Now the US Ambassador to the United Nations her December 13 outburst against Russia for its lead role in the mass civilian casualties in Aleppo reflected the concerns of her earlier work. “Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you?” a teary-eyed and voice-quivering Power challenged the Russian UN ambassador.

But Ms. Power herself is the public face of a US administration that might as well be using her own work as a handbook for justifying inaction. Those justifications have shifted continuously since 2006. First President Obama confidently predicted that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad would fall without US intervention. Later he dismissed opposition forces as a ragtag group of “doctors and lawyers” who had no chance of defeating Assad’s army.

The president threatened Assad not to cross his “red-lines” and employ chemical weapons and then blinked when Assad called his bluff. When ISIS first arose Obama dismissed it as the “JV team.” Subsequently the magnitude of the ISIS threat was seized upon as an excuse for allying with Russia and Iran. Yet most of ISIS’s initial support among Syrian Sunnis was the result of Sunnis feeling abandoned by the U.S. to the tender mercies of Assad and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah.

“Between action and inaction the administration chose inconsequential action [— i.e. actions] certain not to effect the outcome” charges Leon Wieseltier. Even a no-fly zone such as that enforced against Saddam Hussein after the First Gulf War to protect Kurds and Shiites was more than Obama would countenance.

When Russia moved forcefully into the vacuum left by the United States Obama warned that Moscow was entering a quagmire and that there could be no military solution. But there was a military solution a senior administration figure admitted recently to the New York Times’ David Sanger; it just turned out be Putin’s.

Obama’s passivity was not mere apathy to the death of half a million human beings and 11 million more turned into refugees. It was a direct consequence of his primary foreign policy goal — reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran and rapprochement with the Iranian mullahs. Iran told the Obama administration that any talks were contingent on American non-intervention in Syria. And Obama chose to recognize the Iranian “equities” in the survival of its ally Assad. All the shifting justifications afterwards were just more of Ben Rhodes’s messaging into the media echo chamber.

How ironic then that Iran Russia and Turkey recently informed Secretary of State Kerry that his participation would be unnecessary at their discussions on the future of Syria. Putin loves rubbing Obama’s nose in his own impotence and irrelevance.

NO WONDER MS. POWER cried in denouncing the Russian atrocities in Aleppo: She has become the accomplice to the genocide she once excoriated. What a relief then to return to the more traditional diplomatic role of “an honest person sent to lie for one’s country” in announcing the US abstention on Security Council Resolution 2334.

Power began with a denunciation of the UN’s consistent discrimination against Israel. Members she noted “summon the will to act only when it comes to Israel” a reference to the Security Council’s inability to stop the slaughter of Sunni Muslims in Aleppo by Russian Iranian and Assad forces.

She then proceeded to lend a hand to the most momentous act of anti-Israel discrimination ever by the UN. By labeling all Israeli settlement beyond the 1949 armistice lines including in Jerusalem flagrantly illegal Resolution 2334 will breathe new life into the international BDS movement make life miserable for Jews — or at least that dwindling percentage who still support Israel — on university campuses and render Israeli political and military figures and citizens living beyond the 1949 armistice lines vulnerable to being legally hounded any time they travel abroad.

The US abstention Power claimed was consistent with long-standing US policy. Wrong. It was not even consistent with the Obama administration’s own policy. Then-UN ambassador Susan Rice vetoed a similar resolution in 2011 on the grounds that it “could encourage parties to avoid negotiations.”

Numerous US administrations have urged Israel to freeze settlement activity. But none have deemed that activity en toto illegal under international law. Security Council Resolution 242 the basis of all subsequent Middle East peacemaking specifically contemplates the return of “territories” captured in the 1967 War not “all” territories or “the” territories. And it refers to the right of each country in the region to live within “secure and recognized borders.”

That wording was precise and deliberate. No one contemplated in 1967 that Israel would or should return its holiest sites. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear to President Lyndon Johnson that Israel’s pre-I967 borders were indefensible — “Auschwitz borders” in Abba Eban’s famous formulation.

In 1994 UN ambassador Madeleine Albright announced that the US would veto any resolution labeling Israeli settlement activity as illegal on the grounds that the issue of sovereignty over the West Bank was a matter that could only be determined through negotiation.

Finally in April 2004 President George W. Bush provided Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a letter making clear that any final settlement must take into account changes on the ground in the nearly 40 years since the 1967 War including the creation of large Israeli settlement blocs and the transformation of Jerusalem. The Obama administration refused to recognize that letter from day one but in doing so it was departing from the previous administration’s policy.

By treating the 1949 armistice lines as sacrosanct and declaring Israel an occupying power in all areas beyond those lines the Obama administration has similarly departed from all previous administrations. No country recognized the 1949 armistice lines as Israel’s legal borders least of all the Arab states which still hoped to eradicate Israel and push the Jews into the sea. They tried in 1967 and were defeated. Defeats in aggressive wars have consequences. Just ask the Germans.

Prior to 1967 there was no internationally recognized sovereign in the West Bank and certainly no Palestinian state whose lands could be occupied. Under the League of Nations mandate which created a homeland for the Jewish people in the area to the west of the Jordan River and which was subsequently incorporated in Article 80 of the UN Charter Israel has by far the best claim of any nation to the West Bank.

But for Samantha Power delegitimizing Israel’s existence must have been a welcome diversion from thinking about Aleppo and the moral bankruptcy of the administration that she serves.

What Could be Wrong with Lighting Candles?

As we were contemplating the Chanukah lights last week one of my favorite writers Theodore Dalrymple was reflecting on the message of the lighted candles that appear like mushrooms after a rain storm in the wake of any terrorist attack in a major Western city such as the recent truck ramming of an Xmas market in Berlin.

The candles he concluded are meant to proclaim that while we may not be religious we are spiritual. And what precisely is the attraction of “spirituality”?

The reason… so many people claim to be spiritual rather than religious is that being spiritual imposes no discipline upon them at least none that they do not choose themselves. Being religious on the other hand implies an obligation to observe rules and rituals that may interfere awkwardly with daily life. Being spiritual-but-not-religious gives you that warm inner feeling a bit like whisky on a cold day and reassures you that there is more to life — or at least to your life — than meets the eye without actually having to interrupt the flux of everyday existence. It is the gratification of religion without the inconvenience of religion. Unfortunately like many highly diluted solutions it has no taste.

Dalrymple referred to that spirituality as a form of modern paganism — “a striving for transcendence without any real belief in it.” In that connection he echoed unknowingly Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik who found elements of paganism in the antinomianism of early Protestantism and in German Jewish Reform whose models drew more from Protestantism than Torah. The essence of pagan ritual Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik observed is that it derives meaning only from the emotional impact upon the one performing the ritual.

In Jewish thought Rabbi Soloveitchik noted it is the objective command not the subjective emotions that is primary. The word mitzvah — commandment derives from a root indicating joinder. In short the essence of the command is the link formed between the one performing it and G-d the Commander. Joy is the outgrowth of the proper fulfillment of the Divine Will through the mitzvah not its goal.

Modern “spirituality” then is antithetical to serious religious belief. Dalrymple speculates that it might also be dangerous on a more immediate level. What does the kind of person who cuts the throats of non-believers or drives trucks into them think when he sees his would-be victims gathering immediately thereafter to light candles?

He thinks: “They are not morally superior as they like to think; they are feeble weak soft enervated vulnerable defenseless cowardly whimpering decadent. Against such people we are bound to win…”

“So if you want more terrorist attacks light a candle” Dalrymple concludes.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, issue 642)