RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tonight begins the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot- The feast of the Tabernacles. As Yoram Ettinger explains:

The Book of Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon accentuates Solomon’s philosophy of the importance of humility, morality, patience, learning from past mistakes, commemoration and historical perspective, family, friendship, long-term thinking, proper timing, realism and knowledge. The Hebrew name of Ecclesiastes is Kohelet, (), which is similar to the Biblical commandment to celebrate the community-oriented Sukkot holiday – Hakhel (), which means “to assemble,” as well as “public” () and “community” (). Solomon’s call for the realization of human fallibility, vulnerabilities and limitations is consistent with a central message of Sukkot: a seven day relocation from one’s permanent residence to the temporary, humble, wooden Sukkah (booth).

3. The temporary structure of the Sukkah highlights the historical significance of the permanent Jewish State in the Land of Israel – which must not be taken for granted – while commemorating the fragile and vulnerable nature of Jewish sovereignty and the Jewish people: the destruction of the two Temples (586 BCE and 70 CE), the ensuing exiles, the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), Venice (1421), Koln (1424), Milan (1489) and Spain (1492) and the Holocaust.

It is an important and joyous holiday. rsk

As often in America, it was met with a great deal of heroism by ordinary men and women rising to the occasion: There was, for example, an Englishwoman in a wheelchair who’d been seated on a raised platform so she could get a better view of the concert. If it were every man for himself, it would have been easy to leave her there, trapped on the dais, exposed to the gunman. Instead, as everyone fled, those around her nevertheless carried her to safety and raised her wheelchair over the fence they scrambled over. There were many stories like that throughout the day, far outweighing the grotesque Tweets glorying in the slaughter of presumed Trump voters. Twitter is an idiotic medium, but not, happily, a representative one.

I had thought by last night we would know more about Stephen Craig Paddock. By now the usual social-media non-paper trail and petty-crime police records and mental-health issues have emerged. Instead, nothing has – except some bizarrely distinctive details: He wasn’t a loner, but lived with his girlfriend – an Australian citizen currently in Japan, but planning to return to the US today. He was not the usual loser, but a multi-millionaire. He had no apparent interest in guns and no military training, but he demonstrated remarkably lethal proficiency, either with semi-automatics he modified or with a genuine automatic he somehow acquired, a weapon that has been used in precisely three crimes in America since 1934. He didn’t “snap”, but instead calmly planned his act, identifying and securing the perfect corner suite in a massive hotel and then discreetly moving in dozens of weapons over four days and constructing platforms in front of those two windows.

Some of these quirks do not appear to be particularly consistent, and the Aussie in the adjoining room, for one, says there were “multiple shooters” and “they killed a security guard on my floor”. On the face of it, “multiple shooters” would seem more plausible than Isis’ claim that Mr Paddock had converted to Islam and changed his name to “Abu Abd Abdulbar al-Ameriki”. But, pending any further revelations, it may well be that a wealthy retiree with no interest in guns got sufficiently interested sufficiently quickly to pull off America’s all-time deadliest single-shooter massacre: An old dog taught himself a new trick, on a spectacular scale.

As I said on stage at the Guthrie Theatre, I had intended to talk about other matters – about the weekend’s latest “vehicle attack” in Edmonton, Alberta, by a Somali immigrant (with an Isis flag on the seat of his car), who stabbed one policeman and ran over four people at Commonwealth Stadium; and about the two young women fatally stabbed (one with her throat slit) at the main rail station in Marseilles, by an illegal immigrant from the Maghreb; and the seventeen-year-old from the northern Caucasus who’s just gone on trial in Oslo after being found with a bomb the day after the Stockholm jihad-motorist struck. But all these events, by fiercely committed ideologues in multiple jurisdictions in service of a global civilizational struggle, were all but forgotten, banished to the in-brief sidebars at the foot of page 37 by one apparently non-ideological American retiree who, unlike the aforementioned, was extremely good at killing large numbers of people.

I confess to a certain resentment at this. I regard the Albertan, French and Norwegian stories as far more relevant to where our world is heading. It is not a small thing when a young Frenchwoman can have her throat slit in broad daylight at a major public venue in a European metropolis, notwithstanding that the Mayor of London and others tell us we have to accept that it’s now part and parcel of life in a big city. Yet in a certain sense these events are ineffectual – as the corpse count of a Stephen Paddock reminds us. And every Stephen Paddock makes it easier for all those who want to brush off Islamic supremacism and retreat to all those lame-o lines about how you’ve got more chance of being killed by a toppling household appliance than by a terrorist, and anyway, even when the shooting starts, half-a-dozen Isis cells can’t match one white-male gun nut. Why didn’t the Somali guy, the North African, the Caucasian jihadist figure out what one 64-year-old from a Nevada retirement community did? That all over the map there are soft targets with large numbers of people penned into small, tight, open-air spaces – and right across the street tall hotels whose upper floors offer easy opportunities for a bloodbath.

