RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week the Islamic State’s ‘Hacking Division’ released the names and addresses of one hundred US military personnel. It urged the ‘brothers residing in America’ – i.e. American Muslims – to ‘deal with’ them, which is to say, it wants them killed.

There is much talk these days of radicalization and deradicalization. At the heart of both processes are religious ideas: theological dogmas. What are some of the key theological principles which might cause a Muslim to take this call seriously? What is the Islamic reasoning given by the IS Hacking Division in support of its call to kill non-Muslims?

The Hacking Division quote two verses of the Qur’an:

Sura 9:123 ‘fight believers who are near to you’ and
Sura 9:14 ‘Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them, and satisfy [actually yashfi ‘heal’] the breasts of a believing people’.

Yesterday, the Police Chief of Charlottesville, Virginia gave a remarkable press conference, the upshot of which was, as the New York Times headline put it:Police Find No Evidence Of Rape At University Of Virginia Fraternity

Not only was there “no evidence” that the horrific gang rape at the frat house party took place, there was “no evidence” that the party took place. Indeed, there was “no evidence” that the man “Jackie” described as her date that night even exists.

And yet last fall Rolling Stone ran a 9,000-word story on the “horrific gang rape” that spurred a media frenzy about the alleged “epidemic” of campus rape across America. Even as the story disintegrated, the feminist lobby took the view that “Jackie” was a brave woman who had performed a useful service. As I wrote last year:

That’s the purpose of “news” as social engineering. The great, messy, contradictory, complexities of reality have to be streamlined and organized into the half-a-dozen approved narratives of the age. At its most absurd, you wind up with “Jackie”, the “victim” of the University of Virginia “gang” “rape”, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for having the courage to come forward and raise awareness by “pulling back the curtain on rape” – even if behind the pulled-back curtain there was no actual rape going on.

“Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam. Allahu Akbar,” the worshipers recited en masse. Then a terrorist roaming among the mosque’s patrons detonated himself…

Don’t you hate it when you’re raining down death-curses on people hither and yon, and then some guy blows you up? In this case, the pro-Houthi Shia victims were killed by a pro-ISIS Sunni terrorist. Some 140 dead, over 350 injured.

This was in Yemen, one of those Obama success stories he was bragging about only six months ago:

This weekend the last US forces in the country hot-tailed it outta there, leaving half-a-billion bucks’ worth of state-of-the-art weaponry in the hands of the blood-soaked loons.

Who do you side with in the ISIS/Iran Sunni/Shia split? Back when Michael E Mann, PhD (Doctor of Phraudology) first decided to sue me, I had a conference call with a bigshot DC lawyer auditioning for my business. Not stinting on the braggadocio, he began the conversation with: “So. Do you wanna win fast? Or do you wanna win slow?”

That’s the choice Iran and ISIS are offering the west: Do you wanna lose fast? Or do you wanna lose slow? The mullahs are happy to nuke us; the Islamic State reckon it’s more fun to behead us one by one.

~So how’s that Iranian nuclear deal coming along? First, John Kerry:

By far the most important aspect of the recent Likud victory was that once and for all everyone in the world could see how biased and unrepresentative the Israeli media are. With the exception of the freebie Israel Hayom, almost the entire print media in Israel are leftist, and with no exception at all the television and radio stations are also. The media in Israel operated a naked jihad against Netanyahu in the months before the election, candidly promoting a victory for the Labor Party’s Herzog team and his day camp staff.

The media made no attempt to disguise their partisan agenda. The bias in the Israeli media rivals that in the Soviet media before perestroika. Almost every page in Haaretz and Yediotwas an anti-Likud propaganda sheet. Channel Ten Television, propped up by state subsidies and handouts from the Likud government, was at least as biased and at least as open about campaigning for the Left. The bias extended down into the countless “polls” of voters that invariably showed Herzog with a strong lead over Netanyahu. When the media awoke from their wet dream after the poll booths closed, they reluctantly reported that “Netanyahu had made a comeback from behind.” Bullfeathers. Netanyahu was never behind. The media had invented a myth about Herzog being in the lead and they stuck to it.

By the morning after the election the entire media Titanic had sunk beneath the waves, after striking the iceberg of reality. It turns out that Israelis ignored the media seeking to “educate” them and instead they voted their own consciences. The media moguls will never forgive them for this. If anything, the arrogant insults hurled at voters for the “Right” just before the election by journalists and by artsy folks helped turn out the Likud vote.

The Left believed its own media fabrications. The Labor Party had reserved the large Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to hold its victory celebrations for the night after the voting. Labor Party activists had put out their own special newspaper, “Israel Tomorrow,” to outline the agenda they would pursue after their victory. It is now being used to wrap fish. The Israeli stock market bounced up 1.5% the day after the election.

