RUTHFULLY YOURS

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the Armenian genocide – or as President Obama euphemistically refers to it, a “dark moment of history.” Dark indeed – nearly 2.5 million Armenians dead at the hands of a Turkish government that sought their extermination.

Now 1915, a new feature film written, directed, and produced by Alec Mouhibian and Garin Hovannisian, has arrived in theaters to face that dark moment, and the continued denial of it, head on. “It is about denial,” the duo state on their movie’s website, “what happens when the past is ignored; what happens when it is confronted… With the centennial of the Armenian Genocide upon us, we are ready to face the past together.”

I recently posed to Mr. Mouhibian some questions about the film.

Mark Tapson: This is essentially the first film for both you and Garin Hovannisian, so congratulations on pulling everything together and getting this film off the ground. How did the project come about? What drove you to take on this controversial topic, and why did you frame it as a psychological thriller as opposed to, say, a documentary?

Two gunmen were killed by police Sunday night after they opened fire wounding a security officer at a Texas art competition featuring works depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, a practice that is strictly forbidden in Islam.

As of very early Monday morning, the identity of the two attackers was unclear, but it is hard to believe the assault was not carried out by Islamists. Watchdog group Judicial Watch has claimed [2] the Muslim terrorists of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) are operating a training camp in Mexico about eight miles from the U.S. border near El Paso, Texas.

The fact the event was attacked is proof that free speech needs protection in America, event organizer and author Robert Spencer told this writer in a late-night telephone interview.

“The shooting shows how much the event was needed,” Spencer said. “The shooting shows freedom of speech is under violent assault in the United States. It shows that the jihadis are willing to kill to enforce our obedience to Shariah law.”

]White racism, like disco or barbershop quartets, faded from popularity a while back. The KKK last flourished a century ago by which time it had branched out to ranting about Catholics and Jews. Even then its power was slight and its views less mainstream compared to that of black racists today.

In 1925, at the peak of its power, the KKK managed to bring 40,000 members to a march in Washington D.C. The Nation of Islam, which believes that white people are an inferior race created by a mad scientist to taint black blood, was able to bring 400,000 marchers to the city with its Million Man March. Participants included black leaders like Jesse Jackson, MLK III, Rosa Parks and Barack Obama.

Using just a pen and a phone, Henry Morgenthau exposed Ottoman atrocities.

Turkey’s massacre of more than one million of its Armenian citizens remains controversial on its 100th anniversary, with Ankara doing its best to whitewash what happened. That’s impossible thanks to a U.S. diplomat who, long before social media and online video, called his fellow Americans’ attention to the atrocities.

In 1915 Henry Morgenthau Sr. was U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He witnessed the first targeted arrests and killings of hundreds of leading Armenians in Istanbul. He gathered reports of forced deportations of Armenians from their homes in eastern Turkey, which few survived. His State Department cables and candid discussions with Turkish officials became a 1918 book, “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” which remains the leading source of information about what happened.

A federal prosecutor handed up indictments Friday in New Jersey’s bridge-closure scandal after a 16-month probe. Gov. Chris Christie wasn’t implicated, but the investigation has damaged his political standing. Many pundits say the bridge closure by aides to punish a political opponent should disqualify Mr. Christie from running for President, though there’s no evidence he knew what his aides were doing.

Voters can make up their own mind, but this also raises the ripe question of disparate political treatment. Specifically, is anyone at Justice or the FBI investigating the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign donations while she was Secretary of State? The risk of quid-pro-quo corruption involving U.S. foreign policy would seem to be at least as important as commuter inconvenience at the George Washington Bridge.

SAN DIEGO—Move over, Mexico. When it comes to sending immigrants to the U.S., China and India have taken the lead.

China was the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013, while Mexico sent just 125,000, according to a Census Bureau study by researcher Eric Jensen and others. India, with 129,000 immigrants, also topped Mexico, though the two countries’ results weren’t statistically different from each other.

