RUTHFULLY YOURS

Expect the Obama administration to take more victory laps this week by claiming Iran has complied with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that reached its first anniversary on July 14. However, recent press reports paint a very different picture, one that confirms its critics’ worst fears: massive Iranian violations of the agreement.

In an annual security report issued this month, German intelligence said Iran made a clandestine effort last year to acquire illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies at a “quantitatively high level,” and that “it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.” A German intelligence agency reported 141 clandestine Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and missile technology in 2015 versus 83 in 2013.

According to a July 7 memo from the Institute for Science and International Security, Iran recently tried, unsuccessfully, to covertly purchase tons of high-strength carbon fiber, which it uses to make rotors for uranium enrichment centrifuges. Under the JCPOA, Iran is required to seek approval for such purchases from a JCPOA procurement working group. The Institute said the JCPOA group probably would not have approved this sale, since Iran has enough carbon fiber to replace the rotors of centrifuges it is permitted to operate under the agreement.

In a separate report, the Institute said many Iranian entities that had been sanctioned for illicit nuclear and missile procurement but were relieved of these sanctions by the JCPOA in January “are now very active in procuring goods in China.”

Many other troubling reports indicate the JCPOA is much worse and much weaker than its critics believed. These include:

ExemptingChina’s redesign and rebuilding of the Arak heavy-water reactor from the JCPOA procurement process.

Iran placing military facilities off-limits to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors.

The Iranian parliament approving a much weaker version of the agreement.

Willful ignorance and delusion, a huge problem since 9/11, is only getting worse.http://spectator.org/the-lessons-we-refuse-to-learn/

Today’s beginning of the Republican convention follows a week that, in nearly perfect fashion, demonstrated how thoroughly America and its allies have refused to learn the lessons terrorists have taught us over the past fifteen years.

The reactions to the terrorist attacks in Nice, France and Obama’s response to the attempted coup in Turkey each illustrate that refusal to learn.

Mizz Clinton seemed to inch away from the Obama dogma that Islam and terrorism have nothing to do with each other. In response to questions from CNN’s Anderson Cooper the terrorist attack in Nice she said we are at war with “Radical jihadists who use Islam to recruit and radicalize others in order to pursue their evil agenda.”

She couldn’t bring herself to connect Islam and terrorism. Hours after the Nice attack, on Twitter, she stuck to the Obama line, saying “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

Reacting to the coup attempt against Turkish President Erdogan, a committed Islamist radical, Obama said all factions in Turkey should support Erdogan, despite his resolve to stamp out his nation’s secular democracy. Obama said not one word about that.

The FBI, meanwhile, proclaimed that there was no evidence that the Orlando nightclub massacre occurred at the “Focus” club because it was a favorite of homosexuals. This, of course, despite Islam’s prohibition of homosexuality, its prescription of the death penalty as a remedy, and the perpetrator’s proclamation of loyalty to ISIS and shouts of “Allahu Akbar” while he slaughtered his victims. The FBI has apparently, and dangerously, surrendered to political correctness.

Though America has prevented itself from learning since the Twin Towers fell on 9/11, at least we’ve not fallen as low as have the French.

Did John Kerry assume that nobody would challenge him on the Obama administration’s stubborn claim that it is winning the fight against ISIS? In the face of bloodshed at home from ISIS, the claim deserves questioning. But somehow, John Kerry appeared to flounder when Jake Tapper of CNN presented an obvious critique to him. Via Tim Hains of RCP:

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday morning, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an assessment of how the war against ISIS is going.

“Daesh,” Kerry said, referencing an alternative name for the group, “is under great, great pressure… They are shrinking. We’ve taken back 40 percent and 45 percent of the territory they held in Iraq and we’re squeezing town after town.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Tapper interjected. “I’m not sure it looks that way to the public that ISIS is on the run… In the last few weeks we have seen a series of ISIS inspired attacks and 49 killed in Orlando and 45 killed in Istanbul and more than 200 killed in Baghdad and 84 in Nice.”

“It depends on where you mean ISIS,” Kerry responded. “If you’re saying that one person standing up one day and killing people is a reflection of ISIS moving in Iraq and Syria, I think you’re dead wrong.”