The Obama administration’s determination to reach an accord with Iran at any cost continues unabated. As the March 31st deadline approaches, the administration has taken to recklessly downplaying Iran’s increasing belligerence, as well as continuing a coordinated attack on Iran’s chief critic, newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This weekend, the White House dismissed a speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that included more chants of “Death to America” by both the crowd and Khamenei himself, insisting that it was only “intended for a domestic political audience.” Yesterday White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest doubled down on that contention when CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked “if those comments give this White House any pause about moving forward with a nuclear deal with that country?” “Those kinds of comments only underscore why it is so critically important that the United States and the international community succeed in preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Earnest insisted. “And the best way for us to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons is sitting down at the negotiating table and getting Iran to make very specific commitments that would prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons.”

Hillary Clinton’s expected presidential run is being hailed as a chance to shatter the glass ceiling. That’s nonsense. Hillary rose to power solely on her husband’s sleazy coattails. She’s not self-made. And it shows. The recent e-mail scandal is just the latest in a life-long pattern of entitlement and hubris — traits successful women know can torpedo a career.

Strangely, feminists ignore the damning facts about how Hillary got where she is. Recently, Hillary addressed 5,000 Silicon Valley businesswomen — real career women. Vowing to “crack every last glass ceiling,” a hint at her White House ambitions, she urged them to demand equal pay and promotions. She invoked her own supposed early struggles to become the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas while a new mother.

During Hillary Clinton’s speech to reporters and analysts attending the Toner Prize journalism awards ceremony in Washington, DC, Mrs. Clinton employed variants of two classic Alinsky narrative manipulation tactics in targeting herself for ridicule over her use of a private email server and address during her time as Secretary of State. The use of her private server and email address allowed her to reverse the hierarchy of authority where the designation of government information is concerned. The use of the Alinsky tactics is meant to move the media on from this very damaging reality.

The UK’s Daily Mail quotes Mrs. Clinton as saying:

“I am well aware that some of you may be a little surprised to see me here tonight. You know my relationship with the press has been at times, shall we say, complicated…But I am all about new beginnings. A new grandchild, another new hairstyle, a new email account – why not a new relationship with the press? So here goes. No more secrecy. No more zone of privacy – after all, what good does that do me…”

Obama’s two terms showed us that he was a sore winner. Israel’s election showed us that he is even more of sore loser. Ever since Netanyahu survived an election that he was supposed to lose, Obama has been throwing a floor-pounding, siren-shrieking and high-kicking tantrum over the Jewish State.

Its latest kick and shriek had White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough sidling into the toxic atmosphere at the D.C. conference for the anti-Israel lobby J-Street to berate Netanyahu.

In attendance at the conference were such luminaries as Saeb Erakat, the PLO negotiator who had called Netanyahu a “filthy war criminal” and claimed that Hamas is “a political, not a terrorist movement.”

Also featured was Nabila Espanioly of Hadash, formerly the Israeli Communist Party. Nabila, a former Communist activist who had accused Israel of “State Terrorism”, told J Street about the need to fight “against fascism and against racism inside Israel.”

The main inspiration for this blog was this summary of the miracle of how the drought-ravished Jewish State overcame a full-blown water crisis by investing $4 billion between 2002 and 2010 to develop water technology that keeps its population and industries alive. Israel’s latest desalination plant, in Sorek, is now at full capacity, producing 627,000 cubic meters of drinking water daily. With the lowest rate of energy consumption in the world, its water is the cheapest and most efficient of any large-scale desalination plant. Israel has exported this knowledge worldwide. The San Diego desalination facility uses the reverse osmosis developed by Israel’s IDE Technologies, which has just opened a new office in the drought-ravished state of Texas. The Norwegian company, EnviroNor, is recruiting Israeli expertise to provide the water-processing technology necessary for its project to convert secondhand oil barges into floating desalination and wastewater treatment plants.

President Obama didn’t want to comment today on the allegations of unnamed White House officials that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been spying on the United States to undermine a nuclear deal.

“As a general rule, I don’t comment on intelligence matters in a big room full of reporters, and I think I’ll continue that tradition,” he quipped at a joint press conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

But he was ready to throw out some more soundbites in regard to how he feels about Netanyahu.

“With respect to Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, I think it’s important to understand that the issue here is not what I believe, but it’s what the Palestinians and the parties in the negotiations and the Israeli people believe is possible. That’s the most important issue,” Obama said. “You know, I’ve said before and I’ll simply repeat, you know, Prime Minister Netanyahu in the election run-up stated that a Palestinian state would not occur while he was prime minister.”