RUTHFULLY YOURS

What are the roots of Barack Obama’s foreign policy? Some focus on the man and his flaws of character, particularly his inability to learn from his mistakes and to adjust his ideas to changing facts on the ground. Others see more sinister motives, an animus against the United States that drives policies diminishing America’s power and influence. Old bad ideas like one-world internationalism and the power of diplomacy to resolve conflicts have played a major role. And of course, domestic political considerations enter into his foreign policy calculations.

Whatever the origins, the end result of Obama’s foreign policy has been a weakening of America’s global clout and respect, one unseen since the Carter administration. One way to make sense of these serial disasters is to see them as the predictable result of a schizophrenic foreign policy that has indulged simultaneously stealth isolationism and “moralizing internationalism,” as historian Corelli Barnett called it.

Isolationism is the default attitude of Americans toward relations with other nations. From the beginning, protected by two oceans, our citizens assumed they could keep their distance from the dynastic power-struggles rending Europe. These sentiments are frequently expressed in the speeches of early presidents. In his First Inaugural Address Jefferson noted that the U.S. was “Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.” Given that advantage, he counseled “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” John Quincy Adams in 1821similarly declared the U.S. a “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” but it “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Can we still celebrate October 12 as an American holiday?Two narratives….
1. Born to a working-class wool weaver in the port city of Genoa, Italy, Cristoforo Colombo apprenticed as a sailor and went to sea as early as age ten. A self-taught and curious man, Colombo lived by his wits and rose in the heady world of 15th-century sea traders, until he hit upon an ingenious idea: He would outflank the Mohammedan Turks and reach the East Indies by sailing west across the Ocean Sea. After weathering nearly a decade of rejection and failure, in 1492 Colombo won the support of the Spanish Crown and set off on an uncertain journey that inadvertently opened a New World, laying the foundation for that most glittering daughter of the Western heritage: America.

2. Christopher Columbus, a dead white male of the worst variety, was a slaver, a capitalist, and a murderer of millions who embarked on a voyage motivated only by greed, which brought European imperialism to the shores of the “New World” and laid waste the ancient indigenous peoples there. Columbus deserves little credit (Leif Erikson had “discovered” the “new” continent 500 years earlier) and much blame for the horrors of the Columbian Exchange — the vast transfer of people, animals, and plants between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. In his wake, the “New World” suffered smallpox, starvation, the cruel subjugation of the indigenous peoples, and the establishment of that most dastardly spawn of the West: America.

* * *

Writing in The Atlantic in 1992, in the run-up to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted that the “great hero of the nineteenth century seems well on the way to becoming the great villain of the twenty-first.”

“The Tel Aviv shoreline has turned into the French Riviera,” says a colleague who spends his summers in Israel, and I hear it’s the same along the beaches of Netanya. French immigrants who haven’t gravitated toward the Israeli coast are raising property values in Jerusalem and Modi’in. Until now, mass immigration to Israel has come from countries lowest on the freedom index. What are we to make of the current flight of Jews from the country that gave us enlightenment, emancipation, religious tolerance, political liberty and freedom of thought?

That is the main question of Alain El-Mouchan’s essay on the rise of anti-Jewish violence in France and consequent increased Jewish movement to Israel. Analyzing the causes of departure, he charts the familiar debate between those who urge flight and those—including French Prime Minister Manuel Valls—who urge French Jews to stay. As it happens, this very predicament is the subject of A Happy End, a new play by Iddo Netanyahu, younger brother of the prime minister of Israel. The play is about a Jewish family that struggles with the decision of whether to leave Germany in the 1930s. A Happy End doesn’t have one.

Looting is a great way to advance the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, an agitator is teaching students after being rewarded by the Left with a teaching gig at prestigious Yale University.

The words of Twitter star Deray Mckesson expose for the umpteenth time the lie that Black Lives Matter, whose members idolize unrepentant cop killers Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur, is a law-abiding, peaceful movement and that those who loot and riot in its name are a fringe or unrelated element. Lawless violence and bloody insurrection are how Mckesson and his followers pursue their vision of so-called social justice.

Mckesson led a class that was discussing, “In Defense of Looting,” an essay by Willie Osterweil whose bio at the New Inquiry website describes him as “a writer, editor, and member of the punk band Vulture Shit.”

It would be hard to find someone whose background better suited him to write about the U.S.-Israel relationship than Dennis Ross. A long-time diplomat and policymaker, he has been involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations in every administration from Carter to Obama, with a single time-out under the first Bush. His new book does not disappoint: Doomed to Succeed devotes a pithy chapter to each administration, explaining its policies and the reasoning behind them.

