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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http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2014/08/24/chaldean-archbishop-of-mosul-warns-the-west-about-islam-western-islamization/

Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul Warns The West About Islam & Western Islamization

Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values ​​are not their values.

Amel Nona, the 47 year-old Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, who fled to the Sunni “re-awakening,” IS-led jihad in northern Iraq, to Erbil, Kurdistan, made the following statements to Corriere Della Serra, published August 10, 2014:

“Our sufferings today are a prelude to what even European and Western Christians will incur in the near future. Your liberal and democratic principles here [in the Middle East] are not worth anything. You need to rethink our reality in the Middle East because you are receiving in your countries, an increasing number of Muslims. You too are at risk. You have to take strong and courageous decisions, at the cost of contradicting your principles. You think that men are all the same. It is not true. Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values ​​are not their values. If you do not understand in time, you will become victims of the enemy that you welcomed into your home.”

In the wake of journalist James Foley’s brutal beheading, a 22-year-old woman is vowing to copycat his execution and become the first female jihadist from the United Kingdom to kill a Western captive in Syria.

Khadijah Dare, originally from London, England, is married to a Swedish man and Islamic State fighter named Abu Bakr. The couple moved to Syria in 2012 and are currently living alongside the extremist militant group with their son, according to London’s Evening Standard.

Dare apparently writes under the Twitter name Muhajirah fi Sham (which means “immigrant in Syria”) to discuss her jihadist ambitions in Syria, though her account has recently been taken down. In a tweet, which has since been removed, Dare revealed her intentions, per The Independent:

“Any links 4 da execution of da journalist plz. Allahu Akbar. UK must b shaking up ha ha. I wna b da 1st UK woman 2 kill a UK or US terorrist!(sic)”.

The graphic video of Foley’s murder, released by the militant group this week, has refocused attention on foreign fighters streaming to join the Islamic State. The man in the propaganda clip speaks in a British accent and U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said it is likely he is a British citizen.

Before moving to Syria, Dare was reportedly a regular at the Lewisham Islamic Center in southeast London, having converted to Islam as a teenager, the same mosque linked to Woolwich killers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale who were convicted of the 2013 murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, the Evening Standard reports.

Trying to distance itself from Dare, the center said in statement, as reported by The Guardian:

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, a second B-29 dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki . General Douglas MacArthur had expected to continue conventional bombing of Japan followed by a massive invasion, codenamed “Operation Downfall.” President Harry Truman was told that such an invasion could cost one million American casualties.He decided–against the advice of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General Dwight Eisenhower and a number of the Manhattan Project scientists–to use the atomic bomb.

Emperor Hirohito announced Japans’s unconditional surrender in World War II in a radio address on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” The formal surrender agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

And that was the end of World War 2- the last war fought with the goal of total victory and unconditional surrender.

Just another episode of Hamas rule in Gaza, as — quoting Reuters here — “Hamas-led gunmen in Gaza executed 18 Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel on Friday, accelerating a crackdown on suspected informers after Israeli forces tracked down and killed the three senior Hamas commanders.”

How did these Hamas-led executions proceed? This from the New York Times [1]: “”Masked gunmen in matching black T-shirts and pants paraded seven of the suspected collaborators, handcuffed and hooded, to their deaths before a boisterous crowd outside a downtown mosque after the Friday prayer, in a highly theatrical presentation. Photographs showed a pair of militants leaning over a doomed man on his knees against a wall, and masses of men and boys cheering and clamoring for a better view.” (Reuters has a video clip here [2], including the crowd and the bloodied street).

Thus runs the course of “revolutionary justice” in Gaza — which is how this process was labeled on the website Al Majd, which is described by the Times as “managed by the Internal Security Service of the Hamas government that ran Gaza until June” (when the Hamas government morphed into the “National Consensus Government” of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah).

