RUTHFULLY YOURS

John Kerry is attempting to walk back his smear of Israel as an “apartheid” state. That the current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades. But what should not be lost in the latest gaffe is that it is not a gaffe. In what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. “Apartheid” trips easily off his tongue because it is part of the Islamist narrative that the administration has internalized.

Forget Kerry. This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—for anyone who didn’t infer it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of — all together now — apartheid policies). As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Obama’s speech “combined fictional accounts of Islamic history and doctrine, a woefully ignorant explanation of Israel’s claim to its sovereign territory, and an execrable moral equivalence drawn between Southern slave owners in early America and modern Israelis besieged by Palestinian terror.”

On the latter two points, in what I described as a “sweet-sounding sell-out,” the president claimed:

The recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

The Muslim Brotherhood leaders invited to the speech over the Mubarak government’s objection must have been giddy. My book explains:

“The basic Arab argument against Israel,” Caroline Glick observes, is that the Jewish nation was established for a single reason: “to soothe the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.”

This is patently false. As Melanie Phillips put it:

The Jews’ aspiration for their homeland does not derive from the Holocaust, nor their overall tragic history. It derives from Judaism itself, which is composed of the inseparable elements of the religion, the people and the land. Their unique claim upon the land rests upon the fact that the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of years—centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene.

He has insulted Israel? How about the way in which this oaf insulted America?

“On April 22, 1971 Kerry testified to a Senate committee that American soldiers in Vietnam were “war criminals.” He elaborated: “These were not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit—the emotions in the room, and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

How did this cur ever become a Senator?

And, more important, how did he ever have the effrontery to run for the Presidency of the nation that he libeled?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/chloe-simone-valdary-on-her-passionate-defense-of-israel-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Chloé Simone Valdary, a Junior at the University of New Orleans and founder of the Allies of Israel Association. She is a conservative and an African-American Zionist.

[LIKE Allies of Israel on Facebook]

Our guest explored the theme of The Jews’ Contribution to the World, examining the roots of the idea that man is born free because he is made in the image of God. [Begins at 16:35 mark]

The discussion was preceded by Chloé’spassionate defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and of Israel, her analysis of the vicious and racist attacks on her by the Left, and much, much more.

Don’t miss it!

The United States has reached a political precipice. The country is facing the greatest Constitutional and existential crisis since the Civil War, a situation which may expose America to assaults on its national security equivalent to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

In an effort to force a radical transformation of the United States, the rogue Obama Administration, enabled by a complicit Congress and a compliant media, has attempted to undermine the Constitution, usurp the power it reserves for the States and deny the rights it guarantees to the American people.

Executing and enforcing federal law is the fundamental duty of the executive branch of government. When a president substantially alters the intent of the laws passed by Congress or creates the conditions for avoiding compliance with the law, he is violating the Constitution.

The extent of Barack Obama’s executive overreach includes manipulating laws ranging from healthcare to immigration to privacy to technology to social issues to national security matters. A March 8, 2014 Washington Post article lists eighteen major changes in Obamacare made by the Obama Administration since 2013.

Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R-AL) office has detailed more than seventy instances from January 2009 through the end of 2013 in which Obama flouted the law on immigration matters.

According to Sessions: “The evidence reveals that the Administration has carried out a dramatic nullification of federal law… Under the guise of setting ‘priorities’, the Administration has determined that almost anyone in the world who can enter the United States is free to illegally live, work and claim benefits here as long as they are not caught committing a felony or other serious crime.”

Among the too numerous frustrations of the political process is that a lot of smart and talented people spend their time and energy fulminating about things that don’t really matter. That diverts attention from our nation’s real problems. There are few better examples than today’s debate about economic inequality.

America may well have an economic inequality problem, but it’s not a problem that will be solved by denouncing “the 1%” or blaming bankers, Republicans or tax rates that are too low. It’s not a problem that will be solved by senseless rhetoric about the false wage gap between the sexes or calling for large minimum wage increases that would reduce the number of entry-level jobs.

To the extent we have an economic inequality problem, it’s not because a small percenatge of our population—comprised of professional entertainers and athletes, corporate CEOs, internet pioneers, and others—are wealthier than the average American. Young graduates bearing large student loans while facing a weak job market, families facing unemployment or low wages, and single parents struggling to raise children do not find their situations any more difficult because some in our nation are wealthy.

Yet, liberals seem to think otherwise, and here we find a stark illustration of the converse mindsets of liberals and conservatives. Liberals seem to want to reduce economic inequality by bringing the people at the top down, while conservatives want to reduce inequality by bringing the people at the bottom up. The left wants to focus on class warfare while the right wants to focus on economic growth, the proverbial rising tide that raises all boats.

