RUTHFULLY YOURS

Understanding the Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi alliance

Hamas’s war with Israel is not a stand-alone event. It is happening in the context of the vast changes that are casting asunder old patterns of behavior and strategic understandings as actors in the region begin to reassess the threats they face.

Hamas was once funded by Saudi Arabia and enabled by Egypt. Now the regimes of these countries view it as part of a larger axis of Sunni jihad that threatens not only Israel, but them.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey, are the key members of this alliance structure. Without their support Hamas would have gone down with the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt last summer. As it stands, all view Hamas’s war with Israel as a means of reinstating the Brotherhood to power in that country.

To achieve a Hamas victory, Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood are using Western support for Hamas against Israel. If the US and the EU are able to coerce Egypt and Israel to open their borders with Gaza, then the Western powers will hand the jihadist axis a strategic victory.

The implications of such a victory would be dire.

Hamas is ideologically indistinguishable from Islamic State. Like Islamic State, Hamas has developed mass slaughter and psychological terrorization as the primary tools in its military doctrine. If the US and the EU force Israel and Egypt to open Gaza’s borders, they will enable Hamas to achieve strategic and political stability in Gaza. As a consequence, a post-war Gaza will quickly become a local version of Islamic State-controlled Mosul.

“Three of the House lawmakers who voted against funding for Iron
Dome—Reps. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.), Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.), and
Walter Jones (R., N.C.)—have received a combined $21,145 in this
election cycle from J Street, according to publicly available Federal
Election Committee (FEC) documents.”The eight other J Street-funded lawmakers who abstained from the vote
are Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D., Ore.), Susan Davis (D., Calif.), Lloyd
Doggett (D., Texas), John Garamendi (D., Calif.), Jim McDermott (D.,
Wash.), Raul Ruiz (D., Calif.), Jackie Speier (D., Calif.), and Ed
Whitfield (R., Ky.).”

Eleven lawmakers backed by liberal advocacy group J Street either
voted against or refused to vote in favor of increased funding for
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, which has been a critical
life-saver during Hamas’s latest assault on the Jewish state.

Congress overwhelmingly approved an emergency increase in funding for
Iron Dome this month by a vote of 395 to 8.

Three of the eight who voted against the funding increase are J
Street-backed lawmakers. Another eight abstained from the pro-Israel
vote and also are financially supported by the group.

Bloody riots continue in Ferguson, Mo, after the killing of a black teenager, but all is quiet in Miami after the murder of a visiting rabbi.

Obama is on the case. Eric Holder has been dispatched to the St. Louis suburb to personally take charge of the investigation as to what led to the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who prior to being shot was caught in the act of strong-arming a convenience store worker. This is on tape and has been broadcast widely.

Dozens of arrests have been made during the nearly two weeks of violent unrest and looting.

Windows have been smashed. Businesses are padlocked. Schools are closed. A city is burning. The president has asked for calm from both sides, from the rioters and from the police, which places those who break the law and those who protect the law on the same footing.

From outside of town in New York, where he doubles as Gotham’s mayor, Al Sharpton quickly got dressed and arrived on the Ferguson scene promptly.

A grand jury is scheduled to begin hearings.

http://conservativepost.com/gaza-corpses-caught-moving-when-they-forget-cameras-are-on-them/

Let the propaganda war begin. It looks like another bad move for Hamas, as they hold an ‘Islamic Funeral’ but they forgot one vital ingredient for the funeral: DEAD PEOPLE.

For years now Hamas has had a violent hold on Israel, and with that same grip, a hold on the mainstream media. We, the conservative post, remain unwavering.

Lights… Camera… Gullible Liberals:

John Kerry Calls for Disproportionate Response to ISIS Beheading an American By Bryan Preston
Secretary of State John Kerry offered remarks in reaction to the Islamic State’s murder of American journalist James Foley today. The State Department tweeted the highlights.
John Kerry ✔ @JohnKerry
Follow
ISIL must be destroyed/will be crushed.
3:24 PM – 20 Aug 2014

For the record, yes, IS/ISIS/ISIL should be crushed. Tellingly, neither Kerry nor President Obama has offered a plan and they are not gathering a coalition of the willing to get the job done. Obama went back to golf this afternoon.
Crushing IS would be right. But it’s not a proportional response to the murder of one American.
Hamas routinely kidnaps Israeli citizens, murders them and leaves their bodies by the side of the road. Hamas launches rockets into Israel with the purpose of killing Israelis and creating the feeling of dread and terror among them.
The international community, of which Kerry and Obama are members in good standing, always calls on Israel to respond “proportionally” to Hamas terrorism and rocket attacks.
Responding proportionally to terrorism is…what, exactly? So far, it’s destroying tunnels and perhaps airstriking a few terrorist leaders, but the group itself is left intact enough to come back and wage terror war another day. It’s not effective in getting rid of the problem of terrorism.

