Here’s What John Kerry’s Peace Settlement Will Look Like (Probably). By Ben Birnbaum.

Here’s What John Kerry’s Peace Settlement Will Look Like (Probably). By Ben Birnbaum. The New Republic, July 29, 2013.

Getting to the Territorial Endgame of an Israeli-Palestinian Peace Settlement. A Special Report by the Israeli-Palestinian Workshop of the Baker Institute’s Conflict Resolution Forum. Chaired by Edward P. Djerijian. James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University, 2010.

The Great Collision: Egypt’s Descent Into Chaos. By Reuel Marc Gerecht.

The Great Collision: Egypt’s Descent Into Chaos. By Reuel Marc Gerecht. The Weekly Standard, August 5, 2013. Also here.

Egypt, Tunisia, Gaza Still Waiting for Democracy. By Shlomi Eldar. Al-Monitor, July 30, 2013.

Manning’s Enablers: The US Army — and Our Schools. By Ralph Peters.

Manning’s enablers: The US Army — and our schools. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, July 30, 2013.

Ralph Peters on Bradley Manning. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, July 31, 2013. YouTube.




Peters:

Yesterday, military judge Col. Denise Lind found Wiki-leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning guilty on five counts of espionage, as well as multiple counts of theft, computer fraud and military infractions. Giving Manning every benefit of the doubt, the judge found him not guilty of the charge of intentionally aiding the enemy — but still convicted him on 19 of 21 counts.

 

Now begins the separate sentencing phase of Manning’s military trial. But the long “guilty” list ensures he’ll spend decades in a military prison.

 

Yet two “unindicted co-conspirators” were missing in the dock throughout the trial. Not Julian Assange and his Wiki-gnomes, but the US Army and our blame-America culture.

 

Consider the guilt of the Army and Military Intelligence. Six weeks into basic training, Manning was tapped to be discharged as unsuitable. But the Army, hungry for even the worst cuts of meat, not only canceled the discharge move, but sent him to its Intelligence Center and School, granting him a Top Secret/Special Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) clearance.

 

Initially stationed at Ft. Drum, NY, Manning was referred for mental-health counseling. But he kept that sensitive clearance. Then he was sent to Iraq, where his behavior was erratic and provocative, but he continued to have access to high-level intelligence until he threw a destructive office tantrum and had to be restrained.

 

Eventually, he was demoted one grade and, finally, sent to work in a supply room. But the damage was already done: a vast dump of confidential and secret US government documents.

 

Extreme political correctness and the Army’s insatiable appetite for troops with top clearances had combined to enable the largest leak of classified information in our history.

 

Prior to 9/11, a soldier could lose his or her clearance over a minor infraction and access to Special Compartmentalized Information was granted on a strict “need to know” basis. To lose access today, you have to hand over 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks or give the Chinese and Russians the NSA’s gravest secrets.

 

Back when I served in Military Intelligence, Manning never would’ve gotten a clearance in the first place — warning flags were everywhere. Same thing with Edward Snowden: He never should have gotten a clearance of any kind.

 

But serious vetting ended with 9/11: Today, it’s just a meat market.

 

None of this excuses Manning’s betrayal of his country. But the Army and the intelligence community need to do some soul-searching.

 

The other enabler that helped make Manning the disaster he became is our patriotism-trashing, dumb-it-way-down culture.

 

Want to find the root of the reflexive anti-Americanism and irresponsibility that propelled Manning, Snowden and others to betray their country? Start with the removal of serious history study from our classrooms.

 

What are kids taught about our country now? They learn about our “collective guilt” for slavery — but not about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died ending it. They learn about the “crime” of dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — but not about the Bataan Death March. Guadalcanal? The Bulge? Nah. But they learn about the internment of Japanese-Americans — a regrettable mistake, but not the Holocaust.

In short, kids are programmed to feel ashamed of the United States of America. Young men such as Manning (who, yes, also attended school in peevishly anti-American Wales for several years) or Snowden make fateful decisions in a mental and moral near-vacuum littered with anti-American garbage.

 

And think of all the Hollywood films, television series and talk shows preaching endlessly that the real bad guys are the Feds (or the US Marines — thanks, James Cameron).

