RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Investigation’ can’t reveal what we already know.

Most of the news coverage of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has been ridiculous if not positively annoying. For days, we’ve been bored by breathless reports of “black boxes” gone missing, the accident scene “contaminated,” moved bodies, and calls for independent international investigations.

Now that BFFs John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have agreed that there needs to be — according to a Russian Foreign Ministry announcement — “an absolutely unbiased, independent and open international investigation” into the “crash” of the Malaysian airliner, we are apparently being told to relax because the “crash” is in safe hands.

What absolute nonsense. It wasn’t a crash: Russian separatists shot the airliner down with one or more Russian SA-11 “Buk” surface to air missiles. Our reconnaissance satellites would have, within seconds, detected the missile launch and pinpointed the spot of the launch to within a few dozen yards. If mobile surface-to-air missile batteries had license plates, some of our satellites would have been able to read them. We know from that information, with about 99% certainty, who launched it: the Russian-backed insurgents fighting to dominate Ukraine. The launch was performed with or without the assistance of Russian military trainers. (There’s a recording of a conversation between the local commanders — which may or may not be authentic and could have been staged for listeners — indicating confusion as to the identity of the target aircraft.)

The aircraft’s flight data recorders (the “black boxes” in reporter-speak) won’t tell us why the missile(s) were launched, how many were launched, or what the missile battery crew knew or intended when they launched it. We know that it was no accidental launch. The wreckage of the aircraft, the bodies of the victims, or anything else on the ground won’t tell us anything of value.

We won’t learn from any investigation whether the Russian surrogates intended to shoot down a civilian airliner or thought they were shooting at a Ukrainian military cargo aircraft. That will never be discovered because the people who fired the missile or missiles will never be reliably identified or charged with a crime in any court. Some of the missile batteries — and we don’t know if the Russian separatists have three or three dozen of them — have apparently been moved back toward or across Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Once again, the Obama administration is content to bury an incident with a pointless and never-ending investigation. These investigations are a delaying tactic, a substitute for action. At this point, we know all we need to know. Some European governments — Britain and the Netherlands — are calling for the European Union to “review” its relationship with Russia as a result of the shoot-down. The EUnuchs will certainly review their relationship with the supplier of about one-third of their natural gas and decide that things are just hunky-dory. They will tut-tut at Putin and President Obama may impose more of the sanctions he’s already imposed on Russian businesses and some of Putin’s pals. But nothing will be done that will result in any change to what Putin is doing on his Ukrainian playground.

By Abraham H. Miller | 07/21/14http://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/brandeis_university_admissions_night.jpg
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati. He has served on the faculty of the University of California, Davis and the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Brandeis University, most recently known for withdrawing an invitation to human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak at graduation, is back in the news and not for anything of which it should be proud. The private university with Jewish roots has been hosting an anti-Semitic, anti-American faculty listserv. Thanks to the intrepid work of Brandeis student Daniel Mael some of that correspondence has been made public and more is underway.

If the Brandeis faculty haters had spewed their invective about any groups other than Jews, they would be facing disciplinary proceedings. But when it comes to hating Jews and invoking cynical Holocaust terminology, even a private university cannot restrain itself from shielding its faculty.

The faculty listserv and its ninety-some members reveal far more than the hatred of a few bigots on the periphery of academia. In many ways, they are academia.

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Brandeis LangeEmails from Donald Hindley to a Brandeis faculty listserv. Click to enlarge.

How we got to this point in higher education is a long and complicated story for another time. Suffice it for me to render the short version: the agitators, who slammed into the deans’ offices in the 1960s and 70s seeking to politicize the universities, now are the deans, the provosts and the presidents. If not incarnated in the same person, in the same politically correct leftist mentality.

My academic elders told me that the politicization of the academy would create political interest groups masquerading as academic departments. I thought these old salts were resisting the virtuous tide of social change. I too wanted to use the university to end the Vietnam War, help the civil rights struggle, and let the oppressed teach their own history in little incestuous fiefdoms removed from real accountability to the standards of any discipline.

My generation should have listened because when a university becomes an interest group for social change, it does not just lose its objectivity; it loses its essence, its very soul. It recruits faculty of a lesser god. Even worse, it becomes a therapeutic society for professors to act out their psychological issues in the classroom before a captive audience and, as Brandeis shows us, on faculty listservs.

