RUTHFULLY YOURS

Instead of demanding what each side cannot do, we must ask what each side can do—and then make the most of it.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders sit at a table and sign a treaty that ends a century of conflict. Israel pledges to withdraw from most of the West Bank, to uproot dozens of settlements and to redivide Jerusalem. The Palestinians forfeit their demands for regaining Haifa and Jaffa and relocating millions of Palestinians to Israel. The right of the Jewish people to sovereignty in its homeland is recognized. Thereafter, Israel and Palestine will live side-by-side in prosperity, stability and peace.

That is what policy makers have sought for more than 20 years, without success. The reasons are simple. A final-status agreement would require Israelis to cede land that is vital to their security and which many regard as sacred; to evict 100,000 citizens from their homes; and to give up half of the country’s capital. A final-status agreement would also mean creating a Palestinian state ruled by a corrupt, unelected regime that, in the current regional chaos, is likely to fall to radicals.

Such sacrifices and risks could be justified only if the Palestinians were genuinely willing to end the conflict. They would have to renounce all further claims to Israeli territory and a “right of return,” and to recognize a legitimate Jewish state on their border. But no Palestinian leader has ever agreed to those terms.

By insisting on concessions that neither side can reasonably make, the peace process has not only failed but brought us further from peace.

Britons have anxiously followed for nearly a week the hunt for three missing teenage schoolgirls who aren’t “missing” at all. The trio appear to have evaded efforts to track them down as they journeyed to Syria to join Islamic State.

Authorities say the three girls lied to their families about their plans for the day on Feb. 17 to buy time to fly from London’s Gatwick Airport to Istanbul. From there they are believed to have traveled into Syria. One of the three allegedly was in contact via social media with Aqsa Mahmood, a 20-year-old Scottish woman who also became an Islamic State bride after she left Glasgow in 2013. The three apparently intend to do the same.

This has prompted tearful pleas from their families for them to return, and a promise from Prime Minister David Cameron to help. A debate is afoot on what rules should be in place to prevent unaccompanied minors from boarding planes under such circumstances, and how else government might intervene.

White House aides are whispering that President Obama ’s veto of the Keystone XL pipeline authorization bill signals a new phase of his Presidency, and we suppose they’re right. He’ll finish out his tenure as a Howard Hughes-like penthouse recluse who is ever more withdrawn from the political and economic center.

The legislation to build the Keystone XL pipeline that Mr. Obama rejected Tuesday enjoys a broad bipartisan consensus, including support from nine Senate Democrats and 28 in the House. Business, labor unions, most consumers, and ally and trading partner Canada are also in favor of this $8 billion infrastructure project, which will create jobs, strengthen North American energy security and increase prosperity.

In three weeks, on March 17, Israelis will go to the polls to elect the next Knesset. As has been the case since the 1980s, large numbers of people at this stage of the process consider themselves or claim to be “undecided” about which slip of paper they will actually place in the envelope in the voting booth.

If one were to base his assessment of the results of the current campaign on man-in-the-street interviews, water-cooler conversations and cafe banter, he would reach one of two conclusions: either that the Green Leaf party (whose platform is the legalization of marijuana) is on the verge of forming the next government, or that blank ballots will be submitted en masse.

Though it is true that a protest vote among predominantly young, secular residents of Tel Aviv in 2006 led to an astonishing victory for the Pensioners’ Party (it garnered a whopping seven seats, when it initially had no chance of passing the electoral threshold), it is generally understood that such gestures never even help further the narrow interests of the group ostensibly targeted, let alone those of anyone else.

Indeed, one thing that Israelis have learned is that no matter what platform a party puts forth, it ends up coming down on one side or the other of the defense divide (i.e., the “Palestinian” question), in spite of everyone’s assertion that elections are about the economy. The public certainly cares about its ability to make a living, and politicians always vie for votes on that score by promising to allocate greater portions of the budget to education, health and welfare. But because handouts only hinder growth, the plight of the middle and lower classes does not improve.

In late 1990, a year after the Revolution of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples of the newly self-liberated countries, who had suffered under the Soviet jackboot since the endgame of World War II, could look back on a year of solid achievement while looking forward to a more prosperous future. Poland, which had led the way in making “1989,” was taking hard but necessary economic decisions that would eventually lead to years of growth and a prosperity unimaginable under Communism. Czechoslovakia, under the tutelage of President Vaclav Havel, whose luminous writings qualified him as the Poet Laureate of “1989,” had welcomed Pope John Paul II to Prague and was preparing in a civilized and democratic way to let his country divide itself into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Germany had reunified on October 3, 1990, despite the nervousness of Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and other Western European leaders. Not without sacrifice, the Baltic states were beginning to disentangle themselves from the Soviet Union, into which they had been forcibly incorporated during World War II, thus setting in motion the implosion of the USSR that would be finalized in August 1991.