Ross describes a recurring pattern wherein a president with warm feelings toward Israel tends to be replaced by a chillier executive, only to be replaced in turn by a friend. Thus Truman (friendly) is replaced by Eisenhower (not so much) then by Kennedy (who initiated arms sales), Johnson (also friendly), but then Nixon-Kissinger (a Machiavellian combination in outmaneuvering Israel), and so on.U.S.-Israel relations have hit a nadir with the current president. Ross quotes National Security Adviser Susan Rice playing the race card as she tells ADL chief Abe Foxman that Benjamin Netanyahu “did everything but use ‘the N-word’ in describing the president.” Yet the changes at the top matter less than they might seem to. Ross’s chief contribution is to show how certain unchanging and misguided assumptions have driven U.S. policy since Israel’s birth and remain idées fixes in the minds of U.S. policymakers to this day. He writes, “I was struck by the similarity of the arguments. I found them recycled, often (to my amazement) couched in the exact same terms.”

Dennis Ross and “Middle East Peace Process” are nearly synonymous, and Mr. Ross wrote an 800-page book on the subject, “The Missing Peace,” after serving as a Mideast envoy to President Bill Clinton. So why another volume now? In “Doomed to Succeed,” the Washington hand brings his account up to date by covering the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations and looking at U.S.-Israel relations from Truman on.

The chapters that cover administrations in which Mr. Ross served—especially at a high level, as he did under Messrs. Bush, Clinton and Obama—are predictably the most lively. There is always the danger that familiarity breeds forgiveness, and the author is indeed less critical of mistakes under Messrs. Clinton or Bush than others might be. But that grant of clemency is withdrawn toward Mr. Obama, as Mr. Ross’s familiarity breeds page after page of criticism.

Mr. Ross’s portrait reinforces the recent account by Israel’s former ambassador, Michael Oren, in his book “Ally.” Six years of Mr. Obama get more pages here than eight years of Messrs. Clinton or Bush, and the author writes that “the president’s distancing from Israel was deliberate.” Though he credits Mr. Obama with deep sympathy for the Jewish state, the incidents he recounts contradict him.

If they fail will they be forced to take Remedial Looting????rsk

Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop) are credited with being the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The two were the lead agitators at the Ferguson and Baltimore riots.

The two Soros-sponsored leftists leave a wake of destruction behind them: hundreds of businesses looted and burned to the ground – hundreds of arrests – the destruction of minority neighborhoods.

The left rewarded their “accomplishments.”
The left loves their race agitation.
The left believes their work is not done.

The Pope has a new comedic advisor… and he’s a rabbi. Rabbi Robert “Bob” Alper was just named as the Pope’s comedic advisor.

Rabbi Robert Alper, who prefers to go by Bob, is 70 years old and lives with his wife in the rural town East Dorset, Vermont. “It used to be Alpert, but we dropped the T at a party in Boston,” the rabbi told PBS NewsHour in a phone interview.Rabbi Alper was one of more than 4,000 people from 47 different countries who submitted jokes through a digital contest organized by the Pontifical Missions Society called Joke With the Pope. The contest was designed to promote engagement with the Pope leading up to his visit to the U.S.

2015.10.10 (Baga Sola, Chad) – Two suicide bombings by female devotees leave forty dead at a busy market and refugee camp.
2015.10.08 (Peshawar, Pakistan) – Radical Sunnis murder a Shiite father in front of his two young daughters.
2015.10.08 (Mosul, Iraq) – Four accused homosexuals are thrown from a rooftop by Religion of Peace activists.
2015.10.08 (Nong Chik, Thailand) – A Buddhist couple selling pork are murdered by Muslim ‘insurgents’.
2015.10.07 (Damaturu, Nigeria) – An entire family is blown up by a Religion of Peace suicide bomber.
2015.10.07 (Bati Kot, Afghanistan) – Religious extremists murder a rival cleric outside his seminary.

These marvelous times in which we live, what wonders they have brought! A man can be a woman by the simple act of declaring himself as such. An overwhelming preponderance of Old World genes is no bar to undiluted Indigenous authenticity. And, according to our moral instructors in the media, when an Islamic fanatic guns down a random innocent on a Parramatta street while shouting “Alahu Akbar!” the explanation is not self-evident but, like so many similar recent incidents, another great mystery of our age.

The key to stretching the leash that in less enlightened times heeled us more closely to fact is that peculiarly modern capacity to “identify” one thing as something which it is not. Advocate that green is really brown or a duck an ostrich and, if your audience can be persuaded not to note the obvious, all manner of re-classification is possible. Take Sun-Herald columnist Charles Waterstreet, for example, whose inspiration when tossing off today’s column appears to have been a decision to identify as fellow Fairfax columnist Elizabeth Farrelly. Understand that to mean he is channeling a compulsion to say little that is coherent at great and flyblown length.

Several efforts ago, Ms Farrelly endorsed the need for a new religion, a melange of green-tinted feminism that more than one reader must have been left suspecting would revere in its chief temple an effigy bearing a striking resemblance to someone, well, very much like the column’s author. Today, her male doppelganger nominates another prospective deity to preside over a rival cult: Saint Malcolm of Wentworth.

At last we have a leader who can bring Muslims into the fold of our Western World, gushes Waterstreet, and it won’t even require any of those difficult, interfaith discussions about women as second-class creatures, let alone the ongoing validity of Koranic admonitions to strike at the necks of infidels and other problematic neighbours.