RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration is refusing to discuss reports that emerged early Thursday claiming that the White House is considering imposing sanctions on Israel for continuing construction on Jewish homes in Jerusalem.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf dodged several questions on Thursday when confronted with reports that the administration had held secret internal meetings to discuss taking action against Israel for its ongoing building in East Jerusalem.

The classified meetings were reportedly held several weeks ago and included officials from both the State Department and White House, according to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, which first reported on the meetings.

The possibility of sanctioning Israel for its ongoing construction sends a signal that the Obama administration is willing to go further in its denunciations of Israel then any previous White House.

At the same time, the White House is vigorously pushing Congress against passing new sanctions on Iran.

When asked to address the reports Thursday afternoon, Harf declined to take a stance.

“I’m obviously not going to comment one way or another on reported internal deliberations,” she said. “We’ve made clear our position on settlement activity publicly and that hasn’t changed.”

When pressed to address whether the White House has reached a point at which it believes its harsh rhetoric against Israel is not enough, Harf again demurred, stating that she would not “address hypotheticals.”

A White House National Security Council (NSC) official also would not comment on the report when contacted Thursday by the Washington Free Beacon.

News of the supposed meeting leaked to the press though Israeli officials who were apparently apprised of the discussion.

Now almost everyone is talking about the Islamic State threats in Gaza against poets, writers and women. The leaflets mention the poets and writers by name — a move that has created panic. The leaflets also include an ultimatum to Palestinian women to abide by Islamic attire or face the Islamic State style of punishment — presumably being stoned to death.

Of course, all this is taking place while Hamas continues to insist that that the Islamic State is not operating in Gaza. Those who are taking the threats seriously are the writers and women whose names appeared in the leaflets.

Islamic State flags can already be seen at football stadiums, on windshields of vehicles, mosques, educational centers and wedding invitations.

It is also clear that if and when the Hamas regime collapses, the Gaza Strip will not fall into the lands of the less-radical Palestinians.

It is important to keep in mind that the counties in Europe now voting for a Palestinian state may effectively be paving the way for a takeover by Islamic State.

It is always dreamlike to see one Islamist terror group accuse the other of being too “lenient” when it comes to enforcing sharia laws. But it is not dreamlike when a terrorist group starts threatening writers and women.

That is what is happening these days in the Gaza Strip, where supporters of the Islamic State are accusing Hamas of failing to impose strict Islamic laws on the Palestinian population — as if Hamas has thus far endorsed a liberal and open-minded approach toward those who violate sharia laws.

President Erdogan builds an opulent palace for himself, part of a 20-year mess that is American Middle East policy

It’s after Thanksgiving, and so it bears mentioning that Turkey, under the direction of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, formerly that country’s prime minister and now its president, has apparently lost its mind. Erdogan, a proudly demagogic Islamist, thinks Muslims discovered America, centuries before Columbus got there. Further, he’s built a presidential palace four times the size of Versailles and 30 times the size of the White House.

Erdogan’s wildly inflated sense of his own importance underscores both the extent and the source of America’s Turkey problem: The Obama Administration, as well as the Bush White House before it, has failed to cut him down to size. The effects of treating Erdogan like a reasonable actor when he is clearly crazy are not only being felt by the people of Turkey, who have seen their democracy curdle into authoritarian one-man rule and their economic miracle turn into an oligarchical prison-house built on enormous mountains of debt.

One familiar target of Erdogan’s public abuse is Israel. And as things head south in Turkey, it is not surprising that the Turkish leader has moved from words to actions. Last week, Israeli authorities rolled up a Hamas cell on the West Bank that was plotting several major operations, including an attack on Teddy Kollek Stadium in Jerusalem. The Hamas cell takes its orders from Hamas commander Saleh al-Arouri, who lives openly in Turkey under Erdogan’s apparent protection.

Israeli officials are furious with Ankara. They’re complaining to both the United States and NATO about Turkey’s hosting Arouri, who proudly claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli students this summer that led to 40-day-long war with Hamas in Gaza.

Ankara has formally denied the Israeli allegations: “Turkey holds dialog with Hamas,” said one Turkish official, perhaps referring to Arouri’s open presence in Turkey’s capital, “but would not under any circumstances allow a terror group to operate from its territory.” But that’s not true, say U.S. officials, who are less concerned with Hamas than with foreign terrorist organizations fighting in Syria. The White House has accused the Turks of giving safe passage to terrorists from both the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra. So, why not Hamas, too?

If you are mystified as to why the left strives so hard to make martyrs out of such unlikely role models as Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, both killed in self-defense, just keep in mind Rahm Emanuel’s credo: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

Within days of the shooting of Brown in August, a “Professor of Science and Education” named Christopher Emdin posted (and then updated in October) a piece for Huffington Post entitled “5 Ways to Teach About Michael Brown and Ferguson in the New School Year.” That article was given new life when a link to it was tweeted by the White House Am-Af Ed just after Thanksgiving. It included the acronym for “in case you missed it” – indicating that the administration thought the article’s content important and valid enough to bring to people’s attention once again.

What is Am-Af Ed? It is the U.S. Department of Education’s Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, an Obama creation designed to improve educational opportunities for blacks in America. But of course, educational excellence doesn’t mean the same thing to the Alinsky protégés in the White House as it does to most Americans. To the radical left, education is about mobilizing, galvanizing, and deploying armies of social justice warriors.

The Am-Af Ed tweet also included Twitter links to: left-leaning PBS; Teaching for Change, whose motto is “Building Social Justice Starting in the Classroom”; and Rethinking Schools, whose mission is “social justice teaching and education activism… to build broad democratic movements for social and environmental justice.” See a pattern developing there?

