RUTHFULLY YOURS

As Censored Voices makes its American debut, my advice to American Jews is this: save your tears—the Six-Day War was decently waged and morally just.

In a recent interview, Daniel Sivan, the producer of Censored Voices (and partner of the director Mor Loushy), describes the effect of their film on pro-Israel American Jews who saw it at Sundance in January:

From their point of view, even to murmur the word “occupation” is treason. But they couldn’t rage against our film, because we didn’t invent the questions within it. They were posed by young soldiers, days after the battles of 1967. So we opened up something with these pro-Israeli Jews. Older people came out crying, they said they’d always been proud of that great victory, but now they feel confused, undermined, and embarrassed.

Yes, Censored Voices will provide fodder for Israel-haters (it already has). But as Sivan rightly points out, such people don’t need Censored Voices to hate Israel. Its more significant effect outside Israel will be to demoralize a generation or two of American Jews for whom the Six-Day War was a source of pride, and who will now be told that it really comprised wanton murder and dispossession.

Conrad Black’s defense cannot undo the damage Henry Kissinger has done.
This controversy between Conrad Black and myself on Henry Kissinger’s legacy to American statecraft will have been worthwhile if it leads anyone to the Claremont Review of Books, where my review of Kissinger’s latest book, World Order, treats that legacy at due length. Regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of my or Black’s writings, they have not shaped American statecraft. Kissinger’s have, and continue to do so.

My review’s one and only reference to Conrad Black was to quote his praise of Kissinger’s book: “brilliantly conceived and executed . . . even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards.” Black construes this as an “attack” on him, of “extreme belligerence.” Who am I to disagree? Black then joins himself to Kissinger — “admiring of his talents as both an academic theorist and a practical executant of foreign policy . . . He is a friend . . . ” — as well as to others who write “civilly.” These, Black says, have been victimized by a “malignant outburst of Codevilla’s love for psychoanalytic imputations of motives to others,” manifested by my “shock-and-awe carpet-bombing.” Black does not quote me. But, forswearing “animus,” he is surprised that my “virulently accusatory” writings, which I “don’t substantiate,” appear “in reputable places like the Claremont Review and National Review.” Why try to disagree? As Casablanca’s Rick said to Ilsa: “The problems of [such as ourselves] don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Kissinger’s problems amount to a lot.

Never mind the atomic ayatollahs, it’s a trans/drag girl fight!

Somewhere in Iran, a team of very studious, serious, and likely bespectacled men is working, diligently and tirelessly, to build a nuclear weapon. Perhaps it will be detonated in Jerusalem. Perhaps it will be detonated in New York City, and perhaps these men describe their work, with grim humor, as “the Manhattan project.”

Meanwhile, in Glasgow, the West is not concerned with men strapping on their armor, but about whether some men who strap on wigs and brassieres are offensive to other men who strap on wigs and brassieres. Our Kat Timpf reports that Glasgow’s biggest gay-pride festival banned and then unbanned performances by some drag queens (but only some! A bit more on that in a bit) from its annual march.

Conservatives have much to criticize in President Obama’s deal with Iran on its nuclear program. The agreement allows Iran to operate sophisticated nuclear equipment, keep its suspected weapons labs open, and maintain stockpiles of nuclear material with ample opportunity to manipulate international inspectors. Washington and its allies must lift crippling sanctions and release $150 billion in frozen assets now, while hoping that Iran will refrain from developing an atomic bomb for the next decade.

Some conservatives may argue that Obama is violating the law, too. The Treaty Clause declares that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Instead of following this process, set out in Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, President Obama plans to codify the deal as an executive agreement without the Senate’s supermajority approval. The Iran deal appears to run counter to decades of practice by the elected branches, which have used the Treaty Clause to make almost every significant arms-control agreement, such as the Test Ban Treaty, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the INF, and the START and New START pacts.

The title should be changed to “A Fool’s Life”……rsk

“My last year in office was the most stressful and unpleasant of my life,” writes Jimmy Carter in his new memoir A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. America’s 39th president hasn’t forgotten the root cause of the problem. “From November 4, 1979 American hostages were held captive by Iranian militants, supported by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his government.” For those who missed the Carter Era (1976-1980) there’s a bit more to it.

“This crisis was of overriding importance to me,” writes Carter, who does not explain that Iran held 52 American hostages for 444 days. He mentions not a single American hostage by name. The Iranian invasion of the U.S. embassy and the taking of the hostages was the clearest act of war against the United States since Pearl Harbor. So what was the response from America’s commander-in-chief?