We have been, for the most part, very lucky. The foot-soldiers of the jihad are mostly dimwit Mohammedans: they have youth and energy and ideological fervor, but they are also largely stupid and unimaginative. The old guys are less energetic, but also less stupid: if Isis were right and there really were Islamic Stephen Paddocks – 40-50-60-somethings, worldly and full of low cunning – things would be very different.

Consider this year’s two pop-concert atrocities: at Ariana Grande’s in Manchester, 23 people died – in the cause of the new global caliphate; at Jason Aldean’s in Vegas, 59 died – for no reason at all. It is a glum thought, but Paddock’s all-time record will likely not stand for long. America’s four deadliest single-shooter mass murders occurred in the last decade. Only one of them – the Orlando nightclub massacre – can be said to have a political or ideological component. The rest seem to be a peculiarly contemporary form of narcissism – that, when my life heads south, the only way to give it meaning is to take large numbers of people with me. There is no cause, no fealty, no “Allahu Akbar!” – because pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will: Who needs Allah? You’re your own Allah. Unlike Manchester or Nice or Paris or Berlin or Brussels, there is no meaning: Indeed, the only meaning is the meaninglessness; that is the point – the black void at the heart of the act.

There are many claims floating around that Russia colluded with Trump/the Trump campaign during the 2016 Presidential election resulting in the victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. While there are general claims about collusion, there are no claims of specific actions. This, of course, ties in with Hillary’s book, “What Happened”.

You can’t claim collusion without pointing to actual acts. That the Mueller investigation teamhas not leaked claims of actual acts throws doubt on his whole enterprise.Here is what I think happened.

What Russia didn’t make happen:

Russia didn’t make Hillary refuse to protect the Consulate in Benghazi.

Russia didn’t make Hillary lie to the people about a video causing the Benghazi attack while she told her daughter it was terrorism.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have an unsecured server in her house and in the bathroom of an apartment in Colorado.

Russia didn’t make people send Huma Abedin emails at home to Anthony Weiner’s personal computer. Weiner had no security clearance and his computer was unsecured.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have her lawyers permanently delete 30,000 emails from her private server.

Russia didn’t make Hillary and Bill create the Clinton Foundation.

Russia didn’t make the Clinton’s take huge “speaking” fees from Wall Street while publicly damning Wall Street.

Russia didn’t make Hillary, her aids, and the press push for Trump to win the Republican primary in the belief that he would be easy to beat.

Russia didn’t make Hillary’s pollsters weight the result to show Hillary as unbeatable.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe those polls.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe that she had Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin locked-up and that she didn’t have to go there.

Russia did not make Hillary go to West Virginia and announce that she would shut down the coal industry, which affected Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio and Colorado.

Russia didn’t make Donna Brazil give Hillary debate questions in advance if the debate.

Russia didn’t make Hillary proclaim that half the voters were “deplorables”.

Russia didn’t make Hillary issue invitations to her speeches, as she did to me in Virginia, where you had to pay $35 to hear her campaign talk.

Russia didn’t make the Clintons make speeches for large amounts of money to people who wanted favors from the government.

Russia didn’t make the DNC cause violence at Trump events.

What Russia may have done:

Russia may have hacked Hillary’s and others’ unsecured servers and released the information to Wikileaks.

What Russia did do:

Russia bought 20% of America’s uranium mines. $145 million of the proceeds wound up in the coffers of the Clinton Foundation.

Russia is reported to have employed Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and paid him about $35 million.

Conclusion:

Someone, and it may have been Russia, leaked information from John Podesta’s server to the public through Wikileaks. The information was damming to the Democrats. The release of this information doomed Hillary’s campaign. Her supporters said, in effect, if you didn’t know what she did, you would have voted for her and she would have won.

This summer, Nazi symbols and the slogan “Jews will not replace us” at a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, generated a rare clarifying moment in an otherwise politically scrambled time. Since the United States led the Allies to victory in the Second World War and the Nuremburg Trials condemned the perpetrators of genocide, Nazism has been the most powerful symbol of evil in our culture and Jews its most identifiable victims. Though it may be said in some sense that “both sides” at Charlottesville — the demonstrators and counter-demonstrators — bore some responsibility for the event, President Trump’s failure to single out the Nazi element in his condemnation of the two was perceived by many Americans as a moral offense against his country, let alone against its Jewish citizens. Those who enlist Nazism for the advancement of their political goals deserve harsh, unequivocal censure. The president ought to have led, not followed, in singling them out.

