RUTHFULLY YOURS

Connoisseurs of obtuse moral idiocy have long cherished The New York Times. Is there any other contemporary organ of opinion that so reliably combines the odor of sanctimoniousness with a seamless adherence to “progressive,” left-leaning orthodoxy? It’s not just the positions espoused by our former paper of record: it’s the combination of those echt correct opinions with the aura of smug self-satisfaction that makes the paper such a remarkable source of nausea-inducing pontification.

Today’s paper provides a particularly egregious example on its op-ed page (I mean the one at the back of the first section, not the one the Times has taken to running on its front page). The column in question is called “The Problem With ‘Evil’ [1].” It’s by Michael J. Boyle, an Associate Professor at La Salle University. Really, it is something special — though I should perhaps add that by “special” I do not mean “commendatory” but rather depressingly singular, as when educationists denominate the academically or intellectually deficient portion of the class as one of “special needs.”

Associate Professor Boyle’s column is about the world’s response to the beheading of the Sunni-loving jihadist James Foley [2] by ISIS barbarians. That’s not how Associate Professor Boyle puts. On the contrary, the burden of his column — as those knowing scare quotes around the word “evil” suggest — is to chastise us imperfectly enlightened folks from the use of “moralistic language” when we describe the knife-wielding pastimes of ISIS.

Not that Associate Professor Boyle is a fan of ISIS. He is on board with the “global condemnation of the insurgent group and its horrific tactics.” But he is alarmed that some of those who condemn separating Mr. Foley’s head from the rest of him should resort to the “moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.” Got that? Those bad “panicked days” of yore, back when our reason was occluded, made us “moralistic” in our use of language. You remember: before 9/11 no one, near enough, had ever heard of al Qaeda. On September 12, 2001, most people — not people like Associate Professor Boyle, of course — would have described al Qaeda as an evil organization whose members were savage, theocratic barbarians that the civilized world should exterminate eftsoons and right speedily. Is that “moralistic”? Or merely, considering the existential threat posed by al Qaeda, commendably moral, as well as, let’s face it, justifiably pragmatic?

If you think that, you are, according to Associate Professor Boyle, insufficiently sensitive and imperfectly enlightened. What’s the worst thing a contemporary academic can say about someone? Yes, you got it. That “moralistic language” — you know, the impulse to describe ISIS as “evil” — is “an eerie echo” of . . . of who? Yes! It’s an “eerie echo” of “President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign against ‘evildoers,’ . . .” Have you ever heard anything so outrageous! Imagine, calling the chaps who steered airliners into buildings tall and squat for fun and profit as “evildoers.” Have you ever heard anything so un-nuanced, so politically incorrect, so unbefitting an Associate Professor, or even a Distinguished Full Professor with a named chair?

ISIS, Obama, Progressive, Terrorism, Islamist, al Qaeda, Middle East

Stunningly (okay, maybe I am not as stunned as I could be), the Obama Administration’s State Department has succeeded in achieving the same stunted intellect toward the threats made by violent Islamists as was held by our government in the days before September 11, 2001. The critical mass moment came in the announcement that State Department rejects the Islamic State’s claim that is it at war with US.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

“The State Department downplayed comments from Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) leaders that they are at war with America, arguing that their violence is not directed at any particular country or race.

“At a briefing Thursday, a reporter brought up anti-American comments from ISIL leaders: ‘I mean, even they are announcing, ISIL people in their message, whatever, the recorded message, other messages, that now we are in a war with America.’

“‘This is not about ISIL versus the United States,’ State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf objected. ‘They are killing anyone who gets in their way: Sunnis, Shia Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Iraqis, Syrians, anyone who gets in their way — and now an American.'”

