RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday, which was Tisha B’Av—a mournful Jewish holiday that commemorates two destructions of Jerusalem, the Spanish Expulsion, and other disasters of Jewish history—Israel’s far-left daily Haaretz trumpeted the news that the European Union had issued a new directive.

It bans any and all interactions, economic, social, or academic, with Israeli companies or institutions situated in East Jerusalem, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), and the Golan Heights—that is, the places Israel took over in the 1967 Six-Day War, where a total of 700,000 Israelis (not far from 10 percent of the country’s population) now live.

The directive also states that “all agreements between the State of Israel and the EU must unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.”

In the run-up to the Six-Day War—among other such statements—Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser said, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” Syrian defense minister (later prime minister) Hafez Assad said, “I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.” Iraqi president Abdur Rahman Aref said, “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map.”

Israelis secretly dug 10,000 graves for the expected victims of the war. Some 14,000 hospital beds were prepared. Gas masks were handed out to the population. Survivors of the European Holocaust in particular were gripped with fear.

The thing about a police state is that it tends to creep up on you. One day you think the Bill of Rights is intact and the freedoms you take for granted are intact, but the next day you find out that under the National Defense Authorization Act (HR 1540), signed into law by President Obama on December 31, 2011, you can be arrested and detained without recourse to an attorney or the courts.

HR 1540 kills the concept of Habeas Corpus by permitting the detention of U.S. citizens without trial. In 2009 the National Emergency Centers Act, HR 645, was introduced for the establishment of “internment camps.” I have not been able to determine if it was passed and signed into law, nor have I found any explanation why the Congress of the United States either passed or even considered these laws.

The 2001 Patriot Act was justified as a response to 9/11 and revised in 2012. It gives the government unprecedented powers of surveillance and enforcement in the name of deterring terrorism.

One of Obama’s many executive orders permits him to “commandeer” all domestic U.S. resources, including food and water supplies, energy productions, and transportation, even in times of peace, with no congressional oversight. On March 16, 2012, the National Defense Resources Preparedness EO expands on a law from the 1950s as the Cold War was heating up and there were fears of a conflict with the Soviet Union.

President Obama, obsessed with leaks to the press, has now turned the entire federal government into a workplace where employees are expected to report “suspicious activity” of their co-workers. Failure to do so could result in penalties including criminal charges. Though figures differ, by 2010 there were an estimated 2.5 million full-time federal employees.

According to an article by Jonathan S. Landay and Marisa Taylor, two reporters for McClatchy newspapers, the October 2011 executive order mandating the program is “based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.” The program, deemed flawed, “could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.”

As Americans have been learning in airports across the nation, the Transportation Security Authority routinely engages in profiling and highly intrusive physical “pat downs” that many find humiliating.

In 2011, the TSA’s “VIPR teams” conducted an estimated 8,000 unannounced security screenings at subway stations, bus terminals, seaports, and highway rest stops in which Americans were required to show some proof of identity. This is the same administration that opposes voter ID, but not when the police functions of the TSA are concerned.

In bits and pieces, news of activities at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been reported and, when the dots are connected, some very scary conclusions can be reached. Why has DHS purchased 1.6 billion bullets as of March of this year? That is reportedly twenty times more than the amount of bullets expended in the Iraq War. Why is the DHS reportedly sending thousands of heavily armored vehicles and combat gear to cities and towns around the nation for use by police forces that are increasingly being militarized?

Recently, Christian Bible translators considered changes that would make Christian scriptures more palatable to Muslim audiences. Instead of “in the name of the Father,” they put forth the phrase “in the name of Allah.” “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit” was reformulated as “Cleanse them in the name of Allah, his Messiah, and his Holy Spirit.” In addition, Isa a prophet of Allah in the Koran who is superseded by Mohammed, has been equated with Jesus in the Christian Bible. Of course, many Christians view this as blasphemy.

