RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former President Jimmy Carter will headline a fundraising convention for Hamas, a group which has been recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Breitbart News reports that Carter, 89, long known as a supporter of Hamas in its struggle with Israel, will be welcomed this weekend to the Detroit event by members of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), implicated by the Justice Department in a scheme to funnel $12 million to Hamas.

Expected to speak at the meeting at Cobo Hall are unindicted co-conspirators Jamal Badawi, named in 2007 in the Holy Land Foundation Trial, and Siraj Wahhaj, listed for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
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Bishop Elizabeth Eaton, head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the U.S., and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim member of Congress, also will speak.
Carter’s involvement may be in violation of the law, U.S. Code 2339B, Section 18, which makes it a crime for any U.S. citizen to provide material support to any group designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz stressed that Carter’s actions, in raising funds for the ISNA, place him “very close, if not across the line,” of criminal behavior.

In a recent article in Foreign Policy, Carter accused Israel of “war crimes” and wrote that in order to end the Israel/Hamas conflict, Hamas must be recognized as a “legitimate political actor” in the Middle East.

In a chilling report, a filmmaker embedded with the Islamic State in Syria shows how the extremist jihadi group is indoctrinating children.

In a chilling report, a filmmaker from Vice News who embedded himself for a number of weeks with the Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) in Raqqa, Syria, shows how the extremist jihadi group is indoctrinating children to hatred and violence (see video below).

“For us, we believe that this generation of children is the generation of the caliphate. This generation will fight the infidels and apostates, the Americans and their allies, God willing. The right doctrine has been implanted in these children,” says an Islamic State member who is running a “training camp” for children. “All of them love to fight for the building of the Islamic State and for the sake of God,” he says.

“Abdullah the Belgian,” as he is called, travelled to Syria with his young son, who he has brought to the camp. As the camera rolls, Abdullah crouches down next to his son, who appeared to be about the age of six or seven.

“Why do we kill the infidels? What have the infidels done?” he asks his son.

Self-conscious in front of the camera, the child answers, “They kill Muslims.”

“All the infidels? Like the infidels of Europe?” his father asks him.

“The infidels of Europe. All the infidels,” he son answers dutifully.

The father continues, “What do you want to be, a jihadist or to execute a martyrdom [suicide] operation?”

“A jihadist,” says the young boy.

Sheikh in Spain spews an anti-Semitic sermon, saying ‘there can be no peace with the Jews, Allah promised them the torments of fire.’Ari Yashar, Ari Soffer
In a recent Friday sermon by a Muslim cleric in Azuqueca De Henares, Spain, the rampant anti-Semitism palpable in that country was put on display in rare fashion.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) on Monday translated the speech by Sheikh Saleheoldine El Moussaoui, who concluded his words with the rousing prayer: “Oh Allah, destroy the plundering Jews…count them one by one and do not spare a single one of them.” (More story below. For audio/video of Sheikh’s genocide-inciting “sermon”, use INN link above.)
Using Israel’s defensive Operation Protective Edge in Gaza as a launching point, Moussaoui remarked “the Jews are by nature treacherous and war-mongering. There can be no peace with the Jews. What peace are you talking about?”
“The Jews and the Zionists have treachery and killing as their way of life. They are a people of enmity and jealousy, the masters of treachery and betrayal,” spewed the Spanish sheikh.
Moussaoui also quoted from the Quran, saying “they (the Jews) want to spread corruption in the land,” and adding that Allah promised them “the torments of the burning fire.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/wisconsin-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=puball

Primary: August 12

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).

SENATE
Ron Johnson (R) Next Election in 2016.
Tammy Baldwin (D)Next Election in 2018.

U.S. CONGRESS

District 1

Paul Ryan (R) Incumbent

http://paulryan.house.gov/ http://www.ryanforcongress.com/

http://www.ontheissues.org/House/Paul_Ryan.htm/** Rated -3 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-makes-some-british-muslims-become-jihadis?f=puball

“The experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually disobey.”

