Happy Birthday to Me!

Today I am 64, praise God. And I don't feel a day over 75. Last night, after midnight, when my birthday arrived, I played the Beatles' "When I'm 64" for me and Mrs. Kosher Hedghog several times. The chorus, you will recall, goes, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" Happily for me, the answer appears to be "Yes."

An old friend from Phoenix left me a voice mail wishing me a Happy Birthday, but expressing regret at my long silence on these pages. So here's one for you, you know who you are:

My hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, says that Madame Secretary's Congressional hearing and testimony yesterday revealed nothing new. I suppose that in the larger sense the Times is correct. We already knew that she lied about the Benghazi attack and had corruptly used the influence of her office to accumulate a fortune through the Clinton Foundation, which employs her family members and friends at incredible salaries.

She is famous for her declaration, "What does it mater?", in her previous Congressional testimony. Indeed, given what we knew about Secretary Clinton already, what does it matter that the hearings disclosed for the first time that she told Chelsea, the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt on the night and day following the attack that it was not caused by a video, was pre-planned, and was perpetrated by an Al Qaeda-like organization (actually identifying the organization that committed the attack). What does it matter that all the while she, President Obama and the State Department publicly insisted that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video? What does it matter that the U.S. government actually arrested the maker of the video, using the power of the Department of Justice to preserve the false story? What does it matter that the Democrats pretend this had nothing to do with the fact that the President was running for re-election on the platform that "Bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda is on the run," that he knew only the first half of the slogan was true, and desperately wanted to keep the public from realizing that until after his re-election? What does it matter?

By the way, anyone whose sole news source is the Los Angeles Time would not know about the disclosures first revealed in the hearing, which I italicized above. The Times did not mention any of them in its reporting about the hearings. They do not support the Times' agenda.

Our Administration also warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week to avoid incitement, after his historically inaccurate accusation that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had first persuaded Hitler to murder European Jewry, rather than expel them. The mass murder of European Jewry unquestionably began with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and accelerated with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Both events preceded Hitler's first meetings with the Grand Mufti. That having been said, it is unquestionable that the Mufti actively encouraged, aided, and abetted the Holocaust. He even took an active role in recruiting an SS battalion composed of Bosnian Muslims, one of whose primary missions was the murder of Jews. So Bibi was mostly guilty of exaggeration. The protest by Saeed Erekat, a Palestinian Authority official, that the Palestinians fought side-by-side with the Allies during World War II, against Nazi Germany, is laughable.

So the Administration went public with its scolding of the Prime Minister of Israel, after having remained silent when Palestinian Authority President Abbas repeatedly denied any Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, openly called for violence and said that Jews must keep their "filthy feet" off the Temple Mount. The Palestinian Authority also in the past week had its allies propose a UNESCO resolution that would have recognized "Barak Plaza" [the Western Wall and its plaza, which the resolution renamed after Mohammed's horse] as an integral part of the Al Aqsa Mosque complex. The effect would have been to deny a Jewish connection to a Jewish place of worship for nearly 2000 years, since the destruction of the Second Temple (excluding the years from 1948 until 1967, when Jordan prohibited Jewish worship at the Western Wall). The plaza itself, west of the Western Wall, was constructed by Israel (not the Muslim Waqf), after the capture of the Old City in June 1967. While that UNESCO resolution was defeated, the cost was approval of a resolution condemning Israel (who else) and declaring that the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem are exclusively Moslem shrines. Who knew? As always, the United Nations lives in an alternative, Bizarro universe.

At the risk of sounding bitter on my birthday, the reason I post here less often is that all the trends that I have decried in my past posts merely seem to be repeating themselves, except that the world seems to have reconciled itself to those evils and barely registers a whimper of protest. So Palestinians attack Jewish men, women and children with knives, and the world decries the shooting of the attackers.

For all that, I cannot say that I am bitter. To the contrary, I am filled with joy to be alive, and grateful beyond words for uncountable blessings that God has bestowed upon me throughout my life. Blessed are you, the Lord, our God, who has kept me alive, preserved my existence, and has brought me to this season.