RUTHFULLY YOURS

Will the United Nations ever face up to the awkward reality that it is subsidizing terrorists in Gaza? Or is that too touchy a topic because it might interfere with UN demands for more of your tax dollars?

The deputy commissioner of UNRWA — the UN’s enormous agency dedicated entirely to Palestinian refugees — was in New York this week to speak at an UNRWA pledging conference at UN headquarters. This deputy commissioner, Margot Ellis [1], happens to be an American citizen, educated at Cornell and Columbia, and a former longtime official of the U.S. Agency for International Development. So one might hope she would be at least dimly aware of the responsibilities of a civil servant — as opposed to, say, a hired lobbyist — to present an honest picture when shaking the can for more public money.

But when Ellis spoke to the General Assembly on Thursday, to ask for more funds for UNRWA, her account of Gaza was so neatly trimmed of highly relevant information on the real source of the trouble that it could have been written by the propaganda mills of Pyongyang. Ellis talked [2] about this past summer’s war between Hamas and Israel in terms of “Palestinian vulnerability” and “the extreme material and human devastation of Israeli military campaigns.” She lamented that “we were certain as was the Palestine refugee community in Gaza, that United Nations schools were a safe refuge for families and children,” and she stressed — as she did at a previous UNRWA pledging conference last December — a need for more construction material, and “the lifting of the blockade.”

Here are some things she did not say. She did not make a single mention of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that rules Gaza, and pours resources into weapons for launching attacks on Israel, while UNRWA — to which the U.S. is the largest donor — picks up a big chunk of the tab for social services. To hear Ellis talk about Gaza, it is as if Hamas does not exist. Neither do the guns, mortars, rockets and hate-mills.

Ellis made not a single mention of the vast tunnel network, discovered by the Israelis this past summer, that Hamas had dug into Israel to facilitate its terrorist attacks. This Hamas venture included more than 30 terrorist tunnels, which by Israeli estimates cost at least $90 million to build, and required an average of 350 truckloads of construction supplies per tunnel. (If UNRWA disagrees with these estimates, perhaps it is time UNRWA — with its extensive networks, facilities and 12,000 Palestinian staffers in Gaza — provided some information on these projects.) Reportedly Hamas used Palestinian children to help dig these tunnels, an abuse of minors that Ellis also failed to allude to.

Russian President Vladimir Putin took a lot of ridicule in the West for his assertion that Crimea is as sacred to Russia as the Temple Mount is to Jews and Muslims. Even in the context of Orthodox theology, Putin struck a cognitive dissonance. But there should be no surprise at the invocation of Holy Russia. Russia has considered itself holy since the fall of Byzantium, when the headquarters of the Orthodox Church passed from the “second Rome” at Constantinople to the “Third Rome” of Moscow.

Laugh at Putin at your peril. The bell tolls for you. Every nation that ever has existed considered itself holy in some way. It is impossible to have a nation except on the premise of the sacred. Men cannot bear mortality without the hope of immortality, and it is the continuity of our nation that vouches for this hope. We are not immortal as disembodied spirits playing harps on clouds, but concretely, in our earthly form. Nations that give up their hope of immortality roll over and die, often through infertility, for example today’s Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians and Poles.

To be sacred is not necessarily to be good: the Aztec priest excising a captive’s heart had a sense of the sacred as intense as Mother Teresa’s. Putin’s assertion of the sacred character of his country is no more or less than a statement that Russia intends to survive. After all we have read of Russia’s impending demographic collapse, Russia’s fertility rate has climbed back to 1.7 last year from just 1.2 a decade ago, an unprecedented peacetime recovery. America’s total fertility stands at just 1.86. Russia is in much worse demographic shape because of the extremely low birth rates of the past generation, to be sure. The point is that Russia won’t be written off.

America’s mishandling of Putin shows once again the utter bankruptcy of secular political science. The devotees of Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Machiavelli, the game theorists and systems analysts, the liberal idealists and neoconservatives, failed to grasp that Russia would look on any attempt to sever Crimea from Russia as an existential threat. Russia threw itself into the arms of its old rival China, and the Russian population rallied behind Putin, in a response that leaves America at a strategic disadvantage.

