FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will President Trump’s Visit to Saudi Arabia Tackle Terrorism and Promote Religious Freedom? by A. Z. Mohamed

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

A number of recently published books on the history, culture and internal workings of Saudi Arabia cast doubt on the ability of the kingdom to undergo the kind of change required to tackle extremism when its chief aim is to preserve and enhance the power of the royal family.

The government in Riyadh neither believes in nor permits religious liberty and free speech for its own citizens or for Muslims elsewhere. Indeed, the kingdom’s human rights record is abysmal at best.

Although Trump is right that America should not “dictate to others how to live,” he needs to consider how he can “build a coalition of partners” whose entire way of life is indelibly linked to the cause and spread of the very extremism, violence and global terrorism that he aims to eradicate.

As part of his first official trip abroad at the end of May, U.S. President Donald Trump will visit Saudi Arabia, Israel, Italy and Brussels, Belgium.

According to a statement released by the White House, Trump’s meetings with King Salman and other key figures “will reaffirm the strong partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia and allow the leaders to discuss issues of strategic concern, including efforts to defeat terrorist groups and discredit radical ideologies.”

The goal may be commendable, but it is hardly attainable in a country like Saudi Arabia, ruled politically by an absolute monarchy and theologically by Wahhabism, both immensely radical.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Does the Environmental Left Understand How Modern Pipelines Work? Its wild exaggeration of an 84-gallon Dakota Access spill suggests that it’s either cynical or ignorant. by Jillian Kay Melchior

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

Last week week, a routine entry in the searchable database at the website of the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources indicated that the Dakota Access Pipeline saw an 84-gallon crude-oil spill in April. The environmental Left rushed to publicize the incident as an “I told you so” moment, but activists’ gloating reveals either their cynical dishonesty or their ignorance about how modern pipelines work.

The spill occurred in an Energy Transfer Partners facility specifically equipped to catch spills. Moreover, the precautions in place to prevent environmental damage worked exactly as they should, according to the South Dakota Department of Environment and National Resources.

“As spills go, this spill was contained, all product was cleaned up quickly, and there were no impacts to the environment,” Kim Smith, a spokesperson for the South Dakota department, told me. “The containment system and notification system worked as they should.”

Compare that to the hysterical reaction from leftist activists and their media allies.

Writing in the Guardian, opinionist Julian Brave NoiseCat said that the leak “demonstrates the risk of technological and human failure inherent in crude oil pipelines,” adding that “indigenous communities, ranchers, and workers [are] forced to live under the constant threat of petroleum poisoning.”

Jan Hasselman, a lawyer for the Standing Rock Sioux, told the Huffington Post: “They keep telling everybody that it is state of the art, that leaks won’t happen, that nothing can go wrong. It’s always been false. They haven’t even turned the thing on, and it’s shown to be false.”

And a Clean Technica reporter claimed the incident “drives home an essential truth about all the systems mankind has devised to transport oil from place to place,” adding: “They all leak. Somewhere, somehow, the vile stuff gets out and when it does, it causes untold damage to the environment.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Cook’s Leap of Faith Those who don’t accept absolutist and unsubstantiated claims about a scientific consensus on climate change are not in ‘denial.’ By Oren Cass

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

Crying “consensus” to defend absolutist assertions, climate activists are charging well beyond the threshold of what mainstream science can support. When they turn back toward the ledge to shout “denial” at anyone who has not leapt with them, the word no longer means what they think it does.

This was my argument in “Who’s The Denier Now?,” published in National Review last month. John Cook, lead author of the “97 percent consensus” studies, has responded to that piece by overstating a consensus in defense of an absolutist assertion and then accusing me of “denial.” He also objects to my citation of his work, which I will address first.

I cited Cook only to refute the claim by Senator Bernie Sanders that “97 percent of the scientists who wrote articles in peer-reviewed journals believe that human activity is the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change.” Specifically, I quoted from three studies that Cook surveyed in Environmental Research Letters, showing consensus levels of 78 percent (climate scientists), 82 percent (earth scientists), and 85 percent (scientists) for Sanders-like statements that attribute to humans a primary role in recent warming.

Cook does not question my accuracy, but instead argues that the consensus among climate scientists should be the relevant measure. Thus, for the 82 percent study, he notes that among the subsample of climate scientists the figure rises to 97 percent. For the 85 percent study, among the subsample of climate scientists the figure rises to 90 percent.

