RUTHFULLY YOURS

At the very moment that Pope Francis is warning the world that “doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain,” doomsday is an imminent reality for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, most urgently in Syria and Iraq. “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us?” the pope asks in his encyclical Laudato Si’.

“No world at all” is the answer for the 70,000 Christians still left in Aleppo, Syria. ISIS surrounds them on three sides. Aleppo may fall to the Islamic terrorists within weeks, with Damascus following. The slaughter of Christian men and other religious minorities will be immense. The women and girls face abduction and sex slavery. Similarly, although the 120,000 Christians living in the refugee camps around Erbil in Kurdistan, which I recently visited, are comparatively safe at the moment, an ISIS victory in Syria would leave them exposed to great danger: They would have nowhere left to seek refuge. For the Christians of Aleppo, it may be too late to flee. Part of the problem for the Christians across the region has been that these “doomsday predictions” have been wilfully ignored in the West, just as disingenuous dismissals of ISIS as the “JV team” allowed that deadly force to gain large sections of Iraq and Syria.

Four U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday’s two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

Navy secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist’s spree “insidious and unfathomable.” President Obama bemoaned the “heartbreaking circumstance” in which the murdered Marines found themselves.

“Unfathomable”? Not if you’ve been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence.”

The World Requires Voter ID, but George Soros and Hillary Clinton Are Determined the U.S. Won’t What the rest of the world calls an anti-fraud measure, Democrats call racist.
It’s been over seven years since the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision that was written by liberal favorite John Paul Stevens, declared that voter-ID laws don’t constitute an undue burden on people attempting to vote. But that hasn’t stopped liberals from fighting in legislatures and courts against those laws and other efforts to promote voter integrity. The lawsuits are often brought by Marc Elias, who doubles as the attorney for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And their efforts have paid off: Only about 18 states currently require a photo ID to vote.

Where do we draw a line against the intolerance of bad ‘religions’, of which the philosopher regarded Nazism as a secular variant? Today, militant Islam fits that same mould — as do its left-liberal apologists, whose reverence for relativism is the offering laid before the altar of totalitarian militancy.

“I have insisted that we must be tolerant. But I also believe that this tolerance has its limits. We must not trust those anti-humanitarian religions which not only preach destruction but act accordingly. For if we tolerate them, then we become ourselves responsible for their deeds.” — Karl Popper

That comes from a lecture on science and religion, delivered in 1940 in New Zealand in a university extension course, Religion: Some Modern Problems and Developments. The lecture has been published in After the Open Society, edited by the ANU’s Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A summary of the main ideas in the book can be found here.

Popper wanted to bring together people of good will, despite their differences. That was Hayek’s aim in The Road to Serfdom, which he addressed to the socialists of the world This does not mean glossing over differences or holding back from criticism of mistakes, but it does mean taking a stand on common ground when it exists. I think that Popper would be surprised and disappointed by the militant atheists. He was a secular humanist, however he argued that the dispute between religion and science in the 19th century was a thing of the past because it was based on each side intruding on the territory of the other. Science is concerned with the way the world works and it does not presume to answer questions about morality or the purpose of life. Religion is a rival for science when it tries to trespass on the territory of science to describe how the world works. The antagonism is intensified when each side thinks that it alone holds of the criteria to decide the issue with certainty.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/police-pursue-gunman-in-chattanooga-tenn-1437065542

1.November 2009
U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 31 during a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, weeks before he was set to be deployed to Iraq. Maj. Hasan, who worked as psychiatrist on the base, was sentenced to death in August 2013.

2.April 2014
For the second time in five years, an active-duty soldier went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, killing three people at the U.S. Army post and wounding 16 others. Shooter Ivan Lopez turned the gun on himself.

3. Sep. 2013Aaron Alexis, a man who had been forced out of the military after a 2010 gun arrest, opened fire in a building at the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12. He died in a shootout with police.

4.March 2014 Jeffrey Savage, a convicted felon, shot and killed a U.S. sailor aboard a Navy destroyer docked in Norfolk, Va. The suspect, shot dead by security forces, had been able to drive onto the base in a truck, walk past a second checkpoint and fight his way on board the vessel.