The push for biblical changes came in large part from Christian leaders of the “Insider Movement” who endeavor to reach Muslim communities by encouraging Muslims to embrace Christianity by “worshipping Jesus or Isa in the mosque.” This is an accommodation to enable Muslims to follow Jesus, yet not explicitly express Christian faith. The “Insider Movement” has been gaining steam for the past decade and advances the idea of the blending of faith rather than complete conversion to Christianity.

It remains to be seen if these modifications or conscious accommodations to Islam, created by proselytizing Christians, threaten the integrity of Christian beliefs. However, a more significant threat to Christianity has existed for years in the form of ongoing, aggressive interfaith activities spearheaded by Muslims who use this religious context to shield their ulterior motive: spreading the supremacy of Islam.

This deceptive undertaking is part of the phased plan for “civilizational jihad” put forth by the Muslim Brotherhood in “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Muslims have been encouraged to form coalitions under the guise of cooperation in order to “absorb” Western culture. They have been encouraged to “take from people the best they have” and “understand the benefit of agreement, cooperation, and alliance.” This effort has translated into establishing so-called “interfaith” groups and ostensibly fostering “interfaith” activities. The problem has been that all cooperation and accommodations are one-way, favoring Muslims and Islam.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/353716/print

With Mohamed Morsi out and Egypt’s future unclear, Erick Stakelbeck, author of the new book The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy, talks to National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about what the “Arab Spring” turned into and where Egypt may go from here, with a warning for the United States.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is there anything about what’s going on in Egypt right now that surprises you?

ERICK STAKELBECK: I’m a bit surprised that it took the Egyptian military a full year to finally step in and pull the plug on Morsi’s disastrous, aggressively Islamist tenure. Beginning in August 2012, when Morsi suddenly and boldly sacked Egypt’s longtime defense minister and other top generals, and continuing through that November, when Morsi seized dictatorial powers and then rammed through a nakedly sharia-driven constitution, it was obvious that he and the Brotherhood (aided by a freshly minted, Islamist-dominated parliament) were going “all in” on their dream to transform Egypt into a draconian Islamic state. In the process, they dropped their longtime strategy of stealthy gradualism and made their nefarious intentions for Egypt abundantly clear to the world.

All the while, the Egyptian military brass largely stayed silent, even as Morsi attempted to stack its ranks — and those of Egypt’s military academy — with Islamists. Why the military waited so long to turn back the MB tide is unclear. As NRO’s Andrew McCarthy has pointed out, top general Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who was handpicked by Morsi, may himself have Islamist tendencies. But Morsi’s ham-handed, polarizing, and tactless methods of going about the Islamist project in Egypt had to be red flags for al-Sisi and other possible sympathizers in the military (as was the looming possibility of famine and starvation among segments of the Egyptian populace). The final tipping point for the military was clearly the demonstrations — the largest in human history — against Morsi and the Brothers during the first week of July.

And that brings us to the greatest surprise of all: that the Muslim Brotherhood, long the world’s most politically astute, patient, and disciplined Islamist movement, overplayed its hand so badly in Egypt and revealed its true intent so early. At the end of the day, instituting sharia was more important to Morsi and his fellow Brothers than feeding the Egyptian people or making even the slightest attempt at jumpstarting the Egyptian economy. That in itself is not surprising. This is who the Brothers are, after all: committed ideological fanatics. What is surprising is that they made it so obvious, so soon.

LOPEZ: What is going on in Egypt now? What do Egyptians want?

Syria is burning, not because of the Arab Spring or Tyranny or Twitter, or any of the other popular explanations. The fire in Syria is the same firestorm burning in Iraq, in Turkey, in Lebanon and throughout much of the Muslim world. It has nothing to do with human rights or democracy. There is no revolution here. Only the eternal civil war.
Most people accept countries with ancient names like Egypt, Jordan and Syria as a given. If they think about it at all they assume that they were always around, or were restored after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. But actually the countries of the Middle East are mostly artificial creations borrowing a history that is not their own.

When Mohammed unleashed a fanatical round of conquests and crusades, he began by wrecking the cultures and religions of his native region. And his followers went on to do the same throughout the region and across the world.

Entire peoples lost their history, their past, their religion and their way of life. This cultural genocide was worst in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe. But the Middle Eastern peoples lost much of their heritage as well.

