RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Herman Melville’s classic story “Billy Budd,” the narrator ponders what could be the matter with the master-at-arms “who has an animus toward the young seaman known as Billy Budd.” Therein ensues a discussion about “natural depravity: a depravity according to nature.” Thus, “one who has this natural depravity can be described as having an

…even temper and discreet bearing [which] would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with reason [other] than to employ it as an ambidexter [deceitful method of pretending to be rational, but actually double dealing] … for effecting the irrational.

Consequently,

…toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and

sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object; it is protectively secretive, which is as much as to say it is self contained, so that when, moreover most active it is to the average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason above suggested: that whatever [its] aims may be–and the aim is never declared–the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational.

The narrator ends this philosophizing with the caveat that this “mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, [is] in short ‘a depravity according to nature.'”

Does this “natural depravity” describe Barack Hussein Obama? Repeatedly, the notion that there is something wrong with Obama emerges among those who attempt to analyze this man. His claim that “we [were] only five days away from transforming America” never actually spelled out what this transformation would look like. His assertion of being the most transparent administration is another empty and unmet promise. Like a snake, he slithers into comfortable camouflage as he and “his team have always had an allergic reaction to being placed on an ideological spectrum with any more precision than that he is a pragmatic progressive.”

Obama and his slavish media pride themselves on presenting him as “cool.” He will not be brought down by any such negative virtue as drinking too much; and certainly scandals that bring to mind Clinton’s dalliances would never be part of Obama’s playbook. In short, “the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual” as Melville’s narrator explains. Even Obama’s days of drugs and partying are casually shrugged away as being “hip” back in the day.

Yezidi and the Islamic State

About 15 miles east of the Syrian border, Yezidi, members of a religious sect numbering probably fewer than 1 million worldwide, sit atop the small Iraqi mountain range of Sinjar. They have little food and water, and, without support, many are already dying. (Sean Thomas offers excellent reporting here.)

Hope is also perishing, because the world’s worst fanatics are heading their way: the Islamic State (IS). On its ordained march to purge the world of anyone who doesn’t kneel, IS has little interest in mercy. The Islamic State project is a proud mission of death.

Of course, you may not have heard about any of this. The hashtag hypocrites are intoxicated by Gaza, after all. Still, this catastrophe is very real. And it’s not just the Yezidi who are suffering. The Kurds of northern Iraq and Syria are in an equally desperate position. Alone and outgunned, they face annihilation.

This isn’t complex. As Max Terzano has noted, the U.S. has a clear moral responsibility to support the Kurdish people. But there’s another issue here. In the Middle East, U.S. credibility has plummeted. If America now ignores the Yezidi–Kurdish plight, doing so will broadcast a terrible message: that our friendship means little and that alternative allies — Iran, for example — might be a better bet. In essence, not only will our humanitarian reputation suffer a hammer blow, so will our broader strategic interests.

Fortunately, we have good options. With the U.S. Air Force’s 728th Air Mobility Squadron at Incirlik Air Force Base, Turkey (a few hundred miles from Sinjar), America has a preexisting infrastructure to support airdrop missions into northern Iraq. In addition, squadrons from the USS George H. W. Bush carrier group are currently supporting intelligence operations over Iraq. Those squadrons could also be used for strike operations against IS, pressuring the group’s rapid-maneuver warfare and degrading its heavy-weapons assets.

Did the scandal and his impeachment really vindicate “the rule of law”?

We are marking this week the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, with the helicopter lifting him away from the White House and out of Washington. In one of those ever-recurring anniversaries of Watergate, Tom Brokaw delivered himself of the judgment that the scandal and the impeachment of Richard Nixon vindicated “the rule of law.” The truth that apparently dare not speak its name is that the lesson has been quite the reverse. For the telling, formal mark of a rule of law is that those who lay down the laws governing others should be willing to regard those same laws as binding on themselves. When the matter is cast as a “precedent” for legislators or judges, the question is whether people are willing to respect the principle they invoked in their earlier decision, even when it cuts against the side they favor now.

