RUTHFULLY YOURS

Speaking at the Wind Technology Testing Center in Boston Massachusetts on October 9th, the windsurfer and windbag-in-chief himself, Secretary of State John Kerry, pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction. Not nuclear arms in the hands of the terrorist sponsoring regime of Iran or in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda. Climate change is the real number #1 national security threat, according to Kerry.

Perhaps Kerry should take his head out of the clouds and take a hard look at the stark reality on earth that we are facing today. Think Ebola and global jihad for starts.

The World Health Organization called the Ebola outbreak “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times.” The Ebola epidemic has already killed more than 4,000 people, mostly in the West Africa. But the Ebola virus has spread to other parts of the world, including the United States. A Liberian man who had traveled to the U.S. has already died of Ebola in a Texas hospital. Now we learn that a nurse who treated him at the hospital is infected herself with the virus.

As usual, the Obama administration is scrambling to deal with the crisis by holding lots of meetings and taking half-hearted measures. It has refused to heed calls by an increasing number of people, including a leading epidemiologist, David Dausey, who works on controlling pandemics and said that we must do “whatever it takes to keep infected people from coming here.” This should include an immediate ban on travel from the countries with the largest rates of infection to the United States. A majority of Americans agree, according to an NBC News online survey. Instead, the Obama administration is more worried about such bans being seen as racist and disrupting the economies of the affected countries in West Africa than protecting the American people and easing their fears.

“We don’t want to isolate parts of the world,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, earlier this month. John Kerry said that “we need borders to remain open,” while calling as usual for multilateral action by African nations to deal with the crisis. They are wrong. Except for vital medical supplies transported on military aircraft to help stem the further spread of the disease in West Africa, the borders should be closed. The breeding ground in West Africa for Ebola must be fully isolated lest the deadly disease turn into a global pandemic. To paraphrase John Kerry, an unchecked Ebola contagion will bring an end to many lives including possibly in the United States – a lot sooner than climate change.

President Obama’s recent claim that Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam was nothing new. Since 9/11, we have heard from both ends of the political spectrum that jihadist terror has material causes and psychological conditions created by social, political, or economic dysfunctions. This argument is an old one, and was common in the aftermath of 9/11. Typical of such thinking was Bill Clinton’s claim that “these forces of reaction [al Qaeda] feed on disillusionment, poverty, and despair.” Left unexplained is the fact that billions of other people around the world even more impoverished and hopeless have not created a multi-continental network of groups dedicated to inflicting brutal violence and mayhem on those who do not share their faith or who block their visions of global domination.

Such materialist analyses ignore or rationalize the historical and theological context of modern Islamic violence. As a result, well into the second decade of our war against jihad we are still misdiagnosing the problem and hamstringing ourselves by resorting to democracy-promotion or economic development, solutions that have nothing to do with the root of the problem––the theologically sanctioned violence, intolerance, and totalitarian universalism that define traditional Islam.

A recent example of this failure of imagination appeared in The Wall Street Journal in an essay by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. De Soto is one of Latin America’s most eloquent champions of free-market economies and the prosperity, freedom, and opportunity they create. Referencing the success of some Latin American countries in throwing off dirigiste or socialist economies, de Soto claims that in the Muslim world as well, “Economic hope is the only way to win the battle of the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.”

To buttress this claim, de Soto uses an analogy between Islamic jihadists and the radical Marxist-Leninist terrorist group “Shining Path” that troubled Peru in the 90s. Just as economic and legal reforms created opportunity and wider prosperity, and thus drained support for Shining Path, de Soto argues, so too in the Middle East similar attention to encouraging entrepreneurship and laws favorable to business could neutralize the numerous jihadist outfits. This analogy, however, ignores crucial differences between a faith-based movement and one like communism predicated on a secular, materialist ideology.

Turkish and U.S. officials are now planning to push the “moderates” onto the battlefield. The “moderates” — Islamists featuring lighter shades of jihad — will be trained at a military base in Turkey to specialize in bombing, subversion and ambush, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, and expected to fight Islamists featuring darker shades of jihad.

The “moderates” are a potential threat to Western security interests. They are potential allies of Turkey’s Islamists.

If Turkey had not funded and armed ISIS in the hope that it would bring Assad’s downfall, none of this would have happened.

