RUTHFULLY YOURS

They’re tasked with protecting the United States from terrorists and keeping America’s biggest cities safe, but Homeland Security’s brief appears to be widening to include more global issues like climate change.

The department that was created by President Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks says that the role of the organization is ‘to assist in the wake of disasters, whether they be man-made or natural’.

However, claims of ‘mission-creep’ are now being hurled at the department which is attempting to redefine its role as one of emergency management than of protection and security against enemies of the state.

Throughout it’s 13 year existence, there has been persistent criticisms the department is wasteful, ineffective and has been far from transparent in how the agency is run, and how money is spent on a day-to-day basis.

In fact, claims of bureaucracy seems well-founded as the departments expanded role verges onto that of its partner agency, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

It is exceptionally murky how the tasks of ’emergency management’ are to be divided between the two government departments.

Thomas Eric Duncan has the distinction of being America’s Patient Zero – the first but not the last person to develop Ebola symptoms in the United States.

Is he a US citizen? No, he’s Liberian.

Is he a resident of the United States? No, he landed at Washington’s Dulles Airport on September 20th, in order to visit his sister and having quit his job in Monrovia a few weeks earlier.

So he’s a single unemployed man with relatives in the US and no compelling reason to return to his native land. That alone is supposed to be cause for immigration scrutiny.

In addition, visitors from Liberia have the fifth highest “visa overstay rate” in the United States. That’s to say, they understand very clearly that all that matters is getting in. Once you’re in, they’ll never get you out.

And, of course, Liberia is one of the hottest spots of Ebola’s West African “hot zone”. It’s been all over the front pages, except apparently in The US Customs & Border Protection Staff Newsletter, where it rated a solitary “News In Brief” item at the foot of page 37.

Does global warming cause everything?

With the Earth’s temperature failing to rise as computer models project, climate campaigners are desperate.

They’ll attribute any strange phenomenon to “climate change.”

They actually want us to believe that global warming is responsible for the Ebola virus, the rise of ISIS, and for tens of thousands of walruses getting together for a “haul out” on a beach in Alaska.

Attributing such things to global warming is among the most shameless tactics in the warming campaign’s playbook.

Watch CFACT’s Marc Morano take down two of the latest of these absurd claims about global warming on Fox Business’ Varney and Company.

If the media was doing its job, it would not present these kind of blatant propaganda scare stories as news.

People deserve to know the real facts about global warming.

CFACT’s on the job.

Both the rule of law and democratic governance in Israel are being jeopardized by the very body purported to be its most committed guardian: the judiciary.

In Israel, the negative impact of the judicialization of politics on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already beginning to show its mark. Over the past decade, the public image of the Supreme Court as an autonomous and impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded… the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda… – Prof. Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism, Harvard University Press, 2004.

The public is further losing its faith in… the legal system, with only 36 percent of the Jewish public expressing confidence in the courts…– “Public’s faith in Israel’s justice system continues to plummet,” Haaretz, August 15, 2013.

The Haifa District Court on Sunday blocked the state from setting a precedent that would help it deter flotillas by legalizing confiscating captured flotilla vessels and their cargo under international law never before used in Israel. – “Court blocks major state initiative to deter blockade-busting flotillas,” Jerusalem Post, September 7, 2014

A recent Post editorial (September 27) was right on the money when it asserted that “The High Court of Justice dealt Israeli democracy a grievous blow last week.” It was a sentiment echoed by the Post’s veteran columnist Michael Freund, who wrote: “High Court of Justice struck a decisive blow to Israel’s democracy last week, one that should send a shudder down the spine of anyone who cherishes basic principles such as the separation of powers….”

Fostering lawlessness?

OH PULEEZ! THESE ARE THE “LEADERS” WHO WERE OVERJOYED WITH THE OSLO SURRENDER AND THE REMOVAL FROM GAZA AND THE TWO STATE DISSOLUTION OF ISRAEL…DIDN’T THEY SEE THIS COMING? ….RSK

Leading Jewish personalities in the United States have reacted angrily to the Obama Administration’s blistering attack upon Israel’s announcement – based on a plan already approved by the Jerusalem Municipality two years ago – that it will construct 2,500 residential units in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Givat Hamatos. The administration also expressed displeasure at the news that a group of Jewish residents had moved into property purchased from Arabs in the Silwan neighborhood.

