RUTHFULLY YOURS

That marvel of American self-government—the separation of powers—is once again frustrating President Obama ’s habit of suspending statutes that conflict with his political goals. This time a federal judge in Texas has rebuked and blocked his attempt to rewrite immigration law—potentially rewiring the debate in Washington.

Judge Andrew Hanen issued a preliminary injunction late Monday against Mr. Obama’s order that awards quasi-legal status and work permits to some five million illegal immigrants. His meticulous 123-page ruling is a vindication of the 26 states that brought the challenge and, more significantly, for the rule of law.

Last November the Department of Homeland Security published memos instructing immigration enforcers to disregard federal laws that require deportation of the undocumented and place strict limits on who may work in the U.S. The White House and DHS claim this “deferred action” is nothing more than routine prosecutorial discretion, as if the department is merely conceding that its officers cannot hunt down and deport the millions of illegals in the country.

Obama’s temporizing has been his foreign-policy trademark, from Iran and Syria to Libya and Ukraine.

With the supposed cease-fire in eastern Ukraine a mirage, the White House can soon be expected to return to its public pondering of whether to supply Kiev’s military with lethal aid to fend off the Russian-backed insurgency. If President Obama finally does decide to send antitank weapons and other hardware the Ukrainians have pleaded for, it will be only the latest example of the administration’s too-little-too-late temporizing.

Indecisiveness is the predominant characteristic of how Mr. Obama executes U.S. national-security policy. Undoubtedly there are other influences: ideological blinders; mistrust of America’s presence in the world; inadequate interest, knowledge, focus and resolve. But in implementing his policies, good or bad, the president has shown that equivocating is what he does best.

Note: Adam Andrzejewski is the chairman of American Transparency and the founder of OpenTheBooks.com. He is the author of the federal oversight report, Federal Transfer- Farm Subsidies in Urban Areas.

There’s an old saying, “When the law’s an ass, somebody has to kick it.”

With tens of millions of dollars in federal farm subsidies flowing into urban areas – where there are no farms – Congress empowered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to more-clearly define the word “farmer.”

With a new definition coming soon, many wealthy urban residents just might be booted off of their substantial federal subsidy. It couldn’t happen fast enough.

Last year, our organization, American Transparency at OpenTheBooks.com, issued our Federal Transfer Report on farm subsidies. We studied three urban areas where there are no farms: New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. We found they were awash in federal farm subsidies.

I HAVE A PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA
RICHARD D. LAMM

I HAVE A SECRET PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA. IF YOU BELIEVE, AS MANY DO, THAT AMERICA IS TOO SMUG, TOO WHITE BREAD, TOO SELF-SATISFIED, TOO RICH, LETS DESTROY AMERICA. IT IS NOT THAT HARD TO DO. HISTORY SHOWS THAT NATIONS ARE MORE FRAGILE THAN THEIR CITIZENS THINK. NO NATION IN HISTORY HAS SURVIVED THE RAVAGES OF TIME. ARNOLD TOYNBEE OBSERVED THAT ALL GREAT CIVILIZATIONS RISE AND THEY ALL FALL, AND THAT “AN AUTOPSY OF HISTORY WOULD SHOW THAT ALL GREAT NATIONS COMMIT SUICIDE.” HERE IS MY PLAN:

I. WE MUST FIRST MAKE AMERICA A BILINGUAL-BICULTURAL COUNTRY. HISTORY SHOWS, IN MY OPINION, THAT NO NATION CAN SURVIVE THE TENSION, CONFLICT, AND ANTAGONISM OF TWO COMPETING LANGUAGES AND CULTURES. IT IS A BLESSING FOR AN INDIVIDUAL TO BE BILINGUAL; IT IS A CURSE FOR A SOCIETY TO BE BILINGUAL. ONE SCHOLAR, SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, PUT IT THIS WAY:

THE HISTORIES OF BILINGUAL AND BICULTURAL SOCIETIES THAT DO NOT ASSIMILATE ARE HISTORIES OF TURMOIL, TENSION, AND TRAGEDY. CANADA, BELGIUM, MALAYSIA, LEBANON-ALL FACE CRISES OF NATIONAL EXISTENCE IN WHICH MINORITIES PRESS FOR AUTONOMY, IF NOT INDEPENDENCE. PAKISTAN AND CYPRUS HAVE DIVIDED. NIGERIA SUPPRESSED AN ETHNIC REBELLION. FRANCE FACES DIFFICULTIES WITH ITS BASQUES, BRETONS, AND CORSICANS.
II. I WOULD THEN INVENT “MULTICULTURALISM” AND ENCOURAGE IMMIGRANTS TO MAINTAIN THEIR OWN CULTURE. I WOULD MAKE IT AN ARTICLE OF BELIEF THAT ALL CULTURES ARE EQUAL: THAT THERE ARE NO CULTURAL DIFFERENCES THAT ARE IMPORTANT. I WOULD DECLARE IT AN ARTICLE OF FAITH THAT THE BLACK AND HISPANIC DROPOUT RATE IS ONLY DUE TO PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION BY THE MAJORITY. EVERY OTHER EXPLANATION IS OUT-OF-BOUNDS.

EL BUREIJ, Gaza Strip — It was not much of an escape.

