RUTHFULLY YOURS

The worst part of President Obama’s speech last night was the appalling failure to mention the Benghazi massacre. Today, we mark the second anniversary of that act of war by the enemy we have been at war with for 13 years, an act of war in which the enemy attacked sovereign American territory and murdered the representative of our country in Libya as well as three other brave Americans. Mr. Obama decided our fallen Benghazi heroes did not merit even a fleeting mention. Let’s focus on two things he did say. The first tells us he was not unaware that a speech about terrorism on the eve of September 11 was a time for reflection on the day’s significance:

My fellow Americans, we live in a time of great change. Tomorrow marks 13 years since our country was attacked. Next week marks six years since our economy suffered its worst setback since the Great Depression.

So the economic downturn gets a nod in a speech about the threat Americans face from radical Islam, but nothing about the Benghazi attack that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called for and that the local al Qaeda franchise, Ansar al-Sharia, carried out two years ago to the day? Here’s the second passage worth noting:

I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.

Core principle? The Benghazi massacre was carried out by scores of jihadists. The commander-in-chief took no meaningful action to come to the rescue of Americans during the hours and hours they were under terrorist siege. In the two years since, the Obama administration has done nothing but indict one jihadist – one – in connection with the attack. Moreover, though Obama’s State Department has identified that man, Ahmed Abu Khatallah, as a senior leader of Ansar al-Sharia, his Justice Department did not charge him as one. As I’ve previously explained, it has filed a politicized indictment designed to fit the administration’s fictional account of Benghazi as a spontaneous uprising provoked by “protests” – an indictment that ignores the legacy of 9/11, al Qaeda’s longstanding jihad against the United States, Obama’s disastrous decision to change sides in Libya, the resulting empowerment of our enemies, and the shocking failure to provide adequate security for Americans mysteriously assigned to work in Benghazi (one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans and one in which Western targets were repeatedly attacked in the months before 9/11/12). We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country?

*The 21st anniversary of Oslo highlights the tragic gap between the underlying assumption of the architects of Oslo – the New Middle East, transitioning to peace – and the Real Middle East.

*The Real Middle East is represented, most authentically, by the Arab Tsunami, which is gaining momentum, not transitioning toward democracy, in defiance of policy-makers, columnists and academicians who defined it as the Arab Spring.

*The Arab Tsunami is a natural derivative of the Real Middle East, as it has been for the last 1,400 years (in reference to inter-Arab relations): the role model of violent intolerance; non-compliance with agreements; unstable/tenuous regimes, coalitions, policies and agreements, which are signed on ice, not carved in stone.

*The following article sheds light on the critical deficiencies of the Oslo state of mind and its derivatives, such as the two state solution and the “disengagement” from Gaza.

The Oslo Accord Reality Check
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, November 1, 2013, http://bit.ly/1aOpfLt

On October 24, 2013 (the Diplomatic Conference) and October 16, 2013 (the memorial ceremony for Prime Minister Rabin), President Peres, the architect of the September, 1993 Oslo Accord, claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian accord was the “opening to dialogue and peace.” Is Peres’ claim vindicated by a reality check?

The Oslo state of mind

The Oslo state of mind was most accurately pronounced by Peres, at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Sept. 16, 2000, on the eve of the 2nd Intifada, 2000-2005 wave of Palestinian terrorism: “I believe that the previous borders, made of barbed wire, minefields, military positions, are irrelevant to our life…. I sincerely believe that a good hotel on the border will provide more peace and security than a military position…. I can see very little use for the past. Two things lose their importance: land and history. … To imagine is more important than to remember…. War is out of the question now…. I doubt very much if the Palestinians will go back to terror. … Once a nation’s economy turns from a focus on land to a focus on brains, borders are irrelevant….”

Exclusive: Jack Cashill shares his experience of being blackballed by progressive enforcer

As anyone who has spoken honestly about Islam knows, multiculturalism isn’t all that “multi” and relativism isn’t all that relative.

This lesson I learned in an unexpected place, the venerable Chautauqua (sha-TAWK-wa) Institution in Western New York, a physically beautiful summer colony with a strong ecumenical Christian tradition.

The climactic scene of my one and only novel, the then-futuristic “2006: The Chautauqua Rising,” unfolded at the Institution. Set, as the reader might surmise, in 2006, this political action thriller tells the tale of a grass-roots insurrection that in many ways anticipated the tea party insurgency of 2009-10.

At the time of the book’s publication, the year 2000, I was unaware of any political turmoil at Chautauqua. In the book, I described the Institution as “a perfectly preserved wish dream of late 19th century Americana.”

My gripe at the time was that it was “too quiet, too calm, too relentlessly civilized.”A casual visitor, I did not sense that Chautauqua had long been drifting leftward both politically and theologically.

In the previous decade, much of the tension at the Institution revolved around the progressives’ newfound enthusiasm for things gay. The left’s fondness for imputing bigotry to others was, however, about to find a new focus.

