RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://micahedmond.com/about/

Micah’s life is a testament to the American dream, proving that anyone can succeed in America regardless of race, religion, or socio-economic status. From humble beginnings in Columbia, South Carolina Micah was adopted by a Jewish family at the end of high school and converted to Judaism.

Understanding the value of education, Micah put himself through Williams College serving in the local Massachusetts Air National Guard and working campus jobs like washing dishes.

Upon graduation Micah started a career on Wall Street, but felt a deeper call to public service. He joined the Marine Corps, was commissioned at Quantico, Virginia and after two overseas tours returned to Alexandria, Virginia to serve his last tour at the Pentagon. During his eight years in the Marine Corps, Micah served as aid-de-camp for two senior generals and speechwriter for the Commandant of the Marine Corps.

After leaving the Marine Corps, Micah continued his public service as a senior staffer for multiple members of the House Armed Services Committee. As a congressional staffer he also served as President of the Congressional Jewish Staff Association.

Micah returned to the private sector by launching his own consulting firm to advise businesses on the impact of federal spending and regulations in the national security sector.

While in private practice, Micah was called back into public service as the senior defense advisor for President Obama’s Simpson Bowles Commission and the U.S. Congress’ Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction where he produced bi-partisan solutions to solve our federal budget deficit and national debt problems.

Once again returning to the private sector at the Aerospace Industries Association, Micah was a key advocate for the U.S. Industrial Base, which supports thousands of local jobs, small businesses and new careers in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Micah’s eighteen years of work experience in the public and private sector provide him a broad understanding of the array of issues facing constituents in the 8th District; including small businesses owners, those serving in the military, employed by the federal government or large federal contractors.

Micah attended Williams College for his BA and Johns Hopkins for his MA and MBA. He is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Why does America convey neutrality between a nation that is indisputably free and a government that is not?

On June 2, the Palestinians announced a new unity government, which included Hamas, an organization designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group.

American aid to the Palestinians since the mid-1990’s, according to a Congressional Research Service report, has exceeded $5 billion. In recent years it has averaged $500 million per year.

The report notes three major U.S. objectives of these funds: preventing terrorism against Israel from Hamas; fostering “stability, prosperity, and self-governance on the West Bank”; humanitarian aid.

When Hamas joined the Palestinian government on June 2, the United States recognized the new government and there was no indication that the substantial funding Palestinians get from American taxpayers would be impacted. Business as usual would continue.

It shouldn’t surprise that U.S acceptance was seen as a green light for terror. Shortly thereafter, missiles started flying again from the Hamas-governed Gaza strip into Israel, and shortly after that, three teenage Israeli boys, one with dual American-Israeli citizenship, were kidnapped and murdered.

The response from America’s president to the kidnapping/murders was to convey American neutrality to an act of terror and to “urge all parties to refrain from steps that would further destabilize the situation.”

It should be clear to all that the world is spinning out of control and becoming an increasingly dangerous place because where there is supposed to be leadership from the leader of the free world there is now a vacuum.

Even independent of the inclusion of a designated terrorist organization in the Palestinian government, the neutral posture of the current American government toward the Palestinian Authority vis- a- vis Israel is quite incredible.

Freedom House is a non-partisan organization in Washington that rates nations around the world regarding freedom. Nations are rated either “free, partially free, or not free.”

Israel is rated “free” and on a scale of 1 – 7, where “1” is the highest rating, Israel is graded 1 on “political rights” and 2 on “civil liberties.”

Attorney General Eric Holder can hardly contain his tears when explaining his program titled “Justice AmeriCorps,” to provide emergency legal representation for the tens of thousands of Central American minors crashing our southern border.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking – goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” Holder said while detailing his program to provide 100 lawyers and paralegals for the minors.

And yet it was (then) Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder who concocted the “legal” cover for the INS to mace, kick, stomp, and gun-butt their way into the home of Elian Gonzalez’s legal custodians (legal U.S. citizens and residents all) on the morning of April 22, 2000, wrench a bawling 6-year-old child from his family at machine-gun point and bundle him off to Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom, leaving 102 people (legal U.S. citizens and residents all) injured, some seriously.