During the argument over the impeachment of President Clinton, William Bennett and I raised the question in the Wall Street Journal of whether the grounds put forth to justify the impeachment of Nixon would be honored now. Among the list of accusations, Mr. Nixon was charged with suborning perjury: “condoning . . . counseling witnesses with respect to the giving of false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers” and “misleading testimony in duly instituted judicial and congressional proceedings.” In the sweep of accusation, Nixon was charged also with misleading the public, interfering with the conduct of investigations, and obtaining from the IRS “confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law.” Those charges, of course, could have been made with even more force against FDR, and against presidents who have come well after Nixon. But the point was that the charges, if proven true, were offered seriously as grounds for removing a president from office.

Bill Bennett and I raised the simple question of whether the people who had persuaded themselves on these points in 1973–74 would respect them now when those charges cut against a president they regarded as their own. The record speaks amply for itself. Whatever else was accomplished 40 years ago in driving Mr. Nixon from office, it did not turn out to be the rebirth of a dedication to the “rule of law.”

But was it a just judgment, nevertheless, at the time? If we look again at the laundry list of charges, what springs out is the recognition that these charges could have been made against many presidents before and since Nixon. And this can be said even by people who do not think — as the late Jude Wanniski put it — that the main fault in the Nixon administration was that the Watergate burglars put the tape inside the door horizontally (where it was spotted by the guard) instead of vertically (where it could have gone unseen).

Center also hosts sex workshops, parties.

A Chicago LGBTQ group that hosts an annual rubber fetish contest and convention has received millions in federal, state and city tax dollars.

Center on Halsted, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community center, bills “Mr. International Rubber” as the “preeminent annual men’s rubber fetish event,” according to the event description of the 2009 contest. The winner that year received a $10,000 prize.

The center will host this year’s “Mr. International Rubber” from Oct. 31-Nov. 2.

Raunchy events such as this are common at the center.

Last August, the group hosted an “interactive” pleasure workshop titled “Awakening Your Sexual Self: Unlearning Shame + Embracing Pleasure.”

“Pleasure is your birthright,” the event description states. “It’s time to wake up and enjoy your body.”

The center’s regular events include various parties, concerts, and class offerings ranging from “Facebook for 45+” to “queer tango” lessons.

Illinois Senate Minority Whip Tim Bivinssaid in an interview with The Blaze that he would like to see a state audit of the group.

“An audit would let us know what they’re doing with the money,” he said. “If you’re paying to keep the lights on, even if they are just renting the building out, there are objections to be made as to how the money is spent.”

Bivins also said that many lawmakers are aware of the use of the funds, but won’t speak out “because they’re afraid of being labeled.”

“I put it into context,” Bivins said. “If this were any other not-for-profit such as United Way, Red Cross, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, etc. . . . and they rented out a building owned by them for heterosexual sex events, I am quite confident that every government body and citizen would be outraged and funding would cease immediately.”

During his time in the U.S. House and as Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel secured more than $2 million in funding for the group.

Though it may seem anciently irrelevant, the war’s consequences remain very much alive.
World War I started one century ago. Wait! Don’t stop reading.

For most Americans, the war is like algebra or frog anatomy — something you have to study briefly in school but then never have to think about again. Unlike World War II, with its unambiguous villains, epic battles and clear victory, World War I is a hot mess. Countries and forgotten empires declared war on each other in no small part because a bunch of aristocrats in funny clothes said they had to.

Everything about World War I — from the seemingly ridiculous fighting techniques (who hasn’t watched a movie with trench warfare and thought, “Man, that’s a dumb way to die”?) to the clothes and music — seems anciently irrelevant.

But the truth is that almost no modern event can hold a candle to it. George Kennan observed that when studying the maladies of the 20th century, “all the lines of inquiry lead back to World War I.” A century from now, people might say the same thing of the past two centuries.

Let’s start with the obvious. The staggering loss of military lives: 650,000 Italians, 325,000 Turks, nearly a million from the British empire, over a million from Austro-Hungarian lands, 1.4 million from France, 1.7 million Russians, 1.8 million Germans and 116,516 Americans — not to mention 8.9 million civilian casualties worldwide. None of that counts the 50 million fatalities resulting from the influenza pandemic largely unleashed by the war.

Without World War I, you don’t get the second — a poignant irony given that the former was sold as the “war to end all wars.” The terms imposed on Germany, described as a “Carthaginian peace” by John Maynard Keynes, made another war virtually inevitable. Much as Adolf Hitler found his life’s mission while fighting in World War I. Benito Mussolini’s Fascism was a direct adaptation of what he called “the socialism of the trenches.”

