RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Sen. Ted Cruz told an audience of Middle Eastern Christians that they have no better friend than Israel, he stated the literal truth: the Assyrian Christians of Iraq’s north are at greater risk than any Christian population in the world, and their only effective defenders are the Kurdish Peshmerga, which was trained and armed by Israel almost from inception. These facts are widely known. Why, then, did Sen. Cruz’s remarks provoke an eruption of Jew-hatred? A large part of the audience could not control its rage, and drove their keynote speaker from the podium.

There’s a history, and a sad one. I published the essay below in 2009 and reprint it here to help put this event in context. It is a dark day indeed when the government of Egypt can see its way clear to an alliance with Israel against radical Islamists, but many (and perhaps most) Middle Eastern Christians can’t bear the idea of an alliance with Israel. It does not augur well for their survival in the region.

The closing of the Christian womb
By Spengler (crossposted from Asia Times Online)

A century ago, Christians dominated the intellectual and commercial life of the Levant, comprising more than one-fifth of the 13 million people of Turkey, the region’s ruling power, and most of the population of Lebanon. Ancient communities flourished in what is now Iraq and Syria. But starting with the Armenian genocide in 1914 and continuing through the massacre and expulsion of Anatolian Greeks in 1922-1923, the Turks killed three to four million Christians in Turkey and the Ottoman provinces. Thus began a century of Muslim violence that nearly has eradicated Christian communities in the cradle of their religion.

It may seem odd to blame the Jews for the misery of Middle East Christians, but many Christian Arabs do so – less because they are Christians than because they are Arabs. The Christian religion is flourishing inside the Jewish side. Only 50,000 Christian Arabs remain in the West Bank territories, and their numbers continue to erode. Hebrew-speaking Christians, mainly immigrants from Eastern Europe or the Philippines, make up a prospective Christian congregation of perhaps 300,000 in the State of Israel, double the number of a decade ago.
The brief flourishing and slow decline of Christian Arab life is one of the last century’s stranger stories. Until the Turks killed the Armenians and expelled the Greeks, Orthodoxy dominated Levantine. The victorious allies carved out Lebanon in 1926 with a Christian majority, mostly Maronites in communion with Rome. Under the Ottomans, Levantine commerce had been Greek or Jewish, but with the ruin of the Ottomans and the founding of Lebanon, Arab Christians had their moment in the sun. Beirut became the banking center and playground for Arab oil states.

BOYCOTT THIS YOU BDS BASTARDS! rsk

Vaxil BioTherapeutics, a biotechnical company based in Ness Ziona,
near Tel Aviv, has produced a ground-breaking therapeutic vaccine for
cancer patients which could prevent about 90% of cancers from coming
back.

Vaxil was founded in 2006 by Dr. Lior Carmon and the vaccine is now in
clinical trials at the Hadassah University Medical Center in
Jerusalem. The vaccine could be available as early as 2017 to
administer on a regular basis, not only to help treat cancer but in
order to keep the disease from recurring.

The vaccine is being tested against a type of blood cancer, ‘multiple
myeloma’. If the substance works as hoped, its platform technology,
VaxHit could be applied to 90% of all known cancers, including
prostate and breast cancer, solid and non-solid tumors.

Nadine Gordimer’s first book was a collection of stories titled Face to Face. It was published in Johannesburg in 1949 by Silver Leaf Books, a firm newly established by my mother. The collection was reissued three years later in New York by Simon & Schuster, retitled The Soft Voice of the Serpent.

Nadine, who died in July aged 90, was married then to Gerald Gavron and had a daughter named Oriane. She told me it was the name of a character in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Unlike most of my parents’ visitors, she talked to me. I was nine years her junior — 17, and in my first year at university — and for all her friendliness I held her in some awe as a published writer, which I aspired to be. I read her stories and admired the vividness of her descriptions. More than her talent, I admired — and envied — her success. Her work began to appear in the New Yorker. I could imagine no higher peak for a writer to attain. I never stopped admiring her skill; but as the years went by, I found it ever harder to like what she wrote, and eventually I liked it not at all.

Nadine often said in her later years that she had been something of a bohemian in her youth. It must have been before I knew her. Soon after the publication of Face to Face she was divorced, moved into a small flat with Oriane, and did not live anything like a bohemian lifestyle. One afternoon when I went with my mother to see her, we came upon her rebuking her black maidservant for not changing, as was the custom in our world, from a morning-blue uniform with matching cap into a black afternoon uniform with a white cap and apron.

