A Victory for Iran

By Mona Charen

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Ninety percent of the American opinion elite will fall for the old "historic breakthrough" conceit every time. The appeal of getting enemies in a room together, where they will shed their animosity and "reason together," is so profound that nothing as tiresome as experience can diminish its allure.

Don't talk to Secretary of State John Kerry or President Barack Obama of the League of Nations (which enjoyed such success ensuring world peace) or the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. Fifty-four countries, including all the major belligerents of World War II, signed the pact. Don't mention the series of "breakthrough agreements" between the United States and North Korea (Claudia Rosett offers a timely reminder), in which we thrice (1994, 2005 and 2007) offered security guarantees, food aid, diplomatic concessions and cash in exchange for North Korea's promise to discontinue its nuclear program. The very same person who handled negotiations with North Korea for the Clinton Administration, Wendy Sherman, is now heading up the U.S. team and stroking the Iranians. (The George W. Bush administration, more immune than most to the siren call of diplomatic breakthroughs, did fall into the trap with North Korea.)

Kerry, denying the Geneva Accord is a naive exercise in wishful thinking, pleads that we need to "put to the test Iran's words and intentions." Any contract requires a meeting of the minds. Kerry keeps saying that we don't need to trust the Iranians because we will be checking them at every stage. But if the parties do not even agree to what they've just signed in the 18 hours after inking a document, how well is verification going to go? Mohammad Zarif, Iran's chief negotiator, asserted that the agreement takes the threat of force off the table and enshrines Iran's "right" to enrich uranium. Kerry flatly denies both. Nice start.

Kerry also challenged Iran to "prove" to the world that its nuclear program is only for "peaceful purposes." Is that a question an adult, far less America's chief diplomat, should pose? Iran controls the world's fourth largest supplies of oil and second largest reserves of natural gas. Are we to believe that Iran is pursuing nuclear power because of concern about climate change? How exactly would Iran's active research on nuclear weapons design and development of ballistic-missile technology suit that explanation?

It has been obvious for more than two decades that Iran is determined to join the nuclear club -- a goal American allies in the region and right-thinking people the world over view with horror and dread. Five Security Council resolutions have demanded Iran to suspend all enrichment of uranium. The Obama administration itself has repeatedly and starkly declared that Iran's possession of nuclear weapons is "unacceptable."

Though, as with so many things, Obama has said this pronouncement is nothing more than a windsock -- it shows which way the wind is blowing, but doesn't hold anything. Like the "red line" about Syria's use of chemical weapons, the stentorian injunctions against Iran's nuclear pursuit are also just so much wind.

Both Kerry and Obama have repeatedly argued negotiation is the only alternative to war. By blurting this in an attempt to dissuade Congress from passing further sanctions, they completely neuter any implied threat of military force. Iran certainly notices the Obama administration's eagerness for a deal, as well as its rejection of military action.

Nor is it correct the only alternative to this capitulation was war. The sanctions this agreement supersedes were working well to force the Iranian regime to come to terms. Their nation is struggling with high prices, shortages and a collapsing currency because of sanctions. This should have been a moment of maximum leverage for the United States and other powers. Yet the deal they've achieved does next to nothing to reverse Iran's march to a bomb, and does a great deal to undermine the fragile, painfully achieved world consensus to impose sanctions.

"For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program," Obama intoned. But we've seen this story unfold many times before, most recently with North Korea. Our eagerness for pieces of paper that can be brandished as "peace" trumps cold reality every time. Iran has slipped the sanctions' nooses. It will soon become a nuclear power -- not despite our best efforts -- but with our tacit acquiescence. We will look back on this agreement with bitterness in the very near future.

