RUTHFULLY YOURS

The fighting in Gaza and Israel this month has been nothing less than a battle for civilization itself. On one side is the civilized, humane, morally serious state of Israel. The other side, Hamas, is a fetid, rotten branch of international Islamist terrorist evil. The United States should be doing all it can to help Israel wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth.

Moreover, if the corrupt and two-faced Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) will not help Israel destroy Hamas, then Fatah itself should be targeted with sanctions, while the United States should conduct a merciless diplomatic offensive against the PA.

Under the presidency of Barack Obama, of course, the United States will do none of these things. Obama’s sympathies seem to lie with the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. But Obama’s moral obtuseness (or worse) provides all the more reason for the rest of us to raise our voices in support of Israel’s morally urgent attempts to eliminate most or all of Hamas’s illegitimate military/terrorist infrastructure in Gaza.

Israel is on the side of the angels in this current warfare. Some angels are avenging angels, and if those avengers are needed, so be it.

Perhaps never since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 has the utter moral superiority of Israel been more distinct, even to many of the usual foggy-thinking chatterers who accept the fiddle-faddle that Palestinians are oppressed. In that 1973 war, Israel was clearly the victim of a perfidious surprise attack by multiple Arab states at once; for a few days, the tiny Jewish nation seemed in mortal danger (especially on and from the Golan Heights). With its usual military prowess, Israel then reversed the tide and, in effect, won a signal victory and preserved its entire territory.

What’s worth noting about that event is that, after the war, Israel controlled the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank, and Gaza. Since then, it has willingly relinquished the entire Sinai in return for peace with Egypt and generously relinquished governance of both Gaza and the West Bank in sincere but vain hopes for peace with Palestinian terrorists. It even went out of its way, in multiple respects, to try to help Gaza become a thriving area under Palestinian control — “a new Singapore,” as Israeli spokesmen are wont to say — only to have its good will repaid with hatred and violence again and again and again.

The Nullifier-in-Chief The border crisis is government without consent of the governed, brought to us by President Obama.

‘Government by consent of the governed” is under attack. The crisis on our southern border tells us that American immigration policy is not decided by the American people through our constitutional process but by foreign criminal organizations, foreign citizens who pay those organizations to transport illegal immigrants, and foreign governments that permit (voluntarily or involuntarily) the transportation of illegal immigrants through their territory.

Not only is immigration policy determined outside of American constitutional democracy, it occurs without the consent of the governed. On the first page, of the first paragraph, of the first Federalist paper, Alexander Hamilton explains the purpose of the American experiment in self-government. It is to “decide the important question” of whether people are capable of “establishing good government from reflection and choice” or whether “societies of men” are “forever destined to depend” upon “accident and force.” In contemporary America, “We the People” do not determine our immigration policy through “reflection and choice”; instead, as Hamilton feared, it is determined for us by “accident” and “force.”

Shortly before the 2012 election, President Obama unilaterally declared an amnesty for those illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. under the age of 18, after Congress had explicitly rejected his proposal. This executive ukase DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) has encouraged a massive new influx of illegal immigration from Central America, according to the migrants themselves. Official U.S. Border Patrol statistics reveal that about 22 percent of the illegal immigrants are “unaccompanied alien children”; the other 78 percent represent family units and adults. The Pew Research Center reports that 84 percent of the children are teenagers. Representative Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, stated: “About 80 percent, though, of these so-called children are about 16 to 17 years old, mostly male. That, from a security standpoint, greatly concerns me.”

Today, the Obama administration (again without congressional approval) promises another — but much more massive — amnesty for around 5 million to 6 million people, about half of all illegal immigrants in the country. The original DACA amnesty (of approximately 600,000) was merely a “down payment,” Representative Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.) told a National Council of La Raza conference. Obama, Gutierrez contends, has promised to expand the amnesty by a factor of ten.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) declared that Obama’s proposed tenfold increase in amnesty “threatens the foundations of our constitutional republic.” It essentially constitutes not only the nullification of the Immigration and Nationality Act but also, Sessions says, represents “executive nullification” of our borders themselves, thus “creating the very open-borders policy explicitly rejected by Congress and the people.” Unfortunately, in the sixth year of the Obama presidency, it has become necessary to explain to our fellow citizens that the Constitution does not give the executive the right to nullify acts of Congress.