“It depends on where you mean ISIS” is not quite as bad as “It depends on what the meaning of is is,” but it is too close for comfort.

The babble from Kerry offers no response, much less comfort, to Americans worried about being mowed down by a truck at a beach, shopping mall, or other location not yet imagined. Of course, the basic facts do not offer Kerry a lot of material to work with. Obama pulled troops out of Iraq, allowing ISIS to rise, and now, instead of ending the war, Obama has succeeded in bringing the war to the Western countries.

The road to the future is filled with potholes. This metaphorical sentence speaks to a world war already in process. Despite denials from the present U.S. administration, the war is organized, promoted and managed by radical Islamists. Driven by an ideology, these religious fanatics want to undermine the West so that a global caliphate can be established. The war is in its twenty-fifth year, but the U.S. and its allies still do not understand the magnitude of the struggle.

On July 14th, a day celebrating French freedom, Bastille Day, at least eighty-four people were wantonly killed, including ten children, by a suspected terrorist who slammed his truck into unwary revelers watching the annual fireworks display. The symbolism was palpable. It is precisely the French liberty, equality and fraternity that the Islamists detest. Theirs is fraternity of barbarism.

If there were ever a moment for an appropriate response, this is it. Paris, Orlando, Istanbul, San Bernardino, Brussels, stand as stark reminders of the international reach of Islamic terror. And there isn’t an end in sight. Moreover, the murderer who killed innocents on the Promenade des Anglais had a history of aggressive views known to French authorities, just as the Orlando killer was investigated by the FBI before his murderous spree. It is not as if clues aren’t provided by savage extremists.

A strategy for dealing with this matter is available to us. It is the template for confronting an ideologically driven foe like Communism. For decades the U.S. fought on the battlefield when the global status quo was challenged. Whether successful or not, and in many instances we were not successful, the willingness to counter aggression mattered. More significantly, the U.S. fought a non-kinetic war in the culture and the political arena. Intelligence operatives penetrated communist cells, ridiculed Marxism-Leninism and caused confusion among leaders. Despite moments of conciliation and fatigue, the national opposition to Communism held. The U.S. had a powerful anti-communist method: fear, a fear that if pushed beyond a certain well understood limit, the U.S. would explode with the full fury of its military might.

Given its physical heft, it’s no surprise that the new Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary published last month by Indiana University Press is the work of generations.

Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, its editor, worked on the 856-page, 4 1/2-pound volume for some 20 years in her Teaneck basement. At its core are words collected a generation earlier by her father Mordkhe Schaechter in the family’s house in the Bronx. For many of those years, when Gitl was a teenager, she helped her father as he cataloged Yiddish words at the dining room table.

But before that, the family legend goes, there was her grandfather, Khayem-Benyomen Shekhter, and his enthusiasm for the Yiddish language. The memory of his enthusiasm is tied to a date more than a century ago: 1908, the year he made sure to attend the great Yiddish language conference in his hometown of Czernowitz, at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.

In Czernowitz, Mordkhe Schaechter, with his arms crossed, stands in front of his parents.

Of course, all languages are the work of generations. It took time for Yiddish to evolve from the medieval German that was picked up by Jews living in the Rhineland, mixed with their inherently Jewish Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, and then given Slavic vocabulary (e.g. bubbe and zeide) and even touches of syntax. (That’s the most accepted, broad-brush origin story for Yiddish, notwithstanding recent clickbait headlines arguing for more exotic origins.)

And it took time for Yiddish to be seen as a language worthy in its own right, something worth cataloging and defining and even writing in. Where people speak two languages, those languages seldom are on equal footing; people always are inclined to value one more than the other. Jews may have loved the dialect they spoke among themselves more than the language of the neighbors, which they generally mastered as well, but in Jewish culture pride of place went to Hebrew, the language of the Torah and the rabbis. Popular demand led to the publication of the first Yiddish books in the 16th century, even though the rabbis objected to it. (The first Yiddish bestseller was “Bovo Bukh,” a rhymed retelling of an Italian poem about Bevis of Hampton; this knightly romance is the origin of the term bubbe meise; rather than the popular, and wrong, etymology linking it to bubbe, or grandmother.) And in the 19th century, with the spread of printing and newspapers, came the great Yiddish writers: Sholom Aleichem, I.L. Peretz, and Mendele Mocher Sforim.

