RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Tooley is President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.theird.org) and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Follow him on Twitter: @markdtooley.

The multimillion dollar American Friends Service Committee, with offices in several dozen U.S. cities and 14 other countries, is the nearly century old political advocacy arm of Quakers in the U.S. Rooted in the Quaker pacifist tradition, AFSC advocates a form of “peace” that has aligned it with countless dubious international causes over the decades, usually anti-American, anti-Western and often anti-Israel.

AFSC touts accommodation of Iran, for example, naturally more concerned about U.S. or Israeli military action than about a nuclear armed Iran. And AFSC endorses Palestinian nationalism in ways that of course demonize Israel while minimizing Palestinian terror.

But AFSC offered a somewhat new twist when recently highlighting a young Palestinian-American activist’s solidarity visit to, and arrest in, racially charged Ferguson, Missouri.

“When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson my people in Gaza were being slaughtered by Israel in Operation Protective Edge,” explained Bassem Masri on AFSC’s blog.

“The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people. When Mike was killed, much of the media started demonizing him and the protestors, often the same sources that blamed Palestinians for their own deaths in Gaza. People naturally saw the connections.”

Masri, a self-described “pissed off citizen,” said Americans have long “maligned” the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but at least the people of Ferguson now understand their common struggle.

“On those terrible nights in Ferguson when the police were attacking peaceful civilians with tear gas, Palestinians under Israeli occupation offered advice on how to deal with the effects of the gas,” Masri recounted.

“Facing violence from an occupying force, whether in Palestine or Ferguson, forges a mindset that demands resistance and standing up for one’s community. When the police used military tanks and checkpoints to imprison the residents of Ferguson, I was reminded of life in the West Bank where I saw the Israeli military use the same tactics of repression.”

Hamas leaders have urged their followers to use their cars and knives to spill as much Jewish blood as possible. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on Palestinians to stop Jews from visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism as well as the location of the Islamic Al Aqsa complex, by using “all means” necessary.

The calls for violence by top Palestinian authorities have been enthusiastically answered by thugs in the streets. Six Israelis have been killed in terror attacks in the last thirty days – not by rockets this time, but by cars and knives wielded as murder weapons against Israeli soldiers and civilians alike, including women and children.

On October 22nd, a member of Hamas rammed his car into pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing a three-month-old girl.

Last week, a Palestinian Jerusalem resident also turned his vehicle into a killing machine. An Israeli was killed and 13 others wounded when he aimed his vehicle at a group of people waiting at a light rail station. On the same day, yet another Palestinian ran into and wounded three Israeli soldiers near Jerusalem.

Leaders of Abbas’s party, Fatah, and of Hamas, Abbas’s partners in the so-called Palestinian “unity” government, shrugged their shoulders and said the attacks were perfectly “natural” or “normal” responses to Israeli policies. Indeed, they regard the killers as heroes.

As Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor said to reporters at UN headquarters in New York on November 10th:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/11/piltdown-muslim/
Not known for his sense of humour, Osama bin Laden was said to have enjoyed a hearty chuckle when George W. Bush described Islam as the ‘religion of peace’. Who could blame him? In hoping to the point of delusion that such a creed exists — indeed, has ever existed — the joke is on the West

I remember when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister, to choose a time not too far distant in the past. I can’t remember Islam figuring in the public debate at the time. Unfortunately, I was also around – although terribly young, you understand — when Egypt took centre stage at the time of the Suez crisis. Anthony Eden likened Nasser to Hitler but not, you might note, to Saladin.

Until its last decade, the whole of the twentieth century insulated the evolving Western mind, generation after generation, from any problem related to Islam. There were devastating world wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and, of course, for forty years, the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation. Oil crises, one of which effectively put paid to the spendthrift Whitlam government, came and went. Then, of course, the great moral crisis of our time, global warming, captured the headlines and our attention.

I don’t want to walk through every traumatic event of the twentieth century. It is sufficient to say that the Muslim problem apparently came out of the blue near to the end of the century. As Muhammad and his message have been around since the seventh century it is clear, is it not, that what we are now variously seeing in many places where Muslims are present in large numbers — terrorism, bombings, butchery, beheadings, rapes, enslavement, general mayhem and, almost worst of all, endemic whining — must be aberrant. Some kind of Darwinian chance mutation must have occurred, spawning a violent scolding Islamic lookalike.

Thus, if this explanation has substance, there are two Islams; the genuine and the mutant. To sharpen the distinction between the two, Islam proper has been given the mantle of the ‘religion of peace’, and its aberrant offshoot badged ‘radical Islam’.

