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June 2017

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America Needs a Post-ISIS Strategy The U.S. should recognize Iran and Russia as adversaries—and that Iraq isn’t a friend.By John Bolton

By on June 29th, 2017

The headlines out of Syria are eye-catching: There are signs the Assad government may be planning another chemical attack. American pilots have struck forces threatening our allies and shot down a Syrian plane and Iranian-made drones. The probability of direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia has risen. Yet the coverage of these incidents and the tactical responses that have been suggested obscure the broader story: The slow-moving campaign against Islamic State is finally nearing its conclusion—yet major, long-range strategic issues remain unresolved.

The real issue isn’t tactical. It is instead the lack of American strategic thinking about the Middle East after Islamic State. Its defeat will leave a regional political vacuum that must be filled somehow. Instead of reflexively repeating President Obama’s errors, the Trump administration should undertake an “agonizing reappraisal,” in the style of John Foster Dulles, to avoid squandering the victory on the ground.

First, the U.S. ought to abandon or substantially reduce its military support for Iraq’s current government. Despite retaining a tripartite veneer of Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs, the capital is dominated by Shiites loyal to Iran. Today Iraq resembles Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, as the Soviet anaconda tightened its hold. Extending Baghdad’s political and military control into areas retaken from ISIS simply advances Tehran’s power. This cannot be in America’s interest.

Iraq’s Kurds have de facto independence and are on the verge of declaring it de jure. They fight ISIS to facilitate the creation of a greater Kurdistan. Nonetheless, the Kurds, especially in Syria and Turkey, are hardly monolithic. Not all see the U.S. favorably. In Syria, Kurdish forces fighting ISIS are linked to the Marxist PKK in Turkey. They pose a real threat to Turkey’s territorial integrity, even if it may seem less troubling now that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans have turned so profoundly contrary to the secular, Western-oriented vision of Kemal Atatürk.

Second, the U.S. should press Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf monarchies for more troops and material assistance in fighting ISIS. America has carried too much of the burden for too long in trying to forge Syria’s opposition into an effective force. Yet even today the opposition could charitably be called “diverse.” It includes undeniably terrorist elements that are often hard to distinguish from the “moderates” the U.S. supports. Getting fresh contributions from Arab allies would rebalance the opposition, which is especially critical if the U.S. turns away, as it should, from reliance on the Iraqi forces dominated by Tehran.

Third, the Trump administration must take a clear-eyed view of Russia’s intervention. The Syrian mixing bowl is where confrontation between American and Russian forces looms. Why is Russia active in this conflict? Because it is aiding its allies: Syria’s President Bashar Assad and Iran’s ayatollahs. Undeniably, Russia is on the wrong side. But Mr. Obama, blind to reality, believed Washington and Moscow shared a common interest in easing the Assad regime out of power. The Trump administration’s new thinking should be oriented toward a clear objective: pushing back these Iranian and Russian gains.

Start with Iran. Tehran is trying to cement an arc of control from its own territory, through Baghdad-controlled Iraq and Mr. Assad’s Syria, to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. This would set the stage for the region’s next potential conflict: Iran’s Shiite coalition versus a Saudi-led Sunni alliance.

The U.S.-led coalition, enhanced as suggested above, needs to thwart Iran’s ambitions as ISIS falls. Securing increased forces and financial backing from the regional Arab governments is essential. Their stakes are as high as ours—despite the contretemps between Qatar and Saudi Arabia (and others)—but their participation has lagged. The U.S. has mistakenly filled the gap with Iraqi government forces and Shiite militias. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

THE MEDIA WILL DO ANYTHING TO BASH TRUMP- AND NOW THEY’RE HURTING: MICHAEL GOODWIN

By on June 29th, 2017

It was many years ago, but the memory lingers of the first time I was embarrassed to be a journalist. It was a steamy summer afternoon and reporters and photographers were shoehorned into a small Manhattan apartment for a civic group’s announcement.

As we waited, a photographer wearing a “Press” card in his battered fedora picked up a bud vase from a table, pulled out the rose and drank the water in one gulp.

The hostess was horrified and shrieked, “What are you doing?” He looked at her as if she were nuts and said simply, “It’s hot in here and I’m thirsty.”

