RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a recent, hard-hitting article [1] for American Thinker, Ed Lasky anatomizes the “pack of lies” that Obama and his party have “peddled to the American people” with respect to the Affordable Care Act. This is no longer news, obviously, though many of the electorate still remain in the dark, to awaken in the course of time to an unwelcome revelation. Lasky goes on to focus on “previous revelations that periodically cloud the luxurious fantasy world where Obama dwells,” such as, to take one example, his admission that there are “no such things as shovel-ready projects,” and concludes: “For a man who went to a swank private high school in Hawaii, then Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law School, [Obama] is the most clueless president to occupy the Oval Office.”

Lasky’s assessment, which a plethora of writers and analysts has come to share, seems indisputable. Indeed, Obama’s regulatory, stimulus-oriented and redistributive economic program is perhaps the most damaging “legacy” he will have left the American people. “The economy continues to strengthen and recover,” touts [2] the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Obama opines [3] that the nation’s financial system is “safer” now than it was in the recent past, and that his administration has laid a “new foundation” for a healthier economy. The facts tell an entirely different story.

For America is simultaneously trapped in a vertiginous debt spiral while relying on the binge printing of fiat money — a process known by the euphemism of “quantitative easing” — brewing a perfect storm of decline and eventual collapse. Of course, as Milton Friedman observes in Money Mischief [4], since Nixon “broke the final tenuous link between the dollar and gold in 1971, no major currency…has any connection to a commodity,” and therefore, “Every currency is now a fiat currency.” The problem, however, is one of fiscal promiscuity or the absence of discretionary oversight of the quantity of money swamping the fiscal marketplace, that is, the unstinted printing of the money supply backed by nothing but the happy accident that the American dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Such intemperate printing of American dollars to service debt load, prop up a bloated entitlement apparatus, and generate “stimulus” projects — those “shovel ready” jobs but only in the sense that the shovel is the gravedigger’s implement — dilutes the value of the country’s legal tender and is viable only so long as the dollar does in fact remain the world’s reserve currency.

Writing yesterday about the IRS’s amazing loss of more than two years of Lois Lerner’s emails (“Where’d they go? They were here just a minute ago!”), I wondered [1] in passing how the Extended White House Public Relations Office, e.g., the New York Times, MSNBC, et al. would handle the news. The Nixon White House, you’ll recall, found quite a lot of the morning’s scrambled on its collective countenance when 18 and 1/2 minutes of audio tape [2] somehow—somehow!—went missing as the Watergate scandal unfolded around the president.

What a godsend to the guardians of our “Right to Know” Watergate was! Day after day, week after week, month after month, the front pages and editorial pages of our former Paper of Record were full of stern admonitions about that egregious abuse of executive power. You could not look at the paper without a synesthetic shudder: Reading it, you could almost hear them licking their chops as their prey—the dastardly Richard Nixon—came ever closer to his doom.

So how does the New York Times handle this extraordinary loss of two years’ worth of Lois Lerner’s emails? (“Really, they were here just a minute ago. We were just about to hand them over to Congress when, gosh darn, they just vanished. Damndest thing.”)

This will amaze you, I know, but it is true: the New York Times today devotes zero words to the story. Take a look at the front page here [3]: Nothing. There are a couple of articles about Iraq’s descent into chaos—Iraq, the country whose transformation Joe Biden, in 2010, called one of the “greatest achievements” of the Obama administration. “I’ve been there 17 times now,” the vice president told Larry King [4]. “I know every one of the major players in all of the segments of that society. It’s impressed me. I’ve been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences.” But I digress . . .

What else do we have on the front page? Warnings about a connection between obesity and liver disease. Something about the tea party in the aftermath of David Brat’s upset victory in Virginia and a story about restauranteurs upset by apps bypassing maitre d’s in securing good tables at posh eateries. The public has a right to know these things. There is also advance word about a coming article about the entertainer “Beyoncé the Boundless” (they teach alliteration in J school), the soccer games in Brazil, and sundry other topics.

