RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you’re not supposed to think about too much. It’s fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it’s one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society. It’s just there and we don’t much talk about it.

Islamic terrorism is considered a social problem in Europe. Ask an expert and they’ll talk your ear off about unemployment, racism, overcrowded housing and the same long list of reasons used to explain urban crime. The United States is slowly coming around to that same point of view.

Forget the great debate between whether people kill people or guns kill people. The conclusion reached by most governments before your grandfather was born is that social conditions kill people.

The Tsarneav brothers are being talked about in the same way that most serial killers are. “They were so nice. What made them do it?” It’s the empty repetition of a question to which no one really wants to hear the answer. “What could have made them do it?” isn’t a genuine question, it’s a ceremonial washing of the hands. A ritualistic statement that we couldn’t have known anything was wrong. How could we? They were so nice.

Tamerlan Tsarneav slapped around one girlfriend, dragged another into a barefoot, pregnant and veiled arrangement, and went around telling everyone they were infidels. Sure he might have settled down at some point, picked up his membership card in the requisite front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood and limited his terrorist activities to donating to Islamic charities that just happen to do business in the middle of war zones. He could have stuck to beating his wife in the privacy of his home and told his neighbors that America would one day be destroyed knowing they would only nod and walk away humming, “But he’s so nice”.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boston-and-the-drone-debate-why-rand-paul-et-al-will-probably-lay-low-for-a-while?f=puball So, will Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Dianne Feinstein go to bat for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? In December, with many conservatives cheering him on, Paul (R., Ky.) railed against the “abomination of designating American citizens as enemy combatants” e.g., detaining them indefinitely outside the civilian criminal-justice system. Mike Lee (Utah), a conservative favorite, was his […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boston-the-msms-exploded-journalism

Over the years, I have watched via Internet video countless IED (Improvised Explosive Device) explosions detonated on American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, when I read the news of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th, and watched the videos of the incident, I was certain that it was a terrorist bombing that killed three people and injured over 170, some losing their limbs, and not an exploding fire hydrant or propane-fueled hot dog stand.

Then came the avalanche of hastily-written bulletins and aired news reports with earnest-looking reporters, half-thought-out educated guesses, “expert” speculations, and plain “yellow” journalism and words and images strung together just to fill print space and air time.

Shortly after the Boston bombings flung bodies and limbs and shrapnel over a Boylston Avenue sidewalk, the Mainstream Media itself exploded to reveal the debris of modern journalism.

Certain that it was indeed a terrorist act, and once the authorities had confirmed that two pressure-cooker IEDs had been set off, I began researching and writing a column about it, and attempted to sift through all the cascading hysteria and hair-pulling and come up with some solid facts and conclusions. I found it virtually impossible to compose a coherent article on the subject. The haphazard stories of who was responsible or not responsible for the bombings, and whom the authorities had arrested or not arrested, or whom the authorities were looking for, kept flickering in the news and my mind like a badly edited silent movie whose last nitrate frames had disintegrated. My mind shut down, and refused to function as it usually would when addressing an important topic.

I gave up on the effort and decided to wait it out. That patience paid off, for the terrorists turned out to be two Chechen brothers who “inexplicably” turned jihadist. They were Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. But in the meantime, some distracting but interesting developments also caught my attention, and none of them reflect well on either the MSM or the Obama administration or on the FBI.

There was the episode of the “running man” seen in a security camera video fleeing the scene of one explosion. He was reportedly tackled by a civilian and somehow turned over to the police. Whether or not he was the same 20-year-old Saudi student who suffered burns and was taken to a local hospital, or someone else entirely, hasn’t been confirmed. His name and that of the civilian who apprehended him remain unknown.

The student was Abdul Rahman Ali Al-Harbi. Photographs of a smiling, geeky-looking kid in a hospital gown were published. He looked like he wouldn’t hurt a fly. It turned out that he was definitely a “person of interest” because his family has terrorist ties. Not long after the bombing, both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John “Swift Boat” Kerry, he of the bogus combat film, combat medals, and French pedigree, met with Saudi officials in Washington and arranged for the kid to be deported back to Saudi Arabia.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346349/radical-islam-once-again We are in the midst of the least-suspenseful investigation ever launched by American law enforcement. Hundreds of investigators are seeking leads around the world to discover the motive of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This probe is considered a foray into the unknown, and perhaps the unknowable. “Do you have any […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346317/obama%E2%80%99s-psychodramas

Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration.

Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events — and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School were cited as reasons for rapid enactment of new gun-control laws — even though the proposed tougher registration rules would not have prevented either mayhem.

