RUTHFULLY YOURS

On December 5, 2014, Interpol issued a “Red Notice” alert, seeking the arrest of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, at the request of the Egyptian government, on charges including, “Agreement, incitement and assistance to commit intentional murder, helping…prisoners to escape, arson, vandalism and theft.” Qaradawi’s support of terrorism led the United States to ban him from entering the country in 1999. Britain barred his entry in 2008, and France in 2012.

Ten days after the Interpol alert was issued, 300 Muslim scholars, members of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, announced: “We reject all the false accusations against Qaradawi.” The Doha-based organization, which is headed by Qaradawi himself, urged Interpol to “rapidly” remove Qaradawi from its most-wanted list, because the warrant is an “insult to Islam and Muslims.”

After a half-century of activity in Europe, the most intriguing recent event involving the Muslim Brotherhood occurred in 2003, when Qaradawi, the Egyptian exile and Ikhwan “spiritual guide” and Chairman of the Sunna and Sira Council, in the new home he found in Qatar, proposed the founding of the World Council of Muslim Clerics.

Qaradawi was already head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, a Dublin-based private foundation founded in London in March 1997 on the initiative of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe. The Federation is the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Europe.

Anthony J. Sadar, a Certified Consulting Meteorologist, is author of In Global Warming We Trust: A Heretic’s Guide to Climate Science (Telescope Books, 2012).
College students indoctrinated to believe that there is no legitimate doubt on anthropogenic global warming.

With the close of another college semester, the long holiday break can give educators a chance to ponder the dismal state of science literacy in the U.S. The sad decline in robust science education is certainly part of the problem and is perhaps most obvious in environmental science classrooms. Contributing to the issue is the skewed content in many college textbooks on the environment and ecology.

While a part-time college professor of the physical, environmental, and atmospheric sciences since 1986 and a practitioner in the field since the late 1970s, I have had the opportunity to review and use numerous popular textbooks.

I was disappointed to read in one of the latest textbooks — Essential Environment: The Science Behind the Stories, 5th edition (2015) by Jay Withgott and Matthew Laposata — the following distorted statement about those of us who dare to challenge the current groupthink on climate change.

“Public debate over climate change has been fanned by corporate interests, spokespeople from think tanks, and a handful of scientists funded by fossil fuel industries, all of whom have aimed to cast doubt on the scientific consensus” (page 322).

This typical misrepresentation is found within Chapter 14 of the book, titled “Global Climate Change.” The subsection of the chapter is labeled “Are we responsible for climate change?” and contains a mere six long sentences crafted to convince students that there are no real honest skeptics to the “consensus” view.

It has been a pretty typical week on the hate Israel front. A European Union Court has decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, and their previous designation as such had not been justified by real evidence that Europeans had developed, as opposed, say, to information supplied by the United States or Israel. An international court in Geneva is hearing evidence of Israeli human rights violations. The United Nations Security Council has been considering a resolution developed by the Palestinian Authority, as well as one by the French that would effectively lay out the terms for Israel’s capitulation over the next few years. Israel’s peace camp has been working with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, encouraging a delay in consideration of the Security Council resolutions, since any action before the upcoming Israeli parliamentary elections could benefit the right-wing parties in Israel. In other words, there is not even an attempt to hide anymore that the United States is putting its foot down for one particular side in the Israeli election. Various European countries are endorsing Palestinian statehood on the terms demanded by the Palestinian Authority. Academic groups, unions, and churches in Europe and the United States are endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Certain European communities are now “Israeli-frei” – free of Israeli goods (or at least those they can identify and care to avoid). The U.N. Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, as well as specific agencies whose only task is to bash Israel, are set to get back to work, creating more resolutions and condemnations of the Jewish state.

As Joshua Muravchik makes clear in his outstanding new book, Making David Into Goliath, this obsession with Israel by most nations of the world and the United Nations – or as they are collectively known, “the international community” – as well as by “the global left,” could not have been imagined a half-century back, prior to the Six-Day War. At that time, Israel was championed by Socialist political parties, and viewed sympathetically as a beleaguered democracy fighting for its existence against a collection of larger anti-Western Arab tyrannies. There was residual sympathy for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom had moved to Israel. There was no movement for Palestinian nationhood, though certainly violent actions by Arabs aimed at Israel and Jews in the region had been going on for decades.