I laugh now at the outlandishness of the photographer’s behavior, but at the time I cringed and wondered: Do I really want to be a journalist and end up like that?

America should be so lucky now. Bad manners are the least of it.

In the sixth month of Donald Trump’s presidency, we are witnessing an unprecedented meltdown of much of the media. Standards have been tossed overboard in a frenzy to bring down the president.

Trump, like all presidents, deserves coverage that is skeptical and tough, but also fair. That’s not what he’s getting.

What started as bias against him has become a cancer that is consuming the best and brightest. In rough biblical justice, media attempts to destroy the president are boomeranging and leaving their reputations in tatters.

He accuses them of publishing fake news, and they respond with such blind hatred that they end up publishing fake news. That’ll show him.

CNN is suffering an especially bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, even trying to make a virtue of its hostility to the president. In doing so, executives conveniently confuse animus with professional skepticism, and cite growing audiences as proof of their good judgment.

The bottom line matters, and there is certainly an audience for hating Trump all the time. But facts and fairness separate major news organizations from any other business looking to make a buck, and a commitment to them creates credibility and public trust.

That’s how CNN sold itself for years — boring but trustworthy. Now it’s boring and untrustworthy.

For all its bravado, the network might be having doubts about its course. Its apology for and retraction of a story connecting a Trump associate to a Russia investment fund, and the resignation of three journalists involved, suggest the network fears it has lost control of its own agenda. It also issued a special edict barring all Russia coverage without approval from top bosses.
SEE ALSO
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story
CNN faced $100M lawsuit over botched Russia story

That’s hardly a solution to a problem that starts at the top. The secret recording of a CNN producer by James O’Keefe’s

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vocational Ed, Reborn Making high-quality career training central to American schooling Steven Malanga

By on June 29th, 2017

At a dinner for Silicon Valley executives in early 2011, President Barack Obama asked Apple CEO Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing back to America. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” the typically blunt Apple cofounder told the president. Examining Jobs’s claim, the New York Times looked at Apple’s vast Chinese operations and found that workers there not only worked for less than Americans did; more of them were skilled. To oversee production and guide some 200,000 assembly-line workers, Apple, for instance, needed 8,700 industrial engineers—positions that required more than a high school diploma but less than a full college degree. While abundant in China, these kinds of employees are harder to find in the United States. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” an unnamed Apple executive told the Times.

That’s a refrain that more and more American business executives are uttering these days. Even as politicians argue over how to create or keep “good jobs” in the U.S., a recent National Federation of Independent Businesses survey reported that the percentage of small businesses saying that they get no or few qualified applicants for available jobs has hit a 17-year high. Studies estimate that hundreds of thousands of positions in manufacturing firms went unfilled, even during the post-financial-crisis downturn and subsequent weak recovery, because of the lack of skilled workers. “Open manufacturing jobs are at an all-time high,” the former CEO of Siemens USA, the industrial giant, observed in December.

Much of the problem, say business leaders and employment experts, is an educational failure. Career and technical training in the U.S. hasn’t evolved to keep up with the transformation of the modern economy—with many schools even slashing funding for vocational education. Worse, parents, guidance counselors, and even politicians keep pushing students to enter four-year college programs that provide no clear paths to employment. Meantime, jobs in traditional blue-collar trades—from manufacturing to automobile repair—have grown more sophisticated and demanding. A huge gap between job seekers’ skills and employers’ needs has resulted.

The good news is that some visionary businesses, educators, and nonprofit funders are intensifying efforts to revamp and upgrade career education—twenty-first-century vocational education—in the United States. The obstacles to such efforts are many, including school officials’ reluctance to partner with industry and lingering prejudices against vocational schooling. But for the rising number of students participating in programs that tailor education to career goals—programs that emphasize work-related experience and teach to the high standards necessary for modern jobs—the payoff has been impressive. Now the challenge is to build on those successes to ignite a broader cultural change that makes high-quality career training central to American education.

