RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/a_violent_kind_of_silence.html

Remember the feminists of the ’60s? Women’s liberation? Remember the women who made feminism the issue of the day? They demanded roles in government, careers, independence, and the right of women to control their reproductive lives. They marched and formed NOW, which describes violence against women as one of their core issues.

The book that started the second wave of feminism was The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, the doyenne of feminism, who described the bored housewife in the suburbs as the “problem that has no name.”

On the other side of the world, we can see many problems for women in Muslim societies. But contrary to Friedan, these problems “have names”: honor-killing, stoning for adultery, rape, child marriage, sex slavery, and female genital mutilation (FGM). FGC/FGM (pictured at right) refers to all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for cultural or other non-medical reasons. Type 2 is the excision of the clitoris, with partial or total excision of the labia minora. Most girls and women are traumatized from this; many die of infection, and those who survive suffer complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

FGM is a barbaric practice widespread in many countries, but the vast majority are either Muslim-majority or home to a large number of Muslim immigrants. Those who claim that it is “cultural” fail to link the approval given to it by Reliance of the Traveler, a manual of Islamic jurisprudence certified as “reliable” by Egypt’s Al-Azhar University.

Child marriage is another problem in Muslim countries, following the example of Mohamed himself, who at 53 married Aisha, a six-year-old, and consummated the marriage when she was a child of nine. Yet Muslims believe that Mohamed provided a “beautiful pattern of conduct.” The number of child brides is on the rise — the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, recently issued a fatwa authorizing marriage to girls as young as 10 years old, and in 2011, a similar fatwa by Salafi preacher Sheikh Mohamed al-Maghrawi permitted girls as young as nine to marry. So here you have children subjected to the destruction of their innocence and sold for abuse. The New York Times reported on this phenomenon in Yemen, where a nine-year-old ran away from her husband and demanded a divorce because of sexual abuse. And in Britain, authorities are now reporting the forced marriage of girls as young as nine on British soil. By contrast, Betty Friedan was outraged that young women of 19 and 20 chose to drop out of college to get married.

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
2013.03.12 (Saddar, Pakistan) – A Fedayeen suicide bomber takes out three people.
2013.03.11 (Dibis, Iraq) – A Shahid suicide bomber detonates next to a girl’s school, killing at least five.
2013.03.10 (Dakata, Nigeria) – Five Christians are shot to death by Islamic extremists while returning home from church.
2013.03.10 (Harasta, Syria) – Terrorists fire on a bus carrying kindergarteners, killing at least one child.
2013.03.10 (Jama’are, Nigeria) – Ansaru Islamists summarily execute seven ‘Christian’ hostages.
2013.03.10 (Landi Kotal, Pakistan) – A 4-year-old girl bleeds out after radicals detonate a bomb outside a rival mosque.

http://www.nationalterroralert.com/2013/03/12/official-cyberattacks-n-korea-jihadist-groups-top-u-s-threats/

Washington (CNN) — Cyberattacks pose more of a threat to the United States than a land-based attack by a terrorist group, while North Korea’s development of a nuclear weapons program poses a “serious threat,” the director of national intelligence told Congress on Tuesday.

The warning by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper came in his annual report to Congress on the threats facing the United States.

“Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable,” Clapper said in prepared remarks before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “Destruction can be invisible, latent and progressive.”

The Internet is increasingly being used as a tool both by nations and terror groups to achieve their objectives, according to Clapper’s report.

However, there is only a “remote chance” of a major cyberattack on the United States that would cause widespread disruptions, such as regional power outages, the report says. Most countries or groups don’t have the capacity to pull it off.

While Clapper emphasized possible cyberthreats, committee members raised questions about the potential nuclear dangers posed by North Korea and Iran, the increasing prevalence of al Qaeda in Syria and the effect of cuts to the U.S. budget on intelligence activities.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/03/12/the-hidden-purpose-of-organizing-for-action-the-obama-teams-new-political-action-group/?print=1 Today in Washington, D.C., major donors to the Obama campaign are meeting with the president at a $50,000 per person fundraiser on behalf of the ongoing campaign’s new so-called “grassroots” organization, Organizing for Action. It is officially explained as follows: A nonprofit organization established to support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national […]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/03/12/breaking-inspector-general-report-on-racialist-disfunction-inside-doj/?print=1 Today the Department of Justice inspector general released a report on potential Labor secretary nominee Tom Perez’s DOJ Civil Rights Division. The timing of the release to coincide with his nomination was certainly accidental, because the report paints a damning portrait of the DOJ unit he managed. The full report is here. The 250-page […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578354683011933850.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

President Obama does a neat John D. Rockefeller imitation these days, taking credit for soaring domestic oil and gas production as if he planned it that way. Not quite. As a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports shows, “All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.”
The research outfit reports that thanks to the innovation of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling on private and state lands, the U.S. in fiscal 2012 produced 6.2 million barrels of oil daily, up from 5.1 million barrels as recently as fiscal 2007. Private industry’s technological advances, operating under state regulation, increased U.S. production last year at the fastest rate in the history of the domestic industry, which drilled its first commercial well in 1859.

The story on federal lands is the opposite. The CRS study finds that federal oil production fell more than 23% from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012 and is today below what it was in 2007. The federal share of total U.S. oil production has slid under Mr. Obama to 26% in fiscal 2012 from 31% in fiscal 2008.

