RUTHFULLY YOURS

I decided to move to Israel (make aliyah) when I was 28, and came to live here with my family when I was 30. At the age of 28, I knew zero Hebrew; by the time we made aliyah I had learned just a little from a cassette-tape course. (Yes, there were things called cassette tapes back then.)

Our first residence in Israel was an absorption center in the town of Hadera on the coastal plain. There we had to take an intensive Hebrew course—meaning I immediately started learning this difficult language more seriously. And right away, even with only a few words and phrases at my disposal, I started to feel connected to my new environment in ways I couldn’t have if English had still been the only language residing in my brain.
1. I felt deeply linked to the ancient past.

The more biblical term for where we were, rather than “coastal plain,” is “Sharon plain” (Sha-rone). As in what is possibly the most beautiful Hebrew poem ever written, the biblical Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon, 2:1):

I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.

It was early September when we arrived. The absorption center was on the outskirts of the town, and the “plain” around us was lush and beautiful. And I thought: “This is the Sharon plain. When someone wrote ‘rose of Sharon,’ this is what they meant. Ancient Jews lived here and saw the same things, used the same Hebrew words that I’m now learning.”

It came upon me more and more as I took walks in the nearby park and orchard. Until then—having been in Israel only once for a short time—that distant past had been an abstraction to me. Now I had an almost mystical sense of its nearness. Those people, my ancestors, had really been here.
2. I could really converse with Israelis and find out what their inner worlds are like.

Campuses are becoming the haunts of the very wealthy and the poor, with little regard for any in-between — sort of like California.

Let me explain. Lately lots of strange things have been in the news about college campuses — from the Rolling Stone’s mythography [1] of the University of Virginia fraternities to Lena Dunham’s invented charges [2] of rape against a supposed Oberlin College Republican to courses on “white privilege” to “hands up; don’t shoot” demonstrations protesting the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Tuition and Debt

But there are lots of campus topics that garner little publicity. Take tuition costs. Aggregate student debt is reaching $1 trillion [3] — a result of an insidious relationship between federally guaranteed loans (many of which cost over 5% annually to service) and tuition spikes that habitually exceed the rate of inflation.

As a result, in a logical universe, there would be widespread student protests against the lack of transparency in university budgeting. There would anger at paying Hillary Clinton nearly a third of a million dollars [4] for a boilerplate 30-minute chat. There would be grassroots complaints about the costly epidemic of new administrative positions and federal mandates that have nothing to do with in-class instruction. There would be inquiries about why teaching loads have declined as tuition skyrocketed.

Instead, there is mostly silence on campus. Why? Perhaps the answer reflects the fact that the campus bookends the trajectory of California — in that elite and wealthy students do not really care that much whether their combined tuition, room, and board tab goes from $55,000 a year to $60,000, given their parents’ ample resources. At the other end, poorer and often minority students are more likely to have access to college grants and scholarships. The working classes in between, who often lack familial capital and are not designated as disadvantaged in ethnic or class terms, more often pay the full bill. Do universities count on such dichotomies — that the most influential in terms of race, class, and gender issues are the most likely not to have to pay themselves the spiraling tab?

The details are still sketchy, but this is what is apparently confirmed as of this writing (8PM EST Sunday night): as many as 50 people have been taken hostage in the Lindt Chocolat Café in Sydney, Australia’s central pedestrian mall, Martin Place. Some of the hostages have been forced at gunpoint to hold up the black flag of Islamic jihad against a window of the café.

The flag says in Arabic, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” – the Islamic confession of faith. It will thus be hard to claim this one was workplace violence, but the mainstream media and Western leaders are no doubt already strategizing on ways to do so. Falling quickly into politically correct lockstep and ignoring the jihad flag in the window, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott insisted that “we don’t know the motivation” of the gunmen.

Meanwhile, police have evacuated the area, as well as the Sydney Opera House, where apparently a suspicious package has been found. Abbott issued a statement declaring that while “this is obviously a deeply concerning incident but all Australians should be reassured that our law enforcement and security agencies are well trained and equipped and are responding in a thorough and professional manner.”

That is no doubt true, but this is an unprecedented event in the West. There have been jihad attacks, and hostage situations, but this is the first jihadist hostage event in a Western country since the Islamic State issued this threat in a September video: “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah, the Exalted. This is His promise to us; He is glorified and He does not fail in His promise. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”

The mobs of racist Garner/Brown protesters are being falsely described as peaceful by their PR corps in the media. The reality is ugly and brutal.

