RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Jewish state has grown dramatically over the last seven decades. But it enjoyed greater freedom of action in its earliest years, when it wasn’t so closely tied to the United States. http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/05/how-independent-is-israel/

This article is based on remarks delivered at a conference on “U.S.-Israel Relations” held on May 6 at the Center for International Security Studies, Princeton University.

On Israel’s Independence Day, it is customary for the Central Bureau of Statistics to summarize some of the basic facts about the transformation of Israeli demography and living standards since the state’s founding in 1948. This is always an encouraging read. Israel’s Jewish population, for instance, has grown nearly tenfold in the intervening years, from 700,000 to almost 6.4 million. When independence was declared in 1948, Israel’s Jews constituted a mere 6 percent of the world Jewish population; today they are at 43 percent. Moreover, 75 percent of Israel’s Jewish population is native-born, more than twice the percentage in 1948. Back then, there were only 34,000 vehicles on the roads; today there are three million. And so forth.

Israel has indeed grown dramatically—in population, wealth, and military prowess. These are all grounds for celebration. But has Israel seen a comparable growth in its independence? That is, has there been a comparable expansion of its ability to take the independent action it must take if it is to protect its interests and survive as a Jewish state? Or is it possible that in these respects Israel was actually more independent in its early years and that it has grown less so over time, especially with the deepening of its relationship with its principal ally the United States?

Let me explore this latter possibility with a quick trip through history. Israel’s security and sovereignty as a Jewish state rest on three events to which precise dates may be assigned: 1948, 1958, and 1967.

In 1948, Israel declared independence. Just as important, the way it waged war, and the way the Arabs waged war, resulted in the flight of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and determined that the new state would have a decisive Jewish majority. 1948 gave birth not only to a legally but also to a demographically Jewish state.
In 1958, still subject to Arab threats to eliminate it, Israel commenced construction of a nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev. Subsequent progress secured Israel’s existence against any conceivable threat of destruction by Arab states.
Finally, in 1967 Israel broke through the narrow borders in which the Jewish state had found itself after the 1948 war, giving it exclusive military control of the land mass from the Mediterranean to the Jordan valley—a control Israel is determined to preserve in any peace scenario. Israel’s victory also finally persuaded many Arabs that they would never defeat it outright, thus creating the incentive for later peace treaties.

These three actions laid the foundation of Israel’s secure existence as a sovereign Jewish state—demographically, militarily, geographically, and politically. But here is an often-overlooked fact: the United States vigorously warned Israel against all three of these actions, and threatened that taking them would leave Israel on its own and “alone.”

Let’s begin again with 1948. Britain had turned over its mandate for Palestine to the United Nations, which in November 1947 voted to partition the territory into two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Initially the Truman administration supported partition, but then began to backtrack in favor of a UN trusteeship over the whole. As Palestinian Jews contemplated whether to declare independence, Secretary of State George Marshall issued the first U.S. “alone” warning to Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), the foreign-minister-in-waiting. “I told Mr. Shertok,” Marshall reportedto President Harry Truman,

that they were taking a gamble. If the tide [of Arab hostility] did turn adversely and they came running to us for help they should be placed clearly on notice now that there was no warrant to expect help from the United States, which had warned them of the grave risk which they were running.

This admonition so shook Sharett’s confidence that David Ben-Gurion practically had to quarantine him on his return.

This is a wonderful column….but if Israel is so important for survival of the Jews, how does Dershowitz reconcile his support for the two state delusion and Israel’s leftist appeasers whose policies are dangerous to Israel? rsk
I just returned from a week-long journey through Hell! It began with a visit to the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland, as a participant of the March of the Living, following a conference commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Laws and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials. My week was consumed with recurring evidence of the worst crime ever perpetrated by human beings on other human beings – the Holocaust.

I traveled from the death camps to several small Polish towns from which my grandparents emigrated well before the Holocaust, leaving behind relatives and friends. During the course of my travels, I discovered the fate of two of my relatives. Hanna Deresiewicz (an original spelling of my family name) was a 16-year-old girl living in the small town of Pilzno when the Nazis arrived; she was separated from her siblings and parents. “The soldiers took several of the most beautiful Jewish girls for sex, and then killed them. [Among those] taken [was] Hanna Deresiewicz, 16.”

Another relative named Polek Dereshowitz, served as an “orderly” to the Commandant of Auschwitz when he was 15. He was suspended “from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of his dogs.” He was later gassed.

