RUTHFULLY YOURS

How some of pre-World War II France’s most influential writers, besotted with fanaticism, turned the full power of their eloquence against democracy—and the Jews.

The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914-1940 by Frederick Brown (Knopf)

Dancing with the devil is an old pursuit among French writers. Even such a stalwart of the Enlightenment as Diderot created a fictional character (the seductive Nephew of Rameau) who could remark, “If there is any genre in which it matters to be sublime, it is evil, above all.” From Diderot through de Sade and de Maistre, Baudelaire and Huysmans, down to Michel Houellebecq and Jonathan Littell, a powerful tradition within French writing has challenged the bounds of conventional morality, loudly defied the dictates of Enlightenment reason, and expressed an abiding fascination with blood. It is as if the culture that, perhaps more strongly than any other, celebrated reason and geometrical order, also provoked within itself a deep, wild, and willfully primitive reaction, a return of the repressed par excellence.

Never in French history did this cultural impulse prove more pernicious than during the troubled decades of the Third Republic (1870–1940). In this period, some of France’s most talented writers gazed longingly into the abyss, and then turned the full power of their eloquence against the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Even as the frail Republic lurched from scandal to scandal and crisis to crisis, writers on both the left and the right subjected it to endless, pitiless mockery and abuse. Robert Brasillach, one of the most brilliant writers and critics of his generation, likened it to “a syphilitic old whore, stinking of patchouli and yeast infection.” Charles Maurras, an enormously skilled polemicist, endlessly denounced it as “the Jew State, the Masonic State, the immigrant State.” Such attacks did much to drain French democracy of legitimacy precisely at its moment of greatest peril. They made it all too easy for a portion of France’s elites to treat the crushing defeat of 1940 as history’s judgment on a corrupt and senile society, and therefore to embrace Hitler’s grotesque New Order rather than to struggle against it.

Frederick Brown, an accomplished literary biographer, has emerged as the leading English-language chronicler of this appalling but fascinating French story. In his book For the Soul of France, he examined the fin de siècle, with particular attention to what he called the “culture wars” between left and right. He centered his account on the Dreyfus Affair, in which the trumped-up conviction of a Jewish army officer on treason charges unleashed a political firestorm that came close to bringing the Republic down. Now, in The Embrace of Unreason, he has taken the story through the interwar period. This time no single “affair” dominates the landscape, but the specter of Vichy looms on the horizon, as the final destination at which so many of those who “embraced unreason” eventually arrived.

Of computers and the convergence of minds.

In 1882, Louis Bamberger bought the stock of a bankrupt dry goods store and used it to open a store of his own in Newark, New Jersey. By 1928, it was one of the largest and most profitable businesses in the country: Bamberger’s department store had expanded from a rented storefront to a million square feet and 3,500 employees. For customers, it boasted a toll-free telephone number and a no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee; for employees, it offered job security and an on-site lending library. The eight-story flagship had its own radio station and launched what would become the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1924, when Bamberger decided to retire and sell his store to Macy’s.

Bamberger was childless; so was his sister and business partner, Caroline. They decided to give a million dollars of the Macy’s sale profit to their longest-serving employees and use the rest to start a school of higher learning. For their school, the Bambergers had two requirements: It had to benefit the state of New Jersey, which had been good to them, and it had to be a refuge for Jewish students being turned away from the many institutions with Jewish quotas.

A New Jersey-based medical school seemed like just the ticket. The mathematician Oswald Veblen and education reformer Abraham Flexner caught wind of the idea and thought they had a better one: not a medical school but a school for advanced study in every field. They pitched their plan to the Bambergers, who were suitably impressed. In 1930, the Institute for Advanced Study was founded.

As the institute laid its cornerstone in Princeton, the Nazis were taking over in Germany—a catastrophe that worked out well for the institute: “The Nazis launched their purge of German universities in April 1933, and the exodus of mathematicians from Europe .  .  . began just as the Institute for Advanced Study opened its doors,” writes George Dyson. The institute quickly stocked up on the biggest names and best minds in European scholarship: Their first hire was Albert Einstein; their second was John von Neumann.

