RUTHFULLY YOURS

…We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.

Those words were spoken by Ehud Olmert in a speech to the dovish, American Jewish, Israel Policy Forum in June 2005. At that time Olmert was Israel’s deputy prime minister. Less than a year later, in April 2006, he became prime minister.

The words shocked many at the time; they sounded morally and intellectually corrupt. The Second Intifada, a savage five-year Palestinian terror war waged mostly against Israeli civilians, was then still winding down—thanks only to the courageous fighting of the Israeli security forces. To intimate that Israel was exhausted, and only looking to get chummy with “enemies” of murderous ilk, sounded like stunning, cavalier cynicism.

Olmert was prime minister from April 2006 to March 2009. Last week a Tel Aviv District Court judge, David Rozen, sentenced him to six years in prison and a million-shekel ($290,000) fine for taking bribes as part of a massive real estate scandal, both while Olmert was mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003 and subsequently when he was a cabinet minister.

Judge Rozen censured Olmert with particularly harsh words:

A public official who accepts bribes, an individual who abuses his power to gain illicit benefits for his own gain, is no better than a traitor. An individual who offers bribes is corrupt and his actions corrupt others. Those who accept bribes evoke nothing but disdain, as they antagonize the public and undermine state institutions.

Some in Israel—generally those who still share the dovish outlook that Olmert adopted—see the sentence as excessive and put hopes in Olmert and his lawyers’ planned appeal to the Supreme Court. Others note that Olmert, going back to when he was mayor, was known to be a focal point of corruption in Israel and see the sentence as justice finally catching up with him.

Eli Hazan, a commentator for the right-of-center daily Israel Hayom, notes that Olmert as mayor

left behind enormous debts, failing municipal services, a mass exodus…from the city…. Ahead of the 2006…election, many Jerusalemites tried to raise the question of Olmert’s conduct in the national media…. The sentence given to Olmert on Tuesday provided Jerusalem residents with closure.… Olmert learned that everyone is equal before the law. This is how things work in a properly run country.

Last year Obama delivered his own “Mission Accomplished” speech at the National Defense University. Its broad theme was that the War on Terror was over; it was time to shut down Guantanamo Bay and stand down from a war footing.

Obama claimed credit for putting “the core of al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan” on the “path to defeat” with his disastrous Afghan strategy which cost 1,600 American lives while letting the Taliban take over the country. He did not acknowledge that the so-called core Al Qaeda had stopped being relevant even before he was elected.

1,600 Americans died chasing a political slogan that existed only in the heads of his speechwriters.

In 2009, the CIA determined that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Next year his own CIA director admitted that there were at most 50-100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

That same year 499 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.

Obama had declared victory against an enemy that the United States wasn’t fighting while losing a war to an enemy that the United States was fighting.

Meanwhile his own people were telling him that Al Qaeda had not been defeated.

National Intelligence Director James Clapper said, in response to a question about whether Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, “No. It is morphing and franchising itself, not only here but in other areas of the world.”

“They are not,” Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn added.

These two men were not telling the Senate Armed Services committee anything they had not already told Obama. But their boss was choosing not to listen.

By narrowly defining Al Qaeda as a small number of leaders and fighters in pre-existing war zones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, he and his White House staffers were making it easier to claim victory while ignoring the threat from expanding groups such as Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.

Obama’s policy snapshot of Al Qaeda in which Osama bin Laden was still a menace and Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan were the biggest threat to America was a decade out of date.

In his Mission Accomplished speech, Obama said that the core of Al Qaeda was no longer a threat.”They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston.”

Al Qaeda’s core might not have directed either attack, though it’s possible it did, but both attacks emerged from its strategy of building up local franchises and training lone wolf attackers over the internet.

What Obama was celebrating as proof of his victory over Al Qaeda actually reflected his failure to understand and prepare for Al Qaeda’s next move.

He was using the fact that Al Qaeda had outmaneuvered him twice, and carried out devastating attacks, as proof that he had defeated Al Qaeda and that we no longer had to worry about Al Qaeda.

In Beverly Hills on May 12, Robert Spencer spoke about his new book, “Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About The War We’re In,” at the Wednesday Morning Club’s monthly luncheon.