This is not the first time I have visited Nazi death camps. I was fully familiar with the statistical evidence of how six million Jews were systematically murdered. I was also familiar with how the Nazi death machine searched out Jews in the furthest corners of Nazi occupied Europe, even as far as the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea, and transported them to Auschwitz to gas them. I also knew that this was the only time in human history when people were brought from far distances to camps designed for one purpose only – to kill every possible Jew they could, find no matter where they lived. And I knew that because this was part of a planned genocide of the Jewish People, it was most important to kill every child, woman and man capable of producing future Jews.

But this visit, during which I learned the fate of two young members of my own family, brought the horrors home to me in a manner more personal than any statistic could provide. I was traveling with my wife and daughter, and I repeatedly imagined what it must have felt like for the parents and spouses of the murdered Jews to realize that everything precious to them was being annihilated, and that there would be no one left to morn them or to carry their seed to future generations.

From the old Hell, Poland, I traveled to a new Hell, called Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it too, provided a hellish end to its Jewish residents in the final months of the Second World War, when Hungarian Nazis turned the Blue Danube into a red mass grave. They shot their Jewish neighbors and dumped their bodies into the Danube River, even as the Nazis were retreating. And now in modern-day Budapest, I was told of the resurgence of Nazism among many ordinary Hungarians. An increasingly popular fascist party, Jobbik, boasts of its anti-Semitism and of its desire to rid Hungary of its few remaining Jews. The Jobbik party in Hungary also hates Israel, and everything else that is a manifestation of Jewishness.

I ended my trip meeting with a Jewish man of Greek background whose grandfather was murdered by the Nazis and who was now being targeted by Greek fascists for his outspoken defense of Israel and the Jewish people. Athens, too, has become a hotbed of Jew-hatred, with is popular fascist Golden Dawn party.

Since the Central Intelligence Agency contractor Robert Levinson disappeared after a trip to the Iranian island of Kish in 2007, journalists, government officials and the curious have asked me: Of the various stories told about Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, which one makes the most sense?

Had he traveled to Iran at the behest of the CIA? Or had the former FBI agent gone to retrieve Dawud Salahuddin, an American-born murderer who’d become homesick? Maybe he was there to turn him into an asset. Or perhaps Mr. Levinson journeyed to Kish as a sleuth for a corporate client who had come out on the losing side of a shady business transaction.

These questions have been impossible to answer since the CIA’s side of this story remains classified. But Barry Meier’s book, “Missing Man,” provides more than enough information to make sense of Mr. Levinson’s tragic trip to Kish, a freewheeling entrepôt where Americans may visit without visas and where Iranian security forces seized the American, imprisoned him, and taunted his family and former colleagues with pictures of him disheveled and wasting away. Mr. Meier, a New York Times reporter who has covered this story for years, limns a depressing picture of the amateurish, voracious intelligence appetites of some in the CIA.

Mr. Meier is sympathetic to his subject. A 20-year FBI agent who’d focused on Russian organized crime, Mr. Levinson left the bureau in 1998 to make more money in the private sector, but his heart remained in government work. When he became a CIA contractor in 2006 “he was thrilled to be back in the game,” as Mr. Meier puts it. Interviews with Mr. Levinson’s colleagues and friends and selections from Mr. Levinson’s emails portray an ardent patriot who was less interested in delivering information to his corporate clients than feeding it to his friend, Anne Jablonski, in Langley’s Illicit Finance Group.

By the time Mr. Levinson departs for Iran—about a third of the way through the book—the reader has the distinct impression that the gregarious family man (seven children and a beloved wife) went to Kish to dig up information on the ruling clergy primarily to improve his stature and his billing potential with CIA analysts. It’s also pretty clear—Mr. Meier leaves some doubt—that the Illicit Finance Group had no idea that he was traveling to Kish to collect information on its behalf. The CIA has admitted to having a relationship with Mr. Levinson, but it has stuck to its story that he was a “rogue” contractor. CONTINUE AT SITE

Some two dozen well-known novelists are writing a book about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that will lack context, ignore reality, give Palestinians a pass for their terror and Jew-hating, and do nothing to end the very occupation they deplore.

The occupation is “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life … the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Jewish author Michael Chabon said after touring the West Bank city of Hebron in late April with his wife, the novelist Amy Ayelet Waldman – who are jointly leading the project to produce the book next year. Perhaps Chabon’s led a sheltered life, for the occupation in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank hardly compares to humanitarian horror in North Korea; political suppression in China, Russia and Cuba; and the lack of fundamental human rights across the Arab world.

