Saturday, July 05, 2014

To celebrate the 4th, think about we could tell the founders

By John Kass
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
July 4, 2014

(Painting by John Ward Dunsmore, Library of Congress)

Like many of you, I plan to barbecue to help celebrate Independence Day.

That's what the Fourth of July is for most Americans, a party with family and friends, beer and barbecue, sweet corn at its best. And watermelon and fireflies at dusk, then the fireworks, and little kids in the backyard running with sparklers in the dark.

There's nothing quite like being outside with a cold one and meat on the menu. But proper barbecue takes time. And so, hours before the guests come, when I've got time alone, waiting for the charcoal to ash out, I have an odd Independence Day routine.

I peer into the fire to get a sense of it and let my mind start walking. I don't know what it is exactly that fixes me when I stare into a fire and feel the heat on my face in July. It must be a kind of self-hypnosis, fire as mantra. Whatever it is, the coals trigger something.

And for years now, what is triggered on the Fourth of July is this:

I think of the men who froze in Valley Forge with Washington's army. I think of the founders who crafted a government they hoped would protect liberty. And I wonder what they'd think of us today.

At least 2,000 men died at Valley Forge without even a shot fired, death from disease mostly. Many lost their feet from amputation after their toes turned black from the cold.

And today I'm asking you to think on it when you have a moment alone. Just keep it to yourself. Don't argue with your brother-in-law about it, or lecture your kids. Just think it through a bit in private. And ask yourself this:

What would we tell the founders and the men of Valley Forge about the nation they gave us?

Would we tell them that many Americans probably know more about the curves of Kim Kardashian than we know about the Bill of Rights?

Or that we've traded liberty for entertainment, and worship smartphones that record our movements, our thoughts and our "likes"?

We often make the mistake of idealizing the founders. They weren't Olympians reaching down from the holy mountain to offer the secrets of fire to men.

Some were slave owners, others were libertines. Some were principled, and others were less so. Some were trusting, others were cynical.

When I was a boy I learned about them as if they were gods. I can see Miss Litton right now, her gray hair in a bun, glasses on black beads around her neck, standing in those clunky black shoes at Sherman School on the South Side, telling us about George Washington and the cherry tree.

So of course, we thought them gods. But gods are too far removed to understand the tiny creatures that approach them with offerings. Men? That's different. They're on the ground. The founders were in the world. They were realists.

And as they hammered out the Constitution, they put all their practical knowledge to good use, because they understood human nature.

They understood the divine spark in humanity, and also the corruption. They also knew the appetite of men to seek power and to use reason and muscle to acquire it. They worried about factions (we'd call them political parties) by studying the fallen empires of dead European white males, something that isn't much encouraged these days.

And so, they created a system of government that took our human failings into account, our hunger, even our admirable desire to bend others to our will in the pursuit of a greater good for all.

They created an amazing system, with three equal branches, each limiting the other's reach.

They didn't set out to make the president into a king. Washington turned down a throne. He could have crowned himself, but he said no.

Yet recent presidents — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — might have said otherwise, given what they've offered the nation: a never-ending war on terror, and the weapons to fight it. These include killer drones in the skies, cameras on our streets to watch us in public and the National Security Agency to read our thoughts in what some of us still think are private moments.

And they've used our fear to shape a new American.

That new American insists, loudly, perhaps too loudly, that the federal government can look all it wants into his private affairs, because he has nothing to hide.

A story about the beginning of the country tells us that a group stopped Benjamin Franklin on the street in Philadelphia. They wanted to know what kind of government the delegates were creating.

"A republic, if you can keep it," Franklin is said to have announced.

Democratic republics require an informed and inquisitive people to survive, a people who are actively involved, a people who question their leaders.

But most of all, they require a people who prize one thing above all else.

It's not barbecue and corn, not beer and fireworks, not Kim Kardashian, not chatter on social media. Not the loving watchfulness of drones or the reach of presidents who fashion themselves kings.

A democratic republic requires something else: citizens who prize their liberty as they celebrate their nation's independence from tyranny.

jskass@tribune.com Twitter @John_Kass

Friday, July 04, 2014

Resenting the Republic

Liberals take exception to exceptionalism.

