RUTHFULLY YOURS

Considering the sundry enthusiasms upon which government at all level spends our money — Harry Reid’s bovine literary interests, helping out those poor struggling people who own Boeing — it is remarkable that the job of apprehending a known felon, once deported from the United States and illegally present in Texas, fell to volunteers in Brooks County, near the Mexican border. Brooks County, like many other border areas, is overrun with illegal immigrants, and the cost of burying those illegals who die in transit, which can run into the six figures annually, has forced the county to cut back on regular law enforcement. And thus we have the volunteer deputies who brought in the felon, who after he injured his ankle had been been abandoned by the coyotes — professional human traffickers — who had brought him across the border. The volunteers were in the process of working a 26-hour shift — that’s 26 hours, not a typo. Consider for a moment that the cost of illegals’ breaking the law is so high that enforcing the law has been handed over to unpaid volunteers.

Similar scenes are playing out across the border. Nearby Duval County, Texas, was the scene of a dramatic car chase when a truckload of illegals was spotted by police, who determined that the vehicle was outfitted with a fraudulent license plate. Two were killed and a dozen injured in the pursuit. (Many years ago, Duval County enjoyed the services of an elected Democratic sheriff whose grandson is a familiar figure here at National Review.) Nearly 200,000 illegals have crossed into Texas’s Rio Grande Valley this year, and the cartels that oversee the coyote operations have the local landowners terrorized into compliance. This includes the trafficking of minors and others destined for the sex trade; perversely, the Department of Homeland Security has been known to send minors trafficked across the border on to their final destinations, thus “completing the criminal mission” of the traffickers, in the words of one federal judge.

Far from the Mexican border, in the South Carolina town of Lexington, Sheriff James Metts is a crusader against illegal immigration, one who successfully persuaded the federal government to allow his deputies to question those they believe to be illegally present in the country and, when warranted, to begin deportation proceedings on the feds’ behalf. In June, Sheriff Metts was indicted by a grand jury on charges of taking bribes from a local restaurateur to release illegals in his employ. According to the indictment, the bribes came from Gregorio M. Leon, owner of the San Jose Mexican restaurant. Both men are well known and, until recently, were admired for their community spirit. One wonders why Mr. Leon would bother with a bribe; if he were hiring illegals, he’d likely receive gentle treatment from the Obama administration. While talking tough about cracking down on those who employ illegals, the administration has in fact been systematically reducing penalties handed down for that felony, according to an inspector general’s report. Fines have been reduced by as much as two-thirds or even four-fifths; there are millions of illegals working in the United States, but there is nothing even approaching a proportional number — or a rounding error on it — of businessmen serving time for employing them.

The 12-day search for three kidnapped Israeli teens ended Monday with the discovery of their bodies near the West Bank town of Hebron.

The kidnapping and murder of the three — Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel, both 16 – was perpetrated by Hamas, the terrorist network that now runs the Palestinian government in partnership with the supposedly moderate Fatah Party of Mahmoud Abbas.

The search for the teenagers was conducted while Hamas increased its rain of missiles fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli civilians. On Sunday, even before the boys’ bodies were found, Israeli air force jets attacked about 12 Hamas sites in Gaza believed to conceal rocket launchers and weapons factories. The Israelis responded to the discovery of the bodies by launching about three dozen more attacks on Monday night.

The rocket attacks from Gaza weren’t enough to truly infuriate Israel, but the murder of the three boys has to a degree unseen in years. An increasingly desperate search to rescue them that entered over a thousand Palestinian buildings and homes, ended with a resolute statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay,” adding the teenagers “were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by human animals.”

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In response, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said, “Netanyahu should know that threats don’t scare Hamas, and if he wages a war on Gaza, the gates of hell will open on him.” Hamas commander Khaled Mashaal reportedly telephoned Turkish President Erdogan to urge that the international community “… move quickly to halt the Zionist aggression and lift the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.”

Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee member Hanan Ashwari told Al Jazeera that “Israeli escalation already took place, now they have an excuse of further escalation.”

Palestinians stoned the Israeli Defense Force ambulance sent to recover the boys’ bodies. The reactions of Zuhri, Mashaal, Ashwari and the stone-throwers should surprise no one because they followed the established Palestinian norm, the Palestinian narrative that is accepted by the global left and its media allies. To them Israel is to be condemned for responding to deadly force with deadly force and the Palestinians held innocent of even disturbing the fictional peace process.

