RUTHFULLY YOURS

The disheartening, though not entirely surprising, breakdown of talks between Israel and the Palestinians marked yet another failure by the two sides to come closer to an agreement that would usher the way for a Palestinian state. Yet, no sooner had the talks collapsed than blame was being assigned by both Secretary of State John Kerry and chief U.S. negotiator Martin Indyk—and naturally it was Israel that bore the brunt of their criticism. Echoing the sentiments of Palestinian leadership itself, Kerry and Indyk pointed to the dreaded settlements as the principal sticking point of the talks, with Indyk suggesting that Israel’s approval of new housing units in the Gilo neighborhood Jerusalem would, as he put it, “drive Israel into an irreversible binational reality.”

Secretary Kerry had the same complaint, insisting that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s refusal to release the final third of Palestinian prisoners, coupled with the provocative new building plans, were the Israeli actions that blew up the nine months of negotiations.

On one development even the State Department was less than enthusiastic: the reconciliation agreement reached by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, announced at the end of April, which State’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, deemed “disappointing” and the timing “troubling.” Even diplomats have to face certain truths, and Ms. Psaki had to begrudgingly admit that, in her words uttered with breathtaking understatement, “It’s hard to see how Israel can be expected to negotiate with a government that does not believe in its right to exist.”

Diplomacy involving Israel and the Palestinians invariably reaches this point—the thorny and slippery intersection of the politically possible and the diplomatically desired, with the inevitable result being that it is Israel made to be seen as the guilty party in having talks collapse, regardless of the actual events leading up to such a failure. Without even the barest amount of self awareness of how the inability to hold the Palestinians responsible for any major acts of concessions for strategic negotiation, U.S. diplomacy is continually based on the assumption that it is Israel—and only Israel—that is going to make negotiation move forward, and that it is Israel, and only Israel, that has the will and ability to make changes in policy and any concessions necessary to satisfy the Palestinian’s maximalist demands.

As a result, and as the Palestinians have cleverly figured out, Israel is made to release terrorist prisoners, agreed to land swaps, or to deliver any number of other painful concessions, just to further engage the Palestinians and keep them at the bargaining table.

In the absence of a special prosecutor, the best opportunity for piercing the veil of secrecy and evasion that surrounds the IRS handling of groups perceived as enemies of the Obama administration lies in civil litigation. The National Organization for Marriage has just obtained a $50,000 settlement from the IRS for its criminal release of confidential donor information to an opposition group. But so far Eric Holder’s Justice Department is not pursuing inquiries into who feloniously released that information.

The absence of any official judicial inquiry into the inner workings of the IRS processes is why it is so important to note that yesterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street a pro-Israel organization that was told its application for tax exempt status was being delayed because:

…these cases are being sent to a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.

Z-Street’s lawsuit alleges unlawful viewpoint discrimination, a First Amendment claim. The IRS tried several arguments to dismiss Z-Street’s lawsuit, all of which were dismissed by Washington, DC federal district court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, an Obama appointee. She noted that Z-Street was not suing to gain tax exempt status, but rather over the viewpoint discrimination evidenced by what it was told by IRS agent Diane Gentry about contradicting administration policies – the process by which the IRS made the determination on tax exempt status. In the words of the Jerusalem Post:

The Z Street case may be what forces the IRS to pull aside its carefully constructed curtain and reveal how it made decisions regarding organizations deemed out of step with the current US administration.

Judge Jackson gave the IRS until June 26 to respond to Z-Street. That deadline has now passed, so the case enters discovery. This means that Z-Street can subpoena IRS officials, place them under oath, and ask them questions about how they acted, and cross examine them closely. They can also subpoena documents and require their production. This is much different than a House committee hearing in which members have only a few minutes to ask questions, and when friendly Democrats have their opportunity to apologize for the impertinence of daring to ask questions of our IRS masters. Depositions taken under oath can last many hours and involve detailed questions.

On June 12—now a full two weeks back—three Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped in Judea (part of the West Bank) on their way home from a religious school there. They were Naftali Frenkel, 16 (a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen), Gilad Shaar (16), and Eyal Ifrach (19). Since then Israeli security forces have conducted a massive manhunt in Judea that has included searching caves, wells, and reservoirs. They have turned up nothing.

We do know what organization was behind the abduction—Hamas, as publicly confirmed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Israel’s internal security agency has just recently announced [2] the identity of the main kidnappers, two hard-core Hamas members from the West Bank town of Hebron. But there has been no word from Hamas about a possible prisoner swap involving the three boys, even though, two and a half years ago, Israel swapped 1027 Palestinian security prisoners for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who had also been kidnapped by Hamas and was held in Gaza for five years. That silence increases the concern that the boys have been killed—or smuggled to a different country, which the Israeli authorities consider unlikely but do not rule out.

