RUTHFULLY YOURS

Knowing what we know now, would we have urged President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, as we did at the time? A version of this question was put to Jeb Bush by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly the other day, and, well, oh dear.

The former Florida Governor and presumptive Republican presidential candidate told Ms. Kelly Monday that he would have authorized an invasion, adding “and so would have Hillary Clinton”—a reminder that the Democratic frontrunner is the only person in the 2016 race who cast a vote for the war. But Mrs. Clinton long ago recanted that vote, and Mr. Bush recanted his answer, too, telling an Arizona audience on Thursday that he would not have invaded “knowing what we know now.”

We’ll leave aside what Mr. Bush’s struggles with the inevitable question say about his preparedness as a candidate—and his team’s as a campaign. The right answer to the question is that it’s not a useful or instructive one to answer, because statesmanship, like life, is not conducted in hindsight. Knowing what we know now, we wouldn’t have been in equities in 2008, or bet on the Green Bay Packers in January. Sigh.

Top officials repeatedly misled investigators without consequences. Congress needs to get tougher.

Two years ago this week, a report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Information confirmed what hundreds of tea party, conservative, pro-life and pro-Israel organizations had long known: The Internal Revenue Service had stopped processing their applications for exempt status and subjected them to onerous, intrusive and discriminatory practices because of their political views.

Since the report, additional congressional investigations have revealed a lot about IRS dysfunction—and worse. But they’ve also revealed Congress’s inability to exercise its constitutional oversight responsibilities of this and other executive agencies.

Consider the repeated testimony and other statements to Congress subsequently shown to be false. The report issued in December by Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.)—then chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—details numerous instances in which senior IRS officials, including former Commissioner Doug Shulman, Acting Commissioner Steven Miller and Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner lied to Congress, denying and covering up the targeting of tea party and conservative groups before the inspector general’s May 2013 report.

Regardless of the circumstances, when a representative from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with close ties to Hamas, is allowed into the White House, a serious, indeed dangerous, problem exists.

One day after the brutal death of his cousin – a revenge attack following the murder of three Israeli teens – Tariq Abu Khdeir, a 15-year-old boy who had traveled to Israel from Tampa, Florida, found himself arrested and beaten by an Israeli officer. On the day of his being taken into custody, authorities alleged Khdeir was masked, armed and actively participating in rioting against officers. They said, as well, he had resisted arrest.

A video purporting to be of the beating went viral, and an Israeli investigation into the footage commenced.

While Khdeir claimed total innocence in the matter, and to be sure, months later, the charges against him were dropped, his family’s choice of an attorney for his case makes Khdeir’s claim of innocence highly suspicious, if not an outright lie. Throughout the process, the lawyer representing Khdeir was Hassan Shibly, the Executive Director of the Florida chapter of CAIR.

CAIR was established in June 1994 as being part of the American Palestine Committee, an umbrella organization acting as a terrorist enterprise run by then-global Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook. Marzook was based in the U.S. at the time and currently operates out of Egypt as a spokesman for Hamas. In 2007 and 2008, amidst two federal trials, the U.S. government named CAIR a co-conspirator in the raising of millions of dollars for Hamas.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Progressive America has a fever and the only solution is more welfare. Celebrities are trying to buy only $29 worth of fair trade arugula at Whole Foods and then taking snapshots of it in a mistaken effort to show how little food stamps buy. Obama is urging more social welfare spending as the answer to the race riots he stirred up across the country by embracing the Ferguson “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” hoax.

Outraged rich liberals are furiously lecturing the rest of the country on income inequality as if there were no escaping the fact that we’re a society of greedy plutocrats that doesn’t care about the poor.

Obama called for “massive investments in urban communities”. Last year, we spent $75 billion on food stamps. The year before that it was $80 billion. That’s up from $33 billion in 2007. The number of participants has doubled approaching 50 million.

Is spending $80 billion on food stamps alone for a sixth of the country not a massive investment?

The great paradox of the War on Terror is that we are fighting an enemy that doesn’t exist. We are told incessantly that there is no such thing as a Muslim terrorist.

There may be a tiny minority of violent extremists, but they are only a tiny minority of no importance whatsoever. And yet we’ve been at war with this same infinitesimally tiny minority for decades.

This tiny minority has killed thousands of Americans. It has the support of entire governments in tiny countries like Pakistan (182 million), Iran (77 million) and Syria (22 million). We are told that this tiny minority is no way representative of the world’s billion Muslims, and yet it’s hard to find a Muslim country that doesn’t support or harbor a terrorist group.

We were told that the problems was their governments, but the Arab Spring showed us that democratic elections lead to governments that are even more supportive of tiny minority of extremists who are somehow taking over entire countries.

Everything we’ve been told is obviously a lie. And the best evidence comes from the liars themselves.

The media is howling that a bunch of cartoonists in Texas were irresponsible for sketching Islam’s dead warlord because they should have known that Muslim terrorists would come to kill them for it. But if the media is right and Islam is a religion of peace, then why should they have anticipated a terrorist attack?

The second Bush President known as “W” was indeed a warm, kind and sincere supporter of Israel as Lipsky reminds us of his speech. He was also a bumbler who invited the king of Saudi Arabia- locus of the funding and training of the 9/11 terrorists- to his ranch in Crawford, Texas where the robed thug had the effrontery only months after 9/11 to promote the Bush endorsde “peace plan”- the usual “give it all up” to Israel. Jeb keeps James Baker as adviser….he is weak on Common Core and national policy and security concerns…..My say is no more Clintons and no more Bushes…..rsk

The uproar over Jeb Bush’s attempt to find his footing on whether we should have fought the Iraq war fails to eclipse the good news — that his most influential adviser on Israel is his brother George.

