RUTHFULLY YOURS

My friend, Nurit Greenger, the indefatigable warrior for Israel gave me a wonderful and treasured gift. The book is named Humanity Not written by Dr. Babaknia and with beautiful and gripping illustrations by a Moslem Iranian artist Ardeshir Mohassness.

Who is the author?

Ari Babaknia, M.D. is a Johns Hopkins trained physician who is currently the Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Los Angeles Center for Women’s Health. In addition to his publications in the medical field, his work includes books related to the Judaism in Farsi:

• Jewish Contribution to Human Civilization 1972
• Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize 1992
• In the past fifteen years Dr. Babaknia has dedicated his life and efforts in writing and editing an extensive 4 volumes historical documentary account chronicling the different aspects of Holocaust in Farsi:

Book 1: The Holocaust: “Man’s Inhumanity to Men”
Book 2: America’s Response to the Holocaust
Book 3: The World’s Response to the Holocaust
Book 4: End of the Holocaust and liberation of the Nazi camps, Documents, Personalities and Events Around the Holocaust

HUMANITY NOT is available through the Memorah Foundation. at Memorah.org.

Part 1 – Click Here

Bioterrorism Preparedness

What does national preparedness mean? It suggests the ability to respond to a wide array of threats and prevent unnecessary loss of life or injury. This requires translating national policy initiatives into local program implementation. It is a significant challenge to prepare for an unknown event, especially without a clear cut indicator of who and how many to protect, and from whom.

National activities to prevent or respond to a bioterrorism event have hinged largely on the development of biosurveillance programs and arms length detector technologies. As I’ve written for FSM back in 2008, when the National Biosurveillance Center was about to be officially opened, the GAO reported that they weren’t sure what the NBC could actually accomplish given the interagency rivalries, growing bureaucracy, problems with interoperability, and the ubiquitous ‘mission creep’ that evolves in such important undertakings. If these were the problems afflicting the NBC under a president, and administration that actually cared about homeland security, imagine how the various government agencies designed to protect the US are faring under an administration that seems consumed with shifting national resources to entitlement programs, decreasing the stature of the US from one of international superpower to that of merely an ordinary country, just another member of the United Nations.

As an aside, and general terrorism preparedness comment, having NY City downgrade its capabilities in their intelligence division so as not to offend the very people who are likely to attack our country – again – seems ridiculous. Our adversaries must laugh themselves to sleep.

According to studies by the GAO and US Department of Agriculture IG reports at increased risk for incidents at laboratories doing research of deadly pathogens as part of bioweapons research, in no small measure due to the feds failure to develop national standards for lab design, construction and operation.

The growing weakness in bio preparedness in the USA from the top down is staggering. From the ADD-like foreign policy and domestic preparedness edicts of President Obama, to the growing disinterest in bioterrorism among all but a handful of health care professionals and health care facilities are just some critical infrastructure issues that this current president is contributing to.

Emerging Pathogens & Public Health

We live in a global world where most people outside of North America are likely to die from an infectious disease – something the average US citizen doesn’t worry about, and hasn’t had to since the mid 20th century. TB, dengue, HIV, influenza, malaria, food-borne illnesses, and environmental (mosquitoes, worms, other insect vectors) threats pose daily risks to most people worldwide, especially the poor, which suggests immigrants from South America, parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia can import their illnesses as they immigrate or travel within our borders.

By May of 2014 the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS, or MERS CoV) arrived in the United States. For many of you, this is a new virus, and another threat emanating out of the Middle East, in case terrorism and energy insecurity weren’t enough! The World Health Organization (WHO) alerted the international community about MERS after identifying the new pathogen from two men who became ill in Jordan in 2012. Early in the MERS lifespan, cases were sporadic. A few cases were in clusters around health care workers and close contacts. Lately the numbers are growing seemingly exponentially. By March 27, 2014 WHO reported 206 confirmed cases. By end of April 2014 the WHO case count increased by more than 50 additional cases. The total as of last month there has been reported at 536 laboratory confirmed cases, and 145 deaths. While the apparent case fatality rate has appeared to decline, from ~50% in the early days of MERS to approximately 25% depending upon the country, that is still a high percentage of deaths per cases infected. While there is still no readily available vaccine against MERS, and the use of current antiviral medications remains in question, an early index of suspicion by well informed health care professionals can reduce the risk of spread, and initiate aggressive intervention, which can also provide life saving support at the earliest possible critical junction in care.