At almost the very same moment, The Washington Times reports:

“Sunni radicals with the Islamic State terrorist group have posted a number of tweets aimed at the citizens of Chicago, including a picture of an unidentified man on Michigan Avenue holding a paper with a handwritten Arabic message: ‘We are in your streets’…

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

· A new life-saving Israeli wound treatment has been proven “in action”.
· Israel’s revolutionary new hip-replacement device will never need replacing.
· The first Arab Bedouin co-operative is launched – in Israel of course.
· Israel wins the International Mathematics Competition for the first time.
· Two Israeli medical companies are launching on NASDAQ.
· Coins minted by the Jewish State 2000 years ago have been unearthed near Jerusalem.

Page Down for more details on these and other good news stories from Israel.

It is possible Operation Protective Edge could have been conducted with greater ineptitude. But it is not easy to see how.

Yes, I know. The title of this column will ruffle many feathers, especially while the cannons are still roaring.

But what is a concerned journalist to do when he sees the elected government of his country lurching from one predictable blunder to another? Show solidarity with a “policy” – for want of a better word – that has led to an unbroken succession of foreseen failure and fiasco? Pretend that policies leading inexorably to disastrous debacle actually reflect considered and circumspect statesmanship?

Anemic indecision

As I sat down to begin this column 36 days after the start of Operation Protective Edge, the Post posted this headline: “Security cabinet meets as dozens of Gaza rockets rain down on Israel.”

The first paragraph of the associated report read: “The security cabinet was… to decide Israel’s response to heavy rocket fire which rained down from Gaza throughout the day…. It remained unclear whether Israel would give the IDF the order to expand the operation or respond in a pinpoint manner to rocket fire in attempts to keep the conflict from spiraling out of control.”

In many ways this report documents the indecisiveness with which the campaign in Gaza has been conducted. After all, the breakdown of the cease-fire and renewal of Hamas’s bombardment was hardly a surprise. One hopes the event was foreseen and discussed by the esteemed members of our security cabinet. Surely, an appropriate response should have been prepared in advance and activated immediately with the renewal of fighting.

But even assuming some consultation was required before the planned response was implemented, it seems that little was decided, other than to persist with what has proven ineffective for subduing Hamas’s attacks.

Extreme ineptitude?

As if to underscore this very point, Hamas rained a record number of 170 missiles on Israeli targets the day the security cabinet met – and continued thereafter with no reduction.

Statements made by U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, after ISIS released videos showing their beheading of photojournalist James Foley, revealed that both seem to suffer not only from severe shortsightedness, but also from an acute case of willful blindness. Similar afflictions beset the U.S. political and military leadership and the media. The rest of Western world seems to suffer from the same problems.

All act surprised by the rapid advance of the ISIS, as well as its brutality. While the President described the beheading as “an act of violence that shocks the conscience,” Hagel announced: “Oh, this is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” Really?

A cursory google search reveals similarly horrid images of jihadists beheading, stoning, stabbing, burning, lynching and other unimaginable forms of taking human lives by celebrating members of al Qaeda, al Shabab, ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah. ISIS’s release of the video of James Foley’s brutal murder was followed two days later with Hamas videos of summary executions in Gaza. Indeed, the credit for exploiting the Western media to publicize their jihadi savagery belongs to the PLO (see below). The common denominator of these and like-minded Islamist Sunni and Shia groups is jihad. Their brutality matches that of the Nazis.

Top: Palestinian lynched for alleged collaboration with Israel, 1992. Below: to entertain thousands of Gazans exiting the Mosque after prayer, Hamas, in a summary execution, shot 18 people in the public square, on August 22, 2014, for alleged collaboration with Israel (Reuters)

Yet, no American, European or other Western leader dared to identify the jihadist problem by its name.

Mr. Obama declared, “There has to be a clear rejection of these kind of nihilistic ideologies.” But the ISIS’s and other jihadists’ ideology is not “nihilistic.” Their ideology directs them to die while killing as many infidels as they can. The more they kill, the merrier will be their reward in heaven, they believe.

