RUTHFULLY YOURS

Pharrell Williams Schedules September Performance in Israel

Art Garfunkel performed in Israel on Wednesday, Bon Jovi will be here on October 3, and the list of artists arriving in Israel has now been joined by one of the hottest names in the world of music, American producer and rapper Pharrell Williams.

At the moment, the 42-year-old Williams is scheduled to perform at Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park around September 9, a few days before the Jewish New Year.

The United States is not a Socialist country, but it has been trending toward paternalism for decades. About 35% of the nation’s GDP is a product of federal, state and local spending. Dependency on government has grown. Two-thirds of the federal budget is now dedicated to entitlements. Excessive regulation has hampered small-businesses, and annually costs consumers billions of dollars in hidden fees. Nanny state antics have had little effect on youth obesity, but have made a significant dent in their parent’s wallets.

While purporting to keep people safe from themselves, regulatory rules’ real function enables favored industries and provides job security for federal employees. The complexity of our tax code benefits America’s largest businesses and its richest citizens. One impediment to simplifying the code is the large numbers of people who have a vested interest in keeping it complicated. Our universities inculcate credulous students into a one-sided political philosophy. Overly sensitive students are taught politically-correct courses from syllabi that contain trigger warnings against microaggressions. It’s a narcissistic world, grown narrow.

Please welcome to the presidential race the latest version of the Democratic front-runner: Ms. Hillary Rodham Obama!

The speech Hillary delivered Saturday on Roosevelt Island made clear her presidency would be Barack Obama’s third term. The policies she would advance as president are intended to deepen Obama’s unprecedented enmeshment of the economy and the government.

Ms. Rodham Obama went through an exhaustive list of goodies her presidency would deliver to Americans. And when I say “exhaustive,” I mean exhaustive. The speech ran longer than 40 minutes, and despite the fact that she had been preparing to give it for weeks, Hillary also made it clear her rhetoric and her delivery are just not going to get much better. Ever.

Nothing she mentioned would be unfamiliar to anyone who has listened to an Obama State of the Union address every January. It’s the 21st Century Left Liberal Laundry List, down to the war she announced against “powerful forces” in hedge funds and on Wall Street who have brought “secret, unaccountable money” into the system — this from a woman who raised hundreds of millions from Wall Street and hedge-fund giants in 2008 and whose family foundation has become the poster child for secret and unaccountable money in American politics.

When it’s released June 23, the new book by bestselling historian Michael Oren is going to be the talk of Washington and Jerusalem — not to mention everywhere people take an interest in the relations between the United States and Israel, which is to say, in many if not most places on the planet.

It’s called “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” and I’m not sure that in the annals of diplomatic history there’s ever been anything quite like this astonishing account of Oren’s four years (2009-2013) as Israel’s ambassador in Washington.

It’s an ultimate insider’s story told while all the players save Oren are still in place; the Israeli prime minister he served still holds office and the administration to which he was the ambassador will remain in power until January 2017.

It’s not that there’s lots of breaking news in “Ally” that will startle people. Rather, it makes news on almost every page with its incredibly detailed account of the root hostility of the Obama administration toward the Jewish state.

In new book, former ambassador and now Knesset legislator describes his impressions from when he was Israel’s envoy in Washington between 2009-2013.President Barack Obama endorsed the Palestinian position on the 1967 lines in 2011 and by so doing altered more than 40 years of American policy without prior consultation with Israel, former ambassador to the US Michael Oren writes in a book to be published later this month.

Oren, in an account of the book that appeared Friday in The New York Jewish Week, wrote that the Prime Minister’s Office was outraged at the move, and instructed him to call congressional leaders.

The monarch could not change the law according to his will and whim. To do that, he needed the permission of his subjects, or at least those of his subjects who controlled the established institutions. This was the lasting significance of the Magna Carta, whose 800th anniversary we celebrate today
In Winston Churchill’s famous speech at Harvard University in 1943 on the common ties of the English-speaking peoples, he defined the bond in terms of three main things: law, language and literature. Indeed, when he elaborated on what he meant, he spoke mainly of concepts derived from and guaranteed by English law:

Law, language, literature—these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all a love of personal freedom … these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.

Moreover, these legally-derived cultural values were appreciated not only by those people of direct British descent. They were transportable to other countries.

As a man with direct personal experience of imperial rule in the first half of the twentieth century, Churchill knew these values could even have a major influence on countries with radically different cultural traditions. In the days of the British Empire, the best means of establishing a successful and lasting imperial regime was to give it English law. Once it had this, an English colony, dependency or protectorate, whether established by settler immigrants, by military conquest, or international treaty, quickly felt the benefits. British imperial rule in many parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas was not representative or democratic, but it was nonetheless orderly, largely benign, and usually fair. Thanks to English law, most British colonial officials delivered good government.

It’s hard to get 96 percent of people to agree on anything, but last month’s Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 96 percent of those surveyed believe we are in for a summer of racial unrest. In the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore, it’s time for some reflection on how we got here.

This year marks two significant anniversaries. In August 1965, the Watts riots broke out in Los Angeles, leading to 34 deaths and $300 million in property damage. Coming after the passage of well-intentioned Great Society welfare programs, the riots made clear that government spending wasn’t going to solve all the problems of urban America.

Indeed, another 50th anniversary we mark this year is that of a seminal work that helped explain why government would be no panacea: Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: A Call for National Action.” Published in 1965 and known as “the Moynihan Report,” it burst many bubbles of liberal thinking.

On June 11, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) released a report on a stunning new concession offered by the Obama administration to break a deadlock in the Iran nuclear talks.

The deadlock stems from Tehran’s refusal to permit inspections of military facilities or answer questions about past nuclear-weapons-related work (known as “possible military dimensions” or PMD in U.N.-speak). With the clock ticking down on a June 30 deadline for a nuclear agreement, the refusal of Iranian leaders to budge on these issues has become a political problem for President Obama, who said in April that Iran has agreed to “the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history.” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has said the nuclear agreement will allow “anytime, anywhere inspections of any and every Iranian facility.”

Activists continue to deny the importance of proactive community policing, even as shootings increase.

I recently observed in these pages that violent crime is rising sharply in many cities. Having spoken with police officers and commanders, I hypothesized that the growing reluctance of cops to engage in proactive policing may help explain the spike in violent crime. The past nine months have seen unprecedented antipolice agitation dedicated to the proposition that bias infects policing in predominantly black communities, a message echoed at the highest reaches of government and the media. Officers in urban areas are encountering high levels of resistance and hostility when they try to make an arrest.

The U.S. makes more concessions to Iran in a prelude to a nuclear deal.

The Obama Administration has long insisted that any nuclear deal will have no effect on U.S. determination to stop Iran’s regional ambitions or support for terrorism. As the political desire for a deal grows more urgent, however, this claim is proving to be hollow.

Consider Hayya Bina, or “Let’s Go,” a Lebanese civil-society initiative founded in 2005 by publisher and producer Lokman Slim. Hayya Bina works largely with Lebanon’s Shiites on a variety of health, environmental and citizenship issues, largely as a way to offer a moderate alternative to Hezbollah’s efforts to dominate that community. The group has received modest funding from the State Department and groups like the International Republican Institute.

But as the Journal’s Jay Solomon reported last week, the State Department sent Hayya Bina a letter, dated April 10, which “requests that all activities intended [to] foster an independent moderate Shiite voice be ceased immediately and indefinitely.” To underscore the point, the letter added that Hayya Bina “must eliminate funding for any of the above referenced activity.”