RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I would like to think he was “a normal bloke”. But I worry these days that your “normal bloke” is fretting about micro-agressions in the safe space at Wesleyan University. The gulf between those who fight and those they fight for has never seemed wider.”

The Victoria Cross is the Commonwealth’s highest decoration for valour on the battlefield. Yesterday it was awarded to the first living Briton for action in the Afghan war (if memory serves, three living Aussies have been so honoured). Lance-Corporal Joshua Leakey was with the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment on a joint UK/US operation in Helmand when it all went pear-shaped, and he found himself having to rescue a fallen American Marine captain while fending off 20 Taliban single-handed:

L/Cpl Leakey, a member of the elite Paratrooper regiment first broke cover to give first aid to a fallen United States Marine, and continued to expose himself to fire as he recovered and fired from two machine guns, running up and down a hill in the high heat of the Afghan summer. Although he ran through machine gun fire and exploding grenades three times, he survived and was able to engage 20 Taliban fighters and save the life of the American officer.

Actually, only five have complained so far, but why not apply warmist statistical methods to allegations of roving hands, lurid texts and an obsession with ‘voluptuous breasts’ that have seen the world’s premier alarmist resign? One possible defence: climate change makes bureaucrats hot to trot.

This is a message allegedly sent in mid-October, 2013, by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to a 29-year-old female staffer at his TERI think-tank: “Here I am sitting and chairing an IPCC meeting and surreptitiously sending you messages. I hope that tells you of my feelings for you.”

The IPCC meeting was the 37th Plenary Session, at the Sheraton in the seaside resort of Batumi, Georgia. It was attended by 229 politicians and officials from 92 countries, plus the usual conservation and activist hangers-on and free-loaders. TERI stands for The Energy and Resources Institute, which has 1200 staff. Pachauri, 74, has been Teri’s Director General for 34 years, almost since its inception. He has also led the IPCC for 13 years.

The TERI staffer, 43 years his junior, was so much on Pachauri’s mind that he allegedly continued to pursue her until she filed a 33-page harassment case last February 13. He resigned abruptly from the IPCC on February 24.

The emissions-reduction campaign sponsored by the IPCC is currently a $US1 billion-a-day exercise. But obviously Pachauri wasn’t taking it all that seriously in the five-day Georgia talk-fest.

They were the winners of CPAC. Here are some impressions from the candidate speeches during the first two days of CPAC, in no particular order: Carly Fiorina: She followed up on her strong Iowa performance with another really good, tough speech. She is an adept public speaker and is obviously auditioning for the role of anti-Hillary attack dog. Scott Walker: It was a barnburner of a speech. He lit up the crowd and handled a heckler adroitly. His record in Wisconsin is a roll call of achievements to thrill conservatives. A few weeks ago, I thought there were three questions about Walker: Would he be up for a national race as a performer? Could he scale up his Wisconsin operation?
And what are his national positions? There shouldn’t be any more doubt on the first. But he is still especially wobbly on the last. I think he is getting unfairly dinged on comparing union protestors to terrorists — that’s clearly not what he meant — but he said what he did because he’s straining for national-security credibility. He’d be better off just having clear, sound answers to foreign-policy questions rather than reaching to extrapolate from his Wisconsin experiences. In the meantime, based on CPAC, the Walker wave will probably only keep building. Ted Cruz: Oddly, the quotient of applause lines to applause seemed off. His jokes were clunky and he was a little shouty.

