RUTHFULLY YOURS

What seems odd is this obsession with Israel, with which she has no ties. Yet this Baroness, who claims to be motivated only by moral outrage, is considerably silent on the far worse moral outrages that go on day in and day out in a country with which she does have ties — of which she made a virtue while in office. Yet Baroness Warsi ignores entirely the horrific and continual human rights abuses in her own family’s homeland of Pakistan. Whether it is Christians being burned alive or the practice of “bonded labor” (slavery), Warsi appears utterly unconcerned. At present, a Christian mother of four is due to be hanged for blasphemy.

What is far more important is that the obsessions and blind spots of Baroness Warsi are the obsessions and blind spots being taught to a generation.

Moral equivalence must be one of the overriding curses of our age. Even those who are capable of making moral judgements now often find it easier to make equivalences between sides than to study facts and work out who may be or right or wrong. So whenever any conflict breaks out, much of the world can be relied on – from the United Nations downwards (or upwards) – to call for a cessation of the “cycle of violence.” In Britain last week, there was an especially flamboyant example of this trend, courtesy of the noble Baroness Warsi.

This is the woman who was promoted by Conservative party leader David Cameron seven years ago; once the Conservative party became the party of government in 2010, she became the first Muslim woman to attend Cabinet in Britain. She could have done an immense amount of good in that role. She could have led reformist trends within the Muslim communities in the UK. She could have acted as a demonstration that Muslims can be loyal British citizens without side clannish, religious or sectional interests overriding other interests. Instead she turned out to be a force of extraordinary regression, and someone who turned out to bang some very predictable drums.

This summer, when Israel was forced once again to engage in a highly targeted air and ground operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, the British government held fairly firm in support of our ally, Israel, in doing what it needed to do to a terrorist group that was kidnapping and murdering teenagers and heavily rocketing Israel.

But Baroness Warsi – who had only ever reached Cabinet because of David Cameron’s personal championing – resigned in protest. She claimed in her resignation that Britain’s ongoing support for Israel was morally indefensible.

Columbia County, Ark. — There’s no sign of it here in Magnolia, Ark., but the boycott season is upon us, and graduates of Princeton and Bryn Mawr are demanding “justice” from Wal-Mart, which is not in the justice business but in the groceries, clothes, and car-batteries business. It is easy to scoff, but I am ready to start taking the social-justice warriors’ insipid rhetoric seriously — as soon as two things happen: First, I want to hear from the Wal-Mart-protesting riffraff a definition of “justice” that is something that does not boil down to “I Get What I Want, Irrespective of Other Concerns.”

Second, I want to turn on the radio and hear Jay-Z boasting about his new Timex.

It is remarkable that Wal-Mart, a company that makes a modest profit margin (typically between 3 percent and 3.5 percent) selling ordinary people ordinary goods at low prices, is the great hate totem for the well-heeled Left, whose best-known celebrity spokesclowns would not be caught so much as downwind from a Supercenter, while at the same time, nobody is out with placards and illiterate slogans and generally risible moral posturing in front of boutiques dealing in Rolex, Prada, Hermès, et al. It’s almost as if there is a motive at work here other than that which is stated by our big-box-bashing friends on the left and their A-list human bullhorns.

What might that be?

If you want an illuminating example of the fact that there is more to the way that prices work in a free market than can be captured by the pragmatic calculations of cold-eyed util-traders, consider the luxury-goods market and its enthusiastic following among people who do not themselves consume many or any of those goods. One of the oddball aspects of rich societies such as ours is the fact that when people pile up a little bit more disposable income than they might have expected to, they develop a taste for measurably inferior goods and outdated technologies: If you have money that is a little bit obscene, you might get into classic cars, i.e., an outmoded form of transportation; if your money is super-dirty obscene, you get into horses, an even more outmoded form of transportation.

