RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democrats may be ready for Hillary, but nothing is inevitable for the GOP.

Thoughts on the 2016 presidential primaries:

No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it is weird and disturbing.

Republicans are the action, and will draw all the lightning. A read on where the base—huge, broad and varied, including but not limited to attendees of this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference—is:

Republicans this year are not looking for Reagan. They’re looking for Churchill. They’re looking for the guy who knows the war is already here, not the guy who knows the war can be averted if we defeat the guys who would wage it. What is “the war”? Everything from scarily sluggish economic growth to long-term liabilities and deficits; from the melting away of the post-World-War-II order to the Mideast to domestic terrorism. Every four years there is frustration and argument; this year there is urgency.

Nearly two months have passed since the global outpouring of support for the murdered staffers of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Now those paeans to freedom of speech have disappeared down the same media black hole as the “bring back our girls” campaign protesting the kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian girls by the jihadist gang Boko Haram. This substitution of sentimental bluster and empty threats for meaningful action is consistent with decades of Europe’s intimidation by Muslim criminals, duplicitous “religious leaders,” and violent jihadists. The “Je suis Charlie” slogan should now be “Je suis Charlie, tendance Brown”––“I am Charlie, Brown variety.”

In one of Peanuts’ favorite running gags, Charlie Brown is baited into kicking a football held by the malignant Lucy, only to have her snatch away the ball at the last minute and send the hapless chump flying. This dynamic has defined the West’s relations with the Islamic world since the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization initiated the modern age of terrorism in the 60s. Indeed, dealing with the Palestinian Arabs has been an endless repeat of this bait-and-switch. From Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas, the “two-state solution” and “Palestinian national homeland” and “two nations living side-by-side in peace” have been the bait luring Europeans and Americans into demonizing Israel, pouring money into corrupt Palestinian Arab terrorist fronts, and making concessions to a never-ending series of escalating demands, all so the West can achieve the mythic “final peace agreement” that the Arabs have repeatedly demonstrated they have no interest in.

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) was established in 2005, at the initiative of former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan and co-sponsored by the Governments of Spain and Turkey. Its stated vision is to build “mutual respect among peoples of different cultural and religious identities, highlighting the will of the world’s majority to reject extremism and embrace diversity.”

H.E. Mr. Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, a high-ranking diplomat from Qatar, assumed the post of UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations in 2013.

Mr. Nasser spoke to the press at UN headquarters in New York on February 24th. He discussed the challenge of terrorism and extremism, including their allure to marginalized youth in the Middle East and the West. He emphasized the need to get at the “root causes” of this scourge, amongst which he included the lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, and lack of good governance and protection of human rights. He said that military force will not be enough to defeat ISIS and other terrorist groups. More importantly, he declared, we must engage in “the battle of ideas.”

If you want to infuriate a liberal, question his patriotism. He’ll sneer, mock and ridicule the question. And then when he is up against the wall, he will mumble that the real patriots don’t need to wear flag pins because they covertly perform their patriotism in the dead of night when no one is looking.

He may even trot out that fake Jefferson quote about dissent being the highest form of patriotism. No, Teddy Roosevelt didn’t say it either. He did however say that “Patriotism means to stand by the country… It does not mean to stand by the president… save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.” And he meant it, ruthlessly attacking Woodrow Wilson until Democratic Senator William J. Stone called the former president “the most seditious man of consequence in America”.

Dissent stopped being patriotic the very second that Obama entered the Oval Office. Suddenly it became unspeakable treason and racist sedition.

Prostitution may be the world’s oldest profession, but anti-Semitism is probably the world’s oldest bigotry. It’s come and gone and come and gone and then come and gone again since the days of the pharaohs.

Well, maybe it was never really gone, but, like cancer, it was in remission. Born at the end of World War II, I was one of those lucky Jews to be born in a period of remission as never before seen, particularly in the United States.

It’s over. And how it’s over. You don’t need a poll to tell you that, but a new one [1] just conducted by Trinity College and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law tells us that 54 percent of self-identified Jewish students in 55 college across the country experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism during the 2013-2014 school year. Whoa! Welcome to the University of Berlin.