She was writing her first novel, The Lying Days, at that time. She worked in the mornings while Oriane was at school. She was extraordinarily self-disciplined. Every day she rose early, did some physical exercises, then worked until lunchtime. Her afternoons were for living: being with her child and later her two children; seeing friends; shopping. That was the routine she established and stuck to throughout her long life, varying it only when she went on her travels. She told me once that she didn’t revise much but wrote “very slowly”. Slowly the works grew: stories for magazines, later collected and republished in a book; the book of stories followed by a novel; then a collection of stories again, and again a novel, in alternation through the years and the decades.

In her own account of her life, she had always, since her childhood, been concerned with the plight of the blacks. But her early writings showed no sign of it. She had nothing to say about white rule and black subjugation — the flaw in the good life we whites could lead in our beautiful, bountiful country, while the greater part of the population endured oppression, humiliation and poverty. But she got to know people who talked about it: some who worked against the regime from within the system, such as the journalist Anthony Sampson, editor of Drum, a magazine for blacks; and politicians, such as my father, Dr Bernard Friedman, a member of parliament in the “liberal” United Party (who later co-founded the anti-apartheid Progressive Party).

While Benghazi Still Smolders, ISIS Burns Bright
– 9.11.14

Though the fires that consumed our diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, two years ago tonight have long since been put out, the incident still smolders in our minds.

Is it because we have never been able to get at the truth behind the attacks? Because we still don’t know what the president said, did, or didn’t do in the thirteen hours Americans were under fire? Is it because the memoirs of people such as Hillary Clinton are still publishing the risible fiction that the attacks were caused by an obscure anti-Muslim video? Or is it because the Obama administration has for two years masterfully ducked, dodged, and bluffed congressional investigators in the most successful cover-up in living memory?

Benghazi is still burning in our minds for all of those reasons, and more. President Obama’s speech last night — in which he proclaimed his “strategy” for defeating ISIS — only fanned those flames.

The thirteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks has arrived. We don’t know what can or will happen today or tonight anywhere in the world, though it seems likely that more attacks will harm more Americans. We know we haven’t won the wars we’ve fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we don’t have confidence in a president who told us last night that American forces would degrade, and ultimately destroy, what he calls the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” aka “ISIL.”

Most of what we know about the Benghazi attacks is in the January report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As Bob Tyrrell and I wrote in the March issue, the report left most of the important questions about Benghazi unanswered.

We know that — despite twenty terrorist attacks on several nations’ diplomats before the 9-11-12 attacks — neither were our people in Benghazi given adequate security nor were military forces put on alert to protect them. We know there were ten terrorist camps active inside Benghazi’s city limits on the day of the attacks and that even that fact wasn’t enough to bestir State to get our people out or Defense to provide a substantial covering force on alert all the time. And we don’t know who in the State Department either knew or should have known of the dangers and should have provided proper security or gotten our people out before they were attacked. We are told, by Hillary Clinton, that Amb. Stevens insisted on being there. She courageously blames a dead man.

Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus has said that no one in the CIA chain of command ordered anyone to delay a military response to the attacks that might have saved American lives. That statement, more than a year ago, was contradicted by the televised interviews with three of the military contractors stationed at the CIA annex to guard the CIA personnel: Mark Geist, Kris Paranto, and John Tiegen. In an hour-long interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, they said that they had been ordered — three separate times — to stand down rather than go to the aid of those at the diplomatic mission. They delayed for a critical half hour at the order of their CIA boss, someone named “Bob,” and later went anyway in violation of his orders. By the time they got there, Stevens was missing and Sean Smith was probably dead.

Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on September 11, 2001, signaled the beginning of the spreading of the global jihadist plague.

The deliberate dismissal of growing jihadist movements the world over has been aided and abetted by the U.S. and other “non-believer” nations.

Exerpts from the “Letter to America,” that in November 2002 was attributed to Osama bin Laden, clearly set the agenda for all jihadist groups. Yet, greed for Arab oil and money led the U.S. and the others to ignore and often discount the rising Islamic tide.

Moreover, they have swallowed every denial and obfuscation of this rise by leading Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as by Muslim Americans who admit their religious loyalty is to the Nation of Islam, not to the secular United States of America.
The spread of the jihadist plague was further obscured by the U.S. president who just over a year ago declared, “Al Qaeda has been decimated.” His recent dismissal of the increasingly contagious ISIS as a “JV team” did little to contain the disease. Other Western leaders are worried and “surprised.” They shouldn’t be.

A year after al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland, Osama bin Laden laid out very clearly the agenda of the jihadist movement. The Arabic document was translated and circulated by Islamists in Britain-whose Prime Minister, David Cameron, is one of the worried and surprised Western leaders-and was published on November 24, 2002, by the Guardian.

