RUTHFULLY YOURS

The American families who were victims of terrorist attacks in Israel in the early 2000s should not have been allowed to bring a lawsuit in the U.S. against the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization, lawyers for the Palestinian groups told an appeals court Tuesday.

The Palestinian groups’ lawyers are appealing a multimillion-dollar award won by 10 families in Manhattan federal court early last year. After a seven-week trial, jurors found the PLO and Palestinian Authority liable for supporting six terrorist attacks in Israel between 2002 and 2004 and ordered the groups to pay the families $218.5 million, an amount that was automatically tripled to $655.5 million under a U.S. antiterrorism law.

Tuesday’s appeal in the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan focused on whether the families’ lawsuit, which was filed in 2004, should have been allowed to proceed in the U.S.

Mitchell Berger, a partner at Squire Patton Boggs who is representing the Palestinian groups, said the U.S. doesn’t have jurisdiction in this case, arguing that although the attacks overseas killed and injured Americans, they were directed at Israel, not the U.S. He said the Palestinian groups weren’t waging a “global terror campaign against the U.S.”

The families brought the lawsuit under the Anti-Terrorism Act, which allows American citizens who are victims of terrorist attacks overseas to sue in U.S. federal court.

U.S. Circuit Judge Christopher Droney asked Mr. Berger: “How is the [Anti-Terrorism Act] ever enforced…when your only option here is to go to Ramallah?”

Mr. Berger responded that victims could sue in the U.S. if they can show “specific jurisdiction” exists, meaning the overseas attack was expressly aimed at the U.S., which he said wasn’t the case here. The attacks at issue included suicide bombings and other attacks in Jerusalem, which left 33 dead and more than 400 injured.

“The brunt of the injury has to be committed against the United States,” Mr. Berger said.

Kent Yalowitz, a partner at Arnold & Porter LLP who is representing the victims and their families, said there was “extensive evidence” that the intent of the attacks was to intimidate the U.S. government and influence U.S. policy, pointing to Palestinian propaganda around the attacks that said “a divine blow will be dealt soon to the U.S. and Israel.” CONTINUE AT SITE

How’s this for an irony? As state attorneys general gin up a fake securities-fraud case against oil companies over climate change, starting with Exxon Mobil Corp. , the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a real securities-fraud investigation of the nation’s biggest solar power company.

SunEdison ’s sin: allegedly exaggerating its amount of cash on hand to resist an impending bankruptcy.

A little history is in order to appreciate the cynical nadir of climate politics in the U.S. You wouldn’t know it from media coverage, but the closest the U.S. Congress came to passing a serious (if still ineffectual) cap-and-trade program was during the George W. Bush administration in early 2007. Then, within days of Barack Obama’s election in 2008, Al Gore announced a revelation: the “climate crisis” no longer required such unpleasant, de facto energy taxes. The problem could be solved with painless handouts to green entrepreneurs.

Hooray! Everybody loves a handout. The activist duo Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus noted that the shift in Mr. Gore’s thinking was “highly significant.” “He knows that cap-and-trade, and most any new regulation, would raise energy prices—a political nonstarter during a recession.”

A proposed oil tax swiftly disappeared from the Obama transition website. With control of all three branches of government in hand, the imminent climate threat to humanity suddenly appeared not so urgent after all—passing a “signature” health-care law did.

Democrats, it turned out, were in favor of climate root canal only when Republicans were in charge.

OK, this is old hat, but what should be striking is how thoroughly the climate lobby has played along. Its main function today has become stringing up apostates as a distraction from Democratic unwillingness to propose policies costly enough that they would actually influence the rate of increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Take the Exxon prosecution, promoted by the attorneys general of New York and California and a host of their Democratic brethren. Though the case is never meant to be adjudicated in a courtroom, suppose it were and suppose a jury somehow found for the plaintiffs. How would Exxon pay a securities-fraud judgment? By selling oil and gas.

Attacking Exxon is not climate policy making; it’s a distraction. Its purpose is to foster an atmosphere conducive to the Gore-Obama green pork-barrel strategy. CONTINUE AT SITE

Forget the alphabet soup acronyms of a thousand organizations. The pro-Israel community has only three elements.

