RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the clock ticking on two terms that incalculably damaged the cause of peace in the Middle East, President Obama is reportedly planning to dictate terms of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement through the United Nations. He must not go further down this path of ego, hubris and vengeance. He will not validate the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him in 2009 and never earned. Undercutting the Jewish state, he will only make negotiations more impossible than they already are.Plainly, the President blames Israel in the person of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the failure of Obama’s attempts to broker a peace deal.

While Netanyahu can be tough to get along with, Obama persistently failed to accept that the Palestinians lack leaders with the courage to end a state of war by accepting Israel’s right to exist.

Obama hit a wall largely because he placed demands on Israel without requiring the West Bank’s Fatah-led government, much less the Hamas rulers of Gaza, even to respect basic Israeli security needs.

The President’s destructive asymmetry dismembered decades of American policy in the Middle East.

Last year’s Iran nuclear agreement was sold with several powerful arguments, and among the most important were these: that the agreement would strengthen Iranian “moderates” and thus Iran’s external conduct, and that it would allow us unparalleled insight into Iran’s nuclear program.

Both are now proving to be untrue, but the handling of the two differs. The “moderation” argument is being proved wrong but the evidence is simply being denied. The “knowledge” argument is being proved wrong but the fact is being met with silence. Let’s review the bidding.

The idea that the nuclear agreement was a reward for Iran’s “moderates” and would strengthen them is a key tenet of the defense of the agreement. If Iran remains the bellicose and repressive theocracy of today when the agreement ends and Iran is free to build nukes without limits, we have entered a dangerous bargain. It is critical that Iran change, so defenders of the agreement adduce evidence that it has. And the new evidence is Iran’s recent elections. Those elections were a great victory for “moderates” and hard-liners, it is said, and they help to prove that the nuclear deal was wise.

QUESTION: Who is more decent and more qualified to be president than a lying scoundrel and mountebank (def. charlatan, confidence trickster, fraud) ?

1.Marco Rubio

2. Ted Cruz

3.Ben Carson

4.Jeb Bush

5. John Kasich

6.Bobby Jindal

7. Joe the Plumber

ANSWER: All the above. We had a choice….rsk

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.