RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prophecy was not one of the then-Beatle’s gifts, but he might well have been thinking of Russell Brand when he sang of “making all his nowhere plans for nobody”. Two pop-culture icons — one who found his feet, after a fashion, versus another lost in the incoherence of an egomaniacal self-esteem
Russell Brand has chosen the red pill. Few, though, have imbibed more blue pills than Russell – celebrity sex, celebrity drugs, celebrity performances, celebrity morals, celebrity worship, celebrity hubris, celebrity wealth and celebrity marriage to Katy Perry. But the blissful ignorance of illusion is now behind him. The red pill has “awoken” him, and in his post-delirium state Brand is Neo, modern-day messiah on a mission to rescue humanity from the Matrix (or Late Capitalism).

The last celebrity with such an overweening messianic complex was John Lennon (1940-80). According to Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner’s bio In My Life (1983), in the early hours of Saturday, May 18, 1968, a cross-legged, elegantly wasted Lennon experienced an epiphany. “I think I’m Jesus Christ. I’m…back again,” announced Lennon, waving both arms in the air and making slow, swirling actions with his outspread hands. Pete Shotton, boyhood friend and constant companion in the brief interlude between the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Yoko Ono, had just shared a piece of LSD and smoked some joints with the famous Beatle, but his rejoinder was pithy enough: “Don’t you think being John Lennon is enough?”

Most of all, we failed to extend our hand of solidarity to those brave Muslim men and women who dared to defy the radical elements within their own communities.

The Western school systems have brought forth a generation that that, by taking the gifts of these freedoms for granted, has failed to learn how irregular in history they are, that the heavy price that was paid by generations gone by to secure them.

Instead of passing on this flame of enlightenment and freedom to the Muslim world, we have undermined it at home.

If we fail to stand up for our values, nobody else will.

More hearts of Western civilization have been targeted and hit. First, armed gunmen entered the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last week and killed 12 people, to impose their understanding of Sharia on the French. Then, the German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost, which had the courage to reprint the cartoons, was firebombed on January 10.

According to the Washington Post, weapons and ammunition are in such short supply at the centers where Iraqi army units receive training to fight ISIS that the trainees are yelling “bang-bang” instead of shooting.

Last August, when President Obama announced that the U.S. would undertake a mostly proxy war against ISIS, I would have said that yelling “bang-bang” is the perfect metaphor for his anti-terrorism campaign. Today, whispering “bang-bang” is more like it.

Iraq, where trainees lack weapons and ammunition, is the site of America’s most robust anti-terrorist activity. Elsewhere, our efforts are even more pathetic. The Post’s editors write:

In Libya, the job of stemming an incipient civil war has been left to a feckless U.N. mediator, even though the Islamic State is known to be operating at least one training camp with hundreds of recruits.

In Nigeria, where a new offensive by the Boko Haram movement has overrun much of one northeastern state, a U.S. military training program was recently canceled by the government following a dispute over arms sales.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/01/strangest-diplomatic-initiative-ever-youve-got-a-friend.php
Let’s cut Kerry a little slack. In Vietnam he was apparently shot in the butt…and in esoteric cases that injury could result in brain damage….rsk
Strangest Diplomatic Initiative Ever: You’ve Got a Friend!

The administration has acknowledged that it erred by not participating in a meaningful way in the giant pro-free speech demonstration in Paris, so it has tried to make amends by sending John Kerry to France. Apparently thinking that he needed reinforcements to convey a full sense of the administration’s symbolic support, Kerry brought along…James Taylor.

For you youngsters, Taylor is a folk musician whom people our age listened to in 1970–a mere 45 years ago. Here is Taylor performing “You’ve Got a Friend” while Kerry looks on in a state of acute discomfort. Don’t feel obliged to watch to the end; I didn’t:

God only knows what the French made of this. Maybe James Taylor is still popular there, like Jerry Lewis. Before we mercifully draw down the curtain on this episode, let’s turn the floor over to the genius of Iowahawk, on Twitter:

During this week’s Golden Globes ceremony, Hollywood made numerous gestures in support of our freedom of expression. Referencing the computer hack of Sony Pictures in response to the film “The Interview” and the horrific murders at the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, Hollywood voiced support for fearlessly standing up for the right to insult. It is now time for Hollywood to act courageously by creating films that authentically portray the life of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.

Opinion leaders need not get lost in balancing rights to criticize, satirize and insult with our natural calls for civility and responsible dialogue. No civilized Westerner can argue against truth and its pursuit. U.S. defamation law generally holds truth as a complete defense. It is a noble cause in itself and justice is intended to flow from it.

With Islam’s Sharia law, however, truth, like non-Muslims themselves, is subordinate to the primacy of Islam and Mohammad. Defending Mohammad’s pre-eminence at all costs has deeply implanted “war is deceit,” taqiyya and other forms of dissimulation throughout Islam; avenging the Prophet, as seen in the Hebdo murders, is Sharia’s justice.

