RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pentagon has relabelled its battle plan for fighting China in the Western Pacific. The battle plan formerly known as AirSea Battle is from now on to be known as “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons.” This is very good news because the use of the term Global Commons in the title goes to the heart of what is at stake for the United States and the rest of the free world.

China is intent upon starting a war with Japan and seizing a large patch of ocean in Southeast Asia. What most people don’t realise about the Chinese nine-dash-claim of territoriality in the South China Sea is that it is not so much about gaining area and resources but excluding others. Commercial operators might not be affected and don’t care about filling in forms and asking permission to cross the sea or sky. The Chinese claim, if enforced, would stop any other country’s warships and military aircraft from crossing the South China Sea. Vietnam, which is 1,200 km long, would be restricted to a strip along their coastline that gets as narrow as 92 km. For Malaysia, their operating strip would be as narrow as 44 km, as shown by these maps from page 5 of State Department Report No. 143:

Jeb Bush thinks he can ride Common Core to the White House. He is using it as a litmus test to prove he is not a scary conservative and will not upset the federal gravy train. This is a grave misjudgment. It will be as toxic for him, as Romneycare was for Romney.

Bush would usher in the complete capitulation of our education system to the progressive agenda. Common Core reproduces everything wrong with Obamacare, and then some. It is unconstitutional, corrupt, and incompetent. And it is a government takeover of our children.

Like Obamacare, Common Core is unconstitutional: our founding fathers reserved education for state and local control. By finessing the word “standards,” and ignoring the dictatorship of textbooks and tests over classroom teachers, Common Core pretends it is not a federal takeover of education. This is a transparent lie.

Can the International Criminal Court [ICC] even be considered an impartial legal body, any more than a Jim Crow court in America’s old South?

The supporters of this repackaged anti-Semitism always seem perfectly comfortable “forgetting” that Hamas offers its people no human rights. Thus is a liberal democracy, Israel, maligned by a theocratic tyranny.

It is clear that these illustrious members of the international community are secretly hoping that if they can rig the system so that the Arabs can finish off Israel, they, in the international community, will still be able to preen and congratulate themselves that the obliteration of the Jewish state had nothing to do with them.

Groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hizbullah or Hamas are considered terrorists because they do not abide by the principles of international or domestic law. That, as well as the acts they commit, is what identifies them as terrorists. The differentiating factor with Islamist terror organizations is that they do not recognize international law at all.

Islamic law frees Hamas and other such groups from any obligation to abide by international standards, which they demonize as “Western” or “Christian” and therefore “Satanic.”

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.