Since at least the 9/11 attacks, we have been reassured constantly that Islam means peace, that violent jihad is being waged by a tiny minority of extremists, and that most Muslims are moderate. But on a Heritage Foundation panel recently, terrorism expert Brigitte Gabriel correctly dismissed that “peaceful majority” of Muslims as “irrelevant” to the equation. And now at least one prominent apologist for Islamic terrorism wants to do away with the term “moderate” altogether.

On a special episode of Hannity a week ago called “Radical Muslims on the March,” host Sean Hannity skeptically asked self-described moderate Muslim Michael Ghouse of the America Together Foundation if the voices of the Islamic community are loud enough to counter “the radicals hijacking your religion.”

“They’re not loud enough,” conceded Ghouse. “We need to gather momentum.” Nearly thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks on our own soil, the moderates who are supposedly the vast majority of the Islamic community are still struggling to gather momentum and make their voices heard? Later in the show Ghouse, whose organization seems more focused on combating the stereotyping of Muslims as radicals than combating the radicals themselves, proved why moderate Muslims like him are ineffectual allies against jihad. In a heated confrontation with FrontPage’s own editor-in-chief Jamie Glazov, Ghouse tried to deflect responsibility for Islamic terrorism away from the religion itself when he shouted that “Islam is not dangerous, it is the bad people that are dangerous.” Bad people – as if the ideology driving jihad is simply “badness.”

Last week Nathan Lean posted an article at The New Republic online entitled “Stop Saying ‘Moderate Muslims.’ You’re Only Empowering Islamophobes,” in which he questions the very legitimacy of that phrase. “This moderate Muslim nonsense,” as he puts it, is “intellectually lazy because it carves the world up into two camps: the ‘good’ Muslims and the ‘bad’ Muslims,” and gives credence to the “unfounded notion” that the more pious the Muslim, the more dangerous.

Who is Nathan Lean? He is the author of The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (with a foreword by Saudi-funded Islam apologist John Esposito), a title that ridiculously suggests that we have nothing to fear from Islam except fear-mongering itself. Did the right manufacture 9/11? The Ft. Hood massacre? The Boston Marathon bombing? What an insulting, patently false notion – that there is less to fear from the savagery of jihad than from the patriots warning us about it. As for the mythical phenomenon of “Islamophobia,” FrontPage readers are well aware that it is a Muslim Brotherhood neologism designed to demonize and marginalize critics of Islam like Brigitte Gabriel, whom Lean smears as “wackos.”

In his TNR piece, Lean complains that “until proven good, or in this case ‘moderate,’ all Muslims are perceived as ‘bad,’ or potentially extreme.” The obvious response here, which Lean doesn’t admit, is that if Muslims are perceived that way, perhaps it might be the result not of anti-Muslim paranoia but of the rabidly violent resurgence of Islamic supremacism throughout the world today.

Precisely! Bat Ye’or, the late Saul Friedman in “Land of Dust” and Professor Moshe Sharon have known and written about this Islamic anti-Semitism long before the Israeli establishment or supporters of Israel averred this. Read

“The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (May 30, 2008) “….rsk

The bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, 16-year-old Naftali who liked to play basketball, 16-year-old Gilad who had just finished a scuba diving course and 19-year-old Eyal with his guitar, will be met by the same ghastly parade of pallbearers who accompany every victim of terrorism.

The reporters will scribble down something about “settlements” and the “Cycle of Violence.” The diplomats will urge restraint and remind everyone that the only solution can be found through negotiations with the terrorists. And the pundits will put it all into perspective burying them under layers of words and weighting their coffins down with stones of forgetfulness.

But all the empty words about the “Occupation” and the “Cycle of Violence,” the invocation of a peaceful solution that is always about to arrive, but never does, and the maps that cede more territory to terrorists are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s not about physical territory. It’s about spiritual territory. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about Islamism.

It’s not about the “Occupation.” It’s about Islam.

“I raised my children on the knees of the [Islamic] religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said.

Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that.

The victory of Islam.

Originally published by Defining Ideas.

Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.

One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the Schuette decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 Bakke decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, Bakke legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.

Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in Fisher vs. University of Texas last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.”

Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administration is talking about is something different.

“Tolerists, far from being the nice, kind, fair, tolerant people they think they are, in fact are the enemies of freedom and the enablers of totalitarianism.”

The acuteness of Howard Rotberg’s book Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed [1], now in its second, updated edition, lies in the ease with which readers will grasp his coinage. We know what he is referring to as soon as he begins to identify its salient features, as if the word has been around for a while. Indeed, the phenomenon is so widespread and so bizarre that it deserves its own term — and Rotberg’s bracing dissection.

