RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323475304578503110141945172.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Mr. Babin is a former Navy SEAL officer who deployed three times to Iraq.

In 2006, my SEAL Task Unit deployed to Ramadi, Iraq. Among the rubble-pile buildings, bomb craters and burned-out hulks of vehicles, we experienced firsthand the harsh realities of war. We fought alongside the U.S. Army’s Ready First Brigade of the First Armored Division to take Ramadi back from a brutal and determined insurgency.

Combat is hard. It is alarmingly violent, ear-shattering, dirty, exhausting and ugly. It is marked by chaos and confusion and self-doubt. But combat also highlights the determination and sacrifice—and courage—of those who persevere. Through such times, an unbreakable bond is formed with brothers-in-arms.

Those bonds were tested greatly as our task unit suffered the first SEAL casualties of the Iraq War: Marc Lee and Mike Monsoor. Later, Ryan Job died of wounds received in combat. These men were three of the most talented and capable SEALs I have known. They were also loyal friends. Their loss is deeply personal to their families and to their SEAL teammates. As Marc’s and Ryan’s platoon commander, I bear the crushing burden of responsibility. I will forever wish that I could somehow take their place.

As a result, Memorial Day is deeply personal—to me, as it is to any veteran, to any military family. It is a time of mixed emotion: solemn reflection and mourning, honor and admiration for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country.
Let’s remember on Memorial Day—and every other day, for that matter—that America did not become a nation without a fight. Last week, I found myself in Washington, D.C., admiring a bronze statue of George Washington. The statue shows him as a general, astride a horse, sword drawn at the ready. This was Washington as a true American leader, inspiring those around him by showing that he too was willing to risk death for the cause of victory. The statue brought to mind the thousands of soldiers who marched with him into battle against the British, facing seemingly impossible odds.

It was not the Declaration of Independence that gave us freedom but the Continental Army. America was born from conflict, delivered by soldiers willing to pay with their blood the tremendous cost of freedom.

The dead did not wish to be martyred. They no doubt longed to return to their homes and families. But they believed in the “glorious cause,” something far greater than themselves. Despite knowing the dangers before them, they followed Gen. Washington into the fray even when victory seemed hopeless and the cause all but lost.

In America today, there are those who believe that under no circumstances is war the answer. Violence only begets more violence, we’re told. The unstated message: Nothing is worth fighting and dying for. History disagrees.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349313/obama-s-cynical-war-speech
Islamic supremacism is not based on a lie.

Two plus two equals five. I mean, I really want it to be five. So let’s just pretend it’s five and, before you know it, it’ll be five. After all, we are the ones (or is it the fives?) we’ve been waiting for. My narrow-minded opponents, stuck in the mathematics of a bygone time, would have us make a false choice between elementary addition and our values. But as James Madison or James Rosen or somebody said, “The arc of arithmetic is long, but it bends toward, um . . . five.”

That, it seemed to me, was about what President Obama was saying in his wag-the-jihad speech on Thursday at the National Defense University in Washington. Poetic justice would not give social justice the time of day, so it is tempting simply to ignore this cynical exercise — the speech was less about national security than about changing the subject. But the otherworldliness of Obama’s meanderings on war and the enemy is worth mulling over.

Why this speech at this time? Because the president is embroiled in not one but three scandals (and counting), involving his derelictions of duty in connection with the Benghazi massacre, as well as his administration’s serial abuses of prosecutorial and regulatory power (siccing the Justice Department on the press and the IRS on the Tea Party). All this malfeasance was for the benefit of Barack Obama, and occurred in an anything-goes climate created by Barack Obama; but, we are told, it happened unbeknownst to Barack Obama, for whom leading from behind is apparently not just a foreign policy but a management style.
The immediate aim of Thursday’s hour-long drone on drones was to turn the news page just before the holiday weekend. From the president’s perspective, it must have seemed a better idea than dispatching yet another of his bumbling emissaries to implode on the Sunday shows.

Longer term, Obama knows who he is and where he is from. When past presidents have gotten into hot water, their instinct has been to mollify the opposition: The monthly Clinton scandal would hit, and next thing you knew a budget was balanced, welfare was reformed, or the era of big government was suddenly over. In marked contrast, Obama is a movement leftist, so when the going gets tough, back into the fever swamp he dives. Thus the speech was like old times: as if it were 2008 again and we were back to Bush’s Iraq War, Bush’s crimes, and Bush’s gulag at Gitmo.