NYPD officers were swarmed by protesters in a knock-down, drag-out brawl on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday night that sent two police lieutenants to the hospital.

The president of the NYPD Hispanic Society on Sunday demanded that Mayor de Blasio and the City Council “denounce these disgraceful protests calling for dead police officers.

“Many elected officials are quick to speak out against police officers, but now that we need them to calm our city, where is their press conference on the steps of City Hall?” said the leader, Dennis Gonzalez. “Their silence is deafening. Tweets about non-violence and peaceful protests aren’t good enough.”

Instead Bill de Blasio continued supporting the racist Garner mobs.

De Blasio released a statement Saturday in which he first talked about how “peaceful” city protesters have been.

“The people of New York have provided an example to the world on how to protest, march and express themselves in a peaceful and respectful manner,” the mayor said.

They’re not the “people of New York” and their only example, like De Blasio’s example, is in how to racially divide a city, spread hate and hurt people.

“[The officers] were punched by numerous people,” said Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counter Terrorism John lMiller. “They were kicked in their face and in the head while the group attempted to steal their portable radios and tear away their police identification jackets.”

A shockingly, disturbing video has recently surfaced exposing the true and pernicious face of Palestinian extremism and xenophobia. The video, made available by Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) shows a bearded sheikh giving what appears to be an impromptu sermon on the Jews. (After all, what else is there to talk about?) The venue is the Al-Aqsa Mosque, considered by those who practice the “religion of peace” to be their third holiest site after Mecca and Medina.

The speech itself is filled with gut-wrenching anti-Semitism, the kind that would even make the editors of the New York Times blush. The sheikh describes how the Jews possess the vilest of traits, how they were responsible for killing the “prophets,” how they attempted to assassinate Muhammad, how their time for “slaughter is near,” how they will be slaughtered “without mercy,” and of course there’s the perfunctory, “Jews are apes and pigs” thing.

Interestingly, the speaker doesn’t mention the longing for Palestinian statehood or independence. Instead, he talks of the establishment of the “Islamic Caliphate.” “Oh Allah’” he states, “Hasten the establishment of the State of the Islamic Caliphate,” and further rants, “Oh Allah hasten the pledge of allegiance to the Muslim Caliph.” He spews forth the latter statement three times to chants of “Amen!” from the large, approving crowd congregating around him.

These comments, which would register horror and revulsion in the West (at least in some quarters) are almost banal among Palestinians. In fact, a similar video featuring a different speaker some days earlier at the same venue, conveyed identical sentiment, expressing admiration for the Islamic State and calling for murder of Jews and annihilation of America.

Guttural anti-Semitism is ingrained and interwoven in the fabric of Palestinian society. Despite their minuscule numbers, 78% of Palestinians believe that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars while a whopping 88% believe that Jews control the global media and still more believe that Jews wield too much power in the business world.

Much of the blame for this can be placed squarely on the doorstep of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which subjects the Palestinian population to a steady diet of hate-filled, Judeophobic rhetoric through state-controlled media and educational institutions. It is so well entrenched that the process of deprogramming, if it were ever attempted, would take generations to reverse.

Ready for Hillary, the campaign before the campaign which has churned out some creepy t-shirts and a terrible country song, is $11 million in debt, and Hillary still isn’t ready.

While Hillary was delivering six figure speeches at heavily indebted universities, Ready for Hillary was burning through a giant pile of money trying to stir up Obama level enthusiasm for their uncharismatic candidate by selling fifty dollar champagne glasses emblazoned with a giant H, a Hillary Clinton cat collar and a Hillary Clinton Christmas tree ornament.

Ready for Hillary wasn’t ready to deliver the overpriced crap it was hawking with customers complaining that their items weren’t delivered and that no one was answering their emails. Usually politicians wait until after they get elected to start ripping people off, but Hillary is too broke to wait that long.

Despite advertising a “Hillary for the Holidays” set of Hillary champagne glasses and ornaments, her organization is already $11 million in debt. Apparently not that many people want to scare small children by hanging a Hillary Clinton ornament from their Christmas tree.

Like Ready for Hillary, Hillary isn’t ready. Instead she postponed her campaign until the spring of 2015 after having promised to decide on the first of the year. Back then Hillary was claiming that she would “have to be convinced that I have a very clear vision with an agenda of what I think needs to be done.”

Serious candidates don’t ask someone else to flatter them into believing that they have a clear vision. That’s the opposite of what a clear vision is.

