RUTHFULLY YOURS

What a week so far for President Obama’s foreign policy.

First, Iran tests two missiles and threatens to get out of the nuclear deal. Hello VP Biden, and enjoy your visit to Israel.

Second, the Cuban state media put out an editorial ahead of President Obama’s visit. Here it goes:

In a long editorial on Wednesday in Communist Party newspaper Granma and other official media, Cuba demanded Washington cease meddling in its internal affairs and said Obama could do more to change U.S. policy.

The March 20-22 visit from Obama comes 15 months after he and Cuban President Raul Castro agreed to end more than five decades of Cold War-era animosity and try to normalize relations.

They have restored diplomatic ties, and Obama has relaxed a series of trade sanctions and travel restrictions, leading Republican opponents and even some of the president’s fellow Democrats to question whether Washington was offering too much without any reciprocation from Havana.

But the editorial made it clear that Cuba still has a long list of grievances with the United States, starting with the comprehensive trade embargo. Obama wants to rescind the embargo but Republican leadership in Congress has blocked the move.

On Monday, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Yukiya Amano explained what had up to this point been a mystery: namely, why its recent reports on Iran’s nuclear program have been so vague and contain such little data. As it turns out, under the Iran nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), there are now limitations on what the IAEA is allowed to report.

According to Amano, due to new U.N. Security Council and IAEA resolutions, the agency will only monitor and verify Iran’s compliance with its JCPOA commitments and will no longer provide broad reporting on its nuclear program. A December 15, 2015, IAEA Board of Governors resolution directed the organization to cease reporting on Iran’s compliance with its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations and past Security Council resolutions because the Board of Governors is no longer seized of this matter.

This also means that even though a December 2, 2015, IAEA report raised several serious unresolved questions about Iran’s nuclear weapons–related activities, the IAEA will no longer report on this issue because its Board of Governors closed the file on the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

But it gets worse. Not only are the new IAEA reports much narrower in focus, they also omit important data on how Iran is complying with the nuclear deal itself.

Many experts were concerned at the vagueness of an IAEA report issued on January 16, 2016, which declared Iran had met the JCPOA’s “Implementation Day” requirements, allowing it to receive up to $150 billion in sanctions relief and other benefits. This was an atypical report for the IAEA which the Institute for Science and International Security said provided few details about the steps Iran took to comply with JCPOA requirements. For example, it lacked information on how much enriched uranium Iran allegedly sent to Russia, whether the IAEA monitored this transfer, and how much enriched uranium Iran may have kept in the country by converting it into uranium dioxide powder, a process that can be quickly reversed.

Experts were even more concerned by a February 26 report which left out important data needed to assess Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA such as the size of its enriched-uranium stockpile, how much uranium Iran is enriching, and details on its centrifuge research and development.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Cuba in two weeks in an oddly timed excursion that, in many ways, encapsulates all that’s wrong with the philosophy, goals, and priorities of his administration’s foreign policy.

Simply put, it’s the wrong trip, to the wrong place, at the wrong time, and under the wrong circumstances.

Admittedly, the longstanding U.S. policy of isolating Havana was due for review. Washington engages with authoritarian regimes of all kinds. Some, like Beijing and Moscow, are simply too big to ignore; others, like Cairo and Riyadh, are key to protecting U.S. regional interests. That tiny Cuba was a lonely exception largely reflected the political power of its emigre population.

Moreover, hopes that U.S. isolation would help topple the Castro regime proved illusory, as the ailing revolutionary founder Fidel transferred power to his brother, Raul, in 2008, leaving the half-century family business in place.

Still, Obama’s trip is troubling. It will cap off more than a year of efforts through which the president deployed his usual array of questionable global strategies – appeasing the regime in question, downplaying its human rights record and ignoring its growing ties to America’s adversaries – in hopes of changing Cuba’s behavior.

The Oscar-winning new film aims to take us right into the heart of the Holocaust. But what does that experience amount to? And what do this movie and its reception portend?

