The undistinguished person who has inherited the helm of the once great Forward was appalled by Netanyahu’s speech to Congress this morning. Jane Eisner, fearing that the warm welcome Bibi received might be associated with people like her, rushed to assure the most reliably anti-Jewish newspaper in the English-speaking world that she and her fellow upper-middle-class urban Jews were not to be associated with the self-confident and unashamed speech delivered to Congress.

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The website of the Cageprisoners human rights organization beloved by Amnesty International and supported by Quaker charities, is by proud definition, an apologist and advocate for terror. Today, as the UK’s leftwing anti-terror site Harry’s Place points out, Cageprisoner’s researcher Ayesha Kazmi deplores the King hearings, the anti-Islam “witch-hunt” going on at the King hearings, and other cliches.

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Everyone who cares about democracy in the world - except those with clinically meaningful depression - should be reading the wonderful blog by Eva Balogh, Hungarian Spectrum ( http://bit.ly/fui2mH ) who covers what’s happening in that sad country. Ms. Balogh had great hopes that the Fidesz government would be forced to modify its odious new Media Law by liberal opinion in Europe and the disapproval of the EU. Today’s entry on how the “Council of Europe” was easily outmaneuvered shows that her hopes were misplaced.
It also shows that there is nothing in the EU as presently constituted that has any interest in whether or not its individual members are democratic countries - as one would expect, but many assume. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that when democratically suspect countries enter the EU in the future - such as Turkey - they will encounter pressure to move back towards democracy. It’s far more likely that the behavior of Turkey’s ruling party will only serve to “encourager les autres.”

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Another reason to regret Jewish investment in the Holocaust. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary committed to hedging UK support for Israel against terrorists, is pledging - and thank you so much for this - “that the British government will “take an active approachâ€� to Holocaust education.
The Foreign Secretary said he was determined to encourage a “wider public understanding of the history of 1933-1945, and the lessons to be drawnâ€� and called on other countries to do the same.” (Jewish Chronicle, 1.27.11)
As I wrote in the Weekly Standard earlier this month, http://tinyurl.com/4c5qgwh , the notion that getting people to understand the terrible lessons of the Holocaust will diminish anti-semitism and make Jewish existence less problematic is the opposite of the truth. The Holocaust should be remembered among ourselves, and our dead never forgotten - but here we see genuflection to the Holocaust in the interest of deflecting our attention to consequential anti-Jewish action by an important player.
Cameron and Hague are acting shamefully, but but we deserve more shame for our foolishness.

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My piece on of how well-meaning efforts to use the Holocaust as an object lesson in moral education makes us tactically vulnerable to the “totalitarian temptation” of dictators like Castro - as poor Jeffrey Goldberg was in Havana recently - and is now making the morale of democratic countries like the US, Israel and Britain strategically vulnerable to a concerted leftwing campaign to delegitimize our defense against deadly enemies.

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It’s easy to criticize what Christopher Hitchens has said about Judaism and Israel. I have done it myself at great length, in 2007. But I think that in 2010, on balance, I’d call Hitchens objectively pro-Zionist, and an indispensable voice for human freedom.

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“Let’s say out loud what many people know but few have publicly said. Diane Ravitch has undergone a personal, not an intellectual, transformation. Because of that personal change she has acquired a new set of friends, including AFT boss Randi Weingarten. Ravitch is basking in the admiration of these new friends for her remarks, but they are not well-thought-out or intellectually honest positions.”

