RUTHFULLY YOURS

The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.

Over the past six years Obama and progressives partially achieved some of these progressive goals. Through legislation, executive orders, like-minded judges, and the interpretations of law by anonymous, unelected federal functionaries, Obama’s government has intervened in the automobile, finance, health care, and housing industries; hampered the explosive growth of the energy industry by reducing development on federal lands and waging a war on carbon; encroached on the states’ sovereignty through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the renegade Department Of Justice; and intruded into civil society and individual rights on issues such as contraception, traditional marriage, freedom of speech, and religious freedom.

Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending has exploded, increasing along the way the wider regulatory scope and intrusiveness of the federal agencies created to manage this transfer of wealth. Social welfare spending now approaches a trillion dollars a year, people claiming Social Security Disability insurance have increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11 million today, and the number of people getting food stamps has doubled to 46 million just over the last decade. These trillions in transfer payments represent a massive redistribution of property. According to the Tax Foundation, America’s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.

Judging by their actions, most Arab leaders do not want to create yet another terrorist Islamist state, dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and to toppling their regimes. We do want a Palestinian state, but please, only one that will provide responsible governance.

According to the “Arab street”, it is the Americans and Europeans who are cowards, afraid to take significant steps against Iran, and terrified of the Islamic ghettoes in their cities, which have been exporting terrorists to fight for the Islamic State, and providing housing to the seasoned fighters who return.

To Arabs, the ultimate irony is that America is paying Qatar to have its airbase there, while Qatar is paying terrorists to kill Americans.

When John Kerry claimed it was the unresolved Palestinian issue that caused a ripple effect that crated ISIS, he simply inspired the Palestinians to use Al-Aqsa mosque as a religious trigger for future bloodshed.

There is a civil war currently under way between radical Islam — motivated by imperialist fantasies of restoring the Islamic Caliphate — and the more moderate secular Muslim regimes which are seeking the path to modernization and progress.

At the same time, Sunni Islam is in the midst of an increasingly violent crisis in its dealings with Shi’ite Iran, which looks as if it is about to be granted nuclear weapons capability, and which for decades quietly has been eyeing neighboring Arab oil fields.

To reduce their own fear, the clerics try to raise the fear levels among the public.

Rare as they are, media accounts of attacks are minimized; victims are blamed; women’s voices are omitted, and the attackers are regarded sympathetically.

A young woman with two inches of hair showing is the small “hole in the dyke” that can with time, break the dam and flood the country with all the things the revolution was carried out to prevent: liberalism, individual freedoms, religious and political tolerance, democracy, free speech, equal rights for women and on and on.

One curly lock in the open air convulses the totalitarian with fear, the fear that he may be shown to be, in the last analysis, irrelevant.

News reports are coming in of massive demonstrations in Iran on October 25, throughout the northern half of the country — Saqqez, Tehran, Mashhad, Rasht, Shahr-e Kord, and Isfahan. The protests all focused on the issue of acid-throwing. At each event, the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, the police and their supporters moved in hard with tear gas and pepper spray. They were shooting in the air, and battering women.

In the days of Shah Abbas the Great, his capital city, the beautiful Isfahan, was celebrated in the rhyming couplet “Isfahan, nesf-e jehan”: “Isfahan is half the world.” Today, however, in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan, acid attacks on “badly veiled” girls have grown frequent. In early October 2014 alone, there were as many as 14 acid attacks on young women in Isfahan.[1]

It’s been nearly a decade since George W. Bush delivered his second inaugural address, which contained this remarkable line: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

If the GOP takes the Senate on Tuesday and wants to learn how to speak foreign policy again, it has to unlearn that line.

Republicans know what’s wrong with Barack Obama ’s foreign policy. He has given the U.S. the reputation of a faithless friend and feckless foe. He sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan with no intention of defeating the Taliban, raising the cost by cheapening the goal. He squandered a hard-won win in Iraq with a fumbled exit.

He announces initiatives—the pivot to Asia, the arming of moderate Syrian rebels—then fails to follow up. He is gutting the military. He repeatedly shows that he is disengaged, ill-advised and stunningly ill-informed. Tell us, Mr. President: Is al Qaeda, core or otherwise, still on a “path to defeat”?

And so on. You know the record. It’s easy to lambaste and lampoon.