Even as the mace dispersed and Elian’s custodians sought medical help for their injuries, FoxNews Andrew Napolitano already had Eric Holder’s number:

“Tell me, Mr. Holder,” Judge Napolitano asked on April 23, 2000, “why did you not get a court order authorizing you to go in and get the boy [Elian Gonzalez]?”

Holder: Because we didn’t need a court order. INS can do this on its own.

Napolitano: You know that a court order would have given you the cloak of respectability to have seized the boy.

Holder: We didn’t need an order.

Napolitano: Then why did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t need one?

Holder: [Silence]

Napolitano: The fact is, for the first time in history you have taken a child from his residence at gunpoint to enforce your custody position, even though you did not have an order authorizing it. When is the last time a boy, a child, was taken at the point of a gun without an order of a judge…Unprecedented in American history.”

Holder: “He was not taken at the point of a gun.”

After a light-hearted exchange about the chance of reaching our destination without getting hit by a missile barrage, my taxi driver’s tone darkened.

“Tell me the truth,” he said. “How do feel when the siren goes off?”

“Startled,” I answered. “But getting used to it.” (Thanks to Iron Dome, I thought, otherwise I would probably be as terrified as the residents of Sderot and other southern towns, who have been under this blitz for years.)

Stopping at a red light, the driver leaned over to me and lowered his voice.

“It scares me to death,” he admitted, in what struck me as a feat of extraordinary bravery for an Israeli male.

He then explained that he has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since being seriously wounded 12 years ago in a suicide bombing. Though he has learned to keep it under some degree of control, he said he relives the horror “every time there’s a flare-up in the situation.”

Little wonder.

It happened on a Friday afternoon, on April 12, 2002, at the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem, when a 17-year-old girl belonging to the Hebron branch of the Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades detonated an explosive device strapped to her body. Four people were killed that day, including two foreign workers from China, and more than 100 were wounded, among them my taxi driver, all because they were out shopping for food for Shabbat.

It was one of many such grotesque attacks on innocent civilians carried out by Palestinian terrorists from Gaza and Judea and Samaria. The aim to annihilate the Jewish state is one thing these assaults had in common. Another is that each was the result of peace talks.

Indeed, the bombing in question was part of the Second Intifada, waged against Israel following the so-called “failure” of the 2000 Camp David Summit. In fact, it was the inevitable outcome of Israeli peace overtures and concessions to Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat. An arch-terrorist with genocidal goals and behavior, the Nobel Peace prize he won for signing the Oslo Accords became his most lethal weapon. And he used it with a vengeance.

“War is peace,” entered our cultural vocabulary some sixty-four years ago. Around the same time that Orwell’s masterpiece was being printed up, an armistice was being negotiated between Israel and the Arab invading armies. That armistice began the long peaceful war or the warring peace.
The entire charade did not properly enter the realm of the Orwellian until the peace process began. The peace process between Israel and the terrorist militias funded by the countries of those invading armies has gone on for longer than most actual wars. It has also taken more lives than most actual wars.

War has an endpoint. Peace does not. A peace in which you are constantly at war can go on forever because while the enthusiasts of war eventually exhaust their patriotism, the enthusiasts of peace never give up on their peacemaking.

Warmongers may stop after a few thousand dead, but Peacemongers will pirouette over a million corpses.

Two decades later the peace process has failed in every way imaginable and cemeteries on both sides are full of the casualties of peace. Two decades which have created two abortive Palestinian states at war with one another and with Israel.

Two decades later, it’s still time for peace.

Peace time means that it’s time to ring up some more Israeli concessions in the hopes of getting the terrorists and their quarreling states back to the negotiating table for another photo op in the glorious album of peacemakers.

And if the photos are properly posed, perhaps there will even be another Nobel Peace Prize in it for all the participants.

It would be nice to think that the peace disease was one of those viruses carried only in the bloodstream of liberals. But it’s not.

What is Hamas doing? Hamas isn’t going to defeat Israel.

It isn’t going to gain any territory. Israel isn’t going to withdraw from Ashkelon or Sderot under a hail of rockets.