In November 2013, Iran’s ambassador to Ankara, Alireza Bigdeli, said: “Just as Imam Khomeini did it in Iran, the Justice and Development Party [AKP] have paved the way for the advancement of Islam in Turkey.”

Nearly a year later, the AKP’s new leader (and Turkey’s Prime Minister) Ahmet Davutoglu rephrased the Iranian diplomat’s “praise” for Turkey’s Islamists: “We have made the conservative, pious (Muslim) masses not a just a part, but the main actor, in the political system.”

Either political diagnosis will explain Turkey’s radical shift towards political Islam in the last decade or so. Davutoglu’s boss, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has never hidden his ideology. On Jan. 8, 1995, he said, “marriage certificates should be issued by imams, not by municipal officials.” In a Sept. 23, 1996 statement, he said, “the system we want to establish cannot contradict Allah’s orders. Our reference is Islam.” And in January 2012, after nearly a decade in power, he declared that his political ambition was “to raise devout generations.”

Unsurprisingly, the rise of political Islam in Turkey, and the AKP’s consolidation of power since 2002, has not only made the Crescent and Star a champion of antisemitism but also created a ruling ideology that borders on jihadism, from the bottom to the top echelons of the state. It is not exactly jihadism, but a lighter shade of it — for the moment.

Last week, for instance, anti-riot police attacked Kurdish demonstrators in a town in eastern Turkey and chanted, “Long live ISIS!” — overt support for the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], which, ironically, Washington apparently hopes to fight in cooperation with Turkey.

We are led by a bunch of juveniles — led straight into a ditch that will take a long time to crawl out of, assuming we get a good president in 2017 (a big assumption given the ongoing slow motion Clinton coronation).

The White House apparently believes the way to lead is by getting out the coloring books and cameras. True, we live in a visual age with a SnapChat attention span but does an agenda have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator? Can’t the greatest communicator on earth educate and inform instead of distract and prevaricate? Can’t a team that takes many billions of dollars of taxpayer money come up with a better way to formulate and pitch policy than relying on tweets and silliness?

Instead we get comments such as “dude that was two years ago” to explain away the Benghazi disaster and divert blame from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton form a former van driver turned National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor. We get the same drivel from failed short-story writer Ben Rhodes — who has become a key foreign policy makers because … I cannot figure that answer out, but it might have something to do with sycophancy, a talent for lying that Obama (who, after all, lied about his own mother’s death for political purposes and clearly feels no compunction about serial lying ) values in people, and a brother who heads up CBS News.

Talent is a job-killer for people wanting to work in the White House. But skill at Adobe Photoshop and reducing complex foreign policy and other issues to 140 characters helps. Simple-mindedness is a must, along with a touch of mendacity.

For this is the mindset of the adolescents running this administration. Of course, this team knows their base the best, so maybe they calculate (and they are a calculating lot) that this is the way to build support among many Democrats.

Just to recap a brief history:

We had a campaign based entirely on slogans and photos. We had Hope and Change; Yes We Can; We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. And other meaningless gibberish-including emails with led by informative hard-hitting subject lines along the lines of “Hey.” For more of this electronic litter see “15 best Obama email subject lines.”

The polls that most campaigns rely on are their own. When the Republicans announced they were lifting spending in 6 Senate races — Colorado, Georgia, South Dakota, Iowa, New Hampshire and Alaska — it was indicative of growing concerns about holding Georgia and winning South Dakota (Democrats have also boosted spending there in what was viewed for most of the campaign season as a likely GOP pickup). It also indicated that the small GOP leads in Iowa, Colorado and Alaska are vulnerable.

In Alaska, where Democrats have a strong ground game aimed at rural Alaskans and native Americans (15% of the population), the Republicans have countered with perhaps their most effective TV ad campaign.

The spending on New Hampshire reflects the most recent polls showing the race tightening, with Scott Brown down only 2 %. Today comes news that Republicans will add $6 million to the $3 million they planned to spend in North Carolina. This comes on the heels of two new polls showing Republican challenger Thom Tillis even, and today ahead by 1 point, in a race where Kay Hagan has had a 3-4 point lead for months.

What this means is that the GOP is now targeting ten pickup races: West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire. Mitt Romney won the first 6 by large margins, and North Carolina by 2%. He lost in the other 3 states by 5-6%. At the moment, the Republican leads in the last poll taken in 9 of these 10 states, all except New Hampshire.

