RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Hebrew Bible is shaped by two extended portraits, of Moses and David. Of the two stories, Moses’ is better known, but the narrative of David is more psychologically complex and dramatically vivid. As they divide the great mountains (Sinai and Zion) and two dominant terrains (desert and land) between them, Moses and David represent, respectively, the giving of the law and the attaining of ultimate redemption through the line of the Messiah.

The story of David is less familiar, partly due to its placement in the book of Samuel instead of the Pentateuch. David’s story is intricate, incident-packed, and follows several different strands. Fascinating in all its parts, it requires some thought and time to weave it together. In some ways, therefore, David’s life is ripe for a novel. Skillful novels unfurl complicated stories and run a strong narrative line through them, helping the reader to understand their shape. Novels can also alter or supplement the original to help the reader understand its essential shape. Here, in Geraldine Brooks’s skillful and eloquent account of the life of David, rather than hint at the apparent hostility David’s brothers bear him, she has one of them accuse him of bestiality. There is no warrant for this in the biblical text, but it certainly does fix the animosity in the reader’s mind.

Last week publishers, copyright experts and other supporters filed amicus briefs petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the copyright-infringement case against Google brought by the Authors Guild. The court’s decision will determine how and whether the rights and livelihood of writers are protected in the future.

If you type, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” into Google’s search box, the text and author will be identified for you in a matter of seconds. This is not because Google has ranks of English majors waiting at the ready, but because, over a decade ago, Google made an agreement with a number of great libraries to make digital copies of every book they owned.

In 2004 Google sent its moving vans to the libraries and carted off some 20 million books. It copied them all, including books in copyright and books not covered by copyright. It asked no authors or publishers for permission, and it offered no compensation for their use—although in compensation to the libraries Google gave them digital copies of the scanned books.

The Authors Guild challenged what Google was doing in Authors Guild v. Google, the copyright-infringement case first brought in 2005 and recently decided on appeal to the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. In October the court ruled that Google was protected by the doctrine of fair use when it copied the books—partly because it only made limited samples from copyright material available to the public, and partly because the court found that making the books available to an electronic search was “transformative.”

“For the modern narcissist, refugees are the gift that just keeps on giving. In an age where nobody does much smiting of innocents (except for the nothing-to-do-with-Islam Islamic State), opportunities for the superlative differentiation of one’s enlightened self from evil brothers and sisters are thin on the ground. It seemed so easy in those halcyon Grade Five days to imagine you, personally, would never knowingly have given small pox or syphilis to an immune-naive native, released a cane toad into the bush or sentenced some starving tatterdemalion to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread. Virtue comes easy when there is no need to prove itself.”

In addition to their other perks and privileges, our political class and its Twitter camp followers enjoy the right to spray their virtue at will upon the public stage. And why shouldn’t they put their goodness on display? It is always someone else expected to pick up the tab.
Listening to the disappointments of your workaday narcissists throws up a few common utterances. The following phrases capture the nub of the problem:

“Well, after all I did for…” “I’m very sensitive and I get hurt very easily”“I feel like I’m always give, give, giving…”;

and much more like this, inevitably:“I was always, repeat always, there for Julie but she was just never there for me.”

For older readers, this apparent confusion about collecting Julie from life’s bus stop has nothing to do with a faulty GPS or daylight saving. “There“, is a mythical emotional “space”, as the current parlance would describe it, (for space think Fairyland, not Star Trek), where a sort of psychic symbiosis is the panacea for all of life’s troubles. The twin vanities of the narcissist are contained within these trite banalities: self-righteousness and the regret that others are failing their moral obligation to fuel the self-proclaimed victim’s ego, to do as wished and re-pay the aggrieved individual’s generosity with the full measure of interest demanded.

If narcissism is the fantasy of becoming ‘big’ to cope with the reality of being ‘small’ in the scale of the world, the invention of social media has plonked obscenely large helpings of ‘big’ social issues on the bain marie of our self esteem. For instance, only a matter of twenty years ago, the closest you could get to the modern phenomenon of ‘virtue signaling’, which teachers once knew simply as showing off, was the chance to read aloud to Grade 5 classmates your social studies project on Truganini or the crown of thorns starfish. But now, with one fell tweet, the entire world can hear how desperately you would like to see the Crown of Thorns stopped from puncturing the hulls of the refugee boats, not to mention flying Truganini from Manus Island for a medically safe abortion.