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If only those Israeli leaders would realize that what they do “impacts” Mick Davis’s social life in London - perhaps they wouldn’t insist so rudely that Israel should continue to exist.
That’s the welcome message that Mr. Mick Davis gave to his fellow South African Jew Peter Beinert at a London public meeting Saturday night. http://tinyurl.com/23dl9dw Davis, who chairs Britain’s UJIA (which stands for United Jewish Israel Appeal, but you could strain your eyes trying to find the full title on their website - so please don’t spread it around) and is a member of the Jewish Leadership Council, had a brave message for the amateurs and idiots running Israel these days:
“I think the government of Israel …have to recognise that their actions directly impact on me as a Jew living in London. When they do good things it is good for me, when they do bad things, it’s bad for me. And the impact on me is as significant as it is on Jews living in Israel… I want them to recognise that.” http://tinyurl.com/2appr9r.
No one doubts that if Mick Davis were running things in Jerusalem rather than serving as CEO of the $65 billion mining company Xstrata, everything would be sorted out. But he can’t. So let’s not have Israeli voters whose decisions determine the llife and death of their children and the continued existence of their country doing things that might cause Mr. Davis discomfort in the face of a BBC interviewer or a Guardian reporter.
After all, the Jewish Leadership Council is devoted to helping other Jews “articulate a confident and compelling narrative of Mainstream Jewish life in the United Kingdom.” But when the actuality of Jewish life - and the actuality of the threats to Jewish life - interferes with a narrative that is “confident” (trans. we won’t bother you about anything) and “compelling” (nothing we Jews do will bring a blush to the cheek of a Guardian reader), it’s clear what Mr. Davis would have diaspora Jews choose: the narrative, not the life of the Jews in Israel or the right of people to have a nation if they have the misfortune to be Jews.
As Mick Davis would no doubt put it, “Please, Israel - don’t impact Mick Davis negatively any more!”

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Geert Wilders trial for insulting Muslims and inciting hatred and discrimination in Holland has raised questions of freedom of speech, religious freedom and whether Islam demands privileges that the Netherlands doesn’t grant to other religions. Recently, the entire panel of judges hearing the case was dismissed for bias and replaced with another panel. Why? “because an expert witness, a retired professor of Arabic and Islamic thought named J. J. G. Jansen, was affronted by a load of post-structuralist cant. Professor Jansen’s indignation may be just as important as the weighty issues touched on in the prosecution of Wilders. It raises the question of whether our best and brightest are still intellectually equipped even to think about, much less decide intelligently, the great questions of law, freedom, and human rights. What is really troubling, and fascinating, about the Wilders prosecution is how much it depends on the intellectual weapons of “postmodernism,â€� deployed by a highly educated Dutch elite. In Amsterdam’s battlefield of ideas, the guns of Adorno, Foucault, Kristeva, Derrida, Edward Said, and their countless academic popularizers have been turned against civil rights and human freedom. Learned pretentiousness has consequences.”

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See my little fantasy on another scandal at UAE (University of East Anglia) - but this time at its famous Creative Writing M.A. Programme, which has - really - produced an extraordinary number of Man-Booker Prize-winning novelists since its founding in 1970 by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.

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Eli Lehrer at National Review Online wrote a nice piece about the new federal proposal to eliminate prison rape, to which Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, linked approvingly.  One of Lehrer’s points is that the subject of prison rape - in a nation which professes horror at all sorts of hazing practices that are called “torture” - remains funny rather than horrible:  “But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.”

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In the new Weekly Standard (June 22), see my new piece on the Cuba spy Myers.

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Jeffrey Goldberg, the estimable foreign affairs reporter now at The Atlantic, says that when I compare his hard-headedness regarding Iran and Hezbollah to his naivete regarding the financial-advice industry (as I did in a recent Wall Street Journal Taste Page piece, “The New Soft-Bitten Journalists”), I am equating Hezbollah’s evil and SmartMoney’s erroneous stock market advice.

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It’s in the new issue on sale now, April 13, and possibly available here:

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on view at the Weekly Standard:  http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/213scmae.asp>

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http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/081lzbjx.asp

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Having only ever voted as a citizen of the sovereign nation of Cook County, as a Nutmegger, as a citizen of the former Taxachusetts, and a subject of NY state, my votes for McGovern, Carter, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Bush I, Dole, Bush II and Bush II have all been wasted.

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may be amusing to you, and you can read it here:  http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/715lnilj.asp.

