RUTHFULLY YOURS

Over at Mosaic Magazine, former Bush aide Michael Doran claims that the Obama administration has had a secret strategy to engage Iran from the time it took office. He’s right, but neglected to mention that George W. Bush and his National Security Advisor Condileeza Rice adopted the same strategy from the same source in November 2006, after the Republicans got crushed in the 2006 Congressional elections. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got a pink slip, Vice President Dick Cheney got benched, and “realist” Robert Gates–the co-chairman of the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations task force that advocated a deal with Iran–took over at Defense. Michael Doran reports all of this, all, that is, except Gates’ central role in the plan. That would place a good deal of the blame at Bush’s doorstep.

Writes Doran:

When he arrived in Washington in 2006, [Obama] absorbed a set of ideas that had incubated on Capitol Hill during the previous three years—ideas that had received widespread attention thanks to the final report of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan congressional commission whose co-chairs, former secretary of state James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, interpreted their mission broadly, offering advice on all key aspects of Middle East policy.

A four star admiral, who was in charge of the largest single military command in the world, slammed Barack Obama, and warned Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated every U.S. National Security Agency under Obama’s administration.

The stunning claim, from one of America’s highest-ranking career officers, has shocked Washington, D.C., and came just days before Obama would invite more than a dozen Muslim Brotherhood leaders to a private, press-banned meeting in the White House.

Admiral James A. Lyons – the former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, the largest single military command in the world, and “the father” of Red Cell – the Navy’s anti-terrorism units – said that “the transformation of America has been in full swing ever since 2008,” the year Obama was elected based upon his campaign promise to “fundamentally transform America.”

A teacher at France’s only state-funded Muslim faith school has quit
his job, writing in a leading newspaper that the establishment was
riddled with anti-Semitism and was “promoting Islamism” to pupils.

Philosophy teacher Sofiane Zitouni wrote in left-leaning daily
Libération on February 5 that the Averroès Lycée (high school) in the
northern French city of Lille was a hotbed of “anti-Semitism,
sectarianism and insidious Islamism”.

When John Boehner announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to address Congress, the Obama Administration reacted strongly. The criticism was not directed primarily at Boehner, who apparently did not inform the White House of the invitation, and may have acted unconstitutionally in delivering it, but against Netanyahu, for breaching diplomatic protocol by accepting the invitation without first notifying the White House.

For example, AP reported that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest “says typical protocol is that a country’s leader would contact the White House before planning to visit the United States. But Earnest says they didn’t hear about Boehner’s invitation until Wednesday morning, shortly before the speaker announced it publicly.” State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki was a bit more circumspect, stating that “traditionally we would learn about plans of leaders…separately from…the Speaker,” i.e., one assumes, from the leader or his representiative.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

On Wednesday, Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar called on Hamas terrorists in Lebanon and Syria to attack Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

At the same time, Zahar denied that Hamas has been involved in the terrorist insurgency in Egypt. As he put it, “Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” that is, Israel.

The Egyptian regime was not impressed by Zahar’s protestations.

Last Saturday, an Egyptian court upheld an October 2014 decision by the Egyptian government to outlaw Hamas’s terrorist shock forces Izzadin Kassam, and designate it a terrorist organization.

Both the government’s initial designation and the court’s decision were in some sense, watershed events. They represent the first time an Arab regime ever defined any Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist group.

But in truth, Egypt had no choice. Despite its insistent protestations that the Jews are its only enemies, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been a major player, indeed, arguably the key player in the jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that threatens to destroy the political, economic and military viability of the Egyptian state. The declared purpose of the insurgency is to overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and integrate Egypt into Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

Last week saw yet another devastating terror assault against Egyptian security forces and civilians in Sinai and in cities around Egypt. Thirty- two people, mainly soldiers, were killed in a coordinated, multifaceted attack that included Hamas’s three signature modes of operation – mortars, rockets and suicide bombings.

Last week’s assault, like almost all previous ones, was credited to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and declared Sinai a province of its “caliphate.”

According to a report by Yoram Schweitzer from the Institute for National Security Studies, Hamas members were among the original founders of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. The Egyptian government views Hamas-controlled Gaza as the rear headquarters of the group. In founding the group, Hamas cooperated with local Salafist Beduin and with al-Qaida terrorists who escaped Egyptian prisons during the January 2011 uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak.

