RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

During the 51st Munich Security Conference last weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was busy conducting one-on-one “hallway diplomacy” with a number of his counterparts, among them U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz.

What emerged from these meetings was renewed optimism on the part of the West that a deal with the Islamic republic was imminent.

Kerry reported back to his boss in the White House that everything was under control: All the P5+1 powers (the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and Germany) would have to do is accept the Iranian regime’s assertion that its nuclear program is peaceful, and an agreement could be signed well before the July deadline.

Kurz indicated that Austria would be happy to hold the next round of talks in Vienna, telling reporters that his government was satisfied with all the previous ones that have taken place there.

US President Barack Obama is mainstreaming anti-Semitism in America.

This week, apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated. And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.

Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to the jihadists who committed last month’s massacres in Paris as “a bunch of violent vicious zealots,” who “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist at Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just “a bunch of folks in a deli,” presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese sandwiches.

In full-page ad in N.Y. Times and Washington Post, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor supports Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress “on the catastrophic danger of a nuclear Iran”

Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel is lending his support to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to Congress on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program.

Popular New Jersey Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach announced on Thursday he would place a full-page advertisements in two of the leading U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, featuring Wiesel’s endorsement of Netanyahu’s speech.

Blindsided by the invitation that Republicans in Congress extended to Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama has declined to meet the Israeli leader, citing what he has said is U.S. protocol not to meet world leaders before national elections. Israeli elections are scheduled for March 17, two weeks after the slated speech.

The advertisement quotes Wiesel as saying he plans to attend Netanyahu’s address “on the catastrophic danger of a nuclear Iran.” Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986, Wiesel asks Obama and others in the ad: “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?”

Obama changes the subject
It has become fairly clear to anyone who takes the time to examine the facts, that the invitation by House Speaker John Boehner to Prime Minister Bienjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress was neither a breach of established protocol, nor any kind of snub or slap in the face. The process was, in fact, identical to what occurred the last time Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2011 — the speaker informed the White House, hearing no objection, he then invited Netanyahu. Of course, as soon as the invite became public this time around, all hell broke loose.

The extremely nasty White House propaganda campaign directed against John Boehner, but even more at Israel and its Prime Minister, took three forms. The first argument was that the White House had not been informed. This was blatantly false, and the New York Times, which could not have been more excited to highlight the growing tension between the two countries (all Netanyahu and Boehner’s fault of course), was forced to issue a correction on its initial reports stating the White House had not been informed. Of course, the news source of record then went right back to misreporting the chain of events soon thereafter. It is still widely believed that Boehner disrespected the president, and surprised him with the invitation, though this is not what happened. The White House is well aware it is nonsense. Score one for the president and his propagandists.

Remembering the Shanghai Ghetto, Home to 20,000 Jewish Refugees
They arrived soon after Hitler’s rise to power, only to be imprisoned by Japan
Last week, JTA reported that the neighborhood in Shanghai that was home to approximately 20,000 Jewish refugees during World War II may be added to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.
While the Nazi-fleeing refugees who settled in Shanghai certainly fared better than the family and friends they left behind in Europe, life in the so-called “Pearl of the Orient” was nonetheless turbulent.
Things in Shanghai looked bright initially, when the first German Jewish refugees, many of them doctors and dentists, arrived soon after Hitler’s rise to power. The local community was apparently so grateful for the professional skills these refugees brought that JTA headlined a 1934 article “German Jewish doctors cause China to be grateful to the Nazis.”
In that article, JTA reported that an American journalist working in China said approximately 100 Jewish doctors had set up practices in Shanghai:
… during the short time they have lived in the city they have come to be regarded as “Hitler’s gift to the Far East” by virtue of the medical skill they have contributed to a territory which has long suffered from inadequate medical attention.

Terrorism is NOT an existential threat, according to Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security advisor, and according to the new White House national security strategy unveiled on Friday, February 6, 2015. Nor does the United States face any other threats to its existence, according to the White House, except for “climate change.”

Rice explained, “Too often, what’s missing here in Washington is a sense of perspective. Yes, there is a lot going on. Still, while the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World War II or during the Cold War.”

Polling indicates as many as one-third of Americans believe Rice and the White House, when in reality the U.S. faces existential threats of greater severity than World War II or the Cold War from terrorists, Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea.

President Obama has sent Congress a proposed Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the Islamic State, and it’s not immediately clear why. His administration says it already has said authority via at least three different channels. Indeed, although the president’s proposal contains limits, he would still have ample legal authority to do whatever he wants against the Islamic State.

So why is he proposing this legislation at all? Because it would constrain our politically realistic options in the war against the Islamic State and Islamism in general, and he wants a congressional imprimatur for waging a constrained war.

An instructive example of his motivations is the bill’s repeal of the 2002 authorization for the use of force in Iraq. The president’s declaration of the end of our war did not, obviously, mark the end of said war.

The great Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry tries to explain to liberals that, among Republicans, moderate does not mean smart and conservative does not mean dumb. Fair enough, but our bigger problem is not that liberal buy into that dichotomy. It is that Republican elites (both establishment and insurgent) act like they agree with the liberals.

I’m just not that worried about liberals thinking conservatives are dumb. Such an attitude has social and individual costs, but it also weakens the American left. Liberals thought Reagan was stupid and ignorant. How did that work out for Reagan? Pretty good. Pat Brown, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale never knew (and never came close to understanding) what hit them.

The amazing muroid hind anatomy of Rattus norvegicus may be the product of eons of mind-bendingly complex Darwinian refinement, but I still don’t give a rat’s ass what Scott Walker thinks about evolution.

And neither does anybody else. Not really.

Governor Walker, making the rounds in London as part of his plan to relocate from Madison to Washington — the presidency is a roundabout affair — was asked whether he “believes in” evolution. “Believes in” is key language — nobody ever asks a politician whether he knows anything about evolution. It is a safe bet that Walker, famously a college dropout, has not been undertaking graduate-level studies of evolution in his spare time, assuming he has any time at all left over from knocking the stuffing out of Wisconsin’s thuggish Democrat-run public-sector unions and triumphing over the Gestapo-style “John Doe” inquisition launched against him by an unethical Democrat-run prosecutor’s office — and winning three elections in four years. Between kicking ass and taking names, Scott Walker probably does not have a great deal of time left over for biology.

‘Kick it while it’s down,” say proponents of fossil-fuel divestment. That’s the new slogan, drilled and refined recently in the wake of plunging oil prices. Since fracking matured to economic competitiveness, the price of oil has been cut in half. In the last six months, the S&P 500 Energy Index has lost more than 20 percent of its value.

Today kicks off Global Divestment Day, a two-day climate-action extravaganza at colleges, universities, city halls, and public parks. At Rutgers, students are staging an “oil spill die-in.” Swarthmore students have arranged a divestment teach-in. Grandparents will gather at a hospital in Wisconsin, asking the health-care center to “divest for a grandkid.” Smith students have planned a Valentine’s Day party asking the college to “break up with fossil fuels.” One theater in Belgium will host an “action speed-dating event” for people to find fellow “rebel friends” to join in civil disobedience later that evening.