RUTHFULLY YOURS

Canadian lawyer William Schabas was forced to resign as chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s “independent” inquiry on the Gaza war Monday after it was discovered he had been paid to provide legal advice to the PLO as recently as 2012. In one fell swoop, Schabas has managed to embarrass and disgrace not only himself, but the whole UN apparatus that appointed and promoted him.

During the Gaza War last summer, Palestinian rockets deliberately targeted Israel’s civilian population, in many cases having been launched from Palestinian civilian sites – both archetypal war crimes. The response of the UN Human Rights Council was to pursue Israel for war crimes for protecting its citizens from Palestinian war crimes.

Though the Human Rights Council is the UN’s top human rights body, it has no human rights conditions for membership. So the vote in favour of creating the “inquiry” on July 23, 2014 saw the likes of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates vote in favour, and the United States and European Union states either vote against or abstain.

Schabas apparently considered this an auspicious sign of a desirable human rights job. He agreed to Chair a three-person team appointed by the Council President, in consultation with Council members and the Palestinians.

Schabas also failed to discern any red flags in the mandate given the “independent” inquiry by the Council. The inquiry was “…to investigate all violations… in the Occupied Palestinian Territory…in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014…” Violations of law “in” Israeli territory – like 3,659 impact sites of rockets and mortars in Israel over a mere 50 days, and 14 terror tunnels built from Gaza with openings into Israel – were somehow omitted.

June 13, 2014 was highlighted by the Council because Palestinian terrorists kidnapped (and later murdered) three Israeli teenagers on June 12, 2014 – in a blatant effort to invert cause and effect. Though the Council resolution had no trouble detailing and “deploring” Israel’s “grave violations of the human rights of the Palestinian civilian population,” it made no mention at all of “Hamas” or the terror tunnels.

Why do Western politicians and the news media refuse to acknowledge that Islam as it is practiced by ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban and Boko Haram is Islam at its essence and all that it can be: brutal, destructive, nihilistic, and anti-life? Liberalism, multiculturalism, and pragmatism are some of the ingredients of Western suicide.

At the end of my last column, “Not Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals,” in which I distinguish between Saul Alinsky’s manual for “community organizing” against selected local targets in the economic and cultural realms, and Takuan’s “Laws” for “governing” the national “community” once the “radicals” have entrenched themselves in political power and have become the authoritarian establishment, I noted:

Seiyo’s laws are presented as abstractions [initially]. I have no argument with them except for their unfamiliar nomenclature. It has been my philosophy of political and cultural commentary to prefer the concrete over the abstract. All abstract hypotheses are founded on concretes, arguing from the particulars to the general. I think that is the best way to communicate the power of ideas. If there are no concretes or particulars to instance, then no matter how broad the abstraction, there is no idea to communicate, and no abstraction to contemplate or reach. Seiyo provides concretes in Part I as an overture to Part II.

Boko Haram has announced its establishment of a caliphate and continues in its slaughter of thousands of Nigerians and its kidnapping of young women for use as sex slaves. Not a word of protest from American campuses.

The death toll in Syria is currently 70,000 murdered with over 2.2 million refugees, half of whom are children, who have fled to detainee camps in any neighboring country that will harbor them. American students are unfazed.

ISIL has announced its caliphate and has captured increasing territory in Syria and Iraq while attaining professional mastery in filming the barbaric beheadings and conflagrations which are now a staple of American t.v. news. They have successfully combined the dark ages with the most up to date cyber-access. College kids have no comment.

What has engaged these morally dormant minds? Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and the pseudo-accusation of its apartheid – the excuse for the Boycott/Divest/Sanction Movement , energized by Arab money, leftist propaganda and radical student groups that openly endorse Hamas, the terrorist organization that calls for the murder of Jews worldwide. In the latest you-tube to show the degradation of acceptable standards of behavior at the University of California campuses, we can see the demonstration at U.C. Davis by Palestinian students shouting Allahu Akbar after a Jewish protest of the Student Body vote to boycott Israel. They were joined by the support of graduate students represented by the UAW Local 2865, the first labor union in the U.S. to make such a move, one that is in opposition to the International Auto Workers Union which disapproves of BDS. To emphasize their zeal, a Jewish fraternity house was defaced by a swastika to which the university’s reaction was to offer support and counsel to the members of the fraternity.

The late Martin Gilbert brought to his work a classic devotion to accuracy and original sources.

In summer 1940, as war raged, the British government sent several hundred children, including 3-year-old Martin Gilbert, to safety in Canada. The children berthed aboard the Duchess of Bedford in a 50-ship convoy, and after the destroyer escort turned back, the convoy was attacked by the Germans and five ships sank.

