RUTHFULLY YOURS

Say this about Vladimir Putin. The Russian strongman has taken the measure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Obama. He knows they dread a showdown over Ukraine, so he is ignoring their rhetorical protests and moving to carve out even more of Ukraine for Greater Russia.

That’s the meaning of the Kremlin’s decision this week to move Russian forces into the Ukrainian coastal town of Novoazovsk while shoring up Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. A NATO official said “well over” 1,000 Russian troops, backed by heavy armor, have joined the separatists in fighting Ukraine’s military.

The Kiev government is calling this an “invasion,” while NATO clings to “incursion,” but that’s a distinction without a difference. Russia invaded Ukraine in February by grabbing Crimea. It has since escalated its military intervention in multiple ways, including with special forces and by firing artillery at Ukrainian positions from both Russian territory and inside Ukraine. If Spanish-speaking men in army garb grabbed El Paso and Mexican artillery fired at the Texas National Guard, Americans would call it an invasion.

The strategy behind Mr. Putin’s move into Ukraine’s southern coast is to open a land bridge between Russia and Crimea. The goal is to reduce Crimea’s isolation so Russian military garrisons can be reinforced by land instead of by air, and the peninsula’s economy can be knit more closely to Russia’s.

The escalation also opens up another front for the Ukrainian military as it tries to regain control over the east. Ukraine’s military has been making progress against the separatist forces occupying Donetsk and Luhansk, and Mr. Putin may figure he had to act now to prevent the rebels from being overrun. Kiev’s forces will now have to fight on a third front against Russian soldiers and armor.

The timing is notable, but not surprising, on the heels of the much-ballyhooed Tuesday meeting between Mr. Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Western Europeans, in their desire to have this crisis go away, had hoped the meeting would yield progress toward a negotiating solution.

The Obama administration talks global warming as the world burns.

Secretary of State John Kerry said during his January 2013 confirmation hearings that he would be a “passionate advocate” on climate-change issues, and he’s living up to that promise. In a speech this month in Hawaii, Mr. Kerry called climate change “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now.” Not 10, 20 or 100 years from now—right now.

If only Mr. Kerry were right. Unfortunately, America faces much bigger immediate challenges and threats than climate change. Our enemies around the world are intent on harming us—right now. America’s secretary of state should worry more about them and less about the Earth’s temperature decades from now.
Here’s a list of a few challenges, all of which pose a greater threat to the world than climate change. It might help the president and his colleagues understand why Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy approval rating is about 36%, according to an August poll by Gallup.

Yiddish Tango Is Irresistible Musical Hybrid
A Rhythmic Melting Pot From Buenos Aires to Vilna
JTA) — The music that packs the Skirball Cultural Center’s stately courtyard – Yiddish tango – is a musical hybrid twice over.

On the tango side, it is a blend of African-born rhythms and a potpourri of European music styles. On the Yiddish side, it combines mournful liturgical melodies with folk songs.

Tango, too, is famous for its sensual dance, while Yiddish music is rooted in the festive freylekhs of traditional wedding bands.

In combination, the two prove irresistible, as the concert crowd stands and sways to the tangled rhythms.

For Gustavo Bulgach, 47, band leader of Yiddish Tango Club — the star attraction at the Skirball on Aug. 21 — the music is also a reminder of his childhood in Buenos Aires in the 1970s and ’80s. Born to a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, Bulgach grew up in Argentina learning Jewish folk music at the feet of his grandfather, a passionate music lover, and in the synagogue founded by his grandfather.

At the same time, he says, “Tango is more than the music you hear in Buenos Aires, it’s something you breathe.”

Bulgach is far from the first to combine Jewish music and tango in a heady combination. Tango music was born in late 19th-century Argentina in communities of newly arrived European immigrants, many of them Jews.

As Jewish musicians learned to play in the increasingly popular style, they added their own musical and linguistic flourishes — not only joining major tango orchestras, but also composing new tangos in Yiddish. Max Zalkind , for one, composed both in Yiddish (“Odesa Mama”) and Spanish (“Mi Quinta in Castelar”).

