RUTHFULLY YOURS

The hand sign that the President appeared to be flashing at the African Leaders’ Conference in August, described by F. W. Burleigh on these pages last week, is not merely a Muslim gang sign. It has long and venerable history.

As Burleigh notes, it represents the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith: there is no god but God, and Mohammed is his messenger.

Here’s a Barbary pirate making the sign. Note the galley in the background.

The Barbary (from Berber) pirates captured and enslaved at least 1.25 million Europeans from the 16th to the 19th century, according to the Ohio State professor Robert Davis. Davis’s figures don’t include the pirate port and slave entrepôt of Salé, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, nor do they include the 2 to 3 million Slavs captured by Tatar and Turkish raiders. In addition to Europeans, around 16-18 million Africans and unknown millions of Cirassians, Syrians, Armenians, and Hindus were enslaved by Muslims. American sailors were also victims of the Barbary pirates, and it took two wars (both declared by Muslim pashas) before attacks on U.S. shipping ended.

It is disheartening to listen to Obama and his administration voices childishly reiterating that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam because it does not represent the majority of Muslims or what Westerners perceive as normative values distilled from the Koran. No radical ideology, religious or otherwise, starts out coherently, much less representing the majority; but it eventually can if appeased and left unchallenged.
Does Obama think that National Socialism could never have represented the Germany of Goethe and Schiller just because it only appealed to a minority of Germans in the 1932 election or was clearly a perversion of traditional German values? All that was true, but irrelevant two years later when Germans who once laughed at the barbarity of National Socialism suddenly were willing to look the other way at its thuggery, killings, and ethnic cleansing in exchange for the sense of pride it lent a public that felt itself victimized. Western European observers of the 1930s who were worried at what was going on in Germany did not, like our president, insist that National Socialism had nothing to with socialism or Germany, but rather feared that it might exploit both and end up not just representing Germany, but enthusiastically embraced by a majority of Germans.

Walk into a store and you’ll see piles of red and pink in the Clearance box. Everything from heart-shaped cards and boxes of chocolate candy to plastic flowers and teddy bears clutching plush red hearts will be 50 percent off because Valentine’s Day comes but once a year. And Valentine’s Day is over.

Obama’s love for America also comes but once a year. He tosses it into a speech in the Midwest when his poll numbers are down and then it goes into the clearance box where you can buy his love and his patriotism for 50 percent off. And it’s still expensive at the price because the heart-shaped box is empty.

Greeting card sentiments come easily to the man who will say anything. Obama promised to eliminate income tax for seniors making less than $50,000, vowed transparent open government and promised that you could keep your doctor. His words were empty promises.

French prime minister admits his powerlessness to stop Islamist terrorist attacks.

“French youth has to get used to living with the threat of attacks for a long period of time. Your generation, your age class, must accustom itself to living with this danger for a number of years.”
–Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France to high school students

While leaders of most nations give their young people messages of hope, France’s socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls passed on one of hopelessness.

Only a couple of weeks after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and at time when the shaken people of France needed to be reassured, especially about the effectiveness of the state’s efforts to protect them, Valls admitted his socialist government is powerless to stop Islamist terrorist attacks. The occasion for this Churchillian moment was Valls’s appearance before an audience of high school students in Seine-et-Marne in late January.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/judaism-vs-the-progressive-faith-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Aaron Shuster (Writer/Producer), Ari David (Host, The Ari David Show Podcast) and Barak Lurie (Host, Barak Lurie Show).

The guests gathered to discuss Judaism vs. The Progressive Faith, analyzing the connection between rejecting the Torah and joining the Left. The dialogue occurred within the context of a focus on The Psychology of Left-Wing Jews.

First Muslim elected to Congress; was sworn into office on the Koran…Member of Congressional Black Caucus, most of whose members will boycott Netanyahu’s speech….rsk

America is the root cause of violent extremism, Congress’s foremost apologist for Islamic terrorism told a White House conference last week.