It’s a “media intifada,” notes Gary Weiss, an old colleague and one of the world’s top business investigative reporters. He is referring of course to the ongoing war in Gaza, where journalists working for American news outlets have, he says, “become part of the Hamas war machine.”
As more than a month has passed since Israel began its Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, it’s high time to dig through the carnage that many of my colleagues from major U.S. media outlets are leaving behind—especially the New York Times.
On August 11th, the normally Israel-averse Foreign Press Association in Israel conceded what those closely following the war coverage already knew: That Hamas has been intimidating foreign reporters. In a harsh statement, it condemned the terrorist group for “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”

This is hardly surprising, as who can expect a terrorist group to treat reporters nicely—except perhaps many reporters themselves? But what is surprising is that New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren undermined her own newspaper—quickly denouncing the FPA’s statement. She said in a tweet that she wasn’t aware of any such harassed reporters, even though she concedes she spent only one week in Gaza herself during the height of the conflict. In an email to the FPA, she said that the FPA’s statement could be “dangerous” to the “credibility” of the foreign press who are covering the conflict. “Every reporter I’ve met who was in Gaza during war says this Israeli/now FPA narrative of Hamas harassment is nonsense,” she tweeted. [Boldface type hers.]

I agree that there’s a lot of nonsense being disseminated about Israel’s war with Hamas, and about the media role in the conflict. And I agree that there is a danger—if people believe that the media, including the New York Times, provides a fair picture of the war in Gaza. (I would argue it is not.)

Since late July, I’ve conducted an in-depth look at the credibility of the media coverage, plus interviews with military experts and some journalists covering the war. Among other things, I’ve discovered that the Times’ most important reporter in Gaza for the past few years has used the late Yasser Arafat as his profile photo on Facebook, and, in a second photo, praised the former Palestinian leader. This suggests that the Times may have less to worry about in terms of Hamas intimidation than others in the press corps. Indeed, this Times reporter’s parallel pieces for Qatar’s Al Jazeera since the war began can only be pleasing to the terrorists.

“An overheard conversation between top Nazis Goering and von Ribbentrop set off the chain of events revealing to the public the existence of the Hitler-Stalin Pact’s “secret protocol,” which included evidence of Soviet war crimes committed in tandem with the Nazis. The Allies suppressed the document at the Nuremberg trials. ”

—Today is the 75th anniverary of the non-aggression pact between the Hitler and Stalin, the latter becoming (after Hitler attacked Stalin on June 22, 1941) the member of the “Big Three” known as “Uncle Joe.” In the commemorative essays discussing the twin dictators’ earlier alliance of August 23, 1939, which would be followed by Hitler and Stalin’s conquest of Poland the following month, the pact’s secret protocol that divided the nations of central and Eastern Europe between them is also mentioned. I have yet to see, however, any discussion of how that secret protocol became known to the public.

That disturbing story of near-suppression takes us past the war to the trials of the Nazi high command in Nuremberg — widely hailed the model of international justice. But what a morally rotten exercise it was, as war criminals (Soviets) sat in judgment of war criminals (Nazis) while war crimes (British and US) were occurring all around (Operation Keelhaul, the little known British-US-enabled “repatriation” from the West of millions of Soviet-claimed persons to death/the Gulag, was in full swing).

There, in a Nuremberg prison yard, a German defense lawyer by chance overheard top Nazis (von RIbbentrop and Goering) discussing the contents of the still-secret protocol, which offered evidence of Stalin’s guilt in committing “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” one of the key charges against the German high command. With Stalin trying to blot out his alliance with Hitler from the record — with full support of his British and American allies — how did the secret protocol ever come to the world’s attention?

Here is what happened at Nuremberg, as discussed in Chapter 2 of American Betrayal, pp. 54-58.

State Dept. whoppers: Beheading wasn’t directed at the US; Islamic State isn’t ‘Islamic’

Under questioning by reporters at a news briefing about the savage beheading of American photojournalist James Foley by savages calling themselves the Islamic State, the hapless Harf maintained with a straight face that not only was the crime not directed against the United States, it wasn’t done in the name of religion either, according to CNS.

No matter what the guys who actually did the killing might think.

“I think ISIL wants to make this about the United States and our actions. And I think what the President was trying to say was that this is not about the United States and what we do,” Harf said, apparently even believing it. “This is about countries in the region coming together to fight a shared threat, and this is not about us.”

