RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443866404577566770697427382.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Richard Landes: Romney Is Right on Culture and the Wealth of Nations
A 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals acknowledges the problems the Republican candidate pointed out.

Mitt Romney caused a firestorm last week in Jerusalem by commenting on the cultural dimensions of Israeli economic growth. Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat, correctly seeing an implied criticism of Palestinian culture, called Mr. Romney a “racist” and complained that Palestinian economic woes are really caused by the Israeli occupation. Analysts said Mr. Erekat’s reaction was a sign that Mr. Romney has disqualified himself as a broker for peace. The episode reveals as much about the dynamics of the Middle East conflict as about presidential politics.

In making his brief case, Mr. Romney cited two books: “Guns, Germs and Steel,” by geographer Jared Diamond, and “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,” by economist David Landes (my father). As in other fields of social “science,” economists argue about whether development derives from cultural advantages or from natural ones such as resistance to disease and access to primary resources. Prof. Diamond, whose book focuses on societies’ natural advantages, last week wrote an op-ed in the New York Times emphasizing both culture and nature and trying to draw Prof. Landes in with him.

But Israel (which neither book examined) and the Arab world (which only the Landes book examined) illustrate the primacy of culture as both necessary and sufficient for economic development. Israel, a country with no natural resources, an economic backwater even in the Ottoman Empire, rose to the top of the developed world in a century on culture alone. The Arab nations, on the other hand, illustrate the necessity of a certain kind of culture: Even those with vast petrodollars still have among the least productive economies in the world.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

After terrorizing the West for two generations, no one pays much attention to the Great Bear anymore. The latest unrest in Russia has merited a fraction of the headlines about the Arab Spring, Palestine or upset Muslims in Burma. The old journalistic guidelines used to be, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The new journalistic guidelines are, “If it’s not about Muslims, we don’t care.”

But the events in Russia are highly educational, not in their absurd specifics involving a female punk band and overweight thugs beating up people in their street, but in the glorious spectacle of what happens when a government mafia starts running out of money and the economy that it has been feeding off can no longer nurture its numberless ranks of official and semi-official parasites.

Most countries have their mafias, and by that I don’t mean the jolly grunters who run numbers out of basements or break legs over interest rates that even banks can’t charge. The government mafia is a web of mutual connections for mutual profit.

Say Ivan wants a construction contract. So he talks to Alexei, who knows someone in politics who can get him that contract in exchange for a bribe. That someone is Boris, who owes his position in a ministry of something or other to his friendship with Anatoly back when they were both junior KGB thugs whose fathers were also in the same business. Ivan gives some money to Alexei, who takes a percentage and passes along the rest to Boris, who takes a percentage and passes it to Anatoly who ushers in Ivan to see Vladimir, who is the undersecretary to the deputy minister of construction, who then demands a bribe that is twice as large as the cost of construction, but that’s okay because the bid is four times the cost of construction.

This is obviously a very inefficient system. In the United States, Ivan would be named John, there would be only half as many people to see, and the bribe would be known as a campaign contribution. And this is also why the United States has fewer bribes and higher taxes, because we don’t believe that government contracts should be handed out to unqualified people on the basis of bribes. We believe they should be handed out to unqualified people on the basis of race, sexual orientation or imaginary environmental crisis.

Our versions of Boris, Anatoly and Vladimir still have to make money. Our version of Ivan runs an NGO dedicated to building clean energy windmills in Ghana or underwater electric cars to feed the hungry in Oslo. Boris and Anatoly didn’t meet while badgering a frightened poet in a Lubyanka basement, but passing a joint at an anti-war rally that the KGB boys in the Lubyanka probably helped organize. Their fathers were both professors of radical history at Yale and have written well-regarded books on how the Founding Fathers only started the American Revolution to protect their monopoly on cotton. They scored the dough for the Ghana underwater hungry windmills by adding a 4 percent tax on gasoline, cough drops or tanning salons. It doesn’t matter because so long as the money exists, the mafia can keep stealing it one way or another.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/cognitive-dissonance/?print=1 A coffee house called the Second Cup I occasionally frequent has decided to go environmentally friendly, prohibiting smoking even in the outdoor courtyard parallel to a busy thoroughfare. The rationale, of course, is that secondary smoke is injurious to its clients’ health and that health comes before any other consideration. The point, naturally, is […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/how-the-obama-campaignmedia-alliance-works/?print=1

Greg Sargent, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, has written a remarkable column [1]. It is remarkable most of all for its honesty in explaining what is happening on multiple fronts in the Obama campaign.

