RUTHFULLY YOURS

Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and Israel are the terrorists,” banners representing terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad waving above the crowd, gangs of “youths” attacking Israeli police throughout East Jerusalem, barrages of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, and the usual condemnations of Israel and calls for “restraint” from the “international community” – all sadly are business as usual. And the “business” is the demonization of Israel and the obscene double standards indulged by too many in the West.

The Israeli authorities have quickly tracked down and arrested 6 Israeli minors as suspects in the killing, even as the killers of the Israelis are still at large. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said, “We do not differentiate between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them.” The speed of the arrest, and Netanyahu’s unequivocal identification of the crime as an act of terrorism, should underline the differences between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which seemingly is making little effort to hunt down the main killers of the 3 Israelis, and the Authority’s political partner Hamas, which praised the killings. As Netanyahu pointed out, “The murderers [of the Israelis] came from the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority; they returned to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority is obliged to do everything in its power to find them, just as we did, just as our security forces located the suspects in the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir within a matter of days.”

But Israel’s enemies are unlikely to draw the proper conclusion from this contrast, or even take time to note how comparatively rare such violence on the part of Israelis is compared to the thousands of Israelis murdered by Palestinian Arabs over the decades. Rather, the moral and intellectual idiocy of the “cycle of violence” meme will determine reactions to this murder on the part of those too lazy or timid to choose a side, even as they hold Israel up to standards of behavior and forbearance no other country would accept. But there are good and bad sides in this conflict, and which side has the moral high ground can be seen by comparing further the reactions of each to the recent murders.

Listen, for example, to the response of Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas to the kidnapping of the Israeli teens, delivered at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Saudi Arabia: “Those who kidnapped the three Israeli teenagers want to destroy us. First and foremost [these teenagers] are human beings like us. It is our responsibility to search for them and to return them to their families. We will hold their kidnappers accountable, whoever they are.”

For those impressed by these comments, notice that the first sentence condemns the kidnapping not as a moral evil or a terrorist act, but as a tactical blunder damaging the Palestinian Arab program of destroying Israel by “stages.” Bad p.r. is the problem, not the evil of terrorism or the deaths of 3 innocent teenagers. This sort of comment is consistent with Abbas’s past habit of joining general condemnations of terrorist acts to complaints about their bad timing or damage to Palestinian interests. Speaking of the Second Intifada and its brutal terrorism, Abbas commented, “If we do a calculation we will see that without any doubt what we lost was big and what we gained was small.” Later, speaking out against a rocket attack from Gaza, he said, “This is not the time for this kind of attack,” which suggests there is a time for shooting rockets at women and children. That is, blowing up innocents is not wrong, just inefficient at that particular time for achieving the long-term goal of a Palestinian state that eventually will include the territory of Israel.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/video-jamie-glazov-on-the-lefts-jihad-denial-2/

In this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell interviews Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov about the Left’s Jihad Denial and progressives’ willful blindness in the face of the Islamic threat. The dialogue occurred within the context of Jamie’s discussion about his battle on Hannity against the Unholy Alliance:

When you consider how many ways an alien may enter the United States it is absurd to focus all attention on just the Southwest Border of the United States that involves just four of America’s 50 states.

In point of fact, it has been estimated that 40% of the illegal aliens who are present in the United States did not run our border and evade the inspections process that is supposed to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence would be harmful to America or Americans but entered the United States through ports of entry and went on, in various ways, to violate the terms of their admission into the United States.

Furthermore, some illegal aliens gain entry into the United States by stowing away on ships, illegal disembark from ships on which they work and are referred to as “ship-jumpers” or enter without inspection from Canada.

Yet the immigration debate has disingenuously focused nearly exclusively, on the need to secure America’s Southwest Border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico.

Of course, given the ongoing crisis involving tens of thousands of unaccompanied minor illegal aliens, primarily from Central America, who are showing up along the Southwest Border of the United States having illegally entered the United States, it is clear that this border must be made secure. However, it is foolhardy to not pay attention to all of the other entry points and methods of entry employed by illegal aliens. It is no less foolish to ignore the other failings of the immigration system that enable criminals and terrorists to game the process by which visas are issued and immigration benefits are conferred upon aliens.

The easiest way to visualize the immigration system is to consider the configuration of a colander.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a colander thusly:

col·an·der noun \ˈkä-lən-dər, ˈkə-\

: a bowl that has many small holes and that is used for washing or draining food

Consider that each of the holes in the colander is comparable to a hole in the immigration system. Politicians who attempt to convince us that all that is necessary as a pre-requisite for implementing Comprehensive Immigration Reform is to secure the US/Mexican border are, in essence, claiming that if you plug one hole in the bottom of a colander it could then be used as a bucket to carry water.

The president is behind on the immigration crisis, but so is Congress.