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I should not have been as surprised as I was.  Since then, I have realized that, perhaps as easy cover for their anti-Zionism, the mainline Protestant churches make a great noise about their occasional condemnation of “Jews for Jesus” and similar group.  But this fastidiousness has simply not trickled down to the parish level.

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Where are the GOP “re-branders” now? Palin brews “GOP Classic” In the spring and summer of 2008, it was popular to talk about the GOP “brand” as damaged goods. Boehner, Schwarzenegger, Tom Davis, even Andrew Sullivan all lamented (or celebrated) the shopworn nature of the Republican brand - and all suggested that the path to re-branding led away from Bush’s White House, to a new formulation - in essence, a kinder, gentler Republicanism of the Bush I or even Rockefeller era. They ignored, of course, Bush the younger’s attempt to provide a compassionate conservatism. Needless to say, none of them had any idea of what branding is all about. As marketers, the GOP rebranders would have had successful careers at the Coca Cola Company in the early 1980s, when New Coke was created. But New Coke was a failure, except by its contrast with Coca Cola Classic. What Sarah Palin delivered last night was GOP Classic - a slap in the face not only to the hapless Obama and Biden pairing, but to those who sought to walk away from the strengths and basic identity of GOPitude and create a New GOP brand. Coca Cola Classic saved Coke. We just saw a master marketer - Sarah Palin - hired by a master CEO - John McCain - do what great marketers have always done.

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1.  Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was broadcast to the world as soon - or sooner than - it was discovered.  John Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter’s pregnancy was covered up by major media sources even though it was well documented.

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Over at Commentary’s Contentions blog, James Kirchik wrote a noble post demanding a reassesment of Joe Lieberman, now that he has been passed over for McCain’s running mate. Kirchik argues that since Lieberman did not modify his positions on key issues to him, such as abortion and the selection of judges, he should be admired for consistency, not damned as a hack:

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Not because it is an indicator of the willingness to sacrifice for one’s country. Not because it provides a background of solemnity and comradeship in the event of a decision to put the lives of servicemen and severicewomen on the line. What McCain gained from his military service - upon which, according to Jimmy Carter, he shamelessly capitalizes - is not moral standing but the ability to think strategically.
McCain just exhibited great generalship in the last few days - not only in whom he picked as VP, but how tightly controlled the whole process was. It took daring, imagination, and the ability to think five or six moves ahead. These are qualities that the men on the Democratic ticket often impute to themselves and have seldom shown in action.
To be fair, given the limitations of their native abilities, had Obama or Biden ever been professional soldiers, they would not have learned these things on the job. But at least they would have learned that even mediocrities must be prepared to be confronted by brilliance. Watch the left this weekend and enjoy their gnashing of teeth.

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Tom Friedman’s column in today’s Times hails China’s progress at the expense of ours: “When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it’s clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America.”

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Earlier this week, John Edwards promised us that he only conducted his affair with Rielle Hunter during the period when his wife’s deadly cancer was in remission - and I see no reason why we should not take him at his word.  And most of us admire him for his gallantry in this regard.  But after a couple of sleepless nights, I’m no longer sure that his behavior is as admirable as I first thought.

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Washington, DC - May 15, 2010. Of course I made up that headline - it hasn’t happened yet.  But George Packer is very wrong in The New Yorker, when, speaking of the West’s obligation to invade Burma in order to save the Burmese, he claims modestly that he knows “all the arguments why we shouldn’t.”  There is one paramount argument he hasn’t thought of - and that is to contemplate, a year or two hence, the onrush of a million words from Andrew Sullivan apologizing for our “botched” effort, if it is imperfect, and condemning those who were once heartened and persuaded by his former eloquence, his now-discarded wisdom and realism.

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Many are outraged by the action of the King School’s health center of Portland, Maine.  There, educators are supplying prescription-only contraceptive medication - “the pill or the patch or any other reproductive health care,” according to the Portland Press Herald - to middle school children.  Parents do not give permission - indeed, they never find out.  Outrageous it is, because this is something the private sector should be doing, not the school board.   Consider these facts.