On the other hand, the latest Georgia poll shows a tie, and Greg Orman, the fake independent, leads in the latest Kansas poll by 3%. If the Republicans can hold their vulnerable seats, and the Obama administration continues to self-destruct, November 4th might be a very good day for the Party

Columbus may have outfoxed the Spanish court and his rivals, but he is falling victim to the court of political correctness. The explorer who discovered America has become controversial because the very idea of America has become controversial.
There are counter-historical claims put forward by Muslim and Chinese scholars claiming that they discovered America first. And there are mobs of fake indigenous activists on every campus to whom the old Italian is as much of a villain as the bearded Uncle Sam.

Columbus Day parades are met with protests and some have been minimized or eliminated.

In Seattle, Columbus Day became Indigenous People’s Day, which sounds like a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday.

The shift from celebrating Columbus’ arrival in America to commemorating it as an American Nakba by focusing on the Indians, rather than the Americans, is a profound form of historical revisionism that hacks away at the origins of this country.

No American state has followed Venezuela’s lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which actually is a Marxist terrorist group’s holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

Anti-Columbus Day protests are mounted by La Raza, whose members, despite their indigenous posturing, are actually mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but who know that most American liberals are too confused to rationally frame an objection to a protest by any minority group.

About the only thing sillier than a group of people emphasizing their collective identity as a Spanish speaking people, and denouncing Columbus as an imperialist exploiter is Ward Churchill, a fake Indian, who compared Columbus to Heinrich Himmler. Ward Churchill’s scholarship consists of comparing Americans in past history and current events to random Nazis. If he hasn’t yet compared Amerigo Vespucci or Daniel Boone to Ernst Röhm; it’s only a matter of time.

ISIS is about to conquer Baghdad while the Kurds are begging for arms and American airpower to prevent the massacre of the people in Kobane. Joey Biden accidentally told the truth about Turkey’s placid approach to ISIS but apologized quickly. Ukraine has gone quiet for the moment but Kim Jong-un remains missing and — given his five weeks’ absence — intelligence analysts are trying to figure out if the North Koreans are about to go off the rails again. And TSA’s experts are screening passengers at some airports, including JFK, to ensure our borders remain open to anyone who will not die of Ebola before they go through customs inspection. The rest of the world is in about the same shape.

In short, President Obama’s foreign policy has so consistently failed that it’s no longer news. The media just report what’s going on mostly without reference to Obama or the United States. And while all of this is going on, the people who helped Obama develop these failed policies are — one by one — throwing him under the bus in one highly-publicized memoir after another. Inspiring loyalty in those who follow you is a primary trait of a leader. Judging by the raft of memoirs by his most trusted advisors, Obama isn’t much of one.

It all began with Duty, former defense secretary Bob Gates’s memoir published early this year. Gates was a holdover from the Bush administration and, as he recounts in the book, he interviewed with Obama for only about 45 minutes to determine whether Obama would keep him on. And in that time he never once asked Obama a substantive policy question. Gates, the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, only wanted to know that he’d not be ignored, whether he could keep his deputy and such.

Then Gates was surprised to discover that he had no real power. All of the decisions on defense policy were made in the White House. When he told Obama that if Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal he’d lose the Afghanistan war, Obama fired the general an hour later. And then Gates recounts that he was shocked that in deciding on the Afghanistan surge, Obama didn’t trust his generals, didn’t believe in his own strategy and — I’m interpolating here — really didn’t give a damn about anything other than the domestic political effects of his action.

Then came Hillary. It’s tougher for Mizz Clinton to duck responsibility for Obama’s policy decisions because she helped formulate most of them, but she takes her best shot in her book Hard Choices. Clinton was Obama’s chief foreign policy adviser as Secretary of State, but she writes of her disagreement with Obama on supporting Syrian rebels. Obama is brilliant, she says. A great prophet on foreign relations and if he’d only listened to her, the world would be a better place.

Now another Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has come out with a memoir bashing Obama for all manner of failures. I haven’t read it, and may not, because we know his motivation.

http://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.co.il/2014/10/defeating-forces-of-darkness.html

Israel – everyone’s best hope for a bright future.

On the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing of the Law) we read how the universe was created – starting with the four words “Let there be light”. Today, Israeli solar energy projects light up countless homes. However, the Jewish State also has found another way to illuminate millions of lives – by removing the darkness itself.

