RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the myths about the Middle East is that there would be peace if only Israel courted Palestinian moderates. This might be possible if any Palestinian who harbored such a thought wasn’t summarily executed.

On Friday Hamas shot 18 fellow Palestinians on suspicion that they had collaborated with Israel. Here’s how a Journal dispatch put it:
“In one instance, about 20 militants dressed in black and with their faces covered brought six of the condemned men, their heads covered with cloth bags, to an alley near the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after midday prayers, witnesses said. A militant shot the men in the head one at a time with a pistol, after which he sprayed them with automatic rifle fire, the witnesses said. The bodies were loaded into government ambulances and taken away.”

That followed three previous executions carried out a day earlier. The killings followed Israel’s attack that killed three senior commanders of Hamas’s military wing after Hamas broke another ceasefire by shooting more rockets into Israel. It’s possible that one or more of those executed did provide information to Israel, but you can be sure that none of them received anything more than a summary trial after a brutal interrogation that would have made any man confess to something.

In any case Hamas considers the public demonstration to be more important than guilt or innocence. The public killings are intended to show anyone who dissents that they will suffer the same fate.

The practice goes back to the days of the British mandate when the mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini killed Palestinians open to a Jewish presence. During the anti-Israel uprisings in the 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction that still rules the West Bank murdered some 800 Palestinians for alleged collaboration. The Palestinians will never have peace as long as they keep murdering anyone who wants it.

Dawn of Libya Says It Has Seized the Country’s Capital and Airport After Weeks of Fighting

Libya’s Islamist militias said Sunday they have consolidated their hold on Tripoli and its international airport, driving out rival militias to the outskirts of the capital after a weeks-long battle for control of the strategic hub.

The umbrella group for Islamist militias, calling itself Dawn of Libya, said it has also taken hold of other locations in the capital that were controlled by rival militias. The move draws to a close one chapter in a prolonged confrontation between the Islamist-allied militia, largely from the city of Misrata, and the powerful militia from the western mountains of Zintan.

The fight has largely destroyed the airport and scarred the capital, prompting diplomats, foreign nationals and thousands of Libyans to flee.

The violence in Libya is rooted in the empowerment of militias after successive transitional governments, since the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, depended on them to maintain order in the absence of a strong police force or a unified military.

It also comes as part of a backlash by Islamist factions after losing their power in parliament after June elections and in the face of a campaign by a renegade military general against extremist Islamic militias in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.

The recent violence has been the worst in Libya since 2011. Mysterious airstrikes have struck the positions of Islamist militias, sparking accusations by them that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which oppose Islamists in the region, were behind them.

A field commander of the Dawn of Libya militia said Sunday his forces were in control of Tripoli and adjacent cities, having pushed back the rival Zintan forces some 90 kilometers (56 miles) south of the capital. It wasn’t immediately possible to reach members of the Zintan militias.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/midair-encounter-of-chinese-jet-and-u-s-surveillance-plane-exposes-limits-of-warming-ties-1408896137?mod=trending_now_2 Some U.S. Officials Say Aggressive Maneuvers Could Involve Rogue Pilots The U.S. says rogue Chinese pilots may be responsible for recent close encounters in airspace above the South China Sea. But as Sam Rogevveen of the Lowy Institute explains, China continues to flex its muscles in pushing its territorial claims in the region. U.S. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Federal agencies understood to play an integral role in protecting the American homeland from terrorist attacks were folded into this bureaucratic leviathan and included, among other federal agencies, the Secret Service, U.S. Customs Service and components of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

The title of the agency, “Department of Homeland Security,” certainly created the appearance that the issue of national security was at the heart of the massive reorganization of federal agencies, but it became readily apparent that this was not the case. In fact, the myriad failures of this agency have caused me to come to refer to the DHS as being the “Department of Homeland Surrender.”

As noted on the official DHS website, the budget for the DHS for Fiscal Year 2015 has been set at more than $60 billion. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been provided with more than 5.4 billion dollars, CBP (Customs and Border Protection) has been budgeted for nearly 12.8 billion dollars while USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) has been budgeted to receive more than 3 billion dollars and the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) will receive more than 7.3 billion dollars.

In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: “So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day.”

Over at the New York Post, a columnist rightly took the president to task by saying, “You can’t divorce the Islamic State from religion.” Unfortunately, the column is full of numerous misstatements that perpetuate the illusion that there is some peaceful, tolerant version of Islam that has been distorted and twisted by “extremists” or “fundamentalists.”

