RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Israel is the most extraordinary collective achievement of the Jewish people in thousands of years. It is the embodiment of the dreams, faith, blood, sweat and tears of the Jewish people today and throughout time in both spiritual and physical terms. Israel is something that every Jew should celebrate and be thankful not only on Yom Ha’atzma’ut, but every day of the year.”

Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day, is a joyous holiday. In Israel, every year, from Eilat to Metulla, from Tel Aviv to the Jordan Valley, everyone across every spectrum – secular, religious; rich, poor; left, Right, Ashkenazi, Sephardi – is out celebrating.

The reconstitution of the Jewish state, and its growth within three generations from a third world economic and military basket case into a prosperous and powerful country, is among the most astounding success stories in human history. Certainly it is the greatest story of Jewish success since Joshua led a nation of former slaves in conquering and settling the land of Israel some 3,500 years ago.

And today, three generations after the enslavement and genocide of European Jewry and the expulsion of the Jews from Islamic lands, the Jewish people in the Land of Israel have built arguably the most dynamic society in the world.

For the Jews of the Diaspora, Israel’s success should be a source of enduring pride and joy. Independence Day should be celebrated by Jews throughout the world. But in recent years, associations of Israel with joy have become increasingly rare.

As one Jewish student activist put it, the celebration on his campus was nothing more than “a bunch of kids eating cake.”

And at the same time, he explained, many students were posting statuses on their Facebook pages talking about how the day was “bittersweet because of the Nakba.”

The situation was all too similar in campuses throughout North America. Yom Ha’atzma’ut, the celebration of the greatest act of Jewish will in modern times, was marked with a shrug, and small clumps of students eating felafel and humous, and cake.

In this week’s episode of the Capitol Hill soap opera, Lois Lerner, the apparatchik at the center of the IRS jihad against conservative groups, was at long, long last held in contempt of Congress. Amid the farce, the House’s IRS probe is floundering.

Ironically, this happens just as the chamber’s separate probe of the Benghazi massacre has been given a chance to succeed. That is because House speaker John Boehner, after over a year of delay, has finally agreed to appoint a “select committee” to investigate Benghazi. Congress has no constitutional authority to enforce the laws it writes, a power our system vests solely in the executive branch. But a select committee, with a mission to find out what happened — as opposed to conducting oversight through the prism of some committee’s narrow subject-matter jurisdiction (judiciary, budget, education, reform, etc.) — is the closest legislative analogue to a grand jury.

Of course, a grand jury operates in secrecy, as is appropriate for protecting the privacy of the innocent while gathering evidence against the guilty. Congressional investigations are generally conducted in the open by ambitious politicians, an atmosphere that can be as conducive to spectacle as to a search for the truth. As Charles Krauthammer sagely observes, the success of the Benghazi investigation now hinges on the ability of chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) to impose on the select committee the discipline of his long prosecutorial experience — to “keep the proceedings clean, factual, and dispassionate.” But if he can do that, the select-committee structure and focus has a chance of breaking through the Obama stonewall and getting to the bottom of things.

The IRS investigation, to the contrary, remains mired in Capitol Hill’s labyrinth of committees and subcommittees. To be sure, some important information has been uncovered. But the case is languishing. Indeed, during the House’s months of dithering over the contempt citation — which is meaningless from an investigative standpoint, however consequential it may be politically — the Obama administration has busied itself codifying the very abuses President Obama claimed to find “outrageous” and “unacceptable” when they first came to light.

In a competent investigation, one designed to find out what actually happened, Lois Lerner would have been immunized months ago. That is, Congress would have voted to compel her testimony by assuring that her statements could not be used against her in any future prosecution — removing the obstacle of her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

They are rankled! Upset! Angry! Outraged! Gnashing their teeth! Balling their fists, straining their massaged tendons, and cutting their palms with their manicured nails! They’re really, really mad! It’s unconscionable! We won’t tolerate it! Their Gucci knickers are in such a twist they have a hard time picketing and not walking funny! We just won’t come here anymore!!! Take that, Sultan of Brunei!

