RUTHFULLY YOURS

The pristine natural world has been gone for a long time; get used to it.

Nearly all of the earthworms in New England and the upper Midwest were inadvertently imported from Europe. The American earthworms were wiped out by the last Ice Age. That’s why when European colonists first got here, many forest floors were covered in deep drifts of wet leaves. The wild horses of the American West may be no less invasive than the Asian carp advancing on the Great Lakes. Most species of the tumbleweed, icon of the Old West, are actually from Russia or Asia.

The notion that America was “wild” when Europeans found it is more than a little racist; it assumes that Indians didn’t act like humans everywhere else did by changing their environment. Native Americans weren’t Ur-hippies taking only photos — or I guess drawings — and leaving only footprints. They cultivated plants, cleared forests with extensive burning to boost the population of desired animals, and otherwise altered the landscape in ways that may have seemed natural to newcomers but were nonetheless profound. As biologist Charles Kay observes, “Native Americans were the ultimate keystone species, and their removal has completely altered ecosystems . . . throughout North America.”

Kay goes on to note that when we set aside a “wilderness” and then let “nature take its course,” we aren’t preserving “some remnant of the past.” We are instead creating “conditions that have not existed for the last 10,000 years.”

And even then, these supposedly wild places aren’t truly wild. That’s because to the extent they are preserved in their seemingly natural state, it is by humanity’s will. Also, the remaining wild animals in those places are often the ones we decided should live or didn’t accidentally kill. And the plants and animals that ate — or were eaten by — those creatures have never been the same. Without humans, the evolution of dogs, cows, pigs, and chickens wouldn’t have proceeded the way it has.

The wild environment isn’t just about trees and bears and other forms of charismatic mega flora and fauna. I heard Bill Gates on NPR the other day talking about the great strides his foundation has made against malaria and how we may be on the brink of actually eradicating polio forever. Diseases play a huge part of any natural ecosystem, and we’ve been trying to drive them to extinction for centuries.

In other words, we pick and choose all the time what should be “wild” and what shouldn’t.

With Europeans intrigued by America’s unexpected success, Alexis de Tocqueville carried out an in-depth study of the new nation in the 1830s. He was quite impressed with our divided government, which featured the separation of powers.

This structure made it difficult for any one branch — executive, judicial, or legislative — to acquire too much power and run roughshod over the other branches and the will of the American people. Unfortunately, today we are witnessing a largely unchecked executive branch issuing decrees that circumvent Congress while facing only tepid resistance.

In civilian life, when a contract is entered into by two parties, and it is subsequently discovered that one side knowingly presented false promises in order to consummate the deal, a legitimate lawsuit can be initiated on the basis of fraud. The Affordable Care Act is a prime example of such a contract, in the form of a bill that never would have been passed if it had been revealed that millions of people would lose the health insurance with which they were satisfied and that they might not be able to keep their doctors (after being promised they would be able to do so).

Nevertheless, this massive case of fraud has not been legally challenged by the legislative branch, leaving one to wonder why.

We hear a great deal about “Chicago-style politics.” It is nothing more than a euphemism for political corruption, including bullying, blackmail, and bribery. These pressures can be just as easily applied to national political figures as to local politicians.

Courage can be quite difficult to find when the threat of exposure hangs over one’s head. In an age when Big Brother is capable of watching everything we do, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which large numbers of public servants are silenced or subdued by secretive threats.

I have had an opportunity to witness firsthand how the blackmail threat operates. Several years ago, while I was in the operating room, I received a call from one of the legal offices at Johns Hopkins University informing me that the state of Florida was trying to attach my wages for child support.

In recent decades a new trend of Holocaust trivialization has developed. While not quite as obscene as Holocaust Deniers claiming that the Holocaust was all some sort of hoax, these fabricators are morally the next best thing. They claim that the Holocaust of Jews by the Nazis may have been quite horrific but it pales in magnitude when compared with the “other Holocausts” of even greater dimensions. And increasingly the “other Holocaust” to which they point is the “genocide” of Africans in the slave trade.

