RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Norman Podhoretz – Reflections of a Jewish Neoconservative
July 14, 2014

As part of the advanced institute on “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews,” Tikvah hosted the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz. Podhoretz has been a partisan of the left, the right, and, most of all, the Jews. In an interview with Tikvah’s executive director Eric Cohen, Podhoretz discussed his life’s work and his ideological transformation. He reflects on his early education and the conflict between his low-brow immigrant Judaism and his high-brow training under Lionel Trilling. He discusses the early days of Commentary, when it was ambivalent about Zionism and part of the anti-communist left. He explains what turned Commentary away from the left, and what kind of foreign policy vision it offered the nascent neoconservative movement. And what about Podhoretz himself? Famously frank and wide-ranging, Podhoretz spends the last half of the event commenting on theology, the American Jewish scene, Radical Islam, classical music, and Shakespeare.

Filming took place on May 19, 2014.

On July 13, Bernard Abouaf, a French Jewish journalist, posted on his Facebook wall: “I just passed through one of the truest moments in my life.” A bit earlier, he had been an eyewitness to a pogrom attempt.

About one hundred Muslim thugs had gathered in front of the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue in Central Paris, a few blocks away from Place de la Bastille (Bastille Circle), and threatened to storm it. Two to three hundred worshipers, who had gathered for a pro-Israel religious service, were locked inside. There were five police officers to protect them–and two dozen Jewish youths trained in martial arts who were members of the Jewish community sponsored Security Organization or of the more militant Jewish Defense League.

For Abouaf, whose family is of Tunisian Jewish descent, the whole scene looked like a reenactment of the storming and torching of the Great Synagogue in Tunis during the Six-Day War in 1967: a traumatic event that accelerated the flight of Tunisian Jews to France or to Israel.

“What I have seen today,” he remarked, “is Arab hatred against Jews. Pure hatred. Right in the middle of Paris. Don’t try to ‘explain’ or ‘understand’, it was hatred, period.” Irving Kristol famously said that a neoconservative was a liberal mugged by reality. Something similar was befalling Abouaf. This was the “truth” he was so eager to share.

The Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue was not stormed. Its bunker-like shape (it was built in 1962) and its strong, straight, iron gates were probably helpful. Even more effective were the young Jewish defenders, who did not shy away from confronting the Muslim rioters. Older Jewish men and women, some in their late forties or early fifties, fought back as well. “The whole thing looked like street guerilla,” one witness said. At least two of the synagogue’s defenders–including a young Chabad chassid–were severely wounded and rushed to a nearby hospital.

The prime minister (and former interior minister) of France Manuel Valls called Serge Benhaim, the synagogue chairman, on his cell phone to assure him that more police forces, including CRS (anti-riot units) would soon be dispatched. It took some time before his orders were implemented; once deployed, even the heavily equipped CRS had to engage into hard fighting and some of them were wounded. Eventually, the worshipers were not just evacuated from the synagogue but escorted away to safer streets or a Metro station: “I will not forget the fear in their eyes as they went out,” wrote Abouaf. This time, it was not just the Tunis pogrom he had in mind, but “scenes of the Holocaust itself.”

Similar incidents occurred all over Greater Paris and France at about the same time. The morning before–that is to say, on the Sabbath–a Molotov cocktail was thrown into a synagogue at Aulnay-sous-Bois, a Parisian suburb. At Asnieres, another suburb, the police said a Muslim mob of 300 gathered in front of the synagogue and shouted anti-Israel slogans for about half an hour. Smaller group of Muslim mobsters attempted to get into the Belleville synagogue, in northeastern Paris, and into the Tournelles synagogue, in the Marais district.

Genetic engineering can produce drought-resistant plants. But activists still don’t like it.

Last year was the driest on record in California, and 2014 could well set another record. Most of the state is experiencing “extreme” drought — the second-most severe category. Reservoir levels are dropping, the snowpack is almost nonexistent, and some communities have already imposed restrictions on water usage. But it is the state’s premier industry — farming — that will be affected most drastically. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses in California, according to the Department of Water Resources.

It seems logical, then, that conservation measures should be focused on agriculture, but not everyone has figured that out. From their perch in a parallel universe, the New York Times’s editorial board saw fit to weigh in last week: “California is in the third year of its worst drought in decades. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how much water the state’s residents and businesses are using.” You wouldn’t know it, either, by looking at the years of rants that the Times has published in opposition to a proven technology that could go a long way toward reducing the usage of water and the impact of the drought.