Or perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Chabon, Waldman and the other esteemed novelists who include Mario Vargas Llosa, Geraldine Brooks and Dave Eggers – all of whom have visited the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza or will do so in the coming weeks – that they wouldn’t be allowed to investigate human rights in any of the aforementioned countries due to their autocratic rule.

But let’s set aside the writers’ naivete and take them at their word. “We decided,” Chabon and Waldman wrote in announcing the project in February, “to mark the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank by editing a volume of essays by notable international writers on topics involving life in the Palestinian territories, free of cant… [to] allow readers to understand the situation in Palestine-Israel in a new way, through human narrative, rather than the litany of grim destruction we see on the news.”

The writers are working with Breaking the Silence, a controversial group of Israeli soldiers and veterans who discuss their service in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Their joint goal is simple: end the occupation. They hope that the writers will, as Breaking the Silence’s Yuli Novak put it, “touch the hearts of many people, both in Israel and internationally, in convincing them of the necessity to end it.”

Recently, the attorneys general of a number of states have launched an effort to use the RICO anti–​organized-crime statute to prosecute opponents of climate-change alarmism. This is nothing less than an all-out attack on science.

There are several vital issues involved here, involving not only substance, but, even more important, process. Let’s start with the latter.

Science is not a collection of facts; it is a process of discovery. Science, alongside its sister, conscience, is based on the signature Western individualist belief that there is a fundamental property of the human mind that, when presented with sufficient information, is able to distinguish right from wrong, justice from injustice, truth from untruth. Matters of science must therefore be determined by reason, not by force. To attempt to prevail in a scientific dispute through the use of force is equivalent to the use of a gun to prevail in a courtroom, or, for that matter, of rape to prevail in courtship. It is nothing less than a criminal rejection of a basic principle of our civilization.

It is also prima facie evidence that the case requiring such enforcement is severely defective. No valid scientific theory has ever required the use of police powers to prevail. No Ptolemaist was ever burned at the stake by Copernicans, nor did the relativity theorists ever find the need to round up the hard-core Newtonians or Etherite dead-enders. Even such counterintuitive theories as quantum mechanics and the Big Bang have done just fine without the assistance of Gestapo raids directed against their detractors. In the courtroom of science, if you have the facts on your side, you don’t need a gun — and juries would be well advised to distrust the case of those parties who choose to use weapons to silence adversarial witnesses.

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

Reprinted from InvestigativeProject.org.

Anti-Semitic incidents seem to spring up each week on college campuses throughout the United States. According to a study, “The strongest predictor of anti-Jewish hostility on campus” is the presence of a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The greater the BDS activity, especially involving faculty members, the more likely anti-Semitic episodes become, said the study issued last month by the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to investigating, documenting, and combating anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses.

One recent example occurred on April 15, when the City University of New York Doctoral Students’ Council passed a resolution calling for an academic boycott of Israel, 42-19. Weeks earlier, a CUNY professor and BDS advocate claimed that the killing of Palestinians in Gaza “reflects Jewish values.” On CUNY campuses, the New York Observer reports, Jewish students were harassed, with “Jews out of CUNY” uttered in at least one instance, and a professor who wears a yarmulke was called a “Zionist pig.”

On April 21, two-thirds of a union representing about 2,000 graduate students at New York University voted to approve a motion to support a BDS resolution against Israel. The motion also urges the union and its affiliate, the United Auto Workers, to divest from Israeli companies. The resolution asks NYU to close its program at Tel Aviv University, claiming the program violates NYU’s non-discrimination policy.

About a month earlier, NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), one of the main organizing forces behind the nationwide BDS campaign, hosted Israeli academic Ilan Pappé, described by Benny Morris as “one of the world’s sloppiest historians.”

President Obama has put the squeeze on school districts across the county: fall in line or else!

CNN has a report:

This latest guidance for schools goes beyond the bathroom issue, touching upon privacy rights, education records and sex-segregated athletics, all but guaranteeing transgender students the right to identify in school as they choose. It echoes what members of the administration have previously said on the topic.

“There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. “This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies.”

The letter does not carry the force of law but the message was clear: Fall in line or face loss of federal funding.

This is a big government shakedown, which violates the intent of the Constitution.

Let’s look at it in the big picture. The history of the West can be written on the theme of the Few v. the Many. The Few are the monarchs and the aristocrats and their retainers, and the many are everyone else. Power and money flowed from the Many and toward the Few. It was a centralized government. That’s why Highclere Castle, where many of the Downton Abbey scenes are shot, is so huge and luxurious. Though I like the series, I have to admit the real castle was built on the backs of the Many.

