RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/07/14/barracking-your-way-to-the-top/

It is one of the curiosities of language that the transitive verb “barrack” (chiefly British, origin unknown) means to “shout or jeer at.” For that is precisely what our Barack, the one now occupying the White House, has descended to in his campaign against Mitt Romney. Shouting, jeering, name calling, and above all lying: “whatever it takes” to smear his political opponent and maintain his hold on the reins of power. It is, to use an adjective Romney himself employed recently, a disgusting performance. “Can a Candidate Lie His Way to the Presidency?” John Hinderaker asked recently at Powerline. The answer, alas, is Yes. But John offers this hopeful addendum: “a candidate likely can lie his way into office, but I doubt that an incumbent president can lie his way to re-election. For the first time in his life, apparently, Barack Obama has a record.” He won’t, in short, be able to seal up the records on his dismal performance these past several years the ways he has managed to seal the records of his high school, college, and law school years, not to mention his years as a practicing attorney.

I recently wrote in this space that “Who Is Barack Obama?” was the question that won’t go away. A lot of people, me included, thought it appalling that Barack Obama’s utter lack of experience wasn’t more of an issue in 2008. Looking back on the election, however, even more extraordinary is the fact that the people of the United States elected a man to be president whom they knew almost nothing about. It wasn’t just Obama’s lack of experience that was at issue; it was the lack at the center of his being: we really had no idea where this fellow came from, who he was, what he stood for.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/ipcc_admits_its_past_reports_were_junk.html

Joseph L. Bast (jbast@heartland.org) is president of The Heartland Institute and an editor of Climate Change Reconsidered, a series of reports published by The Heartland Institute for the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.

If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined. The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary. Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted. Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.

The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

In a sign of the times, the London Summer Olympics will be defended by anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles… just as they were in Ancient Greece. G4S, the world’s largest security company, was to provide 12,000 security personnel, but has so far only managed to come up with 4,000. In another sign of the times, not all of their security personnel speak English. So instead the British government will be deploying 3,000 troops, all of whom hopefully do speak English.
This isn’t the first time that the Olympics have come to London. They came in 1908 when the likely threat was from the Hun. They would have come again in 1944, but war intervened, and London needed its anti-aircraft weapons to protect more vital targets. Instead the games had to be rescheduled to 1948 in a Summer Olympics known as the Austerity Games. Still despite the post-war conditions, the games were described as, “a warm flame of hope for a better understanding in the world which has burned so low.”

But if Europeans could hope to relate to other Europeans through sporting matches, that flame seems rather cool when London has to be ringed with anti-aircraft defenses, as in the days of the Blitz. Muslim terrorists showed the world what they thought of the Olympic Spirit in the Summer Olympics of 1972 with the Munich Massacre and ever since then the shadow of Muslim terror has darkened the flames of the torches.

Since then terrorist threats have become an annual event. Russia is already claiming to have foiled Muslim terrorist attacks aimed at the 2014 Olympics. Even China got into the new Olympic spirit, foiling several attacks against the 2008 games. There is a sort of unity in every non-Muslim nation that hosts the games scrambling to deal with Muslim terrorist threats. A shameful silent unity that no one will dare mention out loud.

Terrorism has become the true international sport and newspapers spend almost as much time forecasting the types of terrorist attacks that may be tried, as they do discussing the athletes. Will it be nerve gas this year? A drone attack? Or perhaps an old-fashioned suicide bombing that seems almost quaint now.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ideology-vs-reality?f=puball

It’s a source of constant disappointment to me that, in this fortunate country where we have a free flow of information and the right to think for ourselves, so many of us, from individuals to media conglomerates, buy into rigid party lines, knee-jerk ideological responses to complex issues, and wild claims from fear-mongers, left or right. Facts matter. Even when those facts are uncomfortable and challenge our general beliefs. When new facts emerge, we have to be willing to (constantly) re-examine our positions. As Americans, we always want there to be good guys and bad guys, clearly identified, but whether we speak of Syrian rebels or our own Congress, the real challenge is just to identify the less-bad guys.

Consider a couple of examples, foreign and domestic, in which we, the People, have been manipulated, based on our ideological biases-which, inevitably, open up blind spots.

