RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bait-and-Switch: Will Obama Still Back Suicidal Iran Deal?

Ayatollah Khamenei is doing everything in his power, through extreme demands, to quash the Iran nuclear deal, which has a deadline of tomorrow night. The question: Will Obama cave anyway? Perhaps Khamenei should ask for everything the U.S. gives Israel, including its own Iron Dome system. Obama would likely do it.

In the latest mullah bait-and-switch, the Iranians are now, at the last minute, refusing to give up their enriched uranium stockpile. Don’t believe it? Well, it’s being reported by Obama’s best loyalists, the New York Times [1]:

LAUSANNE, Switzerland — With a negotiating deadline just two days away, Iranian officials on Sunday backed away from a critical element of a proposed nuclear agreement, saying they are no longer willing to ship their atomic fuel out of the country.

The Buchananites have vanished from the GOP, while the left turns against the Jewish state.

Will history mark the Obama years as the moment American Jewry split with the Democratic Party?

The question has a special resonance in a month in which Barack Obama warns the Israelis they may no longer presume U.S. backing at the United Nations—and dispatches his chief of staff to deliver a speech denouncing the “50-year occupation” of Palestinian lands.

The Obama administration refuses to negotiate openly, lest the extent of its diplomatic surrender to Iran be prematurely and fatally exposed.For a sense of the magnitude of the capitulation represented by Barack Obama’s Iran diplomacy, it’s worth recalling what the president said when he was trying to sell his interim nuclear agreement to a Washington, D.C., audience in December 2013.

“We know they don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordo in order to have a peaceful program,” Mr. Obama said of the Iranians in an interview with Haim Saban, the Israeli-American billionaire philanthropist. “They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess in order to have a limited, peaceful nuclear program.”

Hardly more than a year later, on the eve of what might be deal-day, here is where those promises stand:

Fordo: “The United States is considering letting Tehran run hundreds of centrifuges at a once-secret, fortified underground bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites.”—Associated Press, March 26.

Arak: “Today, the six powers negotiating with Iran . . . want the reactor at Arak, still under construction, reconfigured to produce less plutonium, the other bomb fuel.”—The New York Times, March 7.

Maybe Ellen Pao lost her suit because it defied logic. Firms need talent to prosper, no matter the gender.

ASan Francisco jury late last week rejected a $16 million gender-discrimination lawsuit against a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. This triumph of common sense, though, represents merely a minor setback in the feminist crusade against America’s most vibrant economic sector. The chance that Silicon Valley can preserve its ruthlessly meritocratic culture under a continuing feminist onslaught is slim.

In 2005 plaintiff Ellen Pao got an MBA’s dream job: technical chief of staff to John Doerr, a renowned senior partner with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins was a pioneer in high-tech entrepreneurship, making lucrative early investments in Google and Amazon, among other giants of the Internet age. Mr. Doerr mentored Ms. Pao, treating her, as Ms. Pao put it in an email to him, as a “surrogate daughter.”

What you can do if you don’t care what anybody says. Senator Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) was a vocal critic both of President Obama’s executive-action opening to Cuba and his nuclear non-proliferation talks with Iran. In the midst of his loud opposition, he found himself suddenly indicted by a federal attorney on charges that had aired much earlier without consequence. I think the message was not that the administration was worried over appearances, but rather that it wished to remind all of Washington that it actually welcomed the appearance of not being worried over the idea of federal prosecutorial power being used for tit-for-tat vendettas.

Malice is a valuable political tool for Barack Obama. Benjamin Netanyahu apparently bothered President Obama. What could that possibly entail, given the historic alliance between Israel and the United States? From the petty malice of Obama-administration aides leaking slurs that Netanyahu was a coward and chickens–t to the fundamental malevolence of community-organizing Netanyahu’s opponents in an effort to defeat him at the polls to leaking previously classified information about Israel’s nuclear deterrent, the message is again Chicagoan. Obama in adolescent fashion put it best in the 2008 campaign when he urged his flock, “I want you to argue with them and get in their face,” and when he later lifted a Chicago line from screenwriter David Mamet’s dialogue in The Untouchables to say to his base, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”

Did the former secretary of state delete pertinent e-mails while subject to congressional investigation? Hillary Clinton’s lawyers confirmed what many have suspected since her remarks at a U.N. press conference earlier this month: She has wiped her server clean of any e-mails that she didn’t turn over to the State Department. In so doing, Mrs. Clinton has given her critics more reason to suspect that she is up to no good and yet further reason that Mrs. Clinton should keep those lawyers on speed dial. In the ongoing saga of Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private server at her Chappaqua, N.Y., home, the latest bomb was thrown by her lawyer, David Kendall (of Bill Clinton impeachment fame).