Meanwhile Israel has been cracking down on Hamas, arresting hundreds of its members, seizing weapons and ammunition, and raiding its media outlets and funding operations. Israel has also been trying to get the international community interested in this unfolding story, but with less success.

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In some ways the circumstances haven’t been propitious. There is the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil. There are also the large-scale atrocities by ISIS in Iraq, compared to which an abduction of three young men might fall under the radar. Especially when, in the U.S., the events in Iraq have sparked a bitter debate over which president was responsible, or more responsible than the other, for the mess there.

Israel has been trying to emphasize the point that, less than two weeks before the abduction, at the start of June, the U.S., the European Union, and the UN all welcomed the announcement of a new Palestinian unity government—formed between Fatah, for better or worse an accepted international player for twenty years, and Hamas, which both the U.S. and the EU officially outlaw as a terrorist organization.

Israel at the time objected vehemently [4] to the legitimization of Hamas and said “unity” would give Hamas, already ruling Gaza, inroads into the West Bank and increase the likelihood of terror activity there. That warning seemed bitterly confirmed when the three young men disappeared on June 12. As for the EU, it took its foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, five days to get around to saying something bad about the kidnapping. As for the U.S., while Secretary of State John Kerry strongly denounced [5] the crime, the Obama administration, like the EU, has shown no inclination to rescind recognition of the new Palestinian government, Hamas and all.

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And as for the UN, on Tuesday the mothers of the three boys—who, of course, deserve all possible sympathy—made an apparently naïve and pathetic move of seeking sympathy and concern [7] at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, a body known for its particularly virulent anti-Israeli bias. A video [8] put together by Anne Bayefsky’s Human Rights Voices [9] shows that the UN has actually reacted to the kidnapping with denial, mockery, and the usual vilification of Israel.

That attempt to get the world concerned about the kidnapping and its implications has appeared to me quixotic from the start. It is true that, in major regards, Israel is now more economically and diplomatically integrated [10] with much of the world than in the past. That has not translated into recognition that Israel’s terrorist enemies are as vicious and reprehensible as other terrorists, or tolerance for Israel’s fight against them.

Along with the crisis over the abduction, these last two weeks have seen an intensification of rocket fire [11] from Gaza against Israeli civilian communities, possibly necessitating another Israeli military operation in Gaza. If so, Israel needs to remain realistically aware of the fact that the world is profoundly addicted to the idea of Palestinian victimhood, even when it entails inversion of the truth.

The ruthless exercise of power by strongmen and generalissimos is the natural state of human affairs.

I’m 41 years old, which doesn’t feel that old to me (most days), but history is short. With the exception of those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, the world as I have known it has been remarkably free and prosperous, and it is getting more free and more prosperous. But it is also a fact that, within my lifetime, there have been dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, and half of Germany — and lots of other places, too, to be sure, but you sort of expect them in Cameroon and Russia. If I were only a few years older, I could add France to that list. (You know how you can tell that Charles de Gaulle was a pretty good dictator? He’s almost never described as a “dictator.”) There have been three attempted coups d’état in Spain during my life. Take the span of my father’s life and you’ll find dictatorships and coups and generalissimos rampant in practically every country, even the nice ones, like Norway.

That democratic self-governance is a historical anomaly is easy to forget for those of us in the Anglosphere — we haven’t really endured a dictator since Oliver Cromwell. The United States came close, first under Woodrow Wilson and then during the very long presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Both men were surrounded by advisers who admired various aspects of authoritarian models then fashionable in Europe. Rexford Tugwell, a key figure in Roosevelt’s so-called brain trust, was particularly keen on the Italian fascist model, which he described as “the cleanest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.” And the means by which that social hygiene was maintained? “It makes me envious,” he said. That envy will always be with us, which is one of the reasons why progressives work so diligently to undermine the separation of powers, aggrandize the machinery of the state, and stifle criticism of the state. We’ll always have our Hendrik Hertzbergs — but who could say the words “Canadian dictatorship” without laughing a little? As Tom Wolfe put it, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

Why is that? Is there something magical about Albion’s seed — Protestantism? the English language itself? the combination of the two in the King James Bible? — that inoculates the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand against the European intellectual disease? That disease mutates every 20 years, but the primordial strain of the virus is always identifiable: more power, centralized power, consolidated power. If you were observing Earth from space, or from Rome during the reign of Hadrian, you would not be likely to think of England as the planet’s great mover and shaker; it is just a little island sneered at by Europe’s great men as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But culture and history are sensitive to initial conditions, and somewhere between the drafting of the Magna Carta and the invention of the first power loom, a British butterfly flapped its wings in the right way at the right moment, and the deeply intertwined phenomena of the Industrial Revolution and the liberty revolution emerged together, creating an entirely new kind of civilization, one that showed the world that it is indeed a glorious thing to be a nation of shopkeepers. Walk through modern-day London, or drive through Houston, and see how their shopkeepers are keeping themselves — most of them won’t even bother to sneer at the memory of Napoleon and his grubby little wars.

