RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Democrats and their media acolytes who are pushing back against a full investigation of the Benghazi scandal are in full circle the wagons mode. They are trying to make investigating this scandal into some sort of late night joke against Republicans, but instead are looking more desperate by the day.

Many Americans do not believe the Obama administration’s account of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2012 attack. They smell a cover up. According to a Rasmussen poll earlier this month, 59 percent feel it is unlikely the administration has revealed all of the details surrounding the tragic attack.

“Seventy-two percent continue to believe that it is important to find out exactly what happened in the Benghazi matter, with 46 percent who say it is ‘Very Important.’ Twenty-five percent consider more information about the Benghazi case unimportant, up from 19 percent in January, but that includes just 7 percent who say it is ‘Not At All Important,’” said Rasmussen.

Distrust of the Obama administration was stoked by the recent revelation of an e-mail written by then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes showing White House involvement in concocting the bogus anti-Muslim video explanation for the killings. The purpose of this intervention by the White House was to prepare then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice for her Sunday TV show appearances on September 16, 2012, with the goal of pushing the video narrative even though senior officials at the State Department and intelligence personnel on the ground knew early on that a pre-meditated terrorist attack was the real cause.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made a fool of himself yet again when he tried to claim with a straight face that the Rhodes e-mail had nothing to do with Benghazi. It’s all old news anyway, he intoned.

Bill Clinton has tried to blunt criticism of his wife’s conduct as Secretary of State by saying that the State Department’s own Benghazi investigation, which was led by retired Adm. Mike Mullen and former U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering, “looked into what was wrong. They gave 29 recommendations. She took ‘em and started implementing them.”

That may be true, but Bill conveniently left out the fact that Hillary’s hand-picked Accountability Review Board failed to interview her. When she finally appeared before Congress to testify, Hillary responded to questions with a question of her own: “What difference at this point does it make?”

I’ve been predicting that Russia would not send its army into eastern Ukraine, but stand back and let the country dissolve into chaos. The crisis erupted because the country is dead flat broke, after nearly $200 billion in aid over the past twenty years, most of it stolen. All the huffing and puffing about a new Hitler seizing a new Sudetenland in preparation for a Drang nach Westen is beside the point. The center ring of this bathetic circus has shifted to Beijing, where Vladimir Putin is negotiating the terms of a new Sino-Russian deal. This isn’t a fusion of the two countries by any means, but rather a cautious, self-interested alignment of interests. The Indian journalist M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former ambassador to Turkey and several Central Asian Republics, has a useful assessment on his blog today. Bhadrakumar is a sympathetic and canny observer of Russian policy.

The highlight of the two-day state visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to China on Tuesday is probably going to be the signing of the long-awaited 30-year mega gas deal. The Russian media have been speculating such a strong possibility. The Chinese official remarks, however, remain cautiously optimistic and flag that the “main difference”, namely, over the price of gas, “still lingers.” To be sure, it is a political call now for the Kremlin.
Russia took a tough stance in the recent years insisting that the price of gas should be linked to the price of oil, which is the formula it maintains in dealings with Europe. With the passage of time, China’s negotiating stance (which rejected such a linkage), has strengthened.
Time worked in China’s favor. Beijing has been in no tearing hurry to conclude the deal while it kept lining up LNG supplies from other sources — Qatar and Australia — and kept up the momentum of overseas upstream investments, including in Canada, as well as boosting further supplies from Turkmenistan and other Central Asian countries.
China is also estimated to have the world’s largest source of shale gas. On the contrary, Russia’s negotiating hand has weakened. A ‘Look East’ strategy for energy exports is increasingly a matter of compulsion rather than of choice, as the United States pushes for Europe’s diversification of energy imports to reduce high dependence on Russia.

Sudanese doctor Meriam Yahya Ibrahim, 27, a graduate of the University of Khartoum Medical School, is the beautiful wife of an American citizen, Daniel Wani, originally from South Sudan. Their 20-month old son, Martin, whose sweet smile shines from a recent photograph, is soon to be joined by a baby brother or sister, as Ibrahim is nine months’ pregnant. Soon after Ibrahim and Wani were wed, in December 2011, Wani applied to his government, the United States government, for a spousal visa to bring his wife to America. If there were justice in the world, today the Wani family would be awaiting the birth of a new baby while enjoying the gradual coming of spring in New Hampshire.

There is, however, no justice in the world. Wani and Ibrahim remained in Khartoum and waited for Ibrahim’s visa to be approved, but up until today, this American citizen has not received permission to bring home his wife – and now also his son, who is by virtue of his father a U.S. citizen. “I have tried to apply for papers to travel to the USA with my wife and child, but the American Embassy in Sudan did not help me,” Wani told Morning Star News. And on Thursday, May 15, Ibrahim was sentenced to be hanged for apostasy.

