RUTHFULLY YOURS

Talking to NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, National Security Advisor Susan Rice said the United States would not reevaluate the strategy to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL).
“Strategy’s very clear,” she went on. “We’ll do what we can from the air. We will support the Iraqi security forces, the Kurds, and ultimately over time, the moderate opposition in Syria to be able to control territory and take the fight to ISIL. We’ll do our part from the air and in many other respects in terms of building up the capacity of the Iraqis and the Syrian opposition, the moderates.”

As for the specific elements of this “strategy,” I’ve dealt with them in some detail a month ago and en general last week. Let us summarize: The Iraqi security forces are in no better shape now than they were last June, when they spectacularly disintegrated in Mosul and Tikrit, and they will not be capable of conducting serious anti-IS operations in the foreseeable future. If a decade of American training, arming and equipping them, at an exorbitant cost to U.S. taxpayers, has not done the trick so far, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they will undergo a spectacular transformation in the years to come – whatever the name of the present or future Iraqi prime minister. The Kurds are on the verge of losing Kobani, and they are embittered over Turkey’s inaction and insufficient U.S. support. Their only goal, reasonably enough, is to hold on to what they control. They will never conduct complex anti-IS operations outside their ethnic areas, even if they were theoretically able to do so. The “Syrian moderates” do not exist. Advanced weapons systems delivered to them so far – notably guided anti-tank missiles – have been passed to the IS in pristine condition. That will not change.

BY NATAN SLIFKIN
The Lion Hunter of Zion Returns to Zion! Great news today! The ashes of Colonel John Patterson were brought to Israel for burial alongside his Jewish Legion soldiers, in accordance with his dying wishes. If you don’t remember who Colonel Patterson is, here is my post on him from last year:

The Lion Hunter of Zion

In his youth, King David proved his heroism by slaying a lion. He went on to put his life on the line for the Jewish People and become a hero for all Israel. Three thousand years later, another lion-hearted lion-slayer also put his life on the line for the Jewish People and became a hero for all Israel. He wasn’t even Jewish, but he was one of the greatest friends and supporters that the Jewish People ever had – and his experiences with lions assisted in numerous ways.

Colonel John Patterson was an Irish soldier and engineer assigned to Kenya by the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. His job was to supervise the construction of a bridge over the Tsavo river for a massive railroad project. Unfortunately, railroad workers were constantly being slaughtered by the most notorious man-eating lions in recorded history. Two maneless but huge lions, working together, were estimated to have killed and eaten well over a hundred people working on the railroad.
Night after night, Patterson sat in a tree, hoping to shoot the lions when they came to the bait that he set for them. But the lions demonstrated almost supernatural abilities, constantly breaking through thorn fences to take victims from elsewhere in the camp, and seemingly immune to the bullets that were fired at them.

Patterson was faced with the task of not only killing the lions, but also surviving the wrath of hundreds of workers, who were convinced that the lions were demons that were inflicting divine punishment for the railroad. At one point, Patterson was attacked by a group of over a hundred workers who had plotted to lynch him. Patterson punched out the first two people to approach him, and talked down the rest!

After many months, Patterson eventually shot both lions. He himself was nearly killed in the process on several occasions, such as when one lion that he had shot several times suddenly leaped up to attack him as he approached its body. He published a blood-curdling account of the episode in The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, which became a best-seller, and earned him a close relationship with US President Roosevelt.

The elitist media outlets of Israel, Western Europe and the USA are wrong! Israel is increasingly appreciated and embraced – not ostracized – by the global community.

In defiance of the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement in Britain, and despite the Gaza War, Israel’s exports to Britain, and the Israel-Britain trade balance, surged by 38% and 28% respectively from January-August, 2014, compared to the same period in 2013, expanding employment in both countries. In addition, 37 Israeli-British mergers & acquisitions and British stock market IPOs occurred during the same period.

