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Ruth King

Kerry Gets Tough, Threatens to Refer North Korea to International Criminal Court By Daniel Greenfield

Oh no! Not the International Criminal Court! [2]

What will North Korea possibly do if we refer it to the International Criminal Court? Besides laugh a lot.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday accused North Korea of a litany of crimes and atrocities while reassuring South Korea of America’s “ironclad” security commitments.

Obama Inc. also made “ironclad” security promises to the Gulf Arabs and Israel, so we know what those are worth.

Terrorists Value U.S. Citizenship More Than Our Politicians Do By Michael Cutler

Rampant, blind greed warps the perspectives of those who suffer from that ailment. Consider politicians who have declared that aliens who trespass on the United States and evade the inspections process conducted at ports of entry are “entitled” to United States citizenship or, at the very least, lawful status.

The outrageous view ignores both commonsense and the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and the 9/11 Commission Staff.

Our borders and our immigration laws are America’s first line of defense and last line of defense against international terrorists and transnational criminals, but you would never know this by reading most newspapers or watching most “news programs” in the mainstream media. You also would not learn the true importance of our borders and our immigration laws if you listened to Mr. Obama, leaders of his administration ranging from Jeh Johnson, the Secretary of Homeland Security or Loretta Lynch, the newly confirmed Attorney General.

De-Islamization Is the Only Way to Fight ISIS By Daniel Greenfield

We can’t fight for freedom while endorsing Sharia constitutions.

ISIS_Coptic_Christians Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Obama can’t defeat ISIS with soft power, though ISIS could beat him with soft power assuming its Caliph ever decided to agree to sit down at a table with John Kerry without beheading him. Iran has picked up billions in sanctions relief and the right to take over Yemen and raid ships in international waters in the Persian Gulf just for agreeing to listen to Kerry talk for an hour. And that might be a fair exchange.

As bad as having your capital or ship seized by Iran is, listening to John Kerry talk is even worse.

If ISIS were to agree to a deal, it could pick up Baghdad and Damascus just in exchange for showing up. All it would have to do is find a Jihadi who hasn’t chopped off any heads on camera to present as a moderate. The administration and its media operatives would accuse anyone who disagreed of aiding the ISIS hardliners at the expense of the ISIS moderates who also represent the hardliners.

If Obama did that, he would at least lose in a way that he understands; instead of in a way he doesn’t.

So far ISIS has preferred the classical approach of killing everything in its path. The approach, deemed insufficiently nuanced by masters of subtlety like Obama and Kerry, has worked surprisingly well. Their response, which is big on the Bush arsenal of drone strikes, Special Forces raids and selective air strikes, hasn’t. But Bush was fighting terrorist groups, not unrecognized states capable of taking on armies.

Ferguson Rent-A-Mobs Exposed By Matthew Vadum

ACORN’s successor group in Missouri has been paying protesters $5,000 a month to generate civil unrest in Ferguson, the troubled St. Louis suburb where black youth Michael Brown was killed by a white police officer last August.

We know this because some of the protesters haven’t been paid and, now, they are demanding what they were promised. They held a sit-in at the offices of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) and posted a demand letter online.

Misremembering Iraq By Victor Davis Hanson

Public opinion veers with every change in current conditions in Iraq.

Probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush got himself into trouble by sort of, sort of not, answering the question whether he would have supported going into Iraq in 2003 — had he known then what we know now.

Republican candidates vied in attacking Bush’s initial confusion about answering the question. Most reiterated that they most certainly would not have invaded Iraq, regardless of what they know now or thought they knew then. Politically, it appears to be wiser to damn the decision to invade Iraq and to forget the circumstances that prompted the war — and the later political environment that ended the American presence.

Unfortunately, our country seems to be suffering from collective amnesia.We apparently have forgotten a number of crucial points:

The Iraq Diversion

Liberals want to talk about anything but the current world disorder.

Normally it’s good when matters of policy turn into big public spats, because there is always the chance the public will learn something worth knowing. In the week since Jeb Bush was queried about the war that his brother waged in Iraq, the public’s store of useful knowledge about the Iraq war has, if anything, declined. Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican presidential candidate to wade through the media swamp called the Iraq war.

Jews Who Fought Insults with Bologna, Not Bullets : Rafael Medoff

Fifty years ago this week, American Jews were up in arms over a deeply offensive art-and-poetry display at the World’s Fair – but unlike some of today’s aggrieved protesters, they responded with bologna rather than bullets.

The controversy began when the government of Jordan set up a harshly anti-Israel display at its Word’s Fair pavilion, in New York City in early 1964. It featured a wall-size mural of a Palestinian Arab child, flanked by the text of a long anti-Zionist poem.

“For centuries,” according to the poem, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived in harmony in the Holy Land, “Until strangers from abroad / Professing one thing, but underneath, another / Began buying up land and stirring up the people…The strangers, once thought terror’s victims, became terror’s fierce practitioners.”

Islamic State Is Winning in Iraq U.S.-Led Airstrikes are Failing to Deter the Islamist Militants. By Norman Ricklefs And Derek Harvey

Here’s what must be done to defeat them.

In the closing years of the Vietnam War it was often noted sardonically that the “victories” against the Viet Cong were moving steadily closer to Saigon. The same could be said of Baghdad and the victories claimed against Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq in the past year. The ISIS takeover of Ramadi in the Anbar province over the weekend exposed the hollowness of the reported progress against ISIS. The U.S.-led bombing campaign in support of Iraqi forces isn’t working.

State Department Proposes January Deadline for Release of Clinton Emails By Byron Tau

WASHINGTON—The State Department is proposing a January deadline to complete the release of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email archive from her time in office, with the department citing the complexity of sorting though the tens of thousands of pages for the long review period.

The proposed timeline means the complete set of emails could be released just two weeks before Democratic voters would head to the polls in the first presidential nominating contest.

According to a court filing on Monday, the State Department has asked a federal judge to approve a plan that would release Mrs. Clinton’s email records publicly by Jan. 15, 2016.

Everything Is Awesome, Mideast Edition: Bret Stephens on Ben Rhodes

Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, has been offering a reassuring view of the Iranian nuclear deal in the face of some Arab skepticism. “If you can diplomatically and peacefully resolve the nuclear issue in a way that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” he told reporters last week, “we believe that will lead to a much more stable region.” Mr. Rhodes also contends that with a deal “there will be no need to see [a] regional arms race.”

So what’s more frightening: That Mr. Rhodes believes what he’s saying? Or that he does not?

Just for Mr. Rhodes’s benefit, here’s a refresher course on stability and the arms race in the Middle East since April 2, 2015, the day Mr. Obama announced his framework nuclear agreement with Iran.