A group of eminent leaders tries to build ties.
When in late 2009 MahmoudAhmadinejad, president of Iran at the time, made an unprecedented visit to Brazil at the invitation of Brazilian president LuizInácio “Lula” da Silva, Israel took note. Not six months later, traveling through Israel, Lula declined to visit the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the philosophical father of Zionism, whose tomb is an official stop for visiting heads of state. He made sure, though, to lay a wreath at the grave of Yasser Arafat.

Lula’s pronounced distaste for the Jewish state only made explicit the anti-Israel sentiment that has been simmering for decades in Latin America — a reality that, many have observed, is detrimental to Israel and Latin America both. With the United States and Europe facing the consequences of years of flawed economic policy, Israel is looking elsewhere for new economic partners, particularly for its noted high-tech industry, and burgeoning Central and South American markets present attractive opportunities. But there is an impediment to a mutually beneficial partnership, and it is not economic but political.

Since the beginning of the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, five Latin American nations — Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru — have withdrawn their ambassadors from Israel, officially severing diplomatic ties. Venezuela and Bolivia cut ties in 2009, and Nicaragua in 2010, but in late July Bolivia expanded its censure, ending a visa-exemption agreement with Israel that has been in effect since 1972. President Evo Morales declared Israel a “terrorist state.” A lawmaker from Venezuela’s ruling party called Israel’s latest operation “genocide.”

A strong anti-Israel reaction from the region is not overly surprising. The largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Arab world is in Latin America; 280,000 persons of Palestinian descent reside in Honduras, 350,000 in Chile, and tens of thousands more are scattered throughout the continent. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Latin America are Christian, but they sympathize with the cause of Palestinian nationalism, if not with the Islamist groups, such as Hamas, that tout it.

Latin America has also long been a bastion of political leftism; from Che Guevara and the Castros to the evangelists of liberation theology, political schemers have found inspiration in Marx and his utopian dreams. Cuba, the zenith (or perhaps nadir) of Latin American Communism, cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1973, on the occasion of the Yom Kippur War. In the 1970s anti-American sentiment, common in Latin America, also extended to Israel, perceived by many to be merely an appendage of the U.S.

Major existential problems mean the organization may soon unravel.
Istanbul — April marked the 65th birthday of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed at the height of the Cold War to stop the huge post-war Red Army from overrunning Western Europe.

NATO in 1949 had only twelve members, comprising Western Europe, Canada, and the United States. Its original mission was simple. According to the alliance’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO was formed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Western Europeans were terrified of the Soviet Union, which had just gobbled up all of Eastern Europe. They feared that the American army would go home after World War II, just as it had after World War I, consistent with its isolationist past. And the war-torn democracies were scared that Germany might quickly rebound to prompt yet another European war for the fourth time in less than a century.

Sixty-five years later, the Cold War has been won and has now been over for a quarter-century. Germany is quite up. The Russians are not so out. America seems not to want to be in anywhere.

Those paradoxes prompt some questions. Is NATO even needed in the 21st century? Can it survive its new agendas and missions?

Article 5 of the NATO charter calls for all members of the organization to come to the aid of a fellow member if it is attacked. Article 4 is a watered-down version that obligates NATO members to consult on mutual defense when asked by a threatened member.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/dr-mark-durie-on-islam-vs-human-conscience-on-the-glazov/

This special two-part Glazov Gang series was joined by Dr. Mark Durie, a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, joined the show.

Dr. Durie joined the show to discuss “Islam vs. Human Conscience,” analyzing how Islam wages war on humans moral judgment and intuition. The focus on this phenomenon occurs in Part I below (starting at 5:30 mark). The dialogue transpired within the context of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria and the Islamic roots of that barbaric act. Dr. Durie shed light on the Islamic theology that inspires and sanctions Muslims to enslave and rape kafir women.

In Part II below, Dr. Durie discusses,“Female Genital Mutilation and Islam-Denial,” analyzing how the world blinds itself to the Islamic theological foundation of a vicious Islamic crime [starts at 11:00 mark]. Our guest focuses on this issue within the context of “Our ‘Tend and Befriend’ Response to Jihad,“ — the phenomenon of how Islamic terror has traumatized the West into psychological slavery.