When our Founders saw Old Europe, they realized they had to go in a different direction. Power and wealth had to flow throughout the Many, and the Few couldn’t take it through the piling on of laws and taxes. It was a decentralized government. They also knew, of course, that the Federal Government existed to settle disputes between the States. But whatever was not delineated in the Constitution that was reserved to the Feds went to the States.

This is the cornerstone of conservatism and sets us apart from Obama and the Dems who, ironically, practice the act of power and wealth going to the Few, even though they believe they champion the cause of the Many. Misguided and violates the Constitution.

From Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s commencement address at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., May 14:

What you do will matter far more than what you say. As the years have swiftly moved by, I have often reflected on the important citizenship lessons of my life. For the most part, it was the unplanned array of small things. There was the kind gesture from the neighbor. It was my grandmother dividing our dinner because another person showed up unannounced. It was the strangers stopping to help us get our crops out of the field before a big storm.

There were the Irish nuns who believed in us and lived in our neighborhood. There was the librarian who brought books to mass so that I would not be without reading materials on the farm. Small lessons such as these became big lessons for how to live our lives. We watched and learned what it means to be a good person, a good neighbor, or a good citizen. Who will be watching you, and what will you be teaching them? After this commencement, I implore you to take a few minutes to thank those who made it possible for you to come this far, your parents, your teachers, your pastor, your coaches. You know who helped you. . . .

Do not hide your faith and your beliefs under a bushel basket especially in this world that seems to have gone mad with political correctness. Treat others the way you would like to be treated if you stood in their shoes. These small lessons become the unplanned syllabus for becoming a good citizen, and your efforts to live them will help to form the fabric of a civil society and a free and prosperous nation where inherent equality and liberty are inviolable.

Editor’s note. The following is a fairly lengthy (3,300-word) essay introducing a new case of bias against a faculty member. Professor Dennis Gouws is a tenured professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts who has run afoul of college authorities who in 2014 abruptly began to find fault with his teaching a long-established course, “Men in Literature.” In 2016, they canceled his course, culminating a long campaign of petty hostility against him because of his scholarly and professional interest in “biological maleness.”

We present this case in detail because it exemplifies a development in the campus culture wars that has not yet come into focus for many observers. The Gouws affair shows the intensification of efforts by campus feminists to use bureaucratic authority to enforce their ideological preferences on the faculty as a whole.

Professor Gouws is an academic engaged in teaching his courses, expressing his opinions through ordinary channels, and advocating for open debate over his ideas. He is not someone who was spoiling for a fight, but his department, his dean, his provost, and his president decided that his views were impermissible. This is his story.

* * *

“The attempt to marginalize, discredit, and silence the views of faculty members who dissent from the current campus orthodoxies never stops. It happens at large universities and at small colleges. It happens in the sciences and in the humanities. It happens on big public issues that everyone cares about and on small matters that could hardly muster a quorum on a rainy afternoon.

It happens explicitly at some colleges and universities that wear their leftist commitments to “social justice” openly, like armbands, and it happens implicitly at other colleges and universities that try to maintain the pretense of intellectual openness while crushing dissenting views behind closed doors.

Put all the pieces together, and the picture of the faculty side of contemporary higher education is pretty grim. Faculty members, no matter their private views, know that the price of open dissent is very high. It doesn’t really matter whether a faculty member has tenure. There are plenty of levers besides the threat of job loss. Course assignments. Teaching loads. Promotions. Salary increases. Sabbatical leaves. Petty harassment. Departmental ostracism.

Varieties of Dissent

A few brave and thick-skinned faculty members dissent anyway. Professor McAdams at Marquette University did so and is now, rather famously, suspended without pay as his university tries to strip him of tenure. Professor Robert Paquette at Hamilton College has fared better. With the help of some financial backers, Paquette relocated his Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization off campus and has kept up a relentless series of ripostes to the enforcers of political correctness at his college. Others such as Professor Bradley C.S. Watson at St. Vincent College have managed to create domains of their own within their institutions that, because they are well-funded and highly respected externally, provide a safe harbor from the institution as a whole.

McAdams, Paquette, and Watson are rare exceptions of men willing to bear all the opprobrium heaped on those who refuse to conform to the ideological fashions on campus. There are many more cases of men and women who, however reluctantly, decide that the costs of nonconformity are just too high. They choose—reluctantly and often with deep misgivings—to play along with what the campus regime demands.

And then there are people like Dennis Gouws.

“Men in Literature”

This is mainly a story of how one small college cancelled an undergraduate English course, “Men in Literature.” The course was taught by Dennis Gouws.