RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel keeps the peace? That may seem jarring since when Israel gets in the news—as in the current operation against Hamas terror in Gaza—it’s usually in connection to violence.

But in reality, as a democratic, Western-aligned country and the Middle East’s preeminent military power, Israel has done much over the decades to keep the region from being worse than it is. Israel has used its might—sometimes openly, sometimes discreetly—not only to safeguard its own interests but also those of the West and the more moderate Arab states.
1. Preventing a nuclear Iraq.

When Iraq came to the verge of going nuclear, it was Israel that stopped it.

In the 1970s, France—heavily pro-Arab and dependent on Arab oil—started helping Iraq build the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. By 1981, with Saddam Hussein in power, Israeli intelligence conveyed its grim findings to Jerusalem: Iraq, a sworn enemy of Israel, was aiming to build nuclear weapons at Osirak and was within a year of doing so.

Israel tried diplomacy with France and the U.S. With the former, it was no-go; Iraq was France’s main customer for weaponry, paying mainly in oil. As for the U.S., it agreed with Israel’s assessments but declined to act, possibly because Iraq was then fighting Iran [1].

So on June 7, 1981, under orders from Prime Minister Menachem Begin [2], the Israeli air force dispatched 14 F-15s and F-16s to Osirak. The planes flew low so that Iraq never detected them, and they reduced the reactor to ruins in a minute and 20 seconds.

The attack, of course, was universally condemned at the time. The U.S. suspended a shipment of planes to Israel. But in June 1991, visiting Israel after the Gulf War, then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney gave General David Ivry, chief of the Israeli air force ten years earlier, his “thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm.”

Desert Storm was a success, pushing Iraq out of Kuwait and maintaining relative order in the Middle East. Although further U.S. measures in Iraq are more debatable, at least they didn’t have to be carried out against a nuclear Iraq.
2. Preventing a nuclear Syria.

Syria is another Middle Eastern country you wouldn’t want to see with nuclear bombs. That, too, came close to happening and was prevented by Israel [3].

In late 2006 and early 2007, Israeli intelligence found out that North Korea was building a plutonium reactor for the Assad regime in northern Syria. The aim: to put together a nuclear bomb.

In April, Israel conveyed that finding to Washington. President Bush ordered an inquiry; U.S. intelligence said Israel was right.

The then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, tried to convince the U.S. to attack, but Washington—already embroiled in Iraq—declined. Olmert told Bush that, in that case, Israel would do it. Olmert interpreted Bush’s reaction as a green light.

Shortly after midnight on September 6, 2007, Israeli planes dropped 17 tons of bombs on the reactor, putting an end to it. This time Israel kept mum, not officially acknowledging the operation (it hasn’t to this day), and criticism was more muted. Considering that, a few years later, the Assad regime showed itself quite capable of using chemical weapons against civilians, Israel again did the world a great favor.

After another bloody weekend in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel branded the shootings unacceptable and the city’s top cop demanded more gun control laws. Chicago’s murder rate has actually dropped since concealed carry became legal. Emanuel’s lawsuits over his illegal gun control laws have left the already struggling city deep in the hole and forced to cover the NRA’s million dollars in legal bills.

Concealed carry paid off over the bloody weekend when a vet carrying a gun returned fire stopping a massacre before it happened. The original shooter ended up in the hospital, but nobody ended up in the morgue, which kept the death toll for the weekend down to fourteen.

Fourteen isn’t pretty, but it’s better than twenty or thirty.

Chicago’s murder rate in 1992 was double what it is today. The death rate was at 33.7 out of 100,000 which meant that you had a pretty good chance of being shot in Chicago. Today it’s down to 15 out of 100,000, which is small comfort to those ending up in the morgue, but it gives everyone else much better odds of surviving to see what ingenious ways the next corrupt mayoral administration will use to rip off the city.

Back in 1992, the cops also blamed guns for the murder rate. But it wasn’t the guns that were killing people. It was the gangs.

Now the murder rate is down, but the number of shootings is up. To Chicago’s police boss, that’s a problem, as if it makes a difference to the deceased whether he’s shot, stabbed or dropped in the water wearing cement overshoes. But fighting guns is easier than fighting crime.

The gun obsession is one of the few things that cops and leftists have in common. It’s the last politically acceptable form of prohibitionism in a society that enthusiastically legalizes drugs, even if possessing crack cocaine is statistically much more likely to lead you to kill a man, than possessing a gun will.

Every shooting spree bypasses the obvious problem with calls for more gun laws and something for the youth to do over the weekend that doesn’t involve shooting up the local housing project. This weekend, Rahm Emanuel took on the problem of funding more teen centers while Chicago’s top cop blustered about more gun laws. And then having successfully talked around the issue, they all went home.

