RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration’s efforts to defend its controversial nuclear deal with Iran have turned ugly.

In a speech at American University last week, the president portrayed domestic opponents of the nuclear agreement as partisan Republicans in common cause with “death to America”-chanting Iranian hardliners.
The speech went too far for former Ambassador Nicolas Burns. He told MSNBC after the speech:

I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. I have great respect for the president but frankly I think that speech — the tone of it was ill-advised because what’s really happening here as Congress prepares to vote just after Labor Day is really a battle within the Democratic Party.

To suggest that the opponents of the deal are all in effect Iraq War supporters or warmongers, to suggest if the deal is disapproved than war is inevitable — I don’t think the facts support those contentions.

There is no “Palestinian” people ever mentioned, not even by the Romans that invented the term, not in the Bible, not in other ancient records, not in the 19th century – only since Yasser Arafat.

They are the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

They are indistinguishable from those Arabs who live in the surrounding artificial states such as Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the other entities throughout the Middle East created by the colonial powers, France and Britain. Both powers were victorious after the Ottoman Turkish Empire lay defeated at the end of World War I.

Both of these European powers carved artificial borders across the corpse of what had been Turkey’s empire in the Middle East, and both France and Britain have left a resulting legacy of war and violence ever since. One such territory, previously occupied by Ottoman Turkey for 400 years, was the geographical entity known sometimes as Palestine.

But there is no such thing as a Palestinian people; no such thing as a Palestinian history; and no Palestinian language exists. There has never been any independent, sovereign Palestinian state in all of recorded history — let alone an Arab independent state of Palestine.

Tablet, which describes itself as “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture,” has not taken an editorial position on President Obama’s deal with Iran. “Some of us support the deal,” the editors explain, “because—like a majority of American Jews—we support the president, and we sympathize with his aims of ending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons while keeping America out of another Middle Eastern war.” Others oppose it as unlikely to achieve those goals, while still others “are less concerned with the specifics of the deal than with the prospect of an American alliance with the theocratic Iranian regime.”

Last week New York’s Chuck Schumer became the first Senate Democrat to oppose the deal. That complicated the president’s campaign to push it through Congress, which, as we noted last week, has been characterized by a partisanship vicious even by his standards. (The deal is structured in such a way that Congress will “approve” it if it sustains a veto, something Democrats are numerous enough to do on their own.)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-presidents-certitudes-1439250088

In a withering 1957 review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” for National Review, Whittaker Chambers wrote that he could “recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained.” Of the author’s mentality, he observed:

“It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.”

Which brings me to Barack Obama and his case for the Iran nuclear deal.

Dear e-pals,

2016 is looming and in every single state and every single district every single congressman is running for re-election. In many states Senators are either retiring or running to keep their seats. In 2014 I researched every election, listing the achievements and promises and “hot button issues” of all incumbents as well as challengers for Family Security Matters. All these votes count as we see now when Congress may thwart the ruinous and duplicitous Iran Nuclear deal.

With that in mind, I am embarking on the same voter information guide for Family Security Matters. Stay tuned and stay vigilant….rsk

“We’ve got to show that if you say ‘yes I condemn terror — but the Kuffar are inferior’, or ‘violence in London isn’t justified, but suicide bombs in Israel are a different matter’ — then you too are part of the problem. Unwittingly or not, and in a lot of cases it’s not unwittingly, you are providing succour to those who want to commit, or get others to commit to, violence.” — Prime Minister David Cameron.

In a series of religious rulings published on its website, the Islamic Network charity advocated the murder of apostates; encouraged Muslims to hate non-Muslims; stated that when non-Muslims die, “the whole of humanity are relieved;” and described Western civilisation as “evil.”

The Charity Commission’s solution, however, was to give the charity’s trustees booklets titled, “How to manage risks in your charity,” and warn them not to do it again.

When I was growing up, anti-Semitism was usually portrayed as a phenomenon of the Right. But, in my lifetime, the Left has made a strong claim to be the locus of such prejudice and hatred.

I’ve thought about this today when reading about Daily Kos and others, and how they have howled against Chuck Schumer. Have you seen this cartoon? And people are saying that Schumer wants war with Iran, because, you know, that’s what Jews do: start wars with other countries, or get big, Gentile countries to do their warring for them.

In 2011, I did an hour-long interview with Ed Koch. The whole thing is interesting and entertaining — Koch was one of the greatest interviewees ever — but, today, I wanted to find a particular spot, and did: starting at about 47:55. We talked about anti-Semitism and the Left.

It would be a mistake to say Middle East Studies have been corrupted. For the program’s very purpose has been to serve as a corrupting agent. Specifically, it puts the essence of study — the objective pursuit of knowledge — in disrepute.

Here, of course, I am referring to the modern incarnation of Middle East Studies: an amalgam of leftist and Islamist political dogma that masquerades as an academic discipline. By contrast, the actual study of Middle Eastern history, like the intimately related study of Islamic civilization, is a venerable and vital pursuit — and is still pursued as such by, to take the best example, ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Alas, in our hyper-politicized society, the traditional notion of study seems quaint: a vestige of a bygone time when the designations “Orientalist” and “Islamist” referred to subject-matter expertise, not political activism, much less radicalism.

On days when the political headlines contain both the names “Netanyahu” and “Trump,” one risks whiplash just opening the newspaper.

This may seem like a strange thing for an adult not resident in a psychiatric institution to write, but in my ideal world, there would be a lot more Donald Trumps and a lot fewer Benjamin Netanyahus. Netanyahu spent much of his youth as a soldier, serving in an IDF special-forces unit in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, and has spent much of his political career trying simply to ensure that his lonely little country will survive, beset as it is by hostility on all sides. By way of contrast, Trump’s career in business has from time to time constituted an assault against creditors and good taste both, but Trump’s life has been the sort of life that is possible only in nations blessed by peace and prosperity. Napoleon scoffed that the British were a nation of shopkeepers, but even while we honor the courage and sacrifice of the fighting man, a nation that spends more of its time and energy keeping shop or, God forgive us, developing casino resorts is a happier nation than the one whose men and women are obliged to spend their time soldiering.

It is naturally very difficult for us Americans to understand the domestic political realities of Israel. Israel is not a party to the pending U.S.–Iran nuclear deal, but Israel has more of a stake in the outcome than does the United States, at least in the near term. All honest parties acknowledge that some portion of those unsequestered Iranian funds are going to find their way into financing terror operations, and that may be of some direct concern to the United States at some point down the road; it will be a critical concern for Israel the day after the funds are released. The prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon being lobbed into Tel Aviv is much closer than that of one being lobbed into San Francisco.

As much as I’ve slammed The Donald for his inconsistent and incoherent policy views, I’ve always praised Trump’s intelligence: “He is the P. T. Barnum of American politics, a brilliant self-promoter who knows exactly what he’s doing and who changes his opinions constantly to match what he thinks audiences want to hear, much as Barnum used to switch out circus acts between towns on his tour.” A liberal defender of Trump, former CNN host Piers Morgan, agrees: “He’s a smart, cunning, alert showman who knows what it takes to win.”

In the wake of last Thursday’s debate and his infamous “blood feud” with Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly, I have to say I was wrong. His swift, heady rise in the polls has brought out the inner Donald Trump, someone who could have stepped out of Animal House.