Spencer is the author of 13 books, the most notable of which are “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam” and “The Truth About Muhammad.” His new book, he said, describes how nobody who speaks out about the real goals of Islam is spared by either the liberal main-stream media or those on the political left who seem unable or, worse still, unwilling to define the destructive intentions which Islam has towards America and the West.

Paradoxically, said Spencer, these destructive intentions have been public knowledge for quite some time. In 2008, the Holy Land Foundation, a front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, was convicted of raising money for the terrorist group Hamas, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its leaders were given life sentences for funneling $12 million to Hamas. During the trial documents revealed a strategy paper that stated:

The Ikhwan (Arabic for Muslim Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

It went on to say that this process requires a “mastery of the art of ‘coalitions’, the art of ‘absorption’ and the principles of ‘cooperation’.”

In other words, the scheme is to ingratiate and insinuate themselves into our society by appearing to be in favor of pluralism, democratic values and common fellowship, all the time gaining trust and acceptance only to sucker punch us when the time is right. The Muslim Brotherhood is black with menace. Their hatred of America and the West is doctrinally inspired and is entirely due to the religious fanaticism which inspires Islamic supremacism.

In recent history, many Western leaders born and bred in the fear of the Soviet Union failed to see the resurgence of Islamic totalitarianism and the terror it always engenders. Somehow, they have been unable to identify the defining issue of our time and so imperil us all.

The Veterans Administration hospital scandal that has claimed the lives of at least 40 U.S. military veterans continues to expand, adding to the image of a president who neither knows nor cares what happens to those who shed their blood on the battlefield for their fellow Americans.

With a little under six months before the crucial midterm elections, it is a helpful reminder to voters of the horrors that are not glitches, but essential features, of government-provided health care. The problems at the VA are omens, sneak previews of what the delivery of all health care in America will look like under Obamacare, and so it is fortuitous that the scandal should surface now.

President Obama is predictably, perfunctorily, outraged about these bad things that have been happening in the government he controls. He is shocked and promises to get to the bottom of the issue and do better in the future. It is tedious stuff.

The happenings at the VA are also more evidence, Obama critics say, that the president despises the military. Obama has been moving to reduce soldier pay and benefits and hollow out the military to mid-century staff levels. He has also been going on a human resources rampage, firing flag officers at a rate that alarms military observers. And like any good leftist, Obama believes that the only good American soldier is one who is functioning as a social worker, not a war-fighter.

Meanwhile, Obama VA officials have been working overtime covering up the various waiting list atrocities that have been popping up cross the country.

A whistleblower who exposed the waiting list scandal in Fort Collins, Colorado, says she was suspended after she refused to falsify records.

Lisa Lee, who was employed at that clinic, said she was placed on two weeks of unpaid leave for not following a directive that involved “cooking the books” on scheduling medical appointments to create the false impression that appointments were made closer to the time veterans requested.

“Why are they throwing me under the bus when I’m trying to say what the problem is?”

At least 40 U.S. veterans have died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix, Ariz., Veterans Affairs Health Care system, CNN reported April 30. Many of the dead had been put on a secret waiting list.

We’ve long known the economic case. The humanitarian case is even stronger.
The economic case against the minimum wage exists, and has been made by me and others often enough. But there’s another, even stronger case against the rule. That is the humanitarian case. And until that case, too, receives consideration, the debate will always be a lopsided one.

Consider the current employment culture. Sit down with an employment officer at the company where you hope to work, and something feels strange. After a while, you realize what it is: The party on the other side of the desk is not a company executive, it is Jacqueline Berrien, the head of the EEOC. The process moves in similarly creepy fashion when you are the one offering the job: Sure, your future hire is there in the flesh, but you might as well be talking to Thomas Perez. That is, the rules the United States secretary of labor enforces determine the course of your conversation more than anything you, or the new hire, might feel like saying.

It was not always thus. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, many employers and employees believed that their relationship, the two-party one, was key. Outsiders — regulators, unions, lawmakers — were intruders. That privacy of employer and employee often yielded negative results. The employer might exploit the employee. But the two-party dynamic often succeeded. Because the employee-employer pair set their terms together, they trusted each other. From time to time, they also helped each other.

