RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marie Brenner reports on an incendiary wave of anti-Semitism in France and speaks firsthand to one of the hostages from the siege on the Hyper Cacher kosher market.

How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?”

That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.
“Do something! Do you see what is happening here?” the chairman said to a line of police officers watching the demonstration build to a frenzy. “What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away. For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present. (For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story.) France’s endless demonstrations are a mainstay of the republic, a sacred right rooted in the legacy of Voltaire. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. The protest—against Israel’s Gaza policies—had been banned by the government, fearful of violence, following flare-ups in the preceding weeks. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris.

Egypt’s Arab Spring “revolutionary period is over,” lamented Georgetown University Arabic literature professor Elliott Colla on June 25 at the anti-Israel Washington, DC, Jerusalem Fund before about twenty listeners. With stereotypical academic bias, his presentation, “The Poetry of Dissent,” ignored the political dangers of an “Egyptian revolution” celebrated, in his leftist view, for “many, many accomplishments” of popular culture.

Seemingly unconcerned by the possibility of Egypt becoming a sharia state after dictator Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow, Colla focused on literary “documents of a social movement that tried to change a regime but stumbled.” His slides were reminiscent of a college English seminar, examining genres such as “Literary Journalism,” “Literary Memoirs,” and “Graphic Novels” among the “expressive cultures of revolutionary Egypt.”

The president seems intent on giving away the store, and only Congress can stop him.
Will there be a nuclear deal with Iran? Maybe, but more delays look likely. The nuclear talks blew through another deadline on Thursday when Secretary of State John Kerry said the talks “will not be rushed” but also said they “are not open-ended.” According to Reuters, the White House said the talks can continue “as long as there is genuine commitment from Iran and the P5+1 partners to resolve issues.”

The question now is not whether a nuclear deal with Iran will be a good deal, but how bad this agreement will be. Based on the multitude of major U.S. concessions that have already been made, including allowing Iran to continue to enrich uranium, develop advanced centrifuges during an agreement, and keep a plutonium-producing reactor, a bad deal is assured.

Not believing McCarthy when she says EPA won’t go after their ditches.

There is no rest for the wicked, or at risk of being repetitive, an EPA attorney.

Fresh off a spanking from the Supreme Court f [1]or not taking the costs of imposing new, expensive pollution mandates on coal-burning power plants, the EPA’s legal team is being called to defend a change to the Clean Water Act.

The EPA swears it isn’t true, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) claims the way Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats define “navigable waters” under the Clean Water Act, known more officially as the “Waters of the United States” rule, means everything from ditches and dry creek beds to gullies and isolated ponds formed after a big rain could be considered a “water of the United States.”

I am weary of reading (as I did yet again under the byline of Matthew Duss in Tablet Magazine) that Iran is a “rational actor.” Of course it is a rational actor. It is doubly dangerous for being rational, like a bank robber with a brain tumor taking a hostage. It is a dying country whose rational interest lies in desperate gambles. The bones of rational actors lie in heaps along the timeline of Western history. The Entente and the Central Powers of 1914 were rational actors; so were the Germans and Japanese of 1939 and 1941, not to mention Cardinal Richelieu of France, the Count-Duke Olivares, and the Ferdinand of Austria during the Thirty Years’ War. The Athenians of the Peloponnesian War were rational actors. Napoloen was a rational actor. The leaders of the Confederacy during our Civil War wee rational actors. What they have in common is that rationality can produced catastrophic results.

Nuclear Winter Theorists Pull Back

SINCE 1983, scientists have been bitterly divided over whether a nuclear war is likely to result in a catastrophic global chilling. But the five scientists who introduced the term ”nuclear winter” now acknowledge that they overestimated its severity, and their concession appears to have moderated the longstanding debate.

Scientists say the issues involved are as pertinent to human survival as ever, despite the new friendliness of Soviet-American relations. The strategic nuclear arsensals of both nations remain intact, they note, and could come into play if the current peaceful climate gives way to war.

The techniques developed to predict the effects of nuclear war on climate are also applicable to other climatic predictions, including the possibility that increased carbon dioxide in the air is leading to global warming, theorists say. The nuclear winter scenario is also closely related to the theory that dinosaurs became extinct when a giant meteor hit the earth and threw up a global dust cloud that caused catastrophic cooling.

Climate scientists are warning that we may be headed into a period of global cooling. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is – global cooling was predicted in the 1970s to recreate another Ice Age. Of course, it didn’t happen.

The Earth could be headed for a ‘mini ice age’ researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles – and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

The new model of the Sun’s solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun’s 11-year heartbeat.

No American concession ever empties President Obama’s appeasement reservoir or satisfies Iran’s appetite. So on drone the negotiations toward a disastrous deal that would end sanctions against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism while paving its way to a nuclear-weapons arsenal.

In that connection, as Patrick Brennan noted on the Corner Friday, Senator Ben Sasse has penned a letter to the president that makes a compelling case against a key aspect of the contemplated Iran deal.

Specifically, on the critical matter of establishing violations by Iran that would theoretically trigger reinstatement of the sanctions, Senator Sasse objects that Obama is foolishly shifting the burden of persuasion. The deal, he argues, would require the United States to prove Iranian violations rather than forcing Iran to prove it is in compliance.

At the hate festival that is Quds Day in Tehran, calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel are crowd-pleasers.

On Thursday, Western diplomats in Vienna missed another deadline in the years-long Iranian nuclear negotiations. The latest snag is Iran’s demand for immediate sanctions relief and the lifting of a United Nations arms embargo. The next day in Tehran, the regime issued other demands—namely, that the U.S. and Israel cease to exist.

Thousands of regime supporters on Friday marked Quds Day, an annual hate festival established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini. (Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) Braving a stifling heat wave, the Quds Day celebrants burned the American flag and displayed a caricature of what appeared to be King Salman of Saudi Arabia—a U.S. ally and detested Middle East rival—with his head morphing into a Star of David, topped by a Stars and Stripes yarmulke. All accompanied by the holiday tradition of chanting “Death to America!”

The oldest prejudice reappears in attacks on American capitalists.
On a visit last week to a Buenos Aires school, Mrs. Kirchner learned that the children were reading the Bard’s “Romeo and Juliet.” “I said, you have to read ‘The Merchant of Venice’ to understand the vulture funds,” Mrs. Kirchner replied, adding that “usury and bloodsuckers have been immortalized in the greatest literature for centuries.”

Not all the kids may have caught her point, but her allusion to Shylock, the play’s vindictive Jewish anti-hero, would not have been lost on literate Argentines. Nor would they have missed her reference to those “vulture funds,” her term of abuse for Argentina’s holdout creditors, led by Elliott Management’s Paul Singer, who have had the chutzpah to insist on being repaid. Her refusal to do so led to Argentina’s default last year, which hasn’t stopped her from heaping thinly veiled anti-Semitic abuse on Mr. Singer, who happens to be Jewish.