The left loves root causes more than it loves red shirts and black bandanas, a fashion choice that it shares with some of the gangs responsible for most of the shootings.

As the orchestrated chaos at America’s southern border remains unrelenting, President Obama is doing what he does best: ignoring another crisis in favor of fundraising. And despite that fundraising taking place in Texas, the state hardest hit by the onslaught of illegal alien children, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest insisted Monday that Obama had no intention of visiting the border. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) was incensed. “President Obama needs a wakeup call — and visiting the border and seeing firsthand the severity of this ongoing crisis is that wakeup call,” he said in remarks prepared for airing on Senate floor.

It’s not going to happen, and even Democrats are beginning to get exasperated. On Sunday, Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), whose congressional district sits on the U.S.-Mexican border, accused the White House of being late to the game. “With all due respect to the administration, they’re one step behind. They should have seen this coming a long time ago,” Cuellar told CNN’s Candy Crowley on “State of the Union.”

Actually they did, and not just recently. On January 29, 2014 an ad placed at the FedBizOpps.Gov website was looking to procure escort services for 65,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs). Contained in the same ad was a far greater indicator of the Obama administration’s ultimate intentions once that crisis developed. Whoever provided the escort services was also expected to transport “these juveniles to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.” That would be the ORR whose mission is to “provide people in need with critical resources to assist them in becoming integrated members of American society.”

In other the words, the administration was not only anticipating a crisis before one developed, it had seemingly decided that the massive influx of illegals would be categorized as “refugees.” Yesterday the United Nations got into the act, urging the administration to embrace that definition as a means of making thousands of illegals eligible for asylum, rather than sending them home. When asked whether the administration considered the current border assault a refugee crisis, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was “a humanitarian situation that requires urgent attention.”

Yet urgent attention is exactly what is lacking, and the administration is citing the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 as the reason. Enacted by a Democratically-controlled Congress and signed by President Bush, the law offers additional protections to UACs who are not from Canada or Mexico. Those protections include an opportunity to appear at an immigration hearing, consult with an advocate, possibly retain counsel, and receive placement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is tasked with placing the child “in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

Unfortunately for Obama, another Democrat has challenged his interpretation of the statute. “That law already provides the administration with flexibility to accelerate the judicial process in times of crisis,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who helped craft the Act. “The administration should use that flexibility to speed up the system while still treating these children humanely, with compassion and respect.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/video-jamie-glazov-on-the-unholy-alliances-blame-game/

In this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell interviews Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov about The Unholy Alliance’s Blame Game, in which Jamie dissects Islam’s and the Left’s sociopathic tactic of inflicting wounds — and then making the victims apologize.

The dialogue occurred within the context of Jamie’s discussion about his recent battle on Hannity against Jihad-Deniers, in which he called out progressives’ willful blindness in the face of the Islamic threat:

Years ago, probably in the mid to late 1950s, Grand Union opened a grocery store on the outskirts of Peterborough, New Hampshire, thereby ringing the death knell for the two or three small, independent grocery stores in the village. It was my first experience with Joseph Schumpeter’s dictum of creative destruction. For a few months, my mother hung to her principles and refused to enter what she called, the “grand onion.” But eventually, lower prices and dwindling products on the shelves of the financially-strapped independents forced her to change.

What prompted this subject was an article in the business section of Monday’s New York Times, headlined, “Principles Are No Match for Europe’s Love of U.S. Titans.” The article discusses how tech behemoths, like Amazon, Google and Facebook create a love-hate relationship, with consumers. Many feel principled when independent stores are placed in jeopardy or by the perceived ill-treatment by “Big-box” companies of warehouse employees. But for Guillaume Rosquin of Lyon, in the Times article, a $200 savings on a Blackberry was enough to put his “issues with working conditions aside.” Seven of the ten most visited websites in Europe are operated by American companies. Google has an 85% market share for search in Europe, compared to 65% in the U.S. Facebook, the target of several investigations for its tax practices in Europe, continues to add users – now numbering 150 million Europeans, or roughly one in three.

Amazon is the most visited website in Europe and the world. In June, they had a total of 282.2 million visitors, 35% of which were Americans and 31.8% were Europeans. Twenty years ago, the company did not exist. Principle versus price/convenience is an issue with which we all struggle. But it is also “creative destruction” that is at work. I have a brother who owns what some people claim is the best independent bookstore in the United States, the Toadstool in Peterborough, NH. In full disclosure, I own one share, or four percent of the business. Yet, on a Sunday morning, reading the New York Times book review section, I often – shamelessly – log onto Amazon.