San Diego — President Obama will visit Texas this week for three political fundraisers. One place he will not visit while in Texas: the Mexican border. A border visit is apparently not necessary, in Obama’s view, to monitor the crisis that has seen thousands of migrants — including unaccompanied children — flood into the United States.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest bizarrely says that people criticizing Obama’s failure to visit the border would “rather play politics than actually try to address some of these challenges.” The president, it seems, will “lead from behind” once again. All this has been too much for Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the border city of Laredo. “They should have seen this coming a long time ago . . . because we saw those numbers increasing,” he said today on CNN’s State of the Union. Cuellar admitted that our current system creates perverse incentives. “There is an incentive that if you bring your child over here, or you’re a child by yourself, you’re going to be let go. And that’s exactly what’s happening,” he said. “Our immigration courts are so backlogged. There’s not enough detention spaces. . . . This is the incentive we have to take away.” As for Obama’s pledge to send more personnel to the border, Cuellar didn’t sound confident: “I think he’s still one step behind. They knew this was happening a year ago. . . . and they are not reacting fast enough at this time.”

The crisis at the border should serve as a slap in the face to people in both parties who have been unable to come up with a border solution for the last decade. On the one hand, Democrats’ insistence that any reform must be “comprehensive” and include a path to citizenship ignores the fact that for most migrants, becoming a citizen is not a first-tier priority. The Pew Research Center found last year that of the 5.4 million Mexican immigrants who reside legally in the U.S. today, only 36 percent have chosen to become citizens. Safety, the ability to visit family and friends in Mexico and return, and being able to live openly in society are far more important to immigrants. For their part, many Republicans who insist on an enforcement-only approach ignore the evidence that the 45-year-old “War on Drugs” has done little to stem drug trafficking on the border despite an increase of more than 50 percent in Border Patrol funding over the last six years.

Border Patrol agents I spoke with were reluctant to be quoted on the record, but all agreed that a comprehensive solution that combines better border enforcement (which entails less-political enforcement) with a well-designed guest-worker program is necessary if we wish to make real progress. “We need to enforce employer sanctions at the same time we give employers a legal path to fill the jobs they must have workers for,” one agent told me. A retired agent points to the bracero (“one who works using his arms” in Spanish) guest-worker visa program, which until 1964 brought Mexican manual laborers north to work in agriculture, construction, and service industries.

The bracero program began during a labor shortage in World War II and expanded in response to an immigration crisis that peaked in 1954, when arrests of illegal aliens topped the 1 million mark. Under the bracero program, some 300,000 Mexican workers entered the U.S. legally every year. The results were dramatic. By 1959, arrests of illegal aliens had fallen to 45,000 a year; they remained under 100,000 annually until 1964.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered the eternal conundrum of competing choices. His “Aye, there’s the rub” nicely summarizes the conflicts inherent in the present socio/political/scientific arena of climate discussions.

Years of relentless doomsday prognostications by a variety of public voices spanning the political-scientific spectrum have found their mark in a gullible and guilt-prone public. There is a Medusa-like quality in the serpentine web of doomsday prophets, including members of the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb,” and the current White House science advisor, John Holdren. In the U.S., Rachel Carson proclaimed DDT to be environmental enemy number one, and inspired Al Gore to discover “Inconvenient Truths,” later found to be not so truthful. Al Gore’s contribution to making climate change a co-equal amongst the four horsemen of the apocalypse is matched by M. Mann’s reinterpretation of global temperature history. Repeated refutations of “faulty” science and failed predictions of climate calamities have not deterred these marketers of doom. Cut the head off, yet it lives on.

Sustainability, population control, and redistributive-based social justice were offered as moral justifications for the one-world governance needed to solve one-world problems, as posited by the UK’s Barbara Ward. Answering this “cri de coeur,” the U.N. global bureaucrats crafted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the instrument by which life-sustaining carbon dioxide would be reinvented as the most dangerous threat to the world. Our current Federal government is more certain than ever that “the science is settled,” and that the global climate bears the human stain of excessive consumption of fossil fuels. An unelected Federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has assumed the role of guardian of public health via arbitrary edicts regulating all things atmospheric, in addition to all surface waters. Those wishing to pursue independent traditional scientific inquiry and reproducibility of EPA claimed findings have noted an adamant shyness by the EPA in producing the requested original data.

“Fear and loathing” is no longer confined to Las Vegas, but has been turned into a self-hate/guilt propaganda tool by doomsday prophets and fear profiteers. Humans are carbon — based life forms intertwined in the biological interdependence upon green plant production of oxygen and consumption of carbon dioxide. Thus the guilt stage is set for humans to be declared a living source of this newly-defined carbon pollution, and therefore enemies of mother Earth. According to the Club of Rome: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Population control is the implied remedy.