After all, argue the “other Holocaust” propagandists, in World War II there were “only” six million Jews murdered, but a far larger number of Africans were murdered as part and parcel of the slave trade. Such pseudo-historic nonsense has been repeated so often that it is finding its way into mainstream textbooks and media. Even Israeli leftist columnists are citing the “African Holocaust,” illustrated by one column I cited earlier this week by a radical hater of his own country.

The “African Holocaust Lobby” likes to toss out numbers purportedly estimating the population killed during the African slave trade, starting at around 10 million and often going as high as 60 million. This allows the Holocaust trivializers to dismiss demands that the Jewish Shoah be commemorated, since it was “only one sixth” the magnitude of the “African genocide.”

The “60 million” number appears to have been originally invented by American Afrofascists, militant black racists and race hucksters. The number however has been repeated so often that it is showing up in books and media. Consider “Critical Pedagogy and Cognition: An Introduction to a Postformal Educational Psychology,” written by a psychologist, Curry Malott, Springer Publishers, 2011. Malott is no historian and certainly no demographer, yet he speaks about 60 million Africans killed in the “slave trade genocide.” A more widely cited book referring to the “60 million” is one by a pseudo-historian at the University of Hawaii, one David Stannard, Professor of American Studies, in his book American Holocaust (published 1992 by Oxford University Press). He estimates a 75-80% mortality rate in slave trade transit to come up with his number.

So what are we to make of all this? Let us begin by pointing out how absurd the claims about a 60 million victim African genocide are. The number not only exceeds the total number of Africans enslaved (not just those sold in the American colonies and then the US) by a factor of six. Indeed, the 60 million number exceeds the entire population of sub-Sahara Africa in the 18th century, when the slave trade was at its height. In Concise Economic History of the World by R. Cameron, it is estimated that the entire population of the African continent in 1800 was about 90 million people, but a large portion of those were non-black people living in the Arab areas of North Africa. That leaves the entire sub-Saharan population at less than the fictional 60 million “genocide victims” supposedly murdered in the slave trade.

Yesterday was April 29, the US deadline for the Israeli-Palestinian talks that began nine months ago. Instead of marking the achievement of a peace agreement as planned, the deadline passed with the talks dead—for now, at least.

They were officially suspended by Israel last week after Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah signed a unity pact with Hamas, the explicitly jihadist-terrorist group now running Gaza. The Obama administration has given Israel’s response to that move lukewarm, tentative support.

Where things will go from here is not certain; the present state of affairs raises some questions.

First, is the Fatah-Hamas agreement authentic, and will it really lead to a Palestinian unity government? If one goes according to precedent—three previous Fatah-Hamas unity deals in 2007, 2011, and 2012, each of which collapsed quickly—then the chances are not high.

Among Israeli Arab-affairs commentators, Khaled Abu Toameh sees the agreement as

a tactical move [by Abbas] aimed at putting pressure on Israel and the U.S. to accept his conditions for extending the peace talks after their April 29 deadline…. [There is no] sign that Hamas is willing to allow the Palestinian Authority security forces to return to the Gaza Strip, which fell into the hands of the Islamist movement in 2007…. Neither Hamas nor Fatah is interested in sharing power or sitting in the same government…. Abbas is now waiting to see what the U.S. Administration will offer him in return for rescinding his plan to join forces with Hamas….

Avi Issacharoff, however, suggests that Hamas—now in difficult shape with Iran having scaled back support, Egypt having closed its smuggling tunnels from Sinai, and Israel pressuring it to put a stop to rocket attacks by small, even more

The problem with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy isn’t that she would take office at the age of 69. An older and more mature president is not a bad thing. It’s how little she has done in that time.

After 2008, when Hillary was beaten by an even more inexperienced candidate, most people forgot just how little experience she has holding elected office.