Example: It’s hard to find employers more vilified in the annals of American history than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick. These gentlemen hired the Pinkerton men who shot at the workers during the steel strike over, yes, wages at Homestead, Pa., in 1892. What is mostly forgotten is that the workers also shot at the detectives. What is entirely forgotten is that Carnegie and Frick did much for workers, precisely because they felt responsible to their counterparty. The exploiting Robber Baron Carnegie endowed more than 1,500 public libraries up and down the Atlantic seaboard and out west, and many more around the world. Carnegie’s aim was to dare workers like those who tackled the Pinkertons to improve their skills, so that they might rise as Carnegie himself had. “He that dare not reason is a slave,” reads the motto at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh. Many immigrants after Carnegie did reason, and did rise.

“Trigger warnings” are the latest trend in political correctness — and they’re madness.

Trigger warning: I am going to make fun of “trigger warnings.”

Of course, if you’re the sort of person who takes trigger warnings very seriously, you probably don’t read this column too often. So maybe my mockery will miss its target, sort of like making fun of the Amish on the Internet — it’s not like they’ll find out.

In fairness, the Amish are actually very impressive people. Even though some Amish communities are more tolerant of technology than the stereotypes suggest, their Anabaptist puritanical streak leaves me cold. On the whole, I like modernity. I may not love every new fad of the last few centuries, but mark me down as a fan of refrigeration, Netflix, modern dentistry, universal suffrage, the internal-combustion engine, and all that stuff.

Here’s another thing about the Amish. They don’t expect everyone else to pussyfoot around them.

You can’t say the same thing about the trigger-unhappy folks making headway on college campuses. Before I continue, I should explain what a trigger warning is.

It started on left-wing and feminist websites. Like a spoiler alert in a movie review or a more specific version of the movie-rating system, trigger warnings are intended to alert very sensitive people that some content might set off, or trigger, their post-traumatic stress disorder or simply offend some people. According to most accounts, this was a conscientious accommodation of people who’d been raped or otherwise horribly abused.

But soon the practice metastasized. Trigger warnings were provided for an ever-increasing, and ridiculous, list of “triggers.” For example, one website offers a trigger warning that it contains images of small holes, lest it terrify people suffering from trypophobia, which is — you guessed it — a fear of clusters of small holes. Another website warns visitors that it will not tolerate any debate over the validity of its trigger warnings for, among many other things, trypophobia, pictures from high places, audio of snapping fingers, or images or discussion of spiders, food, escalators, or animals in wigs.

Now, the Internet is a very big place, and there’s nothing wrong with obscure websites catering to the boutique anxieties of troubled people.

But now the cancer has spread to the college campus. At UC Santa Barbara, the student government has formally requested that professors provide trigger warnings on their syllabi. The idea was initially suggested by a student who had been the victim of sexual abuse. Her class was shown a film that depicted a rape, and while she herself was not “triggered” by it, she felt she should have been warned.

Vibrating capsule helping constipation sufferers
‘It’s completely novel,’ says gastroenterologist
HOW PILL WORKS

Yishai Ron, the research leader and a gastroenterologist at the Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said the capsule is designed to pulsate three times a minute, roughly the same pace the colon contracts to move waste products through. It starts vibrating 6-8 hours after being swallowed — roughly the time it takes for food to reach the lower part of the digestive system — so the vibrations are not perceptible, he said.
• Patients in the trial took the capsules twice a week for two weeks. It is too early to know how much the pills will cost or how long a patient would need to take the single-use capsules to clear up constipation.

Millions of people suffer from constipation — sometimes so bad it can go on for months or years. Medications are effective, but as many as half of all those with chronic constipation get little relief or suffer significant side effects, studies show.

Now an Israeli company, Vibrant, is testing a capsule that would vibrate in the colon, rather than deliver medications.

Adding movements inside the lower intestine mimics peristalsis, the biological process that pushes waves of waste through the bowel. The researchers hope it will break up clumps of waste and encourage the system to work more normally.

They have only just begun to test the multivitamin-sized pill, releasing results Saturday showing it was safely tested in 26 patients who have bowel movements just twice a week on average.

Trigger warning: This essay was written by one who feels no need to check his gender, race and class, and who does not apologize for offending readers who may suffer feelings of inferiority due to racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, or other issues of oppression.

