RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Führer wanted to advance on the Soviet Union in a broad front—in full alliance with Warsaw. But the Poles declined.

Because of the recent centenary, debates over the origins of World War I rage with renewed vigor. By contrast, the origins of World War II seem ever more settled and uncontroversial. Adolf Hitler, so the conventional narrative runs, attacked Poland as the first step in the capture of lands to the east—thereby seizing the Lebensraum, or living space, that Germany supposedly required. He paused to neutralize France and Britain before moving on to an assault on the Soviet Union that was, in great part, ideologically motivated. Rolf-Dieter Müller’s refreshing new look at the events of 1939, “Enemy in the East,” does not challenge Hitler’s primary responsibility, to be sure, but it does compel us to look again at the whole origins story.

Mr. Müller, an accomplished German military historian, is the first specialist to explain Germany’s strategic planning in 1938-39 for a larger audience.

Reports suggest that the number of Islamic State (ISIS) recruits from Indonesia tripled to over 500 by the end of last year.

Home to the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia’s more than 200 million Muslims make up 13% of the world’s total Muslims. The nation’s history of extremist movements makes it a ripe location for ISIS recruits.

Wildan Mukholland was one of those recruits. He came from the same village in Indonesia as two militants convicted and executed for their role in the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings, which killed over 200 people and were carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

” The first decision should be to recognize that those who kill in Islam’s name are not mere violent extremists but fanatics driven by a specific religion’s zeal. And their victims are anything but random.”

And got it stomped on. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States on the president’s naiveté as peacemaker, blinders to terrorism, and alienation of allies.

Days after jihadi gunmen slaughtered 11 staffers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a policeman on January 7, hundreds of thousands of French people marched in solidarity against Islamic radicalism. Forty-four world leaders joined them, but not President Barack Obama. Neither did his attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, or Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, both of whom were in Paris that day. Other terrorists went on to murder four French Jews in a kosher market that they deliberately targeted. Yet Obama described the killers as “vicious zealots who … randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”

It is not surprising that former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren is now in the sights of the Obama Defenders Corps, a collection of U.S. administration officials, sycophantic journalists and other obsessive critics of Israel.

The former ambassador has revealed in his new book what most Israelis and many Americans now know to be true: that U.S. President Barack Obama abandoned Israel ever since the beginning of his term in 2009, and that the breach in U.S.-Israel relations is primarily his doing. In fact it was a deliberate policy to create distance between the United States and Israel, since the president was far more interested in making nice to the likes of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim world in general. Close U.S. ties with Israel presented an obstacle in Obama’s path toward accomplishing these other goals.

ADL’s Foxman slams Amb. Michael Oren for mentioning Obama’s Muslim upbringing in an essay about Obama’s views on the Muslim world

And the fallout continues from former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s comments about and analysis of U.S. President Barack Obama.

In a furious press release issued during the waning minutes of his reign, national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman slammed Oren for expressing his views about U.S. President Barack Obama.

The other day at a party, a young man, earnestly secular and ultra-liberal on every single social issue, called Pope Francis a “really cool pope.” I guess as my e-pal Dan Friedman points out, there are many “really cool Reform rabbis” whose views on capitalism and climate change are completely consonant with those of Pope Francis. How hilarious that the coercive anti religion, anything goes, liberal groupies, who cringe at skull caps and phylacteries or celibate priests, suddenly find common ground with a religious leader who abhors gay marriage and any form of abortion, whether surgical or medically induced.
Mark Steyn found this pithy quote from Richard Tol
http://www.steynonline.com/7013/encyclical-variations
http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-pope-on-climate.html
“I am not impressed by normally a- or anti-religious intellectuals who suddenly discovered their inner papist. ”
That sums it up….rsk

-“Kennedy and Bradford Condemn U.S. Policy on Palestine Question,” Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 1948.

Condemnation of United States policy regarding Palestine was expressed by Representative John F. Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts… at the state dinner of the Massachusetts Department of the Jewish War Veterans… Mr. Kennedy demanded the lifting of the arms embargo “to give the Jewish people in Palestine an opportunity to defend themselves and carve out their partition.” He termed the reversal of our stand in the United Nations on Palestine as “one of the most unfortunate reversals in American policy.”

