RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”

It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing.

As long as he gets enough applause for doing it.

With his approval ratings, particularly on American leadership and national security, lower than Assad’s, he decided to exploit September 11 to butch up his foreign policy image.

After spending the last few years ignoring ISIS, he delivered a carefully timed speech vowing to take it on. The speech might have been a little more credible if it had not come from the man whose inaction allowed ISIS to take over parts of Iraq and Syria and who early this year was dismissing it as a JV team.

The scoundrel who lied and claimed that he had defeated Al Qaeda has been reborn again as a patriot who is promising to… defeat Al Qaeda. Even his usual boast of defeating Al Qaeda has been carefully walked back to a claim of having defeated “much of al-Qaida’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

That brief moment of near honesty is diminished only by the fact that the war on Al Qaeda had moved on to the Middle East long before Obama even took office. It was Obama who decided to divert away from fighting Al Qaeda in the Middle East on a failed attempt to defeat the Taliban and an even more failed attempt to negotiate peace with the “moderate” Taliban.

Obama’s strategy is a kitchen sink approach that promises air strikes for the patriots and multilateral coalitions for the appeasers. There will be coalitions with Sunni Arabs and with a new “inclusive” Iraqi government. There will be coalitions with everyone. A UN session will be chaired. Syria will be bombed and “terrorists who threaten our country” will be hunted down.

And all of it will happen without a single American soldier being put at risk.

It’s an utterly incoherent and calculatedly unobjectionable speech by a failing politician that fails to address why we’re in this mess and what past policies we have to rethink to get out of it.

THIS COLUMN IS FROM APRIL 2014. IN MAY RABBI LICHTENSTEIN RECEIVED ISRAEL’S HIGHEST HONOR….WELL DESERVED INDEED….RSK

Among this year’s recipients of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, is the eminent thinker and educator Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. To those many Jews in Israel and elsewhere who are acquainted with or have been touched by his life and work, this award, to be conferred on May 6, Independence Day, will signify one of those rare instances when government committees get things right.

In America, where he was raised and educated, Rabbi Lichtenstein’s name is bound to resonate much more faintly. Within the Orthodox community, it may be familiarly known that he is the leading sage of “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy; that he holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard; that he is clean-shaven; and that he is the son-in-law of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), the towering figure widely regarded as the founder of modern Orthodoxy. In other Jewish circles, most will have never even heard of him. In mentioning his name a few years ago, the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg cited “Orthodox informants” to the effect that the rabbi was “quite the genius of Jewish law” and a “great dude of halakhah.”

With this in mind, my goal here is less to summarize his achievement, a daunting and ultimately futile task, than to offer a portrait of the man sufficient to motivate readers to learn more. (A place to begin might be the online bibliography of his myriad published essays, books, and lectures.)

Aharon Lichtenstein was born in Paris in 1933. Eight years later, his family fled Vichy France to the United States on visas arranged by the courageous American diplomat Hiram Bingham, Jr. After brief stops in Baltimore, where the young boy was already recognized as a prodigy of traditional learning, and then Chicago, they settled in New York in 1945. There he entered a yeshiva before his bar mitzvah and subsequently went on to undergraduate studies and rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University (YU). The following years, spent studying English literature at Harvard, were crucial to the development of his particular strain of religious humanism; Boston also afforded the opportunity to study closely with his future father-in-law.

Upon returning to YU in a teaching capacity, Rabbi Lichtenstein oversaw the rabbinical school’s program for its most advanced students. Then, in 1971, he accepted an offer to join with Rabbi Yehuda Amital in heading a new yeshiva south of Jerusalem in the Etzion Bloc (in Hebrew, Gush Etzion, with Gush pronounced goosh as in “push”). He has been there ever since. Formally known as Yeshivat Har Etzion but universally called “the Gush,” the school represents his (and Rabbi Amital’s) vision for the role of the yeshiva as a unique educational institution within Jewish society; it is perhaps his greatest legacy.

