RUTHFULLY YOURS

Indoctrinating students isn’t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live.

I was a few minutes early for class. Father Alexander, my high-school sophomore-homeroom teacher, was standing outside the room, cigarette in his mouth, leaning on the doorjamb. “Morning, Father.”His response was to put his arm across the door. “Agresto,” he said, “I have a question I’ve been thinking about and maybe you can help me.”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Do you think a person in this day and age can be called well educated who’s never read the ‘Iliad’?” I hadn’t read the “Iliad,” and am not even sure I had heard of it. “Hmmm. Maybe, I don’t see why not. Maybe if he knows other really good stuff . . .” His response was swift. “OK, Agresto, that proves it. You’re even a bigger damn fool than I thought you were.”
***

I grew up in a fairly poor Brooklyn family that didn’t think that much about education. My father was a day laborer in construction—pouring cement, mostly. He thought I should work on the docks. Start by running sandwiches for the guys, he told me. Join the union. Work your way up. There’s good money on the docks. And you’ll always have a job. He had nothing against school, except that if bad times came, working the docks was safer.

Chuck Schumer’s decision to oppose President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal may not defeat the accord, but it certainly does showcase its flagging political support. Mr. Schumer is a party stalwart who wants to succeed Harry Reid as Senate leader, and his defection suggests that the deal will be opposed by at least a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress.

Think about how extraordinary that would be. Major foreign policy initiatives are often controversial, but they typically garner at least majority support. The resolutions for the Gulf War and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq all earned majority support, as did the Nixon and Reagan arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union.

“The question is whether anyone can bridge the fighter and statesman camps. On Thursday night, at least, the candidate who came closest may have been Mr. Rubio, who talked about “an economy that has been radically transformed” and offered a bit of Dodd-Frank regulation wonkery, while also picking a fight—though with Hillary Clinton rather than fellow Republicans.”
Distinction raises question about the electorate: Do voters want a candidate who channels their anger, or one who acknowledges it yet moves beyond it?

The initial Republican debate Thursday night provided entertainment aplenty, but also this bit of enlightenment: It divided the GOP field into two distinct camps, the fighters and the statesmen.

It says something about the national mood of 2016 that it isn’t entirely clear which is the better place to land.

Donald Trump is, of course, the leader of the fighters’ camp, as he showed again on the debate stage. Any expectation that a more sedate Mr. Trump would appear was blown away within seconds, when he opened the official Republican campaign season by threatening to run as an independent if he doesn’t get the nomination.

But it wasn’t only Mr. Trump. Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also signed up for the fight card, as did former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in his own, more folksy way.

While they were engaged in a kind of debate demolition derby, there was another group that seemed more interested in a calmer drive down the political parkway. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich leaned more toward a policy discussion in the traditional mode. More than that, they appeared to think that the correct image to project in a presidential debate was the statesmanlike one, even if that might leave them appearing understated and even plodding at times compared with the crashing sounds around them.

A short 15 years ago, the larger American public was completely ignorant of the vocabulary of jihad.

Now some terms that once were italicized and considered foreign—because they WERE foreign—have become woven into our daily consciousness and news vocabulary.

But to still far too many, the terms introduced by the terror tsunami of the past decade and a half are still fuzzy. In Sharia-Ism Is Here: The Battle to Control Women and Everyone Else, author Joy Brighton brings clarity, citations, history and important supportive documentation to bear to clear up any uncertainty as to the differences between Sunni and Shi’a, laws and customs, and the whole directory of confusing terms.

“If European countries accept a wave of migrants, there will be terrorists among them. … By accepting the migrants, we strongly facilitate the Islamic State’s expansion to Europe.” — Czech President Miloš Zeman.

“We are committed to being active participants in our society, but it has to be on Islam’s terms, without compromising our own principles and values. Democracy is antithetical to Islam… The way forward for Muslims in Denmark is to resist the anti-Islamic integration policy and the aggressive foreign policy pursued by successive governments in this country.” — Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

“If you talk about immigration, you are a xenophobe. If you talk about security, you are a fascist. If you talk about Islam, you are an Islamophobe.” — French MP Henri Guaino.

