RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The day before the Marathon Massacre, the New York Times had scored plaudits for running an op-ed by one of Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards complaining about his hard life in Guantanamo Bay.

On April 14th, the paper of broken record paid 150 bucks to an Al Qaeda member for the opportunity to complain about being force fed during his hunger strike. On April 15th the bombs went off.

The attacks of September 11 introduced a dividing line between awareness and disregard. There was the world of September 10 and the world of September 11. In one world the planes passing in the sky were a minor reminder of our technological prowess. In the other, we were at war.

There was no such clear dividing line when September 11 faded from memory and we returned to a September 10 world. Nor is there an exact date for when we will return to an April 14 world in which it is okay to pay a terrorist in exchange for his propaganda. But if the media has its way, that day can’t come soon enough.

A day after the bombings, the New York Times wrote that a decade without terror had come to an end. But the terror had never stopped or paused. The FBI and local law enforcement had gone on breaking up numerous terror plots to the skepticism and ridicule of the media which accused them of violating Muslim civil rights and manufacturing threats.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-major-syrian-rebel-group-is-now-officially-part-of-al-qaeda/?print=1 Much recent media attention has focused on a series of statements from top al-Qaeda leaders saying that the powerful Jabhat al-Nusra militia in Syria is a franchise of the al-Qaeda global jihadi network. The statements were made by the top al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Jabhat al […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/345874/seeing-things-clear/page/0/1

As regular readers know, I use this column now and then to jot some notes on a book. These do not constitute a proper book review. But sometimes the notes are worthwhile, I think.

I’d very much like to remark on a book by Bruce Bawer, published last year. This one is The Victims’ Revolution. Bawer, if you don’t know him, is one of our finest literary critics and political analysts. He is also uncommonly brave. He writes about the threat of Islamism to our liberal life here in the West, and he does this writing from Scandinavia, where he lives. (Bawer is an American but has lived in Norway for some years.)
This sort of writing wins him no friends — except among people who value the truth, however upsetting it is.

Bawer has the particular gift of shaming people on the left. He asks them, “Won’t you stick up for your own values? Do you realize what the Islamists intend to do to you, and are doing to you already? Do you not have the courage of your convictions? Do you hate the West more than you hate those who would destroy you?”

Among Bawer’s books is While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within.

This new book, The Victims’ Revolution, has a subtitle: “The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind.” You will hear the echo of Allan Bloom’s classic, The Closing of the American Mind. I remember his telling Bill Buckley what he originally wanted to call it: “Souls without Longing.” Bill said, “Oh, what a marvelous title” (or something like that).

How about “Identity Studies”? Bawer devotes chapters to Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Chicano Studies. A later chapter is titled, “Studies, Studies Everywhere.” So true.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed Jeb Bush. And I noted that he had majored in Latin American Studies. I said to him (something like), “That’s a pretty lefty major, isn’t it?” He said (something like), “Yes. Aren’t all ‘studies’ lefty?”

If a person reads only the preface and the first chapter of Bawer’s book, he has more than gotten his money’s worth — more than. This is a vital, sparkling, and truth-telling book.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578428900867620018.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion Atop the quotable Barack Obama there will be this: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Everyone clings to something. But when it comes to criticizing unseemly political dependencies, it’s almost always liberals accusing them of clinging to […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323809304578428552342222358.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
Senate Scuttles Gun Limits
Expanded Background Checks Fail; Obama Denounces ‘Shameful Day for Washington’

WASHINGTON—The biggest push in nearly two decades to restrict firearms in the U.S., touched off by the emotional response to December’s mass shooting of schoolchildren, collapsed in the Senate on Wednesday, scuttling a major element of President Barack Obama’s second-term agenda.

The centerpiece of a Democrat-led gun-control effort—a plan to expand the system of background checks aimed at detecting buyers ineligible to own guns—failed in a 54-46 vote, six votes shy of the 60 needed to advance. Shortly afterward, the Senate blocked a proposal to ban the manufacture and sale of certain semiautomatic rifles often called assault weapons and ban high-capacity ammunition magazines. It drew 40 votes, with 60 senators opposed.

Mr. Obama denounced the Senate action in the White House Rose Garden, where he was joined by victims of gun violence, including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D., Ariz.), who was gravely injured in a mass shooting. “This was a pretty shameful day for Washington. But this effort is not over,” the president said.

Supporters of the background-check measure had hoped the co-sponsorship of Sen. Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania, would draw in his party colleagues. But only four GOP senators joined 50 of the Senate’s 55 Democrats and independents in support.

Wednesday’s votes showed that little has changed in the politics of gun control in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, which left 20 children and six adult staff members dead at an elementary school, as well as the attacker’s mother. Support for tighter laws is strong among most Democrats, but Republicans and those Democrats from GOP-leaning states proved reluctant to vote to tighten access to firearms.

The Senate isn’t expected to take a final vote on its package of gun-control legislation, in essence leaving the issue tabled. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) took a procedural step Wednesday that would enable lawmakers to return to the bill if dynamics changed.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas041813.php3

President Obama rightly asked us not to “jump to conclusions” about motives or responsibility for the two bombs that exploded Monday at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 170.

