RUTHFULLY YOURS

On January 27, Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) announced the formation of a 527 committee called Our American Revival, unveiled a new website, and issued a statement which included the following:

To move this country forward we need new, fresh leadership from outside of Washington. We need leaders who are bold. That’s how we build a better future for our children and grandchildren. We’ve done it in Wisconsin and it can be done across this country with the right leadership.

Walker’s statement refers to his actions in balancing Wisconsin’s state budget, closing an unconstitutional deficit hole of $3.6B while actually cutting state taxes and capping local property taxes. He achieved this mostly by curtailing the hitherto virtually unrestrained power of public employee unions, to the intense dismay of the Wisconsin Left. Walker’s statement also comes on the heels of a major speech delivered over the weekend to Iowa conservatives, in which he urged policies that “go big and bold” in tackling such major public policy problems.

The wish of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, was that the country evolved into a modern democratic state where Muslims, as a majority population, could feel at ease.

But the modernizers who succeeded the colonial authorities in taking power aroused expectations that were simply beyond their abilities to deliver.

But religious authorities were agitating, warning the bewildered masses that these defeats were divine punishments for betraying the true message of Islam by not faithfully abiding by its requirements.

Qutb in his writings recast the division in the world from the classic Muslim one between the House of Islam and the House of War, to one between Islam and jahiliyya, a condition of paganism that preceded the coming of Islam to Arabia. Jahiliyya has now become all-pervasive in the modern world, supposedly sparing none, including Muslims, except for that small coterie of Muslims who took flight [hijra] from the corrupted world and prepared for jihad [armed struggle].

Sad news:

Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, one of four surviving Doolittle Raiders who attacked Japan during a daring 1942 mission credited with lifting American morale during World War II, has died. He was 94. Rod Saylor said his father died of natural causes on Wednesday in Sumner, Washington.

He was a young flight engineer-gunner and among the 80 airmen who volunteered to fly the risky mission that sent B-25 bombers from a carrier at sea to attack Tokyo on April 28, 1942. The raid launched earlier than planned and risked running out of fuel before making it to safe airfields. ”It was what you do … over time, we’ve been told what effect our raid had on the war and the morale of the people,” Saylor told The Associated Press in a 2013 interview.

Wounded, nearly fatally, at Pearl Harbor just four months earlier, the United States decided the way to even the score was to put planes in the air and show the Japanese that we could hurt them. The Americans didn’t withdraw to the safety of San Francisco and San Diego, nor bomb some useless atoll in the Pacific, or issue a stern warning to the emperor to turn over Tojo and Yamamoto in order to bring them to “justice.”

Newt Gingrich is quite possibly the best thinker in foreign policy today. He is more specific on every threat America faces. He is, however, a very poor candidate for public office….but his words and analysis should be heeded…especially by pretenders to the White House in 2016….rsk

How is our nation dealing with the continuing menace of Islamic supremacism, the ideology that catalyzes the jihadist and cultural threat to the West?

At the Freedom Forum in Iowa last Saturday, Newt Gingrich drew an apt analogy to the period from the end of World War II through 1948, as the Iron Curtain consigned half of Europe to tyranny: Imagine that the president of the United States had been not Harry Truman but Stalin’s useful idiot, Henry Wallace – the former vice president whom FDR thankfully dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1944.

Had that happened, Gingrich opined, our president would have been assuring us, “There is no KGB. There is no Comintern. The Soviet Union is not a threat. Communism is okay. I don’t think you should be worried about all these things.”

Meaning: What we’d have had is defeat in the Cold War.

Newt’s admonition was clear. In a rousing speech about “America’s survival,” the former House speaker argued that, after being at it for fourteen years, we are losing “the war with radical Islamists.”

His main point, one very similar to the contention advanced by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (in a recent London speech that was the subject of my NRO column last weekend), is that we are at w

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, violence and hatred against Jews is on the rise, especially in the Middle East and among Muslims in Europe

Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.

The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.

The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, four were killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”

“It has been described as one of the most dangerous post-mortem examinations ever undertaken in the Western world, and I think that’s probably right.”

