RUTHFULLY YOURS

50 years ago, on October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a stunning speech in support of the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater. The rest is history…Goldwater lost and Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980. But Senator Barry Goldwater ignited a Conservative renewal in America. Without him there would have been no Reagan Presidency.

He had warts. Big ones. He despised the Evangelicals and misunderstood them completely without realizing what a big role they were to play in a conservative revival. He also disliked Israel and made no secret of it.

But he had ideas….

Here are a few:

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
Barry Goldwater

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. ”
― Barry M. Goldwater

“A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.”
― Barry M. Goldwater

“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.”
― Barry M. Goldwater

Since when does the US Administration send condolences to a criminal’s family?
I know it happened in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri. Now it is happening in Israel after an Arab youth who hurled firebombs at passing Israeli cars in Judea & Samaria, was killed by security forces. The Obama Administration sent official condolences to the family of this young terrorist when, as part of a violent mob, he endangering the lives of Israelis.

Any country must adopt an unquestioned zero tolerance to growing deadly violence and terrorism. But the attitude of an American Administration is troubling. Would it, I wonder, have sent condolences to the family had the perpetrator of firebomb attacks been an Israeli-American, and the intended victims Arabs? I doubt it. I suspect the Administration would have harshly condemned the act, the perpetrator, and Israel.
Enough, already, of this political incorrectness!

But where is this biased animus coming from? I strongly suspect it is coming from the top of the present US Administration, from Obama himself.

There is a deep motive behind Obama’s animus toward Israel. It stems from his far left Socialist political upbringing both at family and personal mentor levels. It has framed his political mindset both at home and abroad. It is this that affects his worldview. Anyone reading his autobiography, particularly the imprisonment and alleged torture of his grandfather in Kenya by the British, must take from it a sense that the American president harbors resentment to perceived colonizers, oppressors, and imperialist powers. He looks on countries through the prism of his upbringing. Official relations may appear normal on the surface, but grievances bubble up in personal slights. Take, for example, the little addressed gesture by Obama of returning the bust of Winston Churchill that had taken pride of place in the White House, to Britain on entering the presidential residence. It was nothing less than a personal gesture of resentment.

There is little doubt that Obama feels a personal kinship with the Muslim world. This again is grounded by his personal life experiences in Muslim countries. A personal affinity by an important world leader is often a good thing and can make for a more peaceful world if balanced with wisdom and diplomatic skills. What Obama does not take on board is the centuries old hatred of non-believers, and a past of corrupt and primitively brutal reigns of conquest, slavery, and slaughter. Instead, he shares their accusations that all their troubles have been caused by the colonizers, oppressors, and imperial powers of which America is the modern day leader.

Once adopted, Israel is perceived as a colonizer and occupier, especially if that view is expounded through his formative contact years with people such as Khalid al Mansour a vile anti-Semite and radicalized Muslim, who was a high level adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. He wrote a letter of recommendation to Harvard for Barack Obama to gain acceptance, and Arafat adviser, Rashid Khalidi, to whom Obama lavished praise at a Chicago farewell party when Khalidi headed off to Columbia.

Forget due process, evidence, rights — domestic-violence accusers are almost always believed.

A startling report last week by the AP’s Jon Krawczynski sheds needed light on the harrowing story of Dante Cunningham, a victim of a false domestic-violence accusation and a baseless restraining order.

Last season, Cunningham was a forward playing for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, completing his second year with the team. A tall (6′8″), willowy man with a kind face and a broad smile, Cunningham was raised in a military family in Maryland, where he developed the work ethic and grounded nature that helped propel his successful basketball career. As a college student at Villanova, he was the team’s top scorer. He was then drafted into the NBA, where he played for five years and led a relatively quiet life — a dog lover who was well liked by the fans for his cheerful disposition and generosity.

But Cunningham’s life changed in an instant one night in April when his girlfriend, a single mother he’d been dating for months, accused the 26-year-old NBA player of domestic violence. As Krawczynski reports:

It was after 4 a.m. when Dante Cunningham pulled his truck back into the driveway of his suburban Minneapolis home and saw the police waiting for him.