Tolerism is a worldview in which the tolerance of cultural “otherness” — the more violently anti-Western the better — has become Western elites’ most celebrated (perhaps their sole) value, before which all other values, of justice, freedom, intellectual inquiry, or political dissent, have given way. Rotberg posits that it is precisely the abandonment of traditional Judeo-Christian principles and the adoption of a pernicious, unmoored moral relativism that have enabled tolerance (though it is not very tolerant) to assume its unchallenged status as the absolute virtue. The particular focus and defining example of tolerism in our post-9/11 world is Western accommodation of radical Islam: the more violent and hateful the jihadists show themselves to be, the more insistent the tolerists are about the need to empathize with them.

Tolerism is not the same as simple tolerance, Rotberg explains, referring to the history of religious and political toleration as an enlightened recognition of reciprocal accommodation under which tolerance is only one among other, guiding, values. Once elevated to the status of an ideology in itself, however, tolerism is a belief system that requires the uncritical embrace of otherness not for some rational social benefit but as a proof of the tolerists’ moral rectitude; as such, it spells the end of proper discrimination and judgement, and results in the self-contradictory acceptance and encouragement of terrorists and rogue states that are themselves murderously intolerant.

Under the reign of tolerism, the so-called tolerant lose the ability to recognize or appraise evil, believing that fanatics can be placated if only westerners are willing to understand their point of view. Efforts on the part of the committed few to resist Islamic triumphalism are decried as “intolerant,” the mere charge thought sufficient to end all argument. As a result, the betrayal of traditional liberal institutions and rights — through press censorship, the suppression of academic freedom, selective blindness about abhorrent cultural practices — becomes acceptable, even mandatory, and Islam makes steady inroads upon its host culture.

The response to the murder of the three abducted Israeli teens, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, has been predictable in its call for restraint and moderation. Left-wing organizations [1] like the Israeli political party Meretz, the New Israel Fund, and J Street, wedded to nebulous and self-serving concepts like “social justice,” [2] ramble on about calm, measure, reconciliation, and the larger interests of communal peace — as if avowedly vicious and homicidal entities like Hamas and its offshoots will feel humbled and ashamed of their murderous practices and will experience a benign change of heart.

In fact, they are busy celebrating what they regard as a revanchist victory — indeed, candies were handed out to mark the abduction and the ambulance ferrying the bodies of the slain teens was pelted with stones [3] and spray-painted by Palestinian villagers — and will not be deterred from carrying out further atrocities in the future if they are allowed to get away with them. Perhaps the principals of our conciliatory organizations would feel differently if their own children had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed. But one thing is certain: for all their “prayers for the suffering families” and “calls for peace,” they are incapable of imagining what their own people endure and are barren of genuine feeling, while full of empathy and concern for their assailants, who wish only for their speedy death and the subsequent extinction of the Jewish state. There is only one word for such flaccid, self-righteous and ultimately self-immolating appeasers: idiots.

As for the Israeli leadership, it’s a mixed bag. Outgoing president Shimon Peres is a grande fromage who over the years has grown gamy and rancid, with a soft European rind. Benjamin Netanyahu should be cut a little slack given the intense pressures, domestic and international, that he labors under — but he is not his father, who was cut in the mold of the pragmatic and unyielding patriot Ze’ev Jabotinsky. (See Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism [4].)

With only a few exceptions, like Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, the Israeli leadership comprises a motley crew best left to their often lucrative but generally undistinguished careers, prone to log-rolling and corruption, devoid of segulah (Hebrew for virtue or inner treasure), more preoccupied with their American holdings and European vacations than with the security of their beleaguered nation.

The theory, of course, that presumably governs their behavior is that diplomacy and treating with perennial enemies or political adversaries — e.g. acceding to American bullying, glad-handing Turkey, subsidizing the PA, victualing Gaza, engaging in outrageously disproportionate prisoner swaps, giving a hostile and often traitorous Israeli media and academy a free pass, etc. — is a way of ensuring the ultimate security of the country. On the contrary, Israeli citizens are rendered increasingly unsafe by the prosecution of such measures.

”

“Again, Hobby Lobby’s health plan pays for birth-control pills, vaginal rings, contraceptive patches, and other items to help female employees plan their pregnancies. The Left’s arguments to the contrary are — surprise, surprise — lies.

What Hobby Lobby will not cover are four contraceptive methods that its owners fear are abortifacients:

Plan B (“The Morning After Pill”)
Ella (a similar type of “emergency contraception”)
Copper Intra-Uterine Device
IUD with progestin

Rather than simply prevent sperm and ova from uniting, Hobby Lobby’s owners believe that these medications either kill human beings when they are fertilized eggs or prevent them from implanting themselves in utero, whereupon they die.”

Hobby Lobby does not prevent its female employees from using any of these four types of contraceptives. However, since they believe these innovations kill babies, they simply require that any employees who want to use them buy them with their own money.

