RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The Che Guevara of the Palestinians” is set to visit Palestinian Authority-controlled Judea and Samaria next week, beginning in Bethlehem, and the city of Jesus’s birth is already in high excitement. The bearer of that illustrious title is none other than Pope Francis. According to Israel National News, “Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a member of the Argentinian parliament and close friend of Pope Francis…said that the pope intends to define himself as the ‘Che Guevera of the Palestinians’ and support their ‘struggle and rights’ during his visit.”

If the Pope or anyone around him has expressed a similar intention to speak out about the Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, it has not been recorded – in sharp contrast to the abundance of signals that the Pope has sent to Palestinian Authority officials. Fr. Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem explained: “He is taking a helicopter directly from Jordan to Palestine — to Bethlehem. It’s a kind of sign of recognizing Palestine.” In anticipation of his doing just that officially, Palestinian officials have put up posters proclaiming “State of Palestine” and depicting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

Not only that, but while in Bethlehem, Pope Francis will meet with Abbas; he also plans to celebrate Mass there rather than in Jerusalem, a move that Israel National News says “has been called a show of support for the PA.” He then plans to visit a Palestinian “refugee camp.”

Khader predicted: “Knowing who he is, and his sensitivity for all those who suffer, I am sure that he will say something defending all those who are suffering, including the Palestinians who live under occupation.” Ziyyad Bandak, Abbas’s adviser for Christian affairs, was enthusiastic: “This visit will help us in supporting our struggle to end the longest occupation in history….We welcome this visit and consider it as support for the Palestinian people, and confirmation from the Vatican of the need to end the occupation.”

All this comes after a Church official in Jerusalem criticized Israeli authorities for asking that a sign announcing the Pope’s visit be taken down from a historic site on which such signs are prohibited for preservation reasons. The unnamed official referenced recent Hebrew-language hate graffiti spray-painted on mosques and churches, saying that he and other Church officials “question the fact that the police, instead of taking action against the extremists who paint hate slogans on mosques and churches, choose to remove a sign with a positive message that welcomes the pope in three languages. We hope the police will act with the same determination to prevent the growing incitement and violence against Christians.”

While referring to the graffiti as “incitement and violence against Christians,” however, Church officials have been much more reticent regarding Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, even when it has included actual violence. According to Israel National News, “Christian Arab residents of the village of El-Khader in the Bethlehem area were savagely attacked by local Muslims as they celebrated a Christian holiday two weeks ago. A report by CAMERA, an organization which monitors anti-Israel bias in the media, reported that Christians attempting to enter Saint George’s Monastery in the village were intimidated and attacked with rocks and stones.”

In the last two decades, New York City has made tremendous strides in helping people move off welfare dependency, according to a new study by E. J. McMahon for the Manhattan Institute, “Trends in Assistance and Dependency: Tracking Programs for New York City’s Poor, 1956–2014.” In the last 19 years, there has been a 71 percent drop in New Yorkers on welfare. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership and president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, Inc., talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the history and future of welfare policy in the Big Apple and elsewhere.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is the most significant take-away from a study of welfare in New York City over the past 19 years?

E. J. McMAHON: The decrease in welfare dependency has been as striking and dramatic as the decrease in crime in New York City, which started just a few years earlier. During Mayor John Lindsay’s heyday in the 1960s, New York City became known as the nation’s welfare capital. Not by coincidence, it also was the epicenter of what became a national “welfare rights” movement. The welfare rolls increased from about 400,000 to over a million people in the early 1970s, which so alarmed Governor Rockefeller and the legislature that they started pulling in the reins from Albany, with little effect. Even at the peak of the city’s economic recovery in the late 1980s, the caseload never dipped below 810,000. By 1995, Rudy Giuliani’s second year as mayor, the number of New Yorkers essentially on the dole was back to 1.16 million. By the time he left office, it was at 462,000, and it’s now about 339,000. This is essentially the baseline for assessing Bill de Blasio’s welfare policies over the next four years.

LOPEZ: What explains the city’s drop in welfare dependency?

McMAHON: The 1996 federal welfare reform — Bill Clinton’s bargain with a Republican Congress to truly “end welfare as we know it” — was the big trigger, of course. But that was not the whole answer. Rudy Giuliani and Jason Turner, who became the city’s commissioner for welfare and Medicaid eligibility in 1998, were deeply committed to the principle that getting poor people into a job, any job, is better than simply writing them a check. And in pursuing that goal, they adopted the same sort of performance-driven, stat-focused approach the city had applied to policing. Mayor Bloomberg basically stuck with that all the way. In fact, the welfare commissioner for most of Bloomberg’s tenure, Robert Doar, previously had been Governor Pataki’s state welfare commissioner, and had done a lot to promote key reforms at the state level.

LOPEZ: Is this all good news? Do we know how people are doing once off welfare?