Herbert London,President- London Center for Policy Research
http://londoncenter.org/
The winds of moral equivalence in the Middle East are persistent. As the war between terrorists in Gaza and the Israeli government escalates, the media resists the idea of taking sides. CNN contends there are valid positions on both sides of the divide. Ethan Bonner, the New York Times correspondent contends the wall separating Gaza from Israel and Israel from the West Bank is the real impediment to peace.

But is this true? Israel has been attacked unmercifully with 1500 rockets fired indiscriminately at Israeli population centers. These rockets have only one purpose: instill panic. Israel has responded in the way any nation under siege would. It has fired back forcefully at all the launch sites in Gaza. This has led to collateral damage with about 400 Palestinians killed. What hasn’t been emphasized is that Gazan rockets have been fired from mosques, hospitals and schools. Human shields are the tactical defense for terrorism.

On the Israeli side, people are protected from rockets; on the Gazan side rockets are protected from people. There isn’t an obvious moral equivalence between sides. Moreover, the Palestinian population rejoiced over the murder of three young Jewish students. The mother of one of the assailants said she admired her son’s action. When a group of Israeli youths retaliated by apprehending a Palestinian boy and burning him to death, the Israeli officials were appalled and quickly brought the murderers to justice. Is Jewish blood worth less than the blood of Palestinians?

There isn’t any world leader who can tolerate terror bombing on his people without a response. Prime Minister Netanyahu has been patient, but when he speaks he has noted that Jews whatever their political persuasion are united in battling the terror and are prepared to respond with whatever force is necessary to eliminate the threat.

Children should not live their lives in fear that the sound of a siren might mean the end of life. This is the life of an Israeli today. Some contend that there are more deaths on the Gazan side reflecting the use of disproportionate Israeli action. Clearly the loss of any innocent life is tragic. However, it is Hamas that has put its own people in jeopardy. The placement of its rockets reflects the barbarous view of Arab leadership.

This is not a war to end war since the beating heart of bitterness and hatred is everywhere present in the Middle East. However, the immediate threat of Hamas, that has 100,000 missiles in its arsenal, goes to the very survival of Israel. Gaza must be disarmed. If occupation is necessary, so be it. The pockets of arms throughout this strip of land must be discovered and destroyed. There isn’t any alternative.

Israel’s military operation to degrade Hamas’ ability to rain rockets down on Israeli cities has stirred up the usual noisy and nasty protests in Europe. We need not dwell on demonstrations by Muslim immigrants, whose genocidal Jew-hatred has been an Islamic tradition for 14 centuries. More revealing is the hatred of Israel by so many Europeans, ranging from leftover leftists and idealizers of the dark-skinned “other,” to far-right xenophobes and morally addled Christians. Whatever its origins, one thing their bitter hatred of Israel does not have is any foundation in coherent principle.

Take the displeasure aroused by the continually publicized disparity in deaths between Gazans and Israelis in the current ground operation to stop the rockets. Many critics seem affronted that Israel has taken great pains to protect its citizens by building bomb shelters and developing the Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and so have suffered only 2 civilian deaths. They see the videos of dead Palestinian Arab children and blame those deaths on Israel’s “disproportionate response” instead of Hamas’ indifference to their own people’s safety. They ignore Hamas’s tactic of using their own women and children as human shields, ordering them not to flee the fighting, and storing explosives and munitions in tunnels under mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools, subterranean space that could be used to protect their people. They wink at Hamas’ conscious aim to engineer such casualties in order to create the “propaganda of the deed,” the purpose of which is to elicit precisely the uncritical condemnations of Israel that European useful idiots reflexively provide. They disregard Israel’s unprecedented efforts to warn civilians that bombs are headed their way––phoning them on cell phones and land-lines, sending text messages, scattering leaflets, and dropping warning duds on the roofs of targets. And of course, the Israel-haters don’t care that Israel’s actions are always a defensive response to terrorist aggression.

So what’s the underlying principle behind criticisms of “disproportionate” actions and casualties? That tactical and matériel advantages in war are unfair? A war is not a game like golf, where an inferior player is given a handicap when he plays a better opponent. The objective is to stop the aggression and save lives, using all the resources at your disposal. Do you think during WWII that anyone gave a damn about “disproportionate” casualties? Japanese bombs killed 74 U.S. civilians during WWII, 68 at Pearl Harbor and an Oregon family of 6 killed by a booby-trapped balloon. The U.S. bombing of Japan killed 500,000. Those are the tragic wages of aggression, what Aeschylus meant when he said, “The doer suffers.”