But freedom, self-rule, and prosperity are extraordinarily delicate things. The natural state of the human animal is not security and plenty, but terror and privation. When the Romans overthrew Tarquin, they swore they’d never have another king. Soon enough, they had an emperor, a word deriving from the Latin imperator, which, some of my conservative friends would do well to remember, means “commander-in-chief.”

JOHN FUND: REMEMBER MISSISSIPPI- The maneuverings to keep Thad Cochran in the Senate will not soon be forgotten.
How far did the establishment GOP forces backing Senator Thad Cochran go in Mississippi this week? Too far, and their tactics are likely to leave permanent scars in a civil war with Tea Party forces that are out of all proportion to the importance the establishment placed on saving one 76-year-old senator’s ability to please Washington’s K Street lobbying interests.

“This is a win for the establishment, but it’s a win with an asterisk, because it’s so tainted that it might be one of those things where they’re going to be sorry they ever won the runoff in Mississippi,” Craig Shirley, a political consultant and the author of two respected biographies of Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo News this week.

The key to Cochran’s surprising victory was a disproportionately high turnout in precincts with high Democratic registration. Mississippi law permits voters to cross party lines in primaries, but it prohibits members of one party who voted in their party’s primary to participate in a runoff of the other party. It also bars them from voting in the runoff unless they intend to support the resulting nominee in the November election — an unenforceable requirement, but one that showed that the intent of the election law was, in this case, to let Republicans determine their own nominee.

The tactics used to convince black Democrats to vote for Cochran included the same kind of race-baiting that Republicans have complained about for decades. “The Tea Party Intends To Prevent Blacks From Voting on Tuesday” was the headline on a flier that indefatigable journalist Charles Johnson (twitter #chuckcjohnson) discovered had been distributed in heavily black precincts before the June 23 vote. Along with that unfounded incendiary message was a list of issue comparisons between Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Cochran was credited with such unconservative positions as support for federal pork projects and food-stamp funding. The flier carried no identification as to who produced it, a violation of federal law.

Curiously, another flier put out by the pro-Cochran Mississippi Conservatives PAC last week described Cochran’s positions in nearly identical language as the anonymous flier and even carried an identical photo of the senator. The slogan that Thad Cochran “Supports All Mississippians” is the same in both fliers.

“I don’t know who put it out,” former governor Haley Barbour, who raised boatloads of money for the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, told my colleague Eliana Johnson. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.”

New York Soda Ban Loses Again Court of appeals rules Big Apple residents can buy big sugary beverages

New York’s appeals court struck down New York City’s ban on the sale of sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces.

The state’s Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the Board of Health appointed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg exceeded the bounds of its regulatory authority in passing the law on March 12, 2013.

The four-to-two decision disappointed city officials who had hoped the court would reinstate the ban after two lower courts had already ruled against it, according to The New York Times.

The city stayed silent on whether it plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. An appeal is unlikely since the case concerns local government authority and legislation rather than federal issues, Gawker reported.

Bloomberg promoted the proposal as a way to control health conditions such as obesity and diabetes. The restriction would have applied to restaurants, delis, movie theaters, stadiums, and street carts, hitting big companies like Coca-Cola Co.

Restaurants, theater owners, and beverage companies sued, arguing that an appointed board, as opposed to legislative bodies, lacked the authority to impose the ban.

In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Read said the ruling overlooked precedent granting the Board of Health large scope to address public-health issues, such as prohibiting the use of lead paint in homes.

The ruling thwarts public-health advocates and the city’s Board of Health in their efforts to enact measures limiting the consumption of high-calorie drinks known to contribute to obesity.

The ban’s applicability had been questioned since its initial proposal. The restrictions were inconsistent, affecting establishments such as fast-food franchises while leaving convenience stores like 7-Eleven exempt. And though New Yorkers couldn’t purchase huge sports drinks for workouts, equally huge milkshakes and fruit juices remained fair game.

The American Beverage Association, the industry’s trade group, said in a statement that it approved the ruling and that the proposal “would have created an uneven playing field for thousands of small businesses in the city and limited New Yorkers’ freedom of choice.”

Her brand of populism could spell doom for Hillary’s White House ambitions.
Paging Elizabeth Warren: This is your moment.

In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic party is income inequality. I think that’s foolish. The underlying causes of inequality — miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. — are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.

There’s another component to the inequality obsession: populism. People increasingly feel that economic and political elites are enriching themselves, not by making great products or selling valuable services, but by cutting backroom deals and selling influence. This rage is remarkably bipartisan. It is the one theme that loosely unites tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.

