RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dr. Andrew Bostom closes the preface to his new volume, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran [1], with several rhetorical questions, answered encyclopedically in the chapters that follow.

At first glance, someone unfamiliar with the nature of the subject might recognize in them a resemblance to Jeopardy!, now in its 30th year. Jeopardy contestants must correctly identify the historical event, leader or trivia — in the form of a question. To a description, for example, of “totalitarian religious law dictating behavior in all aspects of life for persons of said faith,” a well-tutored college student might ask: “What is sharia?” Of a treaty signed in March 628 between a famous charismatic figure and military commander and a competing Arabian tribe, a brainy homemaker might respond: “What is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah?”

However, few Westerners can actually provide these correct responses, a issue that puts Western society in grave jeopardy.

Only the near-universal ignorance on Islam could explain why the Western press corps and leaders of the so-called “P5 +1” nations — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Iran — all naïvely lauded the late November 2013 news of an interim agreement to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and blindly accepted the notion that the deal would halt Iran’s future military goals.

Actually, the opposite happened. The P5 leaders, hopeful that a written agreement could put Iran’s nuclear ambitions to rest, were all-too-easily duped by Iran.

This reality marched to the fore on February 11, 2014, when Iranians massed in the streets of Tehran shouting “down with the U.S.” and “death to Israel” to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, during which Ayatollah Rehollah Khomeini reestablished the Iranian Shiite theocracy that the 20th century Pahlavi shahs had forestalled for an all-too-brief 54-year juncture (1925-1979).

As if to punctuate the madness of any attempt to reach agreement, current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that day stated that the country’s nuclear program would continue “forever,” and that all Western sanctions to stop it had been “brutal, illegal, and wrong.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, two of the wealthiest and most famous men in America were a pair of Jewish brothers named Nathan and Isidor Straus. Owners of R.H. Macy’s Department Store and founders of the A&S(Abraham & Straus) chain, the brothers were multimillionaires, renowned for their philanthropy and social activism.

In 1912, the brothers and their wives were touring Europe, when Nathan, the more ardent Zionist of the two, impulsively said one day: “Hey, why don’t we hop over to Palestine?”
Israel wasn’t the tourist hotspot then that it is today. Its population was ravaged by disease, famine, and poverty; but the two had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren, and they also wanted to see the health and welfare centers they had endowed with their millions.

However, after a week spent touring, Isidor Straus had had enough. “How many camels, hovels, and yeshivas can you see? It’s time to go,” Isidor decreed with edgy impatience in his voice. But Nathan refused to heed his brother’s imperious command. It wasn’t that he was oblivious to the hardships around him; it was precisely because of them that he wanted to stay.

There never was any need for pushing….Abbas and Hamas have exactly the same murderous ideology…just a difference in tactics….What Indyk and Kerry have done is show their bias against Israel coming straight from the White House…..rsk

Abbas correctly calculated that so long as he continued to negotiate with Israel, the U.S. and the Europeans would continue to prop him up with political backing and financial support in the mistaken belief that a peace deal could be reached.

Thus Kerry and Indyk have been pushing Abbas into a corner by trying to tempt him to commit suicide in the name of permanently solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

While Israeli leaders seek peace, Palestinian leaders seek an endless peace process.

Palestinians say that for Muslims, Palestinian land reaches “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea” — that is, over all of what is now Israel. In their view, Tel Aviv is illegally occupied territory just as much as any of the settlements in the West Bank. This view is based on the Muslim doctrine, deeply rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, called “waqf” (religious endowment). Any territory once under the control of Muslims, must forever be controlled by Muslims.[1] According to Islamic law, “If a person makes something waqf, it ceases to be his property and neither he nor anybody else can gift or sell it to any other person.[2]

Unfortunately, the premises on which American negotiations — led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Martin Indyk[3] — are based are completely at odds with the premises on which Middle Eastern negotiations are based.

Americans seem to believe that all problems are solvable; if there is no solution, it simply means one has not tried hard enough. Americans generally are prepared to compromise on particular points to attain other points that are more important to them. When both sides reach an agreement, Americans usually are prepared to put past disagreements to bed. By making concessions, neither side has compromised its personal honor. Americans focus on the goal, which is to attain an agreement both sides can live with. We negotiate, arrive at an agreement and let bygones be bygones.

The document warns that increasing numbers of students in Hamburg are being influenced by Islamist propaganda and are embracing radical Islam and idolizing jihadist fighters in Syria.

The problems in Hamburg are drawing renewed attention to the alarming growth of Salafism in Germany. Salafists openly state that they want to replace democracy in Germany (and the rest of the world) with a Sunni Islamic government based on sharia law.

Muslim radicals are imposing Islamic norms and values in primary and secondary public schools in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, say school officials, who are asking for stepped-up monitoring of the Salafist groups thought to be behind the Islamization efforts.

At least 25 schools across Hamburg are believed to have been infiltrated by Salafists and other fundamentalist Muslim groups, according to German media reports. But local politicians from the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD)—a party committed to enforcing multiculturalism in Hamburg—have refused to disclose precisely which schools are affected.

