RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lee Smith: Walter Benjamin in Jerusalem
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/one-most-beautiful-pieces-literary-journalism_786494.html?nopager=1

In Mosaic Magazine, Walter Laqueur reviews the recently published Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Laqueur tries to explain how a German writer (literary critic, essayist, philosopher) virtually unknown in his own day (1892-1940) has become one of the touchstones of post-modernist thought. In the precincts of “cultural studies and its various academic subdisciplines,” writes Laqueur, Benjamin’s gnomic style may well count as a plus, an outward sign of inward profundity that, simultaneously, invites the most fanciful flights of interpretive ingenuity. Likewise contributing powerfully to his allure is the sorry story of his life.”

Benjamin left Berlin in 1932 and eventually wound up in Paris, where he had a very difficult time scraping together a living, though it was here that he would embark upon what would become what many consider his masterpiece, The Arcades Project. The work, left unfinished at his death, was inspired in part by Benjamin’s obsession with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. “The arcades in question,” writes Laqueur, “were the glass-enclosed passages in central Paris when that city was, in Benjamin’s terms, the capital of the 19th century. A central emblematic figure for Benjamin was that of the flâneur, the stroller or urban explorer who habituated these environs. Having gathered a mountain of materials, Baudelaire’s poetic masterwork Les Fleurs du Mal being prominent among them, Benjamin wanted to show how urbanization had revolutionized not only culture, as evidenced in art and architecture, urban planning, and new ideas of beauty, but life in general.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14794#.U0E1rVeCUtU

The gloves are off. Israel has had enough. Or so it surely seems.

When Israel’s left of center Justice Minister Tzipi Livni bails out in disgust it can only mean that the entire nation has finally awakened to the truth about Mahmoud Abbas. He is a terrorist. Time for Israel to say so and declare him an outlaw. All that remains is to make it official, give him a head start, and send him into the woods along with the rest of his Palestinian Authority.

A late breaking development comes close to designating Abbas persona non grata.

As of the other day, Israel has suspended all top-level contacts with the PA. That is a step in the right direction.

Abbas spoiled Secretary of State John Kerry’s magnificent obsession when he, Abbas, scuttled “peace talks” by turning in self-pity to the United Nations. This, after Israel saw no benefit in releasing yet another batch of murderers…26 of them. Seeing that this time he won’t be able to dance in the streets with his brother terrorists, Abbas submitted applications for membership in 15 UN organizations.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375098/print

Honor Diaries is an important film that explores the brutality and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim-majority societies. It features both believing Muslim women, like Dr. Qanta Ahmed (whose compelling essay about the film was published here atNational Review Online yesterday), and former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the renowned author and human-rights activist.The purpose of Honor Diaries is to empower women by shining a light on the hardships they endure — including “honor” killings (i.e., murders over the perception of having brought shame to the family by violating Islamic norms), beatings, genital mutilation, forced marriage — particularly of young girls – and restrictions on movement, education, and economic opportunity. The film highlights authentic Muslim moderates struggling against the dead-end of Islamic supremacism.

So naturally, the Council on American–Islam Relations (CAIR) does not want you to see it.

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly has been covering the film anyway, despite CAIR’s howling. The segments that aired on Monday and Tuesday are available on Megyn’s website, here and here.

CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood creation, conceived as the primo American public-relations firm for Islamic supremacists, particularly Hamas — a task CAIR pulls off by masquerading as a “civil rights” organization.

Hamas, as I recounted in The Grand Jihad, is a formally designated terrorist organization under federal law. It is also the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. In the early Nineties, the Brotherhood established a “Palestine Committee” to promote Hamas in the United States, an agenda topped by fundraising and efforts to derail the 1993 Oslo accords — the futile, Clinton administration-brokered attempt to forge an Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement. CAIR’s founders, Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmed, attended a three-day summit in support of Hamas in Philadelphia in 1993, much of which was wiretapped by the FBI. CAIR was established shortly afterwards. By summer 1994, the Palestine Committee was listing CAIR in internal memoranda as one of its “working organizations.”

We’ve discussed CAIR here many times, including in my 2009 column about the FBI’s long-overdue severing of “outreach” ties with the organization. It is infuriating that the Feebs and the wider government thought it was worth canoodling with CAIR in the first place, but the Bureau officially ended the affair after the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted. CAIR, though unindicted, was shown by the Justice Department to be a co-conspirator. In sum, prosecutors established that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was the primary Hamas fundraising arm in the United States. Like CAIR, HLF was identified by the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee as one of its “working organizations.” As terrorism researcher Steve Emerson has shown, CAIR got $5,000 in seed money at its inception from HLF, and thereafter helped raise money for HLF. The federal government shut HLF down in 2001 because of its promotion of terrorism.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-To-my-colleague-Caroline-a-caveat-347503

I am a strong admirer of Martin Sherman and Caroline Glick. I think he is too strong in criticizing Caroline Glick’s book. I have read it and she lays out the dangers of a two state solution as no one else has. If her solutions are not feasible- and I agree they are not…..the subject should best be left to a debate rather than this harsh put down following the requisite initial praise.