“Anyone who thinks that Jews buying a few handfuls of homes in areas of Jerusalem in any way contributes to the problems in the Middle East just doesn’t understand the reality of how deep the antagonism is to the nation state of the Jewish people,” said the former Harvard University scholar and influential political commentator, Professor Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz, who has been generally critical of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, was responding to White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s comment about the “occupation of residential buildings in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem – this is near the Old City – by individuals who are associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Earnest was referring to the Jewish nationalist Elad organization. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post reported that an official of the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah party had declared that the Palestinian broker who made the sale to Elad deserved the death sentence.

“To focus on these events at a time when ISIS is beheading, when Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and when Hamas is preparing rocket attacks, is such a perversion of reality and such a false prioritization,” Dershowitz said in an interview with The Algemeiner.

Asked whether the White House’s criticism implicitly discriminated against Jewish residency rights on the basis of ethnicity, Dershowitz responded: “I see a failure to point the finger where it belongs, at Palestinian leaders who say, ‘no Jew will ever live on the West Bank.’ For the White House to object to Jews purchasing property, it reminds me of those who protested when Jews bought property in pre-Israel Palestine. This isn’t the old days when Jews have to live behind a ghetto wall.”

Her new messaging strategy is taken straight from the 1988 presidential candidate’s playbook.

Dear Reader (including those of you under quarantine),

Well, this “news”letter usually begins one of two ways: serious or jocular. How about, just for a change of pace, we start off scary and see how that works out?

If I were in charge of overseas contingency operations at the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, I would send as many suicide-bomber types back to America (and France and Britain) with a new weapon: Ebola. Airport scanners don’t pick it up. The incubation period is long enough to get the human biological weapons past screeners without detection. I’d tell them: Take as many connections as you can on the flight home. Help people with their luggage whenever possible. Leave a mess in the plane bathroom and a paper trail of your travels that will foment panic when ultimately revealed.

And, if you do get stopped by security officials en route, so be it. There’s lots of gloveless manhandling of suspected jihadis, which brings ample opportunities to infect interrogators, guards, FBI agents, etc. And every one of those infected Americans or Westerners furthers the cause.

But assuming you make it to Cleveland or Spokane or Washington, D.C., the only order of the day is: Have fun for as long as you can and maybe share your spit, sweat, and other stuff in as many creative ways as you can. See a show. Go to a water park and just hang out in the lazy river all day. Eat at a nice restaurant, leave a messy napkin. Don’t bother to wash your hands — and never flush (or if you do, make sure the toilet overflows!). Why, we’ll even give you all the fatwas and cash you need to hit the strip clubs and see a hooker or two. It’s all for the greater good. And when, alas, you start to feel really, really sick and you are at your most infectious, it’d be great if you could blow yourself up at a mall, or at least pass out at a McDonald’s or maybe in the middle of the F-train. If you opt for blowing yourself up, great. If not, try to tell the EMS team that you have something other than Ebola. The aim here is to keep the responders from treating you and the scene as a biohazard for as long as possible. And if you blow yourself up, don’t worry too much about killing a lot of bystanders, just make sure it’s really messy and there’s a lot of splatter.

Now, I don’t think this is a likely scenario, but I don’t think it’s an impossible one either. Regardless, that would be real terrorism, far more terrifying than blowing up a plane. Even one remotely successful effort along these lines would send America into a tailspin.

There may have been a plot, but Obama can’t acknowledge its real source.
The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake is one of the best national-security reporters there is. Late this week, he made an important contribution to the “Khorasan” debate — the controversy over President Obama’s commencement of an aerial bombing campaign, in the absence of congressional authorization, based on what the administration has portrayed as an “imminent” threat to the United States. The source of the threat was said to be the “Khorasan Group,” a virtually unknown terrorist entity.

