RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations fails to acknowledge the Pearl Harbor-esque emergency following the terror attack.

Seventy-three years ago this week, on a peaceful, sunny morning in Hawaii, a Japanese armada carried out a spectacular attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2,403, wounding 1,178 and damaging or destroying at least 20 ships. Washington immediately declared war and mobilized a peaceful nation. In another unfortunate Washington tendency, the government launched an investigation about who to blame for letting the devastating surprise attack happen. A hastily convened political tribunal found two senior military officers guilty of dereliction of duty, publicly humiliating them, as some political leaders sought to hold anyone but themselves accountable for the catastrophe.

With the Democratic members of the SenateIntelligence Committee this week releasing a report on their investigation holding the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency accountable for the alleged “torture” of suspected terrorists after 9/11, some lessons from the Pearl Harbor history should be kept in mind.

First, let’s remember the context of the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when President George W. Bush and Congress put America on a war footing. While some critics in and out of government blamed the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for failing to prevent the terrorist attack, the 9/11 Commission later concluded that part of the real reason the terrorists succeeded was Washington’s failure to put America on a war footing long before the attack. Sept. 11, 2001, was the final escalation of al Qaeda’s war-making after attacking the USS Cole in 2000 and U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998.

So far it looks like Mrs. Clinton would have at least as many problems in 2016 as she did in 2008.

There have generally been two reactions to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ’s Dec. 3 statement at Georgetown University that America should try to “empathize” with our nation’s “enemies.”

One camp holds that Mrs. Clinton simply chose the wrong word to express a banal thought—that the U.S. must understand its enemies. The other camp says her State Department record demonstrates she herself lacks the empathy to know how to deal with America’s adversaries or allies.

Both responses are true, yet I have another observation about her speech: It is further evidence Mrs. Clinton is at best a mediocre presidential candidate. She was lackluster in 2008 and worse today. The stiff, off-putting style is familiar. What’s more surprising is how sloppy, ill-prepared and tone-deaf she has become.

If Mrs. Clinton intended to say we must understand our adversaries—their motivations, methods and goals—she should have said so. If her speechwriter’s draft was unclear, she should have ordered a rewrite. If she can’t summon warmth and wit now, how will she display a winning personality in her umpteenth hundred event, assuming she becomes a candidate?

The empathy quote was

A Newsweek article contains 38 paragraphs, practically every one of which is replete with errors, glaring omissions and/or Arab propaganda.

A recent perusal of mainstream media’s coverage of Israel confirms the sad truth that blatant lies, lousy or non-existent fact-checking and efforts to paint the Jewish state as evil continues unabated.

Take Newsweek, for example. Please.

A 3000 word article dated Dec. 4, written by Sarah Helm, attempts to create a female Arab victim hero. Her lengthy article, “The Young Woman at the Forefront of Jerusalem’s New Holy War,” is replete with pathos, heroism and villains. But in the process of spinning her tale, truth becomes a victim and increased hatred, not peace, is the byproduct.

First, a brief summary of Helm’s doting narrative:

Latifa, a 24 year old Palestinian Arab woman, leads her Arab sisters in their noble effort to protect their holy places from destruction by the evil Jews. In the process, they are beaten and arrested by the armed Jewish guards, but these holy women will not be deterred from their mission. They are the “mosque’s protectors,” swathed in colorful veils. Helms hopefully suggests the name: Women’s Intifada. Fade out.

In this article of 38 paragraphs, there are fewer than four which do not contain either a sloppy error, a falsehood stated as fact, or bald propaganda; sometimes all three can be found in a single paragraph.

For instance, in the very first sentence, Helm refers to the “sister mosque, the Dome of the Rock.” That building, the one with the gilded dome, is not a mosque.

An acclaimed food writer and culinary historian knew that to understand Jewish food was to understand Judaism itself.

This past Sunday, Gil Marks, famed Jewish food writer, author of several acclaimed cookbooks and of the magisterial Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (2010), and an Orthodox rabbi, was laid to rest near his home in Alon Shvut, Israel. Marks has been widely and justly lauded for his sterling contributions to the field of culinary history. Yet he requires appreciation not only as a chef and a food writer but as an interpreter of Torah.

