RUTHFULLY YOURS

I must confess I had a moment of schadenfreude – taking pleasure in another’s misfortune – when I read that, in late September, the Russians had seized the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, and towed it to the port of Murmansk after Greenpeace personnel had boarded a Russian oil platform, “Priraslomnaya,” in the Pechora Sea.

Russia called the 30 people arrested “pirates” and, if found guilty, they face sentences from 10 to 15 years in prison. Five of them were Russians while the others came from some 17 nations, including the United States.

Greenpeace is best known for its propaganda tactics, the latest being the trespass of the oil platform, but in 2009, while Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was docked in Copenhagen, the tables were turned when members of CFACT, a U.S. think tank devoted to debunking environmental claims, boarded it and, while distracting the crew with donuts, hung a banner that obscured the word “Rainbow” with “Propaganda” turning it into the Propaganda Warrior.

A CFACT spokesman said that the piracy charged seemed too severe, but thought lesser charges should apply. Even Russian President Putin said that piracy did not apply, but their actions were reckless. “We can’t help but appreciate the irony. Greenpeace conducts ongoing campaigns for greater government control over individuals. In Russia, they may get a taste of where that leads.”

Greenpeace has incurred the wrath of many with its aggressive, attention-grabbing tactics and, in 1985 French Special Forces sunk the original Rainbow Warrior when it was docked in New Zealand. Ultimately, an international court ruled that France had to pay Greenpeace $8 million. More recently, Greenpeace campaigners who scaled the chimney of the UK’s Kingsnorth coal power plant were acquitted.

While the incidents Greenpeace stages are intended to draw attention to it, most people are unaware of how large the organization is. It has offices in more than 40 nations as it pursues its campaigns devoted to global warming, deforestration, overfishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering, and anti-nuclear issues.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yogi-bear-starves-to-death-during-government-shutdown The death of Yogi Bear, lifelong resident of Jellystone Park, was announced by Ranger Smith this week. According to Ranger Smith, Yogi died of starvation related to the current government shutdown. “Unlike other bears at Jellystone, who eat berries, grass, insects and the occasional fish or bit of roadkill, Yogi subsisted on sandwiches, potato […]

Young America’s Foundation Celebrates ‘No More Che Day’

Editor’s note: October 9, 2013 marks the 5th anniversary of the YAF sponsored “No More Che Day.” It also marks the 46th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death.

Good thing the college “hipsters” who wear Che T-shirts didn’t live in Stalinist Cuba under their idol.

“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates!” snarled the KGB-mentored Che Guevara in 1961. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service! Youth should learn to think and act as a mass. It is criminal to think of individuals! Individualism must disappear from Cuba!”

By the mid-’60s, the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle (blue jeans, long hair, fondness for the Beatles and Rolling Stones) or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked out of Cuba’s streets and parks by Che’s KGB-trained secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” emblazoned in bold letters above the gate and with machine-gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today, the world’s largest image of the man whom so many college hipsters sport on their shirts adorns Cuba’s headquarters and torture chambers for its KGB-trained secret police. Nothing could be more fitting.

The most popular version of the Che T-shirt, for instance, sports the slogan “fight oppression” under his famous countenance. This is the face of the second-in-command, chief executioner, and chief KGB liaison for a regime that jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s and murdered more people in its first five years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six.

Forty-six years ago today, Ernesto “Che” Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. If the saying “What goes around comes around” ever fit, it’s here.

“When you saw the beaming look on Che’s face as his victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad,” said a former Cuban political prisoner, to this writer, “you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by intellectual Michael Chandler, Conservative TV and Movie Star Morgan Brittany and Filmmaker Orestes Matacena (“Two de Force“).

This week the Gang discussed Secrets of the Shutdown. The discussion occurred in Part I (starting at the 12:20 mark) and focused on Obama’s endgame. The dialogue also shed light on ObamaDon’tCare.

Last year, Team Obama was wallowing in praise for its election tech strategy. Its strike team of Silicon Valley pros who believed in stock options and Socialism were credited with winning the election by applying the same data tools that had made Facebook and Google so creepy.

And then when it came time to debut Obama’s signature achievement (if you don’t count wrecking the Middle East) the implementation was every bit as disastrous as if the project had been outsourced to someone’s cousin who had once taken a web design course in 1996.