A Republican Congress will have to take serious, if not main, responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs. So a few pointers toward that end:

A policeman is not a priest. George W. Bush’s foreign policy went wrong when, seeking a substitute rationale for the war in Iraq following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, he turned his freedom agenda into the core pillar of Mideast policy. In doing so, he transformed the role of the U.S. from a great power with the will and the wherewithal to maintain order, deter aggression and punish rogues, into a missionary cause intent on redeeming broken societies through the salvific medium of elections. Instead of being the world’s cop, we attempted to be the world’s priest. Bad move.

“Someday, if our decline is not terminal, there will arise a movement to restore academic standards to our colleges and universities, now crippled by political correctness and cultural and moral relativism. Someday the absurdity of the attack on our energy sources will be recognized (nuclear energy when Miro took up the cudgels, fossil fuels now that the know-nothings have moved on to the phony global warming apocalypse). When that day comes, Miro’s contribution will be rediscovered, reassessed and celebrated. He will be recognized as a hero in the intellectual wars of the latter years of the twentieth century.” Rael Jean Isaac

Miroslav Todorovich died at the age of 89 in Seattle. For many years Miro was a warm friend and valued advisor to Americans for a Safe Israel and attended our national conferences as a special guest when Edward Teller, his close friend and partner in the energy wars, was honored by AFSI.

Miro made an extraordinary contribution to American public life. He was founder–and behind the scenes the key player, for he always gave the limelight to others–in a series of organizations that aimed to restore rationality to our basic institutions, from our universities to our energy system. The names of Miro’s organizations tended to be cumbersome: University Centers for Rational Alternatives, the Committee for Academic

Non-Discrimination and Integrity, Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy, but their goals were simple and fundamental: universities that–without violent disruptions–would teach the achievements of Western civilization; selection based on merit, not accidents of race and color; the development of energy sources based on scientific knowledge, not trumped-up terror scenarios or pie-in-the-sky fantasies.

Miro was born in Belgrade in 1925 where his father co-founded the Belgrade daily Politika which Miro describes as a kind of New York Times of the Balkans (before the Times morphed from the newspaper of record into the loadstone of political correctness). In 1951 he graduated from the University of Belgrade’s Department of Natural Science (with a year studying mass spectrometry at Compagnie Generale de TSF in Paris) and went straight to the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Science, which decided to send several of its most promising young scientists abroad for further study. Miro chose Columbia University. But after only a few months, in what he described as typical of Communist governments, a power struggle at the Institute resulted in an about-face. Miro was called back to Yugoslavia, supposedly for lack of funds. The Institute, unmoved when Columbia offered to provide financial assistance, used his young wife Branka, who had been scheduled to join him in New York, as a hostage. Her passport was confiscated and it would take three years before, in 1956, she was finally able to come to New York. In 1961 their son Mark was born followed by a daughter Mira. Both would eventually obtain degrees in science, Mark in physics, Mira a PhD in chemistry.

Miro would embark upon a long career teaching physics at the City University of New York. But that was only the foundation of his activities. In Yugoslavia Miro had experienced the Nazi regime followed by Tito’s Communist rule. He appreciated the freedoms and democratic values of the United States as only someone from that background could. And so when the universities came under attack in the late 1960s with students disrupting classes, seizing buildings, shrieking obscenities, destroying their professors’ research files, packing guns (Cornell), making non-negotiable “demands,” Miro was horrified at the prospect of academic freedom and indeed Western culture falling to young barbarians within the gates. What he found most appalling was the feeble response of administrations and faculty, with most cravenly caving in to the attackers.
And while many were horrified, Miro acted. In 1968, with famed NYU philosophy professor Sidney Hook, he founded University Centers for Rational Alternatives (UCRA). Hook summed up the organization’s perspective: “Intellectual unrest is not a problem but a virtue. The problem, and the threat, is not academic unrest but academic disruption and violence, which flow from substituting for the academic goals of learning the political goals of action.” UCRA also saw the growing abandonment of any and all curriculum requirements as a major threat to a liberal education.

To paraphrase Jeremiah Wright, the president’s long-time spiritual leader, the chickens**t is coming home to roost. The problem is that Obama and his White House Brat Pack will make sure it continues to do so for another two years.

The President of Chickens**t’s team expresses his policies and acts upon them in consistent disregard for America’s national security interests and those of our allies. How different was former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor’s statement last May that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could still be concerned with the Benghazi attacks — he exclaimed to Fox News’ Bret Baier, “Dude, that was like two years ago” — from a senior Obama administration official last week calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a chickens**t” and a “coward”?

