RUTHFULLY YOURS

With even Obama supporters now questioning the deal with Iran, with the revelation Iranian leaders made a side deal with the IAEA, with recognition that al Qaeda has a sanctuary in Iran, with the U.S. excluded from the inspection team, with leaders in Iran shouting “death to America” and with the Supreme Leader indicating that Israel must be “annihilated,” why does President Obama insist on this arrangement?

From a perspective that is coming into focus, President Obama and his colleagues see themselves as the Sykes and Picoh of the Middle East. That is to say, like members of the British and French foreign offices in 1916 who drew lines in the sand creating states out of the dismembered Ottoman Empire, President Obama regards the nuclear deal with Iran as a way to redraft Middle East geography and, simultaneously, have the U.S. withdraw from the region.

If Iran is in possession of nuclear weapons – a pathway created through the “deal” – it becomes the regional “strong horse,” a condition that justifies U.S. withdrawal. While there is the recognition Sunni nations will object to this hegemonic status for Iran, the Obama team contends that Iran will be a more reliable (Obama used the word “responsible”) partner in stabilizing the Middle East than Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. That is a strategic calculation that many regard as misguided. Why would you put Iran, the major state sponsor of terrorism, in a position to stabilize a region it has helped to destabilize? This is the question that many, including Democratic officials, are asking.

I couldn’t agree more with my friend Charlie Cooke that the ineffable John Kerry’s remarks comparing January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre to the November 13 Paris terror attacks were despicable. What I don’t get is why anyone is surprised by Kerry’s sentiments. They perfectly reflect seven years of Obama-administration policy aimed at eroding the First Amendment in order to accommodate Islamic blasphemy standards.

As has been widely reported, Kerry initially said there was a “legitimacy” to the mass-murder of cartoonists and writers who satirized the prophet Mohammed. Instantly realizing he’d gone too far, Kerry watered “legitimacy” down to “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’” By contrast, Kerry claimed, there really was no “this and that” to rationalize what happened in Paris November 13, a terrorist strike he described as “absolutely indiscriminate” and not done “to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong.”

Of course, this contention is as absurd as it is offensive. Both sets of terrorist atrocities were driven by Islamic supremacist ideology.

Kerry distorted the Charlie Hebdo episode as if it had involved only a reprisal over cartoons lampooning Islam. In fact, the jihadists shot and wounded a random jogger (consistent with the call to jihad against non-Muslims), killed a police officer (consistent with the ISIS call to assassinate Western security personnel as part of that jihad), took hostages at a kosher market, killing four of them (consistent with anti-Semitism, a core theme of Islamic supremacism), and took hostages at a printing factory (again, consistent with the call to jihad).

Captivity, the newly translated novel by the Hungarian writer György Spiró, offers a good reminder not to judge a book by its cover. When I first saw this particular cover, with its black background, stark white typography, and surreally floating sculptured bust, the imagery—combined with the book’s Central European provenance, gloomy title, and Jewish focus—made me think that this would be a brooding modernist enigma of a book, perhaps along the lines of Imre Kertész’s Holocaust fictions. In fact, Captivity turns out to be just the opposite—a sprawling (more than 800 pages), picturesque, old-fashioned historical novel about the Roman Empire, in the showy tradition of Ben Hur and I, Claudius. In fact, both Jesus and Claudius, the main characters of those books, make cameo appearances in Captivity, as do other boldface names of the 1st century CE, including Caligula, Pontius Pilate, and Philo of Alexandria. What sets Captivity apart is that it makes the rare attempt to view all these historical phenomena—from the rise of Christianity to the flamboyant vices of the emperors—through a distinctively Jewish lens.

Considering how little we know about the ancient world in general, the first century CE is a surprisingly well-documented era. In creating his pageant of Jewish Rome, Spiró can draw on the Roman histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, the Jewish writings of Josephus and Philo, and the Christian New Testament—in addition to the Talmud, which preserves many features of Second Temple-era Jewish life. These sources tell us about three distinct Roman cultures, each focused on a different metropolis: the grand politics of imperial Rome, the religious fervor of Jerusalem, and the ethnic strife of commercial Alexandria. Accordingly, these are the cities in which Captivity is set, in the period roughly spanning the death of Jesus, in 33 CE, and the destruction of the Temple, in the year 70.