None of this changes the picture. Senator Sanders didn’t say climate scientists, he said peer-reviewed scientists. Even using Cook’s preferred subsamples, the range from 78 to 90 to 97 percent does not support an assertion of a 97 percent consensus.

Cook also misses the larger point, which is that Sanders (among others) has a habit of overstating scientific consensus. Besides the example above, I quote Sanders claiming that 97 percent of scientists conclude that climate change “is already causing devastating problems” and claiming that “the vast majority of scientists” say “there is a real question as to the quality of the planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our grandchildren.” I also quote former President Obama tweeting that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is “dangerous.” The documented consensus extends to none of these claims.

If Cook anywhere criticized those obvious mischaracterizations of his work as strongly as he now takes issue with my precise citation, I apologize for having missed it. He did comment approvingly on the inaccurate Obama tweet, which he said “raises the awareness of consensus” and “really helps in getting that information out into the general public.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

How to Recognize ‘Science Denial’ Climate change, scientific consensus, and fake experts By John Cook

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

There is a consensus of evidence that human activity is causing all of recent global warming. Not some of it. Not even most of it. All of it.

Numerous studies have quantified the human contribution to global warming since the mid 20th century. Most estimates cluster around 100 percent. In fact, the best estimate is slightly over 100 percent. Various natural factors such as changes in solar activity, volcanoes, and wobbles in the Earth’s orbit have likely contributed slight cooling in recent decades.
Human Contribution.png

Based on this evidence, around 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. Again, this estimate isn’t based on a single survey. Rather, it’s based on a number of studies using a variety of independent methods. This includes surveys of scientists, analysis of public statements by scientists, and analyses of peer-reviewed climate research.

I co-authored a synthesis of the studies into scientific consensus on climate change. Two features jumped out at us from the research. First, as scientists’ expertise in climate science gets stronger, so too does their agreement that humans are causing global warming.

Second, among the scientists with the greatest expertise — climate scientists publishing climate research — there is 90 to 100 percent consensus with a number of estimates converging on 97 percent.
Studies Quantifying.png

That scientific agreement increases with climate expertise has been exploited by those looking to cast doubt on expert consensus. Unfortunately, it’s all-too-easy to mislead people into thinking that experts disagree on human-caused global warming. Just select a group of scientists with lower levels of expertise in climate science and portray their opinions as expert agreement. Or take it a step further and try it with non-scientists, which seems to work almost as well. If you want to work out whether you’re getting taken in with the fake-expert strategy, take a closer look at the “experts” who are being cited.

The most egregious example of the fake-expert strategy is the Global Warming Petition Project. This lists over 31,000 people with a science degree who signed a statement claiming that humans aren’t disrupting climate. This petition is held up as evidence against expert consensus on climate change. The flaw in this petition? Only 0.1 percent of the signatories actually have expertise in climate science. A mind-boggling 99.9 percent of the petition signatories are not climate scientists. This is fake experts in bulk.

This brings us Oren Cass’s cover story in the May 1, 2017, issue of National Review, “Who’s the Denier Now?” Before we get to consensus and fake experts, it’s instructive to begin where Cass begins — on the topic of the term “climate denier.” I agree with Cass that equating the rejection of climate science to holocaust denial is inappropriate. Rather, a less rhetorical and more evidence-based approach is to look to the scientific research into the phenomenon of science denial.

Science denial, as a behavior rather than a label, is a consequential and not-to-be ignored part of society. Denial of the link between HIV and AIDS caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in South Africa. Vaccination denial has allowed preventable diseases to make a comeback. When people ignore important messages from science, the consequences can be dire. And if we fail to understand how science denial works, that makes us vulnerable to being misled by the techniques of denial.

How do we recognize science denial? The various movements who have rejected a scientific consensus share the same five characteristics of science denial: reliance on fake experts, using logical fallacies to arrive at false conclusions, demanding impossible expectations of scientific proof, cherry picking from the full body of evidence and conspiracy theories to explain the consensus.

The various movements who have rejected a scientific consensus share the same five characteristics of science denial.

Psychology tells us something important about the five characteristics of science denial. While they may come across as nefarious tactics, they’re not always deliberately deceptive. The traits of denial can also result from unconscious, psychological biases. This means that deliberate deception can be indistinguishable from someone who genuinely believes false arguments.

