RUTHFULLY YOURS

The coalition that placed Obama in the White House is cemented by what author Joel Kotkin amusingly calls “the clerisy”: the secular priesthood of America’s “progressive” elite, which feathers its nest at the expense of the alliance’s other constituency, the poor.

In case you suffer from the delusion that America’s Democratic Party is the party of equality, Joel Kotkin, in The New Class Conflict, is here to tell you otherwise. Kotkin is a master of revealing statistics, and his book is a short, sharp, inspired diagnosis of what ails America today. It is a damning portrait of a society in awe of smug sanctimonious self-serving Left-liberal elites. These elites use reformist rhetoric and guilt tactics to engineer upward mobility for themselves and downward mobility for the American middle class. Kotkin observes that 95 per cent of the income gains during President Obama’s first term went to 1 per cent of the population. In the 2012 elections, Obama triumphed in eight of the country’s ten wealthiest counties, sometimes by margins of two-to-one. In the first term of his presidency, average annual US household income dropped by $2600 and the number in poverty grew by six million.

Nothing better illustrates the triumph of propaganda over fact than the confected narrative, beloved of Islamists and leftists, which asserts the battles of 900 years ago were imperialist assaults on peaceful and blameless Muslims. They were nothing of the kind.

Soaked in petrol and trapped in a cage, the captured Jordanian pilot watched as the ISIS Islamo-fascist thugs prepared to burn him alive. What were his thoughts in those final moments as they conducted their despicable ceremony and he confronted the horrific fate that was about to engulf him?

Don’t ask President Barack Obama. He didn’t appear particularly concerned at the images of the pilot’s appalling death agony – complete with close-ups – that climax the long, professionally produced video posted on YouTube by ISIS to promote their cause. Indeed, when Obama chose to speak publicly about this abhorrent act, he brushed it aside. Speaking at a National Prayer Breakfast, he indulged in a characteristic exercise of moral relativism, insisting that “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades … people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”.

My only cavil with this wonderful column is that I think that “Tom Cotton Hero and Tragic America” would be more apposite. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is the most brilliant, articulate, heroic star of both Houses of Congress. His resume is breathtaking….rsk
Despite the value of his open letter, he will become Obama’s scapegoat when the Iran negotiations inevitably fail.
The snarky quip attributed to 19th-century French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand — “It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder” — has recently been making the rounds to deride a letter written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and signed by 46 other senators. They wrote to the Iranian theocracy that any agreement on nuclear proliferation negotiated with President Obama will not constitutionally bind the next administration — unless it is properly ratified by Congress.

Democrats were outraged. They charged that Cotton’s letter is a crime, a violation of the 216-year-old Logan Act. That law bars unauthorized individuals from conducting negotiations with foreign governments. Even some Republicans sighed that the letter was a political blunder. It supposedly plays into President Obama’s caricature of right-wing and obstructionist conservatives.

Even some Republicans sighed that the letter was a political blunder. It supposedly plays into President Obama’s caricature of right-wing and obstructionist conservatives. In fact, the letter was not a crime or a blunder.

Yesterday, President Obama declared that because of his serious differences with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, “this can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
Today, we learn the U.S. military will expand its air-strike campaign into the city of Tikrit in order to assist Iranian military forces in the country fighting ISIS. Under President Obama’s unilateral decisions in foreign policy, the United States is closer than we have ever been to Iran, and more estranged than ever from Israel.

As noted in today’s Jolt, we treat our enemies better than we treat our friends:
Russia’s Making Nuclear Threats, and Obama’s Too Busy for NATO

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad.
Congress needs a strategy to defeat both violent and cultural jihad. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security, under the leadership of Chairman Michael McCaul, held the first of a series of very important hearings on the threat of radical Islamism. As I told the committee in my testimony, it is vital that the United States Congress undertake a thorough, no-holds-barred review of the long, global war in which we are now engaged with radical Islamists. This review will require a number of committees to coordinate, since it will have to include Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security at a minimum.

There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation. These three points — which are backed up by the facts — suggest the United States is drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival. First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists.

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad. The violent jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name just some of the most prominent areas of violence.

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is probably the world’s first ever politician demanding votes to end his own rule.

In a speech in parliament on Jan. 28, Turkey’s main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, addressed Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu: “You are not the prime minister. You are [a “photo-op”] kid seated on the prime minister’s chair.”

The weird situation Davutoglu has found himself in is the product of his boss and predecessor, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Last summer, as election season approached, then Prime Minister Erdogan and President Davutoglu tightened their grip on the internet. The duo deliberately limited their citizens’ access to social media and to popular and informative websites. They also increased the government’s power over the courts and the power of the MIT (Turkish intelligence Agency) to spy on people. None of this stopped the AKP from winning at the polls.

The mystery deepened today about the circumstances of the crash of a Germanwings flight in the French Alps. Aviation officials were struggling to explain on March 25 how the passenger jet bearing 150 souls on board could have crashed in clear skies. The onboard flight record or black box was recovered today. Evidence from the cockpit voice recorder shows that one pilot left the cockpit before the plane began its disastrous descent. The pilot was unable to re-enter the cockpit. Officials heard a recording of the pilot trying to bash down the cockpit door before the crash occurred.

Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel’s nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.

Quick! You’re J Street, an anti-Israel lobby pretending to be a liberal pro-Israel lobby. What do you do?

You invite Saudi Arabia’s favorite lawyer famous for saying, “F___ the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway” to your little J Street conference to denounce Israel’s undemocratic character.

Jeb Bush foreign policy adviser James Baker warned that Israel could lose its “democratic character” if it continues to “occupy Arab lands” in a carefully worded keynote address at the J Street conference on Monday evening.

Do Arab countries like Saudi Arabia lose their democratic character that they never had… or is that something that just happens to Israel?

Let’s just flash back to September 11 and see what James Baker was doing then.

ON the day Osama bin Laden’s men attacked America, Shafiq bin Laden, described as an estranged brother of the terrorist, was at an investment conference in Washington, DC, along with… James Baker, the former secretary of state

Last week the Islamic State’s ‘Hacking Division’ released the names and addresses of one hundred US military personnel. It urged the ‘brothers residing in America’ – i.e. American Muslims – to ‘deal with’ them, which is to say, it wants them killed.

There is much talk these days of radicalization and deradicalization. At the heart of both processes are religious ideas: theological dogmas. What are some of the key theological principles which might cause a Muslim to take this call seriously? What is the Islamic reasoning given by the IS Hacking Division in support of its call to kill non-Muslims?

The Hacking Division quote two verses of the Qur’an:

Sura 9:123 ‘fight believers who are near to you’ and
Sura 9:14 ‘Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them, and satisfy [actually yashfi ‘heal’] the breasts of a believing people’.