How dare the Sultan of Brunei, who owns some of our favorite party spots, want to stone to death gays, and lesbians, and even transgenderites, and people of all sixteen lifestyles who make whoopee outside marriage, or even if they’re not married?? Our kinds of people!!!And isn’t cutting off the hands of thieves just a bit harsh, damn it all? Over here, we let thieves off with a fine and a warning. And that rule about no drinking?? Criminey! Unacceptable! No gambling?? That’s criminal!!!

The Clarion Project (which unfortunately is dedicated to “challenging ‘extremism’ and “promoting dialogue,” much as many of the Hollywood protesters do), on May 7th reported:

As Clarion Project previously reported, as of April 1, the first phase of sharia law went into effect in the country. Eventually, punishments including the stoning to death for the crimes of adultery, homosexuality and blasphemy and the amputation of limbs for theft will be implemented.

Jay Leno, who participated in the protest organized outside the hotel, said, “I’d like to think that all people are basically good and that when they realize that this is going on, hopefully, they will do something about it … I mean, it’s just … I don’t know. Berlin, 1933? Hello, does it seem that far off from what happened during the Holocaust?”

Other celebrities and business people are joining in the boycott, including comedians Stephen Fry and Ellen DeGeneres, and TV host Sharon Osbourne. British billionaire Richard Branson, owner of the Virgin Group, said in a tweet: “No @virgin employee, nor our family, will stay at Dorchester Hotels until the Sultan abides by basic human rights.”

Jay Leno, who at one point joined the protests, and speaking without cue cards and with no big adoring audience hanging on his every punch line, mumbled his incoherency about Berlin, and 1933, and the Holocaust. (He really shouldn’t say anything in public without cue cards or a script.) But then his wife, Mavis, has been after the women-brutalizing Taliban in Afghanistan for a long time.

But women are brutalized by Sharia elsewhere in the world, as well, by Islam. Not just in Afghanistan. Try the Sudan, and Libya, and Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and Jordan, and Gaza, the West Bank, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Persian Gulf emirates. And in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, the U.K., Ireland, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, all those former Soviet Central Asian republics whose names end with “stan.” Austria. The U.S. and Canada. And Australia.

The Clarion Project pointed out this disparity between the outrage over Muslim Brunei and instances of other Islamic nations that have investments in the U.S.

Christopher Cowdray, the chief executive of the London-based Dorchester Collection of hotels owned by Brunei, said it was unjust to single out the Beverly Hills Hotel and its employees. “There are other hotel companies in this city that are owned by Saudi Arabia … you know, your shirt probably comes from a country which has human rights issues,” said Cowdray.

“This is misguided,” Robert Anderson, the great-grandson of the founder of the hotel, told Reuters after the vote. “We should be against human rights violations in all countries, not just the Brunei.”

However, the Sultan of Brunei’s wanting to turn his country into an Islamic prison is nothing new. Islam has been practicing these things since long, long before Brunei was a gleam in the eyes of the Sultan’s ancestors. Since the seventh century.

So, where were all these hair-tearing protesters forty years ago? Or when Islamic terrorists began hijacking airplanes? Why do some of these same protesters run Boycott Israel campaigns, and wish to see Israel torn from limb to limb? Why are they just now becoming “conscious” of Sharia? Have they the teeniest notion of how many hundreds of thousands of Muslims and non-Muslims have been meted the harshest Islamic “justice” over the centuries?

Perhaps not. While the mainstream media shies away from reporting honor killings, rapes, murders, domestic terrorism and related Islamic activities just in this country, the Internet is awash with news sites that do report these things. Hollywood types don’t read these sites. Their “social justice” mentors advise them not to.

Where was their “Islamophobia” then? Or is it “Islamophobia”? I’m willing to bet that if one asked at random any of the outraged demonstrators against the Sultan if they were “Islamophobic,” they’d scream bloody murder in denial. “What do you think I am? A racist?” Of course, a Malaysian or Brunei Muslim is not of the same “race” as a Pakistani or Arab or Turkish Muslim. Nor even of the same race as a chalk-white British convert to Islam. Still, the charge of “Islamophobia” is attended by the charge of “racism.”

