RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Vision of the Founding Fathers What kind of nation did the Founders aim to create?
Men, not vast, impersonal forces — economic, technological, class struggle, what have you — make history, and they make it out of the ideals that they cherish in their hearts and the ideas they have in their minds. So what were the ideas and ideals that drove the Founding Fathers to take up arms and fashion a new kind of government, one formed by reflection and choice, as Alexander Hamilton said, rather than by accident and force?

The worldview out of which America was born centered on three revolutionary ideas, of which the most powerful was a thirst for liberty. For the Founders, liberty was not some vague abstraction. They understood it concretely, as people do who have a keen knowledge of its opposite. They understood it in the same way as Eastern Europeans who have lived under Communist tyranny, for instance, or Jews who escaped the Holocaust.

Reagan Warned about Airbrushing Our History Away
This Fourth of July we will celebrate our independence and freedoms. But are we now more politically correct than free?

Last week, Apple Computer removed several Civil War games that uses Confederate flag imagery from its app store. Apple CEO Tim Cook said on Twitter that he wished to honor the Charleston shooting victims “by eradicating racism & removing the symbols & words that feed it.” Recall that Soviet leaders hoped they could drop executed party members down an Orwellian memory hole by airbrushing them out of photographs.

Apple relented a few days later and agreed to reinstate some games if they merely, for example, displayed little troops carrying the infamous Rebel banner. But the partial retreat came only after the Game Labs Team, which develops computer simulations, blasted Apple:

Spielberg’s Schindler’s List did not try to amend his movie to look more comfortable. The historical Gettysburg movie (1993) is still on iTunes. We believe that all historical art forms: books, movies, or games such as ours, help to learn and understand history, depicting events as they were. True stories are more important to us than money. . . . We can’t change history, but we can change the future.

Thanks to Tuesday’s State Department document dump, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mail server is back in the news. The roughly 3,000 e-mails that State plopped on the media were among the 55,000 that Clinton supposedly surrendered before she wiped that server as clean as a chalkboard at the start of class.

But what if that server still brims with Clinton’s e-mails and other documents?

I strongly suspect that Clinton has erased nothing. Her server is pristine. Hillary and company only say that it has been deleted.

“I have confirmed with the secretary’s IT support that no emails . . . for the time period January 21, 2009, through February 1, 2013, reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server,” Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote the House Select Committee on Benghazi. “Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized.”

By asserting that the contents of the server have been obliterated, Clinton enjoys the political advantage of pretending to delete it: Republicans largely have stopped asking for the device.

Hillary’s server is empty, GOPers think. So, why bother with it?

E-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server are slowly being released in batches — and each one reveals a little more about the woman we thought we knew so well. The revelations aren’t surprising, but they are a problem for Clinton, who is seeing her poll numbers drop and isn’t getting the coronation many had expected.

National Review shed light yesterday on the relationship Clinton had with partisan hack Sidney Blumenthal while she was secretary of state. E-mails revealed that Blumenthal, who was forbidden employment by the Obama White House, essentially functioned as a State Department employee, advising Clinton about Libya and messaging on crucial issues.

Totally unconcerned about ISIS’s stated intent to put American heads on spikes, sitting in the White House safely behind a newly reinforced spiked fence, Barack Obama felt moved to weigh in on the heavy issue of a concoction credited to the ancient Aztecs: guacamole.

Coincidentally, the Aztecs were notorious for beheading sacrificial victims with the same gusto as modern-day ISIS.

But this 4th of July, it isn’t ISIS threatening to emulate the Aztecs on American soil that has captured Obama’s attention. Instead, it’s the audacity of the New York Times’ suggestion that peas should be added to guacamole.

Much like “Let’s Move!” Michelle’s gag-worthy ideas about ramping up nutrition levels by adding spinach to meatballs and cauliflower to scrambled eggs, out of the blue, someone at the New York Times proposed adding fresh green peas to guacamole.

As always, with priorities firmly in order, Barack Obama, who probably never noticed ISIS’s strong similarity to the guacamole-loving, head-chopping Aztecs, did find time on Twitter to extol “classic” guacamole dip:

According to news reports, the U.S. and Cuba will be opening embassies later this month. We even heard a rumor that President Obama may travel to Havana to cut the ribbon.

Will Joanne attend the ribbon cutting ceremony?