Congress may have had good intentions in 1917 when it passed the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act to promote vocational training in agriculture, industry, and trades. But the law, which required any student receiving trade-skill instruction with federal funds to spend at least half of his time in vocational training, tended to cut off vocational training from public school education. Career education eventually developed into something that teachers and guidance counselors encouraged students of low academic achievement to pursue. Though the robust post–World War II American economy provided many of these students with a solid middle-income living, vocational school became stigmatized. That stigmatization only intensified as American industrial jobs, battered by global competition and automation, started to disappear during the early 1980s, making four-year college seem for many the surest route to better jobs and higher earnings. Policymakers reinforced the message with subsidized student loans and other initiatives that sought to make college readily available to all.

Unfortunately, many students wound up enrolling in four-year colleges who weren’t suited for it, and the results haven’t been pretty. These days, only 55 percent of college students graduate within six years, leaving many with no degree and dismal job prospects. Meanwhile, student-loan debt has swelled to a monstrous $1.3 trillion.

Many of the students would have been better off receiving some kind of vocational training. Both as candidate and now as president, Donald Trump has tapped into widespread blue-collar discontent with his call to overhaul free-trade agreements to keep jobs from heading overseas. The reality, though, is that plenty of good-paying jobs are already available for properly trained workers. These positions typically fall into a category known as middle-skilled, meaning that they require some postsecondary education—for instance, a certified apprenticeship or a two-year associate’s degree from a community college—but not necessarily four years of university. These jobs are found in health care, information technology, manufacturing, and construction, among other fields. According to a 2013 Brookings Institution study, more than half of all jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) do not demand four-year degrees—and they pay an average annual salary above $50,000. Further, while high-paying STEM jobs requiring advanced degrees do cluster in a few major urban centers, plentiful middle-skilled jobs—ranging from cybersecurity specialist and web designer to robotics engineer and industrial-engineer technician—are dispersed throughout most American metropolitan areas, making them within geographical reach of most Americans.

Yet many of those jobs go unfilled. A 2011 survey by the consulting firm Deloitte and the Advanced Manufacturing Institute found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers—at a time when unemployment nationwide was above 8 percent. (By one estimate, some 1.5 million manufacturing jobs that America has added since the 2008 recession have been for workers with more than a high school education.) Even though the U.S. is graduating some 3 million high school students every year, nearly half of whom will enter the job market instead of continuing school, an estimated 1 million middle-skilled jobs in all fields remain unfilled.

A 2011 survey found that more than eight out of ten manufacturing firms reported a shortage of high-skilled workers.

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Neil Gorsuch’s Good Start In his short time on the Supreme Court, the new justice has already found his voice.John O. McGinnis

By on June 29th, 2017

Neil Gorsuch has spent only a fraction of a term as a Supreme Court justice, but few justices have had a more promising start. He has shown himself a careful textualist in reading statutes, a serious originalist in interpreting the Constitution, and an adherent of judicial restraint—and he has done all this with an engaging style that will allow him to reach over the heads of Court watchers and critics to the people. He seems an ideal schoolmaster for the American republic—a jurist whose every opinion is a lucid primer on the civics of our governance.

His first majority opinion in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA was a superb exercise in meticulous analysis of statutory text. The question at hand was whether a law designed to regulate debt collectors applied to a bank that had a bought a debt and tried to collect on it. By its terms, the statute covers those “who regularly collect debts . . . owed or due . . . another.” The bank argued that it was collecting the debt of its own, not of another, since it had purchased the debt. The debtor seized on the past tense of the term “owed” and contended that the debt was another’s because it had been previously “owed” to the party from which the bank bought it. Gorsuch showed the debtor’s argument did not follow from ordinary language because the past tense is often used to describe the present state of a thing, as when one refers to “burnt toast or a fallen branch.” Moreover, he observed that the word “due” was obviously meant only to cover debt that was currently due. Thus, Gorsuch held that to rule for the debtor “we would have to suppose Congress set two words cheek by jowl in the same phrase but meant them to speak to entirely different periods of time. All without leaving any clue.”

His first concurrence, written in Maslenjak v. United States, objected to the majority opinion in the case because it went further than necessary. Here, the issue was whether a statute that made it a crime to lie during a naturalization proceeding covered only lies that caused the government to grant citizenship. Gorsuch agreed with the majority that causation was required, and thus that the lower court must be reversed because of a jury instruction that did not require such proof. But he complained that the Court’s majority then proceeded to craft instructions on the contours of the jury instruction on causation. Gorsuch correctly argued that the better course was to permit lower courts to decide on these details after briefing on the precise questions. The essence of judicial restraint is judicial modesty: the Supreme Court should decide no more than is strictly necessary because it is likely to make mistakes on matters that are not directly before it.