Israel’s prime minister has indicated it might shelve the two-state solution. How would the world react, and how much would it matter?

Why do people cling so passionately to political opinions, even when a preponderance of facts suggests their views might be wrong or incomplete? To the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (2012), the arguments and narratives we present in defense of our positions are, in fact, “mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.” As such, those constructions are often impervious to new information or alternative narratives. “Intuitions come first,” Haidt writes; “strategic reasoning second.”

So far as I know, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon do not have any special training in the fields of psychology or social theory. Yet these two politicians, who stand at the apex of Israel’s foreign and defense establishment, seem to have internalized Haidt’s conclusions years ago. Having done so, both have regarded with equanimity—some would say with disdain—the cacophony of righteous indignation and overweening certainty with which many pundits at home and abroad pronounce the coming fall of the Jewish state, the irreversible alienation of American Jewry, and the steady collapse of Israeli democracy.

In conversations with diplomats and journalists from abroad, someone in my business quickly learns how unassailable these narratives have become. It isn’t just that they are accepted universally and completely; they are accepted by many who lack the means or the will to summon the knowledge necessary to support such sweeping assurances.

How, then, are we to assess these prevailing theologies, which drive so much of the world’s perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? According to researchers like Haidt who study the human mind, all of us are at least partly lying our way through our politics. Should we then treat these warnings, however unexamined, with at least enough humility to consider whether they might be at least partly true?

In the war with ISIS, the U.S. needs genuine presidential leadership, not a utility infielder playing everyone else’s position.

Let us note briefly the commanding irony of Barack Obama delivering—hours before 9/11—the anti-terrorism speech that history required of his predecessor after September 11, 2001. There is one thing to say: If we are lucky, President Obama will hand off to his successor a terrorist enemy as diminished as the one George Bush, David Petraeus and many others left him.

If we’re lucky.

There is a story about Mr. Obama relevant to the war, battle or whatever he declared Wednesday evening against the Islamic State, aka ISIS. It is found in his former campaign manager David Plouffe’s account of the 2008 election, “The Audacity to Win.”

Mr. Plouffe writes that during an earlier election race, Mr. Obama had a “hard time allowing his campaign staff to take more responsibility.” To which Barack Obama answered: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it.” Audacity indeed.

In a 2008 New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza, Mr. Obama is quoted telling another aide: “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Also, “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters.”

And here we are.

In the days before Mr. Obama’s ISIS address to the nation, news accounts cataloged his now-embarrassing statements about terrorism’s decline on his watch—the terrorists are JV teams, the tide of war is receding and all that.

Set aside that Mr. Obama outputted this viewpoint even as Nigeria’s homicidal Boko Haram kidnapped 275 schoolgirls, an act that appalled and galvanized the world into “Bring Back Our Girls.” No matter. Boko Haram slaughtered on, unabated.

Book Review: ’13 Hours in Benghazi’ by Mitchell Zuckoff with the Annex Security Team
The CIA contractors describe arming for battle, only to be told to ‘wait’ by their base chief as Americans were under assault half a mile away.

In a polarized time, in a polarized country, very little has been more polarizing than the national debate over the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

For critics of Barack Obama’s handling of national security, Benghazi is representative of his many failings. The administration failed to heed dire warnings before the attacks, failed to respond adequately as they unfolded and lied to cover up its mistakes afterward. For defenders of the White House, Benghazi has come to represent the excesses of Mr. Obama’s critics. Mitt Romney hastily condemned the president’s handling of Benghazi just hours after the attacks, before the facts were known. Republicans have been doing the same ever since. Or so the argument goes.

What’s most remarkable about the millions of words spoken and written during three years of debate is that none of them have come from the small group of American officials who were there. This finally changes with the publication of “13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi,” written by Mitchell Zuckoff with five members of the team of six CIA contractors who fought in Libya that night. (One of them, Tyrone Woods, died during the attack on the CIA annex.) “13 Hours” is a crisply written, gripping narrative of the events of the battle in Benghazi that adds considerable detail to the public record of what happened there.