McMAHON: What we know for sure is that poor people are much better off working, even in an entry-level job, than on welfare. As the report points out, a nonworking single mother with two children can collect cash benefits or cash substitute worth $16,032, well below the federal poverty level, but she can more than double that, earning about $34,000, by working. One big part of the difference consists of $8,787 in federal, state, and city earned-income tax credits, which is a very important means of support for low-income workers.

The city’s official poverty rate went down every year for five years after welfare reform, and stayed essentially flat for the next eight years. Although the poverty rate has risen since 2008, it still hasn’t returned to the levels of the mid 1990s. Child poverty, in particular, is appreciably lower than it used to be, which reflects the city’s emphasis on providing support for working parents with dependents. And New York has a lower poverty rate than Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, or San Antonio. The city’s alternative measure of poverty, which starts at a higher income threshold and counts cash income supports from public sources, is actually slightly lower than the official measure, which is based on census data.

LOPEZ: The number of people on food stamps and Medicaid is at an all-time high in New York City. What do these numbers say to you?

McMAHON: There have been several things going on. Eligibility for the federal food-stamps program was expanded in a big way starting around 2002, and New York State began expanding its Medicaid program to families well above the poverty level around the same time, years before Obamacare arrived and started doing the same thing. But there also was a deliberate effort under Mayor Bloomberg to sign more people up for food stamps and Medicaid. He viewed these as “work supports” rather than welfare. The idea was that it was better for a poor person to be working, with the help of food stamps and Medicaid, than to be unemployed and cashing checks. Of course, the ideal would be complete self-sufficiency, and too much of the population is still far from that.

Here’s the implication of Rand Paul’s speech on Wednesday: Barack Obama orders Anwar al-Awlaki killed, while Rand Paul would have sent the late al-Qaeda operative a subpoena and transformed him into a human shield for his fellow jihadists.

That is why only the president will profit more than radical Islam from Wednesday’s reprise of Senator Paul’s Filibuster Theatre. Obama’s maladministration has intensified the terrorist threat, but Paul’s behavior has him looking like the comparative adult in the room.

Senator Paul was speaking against Harvard law professor David J. Barron, President Obama’s nominee for the First Circuit federal appeals court. As Carrie Severino illustrates in detail at Bench Memos, Professor Barron’s agenda is to undermine the Constitution. For that, he richly deserves to be blocked. If Harry Reid’s nuclear option means that by sticking together Democrats can ram him through, the ones facing reelection should bear the weight of confirming a radical leftist.

Nevertheless, the rationale for Senator Paul’s filibuster is narrow: When Barron was an official at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), he wrote several opinions justifying targeted killings overseas of American citizens who join enemy forces in wartime.

Talk about doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

Barron was not referring to just any American citizens but to the likes of Awlaki — a U.S. national who regarded the American people as the primary enemy in a global jihad. Before he was finally killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, Awlaki was implicated in the 9/11 atrocities, the jihadist massacre at Fort Hood, the attempted jihadist bombing of a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009, and other terrorist plots.

I agree with Paul on two points. First, he is right to object to the decision of the “most transparent administration in history” to shield Barron’s legal opinions from public scrutiny by classifying them. There is no good reason to resist disclosure of a mere legal theory offered in support of government action.

Western diplomats gloss over the repression and persecution that mark the Iranian regime.

Will the real Hassan Rouhani please stand up? Since his election last summer — and especially since the start of nuclear negotiations with the West last fall — Iran’s new president has become a darling of the U.S. and European diplomatic set. The soft-spoken leader who now serves as Iran’s political face is widely viewed as a “moderate” counterpoint to his firebrand predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as a guarantor of a much-sought-after nuclear deal with the West.

On the latter point, the jury is still out. Nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers (the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany) are continuing apace. But it’s far from clear that a durable nuclear settlement, especially one that will be acceptable to both Tehran and the West, is actually in the offing.

Regarding Rouhani’s reputation for being a moderate, however, it is already clear that he has not delivered on his promises. To the contrary, despite campaign rhetoric about the need to promote greater human rights and democracy within the Islamic Republic, Rouhani has presided over a deepening wave of state repression during his time in office.

The most conspicuous indicator has been a surge in executions. In 2013, the Iranian regime executed, it is estimated, a staggering 660 people, with two-thirds of those killings occurring after Rouhani took office in August. In the first quarter of this year alone, the Iranian regime killed nearly 200 individuals — the highest pace of state executions in more than a decade and a half. Iranian officials, moreover, aren’t shying away from this grim tally; to the contrary, according to Mohammad Javad Larijani, the head of the Iranian judiciary’s perversely named Human Rights Council, the international community should “be grateful for this great service to humanity.”