By way of example, let’s return to the issue of fake experts. Psychological research finds that we tend to ascribe greater expertise to people we agree with. Think of when a person looks through someone else’s music or book collection and exclaims, “You’ve got great taste!” They’re really saying, “You’ve got my taste.”

This unconscious bias makes us vulnerable to reliance on fake experts when they express views we’re sympathetic to. This isn’t necessarily a malevolent strategy. It’s a natural human bias. This is one of the insights gleaned from the science of science denial.

Our 2016 survey-of-surveys warns against the fallacy of selecting samples of non-experts to cast doubt on expert consensus:

Low estimates of consensus arise from samples that include non-experts such as scientists (or non-scientists) who are not actively publishing climate research, while samples of experts are consistent in showing overwhelming consensus.

It’s with some degree of irony that Cass quotes figures from our survey-of-surveys to cast doubt on the consensus. He employs the very technique we warn against by using samples including non-experts.

For example, Cass cites 82 percent consensus. Let’s take a closer look at where he got this figure. It comes from a 2009 paper by Peter Doran and Maggie Zimmermann, who surveyed a broad group of Earth scientists. This included a variety of scientific disciplines with varying degrees of acceptance of climate change (unsurprisingly, the lowest agreement came from economic geologists). When Doran looked at scientists with the relevant expertise — climate scientists publishing climate research — he found 97 percent consensus.

Similarly, Cass cites a 2014 study (that I co-authored) as evidence that the expert consensus is 85 percent. Rick Santorum also misrepresented this study to cast doubt on the 97 percent consensus. Cass draws on a group that includes non-scientists who hadn’t published peer-reviewed climate papers. When we looked at the relevant experts — scientists who had published climate research — we found 90 percent consensus.

Overall, our survey-of-surveys found that across the different studies into consensus, expert agreement ranged between 90 to 100 percent. Moreover, we found a number of studies converging on 97 percent consensus. And it’s always important to come back to the fact that this consensus is built on a foundation of independent lines of empirical evidence.

When the evidence converges on a single coherent conclusion, affirmed by a scientific consensus, we can accept the science or we can deny it. How do we tell the difference between genuine scientific skepticism and science denial? The science of science denial identifies distinct, tell-tale characteristics of denial. Understanding those traits is essential to avoid being misled by misinformation.

— Dr. John Cook is a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Top 10 College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment Targeting the nation’s worst offenders. Sara Dogan ****

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

Over the past two weeks, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has named 10 prestigious college and university campuses to its list of the “Top 10 College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

The Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between the terrorist group Hamas and SJP on each of these ten campuses, both to inform students about the allies to terror in their midst and to challenge these campus administrations to do what they so far have refused to do—to uphold the First Amendment and promote free expression even when doing so means facing down radical students and faculty who demand otherwise.

Already our campaign has yielded positive results. Mainstream Jewish publication JWeekly.com reported on the Freedom Center’s poster campaign, quoting David Horowitz and noting that San Francisco State University President Les Wong has come under fire recently for failing to adequately protect Jewish students on campus.

Wong himself has also responded to the campaign in a letter to entire SFSU community (which was reprinted at Jweekly.com) noting that “This week I encountered both the re-emergence of posters on campus attacking and condemning the work of Palestinian activists and their supporters.” Wong went on to state, “I believe it is the fundamental role of a university to engage differing viewpoints and to evaluate their merits and shortcomings. It is this belief that compels me to unequivocally reject the concept of ‘anti-normalization’ outright.” SJP as an organization rejects all “normalization” of relations with pro-Israel groups. By making this declaration, Wong is taking an important stand against at least one aspect of SJP’s genocidal agenda.

The full report on the ten campus administrations “Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment” follows below.

Introduction:

Of all the disturbing trends to have emerged on college campuses in recent years, perhaps the most ominous is the support universities offer to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Administrators at San Francisco State University, UCLA, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Brooklyn College and other schools have actively supported organizations supporting terrorists and their activities while suppressing their critics.

