RUTHFULLY YOURS

In recent days, a small fixture of Middle East ceasefire monitoring disintegrated, with scarcely anyone noticing. The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), the multinational force that had monitored the Israeli/Syrian ceasefire lines since 1974, disappeared as though it had never existed. Yet, in the view of Secretary of State John Kerry, an Israeli/Palestinian peace settlement should include entrusting Israel’s security in the strategically vital Jordan Valley to international peacekeepers.

UNDOF’s fate discloses why Kerry’s idea is foolhardy. Two weeks ago, the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front seized the strategic Quneitra border crossing from UNDOF, sending a contingent of Filipino peacekeepers scrambling for safety to Israeli lines. The Nusra Front also took 45 Fijian peacekeepers hostage, who were subsequently released. This was the fourth abduction of peacekeepers since March 2013, leading several countries to withdraw their troops from UNDOF.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, “Armed groups have made advances in the area of UNDOF positions, posing a direct threat to the safety and security of the U.N. peacekeepers along the ‘Bravo’ (Syrian) line and in Camp Faouar.” Mr. Dujarric added that all UNDOF forces have been withdrawn to the Israel side of the ceasefire lines.

In short, peacekeepers are fair-weather friends. It is nice to have them when the going is good. When the going gets tough, however, they get going — elsewhere, or do nothing. Meanwhile, Israel is left holding the bag.

To take one example, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been around since 1978. It was created to monitor Israel’s withdrawal from its Litani Operation in southern Lebanon, following the PLO’s coastal road terror attack on an Israeli bus in which 37 Israelis were murdered. That’s how the UN tends to operate. As in the tradition of the oft-heard schoolyard complaint, it all began when Israel struck back. The original terrorist assaults on Israel don’t produce the apparatus of peacekeeping; Israeli responses do.

In the latest grim tiding of the public mood, merely 42% think the American dream that “if you work hard, you’ll get ahead” remains true, down from 53% in 2012 and 50% in 2010. According to the Public Religion Research Institute poll last week, the steepest declines in belief in the last two years were among people under age 30 (down 16 percentage points), women (14 points) and Democrats (17).

In other words, the most disillusioned belong to the coalition that elected President Obama. But before giving up on upward mobility, they ought to blame the policies he has enacted. Mr. Obama has been the best President for slow growth and inequality in modern history, as new economic surveys show.
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Start with the Census Bureau’s annual poverty and income survey, which came out this month. Real U.S. median household income—or the wages earned in the middle of the wage distribution—was $51,939, a 0.3% increase over 2012. But the 2013 figure is still 3.9% lower than the median income when the recession ended in 2009, and 7.9% lower than the median in 2007.

One trick some liberals use to obscure the uniquely bad performance of the Obama years is to go back to the height of the dot-com bubble in 1999 when real income peaked at $56,895 and compare it to 2013. But this conveniently ignores that real median household income rebounded smartly in the middle of the last decade. That rebound occurred after the Bush tax cuts on capital income and marginal income-tax rates became law in 2003.

The liberals and environmentalists say It’s anthropological man-caused global warming that fuels ISIS. It has nothing to do with Islam. Right?

Inspired by a column by Sultan Knish about how Global Warming is blamed by our liberal intellectual elite for the rise of ISIS, or the Islamic State, “Covering Up Islamic Terrorism for Fun and Profit,” I decided to expand on his satirical remarks.

Of course, Global Warming has caused ISIS to rise like cookie dough on steroids! I say that not meaning to impugn the character of ISIS, it has every right to rise if it wants to. But, it’s a simple explanation not beyond the ken of your average liberal or Code Pinky or transsexual or Democrat. The rise of ISIS is directly analogous to the rise of ocean levels from melting polar icecaps from Global Warming. If a blackboard was handy, I could show you the parallels with some deft strokes of my chalk.

Much of the Mideast is subjected to intense heat and aridity and just downright miserable environmental and living conditions, worse conditions than in historic memory. So naturally all those ISIS fighters, in order to acclimatize themselves to the unbearable, exhausting conditions, swathe their heads in masks of various kinds, swear off barbers, grow itchy, unkempt, long beards, live and fight in sweltering conditions, wear uncomfortable garb, sweat like pigs — excuse me, like very thirsty camels — enjoy the heat of battle, just love their weapons growing hotter in their hands as they fire thousands of rounds at fleeing civilians and Iraqi soldiers, and digging mass graves, dripping gallons of salty bodily fluids while marching along dusty roads when no trucks or SUVs or Humvees are available to take them to the next village to overrun, rutting like rabbits on screaming female captives, posing in Calvin Klein male burqas (made in China, as are all their keffiyahs) to behead Shi’ite captives or Western journalists or Christians or some other infidels or unbelievers, burning down churches, posing in odiferous bunches under the hot, merciless sun for group photographs to send home to friends and family in Europe….

