RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are terror attacks, and there are pogroms. The attack at a Jerusalem synagogue this week that killed four rabbis was a pogrom. It was an attack motivated not by politics but by religious hatred; it was directed not at Israelis but at Jews.

The killers were armed with hatchets and guns instead of suicide belts, and they came not to kill Jews but to butcher them. The images are horrific: a prayer shawl in a pool of blood; a prayer book turned crimson, from which one of the victims had been worshiping as he was killed; and more haunting, the hand of a dead man, still wearing his phylacteries, soaking in his own blood. Witnesses said a worshiper’s arm, also wrapped in a leather prayer strap, had been hacked off its torso.

To Jews schooled in Jewish history, these images are not new; they are the images of a destiny from which Israel had been intended to redeem the Jews. Consider this description of the Kishinev Pogrom in 1903:

[One young boy], blinded in one eye from youth, begged for his life with the offer of sixty rubles; taking this money, the leader of the crowd … gouged out [his] other eye, saying “You will never again look upon a Christian child.” Nails were driven through heads; bodies, hacked in half; bellies split open and filled with feathers. Women and girls were raped, and some had their breasts cut off.

Jews knew that sort of hatred could not be combated with reason. Violence of that sort was not motivated by economics, by contested territory or even by history. It was, they understood, malignant Jew-hatred at its core, driven by a millenniums-old sickness from which Europe would never recover.

The 20th century was to have been the century of reason, of banishing ancient hatreds. But when the Kishinev poison was unleashed with the new century already under way (they had no inkling, of course, of how horrific the century would become), they knew they needed to flee.

At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, evoked Kishinev not as an event, but as a condition. “Kishinev exists wherever … [Jews’] self-respect is injured and their property despoiled because they are Jews. Let us save those who can still be saved!” The Jews, he insisted, needed a state of their own.

He was not the first to say this. When the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 unleashed a similar burst of murderous anti-Jewish violence, an earlier Zionist, Yehuda Leib Pinsker, wrote that “the misfortunes of the Jews are due, above all, to their lack of desire for national independence; … if they do not wish to exist forever in a disgraceful state … they must become a nation.” As long as the Jew was landless and stateless, Pinsker argued as Herzl would once again a decade and a half later, the Jew would persist in a “disgraceful state.” He, too, argued that there was no choice — the Jews needed to flee Europe.

Daniel Greenfield on “Obama’s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad” — on The Glazov Gang »
Why a Radical-in-Chief calls a beheaded American by a Muslim name.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, “The Point,” on Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel came on the show to discuss Obama’s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief’s responses to the Jerusalem synagogue massacre, the Islamic State’s beheading of Peter Kassig, and much, much more:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-greenfield-on-obamas-fantasies-about-un-islamic-jihad-on-the-glazov-gang/

A diplomatic mission was slapped down in the middle of a city controlled by terrorists. The diplomatic mission was left mostly undefended, despite multiple requests by everyone in Libya right up to the deceased ambassador, except by a militia gang linked to Al Qaeda which wasn’t getting paid.

At a time when the State Department was spending fortunes on bad art, on Kindles at the bargain price of $6,000 a reader, not to mention renovating the mansion residence of a political donor/ambassador in Europe who would be the subject of yet another cover-up after being accused of pedophilia (but not before causing a public scandal by blaming anti-Semitism on the Jews) there was no money for securing a diplomatic mission that was so far behind enemy lines it might as well have been in the middle of Iran.

And again it was no one’s fault. Despite multiple whistleblowers from the State Department coming forward, most of them left of center types who wouldn’t spit on a Koch Brother, the panels and committees wrote the establishment a blank check.

It was no one’s fault. Anyone who disagreed with the assertion that the murder of four Americans might be someone’s fault was a right-wing conspiracy theorist. Anyone who thought that we should listen to the testimony of Gregory Hicks, the highest ranking diplomat in Libya after Ambassador Stevens was killed, or to Ambassador Stevens’ own messages asking for more security, was a crazed nutjob.

Only a lunatic would think this might be someone’s fault.

“When I arrived in Tripoli on July 31, we had over 30 security personnel, from the State Department and the U.S. military, assigned to protect the diplomatic mission to Libya. All were under the ambassador’s authority,” Hicks wrote. “On Sept. 11, we had only nine diplomatic security agents under Chris’s authority to protect our diplomatic personnel in Tripoli and Benghazi.”

