RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama’s decision to avoid congressional scrutiny of his emerging nuclear deal with Iran led 47 GOP senators to write a letter warning Iran – and the president – that the Senate expects to be consulted. A subsequent bipartisan letter signed by 367 members of the House of Representatives also urged the president to consult Congress. A look at major 20th-century strategic arms accords lends decisive weight to the position taken by Congress.

It is apparent that if President Obama inks a deal with Iran over its nuclear program, it will be in the form of an executive agreement, to escape the inconvenience of submitting it to the Senate as a treaty. Given the two-thirds supermajority treaty consent requirement of Article II of the U.S. Constitution – formal legal ratification occurs only if the president signs – the president’s giveaway deal with Iran, if reached, would face a brick wall in the GOP-controlled Senate.

Islamic State is providing “fresh oxygen” to extremist groups in Muslim-majority Indonesia, says National Police Inspector-General Tito Karnavian. And that is stirring worries that terrorist attacks, which have fallen off in recent years, could make a resurgence if people going to fight with Islamic State, sometimes referred to as ISIS or ISIL, return home with a hardened sense of militancy and sophisticated combat training. Police say 159 Indonesian citizens that they’ve identified have gone abroad to join the terrorist group–but they believe the actual number is far larger.

Security expert Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, says some of these people are taking their families. “It is a serious problem, and it’s getting bigger,” she said. What impact could ISIS have on Indonesia, and how is the government working to curb the danger? Here’s the short answer.

White House leaves open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state

The U.S. exerted new pressure against Israel by leaving open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state, in what would be a departure from using American veto power to protect its close Mideast ally.

The prospect of a U.N. Security Council resolution arose Friday when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Paris would introduce a measure setting a deadline for a negotiated settlement of the conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, possibly within two years.

“For Netanyahu to embrace Obama’s policies on Iran and the Palestinian issue would spare him the wrath of the White House, but would distance him from Middle East reality, dooming the Jewish State to destruction.”

Defense, scientific and commercial cooperation between the US and Israel is surging unprecedentedly, in defiance of the unbridgeable gap between the worldviews of President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu.

For example, 250 major US high-tech companies maintain research and development centers in Israel, which has become a major source of cutting-edge innovative technologies, improving US competitiveness, increasing US exports and expanding US employment. In 2014, Israeli startups raised an all-time record of $3.4bn, mostly from US investors. Israel operates hundreds of US military and homeland security systems, providing the US defense industries with critical lessons of operation, maintenance and repairs, which dramatically upgrade the quality of these systems and their global competitiveness, improving US research and development, exports and employment. US-Israel cooperation in the areas of cyber, nano and space technologies is rising sharply. Israel provides the US with intelligence, exceeding the intelligence provided to the US by all NATO countries combined. The formulation of US battle tactics, in general – and urban warfare. in particular – is based largely on Israel’s battle experience. Joint US-Israel air force exercises are conducted regularly. US Army units on their way to Afghanistan are trained by Israeli experts in urban warfare, car bombs, suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

American aircraft went into action against Islamic State positions in Tikrit on March 25 in direct support of a stalled Iraqi offensive. The following day General Lloyd Austin, top commander in the Middle East, told Congress that he would like his forces to protect the Syrian “moderate” rebels who are currently trained and armed by the U.S. Also this week a major new theater was opened in Yemen, where a Sunni Arab coalition started sustained air strikes against Shia rebels with Washington’s explicit support.

The alarming aspect of these new developments is that the U.S. role appears to be entirely reactive and not based on a coherent long-term strategy. The engagement in Tikrit has the obvious short-term objective of countering Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, rather than inflicting a decisive defeat on the IS. According to a report in Thursday’s New York Times, President Obama approved the airstrikes, requested by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, on the condition that Iranian-backed Shiite militias move aside to allow a larger role for Iraqi forces that have worked closely with U.S. troops. They went into action only after Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who has been advising anti-IS forces around Tikrit, was reported to have left the area:

