RUTHFULLY YOURS

Middle East Quarterly

For most of the twentieth century, inter-Arab politics were dominated by the doctrine of pan-Arabism, postulating the existence of “a single nation bound by the common ties of language, religion and history. … behind the facade of a multiplicity of sovereign states”;[1] and no single issue dominated this doctrine more than the “Palestine question” with anti-Zionism forming the main common denominator of pan-Arab solidarity and its most effective rallying cry. But the actual policies of the Arab states have shown far less concern for pan-Arab ideals, let alone for the well-being of the Palestinians, than for their own self-serving interests. Indeed, nothing has done more to expose the hollowness of pan-Arabism than its most celebrated cause.
Denying Palestinian Nationalism

Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca became the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. He placed Palestine on the pan-Arab agenda by falsely claiming that he and his father and brother had been promised the country in return for their anti-Ottoman uprising.

Consider, for instance, Emir Faisal ibn Hussein of Mecca, the celebrated hero of the “Great Arab Revolt” against the Ottoman Empire and the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. Together with his father and his older brother Abdullah, Faisal placed Palestine on the pan-Arab agenda by (falsely) claiming that they had been promised the country in return for their anti-Ottoman rising. In January 1919, he signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionists, supporting the November 1917 Balfour Declaration on the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the adoption of “all necessary measures … to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.”[2] Yet when the opportunity for self-aggrandizement arose, in March 1920, he had himself crowned king of Syria “within its natural boundaries, including Palestine.” Had either option been realized, Palestine would have disappeared from the international scene at that time.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“I hate you!” is an epithet that has been uttered by virtually every child, at some point, toward their parent, especially towards those who are rigorous when it comes to discipline. Parents who enforce rules do not do so because they want to punish their child; they do so to teach him or her right from wrong, and to point out that such rules allow households to operate more smoothly. Teachers do not discipline students because it makes them feel good, but for the betterment of the student. Rules are to be obeyed. Police in New York did not “stop and frisk” because they were targeting specific groups; they did so because they were trying to lower incidences of crime. Obviously, at all levels there are exceptions – bad parents, bad teachers and bad police – but the majority has the interests of their charges in mind. The role of a disciplinarian is not to be popular, but to allow society to function. If they do their job well, they will be respected.

We establish governments so that civilized people can live in harmony, to bring order to what otherwise would be chaos. It is why free people choose to live under a code of laws. When rules are known, understood to be fair and unbiased and enforced we feel safe, and freedom can flourish. While we don’t always like to admit it, dishonesty and corruption are common characteristics, perhaps not of most people, but certainly of a sizable minority. Why else lock our offices and stores at night, our homes when we are away and our cars when we leave them even for a few minutes? As disillusioning as it might be, there is no Eden beyond the garden gate.

The world is like the family, the school, the village or the nation only on a larger scale. Our mutual interests are global. Commerce requires that ship lines be secured, that airspace be protected, that truck load-factors be adhered, that cyberspace be secure, and that international laws be obeyed. The desire to do harm is omnipresent. Someone, or some entity, must assure that goods and people can move freely. For forty-five years following World War II, that role fell to two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union – in an unwritten “balance” of power. Threats of mutual destruction kept the fingers of leaders of both nations off the button that would have led to total annihilation. However, one country represented totalitarianism and darkness; the other, democracy and freedom. When the Soviet Union collapsed, some, like Francis Fukuama, predicted “the end of history.” While Professor Fukuama was wrong and history did not end, the world was fortunate that the United States won.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride” is an old English proverb that it is useless to wish for something impossible. Man has never lived in peace. All men are not good. Many are evil. The world has changed from the Cold War days when we knew who the enemy was. Threats now come from smaller rogue nations, governed by heartless dictators whose only desire is power, and from stateless terrorists aided by rogue nations. Some of the former now have nuclear weapons. The assuredness of mutual destruction is not meaningful to them as their stake in the current global economy is small. The latter have no stake in the world as it is, so the death of a suicide bomber is considered an honor. They believe that the giving of their life to their cause is noble – that forty virgins await them. Thus threats are more difficult to discover and stop, making them more lethal, and more probable.

Revelations about North Korea’s systematic oppression, abuse and terror assault decency. Has anyone considered what the American role was in leaving the brutal Kim dynasty in charge of the hapless North? Please read this column from 2008.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-the-legacy-of-an-unfinished-war

Ruth King: The Legacy of an Unfinished War

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote to the survivors of fallen soldiers in Word War II, these were his words:

“He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die so that freedom might live, and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.”

This past Memorial Day, in a leafy town in Connecticut, where soldiers, sailors, veterans and their families and many townspeople gathered for a tribute to the town’s fallen heroes, I was struck by the number of octogenarians who were veterans of the largely forgotten and unfinished Korean War which cost so many lives and accomplished so little in bringing freedom and its blessings.

