RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Who was worse: Hitler or Stalin?” It isn’t a parlor game, but rather the historical equivalent of “ISIS or Iran (or proxy Syria)?” You can play it either way, but “a plague on both their houses” didn’t cut it in 1941, and it doesn’t cut it in 2015.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 gave Hitler room to conquer Western Europe without fear of an attack on his rear. Stalin was a committed member of the pact until Hitler broke it, at which point Stalin brazenly pivoted to the Allies and demanded rights as a) a full partner and b) an aid recipient. FDR might have said, “Boy, watching Adolph and Uncle Joe battle it out would be great – fascists vs. communists, and no American boots on the ground.” But even before Pearl Harbor and Germany’s declaration of war against the U.S., FDR and Churchill set aside their disgust for Soviet internal behavior. They knew full well about the millions dead in the Stalin-engineered Ukrainian famine, even if Walter Duranty was keeping it from NYT readers. But they determined that Hitler was the greater immediate threat.

“Even as he concedes the growing world disorder, Mr. Obama still won’t admit that his policy of American retreat has created a vacuum for rogues to fill. He exhorted the U.N. on Monday that “I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backwards.”

One sotto voce argument the Obama Administration made for its nuclear deal with Iran is that Russia and Iran would return the favor by cooperating to settle the Syrian civil war. As so often in this Presidency, the opposite is turning out to be true.

Mr. Obama said the U.S. departure from Iraq in 2011 would reduce “the tide of war,” but war has returned with a vengeance. He said a “reset” would improve relations with Russia, but tensions are far worse than when he took office. He said the U.S. could safely wind down its military operations in Afghanistan, but on Monday the Taliban took control of the city of Kunduz from the Afghan government.

Even Mr. Obama, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, had little choice but to acknowledge the rising tide of disorder. “We come together today knowing that the march of human progress never travels in a straight line,” he said. “Dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” In particular, he added, “we see some major powers assert themselves in ways that contravene international law.”

Hillary Clinton posted on Twitter Sunday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was “shameless” for presiding over a United Nations women’s rights meeting in New York while his regime persecutes feminists at home. She’s right, and Chinese state media condemnations of her “ignominious shenanigans” underscore Beijing’s sensitivity on the point. But where was this conviction when Mrs. Clinton was U.S. Secretary of State?

Hillary the presidential candidate wants to be seen as tough both on China and women’s rights. In April, after Chinese authorities detained five feminist activists during a political meeting in Beijing, she called the move “inexcusable.” The women were soon released on bail but remain under surveillance as “criminal suspects.”

In a June campaign video, Mrs. Clinton highlighted her tough 1995 speech at a U.N. conference in Beijing, the 20th anniversary of which was marked this weekend with Mr. Xi presiding. “It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food or drowned or suffocated simply because they are born girls,” Mrs. Clinton had said in 1995, referring to Beijing’s population-control measures. “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”

More chaos in Syria suits the Russian president just fine. Higher oil prices will please Moscow and Tehran.

With the Middle East in chaos and a belligerent Russian regime stoking the turmoil, the dueling speeches at the United Nations on Monday by presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin might have offered new insight. What the world saw instead was entirely predictable.

Mr. Obama has already decided to continue his policy of disengagement from the Middle East, and his platitudes about cooperation and the rule of law rang hollow in the U.N.’s General Assembly hall. Of the conflict in Syria, he said, “we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo.” But every listener was aware that Mr. Obama had no intention of backing his words with action.

Dr. Gottlieb is a physician and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He consults with and invests in health-care services companies.

The high drug prices she decries are not the result of market forces gone wild, but rather bad regulation.
Hillary Clinton’s prescription to soothe the economic hangover consumers have from ObamaCare’s regulatory binge is a single ingredient: more regulation. Mrs. Clinton begins her treatment plan by focusing on “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies and the need for price regulation.

Major biotech indexes are down about 20% since Mrs. Clinton first tweeted news of her plan on Sept. 21. What she fails to comprehend is that the high drug prices she decries aren’t the result of market forces gone wild. Rather, they are the result of bad regulation that has created market failures and shortages.

Take Turing Pharmaceuticals, which has come under fire for raising the price of Daraprim, a drug used for decades to treat toxoplasmosis and more recently to treat AIDS and cancer patients, to $750 from $13.50 a tablet. In a Sept. 20 interview, Turing CEO Martin Shkreli said the increase was needed to stay in business and research new medicines. “This drug was doing $5 million in revenue,” he said, “and I don’t think you could find a drug company on this planet that could make money on $5 million of revenue.”

