments but with more sanctions, is being gradually conquered by Russian “little green men,” soldiers disguised as insurgents and supported by identified Russian troops.

A bad deal on Iranian nukes would be so catastrophic to global security that presidential resistance to a related speech – by the leader of an allied democracy, who may be the greatest expert on the issue – should leave everyone speechless.

The Obama Administration’s outraged accusation that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated protocol by accepting House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress is preposterous: Bibi’s speech before Congress in 2011 came about in the exact same way with no similar Obama outrage (predictably, given the upcoming 2012 election). And the New York Times advanced this “violated protocol” narrative all too willingly, only to correct itself as inconspicuously as possible, revealing yet again its own anti-Israel agenda. Ironically, Obama’s main, if not only, motivation for visiting Israel in 2008 (and promising policies far from those he eventually adopted) was to gain the support of Jewish voters, back when he needed them to win the presidency.

The situation in Ukraine is complicated. A large part of the country to the east, is Russian-speaking, Russian culture, and sees itself as closer to Russia. Another part of the country to the west, is Ukrainian-and perceives nearest the Western world.

At the time when the Soviet Union existed, the two parts of the country were governed by the same totalitarian dictatorship. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country has gradually emancipated and took slowly distanced Russian domination. Putin did not accept this desire for emancipation, Russian-speaking populations have been reluctant in relation to it. The Orange Revolution in 2004 led to the emancipation of the advanced camp. The uprising Nejalejnosti Maidan in November 2013 led to a further advanced. Putin responded as might be expected to react by annexing the Crimea, and leading a creeping annexation of the Russian-speaking part of the country. This creeping annexation continues.

What is serious in the case is that the US Obama administration did not anticipate the reaction of Putin, and the countries of the European Union did not advance: Russia n ‘ argued that because the United States and the European Union have given him the opportunity to move forward.

The eminent Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, artistic and general director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater and principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, who is presently touring the United States is being hounded by Ukrainian protesters.
In March of 2014 Gergiev added his name to an open letter which stated: “ We firmly state support for the position of the president of the Russian Federation.” Furthermore, it is alleged that he supports harsh anti gay legislation- an accusation he rebuts in an interview with the New York Times.
The protests culminated on January 29th 2015, when a man carrying a sign criticizing the policies of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia climbed over the orchestra pit and onto the stage at the Metropolitan Opera just as the soprano Anna Netrebko was bowing and accepting applause and flowers after her performance in the opera Iolanta, conducted by Maestro Gergiev. The protester unfurled a poster with a a flag and pictures of Gergiev, Netrebko and Putin with a Hitler mustache which was shown to the audience and performers before he was escorted offstage.
My first thought was of the appalling lax security of an Opera House where such an act could occur .
I am a great believer in protests. I strongly supported the protest against the Klinghoffer Opera, and I have sympathy for the people of Ukraine. But, here is a bit of unsolicited advice. Choose your protests wisely. Hounding and harassing a great conductor is fatuous. Furthermore, putting a Hitler mustache on Putin is questionable. Russia has its own poster boy for genocidal cruelty in Stalin.
In Russia, performers and musicians can have careers ruined by state funders and censors. In America performers are free to criticize and dabble in politics.
In 2008 the late conductor Lorin Maazel took the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to Pyongyang, North Korea. Before departing, he wrote a self-congratulatory editorial for the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120347076630878735) in which he stated: “If we are to be effective in bringing succor to the oppressed, many languishing in foreign gulags, the U.S. must claim an authority based on an immaculate ethical record, toughened by economic clout. Woe to the people we are trying to help if we end up in a glass house.”
He liked that glass house image and repeated it again:” “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw bricks, should they? Is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example to be emulated all over the world?”
Actually Pyongyang played the New York Philharmonic – not the other way around and Maazel played useful idiot to one of the most brutal regimes in the world. The “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-il, did not attend the concert .He was busy implementing his pastime of torture, murder and starvation and speeding up development of nuclear weapons which continues to this day.
No protests greeted Mr. Maazel on his return to the podium in America, and he continued a celebrated music career until 2014 when he died.
Maestro Gergiev is an artist and arguably one of the finest conductors in the world- not a politician with any influence on Putin whose admittedly harsh policies have been enabled in this country by our hapless State Department and administration.
Hillary Clinton who recently reinvented herself as a hawk on Russia, cannot airbrush her record as Secretary of State. In 2009, she “reset” relations with Russia that included an arms treaty. She may run for the White House in 2016. Now, there is a protest for Ukrainian Americans.

In his National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, President Barack Obama said:

And lest we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. . . . So this is not unique to one group or one religion.

It is important to analyze these words — because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by all those who defend Islam against any criticism.

Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence “is unique to some other place” — meaning outside the Christian West — as getting on a “high horse.”

Is this true? Of course not.

In our time, major religious violence is in fact “unique to some other place,” namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities, and other such atrocities?

Defending Islam in front of our religious leaders last week, our president not only invoked the Crusades but seized the opportunity to excoriate the United States for formerly justifying chattel slavery in Christian terms, his tone suggesting that chains are rattling still. Indeed, along with the treatment of American Indians, slavery remains a horrid blot on our past, one that not even the blood that 750,000 Americans shed in the war ending the “peculiar institution” washed away (forget that we are the only nation that fought a civil war to free its slaves).

We’re guilty. Forever. And nothing can lessen our shame.

But in support of the Left’s current vogue for “fairness,” I now expect our president to follow up by convening a special meeting of Muslim clerics to chastise them for the 14 centuries of slavery under Islam that, in its scope, scale, duration, and cruelty, exceeded the outrages of any other slave-based civilization.

In seizing non-Muslims as slaves, the human beasts of the Islamic State caliphate are only carrying on an honored tradition. That is Islam, Mr. President. And it always has been.

Snark is a popular word used for a particular sort of off-putting sarcasm. Snarkiness can manifest itself as adolescent cheap shots, snide condescension, or simple ad hominem patronizing — a sort of “I know you are, but what am I?” schoolyard name-calling. Its incessant use is typically connected with a peevishness born out of juvenile insecurity, and sometimes fed by an embarrassing envy. All politicians are snarky at times; but few obsessively so, given the wages of monotony and insecurity that the snark earns.

President Obama is well known both for ad hominem dismissals of his supposed enemies — everyone from Fox News to the Tea Party to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity — and for his evocations of nefarious straw men who, he claims, if left unchecked, would uninsure the poor, pollute the environment, hurt the illegal immigrant, and wage perpetual war abroad. But Obama’s snarky putdowns and condescending afterthoughts are a particularly disturbing subset of these rhetorical devices, used by him in the grand world of diplomacy as well as in often petty domestic contexts.

Wuppertal’s synagogues had been destroyed on Kristallnacht. By the time the war was over, the 3,000 Jews living in this German city had been reduced to a community of 60. 75 years after Kristallnacht, the Bergische Synagogue began to burn after three Muslim men had thrown six Molotov cocktails at it.

The Jews of Wuppertal however have nothing to worry about. Judge Jörg Sturm found that the attack was not anti-Semitic, but had only been a way of bringing “attention to the Gaza conflict”.

It wasn’t anti-Semitism, but anti-Zionism.

The three Muslim men, two named Mohammed and one named Ismail, received suspended sentences and 200 hours of community service. In their defense, they claimed that they wanted to “send a signal”, but had not intended to set a synagogue on fire when they threw firebombs at it.