RUTHFULLY YOURS

We have barely begun and I have already had enough. We are talking college tours here. The season has commenced, my daughter is a high-school junior and, well, here we go again—lacing up for another amble around another campus, members of an endless string of silent, sullen parades seen across America these days, all led by a backward-walking guide who’s making rehearsed gestures to the left and right.

The campuses are all beautiful, if a bit more barren than leafy in this early spring season. The students—both on the tours and already in college, scurrying along the paths, spilling coffee on their way to class—are appealing too, brimming with the promise of fresh concepts and untested theories and the hope of a better collective future.

The problem is the tours themselves, which have degenerated into such boilerplate that it is difficult, and sometimes almost impossible, to distinguish one school from another. No matter the campus or state, the tour guides seem to be playing musical chairs with clichés:

“We have a really ambitious plan to be carbon neutral by 2030.”

“Our ethos here tends to be work hard and play hard.”

“There is the dining hall, where each week farmers come in to talk to us in detail about where our local food comes from.”

“That’s the library! It’s open 24 hours during study days!”

There is nothing theoretical about the European Union’s plans to eradicate the nation-states of Europe as sovereign states. These plans are becoming “reality,” as the London Telegraph story below explains, and despite all assurances provided by any so-called “opt-out” clause. Meanhile, the emerging shape of federal Europe also shows Western concerns over Russian violations of Ukrainian “sovereignty” to be camouflage for something else. The last thing the EU empire wants to do is safeguard any state’s “sovereignty,” thus preserving its independence of Brussels. This is not to put a gloss on Putin’s opportunism, however, or to recast his motives. It should, on the other hand, bring Brussels’ motives in Ukraine under more informed scrutiny.

From The Telegraph:

An EU Bill of Rights that overrides British laws is becoming a “reality”, the vice-president of the European Commission has said.

Viviane Reding said that people in European member states will in future be able to “rely” on the EU charter of “fundamental rights”.

The European Commission wants to enforce the charter, which enshrines 54 basic rights in EU law, in all member states.

Senior British judges have warned that the EU charter has already taken hold in Britain by stealth and Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has said he is prepared to go to court in an attempt to halt the spread of European human rights laws.

Mr Grayling reacted furiously to Mrs Reding’s comments and said they show “why we need a major re-think of our future relationship with the EU”.

Visiting Chinese air force headquarters on Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told officers “… to speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities.” He urged them to develop an “integrated air and space defense capability” in response to what he called an increasing military use of space by America and other nations.

Xi’s statement was historic. Since the Soviet Union launched the first earth satellite in 1957, the major powers have been wrestling with the question of whether space should be used for military purposes.
During the Cold War, there were several treaties and agreements on the peaceful use of space. The so-called “Outer Space Treaty” of 1967 provided that nations would not place weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, in Earth orbit, on the moon or elsewhere in outer space. China signed that treaty but wasn’t party to a number of other agreements such as the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which provided that neither party would interfere with the other’s means of verification of compliance. For the U.S., that method was primarily through satellite reconnaissance.

Congress, listening to those who thought anti-satellite weapons would provoke the Soviets, banned testing of them from 1981-1985 and again from 1991-1995. Now China has decided that space should be a primary focus of its offensive and defensive military capabilities and is moving quickly to effectuate that decision.

To answer China’s stated intention and developing capabilities, America should be developing an integrated land, sea, air and space strategy and a military operational doctrine to effectuate it. The demand for it is entirely clear given the fact that our armed forces are almost entirely dependent on satellites for navigation, reconnaissance, communications and espionage.

There are about 1,100 satellites in orbit around the Earth, which probably doesn’t include some classified satellites that are operated by the U.S. and other nations. About 50 percent of the 1,100 were launched by the United States. Some of our newer satellites are resistant to cyber attack but not completely defended from them because nothing can be. And all have an enormous problem. They are all 100 percent vulnerable to kinetic weapons that can intercept them in orbit and to directed-energy weapons such as high-powered lasers.

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.

In a move designed to placate a small minority of New York City residents, the NYPD announced that it was disbanding its Demographics Unit.

The unit, which was a small segment of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, came under fire following a series of articles published by the Associated Press using leaked documents showed widespread surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere. Following the articles, several Muslim activist groups protested against the NYPD’s Counter Terrorism strategies. What came next was a series of lawsuits filed by “victims” of the Department anti-terrorism policies.

The “victims” claimed that the NYPD program had “caused a series of spiritual, stigmatic, and pecuniary losses.” The last being better translated as monetary losses.