The trouble began when, just after the United States voted in the United Nations for the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, the State Department’s “striped pants boys,” as Truman liked to call them, convinced him to halt all military shipments to the Middle East – despite the fact that Britain was arming the Arabs and no one the Jews. Then, the day after Truman privately assured Chaim Weizmann of his commitment to partition, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. announced that, as peaceful partition seemed impossible, the U.S. recommended abandoning the partition plan and called, instead, for U.N. rule in Palestine. “This morning I find that the State Dept. has reversed my Palestine policy,” Truman wrote in his diary. “The first I know about it is what I see in the papers! Isn’t that hell? I’m now in the position of a liar and a double-crosser. I’ve never felt so […] in my life.” Three weeks later, on March 25, 1948, Truman seemingly tried to have it both ways – his and the State Department’s. He told reporters that it might be a good idea to have a U.N. “trusteeship” for Palestine after the British left in May, but he was still for partition. It was into this fray that a first-term Catholic Congressman from Boston stepped on April 4, 1948: speaking to Massachusetts Jewish War Veterans, John Fitzgerald Kennedy denounced the “unfortunate reversal… of our policy towards Palestine” as “one of the most discouraging aspects of recent American foreign policy.” He reminded his audience that “since the end of the first World War successive Presidents and Congress have ‘reaffirmed’ the solemn promise of the Balfour declaration” and demanded “explanation from the Administration” as to the “sudden reversal of our position in relation to the partition of Palestine.” Perhaps, he added, there may be sufficient cause for the reversal in Palestine. “If there is,” he emphasized, “we are entitled to know what it is.” Present here, then, are the notes for that speech.

“Either our leaders will protect us from our sworn enemies or we’ll have to get some that will.”

The West is enmeshed in a struggle for civilisation against an extremely well-resourced enemy that regards us, our society and its values as decadent and contemptible. An agent of barbarism with few parallels in history, if our leaders won’t protect us from Islamism we’ll have to get some who will
As the federal government struggles to formulate legislation that will strip Australian citizenship from terrorists with dual nationality it becomes necessary fully to confront the enormity of the jihadist threat. While it appears that some critics of the legislation think it impinges upon the human rights of terrorists they seem oblivious to the long history of the terrorist campaign against Western liberal democracies.

The question is not whether the rights of terrorists are respected. The issue is whether civilisation will survive without taking firm and rigorous action against those external and internal enemies who seek desperately to destroy it. Politicians need to recognise what we are up against, and if they lack the stomach for the struggle they should get out of the way.

There is no doubt that the rise of militant Islamism and its systematic use of jihadist terror represent a profound threat to civilisation. Not since the emergence of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism has the assault on the liberal democracies of the West been so explicit, so comprehensive, so ruthless, and so bloodthirsty. The Islamist challenge was once characterised as a ‘clash of civilizations’, but the behaviour of ISIS confirms that it is best seen as a barbarian war on civilization, per se, developing on a scale not seen since the invasions of the Mongol hordes 800 years ago or the collapse of the Roman Empire under the impact of barbarian invaders 1500 years ago.

Climate science — the comfortably settled careerist variety — would have us believe it has identified causes and trends that place its projections beyond challenge and dispute. Well, one thing is certain: when reality fails to match warmist expectations, the denials are pathological.
It is normal in science for important hypotheses to be met with scepticism at first and then to be accepted or disproven over time by testing predictions against empirical evidence. The absolute pre-eminence of empirical evidence over any and all authority or consensus is the essential core of science and what sets it apart from other areas of understanding and belief.

The hypothesis of dangerous global warming caused by CO2 emissions from the use of fossil fuels has repeatedly failed numerous empirical tests, while ongoing appeals to authority and consensus have served only to render it an un-scientific farce.

Among the failed predictions:

The great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses tested — or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I see bad ideas can persist for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they become intolerant dogmas
For much of my life I have been a science writer. That means I eavesdrop on what’s going on in laboratories so I can tell interesting stories. It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it. There’s too much good stuff coming out of science to waste time knocking the bad stuff.

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudoscience—homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

This should have been obvious to me. Lysenkoism, a pseudo-biological theory that plants (and people) could be trained to change their heritable natures, helped starve millions and yet persisted for decades in the Soviet Union, reaching its zenith under Nikita Khrushchev. The theory that dietary fat causes obesity and heart disease, based on a couple of terrible studies in the 1950s, became unchallenged orthodoxy and is only now fading slowly.