RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Monday evening the bodies of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shear, and Eyal Ifrach, the three Israeli teenage boys kidnapped on their way home from school on June 12, were found by Israeli forces and volunteers in a field northwest of the West Bank town of Hebron, very close to where they were kidnapped.

Trying to hitch a ride home on the evening of the 12th, they were shot dead, it turns out, very soon after entering the car of the Hamas kidnappers—either because one of the three boys, Gilad, managed briefly to phone the police or because that was the terrorists’ intention in any case. If it was not their intention, then they likely aimed to sequester Naftali, Gilad, and Eyal somewhere and try to extort a prisoner swap from Israel.

That detail is still not known because the two Hamas operatives the Israeli authorities have fingered as the kidnappers, Hebron residents Marwan Kawasmeh and Amar Abu-Isa, are still at large. Meanwhile, on Tuesday afternoon, the three Israeli boys were buried together in the Israeli town of Modi’in even though they lived in separate communities. The joint funeral was attended by tens of thousands, with eulogies by, among others, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres.

So ended 19 days of tension and hope, marked by an upsurge of the extraordinary solidarity that lies at the deepest stratum of Israeli Jewish society, despite often bitter fractiousness. They were also 19 days of intensive activity by the Israeli security forces, who, in addition to searching for Naftali, Gilad, and Eyal, arrested hundreds of Hamas operatives, confiscating the terror organization’s funds and closing its institutions and media outlets.

Those three Israeli teens, including a U.S. citizen, have been found — their bodies, that is. The young men were murdered by Hamas operatives. And President Obama put out a statement:

“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing.”

At least he did not pull a Clinton: “I feel your pain.” And Obama is right, of course, that the parents of the dead feel the pain most acutely. But Israelis at large are in pain. They, all of them, are on the front lines in a way that we Americans rarely are (thanks in part to our “blessed location,” as Washington said).

The kidnap and murder of young Israelis is not quite routine, but it is not all that extraordinary either. The day the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was announced, Hamas killed a young soldier named Nachshon Waxman. He had been hitchhiking in central Israel to visit his girlfriend. Hamas nabbed him and held him for five days. The Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, ordered a raid on the terrorist redoubt. It failed: The terrorists killed Waxman and one of the rescuing soldiers.

About this latest episode, Obama said, “From the outset, I have offered our full support to Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice, and I encourage Israel and the Palestinian Authority to continue working together in that effort.”

Sometimes evenhandedness can be false and offensively so. Israel and the PA, a.k.a. the PLO, are not partners in the struggle against terrorism. In fact, the PLO has become a partner of Hamas. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a statement about Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO chief: “If he is truly committed to peace and to fighting terrorism, then logic and common sense mandate that he break his pact with Hamas. There can be no alliance with the kidnappers of children.”

Obama, in contrast, urged “all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation.”

So, the message we have sent to Israel, one of our strongest allies, is: Simmer down, sport.

If birth control is “not your boss’s business,” why do you expect him to pay for it?
Abortion-rights protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court building on Monday holding signs that read “Birth Control: Not My Boss’s Business.”

Much to their chagrin, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.

Of course, that’s not how supporters of the government’s contraception mandate see it. They actually believe that birth control is their boss’s business, and they want the federal government to force employers to agree.

More on that later, but it’s first worth noting how we got here.

First, contrary to a lot of lazy punditry, there is no Obamacare contraception mandate. As my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru notes, even President Obama’s liberal rubber-stamp Congress of 2009–10 never addressed — or even debated — the question of whether companies can be forced to provide contraceptive coverage. Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats simply asserted that they could impose such a requirement. Indeed, “several pro-life Democrats,” Ponnuru adds, “who provided the law’s narrow margin of victory in the House have said they would have voted against the law had it included the mandate.”

Moreover, Hobby Lobby never objected to covering birth control per se. It already covers 16 kinds of birth control for its employees. But it objected to paying for what it considers to be abortifacients, which don’t prevent a pregnancy but terminate one. The pro-abortion-rights lobby can argue that “abortion” and “birth control” are synonymous terms, but that doesn’t make it true.

Why a green-pork blowout would do more harm than good.

Can something good come from a U.S. splurge of climate pork that, in itself, would have no discernible effect on global climate or atmospheric carbon dioxide?

A probable answer is no. It would actually end up making our putative carbon challenge worse.

But Paul Krugman and others say a carbon tax is politically impossible, and that we should settle for President Obama’s “second-best” approach. The problem with subsidies and mandates is that they create vested interests in inefficient renewable energy. Warren Buffett already is collecting millions for what he admits is hopelessly cost-ineffective solar energy in California. State mandates for renewables favor in-state providers, discouraging competition that would lower costs.

