RUTHFULLY YOURS

[videos are posted on the Dispatch International site.]

http://www.d-intl.com/french-soccer-cup-victory-triggers-mayhem/?lang=en#.UaXMWbH8LIU

French soccer cup victory triggers mayhem

Nidra Poller

Familiar mechanism: no more dancing in the streets of Paris on National Day

PARIS. Monday, May 13, French soccer fans turned out to honor the local team – Paris St. Germain – winner for the first time in nineteen years of the French League cup. A sweet victory for another kind of “local,” Nasser al-Khalifi, CEO of the club that was bought by Qatari interests two years ago. A big bash was planned at Place du Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower in the background, as if the vast square were a replica of the team logo. Fans wearing the jersey with the PSG/Eiffel Tower badge over the heart and “Fly Emirates” across the chest hooted and hollered.

True to tradition, smartly dressed players in dark suits stood triumphantly on the open top deck of the team bus as it traveled from the stadium to Trocadéro. A few smiles and grins later they were whisked away in unmarked cars and the celebration turned into a pitched battle between riot police and the usual suspects. Frantic efforts to pin the blame on the “ultras” (hooligans), who did make a brief appearance, are contradicted by ample video evidence. Embarrassed officials and prepaid journalists, forced to admit that the troublemakers were not the “ultras” banished from the stadium by its new proprietors, and maybe not even soccer fans, came up with les casseurs [smashers] and guérilla urbaine [urban guerilla warfare]. Blogger Maxime Lépante identifies them as la racaille [banlieue, particularly Muslim, riff-raff]. I call them punk jihadis.

They did one million euros of damage that night, running on the rampage for hours, terrifying fans, tourists, and motorists caught in the middle of the battlefield. One client arrived at a refined upscale restaurant in tears; she and her husband were caught in the crossfire on their way to dinner. Tour busses were blocked, passengers roughed up and robbed, their luggage stolen from the baggage compartment. Drivers were pulled out of their cars, beaten, forced to turn over the keys. The Café Kléber was devastated, shop windows were smashed, shops were pillaged, customers were terrified. The riot police, outnumbered, were taunted, defied, outrun. They could not protect people or their property.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls, the most popular member of the Hollande government, lost some of his luster in the aftermath. Under the combined blows of criticism from the right wing opposition and clearly visible humiliation of law enforcement, his tough law and order discourse shifted to a stutter of dhimmitude. These things happen, he declared, listing previous incidents over the past decade and predicting potential trouble in the future—the Fête de la Musique in June, the 14 Juillet (national holiday).

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3641/the_palestinian_authority_doesn_t_incite_hatred_apart_from_when_it_does

Before you go to the World Economic Forum, make sure you aren’t broadcasting hateful messages at the same time, eh Mr. Abbas?

Imagine my lack of surprise to read about Mahmoud Abbas’s recent comments about incitement and ‘hate education’ in the Palestinian territories.

Of course, the Palestinian Authority President has a certain line to toe, but it doesn’t exactly help when the statement comes out in the same day that a new video is released completely contradicting your claims, doesn’t it?

Here’s Mahmoud Abbas at the World Economic Forum claiming, “We don’t educate our children to hate…” followed by a video of children being… taught to hate. You couldn’t make it up. But they can…

VIDEO:

The Woolwich horror demands a response
The murder of Lee Rigby is an atrocity which demands a response. No one else should have to suffer his fate

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3635/the_woolwich_horror_demands_a_response

The atrocity in Woolwich last week was one of almost unspeakable cruelty. Any right-minded person would have felt shock and intense anger that a British citizen was publicly butchered to death on the streets of his own capital city. The fact that the victim was a soldier, and targeted for this reason, made the killing feel much more raw and direct, as if this was an attack on us all. That this happened in full public view added a feeling of helplessness and frustration to our anger.

