RUTHFULLY YOURS

Corbyn may say he’s not anti-Semitic, but associating with the people he does is its own crime“I am not a criminal but I seem to find myself frequently in criminal company” is a statement that evades more questions than it answers.

There was something “How very dare you”, about Jeremy Corbyn’s recent temper tantrum in rebuttal of the charge that the company he kept reflected badly on him. “The idea that I’m some kind of racist or anti-Semitic person is beyond appalling, disgusting and deeply offensive,” he said.
Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour. This isn’t to say we detect outright dishonesty in the deflection. But it is evasive to answer questions about your judgement with protestations of your probity. How very dare we? Well, since you are putting yourself up for election we have every right to dare you. And if our point is that you don’t see racism when it’s staring you in the face, then your assurances that you aren’t yourself a racist are worthless.

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It is avouched on all sides that Jeremy Corbyn is no anti-Semite. How it is possible to guarantee the complexion of another’s soul when our own are such mysteries to us, I don’t know. But very well – he isn’t. Speaking generally, it is easier these days, anyway, to hate Israel rather than Jews, since you get the same frisson with none of the guilt. Besides, anti-Semitism need not be the worst of crimes. Depends on the variety you espouse. Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them.

In his speech on the Iran deal, Secretary of State Kerry mentioned “Israel” or “Israeli” 26 times – protesting a bit too much about his concern for the ally put at existential risk by the Obama administration’s cascade of concessions. Even eerier was the similarity of Kerry’s words to those of Neville Chamberlain in the British parliamentary debate on the Munich agreement in 1938. Here is Kerry’s assertion about Israel, together with his concluding words:

The people of Israel will be safer with this deal, and the same is true for the people throughout the region. … [H]istory may judge [the Iran agreement] a turning point, a moment when the builders of stability seized the initiative from the destroyers of hope, and when we were able to show, as have generations before us, that when we demand the best from ourselves and insist that others adhere to a similar high standard – when we do that, we have immense power to shape a safer and a more humane world. That’s what this is about and that’s what I hope we will do in the days ahead.

In the debate on the Munich agreement, Chamberlain’s claims were actually more modest than Kerry’s. He acknowledged the criticism he had received for saying that the agreement signaled “peace for our time,” and he said he hoped Members of Parliament would not “read into words used in a moment of some emotion, after a long and exhausting day, after I had driven through miles of excited, enthusiastic, cheering people – I hope they will not read into those words more than they were intended to convey.” He said he knew “weakness in armed strength means weakness in diplomacy” and he had a program to accelerate Britain’s re-armament. Then he described the effect of the agreement on Czechoslovakia and his hopes for the future:

What will they call “The Hunchback of Notre Dame????”…. Posture Challenged ????? rsk

De Monfort Hall in Leicester, England, has announced that there will be no dwarves in its Snow White Christmas pantomime because the word “dwarf” is too offensive.

The production will be called “Snow White and her Seven Friends” and feature child actors as the “friends,” according to an article in the Leicester Mercury.

Despite the fact that that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has been around for approximately 9 million years, a spokeswoman for the theater insisted to the Mercury that the word “dwarf” is “generally not a word that people feel comfortable with” and that the play had to be changed.

But Warwick Davis, a dwarf actor who has appeared in movies including Harry Potter and Star Wars, told the Mercury that he’s suspicious of that explanation:

“The profit margins for pantos are not very big and it’s obviously much cheaper to involve schoolchildren than it is to pay lots of professional short actors,” he said.

Davis also said that, as a dwarf, he found the decision to eliminate dwarfs to be far more offensive than the word could ever be.

The European Union has been devoted to eliminating borders, and now finds itself functionally with none amidst its worst refugee crisis since World War II.

To paraphrase Stalin, the migrant crisis stopped being a statistic — more than 2,000 migrants have drowned this year — and became a tragedy with the heart-rending images of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach.

The scale of the crisis is mind-boggling. About a million people left Russia after the 1914 revolution. In Syria alone, about 4 million people have fled the country, and another 7 million have been internally displaced. Refugees and migrants also are coming from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other hopeless places, adding up to potentially tens of millions of migrants.

The locus of the migrants’ hopes, more than anywhere else, is Germany. It is expected to get 800,000 asylum claims just this year. The government is talking of taking 500,000 migrants annually for the next several years, and Chancellor Angela Merkel calls the crisis “the next great European project.” The reaction of the rest of Europe should be “No thanks.”

Attempting to secure the Congressional vote required to confirm President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has necessitated Secretary for State John Kerry pledging Obama’s “rock solid” diplomatic support and increased military assistance for Israel – the bitterest opponent of Obama’s Iranian proposal. Speaking at the National Constitution Center on 2 September, Kerry said:

“And diplomatically, our support for Israel also remains rock solid as we continue to oppose every effort to delegitimize the Jewish state, or to pass biased resolutions against it in international bodies.”