There simply is no way to understand Islam without full comprehension of Mohammad’s life. Islam declares Mohammad the best of all Muslims; therefore a seriously engaged Muslim looks to Mohammad’s life for the best guidance on how to be a “good” Muslim. And because Mohammad is also the self-declared final prophet, no one can come after him to change, reform, or revolutionize Islam. The Quran, unlike the Bible, is not made up of stories. Rather, it comprises the words of Allah, and its verses are presented non-chronologically based on length. The Hadith, the vast collections of sayings and acts of Mohammad, also lack any context. Neither can be meaningfully understood except against the background of Mohammad’s life.

In 539 BCE, Babylonian King Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall – as interpreted by the Prophet Daniel – and was, therefore, annihilated by the Persians (Book of Daniel, Chapter 5).

In 2015, Western civilizations must read the writing on the wall, desist from ambiguity, denial and political correctness and embrace clarity, realism and political incorrectness, in order to survive and overcome the clear and present lethal threat of Islamic takeover, which gathers momentum via demographic, political and terroristic means.

While medical ambiguity, and the failure to diagnose lethal disease, cause personal misfortune, policy-making ambiguity and denial could trigger national and international calamities.

History proves that Western ambiguity and the refusal to identify enemies – due to ignorance, gullibility, oversimplification, appeasement, delusion and wishful thinking – have taken root, yielding major strategic setbacks and painful economic and human loss. When it comes to reading the writing on the wall, Western eyesight has been far from 20:20, dominated by modern day Belshazzars, ignoring modern day Prophet Daniels.

A COMMENTARY Editorial

The jihadist siege of a kosher grocery store in eastern Paris on January 9 was not the beginning of a new threat to French Jews and the Jews of Europe. Rather, it was the culmination of a decade of crisis. And it will not be the end.

The new era of deadly anti-Semitism in France began with the January 2006 murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi. He was coming from a Shabbat meal with his mother when he was ambushed by a gang in a Paris slum. The gang held him captive for 24 days, during which time he wasbeaten, stabbed, burned with acid, mutilated, lit on fire, and tortured to death. Halimi’s murderers were African and North African Muslim immigrants with ties to Islamic extremists. They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians. And they chose Halimi because he was a Jew.

France’s 5 million Muslims account for 10 to 12 percent of the country’s total population. It is the largest Muslim population in Europe; it is also the most problematic. Several factors contribute to thisreality.

The first is radical Islam. Since the late-20th century, a Saudi-funded, anti-Semitic strain of Islamist radicalism has spread to all corners of the Muslim world. Many of France’s recent Muslim immigrants from North Africa have brought their Islamist and jihadist sympathies to Europe.Indeed, a 2013 poll found that a startling 27 percent of French Muslims younger than 24 support ISIS.

AS the English writer George Orwell well understood, you can invariably rely on members of the Western intelligentsia to make profoundly silly comments and to ignore difficult facts. The responses by barrister Julian Burnside and journalist/historian Paul Ham to the Islamist murders in Paris illustrate the point.

In the immediate aftermath of the most recent terrorist attacks in France, 7.30presenter Leigh Sales interviewed the Paris-based Ham. In response to the first question, Ham recounted how he had attended “the huge meeting in the Place de la Republique last night” following the attack on Charlie Hebdo . He added that this area “is the symbol of the revolutions of 1830, of 1848, of 1870 and it is the strongest, most powerful recognition of the values the French hold dear — of equality, of liberty, of fraternity”.

The answer to French anti-Semitism

January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.

On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.

Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.

They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.

The late, great illustrator Charles M. Schulz — creator of the famous comic strip Peanuts — is not around to comment on the jihad against satirists and Jews in Paris less than two weeks ago. But the words of his characters, which have rung true since their debut in the 1940s, give us an idea.

One musing, uttered by the hero of the series, the lovable and self-deprecating Charlie Brown, is particularly apt. “It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black,” he said, making a humorous play on a more uplifting adage. What is happening in the Islamist world today, however, is no laughing matter.

Nor should any of us take comfort in the “unity rally” in France on Sunday, attended by an estimated 3.7 million people, many of whom were waving “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) banners. Referring to the targeted slaughter of 10 staff members at the anarchist weekly Charlie Hebdo — and incidentally to the murder of two policemen stationed outside the newspaper’s headquarters, another police officer in a separate incident, as well as four Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket — most of the demonstrators and world leaders who joined them were missing the point.

Even while calling the related killings of 17 people at the hands of Islamist terrorists “France’s 9/11,” officials and journalists across the West were rushing to condemn and warn against anti-Muslim sentiment. Indeed, though the post-massacre edition of Charlie Hebdo was purchased in the millions, most American and European TV media outlets decided not to show its cover, which depicts Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign below the headline “Tout est pardonne” (“All is forgiven”).

The Pope, too, was more concerned about not arousing the wrath of angry Muslims by taking free speech too far than about the mass murder of his flock at their hands.