RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yehudah Glick has spent the better part of the last 20 years championing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Judaism’s holiest site. On Wednesday night, the Palestinians sent a hit man to Jerusalem to kill him.

And today Glick lays in a coma at Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Two people bear direct responsibility for this terrorist attack: the gunman, and Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. The gunman shot Glick, and Abbas told him to shoot Glick.

Abbas routinely glorifies terrorist murder of Jews, and funds terrorism with the PA’s US- and European-funded budget.

But it isn’t often that he directly incites the murder of Jews.

Two weeks ago, Abbas did just that. Speaking to Fatah members, he referred to Jews who wish to pray at Judaism’s holiest site as “settlers.” He then told his audience that they must remain on the Temple Mount at all times to block Jews from entering.

“We must prevent them from entering [the Temple Mount] in any way…. They have no right to enter and desecrate [it]. We must confront them and defend our holy sites,” he said.

As Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday, in the three days leading up to the assassination attempt on Glick, the PA’s television station broadcast Abbas’s call for attacks on Jews who seek to enter the Temple Mount 19 times.

While Abbas himself is responsible for the hit on Glick, he has had one major enabler – the Obama administration. Since Abbas first issued the order for Palestinians to attack Jews, there have been two terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Both have claimed American citizens among their victims. Yet the Obama administration has refused to condemn Abbas’s call to murder Jews either before it led to the first terrorist attack or since Glick was shot Wednesday night.

The inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate took place last week, with scholars coming from around the world to participate in two days of discussion on a plethora of topics. Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya News, subsequently published a lengthy summary of the proceedings on Al Arabiya’s website, and reading it, I was struck by the absence of certain topics one might expect to feature prominently. Egypt, Iran, oil, ISIS, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and Islamic extremism were all there. But in 1,700 words, the Palestinians weren’t mentioned once, while Israel appeared only in the very last paragraph–which deserves to be read in full:

Finally, it was fascinating to attend a two day conference about the Middle East in times of upheaval in which Israel was mostly ignored, with the only frontal criticism of her policies delivered by an American diplomat.
And this explains a lot about the current U.S.-Israel spat. President Barack Obama entered office with the firm belief that the best way to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world was to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and for six years now, he and his staff have worked diligently to do exactly that. Nor was this an inherently unreasonable idea: Even a decade ago, Arab capitals might have cheered the sight of U.S. officials hurling childish insults at their Israeli counterparts.

The problem is that the Arab world has changed greatly in recent years, while the Obama administration–like most of Europe–remains stuck in its old paradigm. Granted, Arabs still don’t like Israel, but they have discovered that Israel and the Palestinians are very far down on their list of urgent concerns. The collapse of entire states that were formerly lynchpins of the Arab world, like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the fear that other vital states like Egypt and Jordan could follow suit; the rise of Islamic extremist movements that threaten all the existing Arab states; the destabilizing flood of millions of refugees; the fear of U.S. disengagement from the region; the “predicament of living in the shadows of what they see as a belligerent Iran and an assertive Turkey” (to quote Melhem)–all these are far more pressing concerns.

And not only has Israel fallen off the list of pressing problems, but it has come to be viewed as capable of contributing, however modestly, to dealing with some of the new pressing problems. Last month, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute published his impressions from a tour of the Mideast, including of Israel’s deepening strategic relationships with Egypt and Jordan. “Indeed, one of the most unusual moments of my trip was to hear certain Arab security officials effectively compete with one another for who has the better relationship with Israel,” he wrote. “In this regard, times have certainly changed.”

At the conclusion of the latest installment of the endless Arab war against Israel, the leaders of Hamas simultaneously accused Israel of “genocide” against the residents of Gaza and took to the streets, dancing, ululating, and jubilating in celebration of their “victory” over the Zionist enemy. That is to say, what the novelist Thane Rosenbaum called Hamas’s “civilian death strategy”—deliberately bringing about the greatest possible number of Arab (as well as Jewish) deaths—had achieved a political triumph in the court of world opinion.