In light of comments such as those by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, one needs to consider the context of recent events in Ferguson. Weingarten asserts that . . .

the fact remains that on Aug. 9, an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed. Given that we are a nation of laws, one can only hope that the lack of an indictment isn’t tantamount to any lack of zeal on the part of the prosecutor to do the job he was supposed to do to enable the grand jury to arrive at an impartial and fact-based decision [.]

This case once again reminds us that there is still much work to be done to achieve racial justice in America. It tells us that our moral compass and legal systems do not always align.

Weingarten epitomizes the leftist ideology that continually must find a racial basis for anything that occurs in this country. That the facts do not align with what the liberals desire is infuriating to them and thus the real tragedy of Ferguson is:

. . . that in order to fully accept the evidence of the case, news commentators feel compelled to say that eyewitnesses to the attack on the police officer were black, thus implying that whites, by the very nature of their melanin level, would not have been capable of abiding by the rule of law. It continues to feed Obama’s premise that race should be the determining factor in everything. But, indeed, if race does make a difference in certain situations, why didn’t the first black president and his black attorney general reach out to the Ferguson black community and tell “one and all to respect a lawful grand jury finding.” Instead these men used their power and “invited mayhem.”
. . . that owners and operators of the town’s shops have had their windows smashed, their stores looted and their merchandise destroyed and burnt. In fact, the majority of affected stores are black owned. Does saying this imply that black hoodlums would care more about black-owned establishments being protected? Thugs are thugs. If it had been white-owned stores does that mean this hooliganism would be more readily accepted? Since when do we consider looters as having a sense of deportment? In fact, as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “the first minute you break a window, you are put in handcuffs” whatever your race.
. . . that instead of viewing the looting and burning as shameful events, there are those who would claim that these frustrated young people have a right to destroy their neighborhood. In his 1997 book titled For Shame, author James B. Twitchell writes “[s]hame is the basis of individual responsibility and the beginnings of social conscience. It is where decency comes from.” When will we begin to demand decency? When will this constructive type of shame become an integral part of people’s upbringing in an effort to contribute to the higher social good?

As Ferguson burned this week, the law books got a workout. Suddenly, grand-jury procedure was all the rage. Commentators better known for parroting the bromide that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich went berserk when the sandwich on offer was a white cop and the grand jury refused to bite.

As it turns out, there was no need to thumb the legal treatises of Blackstone or Joseph Story. If you were going to hit the books, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would have served you better. Brilliantly illustrating modern liberalism’s roots in 20th-century progressivism — a movement as comfortable marching lockstep with Stalin as it was borrowing copiously from Mussolini — Jonah homes in on the centrality of myth. It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.

For the American Left, a bedrock myth is that white cops kill black kids. It derives from the overarching myth that casts racism as our indelible national sin. As Heather Mac Donald explains, citing exhaustive criminology studies, it flows seamlessly from the quackery that dismisses the disproportionately high incidence of violent crime in African-American communities as an illusion — as the product of police racism and the consequent hyper-targeting of black boys and men, rather than of racial differences in patterns of offending.

Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.

Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.

And if the U.S. recognizes “Palestine” then Israel should recognize “AZTLAN” AND CEDE A BIG SWATH OF THE SOUTHWEST”…rsk

As you know, quite a few European countries are in the process of “recognizing” the “state” of “Palestine.” The question arises of what the appropriate response from Israel should be to these actions by the Europeans.

SO here is a plan:

If Belgium recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movements of the Flemish, the Walloons, and the Belgium Germans, and officially recognize the right of each group to set up its own state.

If Denmark recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movement of the Faroese and officially recognize the right of the Faroe Islands to be an independent state.

If Finland recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movements of the Åland Swedes, and officially recognize their right to set up their own state.

If France recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movements of the Basques in France, of Brittany, of Northern Catalonia, of Savoy, of Occitania, and of course of Corsica. Israel should officially recognize their right to set up their own states and arm them generously.

.If Germany recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movements of the Bavarians, the East Frisians, the Franconians, the Lusatians, and the people of Shleswig-Holstein, and Israel must officially recognize their right to set up their own states.

