RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We can not win this war by killing them,” Marie Harf said on MSNBC.

Reversing thousands of years of battlefield experience in which wars were won by “killing them,” the State Department spokeswoman argued that you can’t defeat ISIS by killing its fighters.

“We can not kill our way out of this war,” she said. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs.”

War is one of the few things in life we can reliably kill our way out of. The United States has had a great track record of killing our way out of wars. We killed our way out of WW1. We killed our way out of WW2. The problem began when we stopped trying to kill our way out of wars and started trying to hug our way out of wars instead. Progressive academics added war to economics, terrorism and the climate in the list of subjects they did not understand and wanted to make certain that no one else was allowed to understand. Because the solution to war is so obvious that no progressive could possibly think of it.

What is President Obama doing this week in the face of the unrelenting wave of jihadist-inspired terrorist attacks, the latest of which occurred in Copenhagen and on the bloodied Mediterranean shore of Libya while Obama played golf in California? He is holding a politically correct summit conference on “countering violent extremism,” a three-day community circles talkfest beginning on February 17.

Vice President Joe Biden kicked off the conference. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is delivering the closing address. In between these bookends are sessions discussing community-based ways to prevent violent extremism from taking root, including presentations on pilot programs in three cities where law enforcement officials are purportedly developing partnerships with Muslim community leaders — Boston, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. According to President Obama, “community leaders from Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Boston will highlight innovative partnerships in their cities that are helping empower communities to protect their loved ones from extremist ideologies.”

Charity has received funds from governments of U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Oman and Canada, among others

The Clinton Foundation on Wednesday defended its practice of accepting donations from overseas governments, amid concerns from some ethics experts that such contributions are inappropriate at a time when Hillary Clinton is preparing to run for president.

A Wall Street Journal review of donations to the Clinton Foundation in 2014 showed the charity received money from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, among others. The donors included Canada’s foreign affairs department, which is promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

The foundation had agreed to stop raising money from foreign governments in 2009, after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. That step was in deference to Obama administration concerns about the propriety of taking money from other nations while Mrs. Clinton served as America’s top diplomat.

Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in early 2013, and the foundation later dropped the ban.

Show the world the power of peaceful communities, and tackle bad governance that breeds frustration.

Throughout our history, we have faced threats from aggression, genocide, chaos and dictatorship. Today we are asked to wage a new war against a new enemy. The battlefield is different, and so are the weapons that we need to overcome that enemy and triumph.

The rise of violent extremism represents the pre-eminent challenge of the young 21st century. Military force is a rational and often necessary response to the wanton slaughters of children, mass kidnappings of schoolgirls, and beheading of innocents. But military force alone won’t achieve victory. In the long term, this war will be won only by deploying a broader, far more creative arsenal.

A safer and more prosperous future requires us to recognize that violent extremism can’t be justified by resorting to religion. No legitimate religious interpretation teaches adherents to commit unspeakable atrocities, such as razing villages or turning children into suicide bombers. These are the heinous acts of individuals who distort religion to serve their criminal and barbaric cause.

The radicals are waging a war of ideas the West refuses to fight.

President Obama opened this week’s White House Conference on Violent Extremism with a speech about community-based counter-radicalization efforts, and his Administration is being roundly mocked for its refusal to use terms like “Muslim terrorism” or “Islamism.” The mockery is deserved. Foreign policy is not a Harry Potter tale of good versus He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. And war cannot be won against an enemy we refuse to describe except in meaningless generalities.

But there is a deeper problem with the Administration’s semantic dodges. Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and other jihadist groups are waging more than a military conflict. They are also waging an increasingly successful ideological war for the soul of Islam and its 1.6 billion followers.

An edited speech given by Eve Garrard, Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, to the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism’s event ‘Israel and Antisemitism in Britain: Now and in the Future’.

The murders in France of four innocent Jewish shoppers, connected arbitrarily but not accidentally with the killings of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, make the claim that antisemitism is once again on the rise in Europe seem depressingly plausible. Here in the UK the Community Security Trust thinks there’s been an increase in antisemitism, and since they monitor such things carefully, I for one am inclined to believe them. The Guardian even devoted a whole page (on 5 January 2015) to this resurgence, so I think we can take that as strong evidence that the phenomenon is a real one.