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 4, 2014

You wouldn’t think, five years into the Obama presidency, that so many liberal Americans wouldn’t like America.

A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don’t often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world. Respondents who “often feel proud to be American” were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent, depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of “solid liberals” said they don’t often feel proud to be an American.

The polling data only prove what has been obvious for a while.

Georgia representative John Lewis recently said that “if the Civil Rights Act was before the Congress today, it would not pass, it would probably never make it to the floor for a vote.”

Lewis is right. If it came before the Congress today, it wouldn’t pass. You know why? Because we passed it 50 years ago. The GI Bill wouldn’t pass today either, because that was enacted in 1944. If, somehow, we had Jim Crow today, the American people — and Congress — would vote to abolish it in a landslide.

In fairness, Lewis was primarily condemning congressional gridlock, not GOP racism.

Primarily.

A legitimate hero of the civil-rights era, Lewis has adopted the liberal habit of suggesting that his political opponents have a burning desire to return to the era of Jim Crow. At the 2012 Democratic convention, for instance, he gave a thundering speech that equated a vote for Mitt Romney with going back to the era of segregation.

Contrary to what you hear daily on MSNBC, Republicans don’t want to force Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, Dr. Ben Carson, Senator Tim Scott, or any other African American to the back of the bus.

Lewis isn’t the only leading Democrat incapable of giving the American people some credit. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case, Hillary Clinton insisted we are following in the footsteps of anti-democratic Middle Eastern theocracies. According to Clinton, the majority on the court were like Iranian mullahs, behaving “in ways that are disadvantageous to women but which prop up them because of their religion, their sect, their tribe, whatever.” The shocking, inarticulate stupidity of this analysis is outdone only by the stunning ease with which Clinton offered it.

She’s not alone, of course. To listen to some of the hysterical responses to the court’s decision, you’d think the government in Washington is the only thing thwarting the desire of millions of businessmen to drape their female employees in burqas.

This glib anti-Americanism manifests itself most readily when issues of race and gender are in the headlines, but it hardly ends there. MSNBC host Chris Hayes celebrated soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S. because it strikes a blow against “anti-soccer trolls” who believe in American exceptionalism. “Part of embracing a truly worldwide competition,” Hayes cheered, “is accepting the fact the U.S. cannot simply assert its dominance. Turns out we have to play just like everybody else.”

It’s ironic. In 2009, conservatives (myself included) pounced when Barack Obama seemed to dismiss American exceptionalism as an empty platitude. “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama explained, “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

By this standard, American exceptionalism isn’t exceptional, it’s a vague and meaningless form of national self-esteem, rather than a complex concept describing the uniqueness of the American founding and American character.

Liberals quickly and angrily defended Obama, saying none should dare question his patriotism, and of course he believes America is special. In May, Obama took another stab, telling West Point graduates that he believes in American exceptionlism “with every fiber of my being.” But he immediately qualified what he meant by insisting that “what makes us exceptional is not flouting international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”

Translation: We prove we’re exceptional by playing just like everyone else — just like playing soccer!

Why liberals have become so comfortable running down America is no doubt complicated, but I think one part of the answer is obvious. Liberals tend to equate patriotism with the government. Obama was supposed to usher in a glorious new era of European-style big government. He’s failed, though alas not entirely. But in the attempt he aroused a populist movement — the tea parties — full of people who wore their traditional patriotism on their sleeves and tricorn hats. The forces of American exceptionalism proved formidable, taking advantage of our exceptional constitutional structure to thwart European social democracy.

And liberal resentment over that fact is palpable.

— Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Thursday, July 03, 2014

Guillermo Del Toro Reveals His Five-Season Plan For FX’s "The Strain"

The story of how a project that almost didn’t make it to television became one of the year’s most anticipated new series. Creator del Toro on the books’ long and winding route to the screen.