But what had the unit actually done to deserve such castigation? It collected open source information of various neighborhoods in the greater New York area – i.e. “demographics” – where it was believed the greatest likelihood of Islamic terrorists would seek to assimilate themselves while plotting terrorist acts.

This belief was not based on conjecture but on solid precedent. In the late 1980s and early 90s, a small group of Islamic terrorists congregated in several area neighborhoods and frequented a select group of mosques that were in alignment with their radical theology.

The result was the first World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 23, 1993. The investigation into that attack uncovered an additional plot to blow up several national landmarks in the New York area, including the Statute of Liberty. John Miller, the new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence for NYPD knows these facts. He wrote about them (in part) in his book, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It.

Monday night was the start of Passover, the period when Jews celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from slavery into freedom.

This is the part of the Exodus story that sits most easily with modern culture. We like stories of people who shake off the yoke of oppression and taste the first bliss of liberty. We like it when masses of freedom-yearning people gather in city squares in Beijing, Tehran, Cairo or Kiev.

But that’s not all the Exodus story is, or not even mainly what it is. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part.

America’s founders understood that when you are creating a social order, the first people who need to be bound down are the leaders themselves.

The Moses of Exodus is not some majestic, charismatic, Charlton Heston-type hero who can be trusted to run things. He’s a deeply flawed person like the rest of us. He’s passive. He’s afraid of snakes. He’s a poor speaker. He whines, and he’s sometimes angry and depressed. He’s meek.

The first time Moses tries to strike out against Egyptian oppression, he does it rashly and on his own, and he totally messes it up. He sees an Egyptian soldier cruelly mistreating a Hebrew slave. He looks this way and that, to make sure nobody is watching. Then he kills the Egyptian and hides his body in the sand.

The most renowned Jewish architects in the world are coming out to protest a motion to suspend Israeli architects from the International Architects Union, the UK’s Architect’s Journal reported on Thursday.

The sector magazine featured statements from Daniel Libeskind, who designed both the Berlin and Copenhagen Jewish Museums; Richard Meier, who created the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center and the Getty Center, both in Los Angeles; and Rick Bell, executive director of AIA New York who worked in the public sector before heading the AIA national staff association, CACE, and representing it on the AIA national board.

The architects were protesting a motion approved by the Royal Institute of British Architects, and condemned last month by Jewish human rights group The Simon Wiesenthal Center for allowing “itself to become the victim of an extremist group of spoilers that use tactics redolent of the Nazis’ 1930s boycott campaign, ‘Kaufen Nicht bei Juden‘ – ‘Do Not Buy from Jews.’”

The motion, proposed by Angela Brady, RIBA’s former head, is against the Israeli Association of United Architects — comprising over 7,000 Jewish and Arab Israeli members — because members of the association work as architects in Judea and Samaria, known as the West Bank. The RIBA motion is being criticized for punishing architects who have no say in the outcome of Israel’s political affairs.

On Thursday, Architect’s Journal quoted Libeskind as saying, “I am disappointed to learn of this action, especially from such a well-regarded institution as the RIBA. This decision seems to be completely counter to the mission of the RIBA; these actions are short-sighted and appear to be an attempt to simplify a very complex issue.”

Bell, executive director of AIA New York, which has 5,200 members, described the motion as “absurd,” and said, “I wish this had not happened and, on behalf of the AIA New York, I wish it would go away.”

The last time Naomi Wolfe made news was when she was hired by “Beta Male” Al Gore to look more “Alpha Male” While the entire world waited for her advice she pronounced that he needed more “earth tones.” Wow! rsk

Naomi Wolf has joined the Hamas chorus by attacking feminist hero Phyllis Chesler with being a Zionist agent. How facilely Wolf has adopted the language of Jew-haters the world over — an even more bitter irony coming from someone who has written an entire book comparing democratic America to Nazi Germany.

And Chesler’s sin? To have dared to challenge the Left’s party line of defending the Islamic mutilators of adolescent girls, and practitioners of gender apartheid. But then again, this isn’t anything new for Wolf, seeing that she is on the record as finding the burqa sexy.

In her recent article, “Brandeis Feminists Fail the Historical Moment,” Phyllis Chesler criticized Brandeis’ phony feminists for their complicity in the University denying an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In a response on her Facebook page, Wolf joined the anti-Semites of the Mearshimer-Walt-Blumenthal set, claiming that Chesler has no mind of her own but is merely a puppet of the organized Jews:

“She is funded these days by pro-Israel advocacy organizations that support journalists and writers to advocate ‘the party line’ in terms of hardline anti-Islam and right-wing policy outcomes regarding Israel.”

