RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel’s reported strike January 18 on a joint Iranian-Hezbollah convoy driving on the Syrian Golan Heights was one of the most strategically significant events to have occurred in Israel’s neighborhood in recent months. Its significance lies both in what it accomplished operationally and what it exposed.

From what been published to date about the identities of those killed in the strike, it is clear that in one fell swoop the air force decapitated the Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria.

The head of Hezbollah’s operations in Syria, the head of its liaison with Iran, and Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah’s longtime operational commander Imad Mughniyeh who was killed by Israel in Damascus in 2008, were killed. The younger Mughniyeh reportedly served as commander of Hezbollah forces along the Syrian-Israeli border.
According to a report by Brig.-Gen. (res.) Shimon Shapira, a Hezbollah expert from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Iranian losses included three generals. Brig.- Gen. Mohammed Alladadi was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps liaison officer to Hezbollah and to Syrian intelligence. He was also in charge of weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. Gen. Ali Tabatabai was the IRGC commander in the Golan Heights and, according to Shapira, an additional general, known only as Assadi, “was, in all likelihood, the commander of Iranian expeditionary forces in Lebanon.”

More than forty years ago, in a little-remembered column in National Review, James Burnham, the former Trotskyist turned Cold War analyst, focused his insightful gaze upon the rise of radical Islam and the threat it posed to the world. The genesis of the column, which appeared in the November 8, 1974 issue of the magazine, was Arab use of the oil weapon, but Burnham sensed larger forces—religious, ideological, demographic, and geopolitical—at work.

“Islam,” he wrote in words that today might result in death threats or worse, “is a militant religion in the earthly as well as the spiritual sense.” According to the Koran, Burnham noted, “[i]t is the will of Allah that all men should acknowledge Him, should be under the temporary sway of the descendants of Mohammed, and made subject to the laws of the Koran.” He continued:

In its union of a universal earthly goal (global Islam),
totalist system of belief, and correlated army of believers,
Islam is analogous to modern Communism. In the jihad,
the holy war to fulfill Allah’s will that is suspended from
time to time but never ended until completed, these true
believers who die are translated at once to Paradise.

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.

He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.

His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.

“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will

“not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

Holocaust and Hezbollah reminders
On Tuesday, the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincided this year with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. One response to this significant anniversary was a tweet posted by BBC One’s “The Big Questions.”

“Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?” it asked.

Given the steep rise in European anti-Semitism and global jihadist terrorism — as well as a recent study indicating that a quarter of young British Jews believe another Holocaust will occur during their lifetimes — the repugnant rhetorical question should have been worded differently.

“Is it the time coming to lay the last Holocaust to rest and prepare for the next one?” would have been far more apt.

On the same day, Hezbollah terrorists, backed by Iran, launched four rockets into Israel from Syria. Two of these exploded in the Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces responded with artillery fire, while the Israeli government placed the north of the country on high alert. It was assumed that this incident was but a taste of what Iran had in store for the Jewish state, in the wake of a drone strike in Syria on Jan. 19, during which six Hezbollah terrorists and an Iranian general were killed.

Communities — cities — need Catholic schools. Why? What is to be done in an environment when the closing of Catholic elementary and secondary schools have big cities and small towns alike? In their book Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Garnett document the importance of the schools and the damage done by their disappearance. It’s a sobering, encouraging, and challenging read. Kathryn Jean Lopez: What are the chief ways a neighborhood suffers when a school disappears?

Margaret F. Brinig: When a Catholic school closes, entire neighborhoods suffer. That is, we found that the negative effects of school closures are experienced not just by the members of a school community. What we can demonstrate statistically is that after a Catholic school closes, the “social capital” — the web of connections and trust between people — in the neighborhood declines. People are less likely to feel that their neighbors will help them shovel if it snows, keep an eye on children playing outside, unite for a community project, and so forth.

When they are less likely to feel trust and bonding to one another, eventually other bad things start to happen, too — there are more signs of disorder, like cigarette butts or broken bottles on the sidewalk or in the streets, more groups loitering on street corners, more prostitution, and so forth. Ultimately there’s more crime. Although we study a time when crime was declining across the U.S., we found that crime declines more slowly in neighborhoods, in Chicago and in Philadelphia, that lost Catholic schools. Between 1995 and 2005 in Chicago, serious crime declined 25 percent citywide but only 17 percent in police beats that lost Catholic schools.

The Saudis are sort of allies, but he treats them like best friends.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Secretary of State John Kerry argued that although extremists may cite Islam as a justification for terrorism, the world should refrain from using the term “Islamic radicals.” Extremism, Kerry maintained, is apart from Islam, and the millions who support or engage in violence in its name are driven by “criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill seeking, and other factors.”

