RUTHFULLY YOURS

The received wisdom and unexamined assumptions underlying the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to forge peace between Israel and her enemies are as predictable as the ignominious collapse of this latest attempt. We are now well into the seventh decade of this false knowledge and the spurious narrative dominating American foreign policy under administrations of both parties. Just how old and worn this narrative is can be seen in the late John Barrett Kelly’s The Oil Cringe of the West, a collection of reviews and essays that originally appeared in the critical decade of the 1970s after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars.

Kelly was a New Zealander who earned his PhD at the London School of Economics. In the 1970s and 1980s he was one of the most influential scholars on the Middle East. Like Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis, he was a respected advisor to governments and commentator and on the region who was not afflicted with the sentimental romanticism and civilizational self-loathing that continue to distort Western foreign policy. Dedicated to facts and objective analysis, Barrett was no partisan, criticizing all sides equally when criticism was due. More important, he was the enemy of unexamined opinion and ideological fashion, which of course made him an enemy to the anti-imperialist, Arabophilic establishment, especially in England.

Kelly’s 1973 description of the foreign policy establishment’s view of the Israeli-Arab conflict and Britain’s culpability in creating it is a jewel of concision and eviscerating wit. That view pertains “less to the mundane affairs of men and governments than to the most solemn matters of faith and dogma––of British guilt and Arab innocence and the doctrine of redemption through vicarious atonement.” One can hear the echoes of this sensibility throughout Obama’s notorious 2009 Cairo speech. Also reprised by Obama is Kelly’s reconstruction of the historically false narrative generating that sensibility, which deserves quotation in full: “Britain promised independence to the Arabs during World War I and betrayed that promise afterwards. The worst act of betrayal was the Balfour Declaration which led to the formation of the state of Israel. Arab unity was stultified by British obstinacy in propping up reactionary regimes and opposing revolutionary movements. Although Britain has at last seen the error of its ways and has left the Arabs alone, it still bears the stigmata of past misdeeds. Until these have been erased and the guilt purged, the Arabophile order must toil at its penitential labours, ritually flogging the irreverent and ceaselessly chanting the orisons of repentance.”

Forty years later we still see in England the baneful effects of this false history in an anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism, in the cringing appeasement of Muslim sensibilities, and in the vigorous Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement that seeks to dismantle Israel politically on behalf of the Arabs who want to destroy her root and branch. And ever since Edward Said’s fatuous Orientalism––that toxic stew of historical lies and Foucauldian folderol––this same myth-history now dominates the American intellectual establishment as well. It bespeaks not just the noble-savage/Marxist romanticizing of the colonial dark-skinned battlers against Western imperialism, but the concomitant self-loathing and cheap guilt that in Britain followed the intellectuals’ disenchantment with the Empire, and that has been aped in America by professors and pundits who think that biting the cultural, political, and economic hand that amply feeds them is the height of cosmopolitan sophistication.

It may be warm outside now, but from colder hearts a winter blizzard is blowing. These cold hearts are frozen in the endless winter of Islam that leaves them empty of mercy for even their own daughters.

The title of Robert Spencer’s new book, “Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In” may reference the now infamous Arab Spring, but its focus is more on domestic policy than on foreign policy. This is less of an analysis of what went wrong in Egypt and Tunisia, though that is also addressed, than what has gone wrong with how the United States deals with Islamic terrorism at home.

The problem with Jihad is that we don’t talk about Jihad, as Spencer writes. The first and most effective wave of the Jihad was a political assault by Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as ISNA and CAIR against even discussing the threat. When the next wave of terrorist attacks arrived, policymakers, soldiers and law enforcement officers were left blinded and censored.

Today the situation is worse than ever.

Arab Winter Comes to America is less about the past than the present, less about lands abroad than our own streets and cities. The Arab Spring cracked regimes that had sought a middle ground between the unfettered savagery of Islamic law and the modern world. The Arab Winter may take longer to crack the West which is trying to walk the same fine line, suppressing blasphemy against Islam as hate crimes and silencing criticism of Islam as Islamophobia, but the book suggests that it can and it will.

Robert Spencer, a scholar of all things Islamic, dwells less on the texts than on the failure of our own establishment to draw the right conclusions from them. Having faced personal censorship in the US and the UK by governments that should instead have been listening to him, he is ably positioned to describe the process by which groups linked to terrorism preemptively silence those scholars and experts who would denounce them for what they are while using the threat of youth “radicalization” as blackmail.

“The only people who have perfect clarify about who they are and what they hope to accomplish, are America’s foes,” Spencer writes regretfully.

From Nidal Hasan to the Boston Marathon bombings, Arab Winter Comes to America examines wasted opportunities and missed warnings that could have prevented the mass murder of Americans. And even as Obama and his advisers claim that Al Qaeda has been all but defeated, Spencer warns that the real struggle between our civilization and the medieval terror theocracy out of the desert is only beginning.