This is pretty crude even for a brain-dead Marxist.

In the West, the Arabization of Muslim communities has occurred with government assistance, which, through imposed policies of multiculturalism in the name of diversity, has effected the destruction of South Asian culture.

Britain’s multiculturalism policies have imposed Islamist leadership upon Britain’s Muslim communities and brought about the destruction of South Asian culture.

British suicide bomber and jihadist, Abdul Waheed Majeed, in his last moments before ramming a truck laden with explosives into a Syrian prison, posed in a white Islamic tunic and black scarf for the cameras. Asked by the cameraman to say a few words in Arabic before his “martyrdom,” Majeed replied: “Sorry? I can’t speak. Everyone asks me that and … I’m not a very good speaker.”

Abdul Waheed Majeed (left), of Crawley, England, poses for photographs moments before driving a truck-bomb into a prison in Aleppo, Syria. (Image source: Jabhat al-Nusra video)

Majeed, like a large number of British Muslims, was not an Arabic speaker. He was of Pakistani heritage. About 70% of British Muslims are, in fact, South Asian. A mere 6.6% are believed to be of Arab descent. And very few British Muslims can actually speak Arabic.

Nevertheless, British Islam is firmly focussed on the Middle East. The poet Hamza Beg, writing in the journal of a taxpayer-funded organization, Asfar, noted: “Since 1999, Pakistan, for example, has had a military coup, a purported return to democracy, and the assassination of the leader of the opposition, Benazir Bhutto. However, an entire generation of British-born Pakistanis have been more interested in Israeli incursions into Lebanon, the occupation of Palestine, and the war on Iraq. How has this occurred and what does it mean?”

British Muslims, Beg continued, have rejected “their parents’ cultural understanding of Islam as a religion. British-Pakistani Muslims have become Muslims first, and are losing patience with the Pakistani practice of the religion embedded in Sufi traditions.”

Ricky Greenfield, publisher of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger from 1994 until this year died on April 16, 2014. He was my dear and treasured friend for decades- a man whose wisdom, kindness, wit, cheer and affection enlivened every conversation. We spoke every week and the last time I saw him in the late fall we had a three hour lunch at the Second Avenue Deli.

Ricky was the most unusual man. His love of Israel, Zionism and Jews knew no bounds. He was guided by the strictest principles of devotion to family, empathy for all people’s suffering, generosity without demands, integrity, unshakeable loyalty and humility.

Jewish tradition holds that every generation has thirty six saints (“lamedvavniks”) on whose piety, justice and kindness the world depends.

On April 16, 2014 there were only 35 left- a vacancy that must be filled by someone like Ricky who left such giant footsteps.

I offer my deepest condolences to his beloved wife Karen and his son Jason. May sweet memories light the dark days.

With deep regret,

RSK

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/hillary-clintons-legacy-issue?f=puball
When recently asked what she was most proud of from her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton replied that the office was like a “relay race.” “When you run the best race you can run, you hand off the baton,” she said. Mrs. Clinton was unable to cite any specific achievement, though she did make the rather dubious claim that “I think we really restored American leadership in the best sense.”

Even some of her most ardent admirers couldn’t figure out a good answer to the question about her greatest achievement, during a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air noted, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard raised the question of what accomplishments make Hillary the most qualified Democrat to be the next president. John Heilemann said he would wait for her next book to come out to help inform him how to answer that question, while Chuck Todd rambled on about Secretary Clinton’s reticence to get publicly involved in controversial issues, and playing a quieter role, thus preventing her from being able to claim any great achievements.

But the legacy of Hillary Clinton is turning out to be one of incompetence, bungled efforts, chicanery and outright scandal. Her most famous words have become, “What difference at this point does it make?” referring to how the four brave Americans died in Benghazi in September of 2012. And a number of other scandals have followed her, both from before and during her tenure as Secretary of State. The latest is about $6 billion in contract dollars that the State Department lost track of over the last six years.

According to the Inspector General report:

There was a lack of paperwork: of 115 contracts sampled from the U.S. Mission in Iraq, 33 could not be produced.
There was missing documentation: the Bureau of African Affairs couldn’t provide complete files for any of the eight contracts requested.
There were conflicts of interest: a $52 million contract was awarded to a “company owned by the spouse of a contractor employee performing as a Contract Specialist for the contract.”
Payments were sent when they weren’t supposed to be: $792,782 was sent to a contractor “even though the contract file did not contain documents to support the payment.”
Contracts were even hidden: “The related contract file was not properly maintained and for a period of time was hidden…This contract was valued at $100 million.”