RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Teddy Roosevelt once told a campaign audience that weakness invites contempt. Let’s just say that those words apply to our new friend Raul Castro, who keeps going out of his way to show the world that it was President Obama not him who really wanted to do the wave at the baseball game.

First, Raul Castro skipped President Obama’s arrival. We heard all week that it was the first presidential visit to Cuba since President Coolidge. Historic? I guess that Raul didn’t get the memo or doesn’t care about history.

Second, Raul Castro watched the president of the U.S. praise his education and health care system. Incredibly, President Obama read the regime’s talking points from A to Z. What was the point of President Obama doing this?

Third, Fidel Castro jumped into the act and wrote an op-ed in the state media blasting President Obama. Let’s call that column: “Don’t meddle in Cuba” or I will shoot one of those Soviet missiles against your plane like I did in the missile crisis!

Finally, the state-run media (La Tribuna de la Habana) hit one right over the Rays’ centerfielder head with an attack on President Obama that would have a lot of Democrats screaming “racista”:

The Havana Tribune, a state-controlled Cuban newspaper, has added insult to injury following Fidel Castro’s scathing criticism of President Barack Obama upon his departure from the island. In an editorial, the title of which refers to President Obama as “negro,” an opinion columnist has accused him of “inciting rebellion.”

The article is titled “Negro, ¿Tu Eres Sueco?” which roughly translates to “Black Man, Are You Dumb?” (The idiom “pretend to be a Swede” means to play dumb, hence the title is literally asking, “Are you Swedish?”) The author, who is black, goes on to condemn President Obama for meeting with Cuban pro-democracy activists and “subtly” suggesting that the Cuban Revolution needed to change. “Obama came, saw, but unfortunately, with the pretend gesture of lending a hand, tried to conquer,” Elias Argudín writes.

“[Obama] chose to criticize and subtly suggest… incitations to rebellion and disorder, without caring that he was on foreign ground. Without a doubt, Obama overplayed his hand,” he continues. “The least I can say is, Virulo-style: ‘Negro, are you dumb?’”

Virulo is a white pro-Revolution comedian.

In a recent speech on “[t]he security implications of climate change in fragile states,” Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs — Stephane Dion, who named his dog after the Kyoto Protocol and holds dual citizenship to France — made some problematic claims regarding climate change and food production:

Ladies and gentlemen, to speak in front of you about climate change as a risk amplifier for security is quite a challenge. After all, you are among the best experts that the United States and Canada have produced on this crucial issue. So I will not pretend to teach you anything; my objective is rather to reassure you that as a minister, I am fully seized with how critical the topic of this conference is for humankind.

Critical? Certainly. But how many people really know? For most, conflict and unrest have nothing to do with climate change. Yet look at the facts.

Five years ago, when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians filled Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, they were not shouting “climate change.” They shouted “down with injustice, corruption and poverty.” But the motto on the square was “bread, freedom, social equality.”

Bread. It accounts for almost 40 percent of the Egyptian diet. And food accounts for roughly 40 percent of Egyptians’ household budget. With serious land and water scarcity issues, the country cannot produce enough wheat for domestic demand. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer.

In the winter of 2010 and 2011, China — the world’s second-largest wheat producer — was struck by a “once-in-a-century” drought. At the same time, wheat production in Russia, Ukraine, Australia, Pakistan and Canada also fell dramatically due to drought, wildfires, floods and abnormal weather.

With global wheat supplies down and protectionist measures up, the Egyptian government failed to balance its massive subsidies, and market prices shot up. At the time of the uprisings in early 2011, food prices had increased by 20 percent, and 40 million Egyptians — about half of the population — were receiving food rations.

Or look at Syria. The 2007-2010 drought in Syria was the worst drought on record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centres. A United Nations Development Programme report found that nearly 75 percent of farmers in northeastern Syria experienced total crop failure and herders lost 85 percent of their livestock. Another United Nations report found that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result of the droughts.

A lot of misinformation hear to unpack, so we will tackle it sequentially — starting with the 2007-2010 Syrian drought.

Dion claims it caused “widespread crop failure” between 2007 and 2010. Syria’s primary agricultural crops are wheat, sugar beets, barley, and olives — in that average order of production quantity since 1993.

The guidelines for teaching Islam in public schools — drafted by the Islamic Commission of Spain and approved by the Ministry of Education — are aimed at stirring religious fervor and promoting Islamic identity among young Muslims in Spain.

The guidelines, which envision the teaching of every aspect of Islamic doctrine, culture and history, are interspersed with “politically correct” terminology… but the overall objective is clear: to inculcate young people with an Islamic worldview.

