RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first question the Danish Prime Minister got from one of the journalists, was, “How do you think this is going to affect the Muslims in Denmark? None of the journalists asked, “What are you going to do to protect us from this Islamist savagery?”

Imam Hajj Saeed of the Al-Faruq Mosque in Copenhagen, the day before the terror attack, rejected any thought of interfaith dialogue, and noted that the Prophet Muhammad waged war against his Jewish neighbors rather than engage in dialogue.

The day after the shootings, the political spokesperson of the main liberal opposition party went on television and said, “We are dealing with a small group that is abusing the Koran.” In other words, once again we are faced with one or more Muslims who have completely misunderstood their own religion. The implication, of course is that Danes have nothing to fear from the fast growing number of Muslims or the spread of Islam.

Despite a European-brokered “ceasefire,” the war in eastern Ukraine rages on. Russian separatists continue their assault on the city of Debaltseve, forcing the Ukrainian army to withdraw its troops. And yet, the U.S. State Department continues to hold out hope that the ceasefire will work. “We don’t consider it dead,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “We still need time for the agreement to work through.”

But that’s not even the most outrageous aspect of the Obama administration’s position on Ukraine. This is:

State Dept on Ukraine surrender of Debaltseve: “Sovereign govt has right to make decisions about how to protect their people.”

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 18, 2015

That was Psaki’s response on Wednesday when asked whether the Russian assault on Debaltseve would be considered cause for further sanctions. In other words, the United States respects the right of a sovereign government to surrender territory when its sovereignty is violated.

I’m sure the Ukrainians (and other eastern Europeans) will take comfort in the Obama administration’s recognition of their sovereign right to cede territory to a foreign aggressor.

“Several hundred students, professors and community activists converged at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget cuts, a demonstration during which participants cheered for the end of democracy,” reports David Hookstead, a student stringer for TheCollegeFix.com.

“Several in the crowd also poked fun at the fact Walker never graduated from college. Signs stating ‘too cool for school’ dotted the protest”—apparently not a reference to the “subzero temperatures and a windchill of -17 degrees” (global warming strikes again).

Thanks to Snowden and other self-imposed harm, we know less about the enemy than at any time since 9/11.

It is alarming enough to see the rapid advance, almost unhindered, of radical Islamist armed groups and terror across the globe, but the paralysis in Washington—exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security budget deadlock—compounds the crisis. Moreover, such political failure masks another unsettling problem. As al Qaeda and Islamic State gain strength, U.S. intelligence is relatively weaker and more challenged than at any time since the 9/11 attacks. Most of this weakness is of our own making.

The intelligence challenges couldn’t be clearer. Every day seems to bring news of more horror from the Middle East, Nigeria and the heart of Europe. Yet the terrorists appear to operate with near impunity, exploiting the world’s information connectivity for their social-media campaigns. Their sophisticated propaganda helps inspire and recruit. According to the National Counterterrorism Center, enemy combatants in Syria and Iraq include 20,000 foreigners from 90 countries. More than 3,400 of these recruits are Western passport holders who may return to the West, including the U.S., to continue their war.

Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.

With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.

Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.

You may understandably think of it as an ISIS jobs fair, but the ongoing confab in Washington is officially known as President Obama’s “summit” on “Countering Violent Extremism.” That being the case, many Americans seem surprised at the appearance of Salam al-Marayati, leader of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). After all, the White House is having a public hissy fit over the upcoming speech to Congress by Obama’s bête noire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
An odd time, one might think, for the POTUS to be so chummy with a Muslim activist best know for theorizing, right after the 9/11 attacks, that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” But National Review readers will not be surprised.

While the world obsesses over its distorted perception of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it does not focus on where the real injustice – and mass murder – is taking place.
President Barack Obama’s “random folk in a deli” comment sounded stupid when he said it last week, referring to the victims, all four of them Jewish, in the January attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris.
We should be thankful for small mercies.

When a similar pattern of attack on a meeting of caricaturists in Copenhagen was followed a few hours later by a deadly assault on a bat-mitzva party at a synagogue in the Danish capital on February 14, the American president who has such trouble enunciating the words “Islamist terror” did not, at least in public, pretend that death of a Danish Jewish guard was just a matter of bad karma.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama – who professes Christianity – proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

The Psychology of Left-Wing Jews — on The Glazov Gang
Three Jewish thinkers reflect on the reasons why.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-psychology-of-left-wing-jews-on-the-glazov-gang/

How does a government “get beyond the crisis” without a plan to resolve the crisis?

The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) is an odd document, not yet debated Congress. Among other points, it prohibits “enduring offensive ground operations,” but without defining them.

President Obama seems to want it both ways — to oppose American participation in large-scale battles in Iraq, but to have the “flexibility” to order them; to prohibit ground operations but to have American troops in place to carry them out.

The administration thus appears to remain without an articulated strategy to prosecute the war IS launched against us, our allies and a broad range of civilian non-combatants.