Which brings us to the 1908 Czernowitz conference. The 20th century was young. Change was in the air. And Nathan Birnbaum, the 44-year-old Austrian Jew who had coined the word “Zionism” and advocated for Jews in Eastern Europe, championed Yiddish as the Jewish national language. Peoples throughout Europe were coming to understand themselves as separate nations, wearying of being under the rule of the grand European empires, and Mr. Birnbaum’s Yiddishism offered an equivalent national identity to Jews — without demanding that they leave for Palestine. (He later would abandon Jewish nationalism altogether and help found the Orthodox Agudath Israel movement.) He sent out a call for everyone interested in Yiddish to come to the Yiddish language conference.

For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.

For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about “healing.” Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous. There will be time later for the tears of sorrow.A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage.

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.It is a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that’s what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays.

“The worst times, as we see, separate the civilised of the world from the uncivilised. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilised toughen up, and let the uncivilised take their chances in the game they started.” Amen! rsk

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000762,00.html

Kerry: U.S. Will Meet Fiscal Year Goal of ‘Welcoming 10,000 Syrian Refugees’By Bridget Johnson
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2016/07/13/kerry-u-s-will-meet-fiscal-year-goal-of-welcoming-10000-syrian-refugees/

John Kerry was in Moscow this week, where he invoked Thursday’s terror attack in Nice to press the need to broker an end to the civil war in Syria. “Nowhere is there a greater hotbed or incubator for these terrorist than in Syria,” he said, and on that score he’s right. Too bad another bad deal with Russia isn’t likely to achieve that goal.

The Administration wants the Kremlin to force Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to ground his air force, which continues to use barrel bombs and chemical munitions against civilian targets in rebel-held areas. In exchange, Mr. Kerry is offering Russia enhanced intelligence cooperation, including target coordinates for Russian bombers to attack Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front. Longer term, Mr. Kerry wants Russia to help ease Assad out of power as part of an overall political settlement for Syria.

That might be a reasonable bargain—if only Vladimir Putin had any record of abiding by previous commitments. The Russian president deployed his air force to Syria last year after spending four years blocking every effort at the United Nations to censure the Assad regime. From the beginning his planes have bombed marketplaces, pediatric hospitals, Turkmen villages and other non-ISIS targets in areas besieged by regime forces.

In June the U.S. had to scramble F-18s after Russian planes bombed U.S.-backed rebels in an area near Jordan where a cease-fire was supposed to be in force. The Russians returned for a second round of bombing after the Hornets ran low on fuel and departed. Moscow has repeatedly ignored cease-fire efforts and remains very much engaged in helping Assad crush his enemies, four months after Mr. Putin announced his supposed immediate departure from the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

One year ago today, President Obama announced the start of the flawed nuclear deal that he claimed would prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has made America less safe. It at best only delays Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and does nothing to protect Israel and our allies in the region from Tehran’s continued nefarious activities.

The Obama administration has gone to great lengths to save this deal. Administration officials have boasted of creating an “echo chamber” with reporters ensuring that journalists parroted the administration’s line and ignored worrisome details about the deal.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to endanger our troops and allies in the region and further its quest for regional domination.

Iran has kidnapped U.S. citizens and dual citizens as part of its statecraft. Iran still has not provided information on the whereabouts of Floridian Robert Levinson, who is the longest-held hostage in American history. Iran also continues its unjust detention of Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer Namazi.

Iran has expanded its support to proxy forces in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, which has been made easier by the $100 billion Tehran received because of the JCPOA. The head of designated terrorist group Hezbollah recently admitted that his group, which has the blood of Americans and Israelis on its hands, receives funding directly from Iran.

Over the last year, Iran has continued to expand its ballistic-missile program. Iranian missiles launched in March were marked with a statement in Hebrew reading, “Israel must be wiped off the arena of time.” The Obama administration has backtracked from its original assertions that these launches were prohibited by U.N. Security Council Resolutions.

In January, Iran detained U.S. sailors in international waters and an investigation by the chief of naval operations noted that Iran “violated international law by impeding the boats’ innocent passage transit and they violated sovereign immunity by boarding, searching and seizing the boats and by photographing and videotaping the crew.”