RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lloyd-billingsley/lessons-on-the-new-left-from-the-hanoi-hilton/print/

C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb recently interviewed Lee Ellis, author of Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton. The book is a valuable primer on history that many Americans have forgotten or not know only in part. Leading with Honor is also an introduction to characters all Americans should get to know better, such as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda. Ellis came to know the pair under different circumstances.

In November of 1967 Ellis was shot down on a mission to destroy the guns that protected the Quang Khe ferry that supplied the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In the Hoa Lao prison, which POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, Ellis learned firsthand about North Vietnam and its systematic torture of American POWs. As the author notes, the North Vietnamese tortured more than 95 percent of American POWs including eight tortured to death. Ellis describes the “Pretzel,” one of the regime’s favorite tortures:

After the prisoner’s legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint. Then the torturer would push the bound arms up and over the head, while applying pressure with a knee to the victim’s back. During the torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs to go sleep but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear. When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the “dead” limbs, causing excruciating pain.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/169426 Are we more “polarized” and “partisan” than we were in the past? Political commentators think so. In a recent Atlantic profile, conservative pollster Frank Luntz attributed his cynicism about American politics to the unprecedented polarization of the American people he has seen in his recent work with focus groups. They are “contentious and argumentative,” don’t “listen […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-al-jazeera-anchors-bloody-call?f=puball

A prominent Al Jazeera anchor with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement praising the murders of police officers and advocating attacks on journalists who stand with Egypt’s current government.

Ahmed Mansour’s statement was reported Saturday on the Brotherhood’s own web site, Ikhwan Online. It blamed police and journalists for supporting last summer’s military intervention which ousted President Mohamed Morsi – the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate – from office just one year into his term.

Those who “retaliate against the criminal officers, are the ones who will help in overthrowing the coup,” Mansour’s statement said, according to Ikhwan Online. “They are those which will destroy the economy of the coup. They are those which will decisively prevent the return of tourism.”

A suicide bomber killed four people and injured 14 more last week in an attack on a tourist bus and an Egyptian police conscript was shot in the leg during an attempted ambush.

Mansour’s statement also criticized “the treasonous media” for siding with the military in toppling Morsi last July. The military violently quashed protest camps demanding Morsi’s return to power, killing hundreds of people.

“Considering the media partners in all the massacres is correct, and their being punished at the hands of the movements today is not a terrorist act, but act of heroism,” Mansour’s statement said.

The article was quickly removed by the Brotherhood, however, and Mansour denies making the statement. He claims that he is being set up by Egypt’s military government.

“Coup agencies misled dozens of news sites, including Ikhwan Online [the Muslim Brotherhood] by spreading an article in my name, with incitement to murder,” Mansour wrote on Twitter Sunday. “I proclaim my innocence of this prattle.”

Tricking the Brotherhood would be quite an accomplishment. Mansour has been identified as a Brotherhood member and has long had close relations with the group.

This is not the first time Mansour claims to have been set up. Days after Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood published a report attributed to Mansour which claimed Egypt’s new interim president was a Seventh Day Adventist, “which is a Jewish sect,” the article said.

The new leader wanted to move the Muslim-majority country closer to Christianity, Mansour said.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-wants-to-waste-a-billion-on-climate-change?f=puball

Barack Obama will be remembered for many things during his two terms in office, but high on the list, right after lying to everyone about everything, will be his determination to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on every Green scheme from solar and wind energy to electric cars, and now on “climate change.”

He is calling for a billion-dollar climate change fund in his forthcoming budget, due out next month. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the fund “would be spent on researching the projected effects of climate change and helping Americans prepare for them, including with new technology and infrastructure, according to the White House.

We don’t need any research and we don’t need any new technology. The National Weather Service has hugely expensive computers that enable it to predict what the weather will be anywhere in the U.S. with some measure of accuracy for up to three or four days. After that, it gets fuzzy. What will the weather be next week? Well, maybe a bit warmer or a bit colder.