We Have Ways to Make You Walk

The latest manifestation of Germans’ weakness for excessive and irrational enthusiasms, the mania for green energy is inspiring official suggestions that seniors shun cars and younger sorts have sex with the lights off

Once admired for their logic and technical rigour, Germans are succumbing to green craziness by the day. Germany’s Environment and Nature Conservation Minister Barbara Hendricks, a Soscial Democrat, now wants Germans to stop having sex with the lights on, thus reducing CO2 emissions. And in Hanover, an official report last month foreshadows a crackdown on grannies and grandpas driving cars instead of getting on public transport or giving their Zimmer frames a workout.

Minister Hendricks has spent 1.5 million Euros producing a series of 30-second videos on how to help the climate. One of them shows a teenage girl coming home late at night, and discovering her parents in flagrante in the lit-up lounge room.

“Hi!” says daughter, who is wearing a red beanie and leather coat.

“Hi!” says Dad, standing, in a striped woolen top. Mum, leaning over the couch, wears a yellowish dress.

Daughter flips the switch to dark and the voice-over, in German, goes: “The world says ‘Thanks!’ Five percent less energy consumption in German households makes one coal power plant redundant. Together it’s climate protection.”

Actually Hendricks ought to go further and propose cessation of human sex per se. Normal breathing involves exhalations of 40,000 parts per million of CO2 (compared with only 400ppm in the atmosphere) and I understand that sex involves accelerated breathing.

Apropos of nothing, Minister Hendricks is openly lesbian, but her public guidance to German sex aficionados is so far confined to heterosexual encounters not involving the missionary position. Also, apropos of nothing, the German Greens Party, which of course adores Hendricks’ ads, apologized last month for its extensive links with a paedophile organization in the 1980s and for the Greens’ campaigns at the time to legalise sex acts with children “that occur without the use or threat of force.” The Greens did not drop their pro-paedophile stance until 1990.

“I gain no confidence from Obama or Kerry. Netanyahu gives me confidence. Those men in the Misav Am Kibbutz give me confidence as do the 26-year-old fighter pilot, the 20-year-old tank commander, the 21-year-old second lieutenant, and the young woman regular soldier who we met. And to echo Churchill in saying in 1899 that science had saved Christendom from Muslim conquest, Israel science might help save Israel. Those Nobel Prizes say something about Jewish ingenuity.In a sense Israel stands alone. It is not America Alone, as Mark Steyn argues. It is Israel alone because of the clarity that being on the front line brings. They understand the threat not only to Israel but to the world.”

It is easy, all to easy, for Obama and John Kerry to spout platitudes about the quest for peace in the Middle East. On the ground in Israel, surrounded by enemies and barraged by threats and promises of genocide, delusion is a luxury an encircled nation cannot afford to indulge.

I’m socially reticent except where dancing is concerned. Show me people dancing and I have an irresistible urge to join in. Artlessly it is true but not in a shy way. The sun sets on Friday evening in front of the Western Wall (Wailing Wall) in East Jerusalem. Shabbat begins as does the joyous dancing and singing. Young soldiers with M16s slung over their shoulders are part of the revelry. Circles form, arms on shoulders. I’m invited in. No need to ask twice.

I take time out to pray against the Wall. I’m a Christian. It doesn’t matter. I’m praying to the same God, in the same vicinity, as did Jesus.

If anyone is delusional enough to think that Israel will give up any part of Jerusalem they should visit the Wailing Wall on Shabbat. There is no chance of Israel ever giving up a square foot. This realty underscores my theme of ‘clarity in extremis’, informed by a visit to Israel organised by Shurat HaDin.

Shurat HaDin is a non-profit Israeli law group, directed by (the lovely and resolute) Nitsana Darshan-Leitner. They follow the money and use legal action, often in American courts, to degrade the funding of Islamic terrorism. More generally, they use the courts to combat efforts on the part of the left (and assorted useful idiots) to undermine Israel. They are active in combating the disgraceful and disingenuous BDS campaign. (Refer, for example, to their case against Professor Jake Lynch of Sydney University.) And, in 2011, they successfully ‘torpedoed’ the intended second Gaza flotilla.

A seven-day mission in Israel, however intensive and instructional, does not an expert make. Nevertheless, you would have to be extremely obtuse — John Kerry comes to mind — not to recognise a problem without a solution when it’s been laid bare time after time; negotiation after negotiation. Yet, Kerry is not alone. The pie-in-the-sky two-state solution is still the common currency of discourse among politicians and commentators in the world outside of Israel. The disconnection between this solution and the facts on the ground is stark.

I feel a flush of schadenfreude…rsk
After 27 Years at CNN, News Host Who Meddled in the 2012 Elections to Protect Obama is Out of a Job

By Jennifer Van Laar

After 27 years with the network, Candy Crowley is out at CNN.