Obscure economics professor David Brat toppled House majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary largely by tapping into that populism, particularly on such issues as immigration and Wall Street bailouts.

Senator Warren owes her left-wing hero status to the Democratic version of this kind of populism. She’s been talking for years about how the well-connected “rig the system” for their own benefit. Now, I find many of Warren’s proposed solutions — more regulation, more taxes, more government, etc. — abhorrent. But, believe it or not, I am not a Democratic-primary voter. Those who are love what Warren is selling.

Obama’s drone policy is more about politics than law

The Obama administration’s justification for the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 has always been somewhat murky.

Awlaki was killed in Yemen along with another American, Samir Khan (editor of the al Qaeda magazine “Inspire”), when a missile fired from an American drone struck the car in which they were riding.

The best explanation of the legality of the killings was in a Justice Department “white paper” leaked by NBC in February 2013. It stated a cogent – if troubling – rationale. It said that if: (1) an “informed high level official of the US government” decided that the person posed an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; and (2) capture was infeasible; and (3) the operation would be conducted in accordance with the law of war, then an American citizen who was a senior leader of al Qaeda or an associated force outside the United States could be assassinated by our government.

Many people were troubled by the power found to exist in any “informed high level official” to order the death of an American without due process of law. I was not one of them. A person who forswears his allegiance to America in favor of al Qaeda has become an enemy combatant who can be lawfully killed in battle by any American soldier. That is the law of war. In that respect, killing Awlaki with a drone strike was no different from the carefully-planned shooting down of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s aircraft in 1943.

On Monday, the court-ordered release of a 31-page redacted Justice Department legal opinion revealed more of the rationale behind the Obama administration’s claim to the authority to kill American citizens without due process of law.

It begins by making clear that an American who kills another American outside the jurisdiction of the United States is guilty of murder. Going further than the Justice Department white paper, it invokes the “public authority” justification for law-breaking that covers acts such as a fire engine running a stop light to reach a fire. It concedes that the “public authority” justification doesn’t cover all actions by the Executive Branch, but finds – as the white paper did – that the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorized the president to kill an American who was associated with al Qaeda-related forces such as Awlaki.

“First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, Lee County’s oldest Presbyterian church, went on record Monday night opposition to the vote by its national governing body, Presbyterian Church USA, that they say condemns the nation of Israel and vilifies three American companies.

Rev. Paul deJong, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, said the decision by the local church’s session was unanimous and will be sent to Presbyterian Church USA as a formal protest.

“We cannot and will not support Presbyterian Church USA in its misguided decision to divest itself of stock in companies whose products Israel uses in the occupied territories,” deJong said. “We stand in full support of Israel’s right to protect its citizens and of all American companies to engage in honest free enterprise.”

The center of the controversy was a vote Friday by the General Assembly of Presbyterian Church USA to sell stock it owns in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola because the companies make products used by Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank. The resolution passed 310 to 303.

“The actions of the denomination are at best misguided, at worst represent outright racism, and certainly give every appearance of intentionally promoting anti-Semitism. One must question the motives of anyone who vilifies Israel with greater fervor than any other nation, especially when we consider the numerous places in which violence is being reported continuously. Indeed, rarely in history has one side held so much power and yet used that power with such restraint as Israel is doing in our day,” Rev. deJong said.

Rev. deJong said First Presbyterian Church considers the Bible to be the Word of God and the Bible clearly states that the people of Jerusalem (those we now call Jews) are God’s chosen people.

“There is no defense for anti-Semitism in the guise of peace-making. We find this action by the PCUSA to be indefensible, and we wish to differentiate ourselves from all who would single out for condemnation either Israel as a nation or Jewish people as a race. We call upon all true Christians to do the same,” he said.

Presbyterian Church USA is the largest Presbyterian body in the nation with more than two million members.”

“Just Say No” was the anti-drug slogan coined by Nancy Reagan during her time as First Lady. Then as now, we had a portion of the population addicted to “mind altering substances” that put drug users into an alternate reality. Many of these addicts were enabled by a society that permitted them ready and plentiful access to these drugs.

Well – we now have a similar problem – we have addicts living in an alternate reality. Their inability to grasp the reality around them, or the ramifications of living in a dangerous world, has left them detached and isolated; they are also known as the Obama national security team.

The new addicts, and their alternate reality are fueled by their drug of choice — money – funds that they demand to fuel their completely ineffective foreign policy.

In this 21st century alternate reality, the Department of Defense (DoD) is at the spearhead of our national security – and primary consumer of money.

Congress is now being asked to fund the Pentagon’s “war chest,” basically a slush fund used to break the budget ceilings put in place by Congress (and signed into law by the President), without any strategy or idea as to what they will do with the money.

So – let us ponder this for a moment. The White House and DoD now want more money … to do what?