Hillary Clinton only won one political office and she did so in her fifties. Despite winning two elections, her Senate career only covered the period from January 2001 to January 2009.

It’s more time than Obama spent in the Senate, but that’s not saying much.

JFK was considered young and inexperienced after spending 14 years in Congress. Hillary Clinton isn’t young, but her experience in elected office at the age of 69 will be less than his was at the age of 44.

Hillary’s supporters will argue that she has plenty of experience in public life. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of experience.

Like Elizabeth Warren, a slightly younger and more left-wing Hillary clone, she spent a good deal of time in the corrupt intersection between leftist non-profits, corporate boards and politically connected legal positions. The bad lessons those posts taught her are evident from Whitewater and HillaryCare.

Hillary Clinton embodies the corrupt culture of Washington D.C. whose cronyism and nepotism she has far too much experience with as the other half of a power couple notorious for personal and political corruption.

Respected Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit has made a startling confession: he was wrong about the prospects for peace with the Palestinians that he, like so many Israelis and diaspora Jews on the left, has vigorously advocated. Ever since Labor party politician Yossi Beilin revealed, for his private scrutiny, the peace plan to which Mahmoud Abbas had ostensibly agreed seventeen years ago, Shavit has been a true believer in peace now.

As he recently wrote (April 24): “people as steadfast as us don’t give up on our dreams.” Despite the subsequent failure of the Camp David peace summit (2000), Abbas’s failure to sign the Geneva Accord (2003), and his refusal to accept Ehud Olmert’s virtual surrender offer (2008), the Israeli Left swallowed one hollow Palestinian promise after another. “Have we opened our eyes?” Shavit asks, before providing the obvious answer: “Of course not.” Relentlessly blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Likud party for every failure in the current so-called peace process, the gullible Left believed that Abbas surely would not dare to say no to John Kerry. But it was, once again, wrong.

“The Palestinian president’s position is clear and consistent,” Shavit finally understands: “The Palestinians must not be required to make concessions.” Shavit wisely, if belatedly, concludes that “twenty years of fruitless talks have led to nothing.” But many others, he claims, “haven’t learned a thing. They’re still allowing Abbas to make fools of them, as they wait for the Palestinian Godot, who will never show up.”

RUSH: I’ve been wondering here, folks, whose comments are more idiotic? And whose comments, in fact, are not only just more idiotic, but more dangerous: Donald Sterling’s or John Kerry’s? We mentioned what Kerry said about Israel becoming an apartheid state. It turns out that that was a private meeting, and some reporter from The Daily Beast got past all the security at the Trilateral Commission — whoa — and recorded it, and now they’re all apoplectic. It was a private comment to the conspirators at the Trilateral Commission. The world wasn’t supposed to hear that.

Yes, it was. That’s where Kerry’s being honest. That’s where Kerry’s telling the world what the Regime thinks of Israel. And what Kerry said was outrageous. There are Arabs in the Israeli government. They are elected. They’re in the Knesset. I mentioned it yesterday. It’s not only ridiculous and outrageous, it’s stupid, what John Kerry said. And now he said (paraphrasing), “Well, you know, if I could rewind the tape I would say it all over again in a different way.”

But of course there was no outrage when they caught Mitt Romney in private and his 47% comment. And this Donald Sterling stuff was in private and has been made public. But they’re only concerned about John Kerry’s private comments being made public and how outrageous that is. I’m just gonna tell you something, folks. While this country gets absorbed — and I gotta tell you something, Bernie Goldberg last night was on with Megyn Kelly on Fox. And Bernie Goldberg made a great point about all this, this Sterling business.

He said (paraphrasing), “Take a look at the reaction to it. There is no way this is a racist country. There’s not one shred of tolerance for what this guy said, might have said, might be thinking. There isn’t one shred of tolerance. There’s no way this is a racist country.” He’s exactly right about that. But the Democrat Party strategizes using race. It’s all they’ve got for voter turnout coming up in the November midterms. But you’ll notice that the Drive-By Media is still totally absorbed and devoted on what Donald Sterling said, and they’re doing their best to sweep John Kerry’s comments under the rug and pay no attention to them whatsoever.