Korea, a unified and independent nation since the seventh century, was occupied and annexed by Imperial Japan in 1910 after a succession of wars with China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-05). In the aftermath of World War ll, Korea was freed from the Japanese who surrendered in Seoul in 1945. However, acceding to Stalin’s demands for “buffer zones” in Asia, the nation was divided by the 38th parallel into the People’s Republic of (North)Korea and the Republic of (South)Korea, to be administered by the Russians and the Americans respectively.

There were continuous simmering conflicts between both Koreas caused by South Korea’s resistance to the enforced Communism of the northern regime run by then 33-year-old Kim Il Sung (the father of North Korea’s present dictator) whose patrons were Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. In fact, thousands of North Korean troops fought on Mao’s side in the Chinese Civil War. When those battle hardened troops returned to North Korea, Kim Il Sung “volunteered” them along the 38th parallel, and escalated provocations from border skirmishes to combat and ultimate invasion of the Republic of South Korea on June 25, 1950.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded President Truman to defend South Korea, reversing earlier reluctance to enter into another conflict so soon after World War II. The United States prepared to deploy the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait and send massive air and naval power to the area. Ground troops were committed on June 30th, despite the reluctance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were concerned about stretching American defenses. The draft, still in place, increased the numbers of active duty troops to roughly 700,000 Army and 90,000 battle-ready Marines.

Only two days after the invasion, on June 27th, at the urging of the United States, the UN Security Council voted in favor of armed resistance to North Korea. UN support for the defense of South Korea enabled Truman and Acheson to gain public support for U.S. intervention. Although the United States commenced the war under the auspices of the United Nations with contingents of troops from Turkey, England Canada and Australia it was really America’s war.

In July 1950, World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur was given command of U.S. troops in Korea. Despite his initial assessment of an easy victory, the North Korean Army delivered a series of humiliating losses and retreats to the United States Army and drove south to the nation’s capital Seoul.

Soros and Saudi Arabia Finance a Non-Profit War in Israel Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/soros-and-saudi-arabia-finance-a-non-profit-war-in-israel-2/

[Edwin Black will be speaking about his new book, Financing the Flames, to the Wednesday Morning Club in Beverly Hills on March 11, 2014. For more info, click here.]

Many books have been written about the financing of war, but Edwin Black’s latest book is about the financing of peace. That would seem like a positive theme, except that Black reveals that the financing of peace is really the financing of war.

Edwin Black has a history of writing investigative reports about the financing of conflict and Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel is firmly in that tradition. Black picks up where he left off with his investigation of the Ford Foundation’s bigoted Anti-Israel shenanigans at Durban to look at the left’s financing of the conflict in Israel.

Israel is a small country and most Israeli Jews and Arabs already know that the conflict is stirred up by interested parties. They know that rocks don’t just get thrown randomly at soldiers and confrontations between Jewish and Arab villages are often staged by interested parties who don’t even live there.

The conflict was always externally encouraged, whether it was the British and the Nazis playing spy games or Iran and the Soviet Union funneling money and instructions to terrorists, but the perpetuation of the conflict has interwoven a mesh of conflict profiteers into the country, from hordes of stringers and journalists looking for a conflict photo or terror interview to sell, and over to the networks of non-profit organizations stirring up violence on an even larger scale and for even uglier motives.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/

Reprinted from PJ Media.

If college students listened to Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I recently spoke at Emory University, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.

Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.

But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.

From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

60 years ago an uprising in the Ukraine would have been met with machine guns fired from behind the armor of Communist ideology. With the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t have much of an ideology to deploy against Ukrainian nationalism. It accused the protesters of being fascists, an accusation with some truth to it, but not one that anyone will take seriously coming from another fascist regime.

Putin tried to replace Communism’s international agents of influence by cobbling together a crude
network of leftist anti-imperialists, paleo-libertarians and assorted conspiracy theorists and exploited it with classic tradecraft. Assange and Snowden showed how damaging this could be to the United States, but Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and all the rest of the gang couldn’t keep the Ukraine in Putin’s hands.

The anti-government sentiments projected by RT can bring in useful idiots, Assange and Snowden are evidence of that, but they lack Communism’s power to influence millions through the medium of a comprehensive ideology whose followers were willing to lie and die for it in unending numbers.

If Russia had set out to suppress an uprising 60 years ago, its talking points would have been on the lips and printing presses of innumerable writers and papers that would have immediately constructed rationalizations and denounced the protesters. Americans would have been told that we don’t understand what is going on there, that the protesters aren’t saints and that angering the USSR would destabilize the global situation and lead to war.