‘I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot,” Abigail Borah, a youth delegate to the 2011 Durban climate negotiations, yelled from the conference floor. “I am scared for my future,” she cried, silencing Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s chief climate negotiator. “We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious, and legally binding treaty.”

Now the Obama administration is signaling that there will be not be a new climate treaty. According to a report in Wednesday’s New York Times, the path to a treaty has come to an end, 14 months before the Paris talks scheduled for next year. Instead, the best deal on offer is a non-binding accord. This is big news.

Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is reheating the rhetoric from its fifth assessment report, doing what it always does: produce the right mood music ahead of crunch-time climate talks. Trouble is, it’s all sounding more than a little dated. In that report, the first installment of which was released last September, the IPCC ducked the big question unsettling climate science. What are the possible causes and implications of the pause — or hiatus, as the IPCC prefers to call it — in the rise in average global temperatures? The pause is already more than a decade old. With 39 explanations and counting, and some climate scientists now arguing that it might last yet another decade, the IPCC has sidelined itself in irrelevance until it has something serious to say about the pause and has reflected on whether its alarmism is justified, given its reliance on computer models that predicted temperature rises that have not occurred.

While the IPCC plays yesterday’s tired hits, it appears that next year’s climate-change negotiations will bring forth a mouse. In retrospect, the Durban climate conference turned out to be the high point for expectations that climate negotiations would produce a binding treaty. It was also the high point for the European Union’s climate-change strategy, knocking the U.S. on its heels. After the acrimonious collapse of attempts to agree to a climate treaty at Copenhagen in 2009, American and European climate negotiators drew diametrically different conclusions about what to do next.

There are also the silent “Womenistas” of Congress, including some men, mostly Democrats who list Women’s Issues as a priority- abortion on demand, control over their own bodies, fairness in the workplace, equal pay, opposition to violence against women etc……but not a word about the kidnapped girls of Boko Haram, or “honor” killings, or stoning of adulterous women, or gang rape of minors- all conducted under Sharia law. But, just use lewd language or make a suggestive comment and these idiots will demand censure and legislation….. rsk
Feminists see “rape culture” in nail polish (and everywhere else) but now remain silent about real abuse.

Presumably the advent of a nail polish capable of detecting date-rape drugs in one’s cocktail would mark a high-water point in the empowerment of women against predatory men. Not so fast: The feminist backlash against the product has been vehement. According to ThinkProgress, such an innovation “actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society.”

Feminists of the vocal, bathe-in-male-tears sort find proof of “rape culture” all about: in newspaper satire, in ’80s movies, in the verb “to force.” So one would think news that between 1997 and 2013 at least 1,400 children in Rotherham, England, were victims of sexual exploitation would confirm the feminist narrative and ignite their righteous fury.

Not so fast.

Released Tuesday, August 26, the “Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham,” commissioned by Rotherham’s Metropolitan Borough Council, details sexual abuse, including sex trafficking and gang rape, perpetrated over nearly two decades by older men against children in Rotherham. News outlets have released horrifying supplementary details. The U.K. Mirror, for instance, reports that “Emma,” a Rotherham-area girl, was raped once a week beginning when she was 13 years old. When she provided to police the names of 250 men she claimed had raped her, police ignored her. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls in Rotherham and throughout England probably experienced the same.

In Rotherham there is a real-life “rape culture.” But you will not learn anything new about it from Salon, the Daily Beast, Jezebel, or Slate. It has gone unmentioned at Feministing, Bitch Media, or the Feminist Majority Foundation. There have been no outraged op-eds from Jenny Kutner, Jessica Valenti, or Samantha Leigh Allen.

These are, apparently, not the rapes they are looking for.

Rotherham’s — and England’s — Shame
The Muslim men who tortured more than 1,400 girls are criminals. So are the authorities who covered it up.