Since the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II just over seventy years ago, a seemingly ceaseless parade of filmmakers has gone after the Holocaust in search of meaning. Their searches have been well rewarded. As the critic J. Hoberman noted last year, of the 23 Holocaust films ever nominated in any category for the Academy Awards, fully twenty have won at least one. To their number we can now add Son of Saul, the new Hungarian film that on February 28 garnered the award for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015. It did so, moreover, after already being showered with greater acclaim than any Holocaust movie since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List more than twenty years ago.

Last May, Son of Saul won second prize at the Cannes Film Festival; in January of this year, it was named Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globe Awards. And that’s hardly all. Not only have 96 percent of reviewers liked Son of Saul, according to a website that tracks such things, but many have liked it extravagantly, and some have compared it favorably with such commonly accepted masterpieces of the genre as Alain Resnais’s 32-minute essay-film Night and Fog (1955) and Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hour documentary Shoah (1985). Lanzmann himself has praised it as “very original, very unusual.” (The very fact that one can now speak of a work of Holocaust art in such blandly comparative terms may suggest that the genre has reached a certain ripeness, if not senescence.)

But Lanzmann is right: Son of Saul manages to find, if not a new story, then a new way of telling it. The question worth considering, thus, concerns not its originality but the nature, and the worth, of its achievement—what its example and its reception portend for the future of art about the Holocaust.

I. The World of the Sonderkommandos

Son of Saul follows Saul Auslander, a Hungarian Jew imprisoned in an unnamed death camp resembling Auschwitz. Upon arrival at the camp four months before the film begins, Saul, in his thirties, not large but strong enough, had been spared immediate murder and was put to work as a Sonderkommando, a slave in the camp’s death-machinery. His job since then has been to guide newly arriving transports of Jews from the trains to the camp; to convince them once inside to remove their clothes in an orderly way; to usher them to a shower with promises of soup afterward; to wait impassively outside the chamber door while the screams rise and then fall; to drag out their bodies and deliver them to others who will take them to be burned; and to sort for valuables through the clothes they’ve left behind. Saul does this work with other Jews, each of whom lives in a world of his own; sometimes they exchange whispers, but since they don’t all speak the same language they don’t always understand what others are saying. Besides, what is there to say, and who can be trusted in a place where survival depends on looking out for oneself?

One day, a boy, weak from the gas but still alive, is found in the chamber. He’s carried to a nearby bench and a Nazi doctor is alerted. Saul watches at a distance as the doctor suffocates the boy by hand. Bring the body up to my office for study, he orders—and the movie’s plot kicks into motion.

Saul watches at a distance as the doctor suffocates the boy by hand. Bring the body up to my office for study, he orders—and the movie’s plot kicks into motion.
Saul, claiming that the boy is his son—it’s left open whether or not this is true—decides he must be given a proper Jewish burial. For that he needs to rescue the body and find a rabbi, who will know the rituals and prayers of which he’s ignorant. Saul’s efforts over the course of the film’s two days lead him ever deeper into the camp’s “production” process, from gas chamber to crematorium to ash disposal and on. At each stage he must complete two tasks, one for the Germans—removing bodies, shoveling ash into the river—and one for himself—finding a rabbi amid the shovelers.

North Korea is embarked on a steady, methodical, and relentless journey whose intended endpoint is a credible capability to hit New York and Washington with nuclear weapons. Pyongyang’s nuclear test in January is only the latest reminder that America’s policy response to nuclear proliferation in North Korea is a prolonged, and thoroughly bipartisan, failure. Our policy is a failure because our public and our leaders do not understand our adversary and his intentions. We cannot hope to cope successfully with the North Korean threat until we do.