The story is the same in natural gas, with overall production climbing 20% since fiscal 2007 even as “production on federal lands has remained static or declined each year over the same period.” Production on non-federal lands grew 40% since 2007, while production on federal lands fell by a hard-to-believe 33%. The federal share of total natural gas production in 2007 was 27.8%. Today it’s 15.5%.

This sharp drop in production on federal lands is the direct result of Obama Administration policies. They include the drilling moratorium imposed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, followed by a limit on new drilling permits—the notorious “permitorium.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/another_hockey_stick.html Green forces, eager to promote their theories of global warming, appear to be practicing intellectual recycling. Is this the return of the notorious hockey stick – which, in 2001, was the central dogma of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) believers ? This quasi-religious faith in catastrophic AGW still remains a prerequisite for membership in scientific […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/training_syrian_rebels_to_conquer_golan_heights_and_shoot_down_israeli_aircraft.html

No, they don’t say it quite like that. But after years of hypocrisy, the Obama administration has admitted that while it declined to arm Syrian rebels directly for fear that weapons would end up in the hands of al-Qaeda forces, it has been quietly vetting and training anti-Assad forces while others provided weapons all around. Now the training is out in the open, and Secretary of State Kerry has pledged $60 million in “non-lethal aid” to the rebels. (Plus $250 million to Egypt, while Israel may take a hit of $150 million from sequestration — makes you wonder.)

American assistance is supposed to go only to “moderate” rebels, but arms have been flowing freely, paid for by American “allies” Qatar and Saudi Arabia and moving through Turkey. Recently, a source with ties to Israeli intelligence claimed that a supply line has been running from Bosnian extremist groups, outside the control, influence, or even vision of the U.S. and its allies. Libya and al-Qaeda in Iraq have also been conduits for weapons to rebel militias, and last week, 48 Syrian government soldiers and officials were killed in Anbar Province, an al-Qaeda stronghold.

Israel expects to see any and all weapons, including some of the estimated 15,000 surface-to-air missiles the U.S. admits “disappeared” from Libya, aimed in its direction.

More than a year ago, Maj. Gen. Avi Kochavi, chief of IDF Intelligence, warned that al-Qaeda had moved into the buffer zone that separates Israel and Syria, which had been at least nominally in the hands of U.N. peacekeepers since 1974. Last week, Syrian rebel groups captured 21 Filipino peacekeepers from their Golan Heights enclave and caused others to flee into Israel. Croatia announced that it is removing its 100 soldiers, and Israel fears that others may follow. Kochavi said that should Assad fall, the rebels would aim straight at Israel; Syrian rebel groups agree.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4863

Of the 57 inaugural addresses delivered by presidents of the United States, a mere 17 have been second inaugurals. Very occasionally — as in the case of Abraham Lincoln’s, which is inscribed on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington — and in the case of George W. Bush’s, the second inaugural has been better than the first. So what trajectory is America going to follow for the next four years, as judged by Obama’s second inaugural address on the National Mall?

Second inaugurals have seen soaring, but also disappointing, oratory, ranging wildly in terms of their rhetoric, yet rarely — if ever — has one revealed actual cowardice, which is what President Barack Obama’s did when he delivered it to an audience of hundreds of thousands from the West Front of the Capitol on Monday January 21.

It was cowardly because if he had enunciated the highlights of his policy agenda during the election only ten weeks previously, he would have lost. Gay marriage rights, climate change regulations, healthcare costs, entitlements, voting without proper ID and registration, the legalisation of illegal aliens, and gun control are all important issues in American politics. Yet they were ones that Obama either largely ignored or strenuously downplayed during the presidential election in order to win his “historic” 51.1 per cent to 47.2 per cent popular vote victory over Mitt Romney. Had he emphasised those issues in his campaign — which in his second inauguration speech he put at the top of his agenda for his next term — he would undoubtedly have put off the 2 per cent of electors who would have needed to change their votes in order for Romney to win. His true liberal agenda has only emerged now it is too late for the American people to vote against it.

In his 18-minute, 2,100-word speech, Obama delivered a paean to big government, something that only truly resonates with a minority of Americans. Union membership in the private sector has fallen from 24 per cent of workers in 1973 to 7 per cent in 2011, for example, although over the same period in the public sector it rose from 23 per cent to 37 per cent. This was more of a State of the Union speech masquerading as an inauguration speech, so replete was it with policy statements and digs at opponents, as opposed to the overarching worldview expected of presidents on such occasions. One suspects it will not be inscribed on any walls anytime soon.

In almost all political speeches there is some banality, of course — Obama actually said: “You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course” — but close analysis of Obama’s banalities gives clues to his intentions. For this was the “You didn’t build that” speech, full of what government had achieved for the country, albeit through the repeated use of the straw man argument, as in: “No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.” The fact that nobody has ever suggested that one single person could train all America’s hundreds of thousands of maths and science teachers makes that sentence as otiose as: “Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.” Small wonder that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has interpreted the speech as meaning that “the era of liberalism is back. His unashamedly far-left-of-centre speech certainly brings back memories of the Democratic Party in ages past.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2906/the_cowed_west_strikes_again nother attack on free speech. Another cowed governmental response. Another speaker in hiding. Another incident for the media to ignore. Ah, just another day in the West. The latest outrage comes from the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands, where a doctoral student who interviewed a group of teenaged Muslim-Turkish immigrants on TV about […]