Jarett Wieselman

http://www.buzzfeed.com/

June 26, 2014

Five years ago, auteur director Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth) set out to create a bold, new vampire series for television — and had every door slammed in his face. But the writer/director was convinced his take on the classic monster would speak to an audience that had grown weary of sparkly fangs and doomed romances. So, along with novelist Chuck Hogan (Prince of Thieves, which became the Ben Affleck-led The Town), del Toro committed his tale to paper and, in June 2009, The Strain hit bookshelves.

However, copies didn’t stay there very long, as del Toro’s hunch proved correct and his story of an uncontrollable vampiric virus and the five people determined to stop its spread, caught fire, racing up the New York Times’ best-seller chart. That’s when, in the ultimate irony, dozens of networks attempted to buy the TV rights.

“As soon as the first novel hit the top 10 on the New York Times list, we got calls about the rights,” del Toro told BuzzFeed at The ATX Television Festival, with a laugh. “But I wouldn’t sell the rights until the trilogy was published because I didn’t want to be thinking about the movie or TV show during the writing process.” After two equally popular sequels — 2010’s The Fall and 2011’s The Night Eternal — del Toro quickly partnered with cable channel FX and executive producer Carlton Cuse (Lost) to bring the gory saga to screen.

And while del Toro makes it very clear that he defers to Cuse when it comes to running the show, his fingerprints are all over every episode. “I supervise every single shot in the show,” said del Toro, who co-wrote and directed the pilot episode, which airs July 13. “Every piece of FX you see in the first season is guided by me, I do the final color correction on every episode, I go to Saturday unit when they’re shooting the monsters when I can and assist the guys shooting. I discuss my suggestions with Carlton; now and then I fiddle with the scripts, but I know in my heart of hearts that Carlton is king and I follow his lead — but I do want to be part of the whole thing.”

As part of his ongoing role, del Toro has closely consulted with Cuse about how and when the show should diverge from the source material. For example, the television series creates new characters, kills some book characters early on, and gives others a longer on-screen life.

“With the TV show, if we see an actor we like, he lives longer,” del Toro said. “We’ve taken liberties with that. We’re hitting the big guideposts of the book, but I never hold the book up and say, ‘Damnit, the book was different,’ because I know that you want to recognize the book but you don’t want exactly the same experience.”

To further differentiate between the two, del Toro and Cuse are planning to expand the three books into five seasons of The Strain, should the television series prove as popular as the novels. Like Game of Thrones, which has — to mixed results — featured subplots not in the novels, The Strain will use its extra time to explore entirely new ideas. “The first season is the first book, we have enough anecdotes in the second book to do two seasons, and I think that by the end of the third season, we’ll have enough threads of story to do another two seasons.”

“But then it ends,” del Toro stated emphatically. “We will not go beyond the fifth season. I don’t want this to be a show that stays on until it’s not successful. I would like it to end the way the books are mapped. I don’t want to spoil, but we are going to do what we do at the end of the second book at the end of the second season — we will do that big finale. We know where we’re going and it’s exciting.”

Indomitable D’Souza Produces Powerful 'America'

By Andrew Klavan

http://pjmedia.com/

July 2, 2014

Dinesh D’Souza’s anti-Obama 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America was a surprise smash hit, earning 33 million dollars to make it one of the most successful American documentaries ever. The film put forward D’Souza’s thesis that Obama’s need to feel himself worthy of an absent radical father caused him to view America as a guilty colonialist power that had to be taken down a peg. It predicted that America’s enemies would grow stronger and its friends weaker as Obama progressed toward the end of his term. Much of what it predicted has come true.

You could tell D’Souza had hit a nerve when Obama toadies like Maureen Dowd went on the attack, accusing the Indian immigrant of racism! (What an original way for a leftist to counter an argument she doesn’t like. Funny no leftist has ever thought of it before.) But if we needed any further proof that D’Souza had in fact tapped into a rich mine of truth, it came when the federal government, now an oppressive arm of a corrupt Chicago-style Democrat machine, caught the author and filmmaker in a minor transgression of campaign finance laws and threatened to throw him in prison for over a decade. (This, after all, is the way this administration deals with inconvenient filmmakers, as we know. It’s quicker than the whole illegally-misuse-the-IRS-then-lose-the-evidence thing.)