Some among the Western governments and media demand that the Israelis use the “opportunity” of the teenagers’ murder to try harder to reach peace with the Palestinians. The Israelis shouldn’t and won’t because the Hamas-dominated Palestinian government is threatening another terrorist upheaval.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Non-invasive test for artery function. Israel’s Itamar Medical manufactures the EndoPAT diagnostic device that measures how well your arteries are working. Japan’s Nihon Kohden will market EndoPAT to 100,000 doctors in Japan as its flagship product for monitoring the heart and blood vessels.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-itamar-medical-signs-distribution-agreement-in-japan-1000947940

Tiny propellers can steer to the cells. Nano-sized propellers have been developed by researchers at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. They have the potential to deliver cancer-killing chemicals directly to tumors without harming healthy cells.
http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Smallest-ever-cancer-busting-nano-propellers-developed-by-Israeli-German-team-360182

Kidney cells can regenerate. Until recently, scientists believed that the liver was the only internal organ that could regenerate. Now researchers at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Aviv University and Stanford University have traced cell growth in the kidney. By speeding up growth they may in the future cure Chronic Kidney Disease.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/discovery-could-spare-patients-from-kidney-transplant/

Molecules responsible for depression. Weizmann scientists have identified a microRNA molecule miR135 that controls the levels of serotonin in the brain. Patients suffering from depression have unusually low miR135 levels in their blood. A treatment and diagnostic test are to be developed by miCure Therapeutics.
http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/tiny-molecule-could-help-diagnose-and-treat-mental-disorders#.U6wBdECKhD0

Positive results in Type 1 diabetes treatment study. Israel’s Redhill Biopharma announced preliminary positive data from a pre-clinical study with RHB-104 for the treatment of Type 1 diabetes. Trials of RHB-104 for treating Crohn’s disease and Multiple Sclerosis are on going and are planned for Rheumatoid Arthritis.
http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140626-905884.html

Researchers find major clue toward Alzheimer’s cure. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered one of the reasons for the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. A molecular mechanism involving amyloid precursor protein (APP) elevates brain neuron function and “short-circuits” brain communications.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/researchers-find-major-clue-toward-alzheimers-cure/

ReWalk gets US FDA approval. US health regulators have approved the ReWalk exoskeleton system developed by Israel’s Argo Medical. ReWalk’s leg braces, motion sensors and motorized joints respond to subtle changes in upper-body movement and shifts in balance, allowing paraplegics to stand and walk.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/us-regulators-okay-israeli-made-robotic-legs/

Doctors remove 8 objects swallowed by infant. Specialists at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikvah extracted 8 various foreign bodies from the esophagus of a 14-month-old infant. Gastroenterologists, nutritionists and otolaryngologists extracted pumpkin seeds, orange pits, humous balls and various pebbles.
http://www.schneider.org.il/Eng/Index.asp?ArticleID=918&CategoryID=119&Page=1

A clinic to help diabetics age better. The Center for Successful Aging with Diabetes at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer is a model for how diabetes can be managed. Patients get a five-hour physical and cognitive checkup plus a plan of how to manage diabetes and avoid complications such as dementia.
http://www.israel21c.org/health/how-to-age-successfully-with-diabetes/
http://eng.sheba.co.il/Sheba_News/411.htm

Murder and mothers’ milk
During the wee hours of Wednesday morning, 16-year-old Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir was forced into a car by two men near his home in Shuafat, an Arab neighborhood in east Jerusalem. He was then killed, set on fire and left in a forest.

After identifying the body and giving a statement to the police, his father spoke to the media.

“The settlers killed my son, they kidnapped him and killed him,” he told Time magazine, displaying a photo of the two suspects on his cellphone, from footage caught by the surveillance camera of an adjacent shop.

His assertion that Israeli “settlers” had committed the crime was made before any facts were established by forensic examiners or police investigators. The assumption behind the charge was that Muhammad’s murder was a revenge attack committed by frenzied Jews responding to the abduction and slaying of Israeli teenagers Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel on June 12.

As soon as word got out about Muhammad’s murder, Arab residents of east Jerusalem began to riot. Some young men proceeded to pelt Israeli police with rocks and Molotov cocktails; others smashed and torched light-rail stations, burning tires in the middle of the street. It was an eruption of violence that spread to the Beit Hanina neighborhood and continued for days.

Though the funerals of Eyal, Gil-ad and Naftali had just been held the previous day — amid increasing rocket-fire into Israeli towns from Gaza, and retaliatory strikes by the Israeli Air Force — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it his first order of business on Wednesday morning to issue a statement condemning Muhammad’s “despicable murder” and vowing to “uncover” who was behind it.

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, declared: “This is a horrible and barbaric act which I strongly condemn. This is not our way and I am fully confident that our security forces will bring the perpetrators to justice. I call on everyone to exercise restraint.”

Israelis from across the political spectrum reacted similarly, rushing to denounce “price-tag” actions committed by Jews. Some went as far as Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev, who blamed Israeli society as a whole for the murder.