“In a joint statement, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said the ruling represents “the latest blow to jobs and affordable energy. The administration’s overreaching regulation will drive up energy costs and threaten jobs and electric reliability,” the pair said. “We cannot allow EPA’s aggressive regulatory expansion to go unchecked. We will continue our oversight of the agency and our efforts to protect American families and workers from EPA’s onslaught of costly rules.”
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to regulate emissions produced by coal-fired power plants in order to protect downwind states from deleterious effects of pollution.

The 6-2 ruling in the latest battle of what has been termed the “War on Coal” is a big victory for the Obama administration and environmental groups who maintain burning coal represents a health risk to those with respiratory problems. It also indicates the nation’s highest court is likely to side with the EPA on other issues related to their regulatory powers.

“This is great news for millions of people who suffer from serious health problems caused by the soot and smog-causing pollution from power plants in other states,” said John Walke, director of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Implementation of these long overdue protections will prevent thousands of premature deaths and save tens of billions of dollars a year in health costs. The EPA safeguards follow the simple principle that giant utility companies shouldn’t be allowed to dump their dirty emissions onto residents of downwind states. The Supreme Court wisely upheld this common-sense approach.”

But EPA critics maintained the decision will stifle economic development, especially in coal-producing states. Utility companies and coal producers attacked the regulation, maintaining it was unnecessarily broad and require coal-fired facilities to reduce emissions beyond what is needed.

In a joint statement, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said the ruling represents “the latest blow to jobs and affordable energy.”

“The administration’s overreaching regulation will drive up energy costs and threaten jobs and electric reliability,” the pair said. “We cannot allow EPA’s aggressive regulatory expansion to go unchecked. We will continue our oversight of the agency and our efforts to protect American families and workers from EPA’s onslaught of costly rules.”

Americans are outraged by old, sick and pathetic Donald Sterling’s racist rantings—and the manipulative con-artist mistress who recorded their conversation.

But consensus ends after the expression of furor. Who among us is without sin to offer the first bid for his franchise?

If the NBA establishes the precedent that it can force the sale of an owner’s property because of one’s illiberal speech, however odious, what now is the new standard of behavior? A sort of descending French Revolutionary justice, predicated on the sound and fury of the mob?

Harry Reid believes the Washington Redskins owner should be targeted next for his insistence on keeping the Redskins logo. Should he too be forced to sell and by whom—his fellow morally superior owners? Should the Orlando Magic owner, Doug DeVoss, be hounded out of the league—as was recently suggested—because he opposes gay marriage? How many owners don’t believe in the idea of man-made global warming? Oppose illegal immigration? Doubt the wisdom of affirmative action? Can we scour their emails, tap their phones, or ask the public for their private indiscretions?

And who will police the police? Oddly, some of the very public officials who weighed in on the Sterling matter themselves have a sorry record of racist speech—and in the public, not illegally taped private, realms. Could any of them in their retirement pitch in to buy the Clippers?

Let us quote them, with following brackets of what might have been the conservative equivalent. Vice President Joe Biden called in to record his outrage. Did not Biden himself once offer a creepy racialist riff—creepy precisely because he claimed that Obama was the “first” (not the second or two-hundredth) so-called clean black presidential candidate? [Imagine Dick Cheney claiming Colin Powell was the first “clean” black qualified to be secretary of state.]

Harry Reid is outraged too and wants more franchise owners held to account for supposedly bigoted views. Reid’s own racist rant was more pathetic than was Biden’s because he waded into the details of “light skinned” and “Negro dialect.” [Imagine Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praising Allen West because he had no “Negro dialect.”]

On one level, it’s not fair to say that children of successful politicians shouldn’t enter politics themselves. In a just world, the sins of the father really should not be visited upon the sons; so too should the successes of fathers not prohibit their sons and daughters from seeking similar success.

But . . . but . . . but, insists something from the core of my being. There’s something deeply unsettling, in a nation founded with a hearty disdain for hereditary emoluments, about a national political class that consists of the same names for generation after generation. Aside from the Adamses and perhaps the Livingstons, America’s Founders did not establish anything approaching political dynasties. There’s something innately healthy about public office as a meritorious call to service rather than as a birthright.

Now, though, the Republican donor class seems increasingly likely to lure yet a third Bush in three decades into the presidential arena, with a prior Bush serving as U.S. senator a generation before. Furthermore, reports CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Mitt Romney may be inclined to make a third run for the White House (a fourth Romney run in 50 years, after his father’s 1968 effort) if an increasingly arrogant Jeb Bush somehow decides not to run. And on the donkey side of the fence, of course, Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner to make hubby Bill the first former president to become First Gentl . . . , er, First Straying Husband.