This soothing, half-baked philosophy is cant in the Obama administration. So when the Islamic State took credit for the beheading of Japanese hostage Haruna Yukawa, it shouldn’t have been surprising that the most important thing Rick Stengel, undersecretary of state for happy thoughts, could think to tweet to his followers was that there was “nothing religious about it.”

We’ve gone from incessantly offering (appropriate) distinctions among factions of Islam to fantasizing that terrorists are a bunch of shiftless, underprivileged adrenaline junkies with no particular philosophy at all. Religion is an organized collection of beliefs that makes sense of existence. Under no definition of “faith” is there a stipulation that it must be devoid of any violence. And whether or not violence used in Islam is a distortion of the faith is for people of that religion to work out for themselves.

Have you heard about the secret conspiracy between the Saudis and the White House? I haven’t either, probably because there isn’t one. But events are playing out exactly as one would expect if such a conspiracy existed.

With no help from Barack Obama, the U.S. has launched an energy revolution, becoming the world’s leading oil and natural-gas producer. This has dismayed environmentalists and donors in and out of the Obama administration. After all, Obama bet big — really big — on green energy. The oil and gas boom is not the energy revolution Obama was looking for.

Saudi Arabia and other petro-monarchies aren’t happy about it either (which is one reason the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC states bankroll anti-fracking propaganda in the West). Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it is still arguably the most important one in global markets because its oil is so easy to get out of the ground. The cheaper it is to extract, the easier it is to maintain profits when prices go down. That means the Saudis have an outsized ability to affect the global price of oil.

It is well known in legal circles that Eric Holder’s Justice Department has become so politicized, so unprincipled, and so ethically shoddy that Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s appointee to replace Holder, had to assure senators at her confirmation hearing that she was not Eric Holder.

Lynch was properly grilled on her views on immigration enforcement, executive orders, and terrorist prosecutions. But so far no senator has dug deep into some of the most abusive cases that Justice has filed, and asked why lower-case justice hasn’t been done.

One of the most notorious is Justice’s role in California’s “Moonlight Fire,” a conflagration on Labor Day 2007 that burned 20,000 acres of state forest in the Sierra Nevada along with 45,000 acres of federal forest. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection decided that Sierra Pacific Industries, a family-owned company that is the nation’s second-largest timber supplier, was responsible for the damage. Government investigators claim the blade of one of the company’s bulldozers hit a rock, creating a spark that started the blaze. Sierra Pacific pointed out clear holes in that theory, but Cal Fire nonetheless fined the timber company $8 million to pay for related costs. Because the fire burned more than 40,000 acres of national forest, the federal government also went after Sierra Pacific; in 2012, after five years of litigation, Sierra Pacific reluctantly agreed to a settlement that entailed paying the feds $4 million and giving Uncle Sam 22,500 acres of forest land.

Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

While senators such as Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have vehemently opposed the Obama administration’s rapprochement and concessions toward Cuba, some Republicans have banded together to let President Obama know that they have an eye on lifting the decades-old embargo.

Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — incidentally, the two Senate Republicans likely to vote against the Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation on Iran — told Obama in a letter that they “have sought reforms to restrictions on travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba and the removal of hurdles that hamstring trade.”

“Given the statutory nature of restrictions on activities related to Cuba, real and permanent change to U.S.-Cuba policy will be achieved through successful legislative initiatives,” they wrote.

Like a few million other Israelis, the first thing I checked on Thursday morning was whether we were at war.

We’re not—for now. Israeli forces did not act against Hizballah or Syrian targets overnight—even though, on Wednesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had said: “Those behind today’s attack will pay the full price.”

Wednesday’s attack involved Hizballah’s firing from Syria of antitank missiles at two Israeli military vehicles in the Galilee, and of mortars at the Mt. Hermon ski site on the Israeli Golan Heights. Two soldiers in the vehicles were killed and seven were lightly wounded. All civilian visitors had to be evacuated from the Mt. Hermon site, where there were no casualties.

Hizballah’s attack came in retaliation for an Israel missile strike on January 18 against two vehicles of the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis on the Syrian part of the Golan Heights. Along with others, that attack killed two major Hizballah commanders along with an Iranian general who was advising the Syrian army.

Another case of typical, tit-for-tat, cross-border violence between Israel and its foes? The U.S. State Department related to it that way [2], with spokeswoman Jen Psaki saying: “We support Israel’s legitimate right to self-defense” and adding: “We urge all parties to refrain from any action that could escalate the situation.”

Actually, though, there is much more here than might meet the eye in a superficial glance.