RUTHFULLY YOURS

The recent kidnapping of three Israeli teenage boys by terrorists in
the West Bank is an appalling reminder of the cruelty guiding radical
elements in the Middle East and of the need for vigilance and
solidarity by all those who cherish the sanctity of human life and
fundamental values of human rights.

I was in Israel last week when the boys were abducted. In fact, I
passed very near the spot where it took place the following day. The
stark contrast between the humanity and benevolence visibly on display
on my visit to Israel and the open hostility in Gaza and the West Bank
is a rude wakeup call to those who too often level criticism against
Israel.

The sight of Palestinians in Gaza and Hebron dancing jubilantly in the
streets and passing out sweets to celebrate the kidnapping is as
depressing as it is concerning. This attitude bodes ill for
reconciliation and co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Poll: Palestinians overwhelmingly reject two-state solution, want Palestine ‘from river to sea’
However, clear majority also opposes violence to achieve goals, favors Abbas over Haniyeh.

By more than a 2-1 margin, Palestinians oppose the two-state solution, favoring instead the goal of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” according to a recent poll by the centrist Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

At the same time, though, the poll found that a large majority of Palestinians favored the tactic of “popular resistance” – such as demonstrations and strikes – over violence to achieve their goals, Globes reported Sunday.

Interestingly, Gazans were more moderate when it came to tactics, but more hardline about the goal.

The survey also found that West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas was a much more popular leader than Gazan leader Ismail Haniyeh – both in the West Bank (28.1 percent to 6.9 percent) and in the Gaza Strip (32.4 percent to 11.7 percent).

The poll, which questioned a relatively large sample of 1,200 respondents, was taken June 15-17 – following the abductions of three Israeli teenagers, the formation of the Fatah-Hamas unity government, and the collapse of the Kerry peace talks. However, it was conducted just before West Bank protests arose against Abbas for his cooperation with Israel’s search for the kidnapped boys and crackdown on Hamas.

Goals vs. tactics

Asked what political goal they favored over the next five years, 60.3 percent replied “action to return historic Palestine, from the river to the sea, to our hands,” while 27.3 percent answered “end[ing] the occupation of the West Bank in order to reach a two-state solution.”

Another 10.1 percent said the goal should be a “one-state solution, for the entire region, from the river to the sea, in which Jews and Arabs enjoy equal rights.”

If a Palestinian leadership were to reach agreement with Israel on a two-state deal, 64 percent said Palestinians should still continue to press on for a Palestinian state encompassing the territories and Israel, while 31.6 percent said they would accept a two-state solution.

The American Boomerang — on The Glazov Gang
Internationally renowned Australian author Nick Adams discusses how the world’s greatest ‘turnaround’ nation will do it again.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-american-boomerang-on-the-glazov-gang/

Children living in territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, funded by Europe and the U.S., are encouraged to kill Jews and destroy Israel.

There can be no peace so long as financial incentives to kill Jews and destroy Israel continue to be dangled in front of Palestinian populations. It is this aggression, and not humanitarian relief, that much of the well-intended international funding — with no conditions whatsoever attached — is used for.

The only conclusion one can draw is the EU and the U.S. are actually on the side of terrorism.

So long as the EU and the U.S continue to fund entities which openly promote acts of terror, they should be held criminally liable as accessories to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Rival factions of Fatah and Hamas formed a new Palestinian “unity government” on June 12. The Israeli government expressed deep concern. Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, stressed that the alliance could lead to a resurgence of terrorist acts. The European Union and current U.S. administration decided, nevertheless, to legitimize the new government.

No Western leader highlighted that Hamas had not renounced its explicitly genocidal goals, and that Hamas leaders have never renounced the use of violence.

Netanyahu’s prediction proved accurate: rocket fire resumed from Gaza.

On June 11th, rockets were fired at one of the main roads in southern Israel. The next day, June 12, three Israeli teens were kidnapped in the Hebron area. The kidnappers are apparently members of Hamas, even though Hamas has so far denied this.[1]

Ten concrete measures to prevent Islamic terrorism in the Netherlands.

In several Western countries, the authorities are concerned about the security risk posed by young Muslim immigrants who went to Syria and Iraq to wage jihad and are now returning home. They are considered the most serious security risk in decades.

The risk is not just theoretical. Indeed, on May 24, Mehdi Nemmouche, a young Muslim with a French passport, went on a killing spree with a Kalashnikov assault rifle in the Jewish Museum in Brussels. He killed four people. Nemmouche had previously been in Syria, where he was trained in guerrilla warfare.

