RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Discovery Channel just ran another of its wildly popular “Shark Weeks” without mentioning what is probably the shark attack capital of the Western hemisphere—the Florida straits.

“Getting attacked by a shark just might be the scariest event in nature!” gasped a Discovery Channel narrator during Shark Week. “Australia recorded 56 fatal shark attacks between 1956 and 2008!”he gasped again. “Find out what it’s like from people who’ve lived to tell the tale!”

So the Discovery Channel goes back over half a century and to a distant continent to interview the victims and dramatize the attacks. But why the distant timeline and setting, ask many people in south Florida?

“The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence, who spent years rescuing desperate Cuban rafters. “Probably every month during the early ’90s,” adds Bay of Pigs vet Arturo Cobo who ran the rafter rescue center in Key West and for years heard the sobbing, gut-gripping details of these attacks almost daily.

“Something was moving in this raft,” recalls an airborne rescuer.

So I went in lower. The water all around the raft was turning red…the cloud spreading. Then I saw the shark—about the same length as the raft. The rafter was in fact a Cuban woman in her early twenties. Upon her rescue we found she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others in the raft, including two infants had died, as did the shark, from being repeatedly stabbed by the pointed end of a broken oar by Maria. The Shark had bitten the oar in half as Maria pounded him…I started flying rescue missions full-time after that.

“The boys’ father, delirious from thirst and exposure, finally jumped in the water,” recalls another rescuer.

So the sons threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. They turned away for a second, slightly relieved—but only to spot a huge shark approaching, then another. Soon an entire school surrounded the raft and they ripped into their father…The water turned red as their father was eaten alive….. I can tell you from decades of and heart-breaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida straits every week is shark week.

In August 2012, James Foley retweeted a link to a CNN story asking “Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?”

The article concluded that indeed it was.

Three months later, Foley had been kidnapped. Two years later, on another August, a former branch of Al Qaeda chopped off his head.

In a New Yorker interview this year, which seemed to focus on the Lakers more than anything else, Obama wrote off ISIS as what happens when a “jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms”. He suggested that the answer lay in training the Iraqi police forces better.

That same month, ISIS had declared an Islamic State in Fallujah, the event that Obama was dismissively reacting to, and extended its reach beyond Iraq and Syria into Lebanon and Turkey. By June, the steamroller advance across Iraq had begun destroying the Iraqi military, never mind its police forces.

In April, Peter Bergen, the original author of the CNN article, had another piece contending that “right wing extremists” were now even “more deadly than Jihadists.” On August 18, he produced a CNN piece claiming that ISIS was no threat to Americans.

On the next day, ISIS chopped off James Foley’s head.

The incredibly deadly right-wing extremists have yet to show off the severed head of a journalist.

Obama has now been forced to hit ISIS with air strikes and to even put men on the ground while denying that the United States was at war with ISIS or that ISIS had anything to do with Islam.

And it was that denial which is at the root of the problem.

There has been a debate in the UK press suggesting we should hope that some of these ISIS killers come back to Britain, realize that jihad was all a phase and then head off to university for the start of the new term.

The beheading of James Foley was terrible, she stressed, “because we don’t know what [his] views were.”

Is there a time when even “combatants” — or anyone else — should be treated in this way? And who is to say who is a combatant and who not?

Who is surprised? That is one question I have most wanted to know since the video was released of the murder of American journalist James Foley. The politicians keep expressing it. And interviewers have kept asking people whether they feel it. But who can honestly say that he was surprised to learn that the murderer of the American journalist turned out to be a “British” man?

American journalist James Foley (left) is shown kneeling beside the British jihadist who murdered him moments later (Image source: Islamic State video)
Did anyone really still think that a British Islamist would not be capable of doing this? Why wouldn’t he do it in Iraq or Syria if his allies had already done it in London? After all, it was only last year that two other Islamists beheaded one of our own soldiers – Drummer Lee Rigby – in broad daylight in London. And it is only twelve years since another Londoner – Omar Sheikh – arranged the abduction and decapitation of another American journalist, Daniel Pearl.