 

Undoubtedly, Manning and Snowden are troubled souls. But they’re also narcissistic, dishonest and malicious. The fact that each has defenders only validates the points made above: In pop culture and the classroom, America’s a menace.

 

It’s a shame that Col. Lind, the judge, couldn’t render a much broader verdict.

Needed: A Tragic Hero. By Victor Davis Hanson.

John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

Needed: A Tragic Hero. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, July 30, 2013.

In good times, the larger-than-life figure is an affront; in crisis, he is necessary.

Martin Scorsese on The Searchers. By Martin Scorsese. The Hollywood Reporter, March 8, 2013.

Religious Liberty Threatened. By Ryan T. Anderson.

Religious Liberty Threatened. By Ryan T. Anderson. National Review Online, July 30, 2013.

Advocates of same-sex marriage are classifying Biblical teachings as hate speech.

Ashamed of Patriotism. By Charles C. W. Cooke.

Ashamed of Patriotism. By Charles C. W. Cooke. National Review Online, July 30, 2013.

Cooke:

The 9/11 museum director’s revulsion at patriotism is part of a larger collapse in national confidence.

 

History shows that great and dominant societies can survive a great number of awful things without succumbing to collapse, but that they rarely outlast the gradual disintegration of national self-confidence. With this in mind, consider the words of one Michael Shulan, who “really believes” that “the way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently.” Mr. Shulan, who is the creative director of the 9/11 Memorial Museum, also expressed his distaste at what he called the “rah-rah America” instinct.

 

The news that a New York City–based “creative director” is disheartened by muscular American self-assuredness will presumably not come as a hefty surprise to many. Nevertheless, I might venture that if one’s sole job is to memorialize for the nation the revolting attack that unrepentant barbarians perpetrated on the United States on September 11 of 2001, one’s calculations as to what level of patriotism is and isn’t seemly should change a touch.

 

And yet they haven’t. In Elizabeth Greenspan’s new book about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, Battle for Ground Zero, the author relates a disquieting incident in which Shulan huffily objects to a photograph of three ash-covered firefighters raising an American flag amid the mangled remains of the World Trade Center. Per Greenspan’s account, Shulan’s displeasure was mollified only after he and his colleagues reached a “compromise” and a couple of other photographs of the flag were added to the museum’s collection. “Shulan didn’t like three photographs more than he liked one, but he went along with it,” Greenspan reports.

The job of a curator is to curate, and nobody would expect Mr. Shulan to remain quiet if he had legitimate artistic differences. But the interesting question here is why Mr. Shulan — or anyone, for that matter — would find distasteful or “simplistic” the inclusion of photographs of American firefighters responding to mass murder in an exhibition that venerates the very same.

 

“My concern,” Shulan explained, “as it always was, is that we not reduce [9/11] down to something that was too simple, and in its simplicity would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event.”

 

The never-ending search for complexity where it neither exists nor belongs is the unlovely signet of the pseudo-intellectual. What, precisely, are America’s flag-waving rubes missing about the events of September 11, 2001? What does the photograph show that “distorts” anything? If Mr. Shulan disagrees with Rudy Giuliani’s admirably Manichean statement that, the attacks of 9/11 being “an attack on the very idea of a free, inclusive, and civil society,” “we are right and they are wrong,” then he should say so. He might tell us also what he conceives to be the apparently unknowable “meaning of the event.” Absent an explanation, we should presume that the curator of the 9/11 Memorial Museum considers that there was a better time for firemen to be “vigilantly and so vehemently American” than the day their city crashed down around them. This is unacceptable.

 

Even America’s fiercest critics appear capable of treating as separate their wider political disapprobation and the innocent bystanders of lower Manhattan, rural Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Why not Mr. Shulan? One presumes, for example, that he would not object to a museum’s featuring L. Bennett Fenberg’s beautiful video of American troops blowing up the vast swastika that stood above the rally grounds at Nuremberg on the grounds that it “simplified” the complex Nazi state or abridged the Second World War? Is 9/11 really so different?

 

In recent years, “patriotism,” “ideology,” and “nationalism” have acquired a bad name among our betters. This is a dangerous shame. My first instinct upon reading about Shulan was, “Well, for goodness sake don’t put this man in charge of the Anne Frank Museum . . . ” Alas, that was before a reader wrote to tell me that even the Amsterdam museum honoring the young Holocaust victim has succumbed to such sloppy thinking: I am told that a display on the wall asks visitors to consider if they are “Guilty of patriotism or nationalism?”