D’Souza pled guilty; says he made a mistake; admits he’s not above the law. What he hasn’t done is fall silent in fear. Instead, he’s courageously produced a follow-up to the movie that got beneath this corrupt president’s thin skin and I’m delighted to report it’s a very good one.

America: Imagine The World Without Her begins by letting leftists tell why they hate this country, as they so obviously do. D’Souza doesn’t argue with them or try to make them look stupid. He lets them say exactly what they have to say: we stole the country from the Washington Redskins, we enslaved blacks, we murdered all those nice Vietnamese people, capitalism is greed, we suck.

D’Souza examines the way these arguments have become gospel to the left through the insidious work of “historian” Howard Zinn and the genuinely sinister activism of Saul Alinsky, spiritual mentor to both Obama and Hillary Clinton. And then D’Souza takes the left’s narrative apart by the simple technique of putting our “crimes” in the context of the rest of history and the actions of other countries throughout the world. Turns out — as rock star Bono says in the most moving scene in the picture — America is a terrific nation that has transformed the world for the good and continues to do so today.

Throughout the movie, D’Souza’s love for his adopted country comes shining through. His argument is poignant, powerful and convincing. Hey, you don’t even have to see it to know I’m right. You just have to read the nuanced, subtle, considered views of leftists who are already calling the film “nuts,” and a “total piece of junk,” and “the worst political documentary of all time.” Which is Leftese for “a good movie that tells the truth.”

It isn’t often I get to recommend a conservative work so wholeheartedly, but I’m just about positive you’ll like this, especially if you’re a patriot or simply an honest person ready to hear a different take than the one you’ve been getting at the movies for the last 50 years.

D’Souza’s a tough guy for not backing down, and a talented guy for delivering a strong sophomore effort. We need about 20 more like him.

Today's Tune: Joe Ely - Row of Dominoes (Live June 2014)

Book Review: 'The Big Fat Surprise' by Nina Teicholz

What if the government's crusade against fat fed the spread of obesity by encouraging us to abstain from foods that satiate us efficiently?

By Trevor Butterworth

http://online.wsj.com/

June 4, 2014

In the great morality play of modern diet, the angels, we have been told by a host of experts, favor egg-white omelets and skimmed milk, while the devil gorges on red meat cooked in butter. For 50 years we have been warned to fight the good fight on dietary fats if we want to stay healthy. In "The Big Fat Surprise," as one might guess from the title, Nina Teicholz plays the devil's advocate—convincingly.

The road to dietary hell, she notes, was paved in the 1950s by a series of seemingly related phenomena. An epidemic of heart attacks fell upon apparently healthy middle-aged men, including President Dwight Eisenhower, who brought national attention to the problem. They all had high levels of cholesterol, thought to be the critical component of the arterial plaques that clogged arteries, restricted blood flow and triggered heart attacks. The cholesterol was coming from an abundance of meat, eggs, butter and cheese—foods that had all been rationed during the war.

The connection between a diet rich in saturated fats and cardiovascular disease was made by Ancel Keys, an American physiologist who, when visiting Italy and Spain in 1953, concluded that heart-disease rates among men there were low because they ate very little meat and dairy. It was a hypothesis that turned into a juggernaut of censure, not least because Congress was full of middle-aged men chomping down on red meat and eggs. "Eisenhower," notes Ms. Teicholz, "became obsessed with his blood cholesterol levels and religiously avoided foods with saturated fat." That his earlier four-pack-a-day cigarette habit might have had something to do with his coronary disease didn't seem to occur to anyone.

Eisenhower's personal doctor and America's most prominent cardiologist, Paul Dudley White, whom Keys had assiduously cultivated, described Keys's work as "brilliant" in a front-page New York Times article. Keys became a media oracle, dispensing, as Ms. Teicholz puts it, "fiery language and [a] definitive-sounding solution" to America's new health problem. When the American Heart Association embraced his message, it was game over.

