RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Sydney Anglican priest and keen amateur boxer Father Dave Smith, a sort of antipodean Sizer whose anti-Israel bias will be familiar to regular readers of my blog.

See, for example, his breath-taking Al Quds Day corker here

Father Dave is seen in this photo practising some nifty dance steps at a function given by the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN) last year.

These numbers put the total death toll in Turkey at 13,056, in a span of fewer than 17 months.

Actually, ISIS’s terror attack was no more than a violent expression of the dominant Islamist ideology ruling in Turkey.

Elsewhere in Turkey, banners were unfurled, showing a bearded man punching Santa Claus; another banner showed a group pointing guns in the face of another Santa. On December 31, a headline in an Islamist newspaper read, “This is our last warning, DO NOT celebrate”.

Where, you might ask, are the Turkish authorities? They are busy. The Turkish police, unable to prevent ISIS’s attack, instead detained a woman in Istanbul who called for secularism in a speech protesting jihadist groups.

Last year was no doubt an annus horribilis for Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that 1,178 people were killed between July 2015 and December 2016 in Turkey’s fight with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Bomb attacks by the Islamic State (ISIS) claimed another 330 lives. Those numbers exclude 248 people who died during the bloody coup attempt of July 15, as well as 9,500 apparent PKK members who were killed by Turkish security forces. Turkey also claims that it killed 1,800 ISIS members since July 2015. These numbers put the total death toll in Turkey at 13,056, in a span of fewer than 17 months.

Just when most people thought that would be the final death toll for 2016, on December 10, a twin bombing in Istanbul outside a soccer stadium killed at least 38 people, and injured another 136. A week later, a suicide car-bomb in central Turkey killed 13 off-duty soldiers aboard a bus and wounded 56 more.

After so much bloodshed, Turks thought they could now enjoy New Year’s festivities in peace. They were wrong.

About an hour into the New Year, a mysterious man, later identified as a Kyrgyz ISIS terrorist, walked into Reina, a posh nightclub on the Bosporus, took out an assault rifle and started to shoot at the hundreds of guests celebrating the New Year. The assailant killed 39 people and injured 65, changed his clothes, and, pretending to be a customer, walked out of the club. As of January 8, the killer was still on the run.

“We will win because Americans don’t realize… we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the al-Qaeda planners of the 9/11 attacks.

“This Spanish retreat [in 2004] will be perceived as a huge political triumph for Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamic radicals — probably their most important achievement since September 11, 2001.” — James Phillips, Heritage Foundation.

ISIS’s henchmen butchered 90 people at the Bataclan Theater. What did the French government do to avenge them and to destroy the Islamists responsible? Absolutely nothing. The day after an Islamist killed Westerners at a Christmas market in Berlin, no German military flight took off to bomb ISIS.

The next “peace conference” in Paris, on January 15, is where 70 nations will probably agree to another UN Security Council vote, to establish a Palestinian State, presumably with the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish people and sacred to the Christian people, as its capital. It is another terrible sign of the West’s soft capitulation to terror.

Like Israel today, the Czechs in the 1930s were accused of being “disturbers of the peace”. “Peace,” as in the inversions of George Orwell — sometimes means capitulation to Islam.

What inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States, according to one of the terrorists, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who helped plan 9/11?

The American psychologist, James E. Mitchell, who crafted the interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives after 9/11, just published a book, Enhanced Interrogation.

In it, KSM is quoted as saying that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as it had to the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut — the United States “turned tail and ran.” In the end, KSM told Mitchell:

“We will win because Americans don’t realize… we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting. … Eventually, America will expose her neck for us to slaughter.”

That is exactly why Islamists are trying to hit the West’s soft underbelly: the office of the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, restaurants and theaters in Paris, a cafè in Copenaghen, a promenade in Nice, a church in Normandy and a Christmas market in Berlin. Islamists perfectly understand that the West’s most exposed flank is its home front. The same lifestyle that we defend by words is the main obstacle to the initiative of the defense against Islamists. Islamists have told us in every way, “we love death more than life”, while we in the West love the expectation of life more than life itself.

There are some swamps that we have to drain because they’re our swamps. Washington is our swamp. The lesson of the 2016 election is that people across the ideological spectrum are furious at Washington. Our incoming president won because he convinced enough people that, while Hillary was a swamp creature, he — the self-styled outsider non-politician — would make like a big, shiny Trump colander. But Washington is not going away; once the ooze seeps out, the idea is to build something better — like how New Jersey keeps building new stadiums on the marshy Meadowlands.
Well, good luck with that.
But look, even if we’re not very good at cleaning up our own messes, the fact that we know we should, that we know our messes sully us, is a sign of mental health.
So let’s see if that healthy instinct can help us grasp a principle that ought to be easier to apply: When it’s not your swamp and yet you’re being sullied by it, you don’t drain it. You leave it.
That’s what we ought to be doing about the United Nations.
Republicans are irate over the latest U.N. outrage, the Security Council resolution orchestrated by the Obama administration to reward Palestinian jihadists with territory while rendering Israel a pariah. In truth, the resolution is just business as usual at the U.N. It is also not nearly the worst use our post-American president has made of this ersatz global government.
As usual, though, the GOP response is a hollow gesture, couched in hot rhetoric. Congressional Republicans want to defund the U.N., a 193-nation boondoggle for which the United States alone pays well over a quarter of the freight — about 22 percent of the regular operating budget, and close to 30 percent of the much larger peacekeeping budget (for which we get more scandal than peace).
At best, denying our annual $3 billion payment would accomplish nothing. Defunding measures are called for periodically, whenever the U.N. induces a congressional tantrum over one or another of its obscenities. Even as one lawmaker fumes about shutting off the spigot, another is already saying, “Well, we don’t need to defund everything — after all, the U.N. does a lot of good.”
“A lot of good,” by the way, is an exaggeration. Sure, some U.N. officials are just as well-meaning as any other preening progressive. But the institution stinks, even in its humanitarian aid work. As Heritage’s Brett D. Schaefer notes, citing a 2012 academic study on best and worst practices among aid agencies, U.N. agencies consistently rank “among the worst and least effective performers.”
More important, if $3 billion seems like chump change to you in an age of unfathomable $20 trillion national debt, that’s the way Turtle Bay’s grubby globalists see it, too. They continue to plot international tax schemes (on carbon emissions, financial transactions, etc.), as well as the lucrative skim from redistributionist rackets like the “Green Climate Fund” and the new “Sustainable Development Goals.” The real goal, naturally, is a sustainable fund for the U.N., relieving it of reliance on finicky donors.