RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346768/tk

The Collapsing of the American Skull
The parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about vital issues shrink remorselessly.

One of the most ingenious and effective strategies of the Left on any number of topics is to frame the debate and co-opt the language so effectively that it becomes all but impossible even to discuss the subject honestly. Take the brothers Tsarnaev, the incendiary end of a Chechen family that in very short time has settled aunts, uncles, sisters, and more across the map of North America from Massachusetts to New Jersey to my own home town of Toronto. Maybe your town has a Tsarnaev, too: There seems to be no shortage of them, except, oddly, back in Chechnya. The Tsarnaevs’ mom, now relocated from Cambridge to Makhachkala in delightful Dagestan, told a press conference the other day that she regrets ever having gotten mixed up with those crazy Yanks: “I would prefer not to have lived in America,” she said.

Not, I’m sure, as much as the Richard family would have preferred it. Eight-year-old Martin was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3360/scottish_hotel_cancels_jewish_event_after_threats Student from St Andrews University have reportedly been stopped from holding a charity event due to threats sent to the venue – the St Andrews Golf Hotel. Jewish students were due to hold a black tie Matzah Ball at the prestigious location with almost 100 expected to attend from around the UK. Money raised was […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3358/obama_is_no_great_persuader

For now, the push for Obama’s gun control agenda ended on April 17th. Every measure in the bill, which wouldn’t have stopped the Newtown tragedy, was voted down; Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s amendment on assault weapons garnered a meager 40 votes.

With the president unable to convince the nation to back his proposals for more restrictions on our Second Amendment rights, can we safely say that his rhetorical skills are overrated? Let’s look at his track record concerning the use of his speech.

Back in 2011, George Will aptly noted the lack of persuasiveness in the president’s power of speech. The more the president talked about his health care reforms, the more they suffered in the opinion polls.

Obama campaigned against Chris Christie in 2009. He’s now governor. During the same period, he tried to stop Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial ambitions in Virginia. He was elected governor too. He tried to stop Scott Brown from filling the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. Brown was elected in the special election.

He went out to support congressional Democrats in 2010. His party ended up suffering a “shellacking,” with Democratic losses almost rivaling that of the 1938 midterms. Lastly, Obama went to Copenhagen at the outset of his presidency to lobby Chicago as the next venue for the 2016 Olympics. In the first round, the International Olympic Committee rejected the city.

Recently, Will mentioned that President Obama has spent the most critical moments of his second term pressing gun control. Almost inevitably, he lost. With the Newtown tragedy, it touched the hearts and minds of every mother, father, and grandparent in the country. 20 schoolchildren had died. How could the president not be successful in pushing for more gun control?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

WAR IS PEACE

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, wounded and held in a Boston hospital, said his brother wanted to defend Islam from attack, according to the source.

Who at the Boston Marathon was attacking Islam? Was a 8-year-old boy at war with Islam?

To attack Islam is to prevent it from expanding. To be a non-Muslim is to be at war with Islam. To defend Islam is to kill non-Muslims.

In Islam, attack is indistinguishable from defense. To be a non-Muslim who insists on self-rule is to obstruct the peace of Islam. There can be no peace in the world as long as non-Muslims rule themselves in the Dar Al-Harb, rather than live as second class Dhimmis within the Dar-Al-Islam.

Islam is an identity. It treats any obstacles, including passive and unknowing obstacles, as active resistance. The active practice of any religion other than Islam is an attack on Islam.

The Boston Bomber’s Old “Defend Islam” Alibi

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE BIG GOVBUSINESS

GE Capital got an inappropriate sweetheart deal from Obama Inc. for a $139 billion bailout. The misappropriated taxpayer money was leveraged to get GE to pursue programs that Obama Inc. favored. Apparently one of those programs is refusing to lend to gun stores.

What we are seeing is the political consolidation of big business into an arm of government with misappropriated taxpayer money being used to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, with the “winners” then doing the dirty work of the government and acting as its regulatory arm, destroying entire areas of business that the government has yet to be able to destroy on its own.

