RUTHFULLY YOURS

When John Boehner announced that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had accepted his invitation to address Congress, the Obama Administration reacted strongly. The criticism was not directed primarily at Boehner, who apparently did not inform the White House of the invitation, and may have acted unconstitutionally in delivering it, but against Netanyahu, for breaching diplomatic protocol by accepting the invitation without first notifying the White House.

For example, AP reported that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest “says typical protocol is that a country’s leader would contact the White House before planning to visit the United States. But Earnest says they didn’t hear about Boehner’s invitation until Wednesday morning, shortly before the speaker announced it publicly.” State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki was a bit more circumspect, stating that “traditionally we would learn about plans of leaders…separately from…the Speaker,” i.e., one assumes, from the leader or his representiative.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.

On Wednesday, Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar called on Hamas terrorists in Lebanon and Syria to attack Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

At the same time, Zahar denied that Hamas has been involved in the terrorist insurgency in Egypt. As he put it, “Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” that is, Israel.

The Egyptian regime was not impressed by Zahar’s protestations.

Last Saturday, an Egyptian court upheld an October 2014 decision by the Egyptian government to outlaw Hamas’s terrorist shock forces Izzadin Kassam, and designate it a terrorist organization.

Both the government’s initial designation and the court’s decision were in some sense, watershed events. They represent the first time an Arab regime ever defined any Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist group.

But in truth, Egypt had no choice. Despite its insistent protestations that the Jews are its only enemies, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been a major player, indeed, arguably the key player in the jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that threatens to destroy the political, economic and military viability of the Egyptian state. The declared purpose of the insurgency is to overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and integrate Egypt into Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

Last week saw yet another devastating terror assault against Egyptian security forces and civilians in Sinai and in cities around Egypt. Thirty- two people, mainly soldiers, were killed in a coordinated, multifaceted attack that included Hamas’s three signature modes of operation – mortars, rockets and suicide bombings.

Last week’s assault, like almost all previous ones, was credited to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and declared Sinai a province of its “caliphate.”

According to a report by Yoram Schweitzer from the Institute for National Security Studies, Hamas members were among the original founders of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. The Egyptian government views Hamas-controlled Gaza as the rear headquarters of the group. In founding the group, Hamas cooperated with local Salafist Beduin and with al-Qaida terrorists who escaped Egyptian prisons during the January 2011 uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak.

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University

Like the Lilliputians, North Korea will continue to tie down the world’s Gulliver. Both, in their own way, are status quo powers. The longer Washington waits for the Kim regime to collapse under its own weight, the more dangerous Northeast Asia becomes. Watch this space

The computer screens at Sony Pictures Corporation went dark and then flickered back to life with a ghoulish image and threatening message on November 24, 2014, and thus began the most brazen cyberattack in memory. Two weeks later, a shadowy group called The Guardians of Peace, which claimed responsibility for the attack, demanded that the company pull its release of the upcoming film The Interview, a dark comedy about assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The group’s demand immediately led to allegations that the government of the world’s most isolated totalitarian state had started a new chapter in its long history of aggression against the outside world.

The North Korean government had condemned the movie back in June, employing its usual threatening bluster in a letter to the United Nations that vowed to take a “decisive and merciless countermeasure” if the movie were released. Pyongyang’s later denial of responsibility was dismissed in the wake of the FBI’s conclusion that North Korea was indeed the cyber culprit, and new sanctions were announced by the Obama administration in January 2015.

Between the liberal-Left BBC and the hopeless British police who have internalised far-Left neo-fascist political correctness, little children are being raped and then blamed for being raped because the rapists are Muslim

Will the BBC ever give up on its intellectually dishonest liberal bias? After the devastating Casey report exposing Rotherham Council’s bigoted concerns for Pakistani Muslim sensitivities at the expense of sexually exploited local children, it might have been thought that even the liberal BBC could not put a damage limitation or PC spin on Rotherham’s sex crimes.

Enter Edward Stourton of the BBC’s World At One.

Discussing Rotherham Council’s neglect of vulnerable children with Camilla Cavendish of The Sunday Times, Mr Stourton asked her:

“To what extent do you think part of the problem is what you might call ‘rotten boroughs’ — in other words local authorities which have been under the control of one political party for a long period of time where the usual checks and balances that you might expect don’t apply?”

The self-glorying fantasies of NBC News “managing editor” Brian Williams multiply with every passing day, most recently and risibly his boast that he looked down the very tube of the RPG launcher that shot down the chopper in front – which is quite an accomplishment at that altitude – and the evolving numbers of three-week-old puppies he’s rescued from blazing buildings. So I thought it would be appropriate for our Saturday movie date to pick another tale of journalistic fabulism – Billy Ray’s 2003 biopic of a New Republic fantasist, Shattered Glass:

I can remember the exact moment when I stopped reading Stephen Glass and, for the most part, The New Republic. It was June 1997 and he’d been given the cover story — “Peddling Poppy”, about the ongoing attempt to rehabilitate the first President Bush. About half-a- dozen paragraphs in, Glass wrote:

Another good place at which to contemplate what is going on with Bush is the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ, which is a circuit church run by a handful of evangelicals who hold that Bush is the reincarnation of Christ… Members wander from city to city holding services in public parks and civic halls and handing out leaflets on street corners. Inside the leaflets is a complicated genealogical web that purports to show that Bush is descended directly from the Messiah. The web is written in minuscule print with dozens of winding lines extending like varicose veins from circles within circles. The circles represent secret love children…

Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann has expressed public outrage over the refusal of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue to speak out against the flogging of Raif Badawi, a Saudi human rights activist and blogger who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam.”