It was headlining AOL on Friday: a story about a woman stabbing a schoolteacher to death in front of a class of five and six-year-olds. The gruesome and bloody crime occurred in the southern French town of Albi; the victim was a 34-year-old mother of two.

But a certain bit of information is conspicuously missing from virtually all the reportage. We’re told the killer was under the impression that the teacher had accused her five-year-old daughter of theft. We’re told she had a history of child abuse and “severe psychiatric problems.” We’re told she’s 47. And we’re told she’s a she. But her name is nowhere to be found, and information about her background is…well, you’ll see.

This isn’t true of the victim. Every news source I checked provided her name. The International Business Times (IBD) even led with it in the title: “Deranged Mother Kills Teacher Fabienne Terral-Calmès in Front of Class.” The killer, however, is almost universally identified as “the mother.” But I was sure I knew what the big secret was. Those tow-headed Norwegians are at it again.

The AOL piece, from the AP, did the “The Mother” thing exclusively. Other sources, such as IBD, reported that the police have not released the attacker’s name but that she’s of Spanish origins. Ah, okay, a Franco supporter, no doubt. But I still thought I knew the truth.

So I dug further. New York’s Daily News reported that “[a]uthorities would not comment on what spurred the horrific stabbing.” The BBC said that The Mother used a “long knife.” The Telegraph identified The Mother as a “Spanish national” (emphasis added). We’re getting closer…

I even checked the French publication L’Expresse, which, after being spit out the other end of Google Translate, told us about The Mother, “[I]t would be of Spanish nationality” (obfuscation is always a bit more interesting when processed through artificial unintelligence). The paper also tells us that the school “is located in the district Lapanouse in sensitive urban areas.”

“Sensitive urban areas.”

My, that could be the electronic translation of “scary ghettos where angry, unassimilable North African immigrants will rob you blind and beat you within an inch of your life while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and where, when you call the gendarmes, they say, ‘Are you crazy, Monsieur? We’re not setting foot in there!”

Or it could be that we’ve got nothing on the French when it comes to euphemizing.

The Obama Administration has targeted for-profit colleges as if they are enemy combatants. And now it has succeeded in putting out of business Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges for a dilatory response to document requests. Does the White House plan to liquidate the IRS too?

A month ago the Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 U.S. campuses.

Like the for-profit college industry, Corinthian draws roughly 80% of its revenues from federal student aid. Yet this is a function of its demographics. For-profit schools educate a larger share of low-income, minorities, veterans and single mothers than do nonprofit and public colleges. Eighty percent of their students lack parental financial support.

The Obama Administration’s five-year lashing of “predatory” for-profits has deterred many new students from enrolling in these schools. Corinthian’s system-wide student body has shrunk to 72,000 from 112,000 in 2010, and the company had laid off 1,350 employees in the last year. Then there are investigations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and more than a dozen state Attorneys General over sundry alleged violations, which have added regulatory uncertainty and legal costs. Keep in mind that Corinthian has been found guilty of nothing.

Most of the investigations involve trumped-up charges of misleading job placement rates, which federal law requires for-profits—but not public and nonprofit colleges—to document and disclose. But here’s the rub: There’s no standard definition of “job placement.”

Now will come assertions of equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian societies. But are the situations comparable?

As America approached its national holiday this year, Israel and world Jewry were plunged into mourning for three students who were abducted and murdered by members of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Thirty-eight years ago, on July 4, 1976, jubilation greeted the news that an Israeli commando raid had freed 102 fellow citizens held hostage by Palestinian terrorists at an airport in Entebbe, Uganda. These different outcomes for the same kind of villainy directed at Jewish targets prompts us to ask which side is winning this unilateral war.

Some would say that Arab violence against Jews is no villainy at all, but merely an alternate form of national politics. Representatives of the American government seeking peace in the Middle East have been shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders as though dealing with equivalent societies with an equal investment in territorial compromise. In the arts, the Metropolitan Opera in New York this season plans to present a work that gives sympathetic voice to Palestinian terrorists who in 1985 shoved a disabled American off a cruise ship and into the ocean because he was a Jew. Reflecting the abjuration of evil, the opera is called “The Death of Klinghoffer” instead of “The Murder of Klinghoffer.”

Now that Jewish suspects have been apprehended in the Jerusalem murder of 16-year-old Arab Mohammed Abu Khudair, there are those who would cite the parallel between this heinous crime and the recent murders of Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Frenkel as proof of moral and political equivalence between the two societies. One anticipates that in the coming days the standard outlets for such views will offer standard justifications for Arab rioting and condemnations of Jewish extremism as part of the same alleged cycle of violence.

But are the situations comparable?