“For some reason, my explanation did not make it into the Senate report,” he added.

Obama’s executive order granting amnesty to 4 million illegal aliens exposes yet again the hypocrisy and cynicism of the most partisan administration in recent history. Typical of a president who seemingly can’t remember or doesn’t care what he has publicly told the people, Obama went ahead and took action that more than 20 times he had publicly said he couldn’t legally take­­. And he did so not because of some pressing “crisis” of illegals living “in the shadows,” a rationale that ignores the real crisis–– illegal deadbeats and thugs serially passing though a porous border in order to create mayhem and disorder in our communities. Rather, this action was a rank partisan gift to vocal activists and clients of the Democratic Party.

More important, however, this latest instance of presidential overreach undermines the most important foundation of the Western political tradition going back to the ancient Greeks––the suspicion of any necessarily flawed man’s excessive power that inevitably flouts the limits imposed by the supreme law of the land.

In ancient Athens, for example, the turannos or “tyrant” was the exemplar of the dangers that flow from excessive power vested in one person. It wasn’t that the tyrant was completely evil and oppressive. Many Greek tyrants, like the Athenian Peisistratus, benefitted their communities. Yet given human nature, even a well-meaning leader given excessive power often will abuse it to gratify his own selfish desires, ambitions, and interests at the expense of the law and the freedom of his fellow citizens. In ancient Greek political thought, the tyrant became the monitory example of power’s ability to corrupt, and thus often was depicted as violent, paranoid, and excessive in his actions.

The American founders were intimately familiar with this tradition. For them a generalissimo like Julius Caesar, who violated the Roman Republican constitution and ruled as an autocrat until his assassination, was the warning against creating a too powerful executive. One of the most popular Romans of the pre-Revolutionary period was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide rather than submit to Caesar. Joseph Addison’s play Cato was the most popular theatrical production of this period. George Washington had it produced for his troops during the grim winter at Valley Forge, and Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death” was a paraphrase of a line from the play.

1. Obama isn’t implementing amnesty. He’s fighting amnesty or something.

“I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today… That’s the real amnesty – leaving this broken system the way it is.”

In a speech filled with howlers and crazy lies, Obama’s claim that deporting illegal aliens is amnesty but giving them legal status isn’t, tops the list.

Somewhere George Orwell is climbing out of a grave and calling his lawyer. Really, we can now add “deportation is amnesty and legalization is deportation” to the old freedom and war list.

2. We are a nation of laws

“Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable… “

The least appropriate time to namecheck America as a nation of laws is when you have to decided to…

A. Illegally usurp Congress

B. Provide sanction to lawbreakers

C. Disregard the very immigration laws you’re mentioning

When you use phone and pen to run everything, then the country isn’t a nation of laws. It’s a nation of executive orders.

3. Amnesty for 5 million illegals isn’t “mass amnesty”

“Mass amnesty would be unfair. Mass deportation would be both impossible and contrary to our character. What I’m describing is accountability – a commonsense, middle ground approach”

Obama has a bad habit of claiming to be the centrist because he’s standing between two strawmen extremes. But this is pathetic even by that measure.

Here he’s seriously claiming that amnesty for 5 million illegal aliens isn’t “mass amnesty”. If not every single illegal alien has been amnestied, then it’s not “mass amnesty”.

Is there anyone out there stupid enough to believe that?

4. Which part of illegal don’t you understand?

“But even as we focus on deporting criminals, the fact is, millions of immigrants – in every state, of every race and nationality – will still live here illegally…”

Illegally entering the US is a crime. Illegal aliens are criminals. Identity theft, routine among illegals, is also a crime.

5. No, seriously

“I know that some worry immigration will change the very fabric of who we are, or take our jobs, or stick it to middle-class families at a time when they already feel like they’ve gotten the raw end of the deal for over a decade. I hear these concerns. But that’s not what these steps would do.”

After summarizing some of the problems from his amnesty, Obama’s response is “no they won’t”. That’s it. Followed by using some kids as human shields.

Obama isn’t even bothering to have a debate. He falls back into his usual sanctimonious “I hear what you’re saying, now let me ignore it.”