The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il (son of regime founder “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung; father to current “Dear Respected Marshal” Kim Jong Un) used to speak of hiding his own politics, and in fact his entire country, “inside a fog” — of deliberately concealing his government’s calculations, strengths, and vulnerabilities from foreign eyes. Yet our seemingly unending inability to fathom Pyongyang’s true objectives, and our attendant proclivity for being taken by surprise over and over again by North Korean actions, is not just a matter of succumbing to Pyongyang’s strategic deceptions, assiduous as those efforts might be.

The trouble, rather, is that even our top foreign-policy experts and our most sophisticated diplomatists are perforce creatures of their own cultural heritage and intellectual environment. We Americans are, so to speak, children of the Enlightenment, steeped in the precepts of our highly globalized era. Which is to say: We have absolutely no common point of reference with the worldview or moral compass or first premises of the closed-society decision-makers who control the North Korean state. Americans’ first instincts are to misunderstand practically everything that the North Korean state is really about.

The “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (DPRK) is a project pulled by tides and shaped by sensibilities all but forgotten to the contemporary West. North Korea is a hereditary Asian dynasty (currently on its third Kim) — but one maintained by Marxist-Leninist police-state powers unimaginable to earlier epochs of Asian despots, and supported by a recently invented and quasi-religious ideology.

And what exactly is that ideology? Along with its notorious variant of emperor worship, “Juche thought” also extols an essentially messianic — and unapologetically racialist — vision of history: one in which the long-abused Korean people finally assume their rightful place in the universe by standing up against the foreign races that have long oppressed them, at last reuniting the entire Korean peninsula under an independent socialist state (i.e., the DPRK). Although highly redacted in broadcasts aimed at foreign ears, this call for reunification of the minjok (race) and for retribution against the enemy races or powers (starting with America and Japan) constantly reverberates within North Korea, sounded by the regime’s highest authorities.

At Geneva-based UN Watch, the invaluable Hillel Neuer reminds us that the head of the Advisory Commission for the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) is none other than Syria. That bit of UN depravity, together with a recent visit to Washington, D.C. by UNRWA’s commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, suggest it is high time to revisit the curious matter of why UNRWA these days maintains an office in Washington.

You remember UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a.k.a. the UN outfit with schools in Gaza that have doubled as rocket depots for terrorists attacking Israel. Opened in 1950 as a temporary jobs and aid program for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA has become an ever-expanding fixture of the UN and the Middle East, a de facto patron of Hamas in Gaza, and welfare-dispenser for what is today a population of some 5 million “registered Palestinian refugees” — a project that down the generations has helped foster both a Palestinian culture of grievance and dependency, and money and jobs for UNRWA itself. At the UN, all other refugees come under the aegis of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which seeks to resettle them. Only the Palestinians have a dedicated agency that has turned refugee status into a bizarre form of hereditary entitlement.

It’s bad enough that UNRWA is still operating in the Middle East. But what’s it doing with an office in, of all places, Washington? UNRWA already fields an office right up the thruway, at the UN’s massive headquarters in New York. Why the need for yet another, in Washington?

Washington is not a city known for large populations of those Palestinian refugees UNRWA is supposed to be helping. But Washington is the conduit through which billions of American taxpayer dollars flow annually to various operations of the UN, including hundreds of millions to UNRWA — appropriated by Congress and dispensed by the State Department.

But, it seems more is always preferred.

In 2011 UNRWA opened an office in downtown Washington, choosing a venue located conveniently between the State Department and Capitol Hill. This office does not service “registered Palestinian refugees.” It represents UNRWA’s interests in Washington, and reports on Washington’s doings to UNRWA. It has been staffed since early days by two Americans, both steeped in the ways of Washington: Chris McGrath, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, and Matthew Reynolds, who previously worked as an assistant secretary for legislative affairs in the State Department.

