RUTHFULLY YOURS

Robert Kagan and Muslim DemocracyPosted By David P. Goldman
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/02/09/robert-kagan-and-muslim-democracy/

Robert Kagan’s new book, The World America Made, argues with a straight face that an anti-American Egypt is good for the United States, as long as it is democratic. This remarkable assertion encapsulates the trouble with most foreign policy thinking on the right wing of American politics. I review the book today at Tablet Magazine; in a nutshell: “Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.”

Hardest to fathom is Kagan’s enduring faith in the efficacy of Muslim democracy. He writes:

The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been….Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.

The Red Race Card Posted By Daniel Greenfield

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/10/the-red-race-card/print/

Racism is about many things but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense. What they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.

The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor. It was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.

When your power is a product of social problems, then the failure to locate social problems that are an open sore on society, a cry of conscience and a grievous crime that must be faced, leaves you powerless and irrelevant. Once you start running out of legitimate social problems to tackle, then you have no choice but to start creating them or exaggerating them. Whether the problems you are dealing with are real or unreal, your challenge is to find ways to make them worse in order to retain your power and the social relevance of your movement.

Party Like It’s A.D. 632 Posted By Bruce Bawer

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/10/party-like-its-a-d-632/

Recently the Partij voor Moslim Nederland (Party for Muslim Netherlands), which already enjoys a significant presence in various municipal governments in that country, announced that it intended to run candidates for the Dutch Parliament. An article in Forbes listed the party’s major principles, which included limits on “offensive” speech about religion; the criminalization of blasphemy and of the destruction of religious texts; immediate admission of Turkey to the EU; an end to support for Israel; and the free and unimpeded importation of Muslim brides from abroad.

Whether to work within existing parties, or to concentrate on forming and building up separate Muslim parties, has always been a key strategic question for the soft jihadists of Europe. Though there are Muslims in Norway who are prominent members of several large traditional parties, the country now has a Muslim party too. Founded in 2009 as the Independent Labour Party, it was obliged later that year to change its name to the Samtidspartiet (Contemporary Party) because of official concerns that it might be confused with the Norwegian Labor Party. When outlining the party’s goals, its founder, Norwegian-Pakistani Ghuffor Butt, focused on a desire for lower taxes, gas prices, and the like – making it sound like rather a libertarian party for Muslims. Formerly a cinema director, producer, and political journalist in Pakistan, as well as an actor in some twenty Pakistani movies, Butt ran – and, as far as I know, still runs – a successful store in Grønland, a largely Muslim district in Oslo, that sells Bollywood films.

Yet lest these credentials suggest he was a “liberal” and “modern” Muslim, Butt made it clear, in answer to a Dagbladet journalist’s questions, that his party’s other objectives included lifting the ban on hijab in the police force, establishing exclusively Muslim schools and hospitals, instructing immigrant-group children in their parents’ native tongue rather than in Norwegian, easing residence-visa rules, using taxpayer money to fund the building of mosques and pay the salaries of imams, punishing those who had reprinted the Danish Muhammed cartoons, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and prohibiting homosexuality. (Later, presumably loath to offend some of his allies on the left, Butt made a phone call to Dagbladet to walk back the bit about gays: while homosexual conduct is forbidden by Islam, he said, the party did not intend to change Norwegian law on the subject. Yeah, right.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/290704/holder-vs-racist-photo-id-cards-deroy-murdock

Holder vs. Racist Photo-ID Cards
If ID requirements are discriminatory, America is a lot more racist than we thought.

A bunch of racists in South Carolina are trying to hold down blacks by forcing them, and everybody else, to show photo identification before they can vote.

Astonishing!

Luckily, Attorney General Eric Holder is on it. As he declared in Columbia, S.C., last Martin Luther King Day, the Palmetto State “failed to meet its burden of proving that the voting change would not have a racially discriminatory effect.” Holder’s deputy, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, blocked this provision on December 23, citing “the racial gap that presently exists among photo identification holders in the state.” Specifically, “8.4% of white registered voters lacked any form of DMV-issued ID, as compared to 10.0% of non-white registered voters.” This 1.6-percentage-point gap can mean only one thing: racism.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp
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Female troops move closer to the front
The Pentagon is retaining its longti…
Read more…