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has emerged as the leading pro-terrorist, anti-Jewish organization in America, and the driving force behind the recent surge of anti-Semitism on American campuses. SJP is the chief promoter of the Hamas-inspired and funded “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) campaign in America, an effort to weaken and ultimately destroy the Jewish state. SJP also stages annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate weeks on campuses across the nation which feature pro-Hamas speakers and “apartheid walls” in public spaces on campus displaying pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic propaganda. SJP also creates mock checkpoints and die-ins that obstruct student movements on campus, disrupts pro-Israel campus events, threatens Jewish and pro-Israel speakers, and has physically assaulted Jewish students.

As described in the Freedom Center’s recent pamphlet, Students for Justice in Palestine: A Campus Front for Hamas Terrorists, SJP’s pro-terror campaign is guided and funded through a Hamas front called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. AMP was created by Hatem Bazian, a pro-Hamas professor at UC Berkeley who is also the co-founder of SJP.

In recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury from 2004-2007, described AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States” and explained that “AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”

The following report chronicles ten of the worst collegiate offenders in this category of campuses that support anti-Israel terrorists even when their rhetoric and propaganda cross the line into hate speech while rejecting speech critical of the perpetrators and promoters of terrorism.

(Campuses are listed in alphabetical order)

1. Brandeis University
2. Brooklyn College (CUNY)
3. Saint Louis University
4. San Francisco State University
5. Tufts University
6. University of California, Berkeley
7. University of California, Los Angeles
8. University of Chicago
9. University of Minnesota
10. Vassar College

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korea’s Missile Test Puts Region On Edge Nuclear threat reaching point of no return. Joseph Klein

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

North Korea test fired yet another missile on Sunday. This time the test did not end in a fiasco. The missile was fired somewhere between 430 to 500 hundred miles, staying aloft for about 30 minutes at an altitude exceeding 1,240 miles, before landing in the Sea of Japan 60 miles south of Russia’s Vladivostok region. It exceeded in distance and altitude an intermediate-range missile that North Korea successfully tested last February. While reportedly not an intercontinental missile, North Korea is demonstrating with this successful test, according to at least one expert, a missile with a range as far as 3700 miles, putting Hawaii potentially at risk. The North Korean regime’s missile program is firing on all cylinders, including the use of mobile land-based and submarine launch platforms. It is only a matter of time before North Korea also conducts another, more powerful nuclear test in its relentless march towards achieving a strategic nuclear deterrence that would provide it with the leverage to extort its neighbors and threaten the U.S. mainland at will.

The White House issued a statement noting the proximity to Russia of the landing of its latest tested missile, and reiterating the U.S.’s firm commitment to protect its interests and those of its allies against North Korea’s provocations: “With the missile impacting so close to Russian soil – in fact, closer to Russia than to Japan – the President cannot imagine that Russia is pleased. North Korea has been a flagrant menace for far too long. South Korea and Japan have been watching this situation closely with us. The United States maintains our ironclad commitment to stand with our allies in the face of the serious threat posed by North Korea. Let this latest provocation serve as a call for all nations to implement far stronger sanctions against North Korea.”

South Korea’s newly elected President Moon Jae-In, while indicating more receptiveness to diplomatic talks with North Korea than his predecessor, called the missile test-launch a “clear” violation of UN Security Council resolutions, adding that “we should sternly deal with a provocation to prevent North Korea from miscalculating.”

North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-un appears oblivious to such condemnations and rhetorical threats. The latest missile launch was timed to send a clear message to South Korea’s new government, sworn in just days ago, that North Korea would not back down in the face of joint military exercises or other demonstrations of force by the United States, South Korea or their allies. If anything, such demonstrations are having the opposite effect, further convincing Kim Jung-un and his fellow leaders that North Korea’s only path to survival is a nuclear strike capability strong enough to dissuade the U.S. from daring to launch a pre-emptive military strike or invasion.

Sanctions are also clearly not enough to stop the North Korean regime from pursuing its nuclear arms and ballistic missile delivery objectives. Kim Jung-un could care less whether his people starve to death or not, as long as he can control them. North Korea has also proven to be very adept at evading sanctions through front organizations. According to a UN Panel of Experts report issued earlier this year, North Korea has successfully used front companies to obtain access to the international financial system.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

False Claims To US Citizenship Far from a “victimless crime.” May 15, 2017 Michael Cutler

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

Virtually all criminals lie.