Meanwhile, in 2014, Jimmy Carter’s grandson and Sam Nunn’s daughter are running statewide in Georgia, while a who’s-(father is)-who of second-generation politicos fight not just for election but for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Mark Udall, son of former presidential contender Mo, is in a tight race in Colorado; Mary Landrieu, daughter of former New Orleans mayor and HUD secretary Moon, is in one in Louisiana; Mark Begich, son of tragically killed former U.S. representative Nick, battles in Alaska; likewise in Arkansas with Mark Pryor, son of former senator and Arkansas governor David. Firmly ensconced in the Senate are, from Pennsylvania, gubernatorial son Bob Casey Jr., and, from Arizona, top admiral’s son John McCain.

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared in the U.K. publication Standpoint.

— Nigel Lawson is a member of the U.K. House of Lords and chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This essay is based on the text of a speech given to the Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment at the University of Bath.

There is something odd about the global-warming debate — or the climate-change debate, as we are now expected to call it, since global warming has for the time being come to a halt.

I have never shied away from controversy, nor — for example, as chancellor of the exchequer — worried about being unpopular if I believed that what I was saying and doing was in the public interest.

But I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation, and vilification that I — along with other dissenters, of course — have received for my views on global warming and global-warming policies.

For example, according to the climate-change secretary, Ed Davey, the global-warming dissenters are, without exception, “wilfully ignorant,” and in the view of the prince of Wales we are “headless chickens.” Not that “dissenter” is a term they use. We are regularly referred to as “climate-change deniers,” a phrase deliberately designed to echo “Holocaust denier” — as if questioning present policies and forecasts of the future is equivalent to casting malign doubt about a historical fact.

The heir to the throne and the minister are senior public figures who watch their language. The abuse I received after appearing on the BBC’s Today program last February was far less restrained. Both the BBC and I received an orchestrated barrage of complaints to the effect that it was an outrage that I was allowed to discuss the issue on the program at all. And even the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons shamefully joined the chorus of those who seek to suppress debate.

In fact, despite having written a thoroughly documented book about global warming more than five years ago, which happily became something of a bestseller, and having founded a think tank on the subject — the Global Warming Policy Foundation — the following year, and despite frequently being invited on Today to discuss economic issues, this was the first time I had ever been asked to discuss climate change. I strongly suspect it will also be the last time.

The BBC received a well-organized deluge of complaints — some of them, inevitably, from those with a vested interest in renewable energy — accusing me, among other things, of being a geriatric retired politician and not a climate scientist, and so wholly unqualified to discuss the issue.

Perhaps, in passing, I should address the frequent accusation from those who violently object to any challenge to any aspect of the prevailing climate-change doctrine, that the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s non-disclosure of the names of our donors is proof that we are a thoroughly sinister organization and a front for the fossil-fuel industry.

The legal left and media are always last to know, but there are the makings of a correction in how the courts police conflicts between the political branches. President Obama’s serial executive power abuses—on health care, immigration, marijuana and much else—may be inspiring a heathy rejoinder.

Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to create and amend laws and the President to faithfully execute them, but Mr. Obama has grabbed inherent Article I powers by suspending or rewriting statutes he opposes. The President has usurped Congress with impunity because he assumes no one has the legal standing to challenge him.

Most of the time people who are exempted from laws do not suffer the concrete injuries that the judiciary can redress, while the courts maintain a presumption that Members of Congress also lack such standing. In 1997’s Raines v. Byrd, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against the line-item veto brought by six Congressmen because the loss of legislative power they challenged was a “wholly abstract and widely dispersed” injury.

But that doesn’t mean that conduct that marginalizes the legislative branch is absolved of judicial review. In one notable case, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is suing the White House over the ObamaCare regulatory carve-out that conjured up special subsidies for Members and staffers who were supposed to give up federal employee health benefits to join the insurance exchanges.

Mr. Johnson argues that because Members must designate which staffers do and don’t participate, the rule imposes a nontrivial administrative burden—i.e., he has standing to sue because the rule harms his office, not because he is a U.S. Senator. More to the point, Mr. Johnson claims that the rule forces him to become personally complicit in law breaking and thus damages his political reputation. Several appeals court precedents hold that elected officials who must maintain the public trust suffer injuries when their credibility is undermined, including a 1993 D.C. Circuit ruling by now-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The White House claims Mr. Johnson lacks standing, but that’s because the lawyers don’t want to get near the merits. The real import of his lawsuit is that it invites the courts to restore the proper separation of powers amid executive encroachment.

What makes Rossiter’s column even more important is that he is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS) a markedly leftist group….rsk

Every year environmental groups celebrate a night when institutions in developed countries (including my own university) turn off their lights as a protest against fossil fuels. They say their goal is to get America and Europe to look from space like Africa: dark, because of minimal energy use.