The technology is genetic engineering, sometimes called genetic modification (GM), which enables plant breeders to make old crop plants do new things, including conserve water. Even with research and development hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by government overregulation, genetically engineered crop varieties are emerging from the development pipeline in many parts of the world. Cumulatively, during the past two decades, more than 3.7 billion acres of them have been cultivated by more than 17 million farmers in 30 countries — without disrupting a single ecosystem or causing so much as a tummy ache. Worldwide, these new varieties have provided “very significant net economic benefits at the farm level amounting to $18.8 billion in 2012 and $116.6 billion for the 17-year period” from 1996 to 2012, according to an authoritative report published by Landes Bioscience earlier this year.

Genetically engineered herbicide-resistant plants make possible the use of no-till farming techniques, in which the soil is not plowed, meaning that there is less soil erosion, less runoff of agricultural chemicals, and lower fuel consumption and carbon emissions by mechanized farm equipment. From 1996 to 2010, the shift to genetically engineered crops reduced carbon emissions by 19.4 billion kilograms, the equivalent of removing 8.6 million cars from the road for a year.

The planting of genetically engineered crops has also obviated the need to cultivate vast additional amounts of arable land. Between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops were responsible for the production of an additional 110 million tons of soybeans, 195 million tons of corn, 15.8 million tons of cotton lint, and 6.6 million tons of canola. If modern genetic-engineering technology had not been available, to maintain worldwide production levels farmers would have had to “find” and cultivate tens of millions of additional acres of arable land.

Alan Dershowitz has called it “the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel country in Europe today.” HanneNabintuHerland, a religious scholar at the nation’s leading university, has criticized it for “refus[ing] to distance itself from Hamas as a terrorist organization.” Its government, as NR’s Jay Nordlinger has noted, was “the first outside the Islamic world to recognize Hamas.”

We’re talking, as you might have guessed, about Norway.

In the corridors of Norwegian power, Israel-hatred and sympathy for Islamic terrorists have long been the norm. In 2011, Norway’s ambassador to Israel distinguished between Anders Behring Breivik’s murder spree and Hamas atrocities in Israel: While the former, he said, was inspired by an ugly ideology and was utterly undeserved by its victims, the latter is a result of Israel’s own “occupation” — and thus, presumably, justified, or at least understandable.

Among the pillars of Norwegian civil society these days are Basim Ghozlan, a supporter of Hamas suicide bombings who runs Norway’s Islamic Federation, and Shoaib Sultan, who, though refusing to criticize Iran’s execution of gays and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s description of the Holocaust as a “gift from Allah,” was accorded the high honor of arranging last year’s Constitution Day festivities in Oslo.

Nordlinger again: “Norway’s attitude toward Israel is approximately that of the Middle East Studies department of the University of Michigan.” Precisely.

All this Israel-hatred is, it should be emphasized, grounded in Norway’s left-wing establishment — the mainstream media, the academy, and the political elite. Last September’s elections, which brought a non-socialist coalition to power, shook that establishment to its roots. Not because of the senior partner in the coalition — the soft-socialist, go-along-to-get-along Conservative party — but because of the junior partner, the Progress party, a faction of free-market enthusiasts who are unabashedly pro-U.S. and pro-Israel.

Among the Progress party’s most fervent supporters of America and Israel is Kristian Norheim, a 38-year-old member of Parliament and the party’s foreign-policy spokesperson. On July 12, he posted on his Facebook page a cartoon from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, drawn by Randy Bish. It showed an armed Hamas terrorist holding up a small child, and was captioned “the Hamas missile defense shield.” Norheim’s posted comment on the cartoon: “Sad, but true.”

To anyone who deplores terrorism and is appalled by Hamas gangsters’ habit of hiding behind women and children — and of sequestering themselves in schools, hospitals, and mosques — the cartoon is nothing more or less than a morally admirable response to a morally despicable practice. But the Norwegian establishment reacted to Norheim’s posting with outrage. The cartoon, protested the Socialist Left party, was “tasteless,” an expression of “extreme views.” The Labor party’s Anniken Huitfeldt called it “one-sided . . . propaganda” that was “unworthy” and “stupid.” Rasmus Hansson of the Green party called Norheim “shameful” for posting the cartoon and Trine Skei Grande, head of the Liberal party, said that by giving it a thumbs-up he’d lowered the level of debate.

A mother is arrested for giving her daughter a cell phone and letting her play in the park.
This week, a woman was arrested for letting her nine-year-old daughter (armed with a cell phone) go to a playground unsupervised. Lenore Skenazy of Free-Range Kids explained this wacky story over at Reason:

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park — a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking — two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

There are so many disturbing aspects to this story; it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s begin with the nitwit who called the police in the first place. I’m sure this snitch was puffed with pride when they called the police on this little girl’s working mother. A real citizen soldier, that one.

