RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Once language has been so thoroughly denatured, poisoning the wells of communication and rendering truth an archaic remnant of political nostalgia, the prospects for the recovery of honor, health and strength in a society fade into Spenglerian [34] darkness. Western intellectuals, academics, journalists, politicians and civic leaders have learned from the West’s ideological enemies, having mastered the science of the Big Lie. And in betraying language, they have betrayed the world of thought and the culture of freedom, hawking the tainted wares of a demonic illiteracy.”

An infallible sign of cognitive degradation is the mutilation of language, a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly widespread in the current (anti) intellectual milieu. What George Orwell despaired of in the chronic usages of political language in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language [1]“—it is “designed to make lies truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”—seems even more so today. Orwell’s “six rules [2]” for good writing are not so much the issue here, and some of these have been ably contested by reputable authors. But he is right when he says that clear thinking “is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” Poor thinking corrupts language; slovenly language corrupts thinking—and the inevitable result of these twin perversions is moral corruption and political barbarism.

Of course, one frequently comes across in the political writing of both the left and the right, “progressivists” and conservatives, all manner of less degrading blemishes — grammatical solecisms, logical infelicities, bad paragraphing, sloppy editing practices generating an abundance of typos (my favorites: the “Untied States,” the “Pubic Wars”), and the like. This is to be expected in the Age of the Internet, when one writes an article in the morning and posts it in the afternoon, rather than submit it to several days’ worth of revision. The Age of Rapidly Breaking News leads to critically broken prose. That we also live in the Age of Declining Educational Standards in which rigorous language training — spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammatical concinnity, reading with understanding — has gone by the board and in which the Image has come to predominate over the Word almost guarantees that far too many professional journalists and bloggers can no longer write properly – which means that they can no longer think coherently or even string two or three sentences into a meaningful thought-unit.

But such misfortunes seem like mere peccadilloes when compared to the willful devastation of language used almost exclusively for the transmission of lies and the practice of slander rather than for disciplined argument and conveying empirical verities. Regrettably, linguistic debasement has always been a mainstay of political discourse, whether for “reasons of state,” military purposes, electoral advantage, self-promotion, or the arts of persuasion. What we might call “word deformation” is a staple of political life and should not surprise us.

America’s unconventional oil boom continues to yield major benefits—economic and geostrategic. The latest evidence is OPEC’s decision on Thursday to defy expectations and maintain its current oil production target despite the steepest price decline since the 2008-2009 recession. The price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, plunged as a result to about $70 a barrel, continuing its decline from a peak of nearly $116 in June.

Not too many years ago the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries might have cut production to maintain higher prices. The cartel’s countries have long sought to keep prices high at a level consistent with a growing global economy, not least to keep the revenue flowing into government coffers. Rogue states such as Venezuela and Iran desperately need the cash flow.

But the cartel has lost much of its pricing power thanks in part to the revival in U.S. oil production. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—business innovations done mainly on private land—have pushed U.S. oil output to its highest level since the 1980s.

The Energy Information Administration says U.S. production reached more than nine million barrels a day this year and is expected to keep climbing. OPEC is afraid that demand for its crude will keep falling as U.S. supply continues to grow and more of it makes its way to the global market as American export barriers fall.

One way to read the OPEC decision is therefore as a price war to shake marginal U.S. producers from the market. The U.S. shale boom and high global oil prices have encouraged new areas of production with widely varying break-even price levels. Much of such proven areas as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota can remain profitable even at $50 a barrel, by most estimates. The Eagle Ford Shale in Texas also has a relatively low break-even. But newer areas with higher exploration and development costs could suffer if prices keep falling.

Every penny spent on the ridiculous goal for a two-state solution has been a total waste. It seems that people are finally starting to get it.

Recently Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this statement:

There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan[.]

Personally, I have no problems with that honest statement. I wish the Israelis had been upfront about this years ago; and it would have saved everyone a lot of heartache.

An honest refusal to give the Arabs in Judea and Samaria open and free borders – while militarily wise – would also have let the world know that Israel had no real intention of the giving the Palestinians a state. It would have been suicidal. The Arabs would have been put on notice that no Palestine would ever exist. A people who do not control their borders are not free. There would have been no pretense, and over $100 billion in handouts – from America, Canada, and Europe – to a murderously corrupt Palestinian Authority could have been saved.

That has been Netanyahu’s position all along, even as his administration publicly claimed to be working towards a two-state solution, as was captured by this video, secretly filmed in 2001. Netanyahu bragged about sabotaging Oslo by twisting legal interpretations to prevent the Arabs from ever getting an open border with Jordan. Netanyahu would define the whole Jordan Valley as a military zone. To be fair, even Barak’s “generous” offer at Camp David refused to give the Palestinians border control.