If Italy recognizes “Palestine,” then Israel must recognize the separatist movements of the Sardinians, the South Tyrolese, and the people of Lombardy, and officially recognize their right to set up their own states.

When St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch explained that some exonerating testimony in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, came from several African-American eyewitnesses who described Brown as having charged police Officer Darren Wilson before he fired the fatal shots, it was a powerful moment.

Such testimony was consistent with physical evidence establishing that Wilson had not fired at Brown’s back as repeatedly and poisonously alleged. Indeed, it would seem that the aggressor in this fatal encounter was not Wilson, but rather Brown. According to evidence the grand jury sifted and assessed, it seems that Wilson fired not in cold blood, as so often declared, but in self-defense.

It was this right to self-defense – “even” for a policeman – that the grand jury decision left sacrosanct when it determined there was simply not sufficient evidence to indict Wilson for any crime.

Shocking as it may seem, self-defense is not a bedrock right in some courts – specifically, U.S. military courts, where U.S. soldiers have seen their right to self-defense on the battlefield negated by murder convictions.

The St. Louis County prosecutor has now uploaded the grand jury proceedings (all 24 volumes), assorted evidence and witness interviews so all can see how the system worked, and how the grand jury came to its conclusion. This sets an unprecedented standard for transparency in the face of ongoing demagogic efforts to obscure or ignore these same facts. With incendiary talk of anger “rooted in reality,” as the president put it, the need for protests, the specter of federal charges and “change,” Barack Obama and an army of “racial arsonists” agitate not for justice, not for peace, but for power.

“It is shameful for a public official to make such remarks. Hate-speech and anti-Semitism have seized the state. The hate-speech often exhibited by the ruling politicians encourages public officials to follow suit.” — Aykan Erdemir, lawmaker, Republican People’s Party.

“This governor has a lot to learn from Sultan Abdulhamid… They [Jews] are our people. This is Turkey’s synagogue, not Israel’s.” — Young Civilians group.

The governor has probably scored good points to get a future promotion for the “huge hatred inside” him.

Once again, hate-speech in Turkey will not be prosecuted because it targets people who are not Sunni Muslim Turks.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Edirne, a Turkish province in Thrace, hosted a prominent community of some 20,000 Jews – a larger community than the entire Jewish population of about 17,000 in Turkey today. Most of the Jews of Edirne were forced to leave the city after the pogroms of 1934. In 2000, the Jewish population in Edirne had dropped to 2 (no typo: two) people.

Earlier, in the Ottoman Turkey of 1907, Sultan Abdulhamid had ordered the construction of what would become one of the world’s two biggest synagogues (and Europe’s biggest), known in Turkish as “Buyuk Sinagog,” or the “Great Synagogue”, in Edirne. As the Jews left the town, the Great Synagogue turned into a sorrowful wreck.

A view of the Great Synagogue” of Edirne, from 2010. (Image source: Wikipedia Commons/Yabancı)
In late 2000s, the Jewish community in Turkey applied to the governor’s office in Edirne to have sermons and wedding ceremonies at the synagogue. Luckily, in 2010, the Great Synagogue was declared a historical site and brought under a $1.7 million restoration program to reopen for prayers and visits – not that the Turks thought the building would serve the (literally) couple of Jews left in town, but that they thought it could lure tourists (and money). The restoration work is almost complete.

Last week, most Turks learned that there even was a synagogue in Edirne when the governor of the city threatened to forbid post-restoration prayers at the Great Synagogue and instead turn it into a museum.

Governor Dursun Sahin said he would not allow prayers at the synagogue because Israeli security forces had attacked the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem — although Israeli police denied walking into the house of worship.

Sahin said: “While those bandits (Israeli security forces) blow winds of war inside al-Aqsa and slay Muslims, we build their synagogues. I say this with a huge hatred inside me. We clean their (Jewish) graveyards, send their projects to boards. But the synagogue here will be registered only as a museum, and there will be no exhibitions inside it.”