It is little wonder that this classification has caught on. It provides enormous relief. It is not hard to see why. After all, we can surely deal with a radical offshoot of Islam in circumstances where most of the 1.6 billion (and rising) Muslims in the world follow the religion of peace.

It also has particular appeal to those on the left who automatically want to see good in ‘the other’, particularly if they have non-white skin. But, really, its acceptance has cut across political boundaries. As the person who breathed life into it; George W. Bush, of course, bought it hook line and sinker. But he is just one among a retinue of fellow-traveller conservative politicians in the Western world.

Secretary of State Kerry’s “peace process” actually put Israelis and Palestinians on a new collision course.

Not a single Palestinian Authority official has denounced the wave of terror attacks on Israel. They, too, are afraid of being condemned by their people for denouncing “heroic operations” such as ramming a car into a three-month old infant.

Kerry and other Western leaders do not want to understand that Abbas is not authorized to make any concessions for peace with Israel. For Abbas, it is more convenient to be criticized by the U.S. and Israel than to be denounced by his own people. Ignoring these facts, Kerry tried to pressure Abbas into making concessions that would have turned the Palestinian Authority president into a “traitor” in the eyes of his people. Abbas knows that the people he has radicalized would turn against him if he dared to speak out against the killing of Jews.

The recent spate of terror attacks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank did not come as a surprise to those who have been following the ongoing incitement campaign waged by Palestinians against Israel.

This campaign escalated immediately after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s last failed “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. Kerry’s “peace process” actually put Israelis and Palestinians on a new collision course, which reached its peak with the recent terror attacks on Israelis.

Kerry failed to acknowledge that Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas does not have a mandate from his people to negotiate, let alone sign, any agreement with Israel. Abbas is now in the tenth year of his four-year term in office.

Nor did Kerry listen to the advice of those who warned him and his aides that Abbas would not be able to implement any agreement with Israel on the ground. Abbas cannot even visit his private house in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and he controls less than 40% of the West Bank. Where exactly did Kerry expect Abbas to implement any agreement with Israel? In the city-center of Ramallah or Nablus?

Rabbis became, in essence, the health department of their time.

Much as Jews were accused and attacked for supposedly spreading the plague in the 14th Century because their dietary ad sanitary rituals gave them a slight edge in preventing disease, doctors in West Africa have been attacked on suspicion that they are actually infecting people with the disease rather than combating it.

In an era before antibiotics, blood tests and digital scanning thermometers; In an era before EKG’s, stethoscopes, blood transfusions and even refrigeration; In an era before doctors, science and even a rudimentary understanding of human anatomy, there was the ancient Jewish dietary law of kosher, which continues to offer a lesson for today’s fractured societies of western Africa struggling to contain the Ebola epidemic.

Centuries ago, with an understanding of microbes and hygiene still far in the future, Jews observed that those who ate meat from sick or dead animals would often fall ill and die. Similar woes could result from animals not consumed in a timely way after being slaughtered. While they didn’t know of trichinosis, they also saw that eating pork could be fatal. Shellfish and fish without scales contained a similar lethal threat. The rich and frothy milk of that time could produce gastro illness when served with meat.

While the society was agrarian, life was harsh and painfully short and government was the oppressive rule of hostile royalty, there was an understanding among Jews that certain culinary behavior triggered serious illness. As a result, dietary laws were put into place by an observant community that sought to protect the individual and public health. They were then codified by religious leaders for the purpose of creating a collective societal memory of what the faithful could and could not consume. Rabbis became, in essence, the health department of their time, providing approved animal certification prior to slaughter.

President Obama will set the tone for his final years in office with his looming decision on an immigration executive order. These columns supported reform long before Mr. Obama, and we still do, but if he does act on his own he’s likely to harm the immigration cause and his own legacy.

Liberal activists and Democrats are pressuring Mr. Obama to broaden his controversial 2012 executive action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the country and work. The details of his next edict are still secret, but presumably he’d extend the same provisions of his 2012 order to a larger swath of the undocumented population. Perhaps to millions of adults.

The political case from a Democratic point of view—the only kind Mr. Obama seems to understand—goes like this. Republicans will never pass reform, so he has to act by himself to accomplish something before he leaves office. His base will be pleased, and he’ll divide Republicans. The anti-immigration right may even blow a gasket and further alienate Asian- and Hispanic-Americans between now and the 2016 election. What’s to lose?

The answer is plenty. On the merits, Mr. Obama’s executive order can’t come close to fixing America’s broken immigration laws. The most he can do is to legalize the immigration status of several million people. This would let them remain in the U.S., but it wouldn’t offer a green card or path to citizenship. That requires Congress.