The swelling Israel-Britain trade balance highlights Israel’s special capabilities in the global market, generating cutting-edge technological and scientific developments which have given rise to unique medical, healthcare, agricultural, software and defense technologies and products. Moreover, most of Israel’s export is business-to-business-based, supplying leading international businesses with critical components and technologies, which enhance the quality and reduces the cost of their own products, revolutionizing quality of life, in general, and commercial/defense performance, in particular. The Israeli exports provide American, European, Russian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and additional global giants with a competitive edge in the global competition.

Israel’s unique niches in the area of healthcare were underlined in the June 2014 Forbes’ list of ten health companies changing the world, five of them were Israeli. “It’s amazing that Israel – a country of only eight million people – produces so many leading health technology companies,” David E. Williams, president of the US-based Health Business Group, told the Grapevine. According to Williams, “Israel’s highly educated technical and medical workers are reared in a society that prizes problem-solving and innovation, placing tremendous value on curing illness and saving lives.”

Barbara Opall-Rome, the Israel Bureau Chief of Defense News, sheds light on the global added-value of Israel’s defense industries and Israel’s rising weapon exports, which have grown since the Gaza War. The war revealed the potency of Israel – the world’s largest and most advanced battle tested laboratory – especially in the area of shielding civilians from the wrath of short-range missiles and defending tank crews against guided missiles. According to Opall, “over the past five years, Israel has had military sales of around $7bn annually, and it puts Israel in the top five of the world’s arms-exporting nations…. India is one of Israel’s biggest customers, buying everything from ship and air defense systems to anti-tank missiles and drones.”

The DOJ produces another brazenly politicized set of charges.
On September 10, 2012, al-Qaeda’s emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a lengthy statement to his fellow jihadists in Libya. He called on them to avenge the American military’s killing of Abu Yahya al-Libi, the highest ranking al-Qaeda operative in that country. His “blood is calling, urging and inciting you to fight and kill the Crusaders,” Zawahiri cried.

The diatribe was no surprise, the following day being the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities committed against the United States by the terror network with which we were — and are — still at war. Plus, jihadists in Benghazi, the terror network’s hub in eastern Libya, had repeatedly attacked American and other Western targets during the preceding five months.

The following night, September 11, 2012, jihadists from al-Qaeda’s main Libyan franchise, Ansar al-Sharia, laid siege to a U.S. State Department mission in Benghazi, the very target jihadists had detonated an IED against only three months earlier, on June 6. They torched the facility, murdered the American ambassador to Libya, killed three additional American officials, and wounded several others in an attack that lasted several hours — a terrorist attack by our wartime enemies during which President Obama and the U.S. armed forces took no meaningful action to respond or rescue our personnel.

Now, do you suppose what happened before the Benghazi massacre — the continuing war with al-Qaeda, the serial jihadist attacks, the call by the terror network’s leader right before the 9/11 anniversary to avenge a “martyr” by striking against the United States — just might shed some light on the terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda’s Libyan franchise against the State Department compound that night?

If you do, you clearly do not work for the Obama administration and its brazenly politicized Justice Department.

Here is a note from my most witty and erudite e-pal and friend Professor Edward Alexander:

Opera-lovers draw the line: “Klinghoffer” OK, “Carmen” bad.

“Here is a bulletin from Down Under: “The West Australian Opera has dropped
‘Carmen’ from its scheduled 2015 run because the 140-year-old French opera
depicts smoking.” The Aussie prime minister, Tony Abbott, characterized
this as “political correctness gone crazy.”

http://dailyreview.crikey.com.au/where-theres-smoke-carmen-cancelled-due-to-smoking-concerns/13400

Where there’s smoke: Carmen cancelled due to smoking concerns by Ben Neutze

Sponsorship has been the hot topic of the Australian arts world ever since a group of artists withdrew their works from this year’s Sydney Biennale in response to the organisation’s relationship with a company involved in offshore detention centres.

But a sponsorship arrangement between West Australian Opera and some “good guys” is proving to be particularly bizarre. While the Biennale artists objected to their sponsor’s activities, this time the sponsor looks like it’s objecting to the arts organisation’s activities.

