RUTHFULLY YOURS

BEIJING – Everything in tragedy happens for a reason, and the result always is sad; most things in comedy happen by accident and the outcome typically is happy. Sino-American relations are not destined for conflict, although that is possible. The misunderstandings that bedevil relations between the world’s two most powerful countries remain comedic rather than tragic. That probably is as good as it gets, for no amount of explanation will enable Chinese and Americans to make sense of each other.

Where the Chinese are defensive and cautious, the Americans tend to perceive them as aggressive; where the Chinese are expansive ambitious, the Americans ignore them altogether. The United States is a Pacific power accustomed to maritime dominance. To the extent that Americans focus on China’s foreign policy, it is to express alarm at China’s territorial claims on small uninhabited islands also claimed by Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Apart from some overheated and self-serving rhetoric from a few Chinese military leaders, though, the contested islands are of negligible importance in China’s scale of priorities.

The issue may be moot by this writing: last week, China and Japan released a “Principled Agreement on Handling and Improving Bilateral Relations”, following meetings between Japan’s national security adviser, Shotaro Yachi, and Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi. The document promises to “establish crisis management mechanisms to avoid contingencies” and to employ “dialogue and consultation”.

Neither Japan nor China had any interest in a military confrontation in the Pacific, although both sides employed the island disputes to play to their own nationalist constituencies. The Principled Agreement sends a signal that the Kabuki show had gone far enough.

A common American meme in response to supposed Chinese expansionism in the Pacific projected an Indian-Japanese military alliance to contain Chinese ambitions under US sponsorship. Although a few Indian nationalists enthused over the idea, it was an empty gesture from the outside. If India got into a scrap with China over disputed borders, for example, just what would Japan do to help?

This is very interesting and welcome history but what would Bonaparte say about the condition of Jews in France today?….rsk

Following in the wake of the Napoleon Wars (1804-1815) in which Napoleon conquered much of Europe, came the emancipation of the Jews of Western Europe. For hundreds of years the Jews had been economically and politically marginalized and physically confined to the ghettoes of Europe. After Napoleon, the Ghetto walls came down and the Jews of Western Europe were free to enter European society for the first time. For better and for worse, this represented one of the greatest periods of transformation for these Jewish communities. These new freedoms allowed the Jews of Europe to prosper and have tremendous impact on European society, but also led to a wave of secularization, assimilation and even conversion to Christianity.

August 15th is the birthday of Napoleon. The following article, written by Mr. Ben Weider, the president of the International Napoleonic Society ,gives us much food for thought about anti-Semitism, assimilation and Jewish identity in the world today.

One of the many contributions that Napoleon has made, and perhaps his most important and lasting one, was his Civil Code. This was written at a time in history when discrimination was rampant. It was then that Napoleon decided to liberate and offer Liberty, Equality and Fraternity to Jews, Protestants and Freemasons. He also opened the churches that were closed for years.

The Civil Code of 1804 was to grant religious freedom to all of them. At the time, there were about 480,000 Calvinists and 200,000 Lutherans living in France.

In 1804, Napoleon arranged for the public regulation of the Protestant communities and then decided that the State would assume the responsibility for the salaries of their pastors.

Now, how did Napoleon’s involvement with the Jews come about? It started on the 9th of February 1797. When Napoleon occupied Ancona, a strange thing happened. He was amazed when he saw some people wearing yellow bonnets and arm bands on which was the “Star of David.” He asked some of his officers why these people were wearing the bonnet and arm bands and what was its purpose.

Napoleon authorized the closing of the ghetto and allowed the Jews to live wherever they wanted.

The world is more global than ever. Cell phones and texting mean we are always in touch. The internet brings the world to remote places, and staves off ignorance. YouTube means that whatever one does may be recorded, for better or worse. Products may be designed in the U.S., parts manufactured in Eastern Europe and assembled in China and then distributed around the world from Brazil. Apart from some extreme nationalists and a few xenophobes, most people welcome the legal, free movement of people, goods and services this entails. Yet politically motivated immigration policies threaten the future of Europe, the inviolability of the EU, and they place at risk the unity that has defined the United States for over 200 years.

At home, President Obama has said he will sign an executive order, before year-end, to grant amnesty to millions of immigrants residing illegally in the U.S. His threat of unilateral action raises several questions. First, the House did pass a bi-partisan immigration bill that now sits in a drawer in Senator Harry Reid’s desk. So, why did Mr. Reid not bring the bill to the floor? Keep in mind, any Republican bill will not make it to Mr. Obama’s desk until after the first of the year. Why does Mr. Obama threaten to take such action before year-end? Two, if amnesty is so popular among Democrats why did they not run on the issue in the latest election? And, three, what are Mr. Obama’s motivations? Why is he concerned for the millions of illegals in the U.S.? Is his interest humanitarian or economic, or is it cynically based on the possibility of adding to a pool of future Democrat voters?

About the Author: Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools.

This is the West Bank? You have to tell people what it’s really like, my mother said to me.