That request was pre-emptively ignored. Some couldn’t wait to project their biases and political agendas on this latest act of terror.

In a tweet Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blamed Senate Republicans for blocking confirmation of a new ATF director. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said, “Normally, domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right…” Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst, echoed Matthews on “The Lead” with Jake Tapper.

Blogger Sargent_Rock, responding to Wednesday’s lead story in The Washington Post on the bombings, wrote, “The evangelical wing of the Republican Party is a mirror reflection of the Islamic right. Irony that neither knows it.” This comment mirrors those that suggested “talk radio” contributed to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

People ought to be held accountable for their actions, whether they misuse a gun or build a pressure cooker bomb that randomly kills innocent people watching a marathon.

Given the times, the first reaction for some people to such incidents is to suspect Islamic terrorism. Authorities say that “a person of interest,” a 20-year-old student from Saudi Arabia, has been cleared of any responsibility in the attack.

Politics aside, whoever did it and for whatever reason, numerous questions will and should be asked.

Among those questions: Were the bombs placed in trash cans near the finish line? In the aftermath of 9/11, trash cans were removed from airports as a security precaution. Should the same be done at large gatherings? Should people be told to collect their own trash and dispose of it at home, or in receptacles outside the venue?

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13152#.UW5aSr_iB5k
Justin Bieber hopes Anne Frank “would have been a Belieber,” according to a message the teenage pop star wrote in the guestbook of the Amsterdam Museum dedicated to the late Jewish diarist.

And our hypocritical guardians of memory reprimanded the bad guy in unison.

Within the category of Nazi victims, no one is more in the foreground of world imagination than Anne Frank. She is nomen omen of the Holocaust. If people have read just one book about the Holocaust, it is “The Diary”, which has been translated into sixty languages and published in more than 25,000,000 copies.

The Franks’ famous house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, where the Frank family was hidden in a secret annex and where they were arrested in 1944, is the most frequently visited memory site in Europe (more than Auschwitz) and has had a major impact on how millions of people view Anne Frank.

But the Anne Frank Museum is also one of the reasons that Europe’s conscience is so violently anti-Israel. According to Cynthia Ozick, Anne Frank’s story has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced, infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied”.

The Anne Frank Museum is guilty not only because it sanitized Anne Frank’s story of almost all its Jewish references in order to project what it considered to be more important, the general theme of universal suffering and its transcendence through undying goodness and hope. Anne’s universalism has been intentionally emphasized by the Museum and Foundation in order to play down any threat of Jewish particularism.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/15/obamas-china-syndrome/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=obamas-china-syndrome Secretary of State John Kerry spent the weekend showing what predictably comes of the North Koreans behaving badly:  China benefits.  Unfortunately, this is not the only example of the Obama administration’s cravenness in the face of misbehavior on the part of Beijing and/or its proxies. Call it Team Obama’s China Syndrome. Let’s start with […]

http://www.mandatory.com/2013/04/16/men-kicked-out-of-festival-in-saudia-arabia-for-being-too-handso/?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl9%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D299634

Wait…what?

You read that right. In Saudia Arabia, at least three men were ejected from the annual Jenadrivah Heritage & Cultural Festival for being too handsome.

An official from the festival said the three men – who happened to be delegates from the United Arab Emerates – were “taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and that the Commission [for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices] members feared female visitors could fall for them.”

As you most likely have heard once or twice before, Saudi Arabia is an incredibly conservative Sunni Muslim society that prohibits women from even so much as interacting with males they are not related to. So, in this situation, you can see why festival management would take extreme caution by deporting the three men to Abu Dhabi.

They’re like Tom Cruise in “Minority Report”, preventing a crime before it happens. And trust us, being ridiculously good looking is certainly a crime. We should know. The Mandatory team has been kicked out of a number of places for simply being way too attractive.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/17/john-kerry-benghazi_n_3101643.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — Seven months after the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, the Obama administration on Wednesday insisted that it was making progress in holding accountable those responsible for killing Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. has identified people it believes were involved in the Benghazi attack. FBI investigators are still combing through video and other evidence gathered from largely lawless eastern Libya, he said.

Kerry, however, didn’t say if any suspect has yet been arrested, detained or otherwise targeted by American or Libyan authorities — a lingering black eye for an administration that has repeatedly promised justice.

“We are making progress,” Kerry said. “There’s video, as you all know. We have identified people. And they are building a case. You know, we’re going through the tedious, laborious and very difficult process of gaining evidence from a part of the country which is dangerous and working in a place where the standards are different and the expectations are different. We’re working through that.”

The former Massachusetts senator, testifying before Congress for the first time as secretary of state, fielded several angry questions from Republican lawmakers over the administration’s diplomatic security posture ahead of the attack and its real-time response to violence in a city that served as the base for the U.S.-backed rebels who overthrew dictator Moammar Gadhafi a year-and-a-half ago. They included President Barack Obama’s oft-repeated but until now entirely unfulfilled declaration to hold Benghazi’s perpetrators accountable.