A WA Government agency called Healthway, aimed at promoting healthy lifestyles and discouraging smoking, has come on board as a major sponsor for WA Opera in a $400,000, two-year arrangement. WA Opera subsequently ditched its upcoming season of Georges Bizet’s Carmen because it contains onstage smoking, the West Australian reports. The opera, which is consistently in the top five most-performed in the world, will be replaced by another yet-to-be announced piece.

Acting in the manner of sorcerers’ apprentices over several decades, the makers of U.S. foreign policy have contributed to turning many of the tensions among the world’s peoples into disasters. These American-caused disasters diminish the respect for America upon which our own peace depends. The trouble comes not from any errors of detail, but rather from disregarding the fundamentals of statecraft. The remedy lies in paying attention to them. Herewith, a glance at the U.S. government’s responsibility for the disasters now unfolding along the Islamic State’s bloody edges.

For centuries, albeit uneasily, Turks, Kurds, and Arabs had lived alongside one another along the edge of the Fertile Crescent that runs between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Now, however, we see Sunni Arabs who have carved out a state from what used to be Syria and Iraq, making substantial progress in their effort to annihilate millions of Kurds in ancient communities along Turkey’s southern border. As Turkey’s mighty army watches, riots of resentment among Turkey’s large, long-suffering Kurdish population bespeak an estrangement that may not be reversible.

The radical-Sunni Islamic State’s use of superior weapons – which alone makes it possible for Arabs to make headway against superior Kurdish fighters in defensive positions – is due almost entirely to having captured American equipment from an Iraqi army upon which our government lavished vastly more resources than brains. That, in turn, is due to our bipartisan foreign policy establishment’s enduring, reality-proof commitment to a “united, democratic Iraq,” to be achieved by making nice with its Sunni minority, regardless of its efforts to rule Shia and Kurdish peoples. U.S. sorcerers’ apprentices were surprised and disappointed when the Iraqi government – necessarily led by the massive Shia majority – appointed Shia commanders to the army. They were surprised and disappointed again when Shia soldiers in this “inclusive” army refused to fight to defend regions populated by Sunnis who are friendly to the Sunni Islamic State, in the name of an Iraq in which nobody but the Americans believe. Dismayed to see the Iraqi army’s wonderful American equipment fall into the hands of the Islamic State, the U.S. government now resolves to pour more equipment into that army while making it even more “inclusive” than before.

Why is he always telling them what he’s not going to do?

This has become a constant refrain among President Obama’s Republican and conservative critics. And it is an excellent question. Why does the president tell jihadists from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda that the American campaign against them will be strictly limited to aerial bombing (sporadic, at that) and absolutely, positively will not involve the introduction of U.S. ground forces?

The theory behind the question is bulletproof: the only way you can hope to keep bad actors in check, to discourage them from acting roguishly in pursuit of their ambitions, is to indicate that you might respond with your superior powers. Even if you are reluctant to unleash those powers, the seed of doubt planted by signaling the possibility of decisive counteraction forces rogues to tread lightly. On the other hand, take your decisive weapons off the table and you’re sure to find ISIS mocking your impotence, sacking city after city, and poised to take Baghdad.

My question for my colleagues: why don’t we practice what we preach?

Back in June, my book Faithless Execution was published. Contrary to some of the commentary it provoked, I did not call for President Obama’s immediate impeachment. Indeed, I argued that the lesson of the Clinton impeachment episode was that it is a mistake to commence impeachment proceedings in the absence of strong public support for the president’s removal.

The point of the book was to address how presidential lawlessness — a threat to our governing structure over which the Framers agonized — is dealt with in the American constitutional system. Other than the ballot box, the Constitution provides only two ways for Congress to rein in presidential maladministration: the power of the purse and impeachment. That is, Congress can starve the administration of the funds needed to carry out its rogue practices, or it can remove from power executive officials — up to and including the president — who are lawless, derelict, profoundly dishonest, or incompetent in the carrying out their duties.

1,400 British non-Muslim children were gang-raped and brutalized by Muslims in the British city of Rotherham, in accord with the Qur’anic allowance for the sexual enslavement of infidel women that the Islamic State has pointed to in order to justify its exploitation of captive Yazidi and Christian women. But no airstrikes were called in Rotherham; rather, British officials there “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.” And now four years of key and highly incriminating files have gone missing.

