RUTHFULLY YOURS

While today Israel enjoys wide support on both sides of the American political aisle, this was not always the case. Late in 1956 the eminent political theorist Leo Strauss took the unusual step of commenting on contemporary political affairs to come to Israel’s defense. Strauss was moved to write by attacks against the nascent Jewish state in the conservative National Review. In this letter to Willmoore Kendall, a professor of political philosophy, founding editor of National Review, and an admirer of Strauss, Strauss reflects on the Jewish state based on his observations as a visiting professor at Hebrew University. Israel is a modern Western country with a spirit nurtured by the Hebrew Bible, he explains. Claims that the state is racist are unfounded. Strauss reminds his readers that political Zionism aims to reconnect the Jewish people with their heritage and restore the inner freedom and dignity that was lost in the ambiguous results of European emancipation.

The original letter is reproduced in full below. It was later edited and republished as an official Letter to the Editor in the January 5, 1957 issue of National Review.

November 19, 1956
Professor Wilmoore Kendall
Department of Political Science
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Professor Kendall:

For some time I have been receiving The National Review. You will not be surprised to hear that I agree with many articles appearing in the journal, especially your own. There is, however, one feature of the journal which I completely fail to comprehend. It is incomprehensible to me that the authors who touch on that subject are so unqualifiedly opposed to the State of Israel. No reasons why that stand is taken are given; mere antipathies are voiced. For I cannot call reasons such arguments as are based on gross factual error, or on complete non-comprehension of the things which matter. I am, therefore, tempted to believe that the authors in question are driven by an anti-Jewish animus; but I have learned to resist temptations. I have been teaching at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the whole academic year of 1954-1955, and what I am going to say is based exclusively on what I have seen with my own eyes.

The first thing which strikes one in Israel is that the country is a western country, which educates its many immigrants from the East in the ways of the West: Israel is the only country which as a country is an outpost of the West in the East. Furthermore, Israel is a country which is surrounded by mortal enemies of overwhelming numerical superiority, and in which a single book absolutely predominates in the instruction given in elementary schools and in high schools: the Hebrew bible. Whatever the failings of individuals may be, the spirit of the country as a whole can justly be described in these terms: heroic austerity supported by the nearness of biblical antiquity. A conservative, I take it, is a man who believes that “everything good is heritage.” I know of no country today in which this belief is stronger and less lethargic than in Israel.

But the country is poor, lacks oil and many other things which fetch much money; the venture on which the country rests may well appear to be quixotic; the University and the Government buildings are within easy range of Jordanian guns; the possibility of disastrous defeat or failure is obvious and always close. A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.

I hear the argument that the country is run by labor unions. I believe that it is a gross exaggeration to say that the country is run by labor unions. But even if it were true, I would say that a conservative, I take it, is a man who knows that the same arrangement may have very different meanings in different circumstances. The men who are governing Israel at present came from Russia at the beginning of the century. They are much more properly described as pioneers than as labor unionists. They were the men who laid the foundations under hopelessly difficult conditions. They are justly looked up to by all non-doctrinaires as the natural aristocracy of the country, for the same reasons for which Americans look up to the Pilgrim fathers. They came from Russia, the country of Nicolai the Second and Rasputin; hence they could not have had any experience of constitutional life and of the true liberalism which is only the reverse side of conservatism; it is all the more admirable that they founded a constitutional democracy adorned by an exemplary judiciary.

Anti-Netanyahu electioneering by the Obama gang confirmed.

A Senate report — in spite of itself — tells all.

It turns out that back in 2013 the State Department donated $350,000 to an NGO called OneVoice. The supposed aim was to enable OneVoice’s Israeli and Palestinian branches “to support peace negotiations.”

Since that was not a partisan political aim, the State Department’s funding of the NGO was seemingly kosher. But things — as detailed in a report released Tuesday by a bipartisan Senate subcommittee — got tricky.

The State Department authorized OneVoice to use the grant for a 14-month period ending in November 2014. OneVoice, as noted by the Times of Israel, used the funds to create an “organizational infrastructure” — and then, when the 14 months expired, handed over that organizational infrastructure to another Israeli group, known as V15, that was partisan with a vengeance.

The V in V15 stands for victory. It so happened that, in December 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the Knesset to dissolve itself, which it did, and new elections were held in March 2015. V15’s aim was, pure and simple, to defeat Netanyahu and replace him with a center-left candidate; their slogan was “Anyone but Bibi.”

As the report by the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs describes it:

In service of V15, OneVoice deployed its social media platform, which more than doubled during the State Department grant period; used its database of voter contact information, including email addresses… and enlisted its network of trained activists, many of whom were recruited or trained under the grant, to support and recruit for V15.

