RUTHFULLY YOURS

Diana West is the author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press), from which this essay is adapted.

In his contribution to the famous 1949 collection of essays by ex-Communists titled The God That Failed, Arthur Koestler carefully illustrates how set language binds thought to ideology at the expense of evidence. Koestler, author of the unparalleled novel of Stalin’s show trials, Darkness at Noon, describes a conversation he had early in his Communist career with “Edgar,” his Party contact, in which they discuss the front page of a Communist newspaper.

“But every word on the front page is contradicted by the facts,” I objected. Edgar gave me a tolerant smile. “You still have the mechanistic outlook, he said, and then proceeded to give me the dialectical interpretation of the facts . . .

Gradually, I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectical interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique, you were no longer disturbed by the facts [emphasis added].

UNDIPLOMATIC SLUR FROM DIPLOCUR DANIEL C. KURZER…FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL – ”

“Mr. Kurtzer said while it was unlikely the Obama administration would take the extraordinary step of declaring Mr. Dermer “persona non grata” — the official method for a foreign diplomat to be ousted from a country — it could request that Mr. Dermer be reprimanded or removed. “He has soiled his pad; who’s he going to work with?” Mr. Kurtzer said.” RSK

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration, after days of mounting tension, signaled on Wednesday how angry it is with Israel that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted Republican leaders’ invitation to address Congress on Iran without consulting the White House.

The outrage the episode has incited within President Obama’s inner circle became clear in unusually sharp criticism by a senior administration official who said that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Dermer, who helped orchestrate the invitation, had repeatedly placed Mr. Netanyahu’s political fortunes above the relationship between Israel and the United States.

The official who made the comments to The New York Times would not be named, and the White House declined to comment. The remarks were the latest fallout after Mr. Dermer, without the White House’s knowledge, worked with House Speaker John A. Boehner to arrange the speech, which is scheduled for March.

Full text of the letter is … available at
http://www.cruz.senate.gov/files/documents/Letters/20150129_Letter_to_Secretary_Kerry.pdf

Sen. Cruz: Has President Obama Launched a Political Campaign Against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu?
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Congressman Lee Zeldin, R-NY-1, today sent
a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking for information regarding
media reports that U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used to fund efforts to
influence upcoming elections in Israel. This is from Senator Cruz’s press
release.

Molly White, a Republican state rep, asks Muslim community members to renounce terrorism, swear allegiance

A Texas lawmaker instructed staff to greet Muslim visitors with an Israeli flag.

Molly White, a Republican state representative, said in a Facebook posting that she would be out of the office on Thursday, Muslim Capitol Day, organized by the local Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter.

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” she said. “We will see how long they stay in my office.”

The Texas Tribune said about 100 Muslims visited the Capitol, most of them students and children.

Within hours, White’s Facebook posting had drawn hundreds of replies, positive and negative, including one from Martin Woodward, who said he was Jewish, Texan and a supporter of Israel.

“Choosing to display the Israeli flag solely as a reaction to Muslim visitors is not respectful to Israel, her citizens, or her supporters,” he said. “I urge you to reconsider your actions.”

White, who engaged with other commenters, saying she would ban those who are “insulting,” did not reply to Woodward.

From her page, it appears that White backs laws that would ban Muslims from settling differences through Sharia, or Islamic law.

Most Jewish groups oppose such laws, in part because they would likely also lead to restrictions on Jewish religious courts, or batei din.

The civil war in Syria will soon enter its fifth year, with no end in sight. On January 20, Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus to discuss the conflict in an exclusive interview.

I would like to start by asking you about the war. It has now been going on for almost four years, and you know the statistics: more than 200,000 people have been killed, a million wounded, and more than three million Syrians have fled the country, according to the UN. Your forces have also suffered heavy casualties. The war cannot go on forever. How do you see the war ending?
All wars anywhere in the world have ended with a political solution, because war itself is not the solution; war is one of the instruments of politics. So you end with a political solution. That’s how we see it. That is the headline.

You don’t think that this war will end militarily?
No. Any war ends with a political solution.

Your country is increasingly divided into three ministates: one controlled by the government, one controlled by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and one controlled by the more secular Sunni and Kurdish opposition. How will 

you ever put Syria back together again?
First of all, this image is not accurate, because you cannot talk about ministates without talking about the people who live within those states. The Syrian people are still with the unity of Syria; they still support the government. The factions you refer to control some areas, but they move from one place to another—they are not stable, and there are no clear lines of separation between different forces. Sometimes they mingle with each other and they move. But the main issue is about the population. The population still supports the state regardless of whether they support it politically or not; I mean they support the state as the representative of the unity of Syria. So as long as you have the Syrian people believing in unity, any government and any official can unify Syria. If the people are divided into two, three, or four groups, no one can unify this country. That’s how we see it.

In the 5th Century BC, the “Persian disease” noted by Hippocrates probably was bubonic plague; in 8th-century Japan, it meant the measles. Today it well might mean chlamydia. Standout levels of infertility among Iranian couples, a major cause of the country’s falling birth rate, coincide with epidemic levels of sexually transmitted disease. Both reflect deep-seated social pathologies. Iran has become a country radically different from the vision of its theocratic rulers, with prevailing social pathologies quite at odds with the self-image of radical Islam.