The ObamaCare websites didn’t go down because of high demand. They went down because of bad design. The design on Healthcare.gov was so bad that it was almost as if the website had been designed to fail. Or as one tech expert put it, the website was so cluttered with junk that it was running a denial of service attack against itself.

It’s not too surprising that a government website would be badly designed, but Team Obama’s digital strategy had been built around using them for messaging to bypass even friendly media outlets. The content on government websites blended with the Obama campaign so closely that it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

But that is where the border between competency and incompetence for Team Obama begins. Team Obama excels at promoting Obama and attacking Republicans. It isn’t actually good at anything else.

The left excels at one thing and only one thing; propaganda. Great products and bad marketing are a familiar business story. But what the left has is a terrible product with great marketing.

Vladimir Putin likes to talk about the importance of national sovereignty, with special emphasis on not meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries. But now he is stretching the long arm of Russian law into Western European capitals. And Stockholm, at least, appears willing to play along.

Four years ago, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed in prison by his jailers for trying to expose a $230 million fraud. Not satisfied with that outcome, Mr. Putin put Magnitsky posthumously on trial and convicted him, along with his client Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, of tax evasion. Mr. Browder, who remains very much alive, was expelled from Russia eight years ago, but Moscow apparently isn’t done with him. After his “conviction,” Russia sought an international warrant for his arrest from Interpol, which sensibly refused to become complicit in Mr. Putin’s campaign.

Mr. Browder’s real crime is to have spent the past four years seeking justice for Magnitsky. He pushed for the Magnitsky Act passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law in 2012. The Act imposes financial sanctions and travel bans on Russians guilty of human-rights violations. Last month, federal prosecutors used the act to seize several pieces of Manhattan real estate owned by a Cyprus-based shell company allegedly linked to Magnitsky’s jailers.

Mr. Browder has been pressing countries in Europe to adopt a similar approach, and earlier this year he was invited to testify to the Swedish Parliament about the need for a Swedish Magnitsky Act. As has become his habit, Mr. Browder sought assurance from Stockholm that he would not be arrested and shipped off to Russia.

Martin Valfridsson, State Secretary in the Swedish Ministry of Justice, twice declined the request, claiming that he was not permitted under Swedish law to provide advance notice that any particular person would not be arrested. Mr. Valfridsson’s letters express all the appropriate concerns about Magnitsky’s case and fate, but in the end he seeks refuge in a different set of pieties about the rule of law and Sweden’s international obligations.

The fact that so many still entertain that Israel should give up her inheritance is bad enough, but many think that Israel should divide Jerusalem.

Ponder that for a moment! Would you ask the French to divide Paris? Would you ask the Italians to divide Rome? There are a lot of people who think it outrageous that the British divided Ireland in 1921. We Americans fought to preserve our own unity during the Civil War; and did so even though both the British and French favored the Confederates. We defied world opinion to win.

Yet, somehow, we ask Israel to make territorial concessions that none of our respective countries would tolerate. This is the height of hypocrisy, and doubly so, when it comes to Jerusalem.

Psalm 137:5-6 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Has the obscenity of 40 years of a divided Berlin been so erased from Germany’s memory? One does not divide cities. Have the Germans who bemoaned their country divided for four decades so quickly forgotten? Now some Germans are taking the Palestinian side. The German government could only muster the courage to abstain from the vote on Palestinian statehood.

The Irish bemoan that the core of its ancient Gaelic civilization, Ulster, is still in British hands. Yet, they fail to understand that Israel might want the center of her ancient Hebrew civilization: Judea and Samaria. Do any of these countries have a sense of history? Even their own?!

Norway is now a hotbed of anti-Israel opinion. Have they forgotten who occupied Norway for 5 years in World War II? Was it Zionists or Nazis?!

The list goes on. Starting with the sadly comical, we can look at Québec, where Huntington mayor and TV commentator, Stéphane Gendron, made outrageous comments about Israel on TV, saying Israel does not deserve to exist. The man is Quebécois, from a people who demand the right to have a French culture and nation, yet somehow cannot understand why Jews might want to have a Jewish culture and nation. If Monsieur Gendron wants to fight apartheid, perhaps he should start dismantling Québec’s Francophonic Language codes. This is a man who bragged about running over kittens in his pickup. Yet, somehow the Québecois consider him a major intellectual force, qualified to comment on Israel.