An executive order also can’t increase the number of visas, which means it can’t reduce the future flow of illegal immigrants by providing more legal pathways to enter the U.S. So no new science-graduate visas for tech workers, no visas for farm workers to end the labor shortage in agriculture, and no guest-worker program to create a flexible labor market for other jobs in a growing U.S. economy. Mr. Obama is offering amnesty without addressing the root cause of border-crossing economic migration.

As for the politics, we think there’s a good chance Republicans would pass immigration reform in some form in the next two years. The leadership wants to do it, and a majority of the rank and file privately want to vote for it to end the debate. Most realize the growing importance of minority voters to the GOP’s chances of winning the Presidency.

The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits.

What the hockey-stick portrayal of global temperatures did in bringing a sense of crisis to the issue of global warming is now being replicated in the controversy over income inequality, thanks to a now-famous study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, professors of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. Whether the issue is climate change or income inequality, however, problems with the underlying data significantly distort the debate.

The chosen starting point for the most-quoted part of the Piketty-Saez study is 1979. In that year the inflation rate was 13.3%, interest rates were 15.5% and the poverty rate was rising, but economic misery was distributed more equally than in any year since. That misery led to the election of Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies helped usher in 25 years of lower interest rates, lower inflation and high economic growth. But Messrs. Piketty and Saez tell us it was also a period where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer and only a relatively small number of Americans benefited from the economic booms of the Reagan and Clinton years.

If that dark picture doesn’t sound like the country you lived in, that’s because it isn’t. The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.

IRBIL, Iraq — The deaths of five nuclear scientists Sunday in an ambush outside Damascus has raised anew suspicions about whether Israel is conducting an assassination campaign intended to blunt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

At least one of the men was an Iranian nuclear technician, according to Syrian state television, members of the internal security wing of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors violence in that country.

Rami Abdurrahman, the observatory’s director, described the dead as “five nuclear engineers” in a Facebook post and said they worked at a scientific research center “near the neighborhood of Barzeh, northern Damascus.” The Britain-based observatory, which works with a network of informants in Syria, has a reputation for accurate reports on events there.

Syrian government officials, speaking to government-friendly television stations, later confirmed that at least one of the men was an Iranian “scientific consultant,” but they released no other details on the nationalities of the other four men killed.

Both Iran and North Korea have provided Syria with technical nuclear expertise in the past, most notably at a secret reactor facility that the Israeli air force destroyed in a surprise attack in northern Syria in 2007. That previously unknown reactor facility was being built with the technical assistance of Iranian and North Korean scientists, according to statements made after the attack by American and Israeli intelligence officials. The facility, which U.S. and Israeli officials said hid a Syrian attempt to start a secret nuclear weapons program, was rendered unusable in the strike and later was dismantled by the Syrians.

“We can confirm that five scientific experts were martyred by terrorists as part of the ongoing plots of the Zionist entity,” a Hezbollah internal security commander said via instant messaging from Beirut. He insisted on anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to reporters. “This follows the pattern of the enemy who backs and controls terrorists inside Syria in a program to hurt the resistance axis.”

The commander also cited the assassination in December 2013 of Hassan Laqqis, a high-ranking Hezbollah official who reportedly was tied to the group’s technical programs, including advanced drone and missile technology, according to accounts in Hezbollah-controlled media outlets shortly after his death. He was killed by unknown gunmen outside a suburban Beirut safe house.

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world’s noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy’s breast.

But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.

In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.

Boy Soldier’s WWII Diary Debuts on Veterans Day

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boy-soldiers-wwii-diary-debuts-on-veterans-day?f=puball

World War II veteran, international architect and author Julian Kulski’s book, The Color of Courage – A Boy At War: The World War II Diary of Julian Kulski, will be published by Aquila Polonica on Veterans Day.

The Color of Courage is a rare and vivid day-by-day eyewitness account by a young boy who becomes a man far too soon under the brutal Nazi German occupation of Poland. Julian is a 10-year-old Boy Scout when the Germans invade his native Poland to start World War II. At an age when most boys are still playing with toys, Julian begins his own private war against the Germans with small acts of sabotage. At 12, he is recruited into the clandestine Underground Army by his Scoutmaster, and begins training on weapons and military tactics.

By 14, he is holding up German soldiers at gunpoint, has gone on a secret mission into the Warsaw Ghetto to liaise with Jewish resistance leaders, is captured by the Gestapo, beaten and interrogated, sentenced to Auschwitz, rescued, and joins a Commando unit of the Underground Army. At 15, he fights in the Warsaw Uprising, ending the war as a German POW.

The war’s end brings physical freedom but very little peace for the 16-year-old veteran suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). A wise army doctor advises Julian to write down his experiences to help lessen the psychological and emotional burdens of the war. The Color of Courage is the result. In this book, you will learn: