RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘I just don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish.” So says Jim Hagen, South Dakota’s secretary of tourism, about the federal government’s blocking off not only the entrance to the Mount Rushmore monument but also roadside viewing areas outside the park. “They won’t even let you pull off on the side of the road,” he says, noting that this particular act of shutdown theater is damaging his state’s tourism economy and ruining the plans of countless travelers. Shutdowns are strangely labor-intensive things: After setting up traffic cones to block off the Mount Rushmore viewing areas, the feds had to pick them up again because of a blizzard, but apparently had plans to put them right back down again after the plowing is done. Perhaps Mr. Hagen has too gentle a cast of mind to appreciate just what the Obama administration is trying to accomplish: It is an act of political theater, a gross and possibly illegal abuse of political power, an assault on private property, and a wanton subjugation of responsible governance to the political interests of President Obama and his party.

Consider the case of Ralph and Joyce Spencer, 77 and 80 years of age, respectively, who were evicted from their home on Lake Mead in Nevada by an officious park ranger who told them they had 24 hours to vacate the premises. The Spencers own their home outright, but it sits on land leased from the federal government. A lease is a legal contract, and the government shutdown presents no legitimate reason for the violation of that contract. Even if it did, the place to settle such a dispute is in a court of law — not through the arbitrary exercise of federal police power. This is not a blunder: It is the malicious harassment of private citizens in their own homes by an administration intent on creating hardships and then using them for propaganda purposes. You own your home right up until the moment when that the fact becomes inconvenient to President Obama.

After a week of controversy over Labour leader Ed Miliband’s Marxist father, we need to focus on the core issue: the historical reality of communist oppression [See update at the bottom of the piece]

Why isn’t the Black Book of Communism on the curriculum of every school in Europe? Because it isn’t exhaustive enough? Because its authors lack credibility? Because there is still more to be understood and researched on the matter?

At more than 850 pages of carefully sifted evidence by a group of top-level scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines, the Black Book is as solid a piece of scholarship as any other you’ll find being taught in our schools.

Is it definitive? How could it be? Communist regimes went to great lengths to conceal their crimes, and one of the most oppressive of all, North Korea, still exists to this day. What the book does is use the best available evidence to give a sense of the scale of what we are dealing with.

In introducing the Black Book, lead author Stephane Courtois, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, offers the following rough breakdown of the numbers of people that communism killed:

USSR — 20 million

China — 65 million

Vietnam — 1 million

North Korea — 2 million

Cambodia — 2 million

Eastern Europe — 1 million

Latin America — 150,000

Africa — 1.7 million

Afghanistan — 1.5 million

Communist movements, parties not in power — 10,000

In total, this is not far short of 100 million deaths at the hands of a single ideology. Nothing like this has ever happened before. (As an aside, my personal view is that the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews was the greatest single crime of the modern era, while communism was the greatest criminal system.)

If a 9 year old Palestinian girl had been shot by Israel, and the government had gloried in it, this would be headline news, worldwide. The BBC is shameless in its bigotry

Some readers may have little daughters of nine, younger or older. Regardless, you have the capacity for empathy? Palestinian children count just as much as any other. They suffer under the currents of history, in our view mainly due to their own leaders.

But no matter, a child is child. Unless she’s an Israeli Jew, the BBC and most of the Western media appears to believe. We will keep this brief, but it is truly shocking and disgusting. As we reported here, a nine year old girl was shot by a Palestinian sniper while the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority circulated on Facebook a celebration of the would-be child murderer, thus:

“The sniper of Palestine was here. He saluted Hebron, and rested in El-Bireh. He left the signature of [real] men in different parts of the homeland. He saluted and left, and moved on to a different place, with a new signature, as he tells the stories of those who love the homeland.”

If Israel had sent a sniper to kill a little Palestinian girl that on its own would have been major international news. If the Israeli Cabinet had gloried in it, this would have been top news for days or weeks on end. A UN resolution would not have been out of the question.

BBC headlne? Not at all.

Since she’s a 9 year old Israeli Jew, no-one cares. The BBC isn’t biased. It’s possessed with hate. And since they know this story — from us and others — there can really be no other conclusion than that.

Or do you have a better explanation? Journalistic integrity just ain’t one of them…

Diplomats gravitate from all over the globe to New York City for United Nations week. Traffic is snarled and barriers block midtown streets so the panjandrums of the globe can determine the fate of Syria, nuclear weapons in Iran and a Palestinian state. But this is only part of the reality.