NASA’s ex-science mission head quit over Obama cuts
Science Insider
Thursday, February 9, 2012
News
Next week, President Barack Obama will propose a $300 million cut in NASA’s planetary science programs as part of his 2013 request for the agency, Science Insider has learned. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2835/al-qaeda-east-africa

BIN LADEN AND COMPANY LIVED IN KHARTOUM AND SUDAN OFFERED TO SHARE INTEL ON HIM WITH THEN PRESIDENT CLINTON AND HIS HALBRIGHT SEC. OF STATE….THEY REFUSED. NOW AL QAEDA IS PROLIFERATING THROUGHOUT AFRICA…..RSK GROWING THROUGHUT AFRICA….RSK

Al-Qaeda is expanding its presence in Africa. The Islamist terrorist group hopes to find in the African continent new safe havens from which to attack Western interests and build logistical bases. Al-Qaeda is already present in the North Africa and in Somalia. However, Al-Qaeda is looking for new countries in which to establish its own rule. It is now looking at Ethiopia, a country ruled by a cruel dictatorship, and situated in the Horn of Africa. Although Ethiopia has a Christian majority, a third of the population is Muslim. Ethiopia is, the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa and where the Prophet Mohammed found refuge when he was persecuted by the Meccans. It is also the country where the jihadist Abu Musab Zarqawi may be following in the Prophet’s footsteps, and to which he is thought to have to relocated before being killed in Iraq.

Al-Qaeda Cell Uncovered

The Ethiopian government recently confirmed having arrested eight suspected Al-Qaeda members as they were attempting to launch an attack in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian state-run news agency, ENA, citing a statement by Ethiopia’s Federal Police, reported that the National Intelligence and Security Service Taskforce of the Federal Police said the eight suspects had been arrested after they were found organizing, providing training to, and educating recruits, with the assistance of the Somali terror group, Al-Shabab. According to the same report, the suspects also had links with al-Qaeda cells in other parts of the world, including Kenya, Sudan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/2/10/main-feature/1/terror-in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust/e

For most people, “Mykonos” evokes sunny holidays on the Greek coast. But for the Iranian diaspora, the word is a warning that the murderous arm of the Islamic Republic can reach Iranian immigrants even when they find new homes in the democratic West. Mykonos was the name of a nondescript, now defunct, Greek eatery in Berlin where, on September 17, 1992, a team of Islamic Republic agents murdered four Iranian dissidents in an act of terror. Mykonos shattered the German illusion that Iran was a moderate regime amenable to reason and negotiation.

Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, Iranian-American journalist Roya Hakakian’s book on the Mykonos killing, was published this fall just as news emerged of an Iran-backed plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. Some skeptics dismissed U.S. claims about Iran’s role; but Hakakian’s meticulously documented account of the Mykonos incident is a powerful rejoinder, as well as a lesson in ruthlessness and conscience.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/4509 Another Reason Why Going Negative Is a Bad Thing By Frank Salvato Unless you are an inside-the-beltway campaign consultant or you have been living an oblivious life, you most likely stand with the rest of the American electorate in being increasingly disgusted with the negative tone that the Republican candidates for President have employed […]

Iraq’s Nuclear Reactor Osirak then, Iran’s Nuclear Reactor Bushehr, Now – Operation Opera-Tammuz

THE OSIRAK MISSION FLEW FROM ETZION AIRFIELD IN SINAI PENINSULA, THEN OCCUPIED BY ISRAEL….AND FINALLY CEDED TO THE EGYPTIANS IN THE CAMP DAVID SURRENDER. ONE OF THE MISSION’S PILOT ILAN RAMON WAS LATER KILLED IN THE U.S. LED COLUMBIA SHUTTLE DISASTER IN 2003.

As Iran’s threat to destroy the State of Israel and to remove the Zionist Entity from the map of history are resonating louder throughout the world, let us visit, one more time, Israel’s distinctive bravery and her military might to defend herself. More so, it is an amplifying reminder that Israel can only rely upon herself to defend herself.

On June 7, 1981, a bunch of brave Israeli Air-Force pilots took off from military airports in Israel, in a squadron that consisted of eight F-16As, each loaded with two unguided Mark-84 2,000-pound delay-action bombs, escorted by a flight of six F-15As, assigned to the operation to provide fighter support. These pilots were assigned to Operation Opera its final goal, after flying 1,100 kilometers over Saudi Arabia, was to bomb, and heavily damage, the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.