The minority of people who argue that this should be treated as ‘just another murder’ – as though this case was not exceptional – are not only wrong but callous and wilfully blind to the problem. An unarmed British soldier was murdered in the most brutal way in broad daylight on a London street for the very reason that he was a British soldier. The killers then stood there and gloated over their crime and shouted their reasons, based on their extreme Islamist ideology.

Those who claim that this killing was done by two ‘nutters’ who ‘happened to be Muslim’, or ‘happened to invoke Islam’, are dodging the issue. This is just intellectual laziness or moral cowardice, an unwillingness to face up to the very real problem of extreme Islamism.

The contemptible tiny minority that tries to draw comparisons between this killing and British military actions in Afghanistan are morally warped. All wars cause civilian deaths, but British soldiers in Afghanistan are not in the business of running down Afghan civilians and then hacking them to death with cleavers. British troops are there with the consent of the elected Afghan government and the authority of the UN. The vast majority of deaths in Afghanistan (as all UN and NGO studies demonstrate) are caused by the Taliban and other Islamist insurgents, not ISAF forces.

If our critics really wanted to look at who was ‘killing Muslims worldwide’, they would find that the answer is violent Islamists and repressive regimes, not the West. The argument that ‘Western foreign policy’ causes terrorism does not get us very far. What are they suggesting: that Al-Qaeda should be given a veto over every action we take abroad, that we should defer to the judgment of machete-wielding terrorists?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323975004578503040989151234.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Curious IRS Timing

The IRS has admitted targeting groups that wanted to speak on issues during the 2012 election season. But did the agency also target tax-exempt groups that opposed Administration policy priorities?

At a House oversight hearing last week, Treasury Inspector General Russell George opened the door on the possibility of more IRS political targeting. Asked by Chairman Darrell Issa whether there were other political criteria that IRS workers had been told to “be on the lookout” for, Mr. George said he could “not give you a definitive answer, sir, at this time. But I certainly will.”

A definitive answer is needed because troubling cases are surfacing. The Arlington, Virginia-based Leadership Institute, a 501(c)(3) that trains young conservative activists, says it was audited in 2011-2012 and had to produce some 23,000 pages of documents for the IRS as well as answer questions about where its interns came from and where they are currently employed.

Curiously, the intrusive questionnaire came from the IRS’s Baltimore office on February 14, 2012, soon after the Cincinnati office asked the Hawaii Tea Party on January 26, 2012 to “provide details regarding your relationship with the Leadership Institute” and “provide copies of their training materials.” The group’s audit fell squarely within the IRS’s 2010-2012 season for conservative targeting.

A Pennsylvania pro-Israel group called Z Street says it filed for 501(c)(3) status in December 2009, intending to operate purely as an educational group. Founder Lori Lowenthal Marcus says that its tax counsel called the IRS in July 2010 to check on the slow pace of approval, and the IRS acknowledged its targeted enforcement.

Asked about the slow pace of approval, the IRS auditor on the case, Diane Gentry, said the application was taking so long because auditors were supposed to give special scrutiny to groups “connected with Israel.” Ms. Marcus says Ms. Gentry further explained that many applications related to Israel had to be sent to “a special unit in D.C. to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Z Street filed suit in August 2010 in federal court in Pennsylvania alleging “viewpoint discrimination,” and its case has since been moved to Washington, D.C. Ms. Gentry did not return our phone calls.

http://news.yahoo.com/john-kerry-israel-prosperity-may-blocking-peace-process-173817417.html Is it possible that the many accomplishments and economic prosperity of Israel is preventing the peace process from moving ahead in the Middle East? That seems to be what our Secretary of State thinks.   U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East on May 26, […]

  http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/ This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on The Jerusalem Post. It is opening week of another session of the UN’s top human rights body, the UN Human Rights Council, and antisemitism will once again be promoted around the globe via an organization built on the ashes of the Jewish people and sworn […]

More Peace, Less Process: The Key to Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has already visited the Middle East four times since President Barack Obama named him to the post back in February. Perhaps anticipating the large number of yawns that such a statistic is likely to produce, Kerry directly addressed, during his […]