According to the guidelines, preschoolers (ages 3- 6) are to learn the Islamic profession of faith, the Shahada, which asserts that “there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.” The Shahada is the gateway into Islam: one becomes a Muslim by repeating the Shahada three times in front of a witness. They are also encouraged to “emulate, through different forms of expression, the values observed by Mohammed.”

In primary school (ages 6-12), the guidelines call for children to “recognize Mohammed as the final prophet sent by Allah and accept him as the most important.”

The Spanish government has published new guidelines for teaching Islam in public preschools and primary and secondary schools.

The guidelines are being touted as a way to prevent Muslim children and young people from being drawn into terrorism by exposing them to a “moderate” interpretation of Islam.

6-minute-video #10 http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S in a mini-seminar http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to President Obama’s worldview the Palestinian issue is a principal Muslim concern and a major source of Muslim animation and frustration, which has fueled regional violence, intensifying Islamic terrorism.

However, irrespective of Obama’s far-reaching gestures to the Palestinian Authority, the number of Muslim terrorist cells in the US has increased, as have Islamic terrorist attacks on the US mainland, such as in San Bernardino (2015), Boston (2013), Times Square (2010), Ft. Hood, Texas (2009), Little Rock, Arkansas (2009), Dallas, Texas (2009), etc.

Moreover, in 1983, while President Reagan brutally pressured Israel to end its offensive against the PLO in Lebanon and withdraw to the international border, Islamic car bombs blew up the US embassy and the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut, murdering 300 US Marines. In 1998 and 2000, while President Clinton pressured Israel to make dramatic concessions to the Palestinians, and made Arafat a frequent foreign visitor to the White House, Islamic car bombs hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, murdering 300 persons, and Islamic terrorists hit the “USS Cole” at the port of Aden, murdering 17 US sailors. Furthermore, “September 11” was planned while President Clinton pressured Israel to repartition Jerusalem, retreat to the pre-1967 lines and accept a limited version of the Palestinian “claim of return” to the pre-1967 area of Israel.

President Obama was right when declaring in June, 2009, at Cairo University: “Islam has always been part of America’s story.” Indeed, Islamic (Barbary) terrorism targeted US ships between 1776 and the beginning of the 19th century. John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president (1825-1929), researched the causes of anti-US Islamic terrorism, concluding that the core cause was Islam’s endemic hostility toward the “infidel” as expressed in the Quran.

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered. Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon. Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’. Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made. They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

But it then appeared that although the Asad Shah murder was being treated by police as ‘religiously motivated’ the suspected killer might in fact have been another Muslim and that, it was speculated, there might also have been a connection with a message on Facebook in which Mr Shah wished a very happy Easter to his ‘beloved Christian nation’ and suggesting people follow in ‘The Real Footstep of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ’.

Mr Shah was an Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi), a member of – against some stiff competition – one of the most persecuted sects within Islam. Persecution against them in Pakistan and elsewhere around the Islamic world is rife. Yet despite that (or perhaps for that very reason) they are probably the most peaceable and indeed admirable sect within Islam. Among other things, Ahmadiyya Muslims formally reject the concept of Jihad that other schools cling to. In Britain whenever there is a vaguely positive news story about Islam it almost invariably involves Ahmadi Muslims. Remember the bus adverts a few years back saying that Islam had ‘love for all, hatred for none’. That was paid for by Ahmadiyya Muslims. Remember the stories of a Muslim group not burning poppies but actually selling them for the Royal British Legion? Ahmadiyyas again.

Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also urged increased cooperation with China to discourage Pyongyang.

As world leaders gathered for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Obama first met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye. He then had a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at which both leaders urged North Korea (DPRK) to give up its nuclear arsenal. Xi also agreed to fully implement the latest economic sanctions against the regime of Kim Jong-un which were imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 2. The wording of that resolution was stronger than initially expected, primarily due to China’s displeasure at Pyongyang’s tendency to take Beijing’s support for granted even when its actions run contrary to China’s strategic interests.

China’s longstanding priorities of “no war, no instability and no nukes” on the Korean Peninsula—in that order of priority—have produced ambiguous policies over the past decade. Two influential power centers in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department and the International Department of_the_Communist_Party, continue to regard North Korea as an important geopolitical buffer between China and South Korea. They see the stability of the DPRK regime as more important than its compliance with non-proliferation strictures. Following North Korea’s second nuclear test (June 2009) China initially supported a sharply worded UN Security Council resolution, but in October of that year reversed its approach and effectively became North Korea’s protector and enabler, with former prime minister Wen Jiabao saying it was necessary to “put all our efforts without fail to boost peace and stability in Northeast Asia.”