RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of Voice of Israel talk radio (voiceofisrael.com).

The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s war in Gaza was released Monday. In anticipation of the report, whose findings were a foregone conclusion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that Israel would not bear the brunt of yet another unjust assault on its character and behavior in the face of barbarism.

His sentiments were drowned out, however, by the cacophony of cheers from much of the media and most of the nongovernmental organizations whose testimony to the UNHRC provided canon fodder against Israel.

It’s an old story with a predictable punch line: Israel is no better than Hamas and other “armed groups” in Gaza. But it has less of an excuse than Palestinian terrorists to engage in military action, since the only reason that it incurs rocket and mortar attacks is that it is an occupying power, which denies innocent Palestinians basic human rights protected by all kinds of international conventions.

Italy Fell, Fascism Rose, Europe Reeled: Remembering the Great War
Sorrento, Italy — Even here, in this coastal haven of sun-drenched serenity, there are reminders. In the center of the Piazza della Vittoria, overlooking the Gulf of Naples, is a monument to the victims of “Mors Immortalis, 1915–1918.” It pays homage to Sorrento’s fallen, a tiny remnant of the more than 600,000 Italian soldiers who perished in the furnace of the First World War. Italy’s catastrophic decision to become a combatant in the war would echo feverishly through time: Though it emerged as one of the victors, an impoverished and embittered Italy gave birth to European fascism in a modern totalitarian state.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio di San Giuliano, wanted no part of the crisis that broke out in July 1914. He viewed Austrian demands on Serbia as needlessly provocative. Though Italy had an alliance with Germany and Austria, their behavior, he claimed, released his nation of its obligations. But San Giuliano died in October. By the beginning of 1915, after more than six months of slaughter and stalemate, the major Allied nations — Great Britain, France, and Russia — were desperate to lure neutral Italy into the imbroglio.

If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected. We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel and a peck of it, but the United States of America remains, to the Left’s dismay, plainly recognizable as herself beneath the muck.

‘Lots of folks expected us to do something strange and break out in a riot. Well, they just don’t know us,” the Reverend Norvel Goff told the packed, multiracial congregation of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Sunday. It was the first service since the horrific slaughter of nine innocent souls by a racist fanatic.

Not being a Christian, I can only marvel at the dignity and courage of the victims’ relatives who forgave the shooter. If I could ever manage such a thing, it would probably take me decades. It took them little more than a day.

A new webpage was launched on Monday featuring over one hundred personal testimonies from Jewish students who have experienced antisemitism on campuses across the U.S. over the past year-and-a-half.

Behind the project is the non-profit campus watchdog AMCHA Initiative which gathered the extensive testimony from public reports, and students at 47 colleges and universities in 20 states.

In their reports on the site, some students said they felt intimidated and frightened. Others said they wanted to hide their Jewish identities for fear of being targeted by classmates. One student from University of Washington said that after seeing his Star of David, some people “brand me as someone toxic, someone worthy of their disdain and vitriol.”

There they go again. Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren writes a book – and a Wall Street Journal opinion piece – offering a devastating critique of Barack Obama’s treatment of Israel. And when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly asked by the U.S. Ambassador (according to an anonymous source in Haaretz) to publicly repudiate Oren, Bibi refuses.

Why is it that after 60 years of fairly connubial bliss, the U.S. and Israel now seem to be estranged lovers? Some put it down to personal antagonism between Obama and Netanyahu; or to public insults (an Obama advisor saying “Bibi is a chickens**t); or to Bibi’s un-White House sanctioned Congressional speech about Iran.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), the chairman of the special panel investigating the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, voiced a new level of frustration with his Democratic counterpart today.

Gowdy accused Representative Elijah Cummings of helping the Obama administration to hide Benghazi records. “Worse than inaction, you have enabled this failure to produce and contributed to a culture of intentional non-compliance and correspondingly incomplete public record [sic],” he wrote in a biting letter to the Maryland Democrat that accompanied the release of longtime Clinton loyalist Sidney Blumenthal’s emails to Hillary Clinton.

Meet DeRay McKesson, the public face of #BlackLivesMatter.

Hours after last week’s shooting in Charleston, S.C., Al Sharpton announced plans to travel to the Charleston peninsula. “The Rev” never showed. But DeRay did.

Meet DeRay McKesson: Bowdoin ’07, a former Minneapolis-area school administrator — and now the public face of “Black Lives Matter.” Imagine Al Sharpton, circa the Crown Heights riot, with access to Twitter. That’s DeRay.

When protests began in Ferguson, Mo., McKesson was still working in Minnesota as a human-resources executive with Minneapolis public schools. He would drive to St. Louis on the weekends and tweet — incessantly. He quickly became one of the most recognizable members of the demonstrations. With fellow protester Johnetta Elzie, he launched a newsletter, This Is the Movement, that pulled in 14,000 subscribers at its peak. In March he quit his job and moved to St. Louis permanently.

A new batch of e-mails released by the House Select Committee on Benghazi reveals that Cody Shearer — a man investigated by the State Department in the 1990s for falsely representing himself as an agent of the U.S. government while taking cash from a genocidal warlord — wrote at least one crucial intelligence memo on Libya that was sent directly to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On March 6, 2011, longtime Clinton consigliere Sidney Blumenthal forwarded Clinton a memo written by Shearer on Mahmoud Jibril, then a relatively unknown figure in the Libyan opposition against Gaddafi. In it, Shearer urges the U.S. government to make immediate contact with the Libyan politician. Clinton met directly with Jibril within days of receiving the memo. He was named head of the interim Libyan government soon after.

The Confederate battle flag is far from the only worrisome symbol in America today.
“Symbols, flags, organizations, and phrases that emphasize racial difference and ethnic pride are growing fissures in the American mosaic.”

Everyone is weighing in on the horrific murders in Charleston and blaming the mindset of the mass murderer on wider social pathologies. After the airing of the racist crackpot ideas of the unhinged Dylann Roof, calls have gone out to ban the public flying of the battle flag of the Old Confederacy, which has also been incorporated in various forms in four state flags. Perhaps we should step back and eschew symbolism that separates us by race rather than unites us as fellow citizens.