The Muslim conquerors made a special point of persecuting and exterminating the native beliefs and indigenous inhabitants they dominated. Israeli Jews, Assyrian Christians and Persian Zoroastrians faced special persecution.

Conquered peoples were expected to become Muslims. Those who resisted were repressed as Dhimmis. But those who submitted and became Muslims suffered a much worse fate, losing major portions of their traditions and history. They were expected to define themselves as Muslims first and look back to the great day when their conquerors subjugated them as the beginning of their history. Their pre-Islamic history faded into the mists of the ignorant past.

But Islam did not lead to a unified region, only to a prison of nations. The Caliphates, like the USSR, held sway over a divided empire through repression and force. Many of those peoples had lost a clear sense of themselves, but they still maintained differences that they expressed by modifying Islam to accommodate their existing beliefs and customs.

Why do millions of Egyptians, including politicians and activists, consider Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s “stooge”—as she is so commonly referred to by many in Egypt, from the media down to the street?

In America, some are aware of matters, such as that “Patterson in particular resisted opportunities to criticize the Morsi government as it implemented increasingly authoritarian policies. In a memorable May interview with the Egyptian English-language news sit[e] Ahram Online, she repeatedly dodged pointed questions about Morsi’s leadership. ‘The fact is they ran in a legitimate election and won,’ she said…. Republicans from Texas Senator Ted Cruz to House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce have pounced on statements like these, increasingly seeing Patterson as the key implementer for a policy that at least offers tacit support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Following the Egyptian media, however, one discovers that the reasons Egyptians dislike Patterson are many and unambiguous.

Last week, for example, El Fagr reported that, during their most recent phone conversation, Patterson demanded that Egypt’s recently appointed Supreme Commander of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, release all Muslim Brotherhood members currently being held for questioning: “And when Sisi rejected this order, the American ambassador began threatening him that Egypt will turn into another Syria and live through a civil war, to which Sisi responded violently: ‘Neither you nor your country can overcome Egypt and its people.'”

Earlier, Patterson was reported as “trying to communicate with General Sisi, demanding dialogue with the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and concessions to them,” to which Sisi reportedly retorted: “Stop meddling in our affairs… the Egyptian people are capable of looking after their own welfare.”

How does despotism come to a modern democracy? Tocqueville thought it was by means of the regulatory state, which “extends its arms over society as a whole.”

[I]t covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

Exactly how would you go about doing this? Ask the acronyms, starting with the NSA and IRS (and let’s not forget the EPA). The NSA hoovers up information about everyone everywhere because you just don’t know who might turn out to be a security threat. (And given our government’s penchant for criminalizing behavior that only yesterday was considered innocent, the category “security threat” just grows and grows and grows.) The IRS, as we continue to learn, is only incidentally in the business of collecting taxes. At bottom it is a weaponized bureaucracy, deployed to intimidate, silence, and punish individuals and enterprises deemed to be at odds with the ruling nomenklatura in Washington.

IRS: that’s “Internal Revenue Service.” I think they may have to change their name soon: maybe “URS,” for “Universal Revenue Service,” for like many bureaucracies, the IRS just grows and grows and grows. A disturbing article [1] by Colleen Graffy in The Wall Street Journal shows how the IRS, emboldened by new legislation, has set its sights, and its intrusive, bureaucratic paws, on foreign domiciled Americans. The legislation is called FATCA (don’t you just love it?), the “Foreign Tax Compliance Act.” It is, as Ms. Graffy points out, a law of “breathtaking scope.” Imagine this scenario:

You were born in California, moved to New York for education or work, fell in love, married and had children. Even though you have faithfully paid taxes in New York and haven’t lived in California for 25 years, suppose California law required that you also file your taxes there because you were born there. Though you may never have held a bank account in California, you must report all of your financial holdings to the State of California. Are you a signatory on your spouse’s account? Then you must declare his bank accounts too. Your children, now adults, have never been west of the Mississippi but they too must file their taxes in both California and New York and report any bank accounts they or their spouses may have because they are considered Californians by virtue of one parent’s birthplace.

