RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://chqdaily.com/2012/07/23/zakaria-choice-to-modernize-pakistan-must-be-pakistanis/

ON OBAMA SAYETH FAREED :

“Whatever you may think about President Obama’s economic policies — the things he’s done, the things Romney said he’s going to do — on foreign policy, I think it’s pretty indisputable that President Obama has done a pretty good job. I think you see this in two things. You see conservative columnists like David Brooks have written columns pointing this out, other conservatives like David Frum have pointed this out, and most importantly, you see this as the one issue that Mitt Romney is not raising in the presidential campaign. It’s an unusual situation for a Democrat to have an advantage in foreign policy. You would have to go back to John Kennedy to find the time when a Democrat could credibly claim that he was tough enough and smart enough to have an advantage in foreign policy over his opponent. Obviously Johnson did not have that opportunity during the Vietnam War, and since then, the Democrats have always been seen as weak. But Obama has done two or three things very effectively, I think. First is, he has drawn down the United States to a more manageable position in this broader campaign that we’ve been talking about in the greater Middle East. He got troops out of Iraq. Everyone said all hell would break loose. You notice hell did not break loose. That is a very good model for how to approach Afghanistan. Everyone is going to be kicking, and screaming and telling you terrible things are going to happen. Well, some things are going to happen, but they were going to happen anyway. A lot fewer terrible things are going to happen than people say. We should continue to rebalance ourselves in precisely this way, so that we have the flexibility, the resources to deal with all kinds of other challenges. Principally, nation-building at home. But also dealing with the other real foreign policy challenges we face in Asia, which is going to be the center of the world and the world economy. President Obama has pivoted to Asia very wisely and strategically. I think that in his policy toward China, you have the right balance of toughness and cooperation. In the policy toward Russia, you have the right balance where you try to get them to work with you on things like Libya and Syria, but you stand up to them when you need to. On the whole, it’s a very practical approach. I think a bunch of Democrats or liberals aren’t happy that he maintained some of the elements of the war on terror that the Bush administration did. Some wish that he were more expansive in his interventions on the basis of human rights, but I think he has been successful precisely because it has been a balanced, centrist, pragmatic approach, which is actually very much in the American tradition of successful diplomacy.”

—Transcribed by Rabab Al-Sharif

Fareed Zakaria, host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN and editor-at-large for Time, introduces Chautauqua’s week of lectures on Pakistan Monday morning in the Amphitheater. Photo by Adam Birkan.

Laurence Léveillé | Staff Writer

Violence caused by jihads is a relatively new problem, but many people associate it with Islam as a whole.People first thought the cause of the Sept. 11 attacks had to do with Islam, a religion that has been around since the seventh century. Despite beliefs that the religion is the cause of some violence, countries such as Indonesia and India are peaceful and democratic societies, said Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large of Time magazine and CNN host, during Monday’s morning lecture. Zakaria was the first speaker of Week Five, themed “Pakistan: Straddling the Boundary Between Asia and the Middle East.” He informed the audience about the history of Westernization in the Arab world and Pakistan’s deeply rooted religious nationalism.

“It is easy to understand why people kill,” he said. “The whole history of humanity is full of that, unfortunately. What is more difficult to understand is why somebody would be willing to die in killing people.”

The problems behind the practice of jihad in the Arab world are of recent origin, Zakaria said. When the Arab world was decolonized in the early 1950s, there was promise and hope for it, he said. Leaders spoke of renewing the Arab world and used Western economic ideas to take steps toward modernization.

But by 1965, that same area was a political desert and an economic wasteland because the Western style of modernization had failed. Stagnation, corruption and dictatorship followed.

“It fails because the political model, which promised republics and democracy, turned into military dictatorship,” Zakaria said.

As the rest of the world faced changes in the early 1990s, the Arab world went backward in time. In Egypt, people had more freedom of the press in 1950 than they did in 1995, he said. The failure of the political model led to the rise of dissent.

Dissent could not develop in cafes, newspapers or parliaments of the Arab world. As a result, it became prominent in the only place it could not be banned: the mosque.

“Islam became the language of political opposition to these regimes, because it was the only language that was permissible,” Zakaria said.