Overlooked in the midst of all the celebrations in Egypt concerning the presidential election of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, his predecessor, President Adly Mansour – who very much shares in Sisi’s worldview and politics – made a strange comment about the place of the nation’s Christian minority, the Copts.

Sisi declared Mansour acting president of Egypt on July 4, 2013 – right after former President Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party were overthrown in the June 30 Revolution, which was supported by the Coptic Church.

In a televised speech delivered a few days ago, Mansour again addressed the Copts in a very inclusive way, one very much welcomed and appreciated by Egypt’s Christians. Among other things, he indicated that they were equal citizens, “brothers” to the Muslims; that they have been an integral part of Egypt’s history; that both Copts and Muslims are victims of and enemies to “terrorism” (a reference to the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations).

Then he said:

I speak to you [Copts] today through the true spirit of Islam – the spirit whose values appeared in the Pact of Omar, wherein the righteous Caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab, made a covenant with the Christians of Jerusalem, after Medina opened [conquered] it in the year 638; the Pact which preserved for the Christians their churches, monasteries, and crosses, and their religion and possessions. Egypt again renews the spirit of this pact and its principles with you; Egypt, the Muslim state, which takes from the values and principles of the tolerant and true Islamic Sharia for its legislation.

To those familiar with the actual text of the Pact of Omar – also known as the shurut, or “the conditions,” of Omar – the above speech is an absurd contradiction. After all, whereas Koran 9:29 provides divine sanction to fight the “People of the Book” (namely, Christians and Jews) “until they pay the jizya [monetary tribute] with willing submission and feel themselves subdued,” the Conditions of Omar lay out in detail how Christians are to feel themselves subdued.

Below are excerpts from the Conditions (see Crucified Again for my complete translation and historical discussion of the text). The conquered Christians appear to be speaking and agree:

Not to build a church in our city – nor a monastery, convent, or monk’s cell in the surrounding areas – and not to repair those that fall in ruins or are in Muslim quarters;

Not to clang our cymbals except lightly and from the innermost recesses of our churches;

Not to display a cross on them [churches], nor raise our voices during prayer or readings in our churches anywhere near Muslims;

ON a hot summer’s day earlier this year, a beautiful young Pakistani girl named Amina stood in the living room of her western Sydney home, listening in horror as her father explained how he planned to ­murder her.

“I am going to kill you now, right here!” he shouted at the 16-year-old. “And no one will say anything about what I do to you. I am too powerful in the community.” Amina’s parents had promised her to a man 13 years her senior and she had made the mistake of refusing to marry him. Her arguments would not sway her father and even when her husband-to-be beat her in front of him, her dad remained ­resolute, telling her: “He is already your ­husband in front of God.”

“She adored her father but he believed that by refusing to marry this man, she was ­damaging the honour of the family,” says Eman ­Sharobeem, manager of the Immigrant Women’s Health Service in Fairfield, Sydney. “I have no doubt that he would have killed her if I hadn’t intervened.” Amina might have been raised in Australia, adopting the attitude and dress of her teenage friends, but to her father she was “just a good sale item, a stunningly beautiful girl who would bring a good dowry”.

The child’s father eventually agreed to spare his daughter’s life — not out of any sense of mercy, Sharobeem says, but because he realised it would be difficult to kill the girl and get away with it. So he packed Amina off to Pakistan, where she has been held in his family’s home for the past two months. “She texted me the other day,” says Sharobeem. “She said, ‘They won’t kill me because they know you know. But they will keep me here until I agree to marry that man.” Her last text said: “I might give in.”