Lobbies that form around such favors are quietly unfriendly to interstate power lines that would force expensive local energy to compete with cheaper renewables elsewhere. In Germany, where vast subsidies flow to wind and solar, coal has become the fuel of choice for utilities struggling to provide backup power. Result: German carbon-dioxide output is growing not shrinking.

Most glaring is the renewable lobby’s opposition to fracking—never mind that fracking, by displacing coal, has done more to reduce carbon output than renewables have. As for cap-and-trade, check out the Senate testimony two weeks ago by Joseph Mason, of LSU and the Wharton School, on how easily such schemes have succumbed to fraud and corruption.

A straight-up, revenue-neutral carbon tax clearly is our first-best policy, rewarding an infinite and unpredictable variety of innovations by which humans would satisfy their energy needs while releasing less carbon into the atmosphere.

Failing that, our second-best policy might well be to do nothing, skip the green pork bonanza, and hope that new energy technologies emerge out of the already-ample natural incentives to do so. Why? One thing that can be safely predicted is that renewable energy that becomes addicted to subsidies in order to survive will not meaningfully replace fossil energy that remains cheaper in real terms.

Couple Has Raised More Than $1 Billion in Two Decades; Republicans Worry of Early Lead in 2016

Bill and Hillary Clinton helped raise more than $1 billion from U.S. companies and industry donors during two decades on the national stage through campaigns, paid speeches and a network of organizations advancing their political and policy goals, The Wall Street Journal found.

Those deep ties potentially give Mrs. Clinton a financial advantage in the 2016 presidential election, if she runs, and could bring industry donors back to the Democratic Party for the first time since Mr. Clinton left the White House.

Republicans, while capable of raising similar sums, worry the Clintons will take an early lead in the next presidential race, which is expected to total well above the $2 billion spent in 2012.

“Clinton Inc. is going to be the most formidable fundraising operation for the Democrats in the history of the country. Period. Exclamation point,” said Rick Hohlt, a lobbyist and fundraiser for Republican Party presidential candidates. “It sure causes concern.”

The Journal tallied speaking fees and donations to Mr. Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns; the Democratic National Committee during Mr. Clinton’s eight years in the White House; Mrs. Clinton’s bids for Senate and president; and the family’s nonprofit entity—The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

The Journal was aided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks election contributions. The center provided an industry breakdown of campaign donations.

Finding an exact total is difficult because the Clintons aren’t required to make public any details about donations to their foundation. They voluntarily report donor names, however, and donation amounts within broad ranges.

Tel Aviv
Here is what bias against Israel looks like. Three Israeli teenagers are abducted by the terrorist group Hamas, and after a desperate weeks-long search for the boys, they are finally found—dead in shallow graves near the site of the abduction. While all this is happening, Hamas instigates a new round of missile attacks from Gaza, firing 56 rockets at southern Israeli communities. The Obama administration’s response? Express sympathy but call on Israel to refrain from responding.

Moments after the news broke today that the bodies of the teenagers had been found, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. was “urging restraint”—that is, urging Israel not to respond to the murder of its citizens.

Likewise the president’s condolence statement concluded with an admonition that “all parties refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation.” Make no mistake—this is not a call on “all parties.” It is a call directly to Israel, as Hamas already acted to “destabilize the situation” by abducting and murdering three teenagers and it continues to “destabilize the situation” by launching dozens of rockets a day at Israel, including 16 this morning. Throughout this rocket campaign Obama issued no statements calling on Hamas to stop “destabilizing the situation.” Hamas is prosecuting a multifaceted terror offensive—and Obama’s position is to call on Israel not to respond, on the grounds that that would be “destabilizing.”

The murder of the teens and the rocket fire from Gaza are, of course, entirely the fault of Hamas. But it would be taking too narrow a view of the situation not to consider the way over the past five years the Obama administration has shaped the environment in which these events are unfolding.

A few examples: Israeli intelligence believes the Hamas cell that carried out the abduction was run by a Hamas leader who lives openly in Turkey. The Erdogan regime has, of course, made Turkey a comfortable haven for anti-Israel terrorists, allowing weapons smuggling to Hezbollah, staging the terror flotilla to Gaza in 2010, hosting (and feting) Hamas leaders, and so on. Obama’s protest? None. In fact, a few years ago Obama said that Erdogan was his favorite Middle East leader, and Obama over the years has offered nothing but lavish public praise for Erdogan.

Hillary Clinton needs a conscience transplant, and she needs it now. Her book tour is in a shambles, the fate of her $14 million advance from her publisher is marooned somewhere in limbo. She’s under 50 percent approval for the first time in the presidential polling for 2016, and, scariest of all, she’s having to call on Bubba for help. She knows better than to become merely “a wife of,” but 2014 is beginning to smell like 2008, and she’s Miss Inevitability once more. This is dj vu all over again.

