RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There’s something very powerful about finding snow in summer.”Andy Goldsworthy (1956 – )British sculptor

Apropos of the above quote, climbing Mount Washington in late July a few years ago, by way of Tuckerman’s Ravine, my son Sydney, grandson Alex and I found two or three patches of snow high up in the Ravine. But by August the snow will be gone, as will be New Hampshire’s opportunity to create a glacier. June, while mostly spring, includes the summer solstice – after which days become shorter. It doesn’t seem that way at first, just as the days don’t really seem to get longer after December 21st. But they do. The setting sun moves ever so slowly southward at this time of year, shortening its arc in the sky, until suddenly it’s dark at four o’clock, with much of the Northern Hemisphere in hibernation.

While much happened during the month, it is also of interest what did not happen. For example, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared in March, has still not been located. Nor has one 44 year-old woman who is still missing from the March 22 mudslide four miles outside of Oso, Washington, a slide that took 43 lives. And, the old adage, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ applies to the more than 300 school girls abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria in May. In fact another 90 school girls were kidnapped in June, but this kidnapping was not seen by the media as “news.” A month earlier the abduction galvanized people, as to the evils of Islamic terrorism. Even Michelle Obama posted a photo of herself holding a hash-tag message of support for the girls. Unfortunately her message disappeared into the netherworld of the internet, perhaps to join the missing e-mails from Lois Lerner’s computer? The Nigerian school girls, I fear, have had, or will have, a far less innocuous fate. A Twittered message does not carry the same clout with cowardly thugs, as would a surprise visit from a unit of Special Forces.

The month’s biggest story was the deteriorating situation in Iraq. One of its more discouraging sidebars has been the remarkable behavior of so many of our political leaders, more focused on casting blame for the sorry condition in which Iraq finds itself than seeking answers. Politicians are masters at waving hockey sticks when they sense victory, and at fading when the foul odor of loss is in the air. Congressmen and women have few equals in the art of ducking responsibility and can often be found pointing an accusing finger at an opponent on the other side of the aisle. Iraq, for them, has been a field day. It was the fault of Obama for leaving Iraq too soon, say the Republicans, haughtily and contemptuously. No, blame belongs with Bush for involving us in the first place, claim their slippery and supercilious counterparts. It is forgotten that the Iraq Liberation Act, which supported the notion of regime change, was signed into law in 1998 by President Clinton. Selective memory is a common condition among all politicians, especially when events prove past actions embarrassing. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Harry Reid and John Kerry not only voted in 2002 to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, but did so avidly, which may be one reason why Harry Reid has been reluctant to bring any bill to the floor of the Senate.

Peace upon the boys, not the Palestinians
The discovery on Monday of the dead bodies of Israeli teens Eyal Yifrach, Naftali Frenkel and Gil-ad Shaer sent shock waves across the country. In spite of a growing sense of doom — due to the fact that their Hamas captors had not come forth with demands, and extensive searches were coming up empty — there was nevertheless a ray of hope that the boys were still alive.

Fresh in the public’s mind was the 2006 abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, who spent five years in Hamas captivity until being released in exchange for 1,027 terrorists. Based on this experience, much discussion following the June 12 kidnapping of the three teenagers was devoted to the question of how to handle the current situation better. In other words, there was an assumption that Israel’s biggest dilemma was going to be whether to launch a rescue operation or negotiate for the boys’ release.

It is thus that the news of their cold-blooded murder and subsequent burial in a hole in the ground was not only tragic and enraging; it also came as somewhat of a surprise.

What came as no surprise at all, however, was the response of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the so-called “international community.”

Residents of the PA attacked the ambulance transporting the bodies of Eyal, Naftali and Gil-ad out of the area near Hebron where they were found. The mob expressed its sentiment about the boys by hurling epithets, rocks and paint at the vehicle, smashing its windshield.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas — who had been lauded publicly by the Israeli government (and by Naftali Frenkel’s mother, Rachel) for his assistance in the search for the boys and their kidnappers — immediately appealed to the United States and Europe to prevent Israel from retaliating militarily.

Hamas thumbed its nose at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that “Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay” for the premeditated slaughter of the teens. Its senior spokesman, Sami Abu Zuhri, wrote on Facebook: “Netanyahu … must understand his threats do not terrify us. If he launched a war against Gaza, the gates of hell would be open on him.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement condemning “the deliberate killing of civilians,” calling the murder of the boys a “heinous act by enemies of peace [that] aims to further entrench division and distrust and to widen the conflict.”

After Cain killed his brother, the Lord told him, “A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth.”

But the natural order has been reversed, instead the Abels, if they survive, become homeless
wanderers and the Cains build their Caliphates on the tombs of their victims.

