RUTHFULLY YOURS

A former Army Ranger And a Marine veteran join Kurdish fighters against Islamic State in Syria

Bruce Windorski could hear Islamic State fighters taunting him as he peered down the moonlit Syrian village street early this year. Their voices were getting louder, and their aim seemed to be getting better.

The 40-year-old former Army Ranger from Wisconsin reached into his bag of semi-reliable grenades, chose one, pulled the pin and tossed it over the wall. There was a blast, he says, and the jeers came to an abrupt halt. “It was definitely a satisfying event.”

But the battle continued for days. As militants closed in one night, Jamie Lane, a Marine combat veteran who had traveled from California to fight, wondered if they would make it out alive. “We’re holding our ground,” he says quietly in a video he took in the pitch dark as gunfire crackles. “I imagine it will go until dawn.”

The men are part of an unusual fringe of American veterans joining the war against Islamic State. They go, even as their president and Pentagon leaders strive to keep U.S. forces out of the ground war.

Sometimes you have to fight battles you cannot win because fighting – regardless of the outcome – advances a larger cause. Israel’s fight against the nuclear deal the major powers, led by US President Barack Obama concluded with Iran was such a battle. The battle’s futility became clear on July 20, just six days after it was concluded in Vienna. On July 20, the US administration anchored the deal – which paves the way for Iran to become a nuclear power and enriches the terrorism-sponsoring ayatollahs to the tune of $150 billion – in a binding UN Security Council resolution. Once the resolution passed, the deal became unstoppable. Most of the frozen funds that comprise the $150b. would have been released regardless of congressional action. And the nonproliferation regime the US developed over the past 70 years was upended the moment the deal was concluded in Vienna. The fight in Congress itself probably couldn’t have succeeded even if the administration hadn’t made an end run around the lawmakers at the Security Council.

These threats hardly align with the EU’s stated ambition of “ever-closer union” between member states. They are a gun to the head of EU integration.

The question of “what to do” remains politically toxic for any mainstream Western European politician. During the summer, British Prime Minister David Cameron passingly referred to the “swarm” of migrants at Calais. His political opponents immediately jumped on this and denounced his “offensive” language. What chance is there, however, of proposing the kind of bold thinking we will need to consider in Europe if we keep reducing our response to this crisis to a language game?

Professor Paul Collier recently suggested setting up EU-sponsored work-havens in Jordan to ensure Syrian refugees (who comprise 40% of recent EU arrivals) have an incentive to stay in the region.

It would make far more sense for EU countries to keep migrants out of Europe while sorting out who they are (most arrivals come without papers) and then assessing the legitimacy of their claim. The EU might consider paying North African countries to provide such holding centres. Tunisia is an obvious possibility, as is Morocco.

emigration, which is eroding the current 66% Jewish majority.

The growing, youthful Jewish emigration from Jerusalem is driven by the scarcity of jobs as well as costly and limited housing. It was triggered – beginning in the 1990s – by Israeli Prime Ministers, who have relegated Jerusalem to a lower national priority, in sharp contrast to preceding Prime Ministers.

Simultaneously with a litany of “O Jerusalem” boasting statements, they have demonstrated “Oy Jerusalem” feeble action, reflecting limited capability to withstand opposition, by US Presidents, to Jewish construction beyond the pre-1967 armistice line. Moreover, succumbing to US pressure has yielded more, and rougher, pressure. Thus, they have constrained the development of Jerusalem’s infrastructure of transportation, housing and employment – which constitute a prerequisite for transforming Jewish emigration into robust Jewish immigration – since it requires construction on substantial, state-owned land, available within the largely unpopulated boundaries of reunited Jerusalem, not in the limited parameters of pre-1967 Jerusalem.

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama fulfilled a lifelong dream he has spent nearly seven years in office trying to realize.

It is a very different dream from that of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Obama invokes whenever it feeds his own visions of a particular form of grandeur.

This is not to say that rising from modest means to becoming the head of the United States and, by extension, the leader of the free world, is not already about as grand as one can get. But it is America’s greatness — not Obama’s — that enabled him to make it to the White House in the first place.

His ability to pull it off a second time, in spite of a bad economy and the sweeping radicalization of the Middle East, is a measure of how well he had already implemented the methods of his mentor, “Rules for Radicals” author Saul Alinsky, of infiltrating the country’s institutions and destroying them from within.

