RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prognosticators from the London Times to Democratic pundit James Carville are predicting that President Obama this year will finish a deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program. With a record of foreign policy failure, Obama is eager for a seeming success, even if the agreement leaves the mullahs with the capacity to quickly build some nuclear bombs at a time of their choosing. Such an outcome would obviously be a strategic disaster, leaving this country and its regional allies vulnerable to an inveterate enemy driven by an apocalyptic ideology.

Obama and his foreign policy team will bear the brunt of responsibility for this failure, as they should. In addition to displaying sheer incompetence and ignorance in his foreign policy, the president has serially sacrificed our security and interests to political needs. Time and again he has made decisions based on partisan calculations that tried to reconcile the ideological dogma of his left-wing base with the demands that something should be done about global threats.

Say what you will about palpably biased New York Times coverage of Israel, so glaringly obvious in its news, opinion, and editorial pages. But the Times rarely undermines its professed commitment to “all the news that’s fit to print” as blatantly as it did last week.

Its year-end Magazine (December 28), devoted to photographic homage to noteworthy people (and symbolic exemplars) who died in 2014, included a full page devoted to 2,500+ children killed in combat zones across the world. A table listed the countries and their horrifying triple-figure numbers: South Sudan (600); Afghanistan (473); Central African Republic (430); Iraq (416). Two nations — Pakistan and Syria — were listed with “number unknown” beside their names, but surely deserving of inclusion. More a Hamas hellhole than a country, but surely worthy of mention, was Gaza (538).

In her brief introduction to the gruesome tally, Anne Barnard — Beirut Bureau Chief for the Times — claimed to have become “oddly inured to battles, bombings and destroyed bodies” from her war coverage in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (also, but curiously unmentioned, Lebanon). Yet amid the vast carnage of innocent young lives lost in what surely was “a terrible year for children in conflict zones,” she wrote, “one death undid me.” Guess where, and guess who was responsible.

Dispatched to Gaza to supplement the Times’ already extensive coverage of the consequences for innocent civilians of Hamas’s unprovoked rocket and tunnel barrage against Israel, Ms. Barnard encountered “a little girl, lanky and ponytailed,” on a hospital gurney. After “a shell” (presumably Israeli) smashed through the wall of the home where she lived with four sisters and extended family, six-year-old Tala died shortly after arriving in the hospital. Visiting her family, Ms. Barnard sorrowfully examined Tala’s doll, unworn clothes, and school notebook. At the hospital she met the doctor who had stood beside her, “tracking her pulse until it was gone.”

Ms. Barnard nowhere m

The Left, of whatever stripe, are falling over themselves to promote the Valhalla of Palestine. But whoever promotes Palestine today promotes the rise of Hamas. It’s as inevitable as storms after strong winds.

They may not do this intentionally, but that will be the result.

From radical Marxists to Social Democrats to Laborites, they are all keen to see the dawn of an Arab Palestine.

Despite all being anti-nationalists, they have all devoted their political capital (hardly an appropriate word for the grey economy of Socialism) and clout to cultivate a Middle East in their image, one that will labor in the socialist tradition.

All of them fail to learn from history when leftist activism destabilizes a country or a region and leaves them with serious egg on their faces. They never get the glory they seek. They are among the first to be dragged off the streets and never come back. But like clowns in a deadly circus, they keep on pratfalling.

It happened when Iraqi Communists plotted an Iraqi world post-Al-Bakr, and ended up being dragged away by Saddam’s henchmen.

“Bill Clinton Underage Sex Lawsuit Shocker!”, screams the tabloid that ruined John Edwards’ presidential bid.

Say all you want about The National Enquirer, but Democrats of all people should know the scandal rag is one of the few places that does any honest investigative journalism anymore — or even can afford to. Don’t believe me? How do you spell John Edwards? The folks at the New York Times are still trying to get that one right.

Now the Enquirer has another hot story: “Bill Clinton Underage Sex Lawsuit Shocker!” [1] It begins in the mag’s inimitable prose:

Bill Clinton has been identified in a sex lawsuit involving underage girls – and the sleazy scandal threatens to blow up his wife Hillary’s bid to be president!

In a bombshell exclusive, The ENQUIRER has obtained shocking court documents that reveal details of Bill’s close relationship with billionaire money manager Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex creep.

Why are some students doing this? Because they can. No one is stopping them. There is no accountability and no cost — either to them or to the people failing to educate them. Bad behavior is rewarded; it is allowed to go on.

Will self-declared jihadis and other “speech police” decide what is, and what is not, allowed to be discussed and taught in Western universities?

Is education now about instilling fear?

The first amendment right should not extend to depriving others of their first amendment right.

What criteria had the professor used — and for that matter Europe — to determine that Hamas was not a terrorist group, as opposed to the criteria used by the government of the United States to determine that, in fact, it was?

Academic freedom in the West is usually a given — or was.

The US Census Bureau announced last week that New York slipped to fourth place in population among the 50 states.

Though babies are still born here every day, and immigrants still flock in, overall population growth lags because New Yorkers are abandoning the state.

Don’t blame the weather. Blustery Montana and North Dakota aren’t having this problem. New Yorkers are escaping high taxes and dismal job growth.