Of course, they don’t condemn Islam. Islam is such a colorful religion, what with all that praying and prayer mats and pretty architecture and flowing garb. It’s all so culturally diverse, you see. Sharia has nothing to do with Islam. Right? They can divorce Islam from Sharia and not be caught condemning Islam. CAIR will never file a slander suit against Jay Leno. Leno was smart. He didn’t equate Sharia with Islam, either. Nor with jihad. Or perhaps he commits the same error, that is, segregates Sharia from Islam.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304831304579542402390653932?mg=reno64-wsj

Those who know the files he stole think he was working for a foreign power, perhaps Russia, where he now lives.

Edward Snowden’s massive misappropriations of classified documents from the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence is mainly presented by the media as a whistleblowing story. In this narrative—designed by Mr. Snowden himself—he is portrayed as a disgruntled contractor for the National Security Agency, acting alone, who heroically exposed the evils of government surveillance beginning in 2013.

The other way of looking at it—based on the number and nature of documents Mr. Snowden took, and the dates when they were taken—is that only a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation.

So far, only the whistleblower version has had immense international resonance. The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists who assisted Mr. Snowden in this enterprise were awarded the 2014 Polk Award for national-security reporting. Former Congressman Ron Paul organized a clemency petition in February for Mr. Snowden, stating: “Thanks to one man’s courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them.”

Yet others—until now not often quoted in news accounts—see Mr. Snowden as neither a hero nor a whistleblower. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2014, that “The vast majority of the documents that Snowden . . . exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities.” Time magazine on April 3 quoted Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), the head of the House Intelligence Committee, as saying Mr. Snowden was “definitely under the influence of Russian officials.”

Between the River and the Sea there will exist either exclusive Jewish sovereignty or exclusive Arab sovereignty. This is not right-wing extremism or religious fanaticism, merely sound political science.
Following my participation in The Jerusalem Post Conference in New York last month, I received an invitation from Russell Robinson, the CEO of the Jewish National Fund, to make a telephone address to major JNF donors across the United States, assessing the status of the peace process.

I shall devote this week’s and next week’s Into the Fray columns to sharing with Jerusalem Post readers the topics I raised and the analysis I made during that address, which took place as the solemn Remembrance Day drew to a close and the festivities of Independence Day began. (Some minor modifications and editorial tweaks have been made to accommodate the transition from oral to written form):

Shakespeare on the futility of self-deception.

I believe that to adequately comprehend the situation we are in, we must understand the process that brought it about.

At the risk of being flamboyant, I should like to begin my explanation of the foretold futility of the “peace-process” with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act I, Scene 3.

Although some might find the connection between the citation and the Arab-Israeli conflict e abstruse, I will explain the relevance shortly, and hope that, like myself, the Post readership will find it instructive in elucidating the defective rationale on which the entire peace process was founded.

The quotation relates to an incident in which Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) is exiled by Richard II (ruled 1377-1399) and is distraught at being banished from his beloved England.

His father, John O’ Gaunt, attempts to assuage his distress by advising him to fend off the hardships of exile by imagining that they do not exist:

Heaven help humanity
On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama received an “Ambassador for Humanity” award from movie director Steven Spielberg, the founder of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation.

“Standing up to anti-Semitism is not simply about protecting one community or one religious group,” Obama said in his acceptance speech at the gala, which was held in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Holocaust museum that Spielberg established after making the film “Schindler’s List.”

The president also urged Americans to “speak out against the rhetoric that threatens the existence of the Jewish homeland,” and assured that he would “sustain America’s unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.”

Due to Obama’s appalling treatment of Israel in particular and his disastrous foreign policy in general — both of which have empowered human-rights abusers across the globe — these words ring as hollow as the distinction bestowed upon him by Spielberg.

As a result, conservative pundits have been justifiably taking him to task for his hypocrisy. Obama, after all, is the president on whose watch the Iranian regime is racing towards a nuclear bomb; the Syrian dictator is massacring his people in the tens of thousands with every means available, including chemical weapons; the Turkish prime minister has come out of the Islamist closet to side with forces hostile to the United States and Israel; the Russian president has invaded Ukraine; and the Palestinian Authority is burying the hatchet with Hamas, instead of negotiating its false claims to and ostensible desire for statehood.