So if Hamas can’t win, why is it fighting? Why rain down destruction and misery on millions of Israelis with your Iranian missiles and your Syrian rockets and invite a counter-assault on your headquarters and weapons warehouses, which you have conveniently placed in the middle of the Palestinian people on whose behalf you are allegedly fighting? Hamas is in a precarious position. When the terror group took over Gaza seven years ago, things were different.

It had a relatively friendly regime in Cairo that was willing to turn a blind eye to all the missiles Iran, Syria and Hezbollah were sending over to Gaza through Sinai.

Hamas’s leaders were comfortably ensconced in Damascus and enjoyed warm relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran.

International funds flowed freely into Hamas bank accounts from Fatah’s donor-financed Palestinian Authority budget, through the Arab Bank, headquartered in Jordan, through the UN, and when necessary through suitcases of cash transferred to Gaza by couriers from Egypt.

Hamas used these conditions to build up the arsenal of a terror state, and to keep the trains running on time. Schools were open. Government employees were paid. Israel was bombed. All was good.

Today, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, faces an Egyptian regime that is locked into a life-and-death struggle with the Brotherhood. To harm Hamas, for the past year the Egyptians have been blocking Hamas’s land-based weapons shipments and destroying its smuggling-dependent economy by sealing off the cross-border tunnels.

Syria and Hamas parted ways at the outset of the Syrian civil war when Hamas, a Sunni jihadist group, was unable to openly support Bashar Assad’s massacre of Sunnis.

Terrorism is a game. The rules are simple. You have three choices. 1. Destroy the terrorists. 2. Live with terrorism. 3. Give in to the terrorists.

There are no other choices.

The first choice comes from the right. The third choice comes from the left. The second choice is what politicians choose when they don’t want to make a decision that will change the status quo.

Despite all the explosions in Gaza, Israel is still stuck on the second choice. The air strikes aren’t meant to destroy Hamas. They are being carried out to degrade its military capabilities which will buy a year or two of relative peace. And that will be followed by more of the same in the summer of 2016 when Hamas will have deadlier Iranian and Syrian weapons that will terrorize more of the country.

That doesn’t sound like much of a deal, but these kinds of wars have bought more peace than the peace process ever did. The peace process led to wars. The wars lead to a temporary peace.

This status quo became the mainstream choice ever since Israelis figured out that the peace process wasn’t going to work and that their leaders weren’t about to defy the UN, the US, the UK and all the other U’s by actually destroying the terrorists.

When Netanyahu first ran against Peres, the difference between the center-right and the center-left was that he campaigned on security first and appeasement second, while Peres campaigned on appeasement first and security second. The center-right has dominated Israeli politics because most Israelis accepted Likud’s security first as a more reasonable position than Labor’s appeasement first.

Living with terrorism was a viable choice in the 80s. It stopped being a viable choice after Israel allowed terrorist states to be set up under the peace process. It’s one thing to manage terrorism in territories that you control. It’s another thing to deal with entire terrorist states inside your borders. Even physical separation isn’t enough. Not when terrorist groups can shell all your major cities.

Israel responds to that threat with light air strikes which damage Hamas’ military capabilities. Hamas loses a few commanders, fighters and rockets, but scores a PR victory. Israel buys two years of peace while encouraging its enemies to attack it as a bunch of racist baby killers. Then Hamas replaces the rockets and fighters and launches a new operation and the whole thing begins again.

As is often bemoaned by scholars, genuine classical education in American schools is virtually non-existent. Whereas 100 years ago, university students learned Greek and Latin, today, remedial math and English instruction is the norm.

Yet, if people had a glimpse of Solon who lived approximately from 640-560 BCE, they would take to heart his warning about the “Signs of Dictatorship.”

The power of hail and snow springs from a cloud,

and thunder from the fire of lightning.

Strong men destroy a city, and a tyrant

enslaves a people through their ignorance.

A ship once out of port is hard to capture:

know this now before it is too late.