For years, child marriage in this country has been hidden under layers of culture and tradition in tight-knit communities — a fringe issue that’s been difficult to gauge and hard to investigate. Then came news of a 12-year-old girl who was “married” in January to a 26-year-old Lebanese university student in an Islamic ­ceremony at the girl’s home in NSW’s Hunter ­Valley, and the layers of secrecy began to peel away. On best estimates, the number of girls in Australia being forced into marriage here or overseas is in the hundreds every year. Girls as young as 12 or 13 are disappearing from schoolyards, packed off to the countries of their parents’ birth to wed men they have never met, while others are taken from their homes in southern Asia and the Middle East and brought into Australia to marry.

The National Children’s and Youth Law Centre has identified 250 cases of under-age marriage over the past 24 months, while ­Sharobeem, who was herself married to a cousin at the age of 14, says there are at least 60 child wives living in south-western Sydney alone. In Melbourne, Melba Marginson, executive director of the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Coalition (VIRWC), says she sees 150 women a week who are in forced and ­violent marriages, many of them married off when they were still children. “But what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she says.

Those within the communities say the problem is greater than even these campaigners believe it to be. Alia Sultana, a Pakistani ­Hazara woman who works with Afghan ­Hazaras in Melbourne, told me: “I would say nearly every Afghan Hazara family in ­Melbourne is involved in this practice.” ­Sultana, who fled the Taliban two years ago with her family, added: “I only know about these girls because I am also a ­Hazara, and the other women tell me about them. They are kept prisoners, locked in their husbands’ homes and only allowed out if their mothers-in-law go with them, so they can never seek help.”

Mark Durie is a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum, and director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. A graduate of the Australian National University and the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.

Today a report appeared in The Australian, a national daily newspaper, which discussed forced marriages in our nation. There were many good points made in this article, which was entitled It is the young flesh they want.

However the article reported, as if it were true, a completely false and easily disprovable statement about the Koran. The offending paragraph was:

“It is critical that the whole community is educated,” says Jennifer Burn of Anti-Slavery Australia. “The Koran does not support child marriage and the Grand Mufti of Australia says that consent is vital. But there are over 60 different traditions within the Muslim community, with different interpretations of the religious scriptures. We need the religious leaders to take the message into the communities, because they will listen to their leaders rather than us.”

It is true that the Koran does not refer specifically to child marriage. However in discussing divorce it does refer to conditions applying for a female who has not yet menstruated, i.e. for a pre-pubescent girl. The reference is found in Sura 65:4 in a list of regulations concerning the waiting period (the Iddah or Iddat) for divorced women before they can remarry. The verse deals systematically with different cases of women who for some reason are not having regular periods. It reads:

“And of those of your women who have given up hope of menstruating, if you doubt, their (waiting) period is three months, as well as those who do not menstruate. And those who are pregnant, their period is until they deliver their burdens.” (Sura 65:4)

It might be thought that this verse is ambiguous in relation to young girls. However it is quite clear. It systematically covers the three main cases where a female is not menstruating: the old, the young, and those who are pregnant.

Ibn Kathir’s highly respected commentary on the Koran has this to say about this passage (see here).

Allah the Exalted clarifies the waiting period of the woman in menopause. And that is the one whose menstruation has stopped due to her older age. Her ‘Iddah [waiting period before marriage] is three months instead of the three monthly cycles for those who menstruate, which is based upon the Ayah in (Surat) Al-Baqarah. [see 2:228] The same for the young, who have not reached the years of menstruation. Their‘Iddah is three months like those in menopause.

The disappearance and presumed kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers took place on Thursday evening, Israel time. By Friday evening, Israel time, the IDF had released their names and photos.

They are: Gil-ad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach. It has been confirmed that one of these students is also an American citizen; we have not been told who that might be. Two are students at Makor Chaim yeshiva. The third is a student at Shavey Hevron yeshiva in Hebron. Perhaps the IDF hopes that releasing this information will help witnesses come forward or that humanizing the boys may lead to sympathy for them.

Last night, hundreds prayed for them at the Western Wall. Their fate was discussed at every Sabbath table including my own and in many synagogues around the world.