Some of us, perhaps many of us, thought that the Second World War, and the huge and ravenous killing of the European Jews which was so distinctive a part of that tremendous blood-letting, would have put an end to serious antisemitism in Europe; we thought that shame and horror would effectively preclude its resurrection from the grave of the death-camps. Well, if we did think that, we were wrong, and more fool us. We shouldn’t have expected so long-standing and deep-rooted a hostility to melt away in the post-war spring sunshine, such as it was.

For strange psychological reasons that archaeologists who sift through the rubble of our civilization will long ponder, the biggest story of our time cannot be reported honestly.

For example, the Islamic State’s rapidly growing Libyan branch office has just held a mass execution of 21 men. The Government of the United States deplored it thus:

Statement by the Press Secretary on the Murder of Egyptian Citizens

“Egyptian citizens”? They didn’t die because of their passports; they died because they were Coptic Christians – or, as their executioners put it, “followers of the cross”.

Why would the White House so dishonor the dead? As I wrote a week ago, the Administration’s lies about the perpetrators necessitate lies about their victims:

Lies beget lies. The Obama Administration insists that the Islamic State is not Islamic, Islamic terrorism is nothing to do with Islam, there’s no Islam to see here, no way, no how. You can’t hold the line at one lie, and tell the truth on everything else. The lie on Islam infects everything else. If they’re just “violent extremists” in general, they have to be violent and extremist in general – or “randomly”, as the President would say.

Because the United States Government will not tell the truth about the Islamic motivation of the killers, it cannot tell the truth about the victims – whether Jews in France, or Copts in Libya, or Anglicans in Nigeria.

The importance of Cicero in Western thought cannot be underestimated. According to Garrett Lysford, the “American Republic is hardly a new idea and is in fact a mere innovation of a far more ancient political system: The Roman Republic.” The Founders “especially revered Cicero for his ardent patriotism, poisonous contempt of demagogues, and extensive dialogues on philosophy and statecraft; for this reason his ideas figured prominently in the political theory undergirding the Constitution. John Adams especially held Cicero in the highest esteem”.

John Adams wrote “The Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America” and the “text is replete with Ciceronian thought.” It can be stated that “the influence of Cicero through Adams ultimately shaped the structure of the American Constitution and brought about the birth of the American Republic.” In fact, the Founders were “steeped in the classical tradition” and “college entrance exams required knowledge of Cicero, Virgil, Homer and the Greek New Testament.”

If a Texas judge’s temporary stay against it is upheld, it could be headed to the Supreme Court.

Late Monday, a federal district judge in Texas issued a temporary injunction that bars the Obama administration from proceeding with the president’s unilateral decree of effective amnesty for millions of illegal aliens.

To be clear, the order issued by Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. court for the southern district of Texas in Brownsville is a temporary stay. It is not a ruling on the merits of the lawsuit brought by 26 states that claim they will suffer profound financial and other damage from the president’s lawless executive action — an action that Obama himself many times conceded would be lawless before he finally took it late last year.

Today, the Justice Department will seek an emergency order from the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to block Judge Hanen’s injunction. There is a good chance the Justice Department will succeed, at least temporarily. If the Fifth Circuit blocks the injunction, that, too, would not be a ruling on the merits of the case. It would just mean a return to the status quo that allows Obama to proceed with the implementation of his amnesty decree.

Never in the history of public relations have an institution and its representatives been so mismatched as at the current U.S. Department of State, where, tasked with articulating America’s position toward Middle East terror outfits, Russian aggression, and the world’s other vicissitudes, are Jen Psaki and Marie Harf, currently in the midst of an interminable Lucy-and-Ethel routine as Foggy Bottom’s spokesperson and deputy spokesperson, respectively. In an administration that has always given the distinct impression of being directed by second-year poli-sci majors from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Psaki and Harf are the only two under the impression that Legally Blonde was a documentary — one that they are apparently trying to re-create, with little success, at Foggy Bottom.

Start with Harf, who apparently fell back on government work after losing out on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” anchor job. Talking to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews this week, she proclaimed that since “we cannot win this war by killing [Islamic State fighters] . . . we need in the medium- to longer-term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether . . .” Matthews interrupted before she could offer another possible motive, but we can assume it was not going to be “whether . . . they are Islamic fanatics who enjoy murdering in the name of the world’s second-largest religion.” No, clearly driving the recent spate of beheadings and burnings-alive is the absence of a neighborhood Gap store. That is, it seems, the wisdom bestowed by a master’s degree in foreign affairs at Mr. Jefferson’s University.