Ibrahim has been a Christian her whole life. She was brought up, first in western Sudan, and then in Khartoum, in the Ethiopian Orthodox faith of her Ethiopian mother. But she had the misfortune of having a Sudanese Muslim father. Even though her father abandoned the family when she was 6 years old, in the eyes of Shariah, she is a Muslim. Therefore, she is an apostate for not practicing Islam. Unbelievably, she and little Martin, have been incarcerated since February at Omdurman Women’s Prison in Khartoum.

While Ibrahim was waiting for the U.S. government to grant her a spousal visa, Amnesty International, which is highlighting Ibrahim’s case, says that a distant relative accused her of adultery and reported her to the authorities in August 2013. Ibrahim’s marriage to Wani, a South Sudanese Christian, is not recognized under Shariah. Ibrahim then attempted to defend herself by explaining that she was not a Muslim. This past February she provided to the court her marriage certificate that listed her as a Christian, and the location of the wedding as a church in Khartoum. But this resulted in the young wife and mother being charged with apostasy. The charges fall under Sudan’s Shariah-based Criminal Code, Articles 126 (apostasy) and 146 (adultery). The apostasy sentence carries a punishment of flogging – 100 lashes.

“The idea that tens of millions of Americans could be, in effect, turned into anti-Americans seemed insane. But it happened, didn’t it?”

In Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, historian and political scientist Barry Rubin answers that question in convincing style and considerable detail. What happen was a “break from all American history” and “an ideological defacing of liberalism” on the part of the “Third Left,” the heir to both the Old Left of the 1920s-1950s and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.

As Rubin sees it, the Third Left took over liberalism, portrayed its only opponent as reactionary right-wing conservatism and claimed that their radicalism represents all that is good in America and a correction to all that is evil. The new radicalism also claims a monopoly on truth and a right to fundamentally transform America. This altered approach, Rubin explains, “was one of an unprecedented degree of statism, an imperial presidency that went far beyond Richard Nixon’s dreams: record high levels of government regulation, taxation and debt.” It was “a different system from the one through which America achieved success and prosperity. Yet the fact that such changes were occurring was everywhere denied even as it was happening.”

The timing was also significant. Across the globe, regimes following the Old and New Left’s model were collapsing. At the very moment in human history when it became obvious that the far left’s ideas had failed and that statist big government, ever-higher-regulation policies did not work, it became possible for the first time ever to convince Americans that these things were precisely what the country needed. And at the very time in human history when Western civilization and liberal capitalism were so obviously the most successful in history – recognized as such in the Third World and most of all in formerly Communist China – a camouflaged radical movement convinced many of those benefitting from the system that their own societies were in fact evil and failed.

According to Rubin, it became possible to convince Americans their society had failed because the Third Left “put its emphasis on infiltrating the means of idea and opinion production.” The Third Left shunned the factories and focused on foundations, NGOs, popular culture, publishing and journalism. Reporters “routinely used politically charged language that would have gotten them fired in earlier times” and mass media were out to “protect the image of anyone on the left side.” Rubin cites the portrayal of Ted Kennedy, involved in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame, as heroes on women’s rights while others who had done nothing were “accused of waging a war on women.” Likewise, Rubin notes that Time magazine ridiculed Arianna Huffington when she was a conservative in 2001 but in 2006, when she turned to the far left, the same publication extolled her. “Such lessons put across the point that those who cooperated with the Third Left would be rewarded; those who crossed it would be destroyed.”

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Pamela Geller, the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.

FP: Pamela Geller, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Geller: Thank you, Jamie.

FP: I understand that the Muslim author Reza Aslan has said that he wanted to “make hate babies” with you. Can you please give us the details?

Geller: Jamie, it was on a Reddit thread. Reza was taking questions, and one Reddit user asked him: “Hello Reza, I have an excellent start up question for you. You and Pamela Geller are stuck on an island, what happens?”

Aslan answered: “Are we stuck forever? If so, then I guess it’s time to make some hate babies Pam.”

The person who asked the question, “benalmy,” was thrilled by this display of hatred and savagery, and wrote back: “oh dude you are awesome!” Another commented: “By expressing his ability to hate a woman and still wish to have sex with her, he becomes very relatable to reddit’s users.” And it was true: “scruba” wrote: “Reza, you’re my hero,” and “btn pshr” added: “omg this is amazing, I can’t even…” “Squishie 5413” wrote: “This is the best response I’ve ever seen.”

Only one commenter, “wanweilin,” at the very end of the thread, dared to challenge Aslan and state the obvious: “Sounds like rape. Appropriate for treatment for an infidel.”

We know there is a term for this: “hate-f**k.” And the Left has a field day with it to humiliate and slander conservative women. Vile.