There is no difference whatever except in context. The statements are expressions of a dominant mindset in the White House. It’s a devolution from the “best and the brightest” of the Kennedy era to the “most narcissistic and arrogant” of Obama’s presidency.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s report in the Atlantic was both detailed and clear. Not only does he report that an unnamed senior Obama official said that Netanyahu is “a chickens**t,” the same report said the official called the Israeli PM a coward on the issue of the Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars.” Now, said the official, it’s too late for Netanyahu to do anything about the Iran nuclear program. As if that were true and a good thing to boot.

The media have reacted with surprise — rather than disdain — at these remarks and the administration has made a show of apologizing. But the truth of Obama’s determined break with Israel is now quite evidently a key part of the legacy Obama wants to establish. Consider the context in which these remarks occur.

The first part of the context is the fundamental difference between the Israeli leader and Obama. Barack Obama spent his youth as a member of the “Choom Gang,” smoking weed and heaven knows what else, being coddled through the halls of academia (we still know nothing about his grades or the courses he studied). Benjamin Netanyahu was born in Israel, spent much of his youth in Philadelphia and when he returned to Israel, joined the Israeli army. He became a member of their elite commando unit — Sayeret Matkal (modeled after the British Special Air Service and akin to our Delta Force) — and served in a hostage rescue mission as well as the 1973 war. He was wounded in battle more than once. In each case, the boy made the man.

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research
In the international effort to undermine Israel every avenue of attack from the military to the cultural is being employed. The Arab world is continually stirred to a frenzy pitch on imaginary or exaggerated threats. Palestinian Authority President Abbas (seemingly president for life) spread the unfounded incendiary rumor that Israeli settlers were “desecrating” Al-Aqsa Mosque and noting “we must stop them (the settlers) from entering by any means possible.” But there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that this claim is true?

When Mahmoud Abbas maintained that Jerusalem should be inundated with massive Muslim tourism in order “to preserve its Muslim nature,” Sheikh Qaradawi repudiated this idea arguing instead that visiting Jerusalem is forbidden so long as it is under Israeli occupation; “Jerusalem must be liberated by force and not by ‘tourism’.” As al Qaeda sees it “Jerusalem is the capital of the imminently approaching Islamic Caliphate.”

These threats and the ever present hostile rhetoric create hateful responses. An intifada or the signs of it are breaking out in Jerusalem. Hundreds of young Palestinians have been arrested for the use of “cold weaponry,” such as stones, Molotov cocktails and light explosives. All of the assailants exhort the slogan of “popular resistance” preached to them by the Palestinian Authority President Abbas, even though those in the Obama administration insist on calling him “a moderate.”

None of these recent outbursts is surprising after Abbas’ speech in the United Nations in which he accused Israel of waging a “war of genocide” in the Gaza Strip. Needless to say, Abbas did not mention the thousands of rockets fired into Israel before war commenced.

On October 22 Chaya Zissel Braun, a three month old infant, was killed when a Palestinian man slammed his vehicle into a crowd at a light rail stop in Jerusalem. Nine people were injured, three seriously and one woman died from her injuries. Hamas took credit for this heinous act.

Beverly Perlson of Band of Mothers has sent the following letter to the Secretary of Defense about the horrendous miscarriage of justice that has imprisoned Sgt. Derrick Miller for “pre-meditated murder” for defending himself and his men in Afghanistan.

This is another shameful, shameful case where it becomes clear that the US government would have preferred mourning US casualties to supporting still-living troops who have survived the deadly pitfalls of COIN.

October 31, 2014

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel

Dear Secretary Hagel:

