RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Everyone is running to the fainting couch- shocked, shocked that Iran has given medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recently captured and humiliated American sailors.

The act is heinous and they’ll probably get more millions from Obamakerry, but where is the outrage or at least some empathy when Palarabs enabled and encouraged by Abbas name streets in honor of terrorists who kill Israeli civilians including women, and children and infants swaddled in their cribs?

And these are the terrorists with whom Israel is asked to negotiate and treat as partners for peace by the Eurotrash and our media and State Department…..rsk

It is March, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is called to New York by his father, Garnett Skeen, to attend to some trust fund affairs. Skeen’s detective agency is subsidized by a trust fund his father set up years before, but his mother, Eleanor “Nellie” Skeen, wishes to set up her own trust fund for her son. A daughter of an Oklahoma oil magnate, she is “very well situated” in terms of wealth. Skeen’s parents, however, are driving to Nags Head in the Outer Banks of North Carolina to spend the rest of the winter. The elder Skeen tells his son that he must prove his existence for a new bank officer who will be administrating the new trust fund; therefore, Skeen must travel to New York City. In New York, he meets an alluring and tempestuous opera singer, Brianna “Ginger” O’Quill. During one of her performances at the Metropolitan Opera, he goes backstage and kisses the diva’s hand. She interprets the gesture as an invitation to pursue him, which she does even though she knows he is married and in love with his wife, Dilys. But a rival for her attentions is jealous and attempts to murder Skeen – or O’Quill…or anyone.

Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver offer a boisterous, colorful history of New York’s Catskill Mountains, but like the tummlers of yesteryear, once they depart, it’s hard to remember what the noise was about. The Catskills have always been at the edge of the American experience—a hinterland of New York City. Unlike William Cronon’s classic Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examined how 19th-century Chicago transformed the Midwest’s ecology and economy, The Catskills offers loosely linked stories where the Big Apple is forever popping up to take over the narrative.

As the authors note, only in the last two centuries have people even called the Catskills a single mountain range. Despite heroic efforts to unify the story, the book is really about three regions: the Hudson Valley, at the center of American history and culture from 1750-1850; the remote, central Catskills, forever wild by statute and the primary source of New York City’s water supply; and the southern Catskills, famed for their 20th-century Jewish resorts.

The problems with the Catskills-as-autonomous-region start at the beginning. The Hudson River was a water highway in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, but the theater’s key events took place far south, in Manhattan, and far north, in the region’s Lake George-Lake Champlain extension. The authors somehow discern George Washington’s tactical genius from his string of New York military disasters in 1776, but it hardly matters: Washington never fought in the Catskills.

They turn to Washington Irving’s short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” which satirize the vanishing Dutch world of the Hudson Valley and the disconcerting changes in postrevolutionary society. Irving was actually a New York City and Europe-based writer—though like his antihero Ichabod Crane, he later resided in the Hudson Valley on the opposite bank from the Catskills. Fortunately, two of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which similarly contrast the vanishing Native American culture with that of the European-descended frontiersmen, are actually set in the Catskills.

The Hudson River School painters also contrasted the vanishing rural world with the booming 19th-century economy. Even as the Hudson Valley bustled with tanneries, factories, and bluestone quarries providing the paving for New York City’s sidewalks, painter Thomas Cole and his fellow Romantics found the sublime in Katterskill Falls, setting nature’s untamed magnificence against civilization’s distant encroachments. Lacking an eye for art—or, perhaps, adequate search skills in Google Images—Silverman and Silver contrast the Hudson River School painters with the allegedly “cold” landscapes of England’s J. M. W. Turner, which were far more melodramatic exemplars of Romanticism.

In choosing to take up this story in the summer of 1936, Weidermann finds a moment of relative calm and normality in the émigrés’ lives.On 3 July 1936, a Czechoslovakian Jewish journalist named Stefan Lux entered the general assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, shouted “C’est le dernier coup”, and shot himself with a revolver. Lux wanted his suicide to be a warning cry against anti-Semitism and Nazi militarism. But if he thought that even such a public sacrifice would serve as the “final blow” against fascism, he was tragically mistaken. Two years after Lux’s death came the dismemberment of his country in the Munich Agreement and the Germany-wide pogrom known as Kristallnacht. The following year
brought the Second World War and the beginnings of the Holocaust. All that Lux’s death accomplished was to confirm the very powerlessness it was meant to protest. Nor did he even win the posthumous thanks of posterity, given that today his name and his deed are practically unknown.

