RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Cotton won an election for standing on conservative principles and if he ruffles the feathers of establishment “corkers” good for him and the country….rsk

Arkansas lawmaker has been unusually vocal, drawing the ire of some Republican colleagues

WASHINGTON—Freshman Sen. Tom Cotton’s temporary office is located in the less-than-desirable basement of the Russell Senate building, reflecting his rookie status. Like other junior senators, he performs his share of Senate chores, including presiding over the chamber. But the similarities end there.

Among this year’s crop of 13 newly minted senators, Mr. Cotton, who served one term in the House, has emerged early on as the most vocal and polarizing newcomer, set apart by his headline-grabbing foreign policy.

The Arkansas Republican’s tactics have drawn praise from his conservative supporters, but irritated some GOP colleagues when his moves have conflicted with their efforts.

Long gone are the days when Senate freshmen were expected to keep their heads down and mouths closed for their first months in office. Still, even in a chamber where newcomers, such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas), have entered with a national following and not shied away from bucking their leaders at times, Mr. Cotton has drawn unusual attention, particularly for inserting himself into negotiations with Iran.

The protests over the past week in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, sparked by the unprovoked beating of Ethiopian-Israeli soldier Damas Pakada at the hands of two police officers, are causing pangs of guilt and remorse across the country. And rightly so, but largely for the wrong reasons.

Immigrants in all countries suffer in one way or another. Jews from the Diaspora who “make aliyah” are no exception. Unlike, say, the United States or Australia, Israel’s establishment was based on a shared religion and nationhood. Regardless of the ostensible homogeneity attributed to a state such as this, Israel has all the characteristics of, and problems inherent in, a “melting pot” society. This is what makes it so rich in fabric and so poor in compassion.

Ironically, the lack of empathy towards each subsequent wave of immigrants is highest among other, more veteran ones. Like college freshmen hazed by seniors, they catch a case of amnesia when it’s their turn to commit the unpleasant initiation rituals on frightened newcomers to campus.

In Mel Brooks’ comedy “History of the World Part I,” Moses is shown descending from Mount Sinai with three stone tablets in hand. As he declares, “I give you the Fifteen Commandments,” one falls and breaks, and Moses corrects himself, “er, Ten Commandments.” Jews, including the observant, find this funny rather than offensive. As we learned once again in Garland, Texas, Muslims do not laugh at jokes about Mohammed, the purported author of the Koran (as Moses is the author of the Torah). Two wannabe Jihadists with assault rifles and body armor were no match for an off-duty Texas traffic cop with a sidearm, but the incident might have turned into a massacre worse than the murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff in January.

Why do Jews as well as Christians–but not Muslims–laugh at jokes about the founders of their faiths?

The wave of Charlie Hebdo reached the US, where the French weekly’s survivors issue had not sold more than three hundred copies and all the US newspapers had refused to republish the drawings.

While in Texas an Islamist commando tried to hit a cartoon competition, at the PEN Club of New York it was the thing to boycott a prize to Charlie.

A high school teacher from the French town of Poitiers, Jean-François Chazerans, is under disciplinary proceedings for speaking in class and saying: “These rascals of Charlie Hebdo have got what they deserved”. It goes without saying that most of the high school teachers went out on strike when Chazerans was suspended and not when another colleague, “the Islamophobic” Robert Redeker went into hiding. Libération, the French leftist daily, defended the professor’s opinion.

Today’s lead story in The Wall Street Journal is about the result of its latest poll regarding Hillary Clinton. It says a lot about why she and the leaders of the Democratic Party must surely hold its core members in contempt. “Support for her among Democrats remains strong and unshaken.”

In the seven weeks since she announced her candidacy to be the next President of the United States and then virtually vanished from view, the news about her destroying private emails that should have been public records and the shenanigans of hers and Bill’s foundation have taken their toll.

Pamela Geller tested the First Amendment and America failed.

Have you hugged a Jihadist today? Everybody else has. Have you trashed Pamela Geller this morning? Welcome to the club.

Pamela Geller made a mistake. She tested the First Amendment and the First Amendment lost.

This fighter for Israel, this battler against Radical Islam can seem to find no friends after what she did.

She tried to prove that America is not France, where 11 were murdered by Islamists for printing Mohammad cartoons, nor are we the Netherlands, where Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s partner, Director Theo van Gogh was murdered for his documentary Submission, which exposed Islamist mistreatment of women.

Following another recent jihadist effort (thankfully thwarted) to destroy a Christian church in France, the essayist Fjordman commented:

“The differences between the Middle East and Europe are growing smaller every day.”

Following another jihadist attack (thankfully, only jihadists were killed) on a Texas gathering of courageous artists and other defenders of free speech, it seems that the differences between Europe and the US are getting smaller every day.

Diana West has performed yeoman’s work in exposing the Soviet-FDR connection in American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. She has aired out America’s dirty laundry and hung it out to dry. Neocons and other strange creatures attacked her for contradicting their over half-century-old meme that FDR was a blameless dupe of Joseph Stalin and that there were no real Soviet agents and fellow travelers in FDR’s administration.

Such were the number of attacks and the personalities making them that she had to write another book to counter all the lies, misconceptions, academic pufferies, character assassinations, and misrepresentations about her and American Betrayal in those attacks, in a second book, The Rebuttal: Defending ‘American Betrayal From the Book Burners. I followed this ongoing exchange between West and her detractors from Day One. It was similar to watching Cyrano de Bergerac take on a hundred cutthroat swordsmen. I can hear her muttering now, about the caliber of her attackers: “I have been robbed. There are no hundred here!”

On the evening of May 7 at the Luxe Hotel in Los Angeles, Dr. Mary Grabar, who taught college English for 20 years and has been writing about education for the last 10 years, will discuss [2] the influence of 1960s radical Bill Ayers and his comrades, and offer strategies for fighting it.

Mary Grabar was born in Slovenia but her parents took her and fled the communist regime to Rochester, New York. She went on to teach in colleges and universities in Georgia for 20 years, earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia in 2002.

Today she is a dissident to the reigning political correctness on our college campuses. She came to conservatism after witnessing the deliberate destruction of our literary heritage and our respect for the West and for the United States by radical professors in her graduate seminars. In 2011 she founded the Dissident Prof Education Project [3], Inc., dedicated to “resisting the re-education of America.”

I recently posed to Ms. Grabar some questions about her book and the upcoming presentation.

This year is the centenary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the occasion for revisiting that momentous discovery by paying tribute to one of the most famous scientists of modern times. Steven Gimbel’s brief book is a welcome contribution to that event, placing Einstein in his “space and times,” as his subtitle has it. “It was relativity,” he declares, “that made Einstein Einstein”—that gave the scientist the authority (the standing, a jurist might say) to pronounce on public affairs. Sixty years after his death, Einstein still enjoys that authority. The current issue of an English journal, in a discussion of the war against ISIS, quotes at length (and critically) a 1947 article by Einstein on the Cold War. And as I write, a Washington Post article on the Middle East peace process cites Einstein on the futility of repeated experiments, concluding, “This applies to Gaza.”