In 2008, the mainstream media was in love with Barack Obama. They had a collective thrill running up their legs. John McCain was stunned — he thought the national press was his base. But McCain was foolish to think that the national media would give him a fair shake if he ran against a Democrat in the general election. McCain got the good press only when he ran against George W. Bush for the GOP nomination in 2000. That was an easy call for the media. Bush was a born again Christian, a Bush (privileged), a Texan. He spoke with a southern accent. These are characteristics all worthy of contempt if you write for the New York Times or Washington Post. McCain was a maverick. He supported campaign finance reform. He did not always vote with Republicans in the Senate. So backing him versus Bush was easy.

In 2008, the national media effort on behalf of candidate Obama had several components:

1. Make him a more appealing choice (fresher, younger, uncorrupted by politics) than Hillary Clinton.
2. Condemn any attempts by Obama critics to examine his largely unexamined history.
3. Create an image of Obama as a man above politics, a uniter, a healer, a redeemer, a post-racial candidate (unthreatening).
4. Dirty up McCain’s record with innuendo about adultery and colluding with lobbyists, and portray him as a man too old to serve — unsteady, out of touch, a cancer patient.
5. Report all attacks by the Obama campaign on McCain as truth.
6. Destroy Sarah Palin, making the GOP ticket look too risky to voters, given McCain’s age and health.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/08/obama_and_the_ethics_of_public_speaking.html

In a popular public speaking college text[1], my students are enjoined to be honest in what they say because “public speaking rests on the unspoken assumption that ‘words can be trusted and people will be truthful.'” Clearly blatant contempt for the truth is one kind of dishonesty but “more subtle forms of dishonesty are just as unethical.” These include

* juggling statistics, quoting out of context, [and] misrepresenting the source of facts and figures

* painting tentative findings as firm conclusions

* portraying a few details as the whole story

* citing unusual cases as typical examples

* substituting innuendo and half-truths for evidence and proof

* defaming, demeaning or degrading individuals or groups and engaging in abusive language

Barack Obama “juggles statistics” by stating that unemployment numbers are down but neglects to explain that “167,000 people dropped out of the labor force every month.” Thus, if “342,000 workers had not been suddenly dropped from the labor force meaning the size of the labor force was the same as March 2012, then the unemployment rate would have risen two tenths to 8.4%. Or, if the labor force were the same size as when Obama took office, [the unemployment rate] would be a staggering 11.1%.” In fact, the unemployment rate is meaningless since “some 5 million fewer Americans are working than when Obama took office.”

http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/70714/what-kind-support Much anguish has been expended over Jews who detest Israel so virulently they are in the forefront of the delegitimisation campaign. Such people were devastatingly satirised by Howard Jacobson as “as a Jew” Jews, who parade their identity solely to demonise Israel. There is, however, another group which is having a devastating impact on […]

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/world/florence-waren-jewish-dancer-who-resisted-nazis-dies-at-95-647725/#ixzz22jMwhJ3X

Even in the depths of war in occupied France, Florence Waren and Frederic Apcar — or “Florence et Frederic,” as they were billed — dazzled Paris, he in tails, she in jeweled gowns with flowers in her hair, the two of them gliding and swirling across the stage as one of the most famous ballroom-dance teams in Europe.
In old black-and-white photographs, Ms. Waren, then in her early 20s, is often airborne, seemingly weightless in Mr. Apcar’s arms. At times they shared the stage with Édith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier. And on many nights Nazi officers were in the audience.
But what the members of the Wehrmacht did not know was that Ms. Waren was, as she put it, “hiding in the spotlight.”
Ms. Waren was a Jew in disguise, performing in a Nazi-held city where Jews lived under constant threat. She was a lawbreaker, hiding other Jews in her apartment, risking her own deportation to a concentration camp. And she was a smuggler, helping to supply guns to the French Resistance.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3248/liberal-democrats-who-support-israel

Let me begin by categorically stating that no president has ever completely satisfied me with regard to his policies toward Israel. Every single president, Republican and Democrat alike, has refused to do the right thing when it comes to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. There may be room for disagreement about some parts of Jerusalem that were captured by Israel during its defensive war with Jordan, but there is no room for disagreement about the status of West Jerusalem, where the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, the Prime Minister’s office, and the President’s residence have always been located. I have been and will remain critical of any president who wrongly believes that recognizing West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and placing our embassy there will make it more difficult to achieve peace.

