RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the midst of the United Nations Security Council’s April 18th quarterly “open debate” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon interrupted the proceedings with news of an explosion on a Jerusalem bus. The explosion was subsequently confirmed by police to have been caused by a terrorist bomb. At least 21 people were injured in the attack. Debkafile cited medical sources in reporting that “nuts and bolts were found in the bodies of some of the wounded.” The Palestinian terrorist himself, a resident of East Jerusalem, did not die during his bombing, but was severely wounded.

Not surprisingly, Hamas praised the attack, although it did not immediately claim responsibility for it: “Hamas welcomes the Jerusalem operation, and considers it a natural reaction to Israeli crimes, especially field executions and the desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Meanwhile, Hamas has been busy diverting materials intended for reconstruction of homes in Gaza to build more terror tunnels. On the same day as the Jerusalem bus bombing attack, the Israeli Defense Force announced that it had discovered a tunnel extending more than two kilometers from Gaza underneath an Israeli community near the Gaza border. According to a Debkafile report, the tunnel “appeared to be wide enough to enable Hamas fighters to infiltrate into Israel and return with Israeli prisoners.”

The Jerusalem district police commander, Deputy Commisioner Yoram Halevy, warned that “a large wave of attacks is ahead of us.”

The vaunted “97% consensus” on dangerous manmade global warming is just more malarkey

By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree: Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another.

People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

As for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today. Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them. An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous; but actual weather records do not show this.

It would be far more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen 50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.

It’s not easy to make one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel companies a sympathetic victim, but a collection of state attorneys general, led by Eric Schneiderman of New York, has managed it.

They have launched a campaign against Exxon Mobil that is a transparent — nay, an explicit — attempt to punish dissent on climate change. The members of the self-described “Green 20” are demonstrating a banana-republic-worthy understanding of the law and their responsibilities. They shouldn’t be entrusted with the power of a meter maid, let alone a top position in law enforcement.

Schneiderman subpoenaed Exxon Mobil last year, in what purports to be a fraud investigation. The alleged offense is having less alarmist views on global warming over the years than the green clerisy deems acceptable. How this would constitute fraud is unclear.

Investors would have found Exxon Mobil alluring even if the company had maintained that the planet was in danger of becoming uninhabitable, for no other reason than oil is a miraculously efficient source of energy that we aren’t close to replacing. Consumers would have filled their cars with Exxon Mobil’s product regardless, and surely felt defrauded only if the gasoline didn’t get them to work or to their kids’ soccer practice as advertised.

Usually, officials charged with law enforcement at least try to obscure their political motivations. Not the attorneys general who stood with Schneiderman at a saber-rattling press conference a few weeks ago. Dispensing with any pretense of disinterestedness, they dubbed themselves “AGs United for Clean Power.” Al Gore appeared at the presser, not as a legal expert, but as a totem of the green Left. Schneiderman said that President Barack Obama’s climate agenda has been frustrated, so he and his colleagues would work “creatively” and “aggressively” to advance it.

At an open debate on the Middle East at the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday — as a bus was being blown up in Jerusalem — Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon told his Palestinian counterpart, Riyad Mansour, that he ought to be ashamed for not denouncing terrorism and incitement.

Danon had brought Natan and Renana Meir to the session to personify the devastation that Palestinian Authority incitement to violence against Jews continues to wreak. Natan is the widower of Dafna Meir, a 38-year-old nurse who was murdered three months ago by a Palestinian teenager at the entrance to her home in Otniel, a settlement south of Hebron. Renana is Natan’s 17-year-old daughter, who not only witnessed her mother being stabbed to death, but tried to help fend off the assailant.

The 15-year-old terrorist later told Israeli interrogators that he had been inspired to commit his heinous act from broadcasts on PA television and social media.

Mansour did not condemn any of it, of course. Instead, he berated Israel for imprisoning and killing Palestinian children. No surprise there, which is why Danon — who should be lauded for standing alone in the hornets’ nest of hypocrisy and deceit that the Security Council occupies — was wasting his breath. As Natan Meir said later in a small press conference after the event, it hurt him to hear a diplomat referring to jailed Palestinian kids as victims, when one of those “kids” had slaughtered his wife in cold blood.

Danon already knows that the PA is a lost cause in every possible respect. So his finger-pointing at Mansour was a gesture aimed elsewhere — but hopefully not at the United States, which is just as deserving of a tongue-lashing as the PA that it morally equates with Israel.

Indeed, “disgraceful” doesn’t begin to describe the statement made by David Pressman, the U.S.’s “alternative representative to the U.N. for special political affairs,” at the session in question. Condemning terrorism and settlements in the same sentence, Pressman talked about America’s “steadfast” efforts to “advance dialogue and progress,” which, he said, “will be borne from hard choices made by both leaders to advance the cause of peace over parochial politics.”

Thus, he continued: “We remain very concerned by the wave of terrorism, violence and the utter lack of progress the parties have made toward a two-state solution. It is important that both sides demonstrate, with concrete policies and actions, a genuine commitment to achieving a two-state solution to reduce tensions and restore hope in the possibility of peace. What we have seen on the ground, and what families like the Meir family present here today have experienced first-hand, is absolutely unconscionable.”