Internet repression has also widened. Two years ago, in his Nowruz address to the Iranian people, President Obama warned that an “electronic curtain” had descended on the Islamic Republic, thanks to the Iranian regime’s systematic efforts to isolate its citizens from the World Wide Web. Today, those efforts are more frenetic than ever; in the past year, Iran has launched a new Internet filtering program, blacked out a number of social-media platforms, including Twitter and WhatsApp, and convened a new “Supreme Council for Cyberspace” to oversee and regulate online access by its citizens. For these efforts, Iran has been named an “enemy of the Internet” by journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

The American Embassy in Prague is financing a new project aimed at promoting Islam in public elementary and secondary schools across the Czech Republic.

The new law removes the requirement that there must be a special reason to sue for defamation or insult. Swedish thought police will be able to prosecute anyone who expresses an opinion about Muslim immigration and much else if that opinion is deemed to be defamation or slander. The Swedish government is also spending 60 million krona ($9 million) to boost voter turnout in Muslim neighborhoods.

“The influx of immigrants is reaching biblical proportions. Italy is fighting a losing battle.” — Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi, Head of the Italian Navy

In Austria, police say they believe that two teenage girls who vanished from their homes in the capital of Vienna on April 10 may be in Turkey, and that whoever helped them get there is using them as pin-up girls to boost recruitment efforts for the “holy war” in Syria.

Friends of Samra Kesinovic, 16, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, said the girls had become radicalized after attending a local mosque run by a Salafist preacher, Ebu Tejma, and learning about the duty of every Muslim to participate in jihad. The girls were expelled from school after inscribing “I Love Al-Qaeda” on tables and walls.

But the girls’ parents—originally Bosnian refugees who settled in Austria after the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s—say that messages and photographs posted on social media networks which claim that the girls are on the front line and fighting with their new husbands are fake.

In a possible break in the case, Austrian police say they traced a phone call Samra made to her sister in late April to a landline based in Turkey. The search for the girls continues.

At least 100 Austrian citizens or residents have participated in the fighting in Syria, according to Austrian media. Approximately 40 of them are currently on the front lines, 44 have already returned to Austria and 19 have been killed in action.

Also in April, the most senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile in Britain, Ibrahim Munir, denied claims that the group was moving its international headquarters from London to the Austrian city of Graz. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported on April 12 that the Muslim Brotherhood was preparing to move its headquarters to Austria in an “apparent attempt to avoid an inquiry into its activities set up by the Prime Minister.”

The group was expelled from Egypt after a counter-revolution there in July 2013, and recently opened a new headquarters above a kebab shop in London. On April 1, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced an investigation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Britain.

Students who demand emotional pampering deserve intellectual derision.

Dear Class of 2014:

Allow me to be the first to offend you, baldly and unapologetically. Here you are, 22 or so years on planet Earth, and your entire lives have been one long episode of offense-avoidance. This spotless record has now culminated in your refusals to listen to commencement speakers whose mature convictions and experiences might offend your convictions and experiences, or what passes for them.

Modern education has done its work well: In you, Class of 2014, the coward soul has filled the void left by the blank mind.

When I last delivered a commencement address via column to the Class of 2012, I complained about the dismaying inverse relationship between that class’s self-regard and its command of basic facts. This led to one cascade of angry letters, blog posts and college newspaper columns from the under-25 set—and another cascade of appreciative letters from their parents, professors and employers.

Of the former, my favorite came from a 2012 graduate of an elite Virginia college, who wrote me to say that “America has a hefty appetite for BS, and I’m ready and willing to deliver on that demand.” I gave him points for boldness and cheekily wrote back asking if we might consider his letter for publication. The bravado vanished; he demurred.

Well, Class of 2012, I did you a (small) injustice. At least the pretense of knowledgeability was important to you. For the Class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss.

To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.

At the heart of the computer revolution is Moore’s law, named after Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, who predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. As the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce notes in “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper,” Moore’s law explains why the average smartphone today carries a quarter-million times the data-storage capacity of the computer onboard the Apollo 11 spaceship that went to the moon in 1969.

Mr. Bryce argues that a similar dynamic, making less do more, drives virtually every technological change that has created the modern world, from cars and airplanes to advanced medicine, strategic metals and the iCloud. Technological innovation, in short, has a particular character—a dynamic of improvement that accelerates and amplifies (“faster”) while requiring, by any consistent unit of measure, less space and material (“smaller,” “denser”) at a lower cost (“cheaper”).

Mr. Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we must embrace [technological innovation], not reject it.” The book’s other purpose is to persuade climate-change fundamentalists that they are standing on the wrong side of history. Instead of saving the planet by going backward to Don Quixote’s windmills, they need to take a progressive approach to technology itself, he says, striving to make nuclear power safer, for instance, and using the hydrocarbon revolution sparked by fracking and deep-offshore exploration to bridge the way to the future.