I have also disagreed with presidents, both Republican and Democrat, who have suggested that Israel’s settlement policy is the major barrier to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The major barrier has always been, and remains, the Palestinians’ unwillingness to recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, to renounce their absurd claim to a so-called “right of return,” and to accept reasonable offers from Israel regarding the borders of the West Bank. Though I have long been opposed to Israel’s settlement policy on humanitarian and democratic grounds, I insist that the continuing occupation is largely the result of Palestinian refusal to accept the reasonable compromises offered by Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert. If the Palestinians had been prepared to accept such reasonable compromises, the occupation would end, as would the concerns over humanitarian and democratic issues. The same might be true if the Palestinians were now prepared to negotiate a two-state solution with no preconditions. At bottom, therefore, this dispute is more about land than it is about human rights, because the Palestinians can secure their human rights by being willing to compromise over land, as the Jews did both in 1938, when they accepted the Peel Commission Report, and in 1948 when they accepted the UN Partition Plan.

There have been better and worse presidents when it comes to Israel; some of the best have been Republicans, as have some of the worst. Some of the best have been Democrats, as have been some of the worst. No president has been perfect, and no president has been perfectly bad. (Though Eisenhower may have come close.)

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3250/anti-semitic-ioc

The official OIC biography does not make a reference to Count Baillet-Latour as an organizer of the Nazi games. The OIC honors him as one of the great figures of the Olympic Movement. In 1936, after the games, the Count became an honorary member of “Freude und Arbeit,” the Nazi sports organization of propaganda minister Goebbels. The Count’s wife congratulated Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland, and in 1940, when Germany invaded her home country, thanked him “for bringing Nazi ideology to Belgium”.

During the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, Count Jacques Rogge, the Belgian who is the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), refused to hold a minute of silence for the eleven Israeli Olympic athletes murdered forty years ago at Munich. Instead, a week before the official opening of the Games, the Belgian aristocrat held a minute of silence during a minor ceremony in the Olympic village.

Count Rogge has announced that he will also attend a ceremony in London today, Monday August 6, organized by the Israeli embassy and the London Jewish community, and that he will speak at a ceremony in Munich on September 5. Critics of Rogge claim that the Count was afraid to mention the murdered Israelis in the opening ceremony of the London Games because he feared that this would upset member states of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). Fear of the OIC made the IOC cower.

Normally, when an athlete dies, as in the case of a Georgian athlete two years ago during the Winter Olympics, the IOC President expresses his condolences during his official speech, while the Olympic flags are flown at half-staff.

The families of the 11 murdered Israeli sportsmen declared that they were “very hurt” by Rogge’s decision. Ilana Romano, widow of weightlifter Yossef Romano, said that the Count had let “terror win.” Ankie Rekhess, widow of fencing coach Andre Spitzer, said that Rogge was using the upcoming Munich ceremony as an excuse not to hold the minute of silence and questioned his motives for attending the Munich event. “If they cannot do the right thing at home, in the Olympic ceremony, why come?”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3253/will-egypt-muslim-brotherhood-orient-to-saudi

Depending on whom you believe, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will ally with Saudi Arabia (according to Fouad Ajami) or Iran (according to former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar. These are mutually exclusive scenarios given the extreme enmity between Riyadh and Tehran, intensified by Syria’s civil war. I don’t believe either scenario, but both of them are worth reading as gauges of the complexity of the Middle East’s descent into chaos. >First, Ajami, the tireless cheerleader of the Arab Spring and true believer in Arab democracy (in Tablet last week):

It should have come as no surprise that Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, made his first official foreign visit to Saudi Arabia. Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood man, went to Arabia last month for both religious and political reasons: He prayed in Mecca, and then there was a formal summit in Jeddah with the Saudi monarch and his crown prince. There was nothing concealed—the summiteers announced that theirs would be an alliance of “moderate Sunni Islam.” There was no need to mention Iran and its tributaries, the embattled Syrian regime, and Hezbollah in Beirut: For Saudi Arabia, this is the most natural of alliances, a return to the time of Hosni Mubarak when the Saudi-Egyptian axis held sway.

Nowhere does Prof. Ajami mention what the casual reader of any newspaper knows, namely that the Saudis hate and fear the Muslim Brotherhood as much as they hate and fear Iran, because the Muslim Brotherhood is the only force with the potential to overthrow the Saudi monarchy. This remarkable lapse identifies the article as prescriptive rather than descriptive, that is to say, more of Ajami’s wishful thinking. He adds: