RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Michael Oren met Yitzhak Rabin as a teenager in 1970 he had never visited Israel. But he vowed to become its ambassador to the U.S.

In Romain Gary’s celebrated (if now forgotten) memoir “Promise at Dawn,” the author recalls an announcement from his mother. “You are going to be a French ambassador,” she tells him. It was the 1920s; Gary was a child. He and his mother were Lithuanian Jews, and they were nowhere near France. But by the time he wrote his memoir in 1960, Gary was a successful novelist with an appreciation for the narrative power of an unlikely dream realized. He was also a French ambassador.

In his memoir “Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide,” Michael B. Oren remembers traveling to Washington, D.C., with a Zionist youth group in 1970 and shaking hands with the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin. “Silently, I vowed, ‘That is what I’ll be someday—Israel’s ambassador to America,’ ” writes Mr. Oren. At the time, he was a New Jersey teenager who had never even visited Israel. What follows is a “quintessentially American story of a young person who refused to relinquish a dream irrespective of the obstacles,” Mr. Oren writes, culminating in—well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it.

U.S. legislation to ease sanctions will instead primarily benefit Havana’s state-owned monopolies.

Three bills full of lofty but disingenuous rhetoric about “supporting the Cuban people” were recently filed in the U.S. Senate to ease sanctions. To have an honest debate about sanctions on Cuba, it’s important to understand how that totalitarian regime conducts business. The bills primarily benefit three monopolies in Cuba, all owned and operated by the Cuban government: Etecsa, Alimport and Gaesa.

Let’s look at each piece of legislation:

“While Russia and Islamic State are advancing abroad, the Obama Administration may have allowed a cyber 9/11 at home.”

If you thought Edward Snowden damaged U.S. security, evidence is building that the hack of federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) files may be even worse.

When the Administration disclosed the OPM hack in early June, they said Chinese hackers had stolen the personal information of up to four million current and former federal employees. The suspicion was that this was another case of hackers (presumably sanctioned by China’s government) stealing data to use in identity theft and financial fraud. Which is bad enough.

Yet in recent days Obama officials have quietly acknowledged to Congress that the hack was far bigger, and far more devastating. It appears OPM was subject to two breaches of its system in mid-to-late 2014, and the hackers appear to have made off with millions of security-clearance background check files.

System that failed to prevent millions of sensitive government files from being hacked is largely unable to stop the most sophisticated attacks
WASHINGTON—A federal security system that failed to prevent millions of sensitive files on government employees from being improperly accessed has been plagued by delays and is largely unable to stop the most sophisticated attacks, current and former U.S. officials said.

The security system in place at the Office of Personnel Management, known as Einstein, is incapable in most cases of stopping previously unknown malware from penetrating government networks. It mostly relies instead on “signatures” from past computer breaches, and then looks for similar digital fingerprints.

Grave incompetence or brazen dishonesty?

Those are the only two conclusions one can reasonably come to after reviewing Hillary Clinton’s stunning Sunday interview on local New Hampshire TV.

When WMUR local TV host Josh McElveen asked Clinton why her State Department greenlit the transfer of 20 percent of all US uranium to the Russian government, Clinton claimed she had no involvement in her own State Department’s decision to approve the sale of Uranium One to Russia.

“I was not personally involved because that wasn’t something the secretary of state did,” said Clinton.

Over the weekend, Pope Francis made a statement that should be of deep interest to the many thousands of faithful Catholics who work in the American defense industry or to the countless more who’ve invested in American arms companies. Speaking Sunday, the pope said, “If you trust only men, you have lost.” He continued, “It makes me think of . . . people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit of a distrust doesn’t it?”

Interestingly, in that same speech the pope wondered aloud why the Allies didn’t do more to stop the Holocaust: “The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb [the railway lines]?” Presumably this desire for specific air strikes can be reconciled with his condemnations of arms makers so long as the bombs are manufactured by, say, Hindus. And are the weapons that his security detail carries made by Buddhists?

Rachael Hanna is Associate Managing Editor of the Harvard Political Review.

Zaidan’s comparisons should raise concerns about whom the Obama administration designates as terrorists — or even chooses as strategic partners: If these groups are not America’s enemies, who is?

Whatever sympathies he may have for the Al Nusra Front, Zaidan’s loyalty to the ethics of his profession and his responsibility to his readers evidently do not outweigh his loyalties to a terrorist organization.

Why is Ahmad Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, tacitly endorsing a terrorist organization?

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of Voice of Israel talk radio (voiceofisrael.com).

The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s war in Gaza was released Monday. In anticipation of the report, whose findings were a foregone conclusion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated that Israel would not bear the brunt of yet another unjust assault on its character and behavior in the face of barbarism.

His sentiments were drowned out, however, by the cacophony of cheers from much of the media and most of the nongovernmental organizations whose testimony to the UNHRC provided canon fodder against Israel.

It’s an old story with a predictable punch line: Israel is no better than Hamas and other “armed groups” in Gaza. But it has less of an excuse than Palestinian terrorists to engage in military action, since the only reason that it incurs rocket and mortar attacks is that it is an occupying power, which denies innocent Palestinians basic human rights protected by all kinds of international conventions.

Italy Fell, Fascism Rose, Europe Reeled: Remembering the Great War
Sorrento, Italy — Even here, in this coastal haven of sun-drenched serenity, there are reminders. In the center of the Piazza della Vittoria, overlooking the Gulf of Naples, is a monument to the victims of “Mors Immortalis, 1915–1918.” It pays homage to Sorrento’s fallen, a tiny remnant of the more than 600,000 Italian soldiers who perished in the furnace of the First World War. Italy’s catastrophic decision to become a combatant in the war would echo feverishly through time: Though it emerged as one of the victors, an impoverished and embittered Italy gave birth to European fascism in a modern totalitarian state.

Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio di San Giuliano, wanted no part of the crisis that broke out in July 1914. He viewed Austrian demands on Serbia as needlessly provocative. Though Italy had an alliance with Germany and Austria, their behavior, he claimed, released his nation of its obligations. But San Giuliano died in October. By the beginning of 1915, after more than six months of slaughter and stalemate, the major Allied nations — Great Britain, France, and Russia — were desperate to lure neutral Italy into the imbroglio.

If it seems to you that the Left has, collectively, lost its damned mind as the curtain rises on the last act of the Obama administration, you are not imagining things. Barack Obama has been extraordinarily successful in his desire to — what was that phrase? — fundamentally transform the country, but the metamorphosis is nonetheless a good deal less than his congregation wanted and expected. We may have gone from being up to our knees in welfare-statism to being up to our hips in it, and from having a bushel of banana-republic corruption and incompetence to having a bushel and a peck of it, but the United States of America remains, to the Left’s dismay, plainly recognizable as herself beneath the muck.