RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://freebeacon.com/culture/getting-greens-wrong/?print=1#Print

Patrick Allitt has written a book no one will like. Neither environmentalists nor those he calls counterenvironmentalists. He’ll be tempted to flatter himself with the tattered response of those criticized from both sides: “I must be doing something right.” He’ll be wrong.

The purpose of the book, in Allitt’s words, is “to explain the history of American environmental controversies since World War II and to encourage an optimistic attitude toward the environmental future.” But it reads more like an environmental “he said, she said.” On issue after issue, Allitt presents one side, then the other, making for a seesaw of a read.

Allitt misses the central role of ideology in these controversies. He treats the sales pitch of an environmental organization as if it were its main object. But “safety” issues are the gloss green groups apply to mask deeper agendas.

Take, for example, Allitt’s treatment of Amory Lovins, to whom he devotes a respectful section. Allitt describes Lovins as “a brilliant and hardheaded polymath” who is “fully aware, as we all should be, that successful handling of energy and the environment depends more on weighing many issues together than by clinging to single causes and solutions. Among these issues are cost, cleanliness, conservation, public trust, and democratic responsiveness.”

These anodyne comments are amazing if one knows something about Amory Lovins, who rose to prominence as an opponent of large-energy power sources, including coal and nuclear, even complex solar. These “hard path” technologies, Lovins argued, meant dependence on “alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by a faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you.” How many people actually feel humiliated when they flip on a light-switch because they don’t have a personal relationship with their power station?

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-The-magnate-and-the-mullah-A-Friedman-fantasy-348235
Tom Friedman’s anti-Adelson diatribe shows how intellectually corrupted the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian issue has become.

Truth be told, Tom Friedman can be a pretty astute and articulate journalist – except when he writes about Israel.

Then his work degenerates from the astute to the inane and from the articulate to the incoherent.

But even by his usual misleading sub-standards, his recent piece, “Sheldon: Iran’s Best Friend” (The New York Times, April 5), was a doozy.

Full Disclosure

In it he makes a puerile attempt to draw a parallel between the danger that the rabid anti-Israel mullah Ali Khamenei and the avid pro-Israel magnate Sheldon Adelson pose for the Jewish state.

Full disclosure: In the past I have applied to Adelson’s Foundation for financial support for my own nonprofit entity – The Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. But sadly, to date, not only I have not received a bent penny, I have not had any acknowledgment of my request being received.

So I have very little allegiance to Adelson that might induce me to write in his defense against Friedman’s frivolous attack, although malicious souls will doubtless imply that I do. Quite the opposite is true. If anything I should feel a little resentful at having been so ignobly ignored.

I have a completely different rationale for penning this week’s column. My reason for doing so is to use Friedman’s article to show how intellectually corrupted the discourse on the Israel-Palestinian issue has become, and how self-contradictory and disingenuous the increasingly desperate arguments of two-state proponents have become.

These elements are all starkly illustrated in Friedman’s anti-Sheldon rant and vividly underscore just how bankrupt the two-staters’ case has become.

‘Toxic tycoons’?

Accordingly, I do not want to dwell too long on Friedman’s childish chagrin that Adelson is using his self-amassed fortune to advance causes he believes in, and to support politicians he feels would be likely to promote them.

But some brief reference is unavoidable.

Friedman alleges: “Adelson personifies everything that is poisoning our democracy and Israel’s today — swaggering oligarchs, using huge sums of money to try to bend each system to their will.”

But after even the most cursory perusal of his anti-Sheldon diatribe, any fair-minded reader might be excused for concluding that what really bothers Friedman is not the toxicity of the democratic system in the US or Israel, nor the power plutocrats per se have in affecting the outcomes it produces.

Indeed, I have a strong suspicion that if Adelson were funding the same political causes and/or organizations as, say, George Soros, he would not have come in for censure.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/04/10/the-wages-of-being-americas-ally-in-the-age-of-obama/?print=1

Outside of the specter of U.S. pressure on Israel to release additional scores of terrorists, I confess to having had little interest in the latest futile American quest to resuscitate the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” Like most transnational progressive enterprises, this decades-old theater is all process and no peace—about what you’d expect from a venture in which the United States believes it must be an impartial “honest broker” between America’s friends and America’s enemies.

To make a long, long, long story short, there can be no acceptable peace between Israel and the Palestinians absent four non-negotiable conditions: (a) there must be a single authority capable of negotiating for the Palestinian side; (b) the Palestinians must unconditionally accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; (c) the Palestinians must convincingly renounce terrorism; and (d) the Palestinians must abandon the absurd “right of return” demand. Islamic supremacists whine that this is a one-sided set of requirements, but it’s not. It is basic in any negotiation that each side acknowledge the other’s right to exist and basic sovereign prerogatives. Besides, we all know that there is almost no concession Israel would refrain from making for the sake of peace if these elementary understandings were in place. So my general attitude about the “peace process” is: Wake me up when the Palestinians agree to those conditions and, in the meantime, try not to do too much harm.

Brandeis sides with a spawn of Hamas over a champion of women’s rights.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375620/roots-cairs-intimidation-campaign-andrew-c-mccarthy

Author’s Note: This week, capitulating to Islamic-supremacist agitation led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Brandeis University reneged on its announced plan to present an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the heroic human-rights activist. In my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad, I devoted a chapter to the origins and purposes of CAIR, its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, and its aim to silence critics of Islamic supremacism. In light of the continuing success of this campaign — despite a federal terrorism-financing prosecution that exposed CAIR’s unsavory background — it is worth revisiting that history. What follows is an adapted excerpt from that chapter.

In January 1993, a new, left-leaning U.S. administration, inclined to be more sympathetic to the Islamist clause, came to power. But before he could bat an eye, President Bill Clinton was confronted by the murder and depraved mutilation of American soldiers in Somalia. A few weeks later, on February 26, jihadists bombed the World Trade Center. The public was angry and appeasing Islamists would have to wait.

Yasser Arafat, however, sensed opportunity. The terrorist intifada launched at the end of 1987 had been a successful gambit for the Palestine Liberation Organization chief. Within a year, even as the body count mounted, the weak-kneed “international community” was granting the PLO the right to participate (though not to vote) in U.N. General Assembly sessions. And when Arafat made the usual show of “renouncing” terrorism — even as he was orchestrating terrorist attacks in conjunction with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Islamist factions — the United States recognized him as the Palestinians’ legitimate leader, just as the Europeans had done. Arafat blundered in 1991, throwing in his lot with Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and that seemed to bury him with the Bush 41 administration. But Clinton’s election was a new lease on life.