Were there fair and impartial trials of the accused? Were they provided with lawyers, permitted to mount a defense, treated with dignity? Was their right to privacy respected? Did the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross immediately pronounce themselves appalled? Did the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, decry this mass public use of the death penalty? Did the UN Relief and Works Agency, a megaphone for Gaza, even mention these horrific executions in its daily Situation Report [3]? Did UNRWA’s Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl, formerly of the ICRC, self-appointed arbiter of legalities in Gaza, issue an outraged denunciation of these mass executions?

You know the answer. No. There was none of that. This mass public execution of Palestinians, by Palestinians — according to Reuters, the third round of executions of suspected collaborators just this month — aroused no global outcry. The story played in the New York Times and on Reuters as a tale — albeit with gruesome touches — of Hamas defending itself against Israel. As the Times headline framed it: “Executions in Gaza Are a Warning to Spies.”

Yes, these executions are certainly a warning to spies. But how, precisely, are they less barbaric than, say, the executions of ISIS? Forget even a trace of humanity. Before a rowdy crowd, men in handcuffs and hoods are deliberately paraded by masked gunmen, herded against a wall en masse, and shot to death. For what? For alleged betrayal of a terrorist group that seized power in Gaza in 2007, in a bloody coup against other Palestinians, and uses schoolchildren and hospital patients as human shields for its attacks on Israel.

Connoisseurs of obtuse moral idiocy have long cherished The New York Times. Is there any other contemporary organ of opinion that so reliably combines the odor of sanctimoniousness with a seamless adherence to “progressive,” left-leaning orthodoxy? It’s not just the positions espoused by our former paper of record: it’s the combination of those echt correct opinions with the aura of smug self-satisfaction that makes the paper such a remarkable source of nausea-inducing pontification.

Today’s paper provides a particularly egregious example on its op-ed page (I mean the one at the back of the first section, not the one the Times has taken to running on its front page). The column in question is called “The Problem With ‘Evil’ [1].” It’s by Michael J. Boyle, an Associate Professor at La Salle University. Really, it is something special — though I should perhaps add that by “special” I do not mean “commendatory” but rather depressingly singular, as when educationists denominate the academically or intellectually deficient portion of the class as one of “special needs.”

Associate Professor Boyle’s column is about the world’s response to the beheading of the Sunni-loving jihadist James Foley [2] by ISIS barbarians. That’s not how Associate Professor Boyle puts. On the contrary, the burden of his column — as those knowing scare quotes around the word “evil” suggest — is to chastise us imperfectly enlightened folks from the use of “moralistic language” when we describe the knife-wielding pastimes of ISIS.

Not that Associate Professor Boyle is a fan of ISIS. He is on board with the “global condemnation of the insurgent group and its horrific tactics.” But he is alarmed that some of those who condemn separating Mr. Foley’s head from the rest of him should resort to the “moralistic language once used to describe Al Qaeda in the panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.” Got that? Those bad “panicked days” of yore, back when our reason was occluded, made us “moralistic” in our use of language. You remember: before 9/11 no one, near enough, had ever heard of al Qaeda. On September 12, 2001, most people — not people like Associate Professor Boyle, of course — would have described al Qaeda as an evil organization whose members were savage, theocratic barbarians that the civilized world should exterminate eftsoons and right speedily. Is that “moralistic”? Or merely, considering the existential threat posed by al Qaeda, commendably moral, as well as, let’s face it, justifiably pragmatic?

If you think that, you are, according to Associate Professor Boyle, insufficiently sensitive and imperfectly enlightened. What’s the worst thing a contemporary academic can say about someone? Yes, you got it. That “moralistic language” — you know, the impulse to describe ISIS as “evil” — is “an eerie echo” of . . . of who? Yes! It’s an “eerie echo” of “President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign against ‘evildoers,’ . . .” Have you ever heard anything so outrageous! Imagine, calling the chaps who steered airliners into buildings tall and squat for fun and profit as “evildoers.” Have you ever heard anything so un-nuanced, so politically incorrect, so unbefitting an Associate Professor, or even a Distinguished Full Professor with a named chair?