Then we have the infuriating Roger Waters. With so many tyrannies to choose from, he chooses to attack Israel. Waters is an elderly rocker who somewhere along the line never learned that rockers do not know beans about politics.

Our own government here in the USA is the most damaging. We alone seem to have some influence with Israel; and we abuse it to unwise ends. The most recent absurdity is promising $4 billion dollars to bribe the Palestinian Authority to negotiate with Israel. The only thing that will accomplish is to subsidize Swiss banks.

The press briefing at the Foreign Office was a routine affair, a photo-opportunity for the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, to show that the Anglo-American special relationship was not in tatters after all by standing alongside the visiting US Secretary of State, John Kerry. The question to Kerry, from Margaret Brennan of CBS, was one of those journalistic afterthoughts, tacked on to the end of a long-winded demand for a response to yet another Syrian denial of culpability: “And secondly, is there anything at this point that [Assad’s] government could do or offer that would stop an attack?”

“Sure.” John Kerry’s reply was unhesitating. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that.” Then, a snort of dismissal: the busy statesman was evidently impatient with this line of speculation. “But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

Kerry had misspoken. Did he realise immediately? Everybody else did. What was obvious to him was by no means so to the Russians and their clients in Damascus. Why wouldn’t Assad do it, and why couldn’t it be done? Hey presto — a diplomatic démarche! Before Washington had even woken up, a new Russian peace initiative was on the table, intended to delay any US attack until the Greek Kalends. From the Kremlin came the sound of popping corks; from the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the sound of gnashing of teeth; from the Pentagon, the sound of orders countermanded; from the Sixth Fleet off the Syrian coast, the sound of retreat; from Assad’s bunker, the sound of “Allahu Akhbar!”

And from the White House? Silence — or was that a sigh of relief? President Obama had been looking for weeks for a way out of launching an unpopular punitive action. Congress had supplied a reason for delay, but a congressional veto would make the President look weak. Obama needed another excuse to jaw-jaw rather than war-war. So he was secretly gratified by the Russian initiative — authorship of which was retrospectively claimed by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, to great applause in Warsaw. Nobody seemed to pay much attention to the victims of the Syrian civil war: the dozens of towns reduced to rubble, the thousands of corpses, the millions of refugees. While the diplomats and inspectors talked, the war would go on.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/dizzy-spells/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f4ce370fe9-Mosaic_2013_10_9&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f4ce370fe9-41165129   There is something lubriciously intriguing about the biography of a Victorian statesman subtitled “The Two Lives”. Given the current fashion among biographers for closet-rattling in search of hidden skeletons, one might imagine the two lives to be anatomised were a hypocritically virtuous public existence and a sybaritically scandalous private one — a portrait […]

And I don’t mean the “itbach al-Yahud”-chanting crowd.

A friend sent me an article to read which appeared in the October 6th Jerusalem Post. The author, Aaron Magid, is a Masters candidate in Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. This brought back some painful memories of my own masters and doctoral studies in this same field decades ago. His essay was titled Feeling Uncomfortable At J Street. Here’s how he opened it…

“Attending the annual J Street Conference for the first time, I wanted to be proven wrong. Supporters of Israel within the Jewish community had ridiculed the newly created lobby group for launching harsh and unfair attacks against Israel. As a supporter of Israel who is also firmly opposed to increased settlement building and in favor of ending the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, I believed J Street would be my perfect home.”

Aaron will likely succeed where I failed. He attended this year’s annual J Street Conference because he sings some of those folks’ same tunes–he’s all for a Judenrein Judea, for example. This goes over nicely with too many running the duplicitous show in the Ivory Tower as well.

I naively expected that the same lenses of academic scrutiny would be applied towards Arabs and others pointing fingers at Jewish nationalism and Israel and paid the price. I was denied a Ph.D. dissertation advisor by the chief honcho, a specialist on Turkey, who, among many other such things, managed to never mention the word “Kurd” once and who liked to speak about “fascist Zionists” and such. I raised the wrong issues and asked the wrong questions.