Since 9/11, truly, we are all Israelis. What used to happen only to Jews or mainly to Israeli Jews (hijackings, suicide/homicide bombings) remained unchecked by the world and now that same style of hatred and violence has increasingly been unleashed against civilians everywhere. We are all at the mercy of merciless, maniacal Jihadists.

When an Israeli civilian—essentially a teenager–is kidnapped, it is always an act of evil, a statement of vulgar anti-Semitism, and a rejection of the entire Western enterprise. Please bear in mind that Israel lives in a neighborhood that has exiled Jews from Arab lands, has denied that this is the case, and wishes to exterminate Jewish Israel. Read the Hamas charter, it is quite chilling. Israel is also the most stable country in the Middle East, where a Sunni-Shiia Holy War is raging out of control. It also remains a strong military power in a neighborhood in which Islamists are about to gain state power in Iraq and elsewhere.

This kidnapping is a casus belli. Those who quote Rabin’s remark that “peace is made with enemies” leave out something important. Peace is made with defeated enemies, because undefeated ones are trying to kill you, or worse, your children. That’s what an enemy is.

The kidnapping of three Jewish teenagers in Judea Thursday brings home a fact that might not stand out abstract discussions about the significance of the Palestinian Unity Government, or the various 2-state, 1-state, or any-number-state plans.

This is the fact that the Palestinian Arabs — they want to be a nation, so call them the Palestinian Nation — is the deadly enemy of the Jewish state and individual Jews.

Palestinian sources are quiet now about the kidnapping, although there are reports that prisoners in Israel are ‘celebrating’, in the hope that there will soon be yet another “prisoner exchange” like the one that freed 1024 Arab prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit.

They understand that their Jewish enemies are upset and angry and they would prefer not to provoke them at this point. The jubilation will have to wait for the ultimate outcome, which, if everything goes their way, will be yet another instance of Jewish submission to Arab strength. They’ll shoot in the air and give out candy, and another thousand or so murderers will go home (it’s too painful to speculate about the condition the boys will be in, if they survive).

We could have coexisted with them peacefully and profitably for both peoples. But starting with al-Husseini, they chose a different path, the path of rejection. Yes — they chose. And it didn’t turn out well for them. But even when it was possible to go a different way, they were resolute. They made their choices and then they doubled down. They bear the responsibility for the consequences.

Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitanopera@metopera.org
Attn: Peter Sellars, Peter Gelb, Nicole Halton, Susan Hayes

To the Staff of the Metropolitan Opera:

During World War II, a violinist dressed in military uniform went to play for the servicemen in a United States Army hospital in Italy. As he entered a ward designated for young men who had recently lost limbs, he was shocked to see that one patient was attempting to applaud with his only hand. As the musician’s face lit up with compassion and sensitivity, he raised his violin and played. His name was Jascha Heifetz, a Lithuanian-born Jewish American whose 65-year career began at age four. He made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 16, and became world renowned for the perfection to which other violinists still aspire.

Seated next to Heifetz at the hospital piano was pianist Milton Kaye. Fifty years later, Kaye recalled that memorable concert when he heard “the greatest violinist of the ages.” The following year, pianist Seymour Lipkin beheld that same magnificence when he accompanied Heifetz on another GI tour, stating that the violinist always played his best, no matter the circumstances. Heifetz had been so moved when he entertained the paraplegics, that despite his grueling schedule, he continued to add more such concerts to his tours, and Kaye remembers those days as “the greatest privilege” of his musical life.

In addition to an unparalleled talent, Heifetz had what is known as neshamah, a Jewish soul – what may be described as an energy and essence of virtue and humanity, passion and compassion, and depth of empathy for others. It was even apparent to his father who saw the four-year-old prodigy cry when he played sad music. No doubt, it is the Israeli neshamah that provides quality medical attention even to their enemies, and the same that sends Israeli first responders to countries devastated by natural disasters. And it is this same quality that appears to have eluded the next generation of Heifetzes,– Jascha’s great nephew, Peter Gelb, artistic director at the Metropolitan Opera (The “Met”).