The Duchess sailed on safely, past the icebergs of Labrador, “marvelous for children to behold [and] among my first memories,” Gilbert wrote. Soon after, another boat with 77 children evacuees was sunk by the Germans, drowning them all, and the scheme was abandoned.

Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq.” Those were among the words the late Chris Kyle, of “American Sniper” fame, used to describe the enemy he and fellow veterans of the Iraq war faced. After seeing images this week of Islamic State jihadists murdering a caged Jordanian pilot by burning him alive, can there be any real doubt that Kyle was right?

We say this as a corner of liberal America has fallen over itself denouncing Clint Eastwood ’s blockbuster biopic of Kyle, who was killed in 2013 by a deranged Marine veteran. HBO’s Bill Maher called him a “psychopath patriot,” and other Hollywood action heroes like Michael Moore have weighed in similarly. Their view is that Kyle must have been inhumane since he killed scores of enemy fighters without being burdened by a guilty conscience.

Courts New Controversy on a State Visit to China When She Mocks Chinese Pronunciation

BUENOS AIRES—President Cristina Kirchner , under pressure here over the case of a dead Argentine prosecutor, courted new controversy on a state visit to China on Wednesday when she mocked Chinese accents.

Mrs. Kirchner, who is in China trying to drum up investment in infrastructure projects, sent out a tweet in which she swapped L’s for R’s in the Spanish words “petróleo and arroz”—petroleum and rice—to caricature a Chinese accent in Spanish.

American Sniper, the movie based on Chris Kyle’s book of the same name, depicts the brotherhood of soldiers, the adrenalin mixture of fear and bravery that accompanies every soldier in combat and the fateful decisions they must make instantaneously. The movie also covers the difficulties of subsequently re-entering civilian life – what is clinically termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It is the gripping story of Chris Kyle’s eight years as a SEAL and his four deployments to Iraq between 2003 and 2009. There is nothing political in the story, and that is what has upset so many on the Left. It does not glorify war, but it does not condemn it. It is agnostic. It is the story of a man, a soldier and how he dealt with the demons that tormented him – not appropriately, according to the Left.

I am not a movie person; so only reluctantly did I let my wife drag me to see American Sniper last week; though I admit to having been intrigued by negative reviews from those who had not seen it, but were not shy about their criticisms. For example, former Vermont governor and Presidential candidate Howard “The Screamer” Dean admitted to not having seen the movie, yet claimed it appealed to “angry Tea-partiers.” He later apologized to the nation’s veterans, but couldn’t resist taking another jab at the “thousands of right-wing nut jobs” who had twittered him.

We all care about the planet, but the facts show that the climate just hasn’t warmed significantly in the last 100 years. That is not something to be welcomed by the institutions and assorted freeloaders aboard the Great Green Gravy Train

The fanfare in the latest headlines? ‘2014 the hottest year on record’! They say that it was the hottest year since records began in 1880. The Daily Mail said it was definite proof that the earth was warming ‘very quickly’. The BBC went one better, saying that 18th Century data shows that it was the hottest year in about the last 250.

And another press report said that nine of the hottest years have occurred in the last 10, which is probably true if you only start in 2004. Never mind that the report was about world climate change in which Britain is an insignificant player.

And the short riposte to this is in the spherical plural.

Most climate scientists accept that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has some warming effect on Earth’s climate, but undisputed science shows that its direct effect is tiny and declines dramatically as carbon dioxide levels rise.

The climate models produce scary warming forecasts by assuming “positive feedbacks”. This is the basis of their claims that man’s production of this harmless gas-of-life is pushing Earth towards an irreversible temperature tipping point.

Their main feedback assumption, expressed simply, goes like this: more carbon dioxide produces surface warming, which causes more evaporation from the oceans, which increases water vapour in the atmosphere, which increases greenhouse warming, which causes more evaporation, and so on, and on.

As a senator, candidate or hired speaker, Clinton has spared no expense on travel.

Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney each finished second in their party’s primaries when they ran for president in 2008, but they took dramatically different routes to arrive at the same result — literally, in a way.

A deeper look into the candidates’ campaign expenditures reveals that Clinton spent more than nine times as much as Romney did on private jets during the 2008 race.

An analysis of public documents by National Review Online shows that Clinton took more than $19.2 million worth of private flights during the primaries before dropping out when then-senator Barack Obama finally built an insurmountable lead. Romney, who ultimately finished second in the primaries to Senator John McCain, spent just over $2.2 million on private-plane travel.