During the past three years, thousands of young Islamic immigrants from all Western countries, Europe, Australia, America and even Russia, have gone to fight in Syria, where they have committed the most horrible atrocities. Some of them were killed in action, while others have since returned home. They carry Western passports but they hate the West. They walk our streets as ticking time bombs, eager to cause as much havoc in our cities as they have caused in Syria.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
A FEW QUICK THOUGHTS ON COCHRAN
1. Beating a Senate incumbent is still really hard. Even when the votes go your way, the incumbents have any number of dirty options at their disposal. It happened in Alaska. Now it happened again.
The system itself is corrupt and winning an election means beating the system. The bigger the election, the harder the system pushes back. It’s an elastic effect. Scale that up and you can see how hard winning the White House becomes.
This is why the left started at the bottom. It’s much easier to take over organizations from the top than the bottom. You have to become the system before you can beat the system.

2. The Tea Party brand has been severely damaged. That is to be expected. Even the left doesn’t stick with a brand. It uses innumerable front groups. The Tea Party brand should be retained as feeders for recruitment, but it might be wiser to route actual work through groups branded with names like “Reform” and “Change”.
And that takes me to…

3. The ongoing problem on the right is that it talks ‘extremist’ and legislates ‘moderate’ while the left talks ‘moderate’ and legislates ‘extremist’.
That’s a big part of why Obama is in the White House and conservatives are still struggling to make headway.
Obama isn’t in the White House because Americans woke up Communist one morning. I know that “Free Stuff” is a popular theory, but people always liked free stuff. The larger welfare population helped shift the balance, but if Obama had been a non-viable candidate, there would have been no balance to shift and it would have done him as much good as it did Jesse Jackson or Dukakis.
Obama is in office because much of the country believes that he is a moderate and a centrist.
The left can get away with it because it talks centrist and lives radical. If the right is ever going to do better than another liberal Republican, its candidates are going to have to talk like liberal Republicans while legislating well to the right.
It is doable. Rand Paul has been doing the talking part well enough. Unfortunately he talks the talk so well because he actually is well to the left.
And that’s the bigger problem.
Lefty candidates can have a certain amount of trust from the base because they are committed to an ideology. Obama’s supporters knew that he was for gay marriage and racial polarization no matter what he said. The right needs candidates who are ideologically committed so that trust stops being an issue.

NOT A ONE
There can be no conservative case for amnesty because there is no such thing as a conservative case for a policy that will not have a conservative outcome.
The only meaningful argument for a policy is based on outcomes.
If the outcome of a conservative policy is more liberalism, it was never a conservative policy to begin with. That is the simplest and most reliable acid test of any “conservative” policy agenda.
Will Policy X put the country on a more liberal or conservative track?
There Is No Conservative Case for Amnesty

Kerry: Russia Must “Literally” Disarm, State Department, Don’t Take Him “Literally” – This administration and its foreign policy are literally a joke.

CYNICAL AND DISHONEST
The leading factor behind the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t come from Iraq. It came from Syria.
The theory that turned Al Qaeda into a regional monster didn’t come from Dick Cheney. It came from Obama’s Presidential Study Directive 11 which helped pave the way for the Arab Spring. The definitive speech that opened the gates of hell wasn’t Bush’s speech on Iraq, but Obama’s Cairo speech.
Al Qaeda in Iraq was a vicious terrorist organization before the Arab Spring, but it was not capable of menacing Baghdad with a sizable army while crushing numerically superior forces along the way.
That didn’t happen in Iraq. It happened in Syria.
Don’t Blame Bush for Al Qaeda in Iraq, Blame Obama

There is a problem in Britain when it comes to discussing objectively the issue of Islamism. Nowhere is this more demonstrable than at the BBC

That the BBC has a left-wing liberal bias in its current affairs programming and news broadcasting is now, like the weather, a staple feature of British national consciousness. Perhaps like the weather, the BBC just cannot be reformed. We simply have to live with it and make allowances.

Still, when one hears yet another piece of skewed BBC news reporting, it’s difficult not to be angered, particularly when the subject is terrorism.

BBC’s Today programme recently reported on a video showing a young British Muslim from Cardiff, Nasser Muthana, apparently attempting to recruit would-be jihadists. The programme also reported on an interview with Nasser Muthana’s father, Ahmed Muthana, who denied any knowledge or awareness of how his son had been ‘radicalised’.

Sarah Montague of the Today programme, discussing the radicalising of young Muslims in Britain with Sir Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, commented: ‘the father clearly had no idea of the influences on his son’.

That comment goes way beyond the evidence. How could Sarah Montague possibly know that? She, like the rest of us, knows only what the father said, nothing more.

Montague’s comment was a classic example of a common BBC practice of skewed liberal interpolation, where a liberal value judgment is insinuated into the factual debate which then passes off as fact into the public consciousness.

This is not news reporting, but a form of social engineering, and is particularly noticeable not just with matters concerning radical Islam but also with liberal sacred cow issues such as immigration and social welfare reform.

Time and time again with current affairs and news, the BBC often gives the impression of wanting to turn the public mind in a liberal direction and seems to see itself as the officially designated fixer of public opinion, while at the same time singing the praises of free speech. Free speech, that is, so long as the boundaries are liberal.

The point is particularly relevant as Montague’s train of thought slipped neatly into the views of Sir Peter Fahy of the Prevent strategy on counter terrorism.