But the obsession with Palestinian Arab casualties, nearly all of them the consequence of Arab aggression and callous disregard for even their own families, is just another expression of the irrational hatred of Israel. If one calculated, just based on the global media’s intense coverage, how many Arabs have died because of Israel’s defense of its people, you’d think the conflict has taken the lives of millions. In fact, since WWII, 41 million people have died in violent conflicts all over the world––but about 40,000 Arabs have died at the hands of Israel, most the result of 3 wars of aggression waged against the Jewish state. Meanwhile, 11 million Muslims have died in other conflicts, 90% of them killed by fellow Muslims. Indeed, even as international critics are devoting hours of coverage to the casualties in Gaza, tens of thousands of Muslims are dying in Syria and Iraq at the hands of other Muslims. Nor is Israel the premier non-Muslim killer of Muslims. If killing Muslims is an excuse for homicidal hatred, there are much grosser offenders than Israel. Russia killed 100,000 Muslims during the 1979-89 Afghan war, and more recently slaughtered about 150,000 Chechnyans, most of them Muslims. But Russia doesn’t receive a fraction of the global hatred and opprobrium Israel suffers when it defends itself against terrorists like Hamas and Fatah.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-downing-of-a-malaysian-airliner-over-ukraine-a-new-instrument-of-terror-in-play?f=puball

It started with a crisis in Ukraine; it then became a Russian invasion of Ukraine and “taking back its legitimate territory” from the Putin-led Russian perspective. It has continued with an intermittently savage conflict on Ukrainian territory with pressure fostered in part by so-called “Russian separatists” working to reduce further the size of the territory controlled by the government in Kiev.

This is Russian map re-writing at work.

One would think after being caught by surprise by the takeover of Crimea by Russia that DNI Clapper would have put significant tasking on all American intelligence assets to keep a sharp focus on that geographic part of world. As previously written:

It has been widely reported that there was a breakdown in US Intelligence Community on US strategic warning of Russia making a move on Ukraine. Regardless of DNI Clapper’s public statements some very good reporting is coming out about a strategic intelligence failure of the first order. It will take time to see the real facts of the IC’s performance.

Overtime, Congress is fully capable of seeing that if NSA can read the private e-mails of the Presidents of Brazil and Germany what did they do in the case of Russian and Ukraine leaders?

This should be a very high priority work in progress to bring disclosure to the American people; after all they paid for all this. With the revelations of the overzealous and highly inappropriate attack on world leaders by NSA, and early strategic miscalculations about Russian intentions a continuing bi-partisan serious effort by Congress to address “all things NSA” is important.

http://www.sldinfo.com/meeting-the-challenges-of-the-beaten-zone-at-sea-shaping-a-way-ahead/

With a swift destruction of a Malaysian airliner by the use of a sophisticated surface to air missiles shot from Ukrainian territory, a new instrument of terror in the hands of those who wish to use it has been clearly demonstrated. And in the world of terrorists, imitation of success is a demonstrated way forward.

Putting the entire civil aviation industry at its feet is a distinct possibility. When terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center and stuck the Pentagon, the effect on the civil aviation industry was immediate. With ground missiles in the hands of terrorists the same dynamic can easily be unleashed.

As of Sunday evening, on Day 13 of Operation Protective Edge, Hamas was still fighting on against Israel, although its prospects didn’t look good.

With Hamas’s rocket fire on Israel intensifying two weeks ago, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, with Iran’s nuclear program the main thing on his plate, kept ordering only small-scale retaliatory strikes from the air, hoping to avoid a larger conflict. But Hamas kept firing—more and more. So Israel launched Operation Protective Edge—but still tried to keep it limited, without boots on the ground in Gaza.

On Wednesday morning Netanyahu made an adroit move, publicly accepting an Egyptian ceasefire proposal. Hamas turned it down flat. Netanyahu, who told the Israeli public in a televised address on Sunday evening that he has been in constant contact with the leaders of the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, France, and other countries, undoubtedly drove that point home to them.

With Israel’s diplomatic position strengthened, and with Arab media growing harshly critical of Hamas, Hamas responded by…escalating the war. On Thursday at dawn the Israeli army spotted and repelled a group of 13 Hamas terrorists who had infiltrated into Israel through a tunnel from Gaza, on their way to perpetrate a massacre at nearby Kibbutz Sufa. The near-catastrophe was a pivotal moment that put an end to Israel’s boots-on-the-ground debate.

On Thursday night Israeli infantry, tank, and engineering units entered Gaza. The stated goal was to find the tunnels along the border—in which Hamas has invested vast sums and years of work—and destroy them, removing an intolerable danger of murderous attacks and kidnappings from residents of southern Israel.