“Saudi Arabia practices a form of Sharia law that is one of the most brutal systems in the world… Does the Austrian Foreign Ministry really want to give such a state the opportunity to build an international propaganda center in Austria?” — Editorial, Die Presse.

“An inter-religious dialogue center that remains silent when it is time to speak out clearly for human rights is not worthy of being called a dialogue center. It is a silence center.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

“If the center wants to remain only an economic center with a religious fig leaf, then Austria should no longer be a part of it. In any event, Austria will not allow itself to be threatened or blackmailed.” — Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann.

It all looks nice. It isn’t.

On Muslim Brotherhood channels based in Turkey, Egyptian clerics and commentators called for the murder of Egypt’s President Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi and the journalists who support him.

Under the nice wrappings of Holocaust Remembrance Day, there is an entirely different Turkey.

Perhaps he thinks the Holocaust, too, happened because of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

For a few moments, one could think there are two countries in the world that go by the name “Turkey.” Then reality quickly corrects the mistaken belief.

“We hope that every person develops an understanding of the Holocaust, which constitutes one of the darkest moments in human history, and will consider the importance of working together so that such a tragedy, and the conditions that made this inconceivable crime possible, will never re-emerge,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement on January 27. How nice and thoughtful. But there were more Turkish niceties.

Oh puleez! The pentagon is now psychoanalyzing?….Hmmm….they missed knowing that Major Hassan of Fort Hood was a crazed jihadist…Will they decide that Bowe Bergdahl had potty training problems? rsk

He’s hardly the first foreign leader to be put on the couch by our foreign-policy establishment.

‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world,” wrote the great British historian Thomas Carlyle, to open his 1840 Lectures on Heroes, “is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”

It was in that spirit that the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, published “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend,” in the early 1940s:

Unconsciously [Hitler] is not dealing with nations composed of millions of individuals but is trying to solve his personal conflicts and rectify the injustices of his childhood. Unable to enter into a “give-and-take” relationship with other human beings which might afford him an opportunity of resolving his conflicts in a realistic manner, he projects his personal problems on great nations and then tries to solve them on this unrealistic level. His microcosm has been inflated into a macrocosm.

That study, written with the aid of psychologists from Harvard University, the New School for Social Research, and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was the American government’s first attempt to employ the cutting-edge techniques of psychoanalysis to gain a strategic edge in foreign affairs.

The practice persists. It was revealed this past week that the Office of Net Assessment — the Pentagon’s “internal think tank,” established by President Nixon in 1973 — tentatively diagnosed Russian president Vladimir Putin with Asperger syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder, in a study written by its “Body Leads” behavioral analysis project in 2008.

The conclusions drawn by researchers are based on an analysis of patterns of movement. “How a person (and their body) visibly reveals the self in motion,” writes the Naval War College’s Brenda Connors, who prepared the report, “ultimately offers a map to how their brain functions and how they make decisions.” For example:

The Brute-Force Left

There has been a great deal of overblown talk about the alleged “libertarian moment” that the United States is experiencing just about now, and there is a reason that the Right, broadly speaking, has taken an intellectual turn in the libertarian direction. The first and most important is the ascendance of Barack Obama, whose vision of effectively unlimited government gives conservatives the willies. But there are deeper reasons, too: The Right believes, not without some reason, that the main reason we ended up with a disastrous Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate government — the brief years of which imposed damage that will take much longer to undo — had to do with the foreign policy of George W. Bush and the fiscal incontinence of congressional Republicans during the Bush years. While the Obama administration has not yet produced a superior foreign-policy operating model, the Bush approach is not really looking any better in retrospect, at least in the sense that it would be difficult to say with a straight face that Iraq, Afghanistan, or the broader Middle East look today like more tractable problems than they did in 2001, or like they might become more tractable. On the domestic front, abortion has effectively calcified into a modus vivendi (more accurately, a horrifying modus mortis), and the new lion of the social issues, gay marriage, is a wet kitten by comparison, in that no sensible, non-fanatical person thinks of gay marriage as being as urgent an issue as abortion.

All of those are relevant, but consider one further, broader dynamic at work: The Right is finally coming around to the understanding that what mainly distinguishes it from the Left is not its general preference for muscular foreign policy, its not always convincing defense of the Judeo-Christian tradition, or even its relatively faithful reading of the Constitution, as important as those things are. Rather, the fight between Right and Left is about coercion.

With Mitt Romney out, former Governor Jeb Bush is the new front runner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, as he tries for the third restoration of the House of Bush. Although his Florida backers assure us he governed as a conservative, Jeb actually has actually warned us that, like his brother George W. Bush, he would be a Big Government Republican.

Jeb Bush said the President he would most emulate is not his father, Bush 41 or Ronald Reagan but big government himself … Lyndon Baines Johnson! According to the Miami Herald in February of 2013, Jeb Bush told several hundred people at a St Leo University that, were he to become president, he would strive to be like LBJ. Putting aside LBJ’s lies to the American people about what was really happening in Vietnam, and the first government raid on the Social Security trust funds which was the first step towards the massive federal debt of today, LBJ’s expansion of the Welfare State under his ‘Great Society” programs started the entitlements bankrupting us today. Bush praised “LBJ’s strong, practical leadership”. This is Jeb’s role model?