RUTHFULLY YOURS

February 14 will be anything but a day of sweet nothings in Nigeria.

There’s been no love lost on the campaign trail as President Goodluck Jonathan, the Christian incumbent since 2010, faces a challenge from former President Muhammadu Buhari. The retired major general, who ascended to power in a 1983 coup, is a Muslim.

Boko Haram was born many years after Buhari was overthrown in a coup following two years of Buharism checkered with human rights abuses. Jonathan inherited the scourge of Boko Haram and has been accused by the United States of violating human rights in sweeps aimed at stopping the terrorist group, which reached the self-proclaimed caliphate stage last year.

The indictments one could level against the BBC are too numerous to mention and their range too extensive to fathom. As new stories air on the BBC, the narratives become more twisted to acquit the Palestinians and Islamists of every wrongdoing and, instead, reproach Israelis and Jews. A brew of false narratives repeated, proven facts selectively omitted, acts by Palestinians blamed on Israelis, and the viewing public receives a tale that is forever embedded in their memory, that Israel is guilty – of aggression, apartheid, land acquisition, killing innocents, confining refugees, murder, massacres, building walls, withholding food and water, intensive checkpoints, and the ever popular “Palestinians have been victimized since time began.” Palestinian Arab nationalism became a political movement after they lost the 1967 Six-Day War, and needed an identification that would resonate with the international community.

Regarding the selective omission or rearrangement of facts, just hours after Palestinians attacked Eilat, Israel, August, 2011, leaving eight dead and many wounded, the BBC announced, “Israel pounds Gaza after deadly attacks near Eilat.” The Palestinians’ 100-plus rockets fired into Israel were left unmentioned as were the mayhem, deaths and injuries that Israeli citizens suffered, but the retaliation – because Israel had to stop the assault to protect her citizens – was what the BBC labeled “aggressive action.”

With bases in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, Iran has surrounded all the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. This encirclement can be comfortably backed with Iran’s ongoing nuclear weapons program.

The Iranians already have Hezbollah sitting on Israel’s northern border. All they need now is another terror group sitting in Gaza to the south, in order to create a similar encirclement. And they are working hard to achieve that goal.

“We welcome any party that supports the Palestinian cause.” — Osama Hamden, Hamas leader.

Iran is not interested in the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. The only thing Iran is interested in there is turning Hamas into another Iranian-backed army that would be used to attack Israel.

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.

The primary goal of the license-plate tracking program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according to one government document. But the database’s use has expanded to hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rape suspects, say people familiar with the matter.

Officials have publicly said that they track vehicles near the border with Mexico to help fight drug cartels. What hasn’t been previously disclosed is that the DEA has spent years working to expand the database “throughout the United States,’’ according to one email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Rafah is a town in Egypt, on the border of Gaza, that will soon cease to exist. The government of Egypt is destroying it, leaving thousands of Egyptians homeless, in an effort to create a buffer zone along the border.

Here’s a Jerusalem Post story from late last year story noting the facts and the Amnesty International reaction to them:

Egypt has forcibly evicted an estimated 1,165 families in Rafah so that it can clear a buffer zone by the Gaza Strip border, charged the human-rights group Amnesty International, which is concerned that additional homes will be demolished in the coming weeks.

“The scale of the forced evictions has been astonishing; the Egyptian authorities have thrown more than 1,000 families out of their homes in just a matter of days, flouting international and national law,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said….“Shocking scenes have emerged of homes in Rafah being bulldozed, bombed, with entire buildings reduced to piles of rubble and families forcibly evicted,” Sahraoui said.

It was obvious that we’d lost the Vietnam War long before the last helicopter lifted off from a rooftop in Saigon. Though the rights and wrongs of the war had been at the top of the news for years, it wasn’t until our military faced up to the questions of why we lost that the most important debate began.

What went wrong, how did we lose and were we wrong to go to war in Vietnam were the questions to which politicians and the public were eager to debate only to assign blame. The recriminations lasted for more than a decade. And, as some would argue, their effects are still affect the minds of our military leaders.

It wasn’t until the military realized that it had the duty to answer the ugliest questions that those questions were faced, and then embraced, by the generals, admirals and those who succeeded them. On those debates were built the military we have today.

Washington’s energy debate has been focused on President Obama ’s endless opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, but maybe that was only a warm-up. His new fossil fuel shutdown target is Alaska.

President Obama announced Sunday that he’ll use his executive authority to designate 12 million acres in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, walling it off from resource development. This abrogates a 1980 deal in which Congress specifically set aside some of this acreage for future oil and gas exploration. It’s also a slap at the new Republican Congress, where Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been corralling bipartisan support for more Arctic drilling.

The ANWR blockade also seems to be part of a larger strategy to starve the existing Trans-Alaska pipeline, the 800-mile system that carries oil south from state lands in Prudhoe Bay. ANWR occupies the land east of that pipeline. The Interior Department this week will release a five-year offshore drilling plan that puts vast parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas—the area to the north of the pipeline—out of bounds for drilling. This follows an Administration move in 2010 to close down nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA)—the area west of the pipeline.

The jihadist group in Nigeria killed 11,245 people last year. Now their rampage seems ready to escalate in 2015.

The new year began with terror attacks in Paris inspired or orchestrated by al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula and ISIS and then reports of up to 2,000 residents killed by Boko Haram in a days-long massacre in Baga, Nigeria. While Paris has grabbed the majority of media attention, the events in Baga may prove to be the most significant as Boko Haram expands in northeastern Nigeria. This weekend the group captured the town of Monguno and its military barracks while simultaneously attacking the state capital, Maiduguri.

A key goal of all terrorists is to provoke outsize reactions by committing heinous deeds. This is particularly true of jihadists, whose main feature is the takfir they impose on the majority of other Muslims—declaring them not to be “true” believers and thus outside of their group and liable for death. High-profile attacks aim to polarize societies and create animus against mainstream Muslims, creating more potential recruits for the radical Islamists.

Why capitalism is the only real cure for corruption.

Whenever I think of Greece and its economy, I can’t help but recall the stool-sample story.

Sorry to begin on a scatological note, but here’s a revealing tale about a country that, by electing the radical left-wing Syriza party over the weekend, just voted itself down the toilet. In 2011, Greek entrepreneur Fotis Antonopoulos and his partners decided to start OliveShop.com, an online store specializing in organic olive-oil products.

Before they could start their business, they first needed the right paperwork. As recounted in the Greek newspaper e-Kathimerini, authorizations were required from the government tax office, the local municipality, the fire department. Also the bank, which insisted that the entire website be in Greek—and only in Greek—despite Mr. Antonopoulos’s attempts to explain that he intended to market his products to foreign customers.

“In Ireland you can hear people say almost every day: ‘Oh, those poor Palestinians! It is wrong what Israel is doing to them! It is terrible what Israel is doing to them!’ I ask them: ‘Have you ever been to Israel?’ The answer is always ‘no.’

“So my next question is: ‘Then how can you make an informed judgement? Based on media reporting? Don’t you know that the media in Ireland is always anti-Semitic? The media reports are lies.’ I tell them to visit Israel and see the truth for themselves.

“Every day I put on my lovely Star of David necklace and wear it so that people can see it. People stop me and exclaim: ‘What a nice necklace you have on! Where did I get it?’ This gives me a chance to promote Israel as a great place to visit.