Every time Obama “contextualizes,” Putin and ISIS grow bolder. Not too long ago, most Russians were reportedly unhappy with Vladimir Putin. His crackdown on freedom and his kleptocratic economy were hardly popular. Most likely, given their druthers, Russians were not all that interested in Putin’s risky and costly dream of gobbling up former Soviet Republics to create some grander version of Russia’s mess. But now? As the ruble crashes, as Russia’s oil income dives, and as sanctions start biting the man in the street, Putin, in counterintuitive fashion, is apparently more popular than ever.
Why? Because he has become an easy mechanism for ordinary Russians to vent frustration and anger over what they perceive as a too-powerful and bullying West. In a fairer world, Western decadence and self-indulgence would not have earned Americans and Western Europeans singular wealth, leisure, influence, and an overall good life — at least not more so than an Orthodox, politically proud, and historically illustrious Mother Russia.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the founder of the AHA Foundation and the author of Infidel, Nomad, and the forthcoming Heretic: The Case for a Muslim Reformation, to be published next spring.

ISIS is recruiting young Muslims from around the globe to Jihad, and the White House apparently doesn’t understand why

Recent days have witnessed a number of attempts to grapple valiantly with the threat posed by ISIS and radical Islam. Graeme Wood in The Atlantic and Damon Linker in The Week are among those who are now confronting the theological arguments that inspire radical Islamic fighters and groups such as ISIS.

How can the Obama Administration miss the obvious? Part of the answer lies in the groups “partnering” with, or advising, the White House on these issues. Groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council or the Islamic Society of North America insist that there should be no more focus at the Summit on radical Islam than on any other violent movements, even as radical Islamic movements continue to expand their influence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria, and elsewhere.

Penny Starr of CNSNews.com has reported that the second day of this past week’s White House summit on “Countering Violent Extremism,” was initiated by an unidentified “Muslim prayer,” exclusively, while “no other religious text was presented during the portion of the event that was open to the press.” Imam Sheikh Sa’ad Musse Roble, president of the World Peace Organization in Minneapolis, MN., recited a “verse from the Koran”, in Arabic, only, followed by a translation of his words by Imam Abdisalam Adam of the Islamic Civil Society of America. Adam stated,

In translation those verses of the Koran mean ‘Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption in the land, it’s as if he has slain mankind entirely, and whoever saves one life, it’s as if he has saved mankind entirely.”

…..And over to the right, a knot of Muslims, the men in board shorts and bare chests, the solitary woman in Koranic swimming attire – ankle-length trousers, hijab and some species of voluminous shawl that hangs limp and wet atop yet even more bolts of fabrics. Poor thing, you think, having earlier watched as she struggled from the water in that broad acreage of soggy drapery.

But they seem happy enough, gabbling and laughing, the woman included. If there is a cause for a concern, it hangs over everyone on the beach, regardless of origin and ethnicity. The afternoon’s blue skies are vanishing behind a mattress of low, dark cloud rolling in from the Bay. You can feel a storm brewing and that may well mean one of Melbourne’s infamously sudden drops in temperature, with the pelting rain and lightning that so often go with them.

Indeed, there is a distant rumble, but it could not be thunder because it comes out of the north and grows louder with every second: a Qantas jumbo is climbing out of Tullamarine. The plane is now overhead and banking to the east, setting its course for Godknowswhere. There is not yet need to fret about gathering up the towels and baskets in a sudden, wind-whipped barrage of stinging sand.

Just like everyone else, the Middle Eastern clan notices the low-flying jetliner, and one of the bearded men says something that makes his companions smile.

Then, as the plane cuts its arc above the water, he raises both arms as if to mime the shooting of a rifle, sights the jetliner with a pair of lined-up upraised thumbs and squeezes an imaginary trigger.

There are more smiles as the red tail and its flying kangaroo diminish in the distance. Just another day in multicultural Melbourne.

A President who refuses to acknowledge that Islamist terror has anything to do with Islam is a poor prospect to resist Russian ambitions in the Baltic, should Moscow next target those nations in its campaign to re-claim the former Soviet empire. As Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia understand, they are on their own.
Two weeks from now, March 11, 2015, will mark 25 years since Lithuania declared its independence from the crumbling Soviet Empire, the “evil empire”, as President Ronald Reagan so eloquently and accurately described it. Similar declarations followed from Latvia and Estonia. This milestone should be an occasion for celebration. Instead, there is growing fear about the future.

My Lithuanian-born wife is in frequent contact with family and friends in her former homeland. All have expressed fear about Russian intentions. My Brother’s-in-Law daughter is now in her third year of medicine. In her spare time she has written poetry and short stories. She has read the classics in English. The youngest son is shortly to leave school. Both were born after independence. Will they be condemned to face a loss of personal freedom in the future? I do not pretend to be a disinterested observer.

During our visit to Russia back in 2012, I noted in my travel diary the Russian ambivalence towards its Soviet past. At the Moscow River Port on July 5, 2012, just before our departure on our River Cruise to St Petersburg, I wrote: “Amused to see a cruise vessel named Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Cheka). This reflects a typical Russian ambivalence about its past. Could you imagine a German cruise vessel on the Rhine being called the Heinrich Himmler?”