RUTHFULLY YOURS

Both the rule of law and democratic governance in Israel are being jeopardized by the very body purported to be its most committed guardian: the judiciary.

In Israel, the negative impact of the judicialization of politics on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already beginning to show its mark. Over the past decade, the public image of the Supreme Court as an autonomous and impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded… the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda… – Prof. Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism, Harvard University Press, 2004.

The public is further losing its faith in… the legal system, with only 36 percent of the Jewish public expressing confidence in the courts…– “Public’s faith in Israel’s justice system continues to plummet,” Haaretz, August 15, 2013.

The Haifa District Court on Sunday blocked the state from setting a precedent that would help it deter flotillas by legalizing confiscating captured flotilla vessels and their cargo under international law never before used in Israel. – “Court blocks major state initiative to deter blockade-busting flotillas,” Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2014

A recent Post editorial (September 27) was right on the money when it asserted that “The High Court of Justice dealt Israeli democracy a grievous blow last week.” It was a sentiment echoed by the Post’s veteran columnist Michael Freund, who wrote: “High Court of Justice struck a decisive blow to Israel’s democracy last week, one that should send a shudder down the spine of anyone who cherishes basic principles such as the separation of powers….”

Fostering lawlessness?

OH PULEEZ! THESE ARE THE “LEADERS” WHO WERE OVERJOYED WITH THE OSLO SURRENDER AND THE REMOVAL FROM GAZA AND THE TWO STATE DISSOLUTION OF ISRAEL…DIDN’T THEY SEE THIS COMING? ….RSK

Leading Jewish personalities in the United States have reacted angrily to the Obama Administration’s blistering attack upon Israel’s announcement – based on a plan already approved by the Jerusalem Municipality two years ago – that it will construct 2,500 residential units in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamatos. The administration also expressed displeasure at the news that a group of Jewish residents had moved into property purchased from Arabs in the Silwan neighborhood.

“Anyone who thinks that Jews buying a few handfuls of homes in areas of Jerusalem in any way contributes to the problems in the Middle East just doesn’t understand the reality of how deep the antagonism is to the nation state of the Jewish people,” said the former Harvard University scholar and influential political commentator, Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz, who has been generally critical of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, was responding to White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s comment about the “occupation of residential buildings in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem – this is near the Old City – by individuals who are associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Earnest was referring to the Jewish nationalist Elad organization. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post reported that an official of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party had declared that the Palestinian broker who made the sale to Elad deserved the death sentence.

“To focus on these events at a time when ISIS is beheading, when Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and when Hamas is preparing rocket attacks, is such a perversion of reality and such a false prioritization,” Dershowitz said in an interview with The Algemeiner.

Asked whether the White House’s criticism implicitly discriminated against Jewish residency rights on the basis of ethnicity, Dershowitz responded: “I see a failure to point the finger where it belongs, at Palestinian leaders who say, ‘no Jew will ever live on the West Bank.’ For the White House to object to Jews purchasing property, it reminds me of those who protested when Jews bought property in pre-Israel Palestine. This isn’t the old days when Jews have to live behind a ghetto wall.”

Her new messaging strategy is taken straight from the 1988 presidential candidate’s playbook.

Dear Reader (including those of you under quarantine),

Well, this “news”letter usually begins one of two ways: serious or jocular. How about, just for a change of pace, we start off scary and see how that works out?

If I were in charge of overseas contingency operations at the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, I would send as many suicide-bomber types back to America (and France and Britain) with a new weapon: Ebola. Airport scanners don’t pick it up. The incubation period is long enough to get the human biological weapons past screeners without detection. I’d tell them: Take as many connections as you can on the flight home. Help people with their luggage whenever possible. Leave a mess in the plane bathroom and a paper trail of your travels that will foment panic when ultimately revealed.

And, if you do get stopped by security officials en route, so be it. There’s lots of gloveless manhandling of suspected jihadis, which brings ample opportunities to infect interrogators, guards, FBI agents, etc. And every one of those infected Americans or Westerners furthers the cause.

