RUTHFULLY YOURS

Abbas has chosen to align himself with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, thus facilitating these two organizations’ dreams of taking over the West Bank. These two radical groups seek to destroy Israel and are opposed to any peace process in the Middle East.

These threats are primarily aimed at getting the international community into providing the Palestinian Authority with more financial and political support.

This alliance could also result in renewed terrorist attacks against Israel, because Hamas and Islamic Jihad will interpret Abbas’s anti-Israel moves and rhetoric as a green light for such actions.

Abbas’s rapprochement with Hamas and Islamic Jihad will only confirm the fears of many Israelis that the West Bank will fall onto the hands of Islamists once Israel withdraws from that area.

The two-state solution started the day Hamas kicked Abbas out of the Gaza Strip and turned it into an Islamist emirate. In the end, the Palestinians got two states that are even at war with each other.

Guess who is the number one violator of women’s rights in the world today? Israel. Violating the rights of Palestinian women.

At least that is the view of the UN’s top women’s rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). CSW ends its annual meeting on Friday, March 20 by condemning only one of the 193 UN member states for violating women’s rights – Israel.

Not Syria. Where government forces routinely employ rape and other sexual violence and torture against women as a tactic of war. Where in 2014 the Assad regime starved, tortured and killed at least 24,000 civilians, and three million people – mostly women and children – are refugees.

Not Saudi Arabia. Where women are physically punished if not wearing compulsory clothing, are almost entirely excluded from political life, cannot drive, cannot travel without a male relative, receive half the inheritance of their brothers, and where their testimony counts for half that of a man’s.

It is the morning after in Israel, and there are a few developments worth noting. As ‎Bill Kristol joked on Twitter:‎

‎”BREAKING: British PM Cameron, in close re-election ‎contest, has called WH to ask that Obama intervene ‎against him.” ‎

David Cameron might be the first in a string of elected ‎international leaders calling for help for their ‎opponents given U.S. President Barack Obama’s track record since ‎he took office.‎

For if there is one consistent political story that has ‎emerged about Obama, it is his unique ‎ability to destroy his political allies. After his ‎landslide victory in the presidential contest following ‎the financial collapse in 2008, the Democratic Party ‎held 60 Senate seats (after one party switch) and ‎‎258 House seats. Today, after two disastrous mid‎term routs, the Democrats have fallen into the ‎minority with 46 Senate seats and 188 House seats. ‎The House total is the lowest for the party in nearly ‎a century. ‎

Following the horrendous terrorist attack in Tunis, it is inevitable that I am reminded of my week-long Chronicles assignment to Tunisia in September 2012. In view of the carnage that left 20 Western tourists dead on March 18, it is worth revisiting my notes posted in the immediate aftermath of that trip.

“I covered some 2,000 miles by rental car, bus, SUV, and a powered hang glider, The tour has confirmed that of faraway places we often assume to know more than we do. The first country affected by a wave of popular discontent known as the Arab Spring was full of surprises.
?“To start with, the country is safe for foreign visitors. There have been no attacks on tourists, either at the time of the [2011] ‘Jasmine Revolution] or during the periodic eruptions of street protests since then… Even in dusty provincial towns, where no foreigners venture, gas station attendants and cold drinks vendors invariably greeted me with a smile and a polite “ bonjour, Monsieur, ça va?” This is in contrast to the barely concealed hostility I have encountered on my recent trips to the West Bank, or – over a decade ago – in Libya.

Finding Out I Was a Communist and How I Escaped — on The Glazov Gang
Ex-leftist Ari David shares how he found himself imprisoned within the political faith — and how he found his way out.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/finding-out-i-was-a-communist-and-how-i-escaped-on-the-glazov-gang/

In 1897, twenty-three-year-old Winston Churchill waged war against the Islamists of that day on the North-West Frontier of India. Churchill used his mother’s political influence to take leave from his regiment, the Fourth Hussars, and get attached to the Malakand Field Force as a war correspondent. This assignment resulted in a series of articles for the Daily Telegraph and his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Churchill’s observations about the nature of the enemy and the half-measures taken by the British government of the time to deal with the enemy have an eerie resemblance to the West’s contemporary struggle against the Islamists.

The Malakand Field Force, led by General Sir Bindon Blood, was dispatched to relieve the Malakand Pass and Fort Chakdara, which guarded the important road to Chitral on India’s North-West Frontier. Churchill, although a war correspondent, served at the front and saw action with British and Indian forces fighting the uprising by Muslim tribesmen. Though some non-religious leaders were involved in the uprising, the tribesmen were largely inspired by Muslim holy men, one of whom Churchill called the “Mad Mullah.” Churchill described him as “[a] wild enthusiast, convinced alike of his Divine mission and miraculous powers [who] preached a crusade, or jihad, against the infidel.”