Tightening up the process for legal acquisition of firearms would not much hinder the mentally ill from getting their hands on guns. And the various measures needed to stop a crazy Adam Lanza or Jared Lee Loughner would be mostly intolerable for liberal or conservative civil libertarians — incarcerating far more of the mentally unhinged, censoring the depiction of gratuitous and violent use of guns in video games and films, confiscating the vast pools of semi-automatic rifles and handguns owned by private citizens. No matter. Sandy Hook and the shooting of Gabby Giffords were still arguments to shame opponents — in the president’s words, “lying” opponents — into accepting the administration’s proposals.
Furthermore, the politically driven distortion of recent gun violence was aimed not just at passing gun-control legislation, but also at demonizing opponents for the 2014 elections. That is why President Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, almost immediately floated the idea that the catalyst for the Boston violence was “tax day,” in a not-so-subtle insinuation that just maybe some right-wing tea-party types had set off the bombs. That theme soon metamorphosed among the Left into charges that right-wing-inspired sequestration had curbed law-enforcement vigilance and that right-wing opposition to laws against acquiring explosives had enabled the bombers.

In President Obama’s State of the Union Address this February, he cited current inclement weather to argue for renewed efforts to implement some type of cap-and-trade taxes and to grant more subsidies of “sustainable energy” (e.g., wind and solar): “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.”

Such weather hysteria brings to mind candidate Obama’s bizarre claim in May 2007 that the tornado in Greensburg, Kan., killed 10,000 people. (“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.”) The tornado actually killed ten or eleven people. In that particular abuse of current events, Obama was not trying to hype global warming; he was trying to blame incumbent president George Bush — as if the supposed dearth of Kansas National Guardsmen (you see, according to Obama, most of them had been sent off to Iraq) meant that 10,000 innocent people had perished for want of emergency attention.

Note that despite the psychodramatic “before it’s too late” reference to Superstorm Sandy, recent weather data show that the planet has not heated up in the last 15 years, despite a vast increase in the worldwide levels of carbon releases into the atmosphere. Moreover, the fact that the United States, almost alone among industrial countries, is beginning to cut its rate of carbon emissions is due almost entirely to the transition from coal to natural gas for generating electricity. Yet natural gas is a sort of politically incorrect fuel not usually seen as green enough for environmentalists.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/04/22/recognizing-that-radical-islam-is-our-enemy-lessons-from-the-cold-war/?print=1 Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/04/mosque-related_violence.html President Obama has done all he can these past five years to manipulate language and facts in order to exonerate Islam and Moslems from terrorist attacks committed in the U.S. by Moslems in the name of Islam and jihad. After Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood mowed down numerous innocents while chanting “Allahu Akbar,” Mr. […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/tamerlan_tsarnaev_and_a_lesson_to_the_inhabitants_of_the_world.html What’s in a name? In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an understanding of the man after whom he is named is essential to grasp to historic forces on whose behalf he allegedly embraced cruel terror, bringing along his kid brother Dzhokhar.   The late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen Muslim, […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/can_a_president_who_has_promised_to_stand_with_the_muslims_protect_americans.html In Obama’s Audacity of Hope, he stated, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in any ugly direction.”  He also asserted in Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, “We can absorb [another] terrorist attack.”  These are two straightforward statements that raise the question of whether a man who has been seemingly obsessed […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578438913145965432.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Flight Delays as Political Strategy
The FAA furloughs traffic controllers rather than cut other spending.

President Obama’s sequester scare strategy has been a political flop, but his government keeps trying. The latest gambit is to force airline flight delays until enough travellers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.

This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year. The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.

Capitol Hill Republicans say the White House is free to make other cuts instead. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster suggests the FAA first take a whack at the $500 million it’s spending on consultants, or perhaps the $325 million it blows on supplies and travel.

In case there’s any doubt about the President’s ability to prioritize, at least two GOP Senators, Jerry Moran and Roy Blunt, have written bills to clarify Mr. Obama’s authority to make sensible spending decisions. He’s not interested, and Senate Democrats have blocked such reforms. Making smart choices about federal sending would spoil the fun of creating flight delays and then blaming Republicans.

So this week the FAA has managed to turn the first stages of a 5% budget cut into hours of delays at the nation’s airports. The furloughs are landing on air-traffic controllers as much as they are on less vital FAA jobs. Officials at the Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent bureaucracy, say it would be bad for morale to impose heavier furloughs on the employees who don’t direct airplanes. DOT has also ruled out any reductions in the FAA workforce to achieve the needed savings, along with most other obvious options that a private business would explore.