“Cursed shall you be from the earth,” the Lord said, and so it has been.

The earth under their feet may be cursed, it yields nothing but sand and thistles, but they are nomads, forgetting agriculture, remembering only their tradecraft of murder. They become worshipers of death dreaming of the green verdant fields of paradise which they can reach only if they kill enough men, women and children.

Leaving devastation behind them, dead lands, lost cultures, widows and orphans, they claw their way up to heaven on a ladder of bones.

Everything around them dies until the only green is on their flags. They are cursed from the earth and they curse the earth. Where they go, the world dies.

It is not murder that makes it impossible for Abel to live with Cain says the State Department, says the European Union and says the New York Times. It is Abel’s fields and houses that provoke Cain.

The PLO formed a unity government with Hamas and the loud voice of consensus, the voice of men who imagine that they become god when they speak in a single voice, is that it was the Israeli houses that were to blame. It is not Cain’s fault that he kills. It is Abel’s fault that he builds.

Of the three kidnapped and murdered boys, two Israeli and one American, Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times wrote, “Palestinians… see the very act of attending (school) yeshiva in a West Bank settlement as provocation.”

My friend, Nurit Greenger, the indefatigable warrior for Israel gave me a wonderful and treasured gift. The book is named Humanity Not written by Dr. Babaknia and with beautiful and gripping illustrations by a Moslem Iranian artist Ardeshir Mohassness.

Who is the author?

Ari Babaknia, M.D. is a Johns Hopkins trained physician who is currently the Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Center for Women’s Health. In addition to his publications in the medical field, his work includes books related to the Judaism in Farsi:

• Jewish Contribution to Human Civilization 1972
• Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize 1992
• In the past fifteen years Dr. Babaknia has dedicated his life and efforts in writing and editing an extensive 4 volumes historical documentary account chronicling the different aspects of Holocaust in Farsi:

Book 1: The Holocaust: “Man’s Inhumanity to Men”
Book 2: America’s Response to the Holocaust
Book 3: The World’s Response to the Holocaust
Book 4: End of the Holocaust and liberation of the Nazi camps, Documents, Personalities and Events Around the Holocaust

HUMANITY NOT is available through the Memorah Foundation. at Memorah.org.

Part 1 – Click Here

Bioterrorism Preparedness

What does national preparedness mean? It suggests the ability to respond to a wide array of threats and prevent unnecessary loss of life or injury. This requires translating national policy initiatives into local program implementation. It is a significant challenge to prepare for an unknown event, especially without a clear cut indicator of who and how many to protect, and from whom.

National activities to prevent or respond to a bioterrorism event have hinged largely on the development of biosurveillance programs and arms length detector technologies. As I’ve written for FSM back in 2008, when the National Biosurveillance Center was about to be officially opened, the GAO reported that they weren’t sure what the NBC could actually accomplish given the interagency rivalries, growing bureaucracy, problems with interoperability, and the ubiquitous ‘mission creep’ that evolves in such important undertakings. If these were the problems afflicting the NBC under a president, and administration that actually cared about homeland security, imagine how the various government agencies designed to protect the US are faring under an administration that seems consumed with shifting national resources to entitlement programs, decreasing the stature of the US from one of international superpower to that of merely an ordinary country, just another member of the United Nations.

As an aside, and general terrorism preparedness comment, having NY City downgrade its capabilities in their intelligence division so as not to offend the very people who are likely to attack our country – again – seems ridiculous. Our adversaries must laugh themselves to sleep.

According to studies by the GAO and US Department of Agriculture IG reports at increased risk for incidents at laboratories doing research of deadly pathogens as part of bioweapons research, in no small measure due to the feds failure to develop national standards for lab design, construction and operation.

The growing weakness in bio preparedness in the USA from the top down is staggering. From the ADD-like foreign policy and domestic preparedness edicts of President Obama, to the growing disinterest in bioterrorism among all but a handful of health care professionals and health care facilities are just some critical infrastructure issues that this current president is contributing to.

Emerging Pathogens & Public Health

We live in a global world where most people outside of North America are likely to die from an infectious disease – something the average US citizen doesn’t worry about, and hasn’t had to since the mid 20th century. TB, dengue, HIV, influenza, malaria, food-borne illnesses, and environmental (mosquitoes, worms, other insect vectors) threats pose daily risks to most people worldwide, especially the poor, which suggests immigrants from South America, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia can import their illnesses as they immigrate or travel within our borders.