There’s the anti-Israel side of the pro-Israel community. This misnomer calls itself Liberal Zionism even though, like the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither liberal nor Zionist. Instead illiberal anti-Zionist groups such as J Street provide a comfortable pathway from the pro-Israel community to the anti-Israel left by selling the illusion that it is possible to be pro-Israel while opposing the survival of Israel.

These illiberal anti-Zionists, like most domestic abusers, claim to be providing “tough love” by pressuring the Jewish State to make the “tough decisions” it needs to make in order to “end the occupation”.

These “tough love” and “tough decisions” though all translate into appeasing and aiding terrorists. The only people that the illiberal anti-Zionists, who clutch fistfuls of dirty Soros cash while hiding behind the blue skirts of the pro-Israel community, are willing to get tough on are Jewish victims of Islamic terror.

Somehow Abbas and Hamas never seem to come in for any tough love from these lovers of Israel who instead relish showing their tough love by kicking and beating the Jewish State at every opportunity.

And then there’s the great center of the pro-Israel community, which is not quite anti-Israel nor quite pro-Israel. Instead it hovers moderately and indecisively in the glorious middle. The center of the pro-Israel community is not really pro-Israel. Instead it’s for a two-state solution. It’s for Israel and for the PLO. It wants foreign aid for both. It wants peace. And no amount of terrorism will change its mind.

The marshmallow center of the pro-Israel community is the best recruiting ground for the anti-Israel left because its worldview is hypocritical and incoherent. It lobbies for arms for Israel and yet insists that peace is inevitable. It concedes that both sides have good arguments, but that Israel’s argument is slightly better. Or perhaps slightly less worse. It evades the issues to talk up Israel’s tech sector or the gay bars in Tel Aviv. It believes in boosterism, but not in Israel’s right to finally end terrorism.

The best and brightest culturally liberal youth naturally see through this nonsense and leave. And why shouldn’t they? On campuses they hear from one side that Israel is the devil while their side tells them that Israel is flawed, but basically means well because it is tolerant enough to concede most of the arguments of the other side. You don’t need to be a debate champion to see the trouble with this.

When its younger crowd is through singing “Shalom, Salaam”, it will go either left or right.

The center of the pro-Israel community is actually liberal and Zionist, but it is too liberal to be Zionist and too Zionist to blend well with the left. And so it is a walking contradiction that stands for nothing. It calls for tolerance and applauds its own humanism. It raises money for Israel, but it lacks all conviction when it comes to defending Israel. It is not pro-Israel in any way that truly counts.

Finally, there is the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community. It is a testament to the perversity, neurosis and insecurity of the Jewish establishment that the pro-Israel wing is the smallest part of the pro-Israel community. The pro-Israel wing is easily overshadowed by the anti-Israel wing which lunches at the White House and the organizational behemoth of the center which pretends that it doesn’t exist.

The pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community consists of far smaller groups such as EMET, ZOA, AFSI and many others. It relies heavily on volunteers like the elderly men and women who spent years protesting the PLO deal, gathering in small groups on street corners and handing out fliers in the rain.

It is unglamorous. It is obscure. It is mostly unheard. And it will still save Israel.

My previous post tells of the adoption of a Palestinian activist’s play by the powers that decide the curriculum in the Aussie state of Victoria, aimed at teenagers. Quite a coup, leading to enormous satisfaction on the anti-Israel mob’s part.Where has the Aussie Jewish “leadership” been meanwhile?

Have they protested? Have they been fobbed off with the fact that also on the VCE playlist for 2016 is a play that uses an Aboriginal leader’s 1938 protest to the German Embassy over Nazi persecution of Jews as a peg on which to hang its themes? If so, they are woefully mistaken, for the latter play is in no sense a trade-off.

Soon to be launched, in Adelaide, is a novel by pro-BDS stalwart Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees of Jake Lynch’s Peace Centre.

Like the Palestinian activist’s play, Rees’s novel would appear to have a love story as hook on which to hang a political message.

The book is to be launched in May by Adelaide barrister Paul Heywood-Smith QC, a founding member of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA).