To read The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food is to encounter a smorgasbord of extraordinary insights, culinary and otherwise. Marks informs us, for example, that not until the 15th century did Ashkenazi Jews in Germany and Austria begin to apply the term hallah—which in the Bible designates only the bit of dough offered to the priest as a tithe—to their Sabbath loaves. It seems that, in those lands, Christians still perpetuated certain pre-Christian practices, one of which had been to prepare, around the time of the winter solstice, an attractively braided loaf to appease the pagan goddess Holle, an “ugly Teutonic crone with long matted hair.” In time, having replaced the pagan referent with a sacred one, Jews all over the globe, Ashkenazim and Sephardim alike, would be inaugurating their Sabbath meal with a blessing over two artfully braided loaves of “hallah.”

Marks has similarly fascinating stories to tell about other Sabbath foods. His Encyclopedia even features a cholent map, charting the historical spread and evolution of this Sabbath stew from the hamin cited in the Mishnah, to the adafina of Spain, to the slow-cooked, potato- and barley-based casserole of Ashkenaz that is relished by so many today. And his discussion of the holidays is no less enlightening. In this Hanukkah season, anyone who, like me, mourns the plummet of the potato latke from its former prominence will be amused and edified by Marks’s reconstruction of how that once-universal dish gave way, in Israel, to jelly doughnuts, known as sufganiyot. (Hint: it was all the result of a socialist plot.)

The elections offer the voter a choice between the delusional Left and the incompetent Right.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in [the legislature] – Orson Welles

Elections are won… chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody – Franklin Pierce Adams

This Wednesday, the inevitable happened. The improbable coalition, cobbled together out of irreconcilably disparate components, finally disintegrated.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

The disintegration of the coalition was virtually inevitable from the moment it was formed. From the get-go, it was the product of the puerile petulance of its principal participants and the perverse partnerships that this produced.

But even more fundamentally, the fatal friability of the coalition can be traced back to the pathetically poor electoral campaign run by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, in which almost every conceivable mistake was made: from purposefully refraining from presenting a policy platform to voters, essentially asking for support without stipulating what the support was for; through the predictably ill-fated union with Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu faction that, inevitably, reduced support for the combined electoral entity, to the needless attacks on Naftali Bennett, driving undecided voters to support neophyte Yair Lapid.

Thus, while at the start of the campaign for the last elections, most pundits widely predicted a decisive win for Netanyahu and the Right, the gross ineptitude with which the campaign was subsequently conducted led to severe erosion of voter support for the joint Likud-Beytenu list, which almost resulted in it snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory.

http://acdemocracy.org/ The end of the Cold War brought many changes including the unification of Germany, the expansion of democracy into Eastern Europe, and the integration of Russia into the global economy. It also removed the previous five-decades-long worry about a nuclear war. “Thinking about the unthinkable,” that is, seriously contemplating nuclear war, has all but […]

As MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber squirmed through a session with the House Oversight Committee, we are provided perfect example of an all too common practice: the “ends justify the means” political tactic foisted upon our political system by the Alinskyites of the American Progressive Movement. And while Mr. Gruber is today’s poster-boy for a bloated faction of disingenuous politicians, only a fool would believe that this concerted disingenuousness is exclusive to just one side of the aisle.

In a Washington Post piece titled, The Gruberization of the Democratic Party (the correct designation is Democrat, not Democratic, but that’s another matter of disingenuousness entirely), Ed Rogers writes:

“It’s too bad the Gruber videos weren’t revealed before the 2014 elections, because they perfectly crystallize the entire Democratic 2014 campaign. That is, don’t admit what you really believe or what you will really do in government. Say things that purposely deceive or at least misdirect the voters from your true intentions. Anyway, Gruber isn’t just a bad episode. He is a living example of what the Democratic Party has become.”

While I concur with Mr. Rogers’ analysis, he stops short in focusing solely on the Democrat Party. But for a very few in elected office – very few indeed, the practice of not being “straight” with the American Electorate is epidemic among political class. The very existence of the job descriptor “spin doctor” proves this point beyond doubt, to wit, if a politician was being honest with his constituency, why would he or she need to “spin” anything? To “spin” is to deceive or manipulate the truth; to provide “nuance” to the “narrative.” To deny it would require a willing suspension of one’s common sense; an all too rampant malady in the United States in and of itself.

Political disingenuousness is present in almost every issue and on both sides of the aisle. Inside the beltway Democrats and Republicans have abdicated serving the public, instead existing pre-occupied with the acquisition and retention of power and station. To make my point, here are three issues that both sides of the aisle routinely sacrifice at the altar of political opportunism:

A knife is not a conversation and riots do not make for better relations between the races.