Now, for the first time, a confidential report leaked to the German newspaper Bild identifies seven of the problem schools by name. The schools where Islamist fanatics are “waging a religious war” against non-Muslim teachers and classmates are located in districts across the city, the document says, but the situation in Mümmelmannsberg in eastern Hamburg is “particularly appalling” and “the focus of an organized strategy” by Islamists to recruit new followers.

Teachers and school administrators say that efforts by Muslim fundamentalists to run the schools “according to their own rules” have increased in recent months, and speculation is rife that the document was leaked by someone seeking to force city officials into taking more forceful action.

School principals are being pressured, among other demands, into setting up special prayer rooms for Muslim children, who are increasingly gathering for prayers and shouting Islamist slogans on school playgrounds. Girls are requesting exemptions from gym classes and swimming lessons, and are being harassed if they fail to dress according to Islamic norms.

All of a sudden, Hillary’s not feeling the love from Democrats
It’s almost as if Democrats are starting to realize that Benghazi is going to take down their formerly presumptive 2016 nominee.

Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times:

Progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeated her Shermanesque pledge Sunday and vowed not to run for president in 2016, but she declined to endorse her party’s clear frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

Rick Moran, AT:

It looks like Vice President Joe Biden is dead serious about running for president in 2016. During a closed door speech before wealthy Democrats in South Carolina, Biden took a shot at the Clinton administration’s economic policies in what was described as an “Elizabeth Warren-type” address. (snip)

Biden, a potential 2016 candidate, said the unraveling of middle-class financial security began in “the later years of the Clinton administration,” not under George W. Bush, CNN reported Saturday.

On CNN panel yesterday, there was this interesting comparison on Biden’s remarks (via Noah Rothman, Mediaite):

“This is sort of the case that then Senator Barack Obama made against Hillary Clinton back in ’08,”The Atlantic’s Molly Ball said.

We all remember how that worked out.

While I do not discount Hillary’s lust for power, the plain fact is that she is not an attractive candidate. She has none of the charm of her husband, and has accomplished nothing positive in her Senatorial or State Department careers. Benghazi is an open sore, and it could well get badly infected.

John Kerry began the year trying to bring representatives of the Assad regime together with rebel leaders in Geneva to end the civil war in Syria.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike one.

Next, the secretary of state worked tirelessly to create a framework agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, with a view to settling their differences once and for all.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike two.

This week, U.S. negotiators and their counterparts from the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany—will meet in Vienna with Iranian negotiators to work out the details of a final nuclear agreement.

You know where this is going.

There’s been a buzz about these negotiations, with Western diplomats extolling the unfussy way their Iranian counterparts have approached the talks. Positions are said to be converging; technical solutions on subjects like the plutonium reactor in Arak are being discussed. Last month Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Javad Zarif said there was “50 to 60 percent agreement.”

All this is supposed to bode well for a deal to be concluded by the July deadline. If the Iranians are wise, they’ll take whatever is on the table and give Mr. Kerry the diplomatic win he so desperately wants. Time is on Tehran’s side. It can sweeten the terms of the agreement later on—including the further lifting of sanctions—through the usual two-step of provocation and negotiation.

The Obama crowd too often responds to critics and to world affairs like self-absorbed adolescents.

As American foreign policy continues its long string of failures—not a series of singles and doubles, as President Obama asserted in a recent news conference, but rather season upon season of fouls and strikes—the question becomes: Why?

Why does the Economist magazine put a tethered eagle on its cover, with the plaintive question, “What would America fight for?” Why do Washington Post columnists sympathetic to the administration write pieces like one last week headlined, “Obama tends to create his own foreign policy headaches”?

The administration would respond with complaints, some legitimate, about the difficulties of an intractable world. Then there are claims, more difficult to support, of steadily accumulating of minor successes; and whinges about the legacy of the Bush administration, gone but never forgotten in the collective memory of the National Security Council staff.

More dispassionate observers might pick out misjudgments about opportunities (the bewitching chimera of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, or the risible Russian reset), excessively hopeful misunderstandings of threats (al Qaeda, we were once told, is on the verge of strategic defeat), and a constipated decision-making apparatus centered in a White House often at war with the State and Defense departments.

There is a further explanation. Clues may be found in the president’s selfie with the attractive Danish prime minister at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December; in State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in March cheerily holding up a sign with the Twitter TWTR +5.90% hashtag #UnitedForUkraine while giving a thumbs up; or Michelle Obama looking glum last week, holding up another Twitter sign: #BringBackOurGirls. It can be found in the president’s petulance in recently saying that if you do not support his (in)action in Ukraine you must want to go to war with Russia—when there are plenty of potentially effective steps available that stop well short of violence. It can be heard in the former NSC spokesman, Thomas Vietor, responding on May 1 to a question on Fox News about the deaths of an American ambassador and three other Americans with the line, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579491643733173318?mg=reno64-wsj

Documents reveal a lawless attempt to block an Alaska mine project.

A basic precept of American democracy is that petitioners before their government receive a full and fair hearing. The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is in urgent need of that remedial civics lesson.