Arab rioters did not wait for the identification or apprehension of suspects in the killing of Mohammed Abu Khudair to begin destroying Jewish life and property. One of their first targets was Jerusalem’s new light-rail system that connects Jewish and Arab sectors of the city. In their own communities, murderers of Israelis enjoy support, encouragement, adulation. News of the abduction of three Israeli boys had no sooner hit the Internet on June 13 than Arab celebrants were handing out candies and posting three-fingered salutes, called Gilad Shalits, for the Israeli soldier seized by Hamas and held for five years until “swapped” in 2011 for 1,027 Arab prisoners whose crimes had included the killing of 569 Israelis. The celebrants of mid-June were mocking the value that Jews place on individual life, one that contrasts so sharply with the value they place on taking Jewish life. Three Shalits would have given them three times the bargaining power had the abduction not ended with the boys being shot instead. Almost a month after the murder of the Jewish boys, the Arab perpetrators are still on the loose.

Written for Arutz Sheva. An expert in international law weighs in on the proposal to achieve a ceasefire with Hamas.

Any time there is an announced “cease fire” between Israel and Hamas, it wrongly and foolishly bestows upon that terror organization

(1) an expressly legitimate status under international law; and

(2) a clear and newly incontestable condition of legal symmetry between the parties.

This is never a tolerable jurisprudential arrangement for Israel.

Moreover, no proper system of law can ever permit any sort of compromise or accommodation by a government with criminal organizations, even, in the case of Israel and Hamas, one that might involve a somewhat less formal arrangement than the currently proposed cease fire.

It follows that Israel ought never to unwittingly prop up its criminal adversary in Gaza by agreeing to a cease fire or similar “armistice”; instead, it should proceed immediately to do whatever is needed operationally, while simultaneously reminding the world that the pertinent conflict is between a fully legitimate sovereign state (one that meets all criteria of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, 1934) and an inherently illegal insurgent organization that meets none of these criteria, and that routinely violates all vital precepts of the law of armed conflict.

Hamas’ inherent illegality is readily deducible from the far-reaching codified and customary criminalization of terrorism under authoritative international law, and can never be challenged by even well-intentioned third parties (e.g., the United States) in the presumably overriding interests of “peace.” This is true even if Hamas were somehow mistakenly acknowledged to have “just cause” for its insurgency

Since the Hebrew Bible, there have always been clear and determinable rules of warfare. Now, moreover, especially since prominent codified changes enacted in 1949 and 1977, these rules bind all insurgent forces, not only uniformed national armies. In modern usage, they derive most plainly from the St. Petersburg Declaration (1868), which, in turn, followed upon earlier limitations expressed at the First Geneva Convention of 1864.

In any conflict, the means that can be used to injure an enemy are not unlimited. It follows that no matter how hard they may try to institute certain self-serving manipulations of language, those who would identify the willful maiming and execution of noncombatants in the name of some abstract ideal – any ideal – are always misrepresenting international law.

Whenever Palestinian insurgents (Hamas; Fatah; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Islamic Jihad, it makes no difference) claim a legal right to use “any means necessary,” they are attempting to deceive. Even if their corollary claims for “national self-determination” were in some fashion legally supportable, there would remain fully authoritative limits on permissible targets and weapons.

Under binding humanitarian international law, the ends can never justify the means.

Events are drawing Israel into a major war with neighboring Arab terrorist organizations to result in another total reordering of Mideast relationships.

Comparison of the current scene with the eve of the Six Day War in 1965 is almost unavoidable. Then, too, a reluctant Israel waged a preemptive action because of what it saw as an existential threat from an alliance of Arab neighbors.

As great as the possibility for another complete regional redispositioning is, the outcome of events is even more unpredictable than it was in 1965. Today’s situation is vastly different:

First, Egypt, the largest and traditionally the leading Arab state, will not be the tripwire which brought on Israel’s preemptive strike then. This time Cairo could well be a benevolent neutral if not an ally in any new encounter between Israel and its principle enemy, the radical Arab Islamicists. Cairo’s military junta is waging a ruthless campaign against the jihadists, voted into power but which it dislodged with considerable popular support.

Secondly, the prospect of a Soviet Union intervention is missing – and a clash of the then two superpowers – which hung over the earlier events. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, his ability to influence events in the region with conventional military forces and aid is marginal. In part, that is because his imbroglio in Ukraine having produced early victories is now turning into a Russian disaster.

Thirdly, the ambivalent position of the Obama Administration despite all its public protestations of loyalty to a U.S. ally, is a sharp contrast to Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s profound pro-Israel sympathies at a time when the U.S. Left had not made a bogus Palestinian crusade a central issue.

And, fourthly, there is a new aggressive and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, mobilizing long suppressed Shia minorities throughout the region in a Muslim sectarian conflict. Tehran’s mullahs have been able to bridge the historic Arab-Persian divide to bolster Arab Shia and even non-Shia allies.