Teaching for Change devotes an entire page to “Teaching About Ferguson” to help indoctrinators – I mean, educators – enable students to “be proactive in their own communities” – because apparently it’s less important to give students of color an education than it is to pump them up for community action. The page is replete with items about the history of racism in America, along with positive references to Malcolm X, radical historian Howard Zinn, and the Black Panthers. That would be the same Black Panthers whose recent plot to bomb the Gateway Arch and murder the Ferguson police chief and a St. Louis prosecutor was stalled because the racist thugs ran out of EBT credit. What a standard for academic excellence they set.

Israel’s 19th governing coalition collapsed this week after less than two years in office. It included two right-of-center parties totaling 43 seats (the Knesset has 120) and two ostensibly “centrist” (actually leftist) parties totaling 25.

In recent weeks the respective leaders of the two leftist parties, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, had been staging a palace revolt. They lashed out at the government and its leader, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in ways only befitting a vituperative opposition. Lapid, the finance minister, refused to implement government policy and insisted on his own misguided, destructive plans.

It left the exasperated Netanyahu with no choice but to fire these two and, in effect, dissolve the government. New elections have been set for March 17.

Meanwhile three polls (summarized at the end of this analysis by Times of Israel editor David Horovitz) have indicated that, since the previous elections in January 2013, a lot has changed in Israel.

It was those elections’ right-leaning but equivocal results that gave rise to the dubious, rickety coalition that fell this week. But now all three polls tell the same story: the right will do much better in the new elections and be able to form a coalition without the “center” (or left), possibly with the ballast of ultra-Orthodox parties that are also right-leaning politically.

What changed?

Back in January 2013 things looked relatively quiet to Israelis. Successful terror attacks were down to very low levels. The November 2012 Gaza war had lasted only eight days with very few Israeli casualties. Iran was still under tough sanctions, creating hopes—illusions—that the West was serious about stopping its march to the bomb.

What a difference—at least, in perceptions—two years make.

While Israel won the 2014 Gaza war decisively, it had most of the country scurrying to bomb shelters for seven weeks and cost Israel 64 soldiers’ and seven civilians’ lives. In its aftermath, a wave of Palestinian terror attacks that started in September has killed 12.

Three days after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and leader of the Yesh Atid party and now former finance minister Yair Lapid failed to resolve their differences and so thrust Israel into an electoral season less than two years after the last election, the Left’s narrative is already clear. Netanyahu has forced unnecessary, costly elections on the country.

He did so because his reactionary nature, overweening ego and thin skin made it impossible for him to handle a true reformer like Lapid, who was trying to push the country forward.

The actual situation is quite different. These elections are necessary. The up to NIS 1.2 billion that taxpayers will have to pay to finance the vote scheduled for March 17 is money well spent. And if the current polls are even close to what the election results will be three months from now, then the public understands that they are necessary and intends to elect a government that will serve it better than the one that just dissolved.

To be sure, Netanyahu is the one who decided to call elections. But the person responsible for making it impossible for the existing government to function is Lapid. Over the past few months Lapid has had the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.

In 2013, Lapid ran as a centrist. The television celebrity’s new party, Yesh Atid, presented itself as the voice of the hard-working middle class whose members love this country and are tired of electing governments that trample their economic interests and take them for granted in favor of special interests, especially the haredim.

In other words, Lapid ran as his father’s son.

The late Yosef “Tommy” Lapid’s Shinui party also claimed to be the voice of the middle class and the ideological Center, fighting the special interests, especially the haredim.

But as economic commentator Rotem Sella explained Thursday on the NRG website, aside from boycotting the haredim, Lapid Jr. did not follow in his father’s footsteps after taking office.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/annmarie/counter-jihad-coalition-takes-to-the-streets-to-warn-people-about-islam-1/print/

“Counter Jihad Coalition” Takes to the Streets to Warn People About Islam By Ann-Marie Murrell

Visit The Counter Jihad Coalition here and contact them at: CounterJihadCoalition@gmail.com.

While Islam is waging a bloody battle across the entire world, instead of calling out their atrocities most of the media chooses to punish the people trying to warn the world about Islam. Freedom Fighters like Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, and Brigitte Gabriel are continuously denigrated for simply telling the truth.

Regardless of 9/11/01 and 9/11/12, and despite the fact that Americans are being beheaded by ISIS, if you dare suggest that the Islamic State is getting their killing orders directly from the Quran you are called ‘intolerant’ and ‘Islamophobic’. Meanwhile, ISIS is becoming more and more popular on social media and posters saying ‘ISIS is Here’ were seen in the original Ferguson riots.

So if no one is allowed to warn people about the violence of Islam, how will we be prepared when they try to accomplish their goal of taking over America? You take it to the streets–and that is exactly what a group called the Counter Jihad Coalition is doing, evangelizing at a popular outdoor mall known as the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California.

According to Samira Tamir of the LA chapter of ACT for America, the Promenade has become a very popular shopping area for Muslims in the area with bearded men and women wearing full hijabs–so each weekend, the CJC sets up a table with pamphlets and they tell people about Islam using direct quotes from the Quran.

Of course, their presence isn’t welcome with many 3rd Street Muslims.

Dr. Jamie Glazov, who spends many weekends at the Promenade, has been instrumental in bringing attention to the Counter Jihad Coalition’s work. This episode of The Glazov Gang below features Louis Lionheart of TruthDefenders.com, who works alongside the CJC on 3rd to tell the truth about Islam. As can be seen in the video, he was physically attacked by a Muslim woman at the Promenade after telling a crowd about the true nature of Mohammed’s marriage to 9-year-old Aisha: