RUTHFULLY YOURS

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from one that appeared in the November 3, 2014, issue of National Review.

Minneapolis — “Are you a spy?”

Yusuf laughs as he says it, but the question is not unthinkable. I am, after all, likely the only person of pallor within a square half mile, and definitely the only one perusing the goods on offer in the Somali market at the corner of E. 24th St. and 10th Ave. S. — prayer rugs, pastel hijabs, and discount travel packages to Mecca, on sale to Minneapolis’s approximately 30,000 Somalis. The proprietors who eye me quizzically agree: I am not their target market.

When exactly their target market might arrive, though, is a mystery. Dozens of people are milling about, but none are shopping. The very few women, all older, are clerking the shop counters. There are many more men, of all ages, most of them seated idly around café tables. As the afternoon wears on, the crowd grows younger. One sees less traditional garb, more college sweatshirts and snapback caps.

Which is what Yusuf is wearing, as he leans against a counter and asks whether I am a spy. “There have been more white people around,” he remarks. “Especially with what’s been going on.”

What’s been going on is an exodus of Minnesotans to the Middle East to join up with the Islamic State — at least 15 Somali men and three women from Minneapolis, according to an ongoing FBI investigation. Twenty-nine-year-old Abdirahmaan Muhumed, for example, left nine children in Minneapolis to fight in Syria. In August, he became the second American to die fighting for the terrorist group, following the lead of the serendipitously named Douglas McArthur McCain, not a Somali but a fellow Minneapolitan. That same month, a 19-year-old Minneapolis girl told her parents she was going to a bridal shower. She called them weeks later from Syria, where she was nursing wounded Islamic State fighters.

Somewhere nearby is 20-year-old Abdi Nur, who boarded a one-way flight for Turkey last spring, and is now believed to be in Syria. Abdullahi Yusuf, 18, hoped to follow him, but was apprehended at Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport in May. Both were charged in November with conspiring to provide support to the Islamic State.

Veterans of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities are worried about the federal government’s ability to protect the homeland once President Obama’s executive amnesty takes effect. In interviews with NRO, they expressed concerns about rampant fraud in federal documents and the possibility of a new wave of immigrants at the southern border.

Having lived through the amnesty of 1986, James Chaparro, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security who managed intelligence efforts across the department, warns of the potential for massive fraud. “Very frequently you see unscrupulous immigration consultants and criminal organizations taking advantage of new programs that are being implemented,” he says. “You will likely see an industry grow up around fraud.”

Chaparro, who left his position as the assistant director of intelligence at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (part of DHS) in the summer of 2013, says he expects to see instances of fraud similar to the complications that followed the 1986 amnesty.

In fact, fraud has already begun and counterfeiters are already being called upon to provide falsified records for illegal immigrants seeking to take advantage of Obama’s amnesty, says former national deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol Ronald Colburn. “All this does is mask those that could or would do harm to the U.S. in the future,” he says. “The worst is yet to come.”

Right now, Colburn says, drug cartels seeking to infiltrate the United States are expanding their operations inside Mexico and around the world. The Sinaloa Cartel, Gulf Cartel, and Los Zetas are among the criminal enterprises that he says have begun training militant Islamist groups in West Africa in exchange for safe passage of the cartel’s contraband into western Europe. As a result, he says the challenge American forces face in West Africa today has shifted from a counterterrorism dilemma to a counter-narcotics-trafficking and counter-organized-crime problem — a problem the amnesty could help bring home.

Rolling Stone has published an incredible story about a rape at the University of Virginia, sending shock waves around the country.

But when I say the story is incredible, I mean that in the literal, largely abandoned sense of the word. It is not credible — I don’t believe it.

I’m not saying that the author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, deliberately fabricated facts. Nor do I believe that all of her reporting was flawed. There may be an outrageously callous attitude toward sexual assaults at UVA. Rape, particularly date rape, may be a major problem there. I’ve talked to enough people with connections to the campus to think that part is credible enough.

But the central story isn’t about a spontaneous alcohol-fueled case of some creep refusing to take no for an answer (an inexcusable offense in my opinion). It’s an account of a well-planned gang rape by seven fraternity pledges at the direction of two members. If true, lots of people need to go to jail for decades — if.

The basic story is this: Jackie is asked out on a date her freshman year by a junior named “Drew” (not his real name). After dinner, they go to a party at Phi Kappa Psi. Quickly, Drew asks Jackie, “Want to go upstairs, where it’s quieter?”