5.July 2011
Army Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo was arrested after police said they believed the AWOL soldier was planning to attack Fort Hood. Mr. Abdo, sentenced to life in prison, planned to bomb a restaurant near the base and then to shoot any survivors, according to court testimony.

It is so kumbaya…Perhaps they should also celebrate Ashura the holiday where the Shi’ites flagellate themselves with chained blades. The prigs should be far more concerned with the plight of Christians being murdered and harassed and driven from their homes by Moslems throughout the Middle East….rsk

Like 1.6 billion Muslims around the world fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, Jeff Cook has been rising before dawn each morning to have breakfast. He doesn’t eat again until breaking his fast with dinner.

But Mr. Cook isn’t Muslim, doesn’t have close Muslims friends, and has never been inside a mosque. The Christian pastor from Greeley, Colo., is fasting for the 30 days of Ramadan, which ends Friday, as part of a nascent effort among American Christians to better understand and support Muslims.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed the identity of the Chattanooga gunman who killed four Marines today as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24.

“The FBI’s Knoxville Field Office, along with the Chattanooga Police Department and other law enforcement partners, are working jointly to investigate today’s shootings at a military recruitment center and a reserve center in Chattanooga, Tennessee in which four individuals were killed and three injured,” the Bureau said in a statement.

Abdulazeez, who first targeted a recruiting office in a strip mall, was also killed in a shootout with police outside of a Navy Reserve facility, where the four Marines were shot to death.

Allies should have the same ideals and values. They stand together when one is threatened or feels threatened. They are willing to share intelligence and defense capabilities. They assist in saving each other’s lives on and off the battlefield. Yet the press, the Obama administration, and even some in the Jewish community have portrayed Israel as anything but an American ally, as an obstacle to peace. They have been neither objective nor fair in reporting Israel’s concerns, as evidenced by the attacks made against former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, regarding his book Ally.

In her book Stonewalled, Sharyl Attkisson addresses the current problem with the media, since many are no longer, “willing to serve vigorously and effectively as the Fourth Estate watchdog to government and other powers.” Those who want to silence someone launch a propaganda campaign to divert from the damaging facts by focusing on something else, something she calls “controversializing.” This is happening to Michael Oren as the Obama Administration’s watchdogs have unfairly attacked him personally, while ignoring and brushing off the Iranian actions and rhetoric.

The nuclear deal with Iran will stoke more Sunni-Shiite violence, and the Saudis may go shopping for nukes.

While President Obama hopes his nuclear deal with Iran will burnish his presidential legacy as a great peacemaker, the near-term consequence will be more—and even bloodier—sectarian violence in the Middle East. In particular, security threats will escalate for Saudi Arabia and Israel, until now America’s two major Mideast allies.

The Israelis and Saudis, longtime adversaries, in recent years have joined in vehement opposition to Mr. Obama’s attempts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran. For the Israelis the concern was entirely about an Iranian atomic weapon. But for the Saudis the fear was less about future nuclear capability than about the real and present threat that a deal would further enhance Iran’s regional stature and its capability to ratchet up the regime’s exploitation of regional sectarian divisions.

Case is being handled as a terrorism probe.

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—A 24-year-old Kuwaiti-born man opened fire at two military facilities here Thursday, killing four Marines and injuring three others before dying from a gunshot wound, authorities said.

The case is being handled as a terrorism probe, though officials cautioned they still hadn’t determined a motive for the shooting. The gunman was identified as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez.

While the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been monitoring hundreds of suspected supporters of Islamic State, people familiar with the probe said Mr. Abdulazeez, who resided in the Chattanooga area, wasn’t on their radar as a potential threat.

Investigators are now scouring the details of Mr. Abdulazeez’s life, trying to determine if he had help, or if he had associates who also might pose a threat.

The first shooting began at about 10:50 a.m. when a gunman drove up and fired 25 to 30 rounds at a military recruitment center in a strip mall east of downtown Chattanooga, where one Marine was wounded, Pentagon officials said.