It is sad to see the shadowy effects of aging on previously brilliant minds. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute may therefore have opened up the promise of a brighter tomorrow. They have discovered that the protein interferon beta impairs the cognitive ability of the brain – common in old age. New treatments that block or remove this protein may one day prevent or reverse cognitive decline and rejuvenate the brain. Israeli biotech Compugen has discovered another “murky” protein, codenamed CGEN-15049 that prevents the immune system from destroying tumors. Attacking CGEN-15049 could prevent cancers of the lung, ovaries, breast, colon, stomach, prostate and liver. A new treatment may already be underway thanks to FutuRx – a new Government-funded incubator for Israeli bio-techs.

Watching someone being treated successfully for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) is like seeing a dark cloud lifted. So we hope for only blue skies from now on, now that the US FDA has fast-tracked the NurOwn ALS treatment developed by Israel’s Brainstorm. On the other hand, those suffering from the dry form of age-related macular degeneration (dry-AMD) may develop dark areas on the retina of the eye, causing progressive blindness. OpRegen, developed by Israel’s CellCure NeuroSciences is hoping to become the first approved therapy for dry-AMD.

Rebuilding or repairing infrastructure in the Gaza Strip is the best thing that could have happened to Hamas. Hamas knows that every dollar invested in the Gaza Strip will serve the interests of the Islamist movement. The promised funds absolve Hamas of all responsibility for the catastrophe it brought upon the Palestinians during the confrontation with Israel.

Hamas will now use its own resources to smuggle in additional weapons and prepare for the next war with Israel. Hamas can now go back to digging new tunnels and obtaining new weapons instead of assisting the Palestinians whose homes were destroyed as a result of its actions.

The biggest mistake the donor states made was failing to demand the disarmament of Hamas as a precondition for funneling aid to the Gaza Strip. Hopes that the catastrophic results of the confrontation would increase pressure on Hamas, or perhaps trigger a revolt against it, have faded.

It would be naïve to think that Hamas would not benefit from the billions of dollars that have just been promised to help with the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, during a donor conference in Cairo.

The Palestinians were hoping for $4 billion, but the donor states pledged $5.4 billion, half of which will be “dedicated” to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, according to Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende.

It is not yet clear how the second half will be spent.

Qatar, a longtime supporter and funder of Hamas, promised $1 billion, while US Secretary of State John Kerry announced immediate American aid of $212 million. The European Union, for its part, pledged $568 million.

Caught in their crossfire
Soon to vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli academics, the Doctoral Students Council at the City University of New York is showing itself to be as closed-minded and intellectually bankrupt as so many of its counterparts in institutions of higher learning across the world. This is but one example of the moral turpitude that has infected Western campuses with a disease far more deadly than Ebola.

There are, however, two literary silver linings in this otherwise black cloud: irony and poetic justice.

The irony is that the majority of Israeli academics (particularly those in the humanities and social sciences) not only share the outlook of their colleagues in universities abroad, but impart it to their students at home. Nor is the lectern their sole soap box. On the contrary, their academic credentials also give them access to the op-ed pages of all Israeli newspapers. And the greater their critiques of their own country, the more exposure they receive in Europe and the United States.

This is where the poetic justice comes in.

Whenever an academic community boycotts Israeli professors, it automatically loses a host of highly articulate useful idiots for its cause. And there is no Israel-bashing quite as effective as that which emanates from the Jewish state itself.

It is thus that members of Israeli academia feel unfairly treated by such boycotts. Aside from having to kiss goodbye their coveted junkets, lecture tours and book deals, they are shocked that they — the “good Jews” with impeccable left-wing politics — should become ivory tower cast-outs.

Take Dr. Anat Rimon-Or, for instance. A lecturer on education, culture and ethics at various academic institutions in Israel, Rimon-Or is a radical ideologue whose positions on Israel would make any anti-Semite proud; and her dim view of the West would warrant her being hired to do public relations for the Iranian regime.

Last month, Rimon-Or posted a lengthy defense of ISIS on her Facebook page. Rather than being discredited on the spot, she was invited to participate in a prime-time TV panel on Monday evening. This coincided with reports of ISIS holding its ground in Kobani in Syria, after successfully taking over a military base in Iraq.