So wrote Thomas Babbington Macaulay, the Whig MP, historian and poet, in 1848; and, as usual, he was spot on. A leaked MI5 report on the profile of British jihadis made the same observation in more pedestrian prose. “Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly.”

Mehdi Hassan has a fascinating piece in the Huffington Post, in which he reveals the books that two Brummie Muslims had ordered from Amazon before heading out to join the insurgents in Syria. Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, who pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, had not bought works on politics or advanced theology, but Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. Dummies indeed.

An alarming number of our young men – boys born and brought up in the United Kingdom – are involved with extremist paramilitaries in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. There are credible estimates that more British Muslims are fighting with Islamic State (formerly ISIS) than serving in the Armed Forces. As Douglas Murray writes in the current Spectator, this isn’t even the first time that a British Muslim has arranged for the beheading of an American journalist.

What is pushing these youths into violence? Is it something in their religion, something in their socio-economic circumstances, something in their character, or something else entirely?

There are evidently several factors at work, and we should be wary of oversimplifying, but one observation made by almost all the experts who have studied Western-born Islamic militants is that they fit the classic profile of the terrorist down the ages: male, typically in their twenties or early thirties, with some education, narcissistic, lacking in empathy, lonely, unsuccessful with women, often with a history of petty crime.

What makes a terrorist different from other bellicose young men is that he has found a cause that validates his anti-social tendencies – a doctrine that teaches him that he is angry, not because there’s something wrong with him, but because there’s something wrong with everyone else. Islamic State thugs, like Baader-Meinhof gangsters, IRA gunmen, Red Brigaders or nineteenth century anarchists, are convinced that they can see things more keenly than others, and that this clarity of vision elevates and ennobles their aggression.

Most Americans oppose tax-funded support for insurance companies that lose money under Obamacare.

When Congress reconvenes on Monday, September 8, Republicans should fire a torpedo directly into the USS Obamacare. It would blast the creaking vessel’s hull well below the waterline and possibly flood the engine room. And for this, a recent survey reveals, Americans of all stripes would cheer wildly.

Republicans must sink the Obamacare bailout. Believe it or not, Obamacare forces taxpayers to help health-insurance companies absorb significant losses that they incur through Obama’s medical scheme. According to the House Government Oversight Committee, this could cost $1 billion this year alone. This outrage — lodged on page 233 of the original 2,409-page Obamacare bill — would be awful enough if these insurers were prosperous, albeit unwitting, victims of Obama’s $2.6 trillion entitlement. Instead, insurance companies helped pile-drive Obamacare down the throats of Americans, a majority of whom opposed this legislation and loathe it more today than yesterday. Hard data now demonstrate that Americans hate the Obamacare bailout — all across the political spectrum.

McLaughlin & Associates surveyed 1,000 likely voters last June. It asked a simple, straightforward question:

“If private insurance companies lose money selling health insurance under Obamacare, should taxpayers help cover their losses?”

The reaction was volcanic.

McLaughlin found that 81.2 percent of respondents said “No” to this concept, while only 9.9 percent approved. Another 8.9 percent were not sure what to think.

For the president, belief in historical predetermination substitutes for action.
President Obama doesn’t know much about history.

In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” — as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an inevitably positive course.

Another of Obama’s historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn’t belong in the 21st century. At various times he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or the Islamic State has no place in our century and will “ultimately fail” — as if we are all now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality and savagery.

Can’t get two-third of the Senate to approve a bit of Green Legislation you favor? No problem, if you’re willing to entirely jettison the Constitution.

Do you remember this bit from the Constitution of the United States?

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; . . .

That’s the so-called “Treaty Clause” from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution. It is one of several checks on executive power thoughtfully provided by the Founders but flouted by the Golfer-in-Chief currently occupying the White House.

Can’t get two-thirds of the Senate to approve a bit of Green Legislation you favor? No problem! Just pretend that the United States of America is subject not to its Constitution but to the transnational organization of gangsters, kleptocracies, and Third-World dictatorships known as the Untied Nations.