Enlarge Image

The Big Fat Surprise

By Nina Teicholz
(Simon & Schuster, 479 pages, $27.99)

But, as Ms. Teicholz observes, there was a paradox in the statistical data. At the time, the Swiss ate a lot of animal fat; so too, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes and the Germans. But there was no correlation with rates of heart disease. Why, Keys's critics asked, was he ignoring this data? In 1956, armed with a massive U.S. government grant, Keys embarked on "the first multicountry epidemiological undertaking in human history" to prove his hypothesis—the "Seven Countries study," as it came to be called. Critically, and appallingly, he excluded the "paradox" countries.

Ms. Teicholz, who has a gift for translating complex data into an engaging forensic narrative, explains why the "proof" that the Seven Countries study seemed to deliver was far from conclusive. One morsel: Keys had included data on the Greek diet taken during a 48-day Lenten fast in Crete, when participants were required to abstain from meat, fish, eggs, cheese and butter. Forty years later, researchers estimated that 60% of the Cretan population had been fasting at the time of the study, but no attempt had been made to separate fasters from non-fasters.

Yet when skeptics, including the National Academies of Science, weighed in on Keys's impoverished data, and on related claims that multiplied over the succeeding years, the media attacked the skeptics, heedless of statistical reasoning. Meanwhile, the food industry—apart from the protesting cattle and dairy lobbies—happily ministered to the new dietary wisdom. Government agencies weighed in with dietary guidelines that emphasized carbs and vegetables and warned that red meat was something one could only risk eating a few times a month. And when this miserable diet, shorn of taste, wearied its adherents, as it so often did, the pharmaceutical industry stepped in, offering drugs to lower cholesterol.

As the 20th century closed, the Owl of Minerva finally stirred in the light of unavoidable evidence: None of this advice was preventing heart disease. What was left, as Ms. Teicholz adumbrates, was a monstrous thought: What if the crusade against cholesterol had fed the spread of obesity by encouraging a population to retreat from the very foods that would have satiated its hunger more efficiently than the hallowed grains and fruits and vegetables of the great dietary pyramid? What if the low-fat mantra had driven a population into feeling perpetually hungry? What if you were better off eating meat, eggs and dairy than a diet bloated in carbs and vegetable oils?

It is a commonplace in public-health discussions of obesity to warn that the search for "perfect" or "better" evidence is the enemy of good policy and that we can't afford to wait for all the information we might desire when there is a need to do something now. Yet Ms. Teicholz's book is a lacerating indictment of Big Public Health for repeatedly putting action and policy ahead of good evidence. It would all be comical if the result was not possibly the worst dietary advice in history. And once the advice had been reified by government recommendations and research grants, it became almost impossible to change course. As Ms. Teicholz herself notes, she is not the first to point out that saturated fats have been sinned against by bogus science; and yet, the supermarket aisles are still full of low- and no-fat foods offering empty moral victories.

"The Big Fat Surprise" is more than a book about food and health or even hubris; it is a tragedy for our information age. From the very beginning, we had the statistical means to understand why things did not add up; we had a boatload of Cassandras, a chorus of warnings; but they were ignored, castigated, suppressed. We had our big fat villain, and we still do.

Mr. Butterworth is editor-at-large for STATS.org.

Book Review: “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet” by Nina Teicholz

We thought we knew about eating right

By Sue Ontiveros

http://www.suntimes.com/

June 23, 2014

Everything we think we know about how to eat right is wrong.

The advice that one must eat a low-fat diet — one that avoids meat, butter, eggs, cheese — to be healthy has been drilled into us for decades by doctors, dietitians, government, the media and TV weight-loss shows. This conclusion must be the result of thorough scientific research.

But after reading Nina Teicholz’s “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet” (Simon & Schuster, $28), one realizes that’s not true at all. Rather, Teicholz shows that in their haste to stem the tide in the 1950s of heart attacks plaguing middle-aged men — and our president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower — the medical and nutrition communities embraced very shoddy evidence supported by some very persuasive researchers and ran with it. The government jumped on the bandwagon and food manufacturers were only too happy to get on board, because they were making the products we were being persuaded to eat.

Oh, there were researchers saying, wait a minute, that’s not right, according to Teicholz’s meticulously researched book. (She spent nine years reading thousands of nutrition studies, learning about nutrition, talking with nutrition experts and food company executives.)

