RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam focuses on oppression, group identity and Reagan the warmonger.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—President Ronald Reagan, speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1987

President Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev remains one of the most dramatic calls for freedom in our time. Thus I was heartened to find a passage from Reagan’s speech on the sample of the new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam that students will take for the first time in May. It seemed for a moment that students would be encouraged to learn about positive aspects of our past rather than be directed to focus on the negative, as happens all too often.

Presenting himself as Tobi the German, the author hears praise of Nazis in the West Bank and talk of Jews’ ‘racist’ DNA in Tel Aviv.

Here is the classic recipe for writing about Israelis and Palestinians: start by mentioning the “cycle of violence” and the distrust it has bred between two peoples in a contested holy land. Next speak of the sane moderates on both sides who are willing to compromise and believe in what “everyone” knows to be the reasonable way forward, a two-state solution. Bemoan how “extremists” on the side you dislike are sabotaging prospects for peace. Repeat until the U.S. president calls for a new peace conference, then insist it represents a last chance.

In “Catch the Jew!,” Tuvia Tenenbom eschews this crusty framework. Crisscrossing Israel and the Palestinian Territories over seven months in 2013-14, Mr. Tenenbom meets with high-ranking politicians, celebrated writers, religious leaders, “human rights” professionals, left-wing political activists and West Bank settlers, cajoling Jews and Arabs to speak for themselves. Mr. Tenenbom’s conversations range from the sacred to the profane, from high-level politics to ribald discussions of the dating rituals of various religious groups and ethnicities. “Catch the Jew!” is an illuminating—and alarming—account of a part of the promised land that few foreigners see.

Nuclear talks with North Korea prove Iran’s program will go forward—deal or no deal.

By the nuclear compliance standards of Barack Obama and John Kerry, North Korea was a model state—in 1992. In 1985, North Korea joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In 1992 it and South Korea jointly declared the “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. North Korea next signed a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Within months, the IAEA reported “inconsistencies” in North Korea’s nuclear program.

Three years ago, film-goers were treated to “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” which critic Kenneth Turan called a “pleasant fantasy” about the Middle East. Today, of course, Yemen is the hub of a bloody conflict, one which President Obama persists in viewing with equal unreality.

Most obviously: Yemen is not, as the administration has touted, a “success” brought about by its “smart diplomacy.” Most importantly: Iran has a plan. Yemen is a vital component.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees that. So does Saudi King Salman (and no, I will not dwell on the pun). His foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, last week called Iran “an aggressive state that is intervening and operating forces in the Arab world.” Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he added, represents “a threat to the Gulf and the entire world.”

A quick tour of the neighborhood: Much of Syria is already an Iranian satrapy. Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist foreign legion, is the most powerful force in Lebanon. Iranian military advisers and Iranian-backed Shia militias increasingly call the shots in Iraq. And now Iran is aggressively supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It’s okay to insult Jews, but watch out when it comes to blacks or Muslims.
Don Imus, the famous radio/TV talk show host, was caught making a joke insensitive to Blacks and it nearly finished him off. He was taken off the air, spent years being rehabilitated, and now he’s back, but careful – very careful. Zero tolerance!

Schooled by people like Al Sharpton, Imus learned the limits to humor – and so did every other comedian. Don’t go there is the message.

But for Jews, the jokes keep on coming…tasteless, offensive, hurtful, harmful, doesn’t matter. Fair game to be Jewish and we’re into a trend.

So now it’s Trevor Noah and who is this, you ask? I asked the same question and the answer is that if you thought Jon Stewart was obnoxious when it came to Israel, wait till you meet this creep. Trevor (no Noah this guy) is a 31-year-old South African who is slated to take Stewart’s place on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.

The long road from marching side by side at Selma to today, when the White House is openly clashing with Israel.

President Obama is trying the patience of Jewish Democrats in Congress, a dozen of whom took Deputy National Security AdviserBen Rhodes to the woodshed last week over the president’s continued criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to Politico, the lawmakers complained to Mr. Rhodes that Mr. Obama is behaving as though the Israeli prime minister’s recent comment dismissing the chances for Palestinian statehood is all that is blocking the peace process, when the talks have been moribund for a year. The Democratic congressmen also noted that the president had refrained from criticizing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and had even hinted that he might back United Nations recognition of Palestine.

If the steady, but manageable flow of ignorant commentary on Israel of late has turned into a flood, it’s because of a particular tactic of the left employed in abundance since the Israeli elections. A surefire way to misunderstand Israeli politics is to view it through the stable lens of America’s two-party system. And one meme that has gained traction on the left during Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership is the lazy, obtuse narrative that he acts as some sort of representative of the Republican Party rather than his own party and country. Such self-refuting nonsense doesn’t generally need to be dignified with attention. But the latest version represents a despicable smear that demands a response.

Video Review of “United in Hate”

Why Jamie Glazov’s analysis of the Left’s romance with Islam is more urgent than ever.
by Dale Brown
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dale-brown/video-review-of-united-in-hate/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/jamie-glazov/measuring-obama-vs-putin-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the editor of Frontpage’s blog, The Point.

Daniel came on the show to discuss Measuring Obama vs. Putin, analyzing who is stronger — and who is more afraid of whom (starting at 32:15 mark). The discussion occurred within a focus on The Real Meaning of ‘Allahu Akbar’.

Daniel also shed light on Why Jihadists Lust for Their Own Death, How Islam is Different, Why Obama is Helping Iran Get the Bomb, Behind the Scenes of Obama’s War on Israel, and much, much more.

“This is a testament to when we are not vigilant in defense of human rights what can happen. Obviously, for an African-American president, to be able to visit this site gives me even greater motivation in terms of human rights around the world.”

—- President Obama, after his 2013 visit in Senegal to a former slave fort used in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

As uplifting as these words may sound, President Obama’s “motivation” and vigilance “in defense of human rights around the world,” at least in regard to the enslavement of black Africans, apparently ends with the now defunct Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For once again, the Obama administration has shamefully failed to raise a loud voice against the persecution and imprisonment of anti-slavery activists in the world’s worst slave state, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.

The United Nations (UN) human rights office earlier this month called for a review of the conviction of a remarkable and fearless Mauritanian anti-slavery activist, Biram Ould Dah Abeid, who, like Obama’s Kenyan relatives, is black African. Biram and two others were sentenced to two years in prison last January, according to Amnesty International (AI), for having staged a demonstration last November “to raise the awareness about land rights for people of slave descent (land slavery).”