RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Islamic State militants kidnapped around 30 women from neighbourhoods of Mosul on April 20th.

Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official from Mosul Saed Mamuzini told BasNews that the militants kidnapped the women because they refused temporary marriage (Nikah) with the jihadists.

The women are from the Wadi Ikab, Hail Tanak and Tamouz 17 neighbourhoods of Mosul and their current whereabouts is unknown.

Mamuzini explained, “IS insurgents had selected the women for temporary marriage with the jihadists, and kidnapped them when they refused.”

“The women are aged between 20 and 35, single and married.”

IS militants used their women’s brigade, al-Khansa, to investigate, arrest and kidnap women under their authority.

The jihadists have kidnapped thousands of young girls and women since they took control of areas in Syria and Iraq, forcing them into temporary marriage .

Reports from IS strongholds in Iraq confirm that the militants regularly use women as sex slaves and sell them in markets.

IS is also responsible for the kidnap of over 5,000 Yazidi women when they attacked Sinjar, northern Iraq last year

The genocide of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims was very real, so was the appalling torture. Women were raped and crucified, people had horseshoes nailed to their feet as they were marched through the streets. Unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated. Yet almost no-one in the Islamic world, and too few in the West will acknowledge it even happened.

As the world continues to look on in dismay at the barbaric atrocities committed against Christian minorities by the Islamic State — the self-proclaimed new “caliphate” — today, April 24, marks the genocide of Armenian and other Christian minorities by Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate.

While Barack Obama is busy telling Americans that Islam has been “woven into the fabric” of America since its founding, police in Spain have just arrested eleven members of a jihadist cell that, woven into the fabric of Spain, was plotting to bring ISIS-style beheadings to a western city near you.

As Soeren Kern notes in an important and depressing post at the Gatestone Institute web site, police have accused the cell of planning to bomb various public and private buildings in and around Barcelona and of—this is especially nice—plotting to kidnap and behead a random person. I’m not sure that the Muslim presence in Spain has gotten the attention it deserves here, but as Kern points out Catalonia not only has the largest Muslim population in Spain, it also has the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe. “The cell’s primary objective,” Kern reports, “was to show that terrorist attacks such as those perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria could be carried out in the West.”

As always, Winston Churchill said it best. Here he is on March 24, 1938, less than two weeks after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria:

For five years I have talked to the House on these matters—not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. .  .  . That is the position—that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit.

Churchill didn’t resign himself to this transformation: “Now is the time at last to rouse the nation. Perhaps it is the last time it can be roused with a chance of preventing war.” But the nation was not roused. Six months later was Munich. A year later, war.

This week, for the first time since President Obama abandoned the bipartisan and international policy of pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, the Senate will have a sustained debate on the administration’s Iran policy. For the first time! The op-ed pages and the journals have been full of arguments about the path the administration has gone down. A remarkable number of serious observers, including many sympathetic to the notion of a negotiated deal with Iran, have been critical of the administration’s repeated cascades of concessions.

The Left discovers the value of fake hate crimes. When tyranny arrives on these shores, it isn’t going to start off looking like something out of George Orwell — it’s going to look a lot like college, which is why the sort of people who twice made Barack Obama president of these United States will welcome it. George Washington University (“the Harvard of safety schools,” as alumnus Dan Foster calls it) has a swastika problem. This goes back a ways. In 2007, a Jewish student, Sarah Marshak, reported that her dorm-room door had been defaced with swastikas, and she complained that the university was doing too little to investigate. But the university was in fact investigating thoroughly — it had, ridiculously enough, gone as far as consulting the FBI — and its sneakily hidden surveillance cameras recorded the vandal in action. No points for guessing that the malefactor was Sarah Marshak.

Recently, somebody drew swastikas on the wall of a GWU dormitory. Whether that is the work of another hoax artist or a genuine free-range national-socialist graffitist is unknown, but the school’s students have an unproud history of faking hate crimes. A group of left-wing students some years back drew up a phony anti-Muslim flier that was falsely attributed to a conservative group, the Young America’s Foundation, in an attempt to smear the organization as racist. (If you’re wondering what these jackasses grow up to become, consider that Matthew Bruenig of The American Prospect and Salon similarly manufactured out of whole cloth a quotation he attributed to me, expressing sympathy for Donald Sterling during the controversy over his racist comments. I’d never even heard of Sterling at the time and assumed everybody was talking about a character on Mad Men. Purportedly respectable institutions still publish Bruenig.)

Voting to confirm an attorney general who won’t uphold the Constitution isn’t a way to inspire confidence among conservatives.

Hillary Clinton didn’t have such a bad week after all. Sure, she’s reeling from the latest unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation family piggy bank. But they’re only marginally worse than earlier unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation.

They are roughly on par with the revelations about how Mrs. Clinton obstructed Congress’s Benghazi investigations by purging her unlawful private e-mail system, which was worse than her obstruction of the State Department’s Benghazi investigation. Yet it may not have been as bad as the obstruction of justice that was a staple of her husband’s administration. Those obstructions, in turn, were on par with her husband’s selling of a pardon to a fugitive fraudster on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List . . . which itself was not quite as bad as his awarding pardons to FALN terrorists — to ingratiate Hillary! with the New York Puerto Rican community (or at least the radicals therein) in preparation for her Senate campaign.

We could go on corruptio ad absurdum. But you get the point: Reeling is not so bad. Reeling is what Clintons do. The way they operate, it’s what they have to do. They should change the Clinton Foundation’s name to Reel Clear Politics.

