RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two years later, the White House still won’t say where the president was during the Benghazi attack.

Former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor made news recently when he told Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, “Dude, this was like two years ago.” Vietor’s juvenile comment regarding the Benghazi terrorist attack plunged jaws from coast to coast.

With somewhat less fanfare, Vietor also revealed that he “was in the Situation Room that night.” Asked if Obama were there, too, Vietor replied: “No.” He then challenged Baier, saying, “The fact that your network at one time reported that he watched video feed of the attack as it was ongoing is part of what I think has been a pattern of inaccurate — ”

Baier interrupted: “Where was the president?”

“In the White House,” Vietor said, but “not in the room I was in.” He added: “I don’t have a tracking device on him in the residence.”

So, where was Obama and what was he doing while al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists were busy killing four American public servants?

Nobody knows.

NEW GLAZOV GANG: Islam’s Role in Boko Haram’s Kidnapping of Schoolgirls.
Scholar of Islam, Dr. Mark Durie, connects the dots between a monstrous Jihadist crime and Islamic theology.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islams-role-in-boko-harams-kidnapping-of-schoolgirls-on-the-glazov-gang/

Already battered by Benghazi — and with more battering certain to come, how damning we don’t yet know — Hillary Clinton has been slammed once again by news that the State Department, while she was secretary of State, refused to brand Boko Haram as a terror organization. (One wonders what they would have called the Gestapo.)

Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast [1] broke this highly disturbing story:

The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years. And now, lawmakers and former U.S. officials are saying that the decision may have hampered the American government’s ability to confront the Nigerian group that shocked the world by abducting hundreds of innocent girls.

In the past week, Clinton, who made protecting women and girls a key pillar of her tenure at the State Department, has been a vocal advocate for the 200 Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, the loosely organized group of militants terrorizing northern Nigeria. Her May 4 twee [2]t [2] about the girls, using the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, was cited across the media and widely credited for raising awareness of their plight.

Well, better late than never, as they say. Or better panicked than never.

Of course, anyone who had been paying the slightest attention to world affairs, surely a secretary of State, would have known about Boko Haram’s legendary psychopathic misogyny for years. So what possible excuse would there be for not branding them a terror organization? Could this have been the work of the same person who refused to answer pleas for backup from our now deceased ambassador in Libya? It’s certainly consistent. Or maybe she just didn’t want to do anything to endanger the family cash flow [3] from the UAE and elsewhere.

Ted Cruz has released a list of 76 examples of Obama’s lawlessness. This is the central theme of a forthcoming book by the PJM’s own Andrew C. McCarthy.

To help while away the time while whittling away the calories, I generally listen to something while wheeling along the treadmill. One current favorite is the long-running English discussion program “In Our Time [1]” with Melvyn Bragg. Yesterday, I happened to puff away to a discussion of Magna Carta [2], the great foundational document of democracy that the barons imposed upon the evil King John (remember the Sheriff of Nottingham? Sir Guy of Gisbourne?) at Runnymede in 1215. (The operative bits date mostly from the charter of 1225, but 1215 is the date impressed upon our school memories.)

Bragg began his show by quoting one of the most famous sections of the Great Charter, clause 39: “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

Here for once the “emanations and penumbras” that William O. Douglas discerned some centuries later really do cast their reverberations. For what these few lines limn is what we now call the right of due process, with hints about a presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, and a good deal more of the machinery of modern civil rights.

Above all, however, Magna Carta revolves around two checks on tyranny, outlining the protections individuals enjoy against the arbitrary coercive power of the state and, just as important, declaring the subjection of the sovereign to the law of the land.

Magna Carta has been an immensely influential document, not least on the framers of the U.S. Constitution. Whole books have undoubtedly been written on this subject, but listening to Melvyn Bragg and his guests yesterday, I thought especially of this bit from Article II of the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The Constitution is the founding document of the law of this land, the United States of America, and the framers empowered the president to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution in discharging his obligation to faithfully execute the Office of the President.

The Nigerian terror group reflects the general Islamist hatred of women’s rights. When will the West wake up?

Since the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria last month, the meaning of Boko Haram—the name used by the terrorist group that seized the girls—has become more widely known. The translation from the Hausa language is usually given in English-language media as “Western Education Is Forbidden,” though “Non-Muslim Teaching Is Forbidden” might be more accurate.