Senate Republicans plan to drop a report on Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) climate change hearing Thursday highlighting flaws in the methodology used by the federal government to assert that the globe is catastrophically warming.

The Environment and Public Works Committee hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now” includes two panels of research scientists and witnesses from environmental and industry groups.

The GOP report notes numerous examples of how actual temperatures have failed to meet the predictions put forth by models used by the president and his agencies to push climate-change policies. “The American public should be deeply troubled to learn that EPA is actively working to increase energy prices based on predicted global temperature increases without first undertaking efforts to determine if temperatures are actually increasing to the extent predicted by the climate models they are using,” the report states.

“If the computer models and predictions have been inaccurate, why is our federal government relying on these models to take unilateral action? If global warming has been ‘worse than predicted,’ why won’t the federal government provide the data supporting this claim? As it continues to be recognized that the Earth has not warmed for the past 15 years, will we see the term ‘global warming’ abandoned and replaced in its entirety by ‘climate change?’ Given that many of these models predicted warming trends well before China surpassed the United States as the largest GHG emitter, and given the fact that emissions continue to grow at a pace beyond what was originally incorporated into the models, shouldn’t the warming be far worse than what was predicted in the worst case scenarios rather than well below predictions?”

Mashiach Did Not Arrive — Again b

Mishpacha Magazine
July 19, 2013

I pray that the above headline will supplant “Dewey DefeatsTruman” as the classic illustration of the dangers of prediction. (I’m writing before Tisha B’Av.) But I’m pretty sure it won’t. Not after watching footage of police rescuing a chareidi man who made the mistake of wandering in his IDF uniform into Meah Shearim on the way to visit relatives. He had to barricade himself in a building after being surrounded by an angry mob, and required a phalanx of policemen to get him out.
The phenomenon of chareidi soldiers in uniform, or even out of uniform, being verbally accosted and made to feel otherwise unwanted has spread far beyond Meah Shearim. Wallposters against “chardakim” (chareidim da’at kal) can be seen in chareidi neighborhoods around the country, with religious soldiers in uniform portrayed as missionaries. These attacks by chareidim on one another recall nothing so much as the bitter internecine fighting in Jerusalem that preceded the destruction of the Second Temple.
Rabbi Ben Tzion Kokis once pointed out at a convention of Agudath Israel of America, that then too those attacking their fellow Jews did so in the name of their greater faith. The zealots destroyed the firewood and water that would have permitted Jerusalem to withstand siege for years, in order to force a direct confrontation with the vastly superior Roman forces, and they accused Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai and the chachamim of lacking faith in Hashem’s power.

Karen and Billy Vaughn are the parents of a fallen Navy Seal, Aaron Carson Vaughn. I met with the Vaughns when I spoke to a sold-out Tea Party event in Fort Lauderdale in June. The Vaughns are extraordinary heroes. Their courage to speak about Obama’s crippling rules of engagement is to be applauded.

The Vaughns have exposed the delusional U.S. military “rules of engagement” policy that led to the takedown of a Chinook helicopter, Extortion 17, by the Taliban. All 38 people on board the Chinook — 15 SEAL Team Six members (including Aaron Vaughn) and seven Afghan National Army commandos — were killed. The attack on Extortion 17 came just three months after the Osama bin Laden kill, and both Obama and Biden had identified the team that took OBL out. Retribution was inevitable.

The Vaughns were also one of the families that released the video that revealed the incredible fact that military brass invited a Muslim cleric to their children’s funeral in 2011 — an imam who “damned to hell” our fallen soldiers, in line with Islamic doctrine for infidels. Video here.

Now Billy Vaughn and U.S. Army Major General (ret.) Paul Vallely have teamed up to write a shocking new book: Betrayed: Exposing the High Cost of the War on Terror (coming in August from Hugo House Publishers). It tells the story of how on August 6, 2011, Taliban jihadists ambushed Extortion 17 as it was transporting American forces to an area where Army Rangers were engaged in a firefight.