GE Got $139 Billion Obama Bailout, Now Refusing to Lend to Gun Stores

A TAX ON HOT AIR

If Thomas Friedman went stark raving mad, how would anyone tell? The man has written an entire book dedicated to the thesis that the earth is flat and responds to every major event by making up more words and trying to tie them into his globalized flat earth theory. No matter what happens, Friedman shoves into his feeder tube and out comes his randomly generated understanding of the universe.

The difference between Thomas Friedman and the cult leader waiting for the UFO is that the cult leader has some grasp of reality. Friedman does not. He blends the insipid treacle of a motivational speaker with a completely delusional worldview that he makes up as he goes along bolstered by politician style anecdotes of his world travels.

Thomas Friedman has never grown anything except a mustache and it shows. He tries to make up for this by using “incentivize” because he hears that’s what business people do. But all he’s doing is throwing out hollow cliches.

Thomas Friedman Recommends Fighting Islamism With Carbon Taxes

NIGHT OF THE LONG SPORKS

Obama sending out his political hit squad after Senators from his own party who dissented from him on one bill is creepy. The eternal campaign is not only being used to target Republicans, but it’s even being used to perpetrate “Night of the Long Knives” purges within his own party.

The Democratic Party is being radicalized by the far left. It’s hard to imagine that moderate Democrats like Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Senator Henry Jackson would have a place in a Democratic Party so radicalized that it is not only unable to tolerate moderate senators in New York or Washington, but that it can’t even tolerate them in red states where they are the only alternative to Republican senators.

Obama Campaign To Go After Pro-Gun Democratic Senators

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

THE WAR THAT WON’T GO AWAY

After the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Obama asked, “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”

In Obama’s speech, the willingness of the Tsarnaev brothers to kill the people of the country they had grown up in is a paradox. But it isn’t a paradox; it’s the point.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev carried out the marathon massacre not because they were on the outside, but because they were on the inside. Islamic terrorism was their way of expressing their American identity. When they detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon, they weren’t doing it as Chechen Muslims, but as American Muslims.

There is a reason why second and third generation Muslims are more likely to turn terrorist than their immigrant parents. It is because they have become American, British, Canadian and Australian part of the way. They have gone deep enough to begin making a claim on the country. The Western Islamist seeks to align his internal Islamic identity and his external national identity by unifying them through Islamization.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were not fighting for Chechnya at the Boston Marathon. They were fighting against the American infidels who were barring the way to an Islamic America.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/dangerous_times_will_shale_beat_shariah.html A week after the Boston Marathon bombing, Conservative London Mayor Boris Johnson wrote a shameless puff-piece celebrating the glories of “sensuous” camel racing in the Gulf emirates in the London Telegraph. Gulf Arabs, including the Saudi Arabians, are huge terrorist enablers, big European spenders, London party animals, media investors, sexual abusers, wife beaters, Euro-American arms […]

BasicsProject.org Well, bravo to the mainstream media – at least the Conservative mainstream media – for finally putting two-and-two together in understanding the role that political correctness plays in the ongoing conflict with violent jihadists and fundamentalist Islam. To say that they showed up “fashionably late” to the party is borderline sarcastic. Nevertheless, the subject […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/346785/print

The administration’s Boston explanations don’t add up.
Unlike you, federal government officials are immune from charges of fraud. The executive branch, vested with all of the government’s prosecutorial authority and discretion, is not going to investigate its own operatives for carrying out its own mendacious policies.

That is the story of last week’s Boston Marathon bombing and the frantic efforts of the bombers, the brothers Tsarnaev, to evade capture, shoot it out with police (two of whom they killed), and — we’re now told — detonate more bombs in Times Square.
The Times Square non-attack is quite interesting. The specter of it, projected in the immediate wake of the Marathon murders and maimings, is horrific . . . so horrific that the government, in leaking this tidbit from its botched interrogation of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, knew that news media were certain to lead their broadcasts with it. The press would never wonder why they, and thus we, were being told about it.