Gorsuch also signaled that he will be an originalist and a strong ally of Justice Clarence Thomas. In Weaver v. Massachusetts, in which a majority of the Court assumed that the right to a public trial extends to jury selection, Gorsuch joined Thomas in demanding that that assumption be tested against the original understanding in a future case. In dissent from the Court’s refusal in Peruta v. California to take a case on the Second Amendment, Gorsuch again joined Thomas in arguing that the lower court had ignored the history surrounding the amendment, which shows that the right to bear arms includes the right to carry them publicly.

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U.S. Syria Policy: Incoherent, Reckless By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on June 29th, 2017

The United States is in danger of descending into the Syrian quagmire. There are clear signs of mission creep devoid of logic or strategic rationale. It is not too late yet to step away from the brink. This would require swift action by President Donald Trump to rein in the war party before it takes America into yet another unwinnable and costly Middle Eastern war. And yet the President is said to have displayed relative indifference to the subject of Syria as the crisis escalated, focusing his attention instead on various domestic issues.

On June 27, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tweeted that “[a]ny further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.” A day earlier the White House issued an ominous warning to Syria’s president against launching another chemical assault (“A heavy price will be paid”), and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presented a similar message to Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

Such statements provide direct inducement to terrorists to stage false-flag attacks which would be used to invite large-scale U.S. intervention. For example, over 80 people died in a suspected chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun last April 4. The U.S. immediately blamed the incident on government forces, with no proof, and used it as pretext to launch the missile strike on the morning of 7 April against the Shayrat Airbase controlled by the Syrian government. This was the first unilateral military action by the United States targeting Syrian government forces since the civil war started in 2011. President Trump declared shortly thereafter that it is “in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

Cui bono? The Syrian government has no motive to use chemical weapons against civilians. It is winning the war, contrary to most expectations. The jihadist opposition, by contrast, is desperate for America to come to its rescue. Early prospects looked bright after former President Barack Obama recklessly drew a “red line” in 2012. He declared that he would intervene if “we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The predictable result was a massive sarin nerve gas attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August 2013. As Seymour Hersh and others have subsequently established on the basis of documents obtained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Nusra Front—the Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda—had access to the nerve agent and carried out the attack.

To his credit Obama refrained from ordering an all-out attack on Assad’s forces. His then-Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was able to dissuade the President—according to a recently published book by the German Middle East expert Michael Lüders—after a British military laboratory established that the gas traces found at Ghouta were of a different chemical composition to the type Syrian army had. Furthermore, the attack took place while UN weapons inspectors were in Syria, on Assad’s invitation. He is an energetic, even ruthless man, but he is not stupid or insane.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cyberwarfare Is On by Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on June 29th, 2017

The latest and most damaging attacks, which have supposedly originated in Ukraine, are said to be using a variant of the code “Eternal Blue,” which reportedly was stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA). This malware was allegedly designed to take control over or destroy computers running an older Microsoft Windows program without leaving any known detectable trace. Demand for a ransom of $300 in Bitcoins appears on the screen, but paying the ransom, as done with last month’s WannaCry attack does not guarantee the computer hard-drive was not corrupted. The special features of this cyber-weapon allow it to access all your information, including whatever has been stored on a cloud.

The ongoing attack, dubbed Petya or GoldenEye (apparently named after Ian Fleming’s inspired 1995 James Bond film of the same name), has shut down the computers of large domestic and international corporations around the world, including the second largest pharma company in the U.S., Merck, Russia’s largest oil company, Rosneft, Ukraine’s State power distribution company, airports, transportation companies, banks and hospitals.

GoldenEye is also wrecking havoc in the operations of the world’s biggest cargo and freight carrier company, the Danish Maersk Line, which operates 590 containers from 374 offices in around the world. “Last year Maersk shipped approximately 12 million containers around the globe, making 46,000 port calls in 343 ports in 121 countries.” Delays in arrival and departure of Maersk container ships are also disrupting ground transportation and have already upset delivery of products. The longer the computers are down, the greater the confusion and damages.