‘Let me just tell you,” says Joan Rivers: “If New Jersey were firing rockets into New York, we would wipe them out. If we heard they were digging tunnels from New Jersey to New York, we would get rid of Jersey.”

Rivers — comedienne, fashion maven, Botox cautionary tale — has never been known for subtlety, so when a TMZ reporter seeking celebrity reactions to the conflict between Israel and Hamas snagged her, Rivers was characteristically frank: “Palestinians — you cannot throw rockets and expect people not to defend themselves!”

How has it come to pass that the host of E! Network’s Fashion Police and author of Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman’s Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery thinks more clearly about the Jewish state and its terrorist neighbors than the bulk of the American entertainment industry, the majority of the global media, and the president of the United States? For someone on the crest of every trend, doesn’t Rivers know she is dangerously out of fashion on the subject of Israel?

Consider the statements of her fellow celebs: Actors Mark Ruffalo and John Cusack, actress and UNICEF ambassador Mia Farrow, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain have all tweeted support for Gaza, as has comedian Rob Schneider, who added, “To not be outraged at the killing of children is to risk your very soul. #Gaza.” Under pressure from Palestinian academics this spring, scientist Stephen Hawking withdrew from a conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder interrupted a performance in the United Kingdom for a profanity-filled criticism of Israel, Comedy Central host Jon Stewart has earned accolades for his relentless criticism of Israel, and actress and pop star Selena Gomez posted “It’s about humanity. Pray for Gaza” to her Instagram.

Support for Israel is hard to come by. In 2011 singer Katy Perry replied to an Israeli follower’s “please pray with us” tweet — sent after Hamas rockets left eight Israelis dead and more than 30 wounded in the Red Sea town of Eilat — with “I am! My prayers are for you guys tonight, SHALOM!!!” Twitter users responded mercilessly: “You heartless lesbian,” wrote one. “Israel has killed THOUSANDS OF PALESTINIANS, yet you’re gonna pray for Israel? You shiz [sic].” Perry “spits on Gaza and it’s [sic] murdered children,” wrote another. Or a third: “I hope your private jet crash lands in Palestine so they can stamp on you like the whore you are.” A similar response greeted Kim Kardashian, who, during a Gaza flare-up in 2012, tweeted “Praying for everyone in Israel.” She subsequently removed her tweets and issued an apology.

Hillary Clinton is absolutely 100 percent pro-Israel.Except for the parts where she opposes Jews living in Israel. Also she takes pride in being the “designated yeller”.

Speaking to Fareed Zakaria on CNN Sunday morning, Hillary said that the continued settlement activity is “my biggest complaint with the Israeli government.”

“I’m a strong supporter of Israel, a strong supporter of their right to defend themselves. But the continuing settlements, which have been denounced by successive American administrations on both sides of the aisle, are clearly a terrible signal to send if, at the same time, you claim you’re looking for a two-state solution,” she said.

During the interview, Hillary also took pride of her complicated relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I was often the ‘designated yeller,’” she said.

That’s an attempt at putting a cutesy spin on ugly scenes like these.

In March 2010, Clinton made a now-infamous phone call to Netanyahu in which she berated and threatened the prime minister for 45 minutes, issued a list of demands he would have to meet to salvage the U.S.-Israel relationship, and then instructed the State Department press secretary to boast to the press of just how harshly she had treated Netanyahu.

“The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting,” Clinton told CNN on Friday.

After the Clinton phone call, then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren commented that relations between the two countries had hit their lowest ebb in 35 years.

The pattern is the same. Muslim violence and hate is rewarded. Opposing voices are silenced.

During Friday prayer in the Al Nusra mosque in Berlin on July 11, Danish imam Abu Bilal Ismail urged listeners to kill Jews, Die Welt reports.

In a Youtube video clip of the sermon to which English subtitles have been added, the imam is filmed saying that all Jews should be killed.

“Count them and kill them to the very last one. Don’t spare a single one of them. Make them suffer terribily,” the subtitles read. He urged God “to destroy the Zionist Jews … to kill every last one of them and not have pity on any of them … Shake the ground under their feet, make them suffer.” He also said Jews “act like sole rulers of the entire world and disseminate corruption.”