I see Hillary Clinton has just been inducted into the “Irish America Hall of Fame”. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of that until today, but as an authentic son of Erin I strongly object to the Hall of Fame helping Hillary put the sham in shamrock. She has English, Welsh and Scottish blood coursing icily through her veins, but not a drop of Irish. Perhaps that’s why her blarney is so clunky and heavy-handed. At any rate, it’s 15 years since Mrs Clinton’s first political campaign – when a sitting First Lady decided to run for the Senate in a state she’d never lived in. In that time, she’s gone from presidential spouse to senator to president-presumptive to Obama roadkill to State Department airmiles queen to deleter extraordinaire and and president-presumptive 2.0. But, with hindsight, a lot of her subsequent presidential campaign style was visible in this St Patrick’s Day column from 2000:

As my favourite 1970s McDonald’s jingle put it:

Hey, come on down
The weather’s getting better
Have a big thick shamrock shake
We’ll welcome in the spring together…

As the head of the Department, Clinton should have been obligated to ensure proper records were kept. Did Hillary Clinton’s State Department exit follow the Department’s standard records-keeping protocol? Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Tuesday answered a pressing question I posed here about Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct official business. Responding to questions from AP reporter Matt Lee, she reported that the State Department had “no record” that Mrs. Clinton signed a “separation statement” (Form OF-109) certifying the completeness of the records that she left with the Department upon her resignation. When pressed on whether Mrs. Clinton actually signed the document, Ms. Psaki left herself some wiggle room, stating that she was “fairly certain” the former secretary of state had not. Ms. Psaki, acting more like an extension of Hillary 2016 than a State Department spokesperson, then went into full spin mode, disclosing that neither of Mrs. Clinton’s two Bush-administration predecessors signed a Separation Statement. She further stated that Mrs. Clinton broke no rules in failing to sign the statement.
But Ms. Psaki’s spin misstates applicable State Department rules and leaves many questions unanswered. First, the governing rules. The State Department Foreign Affairs Manual and Foreign Affairs Handbooks, which set forth the Department’s internal operating procedures and guidelines for the day-to-day operations of the Department, plainly require that all departing employees sign a separation statement. Department management is responsible under those procedures for “reminding all employees who are about to leave the Department . . . of the laws and regulations pertaining to the disposition of personal papers and official records” and for “ensuring that . . . [the] Separation Statement [is] executed for each departing employee.” Elsewhere, the same department rulebook, addressing termination of an employee, provides that a “separation statement will be completed whenever an employee is terminating employment.” Ms. Psaki’s suggestion that the rules were not broken therefore can’t bear scrutiny when actually reading those rules.

The key questions remain unanswered. The State Department’s explanation of why Hillary Clinton did not sign the Separation Statement that every other State Department employee is required to sign upon resignation is quickly approaching the farcical. In Wednesday’s daily press briefing, State Department spokesperson and Hillary Clinton spinmeister Jen Psaki offered a new take on why Mrs. Clinton was excused from signing the form:
“Secretaries of state often do not sign this form, as it is a step to revoking their own security clearance. There’s a long tradition of secretaries of state making themselves available to future secretaries and presidents, and secretaries are typically allowed to maintain their security clearance and access to their own records for use in writing their memoirs and the like. Hence, this is not a form that many would have signed.”

Before showing why this explanation is insufficient, let’s start with how it is correct. Psaki is undoubtedly correct that secretaries of state often retain their security clearances (although probably not their clearances into every program) after leaving office. That is probably true with Mrs. Clinton, who might be called upon from time to time to weigh in on an issue with which she has some experience or insight. And there is also some precedent for former secretaries of state being granted access to their official records after they leave office to write their memoirs or for some related purpose. Finally, at least according to Psaki’s prior statements, neither Secretary Condoleezza Rice nor Secretary Colin Powell signed such a statement upon leaving the Department

The Democrats are on the wrong side of a familiar issue. Last summer, I interviewed a slave. Her name is Ima Matul, and she is a native of Indonesia who was brought to southern California as a teenager with the promise of a job working as a household maid. She got the job. The rest will be familiar to those familiar with modern-day slavery in the United States: The family for whom she was to work took her passport and separated her from her cousin, with whom she had come to the U.S. The cousin was sent to work in another home. Ima Matul was, needless to say, never paid — the family said they were simply keeping the money safe for her until she returned home. She worked 18 hours a day or more. She was cut off from all communication, beaten, and abused. She was told that if she were to try to run away, she’d be arrested as an illegal immigrant and taken to prison, where she would be held indefinitely with no passport or other identification, and where she would certainly be raped.
She eventually escaped, with the help of a sympathetic nanny next door and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles. The humiliation, terror, and betrayal of her experience has never really left her, though she speaks about her experience with remarkable calm.

The promised money wasn’t very much: $150 a week. “It was more money than I could ever make at home,” she says. “And coming to the United States sounded like the best thing I could think of.” To a person in her situation — young, not having much in the way of resources or connections, experiencing family troubles (as a teenager, she’d been forced into a marriage with a considerably older man), and having little hope for happiness or advancement — working as a domestic servant abroad sounds like something bordering on deliverance. Many people in a similar plight make it to the United States. Many are cruelly disappointed by what awaits them.