For Palestinian Christians, the destruction of the ancient Byzantine church ruins is yet a further attempt by Palestinian Muslim leaders to efface both Christian history and signs of any Christian presence in the West Bank and Gaza, under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas. A growing number of Christians feel they are being systematically targeted by both the PA and Hamas for being Christians.

Bulldozers were used to destroy some of the church artifacts; some Palestinian Christians accused both Hamas and the PA of copying ISIS tactics to demolish historic sites.

“Where are the heads of the churches in Jerusalem and the world?… Where are the Vatican and UNESCO? Where are the leaders and politicians who talk, talk, talk about national unity and the preservation of holy sites? Or is this a collective conspiracy to end our existence and history in the East?” — Sami Khalil, a Christian from the West Bank city of Nablus.

The plight of Palestinian Christians does not interest the international community. That is because Israel cannot be blamed for demolishing the antiquities. If the current policy against Christians persists, the day will come when no Christians will be left in Bethlehem.

Palestinian Christians are up in arms over the destruction of the ruins of an ancient Byzantine church that were recently discovered in Gaza City.

The protest, however, failed to win the attention of the international community, especially United Nations agencies such as UNESCO, whose mission is to secure the world’s cultural and natural heritage.

The ruins of the 1800-year-old church were discovered in Palestine Square, in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, where Hamas is planning to build a shopping mall. The dramatic discovery of the antiquities did not seem to leave an impression on the construction workers, who removed artifacts and continued with their work at the site.

Three momentous events mark 1979 as the year in which modern jihad, having evolved over the course of the century, emerged as a global movement: the establishment of a theocratic regime in Iran, the siege of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While the conditions for an Islamist explosion had existed for a long time, these events were the spark.

On April 1, 1979, following the overthrow of the shah and the return of the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France, the Shiite populace of Iran voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic republic. A new constitution outlined the central role of divine revelation in determining Iran’s laws, which would be based on the Koran and the Sunnah, the traditions of Islam. Then on November 4, a crowd of student protesters who were loyal to Khomeini and committed to taking their revolution to the “great Satan,” America, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six Americans hostage. Most of them would remain in captivity until the day Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s place in the White House. Focused on rescuing their imprisoned countrymen, Americans had a poor understanding of the broader picture in Iran. The elderly Khomeini was not seen as a serious alternative to the royal Pahlavi family, who were friendly to the United States. But the revolutionary cleric and his new guard of religious fanatics were able to exploit the ancient Persian reserves of pride and resilience, quickly imposing a Shia version of theocracy in which Islam and politics were totally reintegrated. The mullahs of Tehran became the center of political as well as religious power in Tehran.
Mideast Two Revolutions

Demonstrators hold up a poster of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini during an anti-shah demonstration in Tehran in 1978 / AP

The Shia of Iran thus demonstrated to the world—including the Sunnis, many of whom would be envious—that the theocratic caliph- ate was viable in the modern world. It also demonstrated that Muslims not only should but could reject the Western separation of politics and faith. Modernity’s separation of Allah’s writ and governance could be reversed.

Just as important, the success of the Iranian revolution and the embassy attack proved that the United States, and by inference all other great powers, was not invulnerable. The Muslim world did not have to be the powerless victim of Western machinations, such as interference in Iran’s domestic affairs and overarching control of the geopolitics of the Middle East.

Last month, Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified before the Senate that the Department of Justice that she is considering taking legal action against energy industries dubious of the dire role of carbon emissions to change the climate. And Democratic attorneys general from numerous states are in hot pursuit of global warming heretics.

Before more partisan lawyering and congressional testimony clouds the climate change concern, let’s clear up what is known about this issue.

“Everything we know about the world’s climate — past, present, and future — we know through models.” So states professor Paul Edwards, a supporter of the “consensus” view of climate change, in the Introduction to his highly acclaimed book A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010). He also notes that “without models, there are no data.” [italics in original]

Models have become integral to modern scientific practice. In many fields, Edwards says “computer models complement or even replace laboratory experiments; analysis and simulation models have become principal means of data collection, prediction, and decision making.”

Such is the contemporary world of science aided by the powerful tool of modern computers. The three basic components of the scientific method — observation, hypothesis, and testing — still hold, but in many cases the testing portion has been abetted, if not in some cases usurped, by models.