Creative and aspirant individuals have always led innovation. When they live within a democratic capitalistic society they thrive. It is no surprise that American companies dominate web-based businesses in Europe rather than European, because America’s culture has allowed and encouraged the creative forces to be unleashed that provide for a dynamic society. However, a natural consequence of unleashing the creative spirit is inequality in terms of outcomes. For those who are bright, creative and aspirant will do best. However consumers benefit as well. Two principal benefits of creative destruction are reduced prices and greater availability of goods and services.

In the film Obvious Child, Jenny Slate plays Donna Stern, a stand-up comedian who specializes in making jokes about her private parts, with the occasional foray into fart humor. She is about to go onstage. Her friend offers her some encouragement: “You are going to kill it out there!”

Donna replies: “I actually have an appointment to do that tomorrow.”

Donna’s talking about her abortion appointment.

Get it? It’s funny because it’s true. Or if you’re like me, you think it’s not funny because it’s true.

Many critics think it’s funny. One dubbed it “far and away the most winning abortion-themed comedy ever made.” Of course, as an artistic genre, that’s setting the bar pretty low, like serving the best gas-station sushi in the state of Oklahoma.

Since it opened last month, the film has grossed less than $2 million. Compare that to 2007’s Juno, a brilliant film widely seen as pro-life (at least among pro-lifers), or Knocked Up, a raunchier romantic comedy also hailed by abortion foes, both of which grossed more than $140 million domestically. Obvious Child, then, seems less like the cultural watershed its friends and foes make it out to be and more like a barely successful art-house flick.

That’s worth noting given that the film’s writer and director, Gillian Robespierre, was motivated in part because films such as Juno and Knocked Up “rubbed [her] the wrong way.”

Dinesh D’Souza had a similar motivation in making America: Imagine the World Without Her, a new documentary love letter to his adopted country. He’s often described as the Right’s Michael Moore, but he’s aiming higher, hoping to contend one day with Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone in the feature-film business. He tells National Review that “the Left knows the power of telling a story.” Stone and Spielberg are “much bigger than Michael Moore. They don’t make liberal films — they just make films, and they have a point of view. I want to make films with a different point of view.”

D’Souza’s absolutely right about Spielberg (though too kind to Stone). One of my biggest complaints about contemporary conservatism — in and out of politics — is that it has lost sight of the importance of storytelling.

My late friend Andrew Breitbart liked to say that politics is downstream of culture, meaning that any truly successful political turnaround needs to start by changing popular attitudes. Adam Bellow, a storied editor of conservative books, has a similar conviction and is trying to launch a conservative revolt in the world of fiction.

Mr. Obama may imagine his red lines are still credible, but our enemies know otherwise. They get what the dwindling number of the president’s courtiers—namely, Tom Friedman and some New Republic editorial assistants—don’t: There’s no spine in this president’s speech.

Ours is still an American world, but it is presided over by a president who doesn’t believe in American power. The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity—and a sense that the moment is theirs to seize. We know how that story ended.”

In 2008 Fareed Zakaria wrote an influential book titled “The Post-American World.” It was, mercifully, not another lament about American decline. Instead, the book described “the rise of the rest”—China, Brazil, Turkey and other supposedly emerging powers—and made the case that the U.S. had to learn how to accommodate itself to a world in which its primacy was no longer incontestable.

I admire the book, but the title was missing a word. It turns out that we are not in a post-American world of diminishing U.S. influence. We are in a post-Pax Americana world of collapsing U.S. will. Britain, it was once said, gained her empire “in a fit of absence of mind.” Now Barack Obama is relinquishing U.S. dominance with about the same degree of mindfulness, and Americans seem content to go along with it.

Remember Crimea? Remember Syria’s Bashar Assad, and how he had to “step aside”? Remember Afghanistan, which Mr. Obama once called “the war that has to be won”? Remember him talking about core al Qaeda being “on a path to defeat”? Remember him celebrating Iraq as “stable and self-reliant”?

Whatever. All this seems to blow past Mr. Obama’s field of vision like some infomercial in Bulgarian—it means little in its own language and even less in ours. “The world is less violent than it has ever been,” the president told Tumblr users last month, a day or so after Mosul fell into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. “Terrible things happen around the world every single day, but the trend lines of progress are unmistakable.”

Who needs a foreign policy when the arc of history is bending your way?

In 2005 Israel withdrew from Gaza, yet Israel has since been forced to go to war twice to stop a rain of rockets and mortars fired from the territory by the terrorist group Hamas and its allies. Now Israel might have to fight a third time to protect its citizens from random aerial assault.