As someone once said, let this be clear.

Some Islamist animal with a knife slit the throat of an American citizen, explicity because he’s an American citizen. Then distributed a video of the barbarity called, “A message to America.” And that video concluded with a warning to the president of the United States about another hostage, Steve Joel Sotloff, that said, “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

But John Kerry’s State Department is outraged that anyone could take that to mean this was directed in any way at “the United States and what we do.”

And religion?

Most people might think a group that calls itself the Islamic State might have more than a passing belief that it operates in the name of some religion or other. Not to point fingers or anything — just to pull a religion of the air, you understand – most people might think that group was operating in the name of Islam

Whey may be the way to go. Image via Shutterstock.com.

Bodybuilders ingest buckets of whey protein powder to bulk up their
muscle mass. But researchers from Israel have found a new blood-smart
reason to eat like a “hulk” before meals.

A new study by Israeli and Swedish researchers has found that a plain
whey protein drink one half hour before breakfast could help
diabetics, or those on the verge of diabetes, prevent blood-sugar
spikes and better manage the disease.

Researchers Prof. Daniela Jakubowicz and Dr. Julio Wainstein at
Wolfson Medical Center in Holon; Prof. Oren Froy of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem; and Prof. Bo Ahrén of Lund University and
their colleagues studied a group of people who consumed whey protein
before eating a high-glucose meal.

What exactly is a garmento?Is it a cringe-making label or a badge of honor? Does the stereotypical garmento embody traditional Jewish values? Or does he (or far less often she) defy or deny them?
Why did so many Jews go into the rag trade anyway? And Sam, really, why did you make the pants so long?

Steven Fischler of Teaneck and his business partner, Joel Sucher of Hartsdale, N.Y., examine these questions — well, at least some of them — and similar ones in a documentary, “Dressing America: Tales From the Garment Center.” Created in 2009, it will be broadcast a number of times on Channel 13 and on WLIW, beginning on September 2, to mark Fashion Week in New York City.
“The film looks at two things,” Mr. Fischler said. “It talks about the Jewish immigrant roots of today’s garment industry. Some of the Jewish immigrants who came over didn’t have a lot of money, but they had the skills — certainly sewing and clothes-making was something that Jews did in Europe. They brought their skills to this country, and they helped create the billion-dollar fashion industry that we have today.”

Much of that history is shown through old photographs and film snippets, and excerpts from both English- and Yiddish-language movies.
“The other aspect is a little bit of a slice of life,” he said. “There are some recurrent characters, who have been in the industry for a long time, and reflect the golden age of the garment industry, before everything got outsourced — when people didn’t have 90-page contracts but cut deals on a handshake.
“Of course,” he added, “the garment center was much smaller then; much more of a small town than it is today.”

The garment center wasn’t all Jewish, he added; like many of the New York City neighborhoods where its workers lived, it also was Italian. “But it had a very large and strong Jewish aspect,” and much of the documentary focuses on it.
Not only did some Jews come to New York with sewing skills — as they came to Paterson — they also brought an entrepreneurial orientation and a quick-witted willingness to take chances.
“The garment center in New York City really is women’s wear,” Mr. Fischler said. “Men’s wear is mainly in the Midwest, particularly in Chicago, with big companies like Hart Schaffner and Marx.” That’s because men’s styles change slowly — the lapel might wax and wane — so it is far easier and safer to produce large numbers of basic items, and to charge more for them. “But women’s fashion changes every year, and it affects the nature of the business. Women’s fashion companies were much smaller and more highly specialized, and it was a more difficult business.
“If you picked the right dress, you made a lot of money. If you picked the wrong one — if, say, you went for a long skirt in a year when the style was short — you were going to go bankrupt.” Bankruptcy is never pleasant, but it looms less for someone who already has left home, crossed a continent using his wits and then steamed across an ocean in stomach-turning steerage, started a new life from scratch, and learned that it is almost always possible to start all over yet again.