RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an effort to intimidate some of the Jewish senators and congressmen thinking of voting against Obama’s Iran deal, there are murmurs from Team Obama about “dual loyalty” and not caving into “Jewish donors.” These are old anti-Semitic canards. Some have called those planning to vote against the deal “traitors.”

Truth is, voting for a moral cause on behalf of one’s people has never been considered an act of dual loyalty, as evidenced, for example, when the entire Congressional Black Caucus voted to place sanctions on South Africa during its apartheid years. This was rightly considered the moral thing to do and brought with it many votes from non-black congressmen. Surely Mr. Obama, who found such acts of conscience admirable, should not now reverse himself when it comes to a Jewish act of conscience. If the living conditions and equality needs of blacks in South Africa were worthy causes, then certainly the actual saving of Jewish lives from a nuclear inferno constitutes a moral act.

It was November 2012, in the dead of winter, when the ghoul of a lie came back to haunt Israel. The specter, a paper tiger with young biting teeth, appeared in the assembly hall of the United Nations where diplomats are perpetually at daggers drawn. The ghoul was called ‘Observer with non-member status.’ This made it not quite real but not imaginary either, hence young teeth indicative of the latent threat it posed. But just for now Israel had to contend with a quasi-state called ‘Palestine.’

“A victory for the values of truth,” exclaimed Sudan’s diplomat after UN members voted to give Palestine that halfling status. In General Assembly ‘speak’, what he meant was a defeat for truth and a victory for a lie of long standing. For Israel it meant a threat, of historic proportions. For international law it meant relegation to a fun league. For the ruling clique that wanted the UN to create a new state it meant second prize. For nine-tenths of member countries it meant one step closer to rescinding the right of Israel to exist. For America and Europe it meant a new arm-twisting lever to get Israel to do their bidding. For all players it meant a whole new ballgame.

Now you see it now you don’t, OPT is a trick of smoke and mirrors, the stuff of mumbo jumbo.

We’re told there were no winners or losers from Thursday’s main stage debate. We’re told the Fox talking heads asked the tough questions that need to be asked to vet the candidates. We’re told to ignore what was in front of our eyes: the Fox media elite carrying water for the Republican establishment and their own political predilections. Fox had their own agenda, and it has nothing to do with Republican voters’ concerns or what our candidates have to offer America.

There were winners and losers. The winner was the media conglomerate that owns Fox News and Megyn Kelly’s career. Fox is taking credit for breaking all records in number of viewers, as if it were Fox’s accomplishment. Nonsense. Twenty-four million viewers tuned in to hear Trump take on the establishment.

The viewers wanted to hear Trump push for the end to illegal immigration. American citizens have been clamoring to end illegal immigration for decades. We have been lied to and ignored by what Ted Cruz dubs the Washington cartel. Immigration, legal and illegal, is now at a crisis point. Viewers wanted to see how the other candidates would handle Trump’s challenge to the establishment and his brazen personality, and how they would measure up on this issue.

We are well past the point where we can ever believe Obama the man because, as those prescient about Obama’s background instinctively understood, whatever was taught Obama the child is what is now being reflected in his dangerous anti-American actions.

Thus, the 17th-century Jesuit-inspired quotation of “give me the child, and I will mold the man” remains true.

This is why the idea that one can trust the Iranians is not only naive, but extraordinarily dangerous, given the education of their children. In the May 2015 Special Interim Report entitled “Imperial Dreams: The Paradox of Iranian Education” by Eldad J. Pardo, the incessant propagandizing and intimidation of Iranian students is proof positive that they are being primed to attack those whom their leaders deem the enemy. The first page of the report shows the map of a “New Dreams of World Power” with Iran at the center. Underneath this map is a picture of “Iranian children preparing for martyrdom.”

It was my great misfortune to be marooned in the vest-pocket nation before chronic electrical-supply problems were fixed. Now that an abundance of electricity has brought even indoor skiing to the sweltering kingdom, I look back on an experience that only a carbon-phobic Greens voter might envy
This short memoir is about the reality of life without electricity, that dream of the Dark Greens, which I lived in Dubai during the power outage of June 2005. The reports that followed made light of the reality as just a minor inconvenience. That is not what I experienced.

By 2005 Dubai had undergone a decade-long building frenzy and such an expansion of the population that they had outstripped the infrastructure’s electricity-generating capacity—but nobody stopped the developers.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly out on a 2 a.m. flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill, I woke at about 9 a.m. I had woken up, not because it was time to get up but because my hotel room was uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the bed sheets. (I usually sleep with the air-conditioning set to “Igloo”—13°C—as I find that snuggling under a doona in the cold air leads to a better and deeper sleep, but that’s just me.) Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air-conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so.