“The gangs of Jewish ruffians man-hunting for Arabs are no aberration,” he wrote. “Theirs was not a one-time outpouring of uncontrollable rage following the discovery of the bodies of the three kidnapped students. Their inflamed hatred does not exist in a vacuum: It is an ongoing presence, growing by the day … nurtured in a public environment of resentment, insularity and victimhood.”

I go through the headlines and news stories in over one-hundred publications daily. I do this so that I can view multiple sources on some of the same stories. Doing this allows me to formulate what is fact and what is disingenuous spin; propaganda meant to trick the public into thinking one way instead of another. Make no mistake, both ideological prospective do it. It’s the art of modern political war. But the Progressive Left has myriad vehicles to attack the ideological Right, where the Right has many fewer (thank you uber-stingy money people on the Right).

A perfect example of the Left’s disingenuous attack on the Right’s information sources comes in an article in the Huffington Post by Jack Mirkinson titled, FOX News Really Doesn’t Want to Talk About the Good Jobs News, where he writes:

“Quick! Can you find Fox News’s coverage of the latest job figures?”

He includes some main page screen shots.

“Still can’t find them? OK, we’ll help you out. What if we zoom in?…OK, OK, we’ll show you! The link is that little one right in the corner there…For some reason, FOX News appears to want to downplay the very good job numbers. For good measure, the network also downplayed the figures on its airwaves as well.”

He then goes on to show how the far-Left mainstream media outlets dutifully took the Obama Administration’s spun numbers touting them as miraculous by supplying one – one – example: a screen shot of CNN’s breaking news on the numbers.

The good numbers that Mr. Mirkinson points to are the BLS statistic that 288,000 jobs were created last month. Is that good news? Yes. Is it the miraculous news Mr. Mirkinson suggests? No.

To remain at peace when you should be going to war may be often very dangerous….Let us attack and subdue…that we may ourselves live safely for the future.– Thucydides (c. 460–395 BCE)

No government, if it regards war as inevitable, even if it does not want it, would be so foolish as to wait for the moment which is most convenient for the enemy.– Otto von Bismarck (1815–1890)

If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.– Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
For anyone with half a brain it should be crystal clear: The peace-with-Palestinians paradigm is irredeemably broken.

The triple murder of the abducted teenagers, together with the shower of rockets on the South, should have driven that point home, even for the most obdurate devotee of what, perversely, has become known as the “peace process.”

Cavalcade of counterproductive concessions

Over the last half decade, the Netanyahu government has made a series of humiliating and hazardous concessions in an ill-advised and ill-fated attempt to sustain an unworkable process and an egregious endeavor to curry favor with an innately inimical US administration.

Predictably, this has produced nothing but further demands for even more hazardous and humiliating concessions.

The cavalcade of counter-productive climb-downs began shortly after Binyamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, when he reneged on his election pledges and accepted the idea of a Palestinian state.

This ideological capitulation dramatically transformed the debate on Palestinian statehood from whether there should be a Palestinian state, to what the characteristics of that state should be. It was followed in November 2009 by acquiescence to an unprecedented 10-month construction freeze in the hope of coaxing the Palestinians into negotiations. The only response this elicited – and only as it was just about to expire – was a demand for it to be extended.

Then, in 2012, in stark contradiction to Netanyahu’s publicly professed principle of resolute refusal to bow to demands from terrorists (which in large measure brought him much of his initial public prominence), he bowed to the Hamas conditions, releasing over 1,000 convicted terrorists in exchange for a single IDF soldier, Gilad Schalit. This was something so abjectly compliant that even his predecessor, the wildly accommodative Ehud Olmert, had resisted such an exchange.

By so doing, in a stroke Netanyahu made a mockery of his own defiant doctrine which had deemed concessions to terrorists counterproductive.

Counterproductive cavalcade (cont.)

Israel was soon to reap the bitter fruits of its misplaced “largesse” with the brutal murder this April of Baruch Mizrahi, a father of five, at the hands of a terrorist freed in the Schalit deal.

The Justice Department’s charges against Khatallah are curiously sparse.

What happens when the president who has politicized law-enforcement to a degree unprecedented in American history meets a terrorist responsible for killing Americans he has recklessly failed to protect, decimating his pretensions about “decimating” al-Qaeda?

