RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Barbra Streisand tells Axelrod that the president needs to talk to people in simpler terms: ‘I hate to say it, but people are stupid.’

The Obama presidency doesn’t arrive in David Axelrod ’s 500-page memoir, “Believer: My Forty Years in Politics,” until the book is about two-thirds over. But it is worth the wait, or at least the wading.

President Obama is in the middle of his fight to pass the Affordable Care Act. This is the book’s most politically compelling chapter, though the word “ObamaCare” is entirely absent. Some in the White House, such as chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, worry that the stumbling, unpopular effort to pass the ACA will damage Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections. “Rahm recommended scaling back to a plan that would cover fewer people, but garner more votes,” Mr. Axelrod writes.

When President Obama asks what the odds are of passing the most ambitious bill possible, his congressional liaison, Phil Schiliro, replies, “Depends how lucky you feel, Mr. President.”

Mr. Obama smiles and says: “Can I say this? I always feel lucky. Let’s go all in. When your name is Barack Obama and you’re the president of the United States, how can you not feel lucky?”

How Germany chooses to remember its past has always been crucial to Europe’s future.

The news from last weekend’s annual Security Conference is that Angela Merkel has flatly refused Kiev’s pleas to supply it with defensive arms in the face of Russia’s onslaught in eastern Ukraine. “I cannot envisage any situation in which an improved equipment of the Ukrainian army leads to a situation where President Putin is so impressed that he will lose militarily,” the German chancellor bluntly told an audience of high-level dignitaries.

To which one might reply that it’s a good thing Franklin Roosevelt took a different view of Britain’s military chances during the Lend-Lease debate of 1941. Or that Harry Truman didn’t give up on West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948.

One of the pieces of evidence I offer to bolster my arguments from American Betrayal that “we” — the US-led West — lost the Cold War (World War II, also, but that argument requires more space than I wish to use here, or total immersion in the book) is the fact that our college campuses, private and taxpayer-funded, are outposts of Marx.

How can a nation claim victory in an epic “battle of ideas” — classicial liberalism vs. Marxist ideology — when its institutions of “higher learning,” its incubators of leaders, continue to churn out a hardened “nomenklatura” whose allegiance is to the pillars of Marxism-Leninism: collectivism, moral relativism, globalism?

Now this: “UC Student Government Passes Resolution to Divest — From America.”

From The College Fix (via Drudge):

The University of California Student Association board – which represents all 233,000 students enrolled in the UC system’s 10 campuses – approved a resolution on Sunday that calls on the system’s leaders to financially divest from the United States.

Something unexpected and exceptional happened on the Sean Hannity radio show during a discussion of the current cycle of expansionist Islam.

On Thursday, February 5, guest Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, said there were “two things I hope our listeners can do in terms of education.”

The first was to view his recent speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, “Why Were Losing the Global War with Radical Islam”…

and I would say second, read Diana West’s book American Betrayal, which is very chilling in telling us about a similar period in the 1940s and early 1950s in which we were confronted by a Communist threat, and a very large part of our elite tried to pretend that it did not exist …

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will yield another meeting in Minsk in the next few days, with Poroshenko joining the troika, but it appears to be doomed for three main reasons.

First of all, the United States government will not allow the Europeans to make any deals of their own. In March 1992 the U.S. torpedoed the European Union’s peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina, brokered by Portugal’s foreign minister José Cutileiro, which provided for a loose federation of three self-governing ethnic units. U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Warren Zimmermann flew post haste to Sarajevo to tell Alija Izetbegovic that America would support the Muslim side if he reneged on the deal and reverted to the demand for a centralized, unitary state in which the Muslims would dominate by virtue of their plurality. The old Islamist was only too happy to oblige and promptly withdrew his signature.

It didn’t take long.

Less than a month after the Charlie Hebdo murders and the slaughter of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris, Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) has sent a warning now to Belgium: “This,” they wrote in a letter to Het Laatste News (HLM), “is only the beginning.”

The letter, received by HLN’s editors on Feb. 4, referred also to a series of attacks in France that pre-dated the Paris massacres: “What happened in France will happen, too, in Belgium,” the typewritten letter stated in perfect French, “and from Belgium, IS will conquer all of Europe.”