Iran’s fertility decline from about seven children per female in 1979 to just 1.6 in 2012 remains a conundrum to demographers. Never before in recorded history has the birth rate of a big country fallen so fast and so far. Iran’s population is aging faster than that of any other country in the world. In 2050, 30% of its people will be over 60, the same ratio as in the United States but with a tenth of America’s per capita GDP. I see no way to avoid a social catastrophe unique in human experience. Since I first drew attention to Iran’s demographic implosion a decade ago, I have heard not one suggestion as to how Iran might avert this disaster, despite some belated efforts to raise the birth rate.

“In the warmest of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews.” Irving Howe wrote these words to me in 1972 in a letter (actually, a postcard) of bitter reflection about the fact that A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, the great work of literary salvage that he and Eliezer Greenberg had published in 1954, “never got reviewed in any American literary magazine.”

Those words returned to me as I read the shocking report of the death on Jan. 18 (in highly suspicious circumstances) of Argentinian federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. In 2006 he had indicted seven Iranians, who are still at large, and a Lebanese suspect (now dead) for the massacre of 85 Argentinian Jews in the 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center. Nisman had also concluded that the Iranians were responsible for the 1992 attack on Israel’s Buenos Aires embassy, which killed 29 and wounded 242. Nisman was scheduled to present, on Jan. 19, evidence that Argentinian President Kirchner and her Foreign Minister Timerman had entered into a secret agreement with the Iranian government to release the killers in exchange for an Iranian oil agreement to purchase Argentinian grain.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/auschwitz-liberation-70th-anniversary-survivors-pictured-as-children-reunited-for-the-first-time-since-being-freed-10006410.html

A group of now-elderly Auschwitz survivors have met for the first time since they were freed from the facility as children, as part of events marking the 70 years since the death camp closed.

Poignant images taken yesterday show Miriam Ziegler, 79, Paula Lebovics, 81, Gabor Hirsch, 85, and Eva Kor, 80, posing in front of photograph showing them dressed in striped prisoners’ robes on the day they were liberated.

USC Shoah Foundation, the US organisation founded by film director Steven Spielberg, reunited the quartet pictured in the iconic image taken by Alexander Vorontsov.

The organisation hopes to build an archive of Holocaust memories, and this year successfully identified all the children in the photograph, The Times reported.

Auschwitz was among the most notorious of the extermination camps run by the Nazis to enslave and kill millions of Jews, political opponents, prisoners of war, homosexuals and members of the Roma community.

As many as ten of the 13 people pictured in the image are still alive, with four able to attend the 70th anniversary events at the former concentration camp, where they were joined by nearly 300 other survivors and international leaders.

The guests gathered in an enormous tent over the gate and railroad tracks that marked the last journey for more than a million people murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This year’s events are expected to be the last major anniversary that a significant number of survivors will be strong enough to attend — stoking fears that their stories will be forgotten amid growing anti-Semitism and radicalism in Europe and the Middle East.

One survivor, Roman Kent, became emotional as he issued a plea to world leaders to remember the atrocities and fight for tolerance.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

CONTENTS
1. Sky News uses “Auschwitz remembered” program to blame the Jews for anti-Semitism
2. BBC: “Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?”
3. 84% of “Palestinians” believe Israel was behind Paris jihad massacres
4. The anti-Israel cult
5. Netanyahu’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day address at Yad Vashem
6. ISIS handbook: permissible to have sex with captured children
7. State Department-funded group pays for anti-Netanyahu campaign
8. Mossad chief angered by fake reports about him put out by Obama and Kerry
9. The Arab Spring, four years on
10. Israeli C4I network extends special ops reach

You know the song “well look me over closely tell me what you see”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/397307/jim-geraghtys-kilter-2016-rundown-jim-geraghty

The First Tier: So far…..

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Forget everything you’ve heard about him being uncharismatic or a boring speaker — he wowed the crowds in Iowa this weekend. He’s in the sweet spot, serious and accomplished enough for the “Establishment,” and indisputably conservative enough for the grassroots. (Rush Limbaugh just declared, “Scott Walker is the blueprint for the Republican party if they are serious about beating the Left.”) He’s been tested like few others in the field; the Left threw everything it had at this guy and he’s still going strong.

Florida senator Marco Rubio. Watch him tear into the Obama administration giving away the store on Cuba, and see a Republican contender who understands some key lessons about freedom, evil in the world, U.S. power, and leverage. He’s arguably the best communicator in the Republican party, and the GOP desperately needs a good communicator as its nominee. With rave reviews from Charles Krauthammer and James Pethokoukis, he could end up being the conservative pundits’ favorite choice. Yes, there’s still irritation about the “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal, and the Obama presidency has encouraged skepticism about whether senators are ready for the presidency. But he’s been speaking about the broad, unifying national theme of American exceptionalism since 2010 — and obviously, he offers a fantastic contrast with Hillary. He’ll vivisect her record as secretary of state and make her look ancient by comparison.