RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) dedicated part of his statement at today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear deal to the Americans being held in Iran.

Secretary of State John Kerry had said earlier in the hearing that “we are going to continue to press Iran for information about the missing American, about the immediate release of Americans who’ve been unjustly held, and there isn’t a challenge in the entire region that we won’t push back against if Iran is involved in it.”

Regarding the colossal farce of the Tim Hunt affair, about which I wrote previously on this site [1], more remains to be said about the doubling down of Hunt’s dissembling critics and delators. Connie St. Louis [2], his principal and most effective accuser, whose pre-redacted CV has now been rumbled as a document full of misrepresentations and “downright falsehoods [3],” is unrepentant about the snuff job she helped foment. Berating Hunt for sexism and old-boyism while bowdlerizing his text and excerpting only the “problematic” portion of his pre-luncheon toast, she essentially reverse-triggered the larger context of his speech. In this way she tampered with evidence in order to convict her prey.

For this piece of skullduggery, she suffered no qualms of conscience. “I’ve no regrets about breaking a journalistic story,” she boasted.

In fact, her story has nothing to do with journalism as we once knew it. It is a journalism so yellow and speckled it resembles a rancid banana. Of course, if she is referring to contemporary journalism, then she is spot on, for most mainstream reporting in our day is little more than a vast propaganda and indoctrination mill serving the progressivist cause. In a fair milieu, it is not Hunt but St. Louis who should be drummed out of her profession and summarily dismissed from her teaching post. If I were Tim Hunt, I would immediately retain a pitbull lawyer and sue for malfeasance, libel, and defamation of character.

Malaysia is in the midst of a first-class political scandal, thanks in part to reporting in this newspaper that $700 million linked to a state-owned investment fund allegedly was transferred to the personal accounts of Prime Minister Najib Razak. Mr. Najib denies wrongdoing, and neither the original source nor ultimate destination of the money is clear.

Yet the larger scandal in Malaysia is hiding in plain sight. We’re talking about the imprisonment of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who is five months into a nonappealable five-year prison sentence on trumped-up sodomy charges. Nearby we publish an op-ed by Mr. Anwar, written in his jail cell, detailing the Najib government’s broader assault on the civil liberties of all Malaysians.

While Mr. Anwar’s op-ed speaks for itself, it would help if others speak up for him. That goes especially for President Obama, who has long claimed an interest in cultivating the forces of moderation in the Muslim world. Too bad, then, that he refused to meet Mr. Anwar when he visited Malaysia last year, though he had time for a very public round of golf with Mr. Najib in Hawaii a few months later. Mr. Obama’s reticence on behalf of political freedom in the world, from Iran in 2009 to Malaysia today, is one of the mysteries of his Presidency. Out of realpolitik or indifference, he is mute.

As Florida Governor, Jeb Bush conquered what he called “Mount Tallahassee,” and now that he’s running for President he is proposing to do the same to “Mount Washington.” On Monday he offered some initial ideas on how to do it, and some are better than others.

The good news is that he wants to start by reducing the size of the bureaucratic Everest. “You can have a fast-expanding economy or you can have a fast expanding government, but you can’t have both,” he said in a speech at Florida State University.

His best idea would freeze the federal workforce and then reduce it by 10% over four years through attrition. In particular he proposes a “three-out, one-in” rule—one new hire for every three who leave. According to the White House budget office historical tables, that would shrink federal civilian employment by some 210,000 from the 2.114 million full-time equivalent (FTE) positions in the executive branch in 2015. As recently as 2008 there were 1.875 million FTEs.

Internal government review reveals that hundreds of messages contain potentially classified information.

WASHINGTON—An internal government review of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email archive has revealed that hundreds of those messages contain potentially classified information.

Due to concerns about the mishandling of classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s personal email server, the inspectors general for the Department of State and intelligence community have asked the Justice Department to consider a criminal investigation, according to a source familiar with the matter.

A memorandum from both inspectors general viewed by The Wall Street Journal found that an investigation discovered “hundreds of potentially classified emails within the collection” of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Asa Kasher, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, is the co-author of the IDF code of ethics (1994). In 2000 he was awarded the Israel Prize for his contributions to philosophy.

In “Who Censored the Six-Day War?,” his scrupulous investigation of the Israeli film Censored Voices, the historian Martin Kramer has performed an important public service. The film is one of the latest entries in what has become a regular feature of culture and politics in Israel. We are quite often invited to watch a film or a play, read a pamphlet or a column, always made of two ingredients: first, stories about IDF commanders or troops who seemingly acted in an ethically improper or even atrocious manner in their military capacity, during an old war or a recent operation; secondly, claims against the Israeli occupation of the territories beyond the eastern border of Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. The gist of such presentations of alleged stories and political claims is usually the simple demand to jump from the stories, which are presented as facts, to the conclusion, which is presented as a moral obligation. Alas, each of the three parts of the plot—stories, claims, and conclusion—is problematic, ethically or morally, legally or logically.

The horrific Iran nuclear deal is, these days, overshadowing the miracle of the Israeli economy, particularly in the area of high technology. With the exception of the U.S., Israel–a country of a mere 8 million people–leads the world in high tech, an astonishing feat. In this interview Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks about the big, exciting things that are happening in the high-tech powerhouse center emerging in Beersheba–and much else, including why Israeli milk cows are the world’s most productive and how this desert nation solved its water crisis (California, take note).

Steve Forbes: Thank you very much, Prime Minister. We’re meeting here in Beersheba. By all accounts Israel is now one of the top two or three high-tech powers in the world–ahead of the European Union, with its 500 million people. You’ve done this with 8 million people. How? And how do you maintain your leadership with only 8 million?

I have written about the issue of the politicization of immigration and use of deceptive language where immigration is concerned many times. However, these issues are important to contemplate – especially as the campaigns for the 2016 presidential election ramp up. It is important to know where we have been to understand how we have come to be where we are.

Jimmy Carter was the first politician to engage in “Immigration Orwellian Newspeak” by referring to illegal aliens as “Undocumented Immigrants.” Carter intentionally created the misleading perception that all foreign nationals should be given equal standing through misuse of the term “immigrant.”

This is as false as referring to burglars as “residents” of a home they have broken into and devalues the lawful system by which aliens are lawfully admitted into the United States. Simply stated, this is anarchistic. Use of such language also devalues lawful immigrant status as well as United States citizenship.