Lying is a common tactic used by criminals to conceal their identities, their backgrounds and their crimes. They lie to cover their tracks, to evade detection and to escape from the reach of the “long arm of the law.”

This is why suspects who are taken into custody are fingerprinted and photographed, to attempt to make certain that the name the suspect provides is truly his/her name. Often criminals use multiple false identities whether by committing identity theft or fabricating altogether fictitious identities.

In point of fact, the 9/11 Commission found that in the aggregate, the 19 hijackers who participated in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, used more than 300 false identities or variations of false identities to conceal their identities and their movements as they went about their deadly preparations.

The 9/11 Commission also identified other terrorists who had entered the United States in the decade leading up to the attacks of 9/11 and found that the majority of all of these terrorists engaged in multiple forms of immigration fraud. This was the starting point for my recent article, Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill.

The act of lying is, itself, a crime when it is done in furtherance of other criminal activities. A section of federal law, 18 U.S. Code § 1001, addresses this crime. Here is how this statute begins:

Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully—

(1) falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact;

(2) makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or

(3) makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry;
shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years.

Please notice that the statute cited above noted the potential nexus between false statements and terrorism.

Getting back to immigration, aliens who enter the United States without inspection or who enter the United States legally but then violate the term so their immigration status may lie to authorities about their names, their countries of birth and/or countries of citizenship in order to evade detection by immigration law enforcement, to create the appearance that they are entitled to various public assistance programs or to be able to be employed in the United States and to achieve other illegal goals.

Such false claims to United States citizenship is a violation of 18 U.S. Code § 911. The description of this crime and the punishment for this violation of law is contained in this brief sentence:

Whoever falsely and willfully represents himself to be a citizen of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

The primary goal of illegal aliens is to not be arrested and deported (removed from the United States).

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Only Trump Can Win in North Korea It’s time to think outside the box. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

America is facing the same old bad choices in North Korea.

Either we apply multilateral sanctions hoping that Kim Jong-un, unlike his dad, Saddam Hussein and the Supreme Leader of Iran, will be suitably impressed by having to smuggle his iPhones through three other countries. Or we build a multilateral coalition to take out its military with minimal civilian casualties and then spend the next decade reconstructing and policing it into a proper member of the United Nations.

Is anyone surprised that after Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have little appetite for either alternative?

How is it possible that we beat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in less time than it’s taking us to figure out that we can’t even trust the clods of dirt in Afghanistan? Let alone reach a peace deal with them.

But WW2 was a war. It may have been the last war in which we leveraged all the firepower at our disposal to smash an enemy. We don’t fight wars anymore. Instead we’re the world’s policeman.

The military and the police have very different functions. The military destroys a threat. The police keep order. What we’ve been trying and failing to do in Afghanistan is keep order. It’s what we want to do in North Korea. Get that obnoxious kid next door to stop testing nukes every time he has a bad day.

The vocabulary is a dead giveaway. When we call a country a “rogue state” instead of an “enemy”, we’re not saying that it’s a deadly threat to us, but that it’s not behaving the way a member of the global community should. But being a “rogue state” is only a crime to globalists. Our problem isn’t that North Korea is failing to abide by the United Nations Convention on the Treatment of Radishes. It’s the nukes.

To solve a problem, you have to clearly define it because your solution will follow your formulation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Meet the American women who are flocking to join ISIS Paul Sperry

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

ISIS is recruiting an army of AK-47-brandishing women from the West who are just as bloodthirsty as the men they are marrying. Calling themselves “lionesses of Allah,” they are thought to now number more than 600, and they’re bearing the next generation of terrorists, whom they call “cubs of the caliphate.”

Many of these women are true believers who trust that even with horrific gore and bloodshed, they are helping carry out the holy work of Allah in restoring the ancient Islamic caliphate, and that once it’s reestablished, all believers will live in peace and harmony under Islamic rule.

Some of these ISIS brides living in Syria and Iraq have made the terrorist watchlist. Arguably the most dangerous is Sally Jones, 49, a British Muslim convert who goes by the nom de guerre Umm Hussain al-Britani. She is reportedly now on a British special-forces “kill list” after threatening Queen Elizabeth II.

Jones, who in her youth was a guitarist for an all-girl rock band, Krunch, has also been implicated in two foiled plots to kill Americans and is training her young son to follow in her footsteps.