A Pro-Terror Rally on a Palestinian Campus

By Jeff Jacoby

Sunday, November 24, 2013

THEY WEREN'T wearing swastika armbands or chanting "Sieg Heil!" during the Islamic Jihad rally this month on the campus of Al-Quds University. They didn't need to. Everything about the event reeked of fascism and anti-Semitic bloodlust. Demonstrators at the Palestinian school paraded in paramilitary gear, with massed black flags, mock assault weapons, and arms extended in Nazi-style salutes. There were banners lionizing suicide bombers, and hand-drawn Israeli flags on which students trod. Islamic Jihad — long identified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union — posted photos of the rally on its website. In one, students representing dead Israelis sprawl on the ground as black-clad jihadists brandishing weapons stride past.

Such celebrations of terrorism and incitement to violence are pervasive in Palestinian society. Children raised under the Palestinian Authority are indoctrinated from an early age to regard Israelis and Jews as enemies to be destroyed and infidels to be loathed. Nothing about the nearly three-hour rally at Al-Quds would likely have surprised the estimated 1,000 students who saw it. Most of them have been fed a steady diet of such poison all their lives, and not just in schools and mosques. From TV shows and popular music to the naming of sports clubs and public squares, the next generation of Palestinians has grown up amid the most violent culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich.

A fog of political correctness usually keeps events like the Al-Quds rally from getting much attention in the Western media. But this one, first reported by veteran British journalist Tom Gross, made news last week when it led Brandeis University into suspending a longstanding academic partnership with the Palestinian school. It wasn't the grotesque rally itself that provoked Brandeis to pull the plug, though that should have been sufficient: One of Islamic Jihad's many innocent victims was a 20-year-old Brandeis undergraduate, Alisa Flatow, who was one of eight people murdered in 1995 when an Islamic Jihad bomber blew up the bus in which they were riding.

What finally forced the issue was the refusal of Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds and a well-known Palestinian intellectual, to condemn the hate-drenched rally even after being asked to do so by Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence. Nusseibeh replied instead with an outrageous letter that denounced "vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists," and suggested their only purpose in raising the issue was to "prevent Palestinians from achieving our freedom."

Nusseibeh is often described as a Palestinian "moderate." But in a culture as poisoned with vitriolic anti-Semitism as the Palestinian Authority, moderation doesn't go very far. It doesn't even go as far as repudiating the Nazi-like salutes and tableaux of dead Israelis during a public rally on an East Jerusalem college campus. Not even to retain the goodwill of an institution as dovish and liberal as Brandeis, a Jewish-sponsored university that was proud of its relationship with Al-Quds.

The genocidal values of Islamic Jihad are no anomaly. They are the values of Hamas and the PLO.

They are the values that led the Arab League to spurn the UN's proposed two-state solution in 1947, and to announce that it would crush the newborn Jewish state in "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre." They are the values that induced Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestinians in the 1930s, to form an alliance with Adolf Hitler, eagerly collaborating with the führer in the hope of importing the Final Solution to the Jews of the Middle East.

"Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany," Husseini wrote in his journal, "was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world." He asked Hitler "for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem … according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews."

There may have been no actual swastikas at the Islamic Jihad rally, but the lethal values represented by the swastika have been a part of the Palestinian national movement for the better part of a century. They still are, however much people of goodwill might wish otherwise. So long as even famous Palestinian "moderates" cannot bring themselves to bravely defy those values, Palestinian sovereignty will remain a reckless gamble — and peace as far off as ever.

Union Organizers, Not Employees, Are Behind Walmart Smear Campaign

By Ryan Williams

Monday, November 25, 2013

This week, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that it is issuing complaints against Walmart as part of a so-called retaliation against employees who protested at a recent shareholders meeting. There’s no proof Walmart took any action against employees who protested, but facts are irrelevant when it comes to union-backed worker centers like OUR Walmart and their allies at the NLRB.

The complaint was unveiled during a call with the media held by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and OUR Walmart hours before the NLRB made its official announcement. The fact that a union boss and a union affiliated worker center knew that the NLRB was taking action against Walmart hours before the public was informed is disgraceful and shows that this government agency is colluding with Big Labor. It’s just another example of the dishonest and highly orchestrated smear campaign that is being launched this holiday season against the nation’s largest retailer.