In his speech Sunday evening Netanyahu spoke of somewhat broader aims—“an extended period of calm and security” and “inflicting serious damage” on Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza. While the IDF has indeed been finding and destroying tunnels, Sunday also found it locked in heavy fighting in the Shejaia neighborhood of Gaza City, a Hamas stronghold.

Which brings one to the issue of casualties.

People who complain of “asymmetry” and “disproportion”—meaning that something has to be wrong because Israelis aren’t dying—could feel somewhat better on Sunday evening, as the IDF officially announced that the total of soldiers killed since Israel invaded Gaza on Thursday night now stood at 18, 13 of them in the previous 24 hours. As for the Palestinian side, the death toll since the war started reportedly came to over 400, including 65 in the fighting in Shejaia on Sunday.

On the Israeli side, sensitivity to casualties is particularly high, and Netanyahu devoted a good part of his speech to the issue on Sunday evening. But with most of Israel under constant rocket fire for almost two weeks, and ongoing infiltration attempts from Gaza, Israelis will tolerate the casualties because they know the alternative is an Israel that is no longer viable.

Whether it’s Obama sneering “Sue me” to critics of his abuses of power or Putin shrugging at yet another atrocity, we are no longer in the civilized urbane precincts of law and government.

What both men have in common is a hard left background which has taught them that the only defining principle in politics is Lenin’s “Kto-Kovo”. Kto-Kovo or Who-Whom reduced all interactions to warfare. The Bolsheviks ushered in the end of rules, decency or honor. All that mattered was who would be able to destroy whom. It didn’t matter whether you had justice on your side, but what you would do about it.

Obama and Putin have the same message for America. “Kto-Kovo.” “Sue me.” “So what?” “I won.”

Both men are mocking the impotence of their opponents who by failing to stop them have shown that they are weak and worthless. Instead they use them to divert attention from their own crimes.

In a Kto-Kovo world, there are no compromises and no morals. There are no laws and no limits.

If you can do something, you do it. If your opponents can’t stop you, then you have the right to do it. The true radical, the man of destiny, will do anything he wants because that is what makes him great. Lies are constant and utterly shameless. No lie can ever be exposed because the liar moves on to the next lie and then the one after that. Truth is as meaningless in a Kto-Kovo world as law.

Words and laws are just means to power. And in a Kto-Kovo world, power is all that matters.

A Kto-Kovo leader, whether in the 7th century or the 21st century, operates by rallying his followers through bold acts that expand their power and humiliate and destroy the morale of their enemies.

Whether it’s Putin invading Ukraine or Obama unilaterally running his amnesty, a Kto-Kovo leader attacks and challenges his enemies to stop him. He ignores any authority not under his control and does what he wants and by doing so he demonstrates that his power is the only authority that counts.

Barack Obama’s team recently took credit for improving the “tranquility of the global community,” and the president made it clear just what a calm place the world has become during his tenure.

But this summer Obama’s tranquil world [1] has descended into medieval barbarism in a way scarcely seen in decades. In Gaza, Hamas is banking its missile arsenal in mosques, schools and private homes; even Hitler did not do that with his V2s. Hamas terrorists resort to trying to wire up animals [2] to serve as suicide bombers. Aztec-style, they seek to capture Israeli soldiers to torture or trade — a sort of updated version of parading captive soldiers up the Templo Mayor [3] in Tenochtitlan.

Hamas cannot build a hotel, but instead applies its premodern cunning to tunneling [4] and killing in ever more insidious ways. Yet it proves incompetent in doing what it wishes to do best — kill Jewish civilians. Its efforts to kill Jews while getting killed in the process earn it sympathy from the morally obtuse [5] of the contemporary world who would have applauded Hitler in 1945 as an underdog who suffered greatly as he was overwhelmed by the Allies that he once tried to destroy.

In Paris, just seventy years after the Holocaust, sympathetic rioters hit the streets to cheer on Hamas’s efforts to kill more Jews with their crude versions of Vergeltungswaffen [6]. The passive French solution apparently is once again to encourage Jews to leave the country, given the growing number of new Nazis in their midst. Whether Hamas or Putin, the European response is always the same: why cannot they just go away to bother to some Jews or Americans, and leave us alone?

Russian operatives, role-playing as Ukrainian separatists [7], shot down a civilian airliner, then tried to doctor the debris field, then let the bodies decay, and now are looting the wallets of the dead. You cannot get much less tranquil than that.