In 2000, the Institution chose the former “general secretary” of the hard left National Council of Churches, the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, to be its director of religion. Four years earlier, Campbell had helped orchestrate the black church burning hysteria/ hoax that excited the Democratic base in the run-up to the 1996 election.

The year before her appointment to Chautauqua, Campbell did her Christian best to deliver young refugee Elian Gonzalez to the godless purgatory of Communist Cuba.

This longtime apologist for Fidel Castro hewed faithfully to the party line. Dominican Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, who was helping facilitate Elian’s return, experienced her dogmatism firsthand.

Claimed ‘best antidote’ to anti-Semitism was for Jews to pressure Israel

Rev. Bruce Shipman, the Episcopal chaplain at Yale, has resigned in the wake of controversy over a New York Times letter he wrote suggesting Jews were collectively culpable for Israel’s actions and for subsequent rises in global anti-Semitism. “The Rev. Bruce M. Shipman, on his own initiative, has resigned as Priest-in-Charge of the Episcopal Church at Yale, effective immediately,” said a statement released by the Episcopal Church at Yale. “It is our belief that the dynamics between the Board of Governors and the Priest-in-Charge occasioned the resignation of the Rev. Shipman.”

In his letter to the Times, written in response to Deborah Lipstadt’s op-ed about rising European anti-Semitism, Shipman claimed that “the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.” Many readers expressed outrage at what they deemed Shipman’s exercise in victim-blaming, and an attempt to hold all Jews across the globe responsible for the actions of the Israeli state. As Bard College’s Walter Russell Mead put it,

No, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be a realization among cretins that “the Jews” are a group of people with very different opinions and desires, that they do not act in concert, and that individual Yale students, for example, of Jewish descent who are American citizens have zero responsibility for any policies of the government of Israel. Anti-Semitism is like racism: most racists don’t think of themselves as racists and most anti-Semites similarly don’t recognize their own twisted prejudice. Perhaps the chaplain at Yale should reflect on the passage in which a well known first century Jewish rabbi urged his followers to take the log out of their own eye before trying to take the splinter out of someone else’s.

Our own editor Mark Oppenheimer also questioned Shipman’s moral calculus:

By your reasoning, why wouldn’t one write, “The best antidote to stop-and-frisk policing would be for black men everywhere to press other black men to stop shooting each other”? Why wouldn’t one write—perhaps after a Muslim was beaten up by white-supremacist thugs—“The best antidote to Islamophobia would be for radical Islam’s patrons abroad to press ISIS and Al Qaeda to just cut it out”?

It is fine to discuss a philosophy of freedom. But discussing it also requires a good, hard look at the political realities that negate any chance of freedom in the near future.

Frightened Turtles

I would like to remind readers that we live in a country that is barely free. If we lived in ideal political conditions in which the only flaw might be a border closed to some or all immigration, the “open borders” argument might hold water. But we live in a growing authoritarian or police state.

This is an issue which many intellectuals – including some I should logically regard as moral and intellectual allies – shy away from like frightened turtles.

This country for too long has been the plaything of statists and “social engineers” of every stripe – Republicans, Democrats, environmentalists, welfare statists, special interests or lobbyists, and so on. President Barack Obama is the apex and end heir of every statist law and notion ever proposed or legislated, ever since ratification of the Constitution, even as the ink on it was barely dry – and Obama is the logical end of all those unopposed laws and policies. He loots without care or thought of whatever might replace the looted wealth and nullified rights – except for stage-managed anarchy and beating into submission the American spirit.

Obama practices Islamic taqiyya, which is saying one thing in his woozy, folksy style English, but meaning something else. Most readers here, instead of conceding that Obama is a nihilist, buy the official line that he is merely a rudderless, arrogantly insouciant pragmatist. Actually, his predecessor, George W. Bush, was a card-carrying pragmatist, formulating his policies on the premise that he could preserve that status quo – whatever that might have been – by denying the deadly peril of Islam. However, Obama, who administration has been top-heavy with Muslims from his first term, is a rotten-to-the-bone nihilist steeped in “community organizing” and a subscriber to the agenda of the “socialist transformation” of the country into a super-size European Union. Some intellectuals of my acquaintance deny that he is a nihilist, and instead call him a rudderless pragmatist or assign him some other non-condemnatory appellation.

This is not observing his behavior and actions with any kind of objectivity. It is an evasion of the evidence of one’s senses. Waiting for Obamacare to collapse? Waiting for Obama to okay the Keystone Pipeline? Waiting for him to put together a “Coalition of the Reluctant” to combat ISIS? Waiting for him to rein in our lawless Attorney General, Eric Holder, or to order any number of federal agencies to stop spying and threatening private citizens and organizations that question federal power? Take a number.