What is naively called the “Arab-Israeli conflict” has a deep-seated pathological fanaticism at its core. American secondary school students will learn nothing about it from a new curriculum that amounts to a regimen of crude indoctrination depicting Israel as the devil’s very own experiment station, black as Gehenna and the pit of Hell. But this is what a duo of Washington State Palestinophiles named Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, founders of the local Palestine Solidarity Committee, have been promoting with passionate intensity for some time.

In early October, Bevis appeared, by invitation, at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies, the annual meeting of the state’s social studies teachers, to preside over a workshop in which she could recommend the Bevis and Mast curriculum as a replacement for the material in currently used textbooks. (The conference’s keynote speaker was a zealous Israel-hater named Jen Marlowe, stalwart of the “Jenin Freedom Theater.”) Bevis is a regular at similar conferences and held forth a week later at the “Teaching for Social Justice” gathering in Portland. At least three schools are known to have adopted her materials; Bevis has not divulged the names of schools where she has been active.

The tawdry character of the Bevis and Mast curriculum is inherent in its bizarre title: “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Its designers noticed that the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center had packaged materials relating to the Holocaust in one of the trunks used by Jews who were shipped off to the death camps of Europe. But how dare the Jews monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other groups, and none more so than the Palestinian Arabs, would very much like, ex post facto, to claim for themselves? And so it came to pass that Bevis and Mast collected their own CDs and sacred relics of the “Palestinian cause” into an online “trunk.”

Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop US funding of the United Nations after the People’s Republic of China was admitted to the organization. He said:

“I suggested on the floor of the Senate today that we stop all funds for the United Nations. Now, what that’ll do to the United Nations, I don’t know. I have a hunch it would cause them to fold up, which would make me very happy at this particular point. I think if this happens, they can well move their headquarters to Peking or Moscow and get ‘em out of this country.”

What would he say of the UN today? Well I don’t know if he cussed but “international chickensh-ts” sounds about right.

P.S. When my husband and father voted for Goldwater in 1964 I was appalled….that was then…rsk

The former Secretary of State and New York Senator, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, has informed the American people that businesses do not create jobs.

In providing Americans with a rather interesting economic perspective of how people get hired, the former First Lady then went on to let Americans know that “trickle-down economics” not only doesn’t work, but it has failed spectacularly. I suppose this is meant to mean there is somehow a connection between the policy of trickle-down economics and how jobs are either created or not created. That’s important as there are 20-24 million Americans that need full-time jobs.

It is unclear to what era of American economic life she was referencing, but as far back as America under President Calvin Coolidge we had unemployment below 3%, a balanced budget, growing personal income, and in fact the generation of budget surpluses with a top tax rate on income that had been reduced to 28%.

Maybe the answer to Mrs. Clinton’s riddle lies elsewhere.

Under President John F. Kennedy, the top tax rate was reduced from over 90% to 70%, and subsequently, in the years following, as the President then said before a Detroit audience at the prestigious Economic Club “a rising tide lifts all boats” as millions of new jobs were created.

That does look like a failure.

What about President Ronald Reagan? He reduced top tax rates from 70% to first 50% and then in 1986 to 28%. Both tax rate reductions were part of an across the board tax rate reduction and reform which grew the US economy between 1983-89 by some 18+ million new jobs.

And between 1993-2000, the US economy grew by another 21 million jobs, with capital gains taxes being reduced in 1996 along with companion legislation calling for a balanced budget and welfare reform.

What failed?

The former Secretary of State then references President William Clinton’s administration by saying the former President had a secret–he brought arithmetic to Washington as opposed to apparently all other administrations.

Until Jerusalem is the capital of a Palestinian state and Israel is pushed back to its pre-1967 borders, it will be “halal” for Erdogan to blame Israel for global warming, the Ebola virus, starvation in Africa and every other misfortune the world faces.

On the press freedoms index 2014 of Reporters without Borders, Turkey ranks an embarrassing 154th, a score worse than Burundi, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Libya, Uganda and Kyrgyzstan, among others. Once again, Erdogan corrupted facts and figures in order to bash Israel.