Ismail is a regular speaker at the Grimhøj Mosque in Aarhus. He has previously been accused of encouraging young Muslims to travel to Syria and fight in the civil war.

Meanwhile things are getting uglier on the street.

Jonatan Møller Sousa, deputy head of the national zionist organisation revealed some of the threatening Facebook messages he received after he went on TV2 News on Saturday to discuss the Gaza conflict.

“Unfortunately no jews died: We are going to change that in Denmark,” one of them read, while another said: “I hope you and your zionist friends will burn in hell and suffer an even more painful death than all the kids in Gaza that were killed.”

And now a pro-Israel rally was shut down.

Also on Friday, police in Copenhagen cut short a demonstration of support for Israel and peace in the Middle East that the Danish Zionist Organization had organized near parliament with a group of Iranian dissidents, according to an account of the event by Vilhjalmur Orn Vilhjalmsson, an Iceland-born academic who attended the rally.

As the war in Gaza rages, Hamas—the Palestinian terror organization that rules Gaza and also enjoys great popularity in the West Bank—is naturally resorting to propaganda imagery to try to portray Israel as a vicious, immoral slayer of civilians. Of course, some Gazan civilians are getting killed and injured—for reasons that many have pointed out, particularly Hamas’s systematic use of the civilian population as human shields [2].

Palestinian propaganda has a long and inglorious history, and now is a good time to look at the most egregious examples and get an idea of what Israel is up against. Along with the “Pallywood” genre of fraudulent claims against Israel, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah-led government of the West Bank, systematically cultivate outright hatred of Israel and Jews.

The case of the supposed killing of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura by Israeli forces in a September 2000 firefight in Gaza was Pallywood’s greatest triumph, because the alleged crime was used to incite a whole population into murderous rage and attacks against Israelis. But as was proved by the intrepid French media analyst Philippe Karsenty and others, the charge was a fraud; not only could al-Dura not possibly have been shot by the Israeli troops because of their physical location, but it turned out he was not shot—or killed—at all. See al-Dura’s supposedly dead form miraculously “move” at 2:40, and note the total absence of blood.

Illegal immigrants are a minor annoyance; America’s shift towards European fertility is a catastrophe from which we may never recover. The demographic crisis isn’t at our borders but at home. It’s easy to blow off steam about illegals on the border, and tough to address the fundamentals. I’ve tried to do so in the past, for example here, but the real problems and prospective solutions don’t make easy sound-bites.

Just to make things clear: I want super-tough, restrictive immigration laws. I’d prefer a Canadian-style system that favors highly-educated immigrants with capital to invest. But I don’t think the best immigration law in the world is going to do much good.

The latest dip in fertility below replacement might be driven by economics, but the economics don’t appear to be getting any better.

Barack Obama is apparently very angry with Bibi Netanyahu.

We have known for some time, via hot mike and other methods, that neither he nor his secretary of State much care for the Israeli prime minister. But — perhaps exacerbated by a multiplicity of foreign and domestic policy failures, plus atrocious poll numbers, one this weekend showing Romney beating him handily [1] were the election held today — Obama seemed more irked than usual.

He needed someone to beat up since the world was beating him up. And the Israelis had just hugely embarrassed his secretary of State (and by extension him) by pointing out their absurd bias in favor of Hamas in ceasefire negotiations, so absurd in fact that they outraged even Israel’s most famous liberal/left politician, Tzipi Livni, who would normally do almost anything for a chance for peace. (Ironically, the details of the pro-Hamas negotiations in which Israeli security concerns — the tunnels, demilitarization, etc. — were ignored were exposed by Barak Ravid in Israel’s most liberal newspaper, Haaretz.)

Further, they had outraged the Egyptians [2], who were dumped from the negotiations by Obama and Kerry in favor of Turkey and Qatar. Our administration seems to have a preference for the more extreme Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood societies, although you would think, given their professed loyalty to women’s and gay rights, these cultures would be anathema to them. Never mind. Obama is an equal opportunity narcissist and everything’s fine, unless you cross him.