For the study, presented last week at the Population Association of America conference in San Diego, researchers analyzed annual immigration data for 2000 to 2013 from the American Community Survey.

Wisconsin ranks 40th in the nation for job growth, or so says a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Many in the media and political circles pounced on the release as evidence that the policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, have left the Badger State trailing much of the nation.

But the report failed to give sufficient context to Wisconsin’s job growth. The BLS, along with other reports touting similar results, ranked states based on how much private employment increased over a year.

Why might Wisconsin’s employment increase seem modest? One reason could be that more Wisconsinites than people in many other states already had jobs, which they did. Another wrinkle comes from factors like the energy boom in the upper plains states. In states like Wisconsin not so blessed with shale, job growth can seem comparatively slow.

Let’s look at Wisconsin’s employment growth since Mr. Walker took office. Since February 2011, Wisconsin’s employable population has grown by about 100,000 people, but the number of people employed increased by about 135,000. That means employment outpaced population growth significantly.

As Barack Obama’s presidency stretches into its final quarter, relations between the United States and Israel have reached the breaking point. Having come into office determined to put “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, as the president told Jewish leaders in 2009, the Obama administration is now discarding the basic assumptions underpinning the U.S.-Israel alliance. The equities of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the nature of the Iranian threat, the region’s security architecture—all the old certainties have given way to the president’s quest for a rapprochement with the Iranian regime and a new balance of power in the Middle East.

Even as it seeks a regional order that will come at Israel’s expense, however, the White House professes a great love of the Jewish state. Those who doubt this love, administration spokesmen say, are “politicizing” the Israel issue. This raises a critical question: What does it mean to be pro-Israel in the age of Obama?

Anti-Semitism on American college campuses is rising—and worsening. Where does it come from, and can it be stopped?

“I never dreamed that it could come to this!”

In February, a Jewish college student was hospitalized after being punched in the face at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus in upstate New York. His family has insisted on maintaining the boy’s privacy, but other such incidents, some caught on camera, include a male student punched in the face at Temple University, a female student at Ohio University harassed for defending Israel, and a male student at Cornell threatened physically for protesting anti-Israel propaganda. On three successive days last summer, the Boston police had to protect a student rally for Israel from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau!” At the University of California-Irvine, this year’s Israel Independence Day festivities were blocked and shouted down by anti-Israel demonstrators. Every year, some 200 campuses now host a multiday hate-the-Jews fest, its malignancy encapsulated in its title: “Israel Apartheid Week.”

The Louis D. Brandeis Center in Washington, founded in 2011 to protect against such intimidation, has reported being startled by the results of its own 2013-14 survey: “more than half of Jewish American college students [have] personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.” The film Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism on Campus faithfully captures scenes of the violence that often attends this new academic experience.

No one knows what exactly happened to the deceased Freddie Gray, except that it should not have happened. Between what is outlined in the indictments and what will be proven in court is an unknown abyss. But the more dramatic the short-term exuberance over the sweeping indictments, the more likely the long-term fury when the charges are likely to be substantially reduced or unproven in court.

Almost everyone blames the subsequent Baltimore rioting on some –ism — endemic racism, economic inequality, the lack of jobs, the legacy of slavery, systematic police brutality and insensitivity, the pathologies of the black underclass, the destruction of the black family and on and on. However, most of America, rich and poor, black, white and other, liberal and conservative can more or less chart the conditions that explain a Ferguson or Baltimore — and remain quiet about it. At this point, I don’t think much will change until action follows rhetoric and someone like Barack Obama symbolically puts his kids in the public schools rather than at Sidwell Friends, or some of the loud MSNBC team choose to live, in desegregated style, in the Baltimore inner city, or Apple and Google grandees mentor East Palo Alto gangbangers, or an Al Gore recruits inner-city youth on his green staffs, or a Warren Buffett leads a national effort on the part of plutocrats to invest money in Detroit or Oakland shopping centers.