The Saudis are planning to establish themselves as the Arab world’s undisputed military superpower…. At this rate Saudi Arabia will soon replace Egypt as the Arab world’s most significant military power.

The Saudi royal family is determined to secure the overthrow of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of Iran’s most important regional allies, and any attempt by Riyadh to deepen its involvement in the Syrian conflict is likely to result in direct military confrontation with Iran.

The tragedy of all this for the Obama administration is that, had it not been for its obsession with doing a deal with Iran, Washington could have formed a useful strategic alliance with Riyadh to defeat common foes, such as Islamic State (ISIS,Isil) in Syria and Iraq.

I would recommend that Classical Liberalism – A Primer, by Eamonn Butler, be incorporated into the standard curriculum of any university’s political science or economics course, and be made required reading, qua primer, except I know that in today’s educational environment pigs will fly first class on Kuwait Airways before that ever happens. I would even recommend it be used as a textbook in high schools’ “social studies” courses; however, I realize that is unlikely as roses blooming on Mars, as well, as long as public schools remain in the government’s “public” hands. Public schools and universities are in the tenacious grip of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-freedom, anti-freedom of speech faculties of Marxists, collectivists, feminists, enforcers of politically correct thought and language, and the advocates of tolerance for everything but free inquiry.

High school students who survive the dumbing-down of their cognitive powers and the corruption of the evidence of their senses by Common Core, and college students who successfully resist, at the risk of their tenure as students, their incessant political indoctrination in academia, may or may not have difficulty reading Butler’s brief introduction to the subject of classical liberalism. It all depends on their commitment to take their “education” seriously and their willingness to escape or combat the poisonous miasma of contemporary educational philosophy. It all depends on whether they’re satisfied with being the passive receptors of the “received wisdom” of Karl Marx and Howard Zinn and the U.S. Department of Education, or have active minds that are not satisfied or content with the zealous but pat explanations offered by their PC professors.

NICKELSDORF, Austria — Thousands of migrants who have been bottled up in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday. Early Saturday, the first buses carrying them arrived at the Hungary-Austria border.

In a chaotic scene here at the main border crossing on the road to Vienna, local volunteers handed out water and bananas to the first busloads of exhausted but happy migrants. As they began passing from Hungarian territory through the border checkpoint, a few shouted, “Thank you, Austria!”

Earlier, after several days of chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel and allowed the people living in a squalid encampment in a below-ground plaza outside the city’s main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.“On the basis of the current situation of need, Austria and Germany agree to allow in this case the onward journey of these refugees into their countries,” Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria wrote on his Facebook page.

Belgian police have concluded an investigation into a vicious anti-Semitic assault at a cafe in Brussels, in which a European Union official physically attacked a female co-worker, while verbally abusing her as a “dirty Jewess.”

The assault, in full view of other restaurant patrons, occurred on the patio of the “Italiano” cafe near European Union headquarters in the city, Haaretz reports.

A 50-year old Italian woman – a department head at the European Council – saw a man at the cafe holding a metal plaque engraved with “Mussolini” and praising the World War II-era Italian fascist leader.

She apparently infuriated the man by informing him that “he [Mussolini] was still a dictator,” to which the man replied: “Dirty Jewess … Hitler should have exterminated all Jews, just like Jews today are exterminating Palestinians.”

When Israeli Jews are murdered, often barbarically, nearly all European and American media blame Israel and find excuses for the killers.

Forgotten is that the “Palestinian people” and the “Palestinian cause” are a mythic narrative invented by the KGB and Nasser’s secret service propaganda machine in the 1960s.

Hamas has an even more genocidal goal: the destruction of Israel and all Jews. For many journalists, that is also a detail not worth mentioning.

The Iranian regime claims non-stop that its main objective is the elimination of Israel and Israeli Jews. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just published a book, Palestine, detailing his plans to destroy Israel. For most commentators, the book is of no relevance. It does not matter. Leaders of Western countries adopt the same view.

What is at stake in enriching Iran and arming it with nuclear capability is more than the fate of Israel and Israeli Jews: it is also the fate of America — even if it does not wish to realize that goal yet –as well as values of Western civilization.