It seems the world — the Western part of it at least — has been infected with a galloping derangement that insists on viewing events, motives and one particular creed not as they are but as so many would wish them to be. Get that straitjacket ready! I must be a suitable case for treatment.

Visiting an asylum for people who, to put it delicately, have intellectual deficits is a salutary experience. I entered a large open space where the inmates were gathering for communal recreation. It was hard to take it in at first, until my mind became more focused. Let me give you a taste of this delusional world inside the asylum.

A tall, careworn chap was plaintively explaining to anyone who would listen that there was a rationale for the Charlie Hebdo murders. The pen is mightier than the sword, he said with a grimace, as though this cliche were decisive and proved his point beyond all doubt. It’s a setback is all, his buddy euphoniously intoned when told of the latest massacre in Paris. He broke into song and a soft-shoe shuffle. ♫ You say Islam and I say ISAL. You say Muslim and I say peaceful. Islam – ISAL, Muslim – peaceful, let’s call the whole thing off, I needs me a round of golf.♫. It was completely unnerving.

Although we live in a forgetful culture, it is worth casting our minds back as far as last week. If you recall, back then we were all discussing the inability of students at Yale to cope with anything as scary as Halloween. For some of us the whole business was disturbing not so much because some brats at an Ivy League university were showing themselves unfit to be students but because the adults — their professors — all seemed to have surrendered to them.

What else was clogging us up? Well, Caitlyn Jenner had just finished a clean-sweep of the award season by being named “Glamour Woman of the Year.” Naturally no one dared question why someone with a penis should be declared woman of any year. In Britain, a left-wing woman came out as “trans” but, despite admitting she wasn’t going to do anything physical about this, immediately began to be written about in non-gender-specific plural pronouns. The inevitable, unspoken conclusion was that we should molest our delicate and beautiful language in any way possible rather than upset anyone from the non-cis trans community.

I mention this because we should recall that this is what the modern Left in the modern West has reduced us to: a twittering, gibbering puddle of competing neuroses — some sincere, most not.

Then some real triggering went off in Paris. And instead of students falling over themselves to pretend to be more wounded than the next, people the same age as they and younger were being gunned down in Paris by the score for having a drink or going to a concert or football match. Of course, the major tragedy was that so many lives had been lost or destroyed so un-mendably. But one follow-on grief was that once again the people who should be in positions of power decided to check out.

At a time when the liberal left is consumed with placating the sensibilities of minorities and creating “safe places” on campus to insure that words will never harm them, I wonder if our president and other pundits are considering the sensibilities of 9/11 and Boston Marathon survivors and the grieving families of those who were murdered. How devastating it must be to have lived through those domestic Jihadist attacks, suffered permanent physical and mental impairment and then have to listen to our president proclaim that there is no need to fear the influx of 10,000 Muslim immigrants, or to read the Times’ daily vilification of people with the opposite point of view.

At the same time that the newspaper reports the bombing of the Mali hotel due to security lapses, its columnists excoriate those who question the efficacy of our national security to safeguard us from terrorist interlopers. Fear is the appropriate reaction for people who have experienced firsthand or suffered the consequences second-hand of the stated aims of Islamic Jihad. Too many of us have felt sick just seeing the images of executioners lopping off the heads of innocent people, raping and kidnapping scores of women and militarizing African children – forcing them to do unspeakable things including cannibalism. It’s impossible to pretend after this year’s double catastrophe in Paris that we can walk the streets of NYC, a prime stated target for repeat attack, completely confident that our excellent police and anti-terror squads can be omniscient and omnipotent. It just isn’t feasible in an open society where we don’t have security screening in our public museums, city transportation hubs, multiplex theaters or most of the myriad places where people congregate. A day after the Paris attack, I saw a New Yorker with a backpack large enough for a weeklong camping trip enter a movie theater, sit down and casually place that baggage on the floor beside her.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. –Abraham Lincoln

Last evening, we shared a table with a young group of marines en route to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training in Maine. I woke up this morning feeling especially thankful to those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our nation and yet I kept thinking about the Gettysburg Address. This is because I worry whether our soldiers (and their families) deployed after 9/11, many injured or in coffins, sacrificed in vain. Did the soldiers who liberated our country from England, as well die in vain? Did the 620,000 casualties of the Civil War die in vain?