Spike Lee and other black actors are demanding more racial or ethnic “diversity” in film, especially in films that win Oscars.

Affirmative Action in Film

Spike Lee and other black actors are demanding more racial or ethnic “diversity” in film, especially in films that win Oscars, regardless of whether or not anyone wants to see them or their films, or even if the films in which “minorities” appear deserve an Oscar or any kind of recognition.

What Lee and other claimants of entitlements want is much like anti-smokers demanding that all restaurants and bars be made smoke-free by law. That is, for the government to favor their voting bloc or pressure group and to “socialize” private property and private associations. To “socialize” private property and private associations, however, is to seize them. Or, compare that with Muslims demanding that supermarkets create a special section for halal food products.

What no one seems to understand is that affirmative action in film – which is what #OscarsSoWhite is demanding – will mean affirmative action in literature. Most films today are based on novels or on adaptations from novels (mostly bad adaptations, and a handful of decent ones). Or on film scripts. “Diversity” in employment has always been linked to political correctness in speech and even in imagery. One can see it in television and print advertisement. It also means “rationing” casting parts to blacks and other minorities. It means forced social associations.

It means the collectivization of artistic and moral values based on race, gender, and even disabilities.

There is a minor character in Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel, Atlas Shrugged, which, among other things, chronicles the destruction of America at the hands of statists, egalitarians, career parasites (politicians and bureaucrats), and other looters-by-law. The character is Ralph Eubank, a failed writer who nonetheless has political pull in Washington.

Over the past 15 years, Plan Colombia and other U.S. assistance have helped transform Colombia from a country ravaged by drug cartels and terrorist insurgents to the more prosperous and secure society it is today. It has helped turn Colombians once terrorized by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) into a strong people that have weakened this narco-terrorist organization, and brought it to the negotiating table on its knees. It has helped turn a country with a corrupt and unreliable judiciary into a place with growing confidence that justice will be served for those who violate laws.

Although these realities today may seem like they were inevitable all along, we should never take them for granted nor should we allow these hard-fought gains to be eroded. We should also never forget the Colombian and American military and civilian lives that have been lost along the way.

However, it is too early to declare complete victory. President Juan Manuel Santos, who visited Washington this week, is currently engaged in peace talks with the FARC, a three-year process that is supposed to culminate in an agreement by March 23. At that point, the Colombian people have been promised the final say through a national referendum, which should clearly state all of the terms of the agreement so that Colombians know exactly what has been agreed to by both President Santos and the FARC.

Many Colombians doubt the FARC’s intentions to abide by the terms of any peace agreement, and I share many of their concerns because of the group’s history of criminality, duplicity, broken ceasefires, and terrorism that has rightly earned it a designation by the U.S. government as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

For example, even at this late stage in the negotiations, it’s unclear whether FARC guerrilla leaders will be allowed to participate in the political process while serving a prison sentence, if they will disarm and surrender their weapons, if they will cease all drug trafficking, and what kind of accountability there will be for human-rights violations. There has also been concerning talk about returning to Colombia FARC officials who are currently in U.S. prisons for their crimes and for the U.S. to stop seeking to bring to justice FARC members who have violated U.S. laws; given President Obama’s penchant for flawed prisoner-exchange deals, I have little confidence in his ability to do the right thing in this case either.

Obama’s long game is a complete restructuring of the balance of power in the region—but with what results?

The administration of President Barack Obama seldom missed an opportunity to insist that the alternative to the Iran nuclear deal was a war with Iran, a prospect that has now presumably been kicked further down the road. Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now.

Where America stands on the question of the wars that Iran is fueling across the Middle East has been obscured to some extent by outdated expectations, diplomatic niceties, and deliberate smoke-screens. But it would be wrong to take pro forma statements about America’s alliances with old friends like Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel at anything like face value. The first thing the Obama Administration did following the recent burning of the Saudi embassy and consulate in Iran by a state-sponsored mob was not to condemn this assault on a longtime U.S. ally. Rather, the White House immediately launched a media campaign pushing the message that the problem was actually Saudi Arabia, and, as anonymous U.S. officials suggested on background, maybe it was time to reconsider America’s regional alliances.

