RUTHFULLY YOURS

When, exactly, does it matter? Who decides? Apparently not Israel.

Ambassador Samantha Power’s testimony may have completed the transition of the United States from Israel’s ally… to an arbiter between Israel and those who seek to erase it.

The “peace process,” first codified in the Oslo accords, commits Israel and the Palestinians to resolve differences bilaterally, not through the dictates of a third party or organization.

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, says the U.S. will no longer automatically exercise its veto in the UN Security Council to protect Israel.

In testimony before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Power specifically declined to rule out support for resolutions on Palestinian statehood or the “peace process.” “We will look to see what will advance Israel’s security and what will advance peace in the region… Our objective as an administration is what can we do to defuse tensions, what will it take to get those negotiations back on track.”

“There is global unanimity that jihad is an obligation.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“My convictions emanate from what Allah said: You must kill the non-believers, regardless of whether they are Muslims or atheists.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“Beheading is permitted in Islam. I recommend you read the Suras [chapters] of Al-Anfal (8), At-Tawbah (9) and Mohammed (47).” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“I swear by the name of Allah, this is not violence. We are defending our religion.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

A Spanish woman married to a Moroccan jihadist has given birth to the first Spanish citizen born in the Islamic State.

The child’s father, 28-year-old Mohamed Hamdouch, is notorious for his exceptional brutality and cruelty both on and off the battlefield. He is known in Spain as the “Beheader of Castillejas,” in recognition of his penchant for posting photographs of himself smiling while holding the decapitated heads of Syrian soldiers.

The child’s mother is Asia Ahmed Mohamed, a native of the North African Spanish exclave of Ceuta. She married Hamdouch after he gave her a suicide vest as a dowry.

This information was part of the University of Pittsburgh’s “Gender-Inclusive/Non-Sexist Language Guidelines and Resources” document. The University of Pittsburgh has released a set of “Gender-Inclusive/Non-Sexist Language Guidelines and Resources” informing instructors how they should be talking in their classrooms in order to not offend anyone.

One suggestion is to ask “students to write down preferred names and pronouns” on the first day while also keeping in mind that just because a student wanted a particular pronoun on the first day doesn’t mean that he/she/they/zi/zie will always want that pronoun because “a person’s gender identity may change over time.” “Zi” and “zie” are provided as examples of gender-neutral pronouns in the document, as well as the singular use of the pronoun “they.”

Do we really need to create whole separate identity classes to describe which personality traits we like? The women’s blog Bustle is offering advice for anyone who may want to date a “sapiosexual” — which it describes as an “uber-trendy ‘sexual orientation’” in which people are more attracted to intelligence than other characteristics.

“Identity politics reign supreme, so it’s fitting that we constantly conceive new categories to label and define our niche sensibilities and predilections, however ridiculous or annoying or unnecessary they may seem,” writes self-described “recovering sapiosexual” Kristen Sollee, taking the words “ridiculous” and “annoying” right out of my mouth. See — I had thought that simply saying you find intelligence attractive was a good enough way to convey that you find intelligence attractive, and that the phrase “sexual orientation” was reserved for describing something a little more integral to your identity than what you could flippantly mention as “recovering” from. But apparently not.

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is thinking about running for president on the Democratic ticket by appealing to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s populist fans. Warren is a very bright former Harvard law professor. So it is interesting that O’Malley thinks the best way to reach out to her fans is to say remarkably stupid things.

Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, recently interviewed O’Malley, asking him to respond to something GOP-presidential-contender Senator Marco Rubio had said. Inskeep: “[Rubio] argues that an active government actually keeps people frozen at their economic status because if you are well off, if you can afford a lawyer, if you can deal with regulations, you can maneuver through government and stay prosperous. And if you are not so well off, it’s harder to work the system. Is there some truth to that? You were a big-city mayor; you know how government works.” O’Malley replied: “No, I don’t think there’s any truth to that.”

When the state was established, Jews lifted their heads and decided to fight back.