At 10 years of age, I became aware of terrorism. I watched it play out during the television broadcast of the 1972 Olympics when a terrorist group, identifying itself as “Black September”, killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team. Why were these athletes arbitrarily murdered on a world stage? I truly didn’t understand the catalyst until I was much older. Black September was a movement to avenge Palestinians’ losses in Jordan. This was one battle in a continuum of battles and part of a larger war.

It’s the Maths, Stupid I’ll share 2 of my life-long basic positions:The UK left is where I both belong and feel “safe”. Qualitative analysis is where it’s at, not the hard edged cold world of quant.

We’ll return to these.

My family are socialists. The Labour Party is the natural home of the working classes – which is where I’m from. Ok, I confess. I was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the heady days of Marxism Today. Seems we ended up with political post-modernism so I’m sorry about that. Joined the Labour Party then left it after hearing Ed Balls mention immigration 6 times in the space of 4 minutes.

Half-Jewish and entirely secular on all fronts, I grew up in North West London. At school there were fights in the playground when I was called “Yid” and worse. My name marked me out – it practically yelled it out – as Jewish, even though I was of course only half-Jewish. I pretty much always lost those fights.

Later on I married a Jewish woman and now have a son who is, of course Jewish.

As a politically active student I recall a sense of unease at NUS conference & on campus when groups of keffiyah-wearing students from “other political groups” seemed to be just a bit too interested in the Middle East.

After my student days I joined that group of people who – whilst not politically active day-to-day- knew exactly where right and wrong lived. Whilst we bemoaned the retreats from socialism of the Blair & Brown years, we remembered what it was to live though 18 years of Conservative government. So we never, ever voted anything other than Labour despite some friends moving off to the Greens or seeking other radical homes.

Blaming the West has become the most pervasive method of teaching for many Middle East studies departments, which are becoming the heart of pop-culture academia. Efraim Karsh, a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern studies at Bar-Ilan University and professor emeritus at King’s College London, in his latest book The Tail Wags the Dog: International Politics and the Middle East, dispels this myth.

“Britain’s ‘original sin,’ if such was indeed committed, lay not in the breaking up of Middle Eastern unity but in its attempted over-unification.” Overall, the blunders of the great powers were in trying to impose their own wishful thinking instead of obtaining a real understanding of the Middle East.

Unpopular truths abound. Karsh shows that descriptions of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, the secret bargain between London and Paris to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, “as the epitome of Western perfidy couldn’t be further from the truth.” In fact, rather than being aimed at suppression of the Arabs, the agreement “constituted the first-ever great-power recognition of an Arab right to self-determination.”

Todd Haynes, the director of “Carol,” is a lover of pulp fiction. Past credits include Mildred Pierce and Far From Heaven, two weepy period films about women in familial straits and “Carol,” adapted from an autobiographical novel by Patricia Highsmith, follows in this tradition. Not having read the novel, I can only comment on the plot and characters as presented in this film version set in the 50’s in New York.

Played by Cate Blanchette, Carol is an elegant wealthy socialite who goes Christmas shopping in her mink coat and full maquillage. At the doll counter she meets Terese, a salesgirl played by Rooney Mara wearing a Santa hat and a blank expression that’s either boredom or inexperience. We soon see that Terese lives in what is meant to be a cold-water flat that has no radiator or phone; she lights the oven for heat and receives her calls from the pay phone in the common hallway. Incongruously, the set designer has made this cold-water flat a generously sized 3 room apartment that is fully furnished. This is the first in a string of details that don’t ring true, either to the characters or the period of the 50’s. Terese is a blank slate – we know nothing about where she’s from, whether she has a family or a backstory – only that she has taken a few pictures and might want to pursue that interest at some time in the future. Though she’s a naïve young salesgirl, she is pursued by a wealthy young man who wants to marry her and take her to Europe – two offers that she instinctively spurns though we’re not sure why.