Everyone knows who Einstein was, but von Neumann might have been the greatest mind of the 20th century. He was born in Budapest to a secular Jewish family. By adolescence, he was fluent in five languages and had started working independently on “the deepest problems of abstract mathematics.” Said the physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner: “Whenever I talked with von Neumann, I always had the impression that only he was fully awake.” The mathematician Herman Goldstine once said that von Neumann’s lectures made complex problems so perfectly clear that students didn’t need to take notes. When von Neumann obtained his doctorate in 1926, his oral examination featured a single question: “Pray, who is the candidate’s tailor?” Von Neumann was also a snappy dresser.

There is an urgent need to overcome profound ignorance in a world fast succumbing to a false Arab narrative that would leave ancestral Jewish land deserted and in the hands of thieves. The time is long past due for Israeli sovereignty in Area C.

“Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him?
“He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination.

“So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him.
“Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do;

“I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right.”

So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem, “Gone like a Dream”. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora to support the reconstituted Jewish state. This inevitably led to the fateful abandonment by so many Israeli politicians and successive governments of the need to include within the reconstituted Jewish state every inch of sovereign ancestral Jewish land from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan.

For 47 long years since the liberation of biblical Jewish Judea and Samaria from illegal Jordanian occupation – territory the world grotesquely prefers to call the “West Bank” – the beloved Jewish heartland has remained in a political limbo and not been fully or even partially annexed.

Israel’s foolish failure to take sovereign control of its own historical, physical and spiritual heartland has allowed a hostile world to thus assume that Israel itself does not believe it has legal sovereignty in the territory. Like Moshe Dayan’s calamitous decision to give away the keys of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf, this betrayal of the Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria has become a living nightmare for Israel.

Both acts of searing stupidity could so easily have been avoided, but the seeming need by so many on the left in Israel to appease and placate the international corridors of power has had tragic consequences for the Jewish state.

The return of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl from the clutches of the Taliban is cause for relief for his family and all Americans. But there’s no denying that the price of his recovery is high. The Obama Administration swapped five of the hardest cases at Guantanamo in a fashion that will encourage terrorists to kidnap more Americans to win the release of more prisoners.

This does not mean we agree with Republicans who say President Obama broke the law by failing to inform Congress 30 days in advance of the prisoner release from Gitmo. Presidential power is never stronger than in the role of Commander in Chief. Congress did not attempt to use its comparably strong power of the purse. Instead Congress’s Gitmo language sought bluntly to constrain Mr. Obama’s wartime decision-making.

This is unconstitutional, as the President averred in a statement at the time he signed the bill. That Mr. Obama—and his liberal friends—denounced George W. Bush for similar signing statements is one more antiterror irony of this Presidency. Readers should watch to see if the same politicians and newspapers that assailed Mr. Bush are more forgiving when a Democratic President is using the same war powers.

The real problem with this prisoner swap is the message it conveys about American weakness, especially in the context of Mr. Obama’s retreat from Afghanistan and elsewhere. The world’s bad actors have long perceived that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate over hostages, in contrast to, say, France or Italy. This has made American soldiers and civilians less promising targets.

The Taliban swap will change that perception and increase the likelihood that more Americans will be grabbed, not least in Kabul. Don’t be surprised if 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shows up on a list of future prisoner-swap demands.

It’s true that Israel has also traded Palestinian prisoners, sometimes hundreds at a time, for its captive soldiers. One difference is that Israel conducts those swaps in the context of an otherwise tough antiterror policy. This includes unilateral targeting of Hamas and periodic military operations against terrorist havens. No one doubts Israeli resolve.

The same isn’t true of the Obama Administration, and the Taliban swap will only underscore the perception that the U.S. is tiring of its antiterror fight. Mr. Obama announced last week that the U.S. will withdraw all of its military forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2016, no matter the facts on the ground. The U.S. hasn’t used drones to hit a terror target in Pakistan since December. The prisoner swap sends a similar message of retreat.

Plan Sets in Motion Main Piece of President Obama’s Climate-Change Agenda

WASHINGTON—The Environmental Protection Agency will propose a draft rule on Monday seeking a 30% reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2030 from existing power plants based on emission levels from 2005, according to two people who have been briefed on the rule, setting in motion the main piece of President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda.