“Netanyahu’s refusal to back down in the face of political and media pressure, his insistence in making his case directly and emphatically, is as much a statement as any of the technical and strategic and moral claims he will make in his speech. And by going to war against Bibi, the White House has inadvertently raised the stature of his address from a diplomatic courtesy to a global event. Netanyahu’s commitment to warning America about a nuclear Iran has given him the opportunity to explain just how devoid of merit the prospective deal is. His speech is proof that Congress is a co-equal branch of government where substantive argument can triumph over vicious personal attacks and executive overreach and utopian aspirations. Of course Barack Obama can’t stand it.
It exposes the Iran deal as indefensible — and Obama’s politics as bankrupt.”
The emerging nuclear deal with Iran is indefensible. The White House knows it. That is why President Obama does not want to subject an agreement to congressional approval, why critics of the deal are dismissed as warmongers, and why the president, his secretary of state, and his national-security adviser have spent several weeks demonizing the prime minister of Israel for having the temerity to accept an invitation by the U.S. Congress to deliver a speech on a subject of existential import for his small country. These tactics distract public attention. They turn a subject of enormous significance to American foreign policy into a petty personal drama.
They prevent us from discussing what America is about to give away. And America is about to give away a lot. This week the AP reported on what an agreement with Iran might look like: sanctions relief in exchange for promises to slow down Iranian centrifuges for ten years. At which point the Iranians could manufacture a bomb — assuming they hadn’t produced one in secret. Iran would get international legitimacy, assurance that military intervention was not an option, and no limitations on its ICBM programs, its support for international terrorism, its enrichment of plutonium, its widespread human-rights violations, and its campaign to subvert or co-opt Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria. Then it can announce itself as the first Shia nuclear power. And America? Liberals would flatter themselves for avoiding a war. Obama wouldn’t have to worry about the Iranians testing a nuke for the duration of his presidency.

Alas, Bush himself ignored the Bush Doctrine, falling all over himself to declare that Islam was a “religion of peace” hijacked by a teeny, tiny, weenie minority of meanies….rsk
There is a path to victory in the fight against radical Islam, and our next president should embrace it. What should be our strategy against ISIS? We ask the question without ever considering Iran. What concessions about centrifuges and spent fuel should we demand to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power? We ask the question never linking the mullahs’ weapons ambitions with its sponsorship of the global jihad . . . the only reason we dread a nuclear Iran.
What should be the national-defense strategy of the United States against radical Islam, the most immediate and thoroughgoing security and cultural threat we face today? I had the good fortune to be asked to participate in a CPAC panel Friday on defending America against rogue states. With 2016 hopefuls crowding the halls, it got me to thinking: What should we hope to hear from Republicans who want to be the party’s standard-bearer? It is often said that we lack a strategy for defeating our enemies. Actually, we have had a strategy for 14 years, ever since the fleeting moment of clarity right after the 9/11 attacks. That strategy is called the Bush Doctrine, and it remains the only one that has any chance of working . . . at least if we add a small but crucial addendum — one that should have been obvious enough back in 2011, and that hard lessons of history have now made inescapable.

An African-American scholar says that emphasis on STEM education is bad for blacks. Earlier today on Sirius XM Urban View, an African-American talk station, the guest was Daryl Scott, president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The conversation turned to STEM — science, technology, engineering, and math — education, and the origins of the ongoing push to encourage institutions and students to focus on those subjects. Can you guess what happened?
In 1983, the guest explained, a commission empaneled by the secretary of education issued a report titled “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform.” In a memorable phrase, it warned of “a rising tide of mediocrity” in the nation’s public schools. That phrase, he said, was a “euphemism.” A euphemism for what? “For us — for African Americans.” There is nothing that happens in these United States that will not be impugned as secret racism. Nothing. “A Nation at Risk” is in fact full of memorable phrases — “unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament” is redolent of the Cold War concerns of the day — any of which might be read as racist code by a 21st-century progressive, because a 21st-century progressive can read the ingredients on a pack of Bazooka bubble gum as racist code.

Even if many Muslims came to Europe seeking economic opportunity, they are often defined as victims of racism and oppression. So, the thinking goes, if you are a victim of racism and oppression, how can you be racist yourself?

The Palestinians repeat almost daily that they would like to kill the Israelis, while the Israelis say they would like peace. What follows are usually bitter, politically-motivated denunciations of Israel by Europe, masquerading as human rights.