The Left is foaming at the mouth over the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision this morning.

“This is going to turn the dial back,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz warned on MSNBC. The Democratic party’s national chairwoman added: “Republicans want to do everything they can to have the long hand of government, and now the long hand of business, reach into a woman’s body and make health care decisions for her.”

“Today’s Supreme Court decision unfortunately jeopardizes basic healthcare coverage and access to contraception for a countless number of women,” said Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

In Obama’s most recent — and embarrassing — public whine, he lashed out at the once-obsequious press. In his now customary first-person I/me/my/mine lament (e.g., “They don’t do anything, except block me and call me names. . . . If they were more interested in growing the economy for you and the issues that you are talking about instead of trying to mess with me, we would be doing a lot better. . . . The critics, the cynics in Washington, they’ve written me off more times than I can count.”), he lambasted the partisan culture of Washington. He lashed out at the Tea Party, the House Republicans, his opponents in general, and all those who would unreasonably oppose his blanket amnesties, his climate-change taxes and regulations, the shutdown of the Keystone-pipeline project, Obamacare, and $9 trillion in new debt.

Apparently someone other than Obama is in charge when the IRS goes rogue, the VA implodes, the Justice Department goes after Associated Press reporters, the consulate in Benghazi is overrun, the NSA taps the phones of allied leaders, Iraq is torn apart, the Middle East melts down, or we trade five terrorist kingpins for an American deserter. Obama’s impromptu adolescent moaning was bizarre and reminds us again why he would be wiser to stay close to his teleprompter.

Obama also seems oddly to forget that when he promised to use his pen and phone to run things by his lonesome, nearly everyone took him at his word. And so he tried just that. What Obama is now angry about is not partisanship per se, but that his own partisanship and subversion of settled law have been repudiated consistently by both the Supreme Court and the American public. Were Obama’s poll ratings at 60 percent, and were the Supreme Court upholding his pen-and-phone governance, and were the Democrats on the verge of winning back their long-lost supermajority in the Senate and taking back the House, then Obama would hardly be decrying partisanship, the media, the Tea Party, or Republicans in general. “Messing” with Obama means not being convinced that his record has helped America.

So there is an increasingly desperate strain to the Obama Left, the more so in that the scandals pile up and any idea of a legacy vanishes into Carteresque caricature. One unfortunate result of the end of the “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” agenda is a sour-grapes nihilism — a sort of “the scandals are your problem, not mine” attitude. In each case, those worried about the mounting chaos are flippantly dismissed with the assumption that they themselves are at fault for worrying about it.

A rogue IRS? Obama smiles that there is not a “smidgen” of corruption as the new IRS commissioner says the agency owes the American people no apologies.

The VA scandal? Too many wars have meant too many veterans needing treatment.

The Presbyterian Church Marginalizes Itself By Jeff Carter

I was born and raised a Presbyterian. Presbyterians and the US have a very close history. The history books glorify Sam Adams and his efforts in Boston. But, the kindling and initial fire for the American Revolution was made in the pulpits of the Presbyterian churches of New Jersey. The pastors in those pulpits gave both a spiritual, and academic base to rally upon.

The American Constitution is patterned after the documents that formed the Presbyterian church, and a lot of the signees of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterians. I don’t think any one church has a monopoly on worship, a relationship with God, or can guarantee a path to heaven.

Traditional organized religious organizations are losing members in droves. The Presbyterian Church has lost 30% of its membership in the last 13 years. This weekends action to divest itself from Israel will hasten the decline.

Why have traditional churches lost members? It’s because they have lurched to the far left when it comes to official church policy. They are only preaching to one side of the choir. The thing is, if you look at demographics, left wingers attend church in less numbers than right wingers. Traditional churches have made a business decision to go after a market decreasing in size.

One of my local pastors, John Vest, has been blogging about it. John is a progressive member of the church, but was against divestment. He signed this letter, The Things That Make For Peace. Among the points made this one stands out,

It is telling that one of the earliest and loudest affirmations of Zionism Unsettled was by David Duke, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist and anti-Semite in the United States today, who said:
In a major breakthrough in the worldwide struggle against Zionist extremism, the largest Presbyterian church in the United States, the PC(USA), has issued a formal statement calling Zionism “Jewish Supremacism” — a term first coined and made popular by Dr. David Duke.
The reality that David Duke would endorse a Presbyterian study guide available for purchase on the PC(USA) website is sickening to us, and should give all Presbyterians great pause in considering the arguments and language of this document and Zionism Unsettled’s ideological relationship to the overtures coming before the General Assembly.