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The judge played the holocaust card. In his testimony yesterday, Bush’s nominee for AG compared the interrogation of terrorists in Iraq, with vital information about threats to U.S. servicemen and Iraqi civilians, to the death camps of Nazi’s Germany. On the one hand, our treatment of people who have chosen to forego the protections afforded by the Geneva Convention, as such criminals were treated by the British in Northern Ireland (with the approval of the European Court of Justice) - on the other, extermination of people for the crime of being circumcised.

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That’s a headline you won’t see. But if there ever was an instance of a “lobby” effect in the manner in which Professors Mearsheimer and Walt accuse what they call the Israel Lobby - to act against the interests of the United States because of a blood tie - it displays itself in the House resolution regarding the Muslim slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Those who promoted this resolution are correct about the Armenian genocide, but the resolution itself is, in my view, utterly pointless. There are many reasons why the resolution has no effect. Everyone knows that genocide was committed against the Christian citizens of the Muslim Ottoman state. There are virtually no Armenians left in modern-day Turkey, and yet Christians and Jews live in and visit Turkey today in more safety and to a warmer welcome than they do in any other Muslim-majority state. The resolution has no bearing on Turkey - the murder of Armenians during 1914-1918 was conducted by an entity with which modern Turkey has no continuity, in territory or law.

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Many have written wisely on the way that Columbia University’s president Lee Bollinger was unwise or, in Arnold Ahlert’s technical term, idiotic to have invited Iran’s dictator Ahmadinejad to a debate. Bret Stephens in today’s Wall Street Journal, the historian Arthur Herman in today’s NY Post, and Anne Applebaum in a subtle piece in today’s Slate have all pointed out the unwisdom of Bollinger’s decision to invite this murderer of students, homosexuals and Americans. However Bollinger’s plucky and eloquent performance has blunted some of the criticism - all pay some tribute to his words, and one of his strongest critics, the New York Sun’s editorial page, seems to have changed its mind about Bollinger’s actions entirely.

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Even though Yom Kippur has passed for us members of the Israel Lobby, I awoke this morning with tremendous feelings of guilt. Here I was, comfortable in my own bed, and thinking how MoveOn.org had done more, while intending quite the opposite, to bring peace and freedom to Iraq than has any of us who are actually anti-Fascist. And my feelings were confirmed by reading that MoveOn has voluntarily ponied up the amount of the New York Times subsidy to its recent anti-Iraqi advertisement.

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Arthur Sulzberger has done it before. By using the New York Times Company’s bottom line in order to fund almost two-thirds of the MoveOn.org advertisement, in which they call General Petraeus a liar and a traitor, Mr. Sulzberger reminds me of an incident from more than a decade ago.

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Of course, I am a kike, so what I say should be discounted accordingly. But when my daughter (who is not a kike) graduated from the University of Chicago in 2004, John Mearsheimer gave the graduation address. This was before his working paper on the “Israel Lobby” was published, and he was known only as a professor of political science at Chicago. Mr. Mearsheimer’s address, delivered in a droning, soporific tone, that comported all-too-comfortably with the sunny, slightly hot day in June, was a lengthy tour d’horizon of America’s relationship with the rest of the world, and what Mearsheimer thought it should be, in the 21st century. The only thing notable about it was that it was too long and too dull, and the audience of proud parents squirmed in the heat and the dullness.

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Hilary Clinton inadvertantly revealed the reasoning - explicit in her case, but unconscious among her colleagues - behind the curious willingness of Democrats to support the President’s war powers in recent weeks. Mrs. Clinton told supporters in New Hampshire that, while terror is terrible in itself, it could be even worse: “… if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world.”

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The more that we help the forces that are pushing the Democratic party away from the mainstream, toward the left, and (as I think) towards the cliff, the better off we will be. So I urge my fellow PoliticalMavens mavens to close your heartstoward these people, but open your pocketbook. Who cares if Senator Edwards is, as a wonderful piece in yesterday’s The State argued, a big phony: as long as he is in the primary race, he keeps the center of gravity so far to the left that it hurts every candidate.

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