RUTHFULLY YOURS

I was reading a recent copy of one of Britain’s popular newspapers, the Daily Express, when a particular item caught my eye.

The highly respected writer, Niall Ferguson, warned that, “President Obama’s policy of non-intervention, or, as he puts it, his being “resolved only to avoid being George W Bush,” resembles the incoherent foreign policies of British Liberals a century ago before the First World War.”

Ferguson was opining that despite the swirling tensions in the ever perilous Middle East and the current hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine, the real powder keg that could ignite a potential World War Three lies in the Far East as Japan and China fight over ownership of five uninhabited islands and three barren rocks.

Japan calls the territory the Senkaku Islands, and is using an ever increasing number of naval ships and warplanes to guard them while at the same time trying to involve the US.

On the other hand, China views the “nationalisation” of what it calls the Diaoyu Islands by the Japanese in 2012 as a serious provocation and will do whatever is necessary to assert its sovereignty.

The real danger is that if war were to break out between China and Japan, the US is bound by treaty to come to the aid of Japan. This would be another red line for Obama but following his experience with Syria, it is unclear how he would act, if indeed at all.

Brad Williams, a professor of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, made comparisons of the Sino-Japan tensions to those that led to the First World War; known as the Great War.

“Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzi Abe,” Professor Williams said, “probably sees China as a modern-day imperial Germany that is prone to aggressive behavior. That, of course, could trigger conflict despite the deep economic inter-dependence between the two countries.”

Indeed, Japan has stated that the tensions are similar to those between England and Germany before World War One – the war to end all wars.

At the end of Part One of this column, I asked: Was the law was on the government’s side and not on Cliven Bundy’s? What kind of law is it? And how is it being enforced throughout the country?
Few sitting politicians have remarked on the Bundy/BLM standoff. However, Christopher Agee, in his Western Journalism article of April 18th, “Obama Accused by Congressman of Illegal Action at Bundy Ranch,” reported:
Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue. In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution….

He cited the limited powers granted to the federal government, noting the bureau has no “right to assume preemptory police powers, that role being reserved to the States,” and explained “many federal laws require the federal government to seek assistance from local law enforcement whenever the use of force may become necessary.”
The letter included a section of the U.S. Code — 43 U.S.C. Section 1733, Subsection C — stating exactly that point. [Emphasis Stockman’s]
“When the Secretary determines that assistance is necessary in enforcing Federal laws and regulations relating to the public lands or their resources he shall offer a contract to appropriate local officials having law enforcement authority within their respective jurisdictions with the view of achieving maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement officials in enforcing such laws and regulations.”

The local law enforcement authority in this instance is the Sheriff of Clark County, Nevada, Douglas C. Gillespie, who, apparently intimidated by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) as the protesters were not, refused to intervene and demand that the illegal BLM vigilantes leave.
Gillespie, however, conspicuously took a back seat to BLM forces during the standoff.

All historical analogies are odious, some dead white man – probably a Frenchman – has said. Obviously, he meant that times change, the cast changes, the nuances change, the world moves on, and no geopolitical situation really replicates an earlier one. Some historiographers go even further; they say that for all these reasons there are not, indeed, any “lessons” from history, George Santayana notwithstanding. Still …

It’s good intellectual fun to make comparisons and sometimes we learn a little by playing a game in which we compare those former events with the contemporary happening. Of course, one problem is that our reconstruction of earlier events is often skewed if not downright wrong. For, obviously, if for no other reason, we view them in the context of the present. Again, still…

That’s the case now examining Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and attempted subversion of Ukraine as a sovereign state. It has become the cliché of clichés to see his program of violating internally accepted borders as the same route to war the totalitarian dictatorships took before World War II. But Putin is no Adolph Hitler, nor certainly no Josef Stalin. He has neither their talent for villainy and he heads an even more fragile economy, and indeed a political union coming apart at the seams. Yet his use of stratagems those 20th Century international outlaws used is all too obvious. One even is tempted to go along with the Polish official who said it was hard to believe Putin’s speechwriters hadn’t actually plagiarized an earlier Hitler model.

So that begs the question are we on the eve of a general war such as broke out in 1939?

The year 1938 was more than usually momentous for European history, and indeed for the whole world so Euro-oriented as it was in the last century. Among the many events were two dramatic crises that captured the headlines:

Trying to head off another catastrophe like The Great War from which the Europeans have never fully recovered because of the enormous loss of life, a deal was made at a conference in Munich between the Western allies and Hitler. War was temporarily averted.