As many challengers of the manmade disastrous global warming hypothesis can attest, the “evidence” for a worldwide climate catastrophe is founded upon the results of atmospheric models. Yet, can such results be trusted enough to direct trillions of dollars in the years ahead to shift the energy sector and redistribute financial resources? After all, as University of Pittsburgh virologist John Mellors asserted in a recent article about HIV treatment in Science (“Researchers claim to find HIV sanctuaries,” January 29, 2016), “You can use a model to support anything you want, but you can prove nothing… You can model that the sun orbits the Earth.”

Atmospheric models have tremendous difficulty simulating key elements of the hydrologic cycle like cloud cover and precipitation patterns. Such components are obviously important to decades-hence projections heavily relied upon for drastic global public policy decisions.

Sylvia goes to Cannes – in a documentary about her life.

My interest in Sylvia Raphael began at the end – her end.

“One day when true peace comes, they will write books about her, name streets after her and make movies of her life,” wrote Eitan Haber, former defense correspondent and close associate and adviser to former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, in Yediot Aharonot in 2005, following the funeral of top Mossad agent, Sylvia Raphael at Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh.

Her “unveiling” at the world premiere on the March 29 at Yad Lebanim in Ra’anana is proof that the day has assuredly dawned.

Interviewed in the movie Sylvia – Tracing Blood following years of personal interest and research, I am proud – as a South African – to introduce the film and its director Saxon Logan, before both departed for Cannes.

MY JOURNEY with Raphael began one morning in 2005 when my eyes zoomed in on a brief report on Page 3 of The Jerusalem Post regarding a funeral that had taken place the previous day, a few kilometers north of my home city of Kfar Saba.

It revealed that the deceased was a South African, that she had been a Mossad agent convicted of a botched assassination in Norway connected with the 1972 Olympics Games Munich Massacre. It also seemed to hint at her not being Jewish. Fed on crumbs, I was hungry for more, and it came in the form of a line that to most would be inconsequential, but for me was alluring and illuminating: “The entire perimeter of the kibbutz had been cordoned off by the police.”

This was a red rag to the journalist’s Gallic bull. The message between the lines was clear – the funeral would be attended by a Who’s Who of Israel’s security community, and the powers- that-be did not want the general public to know too much about it. Why? While her remains were lowered into the earth, it was her life that invited unearthing.

My first question was why would a woman, not Jewish, dedicate the best years of her life, risking life and limb, to a foreign cause – the survival of the Jewish state? Shmuel Goren, a former deputy head of the Mossad, had also expressed after the funeral, “It is a pity that there are not more like her.”

Vassar College, a private, coeducational college in Poughkeepsie, NY, has gone from prestigious to pernicious, by reason of its support for the Islamic invasion of the West (America and Europe) and its biased programs against Israel and Jews. Complicit are eight of the college’s 54 academic departments (including “Jewish” studies) that invite radical speakers, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and others who advocate the BDS movement (boycott, divestment, sanctions), against Israeli products and American companies that conduct business with Israel.

Jashir Puar, Rutger’s infamous professor of women’s and gender study, who is herself conflicted with, among other things, her own gender identity, was a recent guest speaker. She vigorously demonizes Israel, the only Middle Eastern country that would permit her, a homosexual, to live. Without a shred of evidence, she employed the vicious, centuries-old blood libel and accused the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of harvesting Palestinian organs, adding that Israelis are poisoning Palestinians with elements, such as Uranium, to stunt their growth. Curiously, she did not mention a Michigan State University report in 2014 about two dozen Syrians who ate the hearts of their victims and died of Kuru, a neuro-degenerative disorder associated with cannibalism. Two others were hospitalized for treatment in Germany.

Puar is one of several who present preposterous indictments against Israel to academia’s captive audiences – the unwitting students who listen raptly and the spineless faculty who remain mute during these hate-mongering sessions. Puar, who has been declared a “crackpot” by the NY Daily News, is a dangerous crackpot, who now disallows recordings of her lectures.

