RUTHFULLY YOURS

So John Kerry wants to “re-ignite” Syrian peace talks that have already blown up twice, telling CBS News that he is prepared to meet with Bashar Assad in person because “we have to negotiate in the end.” What a non-surprise. The secretary of state always had a terrific soft spot for the Syrian president-for-life. Sooner or later Mr. Kerry was bound to seek a fresh opening, the way liberals always do with the brutality artists who never quite disenchant them.

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire . . .

That’s Kipling. As for Assad, he wasted no time treating Mr. Kerry’s hopeful overture with lordly contempt: “Talks about the future of the Syrian president are for Syrian people alone,” he said, responding to the suggestion that he might be prepared to negotiate his departure from the palace. Rejection, Assad knows, typically ignites attraction.

The fact that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private server in her home, rather than a secure government server, to send emails during her four years as secretary of state has raised many questions. She now says that it was a mistake but also emphasizes that she broke no law. News reports typically describe her offense as not following “policy.”

Whether or not Mrs. Clinton violated a State Department rule, her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails sure looks like obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. Let’s consider some of the basic, undisputed facts, and then the law.

First, Mrs. Clinton was worried that communicating through email would leave a trail that might be subject to subpoena. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that,” she said in 2000, “why would I ever want to do email?” But when she became secretary of state, she didn’t have much choice. So she set up a private server in her house. That way, in the event of an investigation, she could control which emails would be turned over.

We can believe Ed Klein’s sources claiming Valerie Jarrett is the White House point woman for the destruction of Hillary Clinton. Evidence:

It was the New York Times which broke the story. The Democratic press does not eat its own, ever. Yet here was the Gray Lady, setting the headlines for Drudge.

People asked how Hillary could have been so stupid. The answer is that in the normal course of mainstream reporting, there is no Democrat crime too large for the press to cover up. She knew she was perfectly safe. Bill Clinton raping women? That story had no legs. President Obama’s bizarre secrecy and lies about his past — no interest. Obama’s radical record as a community organizer? President Obama attending a black supremacist church led by a Louis Farrakhan clone who hates whites and Jews? No story there, move along. Obama working day and night to promote the hegemony of Iran in the Middle East? Nothing to analyze. Hillary lying to our faces about Benghazi? The IRS abusing its power to hobble the Tea Party before the 2012 Presidential election? Not news worthy.

So it was perfectly normal for Sect. Hillary Clinton to break security rules and think she could get away with it.

“Between acts of abuse sometimes stretching over a number of days, the Oxford men ensured girls were guarded so that they could not escape. In addition to being abused in various locations in Oxford, some of the girls were taken to other towns and cities such as London and Bournemouth for the same purpose.” — Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“I turned up at the police station at 2/3am, blood all over me, soaked through my trousers to the crotch. They dismissed it as me being naughty, a nuisance.” — Victim’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“I made a complaint about a man who trafficked me from a children’s home. He was arrested, released and trafficked me again.” — Victim’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“Police wouldn’t tell us addresses so we could go and bring her home.” — Victim’s parent’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

“She was a minor but we were told it wasn’t our business.” — Victim’s parent’s testimony, Oxfordshire Serious Case Review.

When I found myself hoping that my college-bound granddaughter will not “come out” as Jewish, I realized I had time-traveled back to the Germany of the 1930s—and I wasn’t singing “Willkommen.”

My fears were only heightened this week as I watched the film “Crossing the Line 2,” at its Boston premiere. (http://www.campusintifada.com) The film details the spreading infection of anti-Israel (read anti-Semitic) activity on American college campuses. Guest of honor and speaker at the showing was the noble and beautiful Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who said that watching the film was like “having a bucket of ice water” dumped on her head.

In “Crossing the Line 2” (the second film on the same subject by the producers, Jerusalem U/Step Up For Israel) we see raucous, scary mobs of students (and obvious non-students) in kafiyahs and hijabs, bellowing and bullhorning “We support the intifada!” “F– you, Zionist scum!” Nazi pigs!” and more. We see “die-ins,” apartheid walls, guerrilla theater, mock eviction notices, and other pro-Palestinian antics. And, by contrast, we meet Jewish students facing, and even facing down, the obscenities and bullying. Perhaps they were screened by the producers at central casting, but they all seem fresh-faced, sensible, and mannerly.

But their task is formidable. For instance, Becky Sebo of Ohio University is shown attempting to read a statement in support of Israel to the student senate. Appallingly, in the midst of her remarks, the campus police arrive and she and three others are arrested and taken away in handcuffs. Sarah Abonyi of the University of New Mexico correctly identifies the sources of the hatred: the group called Students for Justice in Palestine, and most important, faculty, particularly tenured faculty. As Aviva Slomich, a CAMERA campus director, says, “Students come and go, but professors stay.”