For more than a decade, feminist blogs and forums have used the term “trigger warning,” or simply “TW,” to alert victims of sexual abuse that they may want to avoid certain articles or pictures online. While concerns about trigger warnings have been around for a while, what prompted the recent spate was a disturbing letter from Dylan Farrow, adoptive daughter of Woody Allen, accusing him of sexual molestation when she was seven years old. The letter was printed in the New York Times on February 1. Six days later Mr. Allen wrote a denial, claiming her memories were “implanted” by her mother, Mia Farrow. I have no idea who is telling the truth and that isn’t the purpose of this note. What was interesting is that following publication the blogosphere became inundated with tweets – varied in terms of where responsibility lay – but consistent in that all suggested the letter should have been preceded with a “trigger warning” label, the contents might prove sensitive to those who had experienced such molestation.

The desire to protect children against depictions of violence and explicit sexual encounters is endemic to parenting. At the same time, fascination with the forbidden is as old as mankind. Nevertheless, despite hands thrown in the air in despair, generations of young have matured into emotionally healthy adults – or, at least, reasonably so. Our fathers and grandfathers (and mothers and grandmothers, in some cases) returned from the Pacific and Europe following World War II, having witnessed brutality on an unprecedented scale. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was then called “battle fatigue” or “combat neurosis.” Many returning vets had trouble adapting, but most did not. They simply chose not to speak of what they had seen. Could modern psychiatry have provided better tools that would have allowed these people to live more productive lives? Perhaps. However, those returning vets helped power the American economy become the biggest and most powerful in the world. They were instrumental in the passage of Civil Rights legislation. They helped lay the foundation of a society richer and more inclusive than the one they inherited. Tom Brokaw dubbed them the “Greatest Generation.”

Not surprisingly, the UK’s main “progressive” newspaper, The Guardian, has provided its readers with a thoroughly Marxist analysis of Boko Haram’s recent kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian schoolgirls. Yes, revolutionary socialism may be almost dead in the UK; but Marxist theory is still alive and kicking.

So why Marxist? Well this newspaper has blamed Boko Haram’s actions on the economic and social problems supposedly caused by man-caused global warming in Nigeria. In other words, the Guardian doesn’t blame Boko Haram for the actions of Boko Haram; it blames global warming. In fact I will argue that it ultimately blames Western capitalism.

The Guardian’s position isn’t a surprise. This newspaper doesn’t blame acts of terrorism on the terrorists who commit those acts either. (Unless the terrorist is white, right-wing and goes by the name of Anders Behring Breivik.) The Guardian, instead (depending on the article and the time of day) blames Islamic terrorism on: unemployment, the Iraq War, Islamophobia, racism, oil, the Danish cartoons, anti-Islamic films, the banning of the burkha, Westerners in Saudi Arabia, The Satanic Verses, Israel, 1967, the Balfour Declaration, autocratic Arab regimes (which are, of course, “propped up by the West”), the “far right”, “anti-terrorism legislation”…

Come to think of it, Noam Chomsky (much loved by Guardianistas) also blamed the Syrian war on global warming. He once said:

“There was a drought of unprecedented scale in Syria… Therefore, the tragedy that has unfolded in Syria is partly a consequence of global warming.”

The Guardian article in question (written by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed) partly relies on a study by the United States Institute for Peace (which is funded by Congress). More specifically, the Institute “links climate change with violence in Nigeria”. In terms of detail, it states that

“…poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict.”

Three things are taken for granted here:

In a graduation season when distinguished guests such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Condoleezza Rice, Christine Lagarde, some state senator from Colorado and a camel in Minnesota have all been bounced from campus by student protests, John Kerry somehow managed to slip through the net and deliver his speech to Boston College students. Can you guess what it was about, boys and girls?

Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduates of Boston College on Monday that they have doom and destruction to look forward to if they don’t take climate change more seriously than previous generations.

‘And I know its hard to feel the urgency as we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston,’ Kerry said, ‘you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your communities or your families.

‘But let me tell you, it is.’

If the U.S. does not act, ‘and it turns out that the critics and the naysayers and the members of the Flat Earth Society – if it turns out that they’re wrong, then we are risking nothing less than the future of the entire planet.’

This is apparently the one speech you’re still allowed to give at American universities.