The Western media is desperate to whitewash Islamic terrorism, as multiple examples (quoted below) suggest. They try to draw an equivalence between victim and terrorist. But where’s the Christian group burning down Mosques to cries of “Christ is Great”?

As the West experiences a rise in the sort of terror attacks that are endemic to the Islamic world — church attacks, sex-slavery and beheadings — it is only natural that the same mainstream media that habitually conceals such atrocities “over there,” especially against Christians and other minorities under Islam, would also conceal the reality of jihadi aspirations “over here.”

As The Commentator reports:

“[T]he level of the [media] grovelling after the tragic and deadly saga in Sydney Australia over the last 24 hours has been astounding.

“At the time of writing, the lead story on the BBC website is of course about that very tragedy, in which an Islamist fanatic took a random group hostage in a cafe, ultimately killing two of them.

“He did this in the name of Islam. But you wouldn’t get that impression if you started to read the BBC’s lead story, which astoundingly managed to avoid mentioning the words Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Muslim, or any derivations thereof for a full 16 paragraphs. The New York Times, which led by calling the terrorist, Man Haron Monis an “armed man”, waited until paragraph 11.

“In the Guardian’s main story — whose lead paragraph simply referred to a “gunman” — you had to wait until paragraph 24.

“If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it.

It is a cosmic inevitability that the human race will eventually be wiped out by something or other. Perhaps we will destroy the planet, perhaps we will be hit by an asteroid, perhaps, if we’re lucky, we will survive long enough to see the sun turn supernova and consume us all.

However it would be a shame if, when humanity shuffles away, the cause of death read simply: “Stupidity.”

Sadly, amid all the sorrow and loss that occurred this week, it appears that even in times of national tragedy stupidity is still very much alive and well.

Indeed, it is an abiding feature of stupidity that it has no off position. In other words, when you’re stupid you’re too stupid to stop being stupid.

And so it is with a heavy heart that I recall some of the responses to the horror that played out in Sydney this week:

The reality: A gunman wearing a jihadist bandanna seizes hostages in Martin Place and forces them to display a jihadist flag.
The police response: Immediately launch a counter-terrorism operation.
The idiot’s response: Immediately launch a debate about whether it should be referred to as “terrorism”.

The reality: The gunman employs a method and symbolism identical to that employed and advocated by Islamic State.
The Telegraph’s response: A special edition of the newspaper saying an Islamic State operative had launched an attack in Sydney.
The idiot’s response: Abuse the newspaper for linking the gunman to Islamic State.

The Democratic Party Killed Two Cops in New York By Daniel Greenfield

A lynch mob is all fun and games until someone actually gets lynched.

At first everyone has a good time marching around and shouting “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe.” The police are accused of being racist killers by the defenders of actual racist killers like Mumia Abu Jamal. Every community organizer within a thousand miles shows up to brandish signs claiming cops are randomly killing innocent black men even as he spits and throws bottles at any cop within reach. Not to mention engaging in the occasional act of convenience store redistribution.

The Mayor of New York City announces that his ridiculously famous son has to be afraid of the police. Obama agrees that his imaginary son also has to be afraid of the police. Their claims are equally plausible.

The lynch mobs make it their mission to invade holiday events, protest parades and scream racist rants. Then they begin attacking police officers. The media insists that protests whose participants chant, “What do we want? Dead cops!” are peaceful.

This homicidally insane definition of “peaceful” had only previously been applied to Islam.

Did you notice the timing of President Obama’s economic lifeline to Castro as announced on December 17th under the guise of “changing [our] relations with the people [emphasis mine] of Cuba?”

No? But you have noticed the price at the gas pumps, right? These two items are closely related. Oh, and by the way, every atom of evidence shows that the actual people of Cuba actually want U.S. sanctions against the Stalinist regime that tortures them tightened. So perhaps President Obama should stop insulting the intelligence of Cuba-watchers by claiming to speak and act on their behalf. Here’s their reaction to this week’s early Christmas gift from Obama to the Stalinist dictator who tortures them:

“Sadly, President Obama made the wrong decision. The freedom and democracy of the Cuban people will not be achieved through these benefits that he’s giving — not to the Cuban people — but to the Cuban government. The Cuban government will only take advantage to strengthen its repressive machinery, to repress civil society, its people and remain in power.” (Berta Soler, leader of “The Ladies in White,” Cuba’s biggest dissident group.

“[Alan Gross] was not arrested for what he did, but for what could be gained from his arrest. He was simply bait and they were aware of it from the beginning… Castroism has won.” (Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s most internationally famous dissident.)

“I feel as though I have been abandoned on the battlefield.” (Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, former Cuban political prisoner awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush.)

The list of back-stabbed and outraged Cuban dissidents is much, much longer.

The problem is that within the extremely politically correct culture of Sweden, questions, insults and criticism are often viewed as one and the same.

“Swedes who disagree… risk being labeled racist, fascist, even Nazi.” — Mikael Jalving, Author of Absolute Sweden.

One might well ask how Swedes would react if other countries decided to determine their borders.

Furthermore, no one seems to have asked what kind of place this new state of Palestine might be: a free, democratic and transparent society like Sweden, or another rogue state, or eventually even another Islamist state.

Apart from South Africa, Sweden now has the highest number of rapes (that are reported); based on unofficial accounts from policemen and social workers, about 75% of them are committed by Muslims.

Sweden, during its September 2014 parliamentary election, voted in a new government. But whom exactly did the people of Sweden elect to run their new government? In a recent (albeit un-sourced) blog, Ilya Meyer, the deputy chair of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association, shed some light on the backgrounds and motivations of some of Sweden’s new cabinet ministers. A few individuals stand out.

The Minister for Housing and Urban Development is the Turkish Swede Mehmet Kaplan, who was aboard the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, of the Turkish extremist Humanitarian Relief Foundation, when it tried to break through the legal Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza coastline. Israel had established the naval blockade in 2007 in response to the smuggling of weapons into Gaza to arm the terrorist group Hamas, which is outspokenly dedicated to exterminating Israel.

Wickedness has darkened this season of lights in Brooklyn. It is no surprise or accident that a ghoul like Ismaaiyl Brinsley bathed himself in messages of hate, racial division and anger and then chose to destroy lives. But Brinsley wasn’t alone in his racially soaked hatred of the police.

For starters, a mob has Brinsley’s back. This seemingly disconnected mob has been on the prowl in the months since America learned of Ferguson, Missouri. They’ve smashed up windows of banks in Berkeley, burned up bakeries in Ferguson, and looted, burned, shot, robbed and killed across the nation. But such mobs are really never disconnected, are they?

When a mob led by Al Sharpton chants on the streets of New York City they want “dead cops,” people should expect dead cops. The clapping and laughing at the crime scene in Brooklyn as well as the happy-it-happened racialist venom on Twitter leave no doubt that the mob has Brinsley’s back.

Rand Paul’s Cuba Meltdown
His mockery of Marco Rubio as “isolationist” reveals Paul as a joke in the foreign-policy arena.

With his enthusiastic support for Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) again shows that his foreign-policy views are wrongheaded. With his bizarre mislabeling of his views and of those who disagree, Paul shows himself (yet again) to be truly ignorant about foreign affairs. And with his juvenile, nasty, strangely personal attacks on fellow Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Paul shows himself temperamentally unsuited for the presidency.

Rand Paul is no conservative; he’s a quack.

First, as for Obama’s policy change, the in-depth arguments against normalizing relations right now have been superbly laid out by the Washington Post, Andrew McCarthy, Rich Lowry, the National Review Online editors, Elliott Abrams, and Mark Krikorian, among others. This column won’t rehash all the arguments. Suffice it to say that while there might be some good arguments for asking Congress to modify the economic sanctions against Cuba, establishing “normal” diplomatic relations sends the horrendous message that human rights and liberty are irrelevant — and that we will ignore (or even reward) a half-century of active hostility 90 miles from our shores even though Cuba has never made amends.