I mean, it’s all hard work, don’t you know, and Global Warming doesn’t make it any easier. There’s even a verse in the Koran, dictated by the angel Gabriel (Mohammad nicknamed it – gender unknown – “Gabby”) into Mohammad’s ear in Allah’s own words, forbidding Muslims from causing Global Warming, and to kill polluters and greenhouse gas aficionados wherever they might be found and sending them to hellfire. To wit:

Quran (9:20) – “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.”

Amsterdam Jewish schools get military police protection

Several Jewish schools in Amsterdam’s Buitenveldert district are being guarded by military police officers and have been for the past month, the Parool said on Thursday.

Four police officers in full uniform are on duty at the entrance of the orthodox Cheider school, while Maimonides and Rosj Pina have similar protection, the paper says. The street also has a mobile police post which has fitted with cameras.

The protection is at the instigation of the mayor, council officials and justice ministry, the paper says.

‘We do not want to sow panic and there have not been any concrete threats,’ one officer told the paper. ‘The guards are a consequence of developments in society. They are part of the policy of discouragement.

Common sense and love of country dictate that air travel to the United States from the West African Ebola hot-zone nations of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone be suspended until the highly contagious, highly lethal Ebola outbreak is over. That’s obvious. Thousands of travel visas issued by the U.S. to nationals in these same countries should be canceled. That’s obvious, too.

But President Obama isn’t taking such obvious measures to safeguard the American people. On the contrary, the administration is doing nothing to prevent Ebola from entering this country, even after the first case erupted on American soil in a Liberian tourist named Thomas Eric Duncan. Last month, Duncan, knowingly exposed to Ebola himself, traveled to Dallas from Monrovia, Liberia, with layovers in Brussels and Washington, D.C. Now, he is in an isolation ward in a Dallas hospital as health officials scramble to monitor 100 people Duncan came into contact with for signs of the killer virus.

The White House response? The Daily Caller’s headline says it all: “White House: We Won’t Stop People from the Ebola-Stricken Countries from Coming to the U.S.”

What explains this presidential cop-out? So far, the left side of the media seems to be taking heart from the unlikelihood that any – or, rather, very many – Americans will become infected with Ebola. They dutifully repeat the official mantra of multinational organizations such as the United Nations, the African Union and the World Health Organization that isolating Ebola-ravaged nations would only make the epidemic worse.

I understand that suspending commercial flights to the region makes it harder for U.N. officials to jet about, and yes, I’m sure it does take a chunk out of African tourism, but such concerns seem a tad secondary at this moment of crisis. Also, as National Review’s Jim Gerachty has pointed out, the U.S. and others weren’t so coy when it came to enforcing a de facto travel ban to Israel during the summer’s Gaza war. Meanwhile, isn’t it possible to halt commercial travel to these stricken countries without also prohibiting all humanitarian aid?

That sounds like a more sensible approach – worth trying, at least, to prevent the disease from spreading to unaffected nations. But I don’t think protecting unaffected nations is the guiding goal of the globalist organizations opposing measures to isolate the ravaged areas – and that includes the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden stated on Twitter: “the impulse to isolate countries may make #Ebola epidemic worse. Must use tried & true public health means to stop it.”

The “skills gap” has been blamed for both the persistent high unemployment and the sluggish economic growth we have experienced. Our schools, which have received the bulk of the blame, are only in part culpable. Responsibility must be shared with government immigration policies that have admitted insufficient high-skilled immigrants, and with employers who, for expediency’s sake, have bypassed the training process. But, perhaps even more important has been the decline in cultural lessons and values. We live so much in the present, while focusing on the future, that we have too often ignored the great literature of the past, with their tales of human behavior under myriad conditions and the moral lessons that were integral to the stories.