After the 2012 Presidential Debate she moderated between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the State of the Union host was roundly criticized for seeming to take sides.When Romney questioned Obama’s claim that he had called Benghazi an act of terror in a Rose Garden ceremony the day after the attack, as opposed to blaming it on a spontaneous demonstration, Crowley said, “He did, in fact.”

Later, Crowley told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Romney “was right in the main. I just think he picked the wrong word.” According to The Wrap, in a memo they obtained,

CNN President Jeff Zucker said of Candy:

To say she lives and breathes politics is more than an understatement. She has an innate ability to sense its nuance, push its limits, and ask questions that others won’t. She is beloved in Washington even by those that she so skillfully takes to task on Sunday mornings. And she’s an award-winning journalist – taking home everything from a Peabody and Emmys to an Edward R. Murrow award. She is a television news icon.

Thus, it is with mixed emotions, that I wanted to let you know that Candy has let us know that she has made the decision to move on, so she can embark on the next chapter of her already prolific career.

A replacement has not been named, though The Wrap mentioned Jake Tapper and John King as strong contenders. Tapper would be an interesting pick, as he is one of the few traditional media journalists whom conservatives respect.

Tony Blair got it right. When asked about the consequences of the West’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain’s former Prime Minister, once again reiterated “the reason it was tough in Iraq and tough in Afghanistan is the reason it is tough today…. It’s tough because terrorism is deep-rooted and it’s got very strong causes within the religion of Islam,” he is quoted saying. Earlier this year, Blair pointed out that radical Islam destabilizes “communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence”. And Blair does not only refer to the Sunni ISIS, or the Taliban, but also warns against allowing Iran the capability to produce nuclear weapons.

Blair is being mocked by the British and American leftist media which has been very careful not to blame Islam for violence and terrorism. Even the Royal family’s love affair with Saudi royals and Gulf Emirs, matched until recently only by the British Foreign Office, is being undermined by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudis, who first banned the Brotherhood and later designated it as terrorist, have, like many others, underestimated the organization’s real influence and were surprised when Sir John Jenkins, a former British ambassador to Riyadh, concluded last September that the special commission he headed found no indication that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in terrorism.

The same thing happened last week, when Barack H. Obama dismissed hundreds of thousands of American petitioners to designate the Brotherhood. Instead, the White House issued this statement: “We have not seen credible evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has renounced its decades-long commitment to non-violence.”

“No evidence”?

Apparently, no one at the White House has seen on live television the Muslim Brothers leading the violence in Cairo and elsewhere, or newspaper headlines and pictures taken in Tahrir Square (or in London, or in Paris) of Muslim Brothers holding signs calling for the killing of the offenders of Islam.

Stand with Hillary PAC released this masterpiece supporting Hillary Clinton’s potential campaign for president in 2016. (Stand with Hillary via YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfU3hI8ML30#t=101

“I’ve been thinkin’ about one great lady like the women in my life
She’s a mother, a daughter, and through it all, she’s a lovin’ wife
Oh, there is something about her, this great lady, caring, hard-working, once a First Lady
She fights for country and my family”

Sure, it has inspired less than favorable reviews:

http://jezebel.com/oh-my-god-this-song-for-hillary-clinton-is-beyond-awfu-1666728236

https://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/04/video-nothing-says-authentic-like-a-country-song-about-hillary-clinton-running-for-president/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/12/04/this-hillary-clinton-song-is-really-terrible-video/

But no review can do this work of art justice, neither the hathos ( aesthetic term denoting the sensation evoked by finger nails dragging across a blackboard) nor the “Attention Wal Mart shoppers” condescension and utter contempt for the audience. You must experience the depths of horribleness for yourself. So listen to the whole thing—I dare you.

For those who would like to savor the libretto:

VERSE 1:

Lookin’ back in time, learnin’ hindsight’s always right

We came together in a way

A defining moment we all can celebrate

And now it’s 2016 and this time I’m a thinkin’

Guys put your boots on, and let’s smash this ceiling!

(YouTube / Stand With Hillary)

CHORUS:

I’ve been thinkin’ about one great lady like the women in my life

She’s a mother, a daughter, and through it all, she’s a lovin’ wife

Oh, there is something about her, this great lady, caring, hard-working, once a First Lady

She fights for country and my family, now it’s time for us to stand up

*BOOM BOOM CLAP*

*BOOM BOOM CLAP* With Hillary

Hillary!