Caroline Glick’s book has opened a dialogue on the subject….the solutions really will come from convinced readers…and this book goes farther than anything else I have read to convince the skeptics….rsk

I strongly concur with Caroline B. Glick’s diagnosis of the fatal failings of the two-state formula, and disagree just as strongly with the prescription she offers to remedy them. m.s.

The mechanics of the policy are fairly straightforward. Israel will apply its laws to Judea and Samaria and govern the areas as normal parts of Israel… Contingent on security concerns… Palestinians will have the right to travel and live anywhere they wish within Israeli territory… … Palestinians will have the same legal and civil rights as the rest of the residents and citizens of Israel… Those that receive Israeli citizenship in accordance with Israel’s Citizenship Law will also be allowed to vote in national elections for the Knesset.

… suddenly reducing the Jewish majority from 75 percent to 66 percent will undoubtedly have unforeseeable consequences on Israeli politics.
– Caroline Glick, The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East (2014)

Caroline Glick is a journalist of exceptional ability. As readers of The Jerusalem Post well know, she is an astute, articulate analyst of political realities in Israel, the wider Mideast and the US. She has penned countless columns, courageously – at times caustically – critiquing unfolding events and ongoing processes with incisive insight.

I have long been a dedicated follower and avid admirer of her writings, which have made her one of the most widely read Israeli columnists in the English language today.

But it is precisely because of her wide readership and her significant influence that any errors in judgment or flaws in assessments on her part should be addressed rapidly and resolutely.

Excellent analysis, erroneous conclusion

Regrettably, I feel this is the case with her new book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, which has received a warm reception among leading rightwing and conservative circles.

The book has considerable value for two reasons. First, it represents a welcome, and much needed, challenge to the monopolistic stranglehold the two-state approach has had on much of the public discourse on the Palestinian issue.

Second, it provides a penetrating historical review of how this choke-hold developed, particularly regarding the formulation of US Mideast policy, and of why this detrimental impediment should be removed.

However, while I strongly endorse her admirable analysis of the pernicious pervasiveness of the two-state principle, I strongly disagree with the conclusions she draws from that analysis. I therefore find myself compelled to take issue with her prescription for the measures with which the problem should be confronted, and with the nature of the alternatives she proposes to replace the dysfunctional paradigm that hitherto dominated the discourse.

Commentary is a true rarity and necessity: a conservative pro-Israel voice that can get a hearing in unexpected quarters.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/04/friday-afternoon-roundup.html

BORN TO RUN AWAY

The real question that should have been asked of Christie at the RJC is about his association with Hamas Imam Mohammed Qatanani, instead Christie diverted to a defense of why he appointed Sohail Mohammed, the Imam’s lawyer, to a Superior Court Judgeship.

Christie isn’t even trying to be honest here. He has left out the most basic pieces of the puzzle. And the quality of his memorized speech strongly suggests to me that this was a planted question which reeks of extreme ugliness because that would mean that he chose to use a Jewish forum as a platform for going into his “Just because he’s a Muslim ” rant.

It smacks of another planted viral video, except this time pandering to the liberals who have turned on him.

Christie’s Dishonest Response on Appointing Terror Lawyer as Superior Court Judge

GOING ROGUE

Saddam had invaded other countries and cultivated terrorists, while the governments that Obama helped overthrow, aside from Gaddafi, were not expansionistic, were not obsessed with building up WMD’s and had helped maintain regional stability.

Bush had sought to stabilize the Middle East by removing Saddam. Obama instead destabilized it by trying to remove every government that was in any way friendly to the United States and was not covered by the umbrella of the Saudi GCC.

Bush’s Axis of Evil had consisted of “rogue states”. Obama’s Axis was made up of allied governments. Bush had set out to stabilize the Middle East by clearing out rogue states while Obama set out to empower rogue states by clearing out stable allied governments… which left the rogue states in charge.THEIR OWN OBJECTIVE

For Western diplomats, success means bringing an enemy to the negotiating table and keeping him there, but as Rubin’s book quotes Kissinger as saying in regard to negotiations with the USSR, “When talks become their own objective, they are at the mercy of the party most prepared to break them off.”

That is the phenomenon that we are seeing in the latest round of negotiations between Israel and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas who has to be bribed with an escalating series of freebies just to stay at the negotiating table to negotiate the pre-negotiating process.

It was also the response of Obama to any talk of sanctions on Iran as the negotiations process became something that Iran offered as a reward to America in exchange for ‘good’ behavior… instead of the other way around.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/04/6-Billion-Goes-Missing-State-Department

Before Linick took office last fall, the State Department had been without an inspector general position for five years—the longest IG vacancy in the government’s history, as noted in The Washington Post.

The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.

In a special “management alert” made public Thursday, the State Department’s Inspector General Steve Linick warned “significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.