Obama’s excuse for his illegal amnesty will be that the immigration system is “broken” forcing him to act. But when Obama says that the system is broken, he means that some parts of it still work and so he intends to break immigration all the way through to benefit his own corrupt political allies.

That will hurt his own voters the most, but the Democratic Party has a notoriously masochistic relationship with its voting base. It beats them up and then it gaslights them by hugging them and telling them that it was really the mean Republicans who punched them in the face.

When African-American unemployment rates rise, the workers who can’t find jobs because of all the brand new DREAMERs won’t blame the White House, they’ll blame the evil Republicans for income inequality, assuming Sharpton manages to read the term correctly from his MSNBC teleprompter.

According to Obama our immigration system is broken because it doesn’t allow illegal aliens who illegally crossed the border to take American jobs. That’s not a broken system, that’s what the system is supposed to do.

When illegal aliens aren’t allowed to legally take American jobs, that’s how you know the immigration system is working. In the language of progressivism, helping means ruining and fixing means breaking. A system that fulfills any useful purpose must be reformed out of all usefulness. If the tattered shreds of the immigration system still keep a single Democratic voter from legally cashing a welfare check and casting a vote, then immigration must be reformed and helped and fixed until it is completely destroyed.

The immigration system is broken because it was reformed so many times that it makes as much sense as an outhouse on a space shuttle. Its main function now is to bring millions of people without jobs to a country where millions are out of work. Obama wants to fix that by adding millions more people.

Our system of immigration is a perfectly good system for importing lots of low wage workers. The only problem is they’re being imported into a country where there are a lot more low wage workers than there are jobs. The cost of providing food stamps and social services for the immigrants and the Americans they put out of work is passed on to the shrinking middle class which kills more jobs.

Some Republicans would like to modify it to help Mark Zuckerberg bring cheaper third world programmers and engineers to replace the Americans over at Facebook. Why settle for just wiping out the working class, when you can also take out chunks of the middle class?

THEY, LIKE JONATHAN GRUBER MUST THINK THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS STUPID….FOR WEEKS AFTER BENGHAZI WE WERE LED TO BELIEVE THAT A VIDEO CRITICAL OF ISLAM WAS THE FUSE THAT IGNITED THE MURDERS IN BENGHAZI. CLINTON AND THE PREZ EVEN WENT TO GREAT LENGTHS DENOUNCING THE ANTI-ISLAM VIDEO AS LATE AS SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

U.S. Embassy Spends $70K on Ads Denouncing Anti-Muslim Film for Pakistani TV

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/09/20/u-s-embassy-spends-70k-on-ads-denouncing-anti-muslim-film-for-pakistani-tv/

“The U.S. Embassy in Pakistan has started screening advertisements on Pakistani television featuring President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning the film “Innocence of Muslims.”The ad cost the embassy $70,000 and started running on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. It features clips of both Obama and Clinton each denouncing the film and seeking to distance the United States from it, their words translated in Urdu.“A message from the President of the United States Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” the spot begins.

There is an old truism in Washington that if you have to release a piece of information, but would prefer that information not get a lot of publicity, the best time to do it is Friday afternoon. Not only are journalists less likely to cover cover stories that come down the pipeline on Friday afternoons, but people looking forward to the weekend are less likely to read them.

Not to cast aspersions on the motives of the Republican-led House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, but there may be a reason why its two-years-in-the-making investigative report about what really occurred during a 2012 raid on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Lybia was released to the public on a Friday afternoon.

The 36-page report found not only that neither the military nor the CIA acted improperly during the raid—in which four Americans were killed, including Ambassador Chris Stevens—but also largely cleared Obama administration appointees.

“We spent thousands of hours asking questions, poring over documents, reviewing intelligence assessments, reading cables and emails, and held a total of 20 committee events and hearings,” Mike Rodgers (R – Mich.) and C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D – Md.), the ranking members of the committee said in a statement to the Associated Press. “We conducted detailed interviews with senior intelligence officials from Benghazi and Tripoli as well as eight security personnel on the ground in Benghazi that night. Based on the testimony and the documents we reviewed, we concluded that all the CIA officers in Benghazi were heroes. Their actions saved lives.”