Jackie is led to a “pitch-black” bedroom. She’s knocked to the floor. A heavy person jumps on top of her. A hand covers her mouth. When she bites it, she’s punched in the face. And for the next three hours she’s brutally raped, with Drew and another upperclassman shouting out instructions to the pledges, referring to Jackie as “it.”

Many alleged details (though Erdely never uses the word “alleged”) aren’t suitable for a family paper. Others are simply hard to believe. The pitch-black darkness doesn’t prevent Jackie from recognizing an attacker or seeing them drink beer. The assault takes place amidst the wreckage of a broken glass table, but the rapists are undeterred by shards of glass.

IF CAROLINE KENNEDY CAN BE CONFIRMED AS, YOU KNOW, LIKE, AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN….ANYTHING GOES…..READ COLLEEN BELL’S LETTER….SUBMITTED WITH HER APPLICATION…..RSK

Why I Want to Live in Budapest for a Year or More

by Colleen Bell

I’m “Hungary” to spend some time in Budapest (LOL) as part of the U.S. government’s Obama Bundlers Abroad program (that part’s also a joke). While I’ve never been a diplomat, I did earn a diploma in high school and college. I hope this essay is good enough to win Senate confirmation.

As a soap opera producer, I bring a world of experience to the task of serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary. My show, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” is seen in more than 100 countries, so they probably know of me already.

Because of my job on the soap opera, I know more than most people do about the challenges of building solid, long-lasting, mutually-satisfying relationships — or at least about pretending to do so.

But if all I had to recommend me was a history of creating high-quality treacherous relationship stories for daytime TV, I could understand how you might be reluctant to send me overseas as the president’s emissary, and the official face of America.

So, you’ll be glad to know that I’m also a campaign bundler for the president, having raised millions of dollars to assure myself an appointment as ambassador. (Just kidding.)

My wealth of experience making phone calls to wealthy Liberals will serve me well in Budapest, as I’m sure they probably have wealthy Liberals over there too, and maybe even telephones. I even hosted a dinner for the president at my house and got Foo Fighters to perform there. If Hungarian government officials haven’t heard of Foo Fighters yet, they’re really good.

Finally, as if all of that were not enough to secure my confirmation, I’ve also been told that I’m an attractive woman. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned that, but when you’re trying to show the world America’s best face, it never hurts to actually have a nice face.

All the Best,
Colleen Bell

NO YOU DON’T AND LIFTING SPIRITS IS NOT WHAT IT IS ABOUT…THE ECONOMY AND OUR FOREIGN POLICIES ARE IN SHAMBLES, IMMIGRATION IS NOW LAWLESS, OUR NATIONAL CULTURE IS BEING ERODED AS YOU SPEAK, AND YOU OFFER THIS TYPICAL BUSHBLATHER AS A GOAL? THAT IS FOR CLERGY AND COUNSELORS….PULEEZ…NO MORE CLINTONS NO MORE BUSHES!…RSK
WASHINGTON — Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said he is thinking of running for president in 2016 and will make a decision sometime in the near future.

Bush also labeled President Obama’s immigration executive action “extra-constitutional.”

“I’m thinking about running for president and I’ll make up my mind in short order – not that far out into the future, I don’t know the exact timeline,” he said at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council event on Monday.

“Do I have the skills to do it in a way that tries to lift people’s spirits and not get sucked into the vortex? And that sounds easy, it’s easy say, it’s harder to do. Do I have those skills? I’ve really got to do a lot of soul-searching to really make that determination,” he added.

Bush also said running for public office is a “pretty ugly business” that he might not want his family to go through at this time.

“I think people kind of appreciate that, so I’m sorting that out,” he said.

In the discussion moderated by Gerald Seib, the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief, Bush said the U.S. has been acting like France.

“The United States should not be in any category remotely close to a problem kind of country. We have everything that is necessary – abundant and natural resources, the most innovative country in the world, the most creative place in the world, labor laws that are unique in the developed world, a big place full of chances to expand, the history of productivity, all this stuff has just been cast aside temporarily and we’re moping around like we’re France, with all due respect,” Bush said.

“I don’t want to be disrespectful, they have a lot of interesting things and great things, but we’re not France for crying out loud – and the crisis of opportunity is we’re not seizing the moment,” he added.

Ashton Carter as Defense Secretary a choice that will likely ensure a smooth confirmation in Congress and an easy transition at the Pentagon, where Mr. Carter was until recently a well-regarded deputy secretary. The larger question is whether a technocrat can do much more than mind the store while the White House conducts its meandering foreign policy.
The good news in this presumptive nomination is that Mr. Carter has the managerial chops to run one of the world’s largest bureaucracies. A trained physicist, Mr. Carter has a reputation for knowing his way around the Pentagon’s byzantine budget and procurement systems. That’s a welcome contrast to outgoing Secretary Chuck Hagel, who had to undergo on-the-job training.

Defense is one cabinet position that cannot be occupied by a lightweight. And experience is particularly significant now, as the Pentagon needs to make decisions about investing in a new generation of ballistic-missile submarines and a replacement bomber for our ancient fleet of B-52s and B-1s.

Even more important is the modernization of the nuclear arsenal (average age of a warhead: 27 years), given that recent testing scandals have revealed dangerous shortfalls in management, infrastructure and morale. Russia and China have invested heavily to modernize and expand their atomic arsenals, and Mr. Carter will need to make certain that America’s shrunken nuclear triad remains credible as a deterrent against adversaries and an umbrella for non-nuclear allies.

Addressing long-term challenges isn’t enough, however. The next Defense Secretary will face a world of ambitious geopolitical adversaries, from Moscow to Mosul to Tehran, who believe that Mr. Obama’s final years in office are an opportunity to exploit weakness at the White House. Mr. Carter will face an especially difficult task finding ways to reassure allies that American power remains credible in this era of U.S. retreat.

Michael Brenner (not Lenni Brenner the Trotskyite and not to be confused with another Michael Brenner who writes also on Israel) writes about the new Jewish Nation State legislation in his “Jabotinsky and the Jewish State law”, November 27, 2014. One of my rules of thumb as a half-century old adherent to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism is that when opponents of right-wing nationalist Zionism and Likud leaders begin to quote Jabotinsky, that’s when one need pay careful and close attention.

Brenner notes that in Jabotinsky’s thinking “all [? YM] a Jewish state meant for him was a territory in which Jews enjoyed a sufficient degree of sovereignty in their internal and external affairs and in which they constituted a majority.”

That, of course, is a facile, if not a shallow, reading of the man’s Zionism.

Books in English have been published disputing Brenner’s bias such as “Every individual, a king : the social and political thought of Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky” by Hebrew University’s Raphaella Bilski Ben-Hur and “The Political and Social Philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky: Selected Writings”, as well as a pamphlet that was issued by the Israel Democracy Institute, “Ze’ev Jabotinsky on Democracy, Equality, and Individual Rights” and many other articles including one on the formation of a ‘new Jew’ personality. Of course, the many Hebrew-language sources that dispute Brenner’s assertion are too numerous to even begin to list.

Beyond this prejudicial build-up, Brenner seeks to surprise and quotes from Jabotinsky’s 1940 book, The Jewish War Front, wherein he proposes that “both Jews and Arabs share equal collective autonomous rights as well”. So much so, that “In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa.”

Of course, that it may be a surprise to many is only a proof that one of the greatest Zionist thinkers of the 20th century was not only ignored and ostracized in his day but posthumously suppressed and banished from our political dialogue.

Brenner sees in the move to legislate a Jewish Nation-State Law “not only an unnecessary provocation to Israel’s Arab citizens” but an act that “also ignores the vision of its founders”. And that is why he quotes from Jabotinsky.

One always need be careful when dealing with quotations from Jabotinsky. Excerpts must be faithful to the fundamental conceptualization of the author’s thinking so that the quotation cannot be used for a purpose which is contrary to the author’s outlook.

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials on Tuesday released a draft of long-awaited federal guidelines on circumcision, saying medical evidence supports having the procedure done and health insurers should pay for it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines stop short of telling parent to get their newborn sons circumcised. That is a personal decision that may involve religious or cultural preferences, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin.

But “the scientific evidence is clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” added Mermin, who oversees the agency’s programs on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

These are the first federal guidelines on circumcision, a brief medical procedure that involves cutting away the foreskin around the tip of the penis. Germs can grow underneath the foreskin, and CDC officials say the procedure can lower a male’s risk of sexually-transmitted diseases, penile cancer and even urinary tract infections.

The CDC started working on the guidelines about seven years ago, when a cluster of influential studies in Africa indicated circumcision might help stop spread of the AIDS virus.

“The benefits of male circumcision have become more and more clear over the last 10 years,” said Dr. Aaron Tobian, a Johns Hopkins University researcher involved in one of the African studies.

But the guidelines are important, because the rates of newborn male circumcision have been dropping, he added.

The guidelines are being published in the federal register Tuesday. For the next 45 days, the CDC will receive public comment before finalizing them next year.

Novorossiya!

In April, in a four-hour call-in show televised across Russia, Vladimir Putin assigned the name New Russia—Novorossiya—to the lands in Southeastern Ukraine he claimed were and are historically part of Russia. The term Novorossiya had been used only once before in history, during the three decades from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, to describe the territories north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov that Catherine the Great had wrested from the Ottoman Turks. What’s more, Putin said, the lands of his Novorossiya—Kharkov, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev, and Odessa—had never been part of Ukraine. The contention is nonsensical. There had never been an officially designated piece of territory called Ukraine before the Leninist regime in Moscow created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR came into being in 1922 with four constituent sub-states, the Ukrainian SSR being one of them.

So Putin’s “New Russia” is, to put it mildly, historically dubious, a work of convenient fiction—and a cover for his assault on Ukraine, featuring the annexation of Crimea and the proxy war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet Putin has done the world a favor by bringing the word Novorossiya back into circulation. Novorossiya is the perfect word to describe the messianic, autocratic, and increasingly dangerous regime Putin has been engineering over the past three years, following his return to the presidency of Russia after a four-year gap in which his aide Dmitry Medvedev warmed the chair.

The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s military proxy intervention in Ukraine should be considered an epiphenomenon of Russian politics. Putin has been changing his regime from a “softer,” largely nonideological, corrupt “electoral authoritarianism” to a highly personalistic, far more repressive, and ideologically inspired dictatorship. The annexation of Crimea was a portent of “a new Russian revolution from above,” according to the popular website Gazeta.ru.

“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” wrote the Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books. “No one knows what will happen to the country now, into which seas or swamps it will drift.” The website Slon.ru declared: “Russia is no longer Europe…but another, peculiar civilization.”

Alexander Dugin, one of the organizers of Russia’s National Bolshevik Party, and perhaps Russia’s most prominent advocate of what might be called national-imperial totalitarian socialism, was thrilled by the annexation of Crimea; he sees it as the onset of a “real evolution,” the “end of liberalism and the beginning of patriotism,” and as “Putin’s challenge to the unipolar world, dominated by all the components of the world [that are] evil.”

Why did Putin open this Pandora’s box?

In 1893, the German labor leader August Bebel breezily dismissed anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools.” From then to the present day, the Western left has been disturbingly complacent about Judeophobia. Communists and socialists of various stripes have persistently underestimated the impact, distinctiveness, and longevity of anti-Semitism. Even today, significant strains of the American and even the Israeli left are far less exercised about global anti-Semitism than the supposed transgressions of the Jewish state. A review of the hard left’s various answers to the “Jewish Question” makes clear that equivocation on anti-Semitism and antipathy toward Israel are enduring, complementary elements in Marxism’s wrongheaded materialist interpretation of world affairs.

Few Marxists have attempted to address Judeophobes’ fundamentally demonic view of the world or the mythical power of anti-Semitic archetypes of “the Jew,” such as Judas, Satan, and the Antichrist. Similarly, few have tried to decipher the phantasmagoric conspiracy theories at the heart of so many anti-Semitic beliefs. This failure contributed to how the Western left viewed the rising anti-Semitism of the Nazis in the 1930s. Very few socialists, anarchists, or Communists (apart from isolated mavericks such as Wilhelm Reich) showed much grasp of the psychology of fascism, let alone addressed seriously the Manichean worldview of anti-Semites before the Holocaust.

Let us begin with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the SPD deliberately played down anti-Semitism and generally avoided any direct attacks on it. The SPD’s paralysis went beyond the fear of challenging the popular prejudices of German workers inside the Third Reich. It was a fundamental failure of the imagination. Both German socialists and Communists grossly underestimated the integrative power of irrational thinking and the centrality of racial anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology. They didn’t see the great qualitative difference between traditional Jew-hatred and Nazi anti-Semitism, which they reduced to a mere political instrument of “reactionary” forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. After 1933, they still regarded Jew-hatred primarily as a tool for consolidating Hitler’s dictatorship.

For the German left, the essence of Nazism was not the destruction of the Jews but the crushing of the working class. They saw Kristallnacht as little more than a trial balloon for more repressive measures against German society as a whole—not as a massive offensive against the Jews. Many left-wing German intellectuals in exile believed that Jews suffered no more than others, and they argued that overemphasizing anti-Semitism would only weaken the anti-Nazi campaign. Writing from postwar Germany in the summer of 1945, Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann), who had served as a staff sergeant in the 5th U.S. Army, was still treating the fate of the Jews as a secondary issue; he dismissed the Jews as a “dreary” subject, and the Holocaust as neither special nor significant.