At least the vengeful governor was honest. He said what he said admittedly “with a huge hatred inside him.” Not a hatred of what he perceives “as the Israeli government’s actions against poor Palestinians,” but what he evidently perceives as anything Jewish. As this author reminded readers here last week: “For most of Turkey’s Islamists, there is no difference between the words ‘Israel,’ the ‘Israeli government,’ ‘Jew’ or a ‘Turkish Jew:’ They are all the same and are all regarded with hostility.”

Once again, the Turkish government silently nodded to the governor. Despite calls for his resignation, he remains in office. No investigation has been launched for his hate speech, which literally contained the words “huge hatred.” On the contrary, he must have won the hearts and minds of many important Turks in Ankara.

But once again, a few brave Turkish men stood up and the governor had to retreat. “I was misunderstood,” the governor later said, apologetically.

An opposition lawmaker had called for the governor’s resignation for his remarks and demanded, in case the governor did not resign, that he be sacked by the government. “If Sahin does not resign to save the dignity of his post and Turkey’s honor, he should be removed from his post immediately,” Republican People’s Party lawmaker Aykan Erdemir said in a written statement. “It is shameful for a public official to make such remarks. Hate-speech and anti-Semitism have seized the state. The hate speech often exhibited by the ruling politicians encourages public officials to follow suit.”

Erdemir was right. Only recently, a school teacher was caught having hung a signpost at the gate of the Neve Salom synagogue in Istanbul that read: “Building to be destroyed.” The man was not prosecuted.

Erdemir has suggested that a parliamentary commission should be formed to investigate “the rising anti-Semitism in Turkey.” It is unlikely that the Islamist-majority parliament will agree with him.

Erdemir was not the only one to defend the Great Synagogue. On Nov. 22, a group of activists who call themselves the “Young Civilians,” a bunch of liberals, rushed to the Great Synagogue to protest against the governor. They issued a press release demanding, like Erdemir, the governor’s resignation.

The governor will not resign but will have to endure the embarrassment of what the Young Civilians, in a powerful line, recommended him to do: “This governor,” they said, “has a lot to learn from Sultan Abdulhamid… He has a lot to learn from the young [Turkish] gendarmerie corporal who lost his life while protecting the Jews in Edirne from the looters during the 1934 pogroms.” They also placed at the gate of the Great Synagogue placards that read, “They [Jews] are our people,” “This synagogue was here when [the state of] Israel did not exist,” and “This is Turkey’s synagogue, not Israel’s.”

The few brave men of Turkey did it, and the government had to step back. Adnan Ertem, the director general of the General Directorate of Foundations, the government department in charge of the synagogue, said that: “Our intention is to keep that building as a house of worship to serve all visitors.”

The synagogue, for the time being, is saved. The governor has probably scored good points to get a future promotion for the “huge hatred inside him.” The opposition member of parliament, Erdemir, has probably added to his career of being a “Zionist” politician. The Young Civilians may soon have to go through a meticulous auditing of their books by government tax inspectors. And once again, hate speech in Turkey will not be prosecuted because it targets people who are not Sunni Muslim Turks.

Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the Hürriyet Daily and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

A diplomatic mission was slapped down in the middle of a city controlled by terrorists. The diplomatic mission was left mostly undefended, despite multiple requests by everyone in Libya right up to the deceased ambassador, except by a militia gang linked to Al Qaeda which wasn’t getting paid.

At a time when the State Department was spending fortunes on bad art, on Kindles at the bargain price of $6,000 a reader, not to mention renovating the mansion residence of a political donor/ambassador in Europe who would be the subject of yet another cover-up after being accused of pedophilia (but not before causing a public scandal by blaming anti-Semitism on the Jews) there was no money for securing a diplomatic mission that was so far behind enemy lines it might as well have been in the middle of Iran.