Late last week, Mr. Kendall wrote a lengthy letter to the Benghazi Select Committee to respond to Chairman Trey Gowdy’s demand that she turn over her server for inspection and analysis by a “neutral detached and independent third-party.” Mr. Kendall flatly refused the demand, suggesting that the committee lacked the authority to request it. But for good measure, Kendall explained that review of the server would be fruitless. After her personal lawyers reviewed the e-mails to determine which records Mrs. Clinton should return to the State Department, she “chose not to keep her non-record personal e-mails and asked that her account (which was no longer in active use) be set to retain only the most recent 60 days of e-mail.” To “avoid prolonging a discussion that would be academic,” Mr. Kendall adds, “no e-mails from hrd22@clintonemail.com for the time period January 21, 2009, through February 1, 2013, reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server.”

At the signing ceremony for the Obamacare legislation, Vice President Biden memorably told the president, “This is a big f****** deal.” The foreign policy equivalent of Obamacare is about to be signed by Secretary of State Kerry. It’s an agreement that will ensure Iran develops nuclear weapons in secret and in safety.

The context of the deal is so clear that even the Washington Post got it right. In a Saturday editorial, the Post wrote that the agreement will reward Iran for more than a decade of ignoring UN Security Council resolutions that had the single purpose of preventing it from developing nuclear weapons. Iran has been lying and cheating so long, only those dedicated to ignoring the facts could believe they would live up to any deal that would prevent them from developing and deploying nuclear weapons.

There’s a lot more to the context than the Post wrote. Saudi Arabia didn’t notify us before it formed its own coalition of nations to attack Iran’s proxy forces in Yemen. The reason, according to NBC’s Richard Engel, is that they feared we would leak their plans to Iran. That is a precise measure of how much they dislike and distrust Obama.

“In this world, nothing is certain, except death and taxes:” A line usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin and with which it is difficult to argue; though I can state categorically that I am certainly the son of my mother. On the other hand, certainty in opinions is usually associated with a mule-like stubbornness, or unquestioning obeisance – neither a characteristic we would like to think of as being ours – but ones common among the political and pontificating classes, the latter of which I admit to being a member. Curiosity, openness and skepticism are as proper antonyms for certainty as uncertainty.

“We live in uncertain times…” is a quote from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1938 autobiography, The Summing Up, and has become boringly ubiquitous. Mr. Maugham likely got the idea from the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times,” with “interesting times” being a euphemism for war. We certainly live in an interesting time. The world is dangerous, manifestly more so than it was six years ago when our newly elected President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, not for what he had done, but for what the committee was certain he would do. That Mr. Obama has made the world more dangerous adds to uncertainty, raises cynicism and is, in part, responsible for the diminishing trust in our leaders and institutions.

Seventy years ago this month, Anne Frank died in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen, leaving behind, stashed in the rooms where she and her family hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam, one of the most valuable historic documents of our time: her diary.

But try telling this story in a Dutch classroom today. “Holocaust Classes? Bulls**t! Say the Students” declared a headline of Dutch newspaper AD. Indeed, large numbers of Dutch students, all of them Muslim, refuse to listen to lessons about the Shoah [the Holocaust], denouncing them as exaggerations and lies, and threatening their teachers. It is a capital example of the kind of exploitation one finds increasingly among radicalized and even non-radicalized Muslim youth in Europe: for even as many question the existence of the concentration camps, the efforts at genocide, they demonstrate in pro-ISIS and anti-Israel rallies chanting “All Jews to the gas” and “Hitler was right.”

A new video has gone up. “British Mandate Part 5: Step Ashore” is now available. You can see it directly via the following link:

http://zionism101.org/NewestVideoVimeo.aspx

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“British Mandate Part 5: Step Ashore” describes how the Haganah focuses on illegal immigration in its fight against the British. England devotes vast resources to stopping Jewish immigration to Palestine, and is largely successful, but suffers a disaster in terms of world public opinion.