Near the end of his life, Solon warned the citizens that Peisistratus, the general in the final war for Salamis and leader of northeastern Attica, was becoming tyrannical. Yet Solon’s warnings were ignored — in fact, the people dismissed them as the ravings of a madman. Solon responded with “[a] little time will show the citizens my madness. Yes, will show, when truth comes in our midst.” And, indeed, he was proven correct when Peisistratus did show his true tyrannical colors.

Barack Hussein Obama consistently flouts American law, disregards the separation of powers, and seemingly could not care less about the swirling scandals surrounding him. As of May 2014 there have been 23 executive alterations of Obama’s own Affordable Care Act. Chris Conover at Forbes highlights the egregious and unilateral changes to Obamacare when he explains that “[t]he Constitution and its carefully crafted system of checks and balances matters. If President Obama disagrees with a statutory provision enacted into law (and that he signed!), the proper course of action is to go back to Congress and get the law changed.”

All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border.

“In Columbia [sic], Rising Violence Breeds New Doubts” (New York Times); “Guatemala Seen Slipping Into a Haven For Drugs” (Los Angeles Times); “Democracy Jeopardized as New Wave of Violence Sweeps Guatemala” (AP); “The Volcano That Is Guatemala” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); “A New Dark Age for Latin America?” (Miami Herald); “Murder Soars in El Salvador” (Washington Post); “Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala” (Washington Post); “Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala Raise Stake of Central American Drug-Addled Violence” (States News Service); “Drug Cartels Take Toll on Guatemala’s Politics” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

No wonder we have so many refugees at our door.

Except there’s one hitch: All of these headlines are very old. The first is from 1987, the last from 2007. And yet, over those two decades, we never saw anything like what we are seeing today.

Something else is going on. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the children at the border aren’t fleeing horrible conditions, violence, and poverty. But horrible conditions are not exactly new to Central America.

In other words, the new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.

President Obama has gotten a lot of grief from his base for being the “deporter-in-chief.” But the basis for this charge is rooted in some statistical sleight of hand that he uses on the stump to show that he’s tough on illegal immigration. President Obama likes to claim that he’s deported a lot of people. But he hasn’t. What he’s done is count people caught and turned around at the border as “deportations.” If previous administrations had counted thwarted illegal immigrants that way, Obama’s number of “deportations” from the border would likely still be much lower than that of other recent presidents. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40 percent since 2009.”

“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” John Sandweg, the former acting head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told the Times.

As a defender of the nation’s borders, President Barack Obama is a hell of a pool player.

The president enjoyed a game at a bar in Denver with Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper on Tuesday, without the noir atmosphere of his furtive visits to pool halls with his grandfather as a kid, when he felt “the enticement of darkness and the click of the cue ball, and the jukebox flashing its red and green lights.”

Obama’s game the other day was bright and cheery, as one would expect of a president who didn’t have any depressing visits to frightened ranchers, overwhelmed border agents or desperate migrants on his future itinerary.

The first rule in a crisis for any executive is put on your windbreaker and your boots and get out on the ground. President George W. Bush didn’t do it soon enough after Hurricane Katrina and, politically, could never make up for it, no matter how many times he visited New Orleans subsequently. Obama’s bizarre resistance to visiting the border on his fundraising swing out West fueled talk of the influx as Obama’s “Katrina moment.”

The Katrina analogy is both over the top and too generous. It is over the top because the border influx isn’t a deadly catastrophe swallowing an American city. It is too generous because Bush didn’t do anything to bring on Hurricane Katrina, whereas Obama’s policies are responsible for the influx of immigrants from the border. It is, in the argot of his administration, a “man-caused disaster.”

According to The Los Angeles Times, the number of immigrants younger than 18 who were deported or turned away from ports of entry declined from 8,143 in 2008 to 1,669 last year. There were 95 minors deported from the entire interior of the country last year. This occurred as the number of unaccompanied alien children arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras exploded from less than 4,000 several years ago to 40,000 since last October.

It’s not hard to do the math and understand the incentives. “Deportation data won’t dispel rumors drawing migrant minors to the U.S.” is how the L.A. Times headlined its story.

The White House brushes off criticism that Obama is avoiding the border as mere “optics,” in contrast to its highly substantive focus. But it is still not taking the crisis seriously.