In 2013, Maurice Shohet, an Iraqi Jew who now lives in Washington, D.C., received a surprising email from the National Archives. A librarian had recovered his elementary school record that was left behind nearly 40 years ago when he and his family fled Iraq. The record is part of a cache of thousands of personal documents and religious texts that were found at the start of the Iraq War, drowning in the cellar of a building run by one of the world’s most wanted men.
This 1793 Babylonian Talmud was one of several sacred Jewish texts that were recovered from the basement of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters. The items were rescued and brought to the U.S. to be restored. Photo by U.S. National Archives

Before and after: This 1793 Babylonian Talmud was one of several sacred Jewish texts that was recovered from the basement of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters. The items were rescued and brought to the U.S. to be restored. Photo by U.S. National Archives

The Jews of Iraq are one of the oldest civilizations in the world. For more than 2,500 years, they called the land in the heart of the Fertile Crescent their home. It’s where they celebrated births and where they mourned deaths. It’s where they worked, studied and prayed. It’s where some of their most important holy writings originated.

By the time the Iraq War began in 2003, their numbers had dwindled to less than 50 people. Most had fled to escape anti-Semitic violence and persecution. They were forced to leave behind centuries worth of sacred and secular texts and artifacts. But a month into the start of the Iraq War, thousands of those materials, stewing in a massive clutter under four feet of water, were found in an unexpected place — the basement of Saddam Hussein’s secret police headquarters.

It was May 6, 2003, and a former member of Hussein’s secret police had received an extraordinary tip. Something quite surprising was concealed in the Baghdad headquarters of Hussein’s intelligence service, or Mukhabarat, he informed Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi.

In October 2008 Outpost published an article by H. Peter Metzger, himself a Brandeis graduate, entitled “Brandeis: School for Terrorists?” Clearly no one was paying attention, for today many profess to be shocked, shocked that Brandeis should have canceled its invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak and be presented with an honorary degree, on the excuse that they had discovered her opinions were inconsistent with Brandeis “core values.” Metzger’s 2008 article, reprinted below, throws light on those “core values.”

Brandeis: School For Terrorists?
H. Peter Metzger

Snatching a loaded M4 carbine, the diminutive mother of three fired on her FBI questioners, and was swiftly injured by return fire. She is now in federal court awaiting charges of attempted murder. The FBI had placed her near the top of its most wanted list of fugitive terror subjects. A CIA spokesman said, “I don’t think we’ve captured anybody more important and well-connected as she since 2003.”
Her name is Aafia Siddiqui, and she is charged with being an important Al-Qaeda ”fixer,” a person who coordinates terror plots between various other terrorists within this very secret organization. In 2004, the FBI called her an “Al-Qaeda operative and facilitator who posed a clear and present danger to America.” When arrested in August just before the shoot-out, she was carrying plans to bomb various U.S. landmarks and to kill former Presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton.

But nowhere in the extensive news coverage of this event was her tie to Brandeis University explored, nor was it mentioned that she was only the latest in a long series of terrorists coming out of that university. Now, I don’t mean kids protesting the Vietnam War, which was common in the 1970’s. I mean real terrorists.
One might ask “So what’s new?” As a long ago graduate of that place, I remember when a terrorist coming out of a Brandeis education was not an extraordinary event. In fact, Brandeis, a university of less than 5,000 students, has provided a sanctuary for more extreme radicals than any other university in America.

From its earliest days, Brandeis attracted not only leftist liberals, but many far-left radicals. Most of the people I cite below were arrested and spent time in prison for violent crimes done in the name of far-left extremist politics.