According to a report dated April 16, 2016 in the sometimes reliable Debka Special Report, “Israel’s top political leaders and military commanders were stunned and shocked last weekend when they found out that US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin have agreed to support the return of the Golan to Syria.”

If this is true, Barack Hussein Obama is plotting yet again a way to torment the Jewish state with yet another vile edict, one which clearly has nothing to do with enlightened statecraft but much more to do with evil witchcraft.

The occupant in the Oval Office cannot salivate enough at the prospect of harming Israel’s security and survivability. No doubt he is fulfilling a malevolent pact he has made with a cabal of Islamists and extreme leftists; both of which ideologies have satanic hatred for Israel.

With this threat hanging over the strategic territory known as the Golan Heights, it is time once again to learn its history and Biblical significance. Even as modern day Syria is convulsed in a murderous and bloody civil war with untold thousands dead and maimed; even as its tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, fights for his political and physical life; even with all this, he nevertheless spews forth his hatred of Israel and his call to take away the Golan Heights from the Jewish state.

But so do those “rebels” who are fighting him and thus remind us of the famous aphorism: “better the devil you know,” or better still, “a plague on all your houses.”

Those of us who have stood on the Golan’s 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel’s fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp-shaped lake below, called in Hebrew, Kinneret (better known as the Sea of Galilee.)

But during Syria’s occupation of the territory, no agriculture of any significance took place and no restoration of its terrain was ever undertaken. Instead, the Golan was a giant Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain down upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers an endless barrage of shells.

TEL AVIV—A bomb exploded at the back of a bus and injured 21 people as it traveled through southeast Jerusalem on Monday, Israeli police said.“We confirm that a bomb went off. We are still examining all possibilities,” said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. Police are investigating how the bomb was planted on the bus.

Few passengers were on the bus when it exploded before 6 p.m. local time, with two seriously wounded, he said. An initial police statement said the bus was empty.Most of the injured were riding in a bus that was driving alongside.

“It looked like a terror attack scene,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “Two buses in flames, many people lying on the road and heavy presence of emergency services.”Many of those wounded suffered from burns, said Elad Pas, a paramedic at the scene. Emergency medical staff reported that others had suffered from smoke inhalation and cuts from shards of glass. “They were hurting, but were very much aware of the situation,” he said.

Police teams including a bomb disposal specialist combed the surrounding area.At the time of the blast the buses were driving between an industrial area and a mostly Jewish residential neighborhood.The attack comes amid one of the worst periods of violence in Israel in decades. Palestinians have carried out more than 300 stabbings, shootings and car rammings against Israelis since September. Some 30 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed by Palestinians, Israel’s Foreign Ministry says. CONTINUE AT SITE

During her formative years, Israel received significant support in Ireland. Having experienced religious persecution themselves, the Irish identified with Jews. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, according to Professor James Bowen of the National University of Ireland at Cork.

Bowen, who serves as national chairman of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), says the initial sympathy expressed towards Israel disappeared when the Irish learned how the Arabs were “dispossessed” of their land in 1948 and then experienced the “horrors of the post-1967 occupation.”

Founded on November 29, 2001, the IPSC has no policy regarding the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, according to Bowen, it believes the decision to turn the area into two states, a federated state, or a single state should be made by the Palestinians and Israelis, who, the group says, have a legitimate interest in the outcome.

Promoting BDS

However, IPSC does not see itself as merely an interested party trying to support both sides. The group and its national chairman have taken a prominent role in promoting the Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanction (BDS) movement in Ireland against Israel. In fact, Irish academics have been particularly adamant in their efforts to have Israeli academic institutions boycotted.

In a letter to the Irish Times dated September 16, 2006, 61 Irish professors signed a petition urging academic institutions throughout the world to adopt a policy of boycotting Israeli institutions of higher education.

The date was no coincidence. The Irish professors, calling themselves Academics for Justice, published their letter on the anniversary of the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. In that incident, thousands of Arab civilians, mostly Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians, were killed by a militia controlled by the Philange, a predominantly Christian-Lebanese party. The Philange claimed the attack on Sabra and Shatila was retaliation for the assassination of then-newly elected Lebanese-Christian president Bachir Gemayel. Although Israeli soldiers did not participate in the massacre, the IDF, which was already in the area, did nothing to stop it.

This is not just some dumb Joe’s opinion…alas, it has become the “doctrine” of the letftish Democratic party….rsk

In this Thursday, April 7, 2016 photo, Vice President Joe Biden speaks at an event in Las Vegas. Biden acknowledged “overwhelming frustration” with Israel’s government on Monday, April 18, and said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration has led Israel in the wrong direction, in an unusually sharp rebuke of America’s closest ally in the Middle East. (AP Photo/John Locher)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden acknowledged “overwhelming frustration” with Israel’s government on Monday and said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration has led Israel in the wrong direction, in an unusually sharp rebuke of America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

Biden, in a speech to the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group J Street, offered a grim outlook for peace efforts, reflecting dim hopes for progress during the remainder of the Obama administration. Although he said Israelis and Palestinians shared blame for undermining trust and shirking responsibility, he was emphatic in his critique of Netanyahu’s government, suggesting his approach raised “profound questions” about how Israel could remain both Jewish and democratic.