The rule, scheduled to be completed one year from now, will give flexibility to the states, which must implement the rules and submit compliance plans to EPA by June 2016. States can decide how to meet the reductions, including joining or creating new cap-and-trade programs, deploying more renewable energy or ramping up energy-efficiency technologies.

Each state will have different percent reduction standards, and the national average will be 25% by 2020 and 30% by 2030, these people said.

The proposed rule will regulate carbon emissions from hundreds of fossil-fuel power plants across the U.S., including about 600 coal plants, which will be hit hardest by the standard.

“EPA will release its proposed carbon pollution reduction rule on Monday,” EPA spokesman Tom Reynolds said. “Until then the agency will not comment on any information that may or may not be in the proposal.”

Congress has too much power already; it should not have the power to silence citizens.

For two centuries there has been bipartisan agreement that American democracy depends on free speech. Alas, more and more, the modern Democratic Party has abandoned that commitment and has instead been trying to regulate the speech of the citizenry.

We have seen President Obama publicly rebuke the Supreme Court for protecting free speech in Citizens United v. FEC; the Obama IRS inquire of citizens what books they are reading and what is the content of their prayers; the Federal Communications Commission proposing to put government monitors in newsrooms; and Sen. Harry Reid regularly slandering private citizens on the Senate floor for their political speech.

But just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does. Senate Democrats have promised a vote this year on a constitutional amendment to expressly repeal the free-speech protections of the First Amendment.

You read that correctly. Forty-one Democrats have signed on to co-sponsor New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall’s proposed amendment to give Congress plenary power to regulate political speech. The text of the amendment says that Congress could regulate “the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to federal elections.” The amendment places no limitations whatsoever on Congress’s new power.

Two canards are put forth to justify this broad authority. First, “money is not speech.” And second, “corporations have no free speech rights.”

Neither contention bears even minimal scrutiny. Speech is more than just standing on a soap box yelling on a street corner. For centuries the Supreme Court has rightly concluded that free speech includes writing and distributing pamphlets, putting up billboards, displaying yard signs, launching a website, and running radio and television ads. Every one of those activities requires money. Distributing the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” required money. If you can prohibit spending money, you can prohibit virtually any form of effective speech.

McCarthy appeared for a multi-part interview about his new book, Faithless Execution, on “Sunday Leaders” with Ginni Thomas.
The first part of the interview is “Does Obama’s End Justify His Means?” The 11-minute video, along with an accompanying article, appears here — or you can past the following link into your browser:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/01/does-obamas-end-justify-his-means/
The next part of the interview is “Prosecutor On Benghazi: ‘Betrayed The People Who Have Put Their Lives On The Line” The 7-minute video, along with an accompanying article, appears here — or you can past the following link into your browser:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/01/prosecutor-on-benghazi-betrayed-the-people-who-have-put-their-lives-on-the-line/

http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/01/prosecutor-on-benghazi-betrayed-the-people-who-have-put-their-lives-on-the-line/

The terrorist attack on the American installation in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, and what was done afterwards is the “most horrifying of the Administration scandals” to former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy. He has emphasized Benghazi in his new book,”Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment“ which includes six possible articles of impeachment.

In this exclusive DC interview, McCarthy discusses the Benghazi scandal as an “utterly foreseeable” act of terrorism on the anniversary of 9/11. To this author, the problem started with a “unilateral” and “unprovoked war with no American interests” declared by Obama in Libya that included “empowering anti-American jihadists.”

McCarthy says the whole debacle ends with a “trumped up prosecution” of a video-maker exercising his first amendment rights.

In summary, he says about Benghazi: “There, from soup to nuts, you see lawlessness. You see the undermining of the checks and balances that are in our system in order to make sure that no branch of the government is able to tyrannize the country. Basically, you reduce Congress to irrelevancy. You see fraud across the board. And, everyplace you turn, the fundamental rights of Americans are eroded.”

On discussing the victims of the Benghazi debacle, McCarthy states, “If we want good, courageous people to do the things that we need done in the world, in terms of our security and in terms of our diplomacy, we have to make people believe that we will protect our own personnel.”

President Obama’s record of lawlessness is prodigious. There is the assumption of a power to rule by presidential decree — unilaterally amending ObamaCare provisions, immigration statutes, and other enactments in flagrant disregard of Congress’s constitutional power to write the laws.