On these accounts, the speech was a yawn. Iraq is in flames, but the Left never cared about that, and most of us who supported toppling Saddam Hussein never shared Bush’s fantasy of a stable “Islamic democracy” that would be a reliable American ally. That Shiites and Sunnis have reverted to their default position, internecine butchery, is a dog-bites-man story. As for Bush’s notorious “crimes,” the public largely supported the interrogation practices the Left demagogues as “torture.” After all, these practices generated the intelligence responsible for the very triumphs — notably, killing bin Laden — Obama ceaselessly brags about. And Congress is not going to close Gitmo when two-thirds of the country (a) strongly supports keeping it open, (b) does not believe it causes terrorism, and (c) couldn’t care less that Obama and his Code Pink base say “history” will judge us harshly. Truth be told, we’re more concerned about how history will judge Obama’s plan to repatriate scores of Gitmo detainees to al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Yemen.

The consequential part of the speech dealt with Obama’s views on the nature of the war. On even this, the president is nothing if not cynical. He proclaimed himself the scourge of what he freely called “violent jihad” — evidently figuring no one would remember he’s the guy who purged words like “jihad” from the government’s counterterrorism lexicon. But when it came to the ideology of our enemies, the speech really did get interesting.

For one thing, the president actually acknowledged not only that the threat to the United States is ideologically based, but also that the adherents of this ideology are Muslim extremists. This was a refreshing change from his wont of calling the threat “violent extremism” (violence being a consequence, not an ideology), and pretending that its adherents are anti-Islamic.

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2013/05/24/obamas-head-in-the-sand-speech-about-terrorism/?print=1 President Barack Obama’s speech at the National Defense University, “The Future of Our Fight against Terrorism,” is a remarkable exercise in wishful thinking and denial. Essentially, his theme: the only strategic threat to the United States is posed by terrorists carrying out terrorist attacks. In the 6400 words used by Obama, Islam only constituted three of […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/who-are-the-real-climate-deniers/

I recently attended a fascinating and informative talk by Tom Harris, director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), delivered at a branch of the Ottawa Public Library. The lecture was, in part, framed as a response to a presentation held the week before by Dave Rhynas, an Al Gore-trained speaker, who followed the warmist party line faithfully. As Harris wrote afterward about it in a circulating email, “The talk was very ‘canned,’ no significant new material from what we are all used to hearing from Gore, so it would have been very easy to take it apart scientifically” — which is precisely what Harris proceeded to do during his subsequent presentation.

Harris is a genial and soft-spoken man, carrying the heft of his encyclopedic knowledge of climate science with effortless good humor and a reluctance to traffic in mere polemics. He weighed both sides of the argument with scrupulous fairness and conceded that many of those on the other shore of the climate divide approach the subject with undoubted moral concern, though not, regrettably, with scientifically valid objectivity. Harris is always willing to give the benefit of the doubt respecting the ethical character of his opponents, even when it is not entirely warranted. His adversary, I’m sorry to say, who sat in the audience two chairs down the row from me, was the polar opposite: dour, grim, portentously solemn in his demeanor, patently disapproving, interrupting more than once, listening as if he were painfully unwilling to listen and taking copious notes as if he were stockpiling ammunition. The body language and general comportment of the two men spoke volumes; one, accommodating and engaging, the other, stiff and piliated, as if underscoring the difference in their philosophies.

Harris’s main point is that the science is far from settled and that if we were honest with ourselves and wished to approach the subject with scientific rigor and impartiality, we would have to modestly agree, in his own words, that “the more we learn, the more we realize that we just do not know. Climate change and extreme weather have always happened and always will, no matter what we do. Perhaps instead of trying to stop it from occurring, we need to adapt and promote a sensible approach to a range of energy and environmental topics.” We plainly need “to learn more about the vast uncertainties in the field of climate change and discuss sensible policy actions.”

Uncertainty, however, is not synonymous with confusion or ignorance. We do not know everything or even enough, but we still know a fair amount about climate realities, as Harris’s discourse made clear. We know the long history of climatological variations, the many different factors that impinge upon and largely account for vast fluctuations in weather over the centuries and millennia, and the response of the scientific community, often, it must be said, disingenuous and repressive, to the data at its disposal.

We know, via proxies like ice core samples, fossil remains, marine specimens, temperature-dependent remanence [1] measurements, as well as historical documents, etc., that there were periods in history when the earth was significantly warmer than it is today, though human beings were not pumping CO2 into the atmosphere — CO2 levels during the Ordovician Age 440 million years ago were ten times higher [2] than they are at present and happened to coincide with an ice age; closer to home, during the Medieval Warm Period the Scandinavians farmed Greenland and in the Roman Warm Period olive groves flourished in Germany. We know that the Northwest Passage was open [3] during the early part of the 20th century and that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, as recounted in his The North West Passage [4], navigated the strait between 1903 and 1906. (Its “gates” have been “forced…ajar,” he writes, and “traced from end to end by one ship’s keel” — his own.)

