RUTHFULLY YOURS

The swap of probable deserter Bowe Bergdahl for 5 “high-risk” Guantánamo detainees is about more than political public relations. By releasing some of the worst murderers, this deal prepares the ground for Obama’s long-term goal of shutting down the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and releasing the remaining detainees. According to Britain’s Daily Mail, a senior Pentagon official claims Obama nixed plans to rescue Bergdahl because “the president wanted a diplomatic scenario that would establish a precedent for repatriating detainees from Gitmo.” Given that on his second day in office Obama issued an executive order shutting Gitmo down, and as recently as this year’s State of the Union speech repeated this pledge, his failure to do so has aroused serial complaints from his progressive base. With his reelection behind him, Obama may now think he can fulfill this promise, no matter the danger to our efforts to protect ourselves against terrorism.

For Obama’s liberal base, Gitmo has been part of a larger narrative of American tyranny, particularly George Bush’s alleged lawlessness in waging an “illegal” and “unnecessary” war in Iraq. Once Howard Dean’s anti-war presidential primary insurgency took off after the war began in 2003, mainstream Democrats began endorsing the far-left “Bush lied” analysis of the war that John Edwards, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton had voted for based on the same intelligence that led to the Bush administration’s decision. With the anti-war movement providing the visuals for television news, the left’s distorted history of Vietnam was resurrected to provide the template for the war in Iraq, particularly the charge that the Bush administration had lied about Hussein’s WMDs, just as Lyndon Johnson had allegedly fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Soon the whole litany of American militarist evils was applied to Iraq and the war against terrorists and their enablers. Torture, illegal detention, and abuse of prisoners were staples of that catalogue, and for leftists Gitmo fit the bill.

Soon we were hearing that Gitmo was a “gulag,” “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights,” a “shocking affront to democracy,” and a “national disgrace.” The New York Times, paying heed to charges by detainees trained to lie, said Guantanamo exemplified “harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse” and recalled “the Soviet Union’s sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies.” Such hysteria, of course, has no basis in fact.

Obama Inc. keeps insisting that Qatar could be trusted when it was already concluded by the 9/11 Commission that the Islamist tyranny had ties to the attack on the United States.

Since then Qatar has become so out of control in its backing of Jihadists that it has been disavowed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but that just made Obama embrace it even harder.

Consider this. Obama is hugging a regime that the Saudis think is too extreme. That’s how bad things are. This latest revelation is no surprise at all.

The New York Times had already let slip that even Obama Inc. was uncomfortable with whom the Qataris were arming.

Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

It’s called plausible deniability. Now we know what was being denied.

The Obama administration isn’t only giving the Taliban back its commanders — it’s giving them weapons.

Miliary records and sources reveal that on July 25, 2012, Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a US Army CH-47 helicopter with a new generation Stinger missile.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah/Palestinian Authority has just cemented a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, the terrorist movement that seized Gaza from Fatah in 2007 and whose charter calls for the murder of Jews. U.S.-brokered Israeli/Palestinian negotiations have foundered in a predictable round of recriminations. But events commemorated in recent weeks provide the clue to understanding why such talks invariably lead to an impasse. On May 15, Palestinians marked what they call the naqba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) – the day Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

That juxtaposition of Israeli independence and naqba is not accidental. We are meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.

But the truth is different. A British document from early 1948, declassified last year, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered … overwhelming defeats[.] … Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”

In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already at war, and Arabs fleeing, even before Israel came into sovereign existence on 15 May 1948.

Thus, what is now called the naqba consisted not of Israeli forcible displacement of Arabs, but of neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responding to Israel’s declaration of independence and Britain’s departure with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air, and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment – the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents – and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes. As Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, writing in Arab News, put it the other week, “[i]t was a defeat but the Arabs chose to call it a catastrophe.”

This past week with the swearing in of the so called unity government, two sides of the same coin were joined together in maniacal matrimony.  With an unrepentant charter sworn to annihilation of not only Israel but world Jewry, Hamas and the equally corrupt and hateful Fatah have ratified their reconciliation agreed to this past […]

Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap — on The Glazov Gang
A glance into the heart of a leftist administration’s darkness.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang/

One thing is certain: both Hamas and Fatah are hoping to use the unity government as a ploy to attract financial aid from the international community, particularly Western donors. The unity government, which is backed by Fatah and the U.S.-terrorist-designated organization Hamas, actually serves both parties as a front for receiving funds from the international community.

Less than a week after its inauguration, the Hamas-Fatah unity government is already facing its first crisis as it remains unclear which party will pay salaries to tens of thousands of Hamas employees in the Gaza Strip.

It turns out that Hamas was hoping that the reconciliation deal it signed with Fatah in April, which led to the formation of the unity government, would absolve the Islamist movement of its financial obligations toward its employees.

That plan was, in fact, the main reason Hamas agreed to the reconciliation accord with Fatah. Over the past few years, Hamas has been facing a severe financial crisis, particularly in the wake of Egypt’s decision to destroy smuggling tunnels along its border with the Gaza Strip.

Hamas says that the new unity government is responsible for paying the salaries of its employees, but Fatah and Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas insist that this is not their responsibility.

The dispute between the two parties erupted into violence last week when hundreds of angry Hamas employees attacked a number of banks in the Gaza Strip after discovering that the unity government had failed to pay their salaries.

President Obama thought trading a deserter for five top terrorists would be a PR coup. What does this tell us about our president as a person? At the most basic level, it shows that Obama does not share Americans’ visceral reaction to Bergdahl’s betrayal of his fellow soldiers and country. Obama, and no doubt Kerry, thought a deserter could be palmed off as a perfectly fine hero.

Before rushing on to the usual chatter about Obama’s incompetence, his wanting to get attention off the VA, and his grandiose belief in his brilliance at negotiating with Islamist regimes, it is important to pause and consider why Obama’s gut reaction is so off.

Obama didn’t have a normal visceral reaction to the 9/11 attack in Benghazi, either. Any normal person would have rushed to his post in the Situation Room to oversee a rescue attempt. On that one, Obama skipped the Situation Room entirely, and the rescue attempt, and went to bed to get his beauty sleep for a Vegas fundraiser. Something is off.

Obama does not have a normal visceral reaction to Iran’s mullahs armed with nuclear weapons. Just as the economic sanctions on Iran were beginning to bite, Obama lifted them entirely, restored Iran’s frozen assets, left their nuclear weapons program intact, and told Israel there will be “negative consequences” if they take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. He is obviously comfortable with a nuclear Iran. That is strange.

Obama does not have normal visceral reactions to jihadi groups.

Our president worked to install terrorists in power in Egypt, where they had been successfully suppressed for sixty years. He helped depose our ally Mubarak and did his best to hand over Egypt to the Muslim Brothers, a Nazi-jihadi group dedicated to sharia law, the worldwide caliphate, and killing all the Jews on the planet. Obama is still punishing Egypt for rising up and getting rid of the Brothers, by withholding military aid. This is not appeasement; it is not even collaboration – it is working for your enemy’s cause.