Walmart protest organizers would like to have the public believe that employees are leading a grassroots effort to institute changes at the company. In reality, the actions by OUR Walmart are part of an ongoing and sophisticated campaign led by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW.) The group’s nationwide protests are carefully staged and choreographed events that are designed to deceive consumers and build support for Big Labor’s agenda. Far from a spontaneous grassroots uprising of retail workers, the Black Friday “protests” of last year – and the ones planned for this holiday season – are nothing more than union-funded theatrics carried out by professional protestors.

With membership at historic lows, organized labor has made no secret of its wish to organize Walmart’s 1.4 million workers. Previous attempts by the UFCW to attack the company under banners like “Wake-up Walmart” and “Walmart Watch” fell mostly flat. The company’s reputation took a few hits but the UFCW failed to diminish overall sales or – much to Big Labor’s dismay – organize any employees.

Undeterred, the UFCW launched Organization United for Respect at Walmart – or OUR Walmart – in 2010. Apart from its more benign and inclusive-sounding name, OUR Walmart gives the UFCW an advantage it didn’t have with previous anti-Walmart campaigns. The group promotes itself as an independent non-profit worker center whose membership consists of former and current Walmart employees seeking broad improvements in wages and benefits. In reality, OUR Walmart is a thinly veiled extension of the UFCW that exists outside the restrictions imposed by federal labor laws. Unlike unions, worker centers do not have to file annual reports with the U.S. Department of Labor disclosing membership and financial information. OUR Walmart also can stage ongoing protests outside Walmart stores – as it did last year on Black Friday – without heeding strict federal guidelines for such actions.

The UFCW’s strategy thrives in this murky legality. It claims a large membership in OUR Walmart without ever disclosing those numbers or the organization’s board of directors. The UFCW can also provide staffing and financial support for OUR Walmart without fear of legal or public backlash. Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart (which oversees the OUR Walmart effort) is on the UFCW payroll earning $156,292 as a campaign organizer. Schlademan built his career organizing for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) before joining the UFCW’s attacks on Walmart. He’s one of countless union organizers on permanent loan to the OUR Walmart campaign. It’s also notable that his previous employer, SEIU, is undertaking an identical strategy as UFCW – using worker center front groups like Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15 to attack and unionize chain restaurants.

The dishonest campaign launched by Big Labor against Walmart is a shameless attempt to undermine the nation’s largest retailer. This Black Friday, people should reject their phony protests recognize the true motives of shadow organizations like OUR Walmart that deliberately deceiving the public.

63 Percent Chance Weather Predictors Are Skeptics on Global Warming

By John Ransom

Monday, November 25, 2013

A new survey from the American Meteorological Society contains more bad news for global warming alarmists: people who actually get paid for accurately predicting weather are increasingly skeptical about whether global warming is man-made or natural or whether global warming is occurring at all.

The survey is the result of increasing tension amongst meteorologists regarding global warming.

“There has been tension in recent years among AMS members who hold different views on climate change,” explains the AMS in the introduction to the new report. “Some members have expressed that their views – which question the view that human-caused global warming was occurring – are treated with hostility within the AMS.”

Scientists? Bullying each other? Naaaaww.

The report found that only 37% of meteorologists who did not make a living by publishing papers supporting the theory that global warming is caused by human activity actually think that man-made global warming is real.

That is meteorologists who make a living predicting weather events are the ones least likely to believe the theories created by new found “climate science.”

The survey also found that of all meteorologists only a bare majority supported man-made global warming theory.

48 percent did not support man-made global warming theory.

The AMS sent out a survey to all meteorologists and got a return of 1854 responses.

The AMS says that the study finds that the more educated experts are about climate science, the more likely they are to believe that global warming is man-made.

But I say that the data just proves that the more dependent scientists are on believing global warming to be man-made in order to make a living through publishing, the more likely they are to believe global warming is man-made because that’s how they make their living.

Of 1821 meteorologist included in the survey, only 231 made a living publishing papers regarding man-made global warming theory. Yet they accounted for a larger share of meteorologists who believe in man-made global warming.