Having annexed Crimea as well as swaths of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin casts a menacing eye at the Baltics. His new favorite ally, Iran, violated President Obama’s ballyhooed nuclear arms deal before the ink was dry, testing a new class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles designed to be tipped with the very nuclear warheads the mullahs deny coveting. Meanwhile, China flouts international law by constructing artificial islands to bolster its aggressive South China Sea territorial claims. In Europe, a Middle Eastern diaspora wreaks havoc on the continent, exploiting its generous laws on immigration and travel between countries while overrunning communities with Muslim settlers notoriously resistant to Western assimilation.

Rarely in modern history has the inadequacy of law to manage the jungle that is international relations been more starkly illustrated. Yet, according to the United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, it is precisely law, as divined by judges, that can tame our tempestuous times. That the judiciary is the institution least competent and least politically accountable for the task is evidently no more an obstacle than the impotence of law itself.

Appointed to the High Court by President Bill Clinton twenty-one years ago, Justice Breyer has been a stalwart liberal—which is to say, a political “progressive” on a court that is increasingly political. He is refreshing nonetheless, even for those of us who recoil from his ideological bent, for his willingness to depart from the Court’s custom of avoiding public debate. Like his colleague and philosophical counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia, Breyer is a frequent public speaker and occasional author on jurisprudential approaches to contemporary challenges. His newest book is The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.1

The work has much in common with Active Liberty, Breyer’s offering of a decade ago, which the Hoover Institute scholar Peter Berkowitz perceptively pegged as a rationalization of “judicial willfulness masquerading as judicial deference” to democratic self-determination. The Court and the World is similarly a call for judicial supremacy, this time under the guise of international “interdependence.” The courts are once again pitched as an enabling agent of democratic choice, but on a supra-national scale.

The world, though, is a very undemocratic place—though perhaps no more undemocratic than Supreme Court diktats that remove controversies like abortion and “same-sex marriage” from democratic resolution.

How to explain the difference between progressive pretensions to “activate” liberty—i.e., to vouchsafe “the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy vaporously put it in imposing same-sex marriage on the nation—and progressive judging’s actual affect of curtailing our freedom to live as we choose? This inversion of democracy, it turns out, flows naturally from Breyer’s inversion of the judicial role—a philosophy of judging shared by a working majority of his Court, the bloc of five unelected jurists whose edicts control ever more of what was once democratic space.

“[O]ur American judicial system,” he contends, should “see itself as one part of a transnational or multinational judicial enterprise.” Inconveniently (but, alas, not insuperably), the only “judicial enterprise” licensed by the Constitution, from which federal judges derive their authority, is the protection of Americans from overreach by our government and the remediation of other harms inflicted by third parties in violation of laws enacted by our elected representatives.

Interpreting the law as written—an intellectual challenge that is vital to the rule of law even if not sufficiently stimulating for many a robed social engineer—is not so much an enterprise as a discipline. In our system, it is supposed to be the politically accountable branches that get to do the enterprising. Nor does the discipline of judging take on a “transnational or multinational” character merely because some small percentage of the parties implicated in legal disputes is of foreign extraction—even if, as Breyer rightly observes, modern technology has made the percentage larger by making the world smaller.

What does Breyer see as the objective of this global judicial enterprise? The advancement of “acceptance of the rule of law itself.” This “rule of law,” you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, bears an astonishing resemblance to the rule of lawyers—in particular, the judges along with the army of equally unelected transnational progressive lawyers who urge them on.

‘We have made gains over the past year that will put Afghanistan on a better path,” said Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on January 27, in a message of congratulations to outgoing commander General John Campbell. But the upbeat pronouncements of top administration officials are inconsistent with nearly all the information coming out of Afghanistan. On the day after Carter’s statement, the latest quarterly report from the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction observed, “In this reporting period, Afghanistan proved even more dangerous than it was a year ago. The Taliban now controls more territory than at any time since 2001.” An independent assessment by Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal also concluded that the Taliban has rapidly extended the terrain it controls since President Obama announced the official end of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. has the ability to blunt the Taliban’s momentum, but a President who refuses to recognize the problem is not likely to provide the necessary resources.

