RUTHFULLY YOURS

INDONESIA, population 210 million, is in shambles, possibly facing total anarchy. A civil war is raging in Sudan. AIDS is decimating sub-Saharan Africa. There are violent separatist movements in France. In Columbia and Venezuela, it is a question whether the gangsters are in charge, or the government. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein is the government, the whole government. Robert M. Steele says there are 26 limited but severe conflicts, 78 lesser conflicts, 15 genocidal campaigns and 178 violent political struggles. That’s normal.

So why does what’s happening in Israel almost invariably get more attention in the media than all the rest put together?

Jesus was born there. According to the Bible, Moses saw it dimly across the Jordan. Muslims believe that the prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven from the Dome of the Rock. It’s got history.

It’s a journalist’s dream town and easy to cover. The beaches are beautiful. The babes in bikinis on the beaches are beautiful. Tel Aviv has a night life. The distinguished Jerusalem Post is an English language newspaper. Ha-Aretz, the so-called New York Times of Israel, publishes an English edition. It’s pretty safe; more Israelis have been killed in automobile accidents than by Palestinians since the beginning of Intafada II. Your byline gets on the front page; your face gets on the evening news.

Inside the career of Ben Wattenberg, who died Sunday at age 81, you could write a history of the modern Democratic Party. To a great extent Wattenberg wrote it himself.

Wattenberg was a Bronx-born Jew whose early jobs in politics included writing speeches and providing advice to the quintessential Southern Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson. He then worked on the 1970 Senate race of the man whose name was a synonym for Democratic liberals, Hubert Humphrey.

In the 1970s, Wattenberg worked tirelessly on behalf of the presidential ambitions of his friend, Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, whose own name is associated with what have come to be known as “national security Democrats.”

Ben Wattenberg has passed away. Ben gave me my first job in Washington when he was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. I worked for and with Ben for much of the 1990s. I was his research assistant and later became a producer for the production company behind his weekly PBS series Think Tank and his various documentary projects. As Yuval suggests, Ben was hard to classify intellectually or ideologically. Though it was not always as difficult as it is today because the tribe he represented — variously described as Scoop Jackson Democrat, Democratic neoconservative, Reagan Democrat, New Democrat, democratic triumphalist etc — no longer much exists. Obviously, the key word there is “Democrat.” But while his devotion to the partisan label with a capital-D waned over the years (without ever vanishing), his devotion to democracy itself was undying and infectious. I had my differences with Ben, ideologically, and at times personally,

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union established a nuclear relationship commonly called Mutual Assured Destruction, known by the pejorative acronym MAD. The basic notion was that Washington and Moscow each possessed sufficient nuclear capability to destroy the other’s society, however a war might start. This mutual vulnerability was expected to ensure that each would be deterred from severely provoking the other. This condition of mutual deterrence, enforced by mutual nuclear vulnerability, was thought to create a “stable balance of terror” that would help prevent large-scale war. That hope was expressed by Sir Winston Churchill when he suggested that “safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

It’s bad enough that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over email exchanges between her and Sidney Blumenthal, but editing the emails to remove certain problematic topics is an admission of guilt. Because it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.

Hillary Clinton withheld Benghazi-related emails from the State Department that detailed her knowledge of the scramble for oil contracts in Libya and the shortcomings of the NATO-led military intervention for which she advocated.

Clinton removed specific portions of other emails she sent to State, suggesting the messages were screened closely enough to determine which paragraphs were unfit to be seen by the public.

Erosion: Undermining Israel Through Lies and Deception analyzes some of the canards and methods used to delegitimize and undermine the state of Israel:

* Is all criticism of Israel antisemitic? When does criticism of her actions cross the line and become unacceptable? What are the criteria that make such condemnation antisemitic?

* The lack of sufficient water resources in the Middle East has become a source of tension which the Palestinian Arabs have adroitly exploited as a weapon against Israel. She is accused of not sharing scarce water resources and developing an effective waste management system.

* Homicide bombings are designed to terrorize, demoralize and crush the spirit of the Israeli civilian population. Understanding the nature of jihad and martyrdom is the first step in appreciating the nature of the danger and the physical threat they pose for Israel and the West.

* How does a government respond to the constant risk of homicide bombings that Israel faces? To thwart these attacks, Israel initiated targeted killings of Palestinian Arab terrorists, built a security fence and established checkpoints. For her efforts to protect her citizens, Israel is maligned throughout the world.

Just two days before the June 30th cutoff for an agreement with Iran on its nuclear program was set to expire, American and European officials announced that the deadline would be extended yet again, marking the third time that the United States capitulated to the Iranians. Sensing American vacillation, weakness and desperation, the Iranians have once more managed to arm-twist and outmaneuver the Obama administration.

The extension comes on the heels of an embarrassing June 24 bipartisan letter signed by a group of nineteen prominent diplomats, legislators, policymakers, and experts cautioning the Obama administration that the emerging deal with the Islamic Republic “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement.” It also noted the need for Obama to address Iran’s deleterious regional machinations and its desire to establish a Shiite hegemony, something the Obama administration has inexplicably chosen to ignore. The letter represents a scathing indictment of Obama’s handling of the Iranian talks and this is especially true when one considers that five of the signatories were former Obama administration officials or otherwise had ties to the Obama White House.

The Democrats act like they own black people and their founder really did.

Last week, Hillary spoke at a dinner named after two slave owners. The slave owners, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, not only owned over 760 slaves between them, but they remain the key figures in the founding mythology of the Democratic Party.

At the event, Hillary Clinton blasted the Republicans as the “party of the past”, but it’s really Hillary and the Democratic Party that are showing their age.

Obama recently spared Andrew Jackson, the Democratic Party’s first president, from being cut from the twenty, instead throwing Hamilton on the ten to the social justice wolves. It’s historically appropriate that the party often accused of plantation politics was founded by an actual plantation owner. The Democratic Party acts like it owns black people and its founder literally did own black people.

One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian historian Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos. Thucydides uses his riveting account of the Athenian argument over the islanders’ fate to warn his readers of the fickle nature of democracy.

Outraged by the revolt of the Mytileneans, the frenzied Athenians suddenly assemble and vote to condemn all the adult males on the island, regardless of the role any of them may have played in the revolt. They are to be executed en masse for rebellion, on grounds of collective guilt. The next day, however, cooler heads in Athens narrowly prevail. The radical demos just as abruptly takes a second vote and withdraws its blanket death sentence of the day before, voting instead to execute only 1,000 of the ringleaders of the rebellion.

It is no secret that several senior Palestinian officials see themselves as potential successors to Abbas. Like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, Abbas has stubbornly refused to share power with anyone. And like Arafat, he continues to run the Palestinian Authority as if it were his private fiefdom.

In Palestinian culture, it is more important if one graduates from an Israeli prison than from the University of Texas in Austin. A Palestinian who carries out an attack on Israel has more credentials among his people than one who studied at Harvard or Oxford universities.