 

Such a question might sound wise, but it is no such thing. The problem with the German people in the 1930s and early 1940s wasn’t that they loved a country or that they thrilled to an ideology but that they loved Germany and thrilled to Nazism. Even George Orwell recognized the dangers of nihilistic detachment. While Orwell was embarrassed that “God Save the King” continued to stir something primeval in him long after his conversion to socialism, he would, he wrote, still “sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”

 

Previously, I have drawn fire for contending that the West is not only morally superior to the rest of the world but that, within the West, the Anglosphere is objectively better than the rest of the West and that, within the Anglosphere, the United States stands out. This is to say neither that the United States is beyond criticism nor that it is perfect. But a nation in which every man is Tacitus cannot and will not stand for long, especially if its cultural institutions are overrun by the hostile and the apathetic.

 

There is a pernicious school of thought in America that holds that the country cannot possibly be the “best in the world” because it is third in grain exports or seventh in state-run education or because the government doesn’t do exactly what one wishes that it would. This misses the point completely. The United States is paramount among nations because it is based on the best of values and because it is prepared to defend them for itself and for others with force. 

The photograph of the flag being raised at Ground Zero is of a piece with the film of George W. Bush embracing the firemen and with Rudy Giuliani’s immediate resolve to rebuild; and together they serve as the overture to a robust and admirable American defense of self. One rather suspects that it is this, and not a particular picture, to which Mr. Shulan ultimately objects. And that being so, one has to ask: What drew him to the job in the first place?

 

 

Rebuilding Life in the Aftermath of Grief. By Peter Wehner.

Rebuilding Life in the Aftermath of Grief. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, July 29, 2013.

The Tragedy of Isolation. By Thomas Sowell.

The Tragedy of Isolation. By Thomas Sowell. Real Clear Politics, July 30, 2013. Also at The American Spectator, National Review Online.

Sowell:

Isolation has held back many peoples in many lands, for centuries.

 

In the 20th century, Western intellectuals’ two most dominant explanations of disparities in economic, educational and other achievements were innate racial differences in ability (in the early decades) and racial discrimination (in the later decades).

 

In neither era were the intelligentsia receptive to other explanations. In each era, they were convinced that they had the answer — and dismissed and disparaged those who offered other answers.

 

Differences in mental test scores among different racial and ethnic groups were taken as proof of genetic differences in innate mental ability during the Progressive era in the early 20th century. Progressives regarded the fact that the average IQ test score among whites was higher than the average among blacks as conclusive proof of genetic determinism.

 

A closer look at mental test data, however, shows that there were not only individual blacks with higher IQs than most whites, but also whole categories of whites who scored at or below the mental test scores of blacks.

 

Among American soldiers given mental tests during the First World War, for example, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.

 

Among other groups of whites, those with average mental test scores no higher than the average mental test scores among blacks included those in various isolated mountain communities in the United States, those living in the Hebrides Islands off Scotland and those in isolated canal boat communities in Britain.

 

Looking at achievements in general, people living in geographically isolated environments around the world have long lagged behind the progress of people with a wider cultural universe, regardless of the race of the people in these isolated places. When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level.

 

Many mountain communities around the world have also been isolated, especially during the centuries before modern transportation and communications.

 

These mountain communities were often not only isolated from the outside world but also from each other, even when they were not very far apart as the crow flies, but were separated by rugged mountain terrain.

 

As distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel put it, “Mountain life persistently lagged behind the plain.” A pattern of poverty and backwardness could be found from the Appalachian Mountains in the United States to the Rif Mountains of Morocco, the Pindus Mountains of Greece and the mountains and uplands of Ceylon, Taiwan, Albania and Scotland.

 

Cultural isolation due to geographic factors afflicts not only peoples isolated in mountains or on islands far from the nearest mainland, but also peoples isolated by deserts or in places isolated by a lack of navigable waterways — or even by a lack of animal transport, as was the situation in the Western Hemisphere when Europeans arrived and brought horses that were unknown to the indigenous peoples.