Stand up

With Hillary

(YouTube / Stand With Hillary)

VERSE 2:

Don’t matter if you’re livin’ across this great land in a red or blue state

‘Cuz our American Dream is at stake

And there’s some Hard Choices that need to be made

We’re needing a leader who is tough and ready Who’s got vision

For me it’s Hillary

And that’s my final decision!

CHORUS:

I’ve been thinkin’ about one great lady like the women in my life

She’s a mother, a daughter, and through it all, she’s a lovin’ wife

Oh, there is something about her, this great lady, caring, hard-working, once a First Lady

She fights for country and my family, now it’s time for us to stand up

*BOOM BOOM CLAP*

*BOOM BOOM CLAP* With Hillary

Hillary!

Stand up America

With Hillary

The government argues that the new powers—intended to prevent British jihadists from fighting abroad and to stop them from returning if they do—are necessary to keep Britain safe.

Civil liberties groups counter that the measures are “draconian” in scope and represent a dramatic expansion of government surveillance powers, ones that are ripe for misuse if they are not matched by strong safeguards.

A key provision of the new law would authorize the government to seize the passports of terror suspects traveling to Iraq, Syria and other jihadist battlegrounds.

The British government has unveiled sweeping new counter-terrorism measures which—if approved by Parliament—would give the United Kingdom some of the “toughest powers in the world” to fight Islamic terrorism.

The government argues that the new powers—intended to prevent British jihadists from fighting abroad and to stop them from returning if they do—are necessary to keep Britain safe.

Civil liberties groups counter that the measures are “draconian” in scope and represent a dramatic expansion of government surveillance powers, ones that are ripe for misuse if they are not matched by strong safeguards.

The Counter Terrorism and Security Bill was introduced to the House of Commons (the lower house of Parliament) by Home Secretary Theresa May on November 26. The bill is being fast-tracked through Parliament and could become law as early as the beginning of 2015.

A key provision of the new law would authorize the government to seize the passports of terror suspects traveling to Iraq, Syria and other jihadist battlegrounds.

A loophole touted as a way for employers to wiggle out of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate has been closed. What happened?
Officials got wind that some employers planned to bypass the mandate by giving their workers bonuses, asking them to decline company-sponsored insurance and sending them to the Obamacare marketplaces to buy subsidized policies. Nudging sick workers, in particular, onto the exchanges could save employers’ health plans money and shift the cost onto publicly subsidized plans. The Labor Department published new guidelines in November to explicitly forbid that practice.

Why did employers think they could get out of a federal mandate?
“Brokers were running around selling this idea that employers could give everybody a raise and say, ‘Go, get the tax credit, knock yourselves out,’ and they wouldn’t pay a penalty. Go figure—the IRS got wise to that,” says Keith McMurdy, a partner in the employee benefit division at Fox Rothschild, a law firm in New York City.

Hasn’t there been confusion around the employer mandate in general?
That probably hasn’t helped. Under the Affordable Care Act, so-called large employers—those with more than 50 employees—were supposed to offer insurance or pay penalties starting this year. But the Obama administration pushed that deadline back repeatedly after the bungled rollout of health insurance exchanges in late 2013. In fact, those delays are being challenged in the Republicans’ recent lawsuit against the administration.

Here’s a little-told success story: Israeli Arabs, women in particular, have made huge strides over the past decade at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, better known as Israel’s answer to MIT. Among both men and women, Arabs’ share of the Technion student body is now equal to their share of the overall population, an impressive achievement considering that more than half of Israeli Arab children live below the nation’s official poverty line.

I spoke today with Yosef Jabareen, an Arab professor of urban planning who spearheads the Technion’s effort to recruit and graduate Arab students. He shared a recently updated report he’s done and explained what he called “a dramatic change” in outcomes for Arab students. “For me, as an Arab professor, it’s fantastic,” said Jabareen. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Technion, completed his education in the U.S. with a master’s from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (America’s answer to the Technion), then returned to his alma mater and five years ago was named assistant to the senior vice president for minorities.In 2001, as this slide shows, Arabs accounted for only 11 percent of undergraduates at the Technion. The percentage rose steadily to 18 percent last year and jumped three percentage points more to 21 percent this year, which is the same as Arabs’ share of the population of Israel (not counting the West Bank or Gaza, of course). Jabareen says that in 1990 Arabs’ share of the student body was only 5 percent to 7 percent. So it’s at least tripled in a quarter-century.