It all began around 1970, when Brandeis saw three of its women students posted to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List (Angela Davis, Susan Saxe and Katherine Power), no small feat since only seven women were put on that FBI list in its entire history

Those Brandeis girls were famous leftist revolutionary America-haters, but they were only the “stars” of the then Hate-America movement. There were many other lesser lights. For example, another Brandeis student was Jennifer Casolo, a revolutionary who was found to have an arsenal of weapons and explosives buried in her backyard–“tons” of the stuff according to White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitz-water. Then there were other minor players like Brandeis students Laura Whitehorn and Naomi Jaffe. Curiously, all these violence-prone misfits were women.

So what has Brandeis been hosting up there anyway? Well, it would appear that Brandeis has been providing a friendly intellectual climate for kids wanting to become violent domestic revolutionaries, all under the guise of elevating “social consciousness.” For example, several of the so-called Brandeis terrorists trace their intellectual development back to classes taught there by Marxist professors like Herbert Marcuse and other America haters.

Not surprisingly, as domestic terrorism finally fell out of fashion and international terrorism took over, Brandeis changed too, and it now provides a sanctuary for Islamic Jihadism.
What? A Jewish-sponsored university teaching Muslim-based Jew-killing? That’s right, and it wouldn’t be the first time that under the guise of “scholarship” Jews themselves have supported causes that harm them first; Soviet history springs to mind. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Brandeis has kept up with the times and is now a big-time enabler of international Palestinian terror organizations. Here’s how:
Today Brandeis hosts the influential pro-Palestinian Crown Center for Middle East Studies, run by a Jew (who else?). The Crown Center recently hired Arab scholar Khalil Shikaki. Testimony from a trial of another Arab professor, Sami Al-Arian from the University of South Florida, shows that Shikaki, while no terrorist himself, was a key distributor of funds and information between terrorists from the Palestinian Authority area and other Arab professors here in America who themselves were raising money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So at the very least, Shikaki is simply another “fixer.”

Anti-Semitism is not a simple bigotry. It is a complex neurosis. It involves assigning malign intent to Jews where none exists on the one hand, and rejecting reason as a basis for understanding the world and operating within it on the other hand.

John Kerry’s recent use of the term “Apartheid” in reference to Israel’s future was an anti-Semitic act.

In remarks before the Trilateral Commission a few days after PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity deal with the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups, Kerry said that if Israel doesn’t cut a deal with the Palestinians soon, it will either cease to be a Jewish state or it will become “an apartheid state.”

Leave aside the fact that Kerry’s scenarios are based on phony demographic data. As I demonstrate in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, Israel will maintain a strong and growing Jewish majority in a “unitary state” that includes the territory within the 1949 armistice lines and Judea and Samaria. But even if Kerry’s fictional data were correct, the only “Apartheid state” that has any chance of emerging is the Palestinian state that Kerry claims Israel’s survival depends on. The Palestinians demand that the territory that would comprise their state must be ethnically cleansed of all Jewish presence before they will agree to accept sovereign responsibility for it.

In other words, the future leaders of that state – from the PLO, Hamas and Islamic Jihad alike — are so imbued with genocidal Jew hatred that they insist that all 650,000 Jews living in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria must be forcibly ejected from their homes. These Jewish towns, cities and neighborhoods must all be emptied before the Palestinians whose cause Kerry so wildly champions will even agree to set up their Apartheid state.

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, Apartheid is a crime of intent, not of outcome. It is the malign intent of the Palestinians –across their political and ideological spectrum — to found a state predicated on anti-Jewish bigotry and ethnic cleansing. In stark contrast, no potential Israeli leader or faction has any intention of basing national policies on racial subjugation in any form.

By ignoring the fact that every Palestinian leader views Jews as a contaminant that must be blotted out from the territory the Palestinians seek to control, (before they will even agree to accept sovereign responsibility for it), while attributing to Jews malicious intent towards the Palestinians that no Israeli Jewish politician with a chance of leading the country harbors, Kerry is adopting a full-throated and comprehensive anti-Semitic position.

It is both untethered from reason and libelous of Jews.