Daniel Mael on “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis and Double Standards” — on The Glazov Gang
A TruthRevolt warrior confronts the leftist Gestapo on his campus.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-mael-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali-brandeis-and-double-standards-on-the-glazov-gang/

Obama Praises Muslims in Easter Message It just wouldn’t be Easter… without Muslims.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-praises-muslims-in-easter-message/print/
Obama said this time of year is a good time to remember the “common thread of humanity that connects us all – not just Christians and Jews, but Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs – is our shared commitment to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.”
Nope. Sorry.
Here’s what the Koran has to say about loving your neighbor.

Qur’an (5:51) – “O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.”
So yes, Muslims believe in loving their neighbors, as long as the neighbors are Muslims. And the right kind of Muslims.
Don’t go expecting Sunni Muslims to love Shiite Muslims or vice versa. Also don’t expect Salafis to love Sunnis who are insufficiently lacking in dedication to terrorism.
So much for that “common thread of humanity.”

http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Sweating-the-small-stuff-349959

While facing monumental challenges with heroism and humor, we always sweat the small stuff as though our survival depended on it.
Checking to make sure I was in a legal spot, I put the gear in park, pulled the emergency brake and turned off the engine. In spite of having spent nearly two hours in the car with the air-conditioner blowing in my face, I was sweating.

This was not due to the weather, however. Though the country was in its sharp, post-Passover leap into summer, the day had a spring feel, its crispness barely marred by the shift from dry to humid that is normal when going from Jerusalem to the coast.

No, the perspiration on my upper lip derived from the anxiety I had been experiencing since preparing for the drive to Netanya.

Nor was the purpose of the trip – to deliver a lecture on Israeli culture and current events – the source of my nerves. I don’t suffer from stage-fright.

But I am terrified of getting lost on the way to a gig.

I also hate being late. This means leaving lots of extra time to take the wrong exit off the highway or maneuver necessary U-turns. As a result, I always arrive early. The day in question was no exception.

I got out of the car and looked around the mostly residential street – more than half an hour to kill and not a shop or café in sight. I decided to walk towards the sea and look around.

Within a minute, I found myself at the entrance to the Park Hotel.

It was here, in 2002, that the Passover massacre took place. During the hotel’s annual Seder, a suicide bomber from Tulkarm (just over an hour away), walked into the hotel disguised as a woman and blew himself up in the dining room.

Blood and body parts covered the matza-laden tables. It was carnage that the Israeli public, already in a trauma- induced haze from daily terrorist attacks against innocent civilians on buses and in restaurants, could barely fathom, let alone stomach.

Thirty people were killed that night and 140 wounded, most of them elderly.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/bundys-rebellion/88675/

Bundy’s Rebellion

The thing that needs to be said in respect of the rebellion that has gathered at the ranch of Cliven Bundy is that it is as American as apple pie. At the rate things are going the Nevada ranchers are going to write themselves into American history right alongside Daniel Shays and the Pennsylvania backwoodsmen who confronted the federal government over taxes on whiskey. The echoes are uncanny — complete with the sanctimonious lectures from the federal government over the law and the righteousness of the anger of the rebels.

Click Image to Enlargehttp://www.nysun.com/pics/9296.jpg

Wikipedia

SIX STAR GENERAL: Washington became in the Whiskey Rebellion the only president in history to appear in arms in battle. The rebels made their point.

Shays mounted his rebellion in western Massachusetts even before we had the Constitution. His aim was to close the courts trying to collect for Massachusetts taxes to cover its costs in the Revolution. Tempers were exacerbated by a depression, like they are today by the Great Recession. Things came to a head in 1786, and the fighting grew serious in 1787. Before it was over, five rebels — and one person on the government side — were killed. In other words, it was worse by far than anything we’ve seen yet in Nevada….READ IT ALL AT THE SITE

I agree with David and Rich that John Hinderaker’s Bundy post is very strong. As a matter of law, Cliven Bundy is in the wrong. He is nevertheless a sympathetic figure, and the concerns raised by the standoff in Nevada transcend the illegality of his conduct.

Rich’s recollection of Lincoln’s exhortation that reverence for the law become “the political religion of the nation” triggered my recollection of a seemingly inconsistent speech Lincoln delivered as president nearly a quarter-century later. As the Civil War raged, the president very controversially suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law in states where Confederate operatives and sympathizers were taking seditious action. Addressing Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln defended his suspension of the writ:

Of course some consideration was given to the questions of power and propriety before this matter was acted upon. The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen’s liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?