It is difficult to think that President Obama — or leaders in Europe — want their names to go down in history as the fools who actually legitimized a rogue entity such as “Palestine” or enabled Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. But just as Neville Chamberlain is looked on as the biggest laughing stock in history for promising “peace” with Hitler, so can Obama’s legacy be that of an even bigger fool. Chamberlain, after all, did not have a Chamberlain to warn him.

On October 30, when the Swedish government recognized “the State of Palestine,” Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said she thought that the decision “shows the way” to other European governments.

It seems she is right. Even earlier, on September 30, French President François Hollande declared that “France will soon recognize a Palestinian state.” French Socialist representatives are presently working on a text along those lines. And on October 13, the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of the official recognition of “Palestine”, even if the vote was non-binding.

But non-binding votes can easily lead to binding decisions.

Sure enough, true to Wallstrom’s prediction, on November 18, the Spanish parliament did the same thing — on the same day as a murderous terrorist attack on Israeli civilians praying at a synagogue in Jerusalem.

Wallstrom had added that the recognition of the “State of Palestine” by the Swedish government would help to facilitate renewed negotiations and strengthen the positions of the “moderates.”

In reality, however, all recent diplomatic statements of Mahmoud Abbas[1] and other “Palestinian” leaders show a willingness to reach a formal recognition of “Palestine” but without the negotiations to which they had agreed under international law in Oslo II, and without any peace agreement.

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A Rational Scrutiny Sampler I highlight some of my prefatory remarks on the four Chess Hanrahan detective novels and on the seven Cyrus Skeen novels.

Taking a break from all the doleful and depressing news running riot in the MSM and the Internet and from around the nation and world, and also from reading a superb book on the Montesorri System which I will review later, I have decided to post a sampler of Rational Scrutiny: Paradoxes and Contradictions in Detective Fiction (Patrick Henry Press, 2014), which is available as a print book, on Kindle, and as an audio book. (With the odd exception of The Pickwick Affair, the print editions also are all available at Barnes & Noble, if you prefer to give them your custom instead.)

In this Sampler I highlight some of my prefatory remarks on the four Chess Hanrahan detective novels and on the seven Cyrus Skeen novels. To wit:

In this volume of nonfiction I present excerpts from novels featuring my own two fictional private detectives who take the “intellectual” approach to solving crimes: Chess Hanrahan, who specializes in solving “moral paradoxes,” and Cyrus Skeen, a denizen of the third decade of the last century. Both are college graduates and veterans of the New York City Police Department. Hanrahan went to Fordham University, quit the force after a tongue-lashing by a district attorney, and became a private detective. Skeen is a World War I era Yale graduate who spent a short time on the force as a plainclothesman before following his avocation of writing short stories, and moved to San Francisco where he gleaned most of his story ideas from his private investigations.

Readers of the print and Kindle editions of their stories (and also patrons of the audio book editions) will be familiar with their “inner narrations” or spells of introspection as they sort through a whirlpool of facts, appearances, and chimeras. Hanrahan operates on a motto he culled from a philosophy student’s test paper: Nothing that is observable in reality is exempt from rational scrutiny. Skeen has no motto, and later in his series is moving away from short story writing to publishable essays that plumb the motivations of the criminal mind.

As long as Israel acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs’ national claims to statehood in Judea-Samaria are authentic and legitimate, Israel can never be secure externally, or internally.

“The Arabs… will not flinch from the war of liberation… This is a fight for the homeland – it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.”

– Ahmad Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor as PLO chairman, few days prior to the Six Day War

Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

– The Palestinian National Charter

In my column last Friday, I warned that we were on the cusp of carnage. This grim prognosis came true even more rapidly than I had feared.

Early on Tuesday morning, Arab terrorists brutally struck down Jews at prayer inside a Jerusalem synagogue.

New phase in old battle

In the wake of the column, I was interviewed by the Voice of Israel’s Dan Diker, who asked me whether the recent incidents of Arab terror constituted a new phenomenon, or merely a continuation of the Arab enmity experienced in the past.

My response was that they were, in fact, both.

On the one hand, they reflect the continuation of obdurate Arab refusal to countenance any expression of Jewish political sovereignty. On the other hand, they are part of the emergence of a new, more menacing phase of that process. It is, sadly and predictably, a ghastly culmination of almost a quarter-century of gutless, guileless Israeli policy that has drastically undermined Israel’s deterrence, and dramatically emboldened its Arab adversaries.