RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned of risks associated with the emerging Internet of Things. The term IoT often refers to devices that are readable, recognizable, locatable, and controllable via the Internet. Gartner estimates there will be around 26 billion networked devices on the Internet of Things by 2020. Certainly, there are many risks inherent with so many objects connected to networks, but there are also many smart technologies that can enhance security and DHS’s mission to protect the nation.

In public safety, sensors, embedded security systems and surveillance cameras that can monitor public behavior are becoming a norm. In 2005 in London, closed-circuit TV cameras helped lead to the identification of those who carried out the attack on London’s subway and bus systems. More recently, the identification of the prime suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing came in part through security-camera images. Because of the limitations of personnel to constantly patrol areas of cities, surveillance monitoring by video and acoustic devices have enabled law enforcement to magnify their reach and also keep an electronic record of forensic evidence.

How many times has it been said or written sarcastically of us Balkans heretics that “The place she wants you to worry about for terrorism is not in the Middle East or Pakistan, but in the Balkans. She wants you to think that Bosnia/Kosovo is the next Afghanistan.”

Well, over the past three years more and more people have gotten the memo that ISIS is setting up its Great White Hope in Bosnia and Kosovo, while recruits from both continue topping the numbers, proportionally speaking.

It has something to do with the fact that the West created Afghanistan-like potential “in the heart of Europe,” as the Balkans are again emphatically being called, this time not to dramatize some desperately concocted genocide “in the heart of Europe,” but to underscore the juxtaposition of the Middle East making its way into Europe, which is happening thanks in large part to that early help from media and governments in concocting that genocide and the wars they justified with it.

This European Middle East we facilitated is precisely what the Caliphate had pinned its hopes on for infiltrating Europe more expeditiously. How many times have we few tried to explain this, and in how many different ways, in response to criticisms that we were mischaracterizing the vast majority of secular, European, moderate, pro-American “Kosovars” and “Bosniaks,” as if that were the point.

It has been a while since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region, whose 2,700-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout the world, dropped its original designation as a “non-political learned society” to become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. So deep has the rot settled that the association seems totally oblivious (or rather indifferent) to the fact that its recent endorsement of the anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign, and attendant efforts to obstruct the containment of resurgent anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, have effectively crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew baiting.

On February 15 of this year, a MESA referendum approved a resolution, passed by the membership during the association’s annual meeting three months earlier, which not only lauded the “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions [BDS]” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action” and deplored opposition to these exclusionary moves as an assault on the freedom of speech, but “strongly urge[d] MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”

What would Eleanor Roosevelt say about the election of Saudi Arabia’s Geneva ambassador Faisal Trad, as Chair of the United Nation Human Rights Council’s monitoring panel?
She would wonder how Saudi Arabia, which refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 because it did not comply with sharia, had any representation at the UNHRC.
Instead, the Saudis worked hard to inflict the West with willful blindness. For decades they fuelled Western greed with petrodollars until they achieved the desired result. Led by the Untied States, which during Mrs. Roosevelt’s time symbolized freedom, the West was ready to sell out its core moral principal – the protection of Human Rights.

Back in March 2007, the then newly elected U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, opened the 4th Human Rights Council session, declaring: “All victims of human rights abuses should be able to look to the Human Rights Council as a forum and a springboard for action.” Now, with the Saudi at the helm, the message is clear: the UNHRC is the springboard to hell.
The Saudi ascendance to a chair at the UNHRC’s monitoring panel began in November 2013 with the election of the Wahhabi sharia-ruled Saudi Kingdom as a member of the organization. The U.S. did not protest.

The Pope could have used his forum in Congress to call attention to the plight of Christians

Unlike Communist Cuba, America hasn’t seized and nationalized Catholic churches and schools. It hasn’t locked up Catholic clergy or installed surveillance equipment in their homes. It hasn’t denounced the Catholic church as “exploiters” and “fascists”. And yet Pope Francis, who had few criticisms of Cuba, came to Congress to denounce the collision between Americans and Indians, and to urge the United States to take in illegal aliens without regard for the law.

There’s a condemnation of the death penalty. Never mind that in the US, the death penalty is used after extensive appeals against some of the worst monsters imaginable, unlike Cuba, where it was used to massacre political opponents of the Castro crime family. And condemnations of selling weapons. Much of this is couched in vague language, but it’s still a sharp contrast from the visit to Cuba.

The Pope even threw in a backhanded defense of Islam…

Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind…

But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.

Of all the points presidential candidate Ben Carson made in defense of his position that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” most poignant is his reference to taqiyya, one of Islam’s doctrines of deception.