The upshot of Mr. Lake’s report is that back in June, U.S. military and intelligence officials assessed that “a shadowy network of al Qaeda veterans in Syria were planning to attack airliners flying to the United States.” The officials thus formulated combat plans for strikes against this terror cell’s key locations. These “targeting packages,” however, were not submitted to the president because, according to an unidentified senior intelligence official, military brass knew Mr. Obama would not authorize the strikes. They did not want to ask if the answer was certain to be “no.”

I have no doubt that this is the case. My focus, however, is on Mr. Lake’s description of the Khorasan controversy. As he frames it,

Some critics on the left and right have questioned whether the White House invented the threat from the so-called “Khorasan Group” in order to justify airstrikes that began in September against al Qaeda and ISIS targets in Syria.

“ISIS,” of course, refers to the Islamic State, formerly, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (meaning Iraq and Greater Syria or the Levant). It is the al-Qaeda spin-off currently rampaging across that region. ISIS is distinguished from al-Qaeda because the two — at least for the moment — are rivals. Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise is Jabhat al-Nusra. Mr. Lake further asserts that this franchise “has been focused on its fight inside [Syria],” in apparent distinction from the so-called Khorasan Group’s focus on attacking the United States.

This is all worth teasing out because there is confusion about what the Khorasan controversy is over. The Lake report, moreover, is a valuable demonstration of how the government’s conscious avoidance of Islamic-supremacist ideology leads to wayward analysis and policy.

The EU’s dependency on Russian gas is a direct result of the EU’s own catastrophic energy policies in the past. It seems that Europe, having made itself almost totally dependent on Russian gas and oil during the past decade, now wants the US to come and save it from self-inflicted disaster.

The Ukrainians by now should have come to realize that with friends like the EU…. The fallout is everywhere, from a maimed Ukraine with hundreds of dead, to the West entangled in a trade war with Russia, with sanctions going back and forth.

While the West is fighting a war with ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the European Union is bringing the relations between Russia and the West over Ukraine into an ever greater mess. The free trade agreement between the US and the EU, the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), is likely to become the next victim of the Ukrainian conflict.

Last week, European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht warned that TTIP is at risk of never being agreed upon. He blamed the debacle on Washington’s and Berlin’s failure to provide political leadership. The real stumbling block, however, is De Gucht’s own European Commission in Brussels. It insists that TTIP include an energy chapter in which Washington guarantees the Europeans unlimited access to US energy and raw materials in case Russia limits its oil and gas supplies to Europe.

The EU’s dependency on Russian gas is huge. Countries such as the Baltics and Finland are 100% dependent on Russian gas. Even Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, is dependent on Russian gas for over 40% of its supply.

This crisis is the direct result of the EU’s own catastrophic energy policies in the past. Exactly one decade ago, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs foolishly created the conditions that permit Moscow to use gas as an economic weapon to a maximum effect.

By ordering Dutch soldiers to be “invisible” in The Netherlands, what message is the government sending to it enemies, let alone its own citizens?

Jihadists now know that a few tweets from a single Dutch jihadist can fundamentally alter Dutch defense policy. It will order the personnel tasked with keeping The Netherlands safe to hide.

A country that has to hide its soldiers on its own soil and protect its Jewish schools with Military Police cannot possibly maintain that it has no real problems with elements of its Muslim minority.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense has advised its soldiers not wear their uniforms in public. Dutch vice Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher of the Labour Party emphasized that the proposal was merely advice.

The Dutch military, however, clearly ordered — instead of advised — its personnel to hide their military professions in public.

Dutch customs officials, whose uniforms could be mistaken as military, received the same advice.

YOM KIPPUR IS ONE OF THE HOLIEST HOLIDAYS IN THE JEWISH CALENDAR. IT IS A DAY OF FASTING AND REFLECTION WHICH I WILL OBSERVE UNTIL THE BLOWING OF THE SHOFAR BEST WISHES FOR A HEALTHY, HAPPY AND PEACEFUL YEAR. RSK