There is rampant fraud on the American people — think: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period,” just for a start.

In the Benghazi massacre, we see the arc of administration malfeasance: In the absence of congressional authorization, the president instigated an unprovoked and ultimately disastrous war in Libya, empowering virulently anti-American Islamic supremacists. He then recklessly failed to provide adequate security for US officials who, for reasons that remain mysterious, were dispatched to Benghazi, one of the most dangerous places on the planet for Americans.

Finally, when four Americans including our ambassador were predictably killed in a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012, the president took no action to rescue them during the siege and then led a tireless campaign to blame an anti-Muslim video, rather than his wayward policy of empowering Islamists — even trumping up a prosecution against the video producer in violation of the First Amendment.

Making recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess.

Ignoring court orders.

Refusing to enforce the immigration laws.

Still another proposal involves making changes to French law that would enable police to confiscate the passports and seize the assets of suspected would-be jihadists, and to deport those foreigners found to be recruiting jihadists in France.

However, Hollande’s anti-radicalization might turn out to be a case of too little too late.

A French former jihadist in Syria has been arrested over the fatal shooting of three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 24.

The arrest, announced by French and Belgian prosecutors during simultaneous news conferences in Paris and Brussels on June 1, confirms the worst fears about the security threat posed by battle-hardened European jihadists returning from the fighting in Syria.

Western security officials estimate that up to 2,000 Europeans—including 800 from France and 200 from Belgium—have traveled to Syria in the hopes of overthrowing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and replacing it with an Islamic state.

Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old French national from the northern town of Roubaix, was arrested at the Saint-Charles train and bus station in Marseille on May 30 during a random search for illegal drugs. He was a passenger on an overnight bus that was travelling from Amsterdam to Marseille via Brussels.

Police found a Kalashnikov rifle, a handgun and an “impressive quantity” of high-caliber ammunition in Nemmouche’s luggage. They also found a GoPro miniature video camera as well as a Nikon digital camera containing a 40-second video in which a man believed to be Nemmouche is heard claiming responsibility for the Brussels attack and expressing regret that the GoPro device failed to capture the shooting.

The voice in the video describes the Brussels killings as an “attack against the Jews” and warns that Belgium will experience “fire and blood,” according to Belgian federal prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw.

The video also shows weapons similar to those used in the Brussels attack and a flag with the words “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” and “Allah is Greater” written on it in Arabic, according to the French anti-terrorism prosecutor François Molins.

In addition, Nemmouche’s luggage was found to contain clothing and a baseball cap similar to that worn by the shooter, as well as press clippings about the Brussels attack.

Britain strips British nationality from immigrants with dual nationality who go to Syria to fight. This act allows British authorities to ban them from re-entering the country. Why don’t European countries do the same?

Yvan Mayeur, the Socialist Mayor of Brussels, said that to combat anti-Semitism and racism, his city needed more “diversity.” But diversity does not mean diversity. Diversity is the new code word for more Islam.

Yesterday, French police arrested the terrorist accused of murdering three Jews in Brussels, Belgium on the eve of the European elections. The killer, 29-year old French citizen Mehdi Nemmouche, a son of Muslim immigrants, had gone to Syria in 2013, where he joined the rebels against President Bashar al-Assad and was trained as a jihadist.

On Saturday afternoon, May 24, Nemmouche walked into the Jewish Museum in Brussels, armed with a pistol and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. He killed three Jews, including two Israeli tourists, and seriously wounded another, who is still fighting for his life in hospital. Then Nemmouche calmly walked out of the museum.

An image of the terrorist, identified by French police as Mehdi Nemmouche, firing his rifle at the Brussels Jewish Museum, taken from security camera footage.

During the past three years, thousands of young Islamic immigrants from France, Germany, Britain and all other European countries, as well as young Western Islamic converts, have gone to Syria, where they trained to be killing machines. Some of them have returned home, where they now constitute the biggest threat to domestic security in decades.

French authorities were able to capture Nemmouche within a week because they had his name on a list of returned Syria fighters. Having his name on a list of jihadists, however, was not able prevent him from committing murder in neighboring Belgium.