We are talking about Joanne Chesimard, a fugitive from U.S. law enjoying life in the tropics as a special guest of the Castros:

It was a murder on the New Jersey Turnpike – stunning violence near the New Brunswick exit.

Now, decades after Black Liberation Army leader Joanne Chesimard was sentenced for the 1973 killing of a state trooper, escaped prison, and surfaced in Cuba in 1984, she is first and foremost among the estimated 70 American fugitives harbored there whose apparent flouting of U.S. law is fuel for critics of recent efforts to restore U.S.-Cuba relations.

In December, 54 years after America severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, Presidents Obama and Raul Castro proposed a renewal of ties.

On June 27th, 1976, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by Germans from the Baader-Meinhof German militant group and Palestinians from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. With no room for negotiation, nearly zero information on the terrorists’ plan, and a deadline of just 48 hours until hostages would start being murdered, the Israeli government and security forces put together one of the most daring, brazen rescue missions in Israeli military history.

Israel Forever invites YOU to commemorate this historic operation and mark this dramatic victory over international terrorism by enjoying the articles, videos and blogs to follow.

July 4th, Entebbe Memories

I was sick thinking of how they had separated the Jewish and Israeli passengers; releasing the Christian ones. That a German terrorist was involved in this separation brought home again the knowledge that the Holocaust will never really leave us.

Rescue at Entebbe: An Anniversary of Freedom

The “non celebration” of Shavuot by so many Jews is paradoxical given the important significance of the festival, this incredible double celebration of land and life as we culminate our Exodus from Egypt.

Video: Meet the Heroes of Entebbe

An intimate look into the operation from the point of view of former IAF soldiers and Israeli hostages.

“…there were Magen David pendants thrown on the floor because the people figured out what was going on…”

Former Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren is a native of West Orange, New Jersey best exemplifies the special relations between the two allies, Israel and the US. With the publication of his memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (2015), he has another best seller. Previous ones were Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (2007). Having read Ally, I concur with praise from two pundits: Bret Stephens, the Tuesday Wall Street Journal columnist of note, and Vic Rosenthal , a former resident of Fresno , California, now a Jerusalem resident whose Abu Yehuda blog posts are a must read about an American living in Israel.

Some Arab Knesset (parliament) members have devoted much of their time and efforts to helping the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — who have their own leaders, spokesmen, representatives — at the expense of their own constituents in Israel.

How does joining a flotilla to the Gaza Strip solve any problems facing Arab Israelis, such as unemployment and poverty? It is also a betrayal of the Arab voters who sent them to the Knesset to fight for more public funds and services for the Arabs in Israel.

Would the two Knesset members be willing to risk their lives for the people who voted for them? It was hard to find Arab Israelis who saw anything positive in Ghattas’s decision to sail aboard a ship to the Gaza Strip. In fact, many did not hesitate privately to criticize the decision.

It is time for Arab Israelis to endorse a new approach toward their state, and distance themselves from representatives who act against their interests and damage relations between Jews and Arabs.

If some Knesset members wish to devote their time and energy to helping the Palestinians, they should consider moving to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Otherwise, they need to start addressing the problems facing their constituents and refrain from causing further damage to Arab-Jewish relations.

Once again, it is time to remind the representatives of the Arab citizens of Israel in the Knesset (parliament) who their real constituents are.

The politically convenient illusion that a coherent United States of Europe might be nudged into being paved the way for the financially convenient delusion that a single currency would see the Euro Zone stable, secure and surging ahead. The turmoil in Greece puts pay to that notion
Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, may be widely referred to as “the master of lies”, but when he spoke to a group of students in Belgium in early May he was not at his best. The Eurozone, he claimed, was an “area of solidarity and prosperity”. There are no reports of laughter but in Hades Tacitus could be heard repeating that old jibe of his, “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: They make a desert and call it peace.

A desert it is, at least in the currency union’s south. About the only abundance is in miserable statistics. To take just a few, Greece’s GDP fell by roughly a quarter between 2008 and 2014. In Spain, youth unemployment stood at slightly under 50 per cent this March, some 10 per cent worse than in Italy, a country with an economy that has barely grown since the turn of the century. There has been a wave of emigration from Europe’s south in which the best and the brightest are over-represented. Talk of a lost generation is not hyperbole.