“We cannot lose this war because it is fundamentally a war of civilization. It is our society, our civilization that we are defending.” — French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Irrespective of Western attempts to portray Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan and Egypt as supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, leaders of these countries, and especially the House of Saud, consider the accord a colossal, lethal threat, resulting from a reckless, short-sighted and self-destructive policy, which will initially plague the Arab World, and subsequently the Western World, including the USA, “the Great Satan” according to the Ayatollahs.

While Saudi leaders are restrained in their official reaction to the Iran nuclear agreement, they voice their authentic concerns and assessments via the House of Saud-owned media, which have traditionally served as a convenient venue, providing the element of deniability, sparing diplomatic inconvenience.

During a recent visit to Capitol Hill, I was told by legislators in both chambers, on both sides of the aisle: “While Israel is concerned about Iran’s nuclearization, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are panicky.”

1) The moderators did not delve into the core beliefs of the candidates. The Constitution itself was only raised in one question. Where’s the beef?

Perhaps it is naive to think that this matters in a world in which identity politics, sound bites and snark frequently trump all else, but I found the debate sorely lacking when it came to giving candidates the opportunity to expound upon their political philosophies.

As a proxy for this point, guess how many times the Constitution was raised during the debate?

In the case of the moderators, only once, on a question from Chris Wallace to Gov. Mike Huckabee regarding his belief in Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage and abortion.

Only Senators Cruz and Rubio even invoked the Constitution.

I understand we are living in the Roberts/Pelosi era, in which the Constitution is selectively applied when not treated as a mere piece of parchment, but come on.

I also understand that the moderators were likely more concerned with drilling the candidates on perceived weaknesses and/or questions that would elicit compelling and/or viral responses.

And it’s not lost on me that voters care most about how they are going to put food on the table, education and national security.

But for GOP primary voters, philosophy matters too.

In President Barack Obama’s defense of his nuclear deal with Iran Wednesday, he said there are only two types of people who will oppose his deal – Republican partisans and Israel- firsters – that is, traitors.

At American University, Obama castigated Republican lawmakers as the moral equivalent of Iranian jihadists saying, “Those [Iranian] hard-liners chanting ‘Death to America’ who have been most opposed to the deal… are making common cause with the Republican Caucus.”

He then turned his attention to Israel.

Obama explained that whether or not you believe the deal endangers Israel boils down to whom you trust more – him or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And, he explained, he can be trusted to protect Israel better than Netanyahu can because “[I] have been a stalwart friend of Israel throughout my career.”

The night the Iran nuclear deal was announced was a sleepless one for Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, utterly distraught by the terms of the agreement. “I got up and emailed my eBook publisher and said I have an idea. What if I do an eBook that could be out in time for the congressional debate? He thought it was a great idea,” Dershowitz explained in an exclusive interview with the Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought. “He gave me two weeks to write it. He got it in eleven days.”

Fears of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon have haunted supporters of Israel and advocates of Middle East peace for over a decade, stoked by frequent public reminders by back-to-back regimes of the Islamic Republic that their goal is the annihilation of the Jewish State. “This book took me less than two weeks to write and ten years to research, so I’ve been thinking about and writing about this potentially for ten years,” explained Dershowitz. “I wrote my first long article about this in 2005. I had my ideas and I’ve been following the deal very closely.

“This use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives. Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

The White House and its allies shouldn’t need to smear American Jews–and a sitting senator–as dual loyalists to make their case.

Chuck Schumer is a politician—a skilled and successful one. Which means that today’s announcement, following months of wildly uncharacteristic silence, that the senior Senator from New York is opposing the Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran is first and foremost a reflection of his calculations as to where his own self-interest lies. It does not take an electoral genius to imagine why a Senator from New York State might oppose a deal that keeps many Jewish voters—and an even higher percentage of non-Jewish voters—up at night. Keeping your base happy is generally the first rule of political survival.