The more attacks, the more advice from cyber security companies could be found online – if you can turn on your computer. The more attacks, the larger the budgets allocated to future attacks. But as we are witnessing, again and again, the majority of cybersecurity advisors seem to be lagging behind, unable to prevent the next attack.

Golan Ben-Oni, the CIO at IDT, the New Jersey-based international telecommunication company seems to have been the first to identify the footprints of GoldeEye, the current cyber-weapon last April. “The World isn’t ready” for this kind of cyber attack, Mr. Ben-Oni warned in the New York Times. “Time is burning…This is really a war,” he said. And five days after the paper run his story, the world was hit with “GoldenEye.” Alas, the prevailing attitude, especially in the U.S. seems to reject the notion of preparing for the unknown.

The damage and cost of recovering from attacks, even less destructive the GoldenEye, are impossible to measure, if only because there are so many accumulative unknown and hidden elements that are difficult to track.

Ian Fleming, the former British naval intelligence officer, realized early on that the capability to launch modern warfare is not limited to nations, but that well-funded rogue individuals or groups have the potential to launch devastating attacks on whichever target they choose, the kind his hero, Bond, succeeded defeating.

Today’s cyber warfare, as Fleming predicted seven decades ago, is not limited to nations. Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean hackers sometimes compete with and sometimes are joined by global criminal and terrorist groups. All these perpetrators are sometimes assisted by rogue insiders who are willing to sell out their nation’s or employer’s secrets.

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When the humor died David Grossman’s award-winning novel fails on many levels and underscores how the left has forgotten how to laugh: David Goldman

By on June 28th, 2017

Laughter is the antidote for self-pity, but self-pity is poison to humor. Once the Left shifted its attention from social progress to support for self-pity, it was lost to humor. The Left now is so humorless that we make self-referential jokes about its lack of humor, for example: “How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?” “One – and it’s not funny.”“Saturday Night Live” would not dare to re-do Eddie Murphy’s “Black History Minute” sketches of a generation ago. The greatest comic talent of his generation broke into the big time with send-ups of black cultural warriors at Saturday Night Live, prosperity-gospel preachers in “Coming to America,” and street hustlers in “Trading Places.” Murphy, sadly, stopped making us laugh 20 years ago. It isn’t just Murphy. Even the potty-mouthed scriptwriters at “Southpark” would think twice about repeating their send-up of transsexuality in the celebrated “Transpecies” episode.

There are still some laughs in standup, wrung at great risk from unsuspecting audiences — as when Louis C.K. says that abortion is no different than a bowel movement, unless, of course, it’s murdering a baby — it has to be one or the other. But this is the painful laughter of existential anguish, not light-hearted laughter at ordinary silliness. Once we decide to wear our silliness as a badge of identity and proclaim, “Silly Lives Matter!,” humor dies. We are like the man with a sore throat who takes laxatives so that he will be too afraid to cough —except that we are too afraid to laugh.

These glum thoughts came to mind as I attempted to read David Grossman’s celebrated but utterly humorless novel about an Israeli stand-up comedian, A Horse Walks Into a Bar. (The bartender says, “Why the long face?) Grossman is an icon of the Israeli left, a peace activist whose political views seep out between the lines of his novels. He has also lived through Israel’s national distress. His son was killed in the last moments of the 2006 Lebanon War.

Despite the prestigious Man Booker award, I found Horse dreadful. Its action transpires on the stage of a nightclub in the coastal town of Netanya, where an aging stand-up comedian turns his act into a heart-rending confessional. The device is promising, the execution execrable. The bathos of the final self-revelation might have worked in contrast to something funny at the beginning. But the jokes aren’t funny; they are simply smutty, or nasty. Here’s an extract from the stand-up routine:

There’s an Arab walking down the street next to two settlers in Hebron. We’ll call him Little Ahmed.” The whistles and stomping die down. A few smiles here and there. “All of a sudden they hear an army loudspeaker announcing curfew for Arabs starting in five minutes. The settler takes his rifle off his shoulder and puts a bullet through Little Ahmed’s head. The other one is a wee bit surprised: ‘Holy crap, my holy brother, why’d you do that?’ Holy Brother looks at him and goes, ‘I know where he lives, there’s no way he was gonna make it home in time.’ ”

That’s an ancient joke, told about Russian sentries, British soldiers inNorthern Ireland, the military government of Ethiopia, and so forth; it wasn’t that funny to begin with and does Grossman poor service in his dotage. Perhaps there should be a rule that prospective novelists first have to serve an apprenticeship as comedy writers.