Yet the very clarity of judgment on Nazism threatens to obscure graver threats to our constitutional democracy. Jews in particular are harmed by the exclusive identification of anti-Semitism with Nazism, which is so far the only form of anti-Jewish politics that has gone down to defeat. Just as tuberculosis is no longer our chief medical hazard, so Nazism is no longer the main threat to the Jews and what they represent. The tale of evil enshrined in the Holocaust Memorial Museum has been overtaken by more sinister political forms of grievance and blame.

Before Charlottesville, some politicians, professors, and community leaders had begun to address the escalation of anti-Jewish politics in America. But those initiatives could use a sharper focus on the real character of anti-Semitism. On December 1, 2016, for instance, the United States Senate passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” or AAA, framed as an extension of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act was originally designed to combat discrimination against African Americans. It sought to cover all its bases in protecting them through its triple targeting of discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin.” Title VI focuses particularly on institutions that receive federal funds, and includes protections against discrimination on college campuses. But over several decades, the prime targets of hostile discrimination on American campuses from Brooklyn College to the University of California, Irvine, ceased to be traditional racial minorities and became instead the most habitual of scapegoats — the Jews — though they are themselves a diverse group of many colors and national origins.

Well before the passage of the AAA, interpretation of the original Civil Rights Act had already been stretched by the Departments of Justice and Education to prohibit “discrimination against Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and members of other religious groups when the discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.” The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) duly investigated hundreds of claims of harassment, threats, and intimidation against Jewish students on college campuses under this interpretation. Yet despite the broadly extended definition and the documented causes for concern, the OCR failed to identify any violations against Jews because anti-Semitism did not comfortably fit the original legislative framework of the Civil Rights Act. The AAA was therefore passed in an attempt to further empower the OCR to protect Jewish students.

But there has always been a problem with the logic of this well-intentioned exercise. Anti-Semitism cannot be subsumed into the framework of the Civil Rights Act because anti-Semitism is not discrimination. It may exhibit the key features of prejudice, bias, and bigotry — and therefore result in discrimination. But it is different in kind. Anti-Semitism is a modern political phenomenon — an ideology that anchors or forms part of a political movement and serves a political purpose. It arose alongside other ideologies like liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism, anarchism, and (somewhat later) fascism, opposing some of them and merging with others. Anti-Semitism was the most protean of these ideologies and was therefore valuable in forging coalitions even among otherwise competing groups. To take anti-Semitism seriously, let alone to subdue it, requires first recognizing its political nature.

An ideology may be defined as a system of beliefs or ideals, a shaping concept in politics, held by an individual or a group. As a political ideology, anti-Semitism enjoys the protection of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibits laws abridging “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” This provision affords champions of an ideology like communism the right to free speech and assembly even though they aim at the destruction of our liberal democracy, so one can hardly deny the same protection to champions of anti-Semitism ostensibly targeting only the Jews.

The AAA was no sooner passed than protests against abridgment of the right to free speech arose, including from administrators of colleges that had seen some of the worst harassment of Jewish students. They asked, in effect, whether Jews must be protected at the expense of the First Amendment. They deserve an answer. But such an answer would require looking into just what anti-Semitism is.

Hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S., earthquakes in Mexico and forest fires out west dominated the news. The New York Times, in reporting on the devastation and sounding like an Old Testament prophet, noted, people could be excused for believing that an angry God (perhaps Al Gore?) had let loose His wrath for destroying what He had created – God, that is, not Al Gore. Hyperbole sells news, so perhaps the folks at the Times could be excused for trying to make an extra buck out of other people’s misery.

Torrents were not limited to Mexico, the Caribbean and the Texas/Florida coasts. At the United Nations, President Trump gave a Reagan-like speech, as he did in Poland. He praised the work of the UN, and cited the principles on which it was founded: “pillars of peace, sovereignty, security and prosperity.” He spoke of its cooperation: “Strong sovereign nations let diverse countries with different values, different cultures and different dreams not just coexist, but work side by side, on the basis of mutual respect.” He reminded those listening that Americans “have paid the ultimate price to defend our freedom and the freedom of many nations represented in this great hall.” He emphasized he was an American leader, not a world leader.

