RUTHFULLY YOURS

To the anti-war Left’s chagrin, Chris Kyle is a cultural phenomenon.

Clint Eastwood’s new movie, American Sniper, marks the return of the American war hero.

Heroism on the battlefield had never gone away, of course, far from it (witness the Medals of Honor awarded for acts of extraordinary valor in Iraq and Afghanistan). But the classic war hero is more than just brave or fierce. He is famous and almost universally acclaimed. On top of his battlefield exploits, he is a cultural phenomenon.

That is what American Sniper unquestionably makes of Chris Kyle. The late Navy SEAL sniper had already written a best-selling memoir and was known as “The Legend” within the military for his record number of confirmed kills during four tours in Iraq. The success of the movie, where he is played by Bradley Cooper, also means he will be remembered as a larger-than-life figure. Such is the power of the silver screen.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

I was reminded of this quote while reading about the ongoing diaspora of France’s Jewish community. Though French Prime Minister Manuel Valls says that if 100,000 Jews leave France, the country will be “a failure” and “France will no longer be France,” that once-inconceivable outcome now seems entirely likely.

Following the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris this month, White House spokesman Josh Earnest briefly became an Islamic theologian. At issue was why U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration, unlike the leadership of France, wouldn’t describe the murderers as adherents to “radical Islam.”

Pressed by NPR’s Mara Liasson, Earnest explained to reporters that the terrorists tried to “invoke their own deviant, distorted view of Islam in order to justify” the attacks.

It’s easy to see the absurdity in saying that men who shout “Allahu Akhbar” before they murder Jews, cartoonists and French policeman are not radical Muslims. But Earnest was not freelancing, he was articulating a longstanding U.S. policy, not only for Obama but also his predecessor, George W. Bush. Both administrations have said repeatedly since Sept. 11, 2001, that radical Islam is not Islamic.

Did somebody say ‘trickeration’?

John Roberts was right: of course Obamacare was a tax. And not just a tax, but a massive new welfare program balanced on the backs of the kulak middle class in the guise of “health care reform.” Like all modern Democrat-led expansions of government, it came as a wolf in sheeple’s clothing, a nasty measure passed by stealth with malevolence aforethought. Hello, suckers!

Those Americans who didn’t get health insurance last year could be in for a rude awakening when the IRS asks them to fork over their Obamacare penalty — and it could be a lot more than the $95 many of them may be expecting.

The Affordable Care Act requires those who didn’t have insurance last year and didn’t qualify for one of the exemptions to pay a tax penalty, which was widely cited as $95 the first year. But the $95 is actually a minimum, and middle- and upper-income families will actually end up paying 1 percent of their household income as their penalty. TurboTax, an online tax service, estimated that the average penalty for lacking health insurance in 2014 will be $301.

Sunday a week ago, the French government sponsored a solidarity rally featuring an array of foreign leaders and all domestic political parties joining together in a “sacred union” (a term recalling World War I) against the massacres at Charlie Hebdo magazine and the kosher market.

Make that all the political parties except one — the National Front (NF) headed by Marine Le Pen, ostensibly excluded because it does not subscribe to “republican values.” In reality, it was barred because, uniquely among French political parties, it opposes immigration; and other politicians fear that the NF gains in the aftermath of the massacres. Likewise, the government yesterday forbade a demonstration by the secularist Riposte Laïque organization that called for “Islamists out.”

Had they not died as part of the Charlie Hebdo killers’ final act, I wonder how much publicity the murders of Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, YoavHattab, and François-Michel Saada at a kosher grocery store would have attracted. An Islamic fanatic killed another quartet of Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last spring, and it was a big story for a couple of days, and then faded away. Over the last decade, the Continent seems to have developed a certain psychological ease with the routine murder of Jews. What remains of Jewish communal life in Europe now takes place behind reinforced doors and barbed wire, and the actual extinction of an entire identity group’s presence is discussed as calmly as the long-range weather. Forty-five per cent of British Jews say Jews have no future in Britain, and 58 per cent says Jews have no future in Europe.

Despite administration claims to the contrary, 2014 was the year of failure on the foreign policy front. In every area of the globe chaos or instability reign.

The Middle East is a cauldron of warring factions and theological imperatives. Libya is falling under the sway of radical groups each trying to gain control of Tripoli. In essence, government has ceased to exist. French forces may be the only hope for the restoration of order, but that is not a sustainable solution.

Iraq is struggling to maintain a state that resembles the recent past. With ISIL carving out a segment for itself and the Kurds banging the drums for autonomy, the future is indefinite. A modus vivendi between Shia and Sunni leaders is also unlikely. On Iraq’s border, Syria is in a similar state of dismemberment. Assad holds on to power precariously with overt Russian support and tacit U.S. acceptance, but his base is restricted to an area around Damascus as rebels of various stripes carve up the rest of the country.

The largely ignored war in the Sinai continues unabated with Egyptian forces taking significant casualties. Sinai has become a sanctuary for terrorists who threaten Egyptian stability and Israel’s southern border.

When interviewing a Jewish woman at the unity march in Paris, BBC Reporter Tim Willcox had the temerity to admonish her, “Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.” This was a woman who herself might have been murdered in that very supermarket earlier that day. Clearly, this man lacks sensitivity and benevolence, and could never have visited Israel. He evidently attended the march not as a reporter of events, but as one whose ideology was to challenge its purpose where Jews were concerned.

The march was called and attended by more than 40 world leaders because Muslim terrorists killed 17 people – 13 for what they did (publish a satirical newspaper) and four for what they were, Jewish; Willcox attempted to justify the murder of the latter. His later retraction of the comment and explanation did not evidence an understanding of the Middle East with respect to Islam’s 1400-year history of carnage in the name of their god, conducted with the intent to establish a worldwide Caliphate and Sharia law.

Two weeks into the 2006 Second War in Lebanon, as Israel tried to put a stop to Hezbollah rockets that were pummeling huge swaths of the northern part of the country, then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the region. She had come to tell Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to do his best to eliminate the terrorist threat as swiftly as possible.

During a press conference with Rice in Jerusalem, Olmert said that he was “determined to carry on the fight against Hezbollah.” This undertaking was particularly difficult, due to the fact that the arch-terrorist organization supplied by Iran placed its headquarters and bases in civilian apartment buildings and strategically stashed military materiel under structures such as nurseries and a baby-formula factory.

Sound familiar?

Seems the West will do anything these days to avoid a confrontation with Vladimir Putin.

Oleksander Turchynov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national defense council, told the country’s parliament something startling last week. He said that there were 8,500 Russian regular troops now deployed in eastern Ukraine and that another 52,000 were poised just on the other side of its eastern border.

The figures are dramatic—and so much larger than what has been reported during the months of Russian attempts to destabilize Ukraine, while Vladimir Putin ’s denials of his troops’ presence continue with stubborn ridiculousness. I asked a Western security expert if the numbers sounded plausible.