More mawkish still is Grossman’s attempt to introduce the subject of God in the Holocaust. His comedian complains that the nightclub’s management didn’t bother to put up posters about his appearance:

“F—–s didn’t even stick a bill on a tree trunk. Saving your pennies, eh, Yoav? God bless you, you’re a good man. Picasso the lost Rottweiler got more screen time than I did on the utility poles around here. I checked, I went past every single pole in the industrial zone. Respect, Picasso, you kicked ass, and I wouldn’t be in any hurry to come home if I were you. Take it from me, the best way to be appreciated somewhere is to not be there, you get me? Wasn’t that the idea behind God’s whole Holocaust initiative? Isn’t that really what’s behind the whole concept of death?” The audience is swept along with him.

I doubt any audience, let alone an Israeli one, would be “swept along with” this heavy-handed, pedantic attempt to blend less-than-amusing comedy with the theological issues of God’s presence in the death camps. Perhaps the jury for the Man Booker Award found this sort of thing deep; more likely, they felt an affinity for Grossman’s self-pity. I didn’t quite finish the book. Dorothy Parker’s encomium came to mind: “This is a novel that should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” I am very sorry that Grossman’s protagonist had a traumatized childhood, but it really is more than I wish to know.

Most of the other jokes in Grossman’s stand-up routine are quite as unfunny, but cannot be quoted in a family newspaper. Not one of them is characteristically Jewish. Jewish humor about horrific situations has a different function entirely: It displaces the listener’s vantage point away from the blunt impact of the horror. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s book on the subject is highly recommended. Holocaust humor is a case in point.

For example (and I paraphrase Telushkin): During the Polish government’s anti-Zionist campaign of the late 1960s, when the Communist regime hounded Jews out of government jobs, Cohen is walking through the winter streets of Warsaw, cold and hungry. He meets an old acquaintance, Silverstein, who is wearing a fur coat and smoking a Cohiba. “Silverstein,” exclaims Cohen, “How do you manage in such awful times?” His friend replies, “Remember that Polish couple that took me in during the Holocaust and saved me? I’m blackmailing them!” The bitter humor helps the listener look at his predicament from the outside in.

There was a time when leftists knew how to laugh. Dashiell Hammett, creator of the modern detective novel as well as a lifelong Communist, wrote in “Red Harvest” a tale of internecine slaughter among gangsters in a Montana mining down that Andre Malraux characterized as “Grand Guignol.” Bertolt Brecht, a Communist from his youth and a pillar of the postwar East German regime, wrote one of the funniest and nastiest works of the 20th century, “The Threepenny Opera.” That was when the Left still upheld a standard of the New Man by which humanity was to be redeemed — even it meant killing very large numbers of undesirables, as in Hammett, or “bashing man on the head until he’s good,” as in Brecht’s “Song of the Unattainability of Human Striving.”

Today’s left, by contrast, occupies itself with sheltering the fragile identities of “marginalized” peoples, which excludes the possibility of laughing at them. The left used to say with Voltaire, “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Now it says, “If a marginalized personal disagrees with you, I will defend toyour death zhe’s right not to hear it.” Zhe, of course, is a gender-neutral pronoun introduced by the Newspeak censors of the totalitarian left.

Underneath the shell of every Social Justice Warrior who tries to fight Islamophobia by defending female genital mutilation while fighting misogyny by requiring written rules of sexual engagement at universities, there is a very frightened and lonely being. This being nurses a fragile and ephemeral sense of identity, often complicated by some degree of what is now called “gender fluidity.” The left defends marginalized groups as they wallow in their own self-pity because individual progressives like to wallow in their own personal self-pity. That is no laughing matter and probably explains why David Grossman’s novel about a comedian has plenty of self-pity but no humor at all.