Moments after Ibrahim al-Awawda climbed over the nine-foot fence separating the Bureij refugee camp on Gaza’s eastern edge from Israel, he was surrounded by six Israeli soldiers. They arrested him, interrogated him and, after he spent a month in two Israeli prisons, sent him back to the poverty, death and destruction in Gaza that had led him to flee.

“I knew they would capture me,” said Ibrahim, 15, whose father was killed in an Israeli strike in 2002 and who has since lived through three wars between Israel and Gaza militants, including last summer’s bloody 50-day battle. “The war shook me,” he added. “I told myself I may find a better life. They served me good food, but later, they threw me back to Gaza.”

A Green and Pleasant Land

Long-awaited winter rains, plus my recent trip to the Arava in southern Israel are the inspiration for this week’s blog. The Arava region in Israel’s Negev “desert” now produces 60% of Israel’s exports of food crops, right alongside massive fields of solar panels. It is a microcosm of Israel’s advanced agricultural technologies that combine with its cleantech innovations to help generate a green and sustainable planet.

My journey south centered around Kibbutz Ketura, just 50km north of Eilat, which hosts the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. It also contains a 5MegaWatt solar field, with self-cleaning robots, built by Arava Power, which is now constructing a 40MW field just across the road. It has a factory growing special algae that makes Ketura the world’s leading source of the natural anti-oxidant astaxanthin.

Two innovative joint research projects have just been approved, involving scientists at MIT and at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. You can probably guess the goals of “Self-Sustained Agriculture Based on Marginal Water”, but you may have more trouble with “Identification of Epigenetic Quantitative Trait Loci Associated with Tomato Seed Germination”! Before we leave the Negev, Israel’s Brenmiller Energy has just announced that it will establish a 10MW solar power station in Dimona, capable of generating electricity from solar energy for an average of 20 hours a day.

Anti-Semitism will always be with us, but it ebbs and flows. And there are Jews who help it along.

In a previous column I promised to come up with the exact date when journalism went to war against Israel. It’s important to get this straight in order to find out what went wrong – what went wrong so far as the epidemic of anti-Semitism now sweeping the world and journalism’s role for this outbreak.

If we could stamp a date to it, or a name, maybe we can figure out where we failed. Was it something we did?

Or something they did over which we had no control?

The draft war resolution President Obama sent to congress last week begins with the statement describing our enemy as “…the terrorist organization that has referred to itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and various other names…”

That characterization implies that the Islamic State has somehow mislabeled itself. And we know which part the president questions: he doesn’t believe the Islamic State is Islamic at all.

If you read Obama’s “National Security Strategy,” released earlier this month, the only statement about Islam you will find is the denial that Islam has any relationship to what used to be called the “Global War on Terror.” The new “strategy” — to label it as such is to deny the meaning of the word – says only that “We reject the lie that America and its allies are at war with Islam.”

That’s true as far as it goes. But who is at war with us?

The Islamist attacks in Copenhagen on Saturday were all but expected. The Danish police report claiming the 22 years old Danish born Muslim, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, was “a Lone Wolf.”

He may have been the only shooter, but he was not alone. And he was not a wolf, nor was he “self radicalized.” He was a sheep inspired by repeated Islamist propaganda and incitement for jihad, targeting those who “offend” their prophet Mohammad, and the Jews.

“Cursing or mocking the Prophet is an act of apostasy, as all scholars concur, whether it is done seriously or in jest. Anyone who does this, Muslim or infidel, must be killed,
even if he repents” [Emphasis added],” instructed Saudi Imam Issa Assiri in his televised sermon that was posted on his Facebook page (translated by MEMRI) in the aftermath of the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket.

Concern over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, and the danger it poses to the survival of the nation should be common to all shades of political opinion in Israel.

Iran has exploited… turmoil to pursue positions of power within other countries beyond the control of national authorities, such as in Lebanon and Iraq, and while developing a nuclear program of potentially global consequence… Nuclear talks with Iran began as an international effort, buttressed by six UN resolutions, to deny Iran the capability to develop a military nuclear option. They are now an essentially bilateral negotiation over the scope of that capability… The impact of this approach will be to move from preventing proliferation to managing it
– Henry Kissinger, before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, January 29, 2015

Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy
– Henry Kissinger

These citations from the doyen of American strategic diplomacy – one from a statement delivered last month, the other, a remark made decades ago – capture the essence of the brouhaha that has erupted over the invitation extended to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by Speaker of the US House of Representatives John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress on March 3.

The first illustrates the substantive disagreement over the emerging accord with Tehran and its nuclear program; the other exposes the underlying reason for the political disagreement in Israel over the invitation – and which, in turn, has sparked parallel political disagreement in the US.

Not a Netanyahu apologist

Regular readers of this column will know that I am not an uncritical Netanyahu apologist. I have on numerous occasions condemned his policy decisions when I have thought them flawed and/or unfounded. On the other hand, I have defended him vigorously against ad hominem attacks by political opponents or by the pathologically antagonistic mainstream media.

However, on the issue of his acceptance of Boehner’s invitation to present Israel’s perception of the Iranian nuclear issue to the representatives of the American people, there should be no room for equivocation.