I spend a lot of time talking about the danger of big government and the nanny state and bureaucrats nosing around in people’s business, but this story brings into sharp relief an even more frightening phenomenon: 911-happy, hypersensitive, busybody do-gooders who take it upon themselves to decide what’s right and wrong for your child. And now, apparently, those “citizen informants” can cause real and lasting harm (not to mention a police record) to their neighbors.

Some might sympathize with the informant in this case — perhaps she was just concerned for this little girl’s safety. But let’s think about what was better for that little girl. Should Debra Harrell have made her daughter sit inside an air-conditioned fast-food restaurant with nothing to do all day but (to the horror of the first lady) eat fries and hamburgers? Or is her daughter better off spending the day outside in the fresh air getting exercise, meeting and playing with other kids, and learning a lesson or two about independence and decision making?

Israel’s Iron Dome system shows that the best defense is not always a good offense.

Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably easy to kill. Not anymore.

Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel), it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon.

Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between those who believe in the strength of a defensive posture and those who put their faith in the attack. Aside from the proponents of the nuclear doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, no one has ever seriously claimed that an exclusively offensive or defensive strategy is viable. Some military organizations have traditionally put more emphasis on defense and others on offense.

Israel, because of its small size, has always preferred to fight offensively. If there is going to be a war, let it happen on the other guy’s territory. This made sense in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1973, however, the IDF’s lightly fortified positions in the Golan Heights and on the east bank of the Suez Canal were overwhelmed in the initial Arab surprise attack.

This led to the delusion that the Bar Lev line in Sinai was somehow an Israeli version of France’s disastrous Maginot Line at the beginning of World War II. In fact, it was a set of positions built during the War of Attrition (1968–70) to protect Israeli soldiers from Egyptian artillery fire, and hadn’t been intended as a line of defense capable of repelling a full-blown attack. The costly success of the IDF’s offensive across the canal and the drive on Damascus in the north convinced Israel’s military leaders that their attack-centered doctrine was the correct one; it just needed better tanks.

In spite of this doctrine’s failure to work as planned during the Lebanon war that began in 1982, Israel’s leaders remained committed to an offensive-minded strategy. However, they knew that their enemies were beginning to equip themselves with long-range missiles. Indeed, Egypt had used a few early-model Scuds during the Yom Kippur War.

Thus, when the Reagan administration offered Israel the chance to take part in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile-defense program in 1983, a small faction inside the IDF leaped at the chance.

Rachel Carson, the muse of the anti-insecticide movement condemned hundreds of thousands of Africans to death from malaria with spurious non scientific facts against DDT which had successfully halted the dreaded disease….rsk

Next year, SA will probably meet its Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the incidence of malaria, thanks to the careful, targeted spraying of insecticides, including DDT, in houses. The insecticides protect residents for an entire malaria transmission season, saving countless lives. This method of malaria control is safe for residents and the environment, and is approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the world’s leading malaria scientists. Despite the overwhelming public health benefits of spraying with DDT, some, who should know better, campaign against it.

Last year, Prof Henk Bouwman of North-West University and co-authors published a paper in a respectable journal, Environmental Research, claiming that DDT spraying led to thinning of bird eggshells. Bouwman collected just 15 cattle egret eggs, five in an area of Limpopo where DDT is sprayed indoors for malaria control, and 10 where no malaria control is conducted. After measuring eggshell thickness and levels of DDT and its metabolite DDE, Bouwman performed a regression analysis and concluded that DDT thinned eggshells.

The idea that DDT thins eggshells is not new, but Bouwman used his research to advocate against DDT for malaria control. Let us accept for a moment that Bouwman’s evidence was solid — one would still have to weigh potential harm to bird populations with the enormous life-saving benefits of using DDT. But, in fact, we cannot even make that supposition, because Bouwman’s analysis was false.

In analysing his data, Bouwman, in what we assume was a blunder, transposed the data from the DDT-sprayed areas and unsprayed areas. An accurate analysis of his data actually reveals that the eggshells in the sprayed areas were marginally thicker than in the unsprayed areas. Yet based on his false analysis, Bouwman argued that “there is good cause for concern about the reproductive performance of the cattle egrets in the study area and also in other DDT-sprayed areas in Africa”.