What country deserves more condemnation for violating human rights than any other nation on earth? According to the U.N.’s top human rights body, that would be Israel.
Last week, Israel was the U.N.’s number one women’s rights violator. This week it is the U.N.’s all-round human rights villain.
The U.N. Human Rights Council wrapped up its latest session in Geneva on Friday, March 27 by adopting four resolutions condemning Israel. That’s four times more than any of the other 192 UN member states.
There were four resolutions on Israel. And one on North Korea — a country that is home to government policies of torture, starvation, enslavement, rape, disappearances, and murder – to name just a few of its human rights violations.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Syria. Where the death toll of four years of war is 100,000 civilians, ten million people are displaced, and barrel bombs containing chemical agents like chlorine gas are back in action.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Iran. Where there is no rule of law, no free elections, no freedom of speech, corruption is endemic, protestors are jailed and tortured, religious minorities are persecuted, and pedophilia is state-run. At last count, in 2012 Iranian courts ordered more than 30,000 girls ages 14 and under to be “married.”
And what did that one resolution on Iran say? Co-sponsored by the United States, it was labelled a “short procedural text,” consisting of just three operative paragraphs that contained not a single condemnation of Iran.
The Israel resolutions, on the other hand, were full of “demands,” “condemns,” “expresses grave concern,” and “deplores” – along with orders to “cease immediately” a long list of alleged human rights violations.
Ninety percent of states – inhabited by 6.6 billion people – got no mention at all. Countries like China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. For the UN, there was not one human rights violation worthy of mention by any of these human rights horror shows.

Barbara Lee is Rated +7 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
On Wednesday, California Democrat Barbara Lee proposed a resolution in the House of Representatives that claims women will eventually be forced into prostitution in order to obtain life-sustaining food and water for their families.

Lee introduced House Concurrent Resolution 29, warning that women will be forced into “transactional sex” to get enough food and clean water — all because global warming will create “conflict and instability” in the world.

“Women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change,” Lee’s resolution reads. It continues claiming, “Food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.”

Lee’s document goes on to urge Congress to agree on the “disparate impacts of climate change on women,” and goes on to demand that Congress use “gender-sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change.”

Two Republican Congressmen, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) have introduced the “Boycott Our Enemies, Not Israel Act,” which seeks to push back against the campaign employed by the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

BDS, which advocates for a boycott of Jewish imports from the State of Israel, has been described by some as a virulently anti-Semitic movement, due to its singling out of Israel alone and complete disregard for other nations.

The BDS movement has been primarily advocated for by Islamist and leftist groups on American college campuses, and backed by radical college professors. The movement faults Israel entirely for any issues concerning the Israel-Palestinian dispute, and lays no blame on the Palestinian population for unrest in the region.

Now that “the Iran-backed Houthis” have entered our language, are their opponents the good guys? Who cares?
Yes, too much information, if you ask me. That’s why every single red-blooded American is watching West Virginia versus Kentucky.

Hey, it’s March Madness. That’s college basketball, to my relatives in Israel who mistakenly think that America is talking about Israel.

Not the case. Americans have other pursuits and can only absorb so much. Today we are being asked to learn how to spell Houthis – as in “Iran-backed Houthis” who are devouring Yemen. Are you kidding? Where is Yemen, by the way, and how did they sneak into the news? Last week there was no Yemen.

Who’s got the scorecard and who’s keeping score? Now it’s the Sunnis versus the Shiites. Can they tell themselves apart? We can’t.

I am in the midst of reading Martin Gilbert’s masterful biography “Churchill- A Life.” It is long-nearly 1,000 pages- and heavy. Churchill was a hero, a prophet, a strategist and a realist who confronted the worst hatred of the last century.

I am delighted that Netanyahu won Israel’s recent election, but a modern day Churchill- as so many reputable pundits have called him- he is decidedly not.

The only person who comes to mind as this century’s Churchill is Geert Wilders…a hero, a prophet, a realist, a strategist…who has warned the West about the faith driven Muslim goals of conquest, caliphate and submission. Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and the founder and leader of the Party for Freedom which currently is the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. He has been subjected to libel, harassment and opprobrium by the media, the police, and the “enlightened” progressives.

He does not bend or retract or submit to pressure….rsk