According to Carson, whoever becomes president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Koran”:

“I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing the Islamic law derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”

Carson said that the only exception he’d make would be if the Muslim running for office “publicly rejected all the tenants of Sharia and lived a life consistent with that.”

“Then I wouldn’t have any problem,” he said.

Carson is now close to getting 1 in 5 black voters

These numbers are interesting mainly because there’s been a lot of effort put into trying to nail down Carson’s base of support.

Currently, in a national election, Bush beats Hillary by 2 percent, Carson is ahead by 7 percent. The difference doesn’t so much come from black voters, though Carson is now close to getting 1 in 5 black voters.

Carson does much better among white women, beating Hillary by 54 to 40 percent. (Every one of those “Republicans have a woman problem” articles are misrepresenting a racial gender voter turnout gap as a gender issue)

Jeb Bush does better with Latinos than Carson by 10 percent. But Carson picks up enough white and black votes that it doesn’t matter.

Pope Francis scolds America for the ingredients that made it great.

Pope Francis chided Americans yesterday for their supposed intolerance and xenophobia, the same thing President Obama does every day, in his historic address to the U.S. Congress.

Although Francis toned down his sometimes in-your-face rhetoric for his congressional speech, it was still a politically tone-deaf lecture on America’s failings, past and present.

It bore more than a passing resemblance to the many speeches President Obama has given around the globe apologizing for America’s history and greatness. The pope delivered this address standing on the dais in front of Vice President Joe Biden (D) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Both are Catholics. Boehner made this major debacle, which amounts to a propaganda boost for the Obama agenda, possible by inviting the pope to address Congress. (A full transcript of the pope’s address is available here.)

It may be significant that only four members of the nine-member Roman Catholic-dominated Supreme Court showed up for the Holy Father’s address. The attendees were Chief John Roberts (Catholic), Anthony Kennedy (Catholic), Sonia Sotomayor (Catholic), and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jewish). Absent were Samuel Alito (Catholic), Antonin Scalia (Catholic), Clarence Thomas (Catholic), Stephen Breyer (Jewish), and Elena Kagan (Jewish).

The Left loves the pope’s message. Although the Left vindictively led the charge against the Catholic church during the various sexual abuse scandals, it now has the current pope’s back because, except for abortion, he agrees with leftists. For example, in recent days the Salon website, a hotbed of hostility to organized religion (except Islam), has switched sides. Salon has been running stories sympathetic to the pope with titles like “The transcendent compassion of Pope Francis” (by leftist mud-hurler Joan Walsh, no less), “Twitter tells the tale: Pope Francis’ speech does not sit well with the conservative ‘intelligentsia,'” “Conservatives who hate the pope rush to his defense,” “5 new ways Pope Francis is sticking it to the Christian right,” and “The GOP’s venomous Pope tirades are the ultimate example of hypocritical rage.”

Advocacy organization that booed Ted Cruz remains uncertain about jihad.

Last year’s inaugural In Defense of Christians (IDC) conference indicated to this author a “strategic confusion among beleaguered Middle Eastern Christian minorities,” a situation that lamentably remained unchanged this year. The recently completed September 9-11, 2015, IDC conference exhibited strange ideological crosscurrents, as panelists often sharply differed over the connection between Islam and religious persecution of Christians and others.
A moment of controversy at IDC’s initial panel, “ISIS, Genocide, and the International Response” at Washington, DC’s National Press Club (video excerpts here), set an ambiguous tone for the conference. Panelists like United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Commissioner Katrina Lantos-Swett focused on the “intrinsically evil” atrocities of groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Beyond politico-military responses, “ultimately, ISIS and like-minded groups must be defeated in the realm of ideas.”

Why are Christian minorities, who are the most to suffer from the chaos engulfing the Middle East, the least wanted in the United States?

To the Obama administration, the only “real” refugees are those made so due to the actions of Bashar Assad. As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on their religious identity by so-called “rebel” forces fighting Assad — including the Islamic State — their status as refugees is evidently considered dubious at best.

The Obama administration never seems to miss an opportunity to display its bias for Muslims against Christians. The State Dept. is in the habit of inviting scores of Muslim representatives but denying visas to solitary Christian representatives. While habitually ignoring the slaughter of Christians at hands of Boko Haram, the administration called for the “human rights” of the jihadi murderers.

In Islamic usage, the “cause of Allah” is synonymous with jihad to empower and enforce Allah’s laws on earth, or Sharia. In this context, immigrating into Western lands is a win-win for Muslims: if they die in the process somehow, paradise is theirs; if they do not, the “locations and abundance” of the West are theirs.

Muslims all around the U.S. are supporting the Islamic State and Muslim clerics are relying on the refugee influx to conquer Western nations, in the Islamic tradition of Hijrah, or jihad by emigration.