RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s trip to New York next week will be a welcome relief for the Iranian leader. Finally, he’ll be somewhere where he’s appreciated, even loved.

Ahead of his trip to America, the US media continued its practice of presenting Rouhani as a moderate, and a natural ally for the US.

NBC News’ Anne Curry interviewed Rouhani in Tehran, focusing her attention on his dim view of Islamic State.

Rouhani told Curry, “From the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.”

The US media and political establishment’s willingness to take Rouhani at his word when he says that he’s a moderate is one of the reasons that Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz was in such a desolate mood on Wednesday.

During a briefing with the foreign media, Steinitz described the state of negotiations between the US and its negotiating partners – Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – and Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program.

The briefing followed the latest round of the biennial Israeli-US strategic dialogue. Steinitz led the Israeli delegation to the talks, which focused on Iran, the week before nuclear talks were scheduled to be renewed.

One of Steinitz’s chief concerns was the US’s insistence that Rouhani is a moderate.

Secretary of State John Kerry didn’t appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to lay out an offensive strategy for defeating ISIS. Instead his real mission was a defensive strategy to protect Obama from critics on the right and the left.

Obama’s delayed strategy hasn’t won over liberals and conservatives. It certainly hasn’t won over the American people. For the first time, Obama’s counterterrorism policy no longer has the support of a majority of Americans. Americans don’t believe that Obama can keep them safe. They suspect that he’s just trying to protect the last shreds of his fading popularity by bombing ISIS. And they’re right.

Kerry was on the defensive from the first, appeasing Code Pink protesters there in support of ISIS, as they have in the past shown up in support of Hamas, and then taking fire from members of the Senate from both parties. He began his statement by appeasing Code Pink and ended it by appeasing Islam.

His statement was layered with television friendly talking points. “We do have a clear strategy,” he insisted. The defensive statement was a reference to Obama’s own disavowal of a strategy. Since then Obama, Kerry and countless administration personnel have insisted that there really is a strategy.

Defending Obama against accusations that his delayed response had allowed ISIS to become a major threat, he claimed that, “Early this summer the ISIL threat accelerated when it effectively erased the Iraq-Syria border and the Mosul Dam fell. The President acted immediately.”

“Immediately” makes Obama sound proactive. Kerry’s testimony was full of similarly active language. He used the word “immediately” three times in close succession. But cheap marketing tricks can’t cover up the fact that Obama’s “immediately” kicked in when ISIS was marching on Baghdad. That “immediately” sounds a lot like “the horse ran away and we immediately shut the burn door.” If you wait until an Al Qaeda spinoff has nearly taken over two countries, then there’s nothing immediate about your actions.

Kerry’s statement was filled with such delayed immediacies. “Deliberately and decisively, we further surged the ISR missions immediately,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) shocks and horrifies the world with videos of mass executions and beheadings, ISIS terrorist Rabie Shehada, also known as “the Palestinian slayer,” has stepped forward to give appalled onlookers a clearer insight into the evil that inspires him and his colleagues. In a video he recently posted online, Shehada earnestly and quite proudly explained:

“I swear we are a people who love death for the sake of God just as you love to live. I swear we are a people who love drinking blood. We came to slaughter you.”

Let it never be said that Shehada ever suppressed his charm.

This particular ISIS vampire has come a long way from studying mechanical engineering at a college in Nazareth Illit in Israel. As a Muslim who clearly didn’t overlook the Qur’anic command to wage war on unbelievers, it’s understandable why developing refrigerators and microwaves didn’t really cut it for him when he entertained visions of his own glorious Islamic future. And so, as his Islamic fate would have it, the young engineering student quit university and traveled through Turkey to get to Syria to join the “moderate” rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA).

It appears the FSA came up a little short for Shehada in terms of what he thought a true Jihadi should be doing with his time. So he quickly moved on to bigger and brighter things: he joined the ranks of ISIS, where he adopted the a.k.a. “Abu Musaab al-Safouri,” named after the village of Safouri near Nazareth.

Shehada was now clearly liberated from the distracting and draining routines of developing power plants and factories; Allah had now bestowed upon him the blessing of being able to spend his days in the productive, fulfilling and cheerful way that every good and obedient Muslim is obligated to do by the Qur’an: executing and beheading the enemies of Islam and reveling in their blood.

While many observers might be mystified and startled by the pronouncements of Jihadi warriors such as Rabie Shehada, those who are knowledgeable of the practices of Jihad and the ideological foundations on which they rest are well aware that the behavior of someone like Shehada is a completely normal and everyday thing in the world of Islamic warfare.