RUTHFULLY YOURS

When President Obama travels to Panama for the 7th Summit of the Americas later this week, expect to be inundated with platitudes about the blossoming of democracy in the region. Don’t believe it. Repression is on the march in the Americas, and U.S. ambivalence is part of the problem.

In the White House’s lack of moral clarity, the region’s bullies smell weakness. One result is that a Caribbean backwater run by gangster brothers now has the upper hand in setting the regional agenda.

If the U.S. president is humiliated in Panama City like he was in Port of Spain in 2009, no one should be surprised. That’s when Mr. Obama tried to be one of the boys with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who thanked him by presenting him a copy of the famous anti-American diatribe “The Open Veins of Latin America.”

The liberals who run California have long purported that their green policies are a free (organic) lunch, but the bills are coming due. Lo, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25% statewide reduction in water use. Consider this rationing a surcharge for decades of environmental excess.

Weather is of course the chief source of California’s water woes. This is the fourth year of below-average precipitation, and January and March were the driest in over a century. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which contains about a third of state water reserves, is 5% of the historical average compared to 25% last year. Reservoirs and aquifers are also low, and some could run dry this year.

The rapid spread of cheaper but good-enough weaponry poses a serious threat to U.S. military dominance.

Precision weapons and networked targeting have helped maintain America’s military superiority for decades. But technology marches on. New defense exporters are joining the global game with advanced and well-priced offerings, creating potential threats to the U.S. and its allies, and weakening Western influence. The Pentagon has a plan to cope with these evolving threats, but is it enough?

To understand what’s happening, consider the global automotive industry. South Korea’s Hyundai Motors became a serious global competitor by leveraging the rapid diffusion of technology, an initial edge in cheap labor, and a “good enough” product for value buyers. Their success wasn’t obvious in 2001, but by 2015 the proof was in our parking lots. A similar “Hyundaization” process is under way in the global defense industry.

A few examples: NATO allies Turkey and Poland didn’t buy their latest self-propelled howitzers from the U.S. or even Germany. Instead they turned to Samsung. South Korea’s Daewoo is building Britain’s next naval supply ships, and Korea Aerospace Industries is exporting TA-50 and FA-50 fighter jets to Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines. The F-16 is America’s cheapest fighter; the new Korean, Pakistani and Indian fighters cost about 33%-50% less. If you’d rather pocket a 67% savings, Brazil’s A-29 Super Tucano has become the global standard for counterinsurgency. An urgent order from the United Arab Emirates is likely to see combat in Yemen soon.

The former Florida governor made over $2 million from a hospital conglomerate’s Obamacare-driven growth. Now, as he prepares to run for president, he says the law should be repealed.

In early 2007, Tenet Healthcare Corp., the giant, publicly traded hospital conglomerate, was reeling. The previous year, the company had been forced to agree to a $900 million settlement with the Justice Department in a Medicare-fraud scandal. Seeking to improve its reputation, Tenet turned to Jeb Bush, offering the former Florida governor a seat on its board of directors. In the more than seven years Bush served on Tenet’s board, the company executed a remarkable turnaround, emerging from the scandal into a period of expansion that returned it to the top of the health-care industry. Bush himself benefited handsomely from the growth.

Obama shows the fallacy of always leaving force as a last resort. Months after leaving the Pentagon nearly nine years ago, I wrote in NR (“Before They Go Nuclear . . . ”) that the Bush administration’s Europe-led sanctions strategy would lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Why? Because of the implicit understanding among the U.S. and its European partners that force was off the table as long as further sanctions could be imposed.

Obama shows the fallacy of always leaving force as a last resort. Months after leaving the Pentagon nearly nine years ago, I wrote in NR (“Before They Go Nuclear . . . ”) that the Bush administration’s Europe-led sanctions strategy would lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Why? Because of the implicit understanding among the U.S. and its European partners that force was off the table as long as further sanctions could be imposed.

The Obama administration has always insisted that force is on the table “if diplomacy fails.” But it has also insisted that strikes would only slow the Iranian program down. That’s of a piece with the rest of the administration’s approach, which appears to reject any notion of “coercive diplomacy.” The president is a faithful believer that diplomacy depends on dialogue and mutual understanding, and that “pressure” is provocative and therefore undermines diplomacy.