Here are some exerpts that should have caught the attention of all Weatern leader, especially those who saw the 9/11 attacks as a deviation from Islam.

The worst part of President Obama’s speech last night was the appalling failure to mention the Benghazi massacre. Today, we mark the second anniversary of that act of war by the enemy we have been at war with for 13 years, an act of war in which the enemy attacked sovereign American territory and murdered the representative of our country in Libya as well as three other brave Americans. Mr. Obama decided our fallen Benghazi heroes did not merit even a fleeting mention. Let’s focus on two things he did say. The first tells us he was not unaware that a speech about terrorism on the eve of September 11 was a time for reflection on the day’s significance:

My fellow Americans, we live in a time of great change. Tomorrow marks 13 years since our country was attacked. Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression.

So the economic downturn gets a nod in a speech about the threat Americans face from radical Islam, but nothing about the Benghazi attack that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for and that the local al Qaeda franchise, Ansar al-Sharia, carried out two years ago to the day? Here’s the second passage worth noting:

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Core principle? The Benghazi massacre was carried out by scores of jihadists. The commander-in-chief took no meaningful action to come to the rescue of Americans during the hours and hours they were under terrorist siege. In the two years since, the Obama administration has done nothing but indict one jihadist – one – in connection with the attack. Moreover, though Obama’s State Department has identified that man, Ahmed Abu Khatallah, as a senior leader of Ansar al-Sharia, his Justice Department did not charge him as one. As I’ve previously explained, it has filed a politicized indictment designed to fit the administration’s fictional account of Benghazi as a spontaneous uprising provoked by “protests” – an indictment that ignores the legacy of 9/11, al Qaeda’s longstanding jihad against the United States, Obama’s disastrous decision to change sides in Libya, the resulting empowerment of our enemies, and the shocking failure to provide adequate security for Americans mysteriously assigned to work in Benghazi (one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans and one in which Western targets were repeatedly attacked in the months before 9/11/12). We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country?

*The 21st anniversary of Oslo highlights the tragic gap between the underlying assumption of the architects of Oslo – the New Middle East, transitioning to peace – and the Real Middle East.

*The Real Middle East is represented, most authentically, by the Arab Tsunami, which is gaining momentum, not transitioning toward democracy, in defiance of policy-makers, columnists and academicians who defined it as the Arab Spring.

*The Arab Tsunami is a natural derivative of the Real Middle East, as it has been for the last 1,400 years (in reference to inter-Arab relations): the role model of violent intolerance; non-compliance with agreements; unstable/tenuous regimes, coalitions, policies and agreements, which are signed on ice, not carved in stone.

*The following article sheds light on the critical deficiencies of the Oslo state of mind and its derivatives, such as the two state solution and the “disengagement” from Gaza.

The Oslo Accord Reality Check
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, November 1, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aOpfLt

On October 24, 2013 (the Diplomatic Conference) and October 16, 2013 (the memorial ceremony for Prime Minister Rabin), President Peres, the architect of the September, 1993 Oslo Accord, claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian accord was the “opening to dialogue and peace.” Is Peres’ claim vindicated by a reality check?

The Oslo state of mind

The Oslo state of mind was most accurately pronounced by Peres, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Sept. 16, 2000, on the eve of the 2nd Intifada, 2000-2005 wave of Palestinian terrorism: “I believe that the previous borders, made of barbed wire, minefields, military positions, are irrelevant to our life…. I sincerely believe that a good hotel on the border will provide more peace and security than a military position…. I can see very little use for the past. Two things lose their importance: land and history. … To imagine is more important than to remember…. War is out of the question now…. I doubt very much if the Palestinians will go back to terror. … Once a nation’s economy turns from a focus on land to a focus on brains, borders are irrelevant….”

Exclusive: Jack Cashill shares his experience of being blackballed by progressive enforcer

As anyone who has spoken honestly about Islam knows, multiculturalism isn’t all that “multi” and relativism isn’t all that relative.

This lesson I learned in an unexpected place, the venerable Chautauqua (sha-TAWK-wa) Institution in Western New York, a physically beautiful summer colony with a strong ecumenical Christian tradition.

The climactic scene of my one and only novel, the then-futuristic “2006: The Chautauqua Rising,” unfolded at the Institution. Set, as the reader might surmise, in 2006, this political action thriller tells the tale of a grass-roots insurrection that in many ways anticipated the tea party insurgency of 2009-10.