In Iraq, ISIS, not content with the usual Middle East savagery, resorts to warring on religious icons, as if torture and murder of the living do not offer enough outlet for their barbarity. They blow up mosques, shatter tombs, and deface graveyards, in their eagerness to restore the 7th century. All that seems more Dark Age than merely medieval.

Iran just missed our “deadline” [8] that was supposed to result in fewer centrifuges in exchange for suspending the sanctions. No sane person now believes that the Iranians will stop nuclear enrichment, or will not get a bomb, or will not threaten to use it when they get one. What will Secretary Kerry do, now that the currency of “red lines,” “deadlines” and “step-over lines” has been all used up?

Last week’s burst of world disorder was ideal for a news dump, and the White House didn’t disappoint: On no legal basis, all 4.5 million residents of the five U.S. territories were quietly released from ObamaCare. Where does everybody else apply?

The original House and Senate bills that became the Affordable Care Act included funding for insurance exchanges in these territories, as President Obama promised when as a Senator he campaigned in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and other 2008 Democratic primaries. But the $14.5 billion in subsidies for the territories were dumped in 2010 as ballast when Democrats needed to claim the law reduced the deficit.

As a consolation, Democrats opened several public-health programs to the territories and bestowed most of ObamaCare’s insurance regulations, which liberals euphemize as “consumer protections,” such as requiring insurers to accept all comers and charge the same premiums regardless of patient health. “After a careful review of the law,” said Health and Human Services in a 2012 letter, HHS granted the territories’ request to apply these rules “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

These uneconomic mandates promptly caused insurance rates to soar and many insurers to flee the territorial markets. You can’t buy any policy at any price in the Mariana Islands. So the territories have spent the last two years beseeching HHS for a regulatory exemption.

As recently as last year, HHS instructed the territories that they “have enjoyed the benefits of the applicable consumer protections” and HHS “has no legal authority to exclude the territories” from ObamaCare. HHS said the law adopted an explicit definition of “state” that includes the territories for the purpose of the mandates and the public-health programs, and another explicit definition that excludes the territories for the purpose of the subsidies. Thus there is “no statutory authority . . . to selectively exempt the territories from certain provisions, unless specified by law.”

Asininity is a common malady of the political class. Nevertheless, one of the more moronic examples I have seen was a letter by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to House Committee on Way and Means Chairman Dave Camp on July 15th. In the letter Mr. Lew argues we should fence in American corporations, calling for “a new sense of economic patriotism.” He argues that American companies, in being responsible stewards of their owner’s wealth, are “effectively renouncing their citizenship.” That was a curious metaphor for an Administration that argues, in cases like Citizen’s United and Hobby Lobby that corporations are not individuals. To whom is owed a corporation’s primary loyalty – the government of the United States, or their shareholders, customers and employees?

Most importantly, the letter was not a serious attempt to resolve a real problem. It was political spin. Mr. Lew is upset about the practice known as corporate inversions. A corporate inversion is a strategy employed by companies with significant overseas operations to reduce U.S. taxes on earnings generated abroad. The United States, besides having the highest corporate tax rate among major countries, is the only one of the Group of Seven to tax earnings generated abroad, even though these companies have already paid taxes in the country in which the earnings were generated. It is the main reason why multinational U.S. companies keep high levels of cash abroad. Inversion is a legal strategy, permitted under the U.S. Tax Code.

What made the letter especially feeble was that Mr. Lew knows what should be done. He begins his fifth paragraph: “The best way to resolve this situation is through business tax reform that lowers the tax rate, broadens the tax base, closes loopholes and simplifies the tax system.” Amen and Hallelujah! Bipartisan support could be found for such proposals. These are all ideas recommended by Republicans like Paul Ryan. So why not work with Congress to pass tax reform? Mr. Lew urges that time is of the essence, but the question goes unanswered. There is little doubt, however, that Mr. Lew would raise such standard objections that obstreperous Republicans in Congress have no interest in working with selfless Democrats like himself. Instead he decided to pursue a cockamamie idea that will cause political opponents to retreat even deeper into their respective corners.

What the Treasury Secretary would like Congress to do is to pass legislation that would negate the aspect of the Tax Code that specifies the terms and conditions under which inversion is permitted. His wording is disingenuous. He makes no mention that corporate inversions are legal under the tax code: He writes, “Congress should enact legislation immediately – and retroactively to May 2014 – to shut down this abuse of our tax system.” His claim is that companies adopt such measures to avoid paying their “fair share of taxes,” as though obeying the law is not what corporations should do. There is, of course, no attempt to define “fair share” – a meaningless phrase solely designed to provide the speaker or writer a sense of moral superiority.