But why were they told? Remember, the Times Square bombing not only never happened, it never came close to happening. It was, at most, a passing jihadist fantasy, one that the jihadists in question peremptorily dismissed as implausible. The threat was no more real than those that regularly stream out of Islamic-supremacist mosques and, just as regularly, go studiously unreported.

Mind you, there is nothing inappropriate about government officials’ speaking about matters on the public record — such as the allegations lodged in criminal complaints. But the Times Square non-attack is not mentioned in the complaint filed against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. In fact, the complaint includes no information from Tsarnaev’s interrogation.

Yet somehow the airwaves are now full of startling revelations from his Miranda-aborted 16-hour post-arrest interview, including not least his confession, and, of course, his assurance, as Allah is his witness, that no one other than he and his Svengali older brother — and certainly no foreign Islamic terrorist organization — had anything to do with their terror spree.

Strange, isn’t it? We are governed by leftists given to finger-wagging about their commitment to due process and the rule of law — they’re not like those bad old warmongering Bushies. Still, here we are in the post-arrest phase of the civilian prosecution the administration was hell-bent on commencing — the phase when due process obliges government officials to remain mum about non-public investigative information that could taint the jury pool and undermine the defendant’s right to a fair trial — and we’re being inundated with stunning confession evidence.

Remember, this is the same crowd that labels the Fort Hood massacre “workplace violence” and won’t honor its victims with Purple Heart medals. To do so, they sniff, might prejudice the objectivity of the trial of a jihadist mass murderer who has publicly announced he’d like to plead guilty. Now, though, in Tsarnaev’s case, government agencies are leaking like sieves.

Why?

Because you are being softened up. Steered by its Gitmo Bar veterans and Lawyer Left compass, the Obama administration is executing a massive national-security fraud: the farce that the jihad against America can be judicialized, that civilian-court processes are a better answer to enemy warfare than are combat protocols.

http://spme.net/?utm_source=Faculty+Forum+Opt-In&utm_campaign=a553450f8f-Faculty_Forum_2013_02_21_Unconfirmed_21_2013&utm_medium=email

The central subject of this issue of the Faculty Forum is an event which recently took place in the United Kingdom. Ronnie Fraser, a freelance mathematics lecturer, brought a claim of harassment before the Employment Tribunal against the University and College Union, the UCU. As he wrote in his personal statement of March 28, 2013, the issue was one of antisemitism and discrimination. “I believe,” he wrote “that the many witnesses we called were able to provide evidence to the tribunal of an intolerable atmosphere over a number of years and that the UCU did nothing to stop these intellectually anti-Semitic acts taking place.” (It should be noted that according to the thinking of modern peace studies, the integration of this type of hostility into a society’s institutions is a form of structural or indirect violence, which paves the way for open violence.) The distinguished advocate, Anthony Julius of the law firm Mishcon de Reya, represented Mr. Fraser.

In its judgment of March 22, the Employment Tribunal found that “the Claimant’s complaints of unlawful harassment are not well-founded … the Claimant’s complaints of unlawful harassment are … outside of the Tribunal’s jurisdiction … [and] accordingly, the proceedings are dismissed.” This outcome was a setback for Ronnie Fraser and for the Jewish community of the UK. Further, this judgment has international implications which are of great concern.

The tribunal had rejected Fraser’s case “as an attempt to shut down debate on Israel.” Although it is not immediately apparent, the core issue here is one of definition, the definition of the word: “antisemitism.” It should be noted, for example, that the UCU had posted the claim on a private listserv that millions of dollars from the failed Lehman Brother’s Bank were transferred to Israel. Effectively, by defining antisemitism down, the Tribunal did not have a problem with this type of statement and took issue with Fraser for even raising it.

For his part, Ronnie Fraser based his position on the “EUMC working Definition of Antisemitism” [Europ

www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Stupendously-stupid-or-surreptitiously-sinister-311146

Into the fray: The unilateral two-state initiative endorsed by INSS this week is clearly not a ‘creative’ pro-peace measure but a demonstrably anti-settler one.