“Smaller Faster” starts with historical examples of how technology does more with less, like the printing press in the 16th century and, not least, the automobile in the 20th, which combined the power of a technological leap (the internal combustion engine) with the efficiency of mass production. Mr. Bryce focuses in particular on the vacuum tube, designed in 1906 by Lee de Forest, the man also credited with inventing the radio.

The media’s latest political line is that the Republican establishment has finally crushed the tea party. The truth, as usual, is more interesting. The tea party has already changed the GOP on policy, and mostly for the better, but it is suffering this year because the candidates and operatives acting in its name have been motivated more by personal than policy agendas. That’s a shame because the GOP needs the tea party to prevent it from lapsing back into the do-little caucus of the George W. Bush-Tom DeLay years.

Marco Rubio (Fla.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.)—those are three Senators elected with tea party support in 2010. Yet they are now part of the Senate GOP mainstream, tugging the conference in a more reform direction. So is Rand Paul on domestic policy. And don’t forget New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, who breaks with Mr. Paul on foreign policy but is making her mark as one of the Senate’s smarter young conservatives.

These Senators won with the help of the tea party wave in 2010, but they also won because they were men and women of accomplishment. The tea party rode these candidates as much as they rode the tea party.

Now consider Matt Bevin, Greg Brannon and Steve Stockman. They are among the tea party champions this year who have lost by large margins in GOP Senate primaries. They didn’t lose because the GOP primary electorate has suddenly been captured by “moderates,” or some mythical establishment in the Burning Tree locker room.

They lost because they were inferior candidates who differed little from their GOP opponents on policy but seemed less capable of winning in November. GOP voters sensibly opted for the conservatives with the better chance to retake the Senate from Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer.

Far more than 2010, the tea party this year has also been hijacked by Washington-based groups that have personal axes to grind. That’s especially true in Kentucky, where a cabal of former aides to former Senator Jim DeMint force-fed Mr. Bevin’s challenge to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

When I’m operating on a child, I shouldn’t have to wonder if Medicaid will OK a change in the surgical plan.

Dr. Pollard, a pediatric ophthalmologist with 40 years of experience, is director of the James Hall Fellowship in Pediatric Ophthalmology at Scottish Rite Children’s Medical Center in Atlanta.

The bond of trust between patient and physician has always been the essential ingredient in medicine, assuring that the patient receives individual attention and the best possible medical care. Yet often lost in the seemingly endless debate over the Affordable Care Act is how the health-care bureaucracy, with its rigid procedures and regulations, undermines trust and degrades care. In my pediatric ophthalmology practice, I have experienced firsthand how government limits a doctor’s options and threatens the traditional doctor-patient bond.

I recently operated on a child with strabismus (crossed eyes). This child was covered by Medicaid. I was required to obtain surgical pre-authorization using a Current Procedural Terminology, or CPT, 2475.TW +1.12% code for medical identification and billing purposes. The CPT code identified the particular procedure to be performed. Medicaid approved my surgical plan, and the surgery was scheduled.

During the surgery, I discovered the need to change my plan to accommodate findings resulting from a previous surgery by another physician. Armed with new information, I chose to operate on different muscles from the ones noted on the pre-approved plan. The revised surgery was successful, and the patient obtained straight eyes.

However, because I filed for payment using the different CPT code for the surgery I actually performed, Medicaid was not willing to adjust its protocol. The government denied all payment. Ironically, the code-listed payment for the procedure I ultimately performed was an amount 40% less than the amount approved for the initially authorized surgery. For over a year, I challenged Medicaid about its decision to deny payment. I wrote numerous letters and spoke to many Medicaid employees explaining the predicament. Eventually I gave up fighting what had obviously become a losing battle.

Mark Steyn is no stranger to apocalyptic doom, having written two best-selling books on societal dissipation and collapse, America Alone and After America.

But in addition to doom on a macro level, as the Washington Post has dubbed him, Mark is also the “world’s wittiest obit writer,” as exemplified by his anthology of obituaries, Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade, newly updated and available on dead tree format (appropriately enough), and finally for the Kindle as well.

Featuring obituaries of figures ranging from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, all the way to show business personalities as diverse as Bob Hope, Tupac Shakur, Evel Knievel, James Doohan, and Michael Jackson, the Passing Parade is a brilliant time capsule of popular and political culture at the dawn of the 21st century.

During our 35 minute long interview, Mark will discuss:

● How his career as an obituarist began.
● The secret Tupac Shakur, Evel Knievel, Wayne Newton connection — revealed!
● How England’s decline in the 1970s was a preview of America in the Obama years.
● How Margaret Thatcher returned foreign policy respectability to England — even without hashtags.
● How did a four-decade old Bob Hope joke lead to Mark’s parting of the ways with National Review?
● What’s the status of the legal imbroglio involving Mark and Michael Mann?