What happens is: You get the most politicized terrorism indictment ever produced by the Justice Department. Behold United States v. Khatallah, Case No. 14 Crim. 141, quietly unsealed in a Washington courtroom last Saturday while the country dozed off into summer-vacation mode.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, of course, is the only suspect apprehended in connection with the Benghazi massacre, a terrorist attack on a still-mysterious U.S. diplomatic installation. J. Christopher Stevens, the United States ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans — State Department official Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty — were killed. Until recently, such attacks have been known as acts of war carried out by the enemy. In the age of Obama, they are now known as “crimes” for which “defendants” like Khatallah are “brought to justice” — rather than brought to Gitmo. Meaning: They are whisked into our country when no one’s paying much attention. The red carpet is rolled out at a federal courthouse, where the “defendant” is given Miranda warnings, taxpayer-funded counsel, and all the rights of the American citizens they plot to kill, including lavish discovery-of-intelligence files relevant to their civilian trial.

Gold-plated due process for our enemies begins with the constitutional right to an indictment returned by a grand jury, providing the “defendant” with notice of the charges against him. In Khatallah’s case, the first thing you’ll notice is that the indictment is tiny: less than two pages long — 15 measly lines of text once you discount the caption, citations, and signature lines. This is a startling departure from Justice Department indictments in jihadist terror cases, a turn to brevity that cannot be explained solely by Obama’s banning of words like “jihadist” from the government lexicon.

In big criminal cases — and there are none bigger than those involving terrorist attacks — indictments tend toward book length, written in a narrative style designed to cut through the legalese and explain what happened. See, if the prosecutor is ethically convinced that there is sufficient evidence to convict an accused terrorist, his duty is to plead the case as expansively as necessary to get that evidence admitted.

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL: KATHRYN LEE BATES 1913

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine!

O Beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Revolutions are not unique. Some countries have revolutions all the time until revolution becomes their national sport. In banana republics the overthrow of one dictator to make way for another gives everyone a day off from work.

These revolutions, no matter how they are cloaked in the familiar rhetoric of liberty, are nothing more than tyranny by other means.

What made the American Revolution unique was that its cause was not the mere transfer of power from one ruler to another or one system to another, but a fundamental transformation of the nature of rule.

Every revolution claims to be carried out in the name of the people, but it’s never the people who end up running things.

The Declaration of Independence did more than talk about the rights of the people. It placed the people at the center of the nation and its government, not as an undifferentiated mass to be harnessed for whatever propaganda purposes they might be good for, but as individuals with hopes and dreams.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That is not merely some bland reference to a mass of people. There is no collective here, only the individual. The greater good of independence is not some system that will meet with the approval of the mass, but that will make it possible for the individual, each individual, to live a free life, not a life lived purely for the good of the mass, but for his own sake.

In a time when government mandates what you can eat and how much of it, only one of the ways it seeks to regulate every aspect of daily life for the greater good– the declaration that started it all declares that the purpose of government is not social justice, a minimally obese population, universal tolerance or even equality. Equality is acknowledged as a fact, not as a goal.

For Gustav Niebuhr, a former religion reporter with The New York Times, last month’s decision by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to divest from companies that do business with Israel is an affront — both spiritual and personal.

The nephew of famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — once described by Barack Obama as “one of my favorite philosophers” — is fighting back against what he sees as a misguided take on Israel and an attack on his great uncle.

The Jewish community was also taken aback — and angered — by the national Presybterian organization’s approval of the divestment, which narrowly passed with a 310-303 vote after a decade of similar efforts and earlier this year, the release of a controversial document.

In “Zionism Unsettled,” a study guide published by a national committee of the Presbyterian Church that blames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “on pathology inherent in Zionism,” the authors attack not only the Jewish state, but also its supporters — including Reinhold Nie­buhr.

Niebuhr was one of the most prominent theologians in America until his death in 1971 and a close friend of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish thinker. But the study guide casts him in a different light. It accuses him of “moral blindness” in supporting the Jewish state and ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

“To call him ‘morally blind’ is really just disgraceful,” said Gustav Niebuhr, who is Presbyterian and a professor of religion at Syracuse University. Also, “it’s just not true.”

In response, Niebuhr is working with Presbyterian clergy and laypeople around the United States — including at least one minister in Philadelphia — to mend ties with the Jewish community. He is also helping draft a full-page advertisement to run in The New York Times on behalf of Presbyterians who oppose the divestment.

Niebuhr was 16 when his great-uncle died, and remembered him as a “kind older relative” who lived on the Upper West Side. But much of his connection to the prominent theologist came later, reading his books and what others had written about him. Toward the end of Reinhold’s life, as his health declined after several strokes, he took almost daily walks with Heschel.

“These walks, ordered by the doctor for Reinhold’s health, when in the company of Abraham, became times of exchange and refreshment,” his widow, Ursula Niebuhr, said in a 1983 speech delivered at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. “It was no wonder to me that these two friends found each other so congenial, not only in this shared universe of discourse, but also in their dependence upon and reference to the Hebrew prophets.”