Instead of hearing them out, those researchers were shut out, silenced. Over and over in “The Big Fat Surprise” they tell Teicholz how after they spoke up, they were no longer given research grants. Their articles were not published in medical journals. They weren’t included on committees for powerful medical groups such as the American Heart Association (boy, does the AHA come off looking bad in this book).

This isn’t what’s supposed to happen in science. It’s not like the judicial system where you are innocent until proven guilty. It’s the other way around; doubt your own conclusion, try to knock it down in the quest to prove it is indeed correct. That was not done here, “The Big Fat Surprise” reveals. Instead, personal gain, politics, big business and money repeatedly have been put ahead of the health of the American people.

Sometimes, key information on studies that were released — supporting the low-fat theory was left out, Teicholz discovered. The Seventh-day Adventist study is often ballyhooed as an example of how good a low-fat diet is. No one mentioned the part where it also determined the women were at a higher risk for endometrial cancer. Teicholz does.

Americans often are told that our chronic health ailments — obesity, diabetes, heart disease — are our fault. Actually, Teicholz shows we have done just what was recommended. We cut our saturated fat intake. We followed the low-fat/high-carbohydrate guidelines of that stupid food pyramid. All that’s happened is we’ve become fatter and sicker.

Teicholz’s book shows that not only are foods rich in saturated fat not harmful to our hearts, but they actually are good for us. However, the message of their danger has been drilled into us for so long it’s going to be hard to convince people otherwise.

During the last decade — starting with Gary Taubes’ groundbreaking work and followed by countless others, now including Teicholz — the evidence has been brought forth showing it’s not the fat, but rather carbohydrates, particularly sugar and refined carbs, that makes us fat and sick. Yet the nutrition establishment continues to push for everyone what’s almost a vegan diet now, according to Teicholz. That just boggles the mind.

Those who have battled weight issues with no success or have other chronic diseases should seriously consider ditching the carbs and bringing meat, fat, butter back into their diets. Read Teicholz’s excellent book and tell me you aren’t convinced she’s right.

Wednesday, July 02, 2014

The time has come for America to stand up

The time has come for our friends to also take action and stop funding and supporting our enemy and his efforts to destroy us.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK

http://www.jpost.com/

July 1, 2014

Israeli outgoing President Shimon Peres (right) delivers a speech next to the bodies of Gilad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel, both 16, and 19-year-old Eyal Ifrach, all three wrapped in their national flag, as he attends their funeral on July 1, 2014 in the cemetery of Modiin in central Israel. Israel on Tuesday paid an emotional farewell to three teenagers killed in the West Bank, while vowing to hunt down the Hamas militants it holds responsible for their kidnap and murder. -- PHOTO: AFP

Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel were teenagers. They were abducted and brutally murdered by Palestinian terrorists from Hamas, a partner in the Palestinian Authority’s unity government, and a terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of Israel and the Jewish people.

The teens’ abduction and murder was supported by Palestinian society as a whole. While Israelis were united as never before in worry and prayer for the missing boys, Palestinian society was united in its expressed delight at the abduction and murder of the boys.

The government’s response to this war crime, and to the support Palestinian society as a whole provides war criminals while reveling in their atrocities, will be significant. The vast majority of Israelis recognizes that maintaining faith with the mordant peace process can no longer be justified. Fatah and Hamas are equally dedicated to our destruction. By continuing to empower and legitimize the PA, Israel is facilitating its debilitation and victimization.

By legitimizing the PA, Israel has enabled the PA to conduct a massive campaign throughout the world to destroy Israel’s moral, legal and diplomatic standing.

The international community’s indifferent response to the Palestinian abduction of the boys demonstrated how far the Palestinian campaign to deny the legitimacy of Israel and to dehumanize Israelis has advanced.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton took five days to issue a milquetoast condemnation of their abduction. But as execrable as Ashton’s silence was, US President Barack Obama’s response was even worse.

Obama waited for the boys’ bodies to be found before ever mentioning them. And when he finally spoke, he made no distinction between Israel, the victim of this war crime, and the Palestinians who facilitated, perpetrated and celebrated this war crime.

In Obama’s words, “From the outset, I have offered our full support to Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice, and I encourage Israel and the Palestinian Authority to continue working together in that effort. I also urge all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki’s reaction to the Israel’s discovery of the boys’ bodies was even more offensive than the president’s refusal to draw a distinction between the victim and the perpetrator.

Diminishing the cold-blooded murder of the boys by Palestinian savages to the level of a mere “tragedy,” Psaki said that the cooperation must continue between Israeli security forces and Palestinian terrorists “despite the pain on the ground.”

Not the pain inflicted on Israelis by the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered and who overwhelmingly supported and celebrated the teens’ abduction and murder. Rather, in Psaki’s world, a general, amorphous “pain on the ground.”

Under questioning by AP reporter Matt Lee, Psaki defended the PA’s Fatah- Hamas government and claimed that its members “are making every effort” to abide by US requirements, including the rejection of violence.

Now it is true that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did once condemn the kidnapping of the teens, and called for his Hamas governing partners to free them. But after he was attacked from all corners of the PA and Palestinian society, he quickly backtracked.

Abbas blamed Israel for the abduction, and accused it of killing “Palestinian teenagers in cold blood.”

It is also true that the media and the Obama administration have repeatedly claimed that PA security forces assisted Israel in locating the teenagers. But if such assistance was provided, it was not helpful. The bodies were found by Israelis, based on intelligence gleaned by Israeli forces in Israeli operations.

So why is the administration pretending otherwise? Obama and Psaki are not motivated primarily by their increasingly apparent antipathy for the Jewish state. They are trying to avoid having to abide by US law.

Standing legislation prohibits the US government from funding foreign terror organizations. Hamas is an officially designated foreign terror organization. If Fatah were ever treated on the basis of its actions, it would also be labeled a foreign terror organization because according to US law, it meets all the criteria for such a designation.

And at any rate, Hamas’s participation in the Palestinian government makes it illegal for the US to transfer any funds or grant any political recognition to the Palestinian government.

Since Obama and Psaki and their colleagues are aware of this fact, they have chosen to lie in order to protect the Hamas-Fatah government from the letter of US law.

This situation is simply unacceptable. The facts are incontrovertible. Thorough the actions of Fatah terrorists and Hamas terrorists, PA is a terrorist organization.

Even if Abbas were sincere in his devotion to peace with Israel – and clearly he is not – he would be nothing more than a figurehead at the top of a governing apparatus, and of a society as a whole that is dedicated to the eradication of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people.

Every year the US gives the PA up to $500 million in aid. At this point, it is impossible to rationally argue that aid to the PA advances the cause of peace, which is supposed to be the point of the aid.

The PA – including Abbas – refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. The PA denies Jewish nationhood. It fabricates Jewish history. And the PA – led by Abbas – supports, facilitates and engages in terrorism against Israel.

US assistance to the PA is instrumental to Palestinian efforts. The PA uses the legitimacy afforded it by US political and economic support to advance its campaign to delegitimize Israel and legitimize its destruction and the murder of its citizens.

In other words, every dollar the US gives the PA advances the goal of destroying Israel. By continuing to support the PA despite its actions, the US is making a singular contribution to the dehumanization of Jews and the destruction of our state.

Obama’s silence during the 18 days the teens were missing, and his hostile and duplicitous statement after their mutilated bodies were found makes clear that he remains committed to continuing this contribution.

In acting in this way, Obama stands in opposition to the will of the American people, who do not wish to contribute to the destruction of Israel. Consequently, the time has come for the people’s representatives in Congress to take action to remedy this unacceptable state of affairs.

To some extent, Congress already has stepped in. Last week the House of Representatives Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, which is responsible for allocating aid to the PA, did not include aid to the PA in the appropriations bill for 2015. The sub-committee’s counterpart in the Senate took a similar, if less forceful step.

Yet despite these actions, both the House and Senate bills assume that the aid will be restored and so they include stipulations for what Obama must do to waive Congressional limits on aid.