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/21/delivering-serbs-to-the-wolves

The Balkans Wars may be over, but the European Union continues its biased attempt at geopolitical social engineering. As always, the principal victims are ethnic Serbs.

Serbia and Kosovo last month announced an agreement for Belgrade’s de facto recognition of Kosovo’s independence. The parties have been squabbling over the pact’s implementation, but the delay likely is merely temporary.

The winners and losers are obvious. Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic admitted: “I’m not saying that the agreement is good, but at this stage we could not get anything better.” The EU offered fulsome congratulations to itself for imposing the plan — by threatening to block Serbian accession to the organization. In fact, since intervening in the Balkans roughly two decades ago Europe and the U.S. have followed only one consistent policy: the Serbs always lose. Even if that meant acquiescing to human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing by the West’s allies.

The Balkans was an inadvertent casualty of the end of the Cold War. Yugoslavia was an artificial creation out of World War I that united antagonistic ethnic groups. After World War II the threat of Soviet intervention helped hold Yugoslavia together. However, long-time dictator Josip Broz Tito died in 1980 and the Cold War ended a decade later. The country’s disintegration was accelerated by Slobodan Milosevic’s use of Serbian nationalism to gain power.

In 1990 nationalists won elections in various Yugoslav republics, which began declaring independence the following year. Civil war erupted in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Fighting in the latter was particularly vicious. Serb forces were brutal, but no side was innocent of atrocities. The West, however, preferred to see only Serbian crimes, intervening to impose the Dayton accords, which allowed ethnic Muslims and Croats in Bosnia to secede from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, but required ethnic Serbs to remain in Muslim-dominated Bosnia.

Allied policy toward Croatia was particularly grotesque. The West supported the anti-Semitic nationalist Franjo Tudjman, even training Croatian forces that conducted the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing — essentially wiping Serbs out of their historic homeland in Croatia’s Krajina region — until Kosovo. However, Washington and Brussels declined to criticize Zagreb for its atrocities. Years later the region remained scarred by war, dotted with wrecked homes, empty churches, and bullet-marked buildings, courtesy of allied policy.

Kosovo was the final piece of Yugoslavia to separate through war. The historic heartland of Serbian culture, Kosovo was transformed over the years, resulting in an ethnic Albanian majority. During local self-rule the minority ethnic Serb population suffered. When Milosevic reestablished central government control, ethnic Albanians suffered. The result was a violent struggle in which insurgents, described as “terrorists” by one U.S. diplomat, and security forces traded brutalities.

Although Western governments largely ignored mass slaughter in Africa, they declared their shock and horror at the deaths of hundreds of white Europeans. After unsuccessfully attempting to convince Belgrade to voluntarily cede control of Kosovo and give the allies free military access throughout Serbia, NATO launched its first war — against a country that had neither attacked nor threatened to attack any alliance member.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Can-the-people-of-Israel-trust-the-government-of-Israel-314214 The people of Israel are confronting a crisis of credibility. Can they trust the people elected to lead them? This week, almost a decade and a half after the Muhammad al-Dura incident at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip, the government of Israel has taken a stand, rebuting responsibility for the death of […]

http://acdemocracy.org/?utm_source=Svoboda+Fuels++Ukraine%27s+Growing+Anti-Semitism&utm_campaign=ACD%2FEWI+BLOG&utm_medium=email The rise of anti-Semitism in Ukraine is barely noticed in State Department’s recent International Religious Freedom Report for 2012. This is especially alarming, because even in the best of times, anti-Semitism is as prevalent in Ukraine as coal in Newcastle.   The collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to nationalist far-right organizations as […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3726/axis-of-jihad Two years into the seismic shift that brought the forces of Islamic jihad and Sharia law to power in country after country in the Middle East and North Africa — with the astonishing and extensive assistance from the U.S. — Iran, Hizballah and al-Qa’eda apparently judge that the U.S. and its Western allies still […]

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/ Human Rights Voices Newsletter – May 24, 2013 In the Spotlight Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Human Rights Democratic Multilateral Alternatives President Obama: do nothing on Iran UN Nuclear Agency “Corroborates” Iran Developing “Nuclear Explosion Device” But Obama Still Dithering President Obama is still blathering on about talking Iran out of its nuclear […]

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/05/24/holder-must-go/ Holder must go By Jennifer Rubin, May 24, 2013 Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday. The […]