 

Cultural isolation can also be due to government decisions, as when the governments of 15th century China and 17th century Japan deliberately isolated their peoples from the outside world. At that time, China was the leading nation in the world. But it lost that lead during centuries of isolation.

 

Sometimes isolation is due to a culture that resists learning from other cultures. The Arab Middle East was once more advanced than Europe but, while Europe learned much from the Middle East, the Arab Middle East has not translated as many books from other languages into Arabic in a thousand years as Spain alone translates into Spanish annually.

 

Against this background, racial and ethnic leaders around the world who promote a separate cultural “identity” are inflicting a handicap on their own people. Isolation has held back many peoples in many lands, for centuries. But such social and cultural isolation serves the interests of today’s ethnic leaders.

 

They have every incentive to promote a breast-beating isolation. It is a sweet-tasting poison.

The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers? By Jeffrey Lord.

The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers? By Jeffrey Lord. The American Spectator, July 30, 2013.

The GOP Divide On Immigration. By Michael Gerson.

The GOP divide on immigration. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, July 30, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Pamela Geller’s Intolerance Crosses Red Line on Bimah. By Rabbi Eric Yoffie.

Pamela Geller’s Intolerance Crosses Red Line on Bimah. By Rabbi Eric Yoffie. The Jewish Daily Forward, July 29, 2013.

Reuel Gerecht and Jeffrey Goldberg vs. Pamela Geller: Geller Wins. By Pamela Geller and Robert Spenser. Atlas Shrugs, October 13, 2010. Also at Jihad Watch.

Pamela Geller: Outraged, and Outrageous. By Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer. New York Times, October 8, 2010.

Pamela Geller: In Her Own Words. Interviewed by Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer. New York Times, October 8, 2010.

Reuel Gerecht on Pamela Geller’s Foul Anti-Muslim Ideology. By Jeffrey Goldberg. The Atlantic, October 13, 2010.

Anti-Zionists Claim To Be Completely Different To Anti-Semites. By Brendan O’Neill.

Anti-Zionists claim to be completely different to anti-Semites. But there’s one key thing they have in common. By Brendan O’Neill. The Telegraph, July 19, 2013.

O’Neill:

Nick Clegg’s withdrawal of the party whip from his Bradford East MP David Ward will reignite the debate over whether there’s a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In January this year, Mr Ward found himself at the centre of a media storm when, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, he lambasted “the Jews” for their cruelty towards the Palestinians. But it is for his more recent comments about Zionism that Mr Ward has had his knuckles rapped by Clegg. Mr Ward tweeted on Saturday night: “Am I wrong or am I right? At long last the #Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the #apartheid State of #Israel last?” Some argue that criticising Zionism or Israel is an entirely legitimate thing to do and is not remotely comparable to expressing disdain or disgust for “the Jews”, and so if Mr Ward was to be punished for anything it should have been for his earlier, very dodgy comments about “the Jews,” not for his blathering about Zionism.

 

I have some sympathy with this viewpoint – but not nearly as much as I might have had in the past. I think the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is getting thinner all the time. These two worldviews are, if obviously not the exact same thing, then at least very close cousins. There is one inescapable thing that they share in common: a tendency to trace all global problems and instabilities back to the behaviour and beliefs of a Jewish thing, whether the Jewish people or the Jewish State. Modern-day anti-Zionism, particularly as practised by left-leaning, trendy Europeans, among whom it is highly fashionable, is the heir to old-style anti-Semitism in one very important way: it has a scary habit of treating Jewish stuff or Jewish people as the source of the world’s ills.

 

What is most striking about modern-day Israel-bashers is their conviction that Israel is not only a state that sometimes fights wars, like, say, America and Britain does, but more importantly is a state which corrupts global politics. It is commonplace to hear radical leftists argue that Israel is the secret instigator of most of the wars in the world, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, we’re told, were launched by Washington and London at Israel’s behest. In the words of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, if it wasn’t for the insidious influence of Israel’s agents in the US capital, “America would not be in Iraq today.” Anti-Zionists always talk about an “Israel lobby,” which apparently didn’t only spearhead the entire War on Terror but is now “cowboying up for war with Iran.” So widespread is the idea that Israel is to blame for everything rotten in the world that a few years ago a poll of Europeans found that a majority think Israel is “the greatest threat to world peace.” Arabs also believe Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. Israel is now regularly referred to as a “rogue,” “criminal” or “insane” state which is becoming “dangerously erratic,” threatening both more regional war and also global tensions. It’s treated as the well of global poison.