A consequence of our concern regarding the preparedness of our youth has been a renewed effort to ensure that high school and college students are well versed in STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math). Since a major purpose of a high school and college education is to get a job, such courses make sense. The practical application of theory is how we build better computers, hospitals, automobiles, bridges, insurance companies and fighter jets.

Our young people face a far more complex world than simply finding and honing a skill for today’s needs. The skills that today seem adequate may not fit needs ten or twenty years hence. Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity is Near, argued that humans will transcend the limitations of our biology – that the distinction between man and machine will blur more than they have. He writes about this disruptive transformation: “The nonbiological intelligence created in that year (2045) will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today (2005).”

While Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions stretch even the most futuristic imagination, there is no question that the amount of knowledge is growing exponentially. In 1982, with the publication of Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller wrote of the “Knowledge Doubling Curve.” He noted that until about 1900, knowledge doubled roughly every 100 years. Then growth, which had been linear, became exponential. Today, knowledge is doubling every one to two years. There are some who believe we are on track to a doubling every twelve hours. Whatever the real speed, the amount of information available to our children and grandchildren is far vaster than what we had to learn. That fact alone explains, in part, why we are so often surprised by the lack of familiarity the young have with literature, history and geography that we took for granted. It complicates the education process. With so much material available, what should be taught?

Our young do need the skills embedded in STEM courses, or should at least be exposed to them. For no matter our curiosity or the desire to learn, without jobs we cannot survive. Like it or not, we will increasingly become specialized in relatively narrow fields.

The Islamic State, Islamic quasi-state that has conquered parts of Iraq and Syria, has threatened America with terrorist attacks and drawn us back into an Iraq war. It has done a lot more than that.

For each of the major players in the Middle East, The Islamic State, or ISIS, has presented them with a wild card they can play to better their hand. For Iran, Russia, Syria and Turkey, the Islamic State has — so far — been the means of leveraging other nations in pursuit of larger goals. In Iraq, though no longer a major player, the Islamic State has maneuvered so successfully as to become an existential threat.

The only nation that hasn’t managed to take advantage of the Islamic State’s conquests has been the United States. Though President Obama has managed to form a coalition of sorts to assist in airstrikes, ground troops are obviously necessary to retake the ground the Islamic State has conquered, and no coalition member has offered any. The airstrikes haven’t prevented further ISIS advances near the Syrian-Turkish border and probably in other areas. Iraq is left to its attempt to re-recruit deserters who had previously fled the terrorist organization’s advance.

Less obvious, but of equal or greater importance, is Mr. Obama’s failure to use the leverage provided by the Islamic State-created mess to better America’s position in the Middle East as many other nations have done to improve theirs.

Turkey is probably the most pragmatic user of the Islamic State and — from the U.S. standpoint — the least trustworthy. Before the Islamic State openly took over about one-third of Iraq, Turkey had provided a mostly open border for terrorist fighters to pass through into Syria and Iraq. Turks have been opposing the Kurds for decades and seeking to overthrow Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria for almost as long. By allowing ISIS forces into both Iraq and Syria, Turkey’s interests were furthered. Now, as the Islamic State threatens Turkey as well, the Turks have reportedly reversed course to assist U.S. and European governments lessen the flow of terrorist recruits into the region.

Iran has probably made the best use of the leverage it has gained in the crisis. Iran’s principal national goal is to achieve nuclear weapons with which they can seek domination throughout the Middle East and beyond. After failing to draw Iran into lower level talks about the Iraq crisis, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said the Obama administration was open to talks with Iran. His statement came hard on the heels of an angry and sarcastic statement by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejecting the idea.

Some say he was the man on whom the fictional character of James Bond was based.
But he was better than Bond.
Much, much better.
No gadgets, no gizmos, not a very Hollywood or glamorous existence.
Just risking his life for half a century – always in the shadows, protecting his beloved people.
Israel’s super-spy Mike Harari passed away in Tel-Aviv at the age of 87-just a few days before Rosh Hashanah.
He was among the last of the greatest spies in Israel’s rich history of early intelligence work: Isser Harel, Meir Amit, and Zvi Malchin. With the exception of Rafi Eitan who is turning 88 next month and Zvi Zamir, who is 89, the generation of great intelligence officers has now passed on. But their extraordinary work will never be forgotten by the Jewish people.
Mike Harari, the legendary Mossad operative, passed quietly, the way he lived his turbulent and always dangerous, eventful life.
His death was announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described Harari as “one of the great warriors for Israel’s security.”