Hillary Clinton spent two decades clearing her way to the White House. If you take her at her word, then she already spent a fortune running for president without ever having a “clear vision” or an agenda of what needs to be done.

Even Hillary isn’t Ready for Hillary.

Round the Bend is a series of tales from the days when Britain ruled India and the Gulf, told with documents newly digitised by the British Library. You can explore the archive yourself.

The Jews may have originated in the Middle East but they were long ago scattered far and wide – to the Gulf, among other places. Few now remain, except in Iran. But a century ago, writes Matthew Teller, there was even a proposal to found a Jewish state at an oasis near Bahrain.

In 1859 Griffith Jenkins, a senior British naval officer in the Gulf, wrote to a subordinate named Hiskal.

Hiskal – or Yehezkel – ben Yosef was a minor official representing British interests in Muscat. And, like his predecessor in the post in the 1840s (a man named Reuben), he was Jewish.

Jews had been living in Muscat since at least 1625. In 1673, according to one traveller, a synagogue was being built, implying permanence. British officer James Wellsted also noted the existence of a Jewish community on a visit in the 1830s.

Jenkins’s letter talks obliquely about the Imam (a Muslim ruler who held sway in Oman’s interior) and the arrival of a man from Persia. He ends by asking Hiskal to explain the matter in private – and then, remarkably, had his letter translated into Hebrew.

“A group of more than 300 hundred [sic; it’s 300, not 30,000] former Obama staffers have written an open letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president of the United States,” reports the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper. These are former staffers from Barack Obama’s campaigns (and their successor organization, Organizing for Action), not his White House, and the letter calls attention to the ostensible parallels with 2008:

We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance.

We worked for him—and against all odds, we won in Iowa.

We organized like no campaign had organized before—and won the Democratic primary.

We built a movement—and the country elected the first-ever African American president.

We know that the improbable is far from impossible.

Unstated but obvious is one more: We beat the inevitable Hillary Clinton.

Beijing abrogates the 1984 treaty it signed with Britain to guarantee the city’s autonomy.

Before Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world, a popular way to glimpse the sealed-off mainland was by peering across the border from Hong Kong. Decades later, that remains a great vantage point. The 75 days of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protest, broken up last week, showed how far Beijing officials go to suppress demands for political accountability.

Protests began when Beijing announced it would not honor its promise of universal suffrage for the people of Hong Kong. The Communist Party declared that the next leader would again be selected by a small group of Beijing appointees, a system that has produced successively less popular Hong Kong chief executives lacking legitimacy. The pepper-spraying of peaceful student demonstrators led 100,000 Hong Kong people to join the protests.

Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. In 1962, 11-year-old Carlos Eire was one of thousands of children airlifted out of Cuba and sent to Florida to escape Fidel Castro’s regime.
News of Fidel’s brush with death brought the news media to my door, literally and figuratively. The journalists were not alone. Even long-lost friends suddenly surfaced, eager to hear what I had to say about this turn of events.
Among those who came knocking, was the New York Times, asking if I would like to write an Op-Ed piece. It was an odd request. Out of all of the things that a Cuban exile might be asked to comment upon, such as the ailing Maximum Leader’s disdain for human rights, or the total ruin of the Cuban economy, I was asked to pass judgement on those fellow countrymen down in Little Havana who were celebrating Fidel’s demise by dancing in the streets. The way the essay was pitched to me could not have been more offensive, or more revealing of deep-seated prejudices. “I can’t help but wonder if this is appropriate,” said the newspaper editor about the dancing in the streets, “since many of them were likely allowed to leave Cuba in the early 60’s with Castro’s blessing.” The ignorance and insensitivity revealed in that pitch was so staggering and appalling–so much in the same league as the Holocaust deniers or the clueless socialites in William Hamilton’s cartoons– that it caught me off guard.
But that was not all. The editor wanted to know what I would say, a priori. My opinion would have to be approved before I would be allowed to voice it..
Given the bigotry already revealed in the editor’s pitch I knew that anything I could say would probably be rejected, but I made the effort anyway, much like a man who is given a chance to duck by a firing squad.
“Yes, “ I replied. “The celebrations in Miami would make a good subject, especially because those who are out on the street are definitely not from the first refugee wave of the 1960’s, as you suggest. The celebrants I’ve seen on television are all genuine children of the revolution, much younger folk who have arrived in the 80’s, 90’s, and the present decade. I can definitely write about the celebrations.”
Once again, the editor pressed me to be more specific about what I would say.