On the 10th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War — another chapter in Israel’s long, painful, and unfinished conflict in Lebanon — an excerpt from the new book ‘Pumpkinflowers’ examines the impact of decades in Lebanon on the Israeli psyche.

Author and journalist Matti Friedman spent much of his IDF service in the late 1990s in South Lebanon at an isolated base called Outpost Pumpkin, an experience he details in his acclaimed new book,Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story. In this excerpt, published here to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, Friedman examines the effect that Israel’s Lebanon entanglements have had on its leaders and people. The years of the Lebanon “security zone,” he believes, taught Israelis that they cannot shape the Middle East to their will and that their fate is not entirely in their own hands. Instead of despairing, however, Israelis have found an admirable way of living with a profoundly troubling reality.

I was sitting not long ago along one of the boulevards in Tel Aviv. The Middle East had succumbed in recent years to chaos and butchery dwarfing our own conflict in one tiny corner of the region. But our country was relatively calm, at least for a time, thanks not to anyone’s goodwill but to the force of our arms.
The promenade was full of teenagers in tank tops, tattooed riders of old-fashioned bikes, men with women and men with men and women with women, speaking the language of the Bible and of Jewish prayer. There were old people sipping coffee outside a restaurant, and some music. The country was going about its improbably cheerful business on a weekday evening.

Beyond the city were the neighborhoods of middle-class apartments with parking lots of company Mazdas, the kinds of places where I found many veterans of Outpost Pumpkin when I went looking for them to write this book, most having first passed through Goa or the Andes for decompression before coming back to their families, finding work as programmers and accountants and settling down to watch their kids on the swings. All of this is more than our grandparents, the perpetual outsiders of the ghettos of Minsk and Fez, had any right to expect.
Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

But it seemed for a moment — and this can happen to me in a cafe in my corner of Jerusalem, or picking up my children at school, anytime — that the buildings on either side of the boulevard were embankments, and the sky a concrete roof.

Even in the heat of summer, when the streets of downtown New Haven have emptied of students, Yale can’t escape the clutches of controversy.

The most recent incident in the long-running saga of Yale’s Calhoun College, named after the former South Carolina senator and vice president John C. Calhoun, comes at a time of national racial tensions that only heightens the sense of drama. Calhoun, who served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in the early 19th century, was famous in his day for his staunch advocacy of slavery. Months of student agitation to change the college’s name came to naught this spring when Yale refused to do so. Corey Menafee, a black man who worked as a dishwasher in Calhoun College, smashed a windowpane in the college’s dining hall that depicted two slaves carrying bales of cotton on their heads. According to his remarks in the New Haven Independent, he acted on an impulse and climbed up with a broomstick to smash the panel. He was promptly arrested and has now resigned from his job; he says that Yale agreed not to press charges if he resigned.

Yale is keeping its part of the bargain, but that probably doesn’t matter to Menafee right now, because the state is doing what Yale refused to do. Despite Yale’s stance, Connecticut is charging Menafee with a felony and a misdemeanor, leading to a progressive outcry over the incident. Charging Menafee with a felony might seem harsh (convicted felons lose voting rights), but it is in compliance with the letter of the law: In Connecticut, first-degree criminal mischief, the felony with which Menafee is charged, involves property damage in excess of $1,500 (which, if you ask me, seems rather low for a felony charge, but the law is the law. The window he smashed was worth at least that much). Yale’s administration, ever the butt of criticism from student activists, does not support the criminal charges, is not seeking restitution, and seems content to sever ties with Menafee. Yale is also removing from the common room other stained-glass windows that depict scenes from the life of Calhoun.

None of that, of course, has stopped the usual brigade of progressive crusaders from defending Menafee, to the point of demanding that he be rehired by the university whose property he destroyed. “Thank you for taking down racist imagery,” read one sign hoisted by demonstrators outside the New Haven courthouse where Menafee appeared earlier today. According to another protester, Yale must also “stop exposing workers to racism,” whatever that means and however one might go about it. John Lugo, a frequent activist in New Haven, has said that Yale should rehire Menafee. In a statement reported in the New Haven Independent, Lugo asked, “What is more valuable to Yale: a stained glassed window of enslaved people picking cotton, or the humanity of the African American people who work at Yale?”

The war Israel fought in the summer of 2006 against Hezbollah was not the same as the war Israel fought against the PLO in 1982. The war of 2006 was not a Lebanese war. It was an Iranian war.