This is very problematic. By assuming that aid will be allocated, US lawmakers take for granted that US law will be broken, and indeed, they green-light such unlawful and repugnant actions.

Immediately after the boys were taken, Reps. Michele Bachmann and Trent Franks co-authored a House resolution defining the PA as a foreign terrorist organization.

As Rep. Franks said on June 12, “All US assistance to the Palestinian Authority should have been be suspended years ago, but openly joining a terrorist organization that kills women and children simply because they are Jewish should convince even the Obama administration to wake up and defund this madness.”

Obviously, the Obama administration remains unconvinced – and undaunted by the resolution, despite the fact that it now enjoys more than a score of co-sponsors, including two Democrats. Obama may continue to fund the PA no matter what Congress does. But only Congress can take action that has a chance of ending US support for the destruction of Israel. If Congress were to transform the language of the Bachmann-Franks resolution into a bill and pass it as a rider on an appropriations bill, then like the Boland Amendment of the 1980s, it could force the executive branch to heel.

The cold-blooded murder of Fraenkel, Shaer and Yifrah requires Israel to stop playing a sucker’s game. The PA is not our partner. It is our enemy.

The US is not our enemy. It is our friend. The American people are our friends.

The time has come for our friends to also take action and stop funding and supporting our enemy and his efforts to destroy us.

The writer is the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

Book Review: 'Those Who Wish Me Dead' by Michael Koryta

By Jim Thomsen For The Gazette

http://billingsgazette.com/

June 29, 2014

Michael Koryta is a writer on the rise. And there are fewer higher elevations he’d rather visit than those of Montana’s Beartooth Mountains — the setting for the Indiana native’s newest thriller, "Those Who Wish Me Dead."

Big Sky Country is the perfect setting for Koryta, an early bloomer — he got his first book contract at age 21 — who has widened his ambition and his palette in recent years, from a competent but undistinguished detective series to one quality literary thriller after another. He scored big in 2011 with a supernaturally-tinged tale, "The Cypress House," and scored even bigger the next year with "The Prophet," a moody, minor-key, perfect-pitch tale of siblings, murder and sports in small-town Ohio.

With "Those Who Wish Me Dead," Koryta is playing all major keys, having married the breakneck pace of a thriller to the marvelous authenticity of its gorgeously dangerous Big Sky settings.

The plot is a ripper, too: 14-year-old Jace Wilson is on the run after witnessing a murder. It’s decided that the best way to stash the troubled boy for safekeeping during the investigation is to place him on an Outward Bound-style summer outing in the Beartooths, between Red Lodge and Cooke City, under the direction of ex-military instructor Ethan Serbin.

But the bad guys are systematically questioning, and killing, every person who might know something. And before long, they’re in Montana, confronting Ethan’s wife, Allison, and using her to lure Ethan and Jace into the open. The ruse works on Ethan, but Jace slips away during the return hike. That sets up a desperate wilderness search between three different groups on a collision course.

Oh, and did I mention the forest fire that’s nipping at everyone’s hiking-boot heels?

The reveals, reverses and twists are enough to keep any thriller fan happy. But what really sets "Those Who Wish Me Dead" apart are the bad guys — Jack and Patrick Blackwell, cheerfully murderous brothers who communicate in a chillingly chipper Chip ‘n’ Dale style. (What came to mind for me were the ultra-polite, erudite gay killers, Wynt and Kidd, from the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever.)

In time, I think "Those Who Wish Me Dead" will become part of the Montana literary canon, in large part for Koryta’s careful but unsentimental rendering of the landscape. In this author’s hands, there’s none of the usual overheated lyric fetishizing of Heart Earth that seems requisite to most Montana lit.

Instead, the setting is rendered through the patient lessons of Ethan Serbin, and through Jace’s eager interest in learning — and learning how to use those lessons to stay alive:

“Montana was better because it forced distraction. Video games and movies hadn’t been able to claim his mind. Out here, the land demanded his mind leave the memories. He had to concentrate on the tasks of the moment. There were too many hard things to do for any other option.”

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor who lives near Seattle. He can be reached at thomsen1965@gmail.com.