But little attention has been paid to the group’s formal Arabic name: Jam’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da’wa wal-Jihad. That roughly translates as “The Fellowship of the People of the Tradition for Preaching and Holy War.” That’s a lot less catchy than Boko Haram but significantly more revealing about the group and its mission. Far from being an aberration among Islamist terror groups, as some observers suggest, Boko Haram in its goals and methods is in fact all too representative.

The kidnapping of the schoolgirls throws into bold relief a central part of what the jihadists are about: the oppression of women. Boko Haram sincerely believes that girls are better off enslaved than educated. The terrorists’ mission is no different from that of the Taliban assassin who shot and nearly killed 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai—as she rode a school bus home in 2012—because she advocated girls’ education. As I know from experience, nothing is more anathema to the jihadists than equal and educated women.

How to explain this phenomenon to baffled Westerners, who these days seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as “Islamophobes” than to stand up for women’s most basic rights? Where are the Muslim college-student organizations denouncing Boko Haram? Where is the outrage during Friday prayers? These girls’ lives deserve more than a Twitter TWTR +4.24% hashtag protest.

Organizations like Boko Haram do not arise in isolation. The men who establish Islamist groups, whether in Africa (Nigeria, Somalia, Mali), Southeast Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan), or even Europe (U.K., Spain and the Netherlands), are members of long-established Muslim communities, most of whose members are happy to lead peaceful lives. To understand why the jihadists are flourishing, you need to understand the dynamics within those communities.

So, imagine an angry young man in any Muslim community anywhere in the world. Imagine him trying to establish an association of men dedicated to the practice of the Sunnah (the tradition of guidance from the Prophet Muhammad ). Much of the young man’s preaching will address the place of women. He will recommend that girls and women be kept indoors and covered from head to toe if they are to venture outside. He will also condemn the permissiveness of Western society.

What kind of response will he meet? In the U.S. and in Europe, some moderate Muslims might quietly draw him to the attention of authorities. Women might voice concerns about the attacks on their freedoms. But in other parts of the world, where law and order are lacking, such young men and their extremist messages thrive.

He’s flogging disaster scenarios to promote his political agenda.

Supervising the Earth’s climate—or at least believing humanity can achieve such miracles—may be the only political project grandiose enough for President Obama. So it shouldn’t surprise that after reforming health care and raising taxes, the White House is now getting the global-warming band back together, though it is still merely playing the old classics of unscientific panic.

On Wednesday the White House released the quadrennial National Climate Assessment, an 829-page report. The theme is that “this is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,” as Mr. Obama told lovable weather personality Al Roker.

His “Today Show” interview was one of eight hits with television meteorologists to promote the report, part of a coordinated political campaign to scare Americans into supporting his anticarbon tax-and-regulation agenda. The report is designed to dramatize the supposed immediacy of climate change by concentrating on droughts, floods, heat waves, torrential rains, wildfires, polar-vortex winters and other indicia of the end of days. Everybody “gets” the weather.

But as a marketing exercise, the report has the feel of that infomercial footage of the people who can’t crack an egg or perform routine household tasks until they acquire this or that as-seen-on-TV product. The cautious findings of serious empirical climate literature are so obviously exaggerated and colored that the document is best understood as a political tract with a few scientific footnotes.

For instance, the report’s “overview” summary asserts that “extreme weather events with links to climate change have become more frequent and/or intense,” climate change is already “disrupting people’s lives,” and “this evidence tells an unambiguous story.” Good thing we’ve been building that ark in the backyard.

Last Friday, the Black Sea port of Odessa saw the worst fighting and loss of life since the Ukrainian crisis began in February.

About 40 people were killed when a pro-Russian mob of about 2,000 attacked a police headquarters and dozens were barricaded in a building that was set afire. The Kiev government continues to blame Russian security forces for the fighting but the world’s reaction is entirely blasé. It’s as if the Western world has already accepted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s action in taking the Crimea by force and subversion, and is now prepared to accept him doing the same to the entire Ukraine.

Ukraine is not, as the headlines tell us, descending into civil war. Rather, it’s defending against a Russian-instigated insurgency, a bloodier version of what Russia did to take over the Crimea. Let’s remember that the crisis began when Ukrainians revolted against their pro-Moscow president, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Moscow when protests against his effort to strengthen ties to Russia ignited a rebellion.

Putin crafted an insurgency that deployed Russian special forces troops in key spots in the Crimea and quickly forced the Ukrainian government, by then headed by interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to withdraw from the entire peninsula.

