RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Thursday, as Jerusalem prepared for the Gay Pride Parade by cordoning off main thoroughfares and hanging rainbow flags across the city, 39-year-old Yishai Schlissel was making his way to the capital with mass murder on his mind and a knife in the pocket of his black coat.

In spite of a heavy police presence at the event, Schlissel managed to walk through the throngs, initially undetected. This would not have been so strange, given the large number of people by whom he was surrounded. But Schlissel’s haredi garb, long beard and sidelocks ought to have caused him to stand out like a sore thumb among the colorful, scantily clad crowd.

By the time he caught the attention of law enforcers, however, it was too late: Schlissel had already succeeded in stabbing six people, among them 16-year-old Shira Banki, who died of her wounds on Monday.

From the truncated shots of the actors in the opening scenes, we know we are in the hands of a director who believes that pretentious cinematography is a signifier of deep thought. We have been alerted that Israel, the mise en scene of this movie, is a fractured society comprised of many polarities: military culture vs poetry; Ashkenazi vs Sephardi (the Israeli version of racism); marriage vs divorce; innocence vs perversion – all of which will be played out during the course of the film.

The plot concerns a teacher who becomes enthralled and obsessed with a five year old prodigy in her class. As an aspiring poet, Nira is astounded at the precocity of the child and his intuitive grasp of emotional epiphanies he is far too young to have experienced. He becomes the contrast to her own son who aspires to a military career and to the militaristic attitudes of Israel itself. These are represented by the song of the Macabees, sung at deafening decibels by the children in Nira’s class and by the foul-mouthed lyrics to the equivalent of a color war song sung by the five year old Yoav and his classmate. The boy’s poetry unleashed in Nira the passion that has been missing from her own marriage, freeing her from its constraints into an adulterous liaison with her own poetry teacher and a loose-haired wild dance that’s a stand-in for a ménage a trois. So many symbols for us to contemplate!

While Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama do their best to paper over the brutality of the Iranian regime and force through a nuclear agreement, Iran’s religious leader has another issue on his mind: The destruction of Israel.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has published a new book called “Palestine,” a 416-page screed against the Jewish state. A blurb on the back cover credits Khamenei as “The flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”
A friend sent me a copy from Iran, the only place the book is currently available, though an Arabic translation is promised soon.
Obama administration officials likely hope that no American even hears about it.
‘Reclaiming Muslim lands’

I had intended to take the same attitude to Cecil the Lion as every US newspaper takes to Cecile the lyin’ Planned Parenthood honcho and her factory outlets of slightly used baby parts. The mawkish sob-sister drivel of the one story versus the utter indifference to the second is too dismal to contemplate. Never mind the inability of the legions of traumatized Americans, in the midst of their tears, even to get the deceased lion’s name right (for reasons we’ll discuss below), that’s no reason not to turn on the most evil dentist since Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man.

After all the complete twaddle in the Anglo-American press about the psycho dentist offing the most beloved lion in Africa, it is somewhat heartening to turn to the comparatively sane coverage in the Zimbabwean media. Kennedy Mavhumashava in The Bulawayo Chronicle:

I find the western outrage over the demise of Cecil, which is only a lion to may of us, suspicious. This was a simple hunt and Zimbabwe wants more of them to generate revenue for our tourism sector.

It is not an overstatement that almost 99.99 percent of Zimbabweans didn’t know about this animal until Monday. Now we have just learnt, thanks to the British media, that we had Africa’s most famous lion all along, an icon!

…But the Western media’s obsession with Cecil gets us thinking. Why only him? What’s going on?

Two years after directing the Environmental Protection Agency to come up with federal carbon limits on power plants, President Obama today announced his new climate change plan with a goal that “by 2030, carbon pollution from our power plants will be 32 percent lower than it was a decade ago.”

In his East Room remarks, Obama rattled off a litany of climate change issues, including “shrinking icecaps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart.”