It was said of Gelb that he declares himself a man of the people, but that he is out of touch with the prevailing zeitgeist (culture of the time). Noted in the Berkshire Fine Arts, Gelb lacks the qualifications to organize a program and appoint or audition singers and, despite his inexpertise, captured this Met position from the ailing James Levine. But it is Gelb’s choice of opera for the 2014 fall season that is most disturbing.

“Both Mr. Assad and the jihadists represent a challenge to the United States’ core interests,” former U.S. Ambassador in Damascus Robert S. Ford wrote in The New York Times on June 10. He advocated a strategy that would supposedly deal with both Bashar al-Assad and the jihadists: “with partner countries from the Friends of Syria group like France, Britain, Germany, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, we must ramp up sharply the training and material aid provided to the moderates in the armed opposition.”

Decrying Washington’s “hesitation and unwillingness to commit to enabling the moderate opposition fighters to fight more effectively both the jihadists and the regime,” Ambassador Ford advocated providing his unnamed Syrian “moderates” with advanced military hardware, including “mortars and rockets to pound airfields to impede regime air supply operations and, subject to reasonable safeguards, surface-to-air missiles.”

Ford’s article is irresponsible and ill-informed at best. It was published on the very day the insurgents belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as “ISIS” to include Syria) started its spectacular advance on Mosul, Tikrit, and points further south. Even more surreally dangerous were the BloombergView editors, who urged (also on June 10) an outright, American-led anti-Assad intervention: “the U.S. and its European and regional allies should take the initiative to circumvent the UN Security Council and put the needed military muscle on the ground. Yes, Russia and China will be furious. So be it.” Now that would be a bold strategy, with many exciting ramifications in Ukraine, along the shores of the South China Sea, and elsewhere. With their gas supplies in balance, “the European allies” can hardly wait.

Ambassador Ford has wisely stayed out of the news over the past couple of days, but it would be interesting to find out if he still stands by the assessment he made four days ago. Does he still advocate arming the Free Syrian Army (FSA) “moderates,” who have been comprehensively routed by the Syrian security forces and who no longer exist as a fighting force? That same FSA, whose units invariably melt away – Iraqi-army-style – whenever confronted with the warriors of jihad, and who have observed a truce with ISIS since late September 2013? To claim that its pathetic remnant can be trained, armed and equipped to the point where it would be able take on Bashar’s army and ISIS simultaneously is insane. Or does Ford have the murderous Al Nusra Front in mind, jihadist to boot, which is a battlefield rival to ISIS and hence perhaps worthy of being treated as a “moderate” force? That same Al Nusra which is currently spreading its reign of terror into Lebanon?

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon compared the Israeli air strike against an active Hamas/Salafi Jihad terrorist to the kidnapping of 3 Israeli children.

Following repeated missile launches from Gaza into Israel, as well as a plot to take down a helicopter, the IAF struck back, taking out Hamas policeman and rocket terrorist Mohammed Awar last Wednesday. Also injured in the strike was Awar’s human shield, his 7 year old nephew, who died on Saturday.

Unlike Ban Ki-moon’s unequivocal condemnation of the kidnapping of Turkish diplomats in Iraq last week where he said, “this is totally unacceptable” and he was “shocked” to learn of the kidnapping by “terrorists”, Ki-moon felt, in the case of Israel, the need to compare, in his boilerplate statement, the deliberate kidnapping of three Israeli children, to the strike against an active terrorist, which also killed a human shield the terrorist thought would protect him from an Israeli strike, as he continues his terror attacks.

Ban Ki-moon expressed, “deep concern on the trend toward violence on the ground and attendant loss of life, including today of a child in Gaza as a result of a recent Israeli airstrike.” Ban urged all parties to “exercise restraint and lend urgent support for the release and safe return of the three youths.”

Ban Hi-moon should have pulled an Obama, and just kept his mouth shut.