One day I went out to meet my father as he returned with the Yiddish paper.

“Look,” he said, shaken and pointing to a photo on the front page. “A Jewish soldier.”

Then I saw him crying and understood how incredible this was. This was 1948. For 2,000 years there had never been Jewish soldiers.

Not a single one during Father’s pogroms and the Holocaust he’d endured. This image was colossal.

Laughing-stock UK Green Party leader Natalie Bennett has reaffirmed her party’s support for boycotts against Israel, underlining in typically bizarre style that the ideological Left in Britain remains the main repository of bigotry against the Jewish state.

Britain’s Green Party, led by the hapless Natalie Bennett, is pretty much a stereotypical ragbag of tree-huggers at the nice and squishy end of the spectrum and hard-line Lefist ideologues at the other end who never really recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall and departed from traditional Left-wing politics on the grounds that it had sold out to capitalism.

With the latter strand of Green thinking in mind — and it is there that one finds the most influential voices in the party — no surprise then that the Greens have emerged as the party with the most bigoted approach to Israel among all those vying for representation at the general election in two and a half weeks time.

Are you upset all the time? Do minor things that other people do drive you up the wall? Do you spend all day muttering about unintended petty slights? Do you self-diagnose your own psychiatric disorders?

Are you convinced that you’re being oppressed by all the people around you?

You’re not just a paranoid schizophrenic. You might also be a Social Justice Warrior.

What the Jacobins and Bolsheviks were to earlier eras, the Social Justice Warrior is to the millennial generation. Just don’t expect an SJW to mount the barricades or storm anything physical. If there were a button on their keyboards that would let them guillotine or gulag their enemies, they would use it.

Since there isn’t, they have to generate hashtagged social media whine mobs instead.

Yesterday’s Mail on Sunday had an interesting account of a meeting in London of Nazis, neo-Nazis, British National Party types and anti—Semites of various other hues. The paper infiltrated the meeting and exposed what was said – which is a very good service and deserves praise.

But I challenge anyone to look through the photos and biographies of the few participants who gathered at Victoria station and then in a nearby hotel and not reflect that this is a gratifyingly washed-up and pathetic movement. During their deliberations they appear to have gone over the usual stuff about how they think the Holocaust was made up and been used by Jews for their own advantage and so on. But I confess to feeling fairly unbothered by such a gathering where the best they can do in terms of personnel is to find an admirer of Hitler from Spain, a retired schoolteacher wearing a British Union of Fascists lapel badge and carrying a book by Oswald Mosley and the absurd ‘Lady’ Michele Renouf, a former ‘hand model’ whose brain has never been what I suppose her hands once were.

According to the Mail on Sunday, Pedro Varela, the Spanish man, gave a speech about ‘the children of darkness’, during which:

‘He also appeared to call for a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses, saying: “In the Middle Ages, the Jews had all the gold in the world but they were living in the ghettos. They still have the gold of the world and are the masters of it…”’

All very predictable. But they’re not the only people calling for boycotts. An anti-Israel boycott is part of Green party policy.

Forty years ago, Saigon fell to communist North Vietnam. Images of terrified South Vietnamese clambering to the roof of the U.S. embassy, and Vietnamese helicopter pilots ferrying them to ships and then pushing the helicopters overboard to make room for more refugees are still heart-wrenching.

Vietnam represented a change in the American security dynamic for the protection of friends and the defeat of adversaries, but the application of useful policy lessons is hard to find.

WWII and the Korean War had required the United States to leave substantial parts of its military in place either to consolidate victory or prevent the erosion of an armistice. In the case of Vietnam, however, the U.S. armed and trained the South Vietnamese military (ARVN) and then left it to the field. The policy was called “Vietnamization.” The question should have been asked, “What is the staying power of an army when its enemy consists of its brothers and cousins — that is to say, when it is fighting a civil war — in the absence of U.S. support on the ground?” And, the corollary, “Particularly when its brothers and cousins are supported by outside powers?”