Sound extreme? We can talk about the composition of the Untied Nations another time. But when it comes to Barack Obama’s cavalier treatment of the Constitution, you need look no further than this morning’s New York Times. Under the headline “Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty,” [1] the paper explains how the president, frustrated by Congress’s unwillingness to barter away U.S. sovereignty by signing on to the so-called “Kyoto Protocol [2],” the economy blighting climate standards devised by Greenies and other folks eager to hamstring the world’s most productive economies, especially the Untied States, is planning to “sidestep” Congress.

It’s written in soporific journalese, but it is an explosive story:

When a drone operator follows a strike order that kills 13 Afghans, he comes undone. Sounds like a plot from ‘Homeland’ or ’24.’

Since antiquity, storytellers have cautioned us about the hazards of men using technology to trespass into realms where only the gods are allowed. For giving man fire, Zeus condemned Prometheus to an eternity chained to a rock with an eagle pecking at his liver. Daedalus’s clever wings melted when his son Icarus flew too close to the sun.

Dan Fesperman’s excellent and timely ninth thriller, “Unmanned,” isn’t quite so archetypal, but it does explore the ethical conundrums of the most potent new weapon in the American arsenal: the unmanned aerial drone. Watching our enemy from the sky is one thing, but what if those same eyes are looking down at us? And who is watching the watchers? “Unmanned” is a smart and thoughtful exploration of the unintended consequences of waging war by remote control.

While the technical details of this exhaustively researched book certainly contribute to its authenticity—the author is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun—it is his sharply drawn characters that make the novel tick. Capt. Darwin Cole’s transition from F-16 fighter jock to Predator drone operator is going smoothly: He conducts missions against terrorists thousands of miles away from behind a screen in the Nevada desert. “Each twitch of his hand,” Mr. Fesperman writes of Cole’s work, “flings a signal of war across the nation’s night owls as they make love, make a sandwich, make a mess of things, or click the remote.”

Everything changes when Cole receives a command via Internet chat from his mysterious J-TAC, or joint terminal attack controller, whom he has never met, to fire at a target in Afghanistan. The result is 13 civilian deaths, among them several children that he has become familiar with while monitoring the village of Sandar Khosh. Cole is especially haunted by the pixilated image of a young girl whose arm is severed at the shoulder yet who manages to survive the strike. She is, in the grim vernacular of drone warfare, a “squirter,” a person who has escaped the strike and is “so called because on infrared they display as squibs of light, streaming from the action like raindrops across a windshield.”

Islamic State militants have overrun parts of Iraq and Syrian provinces such as Raqqa, above, capturing munitions. The group, formerly known as ISIS or ISIL, raises money through extortion, oil pirating and kidnapping. Reuters

The Islamic State runs a self-sustaining economy across territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, pirating oil while exacting tribute from a population of at least eight million, Arab and Western officials said, making it one of the world’s richest terror groups and an unprecedented threat.

That illicit economy presents a new picture of Islamic State’s financial underpinnings. The group was once thought to depend on funding from Arab Gulf donors and donations from the broader Muslim world. Now, Islamic State—the former branch of al Qaeda that has swallowed parts of Iraq and Syria—is a largely self-financed organization.

Money from outside donors “pales in comparison to their self-funding through criminal and terrorist activities,” a U.S. State Department official said, adding that those activities generate millions of dollars a month.

For Western and Arab nations that are striving to stop Islamic State, the group’s local funding sources pose a conundrum: A clampdown on economic activity that helps fund the group, counterterrorism officials and experts said, could cause a humanitarian crisis in the already stressed areas it controls.

“Can you prevent ISIS from taking assets? Not really, because they’re sitting on a lot of assets already,” said a Western counterterrorism official. “So you must disrupt the network of trade. But if you disrupt trade in commodities like food, for example, then you risk starving thousands of civilians.”