If we want to reduce economic inequality, the only logical solution is to raise the living standards of the middle class and those at the lower end of the economic spectrum. History, economics and sociology show that the optimal way to do this is not through political grandstanding or government diktats but through the pursuit of policies that have grown our economy in the past.

We must reform our almost Rube Goldberg-like tax code to remove its economic inefficiencies. We need a simpler, fairer and flatter tax structure, one that lowers rates across the board and eliminates most of the provisions that, while perhaps well-intentioned, serve as disincentives to economic growth. President Reagan enacted tax rate reductions and simplified the tax code in the 1980s, ushering in a quarter-century of economic growth. Certainly there were the usual economic cycles over that period, but this growth led to millions of new jobs and overcame the tax increases of t

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579518273176775310?mg=reno64-wsj
It’s time to defy health-care mandates issued by bureaucrats not in the healing profession.

In my 23 years as a practicing physician, I’ve learned that the only thing that matters is the doctor-patient relationship. How we interact and treat our patients is the practice of medicine. I acknowledge that there is a problem with the rising cost of health care, but there is also a problem when the individual physician in the trenches does not have a voice in the debate and is being told what to do and how to do it.

As a group, the nearly 880,000 licensed physicians in the U.S. are, for the most part, well-intentioned. We strive to do our best even while we sometimes contend with unrealistic expectations. The demands are great, and many of our families pay a huge price for our not being around. We do the things we do because it is right and our patients expect us to.

So when do we say damn the mandates and requirements from bureaucrats who are not in the healing profession? When do we stand up and say we are not going to take it any more?

Corbis

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services dictates that we must use an electronic health record (EHR) or be penalized with lower reimbursements in the future. There are “meaningful use” criteria whereby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells us as physicians what we need to include in the electronic health record or we will not be subsidized the cost of converting to the electronic system and we will be penalized by lower reimbursements. Across the country, doctors waste precious time filling in unnecessary electronic-record fields just to satisfy a regulatory measure. I personally spend two hours a day dictating and documenting electronic health records just so I can be paid and not face a government audit. Is that the best use of time for a highly trained surgical specialist?

Nicholas Kulish and Souad Makhennet recently appeared on CSPAN to promote their new book The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim. Kulish and Makhennet did not find Dr. Heim, who died more than 20 years ago, but their relentless pursuit proved enlightening in several ways.

The authors find Dr. Heim remarkably unlike the “superhuman Nazi of popular imagination” from films such as Marathon Man and The Boys From Brazil. The Austrian Heim excelled at ice hockey and easily mastered foreign languages. He completed his medical studies in Vienna at the age of 25 and was drafted into SS. His wartime duties included service in 1941 at Mauthausen. Survivors of the concentration camp there charge that Dr. Heim killed inmates by injecting gasoline into their hearts and that he decorated his desk with the skulls of selected victims.

After the war Heim spent three years as a POW, treating other prisoners as a medical doctor. His record at Mauthausen somehow failed to emerge and in 1947 he was set free and soon living the good life in a resurgent West Germany. In the early 1960s, about the time the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, Heim began to get nervous. He fled, but not to South America like other Nazi war criminals.

He decamped for Tangier then moved on to Egypt, where German military officers received a warm welcome, a legacy of support for the Axis powers in World War II. The authors also observe that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Husseini, worked with the Nazis and even visited concentration camps.

In Egypt Heim was able to maintain his German properties by remote control. He eventually converted to Islam and adopted the name Tarek Hussein Farid. In 1979 he made the cover of Der Spiegel but the authors show how sleuths such as German policeman Alfred Aedtner were unable to reel him in. So was celebrity Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who gets rough treatment in The Eternal Nazi. The authors show how Wiesenthal got it wrong on UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim and his lies about his wartime service in areas where Jews were being deported to concentration camps. As the joke had it, he suffered from “Waldheimers Disease,” which made him forget he was a Nazi.

No Nazi hunter or government spy agency was able to bag “Angel of Death” Josef Mengele, the big prize, and Treblinka guard John Demjanjuk turned out not to be “Ivan the Terrible.” Likewise, nobody was able to pry SS doctor Aribert Heim out of Egypt where he died in 1992. The authors tracked down his briefcase, full of revealing documents, and put together the story. Along the way they fail to flag some key collaborators.

Werner J. Dannhauser, who worked for COMMENTARY as an editor fifty years ago before moving into academia as a celebrated teacher of political philosophy, was an American original—and of a type of which there are, sadly, fewer and fewer as the years pass. He was a deeply serious intellectual—and a bit of a reprobate. He was a highly responsible bourgeois who tragically found himself a widower at a very young age with two very young children—and a party animal who liked to gamble and drink. (He once prevailed upon his legendary teacher, Leo Strauss, for a loan when he got himself in over his head in a professional poker game and needed some scratch to keep his legs from getting broken out from under him.) He had the beard of a 19th Century Swedenborgian clergyman—and told a Jewish joke like nobody’s business. He taught moral and political philosophy with great gravity—and got into hot water for talking dirty in a Cornell classroom. He was a genuinely delightful man and, when he could free himself from the writer’s block that oddly afflicts so many Straussians, a prose stylist of true grace and wit.

Here he is, in 1975, in an article called “On Teaching Politics Today” which is so politically incorrect in its discussion of, among other things, his students’s “bosoms” that no one, not even he, would write it now:

Like everybody else around me I learned Shaw’s not-so-bon mot early: Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. I wanted to be the third baseman for the Cleveland Indians when I grew up, or a jazz trumpeter, or a movie star, but never a teacher. I drifted into teaching just as I drifted into everything else, both wonderful and dreadful, in my life. Graduate students need money—a student, according to Balzac, is somebody who can afford only luxuries—so I began to do a little teaching on the side. It became more than a sideline because it was a stage of sorts and I was not too bad as an actor on it. To watch a classroom full of people taking down what I said was heady, especially when there were admiring girls among them. So I kept teaching.

Then came a time when I began to realize I had grown too old to be a third baseman and I suddenly got the dreadful feeling that real life was somewhere else. So I left teaching and looked for real life as a social worker, a truck dispatcher, an editor, a researcher for a labor union. In the ivory tower the university struck me as, well, an ivory tower; but out of it, it seemed to be the place where the action was. In I went and out I went, and now I’m back in, having learned, as Milton Friedman puts it, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. One pays a price for being a teacher. One’s wit becomes donnish; one’s arguments pedantic; one grows slower without growing calmer. Continued association with those younger than oneself may hasten the coming of senility. Faculty parties are immeasurably more boring than Village parties or family parties. But real life is not out there either. It’s inside somewhere, hard to find, and teachers have a better chance of finding it than most. One has to learn to trust oneself, to trust the great stupidity one is (Nietzsche). I have not learned much about who I am, but I have learned I am a teacher.

by Avi Goldreich

(Translated from the Hebrew by Nurit Greenger.)

The time machine is a sensation that nests in me when I am visiting Mr. Hobber old books store in Budapest, Hungary. Hobber learned to know my quirks and after the initial greeting and the glass of mineral water (Mr. Hobber is a vegan) he leads me down the stairs to the huge basement, to the Jewish “section.”

The Jewish section is a room full of antiquity books on subjects that Mr. Hobber sees to be Jewish. Among the books there are some that are not even worthy their leather binding. However, sometime, one can find there real culture treasure. Many of the books are Holy Books that may have been stolen from synagogues’ archives: Talmud, Bible, Mishnah, old Ashkenazi style Siddur, and others. Customarily, I open them to see who the proprietor is; who was the Bar Mitzvah boy who received the book two hundred years ago and to whom did he pass the book at the end of his days. It is simply curiosity.

Many of the books are written in the German language. They are books of Jewish rumination written by Christians or assimilating Jews. Sometime one can find a hand written Talmud volume that is very expensive; thousands of Euros, set in the specially aired cabinet. Hobber knows their value. Sometime one can find a bargain such as the book Palestina by Hadriani Relandi — its original professional name Palaestina, ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, published by Trajecti Batavorum: Ex Libraria G. Brodelet, 1714. One can find such original books in only few places in the world, also in Haifa University.

Odd how Rev. Jeremiah Wright got away with being racist for years, isn’t it?
A racist catch makes everybody feel good and right now we all feel terrific, all across the land. Donald Sterling, a billionaire who owns most of Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles Clippers pro basketball team, is our Racist Catch of the Day. He made some terrible remarks about African Americans and he merits our disapproval.

President Obama was quick to register his disgust against Sterling.
Years ago, however, Obama was not so quick to condemn his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright for Wright’s repeated anti-Semitic slurs from the pulpit. Obama sat there for some 20 years listening to all that trash-talk and most in the Liberal press also agreed that Wright did not warrant much coverage…certainly not enough to tarnish Obama.

Only the Conservative press, Fox News, tried and failed to make it a big deal.

But finally here is something we can all agree on – Liberals, Conservatives and Independents. We are all in the same boat. Yippee. We got our man.

We hate that guy Donald Sterling for allegedly warning his mistress (or former mistress) to quit taking pictures with African Americans, and to quit bringing them to the games, even though most of his team is made up of African Americans. So this comment of Sterling’s is not just reprehensible but confusing.

If you’re looking for a mostly white sport, try tennis or cricket.