The alert was just the latest example of the federal government’s continued struggle with oversight over its outside contractors.

The lack of oversight “exposes the department to significant financial risk,” the auditor said. “It creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file. It impairs the ability of the Department to take effective and timely action to protect its interests, and, in tum, those of taxpayers.”

In the memo, the IG detailed “repeated examples of poor contract file administration.” For instance, a recent investigation of the closeout process for contracts supporting the mission in Iraq, showed that auditors couldn’t find 33 of the 115 contract files totaling about $2.1 billion. Of the remaining 82 files, auditors said 48 contained insufficient documents required by federal law.

In another instance, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement issued a $1 billion contract in Afghanistan that was deemed “incomplete.”

From the Inside Out A Lawyer-Spy Makes the Case for the CIA.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/inside-out_786484.html?nopager=1&utm_source=Gabe%27s+Master+List&utm_campaign=0c71c4db80-Journalism_or_Espionage_8_29_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d6f821d880-0c71c4db80-48019861

It was time for the CIA to lawyer up. In 1974, then-New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke a story exposing illegal covert actions conducted by the agency over a quarter of a century. Congressional investigations followed. The CIA emerged from the organizational ordeal wrapped in a dense web of new laws and regulations. A young, freshly minted attorney by the name of John Rizzo, working for the U.S. Customs Service in his first job, recognized that the newly reformed spy agency might need lawyers—lots of them. He signed up.

After the obligatory background check, the polygraph, and some training, a nearly four-decade career began. It brought Rizzo to a wide variety of law-related assignments inside America’s lead intelligence agency, culminating in his service as acting general counsel—the CIA’s highest legal slot (when a presidentially appointed general counsel is not in place).

Serving under a parade of directors, Rizzo saw and heard a lot. The astonishing roster of his bosses begins with William Colby, followed by George H. W. Bush, Stansfield Turner, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutch, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Leon Panetta. Rizzo’s portraits of these individuals in action—some of them legendary figures in the history of American espionage—make this memoir worth the price of admission. But Company Man also holds interest for the light it sheds on a variety of quasi-secret subjects, some of them highly controversial. It also gives us insight into the set of problems that plague all democracies, and has hit America particularly hard: the human and bureaucratic difficulties that arise when an agency whose primary function is to break laws strives to operate under the rule of law.

http://acdemocracy.org/pollard/

John Kerry’s latest desperate attempts to broker, or more accurately, impose peace between Israel and the Palestinians, resulted in a great embarrassment for himself and the U.S.

He tried to use Jonathan Pollard as a bargaining chip with Israel. Accordingly, the U.S. would release Jonathan Pollard from prison, while “demanding” that Israel give major concessions to the Palestinians: halt the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, extend negotiations through 2015, and release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons.

His offer was rejected by all sides, including President Obama. Pollard himself refused to play the badly scripted role assigned to him by Kerry, and rejected the offer to appear in a parole hearing that could have freed him in 2015 .

Kerry’s futile efforts to negotiate a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians are best described by Benny Avni in the NY Post:

“Secretary of State John Kerry worked behind the scenes in the last few days

to pull off a cascading set of maneuvers worthy of ‘House of Cards,’ the Netflix blockbuster. But it turns out Kerry is no Frank Underwood. As brutally selfish as Underwood’s ambitions may be, his plotting, while creative, is always reality-based. When Kerry gets as creative as Underwood, as he did this week, he also tosses realism out the window. Sooner or later, his dream of negotiated Mideast peace will collapse like, well, the house of cards that it is.”

In addition to Kerry’s absurd plan, the involvement of Pollard in it has led to the resurfacing of the old rancorous objection by the US intelligence community, as well as to a justified outrage over the unprecedented and vengeful prison term Pollard is serving.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/04/04/obamas-motley-champions-of-change/?print=1

I did not learn until this week that President Obama’s website, WhiteHouse.gov, regularly profiles young leftwing radicals it calls “Champions of Change.” Now, in a space of just a few days, two of the president’s “champions” have made news.

One is Linda Sarsour, described by the White House as a “community activist” who specializes in “community organizing” and “immigrants’ rights advocacy,” and who “conducts trainings nationally on the importance of civic engagement in the Arab and Muslim American community.” Evidently, civic engagement need not be civil engagement. Ms. Sarsour has joined her voice to that of CAIR in the campaign to suppress Honor Diaries, a film about the brutalization and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim-majority societies. Ms. Sarsour reacted to the widely viewed and acclaimed film by tweeting:

How many times do we have to tell White women that we do not need to be saved by them? Is there code language I need to use to get thru?

I’d note that the executive producer of Honor Diaries is the heroic Somali human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It features several courageous Muslim women, including Pakistani-born Qanta Ahmed, a medical doctor who has an important column about the film and the campaign to suppress it at NRO today. But there are indeed some “White women” involved in the writing, production and financing of the film, and that’s apparently too much for a “Champion of Change” to abide.