“It’s the fashion in these circles to celebrate Mr. Trump’s rise in the polls as if rage and insult will defeat Hillary Clinton and implement conservative reforms”

The conservative blogger Erick Erickson caused a media stir this weekend by withdrawing an invitation to Donald Trump to address his RedState gathering. This comes as a revelation because Mr. Erickson is among the media conservatives who have trumpeted the businessman as a political tonic.
Mr. Erickson says he was offended by Mr. Trump’s crude comments about Fox News presidential debate moderator Megyn Kelly. The casino magnate has been insulting Ms. Kelly since she asked him about his history of demeaning the looks of certain women. The candidate really got going Friday on CNN and said Ms. Kelly was spewing blood “wherever.”

This was finally too much for Mr. Erickson, though it’s fair to ask what took him so long. This is what Donald Trump does. As recently as July 24, Mr. Erickson wrote approvingly that, “The number one thing you hear when you ask any Republican about Donald Trump is this—he fights.” On July 22 he wrote that while he wouldn’t vote for him unless Mr. Trump became the GOP nominee, “Donald Trump is a non-traditional candidate who is running a non-traditional campaign and kicking the asses of traditional campaign consultants.”

The idea that a collective memory of the Holocaust renders Jewish judgment defective is somehow acceptable these days.

Ah, Israel/Palestine, where thinking Westerners go to play! How many people with an advanced degree in the humanities can resist fiddling with competing national narratives of victimhood? The stakes—peace, no less—give the whole thing a frisson of importance lacking in so many other parts of intellectual life. How fortunate the world is to have the Holy Land, without which everyone might have to grapple with the baffling nature of the entire planet or the dreary failures of their own societies.

In “The Two-State Delusion,” Padraig O’Malley has given us an account of his own time in this familiar landscape. As the title suggests, the author believes the idea of two states is not realistic. He’s right, and in reaching this sad conclusion he joins most of us locals, Israelis and Palestinians alike. Since the collapse of peace talks 15 years ago and the violence of the Second Intifada, the idea of a two-state solution has existed mainly thanks to the Oz-like pyrotechnics of Western diplomats and journalists, aided by Israeli and Palestinian politicians trying to keep the foreigners happy and their money flowing. What little hope remained a few years ago has now been quashed by the Middle Eastern nightmare—carnage in Syria, chaos in Iraq, ISIS in Sinai—unfolding a short drive from our homes.

The nuclear deal lifts sanctions on men like Anis Naccache, who tried to assassinate my great uncle.

Congress is debating whether the nuclear agreement between Iran and the great powers goes far enough to curb Tehran’s illicit activities. But equally deserving of scrutiny are the nefarious characters whose names would be removed under the deal from Western sanctions lists.

Consider Anis Naccache, the Lebanese hitman who attempted to assassinate my great uncle Shapour Bakhtiar, Iran’s last prime minister under the shah. On a sweltering July day in 1980, a hit squad of five Lebanese, Iranian and Palestinian assassins led by Mr. Naccache approached a building in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. They posed as journalists, ostensibly to interview Bakhtiar, who had arrived in Paris a year earlier to launch a political campaign against the Islamic Republic before Ayatollah Khomeini’s nascent regime could entrench itself.

Bakhtiar was renowned in Iran. A genuine liberal, he fought as a young man with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War as well as with the French Resistance against Nazi Germany before returning to his native Iran, where he emerged as a leading man of letters and an outspoken advocate of constitutional monarchy. By appointing a critic like Bakhtiar premier in the heady days of 1979, the shah had attempted to stave off the revolution that would soon sweep him from power.

The War in the Pacific raged for fourteen years. It began when the Imperial Army of the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria on September 18, 1931 and ended on September 2, 1945 when Japan accepted the Potsdam Conference terms of unconditional surrender. While the end had been in sight for several months, it came into focus on August 6, 1945 when ‘Little Boy,’ an American-produced uranium-based Atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. With no response from Japanese authorities, ‘Fat Boy,’ a plutonium-based Atomic bomb was exploded over Nagasaki a little after 11:00AM, on Thursday August 9. That was enough for the Emperor. By War’s end millions were dead, including 1.6 million Japanese.

In his 1946 book Hiroshima, John Hersey wrote of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima. His descriptions helped keep the Cold War “cold,” but the damage those bombs caused should be measured in relation to the carnage Japan’s Imperial Army inflicted on Asia, especially China. The 340,000 people who died as a consequence of those two bombs is a lot, but pales when compared to the 4,000,000 Chinese who died during the Japanese occupation and to the more than 400,000 Allied casualties (mostly Americans) in the Pacific and on its islands.

Jews who viciously condemn the Jews—the phenomenon has, lamentably, been with us for hundreds of years. In medieval and later times, famed apostates like Nicholas Donin, Abner of Burgos, Johannes Pfefferkorn, and others would convert to Christianity and then use their “inside” knowledge of Jews and Judaism to attack their former people mercilessly and ostensibly confirm all libels leveled against them.

But the Jewish “apostates” of today, as Edward Alexander points out in Jews Against Themselves [2], an acerbic critique of Jewish Jew-bashers in our time, typically remain nominally Jewish and flaunt their Jewishness as a badge of moral superiority to the target of their vilification—namely, Israel, that country smack in the Middle East that, seemingly, already has enough enmity to contend with.