Is this the conversation we’re having? The mudslingers keep telling us “we need to have a conversation” about race relations.

Okay, go ahead. Let’s talk.

But a conversation means both sides get a chance.

Last night, at Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, a male described by authorities as African-American, Calvin Peters, stabbed an Israeli student, Levi Rosenblat.

The New York Daily News reports that Peters kept yelling, “I want to kill a Jew.”

Is this a conversation? Is this what they mean?

Rosenblat never had a chance against a weapon.

A knife is not a conversation and riots do not make for better relations between the races.

Yet the flamethrowers, beginning at the top with Obama, keep telling us that we need to talk. We need to discuss.

I doubt there was ever a time in America, pre-Revolution and since, that race was not an issue. It was for the framers of the Constitution who, in order to get the southern colonies to accept it, included in Article Two that, for the purpose of taxation, slaves were to be identified as only “three-fifths” of being a person. In Section 9, it was agreed that the issue of slavery was not to be addressed until 1808, but “a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.”

Protesting something, anything, is as American as the flag. After fighting a Revolution for six years to rid themselves of a British monarch and his control of the colonies, Americans embraced the right to protest as part of their definition of liberty and freedom. By 1861 the protests against slavery had so divided the nation a Civil War had to be fought. In 1870, the 15th Amendment enfranchised former slaves with the right to vote, but Congress would wait until 1920 to extend the same right to women!

Having lived through the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert who was the Attorney General, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I concluded that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had “solved” the issues that had afflicted blacks in America. I was wrong.

The protests that occurred in the wake of grand jury decisions not to indict a police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or another group of police officers whose arrest of Eric Garner led to his death in Staten Island, New York are different only because they swiftly went from local to national. The initial Ferguson protests immediately descended into looting and arson. The Garner protests attracted large crowds that disrupted traffic and interfered with consumers in some shopping outlets. It seems to have gone unnoticed that large numbers of those in the latter protests were white.

The protests were magnified by the involvement of the President and the Attorney General who, while urging that violence be avoided, told the protesters to “stay the course.” Had either Michael Brown or Eric Garner obeyed the law, they would be alive. Brown had committed a robbery just prior to his attack on Officer Darren Wilson and Garner had a long history of arrests and was engaged in a minor offense of selling cigarettes.

With the exception of those who joined the protests, white America is deeply at odds with black America. There are serious differences that include issues involving crime rates, school dropout rates, numbers of illegitimate or aborted children, single parent families, and other comparable social differences between the two racial groups.

A MUST READ BIOGRAPHY OF MARIA MONTESSORI WAS WRITTEN BY RITA KRAMER: Maria Montessori: A Biography (Radcliffe Biography Series)Jan 22, 1988

Some book debuts are memorable and marvelous to behold, and this is one of them. I almost feel privileged to review Charlotte Cushman’s Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, recently published by The Paper Tiger.

Maria Montessori was born on August 31, 1870, in the provincial town of Chiaravalle, Italy, to middle-class, well-educated parents. At the time that Montessori was growing up, Italy held conservative values about women’s roles. From a young age, she consistently broke out of those proscribed gender limitations. After the family moved to Rome, when she was 14, Montessori attended classes at a boys’ technical institute, where she further developed her aptitude for math and her interest in the sciences-particularly biology.

Facing her father’s resistance but armed with her mother’s support, Montessori went on to graduate with high honors from the medical school of the University of Rome in 1896. In so doing, Montessori became the first female doctor in Italy.

Montesorri displayed the same insatiable appetite for knowledge that she has encouraged her teachers to imbue in their pre-school and kindergarten students. Her premise was that “class” and a child’s external environment did not necessarily determine the contents and actions of his mind, unless he has a passive, as opposed to an active, ambitious, eager mind. (Passivity is also an action of volition, or of choice, but a negative one.) The mentally healthy mind possesses the human attribute of volition, and can develop a willingness and ability to think. This, Cushman, emphasizes, is a natural desire in children. Bright, independent, confident children could hale from any strata of society. Social status is irrelevant.

As a doctor, Montessori chose pediatrics and psychiatry as her specialties. While teaching at her medical-school alma mater, Montessori treated many poor and working-class children who attended the free clinics there. During that time, she observed that intrinsic intelligence was present in children of all socio-economic backgrounds.

Montessori became the director of the Orthophrenic School for developmentally disabled children in 1900. There she began to extensively research early childhood development and education….