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University

Like the Lilliputians, North Korea will continue to tie down the world’s Gulliver. Both, in their own way, are status quo powers. The longer Washington waits for the Kim regime to collapse under its own weight, the more dangerous Northeast Asia becomes. Watch this space

The computer screens at Sony Pictures Corporation went dark and then flickered back to life with a ghoulish image and threatening message on November 24, 2014, and thus began the most brazen cyberattack in memory. Two weeks later, a shadowy group called The Guardians of Peace, which claimed responsibility for the attack, demanded that the company pull its release of the upcoming film The Interview, a dark comedy about assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The group’s demand immediately led to allegations that the government of the world’s most isolated totalitarian state had started a new chapter in its long history of aggression against the outside world.

The North Korean government had condemned the movie back in June, employing its usual threatening bluster in a letter to the United Nations that vowed to take a “decisive and merciless countermeasure” if the movie were released. Pyongyang’s later denial of responsibility was dismissed in the wake of the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was indeed the cyber culprit, and new sanctions were announced by the Obama administration in January 2015.

Between the liberal-Left BBC and the hopeless British police who have internalised far-Left neo-fascist political correctness, little children are being raped and then blamed for being raped because the rapists are Muslim

Will the BBC ever give up on its intellectually dishonest liberal bias? After the devastating Casey report exposing Rotherham Council’s bigoted concerns for Pakistani Muslim sensitivities at the expense of sexually exploited local children, it might have been thought that even the liberal BBC could not put a damage limitation or PC spin on Rotherham’s sex crimes.

Enter Edward Stourton of the BBC’s World At One.

Discussing Rotherham Council’s neglect of vulnerable children with Camilla Cavendish of The Sunday Times, Mr Stourton asked her:

“To what extent do you think part of the problem is what you might call ‘rotten boroughs’ — in other words local authorities which have been under the control of one political party for a long period of time where the usual checks and balances that you might expect don’t apply?”

The self-glorying fantasies of NBC News “managing editor” Brian Williams multiply with every passing day, most recently and risibly his boast that he looked down the very tube of the RPG launcher that shot down the chopper in front – which is quite an accomplishment at that altitude – and the evolving numbers of three-week-old puppies he’s rescued from blazing buildings. So I thought it would be appropriate for our Saturday movie date to pick another tale of journalistic fabulism – Billy Ray’s 2003 biopic of a New Republic fantasist, Shattered Glass:

I can remember the exact moment when I stopped reading Stephen Glass and, for the most part, The New Republic. It was June 1997 and he’d been given the cover story — “Peddling Poppy”, about the ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the first President Bush. About half-a- dozen paragraphs in, Glass wrote:

Another good place at which to contemplate what is going on with Bush is the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ, which is a circuit church run by a handful of evangelicals who hold that Bush is the reincarnation of Christ… Members wander from city to city holding services in public parks and civic halls and handing out leaflets on street corners. Inside the leaflets is a complicated genealogical web that purports to show that Bush is descended directly from the Messiah. The web is written in minuscule print with dozens of winding lines extending like varicose veins from circles within circles. The circles represent secret love children…

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann has expressed public outrage over the refusal of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue to speak out against the flogging of Raif Badawi, a Saudi human rights activist and blogger who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam.”

“Saudi Arabia practices a form of Sharia law that is one of the most brutal systems in the world… Does the Austrian Foreign Ministry really want to give such a state the opportunity to build an international propaganda center in Austria?” — Editorial, Die Presse.

“An inter-religious dialogue center that remains silent when it is time to speak out clearly for human rights is not worthy of being called a dialogue center. It is a silence center.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

“If the center wants to remain only an economic center with a religious fig leaf, then Austria should no longer be a part of it. In any event, Austria will not allow itself to be threatened or blackmailed.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

It all looks nice. It isn’t.

On Muslim Brotherhood channels based in Turkey, Egyptian clerics and commentators called for the murder of Egypt’s President Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi and the journalists who support him.

Under the nice wrappings of Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is an entirely different Turkey.

Perhaps he thinks the Holocaust, too, happened because of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

For a few moments, one could think there are two countries in the world that go by the name “Turkey.” Then reality quickly corrects the mistaken belief.

“We hope that every person develops an understanding of the Holocaust, which constitutes one of the darkest moments in human history, and will consider the importance of working together so that such a tragedy, and the conditions that made this inconceivable crime possible, will never re-emerge,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement on January 27. How nice and thoughtful. But there were more Turkish niceties.