RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not since the 1930s and early 1940s have we seen so many malevolent empires on the rise.

Empires can rise and fall quickly. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires abruptly collapsed amid military defeat, rising nationalism, and revolution.

Yet on the eve of World War II four new empires suddenly grew out the wreckage of old Europe and Asia. A weak Italy under Fascist Benito Mussolini in just a few years grabbed much of East and North Africa, as well as the Dalmatian coast. Hitler’s so-called “Third Empire” carved off Austria and strips of Eastern Europe — and planned to go to war for more. The Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states and southern Finland. Japan declared first Manchuria, and then Southeast Asia, part of its new “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-derived “civil rights” group, “repeated its defense of freedom of speech” in a baffling January 7 press release that “condemned” the Paris jihadist Charlie Hebdo massacre. A trip down a bad memory lane, though, is necessary in order to evaluate critically CAIR’s commitment to free speech rights with proverbial grains of salt equivalent to the Dead Sea’s renowned salinity.

CAIR, an unindicted terrorism coconspirator, and “defense of freedom of speech” simply do not match. CAIR, for example, has unsuccessfully tried to stop critical commentary on Islam in an American public library and school. CAIR has also harassed a Michigan individual who opposed a mosque construction with frivolous subpoenas, ultimately quashed. One 2012 article on the CAIR-Chicago affiliate website discussed how the First Amendment has “been manipulated to make America the catalyst for unjust hate.”

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, Anthony Shaffer, whom FOX News uses frequently to determine goings-on in the Pentagon, revealed last night that the Army is not the culprit in the cover-up of the Bowe Bergdahl investigation. According to the colonel’s internal Pentagon sources, the Army has already charged Bergdahl with desertion but has been stymied in pursuing the normal court-martial processes due to oppressive command influence from the White House. According to Shaffer’s sources, the immediate culprit is Ben Rhodes, current deputy national security adviser for strategic communication for Barack Obama.

White House fear is totally understandable. If you had traded five key terrorist leaders for one American G.I. and your hero turned out to be a deserter who willingly left his post and his unit and went over to the enemy in time of war, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? Worse, had you quite publicly invited said deserter’s parents to stroll congenially and intimately through the White House Rose Garden with you, and then had that event broadcast round the world, wouldn’t you be embarrassed?

The murder of dozens of Jews in Buenos Aires 20 years ago by Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists is being whitewashed in Barack Obama and the West’s desperate policy of making nice with Tehran.

In downtown Buenos Aires there is a cream painted building locked down like Fort Knox. Alongside the building is a billboard, but it’s no suave ad for Kelvin Klein. The billboard is black, and eighty five names, handwritten in white, cover it from top to bottom.

They are mainly the names of Jews. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists murdered the eighty five when they blew up the Jewish community building, badly injuring many more. This happened in 1994.

Lately, Argentinian President Cristina de Kirchner, another Eva Peron in her beauty and blinding ambition, has been bartering with Iran: a cover-up of the crime in exchange for Iranian oil and Argentine grain.

Claims that Islamist violence has nothing to do with Islam normally come from the liberal/Left, the usual suspects in Britain being the Guardian and the Independent.

Lately however there have been somewhat similar claims made or suggested by the conservative Right, for example by Daniel Hannan, Conservative Member of the European Parliament, who is very well known for his general concerns about the European Union and the future of Europe.

Writing at CapX, a free-market online news service, Mr Hannan claimed that the Charlie Hebdo murderers were social “losers”, young men who were alienated from wider French society and were in no way representative of Islam or of Muslim beliefs.

So, like many on the Left, the Conservative Mr Hannan seeks, in a sense, to contextualise the Charlie Hebdo murders by blaming wider French society. The killers were social rejects, he says; educational failures, welfare addicts etc, and in frustration at French social injustice, they hit out in the only way they knew.

The sky over New York City was a falling sheet of white. Trails of footprints, work boots, paw prints, sneakers and bird claws, told their own story of how the residents of city were getting through the blizzard to their daily errands. Shoppers lugged home milk as if cows were going extinct. Miniature snowmen decorated mailboxes and garbage trucks towing orange plows clattered down empty streets.

Nowhere in the city was the blizzard more pronounced than in Central Park, designed a century ago to create a miniature forest in the heart of Manhattan. Even the tallest trees, taller than any others in the city, were layered with coats of snow and visibility had vanished into a cloud of whiteness.

And walking along a path in the Ramble, I heard a woman lecturing her children on the dangers of what else, but Global Warming.