The rise of violent political Islam was linked to those repressive, Westernized dictatorships, he said.

With his analysis of the Arab world in mind, Zakaria said the country the United States should worry about most is Pakistan, as it has 80 nuclear weapons and is run by a military regime rather than a civilian government.

Zakaria said the reason he believes the U.S. will not win its war in Afghanistan is because the jihadi have safe havens in Pakistan, which Pakistan lets exist.

When Americans go into conflict, he said, they simplify the issue into a “good guy versus bad guy” scenario. But asking Pakistan for support cannot be simplified due to its roots.

Pakistan was founded when the British decolonized India. When they left, some Indians worried they would not be secure in a secular democracy and created their own state.

In 1956, Pakistan became an Islamic state, because its president believed it would provide a source of legitimacy for his dictatorship against democratic forces in the country, Zakaria said.

“He could ally himself with the mosques, the clerics, the preachers, against the Westernized liberals who are trying to do silly do-good things like the rule of law and democracy,” he said.

Pakistan’s strategy is to fight India, to keep Afghanistan on edge and to lead an invincible Islamic resistance against the U.S., Zakaria said.

“We confront this very complex reality of what do we do with a country not whose policies are ones that we oppose, but in whose national DNA or political DNA is hardwired a certain kind of religious nationalism, a certain violent opposition to the forces of secular democracy and an intrinsic anti-Americanism,” he said.

To understand Pakistan’s rooted anti-Americanism, the forces of its existence and nationalism must be understood. It was not necessarily an intended decision, Zakaria said, but rather a consequence of creating a nation with religious nationalism.

When Americans ask Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists in North Waziristan, he said, they are asking the country to unravel a policy that has been around for decades.

“You’re asking them to act in a way that really is beginning to question the very idea of Pakistan,” he said.

U.N. report recommends legalized prostitution
CNSNews.com
Monday, July 23, 2012
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A report issued by the United Nations-backed Global Commission on HIV and the Law recommends that nations around the world get rid of “punitive” laws against prostitution — or what it calls “consensual sex work” — and decriminalize the voluntary use of illegal injection drugs in order to combat the HIV epidemic. Read more…
Moody’s puts Germany on negative watch list
Sky News
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
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The ratings agency Moody’s confirmed it had placed the credit outlook of not only Germany but also that of the Netherlands and Luxembourg on negative watch from stable, citing that no-one was immune from the effects of the economic gloom. Read more…
Pot protesters picket Obama fundraiser
Huffington Post
Monday, July 23, 2012
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Obama will swoop through the Bay Area for three fundraisers, including a reception at Oakland’s Fox Theatre. And the local cannabis community is determined to make its presence known. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz21XSOxV38

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444025204577544891777555840.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

A reader of last week’s column on Hillary Clinton chided me for failing to mention her remark, made as the revolt in Syria was gaining strength last year, that Bashar Assad was “a reformer.” The reader makes a fair point, one that helps explain why the administration has been so feckless about confronting the Syrian dictator.

But the real scandal of Mrs. Clinton’s remark lies in its broader context.

Here’s Mrs. Clinton’s fuller quote, from March 27, 2011, answering CBS’s Bob Schieffer on why the U.S. was prepared to intervene against Moammar Gadhafi but not against Assad: “There’s a different leader in Syria now,” she explained. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he is a reformer.”

That caused some raising of eyebrows. So a few days later Mrs. Clinton clarified: “I referenced the opinions of others. That was not speaking either for myself or for the administration.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arlene-kushner/why-republicans-must-take-the-lead-on-israel/ There is a truism – “You can’t be more Catholic than the pope” – that is rather scrupulously adhered to in political circles. With regard to Israel, this bit of political wisdom suggests that it is inappropriate for U.S. politicians, whatever their predilections or convictions, to move to the right of the Israeli government […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2289

The Olympic Games kick off in London this Friday. Though Israeli competitors hope to come home with some prestige, if not medals, there will be no minute of silence honored for their countrymen slaughtered 40 years ago at the same event in Munich.