73% of scientists who publish papers regarding global warming and climate are inclined to believe that global warming is real and global warming is man-made.

The farther that science gets from this conflict of interest, it seems, the more likely it is that they are disinclined to believe global warming is man-made.

In essence, it’s as if a group surveyed the College of Cardinals to prove the existence of God and ascribed the results to the college members’ oversized education rather than their piety.

And all of this goes to show that the argument that there has already been a scientific consensus reached amongst experts that global warming is real and global warming is man-made is a political argument rather than a scientific one.

“A substantial number of expert AMS members – 22% of the most expert group in our sample – do not subscribe to the position that global warming is mostly human-caused,” says the AMS. “Climate experts are not completely homogenous in their views on global warming, just as climate skeptics have been shown to have a variety of nuanced opinions. Any suggestion that all those with non-majority views simply need to be ‘educated’ is inaccurate and likely to be insulting to a substantial number of AMS members.”

Gee, ya think?

Those of us who are skeptics about global warming are used to being marginalized, trivialized and brutalized by a tiny fraction of people whose wallets get fat by publishing papers in support of man-made global warming theory.

But while more and more data comes out calling into question man-made global warming models, it’s nice to see professional organizations start to treat skeptics with, if not exactly respect, at least the decency accorded people accused of some heinous crime.

Because while this is progress, make no mistake they’re still looking to prove us guilty, if necessary by reason of insanity, if in fact they can’t muster the scientific arguments.

Which of course they can’t.

The Fatal Conceit of Obamacare

By Star Parker

Monday, November 25, 2013

I have lined up my Christmas presents this year for our President, Barack Obama, and for his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.

I will send them both a copy of the last book written by one of greatest economists of the last century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, F.A. Hayek.

The book is called The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.

Although the language and discussion of the book is not all that simple, the basic point is, I think, pretty straightforward. Hayek summed it all up in his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize.

He noted the critical importance that we know what we don’t know. Thinking you know what you don’t and can’t know, the illusion that men can plan, organize, and control things far beyond their understanding, is the “fatal conceit” of socialism.

And, Hayek concludes, that knowing what you don’t know, “ought to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellow, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

Take a walk through the mall or the supermarket. Look at the almost infinite varieties of products in stores and on shelves designed and engineered to meet the unique tastes and desires of millions of different individuals.

You don’t need a Nobel Prize or a Ph.D to appreciate that no supreme bureaucrat with all the power in the world could ever conceive that vast array of products and decide they should be produced.

This is the product and beauty of freedom. Free people deciding what they want and living how they want. And free people deciding to take risk, go into business, and become entrepreneurs and produce and deliver these many varied products.

This approach – freedom – has produced bounty as never has been produced anywhere under any other arrangement.

But the “fatal conceit” is a powerful force. It is a powerful force because there will always be haughty, arrogant people for whom humility is a challenge and who are convinced that the world would be better off if they designed it rather than letting free private individuals run their own lives.

This is totally what the debacle we now confront with the Affordable Care Act – ObamaCare – is about.

Anyone who follows these things and knows just a little bit of history knew from the day President Obama signed this law in 2010 that what is happening today was inevitable.

Neither President Obama nor HHS Secretary Sebelius have ever done anything in their lives except work in one way or another in politics. Neither has ever run a small business, let alone a big one. Neither has a day of experience of being an entrepreneur, of taking personal risk and taking a loan to make a product to serve customers and to meet a payroll.

But both have been supremely confident that they could take over and redesign one sixth of a 16 trillion dollar economy.

Nothing is more unique to each individual than his or her personal health profile and needs. Yet a couple supreme bureaucrats in Washington have used their power to decide what kind of health care hundreds of millions of unique American individual citizens need and how to deliver it.

Can it be any wonder that it is all collapsing?

The only wonders are that there are still those who maintain that this socialist monstrosity can still work and that so many Americans have been willing to give up their precious personal freedom and turn their lives over to arrogant, pretentious, and deeply confused bureaucrats and politicians in Washington.