RUTHFULLY YOURS

What do “right” and “left” mean in the Jewish world when it comes to Israel?

“Right” means the view that Israel has no choice but to cope with hostility from the Arab and Muslim world, and from Europe, that it does not cause except by existing, along with criticisms and pressures from U.S. administrations that are excessive and unfair. “Left” means the view that Israel itself does much to cause the hostility, criticisms, and pressures, and could become a much more accepted country by correcting its behavior.

In the current Israeli election campaign, the left-wing parties—mainly Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni’s Labor/Hatnuah or “Zionist Camp” and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid—have been sounding the theme that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has caused Israel’s “isolation” and has soured relations with the United States, creating a rift for which, in their reading, President Barack Obama is blameless.

Although Labor/Hatnuah and Yesh Atid also harp on the theme of Israel’s high housing and food prices, so far they’ve been long on populist complaints and short on coherent proposals for remedies. Public discourse on economic issues in Israel rarely goes beyond slogans—in part because, in the end, almost invariably, security issues take precedence.

The bloodthirsty barbarity of ISIS has reached a new low. A video released by the Islamic terror group shows captured Jordanian pilot, First Lt. Moaz al-Kasasbeh, inside a cage. A trail of lit gasoline eventually engulfs him in flame, burning him alive.

Yesterday, this exercise in brute savagery was confirmed by the Jordanian government. They revealed that al-Kasasbeh was killed more than a month ago on Jan. 3, less than two weeks after his F-16 fighter jet went down over northern Syria on Dec. 24.

This reality put a full stop on ISIS’s attempt to exchange al-Kasasbeh and remaining Japanese hostage Kenji Goto for Sajida al-Rishawi, an Iraqi women who worked for al Qaeda. Al-Rishawi spent her honeymoon planning a 2005 terrorist attack ultimately carried out by her husband, who killed 27 guests at a Jordanian wedding when he detonated an explosive vest he was wearing. Al-Rishawi has spent the last nine years in self-imposed solitary confinement in Jordan’s Juweidah Women’s Prison. ISIS demanded her release, using an audio clip from Goto to deliver the message. “This is a voice message I’ve been told to send to you,” Goto stated. “If Sajida al Rishawi is not ready for exchange for my life at the Turkish border by Thursday sunset, 29th of January, Mosul time, the Jordanian pilot Muadh al Kasasbeh will be killed immediately.”

Likely Presidential Candidate Proposes a $300 Million Cut to State’s University System

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011 fight with public-sector unions sparked huge protests—and elevated him into a national figure in conservative politics. Now, as he eyes a run for president, he is targeting another group on the public payroll: university professors.

Mr. Walker, a Republican, has proposed a two-year tuition freeze and a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System’s budget—about a 13% drop next year from current funding levels. Under the plan, Mr. Walker would shift control of the university system from the state to a new independent authority. He has also said that he thinks faculty needs to work harder.

The Constitution’s various provisions protecting individual liberty must at times give way to government control in response to health hazards.

From legal scholar Richard A. Epstein ’s “Measles: Misinformation Gone Viral” for the Hoover Institutiononline,

This entire episode was fueled by fraudulent studies published by Dr. Andrew Wakefiel d in 1998 in Lancet magazine, which twelve years later the journal eventually retracted, but only after much of the damage was done. Those studies, which had been funded in part by plaintiffs’ lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, purported to find a (nonexistent) link between vaccines that were manufactured using a mercury-based compound, Thimerosal, and autism. Unfortunately, Lancet’s forthright retraction of the article did not quell the uneasiness about vaccines in either Britain or the United States. Indeed, it may well have fueled populist concerns of an ever-wider conspiracy among establishment figures. . . .

The current struggles over sound vaccine policy raise a tension between public health on the one hand and competing versions of individual liberty on the other. This conflict was, if anything, more acute a century ago when infectious diseases cut a wide path for which vaccines and other treatments provided only a limited response. The main constitutional lens through which these issues were viewed at the time was one of police power. This all-pervasive notion has no explicit textual authorization in the Constitution. But a moment’s reflection makes it clear that the Constitution’s various provisions protecting individual liberty must at times give way to government control in response to health hazards.

On Tuesday we rapped Chris Christie for his odd doubts about public vaccines amid a dangerous outbreak of measles in California. But it seems this is something of an epidemic among potential GOP presidential candidates, so perhaps it’s time for some facts about science, liberty and public health.