Holy struggle against Israel is a prerequisite for Erdogan’s pro-Hamas Islamism, and the cold war and Erdogan’s explosive rhetoric around it have yielded a treasure-trove of votes in a country that champions anti-Semitism.

“The Jewish lobby has lost much of its mythical power. Our prime minister’s rhetoric and actions have largely caused this. The way he [Erdogan] walked out of the Davos meeting [in 2009] has substantially tarnished Israel’s regional charisma. Despite all that, Israel has been unable to harm Turkey.” This quote was from former senior diplomat and member of parliament Volkan Bozkir, of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party [AKP], in an interview with the daily Hurriyet on March 18, 2013. In Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s mini-cabinet reshuffle last month, Bozkir became Turkey’s European Union Minister and chief negotiator with the club for Turkish membership.

She has no excuse for her petulance — and nor do the rest of our aid workers.

Let’s give credit where it is due: Nurse Kaci Hickox did an admirable thing going overseas to fight Ebola in West Africa. The 33-year-old medical volunteer put herself in grave danger to serve the least of these in Sierra Leone, where 1,200 people have succumbed to Ebola, and she deserves plaudits for it.

So one is reminded that human beings do, indeed, contain multitudes, when considering Hickox’s comments to Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning’s Today show: “If the restrictions placed on me by the State of Maine are not lifted by Thursday morning, I will go to court to fight for my freedom.”

By way of background: Hickox was the first person to fall under the short-lived mandatory quarantine order instituted late last week by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Hickox flew into Newark airport last Friday afternoon, registered a fever, and was immediately placed in a quarantine tent outside a Newark hospital. Seen through a plastic window, Hickox’s situation did look rather more Sing Sing than merely sanitizary — which is why by Monday, having tested negative for the disease, she was on her way back to her home in Fort Kent, Maine, to be kept under a legally enforceable home quarantine until 21 days have passed since her last contact with an Ebola patient.

But that is, apparently, not good enough: “I am thankful to be out of the tent in Newark but I find myself in yet another prison in a different environment.”

A more prison-like setup would have been appropriate for Dr. Craig Spencer, the Doctors Without Borders physician diagnosed with Ebola last week (it was his case that prompted the mandatory quarantine orders). The New York Post reports that Dr. Spencer told public health officials he was in “self-quarantine” in his Harlem apartment — when, in fact, he was dining in Greenwich Village, bowling in Brooklyn, and riding the subway system. Authorities only discovered that he had been lying when detectives examined his credit-card statement and subway pass.

For individuals who in their service abroad exemplified Americans’ generosity of spirit, Hickox and Spencer have demonstrated a shocking lack of it since returning back home. Strictly monitored house quarantine — de facto house arrest — is undoubtedly an abrogation of civil liberties. But 21 days of it — lavishly state-funded — to be followed by perfect liberty assuming no problems, seems like a minimal sacrifice to ask of those who put themselves voluntarily in danger. When it comes to a disease that liquidates your internal organs and pushes blood out your eyeballs, “Better safe than sorry” would seem a dictum to which everyone could agree.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino has won tough fights before. Can he pull this one off?

‘There is no inevitability with Andrew Cuomo,” Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino says of his Democratic opponent for governor of New York. “He is under federal investigation for corruption. Our state is dead last in almost everything. That people are voting with their feet in record numbers and moving out of here should tell you that things are bad. And they are going to stay bad unless we change governors and change these policies.”

The Republican speaks with the brashness and confidence of a man who is nipping at an incumbent’s heels. In fact, an October 20 Siena College survey had the 47-year-old challenger at 33 percent to Cuomo’s 54 percent among 748 likely voters (margin of error +/– 3.6 percent). However, the latest Rasmussen poll, which arguably samples respondents more accurately during midterm years, found Astorino at 32 percent and Cuomo at 49 percent among 825 likely voters, although those “certain to vote” gave Astorino 37 to Cuomo’s 47 in the September 25 matchup (margin of error +/– 4 percent).