At the time of the book’s publication, the year 2000, I was unaware of any political turmoil at Chautauqua. In the book, I described the Institution as “a perfectly preserved wish dream of late 19th century Americana.”

My gripe at the time was that it was “too quiet, too calm, too relentlessly civilized.”A casual visitor, I did not sense that Chautauqua had long been drifting leftward both politically and theologically.

In the previous decade, much of the tension at the Institution revolved around the progressives’ newfound enthusiasm for things gay. The left’s fondness for imputing bigotry to others was, however, about to find a new focus.

In 2000, the Institution chose the former “general secretary” of the hard left National Council of Churches, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, to be its director of religion. Four years earlier, Campbell had helped orchestrate the black church burning hysteria/ hoax that excited the Democratic base in the run-up to the 1996 election.

The year before her appointment to Chautauqua, Campbell did her Christian best to deliver young refugee Elian Gonzalez to the godless purgatory of Communist Cuba.

This longtime apologist for Fidel Castro hewed faithfully to the party line. Dominican Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, who was helping facilitate Elian’s return, experienced her dogmatism firsthand.

Claimed ‘best antidote’ to anti-Semitism was for Jews to pressure Israel

Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, has resigned in the wake of controversy over a New York Times letter he wrote suggesting Jews were collectively culpable for Israel’s actions and for subsequent rises in global anti-Semitism. “The Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, on his own initiative, has resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately,” said a statement released by the Episcopal Church at Yale. “It is our belief that the dynamics between the Board of Governors and the Priest-in-Charge occasioned the resignation of the Rev. Shipman.”

In his letter to the Times, written in response to Deborah Lipstadt’s op-ed about rising European anti-Semitism, Shipman claimed that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Many readers expressed outrage at what they deemed Shipman’s exercise in victim-blaming, and an attempt to hold all Jews across the globe responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead put it,

No, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be a realization among cretins that “the Jews” are a group of people with very different opinions and desires, that they do not act in concert, and that individual Yale students, for example, of Jewish descent who are American citizens have zero responsibility for any policies of the government of Israel. Anti-Semitism is like racism: most racists don’t think of themselves as racists and most anti-Semites similarly don’t recognize their own twisted prejudice. Perhaps the chaplain at Yale should reflect on the passage in which a well known first century Jewish rabbi urged his followers to take the log out of their own eye before trying to take the splinter out of someone else’s.

Our own editor Mark Oppenheimer also questioned Shipman’s moral calculus:

By your reasoning, why wouldn’t one write, “The best antidote to stop-and-frisk policing would be for black men everywhere to press other black men to stop shooting each other”? Why wouldn’t one write—perhaps after a Muslim was beaten up by white-supremacist thugs—“The best antidote to Islamophobia would be for radical Islam’s patrons abroad to press ISIS and Al Qaeda to just cut it out”?

It is fine to discuss a philosophy of freedom. But discussing it also requires a good, hard look at the political realities that negate any chance of freedom in the near future.

Frightened Turtles

I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state.

This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles.

This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans, Democrats, environmentalists, welfare statists, special interests or lobbyists, and so on. President Barack Obama is the apex and end heir of every statist law and notion ever proposed or legislated, ever since ratification of the Constitution, even as the ink on it was barely dry – and Obama is the logical end of all those unopposed laws and policies. He loots without care or thought of whatever might replace the looted wealth and nullified rights – except for stage-managed anarchy and beating into submission the American spirit.

Obama practices Islamic taqiyya, which is saying one thing in his woozy, folksy style English, but meaning something else. Most readers here, instead of conceding that Obama is a nihilist, buy the official line that he is merely a rudderless, arrogantly insouciant pragmatist. Actually, his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a card-carrying pragmatist, formulating his policies on the premise that he could preserve that status quo – whatever that might have been – by denying the deadly peril of Islam. However, Obama, who administration has been top-heavy with Muslims from his first term, is a rotten-to-the-bone nihilist steeped in “community organizing” and a subscriber to the agenda of the “socialist transformation” of the country into a super-size European Union. Some intellectuals of my acquaintance deny that he is a nihilist, and instead call him a rudderless pragmatist or assign him some other non-condemnatory appellation.

This is not observing his behavior and actions with any kind of objectivity. It is an evasion of the evidence of one’s senses. Waiting for Obamacare to collapse? Waiting for Obama to okay the Keystone Pipeline? Waiting for him to put together a “Coalition of the Reluctant” to combat ISIS? Waiting for him to rein in our lawless Attorney General, Eric Holder, or to order any number of federal agencies to stop spying and threatening private citizens and organizations that question federal power? Take a number.