 

The obsessive Israel-bashers will say: “Ah, but we are criticising a state, not a people. We’re attacking the Zionist entity, not the Jews.” Fine. Except that their criticisms of Zionism have eerie echoes of earlier expressions of hatred for Jews in the sense that both are about finding one thing, normally a Jewish thing, which can be blamed for all sorts of very complex global problems. In modern public debate, “Zionism” seems simply to have replaced “the Jews” as the thing we can point at and say: “It’s their fault.” That is why modern-day depictions of Israel often closely resemble old-world depictions of the Jews, such as when the Guardian recently caricatured Israeli leaders as the puppetmasters of global affairs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, some Europeans who felt threatened or thrown by the rapid pace of change and instability in emerging capitalist society visited their fury upon the Jews, irrationally treating them as the source of these modernising trends. “The Jews” became the catch-all explanation for bad or weird things that people couldn’t find other explanations for. A German Marxist referred to this as “the socialism of fools.” Today, by the same token, the laying of blame for every global conflict and problem at the feet of Zionism or Israel is the anti-imperialism of fools.

America Exploits a Gullible Arab World. The Daily Star (Lebanon).

Machiavellian plot. The Daily Star (Lebanon), July 29, 2013.

Martin Indyk and Moral Equivalency. By Paul Eidelberg.

Martin Indyk and Moral Equivalency. By Paul Eidelberg. Arutz Sheva 7, July 28, 2013.

What Should We Expect From Martin Indyk? By Rachel Cohen. The Daily Beast, July 24, 2013.


Eidelberg:

How much hard work and stamina, how much self-sacrifice and heroism, are required in each generation to defend civilization against its enemies.

 

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton once said that the American State Department is dominated by “moral equivalency” which applies especially to Foggy Bottom's morally neutral policy toward Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This means that the State Department, consistent with the academic doctrine of cultural relativism, makes no significant distinction between good and evil regimes. American foreign policy thus tends to be morally neutral or value-free.

 

Carry the logic a step further. The State Department’s foreign policy requires its envoys or diplomats to be morally neutral or value-free. But to be morally neutral or value–free is to be shameless! This, inescapably, is the logical implication of the State Department mind-set. Hence, it’s reasonable to assume that this will be the mind-set of Martin Indyk: the Envoy chosen to mediate negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

 

Three years ago I wrote a review of Martin Indyk. Indyk was born in England 1951 but grew up and was educated in Australia.  He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972 and received a PhD in international relations from the Australian National University in 1977. He immigrated to the United States and later gained American citizenship in 1993.

 

Indyk has taught at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He served two stints as U.S. Ambassador to Israel, from April 1995 to September 1997 and from January 2000 to July 2001.

 

On April 19, 2010, Indyk wrote an op ed in the New York Times blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the rift with the Obama administration.  He went so far as to say “Israel has to adjust its policy to the interests of the United States.”

 

Like his Washington handlers, and consistent with the moral equivalency that permeated his university education, Indyk has long advocated a Palestinian state. He should have no problem on that issue with Mr. Netanyahu, who in effect manifested the same moral equivalency on June 14, 2009 when he endorsed the “two state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

 

One does not require military expertise to arrive at a former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff conclusion that a Palestinian a state would endanger Israel’s existence. This is why Netanyahu insists that a Palestinian state must be demilitarized and barred from forming alliances with any Arab regime—a non-sequitur in international law.

 

Be that as it may, since no Palestinian leader would survive a day if he accepted such limitations, and since Prime Minister Netanyahu has the flexible spine required by the American State Department’s policy of moral equivalency, we should expect the PM to flex his spine more than his muscles vis-à-vis Martin Indyk.

 

We certainly can’t expect Indyk to be holier than the Pope. After all, Netanyahu, like the American State Department, behaves as if ignorant of, or indifferent to, the murderous and mendacious character of Arab-Islamic culture. It matters neither to him nor to the State Department that Egyptian-born scholar, the intrepid Bat Ye’or, has called Islam a “culture of hate.” Likewise, it matters neither to him nor the State Department that another intrepid woman, Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, is so contemptuous of Islam that, unlike Bibi, she doesn’t deem Islam worthy of being called a “civilization.”

