RUTHFULLY YOURS

To reprise my current line on “the leader of the free world”: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion. This is not exactly a surprising development. As I said when he was released, Bergdahl is “a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator”. I incline to the latter view myself, but, be that as it may, there are innumerable instances throughout human history of soldiers who abandon their comrades and attempt to aid the enemy.

What makes this case unique is the behavior of Bergdahl’s commander-in-chief. As I wrote on June 3rd last year:

Nevertheless, Barack Obama decided to honor this man in the Rose Garden, and to embrace his parents. In front of the President and the world, Bergdahl’s father sent greetings to his son in Arabic and Pashto, and began with the words, “In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful…”

This is, to put it at its mildest, odd and unsettling.

Carbon dioxide, jobs and the UK Our irrational climate change obligations are harming jobs and industry. Now we’re told we need to penalise ourselves further. How much more damage are we prepared to inflict upon ourselves, asks John Redwood MP

Some green policies really do destroy jobs, plunge people into fuel poverty and make our lives difficult. A recent report says that the UK should make its carbon dioxide targets even more taxing, to allow for all the CO2 emitted in places like China when making items to export to us.

The liberal-Left in Britain, and elsewhere, is engaged in willful blindness about Israel’s ability to forge a two-state solution. The reality is that it isn’t in Israel’s gift to bring one about because the Palestinians always reject it. It’s time the West woke up.

In the wake of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s incredible election triumph, one thought seems to have struck with particular force: that all hope for a two state solution is now dead and buried.

The Guardian lamented the election result, claiming that “there will be no peace process with the Palestinians” while an editorial in the Independent dismissed Netanyahu’s appeal to security:

“It emphasises the degree to which paranoia is now the dominant undercurrent in Israeli politics”. For the Financial Times, Netanyahu’s win was a “scorched earth victory…laying waste to any residual hopes that Israel might negotiate a solution with the Palestinians whose territory it occupies”.

Across the pond, Tom Friedman declared that Bibi would make history by becoming the, “father of the one state solution”. Peter Beinart, writing in Ha’Aretz, warned that the, “peace process is over and the pressure process must begin”. In the same paper, Gideon Levy issued a quite demented rant, declaring that, “Netanyahu deserves the Israeli people, and they deserve him”. The nation, in voting for Bibi, was “very ill indeed”.

Labour voters forced to choose between their party and their support for Israel: Part four of Tablet’s series on anti-Semitism in the U.K.

This is the fourth of a five-part series, A Polite Hatred.

In a packed conference hall in Islington, north London, the disembodied voice of Omar Barghouti is calling in over Skype. The co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement exhorts the crowd to renew their efforts for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which is holding the meeting. He derides and denigrates Israel, the apartheid state. And then, his rhetoric building up to a pitch, he delivers his killer line: “Balfour is dead, now let’s bury his damned colonial legacy.” A loud cheer echoes around the room.

Listening to Barghouti, I wondered how many people in the room understood the import of his words. The Balfour Declaration was a statement in favor of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” To advocate the destruction of Balfour’s legacy—whether it is a colonial one or not—is to advocate the disestablishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, in other words, the destruction of the State of Israel.

Either the people in the room didn’t fully understand the implications of what they were applauding, which is a concern, or else they did, which is even more of a concern. Does the PSC officially support this position? The chairman didn’t respond to my email. But one of the organization’s stated aims is to “campaign in opposition to the Zionist nature of the Israeli state,” which sounds like the end of the idea of a Jewish national home.

The Supreme Court has dealt a heavy blow to efforts — often by the Republican Party — to draw legislative districts that pack black voters into majority black legislative districts in order to elect black representatives.

In a case decided today arising out of Alabama state legislative plans, the Supreme Court held that the Voting Rights Act does not require the preservation and protection of legislative districts with percentages of black voters designed to produce black elected officials. Republicans and black politicians often argue that the Voting Rights Act requires line drawers to preserve proportional black representation by creating districts where black candidates are sure to win election. These plans help Republicans by bleaching out surrounding areas helping to elect Republicans.

Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes into Yemen a short time ago, with the Saudi ambassador in Washington telling reporters that the aim is to “to protect the people of Yemen and its legitimate government from a takeover by the Houthis.”

“The Gulf Cooperation Council countries tried to facilitate a peaceful transition of government in Yemen, but the Houthis have continuously undercut the process by occupying territory and seizing weapons belonging to the government,” Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir said in a statement. “…The Houthis have reneged on every single agreement they have made and continue their quest to take over the country by violent means.”

We have heard much of late of the slash-and-burn frenzies of the Muslim hordes pillaging and slaughtering their way through parts of Africa and the Middle East. It is not only Christians, lapsed communicants, perceived heretics and foreigners who are the victims of their confessional ferocity and predatory aims, but the architecture and muniments [1] of civilization itself. The threat which Islam poses to the life of the West should be obvious to anyone who is not complicit, gullible or mentally defective. To fully understand the menace, we must recognize that the Islamic attack is multi-pronged, taking place on a number of levels or fronts all working in concert, and gaining traction with every passing day.

Terror is the preferred means of those we call “extremists,” “radicals,” or (the new favorite) “gunmen,” whether “lone wolves” (who often seem to roam in packs) or established, heavily armed organizations the media like to refer to as “militants.” The warrant for their habitual violence is rooted squarely in the Koran and the Hadith, not in poverty or unemployment despite assurances from their sympathizers and appeasers. As the Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism [2], cited by Raymond Ibrahim in a penetrating article [3] for PJ Media, makes clear:

“Words matter,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters this week.
Regrettably Earnest was being less than earnest in failing to point out that words can also have several meanings – which can result in people failing to actually communicate with each other because each has a different understanding of the words he is using.

As a lawyer with extensive experience in drafting agreements – I have found the most critical part in any agreement is the definition of terms used in those agreements – so that the parties are in no doubt at all as to the meaning of the words they are using.

The so-called “Two State Solution” has gone nowhere in the last 20 years for precisely this reason.

The parties to the negotiations – including America on its own and as part of the Quartet – have been talking at cross purposes without first agreeing on the meaning of the terms they are using.

Welcome to Startup Egypt A new entrepreneurial culture is emerging from the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

Tahrir became the epicenter of the Arab Spring in 2011. Four years of revolution, counterrevolution and terror followed, and the iconic square at the heart of the Egyptian capital has the scars to show for it. Angry graffiti abounds. The air is tense. A vacant office building—its windows blown out, its facade blackened by fire—overlooks the square next to the equally depressing state antiquities museum.

Scratch beneath the surface, and you’ll find a different Cairo populated by tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, new-media moguls and high-flying former émigrés who are now flocking home, attracted by the stable new climate and economic reforms initiated by the government of President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. Call it Startup Egypt.

Take Cloudpress, a cloud-based marketing platform that allows brands to create and easily share visual content with consumers. It was “acqui-hired” by News Corp. (which owns this newspaper’s parent company, Dow Jones) in 2014, a deal in which the investor picks up an existing company’s human talent.

China is building military bases on artificial islands hundreds of miles off its coast, in waters claimed by six other countries. These new fortresses in the South China Sea raise the risk of war, yet Washington seems to have no strategy to address them. Are the U.S. and its allies ceding the nearly 1.35 million square miles claimed by China without legal merit, including some of the busiest sea lanes on the planet?

Over the past year Chinese dredging and other landfill techniques have transformed tiny reefs into potential homes for military aircraft, ships, radar facilities and other assets. Formerly underwater during high tide, Johnson Reef is now a 25-acre landmass. Nearby Hughes Reef has grown big enough to host two piers and a cement plant. Gaven Reef is now 28 acres, with a helipad and antiaircraft tower. Fiery Cross Reef has grown 11-fold since August, with what appears to be a three-kilometer airstrip under construction. All are part of the Spratly islands, a cluster of rocks between the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam, often some 650 miles from China.