Last week, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, made headlines when he announced that his government had detected the flow of larger numbers of al Qaeda operatives into Syria to support the anti-Assad opposition. And our media-every single outlet-took al-Maliki’s claim at face value: “Oooooh, al Qaeda’s coming! Bad rebels, bad!”

No one stopped to ask why al-Maliki might have made that announcement-when he certainly hasn’t had the West’s best interests at heart since the U.S. abandoned Iraq to Iranian influence. Well, here’s what lay behind it: al-Maliki works closely with the Iranians. The Iranians desperately want to save the murderous (and anti-Western) Assad regime in Syria. And Iran knows that all you have to do is to whisper “al Qaeda!” and we panic. But, of course, we wouldn’t believe anything Tehran said about Syria. So the Iranians got their Iraqi client to be their mouthpiece. And we bought it-without asking for one shred of evidence. Iran 1, USA 0. Again.

This isn’t to say that the Syrian opposition are all angels-the freedom fighters run the gamut (and have some very different definitions of “freedom”). But let’s try logic again: If your family is being massacred and the West just stands by watching and tut-tutting, and Islamists appear to help you defend your home and save your family’s lives, to whom will your sympathies gravitate? At present, al Qaeda is absolutely not a significant player in Syria. But endless dithering can make it one over time. While direct American military intervention isn’t the answer, either, we should be strongly encouraging our regional clients and (relative) allies to act at various levels. Oh, and covert support from the CIA and special ops for the more-attractive elements in the opposition certainly would help-as well as giving us an on-the-ground feel for who’s who.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/missouri-right-to-life-stands-by-endorsement-of-islamist-911-truther

On Monday, July 9, I broke the story that the Missouri Right to Life Political Action Committee had endorsed a candidate for Secretary of State named MD Rabbi Alam with close ties to Islamist groups, specifically Viva Palestina, who is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist who wrote that no Jews were killed in the terrorist attacks.

Those who have contacted Missouri Right to Life have informed us that they are standing by the endorsement. Our requests via email for an official statement about whether the endorsement will be rescinded have been ignored.

The story quickly spread across the Internet after the Washington Free Beacon published their own piece, reporting that Alam was a “satellite campaign manager” for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 and that he was part of a group that visited the White House in December 2009 (Politicker reports that it was part of a group tour that included nearly 270 other people).

Alam stood by his statement that no Jews were killed on 9/11 in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon and took 20 minutes to explain to the reporter why, in his opinion, it is impossible that the World Trade Center was destroyed by airliners.

Alam was later confronted by a Jewish newspaper armed with the facts, forcing him to apologize for falsely saying that no Jews were killed on 9/11. The apology does not change the fact that he long accepted an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and there’s no evidence to suggest that he has abandoned his overall belief in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Nor does it change the fact that he is closely tied to Viva Palestina, a group supportive of Hamas that was founded by anti-American British parliamentarian George Galloway.

Janet Levy, a writer on Islam and national security, told me that she left a message with Missouri Right to Life on July 9 after she read my story and received a voicemail from its Executive Director, Patricia Skain, the next day. She quoted the voicemail as follows:

“We have spent the day researching this whole situation with the candidate Rabbi Alam. We have looked at numerous videos, tried to check into everything we can and honestly we don’t see a reason, a pro-life reason or really any reason to withdraw our endorsement at this time. If you have more information that you can send me that would be fine. We would be glad to look at it. But, we don’t see anything that indicates that he has violent beliefs or tendencies. I understand that a lot of people believe that is part of Islam and honestly I don’t even know. At this time we haven’t any reason to withdraw his endorsement.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-leftist-islamic-alliance-against-freedom-of-speech

Robert Spencer, a tireless defender of freedom and the freedom of speech against Islam, was attacked recently in the New York Daily News and charged with having “inspired” Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to go on his killing spree in July 2011. The writer, Nathan Lean, in his July 9th column, “Expose the Islamophobia industry,” connects several other counter-jihadist writers with Breivik’s actions, and lumps them all together as “untouchables” who ought to be ostracized.