The authors acknowledge the rancorous debate upfront and announce that they don’t intend to join it. Their account “is not about what officials in the United States government knew, said or did after the attack, or about the ongoing controversy over talking points, electoral politics, and alleged conspiracies and cover-ups.”

Instead, it is about what happened that terrible night. The contractors—three ex-Marines, a former Army Ranger and two former Navy SEALs—were in Libya to provide protection for CIA case officers, and they sought to defend U.S. facilities and diplomats during the attacks. What the five survivors have to say is at once compelling and enthralling, infuriating and heartbreaking.

The BBC has been so busy with Israel that it has had no time to protect its own daughters. This is the crux of journalistic malpractice.

Journalism’s main role is to keep us informed. When it departs from that duty, there is chaos. Rotherham, for example.

That’s where more than 1,400 English girls were repeatedly raped over a period of 16 years. The girls were mostly Christian and white. The rapists were mostly Pakistanis living in or around the same northern England town, population 250,000, and since these crimes were committed by Muslims, or “Asian men” – hence, your cover-up.

Polite Society can’t handle the truth.

I learned about all this not from The New York Times (of course not), but it was Rich Lowry in the New York Post who opened my eyes.

I share this one paragraph as follows:

“An independent report released last week says, ‘It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated.’”

Former violinist with tremor regains ability to play while undergoing brain surgery

Naomi Elishuv, a former violinist at Lithuania’s national philharmonic orchestra, had to give up her beloved instrument 20 years ago when she was diagnosed in Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center with essential tremor. When she came on aliya, she performed at the chamber orchestra and conservatory of Givatayim. After the symptoms began, she learned that there was no medical intervention then that could have reversed it.

But on Wednesday, she returned to violin playing while being awake during brain surgery that treated her shaking.

“It’s a shame that I didn’t know about this operation before,” said Elishuv, as she manipulated her bow and touched the strings to produce a normal melody. “Now I’m going to live again.”

A video on YouTube shows the musician playing Mozart as behind a plastic curtain, Sourasky surgeons are painlessly fiddling with her brain to locate the spot that needed to be repaired with deep-brain stimulation.

“My great love is playing the violin, but for many years, I have had to make do with only teaching. The tremor didn’t allow me to play professionally, and this was very hard for a woman who was used to performing all her life,” she said before being wheeled into surgery.

Prof. Itzhak Fried, head of functional neurosurgery at the hospital who performed the operation, explained that he and his team installed a pacemaker with an electrode in the brain region that was damaged. Sterotactic technology was used to reach the area within a few millimeters. Only a local anesthetic was needed, as the brain itself does not feel pain. To find the exact region, Elishuv’s cooperation was needed to stop the tremor. As she played the violin – at first with very shaky notes and finally with a normal sound, the surgeons located the affected area. The electrode was inserted through a small hole made in her skull.

In a televised address this evening, President Barack Obama outlined his ideas on how to defeat the Islamic State. Along the way, he declared the organization variously known as ISIS or ISIL to be “not Islamic.”

In making this preposterous claim, Obama joins his two immediate predecessors in pronouncing on what is not Islamic. Bill Clinton called the Taliban treatment of women and children “a terrible perversion of Islam.” George W. Bush deemed that 9/11 and other acts of violence against innocents “violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.”

None of the three has any basis for such assertions. To state the obvious: as non-Muslims and politicians, rather than Muslims and scholars, they are in no position to declare what is Islamic and what is not. As Bernard Lewis, a leading American authority of Islam, notes: “it is surely presumptuous for those who are not Muslims to say what is orthodox and what is heretical in Islam.” (That Obama was born and raised a Muslim has no relevance here, for he left the faith and cannot pronounce on it.)