“By definition, I don’t deal with issues if they’re easy to solve, because somebody else has already solved them,” he said. “…But this is one of those rare issues, because of its magnitude, because of its scope, that if we don’t get it right, we may not be able to reverse and we may not be able to adapt sufficiently. There is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change.”

HERE IS JUST THE A- LIST…GO TO THE SITE FOR THE ALSO RANS

14. MARCO RUBIO: These two guys back-to-back were the stars of the evening. Rubio’s strong positions on foreign policy are well known, but it was on a subject for which he is often criticized that he shined on Monday night. He had by far the most detailed and cogent position on solving the eternal immigration problem, which he broke down into three phases. 1. Complete border control that would have to be proven to the American public before anything else goes forward. That would include electronic verification for visas, a bigger problem in many ways than the border. 2. Modernize legal immigration by not basing it any longer on family relationship but on actual contributions to our society. 3. Once this is established, offer work permits (not citizenship) to those illegals who remain and are not criminals. Makes sense to me. Grade: A-.

13. TED CRUZ: Cruz was on his game Monday night, crisp, intelligent, to the point in his opposition to what he he calls the Washington Cartel. He also made clear his opposition to the Iran deal in strong terms, calling Obama the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism for releasing over $100 billion to the Iranians to finance Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and who knows who else. They say Cruz has lost the most from the Trump ascendancy. Maybe he’ll come back. Grade: A-.

Rarely do American Presidents display the raw willfulness that President Obama did Monday in rolling out his plan to reorganize the economy in the name of climate change. Without a vote in Congress or even much public debate, Mr. Obama is using his last 18 months to dictate U.S. energy choices for the next 20 or 30 years. This abuse of power is regulation without representation.

The so-called Clean Power Plan commands states to cut carbon emissions by 32% (from 2005 levels) by 2030. This final mandate is 9% steeper than the draft the Environmental Protection Agency issued in June 2014. The damage to growth, consumer incomes and U.S. competitiveness will be immense—assuming the rule isn’t tossed by the courts or rescinded by the next Administration.

President Obama says his nuclear deal with Iran depends on verification, not trust. But what if Iran has a very different interpretation of what verification entails than does Mr. Obama?

Take Ali Akar Velayati, a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who appeared on Al-Jazeera on July 31 and was asked about U.N. inspections of Iran’s military sites. Here’s how he replied, according to the Memri translation service:

“Regardless of how the P5+1 countries interpret the nuclear agreement, their entry into our military sites is absolutely forbidden. The entry of any foreigner, including IAEA inspectors or any other inspector, to the sensitive military sites of the Islamic Republic is forbidden, no matter what.”

The democratic world won the Cold War but has underestimated the tenacity of the new threats to freedom.
For the democracies to triumph in the long battle against Soviet communism enormous commitment was necessary. Both geopolitical and ideological, the struggle called for military investment, patience and resolve. As crucially, this challenge required a reserve of imagination for understanding and responding to the Soviet challenge with the ideas, media instruments and technology that were part of the democratic world’s natural competitive advantage.

In the aftermath of this exacting project, the United States and other established democracies exhaled, believing in the post-Cold War period that the world had indelibly changed and the forces of illiberalism were defeated.

Given the extent of the investment and duration of the struggle, the impulse to relax was understandable. With hindsight, however, a harsh reality has become clear: The democratic West won the Cold War but in the process lost its political imagination.

Today, a set of anti-democratic forces that we have found to be beyond the realm of our imagination have gathered momentum and are seeking to reshape the world order.
Russian President Vladimir Putin; an Islamic State militant; Chinese President Xi Jinping. ENLARGE

The headline of this column is lifted from a 1981 essay by the late Paul Fussell, the cultural critic and war memoirist. In 1945 Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had fought his way through Europe only to learn that he would soon be shipped to the Pacific to take part in Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled to begin in November 1945.

Then the atom bomb intervened. Japan would not surrender after Hiroshima, but it did after Nagasaki.

I brought Fussell’s essay with me on my flight to Hiroshima and was stopped by this: “When we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live.”