Last week, Yatsenyuk blamed Russian security services for the loss of life, saying, “What happened in Odessa was part of a plan by the Russian Federation to destroy Ukraine and its statehood.” He is obviously correct. Russia — Putin, that is — is patiently and determinately taking over the Ukraine. His forces — special operations troops and others, wearing masks and no identification on their uniforms — continue to propel the insurgency.

As NATO commander US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove predicted last week, what we’re most likely to see in the coming weeks is for Putin to “…continue doing what he’s doing, discrediting the [Ukrainian] government, creating unrest, trying to set the stage for a separatist movement” to ensure Moscow maintained a hold on eastern Ukraine.

The wonder of it is how come we have so much but know so little. I have just discovered that my TV has 800 different channels.

I remember when there were only three.

I also remember when those three networks gave no more than five minutes of news. Five minutes and we called it a day.

Then someone suggested, “Let’s try fifteen,” and even the wisest honchos thought that to be too much.

Television was only expected to provide a taste of what’s happening. For depth there was the daily newspaper.

When 15 minutes of TV news worked out, someone else suggested going for a half hour (minus commercials) and the experts thought he was nuts. But it made sense when along around this time the JFK assassination provoked a demand for more comprehensive broadcast coverage.

Then this! In a move thought to be corporate suicide, KYW in Philadelphia switched from music to ALL news ALL the time in 1965 to become one of the first radio stations in the nation to take such a risk. It took a while but it caught on, big, and after a long stint as columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, before switching to novels, I came along as KYW editor in the 1980s, so I saw it all close-up.

In his now infamous September 14, 2012 email, Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, had it exactly backwards. The September 11, 2012 attacks on the Cairo embassy and the Benghazi consulate were rooted in a broad failure of policy, not an internet video, which was later politically transformed by the Obama Administration from a pretext to the cause of the attacks.

The planned demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced on August 30, 2012 by the Salafist Gamaa Islamiyya (IG), a State Department-designated terrorist group. It was designed to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Interest in the anti-Islam video titled “Innocence of Muslims” spread throughout the Egyptian media beginning on September 8, 2012, when Khaled Abdullah, an ultraconservative Salafi, showed it on the Egyptian al-Nas channel.

Spontaneous anger over the video has been widely cited as the cause of the embassy protest in Cairo, but clear evidence shows that jihadists including senior members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a group that merged with al Qaeda, and a senior IG leader who has longstanding ties to al Qaeda’s senior leadership used clips from that film that appeared on Egyptian television as a pretext to incite a mob.

After meetings between the American political officer and the Salafists, the embassy leadership in Cairo attempted to mitigate the video’s impact by releasing a statement before the protest (6am Washington time) distancing the United States from its content. The press release was requested by Deputy Chief of Mission Marc Sievers, written by visiting public affairs officer Larry Schwartz and approved after release by Ambassador Anne Patterson, who was on route to Washington DC.

“The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

Critics have gushed over “Ida,” the new film by Pawel Pawlikowski, perhaps mesmerized by the moody gray cinematography that telegraphs the message that this somber art film is weighty and meaningful. The plot concerns a young novitiate about to take her vows who is sent by the Mother Superior to meet her only living relative, a woman who had previously spurned the convent’s attempts to summon her. Obediently, the young laconic woman goes to meet this unknown aunt from whom she discovers that she is actually a Jew whose parents were killed during the holocaust. Unfortunately, this film comes after this year’s “The Jewish Cardinal,” “Aftermath,” “The German Doctor” and numerous movies from previous years that touch on the subject of what happened to the Jews of Poland. We are no longer shocked or even startled by the news that a young Polish nun in the 1960’s might have been a Jewish child – orphaned, rescued and brought to a convent.

Neither is the actress who plays the part of Ida – her expression remains unchanged throughout most of the movie as she impassively observes the people and situations of life outside the convent without appearing to emotionally absorb them. Though eventually she hears the details of her parents’ violent murder and recaptures their bones for proper burial in a cemetery, Ida remains an enigmatic cipher. She is far less interesting than her flamboyant and tortured aunt who rescues the film from monotony by her self-flagellation for the sins of her communist past and one additional tragedy that cuts much closer to the bone. This performance by Agata Kulesza, though vivid and varied, relies too heavily on the Bette Davis props of constant smoking and drinking as shorthand for character development. Remembering the subtlety of Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Sophie in that eponymously titled movie makes you realize the difference between the visceral feeling of plunging into a character’s soul as opposed to watching an actor find devices to keep her hands busy. I don’t expect every actor to be compared with Meryl Streep but I like to think that critics reserve their superlatives for only those rare great performances, not ones for which the words “well done” would suffice.