He warned that if the UN is to be an effective partner reform is necessary to confront those who would dismantle the world we know: “Too often the focus of this organization has not been on results, but on bureaucracy and process. In some cases, states that seek to subvert this institution’s noble ends have hijacked the very systems that are supposed to advance them.” He reminded his audience that “some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the Human Rights Council.”

President Trump called out North Korea for what they are, a country that impoverishes its people and risks catastrophe in the Pacific region. Bully’s intimidate, he asserted, and must be confronted. He did add a sentence, the last part of which became headline news in much of the media: “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.” Most press accounts left off the final two sentences of the paragraph: “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary. That’s what the United Nations is all about. That’s what the United Nations is for. Let’s see how they do.” Mr. Trump spoke frankly of the Maduro regime in Venezuela, using two of the best sentences in the speech: “The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, whenever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure.”

As do many in politics, Mr. Trump has multiple personalities, like Joanne Woodward as Eve in, “Three Faces of Eve,” or the two faces of Janus. He reminds one of Dr. Doolittle’s Pushmi-Pullyu. We do not know which way he is headed. The weekend after his speech to the UN, he became embroiled in an argument with NFL players, who prefer to kneel rather than stand during the National Anthem. Mr. Trump is right about the disrespect they show, but who cares what those morons do? Don’t we have bigger issues, like economic growth; addressing the inequities embedded in the miss-named Affordable Care Act; fixing Dodd-Frank, which has allowed “too-big-to-fail” banks to proliferate, or doing something about our unsustainable debt? Should not tax reform take priority, or the geopolitical concerns in the Middle East and Southeast Asia? Why take on the NFL? My father warned me: never argue with an idiot, for a passerby would be unable to distinguish between the two. The consequence for Mr. Trump was that a great speech disappeared into a miasma of kneeling, self-righteous, juvenile football players.

The last First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, delivered some palaver this past Wednesday explaining why some women voted for Donald Trump, thus adding to the myriad explanations of “what happened.”

Her words:

“As far as I’m concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice. To me, that doesn’t say as much about Hillary . . . and everyone is trying to wonder, well what does this mean about Hillary? No, no, no, what does this mean about us as women? That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, that guy [scoffs], he’s better for me. His voice is more true to me. Well, to me that just says, you don’t like your voice. You like the thing you’re told to like. The voice you’re told to like…..We have been socialized to sort of sit there and be quiet. We think 12 times before we open our mouths, we argue with ourselves in our head, and we think, before I can speak up, it has to be perfect. While the guy is like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s not thinking about perfect, right, or anything, he’s just like, “I’m used to hearing my voice.” That’s what happens to a lot of people.”

First of all, her grammar is like off…..it should be “Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against her own voice. But, like, never mind, how dare she demean women who think for themselves, vote for their principles, and speak out in their own strong voice?

She delivered more like blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Pure, unadulterated patronizing folderol. rsk

Mainstream reviews of Donald Trump’s recent Warsaw speech laid bare the modern Left’s modus operandi in attempting to criminalise any opinion that gainsays identity politics and political correctness. Conflating “the West” with “the white national right” is nothing less than perverse

President Trump’s Warsaw speech, delivered on July 6 in Krasinski Square, scene of Poland’s 1944 uprising against Nazi occupation, was—depending on your political point of view—either a cry of freedom or duplicity of the greatest magnitude:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilisation in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

The Churchillian urgency of the Warsaw Speech was, for many, not at all misplaced. Western civilisation is indeed in peril because it happens to be confronting a global jihad, and whether we have the will or even the lucidity to meet the challenge remains an open question. For the naysayers, on the other hand, the primary danger facing the West was the speaker of these words.

Jamelle Bouie, writing for Slate magazine, was one of the many pundits on the Left who viewed President Trump’s vigorous defence of Western civilisation, the passage above especially, as an allusion “to ideas and ideologies with wide currency on the white nationalist right”. Similarly, Jonathan Capehart, in the Washington Post, detected “white-nationalist dog whistles” in an appeal to “preserve our civilisation”. Not to be outdone, Sarah Wildman, in Vox magazine, considered Donald Trump’s performance to be straight out of the so-called alt-right’s playbook: that is to say, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and so on. Peter Beinart, in the Atlantic, clarified the situation for anyone who might have thought Trump’s words about freedom and civilisation sounded like John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan defending the West in times past: “The West is a racial and religious term.”

Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day Left’s modus operandi for criminalising any opinion that gainsays their identity politics and ideology of political correctness. Conflating “the West” with “the white national right” marginalises conservative or traditionalist thinking of every kind. It is also, we might note, perverse. Western civilisation, as Roger Scruton explained in The Uses of Pessimism, is not about race or any other form of tribalism but about individual self-determination. The West has the led the way in creating a workable social arrangement “that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent—an order not of submission but of settlement”. Vaclav Havel’s eassay “The Power of the Powerless”, as encapsulated by M.A. Casey in the July-August edition of Quadrant, is an instructive example of the freedomist Western impulse challenging, in this case, the “post-totalitarianism” (or soft totalitarianism) of late communism in Eastern Europe: “life, in its essence, moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution and self-organisation, in short towards the fulfilment of its own freedom”.

The Western ethos, by this account, is neither racial nor religious per se but, ultimately, a project of individual autonomy and liberty. Our post-tribal sense of individual uniqueness, choice and conscience has its roots in long-standing Christian principles. Even the Age of Science, notwithstanding the New Atheists, was not a rebellion against Christian culture but, as writers such as David Bentley Hart have argued, a product of it. Participation in a Western society is open to people of all races and all religions, with the caveat that they embrace a civilisational code that demands not submission but settlement—freedom, in other words.

The NFL’s run of terrible press is over — when President Trump attacked the league Friday night in Alabama, 99.99 percent of the alt-left media reflexively fell into line in defense of a sport they were denouncing as barbaric as late as Friday afternoon.

You know that torrent of negative news the fellow travelers has been spewing out about pro football — the epidemics of CTE and spousal abuse, the league’s plummeting TV ratings, the half-empty stadiums in California, the $6 tickets going begging, etc., etc.?

Now that Trump has slammed the NFL, it is once again … America’s Pastime!

All it took was 90 or so seconds of the president fantasizing aloud about an NFL owner — like his buddy Bob Kraft, maybe, or his ambassador to the Court of St. James, Woody Johnson — reacting to the latest pampered prima donna to take a knee during the national anthem.

“Get that son of a bitch off the field right now!” the president imagined one of his fellow billionaires bellowing. “Out! He’s fired! He’s fired!”

Which would be the owner’s right, obviously. And surely a huge percentage of what used to be the NFL fan base is fed up with the endless PC posturing, both on the field and in the ESPN studios and on the sports pages.

The NFL’s appeal has faded, but not just among the deplor­ables. There’s a reason they are called “soccer moms,” after all. They wouldn’t dream of letting Junior put on shoulder pads. A football field is the furthest thing from a snowflake’s safe space.

But now the lemmings of the left feel compelled to defend something they loathed a mere 48 hours ago, because if Trump likes something, it must be bad. And vice versa.

It’s amazing how quickly the 45th president can rehabilitate the image of any loathed institution or individual, just by jumping on the pile. If only he could apply this magical touch to, say, repealing Obama­care, or building the wall.

We’ve been told that the ritual of football players kneeling when the national anthem is played signifies their protest of police brutality towards black life. But the American flag has much broader significance than that, specifically its presence draping the coffins of fallen soldiers and veterans. Today’s military numbers more than 1.3 million Americans, 17% of whom are black men and women who have volunteered to serve. What message is being sent to those Americans as well as all other ethnicities who voluntarily put their lives on the line in the ultimate act of patriotism for this country.

By supporting the actions of those players who choose to exercise a freedom that would have them thrown into jail in many other parts of the globe, we become complicit in dissing the families of fallen heroes in other uniforms as well. So soon after the anniversary of 9/11, have we forgotten the sacrifice of first responders – the numbers of policemen and firemen who gave their lives then or subsequently due to prolonged exposure to smoke and chemicals and were similarly buried beneath our flag as the symbol of their sacrifice to the people of this nation. Many of those heroes were black as well.

America has been a land of unequaled opportunity and rewards for its football players. Its failures need to be addressed but if you refuse to honor the flag that stands for so many of its important freedoms, perhaps you should also refuse to partake of its bounty. Rather than take the knee-jerk route of one empty gesture of a few minutes duration, why don’t football players set up a charity to help black youth avoid the pitfalls of gangs, drugs and failure to get an education. If each kneeling player became a Big Brother to a child at risk, think of the publicity value and how many other athletes might be spurred on to join that mission. Black Self-Help, specifically aimed at pro-active projects would certainly surpass the “protests” of Black Lives Matter that often turn into scene of looting, violence and random destruction. Here’s an opportunity for Colin Kaepernick, a bi-racial man who was given up for adoption to a white family, who worships god and kisses the tattoos of His sayings, to do some of God’s work, to get off his knee, stand tall and help to lift his less fortunate brothers and sisters to a better future in a better America.