Lux features in an offstage cameo role in the non-fiction chamber drama that is Summer Before the Dark. The German journalist Volker Weidermann has devoted this short, elegiac book to the German émigré writers, most of them Jews, who congregated in Ostend in the summer of 1936, mainly because they had no place better to go. At the centre of this unhappy cenacle were two writers who shared Lux’s fate. Stefan Zweig’s journeys took him all the way to Petrópolis, Brazil, before he gave up hope and took an overdose of barbiturates (with his wife, Lotte) in 1942. Joseph Roth’s death also deserves to be called a suicide: he died in Paris in May 1939 after years of acute alcoholism. (His final crisis was precipitated by yet another suicide, that of Ernst Toller, the communist playwright, who had killed himself in New York City a few days earlier.)

The effects of exile on Zweig and Roth had been immediate and dramatic. When Hitler came to power in 1933, each man was at the peak of his literary career, though that success took very different forms. Roth was a long-time star correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and had just written the novel that was his masterpiece, The Rad­etzky March. Zweig, who lived in splendour in Salzburg, Austria, was a writer of sensational novellas and digestible works on the history of ideas, books that were immensely popular in Germany and beyond. Their close friendship endured despite the evident differences in their temperament – Zweig was a moderate bourgeois, Roth a romantic bohemian – and, trickier still, in their abilities: Roth was a writer of genius, while Zweig knew he had only talent.

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, by Michael Walsh. Encounter Books, 2015. 222 pages. $US 23.99

Western culture has been under attack by enemies within since the leveling collectivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michael Walsh observes in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. But something new and horrible emerged in the 1960s, when the cult of Critical Theory gained a beachhead at American universities, and began a long march through the institutions that culminates in today’s Orwellian witch-hunt against politically- incorrect thought.

The subversives of the past at least preserved the memory of the past. The composer Richard Wagner used the techniques of Western classical music to pervert the way we hear music, but the accomplishments of his predecessors remain embedded in is work. James Joyce may have turned Homer’s Odyssey into pornographic bathos, but he demanded that we read Homer. Thomas Mann’s 20th-century Faust character, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, wanted to “take back Beethoven’s 9thsymphony,” but even the act of subversion elicits the memory of the original.

Not so the children of the Frankfurt School, the motley collection of German Marxist-Freudian-Nihilists who migrated to America during the 1930s and invented what the academy calls “critical theory,” a nihilistic reduction of all thought to political categories. They set the tone for the radicalism of the 1960s, and their students now rule the major universities.

They are the American Taliban and ISIS, who set out to destroy the monuments of the past. Their objective is to erase the old order so thoroughly that it ceases to persist even in our cultural memory. Not only offending texts, but the names of flawed historic figures (for example Cecil Rhodes at Oxford) must be erased. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, they are spirits that only deny, who believe that “everything that comes to be goes rightly to its ruin.”

Not long after the end of World War II, William J. Perry, age 18 and already on his second enlistment, was shipped off to Japan as part of America’s occupation army. Arriving in Tokyo, he saw that the “once great city was decimated—virtually every building made of wood was destroyed by firebomb attacks. Survivors were living in vast wastes of fused rubble, existing on meager rations.” For the young Mr. Perry, witnessing such horror was a “transformational experience”; and he understood that the destruction wreaked by dropping thousands of conventional bombs on Tokyo, as awful as it was, had been exceeded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His encounter with the effects of modern war was to lead to a lifetime devoted to protecting America from the fearsome weapons of the nuclear age, recounted now in “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” an engrossing memoir and, along the way, a concise guide to some of the most intractable national-security perils confronting our country.

In 1954, while finishing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Penn State, Mr. Perry assumed the title of senior scientist at Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories in California, a firm established by the Army to devise defenses against Soviet nuclear-armed missiles. The expertise he acquired there was to make him a participant in some of the Cold War’s most terrifying moments. Thus when Nikita Khrushchev installed nuclear weapons in Cuba in October 1962, Mr. Perry was summoned to Washington, where for eight harrowing days he prepared reports for the president on the technical aspects of the weapons themselves.

Marco Rubio
“I do not believe that we have to destroy our economy in order to protect our environment. And especially what these programs are asking us to pass that will do nothing to help the environment, but will be devastating for our economy.”
Will he go as far as Rick Perry did and suggest we shut down the job killing, data falsifying, purveyor of junk science EPA?

The U.S. Has No Global Strategy…The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.

Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.

The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”

Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.

Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”

But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”