These are the most blatant, but by no means the only, results of Obama’s agenda of reaching out to America’s enemies and admitted pride in “leading from behind.” Indeed, they are the fruits of his hard labor, not the blunders of a novice.

Still, there is one key outcome he did not anticipate when handed the Oval Office on a silver platter: that his many years of education at the hands of mentors like radical community organizer Saul Alinsky and Black Liberation theologist Pastor Jeremiah Wright have had the opposite of his intended effect. They did not culminate in the socialist multicultural world-without-borders of his fantasies.

On the contrary, in the world as it actually exists, a weakling in the White House provided a green light for an escalation in sectarian, feudal, religious and — yes — even border wars. Rather than winning brownie points for kowtowing to despots large and small, Obama has earned their utter disdain.

Yesterday I got an e-mail stating that Michelle Obama had joined the outcry and protest over the decidedly appalling enslavement of the 276 Nigerian Christian girls. There is something awry here. Her husband who is the incidental President of the United States has made an outreach and outright obsequiousness to the Moslem world one of the hallmarks of his so called foreign policy. Remember his fawning speech at Al Azhar University in Egypt early in his Presidency? Has he ever rushed to condemn Islamic terror? Has he used the words Sharia and Jihad? Nah.

Enslavement of women is rampant under Sharia law which is part and parcel of Moslem rule. Persecution and massacres of Christians, including women and children is virtually a diurnal event in Moslem nations. Has the first couple even noticed?
When Barack Obama met the tyrants Kings of Saudi Arabia who enforce harsh sharia laws including flogging and stoning of women, he actually bowed!

Andrew McCarthy’s second book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (Encounter Books May 2010) begins with the words: “And so he bowed” referring to April 2,2009, when only a few months into his term America’s 44th President’s reverentially bowed to Saudi King Abdullah, a moment captured in a photograph that is being recirculated as the Arab/Muslim world has exploded into a violent rampage against the United States. Was it to protect America’s oil supply? No, as his subsequent obsequious Cairo speech disclosed, it was abnegation of the leader of the free world to a tyrant who is the keeper of the holy Muslim city of Mecca, home of Mohammed and site of pilgrimage and travel for millions of Muslims. Furthermore, The World Assembly of Moslem Youth (WAMI) is a collaboration between the Saudi government and the Moslem Brotherhood whose chief aim is to “arm the Muslim youth with full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other systems.”

In the conclusion, McCarthy laments craven American response to a concatenation of Moslem outrages and adds very presciently: “A half a world away, King Abdullah smiled. He knew a bow when he heard one.”

So Michelle, stick to kiddie diets and spare us your caterwauling outrage.

I suppose that throughout history men and women have asked themselves if they were living through either the worst or best of times. The times between wars are most surely the best of times and the times leading up to and during a war qualify as the worst. They are, however, rather quickly forgotten. It only takes about two generations-sometimes less-to move on from such events.

May 8, is “VE Day” celebrating the U.S. victory in Europe in World War Two. I suspect that most of our younger generations, including some of the Boomers, have no idea what the “VE” stands for.

World War Two ended seven decades ago, but not only have most Americans moved on from the horror of September 11, 2001, but it would appear that even the killing of an American ambassador and three security personnel in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 doesn’t arouse much anger even as we learn of a White House cover-up that utterly debases their sacrifice and loss. “Dude, that was two years ago,” said one White House staff member; as crass and crude a dismissal as one can imagine.

From a perspective of more than seventy and a half years, my mind flashes back to the Watergate scandal that began in June 1972 and concluded with President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. That was a long two years as the attending events unfolded.

Forty-three people in the Nixon administration went to jail for their participation in the cover-up. The current Attorney General received a Contempt of Congress citation for his failure to provide information about one of the administration’s many scandals and during a recent speech to the National Action Network, a group founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, asked “What Attorney General has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?” Does the name John Mitchell ring a bell? He was Nixon’s Attorney General.

Holder apparently believes that the charges hurled at him and President Obama are mostly based on the color of their skin. We live in a nation that has a black President, a black Attorney General, and a black member of the Supreme Court, to name just a few Afro-Americans who have made it to the topmost circles of power. There are 43 black members of the House and one in the Senate. I grew up in a nation where blacks could not eat in certain restaurants, get a room at a hotel, and even had separate drinking fountains. I witnessed the Civil Rights era and these, for black Americans, are the best of times in the long history of our nation.