During a recent interview in the slant-roofed Citicorp Building, 43 floors above the sidewalks of New York, Astorino insisted that those bird’s-eye-view polling figures overlook evidence that Cuomo’s support is an avenue wide and a gum wrapper deep.

For starters, in the September 9 Democratic primary, Cuomo lost 24 of the Empire State’s 62 counties to the spectacularly named Zephyr Teachout. The Fordham Law School professor even defeated Cuomo in Albany County, his seat of power. It is startling for an incumbent governor to win only 62.9 percent of the primary vote while yielding 33.5 percent to an unknown, far-left academic with one-tenth of his war chest. (Randy Credico got 3.6 percent of the vote. Thus, 37.1 percent of primary voters rejected Cuomo.)

“Cuomo lost everything tonight except the nomination,” former New York City public advocate Mark Green, a ­Teach­out supporter, told the New York Post.

Do bothersome facts matter anymore?

Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.

The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.

Some days Americans are told there is no reason to restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African country.

Ebola is so hard to catch that there is no reason to worry about causal exposures to those without clear symptoms. But then why do health authorities still try to hunt down anyone who had even a brief encounter with supposedly asymptomatic carriers?

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were caused by a video that sparked a riot, and then apparently not. Various narratives about corruption and incompetence at the VA, IRS, NSA, GSA and Secret Service are raised and then dropped. The larger truth is that these scandals must be quarantined from infecting the president’s progressive agenda.

Laws used to be real, not abstract. Again, not anymore. The administration sort of enacts some elements of Obamacare but ignores others. Enforcement of federal immigration law is negotiable, likewise depending on the campaign cycle.

The Tawana Brawley case, the Duke men’s lacrosse team accusations, and the O. J. Simpson verdict were constructed fantasies. No one cared much about the inconvenient facts or the lies that destroyed people’s lives — given that myths were deemed useful facts for achieving larger racial justice.

“But let’s forget about Obama’s own ideological dislike of the State of Israel and its leaders, whoever they may be. Set aside the fact that it is not Bibi who is acting like a selfish political actor, but Barack Obama and the personal sycophants around him who are more interested in the whims and fortunes of the American Narcissus. Let us instead focus on the fact that an unnamed “senior American official” is waxing triumphant over the fact that it is now “too late” for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear weapons complex. This is good news? The fact that American officials believe it is more advantageous to have a nuclear Iran than to have someone in power in Israel who will not kowtow to the US president says something about the fundamental rot at the core of the Obama administration, its contempt for the national security of the American people – who are at terrible risk from an Iranian nuclear bomb – and the vileness of the cowards and chickenshit officials who people the fiefdom of Barack Obama.”

Lots of twitter today over an important piece by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic about the crisis in US-Israel relations. Most have focused on the Obama administration “senior official” sourced comment that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is “chickenshit.” The full quote is worth reading:

“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.”

Goldberg has his own take on the accusation, and plants blame for the mutual antipathy squarely on the Israeli side. He’s a thoughtful analyst, and he’s not wrong that the Israelis have been, to put it diplomatically, incautious, in their approach to the Obama team. Nor are critics entirely wrong when they suggest that internal politicking – and not peace process politique – have been behind recent Israeli settlement decisions. But that analysis fails to adequately appreciate the fons et origo of the slow-mo disaster that has been US-Israel relations under Barack Obama, and does readers a disservice by laying out the rather shocking notion that team Obama thinks he has somehow played the Israelis into… allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Here’s “another senior official” with whom Goldberg spoke (speaking of chickenshit; um, what about going on the record?):

“It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

Let’s get this straight: Bibi et al, who have what most would agree is a legitimate and existential fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon, are “good” because they’re, er “chickenshit” about launching a strike on Iran; oh, and Bibi is also labeled a “coward” for having been “chickenshit” in that regard. But he’s “bad” because he won’t cave to a Palestinian Authority and Hamas so riven by terrorism, corruption and incompetence that they won’t “accommodate” with each other.