RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368796/print

Prominent indicators confirm that the U.S. is the chief facilitator of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

According to the recently released 2014 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, Syria is the third worst nation in the world in which to be Christian, Iraq is fourth, Afghanistan fifth, and Libya 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation, “extreme persecution” (other designations are “severe,” “moderate,” and “sparse” persecution).

Aside from being so closely and harshly ranked, these four nations have something else in common: heavy U.S. involvement. Three — Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya — were “liberated” thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring “freedom fighters” against the regime, many of whom would be better labeled “terrorists.”

The Syrian situation alone indicts U.S. foreign policy. According to Reuters:

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 “martyr” killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said. “This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm,” said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/368813/print

Why didn’t the president give this speech seven months ago when it would have counted?

It is very hard to take President Obama seriously. At Friday’s big surveillance speech, after five years of Big Government–orchestrated Constitution shredding, he looked the American people in the eye and explained that, as monitoring technology has evolved over the centuries, our nation has always “benefitted from both our Constitution and traditions of limited government.” While your head was still spinning, another whopper: After five years of whimsically “waiving,” ignoring, and unilaterally rewriting congressional statutes, he bleated that “our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.”

Of course, from the man who repeatedly vowed that you could keep your health-insurance plan, all the while scheming to eliminate your health-insurance plan, we’ve come to expect this disconnect between rhetoric and reality. What makes President Obama so hard to take seriously is not just the lying. It is that he does not take his job seriously. Consider the great “metadata” controversy, the focal point of yesterday’s speech.

It has been seven months since Edward Snowden’s first felonious leaks — seven months of firestorm over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-record information on virtually all Americans. During that time the program has been hysterically slandered by critics on the left and right — the libels aided and abetted by legislators who’ve known for years exactly what the NSA was doing and yet feigned shock over Snowden’s “revelations.” (I use the mock quotes in a nod to Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., Upper West Side), who conceded last June that, when it came to the NSA’s data collection, Snowden revealed nothing that hadn’t been well known and hotly debated for seven years.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368805/hillary-hyped-jonah-goldberg

Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including those of you who have merely stumbled onto this “news”letter via the filthy Internet rather than receiving it via the space-age pneumatic technology it was intended for),

Say you work for a company that depends on sales (“Um, are there other kinds of businesses?” — The Couch).

Imagine you have a saleswoman who everyone says is the best — THE BEST!! (ideally said in a Kenny Banya voice). Whenever you point out that her sales numbers stink, everyone calls you “sexist” or insists that you just “don’t get it.”

You respond, “What has she done?”

The universal answer is, “She clocked more miles on sales calls than anybody in company history! She’s driven a million miles! One. Million. Miles!”

You ask: “Yeah, but has she, you know, sold anything?”

“Sexist! You don’t get it!”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about Hillary Clinton. When you ask her diehard supporters what she did as secretary of state they start with, “She travelled a million miles! More than any secretary of state.”

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/01/16/ksms-prison-communiques/ I was invited to provide commentary Tuesday night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program (“The Kelly File”) regarding the all too predictable but nevertheless appalling news that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — al Qaeda heavyweight, 9/11 mastermind, decapitator of Daniel Pearl, jihadist warring against America for the better part of two decades, and murderer of […]

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/01/17/ksms-prison-communiques-2/ We explained in yesterday’s Ordered Liberty post that the publication of jihad heavyweight Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s communiqués, disseminated from the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, herald the return of the pre-9/11 paradigm: jihadist terror treated as a mere law-enforcement problem, not a war. Now, we turn to the propaganda aspects of KSM’s published […]

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/2013_digital_yearbook Chuck Brooks is VP for Homeland Security at Xerox and was first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Science and TechnologyDirectorate at DHS. As an Adjunct Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins he taughta graduate course on Congress and Homeland Security, and was a Senior Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Spector. Chuck is leader […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/176395#.UtpcF7ROmUl

An American pro-Israel group has weighed-in on the brouhaha over Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s recent controversial comments about US Secretary of State John Kerry, in which Ya’alon branded America’s top diplomat “obsessive and messianic” in his quest to impose a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Ya’alon particularly took issue with what he saw as the plan’s disregard for Israel’s security concerns, saying that the security arrangements it detailed were “not worth the paper it was written on”. A recent report suggested that the Defense Minister’s diatribe was provoked by a concerted American campaign to use top military officials to convince Israel to make sweeping concessions.

Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) added its voice to countless others – including politicians, military veterans and rabbis – who spoke up in support of Ya’alon’s comments.

In a bid to “remind” Kerry of the existential threat posed by a withdrawal – particularly by rocket attacks – AFSI took the initiative to republish a recent presentation by Langfan illustrating the strategic importance of the Judea-Samaria region, and translated it into Hebrew and Russian “in case he doesn’t understand plain English”.

http://www.commdiginews.com/todays-best/does-john-kerry-want-israel-destroyed-2207/ December 15, 2014 —  That man John Kerry, our Secretary of State, sure has some appetite. He is insatiable, at least for Israel. Reports keep coming in telling us that Kerry wants peace and security for Israel, even at a price of Israel without Israelis. So Kerry has been engaging in dogged shuttle diplomacy. […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2748/Secrets-of-Katyn-Forest-Whats-Really-Buried-There.aspx

The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with.

I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author Krystyna Piorkowska, the Associated Press reported this week, has unearthed a “lost” U.S. document, dating back to 1945, known as the Van Vliet report on the Katyn Forest Massacre. Few Americans are familiar with the World War II-era massacre, let alone with U.S. Army Lt. Col. John H. Van Vliet, so what is history telling us?

Its message is one that we as a people are deeply conditioned to reject. It concerns decades of U.S. appeasement, support and collusion regarding the USSR, and even in some of the evil empire’s worst atrocities. In American Betrayal I re-examine this terrible pattern, long obscured by false narratives of the “good war” that I learned along with everybody else, for evidence of Soviet agents’ influence on U.S. strategy. Equally important is the corrosive impact this subversion has had on our nation’s character. Nowhere is this moral impact more evident than at Katyn.

http://spectator.org/articles/57426/each-according-his-delusions
The latest faux issue to insinuate itself into our political polemics travels under the unedifying name of “income inequality.” As political abstractions go, this one is more incoherent than most. (Shabbier too in its naked appeal to envy and resentment.) Almost no one who uses the term says what he means by it. But it has the ring of yet another incitement to leftist larceny.

Since President Obama heaved this dead cat into the room a few weeks ago, I’ve been waiting for anyone speaking for the Republican Party to say that this hustle is nothing more than Marxist boilerplate. Since no one in the Grand Old Party has either the courage or the awareness to say this, I guess it’s up to me.

If income inequality is the problem, then income equality is the goal. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, to coin a phrase (or to each according to his or her fanciful desires, if we are to adopt the Sandra Fluke addendum to the original Marx).

Are we to have a government committee to insure that the corporate CFO with the 10th floor corner office makes the same as the security guard sitting in the ground floor lobby? Should universities add what the full professor of women’s studies and the janitor in her building make and pay them both half the total? Should the guy who drives the studio limo make the same as Tom Hanks did on his last picture? Should the burger flipper at the corner McDonald’s make the same as the chef de cuisine at the Chez Pretense? On a more personal example of blatant income inequality, Obama, with his presidential salary and other sources of income, fetches in a multiple of what I make. Will he be sending me a check to equalize things between us? I won’t hold my breath.