According to the writer, adherents of any faith can misread sacred texts literally in order to justify violence: “The problem isn’t just literalist interpretations of the Koran: The New Testament, the Jewish Torah and many other religious books contain explicit calls for disproportionate punishments and killing of nonbelievers.” Forget the false assumption that we are supposed to read all sacred texts allegorically rather than literally. I’d like to see the verses from the New Testament that explicitly instruct Christians to kill non-believers rather than try to convert them. On the contrary, Jesus preached, “Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5.38), and “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.43).

Concerning other interactions with non-believers, Jesus instructed his disciples, “And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town” (Matthew 10.14). Because there are no explicit commands to kill non-believers in the New Testament, over the ages Christians who have justified violence with scripture have had to engage in tortuous interpretations and misreadings that over time have not been able to gain traction among all the faithful. That’s why despite widespread persecution across the world today, there is no major Christian terrorist movement.

Compare, in contrast, the Koran’s explicit calls to violence against non-believers, such as Koran 4.76: “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil: So fight ye against the friends of Satan.” This is consistent with the famous command in 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah.” If someone wants to argue that “fight” is intended metaphorically in these verses, and has been “twisted” by a “literal” reading to serve some fringe interpretation, consider 4.74: “Let those fight in the cause of Allah Who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of Allah––whether he is slain or gets victory––Soon shall we give him a reward.” Obviously in this verse and numerous others “fight” means physical battle in which people are “slain.” Contrary to Christian scripture, in traditional Islamic doctrine non-believers who are invited to convert and refuse the call are not left alone, but killed or, if they are Jews or Christians, sometimes allowed to live in humiliating submission under a treaty that Muslims can break at any time for any reason.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/ferguson-foley-and-a-radical-in-chiefs-double-standards-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Monty Morton, Nonie Darwish and Karen Siegemund.

The guests gathered to discuss, Ferguson, Foley and a Radical-in-Chief’s Double Standards,analyzing how Obama and the media support a lynch mob while engaging in willful blindness to Islamic beheadings:

The Discovery Channel just ran another of its wildly popular “Shark Weeks” without mentioning what is probably the shark attack capital of the Western hemisphere—the Florida straits.

“Getting attacked by a shark just might be the scariest event in nature!” gasped a Discovery Channel narrator during Shark Week. “Australia recorded 56 fatal shark attacks between 1956 and 2008!”he gasped again. “Find out what it’s like from people who’ve lived to tell the tale!”

So the Discovery Channel goes back over half a century and to a distant continent to interview the victims and dramatize the attacks. But why the distant timeline and setting, ask many people in south Florida?

“The Florida Straits probably record 56 fatal shark attacks every few years,” says Matt Lawrence, who spent years rescuing desperate Cuban rafters. “Probably every month during the early ’90s,” adds Bay of Pigs vet Arturo Cobo who ran the rafter rescue center in Key West and for years heard the sobbing, gut-gripping details of these attacks almost daily.

“Something was moving in this raft,” recalls an airborne rescuer.

So I went in lower. The water all around the raft was turning red…the cloud spreading. Then I saw the shark—about the same length as the raft. The rafter was in fact a Cuban woman in her early twenties. Upon her rescue we found she had two bullet wounds in her legs from Castro’s frontier police. All others in the raft, including two infants had died, as did the shark, from being repeatedly stabbed by the pointed end of a broken oar by Maria. The Shark had bitten the oar in half as Maria pounded him…I started flying rescue missions full-time after that.

“The boys’ father, delirious from thirst and exposure, finally jumped in the water,” recalls another rescuer.

So the sons threw him a rope tied to the raft and he clutched it. They turned away for a second, slightly relieved—but only to spot a huge shark approaching, then another. Soon an entire school surrounded the raft and they ripped into their father…The water turned red as their father was eaten alive….. I can tell you from decades of and heart-breaking work from our center here in Key West that in the Florida straits every week is shark week.

In August 2012, James Foley retweeted a link to a CNN story asking “Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda?”

The article concluded that indeed it was.

Three months later, Foley had been kidnapped. Two years later, on another August, a former branch of Al Qaeda chopped off his head.

In a New Yorker interview this year, which seemed to focus on the Lakers more than anything else, Obama wrote off ISIS as what happens when a “jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms”. He suggested that the answer lay in training the Iraqi police forces better.