Don’t miss this special 2-part series!

Europe likes to think of itself as enlightened but Operation Protective Edge and Israel’s counter-offensive against Hamas terrorism has highlighted the extent to which Jew hatred is still ingrained on the continent. To be fair, much of the anti-Semitism we are witnessing there manifests itself among the Muslims who have made Europe their home. But in all honesty, European authorities have allowed the malignancy to fester and metastasize to the point where it is now uncontrollable and threatens other non-Muslim communities. Naturally, Jews, because of their small size are the focus for now but once the Muslim community reaches sufficient numbers, Sikhs, Hindus and yes, even Christians will be next. One need look no further than Gaza, Egypt, Iraq and Syria to witness first-hand the fate of Christians who live in majority Muslim states.

Of course, the irony is difficult to ignore. The Muslims who are currently demonstrating and displaying their blood-curdling hate and vitriol in a free environment would likely be mowed down en masse had they ever dared to protest in the fundamentalist and fascist countries they profess to support. Moreover, many of these Muslim provocateurs despise the very democratic institutions that sustain them. But Judeophobia and xenophobia have no rational basis precisely because they are ideologies rooted in a convoluted mixture of hate, jealousy and ignorance. Detesting the “enlightened” country that provides you with all sorts of entitlements and supporting despotic regimes who would deny freedom to all is consistent with the doctrine of anti-Semitism.

Then of course, there is the so-called intelligentsia and those among the cultural elite, the actors and actresses who feel compelled to weigh in on the Gaza issue and the broader Arab-Israeli conflict despite their extreme ignorance on the matter. Selina Gomez, a product of the Disney machine whose good sense of judgment compelled her to tattoo some Arabic gibberish on her back, posted on Instagram the message, “It’s About Humanity. Pray for Gaza.’’

Of course Gomez likely has no clue where Gaza is and as Joan Rivers sardonically pointed out, probably doesn’t even know how to spell “Palestinian.” Gomez quickly realized the minefield she walked into and backtracked some with a subsequent post stating, “I am not picking any sides. I am praying for peace and humanity for all.’’

Sure Selena, don’t pick sides after all, a genocidal organization like Hamas whose charter calls for the murder of every Jew on the planet is morally equal to the Mideast’s only liberal democracy. A democracy that has dispatched its specialized rescue and medical teams to Haiti, Japan, Turkey and countless other places to provide humanitarian assistance while Hamas was busy digging tunnels for ghoulish purposes with cement earmarked for building schools.

While furious mobs of leftists draped in Keffiyahs and corn syrup were shrieking about Gaza in the public squares of every major city, ISIS was continuing its genocidal advance on Baghdad. In the last 24 hours, the Yazidis, a non-Muslim minority, fled ISIS to a mountaintop where their children are dying of thirst.

The stark reality of their plight, caught between thirst and a genocidal army, is in sharp contrast to the phony claims made about Gaza where truckloads of goods continue passing from Israel during wartime, where the malls have iPhones and the five star hotels offer cakes so tall they can only be cut from a crane.

The dead Yazidi children won’t inspire any protests or much in the way of outrage. The hysterical rallies for Gaza won’t suddenly turn into anti-ISIS rallies. If any of the angry white hipsters with dead baby posters are asked about it, they will offer some variation on, “It’s Bush’s fault” or “It’s Tony Blair’s fault.”

And they had been out there in the early part of the century denouncing any move to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The dead children gassed by Saddam, along with the children in his prisons, were unfortunately created less equal than the photogenic, oddly blonde children of Gaza’s Hamaswood.

Anna, a two-year-old girl whose feet were crushed by Saddam’s torturers, never mattered to them. It isn’t the children that they care about, not the dying Yazidi children in Iraq, the tortured children in Saddam Hussein’s prisons, or even the dead children of Gaza, used as human shields by Hamas in life and then brandished at rallies after their deaths as cardboard propaganda shields by furious Marxists.

When they thought that Israel had bombed a playground near the al-Shati refugee camp killing nine children, they went into murderous paroxysm of outrage. When it turned out that a misfired Hamas rocket was responsible, they fell silent.

They have equally little interest in the 3-year-old Gazan girl killed by a Hamas rocket in the early days of the war.