A Good Start on Tax Reform
By The Editors
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372097/print

It is a testament to the scale and absurdity of the U.S. tax code that it takes a 979-page bill to reform and simplify it. That’s how much paper Representative Dave Camp’s proposal, from the House Ways and Means Committee, uses to reduce marginal rates for businesses and individuals, limit tax deductions and exclusions, and simplify the system overall. And a great deal of the proposal is good.

It’s hard to object, for instance, to the 89 sections of the bill devoted just to removing “deadwood” (provisions that no longer affect taxes paid) from the tax code. We can’t count the number of distortionary or costly active provisions in the individual and corporate income-tax codes that Camp’s bill eliminates. Of course, each of these changes will attract opposition from somewhere, but such is the price of tax reform.

What are the benefits? It would cut the top corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world, to 25 percent, while the top individual-income rate would fall to 35 percent. It would reduce the complexity of the code significantly — allowing 95 percent of Americans to take just the standard deduction — while maintaining similar levels of revenue and encouraging business investment. In other words, we can reliably expect to move in the right direction along the Laffer curve. (Simplifying the tax code also reduces the incentives and opportunities for mischief by tax collectors, and Camp’s bill includes further measures to insulate taxpayers from political abuse by the IRS.)

Across income levels, Camp’s proposal is essentially neutral: Incentives are improved without giving Democrats any chance to wail about tax cuts for the rich. Of course, some will pay more and some will pay less. The bill’s redistribution is largely from single Americans to families, and from firms that have won special advantages in the tax code to those that have typically seen high tax bills. Both of these are, besides any considerations of fairness, good economic policy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372077/print
The history of Obama’s foreign-policy posturing bodes ill for the future of Ukraine.

Don’t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history.

Don’t dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don’t even consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don’t even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don’t ever put a hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history.

President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych just before protesters drove Yanukovych out of office. “There will be consequences if people step over the line,” Obama threatened.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, amplified that veiled warning. He called the Ukrainian government’s repression “completely outrageous” — as opposed to just outrageous or completely, completely outrageous.

Secretary of State John Kerry joined the chorus of condemnation by hinting at economic sanctions if Yanukovych didn’t stop his violent crackdown on protesters.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372094/print
President Obama rejects risk out of arrogance.

‘The price of greatness,” Winston Churchill once said, “is responsibility.”

There can no longer be any doubt that President Obama is unwilling to pay that tariff.

In a world defined by uncertainty and ever-stronger enemies, the president’s administration announced this week that American armed forces would be cut to historically low levels. But the sad farce doesn’t end there.

Last Thursday, we also learned that the president’s new budget won’t include a minor but useful reform he’d proposed last year to trim entitlement spending. The rejection of these changes — ones that every citizen capable of basic arithmetic should know are necessary to save America’s pension program — is telling.

After ten years of war, that is, the military gets gutted while civilian entitlements remain sacred.

This is a White House in which short-term ideological calculations always rule the roost.

Less than a month ago, the president spoke of “working together” with Congress — now he is calling for an end to the era of austerity. (Did it ever begin?) The president’s budget next year proposes increased spending on favorite (wasteful) programs. This is playing to the favorite liberal myth that austerity doesn’t work, that only continued binging can end the hangover. The president knows that the U.S.’s fiscal position remains tenuous, and knows that ballooning deficits will make recoveries much harder in the future.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/waking_up_to_defense_cuts.html

If you are surprised by this week’s announcement of major manpower cuts to the U.S. Army, you haven’t been paying attention. For a long time. There are two components to understanding America’s defense spending choices — the political and the budgetary; they are not the same. The Administration has made the political case clear.

Beginning in 2011, President Obama pronounced himself committed to “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan “responsibly.”
The president committed to a turn inward, beginning with a 2011 statement that “the nation we need to build is our own,” coupled with the promise to cut troops deployed abroad in half.
The refrain “no boots on the ground,” is the mantra of many administration officials, resurrected again last weekend by Susan Rice regarding limits to U.S. support of rebels in Syria — although no one appears to have suggested so much as a huarache.
Secretary Kerry’s visit to Indonesia prompted him to declare global “climate change” as big a threat in Asia as “terrorism, poverty and WMDs.” He skipped China’s increasingly bold assertions of hegemony in Asian waters and increasingly large defense budget (still miniscule compared to ours, but one heads one way, the other the other way).

It really doesn’t matter that none of those things are true, meaningful, or helpful in terms of American national security policy. The president’s political message has been consistent and expedient — except for the large, not-very-truthful explanation of the war in Libya and its aftermath — and resonates with an American public that is “war wary” (if not “war weary”), creepingly (if not yet creepily) isolationist, and happy with a presidential plan to “save money” after years of rise in the national debt.