That same month, ISIS had declared an Islamic State in Fallujah, the event that Obama was dismissively reacting to, and extended its reach beyond Iraq and Syria into Lebanon and Turkey. By June, the steamroller advance across Iraq had begun destroying the Iraqi military, never mind its police forces.

In April, Peter Bergen, the original author of the CNN article, had another piece contending that “right wing extremists” were now even “more deadly than Jihadists.” On August 18, he produced a CNN piece claiming that ISIS was no threat to Americans.

On the next day, ISIS chopped off James Foley’s head.

The incredibly deadly right-wing extremists have yet to show off the severed head of a journalist.

Obama has now been forced to hit ISIS with air strikes and to even put men on the ground while denying that the United States was at war with ISIS or that ISIS had anything to do with Islam.

And it was that denial which is at the root of the problem.

There has been a debate in the UK press suggesting we should hope that some of these ISIS killers come back to Britain, realize that jihad was all a phase and then head off to university for the start of the new term.

The beheading of James Foley was terrible, she stressed, “because we don’t know what [his] views were.”

Is there a time when even “combatants” — or anyone else — should be treated in this way? And who is to say who is a combatant and who not?

Who is surprised? That is one question I have most wanted to know since the video was released of the murder of American journalist James Foley. The politicians keep expressing it. And interviewers have kept asking people whether they feel it. But who can honestly say that he was surprised to learn that the murderer of the American journalist turned out to be a “British” man?

American journalist James Foley (left) is shown kneeling beside the British jihadist who murdered him moments later (Image source: Islamic State video)
Did anyone really still think that a British Islamist would not be capable of doing this? Why wouldn’t he do it in Iraq or Syria if his allies had already done it in London? After all, it was only last year that two other Islamists beheaded one of our own soldiers – Drummer Lee Rigby – in broad daylight in London. And it is only twelve years since another Londoner – Omar Sheikh – arranged the abduction and decapitation of another American journalist, Daniel Pearl.

What is shocking is that expressions of “shock” seem to be regarded as an adequate response. Prime Minister David Cameron has pronounced himself “appalled” by the act, and made clear that he “utterly condemns” it. As though anyone should ever have expected him to think otherwise. But this is to a great extent what government policy is reduced to in Britain, as in the United States. Politicians briefly break off their holidays in order not to do anything much, but to be seen to be doing “something.” And they then make sure to stand in front of the cameras and say how opposed they are to “something.” It is the denigration of people in positions where they actually could do something, to the level of the commentariat.

Objectivity is one of the greatest assets in any human intellectual encounter. But no concept can be so easily abused in the white heat of crisis. And it can become a false front for a failure to come to grips with the issues at hand. For it can easily metamorphous into the belief that we are able to see beyond the current issues and put them in a broad historical perspective.
That is one of the conceits of the present pseudo-intellectuals of the Obama Administration. The fact is that politicians, even those who graduate to statesmen, are not historians except in some very rare instances. So it is better left to our progeny to determine the longer-term results of the current crises and their outcomes. In terms of national policy, we have enough on our hands in simply meeting the demands of the hour for what clearly can be seen in the here and now as a danger to national security. Even that essential concept is a difficult one to measure at any given moment.
To do otherwise has led, in part, to the current incapacity of American leadership to cope with half a dozen threatening geopolitical disasters around the world. It is expressed in the pomposity of the belief of policymakers in the White House that can always maintain sangfroid above the fray. It leads them to believe that because they all knowing about all the issues, viewed from the perspective of opponents or enemies, they are able to couch compromises which would satisfy all parties.As a corollary, they see the pursuit of methods of exchanging views, however contradictory and inconclusive, as the end-all of all international relations.
So, instead of devoting all our resources to coordinating our allies in reinforcing the ability of Ukraine to meet continuing Russian aggression, for example, the Obama Administration lectures Vladimir Putin on his failure to understand a new international morality and thereby jeopardizes his role in history. I can’t imagine the master of the Kremlin with all his ambitions and current problems arising from them cares much for this uninvited counsel on his legacy.
Objectivity in formulating a foreign policy requires above all knowing what our own national interests are and pursuing them to the full extent possible. True, that is easier said than done. But it is the height of arrogance – and stupidity – to believe that one knows the irreconcilable interests of both parties to a dispute; it is more than enough to have clearly defined and registered our own.