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Health-Care Histrionics on the Left Before Trump’s election, Democrats’ rhetoric on health care was moderate. Now they’ve gone ballistic. By Alexandra DeSanctis

By on June 28th, 2017

If we are to believe the latest news reports, congressional Republicans are out to murder Americans, ripping life-saving medication from their hands and forcibly dragging them from health-care clinics by the thousand. Setting aside the fairly obvious fact that the GOP reform bill will not, in fact, kill millions, one wonders why the Left’s semblance of measured rhetoric on health care has vanished so quickly.

The recent histrionics from Democratic politicians, pundits, and even many journalists stand in stark contrast to the tone of public conversation about health-care reform before Donald Trump’s election. As recently as last fall, commentators on both the left and the right seemed to agree that the Affordable Care Act needed further work.

To be sure, Democrats at every level of government remained adamant that the few shortcomings of Obamacare were a necessary part of the equalizing process to provide health insurance for low-income Americans and minorities. But at the same time, most on the left named those shortcomings (however reluctantly) and acknowledged the need for improvement.

Even the Democrats’ own presidential nominee said as much. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton admitted that “premiums have gotten too high” and vowed to “fix” Obamacare. And while Clinton’s idea of “fixing” Obamacare would have looked much different from, say, Ted Cruz’s, she didn’t embrace the far-left-wing solution of single-payer health care, either.

A Huffington Post article from early 2016 divulged some of President Obama’s own proposed health-care reforms, noting, “Even the guy who signed it knows the Affordable Care Act has problems.” And last fall, several Democratic senators stretched magnanimous hands across the aisle, urging their Republican colleagues to work with them for the sake of improving the Obamacare markets.

“There are things we can do and need to do to address restoring competition in these exchanges, and my hope is when we’re through the elections and past the elections, we’ll do those,” said senator Tom Carper (D., Del.) last September.

“You know, I think the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning has been a roller coaster,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy (Conn.) said around the same time. Senator Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.) agreed: “I think it’s important to be vigilant, because like any complex area of policy, it’s going to require some changes.”

But after Trump’s surprise victory in November, the tenor of health-care-reform dialogue underwent a rapid transformation. Today’s Left — including these previously fair-minded Democratic senators — seems to have completely forgotten their earlier admissions that Obamacare needs some work.

Instead, pundits and politicians alike have settled on a tone akin to total panic. The American Health Care Act that passed the House this spring, and the recently proposed draft bill written by GOP leadership in the Senate, are surely not the type of reforms that Democrats had in mind. But neither of those bills by any means represents a full repeal-and-replace effort, and both at least attempt to address the skyrocketing costs and plummeting options that have plagued the Obamacare exchanges.

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What Might be Missing in the Muslim World? by Denis MacEoin

By on June 28th, 2017

Recently, Chinese, Japanese and other educators have found that rote learning and endless drills produce high achievers without creativity, originality, or the ability to think for themselves. Western academic standards of rationality and objectivity have been behind most of the West’s achievements.

“The campus has three mosques with a fourth one planned, but no bookstore. No Pakistani university, including QAU, allowed Abdus Salam to set foot on its campus, although he had received the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his role in formulating the standard model of particle physics.” — Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, commenting on Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, the second-best university among the 57 Muslim states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The very thought that “Islamic science” has to be different from “Western science” suggests the need for a radically different way of thinking. Scientific method is scientific method and rationality is rationality, regardless of the religion practiced by individual scientists.

In April this year, the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Shaykh ‘Ali Gomaa, told an interviewer what he meant as a flat statement of fact: that there are no female heart surgeons, as such work required strength and other capabilities that no woman possesses. He put it this way:

“You may have noticed that there is not a single female heart surgeon in the world… It’s amazing. It’s peculiar. Why do you think that there are none? Because it requires great physical effort — beyond what a woman is capable of. That’s in general. Along comes a woman who challenges this, and she succeeds in becoming a surgeon. But she is one woman among several million male surgeons.”

Now even a child could have carried out a simple Google search and realized that there are countless female surgeons and many female heart surgeons. It would not have taken long to find, for example, the US Association of Women Surgeons, which includes heart surgeons — and that would have settled his hash. But apparently deep-seated, pre-formed judgements about women’s abilities prevented Gomaa from using whatever powers of reasoning and intelligence he may possess.

Sadly, there often seems a profound absence of scientific probing within the Muslim world.