According to the Mirror, “Professor Alexandra Jay, who wrote the bombshell report revealing 1,400 young girls were abused in the town over 15 years, said minutes from key meetings have disappeared. Rotherham Council was slammed in her report for ignoring the scandal and its leader and chief executive have both since resigned.”

These files almost certainly contain damning material about how British officials wouldn’t move against the rape gangs for fear of being stigmatized as “racists” and “Islamophobes.” But those officials are still in positions of power and influence in Britain, and so these missing files are unlikely ever to be recovered.

If anyone in Britain has the courage actually to search for them, has he or she checked Nick Lowles’s office? The people who have the most to lose here are people like Lowles, the leader of the far-Left group with the Orwellian name “Hope Not Hate,” who for years smeared anyone and everyone who spoke out against these Muslim rape gangs as “racist,” “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.” The Muslim rape gangs went unreported, unprosecuted, and in general unstopped because of organizations like Hope Not Hate, and others such as Faith Matters and Tell Mama, that waged relentless war against anyone and everyone who spoke out about these issue.

(Incidentally, when these groups led the campaign to ban Pamela Geller and me from entering Britain, one of the events we had discussed going to was a rally against the rape gangs. And despite smearing us as hatemongering equivalents of British jihadist Anjem Choudary, Lowles, when challenged on the BBC, could not come up with a single “hateful” statement I have ever made in 13 books, hundreds of articles, and over 40,000 blog posts.)

As Yom Kippur sermons go, Martin Indyk’s was a doozy. Speaking at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the former U.S. envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations accused Israel of showing “total disrespect” for the Obama administration.

Indyk said many things in his Yom Kippur address with which one might take issue, but one analogy in particular stands out as especially disturbing.

He said that he “discovered” in the most recent round of failed negotiations “that we would crack the whip, but no one was responding to our whip cracks. That’s a change.”

How disappointing for Indyk. Those who recall his days as U.S. ambassador to Israel no doubt feel a sense of deja vu when they hear Indyk talking about whips. Here is how he described his role in Israel to the Washington Post back on February 24, 1997: “The image that comes to mind is a circus master. All these players in the ring. We crack the whip and get them to move around in an orderly fashion.”

Ironic, isn’t it? The ex-diplomat who accuses Israel of being “disrespectful” has repeatedly compared the Israelis to circus animals who need to have some sense whipped into them. And when the dumb brutes don’t respond, Indyk the circus master is outraged and lashes out at his victims.

The irony goes further. Indyk served a president who has made almost a hobby of being disrespectful to Israel’s prime minister. Nobody can forget the time that President Obama deliberately left Prime Minister Netanyahu waiting for an hour and a half, while he went off to have dinner with Michelle and the kids. Or the infamous photo that the White House released of President Obama with his feet on his desk as he spoke by phone with Netanyahu.

Not to mention just last week, when Mr. Obama repeatedly referred to Netanyahu as “Bibi,” while Netanyahu, by contrast, appropriately referred to Obama as “Mr. President.” In an earlier era, perhaps someone could complain that it was difficult for an American president to pronounce a name such as “Menachem.” But how hard would it have been for President Obama to pronounce the name “Benjamin” ?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/not-naming-the-enemy-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dawn Perlmutter, the Director of the Symbol Intelligence Group and one of the leading subject matter experts (SME) in symbols, symbolic methodologies, unfamiliar customs and ritualistic crimes. She designed and developed Jihad-ID, a symbolic database of the signs, symbols and identifiers of global jihad.

Ms. Perlmutter came on the show to discuss Not Naming the Enemy, explaining how we surrender by not calling Islam by its name. The discussion occurred within the context of Why ISIS Beheads, in which Ms. Perlmutter took us into the dark world of Jihad’s key tactic and signature. She also focused on “How Beheading Raises Islamic State Street Cred,” “Beheading Videos as a Propaganda Tool,” and much, much more: