RUTHFULLY YOURS

All politics is local, and Saturday’s midterm elections in Taiwan mostly turned on local issues such as food safety, stagnant wages, education and infrastructure. But one factor behind the landslide victory of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party is rising fear that Taiwan’s de facto independence is threatened by the island’s increasing economic ties to China. As Taiwan moves toward presidential elections in January 2016, expect tensions to rise across the Taiwan Strait.

Saturday’s results give the DPP control of some two-thirds of Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties, including four of its six special municipalities. Taipei’s mayor-elect is a DPP-backed independent, so for the first time in 16 years the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), won’t govern the island’s capital and largest city. Taiwan’s last three presidents previously served as mayor of Taipei.

The KMT was quick to admit defeat. “I have heard [voters’] voices and I will not evade my responsibility to start reform,” said President Ma Ying-jeou, who may resign as KMT chairman at a party meeting Wednesday.

Though the scale of its losses is a surprise, the KMT has recently earned a reputation for bungling. A series of scandals over tainted food, including hundreds of tons contaminated with “gutter oil” made from waste and animal feed, led Mr. Ma’s health minister to resign in October. The economic affairs minister resigned in August after gas explosions killed 32 people in the southern city of Kaohsiung. The education minister quit amid a scandal over research fraud.

This year’s major political event, however, was the Sunflower Movement, which culminated in a 24-day student-led occupation of the legislature to block ratification of a trade deal signed with China. The cross-strait agreement, covering trade in services, would have been the 22nd enacted since 2008, when Mr. Ma initiated economic detente with China. Freer trade and travel have helped Taiwan’s economy, but in ways that could make the island dependent on Beijing. Cross-strait trade has nearly doubled since 2008, with some 40% of Taiwanese exports and 80% of outbound investment now going to China.

The Gangs of New York A union scam helps explain why Gotham hotels cost so much.

Tourists converging on New York City for the holidays are often stunned by how expensive the hotels are. Much of that is real estate and seasonal demand, but what may be less apparent to travellers is a shakedown engineered by Big Labor and assorted corporate cronies to force non-union accommodations to organize or leave Gotham.

In 2001 the major city hotels bought labor peace through a multi-employer collective-bargaining agreement known as the Industry Wide Agreement, or IWA. The New York Hotel Trades Council (AFL-CIO) and the Hotel Association of New York City, the trade group for the five boroughs, agreed that association members would be neutral when the union tries to organize a property and abide by “card check.” That’s the gambit that denies workers their right to secret ballots in labor elections.

Businesses tend to get the unions they deserve, and three of every four New York hotel employees now belong to a workplace with contracts governed by the IWA. More notable is that the agreement contains an unusual “accretion clause” that foists the IWA’s terms on every hotel that is directly or indirectly owned or managed by any party to the IWA.

Hotel owners in New York often engage third-party managers to run the business or as contractors to provide discrete services such as guest amenities or back-office due diligence. Under the accretion clause, a non-union hotel that hires one of these agents becomes a “joint employer” that must obey the IWA even if its proprietors never consented to the agreement, bargained with the AFL-CIO or joined the Hotel Association.

Recent violence in Israel, and the subsequent coverage in mainstream media, on the web and especially in a British medical journal, triggered a 5-day educational physicians’ medical mission to Israel in late October and early November. This grassroots trip was planned in conjunction with the Israel Medical Association, with additional programing support from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting In America (CAMERA), Media-Central, NGO-Monitor, Magen David Adom, The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), and the IDF Spokespersons Office through the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

The goal was to enable physicians to see directly Israel’s medical actions, beyond the filter of biased news media and international NGO’s. Eleven physicians signed up, most from the USA, but also from Canada and as far away as Sydney, Australia.

Particularly troubling to physicians has been the abuse of civilian populations on both sides by Hamas and other extremist groups. During the summer’s war, Israelis were direct Hamas targets and Gazans were human shields, mutually linked in danger by Palestinian Arab political leaders who had squandered vast amounts of humanitarian aid on weapons, attack tunnels, fortifications and personal aggrandizement.

Palestinian authority figures, including PA president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the ninth year of a four year term, have encouraged violence by exaggerating perceived threats to Islamic holy sites. Those sites, which have been a focus of Palestinian incitement, were holy to Jews centuries before the birth of Islam.

Physicians, who are used to dealing with pain, suffering and death, have been particularly bothered by the use of hospitals as military command posts and rocket-launching sites as occurred in Gaza. This conflict is the embodiment of “needless suffering”, not unlike, for example, cigarette induced lung cancer. Smokers need to quit their cigarettes. Arabs need to cease the hatred.

Perhaps worst of all for physicians, dedicated to evidence based practice, has been the politicization of medical science, by NGOs, academic organizations, and even medical journals, not to convey knowledge or help the sick, but as a form of warfare.

No gratitude expected — but scorn, contempt, derision and backstabbing, this I did not expect.

Bigotry has no bounds. We hear that rioters in Ferguson, USA have found the enemy and it is…the Jews!

Yes the Jews.

Name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.
Protesters have been marching with signs equating the “suffering” of blacks with the “suffering” of “Palestinians.”

How Israel got into the picture, six thousand miles away, nobody knows. Reggie Bush ought to know. The football star was up there with the rest of them denouncing the police and while he was at it, denouncing Israel. Maybe someone ought to inform this millionaire athlete that, going back to the 1960s, Jews were front and center for the Civil Rights movement.

They marched with Martin Luther King Jr. The first name (among many) that comes to mind is Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

Many risked their lives and some even lost their lives for the sake of equality. Two (among many) come to mind. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

These Jewish Civil Rights activists were murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

This is the thanks for all that sacrifice– and please, Reggie, name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.

Likewise, I also marched so that Blacks can share with Whites equality and harmony. I expected no gratitude. I did it in the name of justice. I would do it again.

Charley J. Levine, who passed away on November 16, has been eulogized for his work in pro-Israel public relations and information campaigns. But he also played a pioneering and little-known role in researching America’s response to the Holocaust.

Levine was a communications major at the University of Texas-Austin in the early 1970s. He also had a keen interest in Jewish history. He combined these two areas by choosing to write his master’s thesis on “Propaganda Techniques of the Bergson Group, 1939-1948.”

During the Holocaust years, the Bergson Group’s rallies, newspaper ads, and Capitol Hill lobbying played a major role in forcing the Roosevelt administration to take steps, however belated, to rescue some Jewish refugees. Yet when it came time to write the history of the period, Bergson was left out in the cold.

Part of the reason was that while mainstream Jewish leaders were writing autobiographies giving their version of events, the Bergson activists made no real effort to make their case. Political bias was also a factor. Bergson’s roots were in the Jabotinsky movement, and those who saw him as a political rival were not anxious to give him credit for his Holocaust protests.

The Bergson Group received only passing mention in the first books about America’s response to the Holocaust, such as Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died (1968) and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970). It was not mentioned at all in early Holocaust-related museum exhibits and films.

Charley Levine helped rescue the Bergson activists from the dustbin of history. To complete what would be one of the first master’s theses ever written on the topic, the industrious graduate student scoured old microfilms, visited archives in various cities, and conducted interviews with Bergson veterans and others who were involved in the events of the 1940s.

If the Jews are to prevail in the Arabs’ war against them it is essential that they accurately differentiate misleading red herrings from real root causes.

Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse any aggression, but to initiate it ourselves, and to destroy the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland of Palestine. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united. I believe the time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.

– Hafez Assad, then Syrian defense minister, later president, May 20, 1967

We will not accept any… coexistence with Israel The existence of Israel is in itself an aggression…against the Palestinian people.

– Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, to the international media, May 28, 1967

The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map.

– Abdul Rahman Arif, president of Iraq, May 31, 1967

The Arabs have been waging war against the Jews and their presence in the Land of Israel for over a hundred years; they have been waging war against the Jewish political sovereignty for almost seven decades.

The war has ebbed and flowed over the years, but as I have pointed out in recent columns, we are entering a new, and particularly menacing, phase of ongoing Arab aggression aimed at the annihilation of the Jews and their nation-state. As Shmuley Boteach wrote in his column earlier this week, the sense is that “it’s open season on the Jews of Israel.”

Diagnosing root causes & red herrings

What is LA RAZA? http://www.nclr.org/index.php/about_us/

“The National Council of La Raza (NCLR)—the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States—works to improve opportunities for Hispanic Americans. Through its network of nearly 300 affiliated community-based organizations, NCLR reaches millions of Hispanics each year in 41 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. To achieve its mission, NCLR conducts applied research, policy analysis, and advocacy, providing a Latino perspective in five key areas—assets/investments, civil rights/immigration, education, employment and economic status, and health. In addition, it provides capacity-building assistance to its Affiliates who work at the state and local level to advance opportunities for individuals and families.Founded in 1968, NCLR is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization headquartered in Washington, DC, serving all Hispanic subgroups in all regions of the country. It has state and regional offices in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix, and San Antonio.”
It sounds innocuous, but is far from harmless….They are big advocates of AZTLAN a separatist movement …. the real agenda of the La Raza movement is defying our laws, and demanding concessions.One of its ancillary organizations is the radical Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA), which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West. Here is one of their statements:

“Chicano is our identity; it defines who we are as people. It rejects the notion that we…should assimilate into the Anglo-American melting pot…Aztlan was the legendary homeland of the Aztecas … It became synonymous with the vast territories of the Southwest, brutally stolen from a Mexican people marginalized and betrayed by the hostile custodians of the Manifest Destiny.” (Statement on University of Oregon MEChA Website, Jan. 3, 2006)

And here is the latest of their subversive acts……

http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/29/la-raza-promotes-washington-post-guide-on-where-people-can-vote-without-an-id/ by Patrick Howley

The pro-amnesty Hispanic activist organization the National Council of La Raza helpfully promoted a Washington Post article explaining which states people can vote in without having to use a photo ID.

“Voter ID laws are at-issue across the country, with newly Republican-controlled legislatures having passed them in numerous states after the 2010 election,” explained The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “Most states still request some form of ID, but don’t require it. Another 20 states don’t require identification. In case you’re wondering where your state is at in all of this, a helpful (sic) graphic from the Post’s graphics team.”

So who ended up using the Post’s helpful graphic? The country’s foremost pro-amnesty Hispanic immigrant organization.

The Chicago chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice tweeted Blake’s article with the message, “Reminder — #Illinois does NOT require #voterID to cast a ballot,” along with the pro-Democrat hashtag #TurnOutForWhat. The tweet was helpfully retweeted by the National Council of La Raza.

What seems odd is this obsession with Israel, with which she has no ties. Yet this Baroness, who claims to be motivated only by moral outrage, is considerably silent on the far worse moral outrages that go on day in and day out in a country with which she does have ties — of which she made a virtue while in office. Yet Baroness Warsi ignores entirely the horrific and continual human rights abuses in her own family’s homeland of Pakistan. Whether it is Christians being burned alive or the practice of “bonded labor” (slavery), Warsi appears utterly unconcerned. At present, a Christian mother of four is due to be hanged for blasphemy.

What is far more important is that the obsessions and blind spots of Baroness Warsi are the obsessions and blind spots being taught to a generation.

Moral equivalence must be one of the overriding curses of our age. Even those who are capable of making moral judgements now often find it easier to make equivalences between sides than to study facts and work out who may be or right or wrong. So whenever any conflict breaks out, much of the world can be relied on – from the United Nations downwards (or upwards) – to call for a cessation of the “cycle of violence.” In Britain last week, there was an especially flamboyant example of this trend, courtesy of the noble Baroness Warsi.

This is the woman who was promoted by Conservative party leader David Cameron seven years ago; once the Conservative party became the party of government in 2010, she became the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet in Britain. She could have done an immense amount of good in that role. She could have led reformist trends within the Muslim communities in the UK. She could have acted as a demonstration that Muslims can be loyal British citizens without side clannish, religious or sectional interests overriding other interests. Instead she turned out to be a force of extraordinary regression, and someone who turned out to bang some very predictable drums.

This summer, when Israel was forced once again to engage in a highly targeted air and ground operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, the British government held fairly firm in support of our ally, Israel, in doing what it needed to do to a terrorist group that was kidnapping and murdering teenagers and heavily rocketing Israel.

But Baroness Warsi – who had only ever reached Cabinet because of David Cameron’s personal championing – resigned in protest. She claimed in her resignation that Britain’s ongoing support for Israel was morally indefensible.

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”

Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.

It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.

What might that be?

If you want an illuminating example of the fact that there is more to the way that prices work in a free market than can be captured by the pragmatic calculations of cold-eyed util-traders, consider the luxury-goods market and its enthusiastic following among people who do not themselves consume many or any of those goods. One of the oddball aspects of rich societies such as ours is the fact that when people pile up a little bit more disposable income than they might have expected to, they develop a taste for measurably inferior goods and outdated technologies: If you have money that is a little bit obscene, you might get into classic cars, i.e., an outmoded form of transportation; if your money is super-dirty obscene, you get into horses, an even more outmoded form of transportation.

In light of comments such as those by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, one needs to consider the context of recent events in Ferguson. Weingarten asserts that . . .

the fact remains that on Aug. 9, an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed. Given that we are a nation of laws, one can only hope that the lack of an indictment isn’t tantamount to any lack of zeal on the part of the prosecutor to do the job he was supposed to do to enable the grand jury to arrive at an impartial and fact-based decision [.]

This case once again reminds us that there is still much work to be done to achieve racial justice in America. It tells us that our moral compass and legal systems do not always align.

Weingarten epitomizes the leftist ideology that continually must find a racial basis for anything that occurs in this country. That the facts do not align with what the liberals desire is infuriating to them and thus the real tragedy of Ferguson is:

. . . that in order to fully accept the evidence of the case, news commentators feel compelled to say that eyewitnesses to the attack on the police officer were black, thus implying that whites, by the very nature of their melanin level, would not have been capable of abiding by the rule of law. It continues to feed Obama’s premise that race should be the determining factor in everything. But, indeed, if race does make a difference in certain situations, why didn’t the first black president and his black attorney general reach out to the Ferguson black community and tell “one and all to respect a lawful grand jury finding.” Instead these men used their power and “invited mayhem.”
. . . that owners and operators of the town’s shops have had their windows smashed, their stores looted and their merchandise destroyed and burnt. In fact, the majority of affected stores are black owned. Does saying this imply that black hoodlums would care more about black-owned establishments being protected? Thugs are thugs. If it had been white-owned stores does that mean this hooliganism would be more readily accepted? Since when do we consider looters as having a sense of deportment? In fact, as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “the first minute you break a window, you are put in handcuffs” whatever your race.
. . . that instead of viewing the looting and burning as shameful events, there are those who would claim that these frustrated young people have a right to destroy their neighborhood. In his 1997 book titled For Shame, author James B. Twitchell writes “[s]hame is the basis of individual responsibility and the beginnings of social conscience. It is where decency comes from.” When will we begin to demand decency? When will this constructive type of shame become an integral part of people’s upbringing in an effort to contribute to the higher social good?