RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/so-long-queen-beatrix/print/

A reign plagued by missed opportunities to defend Dutch culture from Islamic hostility.

Today is Queen’s Day in the Netherlands. It’s also the last day on the job for the reigning monarch, Beatrix, who’s stepping down after having been on the throne since her own mother, Juliana, abdicated in 1980.

I’ve been in every kingdom in Europe, but in none of them, I think it’s fair to say, are the people as enthusiastic about their sovereign as in the Netherlands. Take Queen’s Day itself: it’s the Dutch equivalent to the Fourth of July, but the focus is not on the people and their history but on the head of state, whose birthday it celebrates. Go on a pub crawl in any Dutch town and you’ll encounter – guaranteed – one framed (and, quite frequently, enormous) portrait after another of Beatrix, usually over the bar, sometimes with a big vase of fresh tulips in front of it. One grows accustomed to hearing Brits complaining about the Windsors’ luxurious lifestyles, and in Norway the levels of cynicism about and indifference to the royals is surprisingly high. But don’t ever say a critical word about Beatrix to a Dutchman, unless you want to end up with a bicycle frame wrapped around your neck.

This high level of affection for Beatrix is rather surprising, given the fact that her ride hasn’t always been a smooth one. Start with her 1966 marriage to Claus von Amsberg, who before marrying her was a German diplomat, and, before that, a member of the Hitler Youth and Wehrmacht. In a country where the anti-German sentiment engendered by World War II is still palpable to this day – probably higher than anywhere else in Western Europe – the match didn’t go over well, and the wedding day was marked by massive protests.

Then there’s her wealth. Everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth II is rolling in dough, b

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/holder-visits-adl-ignores-anti-semitism-talks-about-helping-muslims/print/ Somehow I don’t think Holder will visit CAIR and spend most of his time talking about Anti-Semitism. But Obama Inc. keeps showing where its priorities lie and who it stands with. “Our investigation into this matter remains ongoing – and I want to assure you that my colleagues and I are determined to hold […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/the-president-of-hollywood/ There was a time when the artistic community felt an obligation to speak truth to power. It was called the Bush years. Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner back in 2006, and proceeded to blast President George W. Bush repeatedly, suggesting that “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” that […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346941/obamaclinton-reparations

Abraham Carpenter Jr., a farmer in Grady, Ark., has more insight into human nature than the average sociologist. “Anytime you are going to throw money up in the air,” he told the New York Times, “you are going to have people acting crazy.”

Carpenter is quoted in an astonishing 5,000-word Times exposé on the federal government’s wildly profligate program to compensate minority and women farmers for alleged discrimination. The government rigged the game against itself and in favor of anyone claiming taxpayers’ dollars. It was like a gambling house that fixed its slot machines to always come up triple cherries (and pay out other people’s money).

The enormous scam was set in motion by a 1997 class-action lawsuit called Pigford v. Glickman, with black farmers alleging that the Department of Agriculture discriminated against them in allocating loans. The Government Accountability Office and the Agriculture Department found no evidence of ongoing discrimination, but that black farmers had been treated unfairly in the past. This injustice became the predicate for officially sanctioned fraud amounting to reparations for non-white, non-male farmers.

The Clinton administration decided on a $1 billion settlement, “more a political decision than a litigation decision,” one lawyer told the Times. The presiding judge expanded the definition of claimants to include anyone who had “attempted to farm,” and no written complaint of discrimination was necessary. The judge wanted to set up a mechanism to provide “those class members with little or no documentary evidence with a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000.”

He succeeded brilliantly. Staff from lawyers’ offices filled out forms for claimants at mass meetings. People filled out applications for their kids. Entire families filled out applications. Most applicants had never received any loans, making it impossible to check the record to verify their claims.

The Times examined 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, and found that “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.” In Little Rock, Ark., ten members of one extended family reaped a cool half a million dollars.