During Gaza war, The Lancet published a 1,600-word “Open letter for the people in Gaza” that aroused a wave of protest among advocates of Israeli around the world. The Lancet editor Prof. Richard Horton – who has been accused for many years by pro-Israeli groups of being unfair to Israel and even “anti-Semitic” for the politics he has allowed to appear in the medical journal – seems to have repented.

At the end of his three-day visit with senior researchers and physicians at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center, Horton said his visit to Israel was “a turning point for me and my relationship with this region.”

Horton promised to write positively in the next edition of the British journal next week.

The outcome of his visit thus holds a promise for new academic and medical collaborations that Horton has promised to support.

“I am proud and humbled to be here… I’ve learned a great deal: Rambam as a model of the partnership between Jews and Arabs; Rambam as a center offering an open hand to the people of Palestine; and Rambam as a place with a unique vision for a peaceful, productive, and diverse future among peoples,” Horton said.

Horton, who delivered a lecture to the Haifa doctors on Thursday, said he visits the Middle East yearly and sometimes several times a year because of his concern for the region. His three days of seminars and meetings with senior researchers and physicians at Rambam and the Technion’s Ruth and Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine was initiated by Prof. Karl Skorecki, Rambam’s director of medical research, and director-general Prof. Rafi Beyar, a world-famous interventional cardiologist.

Horton’s visit included tours of some of Rambam’s medical units, a series of medical and ethical lectures, discussions, debates, and visits to Isifiya and Acre. He also spent an intensive day that included a discussion on science and medicine as a catalyst for peaceful coexistence, which was coordinated by Prof. Zaher Azzam, head of Rambam’s internal medicne B and vice dean of the Technion’s medical faculty. Prof. Asa Kasher, a renowned ethics philosopher, spoke on the ethics of armed conflict and responsible scholarly journalism.

Horton and The Lancet – one of the world’s leading general medical journals – published during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza a 1,600- word “Open letter for the people in Gaza” that aroused a wave of protest among advocates of Israel around the world. It had been written by Drs. Paola Manduca, Iain Chalmers, Derek Summerfield, Mads Gilbert, and Swee Ang on behalf of 24 signatories.

“On the basis of our ethics and practice, we are denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel. We ask our colleagues, old and young professionals, to denounce this Israeli aggression. We challenge the perversity of a propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called defensive aggression. In reality it is a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity,” the letter went.

The journal article made no mention of the incessant rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas terrorists, the placing of rocket launchers in schools and hospitals to magnify the damage of defensive attacks or the bloodbath in Syria and other parts of the world.

It took weeks of protest by pro-Israeli letter writers until Horton’s journal published some of their reactions, which covered much less space than the original letter.

The emergence of ultra-violent groups in the Middle East has allowed non-violent extremist groups in the West to claim an undeserved moral credibility. ISIS is the ideal fig-leaf. Even al-Qaeda, by comparison, now looks “moderate.”

Many of those Muslim groups that condemned ISIS have a long history of promoting extremism themselves. It turns out, for example, that senior officials at Al Muntada Trust — which recently published a statement condemning ISIS, signed by nine other Islamic organizations — have worked closely with Nabil al-Awadi, a “key financier” of ISIS.

The recent videotaped beheadings of Western hostages by ISIS have provided fundamentalists in the West with the opportunity to express shock and outrage at such barbarism — and implicitly to claim their own Islamist narrative as good.

It is difficult to find an Islamic charity or lobby group in Britain that has not publicly voiced its disgust at ISIS. On the face of it, this is welcome news. After all, if Muslim community organizations were releasing statements in support of ISIS, Britain’s prospects would look fragile indeed.

Many of those Muslim groups that have condemned ISIS, however, have a long history of promoting extremism themselves. It turns out, for example, that senior officials at Al Muntada Trust — which recently published a statement condemning ISIS, signed by nine other Islamic organizations — have worked closely with Nabil al-Awadi, a “key financier” of ISIS.

In 2012, the Al-Muntada Trust invited al-Awadi and another jihadi cleric, Muhammad al-Arifi, to speak. Al-Arifi has been linked to the radicalization of Muslim youth in Cardiff. He was recently banned from entering the UK, then went to fight for ISIS. Further, the Nigerian media have accused Al Muntada of funding al-Qaeda affiliate Boko Haram.