The EPA inspector general’s office last week announced it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America’s largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn’t worry other developers because Pebble is a “unique” threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.

The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we’ve also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA’s main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.

This story goes back to the debate over the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to evaluate projects and issue permits. Congress gave EPA only a secondary role of reviewing and potentially vetoing projects (with cause) under Section 404c. EPA has long chafed at this secondary role, which has made it harder to nix projects approved by the Corps.

EPA’s decision to initiate a veto process before Pebble had even received an Army Corps review is a disturbing first—and a flouting of the law. The internal documents refute EPA’s repeated claims that it began this process only in “response to petitions” from local Native American tribes in May 2010, and that peer-reviewed science drove its veto.

Emails show that EPA biologist Phillip North, based in Alaska and working on Pebble, was in 2008 advocating that his agency bring down the 404c hammer. “The 404 program has a major role” with Pebble, wrote Mr. North to Patricia McGrath, EPA’s regional mining coordinator for Alaska, in August 2008. By August 2009, Mr. North was pushing for EPA’s annual mining retreat to include a discussion about vetoing the project: “As you know, I feel that [Pebble] merit[s] consideration of a 404C veto.” The retreat included that discussion, though Pebble’s developer hadn’t yet applied for a permit.

Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-SC) Select Committee to investigate the 9-11-2012 attacks in Benghazi was established by HR-567, which passed by a vote of 232-186 last Thursday. It’s supposed to be made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats. Speaker Boehner appointed Gowdy as chairman and Susan Brooks (Indiana), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Mike Pompeo (Kansas), Martha Roby (Alabama), Peter Roskam (Illinois) and Lynn Westmoreland (Georgia) as the Republican members. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal) has, so far, declined to appoint any Democrats to the committee.

Gowdy evidently had considerable influence in drafting the bill. It gives the select committee a very broad mandate to investigate everything that led up to, and occurred during and in the aftermath of the attacks, including specifically “…internal and public executive branch communications about the attacks on United States facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.” The committee is also mandated to issue a report of its investigation that details its findings. Now comes the hard part, which will have to be a long and detailed investigation.

There are three obstacles to the committee’s investigation. The first is the fact that — though unwisely — Pelosi and the Dems may try to boycott the committee’s work in order to drive a political narrative that it is a witch hunt. The second is the entire Obama administration’s dedication to the cover-up of its malfeasance, its abuses of power, and its efforts to avoid any accountability for its actions. The third challenge is the media’s eager complicity in the ongoing cover-up of the Obama administration’s actions.

Pelosi and the Democratic caucus met for hours on Friday without apparently coming up with an agreement on how they will participate. They’re caught in a dilemma of their own making. Having aided and abetted the Obama cover-up, they don’t want to be seen to be giving the Gowdy Committee credibility by participating in the investigation. Their options aren’t good.

First, they can only boycott the committee’s work at their — and Obama’s — peril. Because the committee’s mandate is so broad, the Dems will have to face the fact that Obama’s entire national security apparatus — Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, Leon Panetta, and the president himself, along with a large number of their subordinates — will have to be subpoenaed by the committee. The Dems can’t fail to be in on these sessions because Obama, Hillary, and the rest must have already demanded that the Dems be present to ask questions calculated to defend them. The Dems’ task will be to ask argumentative questions crafted to protect the witnesses and becloud every aspect of the interrogations.

That’s a given, and the Republicans will have to deal with it by asking real questions — not the kind of mini-speeches Joe Biden used to indulge himself in during hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he lost his train of thought and ran out of time. Gowdy will have to require that his Republicans ask every question in a way to reveal facts and avoid those self-indulgent speeches.

More than 20 years after its release, the critics are still raving for “Schindler’s List.” President Obama gave Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust film a thumbs-up Wednesday at a dinner for the Spielberg-founded USC Shoah Foundation, on whose behalf Spielberg presented Obama with the Ambassadors for Humanity Award.

Thanks to “Steven’s remarkable film,” the president observed, “the world eventually came to see and understand the Holocaust like never before. . . . That’s what stories do. We’re story-telling animals. That’s what Steven does.”

It’s what Barack does too:

I have this remarkable title right now–President of the United States–and yet every day when I wake up, and I think about young girls in Nigeria or children caught up in the conflict in Syria–when there are times in which I want to reach out and save those kids–and having to think through what levers, what power do we have at any given moment, I think, “drop by drop by drop,” that we can erode and wear down these forces that are so destructive; that we can tell a different story.

Obama’s “remarkable title” is itself an example of the power of story telling. It is a commonplace that he rose to prominence almost entirely on the strength of his biography (which Bill Clinton once disparaged as a “fairy tale”). In 2011, when he was at one of his political low points, critics on the left insisted his failure was one not of leadership or of policy but of story telling.

Now here he is telling a story–a story about telling stories. The moral of this story is that leadership is a matter of telling stories. That is partly true–we do not mean to gainsay the hortatory and informative elements of political leadership–but Obama seems to be citing the power of stories as an excuse for inaction.