RUTHFULLY YOURS

For those of us in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast states, February seemed longer than twenty-eight days. March, which in three weeks will welcome spring, arrived just in time. Temperatures in the single digits, with piles of snow that while beautiful appear will never melt, defined our days and nights. The wind whistling across the river left drifts as high as the stockade fence that separates us from our neighbor.

But the world does not center on Old Lyme. It was – dare I call them what they are? – Islamic terrorists that dominated the news this month. Boko Haram, which persists in abducting and killing, has found a use for the school girls taken last spring – remember those ridiculous hashtags “Bring back our girls?” In northeastern Nigeria, several girls as young as ten were fitted out with explosive vests and made to walk into crowded markets. The vests were detonated, disintegrating the child and killing many others. A Jordanian pilot, captured last December by ISIS in Syria, was caged, doused with gasoline and then burned alive. Two people in Copenhagen were killed by an Islamic “lone wolf,” one at a “free-speech” symposium and the second outside a synagogue. The killer was shot. Knife-wielding, 6’5” ISIS Insurgents in Libya marched twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians along a beach preliminary to sawing off their heads. The victims were killed solely for their religion. Toward the end of the month, ISIS kidnapped 70 Assyrian Christians, including women and children. Their fate is unknown, but the likelihood is that they are already dead, either burned or crucified. The month ended with some good news as well as bad. Three Central Asians (residents of the U.S.) living in Brooklyn were arrested for conspiring to join ISIS, the purpose being to carry out terrorist plots against the U.S. And Austria passed a law which would ban the use of foreign funds for financing mosques, Imam’s and Muslim organizations. The law would also require that Muslims living in Austria submit to Austrian law, not Sharia law. That law should become the standard for the West. On the other hand, al Shabaab threatened to blow up the Mall of America outside Minneapolis.

Op-Ed: Pray for Netanyahu On This Day of Reckoning
Obama offers patience and respect for Iran, a country run by fanatics. For Israel, our most dependable ally – contempt.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hours away from giving the speech of his life. Pray for him to succeed.

Pray for the welfare of Israel. Pray for the welfare of the United States. Both nations are in the same boat. We share the same values.

We share the same perils.

Sometimes a speech is just a speech. Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech about Iran policy on March 3 will not be his first address to Congress. It will make familiar, if important, arguments. One might assume that, like the vast majority of speeches, it would soon be overtaken by events in Israel and the United States and the world.

But the Obama administration’s reaction to the Israeli prime minister’s appearance suggests Netanyahu’s is more than just another speech. An administration that disdains the use of disproportionate force has been, to say the least, disproportionately forceful in its efforts to undermine Netanyahu’s message and discredit the messenger. What is Obama so worried about? What is he, if we may put it indelicately, so scared of?

We can get a clue from the almost equally disproportionate reaction of Obama’s surrogates to Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama doesn’t love his country. Why, really, should anyone care about Giuliani’s comment? We have no crime of lèse majesté in this country. But Obama defenders did care. Did they suspect Giuliani had struck a nerve?

In February, Harvard University’s Hillel center for Jewish students co-sponsored an event entitled “From Selma to Ferguson,” purportedly aimed at addressing aspects of the civil rights movement in America. The event’s featured invitee was Dorothy Zellner, a harsh critic of the Jewish State and more importantly, a proponent of the anti-Semitic “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement.

Zellner’s inclusion in the event violates Hillel International’s own guidelines pertaining to partnering with groups or individuals associated with BDS. These guidelines state explicitly that Hillel will not partner with, house, or host organizations, groups, or speakers that as a matter of policy or practice:

•Deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish and democratic state with secure and recognized borders;

•Delegitimize, demonize, or apply a double standard to Israel;

•Support boycott of, divestment from, or sanctions against the State of Israel;

•Exhibit a pattern of disruptive behavior towards campus events or guest speakers or foster an atmosphere of incivility.

The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes.

Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old School journalistic standards of factuality and objectivity (and why should she? The mainstream media long ago decided that the aim of journalists should be, not fair and balanced reportage, but social justice activism). The daughter of leftist journalist Marc Cooper, her writing has been featured in all the usual media outlets from The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly to HuffPost and Salon.

Think of a mistake that we made in international affairs. At the time that we were making it, a phalanx of foreign policy experts was standing behind it. It might be a lonely orphan idea today, but last year you could have thrown a rock at a roomful of PhDs without hitting a single person who disagreed with it.

When the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt were in their heyday, I had trouble finding any foreign policy people who would even entertain the idea that we should continue backing Mubarak. Back then the revolution seemed inevitable. But I correctly predicted Islamist takeovers and counterrevolutions that would topple them because I didn’t see international relations through the lens of a grand theory.

Scott Walker’s claim that foreign policy is about leadership, not expertise, is being mocked now by media types who were relentlessly regurgitating all the expert truisms about the Arab Spring. But he’s right. Foreign policy expertise does not translate into foreign affairs competence. Leadership does.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/03/01/wapo-walker-hit-piece/
Scott Walker Accurately Remembers History, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! Ed Driscoll

Another day, another hit piece on Walker, this time from Philip Rucker of the Washington Post. (Link safe; goes to Hot Air; I’m not rewarding attack articles with extra traffic):

Walker responded by ticking through his recent itinerary of face time with foreign policy luminaries: a breakfast with Henry Kissinger, a huddle with George P. Shultz and tutorials at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution.

But then Walker suggested that didn’t much matter.

“I think foreign policy is something that’s not just about having a PhD or talking to PhD’s,” he said. “It’s about leadership.”

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta [1] against a foreign head of state.

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter [2]. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.

It seems hyperbolic to say that Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran — if Ayatollah Khamenei, in his “wisdom,” allows it to happen — will be the worst deal ever made. But if what we have been learning about it is true, it almost certainly will be.

To begin with, the agreement is said to have a sunset clause of 10-15 years. Whatever the number turns out to be, that tells us that Iran is free to do anything it wants in the nuclear weapons field after a set amount of time, assuming that it hadn’t disobeyed the strictures of the agreement before then — a monumental assumption given past history. (Ironically, in this one way Iran is not unlike other states, all of which, to my knowledge, do their best to hide their nuclear programs, including the U.S.)

The idea — if it can be called that — behind this sunset clause is a kind of bet that Iran will turn into a normal country during the time frame, abjuring the fanatical religious doctrines (global war bringing about the twelfth Imam/Mahdi, etc.) inherent in Khomeinist Shiism that would make allowing Iran the bomb equivalent to giving a loaded gun to a two year old, only with global implications. Of course the more modern view of the world is true for many Iranians now, but will it be true in the future for all or even most? Who will be in power? The ayatollahs — almost all, from what we know, true believers in this apocalyptic ideology or willing to pretend they are — seem to have a stranglehold for now. And what about the Revolutionary Guard, evidently a universe unto itself in Iran, with expansionist goals that already have been largely successful across the Middle East through Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and now into Yemen?

The administration has decided to send two officials to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy ‎conference this week.

One is Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, ‎who once called for a U.N. military operation to drive Israel out of the West Bank. ‎The other is Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser. Rice is best ‎known for lying on five Sunday network news shows in the same morning about ‎who was responsible for the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, blaming it on ‎a video no one in the region had seen. This lie was needed to preserve the ‎mythology of the Barack Obama re-election campaign, that al-Qaida was defeated and on ‎the run. Rice, ever the loyal trooper (a good explanation, really the only one, for ‎her continual advancement up the ranks), made her contribution to ‎the current impasse between Israel and the United States this week by blasting the ‎government of Israel, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be a ‎‎”destructive force” in U.S. Israel relations. As Jennifer Rubin has accurately ‎described it, sending Rice to AIPAC is sticking a finger in AIPAC’s eye.‎