But that is the opposite of what’s desired by Africans I know. They want Africa at night to look like the developed world, with lights in every little village and with healthy people, living longer lives, sitting by those lights. Real years added to real lives should trump the minimal impact that African carbon emissions could have on a theoretical catastrophe.

I’ve spent my life on the foreign-policy left. I opposed the Vietnam War, U.S. intervention in Central America in the 1980s and our invasion of Iraq. I have headed a group trying to block U.S. arms and training for “friendly” dictators, and I have written books about how U.S. policy in the developing world is neocolonial.

But I oppose my allies’ well-meaning campaign for “climate justice.” More than 230 organizations, including Africa Action and Oxfam, want industrialized countries to pay “reparations” to African governments for droughts, rising sea levels and other alleged results of what Ugandan strongman Yoweri Museveni calls “climate aggression.” And I oppose the campaign even more for trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity—and thus the economic development and extended years of life—that fossil fuels can bring.

The left wants to stop industrialization—even if the hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming is false. John Feffer, my colleague at the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in the Dec. 8, 2009, Huffington Post that “even if the mercury weren’t rising” we should bring “the developing world into the postindustrial age in a sustainable manner.” He sees the “climate crisis [as] precisely the giant lever with which we can, following Archimedes, move the world in a greener, more equitable direction.”

I started to suspect that the climate-change data were dubious a decade ago while teaching statistics. Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends.

Then, as now, the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it. The IPCC also claims that the warming, whatever its cause, has slightly increased the length of droughts, the frequency of floods, the intensity of storms, and the rising of sea levels, projecting that these impacts will accelerate disastrously. Yet even the IPCC acknowledges that the average global temperature today remains unchanged since 2000, and did not rise one degree as the models predicted.

Though they may publicly deny that there is any scandal in the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012, there must be doubts emerging, if only because we now know with certainty that a critical email was withheld in violation of a subpoena from the Issa Committee. Though most Democrats loathe Darrel Issa (and the entire Republican Party, for that matter), the expression “cover-up” is now in play, and the senior Congressional leadership of the party is old enough to remember the Watergate hearings, and the articles of impeachment that emerged from that process, authored in part by a young committee staffer named Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Article 1 cited as part of the justification for impeachment:

withholding relevant and material evidence or information from lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States;

In Watergate, keep in mind, the underlying crime was a “third-rate burglary,” while in Benghazi, it is a terror attack, the murder of an ambassador and three guards, the desecration of their flag-draped caskets with a lie from the sitting Secretary of State as to the perpetrators, and the continuing failure of the federal government to bring to justice their killers because the Pentagon’s hands have been tied by the failure of the administration to name the perpetrators as members of Al Qaeda. These matters are far more consequential than a misbegotten intelligence-gathering operation.

The mainstream media has been acting as a cofferdam around the story, limiting its impact to the Fox News and conservative blogosphere ghetto. But with a Select Committee about to be created, professional prosecutorial staff to be hired and deployed, depositions of officials, including Mrs. Clinton, to be taken for however many hours or days are required, and more emails and other documents known to exist and eventually to be released, more news will be created.

At this point, the competitive instincts of the journalism pack may be released, at least among some who have not completely signed on to the proposition that The First Black President must be protected at all costs. Last week saw an Alphabet Network White House Correspondent, Jonathan Karl of ABC News, pursue Jay Carney with a zeal that would do Fox News, The Washington Times, or The American Thinker proud. Always lurking in the back of the minds of many professional journalists is the fear of getting scooped on The Big One, even if they wish the story didn’t exist.

Washington is notoriously a one-crisis town. And it may well be that the growing concern over Russian aggression in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threats to other former Soviet-occupied areas in Central and Eastern Europe will soak up all the controversy oxygen in the U.S. capital.

But there is increasing evidence that the events of 9/11 2012 in eastern Libya were extremely significant although any effort to elucidate them studiously has been ignored by the mainstream media.

They may, indeed, be an important marker in the longer term development of U.S. politics and American foreign policy and therefore of world peace and stability.

There are two overarching reasons why those events were significant:

An analysis of what happened there – when more facts are available – could well reveal the basis of the growing worldwide perception of the fundamental failure of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. That perception, whether a reflection of reality or not, is increasingly an ingredient in world politics given the central role of the U.S. since the end of World War II.

The Benghazi events could produce in more detail than has been otherwise available an evaluation of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, whatever veneer her frenzied activity of almost constant world travel has given it. If, as might be argued, the events at Benghazi and the conditions leading up to them were a product of Mrs. Clinton’s decision-making at State, even at second hand, they are important indicators of her executive ability. Until now that executive command had never been tested in any other venue since she has had no election to executive office.