July 12, 2006 was the first day of what has become known as the Second Lebanon War. The name of the war, like most of the lessons taken from it, is off.

It was the first Iran war.

Hezbollah, acting as Iran’s foreign legion, initiated the war with a massive mortar and rocket assault on communities in northern Israel. Under mortar cover, a Hezbollah unit crossed the border and attacked an IDF convoy traveling close to Kibbutz Zarit.

Five soldiers were killed in the missile attack. Members of the Hezbollah squad stole the bodies of two of the dead, IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and spirited them to Lebanon.

A rescue mission to bring them back failed, after the tank, tasked with the job was hit by a land mine. Five more soldiers were killed.

Hezbollah’s assault was not the opening salvo of the war. That happened two and a half weeks earlier along the border with Gaza. The July 12 attack was a carbon copy of Hamas’s June 25 assault.

At dawn that day, Hamas forces opened a salvo of mortar fire on IDF positions along the border with Gaza. Under cover of the fire, a Hamas cell penetrated Israel through an underground tunnel. The terrorists attacked a tank, killing two soldiers and abducting IDF corporal Gilad Shalit.

Following the opening assault, Hamas maintained its mortar, missile and rocket offensive against Israel for weeks.

In 2006, Hamas acted as a wholly-owned and operated Iranian proxy. Iran began massively funding the Muslim Brotherhood group in 2005. Hamas operatives, like their Hezbollah counterparts and colleagues from the Muslim Brotherhood in Sinai, were brought to Iran for training. Iran smuggled massive quantities of weaponry to Gaza, through Egypt.

In other words, the misnamed Second Lebanon War was a two-front war. It was a coordinated assault on Israel by two Iranian controlled terror armies. They operated with a near identical doctrine and operations guide, albeit, with different capabilities.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8459/gangster-islam-europe “Gangster Islam,” a crime wave packing prisons and overtaking Europe, is a problem the mainstream media will not report. Ordinary Europeans — for fear of being called “racist” or even being imprisoned for “hate speech” — are afraid even to talk about it. Timon Dias, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute, discusses the […]

“A former senior Israeli official,” Bloomberg reports, “said his country has conducted numerous drone attacks on militants in Sinai in recent years with Egypt’s blessing. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential military activity.”

“Militants in Sinai” refers primarily to ISIS, which has a branch there called Sinai Province. The Sinai Peninsula is a part of Egypt that Israel, after wresting it from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, handed back as part of the 1981 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

In light of the fact that, since Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013, Israel and Egypt have maintained tight security cooperation, such Israeli drone strikes come as no surprise. ISIS in Sinai has mounted dozens of attacks on Egyptian security personnel there, and threatens Israel as well.

Sisi, who in 2013 overthrew Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, has also moved aggressively against a Brotherhood offshoot, Hamas, in Gaza—again with Israeli cooperation.

But with a visit to Israel this week by Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry, the Israeli-Egyptian relationship appears to have taken an important step beyond the security sphere. It was the first visit to Israel by an Egyptian foreign minister in nine years. By all accounts, Shoukry’s talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were held in a good atmosphere and went well.

Aside from discussing and further enhancing the security cooperation—which Israel’s deputy chief of staff told Bloomberg is at a “level…we’ve never experienced before”—what’s in it for the two sides?

For Netanyahu, it has to do with fending off initiatives, or possible initiatives, to tackle the Palestinian issue without Israel’s consent and with a likely pro-Palestinian bias.

One of those initiatives comes from France, which in June held an international conference on the Palestinian issue that Israel strongly opposed, and which neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives attended.

Considering France’s longstanding pro-Palestinian bias, and President François Hollande’s Socialist government’s electoral dependence on France’s Muslim population, Israel sees France’s involvement as unwelcome and likely to lead to pro-Palestinian resolutions, potentially in the UN Security Council, and pressure on Israel. CONTINUE AT SITE

While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policy and, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.

Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.

The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).

2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”

“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.

For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.

3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.

