RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

At Tel Aviv University on Monday, Baroness Caroline Cox, a cross-bench member of the British House of Lords, gave a talk sponsored by the Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security and the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, run by Martin Sherman.

A passionate defender of human rights and the rule of law, Cox has spent the bulk of her career fighting forces that threaten to undermine Western democracy in general, and that of her country in particular. The focus of her lecture was the spread of political Islam in the U.K. and Africa, a phenomenon that has taken up much of her parliamentary and humanitarian work.

Though her pro-Israel positions are well-known (she is a co-founder of the One Jerusalem organization and co-president of the Jerusalem Summit), she purposely left the Jewish state out of the discussion. Nevertheless, she made a point of mentioning the symbolic relevance of her topic to the timing of her speech, which happened to fall on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Her message was that jihad is being waged through an Islamist infiltration of the political, cultural, legal and economic systems of non-Muslim countries. It is being accomplished, she said, by pushing to have Shariah law written into, if not replace, the law of the land; by manipulating democracy to destroy it; by investing in educational institutions and making it impossible for anyone to criticize their teachings; and — as in the case of African countries — by preventing anyone who does not convert to Islam from getting a job or receiving government aid, including food for starving children.

The list goes on, and it is as ugly as the honor killings and female genital mutilation practiced by Shariah-abiding citizens and accepted by Western apologists. Even more shocking is the extent to which Britain has willingly resigned itself to this barbarism. Indeed, recounted Cox, the situation is so “schizophrenic” that while bigamy is prohibited in the U.K., polygamy among its Muslim citizens is accepted as a religious-cultural norm.

This, she explained, is not only dangerous for Britain; it is devastating for Muslims seeking the protection of British law. They are abandoned by the system in the name of diversity, and sent to Shariah courts to settle their issues.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/29/john-kerry-real-palestinian-sharia-and-imagined-israeli-apartheid/

Just over three weeks ago (April 8, 2014) speaking at Uppsala University, a remarkably intrepid 26 year old Palestinian woman, Christy Anastas gave a forthright lecture (video here) “update” about the ongoing human rights abuses (predictably) engendered by this Sharia-based system of “law” adopted by Fatah-Hamas, including:

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The forced payment of the Koranic poll-tax (per verse 9:29), or jizya (i.e., from the etymology of the word, per Edward Lane, the great 19th century Arabic-English lexicographer, “the tax paid in lieu of being slain”). Anastas explains, “if you are a non-Muslim, a Jew or a Christian, you have to pay protection money” (to those she aptly terms, “mafia”)…”My uncle had to pay this protection money.” Her uncle stopped making his jizya payments, whereupon he was accused of being a “traitor,” imprisoned, and then executed, right in front of his own home.

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The grotesque violations of women’s rights (Anastas proclaims, “women don’t have rights there [in Fatah-Hamas controlled areas];” “women are treated as possessions there”), resulting from application of the Sharia, including legally sanctioned polygamy and honor killings.

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The sheer absence of freedom of speech—another hallmark of the Sharia: “Israel doesn’t threaten to kill us (Christians) for sharing our views, Palestinians do!”

Last Friday, during a closed-door meeting with a room of influential world leaders, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry opined that if Israel failed to accept his latest “peace formulation,” the country risked becoming an “apartheid state with second-class citizens.”

This statement was redolent with Kerry’s trademark mental and moral cretinism. For over a decade, the disputed territories in Gaza and Judea-Samaria under Fatah, and/or Hamas control have been under a real, not a theoretical system of Islamic Sharia-based religious apartheid.

After more than thirteen centuries of almost uninterrupted jihad in historical Palestine, it is not surprising that a finalized constitution proposed for a Palestinian Arab state declared all aspects of Palestinian state law to be subservient to the Sharia, in harmony with the popular will (i.e., 79.9 percent of Palestinians want the PA to follow the Sharia—Islamic religious law— including 68.6 percent who wanted the Sharia as the exclusive code of law, according to data published by the Palestinian Center for Research and Cultural Dialogue, March 3, 2005). Moreover, contemporary Palestinian Authority religious intelligentsia openly support restoration of the oppressive system of dhimmitude within a Muslim-dominated Israel as well.

During a Friday sermon broadcasted live on June 6, 2001 on PA TV, from the Sheik ‘Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, Palestinian Authority employee Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim Al-Madhi reiterated these sentiments with regard to Jews:

We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah.

An assessment of such anachronistic, discriminatory views was provided by the Catholic archbishop of the Galilee, Butrus Al- Mu’alem, who, in a June 1999 statement, dismissed the notion of modern dhimmis submitting to Muslims:

It is strange to me that there remains such backwardness in our society; while humans have already reached space, the stars, and the moon . . . there are still those who amuse themselves with fossilized notions.

Eleven years ago (i.e., in 2003, prior to Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006), during a briefing for a visiting United States congressional delegation, then Vatican representative to Israel, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, informed US lawmakers that the Palestinian Authority’s new approved state constitution, funded by the US Agency for International Development, provided no juridical status for any religion other than Islam in the emerging Palestinian Arab entity. The Papal Nuncio warned, in addition, that the Palestinian Authority (PA) had adopted Sharia as the overarching guiding principle of their legal code, thus mandating the absolute supremacy of Muslims over non-Muslims as a matter of law. (Archbishop Sambi also initiated a study of the new PA textbooks, which the Vatican deemed to be brazenly Antisemitic.)

John Kerry is attempting to walk back his smear of Israel as an “apartheid” state. That the current secretary of state is a clownish figure has been well known for decades. But what should not be lost in the latest gaffe is that it is not a gaffe. In what he foolishly thought was a safe place to let his hair down, Kerry merely gave voice to what the Obama administration thinks. “Apartheid” trips easily off his tongue because it is part of the Islamist narrative that the administration has internalized.

Forget Kerry. This was made explicit in Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—for anyone who didn’t infer it already from Obama’s friendships with notorious Israel bashers like Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers (see P. David Hornik’s FPM report on Ayers joining his fellow tenured radicals in a 2010 petition accusing Israel of — all together now — apartheid policies). As I recounted in The Grand Jihad, Obama’s speech “combined fictional accounts of Islamic history and doctrine, a woefully ignorant explanation of Israel’s claim to its sovereign territory, and an execrable moral equivalence drawn between Southern slave owners in early America and modern Israelis besieged by Palestinian terror.”

On the latter two points, in what I described as a “sweet-sounding sell-out,” the president claimed:

The recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.

The Muslim Brotherhood leaders invited to the speech over the Mubarak government’s objection must have been giddy. My book explains:

“The basic Arab argument against Israel,” Caroline Glick observes, is that the Jewish nation was established for a single reason: “to soothe the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.”

This is patently false. As Melanie Phillips put it:

The Jews’ aspiration for their homeland does not derive from the Holocaust, nor their overall tragic history. It derives from Judaism itself, which is composed of the inseparable elements of the religion, the people and the land. Their unique claim upon the land rests upon the fact that the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation, which it was for hundreds of years—centuries before the Arabs and Muslims came on the scene.