These so-called diplomats representing every form of tyrannical regime are in New York to indulge themselves. Strip joints are filled to capacity. African “statesmen” in Brioni suits are preoccupied with jiggling strippers. And prostitutes are booked solid. New York is Gomorrah and the U.N. officials love it.

Moreover, so do their wives and significant others. Bergdorf Goodman has a queue in front of its Fifth Avenue store as women line up for baubles and beads, threads and make-up, aggregating to impressive five figure numbers. Even Arab women in black burkas buy Prada gear to keep under their make-shift effort at phony modesty.

The veneer of respectability is accepted by most New Yorkers because the cash registers are on over-time, but there is a perverse dimension to this decadence. Most of these national representatives wouldn’t be able to recognize a human rights issue if it bit them in the rear end.

When they do speak in the U.N. forum, they mouth the words that were assigned to them. In more instances than one might guess, the representatives are recovering from stupor induced revelry. There aren’t any issues in the U.N., only interests. Most of the states are dictatorships placed in the ironic position of deciding the political liberty of others. At the General Assembly every state has the same influence whether it be Micronesia or China. To call it a farce, does not do justice to farce or fairness or even common sense.

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double-life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, April 2010. A Time to Betray was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award and the 2011 International Best Book Award.

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Despite President Obama’s outreach to the new president of Iran, Islamic radicals walked over a U.S. flag and spat on Obama’s image on their way to prayers on Friday.

Mashregh, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards, published a photo of the image of Obama alongside the U.S. flag laid on the ground and radicals walking over them. The picture shows one individual spitting on Obama’s image.

And while the Obama administration and U.S. media have generally portrayed the phone call and Twitter exchange between Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as evidence of warming relations, in September the website of the Quds cyber officers posted an image of Obama, wearing a Nazi field marshal’s uniform, surrendering with his hands on his head. The caption reads, “In the not too distant future…. One [Gen. Qasem] Soleimani is enough for all the enemies of this country.”

In an effort to emphasize the Islamic Republic’s view of the United States as the “Great Satan,” mass rallies will be held across Iran to shout “Death to America” and assail worldwide Zionism on the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover of November 4, 1979, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Masoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters, announced on Saturday.

Colonel Ken Allard is a widely known commentator on foreign policy and security issues. For more than a decade, he was a featured military analyst on NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. That experience provided the backdrop for his most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/perilous-dalliance-with-egyptian-extremists#ixzz2h7oYL2x4
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

“No way!” sniffed the money-honey at Washington Dulles International Airport as she refused to exchange my stack of Egyptian pound notes. “That currency is so unstable, we can’t even establish an exchange rate in real money. It’s worthless paper.” Badly jet-lagged, I testily replied that some humility might be in order since the American government, backer of the aforementioned “real money,” was at that very moment, technically insolvent. While I won the debate on points, those Egyptian pounds are still with me as rueful souvenirs of last week’s whirlwind fact-finding trip to Egypt.

Organized by the Westminster Institute, a McLean-based think tank, our small delegation of media and military analysts was given extraordinary access to Egypt’s top decision-makers, the first such private visit since last summer’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our principal interlocutors included the minister of defense, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi; Theodoros II, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church; and Amr Moussa, drafter-in-chief of the new Egyptian Constitution. We also interviewed business leaders, journalists and student revolutionaries, street-wise veterans of the back-to-back uprisings that toppled the authoritarian regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi.

A few chapters back in the Cory Booker story, the dashing young mayor of Newark, New Jersey was actually dashing into a burning building to save a helpless woman.

Now here we are, a few plot twists later, and Cory Booker’s halo is looking kind of mucky. Take those flirty tweets he sent to an impressively tattooed stripper, the one and only Ms. Lynsie Lee. Did the public react to this naughty news with prudish gasps of disgust?

Nope. Instead, cynics, who were getting used to Booker’s antics, pointed out he may have deployed those tweets to scotch rumors of certain other…. proclivities.

Now, really, tell me. How well is your campaign going when your best-case scenario is you really did mean to tweet that stripper?

It’s getting hard not to notice that Cory Booker likes to lie. A lot. Which is why New Jersey’s special Senate election on October 16 is tightening fast. Booker’s lead over businessman Steve Lonegan has collapsed from a princely 30-point advantage to a mere 3. People are starting to whisper Booker may lose.

Let’s start with the Great T-Bone Fantasia, unearthed by crack reporter Eliana Johnson of NRO. T-Bone was baaaaad. T-Bone sold drugs and threatened to shoot Booker dead. But, wouldn’t you know, T-Bone had a vulnerable side, too, sobbing out his heartrending story in Booker’s car.