By May of 2014 the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS, or MERS CoV) arrived in the United States. For many of you, this is a new virus, and another threat emanating out of the Middle East, in case terrorism and energy insecurity weren’t enough! The World Health Organization (WHO) alerted the international community about MERS after identifying the new pathogen from two men who became ill in Jordan in 2012. Early in the MERS lifespan, cases were sporadic. A few cases were in clusters around health care workers and close contacts. Lately the numbers are growing seemingly exponentially. By March 27, 2014 WHO reported 206 confirmed cases. By end of April 2014 the WHO case count increased by more than 50 additional cases. The total as of last month there has been reported at 536 laboratory confirmed cases, and 145 deaths. While the apparent case fatality rate has appeared to decline, from ~50% in the early days of MERS to approximately 25% depending upon the country, that is still a high percentage of deaths per cases infected. While there is still no readily available vaccine against MERS, and the use of current antiviral medications remains in question, an early index of suspicion by well informed health care professionals can reduce the risk of spread, and initiate aggressive intervention, which can also provide life saving support at the earliest possible critical junction in care.

Since at least the 9/11 attacks, we have been reassured constantly that Islam means peace, that violent jihad is being waged by a tiny minority of extremists, and that most Muslims are moderate. But on a Heritage Foundation panel recently, terrorism expert Brigitte Gabriel correctly dismissed that “peaceful majority” of Muslims as “irrelevant” to the equation. And now at least one prominent apologist for Islamic terrorism wants to do away with the term “moderate” altogether.

On a special episode of Hannity a week ago called “Radical Muslims on the March,” host Sean Hannity skeptically asked self-described moderate Muslim Michael Ghouse of the America Together Foundation if the voices of the Islamic community are loud enough to counter “the radicals hijacking your religion.”

“They’re not loud enough,” conceded Ghouse. “We need to gather momentum.” Nearly thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks on our own soil, the moderates who are supposedly the vast majority of the Islamic community are still struggling to gather momentum and make their voices heard? Later in the show Ghouse, whose organization seems more focused on combating the stereotyping of Muslims as radicals than combating the radicals themselves, proved why moderate Muslims like him are ineffectual allies against jihad. In a heated confrontation with FrontPage’s own editor-in-chief Jamie Glazov, Ghouse tried to deflect responsibility for Islamic terrorism away from the religion itself when he shouted that “Islam is not dangerous, it is the bad people that are dangerous.” Bad people – as if the ideology driving jihad is simply “badness.”

Last week Nathan Lean posted an article at The New Republic online entitled “Stop Saying ‘Moderate Muslims.’ You’re Only Empowering Islamophobes,” in which he questions the very legitimacy of that phrase. “This moderate Muslim nonsense,” as he puts it, is “intellectually lazy because it carves the world up into two camps: the ‘good’ Muslims and the ‘bad’ Muslims,” and gives credence to the “unfounded notion” that the more pious the Muslim, the more dangerous.

Who is Nathan Lean? He is the author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (with a foreword by Saudi-funded Islam apologist John Esposito), a title that ridiculously suggests that we have nothing to fear from Islam except fear-mongering itself. Did the right manufacture 9/11? The Ft. Hood massacre? The Boston Marathon bombing? What an insulting, patently false notion – that there is less to fear from the savagery of jihad than from the patriots warning us about it. As for the mythical phenomenon of “Islamophobia,” FrontPage readers are well aware that it is a Muslim Brotherhood neologism designed to demonize and marginalize critics of Islam like Brigitte Gabriel, whom Lean smears as “wackos.”

In his TNR piece, Lean complains that “until proven good, or in this case ‘moderate,’ all Muslims are perceived as ‘bad,’ or potentially extreme.” The obvious response here, which Lean doesn’t admit, is that if Muslims are perceived that way, perhaps it might be the result not of anti-Muslim paranoia but of the rabidly violent resurgence of Islamic supremacism throughout the world today.

Precisely! Bat Ye’or, the late Saul Friedman in “Land of Dust” and Professor Moshe Sharon have known and written about this Islamic anti-Semitism long before the Israeli establishment or supporters of Israel averred this. Read

“The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (May 30, 2008) “….rsk

The bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, 16-year-old Naftali who liked to play basketball, 16-year-old Gilad who had just finished a scuba diving course and 19-year-old Eyal with his guitar, will be met by the same ghastly parade of pallbearers who accompany every victim of terrorism.

The reporters will scribble down something about “settlements” and the “Cycle of Violence.” The diplomats will urge restraint and remind everyone that the only solution can be found through negotiations with the terrorists. And the pundits will put it all into perspective burying them under layers of words and weighting their coffins down with stones of forgetfulness.

But all the empty words about the “Occupation” and the “Cycle of Violence,” the invocation of a peaceful solution that is always about to arrive, but never does, and the maps that cede more territory to terrorists are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s not about physical territory. It’s about spiritual territory. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about Islamism.

It’s not about the “Occupation.” It’s about Islam.

“I raised my children on the knees of the [Islamic] religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said.

Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that.