Some of the learned pundits, who only yesterday were writing about “the five reasons why Hillary is a lock for the White House,” are writing now about “five reasons why Hillary won’t run.” The budding consensus is that (1) she’s just not very good at politics; (2) there’s no “fire in the tummy”; (3) who wants to clean up after Barack Obama, any way; (4) the country wants real change; and (5) another round of “Clinton, Bush, Clinton” with children of both families waiting in the wings, is thrilling nobody.

The pollsters, consultants and campaign wizards who are paid to know all the answers are puzzled by Hillary’s flopping around like a hen suddenly beheaded by events she was expected to control. “Even more than her dwindling leads over Republican contenders is that while she is pretty much running against herself, in a very high-profile book tour, she is losing ground,” says pollster John Zogby. “Her biggest problem is the inevitably factor. It helped do her in in 2007-2008, and right now it looks to be her major nemesis. She has this whole playing field to herself and is declining in the polls.” That’s definitely not good.

“….You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, Before you are six or seven or eight, To hate all the people your relatives hate, You’ve got to be carefully taught.” (rodgers and hammerstein, South Pacific)
It takes a consistently perverse education to produce young people willing and eager to smash the windshield of an ambulance carrying the murdered bodies of three teenage boys. You’ve got to be very brainwashed to want your child to self-immolate as long as he takes out some of those damned Jews in a holy war against the infidels. And the cult of death is not limited to people who have nothing to lose and nothing to live for – it thrives among the young and educated as well – people who believe that their martyrdom and subsequent rewards in the afterlife will be far superior to the joys of peace, love, family and personal achievement.

In 1948, after the establishment of the state of Israel was approved by the United Nations, the population of the infant state was 650,000. Since then, Israel has absorbed more than 3 million immigrants from all over the world, including the 900,000 expelled from Arab countries without any property, possessions or subsequent reparations. No special UN agency was established to deal with any of this yet all these people who spoke languages from every corner of the globe managed to learn Hebrew thanks to the government sponsored Ulpan program which immersed them in their new language and made them functionally conversational in less than a year. Though these immigrants were initially housed in temporary shelters, the government built housing for them as expeditiously as possible and succeeded in integrating them into the new country.

By contrast, the 729,000 Palestinians (UN number) who left or were ousted from their homes during the first Arab war against Israel were placed in refugee camps in various Arab countries after Israel miraculously vanquished their enemies. They were never given citizenship by the hosting countries, never offered permanent housing and in fact, purposely kept in a state of subjugation and poverty while their leadership skimmed the tills of American and European subsidized support. After the six-day war, when Israel regained control of areas in the west bank, they created neighborhoods for Palestinians who had been living in refugee camps and sought to do for them what they had done for their own immigrant population. Goaded by Arab opposition, this was condemned by the UN as a violation of the refugees’ “inalienable right of return” and the program was promptly suspended.

Are they dancing in Gaza? Are they giving out candy in Ramallah as they usually do when Jewish people grieve?

Who are these savages that rejoice at the misfortunes of their neighbors – and who are these savages that commit these atrocities?

We all know where we were when we first heard it: “The Three Abducted Israeli Teens Found Murdered.”

Their names are important: Eyal Yifrah, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar. They should be remembered for all time because whatever children they were destined to produce, thousands into eternity, are now stillborn. So it is our duty to offer them and their families the gift and comfort of blessed remembrance.

These kids – they were the light of Israel. They were the best. This is a terrible loss.

What was the purpose of this? What the hell was the purpose? These Palestinian Arab monsters, Hamas or otherwise, they cannot be human.

We walk the same streets and yet we live a universe apart. We celebrate life. They celebrate death.

There can be a thousand peace processes but never can there be conciliation with such people.

All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know they are in the right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done but because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision; and whether or not they survive physically depends on chance. If circumstances are not favorable, they end up in gas chambers. (Bruno Bettelheim, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays)

Bettelheim, like the Greek poet Homer, understands that the force that does not kill, that does not kill just yet, can turn a human being into stone, into a thing, even while it is still alive. Merely hanging ominously over the head of the vulnerable creature it can choose to kill at any moment, poised lasciviously to destroy breath in what it has somehow “graciously” allowed, if only for a few more moments, to breathe, this force indelicately mocks the fragile life it intends to consume.

As for the pitiable human being that stands helplessly before this force, he or she has already become a corpse.

Israel, in some respects, is becoming this “pitiable human being,” in macrocosm. Yes, of course, the country’s frustrated leaders will exact some sort of revenge, or perhaps even “justice,” for the most recent Palestinian murders of its children. Still, they will likely continue with the lethal pantomime of a purported “peace process.”

Even now, Mr. Netanyahu stands by his agreement to accept certain presumably de-fanged forms of Palestinian statehood. Even now, still feeling bound to comply with unwavering expectations from Washington, the Israeli Prime Minister has somehow managed to discover adequate reassurance in certain vain hopes for Palestinian “demilitarization.”