The refusal of the International Olympic Committee to devote 60 seconds to memorializing the eleven Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism – first taken hostage and then executed by members of the Black September group – has caused quite a social-media stir. Petitions have been multiplying on Facebook and Twitter, with much response.

One example is a placard showing thumbnail photos of the dead, with a caption reading, “Share if you agree: 17 days; 24,480 minutes. Not 1 minute to honor the memory of the Munich 11?”

It’s a clever idea, and its sentiment couldn’t be better. As a cause, it is as admirable as it is worthy. But it was hopeless from the outset.

To understand why, let us review the massacre itself and its aftermath.

The 1972 Summer Olympics took place in Germany from August 26 to September 10. The last time the Germans had hosted the mega sports fest was in 1936, when the Nazis were in power. As a result, the West German government wanted to present the country in a positive light. Ironically, as it would turn out, the event was officially titled “The Happy Games.”

On September 5, ten days into the games, Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village and took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, immediately murdering the two who put up a fight. Eighteen hours later, the terrorists transferred the rest of the hostages by helicopter to a military airport, where they were going to board a plane to an Arab country. It was then that the Germans carried out a failed rescue mission, during which four of the hostages were shot and then blown up by a grenade that one of the terrorists threw into the helicopter. The five hostages left were then machine-gunned dow

http://news.yahoo.com/sally-ride-remembered-tributes-1st-american-woman-space-002746338.html

Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, died Monday (July 23) at the age of 61.

Ride made history when she launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission in 1983. She became only the third woman to ever travel in space, after Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

Ride traveled into space once more in 1984, as a member of the STS-41G crew on the space shuttle Challenger. Over the course of her career, Ride logged a total of 343 hours in space.

Sally Ride’s death came after 17 months of battling pancreatic cancer.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-future-of-american-intelligence

When preparing how to best counter future threats, the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has two primary avenues down which it can travel. The IC can either concentrate on the probable nature of our future adversaries-or on the nature of the future itself. Although assessing the nature of our enemies has been an important tool in the intelligence repertoire, as time goes on I suspect this method of intelligence, when applied by itself, will fall victim to diminishing returns. Should the IC seek to continue its strategic function, it will require a greater emphasis on anticipating the technological trajectory of the world.

Though technology has redefined the boundaries of human potential, it has also forced us to reevaluate our expectations of privacy. This has inevitably altered the nature of secrecy, which will have a significant impact on the IC in the ensuing decades. The nature of secrecy is changing every year. Therefore efforts to maintain secrecy, such as protective security, must also evolve.

During the Cold War, the IC was able to assess the Soviet Union’s military capabilities in a comparative checklist manner (tank-for-tank, missile-for-missile). This is no longer solely the case for a variety of reasons. Most obviously, the nature of the enemy has changed since the end of the Cold War. Through the proliferation of deadly technology and the asymmetrical transformation of war, our most imminent enemies are individuals capable of inflicting as much, if not more, damage on the United States than all the armies of all the past tyrants combined. For all their butchery abroad, Hitler and Stalin never reached Downtown Manhattan.

Which raises the question: at what point does a 9/11-type attack become “imminent”; during its phase of conception, its phase of planning, its phase of implementation-on the morning of the attack itself? Terrorism as a tactic compels us to summon a greater sense of urgency. Intelligence must be collected and analyzed quickly, so as to become actionable in a timely manner.

There exists the possibility, however, that a more conventional Soviet-like adversary could emerge as this nation’s chief security threat this century (e.g., the People’s Republic of China). Should this scenario arise, the IC would not be excused from eluding the issue at hand. The nature of the enemy is, in many ways, incidental. Our enemies will always undertake that metamorphosis which best exposes our soft underbelly and leaves us most vulnerable. The inherent differences between our potential opponents should affect our policymakers’ grand strategy, but these differences should not exempt the IC from maintaining an anticipatory disposition.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/whos-destroying-western-civilization?f=puball

In his “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America,” Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Akram wrote:

Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’ causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism notes:

This May 1991 memo was written by Mohamed Akram, a.k.a. Mohamed Adlouni, for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the introductory letter, Akram referenced a “long-term plan…approved and adopted” by the Shura Council in 1987 and proposed this memo as a supplement to that plan and requested that the memo be added to the agenda for an upcoming Council meeting. Appended to the document is a list of all Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America as of 1991.