But assuming you make it to Cleveland or Spokane or Washington, D.C., the only order of the day is: Have fun for as long as you can and maybe share your spit, sweat, and other stuff in as many creative ways as you can. See a show. Go to a water park and just hang out in the lazy river all day. Eat at a nice restaurant, leave a messy napkin. Don’t bother to wash your hands — and never flush (or if you do, make sure the toilet overflows!). Why, we’ll even give you all the fatwas and cash you need to hit the strip clubs and see a hooker or two. It’s all for the greater good. And when, alas, you start to feel really, really sick and you are at your most infectious, it’d be great if you could blow yourself up at a mall, or at least pass out at a McDonald’s or maybe in the middle of the F-train. If you opt for blowing yourself up, great. If not, try to tell the EMS team that you have something other than Ebola. The aim here is to keep the responders from treating you and the scene as a biohazard for as long as possible. And if you blow yourself up, don’t worry too much about killing a lot of bystanders, just make sure it’s really messy and there’s a lot of splatter.

Now, I don’t think this is a likely scenario, but I don’t think it’s an impossible one either. Regardless, that would be real terrorism, far more terrifying than blowing up a plane. Even one remotely successful effort along these lines would send America into a tailspin.

There may have been a plot, but Obama can’t acknowledge its real source.
The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake is one of the best national-security reporters there is. Late this week, he made an important contribution to the “Khorasan” debate — the controversy over President Obama’s commencement of an aerial bombing campaign, in the absence of congressional authorization, based on what the administration has portrayed as an “imminent” threat to the United States. The source of the threat was said to be the “Khorasan Group,” a virtually unknown terrorist entity.

The upshot of Mr. Lake’s report is that back in June, U.S. military and intelligence officials assessed that “a shadowy network of al Qaeda veterans in Syria were planning to attack airliners flying to the United States.” The officials thus formulated combat plans for strikes against this terror cell’s key locations. These “targeting packages,” however, were not submitted to the president because, according to an unidentified senior intelligence official, military brass knew Mr. Obama would not authorize the strikes. They did not want to ask if the answer was certain to be “no.”

I have no doubt that this is the case. My focus, however, is on Mr. Lake’s description of the Khorasan controversy. As he frames it,

Some critics on the left and right have questioned whether the White House invented the threat from the so-called “Khorasan Group” in order to justify airstrikes that began in September against al Qaeda and ISIS targets in Syria.

“ISIS,” of course, refers to the Islamic State, formerly, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (meaning Iraq and Greater Syria or the Levant). It is the al-Qaeda spin-off currently rampaging across that region. ISIS is distinguished from al-Qaeda because the two — at least for the moment — are rivals. Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise is Jabhat al-Nusra. Mr. Lake further asserts that this franchise “has been focused on its fight inside [Syria],” in apparent distinction from the so-called Khorasan Group’s focus on attacking the United States.

This is all worth teasing out because there is confusion about what the Khorasan controversy is over. The Lake report, moreover, is a valuable demonstration of how the government’s conscious avoidance of Islamic-supremacist ideology leads to wayward analysis and policy.

The EU’s dependency on Russian gas is a direct result of the EU’s own catastrophic energy policies in the past. It seems that Europe, having made itself almost totally dependent on Russian gas and oil during the past decade, now wants the US to come and save it from self-inflicted disaster.

The Ukrainians by now should have come to realize that with friends like the EU…. The fallout is everywhere, from a maimed Ukraine with hundreds of dead, to the West entangled in a trade war with Russia, with sanctions going back and forth.

While the West is fighting a war with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the European Union is bringing the relations between Russia and the West over Ukraine into an ever greater mess. The free trade agreement between the US and the EU, the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), is likely to become the next victim of the Ukrainian conflict.

Last week, European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht warned that TTIP is at risk of never being agreed upon. He blamed the debacle on Washington’s and Berlin’s failure to provide political leadership. The real stumbling block, however, is De Gucht’s own European Commission in Brussels. It insists that TTIP include an energy chapter in which Washington guarantees the Europeans unlimited access to US energy and raw materials in case Russia limits its oil and gas supplies to Europe.

The EU’s dependency on Russian gas is huge. Countries such as the Baltics and Finland are 100% dependent on Russian gas. Even Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, is dependent on Russian gas for over 40% of its supply.

This crisis is the direct result of the EU’s own catastrophic energy policies in the past. Exactly one decade ago, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs foolishly created the conditions that permit Moscow to use gas as an economic weapon to a maximum effect.

By ordering Dutch soldiers to be “invisible” in The Netherlands, what message is the government sending to it enemies, let alone its own citizens?

Jihadists now know that a few tweets from a single Dutch jihadist can fundamentally alter Dutch defense policy. It will order the personnel tasked with keeping The Netherlands safe to hide.

A country that has to hide its soldiers on its own soil and protect its Jewish schools with Military Police cannot possibly maintain that it has no real problems with elements of its Muslim minority.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense has advised its soldiers not wear their uniforms in public. Dutch vice Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher of the Labour Party emphasized that the proposal was merely advice.

The Dutch military, however, clearly ordered — instead of advised — its personnel to hide their military professions in public.

Dutch customs officials, whose uniforms could be mistaken as military, received the same advice.

YOM KIPPUR IS ONE OF THE HOLIEST HOLIDAYS IN THE JEWISH CALENDAR. IT IS A DAY OF FASTING AND REFLECTION WHICH I WILL OBSERVE UNTIL THE BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR BEST WISHES FOR A HEALTHY, HAPPY AND PEACEFUL YEAR. RSK

“The enemy of my enemy is my potential ally” underlies the 2014 Western policy toward Iran, the enemy of ISIS. It underlay US policy toward Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – the enemy of Iran – until Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

The 1990 reckless policy toward Iraq triggered a conventional conflict, a $1.25 trillion cost to the US taxpayer, 4,500 US military fatalities, a surge of anti-US Islamic terrorism and a dramatic destabilization of the Persian Gulf. The 2014 mischaracterization of Iran could produce a nuclear conflict, a mega-trillion dollar cost to the US taxpayer, an unprecedented level of fatalities, a tidal wave of global anti-US Islamic terrorism and tectonic eruptions of insanity throughout the globe.

During 1989-1990, upon the conclusion of the Iraq-Iran war, the US Administration portrayed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – the enemy of America’s enemy, Iran – as a potential ally, enhancing Baghdad’s strategic capabilities through an intelligence-sharing agreement, supplies of sensitive dual-use systems and the extension of $5bn loan guarantees. Instead of constraining Saddam’s regional maneuverability and inherent, violent, megalomaniac expansionism, the US Administration chose to ignore Saddam’s core, imperialistic, rogue, radical, anti-US ideology, which triggered the Iraq-Iran war.

The larger, historical, ideological, complex context was overtaken by a narrowly and simplistically-designed policy-de-jour.

The recklessness of “the enemy of my enemy is my potential ally” was underlined by an intense US-Iraq diplomatic traffic. For example, Saddam’s meeting with Ambassador April Glaspie on July 25, 1990, which convinced Saddam that he could invade Kuwait with impunity. Thus, an erroneous US policy led to Iraq’s plunder of Kuwait, and consequently to the First Gulf War (1991), the devastatingly costly Second Gulf War (2003-2010) and possibly the Third Gulf War (2014-).

The victory of wishful-thinking over reality, also, undelay Israel’s 1993 policy toward the PLO – the enemy of Hamas – which was gullibly expected to align itself with Israel’s war on Palestinian terrorism, in return for the unprecedented Israeli territorial concessions of the Oslo process. Instead, since 1993, Israel has been a victim of an unprecedented wave of PLO/Hamas anti-Israel terrorism, reinforced by daily hate-education and incitement in Mahmoud Abbas’ schools, mosques and media, as well as a surge of terrorism from 2000-2003, the 2006 Hamas takeover of Gaza and the 2008/9, 2012 and 2014 wars against Palestinian terrorism in Gaza.

There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.

Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things. They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth.

Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.

Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.

If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.

To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.

Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.

Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. These are just outrage fuel for the willfully outraged whose resentment is both culture and religion.

Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.

Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor. Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.

Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.

Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.

First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.