Flying James Taylor to Paris to sing You’ve Got A Friend as a gesture of sympathy to France over the Charlie Hebdo attacks, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry did, was barely less ridiculous than if Canada had dispatched Céline Dion to sing My Heart Will Go On, according to Mark Steyn.

“I would fully have supported Paris nuking Ottawa over that,” said Mr. Steyn, the famously witty cultural doomsayer who is in Toronto this week to be interviewed by Indigo Books & Music Inc. chief executive Heather Reisman about his new book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn on Wednesday night at Indigo Manulife Centre.

“I’m glad that Canada did not descend to the level of the government of the United States,” he said. “I’m also glad that Stephen Harper was not in that lineup of prime ministers holding hands in the street, because I think what was going on there was really an appropriation of the sacrifice of these men.”

ABC referred to here is the AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING COMPANY…..whose aversion to mentioning the words “Islam” or Jihad” mirrors that of the media in the entire West….rsk

Astonished that the ABC — their ABC — reported on Islamist mayhem and murder in Paris without mention of the killers’ motives and affiliation, Geoffrey Luck asked the national broadcaster for an explanation. What followed was a prolonged exercise in admission, retraction, denial and obfuscation.

After the recent jihadi massacres in Paris, journalist and Quadrant contributor Geoffrey Luck was watching his former employer’s coverage when, on January 10, reports by Barbara Miller and other correspondents caught his attention. The reports, which led that night’s 7.00 news, somehow omitted any mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim”.

Luck, who spent 25 years at the national broadcaster, reached for his keyboard and dashed off a quick note in quest of an explanation as to how a report about Islamist butchery could fail to mention, even in passing, the creed and philosophy that demanded the deaths of cartoonists, journalists and shoppers in a kosher supermarket.

Reproduced below is Luck’s original question, plus subsequent rounds of correspondence with ABC functionaries. As he observed after abandoning his bid to have the ABC police its own standards, the to-and-froing is “a document exemplifying how the ABC wriggles and twists on the hook of a complaint.” While the exchange satisfied none of Luck’s queries, it might prompt readers to wonder yet again why, despite its inaccuracy, omissions, bias, cronyism and ongoing delight in broadcasting prime-time obscenity, the national broadcaster has so far seen no greater encouragement to reform than a paltry 5% reduction in its funding.

Sabeel (Palestinian Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center) has partnered with the Presbyterian Church (USA) to produce a new Bible version that changes God’s Word.

The new version has no mention of Israel as Jewish and no mention of Jesus as a Jew. In fact, Jesus (Yeshua) is changed from being Jewish to being a Palestinian Arab, according to Geri Ungurean in NowTheEndBegins.

Sabeel (Arabic ‘the way’ and also ‘a channel’ or ‘spring’) is a Christian liberation theology organization based in Jerusalem. It was founded by Palestinian Anglican priest Rev. Naim Ateek, the former Canon of St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem.

Since the world is at peace, Rudoren has nothing to do except find a few IDF soldiers who badmouth the Six Day War.

Like the White House, the New York Times is potentially guilty of incitement to genocide and defamation; certainly, they are guilty of slanting the news about Israel in every way possible.

This time, the Paper of Propaganda, has published a 1250 word piece that takes up three columns on page A4 and another three columns on page A9—and it has four photos as well.

Rudoren has chosen this moment in history to review a new film by a young, Left filmmaker, Mor Loushy, titled “Censored Voice.”
Even as the Muslim and Arab worlds are on fire; even as Syria has displaced three million refugees; even as Islamic Sunni terrorists have massacred other Muslims, and have tortured Yazidi women and girls; even as Muslim terrorists are massacring civilians in the West—Rudoren has chosen to feature, in a high profile way, the regrets of IDF soldiers who fought in the 1967 war of self-defense. Now, some claim they have been “censored” and that the “abuses” they committed have haunted them ever since.

Even as Muslim terrorists are be-heading civilians and crucifying Christians, Rudoren quotes one Israeli soldier, who, “fresh from the [1967] front, bluntly recounts the orders from above. ‘They never said, ‘Leave no one alive,’ but they said, ‘Show no mercy,’’ he explains. ‘The brigade commander said to kill as many as possible.’” She quotes another: “All of us…we’re not murderers. In the war, we all became murderers.”

Rudoren has chosen this moment in history to review a new film by a young, Left filmmaker, Mor Loushy, titled “Censored Voice.” It has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.