 

So what is to be expected of a diplomat like Martin Indyk whose university education has imbued him—as it has the American State Department as a whole—with the shameless doctrine of moral equivalency?

 

By the way, the intellectual and moral level of Indyk’s academic credentials and diplomatic posts reminds me of George Orwell’s assessment of British academics of the 1930s who held diplomatic posts in the Chamberlain government. Orwell saw that Britain’s intelligentsia was steeped in moral relativism, and that this pernicious doctrine had enfeebled Chamberlain’s foreign policy.

 

The same decadence is evident in the moral equivalency that Ambassador Bolton saw in the America State Department. No wonder: The State Department has more PhDs than any other department of American government. Let me spell this out in the clearest terms, which requires a candid but unpublicized view of higher education in the democratic world, the education of the university graduates that shape the foreign policies of the secular democratic state.

 

Inasmuch these graduates, who have been virtually indoctrinated in moral equivalency and cultural relativism, are now pursuing a career in the cynical domain of international politics where power and economic interests predominate, do not expect them to take evil seriously. This means that the State Department diplomats referred to by John Bolton tend to behave like children who take civilization for granted!

 

Thanks to their morally neutral education, they are abysmally ignorant of what is required to preserve civilization. Smug and steeped in the moral equivalency, which they do not even recognize as shameless, they are oblivious of how much hard work and stamina, how much self-sacrifice and heroism, are required in each generation to defend civilization against its enemies.

 

Think of how much it cost in blood and treasure for America to save Europe from barbarism in the last century—the same barbarism threatening Israel today from Arabs animated by the genocidal charter of the Palestinian Authority.

 

But what does this matter to Martin Indyk and Benjamin Netanyahu, neither of whom has the spine of intrepid women like Bat Ye’or and Wafa Sultan?

Obama Is Bad News for Blacks. By Richard Rahn.

Obama Is Bad News for Blacks. By Richard Rahn. Washington Times, July 26, 2013.

Rahn:

If you knew nothing else about President Obama other than looking at the data, you might conclude that he was insensitive to blacks, given that they have done far worse economically under his administration than Hispanics or whites. What is striking is that the president and his advisers still seem to be clueless about which economic policies work and which don't work. Despite his (at least for this week) emphasis on the economy, he persists in being the anti-Reagan, with anti-growth policies. In his speech Wednesday in Illinois, the president came up with no new pro-growth proposals, just more of what has not worked.

 

President Reagan reduced the maximum tax rate on job creators by 60 percent; Mr. Obama increased the maximum tax rate on job creators by 17 percent. Reagan cut non-defense, discretionary, federal government spending by a third as a percentage of gross domestic product; Mr. Obama has increased it. Reagan cut government regulations while Mr. Obama has greatly increased them.

 

The results are:

 

Under Reagan, adult black unemployment fell by 20 percent, but under Mr. Obama, it has increased by 42 percent.

 

Black teenage unemployment fell by 16 percent under Reagan, but has risen by 56 percent under Mr. Obama.

 

The increase in unemployment rates has been far worse for blacks under Mr. Obama than for whites and Hispanics.

 

Inflation-adjusted real incomes are slightly higher for Hispanics and whites than they were in 2008, but are lower for blacks.

 

The labor force participation rate has fallen for all groups, but remains far lower for blacks than for whites and Hispanics.

 

Most people, when confronted with the evidence presented above, probably would realize that they had been mistaken and then try a set of policies that were successful in the past. Not Mr. Obama. Given the tenor of his most recent talks, he seems to be intent on doubling down on his own failed policies.

 

It was true until the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago, in a world of little economic growth, that for any individual to become better off, others would have to become worse off. Adam Smith was one of the first to understand that as a result of new technologies and better political and business institutions and organizations — and, most important, the rule of law and proper incentives — everyone could become better off without taking anything from anyone else. Despite the empirical evidence of the past 200 years that Smith and all of the clear and rational thinkers who followed him were right about economic growth, there is still the widespread belief that for one person to prosper someone else needs to suffer. It is this mindset that serves as the basic rationale for socialism and the state as an instrument of income redistribution. One would think that only the uneducated still would have this mindset, but it is most prevalent in universities.