According to HLN, counterterrorism officials are taking the letter seriously and believe it is the legitimate work of an IS jihadist. More, they claim that the writer is aware of current events in Belgium, down to small details. (The full text of the letter has not been released.)

The same day, news arrived in the Netherlands that Dutch jihadist Abu Hanief had just blown himself up in Fallujah – the fourth Dutch Muslim to commit a suicide bombing in Syria or Iraq. Hanief, 32, had been among the leaders of pro-IS demonstrations last summer in the Hague in which demonstrators called for the death of Jews. Though he was arrested on charges of hate speech after the protest, he was soon released; and evidently, despite government efforts to confiscate or cancel the passports of Dutch Muslims suspected of planning to join the Syrian jihad, he shortly thereafter slipped out undetected.

This is Europe now, poised at a moment when, while anti-Semitism is at record highs in France and the UK, Muslim groups call for “anti-Islamophobia” policies and boycotts against Israel; when officials in Wolfsburg, Germany, are investigating an alleged jihadist cell with ties to IS and as many as 50 members, most of them living in Germany; when Belgian police have arrested 15 people in the town of Verviers (population 56,000) and several others throughout the country, all since the Paris terrorist attacks that ran from Jan. 7-Jan. 9.

And no wonder, as some so-called “mainstream” Muslims now refuse to distance themselves from the acts of Muslim terrorists – including the atrocities committed by the Islamic State: Noted Shabir Burhani, a religious Muslim in his 20s and a student at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, “We have to accept Islam in its entirety, not try to adjust it to the times. Sharia is part of it, as are jihad and the Islamic state.” But Burhani, who previously served as spokesman for the now-defunct Sharia4Holland, does not view ISIS as the ideal, he told Dutch daily Trouw. It’s not the murders themselves he rejects, he said, but “the way IS does it, and shows it off to the world can be counterproductive. Does that really benefit Islam?”

The head of the Gallup polling firm recently backpedaled on his claim that the official unemployment rate being trumpeted by the White House, Wall Street and the media is a “big lie.”

Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, recently told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans, Wall Street on Parade reported.

“I think that the number that comes out of BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the Department of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight.”

But he contended that the percent of full time jobs in this country as a percent of the adult population “is the worst it’s been in 30 years.”

His appearance on CNBC came days after he claimed the official unemployment rate being trumpeted by the White House, Wall Street and the media is a “big lie.”

Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise & ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.

[Israeli] security experts didn’t anticipate one major event in the Middle East in the past 50 years.
– Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, Saban Forum, December 2014

Allow me to begin this week’s column with three somewhat lengthy excerpts from an essay, “Israel: The Case for Defensible Borders,” published in the influential journal Foreign Affairs.

‘One does not have to be a military expert…’

The selected excerpts relate to three topics:

(a) The indefensible pre-1967 lines “One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967. A considerable part of these lines is without any topographical security value; and, of no less importance, the lines fail to provide Israel with the essential minimum of strategic depth. The gravest problem is on the eastern boundary, where the entire width of the coastal plain varies between 10 and 15 miles, where the main centers of Israel’s population, including Tel Aviv and its suburbs, are situated, and where the situation of Jerusalem is especially perilous…”

(b) The territorial imperative in the age of modern longrange weaponry “The purpose of defensible borders… is to provide Israel with the requisite minimal strategic depth, as well as lines which have topographical strategic significance… there are some who would claim that in an era of modern technological development such factors are valueless [and] that the appearance of ground-to-ground missiles, supersonic fighter-bombers, and other sophisticated instruments of modern warfare has canceled out the importance of strategic depth and topographical barriers… this argument is certainly invalid regarding Israel… where the opposite is true… the innovations and sophistication in weaponry… not only fail to weaken the value of strategic depth and natural barriers but in fact enhance their importance.

How and why the West needs to spearhead the effort to undercut the Sharia narrative.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/to-undermine-sharia-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143014/mitchell-a-orenstein-peter-kreko-and-attila-juhasz/the-hungarian-putin