Watching Trump’s rise, America’s middle class “fed-up crowd” is enjoying the comeuppance of an elite that never pays for the ramifications of its own ideology.

Yeah, I kind of love this guy —->@unsavoryagents [1] Ha ha #LosAngeles [2] violent crime up 26% wake up! #SanctuaryCity [3] pic.twitter.com/4TtvwVWY5C [4]

— RockPrincess (@Rockprincess818) July 10, 2015 [5]

Donald Trump — a former liberal and benefactor of Democrats — is still surging. But his loud New York lingo, popular put-downs of obnoxious reporters and trashing of the D.C. establishment are symptoms, not the catalyst, of the growing popular outrage of lots of angry Americans who are fed up.

The fed-up crowd likes the payback of watching blood sport in an arena where niceties just don’t apply anymore. At least for a while longer, they enjoy the smug getting their comeuppance, as an uncouth, bullheaded Trump charges about, snorting and spearing liberal pieties and more sober and judicious Republicans at random.

Perhaps they don’t see the abjectly crude Trump as any more crude that Barack Obama calmly in academic tones assuring Americans that they all could keep their doctors and health plans when he knew that was simply untrue or announcing to the nation that his own grandmother was a “typical white person” or advising supporters to “get in their face.”

None of my Jewish liberal friends — the few I have left — knows much about the Iran deal. In fact, they know virtually nothing about it. I have not heard one mention it voluntarily and when I have brought it up, keeping it low key to be polite (I have long realized confrontation does no good), they simply ignore what I’m saying or stare blankly as if I never spoke.

I imagine Jewish liberal politicians like Barbara Boxer and Richard Blumenthal are pretty much the same way. Only old Joseph Lieberman seems to have paid any attention and we all know he’s retired.

But then we can hardly blame them. No one seems to know what’s in this deal, not even John Kerry who negotiated it. Or at least they say they don’t.

On a single day, Islamists blew up the Al Sadaq mosque in Kuwait, killing 28, slaughtered 38 tourists on the beach in Tunisia, and beheaded a man in France. Religion of Peace renegades? No at all, just more of the Prophet’s followers heeding his words and example
How often have we heard our political leaders spring to appease Muslims by asserting that, contrary to an ever-growing body of evidence, Islam is a religion of peace? In attempting to avoid antagonising or alienating that minority and preserve the fiction of multicultural amity, “peace” is the first word that comes to their lips when Muslims’loyalty to the state comes into question after an atrocity. Truth is made subservient to compromise.

Dabiq is the glossy, professionally-produced propaganda magazine of ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State. Regularly, it lauds the heroic sacrifices of its suicide bombers, praying that Allah will accept them. It lambasts the campaigns of the “Crusaders” of the West, calling down imprecations from convenient verses of holy writ. Every so often, it publishes a sermon by the Caliph, to inspire and energise the warriors.

Removing all doubt that he is a sham….and a fool….rsk
Disappointing, but not surprising.

The depressing reality though that is that most of the Republican field has endorsed amnesty in one form or another. So this isn’t much of a surprise. Trump is using his own vocabulary, but he’s echoing the same amnesty talking points you could hear from Marco Rubio… or Barack Obama.

During Friday’s interview, Trump said the U.S. should take a two-step approach to the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the country.

“Well, the first thing we do is take the bad ones — of which there are, unfortunately, quite a few,” said Trump, who owns three New Jersey golf courses and once owned three Atlantic City casinos. “We take the bad ones and get ’em the hell out. We get ’em out.”

How the misuse of a term legitimizes the jihadist myth of Western guilt.

Language is the first casualty of wars over foreign policy. To paraphrase Thucydides, during ideological conflict, words have to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which is now given them.One word that has been central to our foreign policy for over a century is “colonialism.” Rather than describing a historical phenomenon––with all the complexity, mixture of good and evil, and conflicting motives found on every page of history––“colonialism” is now an ideological artifact that functions as a crude epithet. As a result, our foreign policy decisions are deformed by self-loathing and guilt eagerly exploited by our adversaries.

The great scholar of Soviet terror, Robert Conquest, noted this linguistic corruption decades ago. Historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism,” Conquest wrote, now refer to “a malign force with no program but the subjugation and exploitation of innocent people.” As such, these terms are verbal “mind-blockers and thought-extinguishers,” which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.” Particularly in the Middle East, “colonialism” has been used to obscure the factual history that accounts for that region’s chronic dysfunctions, and has legitimized policies doomed to fail because they are founded on distortions of that history.