RUTHFULLY YOURS

Long ago, before my teens – I forget my precise age – I experienced a moral epiphany. Looking across the valley from my bedroom window at home I could see the thin finger of the 1,000-foot radio/television broadcasting mast secured to the earth from wind and storm by four even longer guy cables. I loved looking at that tower. I marveled at the skill and tenacity of the men who had erected it.

I did not credit God with its existence.

I was attending a Catholic parochial school at the time. God was everywhere there; in the crucifixes in the classrooms, in the habits of the nuns, and, indeed, the school was located for a time in the basement of the long, black stone edifice of the Nativity Church. At home, God was partially present in a few crucifixes, in the faith of my foster parents and grandparents, and in their strict observance of Catholic holidays, saying grace at supper, and not eating meat on Fridays. Among other things.

Dr. Harold Rhode served for 28 years as an analyst covering Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs at the US Department of Defense. Dan Diker hosts the National Security radio program at voiceofisrael.com. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Counter Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, and a Foreign Policy Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Iranian regime backing for the deal with the US-led Western powers should be a cause for profound concern to the US and its allies.What came out of the US-led talks with the Iranian regime? The Iranians and the American-led Western alliance left the framework agreement negotiations disagreeing on virtually all major core issues on which they reportedly agreed. And now the Iranians have gained international legitimacy as a negotiating partner in good standing with the Western powers. In short, Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, pursuing the world most dangerous weapons, has outmaneuvered the US – the world’s bastion of freedom and democracy. The Obama administration also seems to have rendered the Iranian regime immune to Western military assault. So far, its Iran 1, US-led Western powers 0.

The Turkish ISIS is an ideological inspiration by an Islamist poet, who happens to be President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s favorite.

“From now on, life in Turkey will be difficult for the occupying seculars.” — Editorial, Taraf, August 1993

Is it still too hard to understand why Erdogan’s “fight” against radical Islamists in Syria and Iran cannot be serious?

If a “mere” 11.3% of Turks think so generously of ISIS, it means there are nine million Turks sympathetic to jihadists. And if only 10% of those decide to support ISIS’s jihad, that comes to nearly 900,000 potential Turkish jihadists (even 5% would mean an army of nearly 450,000).

Most Turks had not heard of the magazine Adimlar [“Steps”] until March 26, when a bomb blast ripped through its Istanbul offices. A bomb left at its entrance exploded when the door opened, killing a writer and wounding three, including its editor-in-chief, Ali Osman Zor. The dead victim was his brother.

A bizarre turn of events as a 20-year-old man who had previously been deemed by the FBI as “no imminent threat” was arrested today for planning to conduct a suicide bombing on the Fort Riley U.S. Army base.

According to a press release from the FBI Kansas City field office:

John T. Booker Jr., 20, of Topeka, Kansas, was charged in a criminal complaint unsealed today with one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives), one count of attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and one count of attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization. Booker is expected to make an initial appearance this afternoon before U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree of the District of Kansas in federal court in Topeka.

Booker was arrested this morning near Manhattan, as he completed his final preparations to detonate a vehicle bomb targeting U.S. military personnel […]

Booker is alleged to have spent months discussing multiple plans before deciding on a plan that involved the execution of a suicide bombing mission.

Since the year before his disciple, Barack Obama, was elected president, many of us have been raising alarms about how Saul Alinsky’s brass-knuckles tactics have been mainstreamed by Democrats. It was thus refreshing to find an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week, by Pete Peterson of Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, expressly calling out a top House Democrat for resorting to the seminal community organizer’s extortion playbook.

But in the end, alas, Mr. Peterson gets Alinsky wrong.

He does a fine job of exposing the hardball played by Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Grijalva attempted to intimidate scientists and professors who fail to toe the alarmist line on “climate change” by sending letters to presidents of their universities. He wrote the letters on congressional letterhead and purported to impose a March 16 due date for a response – creating the coercive misimpression that the letters were enforceable demands for information, made by a government official in a position to punish noncompliance. The missives sought information about the scientists and academics (among them, the excellent Steve Hayward of Pepperdine and Power Line), including whether they accepted funding from oil companies. Peterson adds that the letters were followed up by officious calls from Grijalva’s staff. The abuse of power is blatant and reprehensible.

Obama’s betrayal of this country and the world did not start with his worthless “agreement” with the mullahs, a pure kabuki shadow play. The war-priests of Iran already have all the makings for nukes, and the ICBMs to land them on your front door.

Obama’s betrayal started before the start of this administration. Since then, Jarrett has carried on secret “negotiations” with Tehran, ending in the suicidal surrender plan we see today. Obama and Jarrett started six years ago or earlier, because the left began its death-to-Israel campaign a long time ago, and Obama’s friends are all in the radical left.