​Is There a War in Afghanistan?

On December 21, a Taliban suicide-bombing attack at Bagram air base killed six Americans. On January 5, an American Special Forces soldier, Staff Sergeant Matthew McClintock, died and two others were wounded in Helmand province while assisting Afghan forces. As of mid-2015, American Green Berets were still accompanying their Afghan counterparts on six to ten missions per week, according to Major General Sean Swindell, commander of the Coalition’s special-operations forces. Forty times per week, Americans were providing Afghan special-operations forces with intelligence, logistical support, air cover, or other assistance. In December, Stars & Stripes reported, “U.S. troops are increasingly being pulled back into battle to aid overstretched Afghan forces.”

From the vantage point of the White House, these activities do not amount to war. On the White House website, a list of President Obama’s accomplishments says he “responsibly ended the U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Shortly before the President’s final State of the Union address, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price tweeted, “The U.S. ended two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing home 90% of 180K troops deployed.” In the address itself, President Obama offered nary a word of thanks to the 9,800 troops who remain. He mentioned the country only once, as part of a list of places where “instability will continue for decades.”

Jihadist reality is a stubborn thing. Politically correct spin and naïve optimism always fails in the face of persistent aggression. Regarding Iran, the Obama administration’s grotesque misstatements in the aftermath of Iran’s capture and public humiliation of American sailors should now join its post-Benghazi lies in the hall of shame. Before discussing the most recent developments, let’s review the lowlights.

Three weeks ago Iranian Revolutionary Guards intercepted two U.S. Navy “riverine” boats they claimed had wandered into Iranian territorial waters. They forced the sailors onto their knees, taped an American officer apologizing, and then broadcast the images and apology to the world. In response, administration officials actually bragged about their handling of the incident and defended Iran.

Vice President Joe Biden called Iran’s actions “standard nautical practice.” An hour after Iran released its humiliating footage, Secretary of State John Kerry actually thanked “Iranian authorities” for their “cooperation in swiftly resolving this matter” (though he did later say that the footage made him “very angry.”) Secretary of Defense Ash Carter compared Iran’s actions to the way the U.S. provides “assistance to foreign sailors in distress” and also expressed his appreciation to Iran.

The chart on the right shows the intricate money-laundering system the Lebanese Canadian Bank used to divert money to the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, according to United States officials. (The NYT, Dec 13, 2011). And on June 25, 2013, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney announced “$102 Million settlement of civil forfeiture and money laundering claims against the Lebanese Canadian Bank. The “settlement resolves claims related to money laundering network for narcotics trafficking and other criminal proceeds, including funds used to support Hizballah.” Why did the Justice Department settle with the bank? Why was the bank allowed to continue its operations?

***On Monday, in Washington, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced the arrest of operatives of Iran-sponsored Hezbollah’s External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC) for trafficking in cocaine into the U.S. and Europe and laundering millions of dollars of their ill-gotten gains into the coffers of Hezbollah, often through the same Lebanese Canadian Bank or its subsidiaries. In addition, assets of companies and individuals affiliated with the group’s drug trafficking and money laundering activities have been frozen. Lebanese banks and their subsidiaries have helped launder the money, as they have done for decades. However, only last December, shortly before lifting the sanctions on Iran, President Obama signed the bill which “imposes mandatory sanctions on banks that knowingly conduct business with Hezbollah.”

The Lebanon-based Iran affiliated Hezbollah has enjoyed Tehran’s support since its inception the early 1980s. Iran has been sponsoring the terrorist group’s attacks on Israel and assisted in Hezbollah’s international expansion and attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets abroad. At the same time, Iran always encouraged Hezbollah members to generate more funds through illegal activities, such as arms and drug trafficking, money laundering, fraud, smuggling counterfeit products, used cars and car parts and everything else.