Which, according to sources in Israel, is where Netanyahu found himself when the American president called Sunday to admonish him about Gaza. Obama reportedly used or implied the threat of withholding the resupply of weapons — don’t know if this includes the Iron Dome itself — if Israel didn’t fall into line and stop attacking Gaza immediately.

What Obama is doing, in effect, is saving Hamas. It’s almost mind boggling to think, but it’s true.

The standard excuse is that if Hamas is obliterated, what replaces it will be even worse. Oh, really? ISIS or similar may be waiting in the wings to step in, but it’s doubtful if Israel (given its huge 87% public support for the current war) will ever let something like that happen, at least in the near future.

“I know of no right to privacy in the United States Constitution,” says Gerald Walpin. “That is a phrase that has been thrown around that the Supreme Court for many, many years said didn’t exist… It doesn’t exist in the Constitution.” Walpin, a former federal Inspector General nominated by George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate, prominent New York attorney, and author of the book “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution,” sees the National Security Agency (NSA) as one of the most necessary organizations within the United States. “There is nothing unconstitutional about the NSA program, which merely determines whether somebody calls a number.”

Walpin is in the camp of one political and legal tradition, comprising about half of American citizens, that believes that surveillance programs like those of the NSA are the best way to prevent terrorism and save American lives. The other side is more skeptical, to say the least. They claim the right to privacy is fragile, and that national security programs are overbroad—usurping the privacy of the people while instituting surveillance programs that may not be effective. While neither side can reconcile their political differences, one thing is certain: a lengthy and contentious legal boxing match is unfolding, and the final rounds will likely take place at the podium in front of the Supreme Court.

The NSA surveillance controversy came to a head in June 2013, after the now infamous and exiled former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents detailing government surveillance programs to The Guardian. Headlines were bold—is Snowden a patriot or a traitor? The Internet was alive with angry and dubiously informed chatter. People yelled across dinner tables over what the President ought to do. The nation wanted to place blame; was this Obama’s politics or Bush’s? As it gets sorted out in the glaring public eye, the legal justification for United States national security policy will be tested in the courts as well. What’s more, the logical justification behind keeping the policies—that terrorism has been stopped because of them—is being called into question by the public and media.

We should all feel better. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, columnist for the New York Times and apologist for the Obama Administration recently headlined an op-ed: “Newsflash: There was no debt crisis.” He references the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projection that the U.S. federal debt will be no higher in 2039, as a percent of GDP, than it had been at the end of World War II! In doing so, Comrade Krugman accepts as absolute the prophecy of a vision-impaired seer. He appears unconcerned that today’s federal debt borrowers lack the discipline of their post-World War II compatriots. He seems unwilling to account for the fact that while the last baby-boomer turns 65 on 2030, life expectancy continues to rise. Given current trends, there will only be two workers for every retiree in 2039. No matter. He sums up his opinion, in case anyone misunderstands him: “We don’t have a debt crisis, and never did.”

The federal deficit has declined from a $1.4 trillion peak in 2009 to an estimated $500 billion this year, which is good news. The reasons: slowly rising GDP has resulted in rising tax revenues; sequestration helped on the expense side; and the wind-downs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have reduced defense spending. Those three points are positives. But two other factors exude a whiff of the ephemeral: One, the real cost of ObamaCare has not yet kicked in. Keep in mind, nothing is ever free, especially a government program that is advertised to be so. And, two, average interest rates on federal debt are currently 450 basis points below where they were in 2000 and 300 basis points below where they averaged during the post-War years. Were rates at their long-term historic levels, interest costs on $17 trillion in debt would be $500 billion higher – a meaningful increase on a $3.9 trillion budget.

The CBO’s projections, as to the future of interest rates, assume that markets have down-shifted permanently to the current level. Perhaps the Federal Reserve can work its magic and keep interest rates low. But history has shown that price fixing (including the cost of money) does not work over the long term. In times of crisis, for brief periods such as we had in the fall of 2008, it may be necessary for government to intervene in an extraordinary way, but over time free markets self-adjust and work best. I may not have learned much in forty-seven years in capital markets, but the one thing I feel pretty comfortable forecasting is that prices of all asset categories, including money, will fluctuate. At any rate, combined, all of the above factors have produced an unusual level of complacency about the possible threat of rising debt.