Again, all of this was wise, but why doesn’t Israel officially admit that it has no intention of giving the Palestinians a state? Why did Netanyahu, and others, say one thing to the press and another to the Likud base?

Of course, the masters of duplicity are the Arabs, who still want all of Israel destroyed.

On September 20, 2000, a day after Yasser Arafat launched his war of terror, euphemized as the al-Aqsa intifada, state-owned France 2 Television broadcast a news report, filmed by a Palestinian cameraman, of the fatal shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian identified as Muhammad al-Dura. The dramatic voiceover commentary by the station’s longtime Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, described how the boy and his father Jamal were pinned down by Israeli gunfire at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip. The father pleaded frantically with the soldiers to stop shooting, to no avail. “A last burst of gunfire,” intoned Enderlin, “the boy is dead, his father critically wounded.”

This event, which came to be known as the al-Dura affair, is the starting point for Nidra Poller’s 288 page intellectual journey, Al-Dura: Long Range Ballistic Myth.

Poller, an American writer based in Paris, traces the repeated attempts by the state-owned French television station to intimidate via legal measures anyone who publicly questioned the authenticity of the event. The French courtroom thus becomes the stage where an obvious fabrication, masquerading as earnest journalism, is transformed into an indisputable fact.

Although the repeated stifling of objectively sound criticism helped to reveal the true nature of French journalism, especially in its biased depiction of Israel, the damage caused by the original incident in Netzarim was already done and the results were deadly. Poller writes:

The bloodless images of Jamal and Muhammad al-Dura were instantly seared into the public mind. Distributed free of charge to international media, repeated endlessly like a raucous war cry, the Dura video provoked anti-Jewish violence in Israel and, on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, throughout Europe.

During a pro-Israel rally in Johannesburg, a man protesting with the Anti-Israel crowd was apprehended for carrying a rifle, handguns and other weapons.

During the last Jewish High Holidays, Jewish neighborhoods and areas around synagogues were cordoned off. Due to an intelligence tip-off, heavy police and private security personnel manned positions in and around synagogues throughout the High Holidays.

South Africa is often overlooked as one of the sources of growing anti-Israel sentiments and Anti-Semitism but plays a leading role in determining some of the current narratives against Israel.

The word “Apartheid”, from South Africa’s dark history, has been attached to Israel as a label to form the common phrase “Apartheid Israel”. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) also draws parallels between the global embargo on Apartheid South Africa and their goals to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.

The infamous United Nations conference against racism and xenophobia took place in Durban in 2001 and marked a turning point in the relations between South Africa’s Jews and Muslims. The notorious Russell Tribunal hate-fest has also taken place twice in South Africa.

South Africa’s ruling party, the ANC, has traditionally favored relationships with the PLO and Arab states since the days of comrade solidarity between Yasser Arafat and the iconic Nelson Mandela. Coupled with rampant governmental corruption, a relatively large percentage of underprivileged and uneducated population and a small but growing influential Muslim population of about 2.7% (1,600,000), South Africa should be considered as a country with strong potential to foster radical Islamic elements.

Egypt designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in December 2013. The designation was reaffirmed by an Egyptian court earlier this month, as was the order to confiscate its assets.

Now, Egypt seems ready to go further by banning the subversive influence of ‘Political Islam,’ the oxymoronic invention of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been adopted by all Islamist Sunni and Shi’a movements.

Today, the Egyptian fact-finding committee that investigated the violence that plagued the country after the ousting of the “Islamist president Mohamed Morsi” issued its report. It accused not only the Muslim Brotherhood of having a “distorted conception” of and “hijacking” democracy, but concluded that all Islamist parties are intolerant and undemocratic and should be banned.

Recognizing the role of the Muslim Brotherhood, which while presenting itself as tolerant, have been preaching violence, the report also established that the 52 churches that were completely or partially destroyed during the violence that ensued after Morsi’s removal “were mounted after fiery speeches by Muslim Brotherhood leaders [who] incited violence against Christians, their churches and property.”

“The lesson we must learn from this experience is that political Islam forces must not be allowed to exercise politics in this country.” Other stability-seeking Middle Eastern countries have been taking actions against the activities and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. Last March, Saudi Arabia designated the organization, which it previously banned, as terrorist. The United Arab Emirates went further with a sweeping designation as terrorist not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but also eighty one of its ideologically affiliated groups and organizations around the world, including Hezbollah and the North American CAIR and Muslim American Society (MAS).

It is beyond bizarre that activists prattle about freeing the world from the “tyranny of oil”, the most cost-efficient and convenient of all energy sources. The phrase makes as much sense as the “tyranny” of physics

Green-minded people hate coal, because of all its carbon pollution, as they call it. They also hate natural gas, especially the fracked variety, partly because it poisons water supplies and all that, but mainly because it’s so cheap and plentiful. Nuclear power? It’s straight from the devil. Ditto hydro power. So of course we must switch to “renewable” energy, that is, wind farms and solar panels.