There are many fine, important, and informative essays and books on just how antithetical Islam is to Western values – to individualism, to private property, to freedom of speech – and on just how insidious and anti-life it is. But few are the books and essays on why Islam seems to be making progress in its “grand jihad” against the West.

Who or what is actually destroying Western Civilization from within? The Islamists? Or the West? What contributes to the Islamists’ hubris, what encourages them and instills them with confidence that they can “conquer” the West, and especially the United States. Whose “hands” are working together with those of the “believers” to bring down Western civilization and establish Sharia law here and everywhere?

Islam would be as impotent as Scientology, or of a cult that ascribed mystical powers to pyramids, or a diet of bottles of Shaklee vitamins. Is Islam imbued with some inexorable and ineluctable power to conquer the West?

One thing is that Islamists are shrewd enough to exploit the corrosive policies of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, the commitment to “diversity,” indiscriminate “tolerance,” subjectivism, and a host of other policies that assault or negate reason and all standards of measurement of value, superiority and inferiority. Islam is as bankrupt of formal philosophy as is the culture it is “sabotaging.” The intelligence exhibited by Islamists is merely a feral, predatory intelligence. Islam allows no other kind. Islam does not permit independent thought, only agreement with arbitrary assertions.

A wolf may be predatory, but that is how it is programmed by nature. It has no choice in the matter. A Muslim is a man imbued with volition and the capacity for choice; he chooses to limit himself to an ideology that permits him to be merely feral and predatory and submissive. His mind merely detects his enemy’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities – weaknesses and vulnerabilities that are as self-inflicted as choosing to be a Muslim – and plots to exploit them.

Those weaknesses and vulnerabilities are the West’s policies, noted above. And what are the philosophical foundations of those policies? The reigning philosophy is that one cannot know anything, either for certain or at all, that all values are relative, or subjective, that reality is whatever one wishes it to be. On one or more of those premises, there are no absolutes that a defender of the West can repair to or uphold.

The Seattle Times reprinted an Associated Press item about a Saudi religious figure warning Muslims and non-Muslims to “respect” the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Saudi authorities warned non-Muslim expatriates on Friday, the first day of Ramadan, not to eat, drink, or smoke in public until the end of the Muslim holy month’s sunrise-to-sunset fast – or face expulsion…. The prince newly appointed to handle most aspects of law enforcement is known as a strict adherent to religious rules. Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz was governor of the holy city of Mecca before becoming Interior Minister.

I do not think very many people realize that showing respect and deference to Muslim practices and sensitivities outside of Muslim countries is a form of submission to Islam, regardless of the Islamic holiday or the day of the year. This is especially true of those who know little about Islam and have not grasped the implications of granting such respect. They are more concerned with not wanting to hurt Muslim “feelings” than they are with the content of those feelings.

According to the cultural relativism most Westerners are indoctrinated with today, Muslim “feelings” are sacrosanct and not to be troubled or offended. “Feelings,” they are taught, are a tool of cognition, in themselves and in Muslims, so to offend Muslim feelings is to question a Muslim’s world view, and a Muslim’s world view – in which Allah owns everything and everyone and Mohammad was his prophet – is just as good as anyone else’s. Showing disrespect for a Muslim’s feelings implies that one’s own feelings are somehow superior to his. So a Muslim’s feelings must be respected.

There is no such thing as an absolute, goes the line, only perceptions of things filtered by a person’s bias or prepossession or taste, and molded by one’s culture, and so a Muslim’s perceptions are just as valid as anyone else’s. These perceptions cannot be judged because there are no absolutes by which to judge them. A host of Western philosophers have said so, such as Descartes and Kant and Hegel, and vetted by thinkers such as William James, Sartre, and John Dewey and many lesser lights.