Now, it was only advisedly that I described this speech as “seemingly” inconsistent with the one Rich excerpted. For one thing, Lincoln did not believe his suspension of the writ violated the law, and he had a very colorable argument. The Constitution provides for the writ’s suspension in cases of rebellion or invasion; it does not say who may suspend it. The Supreme Court’s eventual conclusion (in the 1866 case of Ex Parte Milligan) that Congress must enact a suspension because the relevant clause is in Article I was sensible, but it was not indisputable. Lincoln was not without reason to believe that he had the necessary authority as long as a rebellion or invasion had occurred. Moreover, Lincoln’s passion for the rule of law was evident even in the act of arguably breaking it: He not only vigorously contended that his suspension was lawful; he also urged Congress to affirm the suspension by passing legislation (which Congress did in 1863).

Observers like Caroline Glick, Michael Curtis, and popular blogger Elder of Zion have all noted the strange fact that feminists tend to beat up on Israel while giving the Arab (and larger Muslim) world a free pass.

As Glick points out:

if being a feminist means attacking the only country in the Middle East where women enjoy freedom and equal rights, then feminism…has become at best, a meaningless term…. The deception at the heart of the feminist movement is nowhere more apparent than in the silence with which self-professed feminists and feminist movements ignore the inhumane treatment of women who live under Islamic law…. Leading feminist voices in the US and Europe remain unforgivably silent on the unspeakable oppression of women and girls in Islamic societies….

On December 30, 2010, Moshe Katsav, who had served as president of Israel (a ceremonial but significant post) from 2000 to 2007, was convicted of rape and sexual harassment by a three-judge panel. The judges were two Jewish women, Miriam Sokolow and Judith Shevah, and an Arab man, George Kara.

It was an illuminative moment in several ways:

● Whereas in Israel rape, including marital rape, is a felony, most Arab countries explicitly or tacitly allow marital rape; rape is currently endemic particularly in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen; and in many Arab countries the victim of rape is the one who is charged with an offense.

● There could be no parallel phenomenon of a Jewish judge sentencing an Arab defendant, let alone a former high official, in an Arab country, not least because almost all the Jews who lived in those countries had to flee because of persecution.

● Whereas there are very small percentages of female judges in a minority of Arab countries (and none in the rest), in Israel half of all magistrate and district-court judges are women, and for years the Supreme Court has included at least one woman.

Even if it doesn’t fit the warped view of today’s feminists, the difference between Israel and the Arab world on women’s rights (and human rights generally) is night and day.

Let’s take Israel first. A survey in 2012 ranked Israel 11th among the 59 developed countries for women’s participation in the workplace and 24th for the percentage of women in executive positions. So Israel—smack in the Middle East, a democratic country surrounded on all sides by nondemocracies—not only ranked among the developed countries on these measures but came in well above average and solidly above average.

New York City has roasted a man to death.

Jerome Murdough, like a very large share of New York City’s homeless, was mentally ill. According to his family, he suffered from both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, along with what his mother gently describes as “beer problems.” He was a former Marine who was in and out of homeless shelters, hospitals, and the occasional jail cell, with eleven misdemeanor convictions for trespassing, public drinking, drug possession, and the like.

During what was an unusually bitter winter in New York, Mr. Murdough sought shelter in an unsecured stairwell in a Harlem housing project. He was arrested for trespassing and transported to the infamous New York City lockup at Rikers Island. His bail was set, bizarrely, at $2,500, ensuring that he remained in place. Because of his mental problems, Mr. Murdough was to be kept under close supervision — he was to be checked every 15 minutes, in fact.

Rikers Island has many problems, from gang riots to widespread rape. There are plenty of criminals on both sides of the bars. It also has some more mundane problems, such as malfunctioning climate-control systems. Mr. Murdough was kept in a six-by-ten cinderblock cell, which effectively became a brick oven when the dysfunctional heating system caused the temperature in the cell to become, in the precisely chosen words of Mark Cranston, the acting commissioner of the city’s corrections department, “unusually high,” which is precisely what you’d have to be to imagine that those words provide an adequate description of the circumstances in question.

Mr. Murdough, trying to keep from freezing to death, was instead baked to death.

Those 15-minute checks never happened; he’d been dead for hours before he was discovered. It was days before Mr. Murdough’s public defender was notified of his death. His family was never notified of his death by the authorities — they learned about it when an Associated Press reporter called to ask about the case.