Clinton Charities Review Tax Returns Amid Scrutiny of Foreign Grants
The Clinton family’s namesake foundation and signature health initiative are reviewing several years of tax returns after questions were raised about the charities’ reporting of tens of millions of dollars in grants from foreign governments, foundation officials said Friday.
The review comes amid intense scrutiny of the foundation’s donors and their political and business relationships with Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Much of that scrutiny has focused on Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, a period during which the foundation had pledged to restrict donations from foreign governments, seek State Department clearance for new foreign donations, and disclose all its donors. In at least some instances, the foundation appears to have ignored those voluntary agreements.

But like all nonprofit organizations, the foundation is also required by law to file publicly available tax returns detailing broad categories of revenue and expenses, including the total financing it received from government entities. The Clinton Foundation and its work are heavily financed by grants from foreign governments, and the foundation reported substantial income from government entities as recently as 2009, when tax returns indicate it took in more than $122 million in government grants.
For the next three tax years, however, the foundation reported no government financing at all. Craig Minassian, a foundation spokesman, said the foreign grants had accidentally been lumped into a different category, listing other grants, gifts and large contributions.

The German officers would often speak of us as Christian Jews and as blood sucking usurers of the Turkish people. What a falsification of the wretched realities prevailing in Asia Minor, and what a reversal of roles! Yes indeed, there was an oppressor. Either the Germans were consciously distorting the facts and roles, or the Turks had really convinced them that the Turks were the victims and the Armenians were criminals. How appropriate it is to recall here this pair of Turkish sayings: “The clever thief has the master of the house hanged” and “The one who steals the minaret prepares its sheath in advance, of course.”

—Grigoris Balakian, from his eyewitness memoir of events during 1915-1918

**

Grigoris Balakian’s eyewitness account of the Jihad Genocide of the Armenians from 1915-1918—recorded in his diaries during World War I, and already published by 1922 (but not in English till 2009, as Armenian Golgotha)—provide a unique confirmation of the ideological, and genocidal nexus, between plight of the Armenians during World War I, and the Jews during World War II, antedating The Holocaust by two decades. Specifically, Balakian’s striking observations (on pp. 280-281) from a chapter entitled, “The Treatment of the Armenians by the German Soldiers” captures attitudes of German military officers towards the Armenians that foreshadow, chillingly, the genocidal depredations they would inflict upon European Jewry during World War II.

Putting a nuclear powered 100,000 ton aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, in the Gulf of Aden along with other U.S. naval assets, was presumably to warn off Iranian freighters bringing arms supplies to the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Yet both the White House and State Department refused to give any assurances to reporters that those Iranian ships would ever be boarded. Such a policy stretches incredulity to the extreme. What, after all, was the U.S. naval flotilla going to do?

At the same time, Obama, who is desperately pushing forward with a terrible deal with that same Iranian Islamic regime, is essentially allowing them to continue keeping the thousands of centrifuges spinning while backing down on any enforcement of inspections at the secret and underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

In addition, Obama is anxious to release billions of dollars of Iran’s frozen assets back to the mullahs who will use that bonanza to finance and spread yet more terror around the globe.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

The world’s largest oxygen chamber. The new hyperbaric unit at Israel’s Assaf Harofeh Medical Center has a capacity for 150 patients per day. It provides high-pressure oxygen to treat victims of diving accidents, burns, carbon monoxide poisoning, radiation damage, bone infections, fibromyalgia, strokes, dementia and more.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Health/Assaf-Harofeh-acquires-worlds-largest-high-pressure-oxygen-chamber-390599

The blind can “see” sounds. Hebrew University of Jerusalem scientists have published more results of their research into the brains of the blind from birth. Their visual cortexes are similar to the fully sighted. They can even be trained to “see” sounds. http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/04/10/brain.awv083
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J9AGklNDUc

Kids in sync physically and socially. Research by Hebrew University of Jerusalem psychologist Prof. Ariel Knafo shows that children who mimic each other’s body language for mere minutes are more likely to share feelings of similarity and closeness, and to potentially engage in more pro-social, positive behaviors.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/26278 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0120878

Bacteria use DNA memory to stop viruses. Researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered how bacteria protect themselves from invasive viruses called phages. Their immune system adds part of the phage DNA into the bacteria’s genome. The research may lead to new treatments for autoimmune diseases.
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/04/13/israeli-scientists-discover-how-a-bacterial-cell-recognizes-its-own-dna/

Arthritis treatment can stop hair loss. Joint research between Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Columbia University has discovered that the rheumatoid arthritis medication Baricitinib is effective in the treatment of Alopecia Areata – an autoimmune disease that causes sudden or gradual hair loss.
http://www.hadassah-med.com/about/news/hadassah-doctors-discover-potential-treatment-of-alopecia-areata
http://www.ebiomedicine.com/article/S2352-3964%2815%2900063-8/abstract?cc=y

Tablets to lower your blood pressure. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Teva has launched, in the USA, a generic alternative to Exforge (amlodopine and valsartan) tablets used to treat hypertension (high blood pressure).
http://www.tevapharm.com/news/?itemid={590B9327-6DFF-48BE-AF70-6DBD27CEF82C}

Probiotic for kids in South Korea. Israel’s Anlit has developed a new probiotic supplement for children in South Korea. Released in Costco stores under the global Cenovis Kids brand, the new supplement has a delicious vanilla flavor and teddy bear shape.
http://www.anlit4kids.com/web/8888/nsf/ProLookup.taf?_function=details&_ID=3676&PF=16&did=1217&G=7648&lang=EN&SM=7667

The future with no brain diseases. Professor Marta Weinstock-Rosin – inventor of Exelon for treating Alzheimer’s – says that the end is in sight for the debilitating disease and others like it. Dr Weinstock-Rosin lit one of the ceremonial torches at this year’s Israeli Independence Day ceremony.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-exelon-inventor-sees-an-end-to-alzheimers/