Who knows, ask the dhimmis-by-default when they bother to ponder the question, and who perhaps have never heard of Hegel or Kant or Descartes, Muslims might be right. “Muslims feel, therefore they exist,” is how they might parody Descartes and characterize the Islamic mindset, if they dared to carry the thought to that point. Who is any non-Muslim to judge a Muslim, or what a Muslim believes? While what works for Muslims may not work for non-Muslims, that’s just a matter of feeling and up-bringing. It just isn’t practical to offend a Muslim’s feelings. Who can blame them for rioting and killing when the cultures Muslims immigrate to are hostile to their confidence that theirs is the only true religion and that are not natural environments in which to practice their creed? It is irrelevant that Islam is antithetical and hostile to the notion of individual rights. Muslims must be cut some slack, and be accommodated whenever possible. Civilizational clashes must be avoided. How else can non-Muslims prove they are tolerant and civilized except by respecting Muslims on bent knee and with bowed head?

The rumors that Islam is “eliminating” Western civilization by “sabotaging” it from within it are only half true. Thanks to a philosophy of unreason, promulgated by Western thinkers and taught in the best schools in the West over the course of two centuries, Western civilization is destroying itself “by its own hand.” And the United States is proving to be very, very accommodating. It has even elected an unbroken succession of Accommodators-in-Chief, beginning with the Peanut Farmer.

That Brotherhood fellow Mohamed Akram was on to something.

Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann dared to call for an investigation of Muslims in the federal government, especially of Muslims closely or remotely connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. She was immediately attacked by the “gangster government” from all quarters, including that of the mainstream media.

Rep. Michele Bachmann says the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist movement that recently came to power in Egypt, has made “deep penetration” within the U.S. government, and she wants an investigation of its influence within five federal agencies.

The Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps the world’s most influential Islamist organization, has long sought to unite traditional Islam with modern democracy in Middle Eastern nations. Its global influence further increased when one of its candidates, Mohamed Morsi, was declared winner of Egypt’s 2012 presidential election. But Bachmann, R-Stillwater, and four other members of Congress see the Muslim Brotherhood as a domestic threat.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-muslim-brotherhood-clinton-state-department-john-mccain-and-todays-lax-security-mindset

There was a time when it was considered necessary and proper to be concerned about possible foreign influences in US government and military service. Way back in 1981 when I first filled out forms as part of the process for joining the US military (it was a DOD form, I don’t remember the number) I had to answer a specific question regarding travel. The question asked if I had traveled to any of a list of nations after certain dates (all communist bloc countries) with a date listed by each nation (the date that each country had turned communist).

Anyone who joined the military in the Cold War era probably remembers this form and this question. If the answer to the question for any of the nations involved was “yes” you had to provide a complete explanation for the reason for the trip, when it took place, etc. Having never visited countries like Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, the Soviet Union, etc., I can’t say that I know what the process would have been had I answered yes.

But the point is, if you wanted to join the US military and you had even visited any communist countries, the Department of Defense wanted to know about it.

Fast forward to today. We are locked in a mortal struggle against a force not unlike communism. In fact, it has been called “communism with a god.” That force is Islam as defined by the Shariah doctrine which forms the basis for it. There are certain countries and organizations that are prominent in the enemy threat doctrine. Yet, to my knowledge, today we have no similar safeguards in place to what the DOD had during the Cold War years to check on the influence of foreign powers on American institutions.

For instance, are any questions ever raised about travel to Iran, Syria or Sudan, three countries on the State Department’s list of terrorist sponsoring nations? For that matter, what about travel to Yemen, like Carlos Bledsoe did where he was indoctrinated to wage jihad in the USA by Anwar al-Alwaki? What about travel to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where the Times Square bomber traveled and received training? For that matter, how about travel to Saudi Arabia? After all, the Salafi strain of Islam that gave birth to Al Qaeda has its seat there and most of Al Qaeda’s cannon fodder seems to come from Saudi Arabia.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1439/friends_reunited_north_korea_and_the_guardian “OCCUPIED” NORTH KOREA IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST HORRIFIC HELLHOLES….DESPITE THE CHARMING ENTREATIES AND SCOLDING OF MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, CONDI RICE AND HILLARY CLINTON….RSK The Guardian should apologise for publishing propaganda from a journalist who is either misinformed or promoting a despotic Communist regime that imprisons hundreds of thousands t is never surprising to […]