I’ve been living in Israel, in Gush Etzion, in Efrat, since the end of August. I’m here because one daughter (YD) is studying in a seminary nearby (much more on that, later), and the other (OD) made Aliyah and is going into the IDF in December.

This is our chance to try a pilot project: can this particular family of upper middle class Jewish American Zionists make it in Israel? Do we have more to contribute being here, or is it important for stalwart Israel supporters to remain in the U.S., constantly correcting the myths created by the mainstream media about Israel, the shtachim, the plight of the Arabs, and all the rest.

And does Israel really need more lawyers? Or English-writing journalists? We’ll see. But for now, here I am.

This morning I showed my mother around the neighborhood. She thinks it is GORGEOUS. As she raved on and on (“you know, everything is flat in Florida, we have none of these gorgeous hills”), I said to her:

ME: You know, mom, this is the “West Bank.”

MOM: It’s so gorgeous…what? What are you talking about?

ME: Here. This house, this neighborhood, this whole area is what the New York Times and the rest of the planet calls the “West Bank.”

One thread runs through all the miasma of the tribal and ideological jungle of contemporary Mideast politics. Through it all is interwoven the power and influence of Iran.

With its 80 million people, its vast territory – the world’s 17th largest country, about the size of Alaska – and its abundant resources, Iran towers over all the other Mideastern territories [except Egypt and Turkey]. Despite its sudden cataclysmic downturn in fertility – a drop-off much deeper than Europe, Japan and China are also experiencing – Iran currently still has a young population that will reach 100 million by 2050.

But more than anything, Tehran is heir – unlike Egypt’s largely historical and tourist attractions – to the traditions of the ancient Persian empires dating from 500 years before Christ. Contrary to the primitive intolerance of the current regime, the Persians through the ages built remarkably strong political entities simultaneously using various ethnicities. [Again what a contrast to the neighboring puny Arab sheikhdoms, however endowed with petrodollars.] That thrust toward power is again a central issue in the region.

There is no dearth of evidence for Tehran’s aggressive ambitions beginning with worldwide terrorism that punctuated recent decades. Whether in the Beirut military barracks bombing of Americans and French troops [1983] or the attacks on Jewish targets in Buenos Aires [1994] or the bitter IED offensive against American forces during the Iraq war, Tehran’s gloved hand was there.

However vulnerable the ties, today Tehran has jumped the security fences first set up post-World War I by Britain and France, and then the U.S.. Its alliances extend to the Mediterranean with the Assad regime [if under siege] in Syria, Hezbollah that dominates ethnic-chaotic Lebanon, and even the scion of the bitterly anti-Shia Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas in Gaza.

Moving toward weapons of mass destruction with the help of other rogue states headed by North Korea and greedy merchants in Russia, Germany, Tehran’s mullahs are reaching for great power status. One suspects even their bitterest domestic enemies do not vouchsafe their country this role.

Woodrow Wilson, generations before Obama was born, enunciated the same political premises and practiced the same abuses of executive power as Barack Obama does now.

The Annotated Woodrow Wilson
Or, Barack Obama’s Ideological Uncle.

The other day, reading through the comments on Daniel Greenfield’s November 7th FrontPage article, “The Leftist and Islamic War on the Family,” one reader Woodrow Wilson:

“The purpose of the education system should be to make children as “unlike” their parents as possible,” Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President.

Intrigued, and unfamiliar with that statement by Wilson (I had read his speeches years ago), I asked the reader for the source of the quotation. The reader replied with ad hominems and did not supply a source. Mr. Greenfield, however, instead directed me to a number of sites showing that Wilson wrote variations of that sentiment, but not precisely the verbatim one as reported by the other reader. One of Mr. Greenfield’s suggestions was the Teaching American History site which features Wilson’s 1913 essay, “What is Progress?” In that essay, the sentiment goes:

“It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.”

“What is Progress?” is regarded as one of Wilson’s most definitive works. However, I found it a rambling discourse, replete with homilies, metaphors, and non sequiturs, on why he was not so much a “progressive” as a bona fide socialist in search of a credible rationalization for being one that would not scare off his auditors. Like Obama, Wilson was no friend of the Constitution.

Nor has been the federal government. All states are dependent in varying degrees on federal largesse, from Delaware (the least) to Mississippi (the most). See the WalletHub charts here. Not so ironically, Republican Red States are among the most dependent – see the Cheat Sheet here for details – while Democratic Blue States are among the least. Regardless of which party has the biggest appetite for the cocaine, this is not what the Founders had in mind when they devised the Constitution to separate federal and state powers. Republicans have always gone along with ensuring that the states become addicted to federal money to facilitate highway construction and other “public works.”