As we went to press Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looked set to launch a major military campaign as Hamas unleashed another indiscriminate volley of rockets that reached well into central Israel. A video posted on Facebook on Tuesday showed a rocket flying over a wedding, complete with shouts and a fleeing bride.

Maybe this time Mr. Netanyahu should address the cause of the problem rather than treat the symptoms. By “cause” we mean Hamas. When Israel left Gaza, it dismantled 21 Israeli settlements (along with four others in the West Bank) and forcibly evicted nearly 9,000 Israeli settlers. Western governments appointed high-level emissaries like former World Bank President James Wolfensohn to turn Gaza into a showcase of a future Palestinian state.

Gaza did become a showcase of a rather different kind. Within a year—and thanks in part to the absence of Israel—the strip descended into a civil war between Hamas and Fatah, the political party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The war was settled in 2007 when Hamas seized power by force. That was followed by a steady increase of rocket fire on Israel that only ended with Israel’s temporary re-invasion in 2009.

For its efforts to defend itself, Israel was vilified as never before, including with the U.N.’s Goldstone Report (later recanted by its principal author, South African judge Richard Goldstone ). The war reduced rocket fire into Israel for a while, but by November 2012 it had to fight again. Israelis were only spared from major casualties thanks to their Iron Dome missile defenses.

Now Hamas seems to have decided that starting another war will be politically opportune—never mind the consequences to ordinary Gazans. Regionally, Hamas has been on the back foot since it lost Syria’s Bashar Assad as a patron, and especially after the Egyptian army overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi last summer. This is a chance to go back on the terrorist offense.

A Climate Activist Bags Himself
Tom Steyer ruined the planet before he offered to save it.

In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a Hemingway story, a man goes big game hunting who should have stayed home. Tom Steyer maybe should have stayed home.

The hedge-fund king has sought to propel himself to the top circle of Democratic money men and possible future officeholders on the strength of his concern about global warming. He wants to spend $100 million this year influencing the midterm elections. All the media lately wants to talk about, though, is his thoroughly postmodern hypocrisy.

The New York Times is the latest to investigate his former hedge fund’s investments to increase the output of Indonesian and Australian coal mines to feed China during a period when China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s biggest carbon-dioxide emitter.

The Times report treads in the footsteps of a lengthy Reuters reconstruction, which follows the Canadian press’s detailed reporting of his firm’s tar sands investments. Many stories are festooned with environmentalist comments lamenting the damage Mr. Steyer did to the planet before he decided to save it.

Mark Tapson reviewed American Betrayal at Frontpage Magazine, Radosh called Horowitz, and Horowitz purged the review from the Frontpage website, and, bonus, withdrew his free-speech-championing Freedom Center’s co-sponsorship of a speech I was to give shortly in Los Angeles for the group Children of Holocaust Survivors. (The speech is here.)

The incorrect review was gone, or so they thought.

But Ruth King, the early bird at Ruthfully Yours, had already posted it, unknowingly saving it for posterity.

I mention this to mark the beginning of the Rado-Horo eruptions against American Betrayal. Like an active volcano, the two men still spew, as evidenced by the statements awkwardly appended to a recently attempted exegesis of their beef with my book. It’s all bitter ash and smoke at this point, but it does continue to draw the curious eye. Oh, and that’s “cockamamie” with two m’s, guys.

In honor of the day, then, the review that went Ka-Boom:

By Mark Tapson

Seven weeks ago at FrontPage Mag I reviewed Stalin’s Secret Agents, M. Stanton Evans’ and Herbert Romerstein’s book which demonstrated that widespread government infiltration by Soviet spies sabotaged our foreign policy and molded the post-WWII world in favor of the Soviet Union. Now comes a brand new book that serves as a sort of companion piece to that work, while being an even deeper, more detailed exploration of that infiltration and its consequences.

The author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character is the fearless, incisive columnist and blogger Diana West, who also wrote The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, and who is the co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America. With her characteristic fierce passion, West argues in her new book that the Communist infiltration led to a successful “assault on our nation’s character” during the Cold War that left us the “heirs to a false and hollow history” and “unwitting participants” in “a secretly subverted pageant.” In other words, perhaps we didn’t win the Cold War after all.

For West, one of the clear indications that something in the American consciousness had changed is the fact that, thanks not only to Soviet propaganda but also to domestic peer pressure, many Americans were more outraged by Ronald Reagan’s unapologetic phrase “evil empire” than by the evil empire itself. This is the result of “the hocus-pocus transformation of liberty-loving anti-Communism into a force of repression to be reviled” and its flip side: “the hocus-pocus transformation of totalitarian Communism into a force of liberalism.”