One of the many anomalies of Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s collapsing foreign policy is Washington ’s growing rift with Israel , despite the two countries’ historically intimate ties at every level.

Obama’s fundamental antagonism toward Israel was always apparent: during the 2008 campaign he announced one of his “transformations” would be putting “light between the U.S. and Israel ”. Nor were his various close relationships to bitter American Israeli critics secret: Obama sat through two decades of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in turn a friend of the notorious Louis Ferrakhan. There was his close friendship with Rashid Ismail Khalidi, once Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization spokesman. [Obama’s 2005 speech at a send-off party for Khalidid departing the University of Chicago for Columbia University is bottled up along with all his other records.] The traditional “Arabists” in the Washington bureaucracy – for example, Obama’s CIA Director John O. Brennan, who continues to deny “jihad” is a call to war against the West – bring up the rear.

The numbers of Christians in the Middle East are dwindling. In Iraq, there were 1.4 million Christians in 2003 and there are now 270,000. In Syria, they were 1,1 million before the civil war and are now 400,000. Everywhere, from Lybia to Iraq, the Islamic State is beheading Christians or converting them to Islam.

It is a demographic and religious revolution of immense historic consequences. We talk with Bat Ye’or, the great Jewish historian of Egyptian origin who dedicated many books to what she called “dhimmitude”, the subjugation of minorities (Jews and Christians) under Islam.

What is the situation of Eastern Christianity?

The situation of Eastern Christianity is a tragedy of immense proportions. It entails human sufferings on a traumatic scale. Even those, like Egyptian President Sisi who would like to help, seem powerless in such dramatic circumstances. As for the West, the ideological and strategic choices it made in the last century incapacitate it and obscure its understanding.

EXERPT

What is it about climate change that brings out the nuts and fruitcake theories? Now we learn that bestowing feminine names, or merely feminine-sounding ones, on hurricanes makes them so much more deadly

“Another storm in the gender tea-cup is also wreaking havoc. It began in mid-2014, when this paper – “Female Hurricanes Are Deadlier Than Male Hurricanes” – appeared here in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Sharon Shavitt, Walter H. Stellner Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois, and her three co-authors, claim that an ‘unexplored social factor’ – namely ‘gender-based expectations’ – has a measurable ‘influence on the human toll of hurricanes that are assigned gendered names’.

“Feminine-named hurricanes (vs. masculine-named hurricanes) cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness. Using names such as Eloise or Charlie for referencing hurricanes….taps into well-developed and widely held gender stereotypes, with potentially deadly consequences.

Do you support any kind of protest against Islamic laws such as killing in the name of Allah, stoning, honor killing, lashing, amputating, child marriages, slavery or burning people alive? Or do you protest the people protesting these practices?

“Have we reached such a stage of intolerance that we cannot listen to one writer profess admiration for another without wanting to attack her with a brick and a knife?… If our Constitution is to mean anything, we must ensure our right to free speech.” — Steve Connolly, Managing Director, Penguin Random House, South Africa.

The scenario of the rainbow nation has been changing rapidly as Islamic preaching is fired up in in all the provinces.

Do you support any kind of protest against Islamic laws being used in modern societies? Do you protest against suicide bombing, killing in the name of Allah, stoning, honor killing, lashing, amputating, slavery, burning people alive, hijab (Islamic veil for women), child marriages, polygamy or other extremist Islamic practices?

Or do you protest the people protesting these practices? If so, you are also at high risk, it does not matter wherever you live.

What would the U.S. President say if the blacks lynched in America’s old South were referred to as “random folks” or “Americans”?

Al Shabaab of course has no problem emphasizing the fact that Christians were being killed because they were Christians: “There are many dead bodies of Christians inside the building,” its spokesman said.

Can anyone explain why the West gives fanciful excuses for what these killers are doing, despite their perfectly clear explanations for what they are doing?

Muslims targeting Christians or Jews means, “don’t focus on the motivations of the Muslims.” Muslims defending Christians or Jews means “desperately focus on the motivations of the Muslims.”

People could at least spare some time this Easter to think about — and do anything they can to help — the beleaguered Christian communities worldwide.

This Easter, the world should spare a thought for the world’s Christians. In Western Europe, this time of year is increasingly secularised, but in large parts of the rest of the world, people are being massacred relentlessly because of a faith on which much of the developed world was founded but now ignores.