RUTHFULLY YOURS

Top U.S. officials sharpened efforts to undermine Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of his visit to Washington next week as tensions rose over his push to scuttle a possible nuclear deal with Iran.

At what U.S. officials say is a historic low point in relations between the longtime allies, the White House now sees Mr. Netanyahu as a serious threat to President Barack Obama ’s efforts to reach an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program.

U.S. officials are deliberately moving to undercut the Israeli leader’s influence ahead of his controversial speech to Congress next week by casting him as opposing any deal with Iran regardless of the terms.

Extremist Group Gains Appeal Well Beyond its Ultraconservative Roots

Islamic State’s ability to lure thousands of Westerners is unprecedented in modern history, and may be its scariest success. It is especially disturbing because the bulk of these women and men flocking to Syria are relative newcomers to Islamic observance—a sign the murderous group is gaining appeal well beyond its ultraconservative roots.

Either outright converts from Christianity or people raised in nonobservant or atheist households, they are often rebels in search of a flag of convenience, terrorism researchers say. In rejecting modern society and its rules, many of these newly baked jihadists have embraced Islamic State’s genocidal cult simply because it is the most obvious counterpoint to the West.

UCLA’s chapter of anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine
(SJP) was enraged by a series of posters depicting Hamas executions
that appeared early Sunday around the school campus.

“These posters are a clear example of hate speech directed against
Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as supporters of
Palestinian freedom and equality,” SJP asserted in a statement. “They
rely on Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes to paint Palestinians as
terrorists and to misrepresent Students for Justice in Palestine as
antisemitic.”

We are, again, in the midst of that periodic occurrence: a crisis in Israel/US relations. This one revolves around White House pique over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of an invitation by House Speaker John Boehner to address the US Congress on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, an issue on which the White House and Jerusalem have been divided for some time.

But any remotely careful analysis of the US/Israel relationship will show that Jerusalem and the White House (but rarely the Congress and, by extension, the US electorate) have often clashed on issues deemed vital to Israel’s security and existence.

In fact, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, declared Israel’s very independence in the face of strong opposition from US Secretary of state George Marshall.

How would you feel if you had to have bodyguards anytime you moved about — not because you were a voluntary celebrity, such as a presidential candidate or movie star, but merely because you exercised your free speech right by publishing cartoons that some found offensive?

Danish journalist Flemming Rose published cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten back in 2006, which led to many violent riots by Moslems around the world. He has written a book, “The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech” (the English edition was just published by the Cato Institute Press).

Mr. Rose, rather than hiding, even though a fatwa has been leveled against him calling for his death, has traveled and spoken widely in his unrelenting advocacy of free speech and against the tyranny of silence. He has argued that “the lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow.

“We can not win this war by killing them,” Marie Harf said on MSNBC.

Reversing thousands of years of battlefield experience in which wars were won by “killing them”, the State Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat ISIS by killing its fighters.

“We can not kill our way out of this war,” she said. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs.”

War is one of the few things in life we can reliably kill our way out of. The United States has had a great track record of killing our way out of wars. We killed our way out of WW1. We killed our way out of WW2. The problem began when we stopped trying to kill our way out of wars and started trying to hug our way out of wars instead. Progressive academics added war to economics, terrorism and the climate in the list of subjects they did not understand and wanted to make certain that no one else was allowed to understand. Because the solution to war is so obvious that no progressive could possibly think of it.

Harf’s argument is a familiar one. There was a time when progressive reformers had convinced politicians that we couldn’t arrest, shoot, imprison or execute our way out of crime.

On March 3rd, despite conflicting opinions on the wisdom of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s addressing the U.S. Congress on Iran without specific U.S. presidential approval, Netanyahu is scheduled to address the concerns of Israel, many members of Congress and world leaders and will emphasize that no deal with the Iranian ayatollahs would be safer than a bad deal which would dismantle the sanctions regime even further leaving one of the world’s leading state sponsors of global terrorism to become a threshold nuclear power.

An argument rarely heard to support his Congressional presentation (despite the absence of proper diplomatic protocol) is that President Obama himself hosted British Prime Minister David Cameron recently at the White House and used him to lobby lawmakers to oppose new sanctions on Iran even though Cameron is involved in the run-up to the British General Election this spring. Nor is Cameron an exception. Obama also met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in June 2009, just three months before her country held elections, and when President Clinton was in the White House, he hosted then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres of the Labor Party less than a month before the 1996 elections. That meeting was perceived as support for the dovish prime minister who ended up losing to Netanyahu in any event. It seems Netanyahu’s crime is not so much a breach of diplomatic protocol, but rather, opposing the Administration’s position on making concessions to Iran.

A few weeks back the US Senate approved the appointment of “Rabbi” David N. Saperstein as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, to head the Office of International Religious Freedom in the United States Department of State, an office that tracks the denial of religious freedom to people around the world. The Obama administration has been bragging about its high-minded pluralism in appointing a Jew to the office, the first time it was held by a non-Christian.

A past leader in the “Rabbis for Obama,” Saperstein long headed the so-called “Religious Action Center” (RAC) of the American Reform synagogue movement. Despite its name, there is nothing remotely religious about the RAC. It is a liberal-leftist advocacy center, a lobby for the entire range of politically correct social causes, occasionally dressing up its agitprop with perfunctory attribution to “Jewish ethics.” Many of its positions are explicitly and diametrically opposed to the text of the Torah and to traditional Jewish values.

Obama’s Summit to Counter Violent Extremism was one of the most schizophrenic events on record. Its overall strategy was to counter Islamic radicalization while claiming that it had nothing to do with Islam. Even the King of Saudi Arabia and the leaders of a number of Muslim countries are willing to talk about Islamic terrorism. Obama isn’t. But he is rolling out a strategy to influence the theology of Muslims.

How do you change the beliefs of a religion which you can’t even name? You can’t and you don’t.

The whole premise of CVE subdivides “violent extremism” from Islam and then further subdivides violent extremism from extremism. Barbers split fewer hairs than this. CVE tells us that the best way to fight violent extremists is with “non violent extremist” Salafi clergy who have the most influence on them. We’re supposed to fight the ISIS Caliphate with supporters of another kind of Caliphate.

While much of the media has been obsessed with tracking down Republican positions on such crucial issues as evolution and President Obama’s religion, one searches in vain for hints of Hillary Clinton’s position on . . . pretty much anything. That is not to say that potential Republican candidates haven’t botched what should have been easy, commonsense answers, but shouldn’t there be at least a little bit of curiosity about where the all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee stands on actual issues that will affect the future of this country? It is early, of course, and Republicans themselves have not yet laid out detailed positions on most issues. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Hillary has not yet put together a specific platform for her campaign. Still, there are enough hints out there to discern a flavor of what she will offer. Clinton has flirted with Elizabeth Warren–style populism, even declaring, “Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” But populism is not an easy fit for the crony-capitalist Clintons, so she appears to be settling into something called “inclusive capitalism.”