 

Perhaps a major reason that professors and other educators are so dense when it comes to productivity increases and the resulting economic growth and real rise in living standards is that most classrooms are not much more productive than they were when Aristotle was speaking to a dozen or so students 2,500 years ago. By contrast, entrepreneurs see better ways of producing more for less and visualize and create things that never existed (i.e., the automobile, the airplane, the iPad, etc.) — and they create wealth and jobs. Mr. Obama comes from the government/academic class rather than the entrepreneurial class and has a much more static view of the world.

 

Reagan thought like an entrepreneur, and thus intuitively understood that economic growth creates opportunities for everyone — most important, for those who have the least. Mr. Obama has fewer senior advisers and top officials in his administration who have had significant private-sector experience than any previous president; hence, like all too many of the European statists and socialists, they think in static terms.

 

The unfortunate irony is that America’s first black president seems bent on continuing a set of policies that can lead only to continued slow growth or stagnation. The ones who are and will suffer the most from these policies are those who have the least. Mr. Obama no doubt has real compassion for the poor, but until he can begin to understand the destructive second-order effects of his policies and see that getting the foot of government off the forces of economic growth is the only real way to make life better for most of them, all too many will continue to suffer unnecessarily.

Reza Aslan Misrepresents His Scholarly Credentials on Fox News. By Matthew J. Franck.

Reza Aslan Misrepresents His Scholarly Credentials. By Matthew J. Franck. First Things, July 29, 2013.

Muslim Author Reza Aslan: I Knew “What I Was Getting Into” By Going on Fox News. By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, July 29, 2013.

Is Muslim Academic Reza Aslan More Biased Than a Christian Scholar? By David A. Graham. The Atlantic, July 29, 2013.

Reza Aslan and the Fox News Zealot. By Zaki Hasan. The Huffington Post, July 29, 2013.

Why the Fox News Scandal Is Good News for Reza Aslan. By Connor Simpson. The Atlantic, July 28, 2013.

Reza Aslan Feels “Kind of Bad” for His Fox News Interrogator. By Dan Amira. New York Magazine, July 29, 2013.

Reza Aslan To Fox News: Yes I “Happen ToBe A Muslim,” But Wrote “Zealot” Because I Am An Expert. The Huffington Post, July 27, 2013.

The Most Damning Part of That Reza Aslan Fox News Interview You’ve Been Hearing About. By Asawin Suebsaeng. Mother Jones, July 28, 2013.

Reza Aslan Interviewed by Fox News Anchor Lauren Green. Video. Breaking News Today!!!, July 28, 2013. YouTube. Also here. Also at BuzzFeed.




Reza Aslan: I Knew What I Was Getting Into Going On Fox News. Video. SamSeder, July 29, 2013. YouTube.




Sam Harris vs. Reza Aslan, January 25, 2007. Full Unedited Video. AllSamHarrisContent, May 27, 2012. YouTube.

George Will on Detroit’s Cultural Collapse.

George Will On ABC: “Cultural Collapse,” “Unwed Mothers,” “Voting For Incompetents” Bankrupted Detroit. By Evan McMurry. Mediaite, July 28, 2013. Video at YouTube.

George Will: Detroit doesn’t have a fiscal problem, but a “cultural collapse.” By Jeff Poor. The Daily Caller, July 28, 2013.

The Left’s Evolving Blame Game on Detroit. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, July 29, 2013.

Note to Paul Krugman: It Took More Than Markets to Ruin Detroit. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 23, 2013.

This Week Transcript. ABC News, July 28, 2013.

GEORGE WILL: You can’t solve their problems, because their problems are cultural. You have a city, 139 square miles, you can graze cattle in vast portions of it, dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there. 3 percent of fourth graders reading at the national math standards, 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate, 79 percent of Detroit children are born to unmarried mothers. They don’t have a fiscal problem, Steve, they have a cultural collapse.

 

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I find that really insulting to the people of Detroit. I think there is a serious discussion about the future of cities in a time of deindustrialization. But in many ways, Detroit has been a victim of market forces, and I think that what Steve said is so critical, that retirees and workers should not bear this. And this story should not be hijacked as one of about greedy, fiscal, public unions.