Officers put the handcuffs on the Minnesota Timberwolves’ reserve as soon as his feet hit the pavement. The reality of his situation and the domestic assault charges that were on their way didn’t really sink in until he was lying in a jail cell and the lights went out.

“The whole time I was like, ‘I’m OK. I’m out of here. Things will be fine,’” Cunningham recalled. “Then it went dark and I was like, ‘This is not a joke. I’m really in this.’”

The woman claimed Cunningham had kicked down a locked bedroom door, pushed her against the wall, and choked her. He strenuously denied the charges, stating that the only time he touched her was on her wrist, when he tried to get her to stop hanging onto his vehicle as he drove away from their residence to cool down following an argument.

This year is shaping up to be a great one for conservatives. Real Clear Politics projects that Republicans are on track to pick up seven Senate seats, and there’s a real possibility that come January 2015, they’ll hold a 54 or 55-seat majority.

This has left Democrats utterly panicked as they scramble to motivate their base at a time when President Obama’s approval rating has stalled at 39 percent. They have turned to an old hat — race-baiting — in hopes of scaring African-American voters to the polls.

Color of Change, a PAC established by 9/11 truther and failed CNN talk-show host Van Jones, has dropped fliers in the mailboxes of voters in Arkansas, a state where freshman Republican congressman Tom Cotton leads twelve-year-incumbent and political scion Mark Pryor in the race for the U.S. Senate. It reads:

Black people are voting at record levels. And we can’t let up now. This election, our votes can stop the greed, brutality, and abuses of power that are threatening our families. When we stand together, we win. It starts with voting on November 4th.

What’s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich?

In early October, Barack Obama went to a $32,000-a-head fundraiser at the 20-acre estate of the aptly named billionaire Richie Richman. The day before he charmed his paying audience of liberal 1 percenters, Obama had sent out an e-mail alleging that Republicans were “in the pocket of billionaires.” Does that mean that Republicans who accept cash from billionaire supporters are always in their pockets, but that when the president does likewise, he never is? And if so, on what grounds is he exempt from his own accusations?

In mid-October, Hillary Clinton gave a short lecture at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas bewailing the crushing costs of a university education. “Higher education,” Clinton thundered, “shouldn’t be a privilege for those able to afford it.”

One reason tuition and student indebtedness have soared — UNLV’s tuition is set to go up by 17 percent next year — is that universities pay exorbitant fees to multimillionaire speakers like Hillary Clinton. College foundations sprout up to raise money for perks that might not pass transparent university budgeting. Clinton — or her own foundation — reportedly charged a university foundation $225,000 for a talk lasting less than an hour. For that sum, she could have paid the tuition of over 320 cash-strapped UNLV students. Is there a Clinton Tuition Fund, to which Hillary contributes a portion of her honoraria to exempt herself from the ramifications of her own accusations?

Multibillionaire Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg wants amnesty for undocumented workers. In fact, he flew down to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s estate to blast his own country’s immigration policies. But Zuckerberg also pays millions to separate himself from hoi polloi. He recently spent a reported $30 million to buy up houses surrounding his Palo Alto estate as well as other properties. That way he can enlarge his own environment and guarantee that his privacy is not impinged on by the wrong sort of neighbors. Couldn’t he spend a comparable $30 million on affordable housing for illegal aliens, or at least allow a family or two to live next to him to provide easy mentorship about the difficult transition from Oaxaca to Palo Alto?

Back in 1968, Henry Kissinger once observed that “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal”. Everything was subordinated to domestic politics according to which Washington’s first instinct was to coerce its allies and attract its foes. In contrast to the Marine’s well known slogan, the motto of the some diplomats was “no worse friend, no better enemy”.

In the intervening half century Kissinger’s ironic adage appears to have become even truer. According to the Business Insider [1], “ISIS Is Making An Absurd Amount Of Money On Ransom Payments And Black-Market Oil Sales”.