She and other Western women are actively recruiting like-minded “sisters” to their twisted cause. Their primary duty is “to raise the next generation of lions in Islamic State,” as Jones’ good friend, Umm Muthanna al-Britani, another young British woman, put it in a tweet.

And ISIS pays them a generous stipend for each “cub” they deliver ($25 for each child per month, plus a $400 maternity bonus, and a $500 marriage bonus). This is a strategic move. With more of its men killed in battle, the terror group has to ensure its longevity.

But these moms celebrate death more than life. In fact, they incite their “brothers” to suicidal violence, even reminding them of the supposed heavenly rewards for achieving martyrdom while killing infidels. As Umm Osama, an online friend of Muthanna, once tweeted: “when you get so excited hoping for 7ooris” — the famous “72 virgins” — “remember this n say ‘Marhrah adDugma’ (u can do it).”

They don’t shed a tear if they lose a husband. If he dies in battle, they are “instantly transformed into a hero — the wife of a martyr,” or “shaheed,” Center for Terrorism and Security Studies fellow Mia Bloom said.

ISIS rewards such widows well. “U dnt hav 2 pay 4 ANYTHING if u r wife of a shaheed,” one Western woman in Syria wrote.

BOOKS Comments turned off

David Isaac: A Review of Tuvya Tenenbom’s “The Lies They Tell”—–De Tocqueville He’s Not!!!!

Posted By on May 15th, 2017

“America I find is not the America I wished to find. It is racist, it is hateful and its citizens are bound to destroy themselves.” This is Tuvia Tenenbom’s cringe-worthy conclusion in The Lies They Tell, a chronicle of his wanderings through America to find out what makes it tick. But Tenenbom doesn’t appear to know a thing about America—despite living in New York for 15 years—and seems unable to learn.

What makes this more astonishing is that Tenenbom’s Catch the Jew!, his previous book, was as insightful as his latest is muddled. That book, a gutsy exposé of European funding of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Israel, with the complicity of some Jewish groups, was the first hands-on, direct-contact revelation of what these NGOs were up to, i.e. undermining Israel’s legitimacy. Israel’s government seems to have awoken to the danger. Recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to meet with Germany’s foreign minister after he conferred with anti-Israel NGOs.

Tenenbom understood what he was talking about in part thanks to his unusual background. Groomed to be a rabbi in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, he broke away to pursue secular studies, formed the Jewish Theater in New York, wrote numerous plays, and became a columnist for the Jewish daily The Forward. Fluent in German, he also writes for the German paper Die Zeit. Unfortunately, none of this gives him special insight into America. Tenenbom admits that the rest of the country is to him a blank. “Like many New Yorkers, I don’t know much about the other forty-nine states that make up America,” he writes.

Catch the Jew! had the added benefit of being Tenenbom’s idea, something that can’t be said of his latest effort. As he notes in his introduction, “Following the success of the two books, [I Sleep in Hitler’s Room, on Germany, and Catch the Jew!] my devoted editor, Winfried Horning, asked me to add another book to the series. . . . Winfried thought that the time had come to have a book about America as well.”

Tenenbom decided the best way to “portray the character of the country and its people” was to go out and meet people. He tours the states, but without a reason (apart from a book contract) or theme his wanderings appear aimless, even to himself. While in Cleveland, he writes, “I ate. I walked. Time to rest. Tomorrow I drive. Where to? Detroit. Why? Because there’s nothing more American than Detroit. How do I know? I just made it up.” The book is filled with this sort of empty trivia.

Tenenbom travels for six months, chatting with a racially diverse cast of Americans. He pesters them with questions about politics, religion, and race. Not surprisingly, they’re reluctant to answer. Maybe in Germany and Israel strangers love arguing about politics with strangers, but in this country, starting in on politics with someone you’ve just met is considered rude. Author Robert D. Kaplan, who made a similar trip, writes in his Earning the Rockies, “If you ask people straight out about such things as politics and foreign policy, they will often as not adopt a pose: after all, they don’t know you, and they may be uncomfortable about being quoted in public.” Tenenbom doesn’t entertain the possibility that the people he buttonholes don’t want to open up to him; instead, he decides they’re frightened. Americans, he concludes, are “afraid to share their political and religious views with strangers. In the Land of the Free, the Brave are quiet.” This peculiar idea becomes a major pillar of his book.