As for the effects of weather events, we have centuries of knowledge regarding this. We know what happens after a blizzard or a hurricane, a drought or a flood.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/can-ukraine-avoid-partition?f=puball

I wish it were as easy as goodies against baddies, students against secret policemen, democrats against autocrats. In the early stages of an uprising – what we might call the Arab Spring Phase – Western media, wanting to simplify things for their readers, gloss over the complexities. Later, when things turn tragic, those readers can be left baffled.

Don’t get me wrong. Viktor Yanukovych was a nasty piece of work, whose goons carried out unspeakable crimes. My sympathies were with the protesters, both in general (the vision of a pluralist, market-oriented Ukraine is more wholesome than that of a country tied to Putin) and on the specific issue that triggered the demonstrations (a free trade agreement is better than a customs union, because it is non-exclusive).

But the ousting of a thug doesn’t mean that “all shall be well / and all manner of thing shall be well”. This is, after all, not the first time that Yanukovych has been toppled by street protests. Ten years ago, crowds in the same places pushed him from office and, in new elections, installed their candidate, Viktor Yuschenko. Years of corruption and failure followed, and Yanukovych came back, in an election that observers agreed had been free and fair, in 2010.

Ukraine means “edge” or “borderland” (Krajina in the former Yugoslavia shares its etymology). To Russian nationalists, Kiev is the cradle of Russian nationhood, and Ukrainians are the Little Russians who, along with the White Russians and the Great Russians, comprised the historic motherland. Plenty of Russians will tell you that Ukrainian is a Russian dialect and Ukrainian national identity a creation of, first, Polish and, later, Austrian occupiers. They point to the many famous Russians who might as easily be called Ukrainian – Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Brezhnev – arguing that the distinction is synthetic and pointless.

Muhammad Ali Mocks Obama’s Iran policy

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/muhammad-ali-mocks-obamas-iran-policy

In an Iranian mosque with hundreds of worshipers present and thousands more watching on television, he denigrated the United States and urged his listeners to chant “Death to America.”

He called America’s leaders liars.

He mocked U.S. President Barack Obama for “constantly threatening us that the military option is on the table. Iran laughs at these threats … We know that the military threats that all options are on the table serve America’s domestic interests … They don’t have the guts to do it and they know it.”

This was the Feb. 14 sermon — not of the famous boxer Muhammad Ali — but of Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Movahedi-Kermani.

A boxing metaphor seems appropriate as Iran’s leadership uses the United States’ leadership as a punching bag.

Teddy Roosevelt’s approach to foreign policy, famously quoted as “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” counseled not to threaten verbally but leave no doubt force will be used if necessary.

Despite the ayatollah’s protestations, Obama has embraced a foreign policy with Iran 180 degrees out of sync with Roosevelt’s, endeavoring to “speak softly and carry no stick.”

Iranians fear Obama as much as they do “Pee Wee Herman.”

http://pamelageller.com/2014/02/muslim-group-boko-haram-continues-bloody-rampage-slaughters-37-christian-college-coordinated-attacks.html/

From my E-pal Dr. JHA: ”

And, unlike the conservative/libertarian media, the Leftist press and its PC minions utter no outrage, demonstrate nowhere, demand no revulsion from again silent Muslim leaders in regard to these atrocities,
time after time after time from the ‘Religion of Peace’.. Their silence is deafening….
But woe betides Israel when it mistakenly harms a single Arab — a flood of howling protest erupts…Shame!”

Daily carnage in the cause of Islam — every day. More gruesome, more bloody, and the West naval gazes and chants huminah huminah huminah-islamo-phobia *hiccup* Adamawa attack:death toll rises to 33, many missing The City Reporters The death toll of insurgents attack on Michika and Madagali local government areas of Adamawa has risen to 33 persons according to local sources. A source at Shuwa said when the [Muslims] struck in the village they opened fire.