It is a tragedy and a shame that it had to take the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of 300 Nigerian girls by Muslim jihadists for the world to finally express its outrage over Sharia’s evil deeds. Similar stories of Christian girls being kidnapped, forcibly married and converted to Islam by their Muslim captors, have been a reality for decades. But unfortunately, and tragically, they have been ignored by our mainstream media. Only a few “Islamophobic” journalists have cared enough to report on such atrocities in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere — until reality exploded to such a great magnitude that it awakened the world’s conscience.

Former Muslim women like Wafa Sultan, Ayan Hirsi Ali and myself have been writing and speaking about the oppression of women in Islamic society for a long time now. I have written a book dedicated to connecting the dots between Islamic law and such kidnappings, rapes and other forms of oppression of women. But instead of helping our voices be heard, the leftist media and academia have ignored us, called us names and done everything in their power to silence us. They have treated the American people like children who are told they should not be outraged about far away cultural practices — because all cultures are equal.

Advocates of cultural relativism who are brutal in judging conservative and Christian Americans, and call them slanderous names, have no problem in tolerating Islamic tyranny over women and other minorities.

After 9/11 Americans asked: “Where are the voices of Arab Americans who condemn Islamic terrorism?” This question led a few brave former Muslim women to stand up and speak. But when we did (at our own peril), the leftist media and academia called us “Islamophobes” and “racists.” What is Islamophobic and racist about warning America about the tyranny of the barbaric religious legal system that we lived under and came to America to escape from its vicious clutches?

Muslims have convinced the leftist elites that criticism of Islamic doctrine is a hateful phobia equal to hating all Muslim people. Students who wanted to learn the truth about Sharia and its implications on women, jihad, the Arab Israeli conflict and terrorism, have been intimidated and forced to withdraw their invitation to former Muslim women speakers.

Not only have Muslim Brotherhood front groups and the Left succeeded in silencing speech critical of Islam, but reports about Islamic atrocities around the world have been suppressed — until now, when one horrifying story of an Islamic crime against humanity could not be contained.

Israel’s ‘Price Tag’ Bogeyman

The madness continues. The Israeli media, the world media, the Obama administration, and a growing number of Israeli politicians are screaming at supersonic-jet decibel levels against the “hate crimes” of the “Price Tag” delinquents.

You will not be surprised if I tell you that the use of the term “hate crimes” by the Israeli leftist media and their fellow travelers never has anything at all to do with Arab terrorists murdering Jews. Indeed, a young woman from Afula was murdered a few days ago and the police believe it was a political murder by Arab terrorists. You would only learn about that murder in the back pages in small font in the far-leftist daily Haaretz, although headlines on the front page and throughout this “newspaper” decry “hate crimes.” Let us note that Haaretz NEVER denounces Arab terrorism as “hate crimes.” And it refuses to use the “T” word (terrorist) to label these folks. Instead, following CNN and MSNBC, these are always “activists” or “militants.”

The “hate crimes” over which the media and politicians are all up in arms consist of teenage mischief and graffiti. Really. The Obama people have also called for action against these “hate crimes.” Small groups of Jewish teenagers have gone running about the country and engaging in petty vandalism and graffiti. They call themselves “Price Tag.” Their mischief is usually directed against Arab property (although in a few cases they have vandalized police and army vehicles). Their graffiti is anti-Arab and they have targeted churches and mosques. In a few cases, vandalism was in fact carried out by leftists and Arabs as provocations to be blamed on the Price Tag urchins.

Now I am the first to demand that these teenagers by apprehended and taken out back behind the woodshed and spanked thoroughly with a hickory switch. Yes they are an embarrassment and yes they are up to no good.

But hate crime? Come on!

“Price Tag” urchins are petty juvenile delinquents. While they have gotten away with their mischief and have not been apprehended, this may be because the police and army in Israel have real hate crimes to deal with, like genocidal terrorists. The Price Tag punks are as much involved in “hate crimes” as are the subway graffiti vandals in any large city in the world.