The government needs to stop cooperating with, and listening to, Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA immediately. The Muslim Brotherhood document, the Explanatory Memorandum, has made it clear that the Brotherhood’s objective is to destroy our civilization from within by our own hands with the influence of these groups. Moreover, as Robert Spencer advises, there needs to be legislation that will bar all such groups and affiliated individuals from advising the government or receiving any grants from it.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Good progress on dry-AMD treatment trials. (TY Karen) Human trials of OpRegen from Israeli biotech Cell Cure (see here) at Hadassah Medical Center are proceeding well. This unique stem cell therapy aims to stop progression of the dry form of Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) that leads to blindness.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/clinical-trial-for-blindness.html

Oral insulin to replace injections. Israeli TV news about the innovative treatment from Israel’s Oramed that will make life better for many of the 400 million people with diabetes.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/214498#.V3uKKjUbNf4

When you cannot eat. Many sufferers from cancer, stroke, cerebral palsy and Parkinson’s cannot take food orally. Israel’s Fidmi Medical is developing an innovative enteral feeding device that is secure, reliable, painless and discreet. It is extremely unlikely to get clogged up or be dislodged by (potentially fatal) accident.
http://trendlines.com/portfolio/fidmi/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQz-HBmHrWE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo8dL-W05Xs

Studying cancer in space. (TY SDM) Israeli startup SpacePharma is working with Bioscience engineering faculty and students at SUNY Polytechnic Institute in a $1.75 million research project that will use research in space to find new cancer cures. They will launch a “lab-on-a-chip” with cancer cells inside in a micro satellite that will orbit the earth, studying how cancer cells behave in zero gravity and micro gravity environments.
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/SUNY-Poly-Israeli-firm-to-study-cancer-in-space-8333922.php
http://www.space4p.com/?page_id=163

UK fellowship award for Israeli CF Professor. (TY Karen) The UK’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has awarded an Honorary Fellowship to Professor. Eitan Kerem, head of the Division of Pediatrics at the Hadassah Medical Center and cystic fibrosis specialist. He was praised especially for his work training Palestinian Arab pediatricians in his cystic fibrosis clinic, and treating Palestinian Arab children.
http://www.hadassah.org/news-stories/royal-college-of-pediatrics-award.html

Generals renowned for strategy and bravery in war often make very poor national leaders. I speak here not of tin pot dictators and “generalisimos” whose chests are festooned with medals and ribbons, but of Israeli generals. As Martin Sherman, Israel’s superb commentator, wrote in The Jerusalem Post over a year ago in “Goofy Generals Galore”: “Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise and ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.”

Moshe Dayan was commander of the Jerusalem front in Israel’s War of Independence and Chief of Staff during the 1956 Suez War. In 1967, while Minister of Defense, he became the symbol of the IDF. Probably the most famous photograph of the 1967 war, is that of Dayan praying at the just-liberated Western Wall. His downfall came when he was blamed for the intelligence failures prior to the 1973 war. Inexplicably in 1977 Menachem Begin restored him to public life by making him Foreign Minister. Dayan played a critical role in implementing the infamous Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. As lead negotiator, he held secret meetings with officials in India, Iran, England and Morocco and prodded a reluctant Begin to accept all Sadat’s demands. The resulting peace agreement gave Israel nothing but promises, which were flouted by Egypt before the ink was dry. In return Israel surrendered the entire Sinai and agreed to give ‘autonomy” to the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. As Henry Kissinger later commented, “autonomy” was the embryo of partition and independence.

Yigal Allon was a respected general who served as Prime Minister for three weeks in 1969 when Levi Eshkol died suddenly. Shortly after the 1967 war his Allon Plan proposed the first post war surrender: it proposed partitioning the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, creating a Druze state in the Golan Heights, and returning most of the Sinai to Arab control. It was immediately rejected by King Hussein and ridiculed by the other Arab states, but it laid bare Israel’s willingness to divide the area, laying the ground for successive American sponsored “peace processes.”

The next general to become Prime Minister was Yitzhak Rabin who served twice, from 1974 to 1955 and again from July 1992 to November 1995 when he was assassinated. While during his first tenure he oversaw the hugely successful Entebbe rescue, during his second term he signed off on the Oslo agreement which was followed by a large and bloody siege of terrorism and continues to have catastrophic consequences for Israel. He shared a Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat for his disastrous actions.

Lt. General Ehud Barak is the most highly decorated soldier in Israel’s history and was Chief of Staff from 1991 to 1995. In 1999 he won against Netanyahu and became Israel’s tenth Prime Minister. He promptly resumed negotiations with the PLO and stated: “Every attempt to keep hold of the West Bank and Gaza leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

This was mild compared to his recent statements. As David Hornik one of Israel’s best commentators points out: “In a speech on June 16, 2016 Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” threats to Israel, declaring “Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….”

Barak went on to give his own outrageous mis-characterization of the current situation:

“Only a blind person or a sheep, an ignoramus or someone jaded, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the ‘budding fascism.…’ If it looks like budding fascism, walks like budding fascism and quacks like budding fascism, that’s the situation…. In capitals around the world—in London and Washington, in Berlin and Paris, in Moscow and Beijing—no leader believes a word coming out of Netanyahu’s mouth or his government’s.”