RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 1992, Nazila Fathi was working as a fixer for Western journalists when she was approached about keeping an eye on ‘suspicious’ reporters.

Security forces in July seized Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, from their home in the Iranian capital. Ms. Salehi, a journalist for an Emirati newspaper, was released in October, but Mr. Rezaian, a U.S. citizen, still languishes in a Tehran prison. After six months of detaining him without charge, the regime announced earlier this month that Mr. Rezaian had been indicted, though the substance of the charge remains a mystery.

The timing—a year and change since Hasan Rouhani ’s election as president of Iran—was no coincidence. It signaled that, for all of the new president’s rhetoric about moderation, the regime wasn’t about to ease the press of its boot against the throat of Iranian civil society. Since Mr. Rouhani came to power, journalists have routinely been imprisoned. Thirty were behind bars in Iran last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

President Obama took a foreign-policy bow during his State of the Union speech last week, boasting that “we’re upholding the principle that bigger nations can’t bully the small—by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine’s democracy, and reassuring our NATO allies.” Whereupon Russian-backed forces promptly expanded an offensive in Ukraine that has already claimed more than 5,000 lives.

On Saturday the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, strategically located on the Sea of Azov, came under indiscriminate rocket fire from positions controlled by the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, the Moscow-sponsored militia in eastern Ukraine. Some 30 people were killed in the attacks; another hundred or so were wounded. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, since November the Donetsk Republic’s “Prime Minister,” had earlier promised an offensive against Mariupol, though both his militia and Moscow were quick to deny responsibility for the massacre.

So what does it take to ruin your reputation around Washington these days? The question comes to mind after learning that one of the capitol’s most corrupt bureaucracies has decided to hire one of its most incompetent contractors—and the answer explains a lot about accountability in government.

Only days after the Internal Revenue Service announced that it would throttle back tax-season customer service in retaliation for modest budget cuts, the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee discovered that the agency had an active $4.46 million contract with CGI Federal. You may recall that company as the same outside website-builder-for-hire that was the lead designer for the ObamaCare website rollout fiasco of 2013.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/01/pat-condell-jews-are-being-driven-out-of-europe-by-muslim-anti-semitism?utm_source=Jihad+Watch+Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=56daa31c2d-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ffcbf57bbb-56daa31c2d-123354825

I know we’ve been beaten down by political correctness and relativism, but does anyone have a conscience anymore?”

Brotherhood seeks to rally anti-Sisi support

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, John Kerry, met with the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in Geneva. De Mistura must have been happy to hear Kerry praise his efforts and that Washington hoped the Russian peace plan for Syria “could be helpful.”

However, the experienced diplomat probably listened more intently to another thing Kerry said. “It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” the secretary of state remarked.

Media outlets immediately noticed that Kerry had made no explicit mention of the need for Assad to leave office, long the position of the Obama administration. Instead, he stepped back and resorted to that tiresome American habit of appealing to the reasonable in foreign officials — as if the man responsible for the carnage in Syria had any interest in “putting his people first.”

Amnesty International has condemned the continuation of capital punishment under the new Saudi leader.

Obama’s detour to Riyadh to pay tribute to the dead King Abdullah and congratulate the new King Salman may have succeeded in resetting his relations with the Saudis.

Before his arrival in Riyadh, he let it be known that he would not discuss human rights violations with the new king. Instead, “The best way to deal with Saudi Arabia was [is] by applying steady pressure even as we are getting business done that needs to get done,” he explained in a CNN interview. The progressive media (CNN, NPR, BBC and their ilk) chose not to worry about his callous disregard for human rights; and, perhaps to distract attention, came up with the non-story of Michelle Obama’s uncovered hair, supposedly in defiance of the Saudi law. “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability,” Obama elaborated. “Balance” is the key word here.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/vichy-mon-amourthe-more-things-change-ruth-king.html

In 1894 a Jewish military Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment for passing French military secrets to the Germans. He spent five years on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. During his imprisonment the head of French counter espionage, George Picquart, identified the real traitor as Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, but French military officials suppressed the evidence, acquitted Esterhazy and accused Dreyfus of additional crimes. Eventually he was set free but had to wait until 1906 for full exoneration and reinstatement in the French military.

A young Viennese journalist attended the trial and was startled by the anti-Semitic ranting of crowds in France. While one may argue that the Dreyfus incident was not the only one that inspired his turn to Zionism–there were plenty of examples in his own adopted Austria–it certainly contributed to his conviction that Jews could never be safe anywhere but in their own land. His name was Theodore Herzl.

In 1895 he wrote “Der Judenstaat”- (The Jewish State). His words echo today:

“Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland.”
“We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country.
“We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilized countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level.”

If failure is a reason to end a policy, here are a number of candidates for the axe.

During his State of the Union address last week, President Obama defended his Cuba policy by pointing out, “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

As it happens, I agree with the president on Cuba. But it seems to me that his advice should be applied to a number of other issues as well. For example:

The War on Poverty: Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in January 1964, just three years after the start of the Cuban embargo. Since then we’ve spent more than $20 trillion fighting poverty. Last year alone, federal and state governments spent just under $1 trillion to fund 126 separate anti-poverty programs. Yet, using the conventional Census Bureau poverty measure, we’ve done nothing to reduce the poverty rate. More -ccurate alternative poverty measures do show some gains during the War on Poverty’s first few years, but little change over the last several decades, despite steadily rising expenditures. And, whatever success we’ve achieved in making material poverty less uncomfortable, we’ve done little to help the poor become independent and self-supporting.

There’s no room in the president’s comfort zone for assessing the practical costs of his ideas. A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama’s game is. That’s because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world.

In his State of the Union address, Obama refused to even take note of the GOP’s historic midterm gains and the fact the House and Senate are now both under Republican control. On foreign policy, Obama talked as if everything was going swimmingly abroad, prompting even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to marvel at Obama’s “disconnect” from what is happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Russia.

And Obama’s policy agenda — “free” community college, tax hikes, mandatory sick leave — failed to take into account that it was dead-before-arrival in this Congress.