Bosch Fawstin on “The Infidel, Featuring Pigman” — on The Glazov Gang
The world’s first anti-jihad cartoonist discusses his superhero’s war against Islam.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/bosch-fawstin-on-the-infidel-featuring-pigman-on-the-glazov-gang-1/

A funny thing happened in the “war on women” — Mia Love and Joni Ernst won, Wendy Davis and Sandra Fluke lost. The representative who will be the youngest woman ever to have served in Congress, Elise Stefanik, is a Republican who won a formerly Democratic seat — not in Oklahoma or Texas but in New York. Senator-elect Ernst is a 21-year veteran of the Army Reserve and National Guard who served overseas during the Iraq war; Representative-elect Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States fleeing the Tonton Macoutes, is a former city councilman and mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah.

The difference could not be more dramatic: The Democrats’ vision of an American woman’s life was best expressed in the Obama campaign’s insipid “Julia” cartoons, in which a faceless, featureless woman at every crossroads in her life turns to the federal government, as personified by Barack Obama, for succor and support. From negotiating a salary to managing her pregnancy, Julia cannot do anything for herself — at every turn, she is reminded that she enjoys political patronage “under President Obama,” in the campaign’s psychosexually fraught and insistently reiterated phrase. So much for the Democrats. And the Republican women of 2014? They helped fight wars and made new lives for themselves on foreign shores. They were women who ran for office on policy platforms, not on their uteruses.

Wendy Davis came to national prominence after filibustering a Republican-backed bill that would have enacted some restrictions on abortion in Texas. Fighting such modest restrictions has become a leading “women’s issue,” even though American women, like American men, broadly support policies such as restrictions on late-term abortions. Some 80 percent of Americans believe that third-trimester abortions should be illegal — but only 19 percent of Americans say that they could only support a candidate who shared their views on abortion, while 28 percent say that abortion is not a major issue to them and about half say that it is one important issue among many. Which is to say, for most Americans — including American women — abortion is not a make-or-break issue, and most Americans — including American women — hold views on the subject that are much closer to George W. Bush’s than to Wendy Davis’s. But Wendy Davis is a women’s champion for attempting to conscript women into support for a position that few of them actually hold.

Democrats believe that women have a congenital duty to support Democrats, as though being in possession of ovaries should naturally make a human being more eager to submit to Harry Reid. (One would think the opposite would be the case.) Jessica Valenti, writing in the Guardian, makes this line of thought explicit: “In a way, female Republicans almost bother me more than their male counterparts. I can almost understand why a bunch of rich, religiously conservative white men wouldn’t care about the reality of women’s day-to-day lives — they’ve never had to. But throwing other women under the bus? For what? Lower taxes? Three minutes on Fox News in the 3 p.m. hour?

James Baker’s venom was well known and his animus to Israel dated back to his Princeton thesis where he called recognition of Israel in 1948 a major mistake. Furthermore, in 2010, the pomaded Baker also accused Obama of “caving in to Israel” on settlements.

Baker Accuses Obama of “Caving In” on Israel-Palestine: http://www.lobelog.com/baker-accuses-obama-of-caving-in-on-israel-palestine/

Former US Secretary of State James Baker says insult fly frequently between Israel and Washington, noting a 1990 incident when Netanyahu was banned from state office building.

WASHINGTON – Insults fly frequently between Israel and the US – at least, between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American colleagues, former secretary of state James Baker said.

“These kinds of things happen all the time,” Baker told CNN on Sunday, responding to a spike in tensions between Washington and Jerusalem after an unnamed US official was quoted insulting the prime minister.

As head of the State Department under president George H.W. Bush in 1990, Baker said that Netanyahu, then deputy foreign minister, was barred from the building after saying American foreign policy in the Middle East was “based on lies and distortions.”

“I barred him,” Baker said. “That may not be widely known.”

The annual ritual to commemorate the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin that took place last Saturday night in the square in Tel Aviv which now bears his name, was a bizarre affair. It was a shameful – and shameless – endeavor to wring the last few drops of political mileage from the abuse of the fraying fabrication of Rabin’s “legacy.”

Act I: Remembering the Real Rabin

As if in a parallel universe…

The rally, dubbed “Returning to the Square and Bringing Back Hope,” was organized by the Israeli Peace Initiative, a group purportedly promoting regional peace, co-founded by Rabin’s son, Yuval.

Regional peace. Hmmm – doesn’t that sound eerily reminiscent of a previous “vision” – now widely discredited and largely discarded – of the Peresian delusion of a New Middle East? (It has always been a source of puzzlement to me whether these “regionalists” have ever actually looked at a map of the war-torn, blood-drenched region before attempting to resurrect the demonstrably daft delusion of regional peace – but that is a topic for another column.) The rally’s organizers proclaimed that the event was meant to urge the government (the Israeli one of course, not, heaven forfend, the Palestinian one) to promote a “peace initiative.”

It was in this vein that co-founder Rabin Jr. addressed the crowd in a speech so detached from reality it could well have been made in a parallel universe where Islam is really the “religion of peace.” He informed PM Benjamin Netanyahu that he “no longer has the strength to hold his tongue,” and felt morally compelled to demand a “daring diplomatic initiative” that blithely ignored “the Iranian threat at our doorstep and ISIS [Islamic State], Hamas and Hezbollah who threaten to destroy us.”

Depressing display of denial and dishonesty