What is shocking is that expressions of “shock” seem to be regarded as an adequate response. Prime Minister David Cameron has pronounced himself “appalled” by the act, and made clear that he “utterly condemns” it. As though anyone should ever have expected him to think otherwise. But this is to a great extent what government policy is reduced to in Britain, as in the United States. Politicians briefly break off their holidays in order not to do anything much, but to be seen to be doing “something.” And they then make sure to stand in front of the cameras and say how opposed they are to “something.” It is the denigration of people in positions where they actually could do something, to the level of the commentariat.

Objectivity is one of the greatest assets in any human intellectual encounter. But no concept can be so easily abused in the white heat of crisis. And it can become a false front for a failure to come to grips with the issues at hand. For it can easily metamorphous into the belief that we are able to see beyond the current issues and put them in a broad historical perspective.
That is one of the conceits of the present pseudo-intellectuals of the Obama Administration. The fact is that politicians, even those who graduate to statesmen, are not historians except in some very rare instances. So it is better left to our progeny to determine the longer-term results of the current crises and their outcomes. In terms of national policy, we have enough on our hands in simply meeting the demands of the hour for what clearly can be seen in the here and now as a danger to national security. Even that essential concept is a difficult one to measure at any given moment.
To do otherwise has led, in part, to the current incapacity of American leadership to cope with half a dozen threatening geopolitical disasters around the world. It is expressed in the pomposity of the belief of policymakers in the White House that can always maintain sangfroid above the fray. It leads them to believe that because they all knowing about all the issues, viewed from the perspective of opponents or enemies, they are able to couch compromises which would satisfy all parties.As a corollary, they see the pursuit of methods of exchanging views, however contradictory and inconclusive, as the end-all of all international relations.
So, instead of devoting all our resources to coordinating our allies in reinforcing the ability of Ukraine to meet continuing Russian aggression, for example, the Obama Administration lectures Vladimir Putin on his failure to understand a new international morality and thereby jeopardizes his role in history. I can’t imagine the master of the Kremlin with all his ambitions and current problems arising from them cares much for this uninvited counsel on his legacy.
Objectivity in formulating a foreign policy requires above all knowing what our own national interests are and pursuing them to the full extent possible. True, that is easier said than done. But it is the height of arrogance – and stupidity – to believe that one knows the irreconcilable interests of both parties to a dispute; it is more than enough to have clearly defined and registered our own.

The majority of Muslim leaders firmly condemn such radicalisation, but the appeal of such illicit underground movements to radicalised young men cannot be underestimated.
The best way to challenge a thoroughly bad thing is to offer a better one.
The better idea we can offer is the broad and all-encompassing values of liberal democracy in which we all have a voice and a say in shaping our future together. In this must involve the power and co-operation of Muslim communities who need to state, more clearly than they have done so far, their denunciation of these fanatical forms of Islam.
Islam has many strengths to contribute to our land. When I was Archbishop of Canterbury I had a strong and rich friendship with Sheikh Zaki Badawi, who sadly died in 2003.
He often remarked that Muslims had difficulties living as minorities in plural societies and much more work had to be done by Muslim scholars. With him I set up an important ‘listening exercise’ that eventually led to a Christian-Muslim Council.
I was also closely involved with Tony Blair in the establishment of Building Bridges following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
There has been a huge investment in strengthening Muslim, Christian and secular dialogue.
Muslim communities are being challenged as never before to discipline their young people or face the consequences that such radicalised young men will be banished from our shores.
This year we are reminded by the commemoration of two world wars that the values of our democratic traditions are precious. Our fathers and grandfathers – including many thousands of Muslims from around the Commonwealth – fought against totalitarianism for the survival of democratic virtues. The bloodthirsty advance of IS is a reminder that totalitarianism is far from dead.
Our fight continues.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2732895/Why-I-Christian-believe-banish-evil-British-jihadis-shores-Says-former-Archbishop-Canterbury.html#ixzz3BON75Tku
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