RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘It’s a sad day for freedom,” Marco Rubio told Bret Baier after President Obama announced he would normalize relations with Cuba. Not a sad day, senator: a sad year.

If there was a theme to 2014, it was Obama’s persistence in bailing out dictators and theocrats from political scrapes and economic hardships, his tenacity in pursuit of engagement with America’s adversaries no matter the cost to our strength, principles, credibility, or alliances.

In this president the thugs in Havana and Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, Moscow and Naypyidaw and Beijing have no better friend. For these bullies, these evildoers, these millenarians and sectarians, Barack Obama is more than a dupe. He is an insurance policy.

Cuba is but the latest example of this president’s failing to exercise leverage in the pursuit of American strength, security, and prestige. Here are the Castro brothers, decrepit and spent, their revolution a joke, their economy in peril thanks to the collapse in oil prices brought on by a strong dollar and increased U.S. supply.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (including you feckless, sniveling crapweasels hiding under your desks at Sony),

Freedom makes a lot of things harder. It is more difficult to raise children of good character in a society that tolerates and often celebrates bad character. It is often harder to build big and important things in a society where everybody gets a vote. That’s why so many people of a “pragmatic” bent have always looked longingly at evil countries where the people are less of an impediment to “getting things done.” Fighting climate change, if that’s your thing, is much tougher when everyone has private property rights. Fighting a war is more difficult when dissenters get to have their say. Maintaining a guild and the wages that go with it is harder when you have free competition.

The true lover of liberty acknowledges these things. He doesn’t say freedom is always more efficient or always yields superior outcomes (though it usually does). The true lover of liberty acknowledges that freedom has costs — cultural costs, economic costs, political costs, national-security costs. And then, do you know what he says?

“I don’t care.”

Well, sometimes I care. At home, when arguing with other Americans, there’s a lot of room to debate how liberty should be used and how it can be abused. A government grounded in protecting liberty depends on self-government and self-government requires restraint. Remember the line from “America, the Beautiful”?

Republican leaders don’t want them to derail Obama’s amnesty.

Last weekend, Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee forced every senator to vote, on the public record, regarding the constitutionality of President Obama’s unilateral decree of effective amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. The resulting Republican establishment hissy fit further confirmed something I’ve been arguing here for some time: Republican leaders in Washington endorse President Obama’s amnesty policy.

Their stated opposition to the imperial manner of the policy’s imposition is poseur stuff. When push comes to shove, when the time comes to do something about presidential lawlessness, what do we get? Childish tantrums over being forced to work on a mid-December weekend — the poor dears having spent a whopping 135 days in session this year . . . and, by last Saturday, facing the crushing burden of another two or three days’ waltzing between the Hill and the nearest studio before their next three-week vacation.

We get party leaders who, despite having decried Obama’s lawlessness during the recent midterm-election campaign, actually whipped against a legislative rebuke of executive lawlessness. We get 20 mindboggling Republican votes in favor of the president’s usurpation of Congress’s legislative authority . . . even as GOP leaders look voters in the eye and promise to persuade the courts that the president has overstepped his constitutional bounds. (I don’t know how many of these guys have ever appeared before a federal judge. “Your Honor, I rise today to urge that this court condemn the president of the United States for taking actions I have voted to endorse and pay for with public funds.” Good luck with that.)

Itai Reuveni, who is holding a Masters Degree in political science, has been working for NGO Monitor Israel Desk for the past three years. Recently Itai was on a private visit in Southern California and I happened to have had an opportunity to meet with him and have an interesting, fascinating, friendly, unofficial, but most congenial conversation with him from which I have learned much about what his organization is doing that is so crucially important. They constantly expose the truth about the NGOs, mostly financed by European states, and are helping to fight Israel’s fight of survival.

Itai and I “get it” now we need others to get it too.

NGO Monitor is exactly what it is, monitoring the NGOs activities, especially those who inject their activities into the life of Israel and thus effect the life of every Israeli.

The NGOs is a complex and ambiguous network which we need to understand in order to be able to act and help Israel to rebuttal them.

In this article I put on paper what I heard from Itai and where it is possible I give some solutions.

Angelina Jolie has made a movie of the remarkable book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and RedemptionJan 20, 2011 by Laura Hillenbrand about Louis Zamperini….rsk

What sad pre-holiday news: American Olympian track star and WWII hero Louis Zamperini passed away last night at age 97, just one day short of Independence Day. It’s somehow poignant that Zamperini’s shadow hovers over the July 4th holiday; it comes half a year before the Universal Pictures release of Unbroken, the Angelina Jolie-directed adaptation of the Laura Hillenbrand bestseller about a man whose unwillingness to break despite the most difficult of circumstances in a Japanese POW camp made him the personification of struggle and heroism. Part of that struggle included getting a movie made on his extraordinary life; imagine, Universal’s first attempt at a Zamperini film came in the 1950s, when Tony Curtis sparked to playing Zamperini as his follow-up to Spartacus.

louzzMany know Zamperini’s story because of the superb book by Seabiscuit author Hillenbrand, and the world will celebrate him at year’s end when Universal releases the film in Oscar season, with Jack O’Connell playing Zamperini. I have been obsessed with Zamperini since I saw a segment on his ordeal broadcast by CBS during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and have written about the movie at Variety and Deadline since then at the slightest provocation, because it seemed such a worth screen story. When CBS chronicled his story, Zamperini returned to Japan to run with the Olympic torch, covering ground not far from where he spent an unimaginably brutal stretch in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. That is only a small part of Zamperini’s legend.