Kerry continued:

“I take a back seat to no one in my commitment to the security of Israel, a commitment I demonstrated through my 28-plus years in the Senate. And as Secretary of State, I am fully conscious of the existential nature of the choice Israel must make…”

The leftist political prejudice in Whitehall and the wider British establishment is as undeniable as the repeated and shameful shunning of Robert Conquest, chronicler of Soviet evil. As one wag put it: anti-communism may die, but anti-anti-communism lives forever
One of the perks of working at Downing Street in my day (the mid-to-late 1980s) was that you were invited to propose candidates for the Honours List. You weren’t encouraged to propose too many people, or to do so too often, and there was certainly no guarantee that your candidates would get beyond the hurdle of the first patronage committee meeting. But it was a pleasant—okay, slightly grand—feeling to know that some worthy person might have his worth recognised as a result of your proposal.

I proposed two people. The first was Professor Norman Gash, the author of a classic biography of the great nineteenth-century Tory statesman Sir Robert Peel, and one of the few strong supporters of Mrs Thatcher in the academic world. The other was Robert Conquest, the historian of Stalin’s purges and the forced Ukrainian famine, who died on August 3. He was more than a supporter of Mrs Thatcher; he was her informal but valued adviser on foreign policy.

If asked in advance which of my candidates would be chosen, I would have plumped firmly for Conquest. Both men were great historians, but Conquest had achieved an international reputation that had understandably eluded the more provincial Gash. In fact it was Gash who appeared in the next Honours List. He got a CBE. (It should have been a knighthood.)

The untold story of Israeli hydrodiplomacy, from the 1950s until now.

n November 1898, Theodor Herzl arranged a meeting with the German emperor, Wilhelm II, to obtain help in creating a Jewish state in the land of Israel. In their conversation, the Kaiser praised the work of the Zionist pioneers, telling Herzl that, above all else, “water and shade trees” would restore the land to its ancient glory. Four years later, Herzl had a lead character in his political tract-cum-novel Altneuland (“Old-New Land”) say of Jewish settlement in Palestine: “This country needs nothing but water and shade to have a great future.” Another character predicts that the water engineers of the Jewish homeland will be its heroes.

Utopian novels set the bar high, and Altneuland is nothing if not a utopian novel. Yet even before statehood, Zionists made remarkable strides in putting the land’s limited water resources to good use. They drained swamps, drilled wells, and developed irrigation systems. By the 1960s, Israel had developed a nationwide system of underground pipes to transport water from the relatively water-rich north to the Negev desert in the south. Israeli engineers also developed the system known as drip irrigation, which simultaneously conserves water and increases crop yields. Later, Israel would pioneer desalination technology. Combining scientific advances with efficient management, the Jewish state is now in no danger of running out of water. In fact, it provides large amounts from its own supplies to the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan, while each year exporting billions of dollars’ worth of peppers, tomatoes, melons, and other water-intensive produce.

In a new biography of Donald Trump due out later this month, the deal-making presidential candidate says that his attendance at the New York Military Academy gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”

I guess that’s sort of like Obama getting all that foreign policy experience by simply living in Indonesia for a few years.

In truth, Trump hasn’t said or done anything outrageous in recent days so this eyebrow-raising comment on his military service will serve to give his numbers another boost.

New York Times:

Donald J. Trump, who received draft deferments through much of the Vietnam War, told the author of a forthcoming biography that he nevertheless “always felt that I was in the military” because of his education at a military-themed boarding school.

On the very first day back from recess, as the House prepared to begin Wednesday debate on the Iran nuclear deal, a Democratic opponent of the agreement introduced his resolution to authorize military force against the Islamic Republic.

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) sits on the House Rules Committee that determined the guidelines for the upcoming 11 hours of debate in the lower chamber, and warned his colleagues this evening that they need to be prepared for what comes after the Obama administration’s implementation of the deal.

Hastings was thinking ahead to that a month ago, when he came out against the Iran deal.

On Tuesday, he introduced the “Authorization of Use of Force Against Iran Resolution.”

More than six years after President Obama took office promising the most transparent administration in history [1], we have now arrived at the moment when the State Department appoints a “Transparency Coordinator.”

Not a moment too soon, one might suppose. Perhaps the Transparency Coordinator’s [2] first assignment should be to bring more transparency to her own job description. News of the post came by way of a press release from Secretary of State John Kerry [3], in which Kerry noted a dramatic increase in requests for information from State, but mentioned not a word about the over-the-top administration secrecy that has provoked so many of these requests. Kerry said he was “pleased to announce the appointment of Ambassador Janice Jacobs [4] as the State Department’s Transparency Coordinator, charged with improving document preservation and transparency systems.”

What might that mean in practice? Go figure. Like Obama in 2009, Kerry went on for a couple of paragraphs about “our commitment to transparency” and how he wants the Department to “lead on these issues,” and “set and achieve a new standard,” and “harness new technological tools,” and “think boldly and creatively” and “fundamentally improve our ability to respond to requests for our records.”