Rand Paul joined the vaccine follies Monday in an interview with CNBC. While acknowledging vaccines are a “medical breakthrough” and it is a “great idea” to raise “public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids,” Mr. Paul then gave credence to the conspiracy theories that have frightened parents. He suggested there is a health concern in giving “five and six vaccines all at one time” and explained that he had delayed his own child’s immunizations.

In an editorial titled “Reckless Rejection of the Measles Vaccine,” the Times argues that it is “shockingly irresponsible” for “misguided parents to put other children and adults at risk of catching measles from their unvaccinated children. Public officials and pediatricians need to restrict where unvaccinated children are allowed to go if the parents refuse to do so.” (NYT 2/3/15) The total number of people infected this year is 102 in the 14 states that have reported outbreaks.

Compare this to the Times’ attitude towards quarantining health care workers returning from ebola-stricken countries in Africa. In that case, the individual’s rights trumped the rights of other children and adults who might have come in contact with someone incubating and spreading a potentially fatal disease. And compare the concern for public safety with the information regarding HIV/AIDS a few years back. In 2008, the Times reported that HIV was spreading in NYC at three times the national rate. 4,762 New Yorkers contracted it in 2006, with gay minority men leading the population at risk; for the population under 30, 77% were Black or Hispanic (NYT 8/27/08). Yet, a few years later, the Times editorial urges that Gay Men Should Be Allowed to Give Blood (11/27/14) They protest that the rules governing blood donations date back to the 1980’s when little was understood about how the virus spreads. Although it is true that significant progress has been made in managing HIV, there is as yet, no cure for the virus. The Times’ objection to the F.D.A’s consideration of a one-year deferral instead of a total ban is that it stigmatizes gay men as well as limiting the pool of donors.

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims are peaceful.

Employing the Islamic device of teqiyyah (the Koranic requirement upon Muslims to be deliberately deceptive in what they say to non-Muslims) the president predictably spewed this inversion of the truth to the Crescent News Network’s prime enabler, Fareed Zakaria.

The tragic truth is that what Barack Hussein Obama says is 99.9% illusion or cynical deception. We are all still waiting for that mythical 99.9% of Muslims to take to the streets to denounce the jihadists, terrorists and fellow Muslims who espouse violence and a culture of death. But don’t hold your breath.

As we approach the dreaded tax filing deadline of April 15th, many Americans are ill-prepared for the news they are going to receive from their tax preparers or tax preparation software. Between three and six million people are going to be affected by penalties, an “Individual Shared Responsibility Payment,” associated with the Affordable Care Act. And most of those affected have no idea how much financial pain they are going to feel.

When the Obama Administration was selling Obamacare to the American people – you remember, “It’s not a tax,” “If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it,” “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it,” etc. – they alluded to the existence of penalties for those Americans who did not purchase ACA compliant health insurance. The amount for the first year non-compliance penalty was routinely quoted as $95. For many the choice was clear: keep the non-compliant health insurance, pay the $95 penalty (read: non-compliance tax), and hope that a Republican-led Congress would affect relief for the taxpayer as soon as they took control in Washington, DC.

Scott Walker is the new flavor of the week, the new dish on the Republican menu. He brought crowds to their feet in Iowa over the weekend and placed first in an important regional poll to identify favorites for 2016.

For someone derided by the smart guys as dull and unexciting, the governor of Wisconsin is suddenly the flash and splash of midwinter. Such flash and splash, synthetic by definition, is usually the work of pundits dulled by the lethargy of January, the most useless of the months, eager to find something “new and entirely different.”

But January ennui (pundits suffering lassitude of their own always often throw in something French in the third paragraph) sometimes uncovers the real thing, and Mr. Walker looks like authentic. Voters, both Republican and Democrat, seem to be bored with the pale and stale, the old and not so bold. Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee and the gang, worthies all, are from a movie sent from Netflix. Hillary Clinton, the freshest face the Democrats can find, only reminds everyone of scandals, some more sordid than others, from the previous century.

Hijab: from privacy to slavery

What began as the seventh century Bedouin woman’s attempt at privacy and protection from the desert has become a veil symbolic of a woman’s indignity and servitude. As Nonie Darwish so aptly explained in her book, Cruel and Usual Punishment, women have come to represent the totality of evil and inferiority in Islamic teaching.

Considered lacking in intelligence and religion, women are seen as half the worth of men in a Shari’a court; in the case of rape, her accusation has no worth without four witnesses. Women may be raped for wearing “indecent” clothing, and beaten by their husbands for leaving the house unaccompanied by a male relative. If her behavior further irritates, he may imprison her without food and clothing, and arrange for stoning until dead. In this despotic society, women bear the honor of the male, so that girls and women may be killed by a father who fears his esteem has been sullied.