Tens of thousands of applicants missed the 1999 deadline of the original suit. Their claims were probably even weaker than the original ones. But as a senator, Barack Obama supported paying the late applicants, and as president, he successfully sought another $1.15 billion for the purpose.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346942/surprise-stimulus-money-misspent What kind of project pays a couple of politically connected people hundreds of thousands of dollars for producing next to nothing? An Obama stimulus project, of course. More than four years after President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus package into law, troubling details continue to emerge. Earlier this month, for example, the […]

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/richard-falk-al-gore-and-al-jazeera/?print=1 For a good rundown on Richard Falk, a special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, see the scathing coverage by Geneva-based UN Watch [1], which blew the whistle last week on Falk’s  article blaming America for the terrorist bombings in Boston. But let’s connect a few more dots. Falk’s article ran not […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323528404578452841949606234.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Until not long ago, Israelis remained prudently coy about whether they would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. More recently, prominent Israelis have voiced doubts about whether Israel can strike those facilities, at least in any way that would make a lasting difference to Tehran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons.

Essentially, they’re saying it’s all a bluff.

The transition marks another decline in the quality of the Jewish state’s deterrence. This would be bad news in better circumstances. Considering the way the Obama administration is acting with respect to Syria, it’s much worse than that.

That’s because President Obama has now made it clear that, when it comes to rogue regimes and weapons of mass destruction, he’s exactly the bluffer he promised he wasn’t. He warned repeatedly that the use by Bashar Assad’s regime of chemical weapons against the Syrian people was a red line, a game changer, a thing “we will not tolerate.” And he responded to the regime’s use of chemical weapons by doing nothing. This is supposed to be the guy who has Israel’s back and will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon?

What’s Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578441032081716170.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Millions of Americans will pay more for health insurance, lose their coverage, or have their hours of work cut back. In recent weeks, there have been increasing expressions of concern from surprising quarters about the implementation of ObamaCare. Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, called it a “train wreck.” A Democratic colleague, West Virginia’s […]

http://www.steynonline.com/5545/the-sheik-of-araby

April 29th apparently marks the anniversary of the launch of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the year 711 – AD, that is; not sure how it’s numbered Islamically. So I thought it would be fun to have a suitably Islamo-dominant number for our Song of the Week. But then I realized I didn’t know any, apart from “Put On A Wahhabi Face”, cheerily sung by millions of Saudi wives as they’re being fitted for their burqas. So, instead of that, how about an all-American number about the desert sands?

Question: What’s the connection between Rudolph Valentino, Adolf Hitler and the Beatles?

Answer: This song:

I’m The Sheik Of Araby
Your love belongs to me
At night when you’re asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep…

Until 9/11 sparked the current torrid romance between western lefties and the Islamists, the last time the stern men of the desert had the developed world mooning over them was 90 years ago. Even before Rudolph Valentino’s screen version, The Sheik was a smash: E M Hull’s novel sold two million copies within a year of publication in 1919. It’s a cracking read, right from its splendid first sentence:

Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?

And, if you think today’s Euro-American feminists are pretty submissive in the face of Islamist theocrats, well, at the very dawn of female emancipation, millions of women apparently wanted nothing more than to be forcibly seized by some Bedouin chieftain, trussed up over his Arab stallion and ridden into the desert to be his bride. Valentino’s moment was brief: the film of The Sheik opened in 1921 and he was dead by 1926, at the age of only 31. And, to the puzzlement of your average bloke, Hollywood’s first great screen lover was frankly a bit of a nancy boy. But his alleged smoldering eroticism drove the gals crazy, and 80,000 of them showed up for his funeral, and came near to rioting. It was the biggest send-off for a charismatic Middle Eastern type until the Ayatollah Khomeini’s six decades later, when the excitable young lads clutching at his shroud managed to yank the corpse off the bier at one point.

So in the early Twenties the trick for Tin Pan Alley was to figure out a way to cash in on all this sheik chic. There’s always been a niche market for lyric exoticism – “Moonlight On The Ganges” and whatnot – and songwriters were already gingerly setting a toe or two on the desert sand. In 1915 Irving Berlin wrote a number called “Araby”, which includes some of the most atrocious rhymes in that great man’s illustrious career, starting with the first couplet –

Tonight I’m dreaming of Araby,
That’s where my dreams seem to carry me

– and continuing all the way through to the final eight bars:

Soon you’ll see within a caravan
An Arab man
Will take me over the desert…

In between comes one of the better quatrains:

That’s why I long to be
Where all those happy faces
Wait for me,
Beside the fair oasis…