ISIS earns about $US1 million each day in oil sales alone, said David Cohen, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. He also said the group has netted approximately $US20 million in ransom payments this year. Additionally, Cohen said ISIS has raised funds through local extortion and crime, like robbing banks.

By contrast, Kurdish oil tankers are sailing in circles in search of a port because Washington has blocked its oil sales anywhere in order to avoid offending Iraq. The New York Times [2] explains:

Roughly two dozen huge oil tankers are idly turning figure eights around the Mediterranean or on the high seas, loaded with oil pumped from wells in Iraqi Kurdistan but with nowhere to legally offload it.

The oil fleet is a costly gamble, to the tune of millions in fees each month, by Kurdish officials who are desperately trying to sell the oil abroad, even as the Iraqi government and the United States are blocking their attempts.

To Iraqi officials, the tankers are carrying contraband — oil that by law should be marketed only by the Iraqi Oil Ministry, with the profits split: 83 percent for the Baghdad government, 17 percent for the Kurdish autonomous government in the north.

Perhaps the secret to ISIS’ recent success can be summed up in one phrase. They punish their enemies, the administration punishes its friends. China has just surprised Western analysts by deploying an SSN [3] — for the first time — into the Indian Ocean. The torpedoes it carries will be aimed at Western ships.

As we survey the contemporary international scene, we remark a multitude of forces arrayed against the historical and cultural integrity of Western civilization, of which Islam is one of the most potent and longstanding, dating back a millennium and a half. There are other antagonistic powers, of course, emanating from both without and within the Western liberal ethos, whether the autocratic impulse associated with the Sino-Russian political matrix or the flirtations with social anarchism and political collectivism that form part of the Western intellectual tradition.

But the greatest enemy the West now faces is itself. As the eminent philosopher Pogo famously noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us,” certainly far truer today than it was sixty years ago [1]. He was not referring to some disparate aspect or specific movement within the context of Western political evolution but to the big picture, the whole Okefenokee we find ourselves inhabiting. The evidence is now all around us of a civilization at war with itself, bent on corrupting and surrendering a magnificent heritage — even if too often honored in the breach — of rational thought, judicial impartiality, electoral franchise, separation of church and state, the right of assembly and freedom of expression. Each one of these hard-won and precious goods is now being eroded under the auspices of cultural relativism, “the tawdry mother philosophy of political correctness,” in Roger Simon’s apt phrase [2], and the source of multicultural “tolerance,” cultural self-loathing and the infantile liability to subscribe to fairy-tales and myths rather than face the salutary unpleasantness of hard facts.

With few exceptions, one cannot open a newspaper or watch a television newscast or talk show or go to a Hollywood movie or attend a university humanities class without coming across instances of pure apocrypha. Whether we are informed that jihadist attacks have nothing to do with jihad; that Islam with its historic toll of 270 million [3] deaths is a religion of peace; that university campuses across North America are crawling with student rapists; that marital violence is always initiated by men; that all cultures enjoy equivalent status despite their human rights records; that truth is no defense against charges of “hate speech”; that criminals have every right to sue their resistant victims; that citizens can be legitimately hauled into court for defending themselves; that the earth is heating up; that costly, draconian measures are necessary to reduce our “carbon footprint”; that exorbitant and ineffectual green energy installations are preferable to cheap and plentiful standard sources; that rejecting ID requirements, that is, what every sensible person knows is an attempt to facilitate electoral fraud, is really a way of ensuring minority voting rights; that Third World peoples are invariably the casualties of Western depredations and are themselves innocent of wrongdoing; or that Western democracies are morally obliged to make reparations to the rest of the world—in every case we are being indoctrinated to embrace manifest lies, evasions and grotesqueries that render us prey to a destructive ideology of guilt, fear, and self-contempt. We are denizens of a postmodern era in which the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, noble and ignoble has been generally annulled—or selectively manipulated, chiefly by the left, in the interests of an ideological program.