“I firmly believe that the actions that Israel’s government has taken over the past several years — the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures — they’re moving us and more importantly they’re moving Israel in the wrong direction,” Biden said.

He said those policies were moving Israel toward a “one-state reality” — meaning a single state for Palestinians and Israelis in which eventually, Israeli Jews will no longer be the majority.

“That reality is dangerous,” Biden added.

Critics have taken to calling the leftist agitators who are running roughshod over university campuses hypocrites. The reasoning is that these self-described social-justice warriors, by shouting down speakers, silencing dissent on social media, and forcing resignations from those they accuse of “injustice,” are betraying the very toleration that allows them to speak freely. Unfortunately, the charge mischaracterizes, not just campus crybullies, but also campuses themselves. Agitators from various radical campus groups, like their predecessors of the 1960s, are not pursuing or even advocating tolerance as a core value (though they may take advantage of those who offer it to them). Rather, they are pursuing power. What is more, those expecting toleration to bring sanity back to campus are placing their faith in the wrong principle. Toleration is a highly useful tool for ordered liberty, but it is far from sufficient for ordered liberty. In practice, toleration is what those in authority give to dissenters; it is not a condition of equal respect for all opinions. Indeed, all societies value some perspectives over others, and to pretend otherwise is to leave the door open for the most radical among us to tear down our society in the name of “progress.”

The progressive myth of an ever-expanding openness to diversity of opinion always has been at best unrealistic and at worst a falsehood uttered in bad faith. The idyll it presents is perfectly suited for the preening of progressive academics, who see their campuses as, properly, neutral spaces within which Truth is pursued by calm, civil, rational individuals concerned only with testing ideas and hypotheses for improving society. The idea is that one can have a community in which there are no orthodoxies, only the free exchange of ideas. Of course, the myth of a neutral square is a particularly false and dangerous orthodoxy, for it puts debate into the straightjacket of scientism (a false sense of what empirical reason, divorced from first principles, can accomplish) and leaves the public square less neutral than open to explosions of emotivism. By pretending that the public square can do without authority, those who actually exercised it for several decades—progressive rationalists—undermined their own already suspect legitimacy, opening the way for the latest round of radicalization.

Our universities abandoned tolerant, civil discourse long ago in favor of a soul-numbing emptiness. The emptiness was sold to us as “free inquiry,” but actually was an attempt to eliminate traditional norms in favor of a caricatured version of the scientific method that purports to value reason above all else. As it has succeeded, this campaign has been replaced by a more vigorous movement to replace supposedly value-neutral faux-scientism with raw emotion and politics. Today’s students and their enablers among professors and administrators seem far more dangerous than their scientistic predecessors. But in truth they are their logical successors and are no more intolerant than those who paved the way for their ascendance.

The problems begin at home, and so do the solutions,” concludes Elliott Abrams in his trenchant analysis of why growing numbers of American Jews are drifting apart from Israel. He most certainly is correct: the drift described in his essay tells us far more about the internal dynamics of American Jewish life than about Middle Eastern realities.

Abrams might have added: ’twas ever thus. Israel has always been a canvas upon which a good many American Jews have projected both their aspirations and their insecurities. That was the case during the early years of statehood when American Jews saw themselves as indulgent patrons of their somewhat primitive Israeli clients. It was so when American Jews drew strength and pride from the military prowess of the Israel Defense Forces, in whose feats of battle they did not have to shed an ounce of blood. It has been true more recently as Birthright Israel has sent over a half-million young Jewish adults on free trips to Israel in order to help them reconnect with their Jewish identities and return as more engaged Jews in America. And—alas—it continues to be the case today, when, absorbing the hostility directed at Israel by journalists, academics, and other elites, growing numbers of Jews have found it harder to summon positive reasons for identifying with the Jewish state.

And why, after all, should they? Does any other group in America identify as strongly with the inhabitants of a foreign country? True, when an earthquake or other catastrophe strikes abroad, altruistic Americans send money and supplies to help the victims. But the longstanding preoccupation of sizable numbers of American Jews with the Israeli condition is probably without parallel in the American historical experience.

Such unnatural concern can only be driven by powerful convictions: a shared religious faith, a deep grasp of the common fate binding all Jews, and an intuitive understanding of the profound link between the two countries’ shared values and interests. Fortunately, a majority of Americans of all faiths partake of that last-named intuition. Unfortunately, growing numbers of American Jews, as Abrams observes, have become so deracinated that they no longer associate themselves with any of these convictions.

For my part,I would distinguish among different types of dissenters. It is evident from opinion research that growing numbers of American Jews are enamored neither of Israel’s present prime minister nor of specific policies formulated by Israel’s government. I am not especially put off when American Jews debate the merits of particular Israeli policies; Jews, after all, are a notoriously contentious and verbal people. What makes the contentiousness worrisome is not disagreement but the breakdown of civil conversation in communal circles.