The academic left and its idiocies pollute our intellectual environment, their near-unreadable nonsense restricting debate to the ever-censored essence of politically correct pedantry, as a genuinely great mind explains in an invaluable new book, ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands’
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

by Roger Scruton
Bloomsbury, 2015, 304 pages, $35

You should read this book. No one else will tell you this, so I will. There has hardly been a more important book published over the past twelve months. If you sincerely wish to understand the times in which you live, there is no book like it. In describing it I will not be able to do it justice, since it provides a complex outline of the intellectual world that continues to promote the ideas of the Left, as inane and destructive as they are. But if you are to understand where these ideas come from, and why they continue to persist, you must read this book. There is no substitute anywhere that I know of. Read it.

The book has a specific purpose. It is to provide a way of escape to students who are caught up in various versions of a modern humanities course, where they are fed an endless mind-numbing postmodernist gruel. The book goes through the various manifestations of the modern Left to explain their idiocies and unravel the Newspeak in which they are encoded. But the book does more. It opens up to those of us who are only vaguely aware of the ways in which the humanities are now taught, our own entry into the depths of a problem most of us are, at best, only dimly aware of.

To use my own education as an example, I am not unaware of the forms of the postmodernism that surround us in the academic world. I meet it in the occasional seminar and come across it in various papers and presentations. Parts of it are almost common core, such as Thomas Kuhn’s notion that science is nothing other than what scientists do, and that the notion of something called “truth” is an entity impossible to discover. But it goes farther, to argue that truth is relative, that there is more than one way to skin an empirical fact. It goes farther still, and argues that even the facts we think we know are merely the product of the ideological world in which we have been raised. And it takes that one extra step to argue that to transcend our own bourgeois outlook, it is necessary to see the world liberated from our own limited backgrounds and instead, see things through the lens of Marxist thought.

Nothing is more embarrassing to watch than a suitor pursuing unrequited love. There’s no thrill in such romance. Every bouquet of long-stemmed roses and every box of candy Barack Obama sends to Havana is returned with a demand for roses with longer stems and a bigger box of candy.

Over the past year, President Obama has removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, re-established diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Havana, and now Mr. Obama announces that he will be the first American president to visit Cuba in nearly 90 years. He’ll no doubt shave extra close for Fidel’s anticipated kiss.
There have been good reasons for previous presidents to withhold the prestige of a state visit. The Castro alliance with the Soviet Union produced a tense, 13-day political and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles from the Florida coast. For those 13 days the world held its breath in fear of World War III. The Castro regime has since attempted to subvert democratic governments throughout the Hemisphere and organized cabals against the United States.

Mr. Obama’s attempts at romance continued this week when the White House sent to Congress legislation to maintain restrictions on American civilian ships entering Cuban waters. The bill arrived on Capitol Hill on the 20th anniversary of the day the Cuban air force shot down a civilian rescue plane over international waters, a plane operated by an American relief organization called Brothers to the Rescue. The pilots were trying to locate and rescue Cubans fleeing prison or death in Cuba.

“These are the same waters that have witnessed record numbers of Cubans risking their lives to reach freedom because of the oppression they are facing under the Castro regime, a regime that has found an ally in President Obama,” says Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican.

(CNSNews.com) – Asked on Monday if Islamic State terrorists are carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians, White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said the word genocide “involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached.”

He condemned the terrorists’ “willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

Earnest noted that the Obama administration has long expressed its concerns over ISIS/ISIL’s “slaughter” of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

“You’ll recall, at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL, at the–some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mount Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.

“So we have long been concerned by the way that–that ISIL attempts to target religious minorities.

“We also know that they target Christians in the area, too. In that region of the world, Christians are a religious minority, and we certainly have been concerned–you know, that’s one of the many reasons that we’re concerned with ISIL and their tactics, which is that it’s an affront to our values as a country to see people attacked, singled out or slaughtered based on their religious beliefs.”

The reporter asked Earnest, “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in this situation?”

“The — my understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached. But we’ve been quite candid and direct, exactly, about how — how ISIL’s tactics are worthy of the kind of international, robust response that the international community is leading. And those tactics include a willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

As CNSNews.com recently reported, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress last week that he is having an “additional evaluation” done to help him determine whether the systematic murder of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East should be declared “genocide.”