Yesterday this same

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/02/28/another-tack-those-three-nos-reworded/

When it involves Israel, the international community’s hearing is notoriously selective yet never capricious or random. There is method in the apparent arbitrariness of what does and does not compellingly impress the self-appointed adjudicators of all that’s virtuous and/or villainous in our setting.

Israel’s own largely left-dominated media – forever engaged in advocacy journalism and tendentiously promoting hyped humbug – isn’t remarkably better.

The obliging etiquette of de rigueur enlightenment demands that Israel’s culpability be accentuated and amplified in all circumstances. Simultaneously, any Arab belligerence must by the niceties of politically correct protocol be disguised, discounted and ultimately denied. Stonewalling must be ascribed exclusively to the uncool Jewish state.

The hardly unforeseeable upshot is that nowhere was much interest shown in Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas’s latest song and dance. Deprived of resonance, the story of his two recent meetings in Paris with US Secretary of State John Kerry expired virtually unnoticed.

This means that few news-consumers, either at home or abroad, can conceivably be expected to realize that Abbas has just delivered three major no’s to Kerry, who is gung-ho on imposing an instant all-encompassing final solution to the Mideast problem – one that has eluded lesser minds than his for the past century-and-a-half.

Since his own ambitious nine-month deadline is fast nearing, Kerry wishes to wow the benighted natives with at least a fuzzy outline of a deal. Abbas has, nonetheless, inconsiderately demolished key components of Kerry’s fragile framework but he’s unlikely to get much flak for his intransigence.

Essentially this arises from the trendy predisposition to blame Israel for anything and absolve the Arab side of everything. This means that few pro forma informed individuals anywhere would at all discover that Abbas has walloped Kerry with the following three strident rebuffs:

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4197/britain-islamists-free-speech

“My intention was to carve out a space to be heard without constantly fearing the blasphemy charge, on pain of death.” — Maajid Nawaz, Liberal Democratic Party candidate for Britain’s Parliament.

“The media’s vaunted concern for minority welfare is at direct odds with its indifference to the minority within Islam that is trying to reform its orthodoxy’s disgraceful attitude to blasphemy—a minority that is gravely endangered and in need of friends.” — Abhishek Phadnis, free speech activist, London School of Economics.

Muslim fundamentalists in London have threatened to behead a fellow British Muslim after he posted an innocuous image of Mohammed and Jesus on his Twitter account.

The death threats against Maajid Nawaz, a Liberal Democrat Party candidate for British Parliament, add to a growing number of cases in which Islamists are using intimidation tactics to restrict the free speech rights of fellow Muslims in Europe. (Efforts to silence non-Muslims are well documented.)

Nawaz—a former member of the Islamist revolutionary group Hizb ut-Tahrir and co-founder of the Quilliam Foundation, a London-based counter-extremism think-tank—on January 12 posted on Twitter a cartoon of Mohammed and Jesus greeting one another (“Hey” and “How ya doin’?”) with the caption: “This Jesus & Mo @JandMo cartoon is not offensive&I’m sure God is greater than to feel threatened by it الله أكبر منه”.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7511

Watching time run out at a dangerous pace, U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to take a more hands-on role in foreign policy. The impending peril he fears is not an Iranian atom bomb, however.

No, in spite of the Islamic Republic’s refusal to halt its nuclear program, Obama is as hopeful about the latest round of talks in Vienna as is European Union negotiator Catherine Ashton.

“We had three very productive days during which we have identified all the issues we need to address to reach a comprehensive and final agreement,” Ashton said last week.

This was music to White House ears. Now it could ignore Iran’s about-face following its signing of an interim agreement with the West in November. Indeed, before the ink had dried on the document, Iran was denouncing Obama’s interpretation of it.

Imagine the U.S. president’s relief, then, that he had not caved to pressure from Congress to step up sanctions against Tehran, and that a whole new series of talks — the first of which will take place on March 17 — was in the cards.

What, then, is causing the American president to grab the reins out of Secretary of State John Kerry’s hands with such urgency?