In fact, if we take “proportional’ literally, Israel should respond to Hamas by kidnapping innocent Palestinians and by launching random bombs on houses, schools and hospitals in Gaza. But that’s not what the “international community” means.
No one in the “international community” is calling on the United States to respond to IS beheading an American “proportionally.” At least not yet.
Why not? Hm.

John Nolte @NolteNC
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Doesn’t sound like a proportional response. Or is that standard only for The JooooZ? RT @JohnKerry ISIL must be destroyed/will be crushed.
4:01 PM – 20 Aug 2014

Leftists who have spent years defending Islamic extremism in Britain, labelling anyone who has raised concerns as bigoted, have been proved wrong. The Left, and those on the Right who cower before Leftist mantras, have much to answer for after James Foley’s murder.

The international outcry over the brutal beheading of innocent journalist James Foley underlines the shameful failure of the United States and Britain to take action over the Islamic State (IS) threat.

It should be no surprise at all that a British Muslim is likely to be responsible for the murder, as several hundred home-grown terrorists have already jumped onto planes, with their UK passports ready to shed blood in Syria and Iraq.

Those on the left, who have spent years defending Islamic extremism in Britain, labelling anyone who has raised concerns about it as bigoted, have been finally proved wrong. Our country does indeed have a very serious problem with Islamic extremism.

From the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby by two men chanting “allahu akbar” to the Trojan Horse school takeover plot, this evil ideology is engulfing our communities and creating the next generation of UK terrorists.

The situation in Iraq with the Islamic State takeover is now critical, after our elected officials have spent months sitting back, observing the crisis and hoping it will just go away. This foolish and complacent strategy has meant that the IS movement has gained in strength, taking more cities and murdering more innocent people.

I wrote recently of the brutal persecution of Christians and other minorities in Iraq, and even since then the situation has worsened. Iraq and Syria are on the verge of become one single terrorist superstate, with the IS movement proving even more brutal and dangerous than al-Qaeda.

We have all known about this problem for many months now and David Cameron is quite right to break off his holiday and return to Downing Street to co-ordinate Britain’s response. Firstly, our remit needs to move beyond that of delivering humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq.

This vital role must continue but we need to enter military engagement and support the US with airstrikes. Secondly, we should consider limited ground operations to support the armies attempting to hold IS back, even if we are only providing training and advice. Thirdly, we need to look again at the problems of Islamic extremism and its impact on British society.

I wrote two weeks ago about two New Hampshire teenagers having their bagpipes seized at the northern border by US Customs & Border Protection. This would be the same “border” “protection” agency that has turned the southern border into an express welfare check-in for any of the world’s seven billion people minded to show up there.

My fellow Granite Staters – 17-year-old Campbell Webster and Eryk Bean, of Concord and Londonderry, New Hampshire – understood that if you go to a highland fling a couple of hours north in Quebec you’re now obligated to get your bagpipes approved by US Fish & Wildlife.

Because that’s just the way it is in the Land of the Free.

So Messrs Webster and Bean got their CITES certificate and presented it to the US CBP agent at the Vermont border crossing.

Whereupon he promptly confiscated their bagpipes on the grounds that, yes, their US Fish & Wildlife CITES paperwork was valid, but it’s only valid at 28 ports of entry and this wasn’t one of them.

Nor is any other US/Canadian land crossing. So, if you’re a piper in, say, Pittsburg, New Hampshire and you want to play in a competition in La Patrie, Quebec 20 minutes north, you have to drive four-to-five hours south to Logan Airport in Boston, fly to Montreal and drive two hours east to La Patrie.

Because that’s just the way it is in the Land of the Free.

They’re following in the footsteps of the Romans, the French revolutionaries, and Mohammed himself.

There are many ways to kill a human being, but few are as flamboyant as beheading. In his Civil Wars, for instance, the Roman historian Appian recounts the beheading of Gaius Trebonius — and, more important, its aftermath:

Since Trebonius had participated in the murder of Caesar by detaining Antony in conversation at the door of the senate-house while the others killed him, the soldiers and camp-followers fell upon the rest of his body with fury and treated it with every kind of indignity. They rolled his head from one to another in sport along the city pavements like a ball till it was completely crushed.

The Romans were a brutal folk, but in the annals of human-on-human violence, similar incidents are not uncommon. There is John the Baptist’s head on Herod’s platter, and Blackbeard’s head roped to Maynard’s bowsprit. The guillotine may have purported to make beheading humane, but les révolutionnaires still rejoiced in the blood of Marie Antoinette.

Still, although one can find state-sanctioned beheadings in “civilized” nations into the 20th century — France last employed the guillotine in 1939 — beheading has assumed a much-deserved taboo. Call it moral progress if you like: In the West, we no longer accept as permissible rending a human being in twain.

Which is what Islamic State jihadists were counting on when they beheaded American journalist James Foley this week. Foley was kidnapped in Syria in 2012, and little was known of his whereabouts until the appearance of a video purporting to show his decapitation. The video is reminiscent of others we have seen in recent years: The murders of Daniel Pearl in 2002, and Nick Berg and Paul Marshall Johnson Jr. in 2004, all American citizens, were similarly broadcast.

Scholars of Islam debate whether the Koran actually sanctions beheading. Whether it does or not, what is clear is that sword-wielding jihadists of the Islamic State type believe that it does. And, the word of Allah aside, Islamic history provides plenty of precedent. In the late 19th century, Mahdists — Islamic millenarians — beheaded foes in British-administered Sudan. Nearly a millennium before, the Muslim conqueror Yusuf ibn Tashfin and his troops cut off the heads of the 24,000 Castilians they had killed in the Battle of Sagrajas in 1086, and then they piled up the rest of the bodies “to make a sort of minaret for the muezzins who, standing on the piles of headless cadavers, sang the praises of Allah,” wrote historian Paul Fregosi. Tashfin then sent packages of heads to every major city in North Africa and Spain. But the practice of beheading goes further back, to the Prophet Muhammad himself, who reportedly ordered the execution of 700 Jewish men in Medina on charges of conspiring against him.

A new study shows that government aid and World Bank projects are not enough to spur lasting recovery.
New Orleans is growing, but is New Orleans back?

Not entirely.

That’s the exchange we’ll all be hearing in the coming weeks as the city marks the ninth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Interesting new businesses have sprung up. Many schools are better than they used to be. New Orleans has more bicycle paths. But the city can’t claim the population it had in July 2005. And poverty rates have increased from their level in the first hopeful years after the storm.

This outcome disappoints, and it also challenges received wisdom. Americans nurse their own very private and personal storm of emoto-thoughts when it comes to natural disasters. We want to do something, so we look for theories that support action. One such theory is that restoring old structures or hurricane and flood spending can so stimulate economic activity at a disaster site that the place will emerge better than it would have been prior to the misfortune. Our officials routinely buttress this thesis.

In addition to such arguments for government or private spending, we see a second theory: disaster as a kind of natural selection of businesses. There’s yet a third theory, which is related: that disaster spaces can benefit from a specific version of Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” In this view, the same disaster environment that is hostile to humans is especially hospitable to innovators. Technological innovators flock in and drive out old backward technology, yielding productivity gains that also render New Orleans, or any other such unfortunate locale, superior to its old self.

This optimism speaks well of our national character, but not necessarily of our logic. For a systematic and global sweep of the evidence suggests that New Orleans is no exception: We often tend to overrate the quality of post-disaster intervention. Economists Solomon Hsiang and Amir S. Jina recently studied economies of nations that had endured the prototypical natural disaster, the cyclone. Studying 6,700 cyclones that took place around the world between 1950 and 2008, the pair published a National Bureau of Economic Research paper supplying strong evidence that national economies decline compared with their pre-disaster trend and “do not recover.” Wrote the authors: “The data reject hypotheses that disasters stimulate growth or that short-run losses disappear.” The conclusion: Cyclone-hit countries, rich or poor, experience such losses. Places where very big cyclones hit lose 3.7 years of development over the following two decades. This blow compares to a tax increase of 1 percent of gross domestic product, or a currency crisis.

Why do only handful of such tragedies trigger national outrage?

Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Mo, has tragically followed a predictable script.

On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 years. African Americans are the victims in about half of the homicides in America each year despite the fact that blacks represent only about 13 percent of the U.S. population.

One would think that these alarming statistics would provoke the sort of protests that we’ve seen in Ferguson, but that is not the case. Nor does racial unrest automatically follow cases in which white police officers fatally shoot black criminal suspects. Only a small handful of such instances trigger outrage in the black community.

Instead, the sort of civil unrest we’re seeing in Ferguson is most likely to be ignited by the infrequent and disparate cases in which someone white, whether a police officer or not, fatally shoots an unarmed African American.

Controversy, for example, arose over George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. Now, small-town Ferguson is in an uproar over a police officer’s fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown.

There is a second theme in such cases. The media almost invariably distort the facts, sometimes deliberately seeking to incite tensions. In the Trayvon Martin case, journalists published photos of Martin as a diminutive adolescent, not more recent pictures of Martin as a 17-year-old who was much taller than Zimmerman.