Psychologically at odds with her gender and consumed by hatred, Puar favors tyrannical Islam, whose police patrol the streets to enforce Sharia on all and would likely condemn her to 500 – 1,000 lashes and imprisonment, or execution. (The highest number of lashes recorded by Amnesty International was 40,000 for murder.) However, the rich and powerful are explicitly permitted to practice pedophilia, citing supportive versus from the Qur’an and the examples of Muhammed.

If Palestinian growth is indeed stunted, as the professor contends without substantiation, blame may rest with theQur’an, which declares that Allah made marriage with first cousins acceptable and lawful because Mohammed seduced his first cousin and children as young as 9, and endorses other sexual activities with infants.

Further, consanguineous marriages – those between blood relatives – are an integral feature in Islam, accounting for more than half of all marriages in some nations and leading to a higher incidence of offspring with genetic disorders. Perhaps Islam produces these impaired children to be sacrificed to war and suicide, with a double purpose of culling out the defective results of inbreeding and assuaging the revulsion that accompanies incest and rape.

In 2014, Vassar’s Hillel Union, part of 100-year-old network of Jewish students, professionals and leaders dedicated to enriching the Jewish campus experience, chose to re-define itself as “Open Hillel.” This is nothing less than abandoning their rules that protect Israel and Jewish students, and revealing their willingness to host anti-Semitic speakers (including Students for Justice in Palestine – SJP) who advocate to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) against Israel.

On February 17, 2016, after several years of discriminatory events and adverse publicity, one outspoken alumnus, CAMERA fellow Jason Storch, succeeded in bringing Palestinian Human Rights Activist Bassem Eid to speak in condemnation of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the BDS campaign, and to reveal some truths about Israel. Nevertheless, the Vassar Student Association, motivated by the SJP and forty faculty members, enacted their BDS Resolution 30-x.

This is not about whether climate change is real or not. This is about people believing a leader so much that they will believe and say things that are totally absurd. We should all be careful not to fall into the same trap.Scientific American is the oldest periodical published in the United States. It was first published in 1845, 171 years ago. I have been reading Scientific American since I started college as a physics major back in January, 1957. I enjoy reading a wide range of articles on medicine, cosmology, physics, archeology, paleontology and whatever else they publish.

In the last few years they have added Politically Correct articles and that bothers me.

The March, 2016 issue features the article “Climate Refugees of Syria” under the category “Sustainability”. The title:

The Ominous Story of Syria’s Climate Refugees

Farmers who have escaped the battle-torn nation explain how drought and government abuse have driven social violence

This article is written in the fine tradition of Rolling Stone’s college rape story. It is the story of Kemal Ali. In true pseudo-documentary tradition, that is not his real name so you can’t possibly check out the story.

Kemal Ali was a well driller. Because of a drought, exasperated by Climate Change, the water table fell so far that he could no longer drill to it and lost his income. There is mention of corruption that made well drilling impossibly expensive. He decided to go through Turkey to Greece and Europe. No mention is made about how he would make a living in Europe.

The article says the drought lasted from 2006 to 2010. It ended 6 years ago. On the way, the bus he was in was attacked. He was wounded and lost the use of his legs so now he languishes in a camp on the Greek isle of Lesbos.So we have a nice, personalized drama.Did Syrians flee Syria during the 2006-2010 drought? Nope.

If you asked Syrians why they fled their homes, do you think any one of them would say “Climate change, of course. Our average temperature is 1o warmer now”? Is it more likely they would say, “I feared Assad’s barrel bombs and poison gas and I feared Da’esh (ISIS) cutting off my head after raping my wife”?

The Syrians fled Syria for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. All share the same climate and the same drought. They don’t share Da’esh.

California has a drought. Californians are fleeing California for other states. Why? Not for the drought. It is because it has become a high-tax state with a “progressive” government. California is working now to end their water problems. They are working with Israeli companies to solve their water shortage the same way Israel solved its water shortage problems.

The obvious answer to Syria’s water problem is to make peace with Israel and use Israeli technology to end the water problems as they have done in Israel.

I am left with the impression that the article is to provide support for the Progressive Agenda. I do not understand how this was in a scientific magazine and not a political one. The only thing it really says about climate is that there was a drought and climate change made it worse.