Sgt. Derrick Miller is an American son currently serving a life sentence in Ft Leavenworth, convicted of premeditated murder for his defensive actions on the battlefield in Afghanistan on September, 26, 2010. I write to you as the very proud daughter of a father who served in the Navy in WWII, a very proud sister of a brother who served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, and the very proud mother of a son who served 4 deployments in the 82nd Airborne in this war. With every inch of my being, I love our military and I understand and appreciate the tremendous personal risk our noble Sons and Daughters take who willingly serve to protect this country they must love so dearly. The great benefits of freedom and safety all Americans enjoy, delivered up to them by these brave Americans can never, in my opinion, ever be overstated. I know I will never truly comprehend the horrors and the enormous stress that the men of my family and their brothers have witnessed in war. I struggle with that as I do believe it is the responsibility of every American to appreciate to their deepest depth what these brave defenders of our freedom endure. However, and in spite of my great loyalty to these most noble and courageous Warriors among us, I do believe I am quite capable of questioning intelligently, the unjust and coercive circumstances leading to the imprisonment of some of our Sons in Leavenworth. I am a mother and never have been one for turning Brothers against Brothers and I am certainly not one who supports sacrificing and punishing our American Sons to appease the very brutal and sneaky enemy we are fighting.

My purpose in writing this letter to you is to ask for your review of the troubling “charge” of premeditated murder in Sgt. Derrick Miller’s case, and furthermore, the troubling witness testimony that led to the egregious life sentence of Sgt. Miller. My original intent was to ask for your consideration of a reduction in the sentence of Sgt. Derrick Miller. I believe the charge of premeditated murder is absurd, given the proper protocol this Soldier followed and the coerciveness involved in the witness testimony of his conviction. In my opinion, this conviction, considering all the facts of the case, present a horrifying predicament for all our Soldiers serving in war.

However, as you are presently reviewing the records for transfer of 79 Gitmo detainees out of Gitmo, I respectfully ask for your same review of Sgt Miller’s record, and for that matter, a review of all our Sons serving in Leavenworth in relation to their actions on the battlefield of this war.

Rabin’s tragic death should not obscure his poor judgment and mistakes and the Arab goal of destroying Israel. Correcting those errors should be Rabin’s true legacy.

Rabin’s legacy was the “Oslo process” which shifted national momentum from Zionism and Jewish sovereignty to Palestinianism and the “two state” delusion.

As it becomes increasingly obvious that the Oslo Accords which brought the PLO to power and laid the basis for the two-state plan was an historic mistake, Yitzhak Rabin’s responsibility for this unraveling disaster begs for reevaluation.

The difficulty is his enshrined status as a “hero” in Israeli society.

This re-examination, therefore, is divided into two parts: his military record and his political leadership.

In his early 20s, Rabin joined the Palmach, a pre-state militia associated politically with the Left, and, in 1945, he helped rescue Jewish refugees being held in the British detention camp at Atlit. In early spring of 1948, he commanded the Harel Brigade, tasked with defending Jerusalem and protecting convoys trying to break the siege.

During a battle near Kiryat Anavim in April, 1948, Rabin left to summon help and then went to Jerusalem to sleep, leaving his men in the field. According to military historian Uri Milstein, “Had Rabin not fled … he could have and should have … organized and led his [battle] shocked troops … to [counter]attack … and defeat the enemy… .” (The Rabin File, Gefen Publishers, Jerusalem, p.223).

Following a series of failures, Rabin was relieved of his command on May 11. Six weeks later, he was given command of the unit that fired upon and eventually sank the Altalena, an Irgun supply ship carrying desperately needed weapons (June 22, 1948). Sixteen Irgun members were killed as they struggled to escape the burning vessel; several Palmach fighters were also killed.

“Independent” Greg Orman, who has so many Democrat Party operative working on his campaign one expects to see Nancy Pelosi’s name on his campaign headquarters door, has stated that he will caucus with whatever party presents the best ideas.

Mr. Orman’s campaign website states:

“If Greg is elected, there’s a reasonable chance that neither party would have a majority in the US Senate. If that is the case, he will work with the other independent Senators to caucus with the party that is most willing to face our country’s difficult problems head on and advance our problem-solving, non-partisan agenda.”

Therein lays the problem, and a perfect example of: a) how constitutionally illiterate our political class has become; b) how constitutionally illiterate our citizenry has become; and c) why the 17th Amendment is the most damaging action ever executed by the Progressive Left throughout US history.

When the Progressives of the early 20th Century marshaled through the 17th Amendment, they did a great damage to the symbiotic set of checks and balanced that achieved protections for both the individual and the individual states, where the power of the federal government was concerned. Under the guise of putting more control of government into the hands of the people, the Progressives, under Woodrow Wilson, literally destroyed the check and balance that protected state sovereignty and, through that erosion, the sovereignty of the individual.

At its inception, the US Constitution mandated, in Article I, Section 3, that:

“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote…”