And again it was no one’s fault. Despite multiple whistleblowers from the State Department coming forward, most of them left of center types who wouldn’t spit on a Koch Brother, the panels and committees wrote the establishment a blank check.

The Benghazi Cover-Up Continues

Muslim ISIS Preacher Occupying Jewish Temple Mount Calls for Destruction of America, Mass Murder of Jews

“Once language has been so thoroughly denatured, poisoning the wells of communication and rendering truth an archaic remnant of political nostalgia, the prospects for the recovery of honor, health and strength in a society fade into Spenglerian [34] darkness. Western intellectuals, academics, journalists, politicians and civic leaders have learned from the West’s ideological enemies, having mastered the science of the Big Lie. And in betraying language, they have betrayed the world of thought and the culture of freedom, hawking the tainted wares of a demonic illiteracy.”

An infallible sign of cognitive degradation is the mutilation of language, a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly widespread in the current (anti) intellectual milieu. What George Orwell despaired of in the chronic usages of political language in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language [1]“—it is “designed to make lies truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”—seems even more so today. Orwell’s “six rules [2]” for good writing are not so much the issue here, and some of these have been ably contested by reputable authors. But he is right when he says that clear thinking “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” Poor thinking corrupts language; slovenly language corrupts thinking—and the inevitable result of these twin perversions is moral corruption and political barbarism.

Of course, one frequently comes across in the political writing of both the left and the right, “progressivists” and conservatives, all manner of less degrading blemishes — grammatical solecisms, logical infelicities, bad paragraphing, sloppy editing practices generating an abundance of typos (my favorites: the “Untied States,” the “Pubic Wars”), and the like. This is to be expected in the Age of the Internet, when one writes an article in the morning and posts it in the afternoon, rather than submit it to several days’ worth of revision. The Age of Rapidly Breaking News leads to critically broken prose. That we also live in the Age of Declining Educational Standards in which rigorous language training — spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammatical concinnity, reading with understanding — has gone by the board and in which the Image has come to predominate over the Word almost guarantees that far too many professional journalists and bloggers can no longer write properly – which means that they can no longer think coherently or even string two or three sentences into a meaningful thought-unit.

But such misfortunes seem like mere peccadilloes when compared to the willful devastation of language used almost exclusively for the transmission of lies and the practice of slander rather than for disciplined argument and conveying empirical verities. Regrettably, linguistic debasement has always been a mainstay of political discourse, whether for “reasons of state,” military purposes, electoral advantage, self-promotion, or the arts of persuasion. What we might call “word deformation” is a staple of political life and should not surprise us.

America’s unconventional oil boom continues to yield major benefits—economic and geostrategic. The latest evidence is OPEC’s decision on Thursday to defy expectations and maintain its current oil production target despite the steepest price decline since the 2008-2009 recession. The price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, plunged as a result to about $70 a barrel, continuing its decline from a peak of nearly $116 in June.

Not too many years ago the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries might have cut production to maintain higher prices. The cartel’s countries have long sought to keep prices high at a level consistent with a growing global economy, not least to keep the revenue flowing into government coffers. Rogue states such as Venezuela and Iran desperately need the cash flow.

But the cartel has lost much of its pricing power thanks in part to the revival in U.S. oil production. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—business innovations done mainly on private land—have pushed U.S. oil output to its highest level since the 1980s.

The Energy Information Administration says U.S. production reached more than nine million barrels a day this year and is expected to keep climbing. OPEC is afraid that demand for its crude will keep falling as U.S. supply continues to grow and more of it makes its way to the global market as American export barriers fall.

One way to read the OPEC decision is therefore as a price war to shake marginal U.S. producers from the market. The U.S. shale boom and high global oil prices have encouraged new areas of production with widely varying break-even price levels. Much of such proven areas as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota can remain profitable even at $50 a barrel, by most estimates. The Eagle Ford Shale in Texas also has a relatively low break-even. But newer areas with higher exploration and development costs could suffer if prices keep falling.