It seems reasonable to assume that levels of intelligence are pretty well the same around the world, regardless of race, gender, or religious affiliation. As human beings, we share the same brainpower, just as we share all other physical functions. Mercifully, earlier views of racial inequality have in most places been replaced by a more fact-based understanding of human characteristics. Today, theories put forward in the last two centuries of a supposed “racial supremacy” of white people have been happily discarded. In democratic societies, white supremacists are universally loathed.

In the OECD’s 2015 PISA science results, seven out of the top ten countries, based on achievements at school level, were in the Far East — including Japan and China, with Korea at eleven. The United States was number 25. In mathematics, the results were even more striking: the top seven countries ranged from Singapore to Korea, with the United States at 39, well below most European nations. While such results show that Asian students are indeed intelligent, there is a price to pay for those outstanding results. Students put in long school days and long school years, and live regimented lives. Recently, Chinese, Japanese and other educators have found that rote learning and endless drills produce high achievers without creativity, originality, or the ability to think for themselves. Often, as we shall see, rote learning in the Middle East seems to lead to poor educational outcomes.[1]

For all that, we are all aware that different nations, different cultures and different religions achieve varied and even conflicting levels of intellectual achievement. The Western democracies, including Israel, have for some time now been the highest achievers in fields such as science, technology, medicine, information technology, astronomy and the exploration of space, as well as in modern academic disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, critical history, economics, analytical politics, statistics, and unbiased religious studies, among others. Western academic standards of rationality and objectivity have been behind most of those achievements. Sadly, many scholars in Western countries, not least the US, have abandoned even a semblance of neutrality on and off campus, following a deep politicization of many humanities subjects, above all the Middle East and related studies.

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Violence against Women: Some Inconvenient Data for the Corrupt UN by Burak Bekdil

By on June 28th, 2017

The last (worst) rankings of the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, from 128th to 144th, are without exception overwhelmingly Muslim countries, including Turkey at the 130th place.

A 2016 study by Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry revealed that no fewer than 86% of Turkish women have suffered physical or psychological violence at the hands of their partners or family.

So, tell us, Ms. Simonovic: Do Turkish men beat and sometimes kill their wives because of Israeli occupation? Is there “a clear link” between Turkey’s rising numbers indicating violence against women and “Israel’s prolonged occupation?”

The United Nations panels lovingly practice hypocrisy all the time. In 2016, a UN debate revolved around the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which voted to blame Israel for Palestinian domestic violence. This year’s show was hardly different in the content of nonsense. The executive director of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, asked Dubravka Simonovic, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, at a session on June 12: “Ms. Simonovic, in other words, what you are saying is as follows: ‘When Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault.'”

At first glance it sounds like dark humor, but it is not. Not just one but two reports presented before the UNHRC by Simonovic argue that Israel is to blame for Palestinian violence against women, through “a clear linkage between the prolonged occupation and violence”.

Where, Neuer asked Simonovic, is the data? There is data, but not the kind that Simonovic would prefer to believe exists.

According to the Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum, there is not a single overwhelmingly Muslim nation in the best 50 scoring list of countries. In contrast, the last (worst) rankings of the index, from 128th to 144th, are without exception overwhelmingly Muslim countries, including Turkey at the 130th place. Turkey’s case is important to note, as the increasing supremacy of Islamist politics in daily life in the country has boosted patriarchal behavior and worsened gender equality since 2002, when President (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power. In other words Turkey, the 17th biggest economy in the world, is the 15th-last country in terms of gender equality.

The United Nations Population Fund grimly observed in a report:

“… women and girls are still exposed to violence, being abused, trafficked, their access to education and political participation is refused and face with many other human rights violations … The fact of violence against women as a concept emerged through gender inequality is widespread in Turkey”.

A 2013 Hurriyet Daily News survey found that 34% of Turkish men think violence against women is “occasionally necessary,” while 28% say violence can be used to discipline women; a combined 62% approval of violence against women.

In 2014, Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry reported that its domestic violence hotline received over 100,000 calls, and estimated that the number of unreported cases is three to five times that number.

A 2016 study by the same ministry revealed that no fewer than 86% of Turkish women have suffered physical or psychological violence at the hands of their partners or family. According to the ministry’s findings, physical violence is the most common form of abuse, as 70% of women reported they were physically assaulted.

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