Do the governments of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have any responsibility for the catastrophe on southern frontier? Reacting to this latest crisis in Obama’s reign of error, Americans are debating the pros and cons of securing the U.S–Mexican border, reforming immigration law, building new detention centers, and more.

But one solution seems off the table:

These Latin governments should improve their own political economies, so that their people need not ride atop freight trains, ford the Rio Grande, and then dodge Gila monsters en route to better lives.

Liberals consider it Washington’s duty to nurture these people. But they first should ask Mexico City, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Tegucigalpa for assistance. Better yet, if Latin politicians improved their own domestic conditions, their constituents could stay home, avoid public assistance, and enjoy prosperity, health, and freedom inside their own countries.

According to the latest data, on table 34 of the 2012 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, 448,697 Mexicans were arrested that year while crossing into the U.S. So were 37,197 Salvadorans; 55,307 Guatemalans; and 48,984 Hondurans; but only 1,149 Canadians. Why so few? Canada’s per capita GDP is $42,734. Its generally unfettered market is rated No. 6 in the Heritage Foundation–Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom. Its honest government is ranked No. 9 in Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index. So, Canadians stay put, rather than flee south for opportunity.

Also, Canada outpaces America on key metrics. U.S. per capita GDP is higher at $49,222, although America, at No. 12, lags Canada in economic freedom and, at No. 19, in transparency.

By comparison, El Salvador’s per capita GDP is $7,438, Guatemala is the world’s 83rd freest economy, and Honduras has Earth’s 140th cleanest government. These nations and Mexico need to get it together, rather than simply stick their kids atop boxcars and send them north to surrender to the U.S. Border Patrol. America’s

Some 40,000 Christians live in Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, Iraq. Residents have been gathering daily in 12 local churches as ISIS jihadists advance towards the community. Their existence is a precarious one.

Some 40,000 Christians live in Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, Iraq. Residents have been gathering daily in 12 local churches as ISIS jihadists advance towards the community. Their existence is a precarious one.

It was the evening of Tuesday, June 10 when Salam Kihkhwa walked into a mobile phone shop in the Qaraqosh city center to purchase more minutes for his phone. Kihkhwa surfs the Internet for several hours each day and was carrying an iPhone 5s in his hand as he navigated his way past brackish puddles on the edge of the road. He set a few wrinkled dinar notes down on the counter to pay for a pack of Winchesters. Just at that moment, he recalls, he heard the scream: “The jihadists are in the city!”

Salam no longer remembers where the scream came from or whether it was a man or a woman. But he knows he left his cigarettes and money on the counter, grabbed his phone and made a run for it. Hundreds of others joined him, and the crowd kept swelling as it dashed through the streets of Qaraqosh.

“They’re coming,” the people fleeing yelled, warning others along the way. They ran into their houses — and the bells of Qaraqosh’s 12 churches began to ring.

Yet the day that the residents of Qaraqosh thought that the radical Islamist militia of terrorist Abu Bakr a-Baghdadi had entered the city turned out to be just one fear-filled day among many. And the situation this week appears to be worsening.

A week after his trip to the shop, Salam is sitting on a sofa in his small home, a wooden cross hanging on the wall behind him. His mother Sabria has set a meal of chicken and couscous on the table while his father Samir brings glasses of ice water. “God, we thank you for this meal,” they say. “Please stand by us.”

On my weekly visit to The Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, Hugh and I discussed the Clintons and their money – Bill can’t stop talking about how much they have, Hillary can’t stop talking about how poor they are, and poor Chelsea has declared, from her $10.5 million apartment, that she’s just too, too bored by money. On Hugh’s show, I put it this way:

“The problem here is it’s a Mitt Romney problem. When Mitt ran, people talked about Bain Capital, and a lot of people couldn’t understand what Bain Capital did. You know, he would talk about Staples, but everyone understood he wasn’t the guy who invented Staples, he wasn’t the guy who worked in stationery and office equipment and built up a chain of stores. Somehow Staples had fallen his way, and he turned it around. And people couldn’t quite equate that as work. And I think it’s actually even worse for Hillary Clinton, because she and Bill Clinton are stinkingly rich just from giving $200,000 speeches to rather shady and shifty figures from the United Arab Emirates. That’s basically how they’ve got rich… People don’t mind money, and people don’t mind Bill Gates having a ton of money, people don’t mind Steve Jobs making a ton a money. But this is hard-to-explain kind of money.”

Her latest book is part of that phenomenon. Her publisher paid an advance of $14 million. It will never earn that back. So what exactly are Simon & Schuster paying for? What exactly are all those Saudi sheikhs paying for, other than dull speeches on the need for education? No other “First Family” has leveraged their “public service” into a grip’n’greet cash-cow on the scale the Clintons have. That’s not like getting rich from “adding value” – from starting and building a business – or even from being a genuine bestselling author, like J K Rowling. I’m not sure how appealing this will be to the electorate at large.