We often read or hear from the media that a nation is “shocked” or “horrified” by the revelation of some crime or government scandal. It is almost never true. At best, most people are disapproving or mildly interested in the shocking news. Since Tuesday afternoon, however, Britain has felt real shock and horror over the report that 1,400 young women in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham had been groomed, raped, prostituted, trafficked, and brutally abused in almost every possible way by a criminal gang for the last 16 years. In addition, the authorities — which in this case are the local government authority, the police, and the child-protection services — had been repeatedly informed of these crimes but had dismissed the reports as false or exaggerated and taken no action to investigate, halt, and punish them.

Some of the examples of this depraved official indifference are barely believable. In one case, a girl was found drunk in the company of her exploiters and was arrested while the men were let free. In another, a father found his daughter, tried to rescue her, complained to the police, and was himself arrested while the authorities took no action on his complaint.

It is not as if this series of crimes was hidden or unknown. No fewer than three official investigations (prior to this one) looked into these crimes. They reported the broad truth that we now know and called for further investigations and arrests. The police and child-protection services did nothing whatever about them. Indeed, they quietly pigeonholed the findings with dismissive comments. The local councilors looked the other way or, on some occasions, intervened to discourage investigations by the police. Only the general public was innocently ignorant.

Hollywood’s Violence Profiteers

Did you miss Tinseltown’s latest political-correctness powwow? Preening celebrities showed their solidarity with Ferguson, Mo., at the MTV Video Music Awards show this week. Rapper Common led the convocation, preachifying about the positive impact of hip-hop music on society as a “powerful instrument of social change” and “truth.”

Cameras showed drug-addled gangsta rapper Snoop Dogg bowing his head and flashing a peace sign during a “moment of silence” for Ferguson. MTV president Stephen Friedman aired public-service announcements plying social-justice messages. “It’s a call to action to our audience that we have to confront our own bias head-on before we can truly create change,” Friedman pontificated.

Spare me the shizzle and hypocri-dizzle.

While these Hollywood do-gooders gnash their Zoom!-brightened teeth over violence in the black community, they turn their Restylane-filled cheeks from the bullet-riddled violence glamorized by their own industry.

The night before the VMAs, a gunman barged into the 1Oak nightclub in West Hollywood and shot rap mogul Suge Knight six times. He survived.

It wasn’t the first time Knight had been targeted for apparent revenge. And it wasn’t the first time the VMA party scene had been rattled by violent gunfire. In 2005, Knight was shot at a pre-VMA party in Miami hosted by rapper Kanye West.

Knight, founder of the Death Row Records empire and possessor of a mile-long rap sheet, reportedly refuses to cooperate with L.A. police, who are investigating the roles of the infamous Bloods and Crips rival street gangs in the crime. The Bloods-affiliated Knight’s reign of criminal terror has been well documented by law enforcement and rap aficionados. A climax: the still-unsolved shooting deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, which multiple insiders believe the record executive ordered.

As recounted in Ian Tuttle’s bracing reports (here and here) about rapes committed by Muslims in Rotherdam, England, this is a longstanding European scandal the cover-up of which brings shame – more shame – to the Western media. In my 2010 book The Grand Jihad, on the Islamist-supremacist threat to the West, I described rape by Muslim immigrants as “the unspoken epidemic of Western Europe.” The book goes on to discuss the unmentionable Islamic doctrinal and cultural underpinnings of the epidemic:

As a violent jihadist tactic, [rape] has long been an infamous weapon in the Sudanese Islamist regime’s genocidal arsenal, used first against Christians and animists in the south in the early Nineties and, more recently, in western Sudan against the Muslims of Darfur, whom Islamists judge to be insufficiently Islamic. Now, with the tide of immigration, jihad by rape has been imported to Europe, where indignation by the politically correct press is predictably reserved not for the perpetrators but for the few journalists willing to report on it.