The victory of Islam.

Originally published by Defining Ideas.

Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.

One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the Schuette decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 Bakke decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, Bakke legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.

Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in Fisher vs. University of Texas last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.”

Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administration is talking about is something different.

“Tolerists, far from being the nice, kind, fair, tolerant people they think they are, in fact are the enemies of freedom and the enablers of totalitarianism.”

The acuteness of Howard Rotberg’s book Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed [1], now in its second, updated edition, lies in the ease with which readers will grasp his coinage. We know what he is referring to as soon as he begins to identify its salient features, as if the word has been around for a while. Indeed, the phenomenon is so widespread and so bizarre that it deserves its own term — and Rotberg’s bracing dissection.

Tolerism is a worldview in which the tolerance of cultural “otherness” — the more violently anti-Western the better — has become Western elites’ most celebrated (perhaps their sole) value, before which all other values, of justice, freedom, intellectual inquiry, or political dissent, have given way. Rotberg posits that it is precisely the abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian principles and the adoption of a pernicious, unmoored moral relativism that have enabled tolerance (though it is not very tolerant) to assume its unchallenged status as the absolute virtue. The particular focus and defining example of tolerism in our post-9/11 world is Western accommodation of radical Islam: the more violent and hateful the jihadists show themselves to be, the more insistent the tolerists are about the need to empathize with them.

Tolerism is not the same as simple tolerance, Rotberg explains, referring to the history of religious and political toleration as an enlightened recognition of reciprocal accommodation under which tolerance is only one among other, guiding, values. Once elevated to the status of an ideology in itself, however, tolerism is a belief system that requires the uncritical embrace of otherness not for some rational social benefit but as a proof of the tolerists’ moral rectitude; as such, it spells the end of proper discrimination and judgement, and results in the self-contradictory acceptance and encouragement of terrorists and rogue states that are themselves murderously intolerant.

Under the reign of tolerism, the so-called tolerant lose the ability to recognize or appraise evil, believing that fanatics can be placated if only westerners are willing to understand their point of view. Efforts on the part of the committed few to resist Islamic triumphalism are decried as “intolerant,” the mere charge thought sufficient to end all argument. As a result, the betrayal of traditional liberal institutions and rights — through press censorship, the suppression of academic freedom, selective blindness about abhorrent cultural practices — becomes acceptable, even mandatory, and Islam makes steady inroads upon its host culture.

The response to the murder of the three abducted Israeli teens, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, has been predictable in its call for restraint and moderation. Left-wing organizations [1] like the Israeli political party Meretz, the New Israel Fund, and J Street, wedded to nebulous and self-serving concepts like “social justice,” [2] ramble on about calm, measure, reconciliation, and the larger interests of communal peace — as if avowedly vicious and homicidal entities like Hamas and its offshoots will feel humbled and ashamed of their murderous practices and will experience a benign change of heart.

In fact, they are busy celebrating what they regard as a revanchist victory — indeed, candies were handed out to mark the abduction and the ambulance ferrying the bodies of the slain teens was pelted with stones [3] and spray-painted by Palestinian villagers — and will not be deterred from carrying out further atrocities in the future if they are allowed to get away with them. Perhaps the principals of our conciliatory organizations would feel differently if their own children had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed. But one thing is certain: for all their “prayers for the suffering families” and “calls for peace,” they are incapable of imagining what their own people endure and are barren of genuine feeling, while full of empathy and concern for their assailants, who wish only for their speedy death and the subsequent extinction of the Jewish state. There is only one word for such flaccid, self-righteous and ultimately self-immolating appeasers: idiots.

As for the Israeli leadership, it’s a mixed bag. Outgoing president Shimon Peres is a grande fromage who over the years has grown gamy and rancid, with a soft European rind. Benjamin Netanyahu should be cut a little slack given the intense pressures, domestic and international, that he labors under — but he is not his father, who was cut in the mold of the pragmatic and unyielding patriot Ze’ev Jabotinsky. (See Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism [4].)

With only a few exceptions, like Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, the Israeli leadership comprises a motley crew best left to their often lucrative but generally undistinguished careers, prone to log-rolling and corruption, devoid of segulah (Hebrew for virtue or inner treasure), more preoccupied with their American holdings and European vacations than with the security of their beleaguered nation.

The theory, of course, that presumably governs their behavior is that diplomacy and treating with perennial enemies or political adversaries — e.g. acceding to American bullying, glad-handing Turkey, subsidizing the PA, victualing Gaza, engaging in outrageously disproportionate prisoner swaps, giving a hostile and often traitorous Israeli media and academy a free pass, etc. — is a way of ensuring the ultimate security of the country. On the contrary, Israeli citizens are rendered increasingly unsafe by the prosecution of such measures.