Global energy analyst and journalist Robert Bryce demolishes such fatuous thinking. He is the author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, an intriguingly cumbersome title for his fifth book on energy.

Bryce was a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne in September. As a cogent and entertaining speaker he is also a class act.

Read his book and marvel that the developed world is now spending countless billions on renewables for no rational reason. Gaining significant (as distinct from token) power from renewables is a pipe-dream. Bryce does the maths, and renewables add up like 2 + 2 = 3. Renewables are not a good basis for policy, as the Germans—the foremost proponents, with a third of the world’s nameplate (peak) solar capacity—are discovering. The German power grid totters towards crisis. Would you believe, 38 per cent of German “renewable energy” now comes from chopping down forests for firewood to burn in otherwise coal-fired power plants, medieval-style.

Bryce says he is agnostic about the global warming debate, and makes his case purely as an energy analyst. He foresees the cost-per-watt of solar panels falling steeply as global production ramps up, but notes that in 2012 solar was meeting only 1/625 of global energy needs. Solar and wind combined produced only 1 per cent of global energy.

Sure. You know what a real call for violence is. “We should have IDs to prevent Voter Fraud” or “ObamaCare is Socialist”.

On Tuesday night, Cornell Brooks, president of the NAACP, appeared on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront to discuss the shooting death of Michael Brown and dismissed calls for violence by a member of Michael Brown’s immediate family as inciting violence.

Burnett played video of Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, telling a crowd of protestors to “burn this bi*** down” after the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson and asked Brooks if “that served as a call for violence?” Rather than condemn Brown’s stepfather’s highly charged rhetoric, the president of the NAACP proclaimed “I don’t think that was a call for violence or it caused violence.”

The NAACP wouldn’t recognize an actual call for violence if it burned down twenty-two buildings, wounded numerous police officers and even torched a church… as long as it was coming from a role model/violent gang banger.

If it’s not a call for violence then “burn this b___h down” must be a call for peace and reconciliation.

In a new video, ISIS threatens to murder Westerners through a wide range of new means, including poisoning of food and drink and hit-and-run attacks. This marks an increase in ambitious threats as ISIS (also known as Islamic State, ISIL, and Daesh) calls on Muslims to wage “jihad in the path of Allah” using easily accessible weapons.

The seven-minute video, entitled, What Are You Waiting For, opens with a group of Francophone ISIS fighters denouncing the West and throwing their French passports into campfire. French is the spoken language in the video, which also contains Arabic and English subtitles. One jihadi known as Abu Osama Al-Faranci, states: “This is a message from your French brothers who have made Hijra, to the Muslims who are still living in the land of Kufr.” In other words, it is an appeal by ISIS fighters who have emigrated to lands controlled by the Islamic State to Muslims living in the land of the infidelity.

Though the fighters in the video mostly speak to Muslims living in France, they also have a broader audience in mind; for instance, Abu Maryam al-Franci addresses “those Muslims in France and elsewhere.”

The jihadis featured in the video implore Muslims to make “Hijra” and emigrate to lands controlled by the Islamic State. But if Muslims do not emigrate, Abu Maryam (holding a machine gun and a machete) reminds them, “Indeed you have been ordered to fight the Kafir [unbeliever/non-Muslim] wherever you find him” and encourages Muslims in the West to attack civilians in their home countries.

The annual White House tradition of sparing the life of a turkey on Thanksgiving by way of a “presidential pardon” may seem peculiar to people who did not grow up in the United States.

It is a gesture that provides a few minutes of comic relief to Americans of all stripes, regardless of political affiliation. This year, U.S. President Barack Obama elicited laughter when he quipped about giving amnesties to two turkeys named Mac and Cheese. This was a veiled reference to his controversial move last week to wave his wand and legalize 5 million undocumented immigrants.

Still, while journalists may have been chuckling, members of Congress, now dominated by Republicans generally appalled at the president’s repeated abuse of his executive powers, were not amused.

As an expat American living in Israel, for whom the issue of illegal aliens in the U.S. is as abstract as celebrating Thanksgiving is distant, I have a different bone to pick (no pun intended) with Obama right now. But it involves Turkey the country, not the bird.

On Thursday, while families across America were cooking yams and pouring cranberry sauce, Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced that it had uncovered an extensive Hamas terror network in Judea and Samaria, and had thwarted a plan to carry out a series of coordinated terrorist operations against Israelis. These operations were to include abductions of Israelis at home and abroad; car-bomb detonations; roadside shootings, and a mass attack on Teddy Stadium, Jerusalem’s 34,000-seat soccer arena.

For this blessing of prevention, all Israelis owe a prayer of thanksgiving.