Despite the increasingly savage state of the world and an openly genocidal Iran — soon to be nuclear, if it is not already — Israeli leaders remain the ones Europeans love to accuse, hate and demonize.

The terrorist attacks are denounced by journalists and political leaders, but their denunciations always sound sanctimonious and thin, condemning the “anti-Semitism” they themselves have been encouraging.

In Europe today, slandering Israel is widely conveyed by European Muslims, and if a political leader or journalist does not agree with what they say, he must be a racist.

There are now 44 million Muslims in Europe.

Killing comes ahead of antigovernment protest march in Moscow on Sunday

MOSCOW—Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge next to the Kremlin late on Friday, in what authorities said appeared to be a contract killing.

“The president said this brutal killing bears all the hallmarks of a contract murder and is of an exclusively provocative character,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin , told Russian news agencies.

He said the president asked to monitor the investigation personally, and had offered his deepest condolences to Mr. Nemtsov’s family.

It was the highest-profile killing of political figure in more than a decade, more typical of the violent years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 than of today.

The White House condemned the “brutal murder” and called for a “prompt, impartial & transparent investigation,” in tweets posted by the U.S. National Security Council.
Mr. Nemtsov, 55 years old, was killed just yards from Red Square and the Kremlin wall in the shadow of the multicolored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, as he walked across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge around midnight, on an unseasonably warm winter night.

Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress this week that no one should pre-judge a nuclear deal with Iran because only the negotiators know what’s in it. But the truth is that the framework of an accord has been emerging thanks to Administration leaks to friendly journalists. The leaks suggest the U.S. has already given away so much that any deal on current terms will put Iran on the cusp of nuclear-power status.

The latest startling detail is Monday’s leak that the U.S. has conceded to Iran’s demand that an agreement would last as little as a decade, perhaps with an additional five-year phase-out. After that Iran would be allowed to build its uranium enrichment capabilities to whatever size it wants. In theory it would be forbidden from building nuclear weapons, but by then all sanctions would have long ago been lifted and Iran would have the capability to enrich on an industrial scale.

On Wednesday Mr. Kerry denied that a deal would include the 10-year sunset, though he offered no details. We would have more sympathy for his desire for secrecy if the Administration were not simultaneously leaking to its media Boswells while insisting that Congress should have no say over whatever agreement emerges.

France’s Anti-Terror, Free-Market Socialist Prime Minister Valls talks about ‘Islamofascism,’ his personal experience with rising anti-Semitism, and the necessity of economic reform.

Paris

‘France has been struck very much at its heart by terrorism—jihadist terrorism and radical Islamism, because let us call things like they are.”

So begins French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as we sit down Tuesday in his office at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s elegant compound in the French capital’s 7th arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine. Mr. Valls speaks English, but in the interest of precision he uses an interpreter for this meeting. A portrait of President François Hollande, Mr. Valls’s boss, looks down from a corner.

When Mr. Valls says “let us call things as they are”—this is his first interview with an American publication since the terrorist atrocities in Paris last month—the contrast with the U.S. president is hard to miss. But when I later ask why other world leaders seem reluctant to acknowledge the Islamist nature of the terror threat, the prime minister says with a sly smile: “It’s up to you to draw the analysis.”

Dressed in a slim-fitting white shirt, and with his deep, firm voice, Mr. Valls exudes an intense confidence. You might say the 52-year-old Socialist embodies energy in the executive, a quality his compatriots have come to admire in an age that calls on leaders to “always start with the real situation, not an imaginary world,” as Mr. Valls puts it.

The “real situation” in France is perilous. When Mr. Valls was appointed interior minister in spring 2012, authorities were monitoring 30 possible jihadist cases, he says. “Now we have more than 1,400 people identified as a potential risk in terms of jihadism. And we have 90 French citizens or people who resided in France who died in Iraq or even more so in Syria. And the intelligence services now have to monitor some 3,000 individuals in relation to jihadist networks, which is huge and unprecedented in the history of counterterrorism.”