What drama! What inner-city realism! What a crock. T-Bone never existed, no matter how many times Booker told his made-up tales to enthralled audiences at Yale and other upscale venues.

And that teen gunshot victim who died operatically in Booker’s arms? He died in the hospital. And witnesses say Booker grandstanded at the crime scene, moving the victim around in “a big act,” endangering what was left of his ebbing life. As for Booker’s mentor, who supposedly died in “a truly poetic way”…”at school in front of a roomful of kids,” her grandson debunks that death scene as a complete fabrication.

But all this dying and shooting and sobbing and drug dealing has made the Ivy League-educated Booker into a big star on the speaking circuit, raking in piles of dough, which, by the way, he lied about, too.

No, he didn’t keep “very little of it, if any,” as he told the New York Times, claiming he’d “given away hundreds and hundreds of thousands” to charity. He kept most of his speaking fees for himself, thank you very much. 88.7% of it, to be exact, adding up to more than a million dollars.

REMEMBER “IRAN/CONTRAGATE” IN 1986 WHEN AMONG THE INDUCEMENTS OF ARMS SENT TO THE AYATOLLAH, THERE WAS SUPPOSEDLY A CAKE BAKED IN THE SHAPE OF A KEY? RSK

The threat of force will do far more than gifts and sweet talk.

‘We know that deception is part of [Iran’s] DNA.” So said Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman last week, testifying to Congress about the next round of negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programs. So why is Ms. Sherman pleading with Congress to delay imposing additional sanctions for the sake of what she called “confidence building”?

How depressingly predictable: Iran lies and prevaricates—about the breadth of its nuclear programs; about their purpose; about the quality of its cooperation with U.N. nuclear watchdogs; about its record of sponsoring terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria to Washington, D.C.; about its efforts to topple Arab governments (Bahrain) or colonize them (Lebanon); about its role in the butchery of Syria; about its official attitude toward the Holocaust—and the administration thinks priority No. 1 is proving its own good faith.

Last month, the administration returned to Iran a 2,700-year-old silver cup shaped like a mythological griffin, which had been stolen from a cave in Iran a decade ago before it was seized by U.S. customs. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei must have been moved to tears.

At least the griffin beat the key-shaped cake National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane brought with him in the 1980s in what would become the Iran-Contra debacle. That episode provides a useful lesson in how not to negotiate with Iran, and from the most unexpected source: Hasan Rouhani, now Iran’s president, then deputy chairman of the Majlis, the Islamic Republic’s parliament.

“If you want to understand why the government is shut down or why elected Republicans would even consider doing something as reckless as using a debt default to extract policy concessions from the White House–without necessarily even knowing which policy concessions they want–Stan Greenberg has a memo for you,” writes Francis Wilkinson, a Bloomberg View editorial board member.

Of course if you begin with the supposition that Republicans are “reckless” and ignore the fact that debt-ceiling brinksmanship is nothing new, what you want is probably to have your prejudices reinforced, not to understand. And Greenberg does deliver. His organization, Democracy Corps, “issued a report this week on six focus groups conducted with Republican subgroups–two each with Tea Partiers, evangelicals and moderate Republicans.”

According to Wilkinson, “the results somehow manage to be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.” We’d say they manage to be utterly banal and unsurprising. The utterly banal part is that Republicans turn out not to care for Barack Obama–who is, after all, a Democrat and a highly partisan one at that.

The unsurprising part–the part Wilkinson finds “shocking”–is that some of them, specifically the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans, speak in rather harsh terms about the president. If Wilkinson actually finds this shocking, he must be about 17 years old, which is to say too young to remember how liberals (including elite ones in academia, arts, entertainment and journalism) spoke contemporaneously of President Bush.

According to Wilkinson, the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans’ “default position” toward Obama “is essentially abject terror.” In truth, some of the examples he cites are actually quite anodyne: “What is he really thinking?” asks one “Tea Party Man.” Another simply says: “Background.” An “Evangelical Woman” says, “His motives behind his actions,” which would be a tautology if it were a complete sentence. An “Evangelical Man” says: “He wants to fundamentally change the country.” If our theory is right, Wilkinson isn’t old enough to remember that Obama himself said the same thing.

The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door.

For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.

The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver’s license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote.

According to Mr. Holder, this amounts to a shocking return to the Jim Crow era. He describes these modest measures to secure the integrity of the ballot as “aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans.” And he is suing the state to bring it back under the federal supervision of the Voting Rights Act for all of its future voting-law changes.