Other high-tax states like Illinois and New Jersey, which has the country’s second-highest tax burden, are also hemorrhaging residents. Families are uprooting and moving to places with lower taxes, more growth and fossil-fuel-friendly policies.

In the November elections, voters in Illinois expelled their high-tax incumbent Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, while voters in Massachusetts and Maryland rebuked tax-and-spend Democrats by putting the governor’s seat in GOP hands.

I filed a 15-page objection with the court over a Verizon settlement, and you can do the same in other cases.

Mr. Walpin, an inspector general under President George W. Bush , is a New York attorney and a former president of the Federal Bar Council.

If you own any stock, you know the frustration of getting a notice announcing settlement of a lawsuit, commenced by a lawyer on behalf of a class composed of all shareholders—you included. The notice informs you that, under this settlement, you get nothing. What that really means is you get zilch but you must pay a pro rata share of your corporation’s legal expenses and of the legal fees for the lawyer who commenced the lawsuit—often millions of dollars. I recently experienced this frustration firsthand, but as I’ll explain the outcome was surprisingly gratifying.

The game works like this. Certain lawyers have an inventory of shareholders, owning very small amounts of shares in corporations, who are on call to act as plaintiff in a lawsuit. As soon as a corporation announces an asset acquisition or sale, the lawyer finds one of his ready-plaintiffs and files a class action to stop the transaction. Such behavior is ubiquitous. As an analysis of merger litigation in the February 2014 Texas Law Review showed, the likelihood of a shareholder suit exceeds 90%.

Tel Aviv

A decade ago, I wrote an op-ed on the election of Mahmoud Abbas to the Palestinian presidency following the death of Yasser Arafat. It ran under the headline “From Strong Man to Good Man.” Mark that one down in the annals of lousy political judgment.

Maybe it’s because I had recently spent some years working in Jerusalem—watching up close as Arafat bombarded Israelis while bamboozling Westerners—that I felt optimistic about the Palestinian future. Maybe it was because I was too taken with the promise of Arab democracy, and with the notion that those elevated to power through a ballot wouldn’t rule by the bullet.

Or maybe I was simply impressed by Mr. Abbas himself, with his grandfatherly mien and progressive rhetoric. “We need clean legal institutions so we can be considered a civilized society,” I heard him say at one well-attended rally in Ramallah, just a day before the election. Also: “We won’t allow any illegal weapons.” And: “We need to make the law the leader in this country, and nobody can be above the law.”

For years the federal government has been hiding potentially exculpatory evidence involving former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg . And now the feds won’t let him make it public.

That’s according to a bombshell legal memorandum that attorneys for Mr. Greenberg and former AIG executive Howard Smith filed on Monday. They’re asking a federal court in Connecticut to allow them to disclose the evidence that prosecutors still claim should be kept under seal. If Messrs. Greenberg and Smith aren’t able to let the sun shine on this abuse, tainted evidence could be used against them by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a civil trial due to begin next month.

A Schneiderman predecessor, Eliot Spitzer , began investigating Mr. Greenberg roughly a decade ago for an allegedly fraudulent reinsurance transaction between AIG and Gen Re. But attorneys for Messrs. Greenberg and Smith only learned of the potentially exculpatory evidence last fall as they prepared to go to trial.

The information the feds have been sitting on all these years relates to Richard Napier, a former executive at Gen Re who was the government’s star witness in a separate criminal case over the transaction. Mr. Greenberg was never charged, but a trial initially resulted in convictions in 2008 of one AIG employee and four Gen Re employees. Those convictions were vacated in 2011 by a federal appeals court because of errors by the trial judge, and the appellate judges also made clear what they thought of Mr. Napier’s testimony.

“Compelling inconsistencies suggest that Napier may well have testified falsely,” wrote Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Among the reasons the appellate judges found his testimony “suspicious” was that Mr. Napier, who had struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid prison time, had changed his story on who had committed the alleged fraud. Also, for a key meeting he described in the construction of the alleged fraud, the government could present no evidence that the meeting took place.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2001 IN AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL REVIEW

Last month, a singular event in Israeli cultural history occurred. The music of Richard Wagner (1813-83) was played at a concert of the Israel Festival by Argentinean-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. Tempered flared and some Israeli public figures called for boycotting Barenboim in future musical events. These developments have renewed controversy over the logic and consistency inherent in such a ban.

Why the ban on Wagner? Ironically, Wagner was played at the first concert of the then Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936 when Arturo Toscanini showed his solidarity with Jews by undertaking the journey to Tel Aviv in the middle of the Arab Revolt to lead the newly-formed orchestra of émigrés from Nazi Germany.

This changed, however, with the advent of the Nazi genocide; Wagner occupied a pre-eminent place in Hitler’s personal Valhalla and in the political and cultural life of the Nazi regime – and thus in the memories of many of its survivors. Additionally, as Wagner’s own great-grandson Gottfried – a personal friend, I should note – has indicated, Wagner’s compendious political writings consistently urge Nazi elimination of Jews from German life and it does not take a detective to find antisemitic stereotypes and encoded political messages in his operas instantly recognisable to Wagner’s contemporaries.