RUTHFULLY YOURS

Top economic aide: With right policies, Israel avoided Greece’s fate Just a decade ago, says Professor Eugene Kandel, the Israeli and Greek economies were on a par. Not anymore.

Is there a lesson for Israel in the Greek tragedy playing out in Athens? There is, according to outgoing National Economic Council Chairman Prof. Eugene Kandel.

“Long-term fiscal credibility is a critical component for any economy,” Kandel told ministers at Sunday’s cabinet meeting. Over the past decade especially, he said, Israel has been a model of fiscal stability, as it has cut its public sector, reduced debt, and — most importantly — encouraged foreign investments.

A splashy new documentary promises to expose the Israeli military’s censorship of atrocities committed in the 1967 war. What it exposes is its creators’ agenda.

On January 26 of this year, the New York Times ran a prominent article by its Jerusalem correspondent Jodi Rudoren about a new Israeli documentary then premiering at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. According to Rudoren’s lengthy report, the film, Censored Voices, was an attention-grabbing exposé about the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, also known as the Six-Day War, as told in conversations with soldiers conducted immediately after the war itself.

We have entered a new era of scientific breakthroughs and technological applications that will change life as we know it. Accelerated technological development is transforming our civilization. The pace of innovation is growing so rapidly that it is becoming exponential as each year passes.

Futurist Dr. Michio Kaku characterizes this blazing technological shift as moving from the “age of discovery” to the “age of mastery.”

This next decade beckons many new technological discoveries and applications. This includes genetic engineering and regeneration of body parts, new cures for diseases, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, nano-technologies, robotics, ultra-high speed trains and self-driving cars, renewable energies, sustainable agriculture, big data, 3-D Printing, digital security, quantum computing, mobility, and paper thin flexible personal computers.

The Iran nuclear talks have missed the June 30 deadline imposed by US President Barack Obama for a final agreement, but the US negotiators are hoping a deal can be struck by July 7. This is an important date because under the Corker-Cardin bill (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015), if an agreement is sent to Congress by July 9, the House and Senate will have only 30 days to review it. If submitted after July 9, however, legislators will have 60 days.

We believe the Obama administration has made unacceptable concessions to Iran in the nuclear talks and, as a result, that any agreement produced by these talks will be a very bad deal.

But what would a “good” deal with Iran look like? To answer this question, the Center for Security Policy, in conjunction with many experts, came up with the following nine red lines, which we have nicknamed “The National Security Nine,” for an acceptable nuclear agreement with Iran. These red lines are:

The deconstruction of literature is not so much the purpose of Critical Literary Studies as it is the deconstruction of your mind.

There is a left-wing “tradition,” decades old now and imported from Europe, of cyclists amassing at key city intersections and just sitting there for the purpose of immobilizing and snarling motor traffic. It’s called “Critical Mass.” There are chapters of this club of thugs in many major American cities, just as there are still chapters of Occupy Wall Street extant. OWL simply wanted to stage a massive “sit-down” demonstration to bring Wall Street to a screeching halt, which it didn’t, and wasn’t interested in cycling anywhere, but was motivated by the same malign purpose.

Pastor James McConnell’s “Satanic Islam” rhetoric may not be everyone’s cup of tea. But should he be facing prison for it? Conservative leaders’ ridiculous rhetoric that Islam State isn’t Islamic is surely more damaging to the future of the West

At 78 years of age, Pastor James McConnell is being treated for both cancer and diabetes. He faces six months in a Belfast prison for a sermon delivered to his church in May last year.

As the fate of indigenous Christians across Syria and Iraq played on the minds of his flock the Evangelical minister took to his lectern in Northern Ireland to address the exterminations being carried out by the soon to be declared Islamic State.

“Today we see powerful evidence,” he began, “that more and more Muslims are putting the Quran’s hatred of Jews and Christians alike into practice.” As always, McConnell’s remarks at the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle were also streamed online.

He then delivered the sort of rhetoric, for which Ulster churchmen are renowned. “Islam is heathen,” he declared. “Islam is Satanic. Islam is a doctrine spawned in Hell.”

Within a month, McConnell was being questioned under the provisions of the Communications Act (2003) for causing a video deemed “grossly offensive” to be put on the internet.

It is axiomatic to suggest that if the UN issues a report it will be anti-Israel. Last week a report was issued drawing a false moral equivalence between a terror group – Hamas – and a democracy in which Arabs are represented in the Knesset – Israel.

This libel that any Israeli response to violence, any retaliation for unprovoked rocket attacks, is reprehensible belongs in the book of shame. Nevertheless, the U.N is shameless. The report blames Israel for war crimes despite a statement from military leaders from four continents that “Israel not only met a reasonable standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard” during last summer’s war.

It was clear from the outset that Hamas was the aggressor having launched thousands of rockets into Israel before there was any military response. But that is merely part of the story.

When the complete history is written of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the dishonesty and duplicity of the Obama White House will be an inescapable fact. As we celebrate Independence Day, Americans ought to be disturbed about the ethical quality of the men and women in high office. The signers of the Declaration of Independence would surely be aghast at the unethical, lawless leadership in Washington, D.C.

However, I’d like to think the Founders would be happy with the vigilance and persistence of Judicial Watch in holding our government leaders accountable for their misdeeds.

To that end, this week we released new State Department documents showing that Hillary Clinton and the State Department’s response to the Benghazi attack was immediately determined by top Obama White House officials, particularly Ben Rhodes, then-White House deputy strategic communications adviser, and Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council. The new documents were forced from the State Department under court order in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

STANLEY KURTZ: What is the purpose of an election campaign? Supposedly, elections allow voters to decide who and how they want to run the country. The candidates explain their positions, debate the merits of the issues and then the voters choose.

You might remember a little thing called the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Well, nothing like that is happening these days. Let’s review. In 2008, Americans elected a president who advertised himself as a post-partisan unifier, a fellow who was famous for saying that there weren’t red states or blue states, only the United States. And a lot of Americans, even some Republicans, believed him. Yet, the man they elected turned out to be the most partisan, the most intentionally polarizing and the most leftist president in the history of the United States.

The people in this audience, I would wager, weren’t fooled by any of this, but, on the whole, the people of the United States were fooled. And the question now is are we, as a people, about to be fooled again?

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington in July 2010, he met with representatives of the National Jewish Democratic Council and the Republican Jewish Coalition at Blair House. After the two delegations quietly entered the dimly lit brocaded dining room, they sat down at a large elliptical table, the Democrats to Netanyahu’s left and the Republicans to his right. But the calm was shattered as the Democrats and Republicans began shouting at each other and pounding the table until they were told to cool it. “The chastised representatives fell silent and finally acknowledged Netanyahu’s presence, but their near brawl demonstrated that Washington’s political schizophrenia also split American Jews” — or so the former Israeli ambassador to the United States and current Knesset member Michael B. Oren reports in his remarkably frank new memoir, “Ally.”