A liberal columnist for The Orange County Register is noticing a prominent shift in the political left becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, despite the tendency of Jews to identify as Democrats.

In his latest op-ed titled “Jews finding less comfort on the Left,” Joel Kotkin explains:

[I]n recent years, anti-Semitism and, particularly, anti-Zionism have shifted ever more to the Left.

Though he notes that remnants of bigotry remain on the Right, Kotkin believes that the security Jews once felt may finally be eroding to the point where they are finding more support from the conservative end of the spectrum in this country and abroad.

And some of the most powerful examples of the Left turning on Jews is happening not only in European universities, but also around the world through various divestment campaigns against Israel.

“The European Left, long enamored of radicals from the developing world, increasingly adopts the notion that Israel represents the ultimate political atrocity,” Kotkin writes.

If one person can stand at the UN and unilaterally declare a state, I advise the leader of the Kurds, the Catalans, the Druze and any other ethnic groups that feel entitled to have their independence to make their way to the building and do so.

It is, therefore, the European Union and several European governments, including France and the Netherlands, that are complicit with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in knowingly and purposefully violating their own, signed agreements. Moreover, according to the Oslo Accords, the PA was designated as an interim body, not a permanent one.

If one really wants to help the Palestinians, one will try to help rid them of their corrupt and repressive leaders; not reinforce them. The Palestinian people deserve better than this.

The “bombshell” that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas threatened he was going to drop on the United Nations during his speech did not materialize.

Ali Kazak knows perfectly well that his narrative is deceitful in the extreme. Kazak’s fantasy about a Greater Israel is false, yet he does not mention a word about the most popular slogan used by Palestinians and their supporters: “Palestine will be free From the river to the Sea.” All Palestinian maps show this same thing: a Palestine stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean. The slogan and the maps show one thing: no Israel. To call for the extinction of a people and country is a threat of genocide, something the Jews of all people have never called for and will never urge.

“The Jewish settlement is not designed to undermine the position of the Arab community; on the contrary, it will salvage it from its economic misery, lift it from its social decline, and rescue it from physical and moral degeneration. Our renaissance in Palestine will come through the country’s regeneration, that is: the renaissance of its Arab inhabitants.” – David Ben Gurion, 1906, later to become Prime Minister of Israel.

Why does Kazak not address the genuine threats of extremist Muslim shaykhs and organizations that say Islam will conquer the world, Muslims will dominate, and the earth will become a single umma [community]?

Staunton, September 28 – Those who are members of traditionally Muslim nations, both from within the Russian capital, the Russian Federation, the former Soviet space, and the Middle East, now number “more than three million” in Moscow, and their numbers will only increase, according to Fari Asadullin, a senior scholar at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies.

His figure, significantly higher than the ten percent that Russian officials invoke, reflects Asadullin’s conclusions that there are far more illegal migrants than the government wants to admit and that this community includes not only of Muslims from Russia and the former Soviet space but also from the Middle East (kommersant.ru/doc/2815999).

That makes Moscow the largest Muslim city in Russia and the largest Muslim capital in Europe, with “ethnic Muslims” now forming a quarter of some of the capital’s districts and becoming an increasingly visible part of the city’s public space, something that both the Russian government and Russian residents must accept.

As the city’s oldest Muslim community, Tatars from the Middle Volga, demonstrate, these people can eventually fit in to the city’s Russian cultural matrix, Asadullin says, unless the authorities try to block the religious practice of Muslims and Russians react to them with Islamophobia. In that event, many of the city’s new residents are likely to turn to radicalism.

EACH YEAR, the United Nations General Assembly passes a resolution condemning the US economic embargo on Cuba. Each year, the United States, joined by a dwindling number of friends, votes against the resolution. Passage is a foregone conclusion. The vote last year was 188-2.

The United Nations was born 70 years ago this autumn. Its idealistic Charter called for the promotion of peace and the protection of human rights and dignity.
The resolution has no legal effect. It is merely a vehicle for inveighing against Washington, and for pretending that communist Cuba’s long record of economic failure and human-rights abuse is somehow the fault of the United States.

For 23 years, under Republican and Democratic presidents, the United States has opposed the anti-embargo measure. But now comes word that the Obama administration may abstain from this year’s vote, an unprecedented step. “It is unheard-of for a UN member state not to oppose resolutions critical of its own laws,” the Associated Press reported on Monday, and some congressional leaders are aghast that President Obama would consider shirking his sovereign obligation to defend US interests before the world body. Even if he favors repealing the Cuban embargo (which President Bill Clinton signed in 1996), it remains the law of the land. Until that changes, says House Speaker John Boehner, the president has a “responsibility to defend US law and that’s what [he] should do.”