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees… by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.
– Ayn Rand, 1965

O, who can hold a fire in his hand; By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite; By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow; By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat?
– From William Shakespeare’s Richard II

I am appalled. Just how long will politically biased claptrap be allowed to masquerade as serious policy research?

“Creative” capitulation

When I wrote last week’s column, “The coming canard: “Constructive unilateralism,” I was unaware that, this week, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) would hold its sixth annual conference in Tel Aviv. Traditionally titled “Security Challenges of the 21st Century,” the focus this year was billed as “Creative Ideas for Israel’s Changing Strategic Environment.”

The speaker line-up was undeniably impressive, with an array of well-known figures from Israel and abroad – politicians, senior military officers and government officials, media personalities, academics and policy analysts.

The program spanned a range of worthy topics that extended beyond purely military and security spheres, including social, economic and diplomatic matters as well.

On some issues the recommendations made, and conclusions drawn, seemed sensible and well-grounded – although I did puzzle over why they may merit the description “creative.”

Thus for example, I found myself endorsing the findings of the team dealing with the question of how to contend with the threat of a nuclear Iran, which urged the US to opt for “strengthening the credibility of the military alternative,” remarking that “the Iranian leadership does not really feel threatened. This impairs the effectiveness of the diplomatic alternative.”

Likewise I tend to concur with the policy prescription for Israeli decision-makers: “…

if all options have failed, and the government of Israel has to choose between an Iranian bomb and the bombing of Iran, it should choose the option of bombing Iran….”

But when it comes to the Palestinian issue, things differ dramatically. Indeed, here the only “creative” suggestion is complete – and completely counterproductive – capitulation.

Poor political science

Readers will recall that last week I warned that comprehensive, coordinated and concerted efforts are being initiated to promote a nonsensical notion, perversely dubbed “constructive unilateralism” (hereinunder CU).

In broad strokes, CU advocates declare a priori – and independently of any reciprocal measure from the Palestinians – that Israel should:

• Renounce any claims to sovereignty beyond a pre-determined line (roughly the present route of the separation barrier, i.e.virtually the entire area of Judea-Samaria);
• Remove all Jewish civil presence across this line either by financial inducements (by offering monetary compensation for evacuation), economic strangulation (by ceasing any development
of Jewish communities in the area) or physical abandonment (by transferring control to the Palestinian Authority); and
• Leave the IDF deployed in areas evacuated, and in territory over which Israel concedes it has no claims to sovereignty.

Clearly, were these measures to be implemented, the political reality that would prevail in the evacuated territories would be largely similar to that which prevailed in pre-2000 South Lebanon, and we all remember how that ended – with the hasty retreat of the IDF and the empowerment of Hezbollah.

Thus, any suggestion to replicate those realities – only this time on a much a larger scale and closer to Israel’s coastal megatropolis – is based on atrociously poor political science and grievous political amnesia. Or worse, a surreptitious and sinister hidden agenda. Read on…

Seamless symbiosis – a reminder

I pointed out that the entity publicly promoting the CU-initiative is an organization called Blue and White Future (B&WF), which describes itself as “a nonpartisan political movement… funded by private donors in Israel… and elsewhere.”

There is, however, an extensive overlap between individuals involved in, the ideas promoted and the vehicles of publication employed by B&WF and INSS, that reveal an almost seamless symbiosis between the two entities, with the former tasked with public activism and the latter with providing the intellectual bona fides.

My diagnosis was dramatically validated this week, at the INSS conference, when the major elements of the CU-concept were given extensive exposure and emphatic endorsement. In a session titled “The Palestinian Issue: Towards a Reality of Two States,” the INSS findings/recommendations were presented by Gilead Sher, co-founder/ chairman of B&WF and a senior research fellow at INSS, who headed the institute’s team that dealt with the study of the topic.

I wish I could find a way to say this more diplomatically, as I have no personal animosity for anyone involved in the compilation of the almost seven-page document produced by the team. Indeed, in some cases quite the opposite. But, sadly I cannot.