Consistent with [top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist] Sheikh [Yusuf] Qaradawi’s aforementioned view that the rape victim is to blame for her plight if she has failed to adhere to fundamentalist protocols for women’s attire, ShahidMehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped (an admonition also given voice by Sheik Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia) (See Sharon Lapkin, “Western Muslims’ Racist Rape Spree”, FrontPageMag.com, Dec. 29, 2005). Not surprisingly given such encouragement, Fjordman painstakingly documents that it has become a commonplace for young Muslim men to participate in sexual assaults and absolve themselves from culpability. (See here, here and here.) As a psychologist working in the prison system, the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple witnessed the six-fold spike in Britain’s Muslim inmate population between 1990 and 2005. He bluntly notes that “thanks to their cultural inheritance, [the Muslims’] abuse of women is systematic rather than unsystematic as it is with” white and black inmates. (See Theodore Dalrymple, “Our prisons are fertile ground for cultivating suickde bombers”, The Times of London, July 30, 2005.) Robert Spencer elaborates [in “The Rape Jihad”, FrontPageMag.com, Sept. 24, 2004]:

The Jewish enemies of Israel, if they are sufficiently profligate in the expenditure of claptrap, often come to the aid of her defenders. Early this summer (2014) I wrote the following paragraph in the prologue to a book (entitled Jews Against Themselves) that I was sending off to my publisher:

“I have not attempted a systematic taxonomy of all the species of Jews arrayed under the genus ‘enemies of Israel,’ a monumental task that would require an Encyclopedia to include the following: Jewish Progressives against Israel; Jewish Queers against Israel; Haredim against Israel; Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Children of Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Jewish Voice for Peace; Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors against Israel; Survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto against Israel; J Street; Jewish Postmodernists against Israel; Jewish Berkeley Professors against Israel; Post-Zionists against Israel; Jewish Members of MESA [Middle East Studies Association] against Israel; Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG, also called, seasonally, London’s Jewish Christmas Carolers against Israel); and so on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Despite this, there will always be readers who express astonishment that there are Jews who question the Jewish right to live as a natural right, or hate Israel and are ashamed to have a state. Surely they are as rare as singing mice or card-playing pigs? Alas, no.”

I felt more or less content with that Swiftian list, yet also sensed that something was missing from it. The recent publication, first in Britain’s Guardian on August 15, and then in The New York Times on August 23, of an ad accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and calling for “full economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel” told me what it was. The ad was placed by “Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors” and also “friends of survivors,” “friend of many survivors,” “cousins of survivors,” “cousins of victims of Nazis in Ukraine,” “the great niece of an uncle who shot himself,” “spouse of hidden child,” and “relative of victims.” Where defamation of Israel is concerned, imagination cannot keep pace with the fantastic moral coarseness of the defamers.

Transferring UNRWA’s activities to the UNHCR will save money and allow Arab refugees to move on and build productive lives.

Following the tragic loss of life at a UNRWA school in Rafah that resulted from an IAF attack on a Hamas rocket position nearby, Israel was condemned. US, UN and UNRWA officials complained that the air force knew, or should have known, that 3,000 people were sheltered at the facility.

No one asked why UNRWA was sheltering people in an area from which Hamas was firing rockets. UNRWA denies that it knew about Hamas rocket launchers that were built nearby.

Using UNRWA facilities to stockpile weapons is only the tip of the iceberg. UNRWA certainly knows that Hamas uses the immediate area around its facilities to fire rockets into Israel. Housing displaced people in its facilities, therefore, rather than removing them from the conflict area, makes UNRWA complicit in a war crime: using civilians as shields.

Similarly, during the Second Lebanese War in 2006, UNRWA knew that its facilities were next door to gunmen from Hezbollah and other terrorist groups who were attacking Israel.

Despite this dual use of UNRWA facilities, the UN was not criticized for allowing it and endangering civilians. Since Hamas and UNRWA are virtually synonymous in Gaza, it appears that a UN agency is protecting a terrorist organization.

Instead of rebuilding its facilities in the Gaza Strip to serve as terrorist infrastructure, the UN should close UNRWA and transfer its responsibilities to the local government. That is unlikely, however, as long as UNRWA continues to receive funding – primarily from the US and Canada.

Stopping those funds, however, is opposed, ironically, by the Israeli government – notably by the Defense and Foreign ministries.