We, with seven other malaria experts, published a response to Bouwman’s paper in Environmental Research, exposing his falsehoods and incorrect conclusions. Bouwman was alerted to his mistake when our response was accepted for publication in January. To date, no erratum or response from Bouwman or his co-authors has been published. This episode is of great concern to the malaria-control community in Southern Africa. Bouwman and a small clique of scientists have long campaigned against DDT using the flimsiest of data, and in the case of Bouwman’s latest efforts, falsehoods. In 2009, Bouwman went so far as to claim on TV that Caster Semenya’s intersex condition was somehow linked to DDT, causing alarm in malarial areas, to the detriment of disease-control efforts. Pressed to provide evidence for his scaremongering, he refused.

Mr. Tren is a director of Africa Fighting Malaria.http://www.fightingmalaria.org/
The Honeybees Are Just Fine

Is a relatively new class of insecticides, known as neonicotinoids or “neonics,” harming bees and other wildlife? That’s what the International Union for the Conservation of Nature claimed in a recent press release announcing the results of a meta-study the organization conducted earlier this year. One might have expected the press release to be accompanied by the underlying scientific studies. But that wasn’t the case.

The proper way to engage in scientific debate is to publish studies so peers can confirm or refute the findings. Frustratingly, IUCN has only released one of its seven studies, preferring to conduct science by press release. This lack of transparency—together with the well-known anti-pesticide position of many of the scientists involved—raises suspicions as environmental groups lobby regulators to ban neonics in Canada and the U.S. The pesticides are already banned for two years in the European Union, and IUCN is calling for even-tighter restrictions and a global phaseout.

IUCN’s claims rest on the idea that neonics can be harmful to bees, worms, and other fauna, and that long-term exposure can cause “impaired sense of smell or memory; reduced fecundity; altered feeding behaviour; and reduced food intake” in species that feed on plants.

First introduced in the 1990s as a replacement for older, more toxic organophosphates and pyrethroids, neonics are often used to coat seeds to obviate the need for widespread spraying, thus reducing exposure to farm workers. Although we can’t know exactly how IUCN arrived at its conclusions, we can examine the existing science and published data, particularly on bees. These data don’t support the anti-neonics case.

Pentagon Prepares to Transfer Six Guantanamo Detainees to Uruguay
Move Is Part of Stepped-Up Effort to Further Reduce the Prison’s Population

The Pentagon is preparing to transfer six detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Uruguay in the next 30 days, according to U.S. officials, part of an effort to further reduce the prison’s population.

Controversy over the decision to swap Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban detainees held in Guantanamo has raised questions about whether Congress will try to block further moves by the Obama administration to try and close the prison.

The Pentagon has notified Congress that it intends to transfer the detainees, which include four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian. The notification of Congress was first reported Wednesday by the New York Times.

An official said the men being sent to Uruguay were low-level detainees, who all have been approved for transfer years ago.

“This is just another transfer,” said the official.

Since Mr. Obama announced a renewed effort to close Guantanamo more than a year ago, the Pentagon has stepped up the pace of transfers. Congress typically has 30 days to object to any transfer and move to block them.

While lawmakers haven’t moved to block routine transfers in the past, many in Congress are angry at the Obama administration for failing to notify them about plans to transfer the five senior Taliban detainees to Qatar.

There are 149 detainees in Guantanamo, including the six the Pentagon wants to send to Uruguay.

Australia Becomes First Developed Nation to Repeal Carbon Tax
Tony Abbott Pledged to Get Rid of the Tax Last Year

CANBERRA, Australia—After almost a decade of heated political debate, Australia has become the world’s first developed nation to repeal carbon laws that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.

In a vote that could highlight the difficulty in implementing additional measures to reduce carbon emissions ahead of global climate talks next year in Paris, Australia’s Senate on Wednesday voted 39-32 to repeal a politically divisive carbon emissions price that contributed to the fall from power of three Australian leaders since it was first suggested in 2007.

Australia, the world’s 12th largest economy, is one of the world’s largest per capita greenhouse gas emitters due to its reliance on coal-burning power stations to power homes and industry. In 2011, daily emissions per head amounted to 49.3 kilograms (108 pounds), almost four times higher than the global average of 12.8 kilograms, and slightly ahead of the U.S. figure of 48.2 kilograms.

The former Labor government, while introducing a price on carbon, said the move would help slash emissions by 160 million metric tons by 2020. It offered voters billions of dollars in compensation through tax breaks and welfare payments for increased costs stemming from one of the most dramatic reforms ever attempted in the energy-reliant economy.

But after the global financial crisis took hold in 2008, followed by the end of a decadelong mining boom in 2012 that slowed growth and employment in the A$1.5 trillion (US$1.4 trillion) economy, Australian voters turned against climate laws—recognized by the International Energy Agency as model legislation for developed countries—blaming them for rising energy bills and living costs.