All is not quiet on the northern front between Israel and Syria/Lebanon.

The recent Hezbollah attack on an Israel Defense Forces convoy in the Har Dov area close to Israel’s border with Lebanon, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed, was the latest move in a dangerous and high stakes game that is now underway on Israel’s northern frontier. Israel and Hezbollah are not the only players. The Islamic Republic of Iran, which the U.S. defines as the leading state-sponsor of terrorism, is also a key presence as Hezbollah’s strategic partner.

The attack at Har Dov was the second move by Iran/Hezbollah in response to the Israeli operation on the Syrian Golan Heights on January 18th. In the Israeli operation, a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer, Mohammed Allahdadi, was killed, as was Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of a famous Hezbollah commander.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had an offer for President Obama at today’s Conservative Political Action Conference.

“I’ve got a deal for you,” Jindal said in his early evening speech while talking about Obama’s references to the Crusades. “I’ll keep an eye out for the medieval Christians. Why don’t you do your job and go after the Islamic terrorists?”

The potential 2016 candidate referenced his recent trip to London, where he irked critics by citing no-go zones in Muslim neighborhoods and called out clerics for not doing enough to stop extremism. “They didn’t like it,” the governor said, adding that he stressed Islamic extremists aren’t martyrs but “these individuals are going to go straight to hell exactly where they belong.”

Jindal also took issue with recent words from the State Department about the nature of the ISIS fight. “How have we won victory in any war other than killing our way to victory?” he said.

“We don’t need a war on international poverty; we need a war on the evil that is radical Islamic terrorism,” he said.

With the Republican surrender on President Obama’s amnesty decree that I predicted over a month ago now taking shape, an appeal to duty may be futile. Nevertheless, it is still worth being blunt about this. The Beltway GOP’s retreat would be a profound dereliction of duty – specifically, the duty that Congress owes to the states.

The federal government, very much including Republican lawmakers and conservative judges, has systematically disarmed the states of their capacity for self-defense. The power to defend one’s territory – including the power to remove aliens who have no legal right to be present – is an ineliminable component of sovereignty. The preservation of state sovereignty, in turn, is part of the core guarantee that induced the states to ratify the Constitution.

Dissenters from approved thinking are the subject of menacing inquiries. Let the climate inquisition begin. The ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva of Arizona, has written to seven universities about seven researchers who harbor impure thoughts about climate change. One of the targets is Steven Hayward, an author and academic now at Pepperdine University. As Hayward puts it, the spirit of the inquiry is, “Are you now or have you ever been a climate skeptic?” Grijalva’s letters were prompted by the revelation that Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a skeptic, didn’t adequately disclose support for his research from energy interests.

Soon’s lapse aside, the assumption of Grijalva’s fishing expedition is that anyone who questions global-warming orthodoxy is a greedy tool of Big Oil and must be harried in the name of planetary justice and survival. Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself. In fact, for people who claim to champion science, they have the least scientific temperament imaginable. Their attitude owes more to Trofim Lysenko, the high priest of the Soviet Union’s politicized science, than, say, to Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, whose work was shunned by Lysenko for ideological reasons. Consider the plight of Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder, who has done work on extreme weather.

There’s nothing unpatriotic about challenging Obama on Iran. The Obama administration values a future relationship with Iran more than it values the historic relationship it has with Israel. Unless there’s a reversal in the reported deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, all the superficial talk about this extraordinary friendship between Israel and the United States isn’t going to mean much. And the histrionics surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech in front of a joint session of Congress only confirm that there are plenty of people who are happy about it.

First, Americans were supposed to be outraged because Netanyahu engaged in a breach of protocol. Then we were supposed to be outraged because the speech would be given too close to the upcoming Israeli elections. (Senator Tim Kaine [D., Va.] is still using this excuse for his own boycott.) But if the Israeli elections — and President Barack Obama has done about everything possible to weaken Netanyahu’s position — are so problematic, then the controversy should be centered on the behavior of the prime minister, not the substance of his argument. But that’s not the case, is it? Administration mouthpieces warn us that the once-special relationship between the nations will collapse under the weight of a single speech — and some of those warnings have come with a hint of anticipation.