Indeed, Obama compounds his predecessors’ errors and goes further: Clinton and Bush merely described certain actions (treatment of women and children, acts of violence against innocents) as un-Islamic, but Obama has dared to declare an entire organization (and quasi-state) to be “not Islamic.”

The only good thing about this idiocy? At least it’s better than the formulation by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (known as CAIR) which has the nerve to call ISIS “anti-Islamic.”

In the end, though, neither U.S. presidents nor Islamist apologists fool people. Anyone with eyes and ears realizes that ISIS, like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic. And most Westerners, as indicated by detailed polling in Europe, do have eyes and ears. Over time, they are increasingly relying on common sense to conclude that ISIS is indeed profoundly Islamic. (September 10, 2014)

TED CRUZ: HATRED, BIGOTRY, OPPOSITION TO ISRAEL LED TO ME LEAVING EVENT
Reports surfaced Wednesday night that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was “booed off the stage” at an event hosted by a purportedly Christian organization.
Cruz, the keynote speaker at the new “In Defense Of Christians” organization’s dinner in Washington DC, had offered the crowd–a number of whom were Christians from the Middle East, including Palestinian Christians–public support for Israel. After doing so, some members of the crowd booed at Cruz, and they persisted until he left the stage, noting their hatred and saying he can’t stand with them if they don’t stand with Israel.
“Tonight, in Washington, should have been a night of unity as we came together for the inaugural event for a group that calls itself ‘In Defense of Christians.’ Instead, it unfortunately deteriorated into a shameful display of bigotry and hatred,” Cruz said in a statement provided to Breitbart News. “When I spoke in strong support of Israel and the Jewish people, who are being persecuted and murdered by the same vicious terrorists who are also slaughtering Christians, many Christians in the audience applauded. But, sadly, a vocal and angry minority of attendees at the conference tried to shout down my expression of solidarity with Israel.”

President Barack Obama has announced a plan for fighting the Islamic State (IS) militants.In an interview that preceded his speech Obama tried to sound confident: “Keep in mind that this is something that we know how to do. We’ve been dealing with terrorist threats for quite some time.”

The claim is unsettling. As it happens, “they” don’t know how to do it. “They” have been dealing with terrorist threats, hesitantly and with disastrous results. The rise of the IS in itself provides conclusive evidence of “their” overall ineptitude, and in particular “their” inability to collect reliable intelligence, anticipate events, and develop coherent strategies to protect American security interests in a volatile region.

“I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL. We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities. We’re going to shrink the territory that they control. And ultimately we’re going to defeat ‘em,” Obama went on. There will be no American troops on the ground, but “because of American leadership, we have, I believe, a broad-based coalition internationally and regionally to be able to deal with the problem.”

Obama was alluding to a “coalition” that is strictly regional: his attempts at the recent NATO summit in Wales to obtain backing for a more “internationally based” coalition were an abject failure. Even Britain proved squeamish. He is now left with a would-be “coalition” of Sunni Muslim countries – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates – which have been aiding and abetting ISIS for years, and which have neither the will nor the resources to fight it. Obama will announce on Wednesday that he will rely on those countries to work together – with American air support and ill-defined overall “leadership” – in fighting the IS.

Those countries’ military forces are unable to confront an enemy which consists of highly motivated light infantry, knows the terrain, enjoys considerable popular support, and operates in small motorized formations. On the basis of its poor showing in Yemen it is clear that the Saudis in particular are no better than the Iraqi army which performed so miserably last June. Even when united in their overall strategic objectives, Arab armies are notoriously unable to develop integrated command and control systems – as was manifested in 1947-48, in the Seven-Day War of 1967, and in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Their junior officers are discouraged from making independent tactical decisions by their inept superiors who hate delegating authority. Both are, inevitably, products of a culture steeped in strictly hierarchical modes of thought and action. Furthermore, their expensive hardware integrated into hard to maneuver brigade-sized units is likely to be useless against an elusive enemy who will avoid pitched battles.