As last week’s light rail car attack claims yet another victim – a 22-year-old Ecuadorian woman who sustained a mortal head wound – Palestinians are busy hailing the miscreant responsible for the cowardly attack that also claimed the life of a 3-month-old infant, as a hero and martyr. This abominable terrorist attack as well as the depraved Palestinian reaction to it comes on the heels of yet another monstrous Palestinian outrage involving the kidnapping-murder of three Israeli teens in the Judea district. There too, the perpetrators, confirmed to be Hamas operatives, were hailed as heroes by both Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” government and accorded the highest religious honors. No doubt that their families will now receive hefty stipends from the Palestinian Authority, courtesy of the American and European taxpayer.

While Israelis laud their scientists, their artists, their doctors and multiple Nobel Prize nominees and recipients, Palestinians have a long and ignominious tradition of extolling the virtues of those who commit mass murder, slaughter innocents on buses and hijack commercial airliners. Public squares and streets are named after them and their children are taught to emulate them. The contrast between Israeli and Palestinian society could not be starker. One society celebrates and encourages progress and life while the other has morphed itself into a death cult, steeped in perverted traits that are an anathema to Western civilization.

Consider the respective reactions of the mothers of sons responsible for carrying out the Ottawa parliament building and Jerusalem light rail attacks. Susan Bibeau, the mother of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, stated the following of her son’s heinous actions, “As a person and mother I am horrified by the actions of my son, I am sickened by it. I will never understand what drives a person to such senseless violence…” That is an appropriate emotion for random violence directed against the innocent. The mother of the Jerusalem terrorist by contrast, was pictured holding a glorified photograph of her son as if he had accomplished some great feat. She displays no shame over the fact that her son is a child murderer. Instead, she excuses his conduct by claiming that it was a mere traffic accident. Her abhorrent and unnatural behavior is encouraged, aided and abetted by the Palestinian Authority and its culture of death.

The “advent of a new generation” of Arabs was the overly optimistic theme for University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole’s recent lecture at the George Washington University Elliot School of International Relations. Cole’s discussion of his new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle East, to an audience of about fifty, mostly Elliot School students, failed to substantiate his ongoing hopes for the so-called Arab Spring.

Elliot School professor Edward W. (Skip) Gnehm introduced Cole as a Middle East expert who is popular on television, a supposedly confidence inspiring credential. Cole focused on Tunisia, noting that this comparatively small North African country with no oil resources had received “insufficient press.” His main concern was “youth revolutionaries,” as the Arab press termed Arab Spring regime opponents in Libya, Tunisia, and elsewhere.

Cole began by claiming that a “relatively successful . . . transition away from authoritarianism” under the “Ben Ali clique,” who were “basically bank robbers,” had marked Tunisia’s Arab Spring. Nonetheless, Tunisia is still “on a tightrope,” he added, as some Tunisian regions are prone to violence and Tunisia’s neighbor Libya also presents dangers. The “Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror” previously described in Cole’s writings “have . . . dashed” the Arab Spring’s “bright hopes” in Libya and elsewhere. Elliot School professor William Lawrence noted in a post-lecture conversation that Libya’s parliament has now fled the capital Tripoli for a Greek car ferry moored in Tobruk. However, in December 2011, Cole stated erroneously that the “Libyan Revolution has largely succeeded, and this is a moment of celebration.”

Cole contrasted Libya with Tunisia, calling the new 2014 Tunisian constitution “very good on paper” and “very nicely worded.” The “secularists won” in defeating attempts to codify sharia, which Cole dubiously compared to Catholic canon law, as well as a gender “complementarity” clause. “The feminists in the room know what that means,” Cole said of the latter, before equating the “party of the Muslim religious right,” Tunisia’s Islamist, pro-jihadist Ennahda Party, initial supporter of both measures, with American conservatives.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/searching-for-the-islamic-war-against-isis-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie came on the show to discuss Searching for the Islamic War Against ISIS, analyzing what’s really behind the “moderate” Muslim world’s failure to take out the Islamic State (starts at 14 minute mark). The dialogue was preceded by Nonie focusing on Tricking and Dividing the Muslim World, shedding light on the best strategies to confront and outsmart our enemy in the terror war.