In rambling remarks Feb. 18 at President Obama’s so-called Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) used the opportunity to smear America, downplay Muslim violence, and urge law enforcement to go easy on suspected Muslim terrorists.

Ellison accused the U.S. of breeding terrorists by somehow persecuting Muslims.

State Department spokesperson Marie Harf became the target of much ridicule last week when she inanely suggested that we can combat Islamic terrorism through job creation. But the concept makes perfect sense to an administration that considers the solution to every issue, including “violent extremism,” to be “social justice.”

You will no doubt recall that Harf, while on MSNBC’s Hardball hosted by the befuddled Chris Matthews, claimed that we cannot beat ISIS simply by killing them; we also have “to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups,” citing a “lack of opportunity for jobs” as an example. She suggested that the U.S. should work with other countries to “help improve their governance” and “help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”

Al-Shabaab burst onto the documentary filmmaking scene this weekend with a new video explaining the grisly Westgate mall attack and suggesting shopping targets for other jihadists.

The 1-hour and 16-minute film is not only slickly produced but the Somali terror group’s video puts ISIS to shame with its high production value and splicing of interviews, news footage, graphics and photos to perfectly mimic a documentary.

The film was released in English and Arabic. The narrator on the English-language film, watched by PJM, has his face obscured by a balaclava and a fuzzy bar over his eyes. That move by Al-Kataib, the media arm of Al-Shabaab, could be in response to western intelligence’s claim to have identified ISIS spokesman and killer “Jihadi John” through his voice, eyes, and build.

The Shabaab narrator speaks perfect English with a Somali accent.

Beginning with a history of how Shabaab thinks the Kenyan “kuffar” have wronged them, the narrator doesn’t mention the September 2013 attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi until the 43-minute mark. “Westgate was perhaps the only natural response to blatant Kenyan aggression,” he says.

I’ve written frequently about how the West’s obsession with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians helps perpetuate global misery by diverting attention from people in far greater distress (think Syrians or South Sudanese). Yet this obsession also perpetuates suffering among the one group it’s ostensibly supposed to help–the Palestinians. Three Jerusalem Post reports over the last week show why.

One warned that a leading Palestinian hospital is at risk of closure because of a $30 million debt. A major reason for this debt is that for years, the Palestinian Authority has failed to pay Mokassed Hospital for many of the patients it treats. This isn’t because the PA lacked money; it has ample funds to pay generous salaries to thousands of terrorists sitting in Israeli jails. Rather, it’s a matter of priorities: On the PA’s scale of values, paying terrorists for killing Israelis is evidently more important than paying doctors for healing Palestinians.

The world has always been dangerous. However, as much as we all would like to live without war, as long as there are men and women driven by passion rather than reason the possibility is unlikely. Following World War I (the war to end all wars!), Europeans desired nothing more than to live in peace. Their families, their homes, places of business, their churches, synagogues and mosques had been destroyed. Woodrow Wilson proposed a League of Nations so that men could discuss differences without resorting to bloodshed. It failed; though was ultimately reborn as the United Nations, but not until another war killed millions more. Vera Britain, author of Testament to Youth and who had lost both her brother and fiancé in the Great War, typified that desire when she wrote a plaintive letter to students at the University of Minnesota in 1934 urging them not to join the army. As a nurse in France, she knew first hand the horrors of war.

Yet just over twenty-years after the guns along that “Great White Line” were silenced, Europe found itself enmeshed in an even bloodier conflict. The Left persists in the myth that when the Right stipulates they want a strong military, it means they are anxious to go to war. It does not. They want peace; but they believe that strength is more conducive to peace than appeasement. It was preparedness and resolve that were needed in the 1930s. While his intentions may have been noble, Neville Chamberlain did not bring “peace in our time.” A well-educated friend of my wife’s recently asked what I thought of Benjamin Netanyahu speaking before a joint session of Congress. I told her I thought it was important that the American people hear from a man for whom Iran getting nuclear weapons is not an academic exercise, but would represent a mortal, existential threat. She responded: “But why does he want to go to war?”