 

WILL: But Steve said he . . .

 

VANDEN HEUVEL: And fiscally responsibility.

 

WILL: But Steve said in his op-ed was the people of Detroit are no more to blame than the victims of Hurricane Sandy, because apart from voting, he said. Well, what did they vote for, for 60 years of incompetence, malcontents, and in some cases criminals.

 

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, let’s (inaudible) get the last word.

 

STEVE RATTNER: So that’s fine. And so what do you want to do, do you want to leave them sitting in exactly the situation you just described, or in the spirit of America trying to help people who are less fortunate, whether their victims of natural disasters or their own ignorance or whatever, do you want to reach out and try to help them and try to reinvent Detroit for not a lot of money. We’re talking about a couple billion dollars here, this is small potatoes in the great scheme of life, or else you have your scenario, just leave them all sit with feral dogs for the rest of their lives.

 

VANDEN HEUVEL: Hobbesian anarchy.

Perspectives on Arab-Israeli Diplomacy.

Perspectives on Arab-Israeli Diplomacy. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, June 23, 2013.

The current efforts of the Obama administration to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace talks come after years in which the two sides have not been engaged in any negotiations. This diplomatic hiatus has had an impact on the public discourse about the questions involved. Many observers in academia, government, and journalism are frequently not familiar with all the nuances that will be raised. The list of studies presented (at link) is intended to fill that vacuum by providing key background papers on the most critical issues that will be on the negotiating table. The authors of these works are former senior diplomats, military officers, and governmental advisors, thus providing the reader an insider’s perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the options to be considered for its resolution.

America Can’t Escape the Middle East. By Zachary C. Shirkey.

America Can’t Escape the Middle East. By Zachary C. Shirkey. The National Interest, July 29, 2013.

Review of Marc Morris’s “The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England.” By Jim Cullen.

Review of Marc Morris’s The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England. By Jim Cullen. History News Network, July 19, 2013.

Book at Amazon.com.

92 Professors Go After Mitch Daniels Over Howard Zinn. By Ronald Radosh.

92 Professors Go After Mitch Daniels. By Ronald Radosh. History News Network, July 25, 2013. Also at Minding the Campus.

Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion in the United States? By Ruth Rosen.

Why the Relentless Assault on Abortion in the United States? By Ruth Rosen. History News Network, July 29, 2013. Also at openDemocracy.

Bayit Yehudi MK: Gov’t That Releases Prisoners, Will Uproot Settlements. By Lahav Harkov.

Bayit Yehudi MK: Gov’t that releases prisoners, will uproot settlements. By Lahav Harkov. Jerusalem Post, July 28, 2013.

Talks About Talks Set to Resume. By Walter Russell Mead.

Talks About Talks Set to Resume. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 29, 2013.

Mead:

With Israel’s cabinet having voted to release 104 Palestinian prisoners, the headlines this morning are particularly optimistic about prospects for Israeli-Palestinian talks. The NY Times: “Israel and Palestinians Set to Resume Peace Talks, U.S. Announces”. The Washington Post: “Peace talks set to begin after Israel agrees to free 104 Palestinian prisoners”.

 

These are all a little misleading: Israelis and Palesitinians aren’t yet ready for actual talks about peace. What has happened is that they have moved from indirect talks about talks about peace to direct talks about talks about peace.

 

We’ll see; neither side really thinks the negotiations will work, but neither side wants to get blamed for failure. That gives Secretary Kerry something to work with. Since this is about the only good news coming out of the Middle East these days, we will cherish it and hope for the best. The Times story in particular suggests that Martin Indyk will be named by Kerry to represent the United States at these talks (about talks). This is even more reason to be hopeful. Indyk is an experienced diplomat and is unlikely to get deeply involved unless he thinks there is a real chance for significant progress.

 

And even if Kerry can’t, as most observers still think, get real peace, there might still be some ways that more people on both sides could go about their daily business without interference or threat. Given the way things have been going for the past decade or so, that would be an achievement.

When History Is Not Helpful. By Mark Davis.

When History is Not Helpful. By Mark Davis. Townhall.com, July 26, 2013.