“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him,” Jeb had said in remarks delivered here in New York and reported by The Washington Post. It was greeted with a raft of snide comments.
A writer for MSNBC promptly advised candidates to do the opposite of everything W. suggests. Politico rushed out a piece wondering how many times Jeb had been “dropped on his head as a child.”
The cynics may have missed George W.’s 2008 speech to Israel’s Knesset in honor of the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence.

In the 1940s and 50s, what passed for sex education was literally about the birds and bees as metaphors for inception and child birth. The emphasis was on waiting until marriage to engage in sex. There were instructional books with a mostly medical orientation to the information they provided but whether they could be found in the schools is anyone’s guess.

Somehow that generation (and earlier ones) managed to learn enough about sex to engage in it within the context of a society that regarded sex outside of marriage as sinful. By the 1960s, the generation fathered in the wake of World War Two told everyone not to trust anyone over thirty and that sex, drugs and rock’n roll were the only things that really mattered in life.

In 1979, with Jimmy Carter’s blessing, the federal government took control of the nation’s educational system via the Department of Education, but the real takeover began much earlier. It has been in serious decline ever since with huge dropout rates and failures to learn reading and math that put us well behind when compared to other nations. Traditional American values have often been abandoned.

‘Mr. Sinatra Adored Israel, and Israel Adored Him Back.’The Chairman of the Board died 17 years ago today. In his centennial year, a tour of his deep-seated Zionism.
By Shalom Goldman|

2015 is the year of the Frank Sinatra Centennial, and though the great singer’s 100th birthday won’t be marked until December, it seems only proper to remember the Chairman of the Board’s deep and abiding commitment to Israel, which he saw as an integral part of the chain of liberal causes that he supported throughout his career. His activities on behalf of the Jewish state started with smuggling money to the Haganah under the British Mandate. Starting in the 1950s, his records and films were banned in Arab counties because of his sympathies with Zionism. He performed for IDF troops, and in the 1970s and ’80s he raised millions of dollars for student centers in Nazareth and Jerusalem.

Sinatra’s initial visit to Israel came in 1962, as part of his first world tour. At the height of his popularity, his managers wanted him to embark on a series of concerts that would take him as far as Japan. Sinatra also had personal reasons for touring: His falling out with the recently elected JFK and the rest of the Kennedy clan, due to a combination of Sinatra’s volatile temper and allegations concerning the singer’s links to organized crime, hurt him deeply. Sinatra turned toward reviving his own career and stepped up his charitable work, which his managers hoped would “temper the image of the flip playboy.”

In May and June of 1962 Sinatra gave 30 concerts in cities around the world. A percentage of the proceeds went to children’s charities. The tour began in Tokyo, where legions of fans turned out see and hear the singer. Because Israel appeared on Sinatra’s schedule, the Arab League rejected proposals that he perform in Cairo and Beirut.

Those poor, victimized killers; they’re only killers because of our distorted perceptions of them. If we didn’t pin “Kick Me, I’m a Killer” signs on their backs, they wouldn’t be killers.

I left a shorter comment on this subject on Sultan Knish’s May 13th column, “Schrödinger’s Jihad.” I decided to expand my remarks on the issue, after having quoted Daniel Greenfield from an email on Schrödinger’s Cats in my May 9th column, “Islam: An Ideology of Lethal Absurdities” on Rule of Reason and Capitalism Magazine.

“The media is howling that a bunch of cartoonists in Texas were irresponsible for sketching Islam’s dead warlord,” wrote Daniel Greenfield in Schrödinger’s Jihad. This is not surprising. The news media has been virtually taken over by the left. Academia is now basically a leftist indoctrination program. Even science has been appropriated by the left (e.g., the attacks on global-warming “deniers”). The news media howls, college teachers perform lobotomies on the young, and scientists toe the line in order to get government “research” grants, or are silent in order to keep their jobs.

Greenfield wrote:

What keeps the lie alive is another paradox. Call it Schrödinger’s Jihad. The more famous Schrödinger’s Cat is a paradox in which a cat in a sealed box with poison that has a 50 percent chance of being released is in an indeterminate state. It is neither dead nor alive until someone opens the box.

Every year, from Israeli Independence Day until May 15, extreme left-wing organizations in Israel hold events commemorating “Palestinian Nakba Day,” while my family’s real tragedy — and that of a million other Jews — remains forgotten. The time has come to make a fundamental change regarding the rights and property of Jews from Arab countries and their descendents, who make up more than 55 percent of Jewish residents in Israel today.

While the Palestinian refugee problem is well-known to everyone, few in Israel are aware of the Jewish refugee problem. The experiences of Jewish people who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries are diverse — some chose to move because of Zionism, but others fled or were expelled from their home countries under threat to their lives. Overall, some 900,000 Jews from Arab countries left their homes between 1948 and 1970. In Morocco, Jews were treated relatively well. In Syria, they were not allowed to sell their property. In Egypt and Iraq, Jews were expelled, forbidden to return and their money and property were taken from them in accordance with laws set by Arab governments.