Today Obama is boasting about this fabulous “chance of a lifetime” – to surrender the world to the mullahs. But today is just the culmination of decades of warmongering, paid for by Wahhabi and Khomeinist war cults, better known as the Saudis and the Iranians, in criminal collusion with the raging left in the U.S. and Europe.

—Mr. Rieber is a writer in Oregon covering ranching and rural Americana.
Document the West in a seamless blend of scientific rigor and literary color.

On an unseasonably warm Christmas Eve in 1844, 25 men led by Lt. John C. Frémont trekked their way south and east from Lake Abert across a vast, undulating plain of sagebrush and into the Warner Valley, in present day Lake County, Ore. They encamped along the marshy shores of a shallow body of water now known as Hart Lake. The lake shelters at the foot of Hart Mountain, which forms the apex of a massive fault block looming high above the scrub and sage like a dark and mighty prow, cleaving the desert.

There, in Hart Mountain’s stern shadow, Frémont’s men roused the camp on Christmas morning with celebratory rifle fire and a salvo from their howitzer, while Frémont distributed small quantities of brandy, coffee and sugar to mark the first Christmas ever celebrated in this remote, uncharted district. “The country has a very forbidding appearance,” wrote Frémont in his journal, “presenting to the eye nothing but sage and barren ridges.”

Why the Speaker’s controversial invitation is a good idea.

House Speaker John Boehner has invited Japanese PM Shinzo Abe to address Congress on April 29. April 29 is Japan’s Showa Day, the annual celebration of Emperor Hirohito, whose militarism led to the Pacific half of the Second World War. The invitation has invited a minor scandal, irking people who remember that Japan’s behavior during World War II was just as vicious, depraved, and inhuman as the behavior of the Germans and the Russians. However, Boehner’s invitation is a good idea, and fits with longstanding American policy. A number of veterans’ groups have objected — and who can blame them?

During the war, the Japanese murdered, tortured, vivisected, even cannibalized American prisoners. Captured Americans were used for forced labor, and were subject to unbelievably sick medical experiments. Allied soldiers who survived Japanese prisoner-of-war camps emerged looking like walking skeletons; like survivors of Auschwitz. Beyond that, of course, is the savage rape-pillage-and-murder campaign Japan waged against China, Indochina, and every Pacific island it could get its hands on For sheer evil, no regime in history outstrips Japan’s government from 1930 to 1945. Hirohito, as god-emperor, was that government’s divine leader.

The details of the negotiations to nowhere are beside the point. We Met fans were thrilled by the brilliance of Matt Harvey, who tossed six shutout innings in his first start after missing 19 months due to elbow surgery. It reminded us, though, that “The Dark Knight” is going to demand a huge contract down the road.
It got me to daydreaming about the negotiations. Let’s say that, as the contract deadline approaches, Harvey says he wants $210 million over seven years — the going rate for pitching aces just set by the Washington Nationals’ Max Scherzer. The Mets’ ownership, the parsimonious Wilpon family, counters by offering five years at $15 million per. The two sides are not even close.

The deadline is about to strike midnight. Knowing his fan base will go ballistic and boycott Citi Field if their idol is not inked to a contract, a panicked Fred Wilpon calls a press conference. There, he waves around a blank sheet of paper. Only he insists that it’s not an empty page. It’s a framework! “Don’t worry fans, we have an agreement in principle,” the owner assures us. “We just have to work out a few, er . . . details.” Then I shake my head and realize: I’m not dreaming the nightmare of the Mets’ Harvey negotiations; I’m living the nightmare of Obama’s Iran negotiations.

There is not, nor has there ever been, an Iran deal. The “framework” the president announced last week was just a stunt. As yet another negotiations deadline loomed with the president plainly unwilling to walk away despite Iranian intransigence, Congress appeared poised to end the farce by voting to stiffen sanctions. The “framework” is a feint designed to dissuade Congress and sustain the farce. In reality, what we have is simply an Obama administration assumption and a timetable. The assumption is that Iran will become a nuclear-weapons power.

Whenever a prominent political figure is indicted on charges of alleged corruption, serious questions arise. Is the prosecution part of a growing and dangerous trend toward criminalizing policy differences? Does it endanger the free speech rights of contributors? Will it constrain the legislative branch from serving as a check and balance on the executive?

These questions are now being raised in the context of the prosecution of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, as they previously were in several other ill-advised prosecutions including those of former agriculture secretary Mike Espy, former presidential candidate John Edwards, the late Senator Ted Stevens, former Congressman Tom Delay and former Texas governor Rick Perry.