Before I explain what it was like to become friends with the pre-eminent McCarthy scholar of our time, M. Stanton Evans, I’d like to point out some of the pitfalls of the territory, starting with the anti-McCarthy tripwire.

This relic of the Cold War, circa 1950s, is used to bring down anyone even thinking about stepping out of line to reconsider the place of Sen. McCarthy in our nation’s history (hell). The anti-McCarthy tripwire is the first trigger. Tripped once, maybe twice, it activates the anti-McCarthy force field, which I will get to below.

“You know that you are going to be attacked,” Stan said to me in the fall of 2012 on reading the manuscript of American Betrayal, which, building on the research in Blacklisted by History, takes as a given that McCarthy is the most demonized man in American history to whom the nation now owes plaudits and apologies galore — and moves on from there. It is not an exaggeration to say that American Betrayal is first an homage to Blacklisted by History. Not surprisingly, I think it reads as a companion piece to the 2012 book Stan and the late Herbert Romerstein wrote as a follow-up to the McCarthy book — Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government. For these reasons, this Amazon “Frequently Bought Together” box is very pleasing to the junior author.

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.

Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?
Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and cultural aspect of his Germany has been lost. Once he’d overcome this initial shock, he would look at the map of Europe again in more detail. The considerable distance between Germany and Russia would probably amaze him. What in Bismarck’s time was the border between Germany and Russia is now a “Greater Poland” which did not exist at his time. And former provinces of the Russian Empire are now independent states: the three Baltic republics, Belarus and Ukraine. Bismarck would probably see this as an unwelcome “buffer zone” between Germany and Russia. He had always placed a great emphasis on a strong German-Russian alliance and would no doubt wonder how all this could happen. He would probably consider how to bring back to life such a continental partnership today. That would be a diplomatic challenge worthy of him: how to forge an alliance between Berlin and Moscow without the agitated smaller states in-between throwing their spanners into the works.

PayPal’s reported purchase of Israeli cybersecurity firm CyActive is the latest example of the growing influence of the Israeli cyber market on the U.S.

According to multiple Israeli media outlets, the secure online payment service is dropping $60 million to purchase CyActive, which predicts what malware hackers are going to invent next.

The Israeli cyber market has exploded in recent years, analysts explained to The Hill.
“I wouldn’t be lying if I said I saw two new cybersecurity startups a week,” said Israeli-based venture capitalist Adam Fisher of Bessemer Venture Partners.

Israel’s Unit 8200 within the Israel Defense Forces has trained world-class hackers that are starting to enter the private sector after finishing their required military service.

“In Israel the best and the brightest are going through the intelligence services and then looking for ways to build something commercial afterward,” said David Cowan, also a venture capitalist with Bessemer, who has been travelling to Israel searching for cyber talent since 1995.

While Silicon Valley is throwing money at former National Security Agency (NSA) employees, many NSA cyber staffers are career government workers.

The Obama administration may not have much use for federal law or for Congress’s constitutional role in providing advice on, determining whether to consent to, and enacting any legislation necessary to implement international agreements. But it exhibits cloying reverence for a fatwa — a sharia law edict — issued by a jurist who runs a regime that is the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terror.

Even when the fatwa is a patent hoax.

Secretary of State Kerry, like his predecessor Hillary Clinton and his boss President Obama, took time out from his tirades against Senate Republicans’ exposition of the Constitution to praise the fatwa the administration claims that Iran’s top mullah, Ayatollah Khamenei, issued against nuclear weapons. As the Weekly Standard’s Jeryl Bier reports, Kerry, in the course of addressing the administration’s negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, told the press during a visit to Egypt:

As you all know, Iran says it doesn’t want a nuclear weapon, and that is a very welcome statement that the Supreme Leader has, in fact, incorporated into a fatwa. And we have great respect — great respect — for the religious importance of a fatwa.

Each for its own reasons, the world’s major powers have decided to accept Iran as a regional hegemon, I wrote March 4 in Asia Times, leaving Israel and the Sunni Arabs in isolated opposition. The global consensus on behalf of Iranian hegemony is now coming clearly into focus. Although the motivations of different players are highly diverse, there is a unifying factor driving the consensus: the Obama administration’s determination to achieve a strategic rapprochement with Tehran at any cost. America’s competitors are constrained to upgrade their relations with Iran in order to compete with Washington.

The Obama administration’s assessment of Iran’s intentions is to positive that Iranian official sources quote in their own propaganda. As Jeryl Bier observed at the Weekly Standard, the just-released Threat Assessment Report of the Director of National Intelligence makes no mention of Iran’s support for terrorism, in stark contrast to the explicit citation of Iranian terrorism in the three prior annual reports. The omission of Iran’s terrorist activities is noteworthy. What the report actually says is even more disturbing. It praises Iran with faint damn:

Despite Iran’s intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia, Iranian leaders—particularly within the security services—are pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran. Iran’s actions to protect and empower Shia communities are fueling growing fears and sectarian responses.