The Islamophobia industry insists that it is not just a fringe minority who distort an otherwise peaceful faith. Instead, they point to the Koran and suggest that terrorists derive their world views from its messages. If that is so, these anti-Muslim agitators are guilty based on the logic of their own argument. After all, Breivik read and interpreted the writings of people like Spencer and [Pamela] Geller. He deciphered their diatribes much like Osama Bin Laden interpreted the Koran. Both men were compelled to act on the messages they digested.

It is doubtful that Lean has cracked open a Koran, or has heard of the Hadith, or The Reliance of the Traveler. For if he had any solid knowledge of Islam and its principal texts, he would grasp that these works do indeed sanction the violence of Muslim terrorists. He would understand that Spencer has every right to be an “Islamophobe,” that is, someone who is fearful of Islam and especially of Sharia law. It is interesting to note that while Lean inveighs against Breivik, who murdered dozens of people, he does not mention the thousands of people killed by jihadists in virtually every country on earth. Moreover, he does not suggest that Breivik also was inspired by al-Qaida, in addition to a potpourri of other “Islamophobic” writers. About Spencer and his outspoken co-counter-jihadists, Lean concludes:

Society has a responsibility to counter these individuals with overwhelming overtures of pluralism – and to systematically push the fear-mongers out of public discourse.

http://www.jidaily.com/9eaec
UNESCO establishes chair at Gaza university accused of housing Hamas bomb labs Michael Higgins

The UN cultural agency was accused Thursday of endorsing a Gaza university that Israel calls a breeding ground for Hamas terrorists.

On Wednesday, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) established a chair in astronomy, astrophysics and space sciences at the controversial Islamic University in Gaza (IUG).

The decision shocked Israel, which bombed a wing of the university during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 because it said laboratories were being used to build bombs.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Israeli government said, “The Islamic University of Gaza is a known greenhouse and breeding ground for Hamas terrorists.
That UNESCO should choose to establish a chair in such a university damages further [its] reputation and it creates uncomfortable and inappropriate bedfellows

“UNESCO’s motto is that ‘It is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed,’ yet the Islamic University of Gaza is poisoning the minds of men for the cause of terror.”

The university conducts lectures on Hamas’ radical ideology and concentrates on hostility to Israel, the statement added.

“Hamas uses Gaza University laboratories to develop and produce explosives and rockets and has even run a course on explosive making. The university is a warehouse for weapons and a venue for secret meetings of military leaders,” it said.

UNESCO and the World Heritage Game The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, better known as UNESCO, charges itself with “Building Peace in the minds of men and women,” and its World Heritage Committee claims to safeguard the shared patrimony of the entire human race. According to the 1972 World Heritage Convention, “parts of […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/309398/islamist-generation-mark-steyn Media types like to talk about “the narrative”: News is just another form of storytelling, and certain plot lines grab you more than others. The easiest narrative of all is anything involving young people. “I believe that children are our future,” as the late Whitney Houston once asserted. And, even if Whiney hadn’t believed […]

http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com.

http://melaniephillips.com/the-synods-shame

“So who can be surprised that the Synod has descended into the Israel-hating, Jew-hating sewer?”

Decent Christians are extremely upset, and rightly so, about the resolution passed at the General Synod a few days ago endorsing the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. The EAPPI aims to bring ‘internationals to the West Bank to experience life under occupation’.Its mission is to ‘accompany Palestinians and Israelis in their non-violent actions and to carry out concerted advocacy efforts to end the occupation’, and it has called on supporters to stage sit-ins at Israeli Embassies, to hack government websites in order to promote its message and of course promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel.

The EAPPI is a one-sided organisation which presents Israel entirely falsely as the regional aggressor and the Palestinians as its victims, whereas the opposite is the case. Last year a senior Fatah official, Abbas Zaki, declaredthat if Israel left the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria this would mean the end of Israel altogether — the Palestinians’ true goal which they had to keep quiet. And he was by no means the first Palestinian to say this.

But the EAPPI makes no acknowledgement that the sole reason for the ‘occupation’ is the refusal by the Palestinians to accept the right of Israel to be a Jewish state, and their resulting endless attempts to wage a war of annihilation against it by murdering Israeli citizens. Instead it casts Israel as the villain of the piece. In other words, the EAPPI promotes the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel, the inversion of truth and justice and the double victimisation of the targets of mass murder.