EXCLUSIVE: As it begins to dawn on everyone in Hollywood the reality that Sony Pictures was the victim of a cyberterrorist act perpetrated by a hostile foreign nation on American soil, questions will be asked about how and why it happened, ending with Sony cancelling the theatrical release of the satirical comedy The Interview because of its depiction of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. One of those issues will be this: Why didn’t anybody speak out while Sony Pictures chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton were embarrassed by emails served up by the media, bolstering the credibility of hackers for when they attached as a cover letter to Lynton’s emails a threat to blow up theaters if The Interview was released?

George Clooney has the answer. The most powerful people in Hollywood were so fearful to place themselves in the cross hairs of hackers that they all refused to sign a simple petition of support that Clooney and his agent, CAA’s Bryan Lourd, circulated to the top people in film, TV, records and other areas. Not a single person would sign. Here, Clooney discusses the petition and how it is just part of many frightening ramifications that we are all just coming to grips with.

DEADLINE: How could this have happened, that terrorists achieved their aim of cancelling a major studio film? We watched it unfold, but how many people realized that Sony legitimately was under attack?

GEORGE CLOONEY: A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians Oof Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.

This video about what is going on right now (October 2014) on US college campuses leaves me breathless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyFlByb64M

We don’t expect much. It’s been nearly six years. We’re long past the point of hoping that Barack Obama will adopt policies that deserve our grudging approval, if not enthusiastic endorsement, particularly on foreign policy and national security.

But we do expect something.

We believe that the president, whatever his ideological disposition, ought to be an unapologetic defender of America when she is smeared or slandered. At a bare minimum, a president ought not lend credence to those who disparage the United States for imagined offenses.

This is apparently too high a standard for Barack Obama.

As Thomas Joscelyn reports elsewhere in these pages, two days before the United States transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay, President José Mujica released a statement denouncing the United States. “We have offered our hospitality for humans suffering a heinous kidnapping in Guantánamo,” it read. Because of their suffering, the detainees—all with direct ties to al Qaeda leadership—were accepted by Uruguay for “humanitarian” reasons and given refugee status.

I admit it. I read Ha’aretz (but I don’t pay for it). How else would I know what Israel’s extreme Left is thinking? So I am used to reading that time is running out, we’d better “end the occupation” before the Europeans decide to make us a “pariah nation” and Obama forgets to veto something in the Security Council.

For example, here’s Barak Ravid today:

Netanyahu doesn’t understand Europe. His approach to the diplomatic crisis with France, Britain, Germany and others is simplistic. He believes the moves in Europe are motivated by European leaders’ eagerness to obtain the votes of the growing Muslim minority by advancing a pro-Palestinian agenda. In addition, he feels Europe’s attitude toward Israel is based on deep-seated anti-Semitic sentiments.

I had hoped Ravid would continue and explain what he thinks does motivate European anti-Zionism if not the things he mentions, but he didn’t. I suppose if asked he would talk about how “The Occupation” is immoral and building across the Green Line ‘frustrates’ the Europeans and the Obama Administration because it supposedly creates facts on the ground which prejudge the outcome of negotiations.

But assuming that the architects of colonialism and perpetrators of the Holocaust* have suddenly acquired a moral sensibility is a stretch.

In the latest issue of the Russian magazine Russkiy Mir (“Russian World,” December 10) our foreign affairs editor considers the implications of the crisis in Ukraine for Russia’s geostratigic position in the years to come. (Translated from Russian by the author)

In Ukraine the United States presented Russia with its most serious challenge in the last quarter-century. Russia has not responded to that challenge in a timely manner. She proved unable to anticipate and then counter the Maidan scenario last winter, even though the grand rehearsal was presented with the “Orange Revolution” ten years ago. Now Russia’s relations with her strategically essential neighbor – Ukraine – are on the brink of rupture, or a painful restructuring for decades to come.

Normal US-Russian relations would require the recognition that Russia has legitimate interests in her near abroad. To understand the Washingtonian mindset, however, we need to recall a quote from President Obama’s graduation address at West Point in May 2014: “The values of our founding inspire leaders in parliaments and new movements in public squares around the globe.” Evidently he was alluding to the Maidan.