In a letter written to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA), Issa reveals there was an attempt to coordinate media spin regarding the IRS investigation between the DOJ and the staff of the Committee’s Ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD). How did Issa find out? A DOJ official in the Office of Public Affairs who thought he was calling Cummings’ office, mistakenly phoned Issa’s office instead.

“I write with serious concerns stemming from a telephone call my staff received late on Friday afternoon from the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA) about the Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants,” Issa states.

A senior OPA official—under the apparent mistaken belief he had called the staff of Ranking Member Elijah E. Cummings—asked if the Committee would release Committee documents to the media so that the Department could publicly comment on the material. I am extremely troubled by this attempt to improperly coordinate the release of Committee documents with the Minority staff. This effort to preemptively release incomplete and selectively chosen information undermines the Department’s claims that it is responding in good faith.

The senior OPA official to whom Issa refers is Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Although his name was not mentioned in the letter, he confirmed that he made the call, which took place last Friday at 5:01 p.m. EST. As Issa indicates, he believes Fallon thought he was talking to members of Rep. Elijah Cummings staff.

(Fallon) then asked the Committee employee if the Committee would agree to release the material to selected reporters and thereby allow the Department an opportunity to publicly comment on it.

The subject of the conversation was attorney Andrew Strelka, who is defending IRS commissioner John Koskinen in litigation initiated by the pro-Israel group Z Street. Prior to his job in the DOJ’s civil trial section, Strelka worked for Lois Lerner in the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organizations Division—where Z Street’s alleged mistreatment occurred. Documents indicate Strelka was kept in the loop about the IRS’s targeting practices.

The Committee wants to talk to Strelka about this apparent conflict of interest, but the DOJ has refused the request, prompting a Sept. 3 letter to Holder from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) accusing the DOJ of “conspiring with Mr. Strelka to prevent the American people from learning the truth.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-state-is-not-islamic-on-the-glazov-gang/

In his recent speech about his ISIS “policy,” President Obama emphasized one of his favorite themes: that ISIS is not Islamic. “No religion,” he assured the world, “condones the killing of innocents… ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way.”

In response to the president’s statement on the supposed un-Islamic nature of the terrorist Islamic State, Frontpage is re-running The Glazov Gang’s feature interviews with two of the world’s leading scholars on Islam: JihadWatch’s Robert Spencer and Shillman Journalism Fellow Raymond Ibrahim.

Both discussions unveil the true roots of Jihadi terrorist groups such as ISIS and reveal the lie behind the statements such as those recently made by Obama denying the Islamic role in Islamic terror. Spencer and Ibrahim both issue a dire warning about the hazardous danger our society faces by deceiving itself about the real enemy we face.

See both interview below:

Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.

You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.

If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.

Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.

This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.

Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.

Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.

To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.

In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.

On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.

“A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow…”

Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when they count up their numbers. Compound death is more than a statistic; it is incomprehensible.

The banal media coverage of September 11 grapples with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.

This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.

The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.

The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.

When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/9-11-thirteen-years-ago-we-vowed-never-forget-but-do-we-still-mean-it

“If September 11, 2001, was a wake-up call, clearly America has fallen back to sleep.”

Stephen Flynn

As we come up on the 13th anniversary of 9-11 we should take a moment to think about the significance of that fateful day, the courage displayed by average citizens and professional responders alike, and the legacy they have left us. Have we been good stewards of their sacrifice, their memory, that legacy?

Some might argue that rebuilding a tower, and placing memorial fountains at Ground Zero, as well as creating the 9-11 Museum are all evidence of our gratitude. No argument there. But it must go further.

For many of us, 9 – 11 has always been very personal, as thoughts turn to the friends and colleagues we lost that fateful day, after having made the ultimate sacrifice. We owe their memory much more than a passing thought. 9-11 reminds us of the work of preparedness we embarked upon, the firefighters and responders to Ground Zero we treated, and the resolve with which we all pledged “never again on my watch.” That was the motto for so many of us who headed various forms of terrorism, bioweapons, or general preparedness enterprises.

Perhaps that was because some of us remembered all too well the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. It was not the random act of madmen. It should have been the wake-up call that America and the West were facing an adversary unlike any we had ever encountered. Instead it was all too readily forgotten. Recognizing the effort, and resolve it took to mount such a concerted attack on the United States in 1993 and again in 2001 gives us pause to think about our own efforts and resolve to counter future attacks.

Unfortunately it took the second and fatal attack of the World Trade Center to spark, albeit it seems in hindsight a fleeting recognition that 9-11 was just the beginning. Even with the Boston bombing on 4-15-13 as a reminder, we as our nation retain a persistent disbelief about the reality of facing an organized, dedicated, resource rich, and hate-filled enemy committed to punishing, taming, perhaps even conquering the West. In spite of three loud, high profile, and deadly attacks in 21 years, we as a society don’t seem to fully grasp the notion that not everyone thinks as we do, believes in what we hold sacred, shares the same goals in life, or wants to peacefully coexist in a ‘live and let live world.’