So testified forensic pathologist Nathaniel Cary on Wednesday, the second day of the inquiry into the 2006 poisoning death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko. The proceeding, held at the Royal Courts of Justice, aims to examine the circumstances under which Litvinenko was murdered with radioactive polonium-210, a highly unusual poison and one of many Hollywood-ready elements of the case that has made it a tabloid fixture for nearly a decade.

Some aspects of the inquiry have a definite cloak-and-dagger feel. Also on Wednesday, journalists were barred from the room at one point so that “Scientist A1,” whose day job is to help maintain the U.K. nuclear deterrent, could testify about the deadly substance. The press was ushered into a separate annex, where Scientist A1 could be heard but not seen.

The details of the case largely are more prosaic, when they’re not confusing for a lay audience. The top-secret Scientist A1 was there to tell the inquiry that “one gram of polonium-210 emits one-six-six, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero alpha particles per sec—”

“Pausing right there,” an exasperated barrister interrupted, inadvertently triggering laughter in the courtroom and the press annex. “I may be wrong, but 166 quadrillion per second?”

Survey finds that while many Germans would prefer not to discuss Holocaust, they are willing to compare Israeli policies toward Palestinians today with those of Nazi regime.

BERLIN – More than one-third of Germans equate Israeli policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi policies towards the Jews, a study found.

“Germany and Israel Today: Linked by the Past, Divided by the Present?” a study of 1,000 Germans age 18 and over was released on Monday, one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The survey, which was conducted in October by the German Bertelsmann Foundation, found that while many Germans would prefer not to discuss the Holocaust, they are willing to compare Israeli policies toward Palestinians today with those of the Nazi regime.

An unholy alliance between former president Al Gore, former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, and Britain’s Prince Charles, and the entire membership of the World Economic Forum, affectionately nicknamed by its lower echelon members, “The Chicken Little Society,” but sourly discouraged by senor members, has formed, and it has a plan for you.

An article by Daniel Greenfield on FrontPage on January 28th put me onto the trail of another horrendous idea from the whirligig mind of Al Gore, “Al Gore Wants to Spend $90 Trillion to Create a World Without Cars.”

If you ever wanted to live in a giant slum with no way to get anywhere except by waiting on the poorly operated local public transit system in hock to municipal systems, you can have it for just $90 trillion. Come on. That’s pocket change. And just think, you’ll be able to live in a horrible futuristic nightmare.

(See either “Soylent Green,” “Logan’s Run,” “Metropolis,” “THX 1138,” or sunless, always-raining Los Angeles in “Blade Runner” for a foretaste of your future – if Gore’s fantasy gels into reality.)

“Former Vice President Al Gore and Mexican President Felipe Calderon proposed a $90 trillion plan to redesign every city on earth so that motor vehicles would become obsolete due to more dense populations.”

It is a scheme to relieve you of the time, expense, and bother of owning a car. And also of owning your own home, of having nice neighbors, of your privacy, of your career, and of living your own life. Gore and Calderon have better uses for your time on earth as a reckless and irresponsible occupant. Western Journalism reported:

“We cannot have these cities with low density, designed for the use of cars,” Calderon said. “We recommend those cities should have more density and more mass transportation.”
The better for you to be stamped, hole-punched, assigned a number, and bar-coded so you can be better managed, controlled, redirected, watched, and reduced to serfdom and dependency.
Remember that Calderon was president of a country that keeps sending hordes of illegal immigrants across our border to idle American workers or become welfare state “clients.” It’s all for your own good. Don’t complain. Don’t you want a clean, safe, and healthy planet?

Israelis in Berlin: Is anything cooler, more postmodern, more transgressive, more emblematic of our hip, new borderless world? In October, New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren wrote of an Israeli “Exodus” to Germany spurred by rising rents and prices of consumer goods in the Jewish State. Not to be outdone, the Washington Post chimed in the following week with a similar story about the “waves of young Israelis” bringing “the long-lost scent of freshly baked rugelach and hamantaschen cookies back to the streets of Berlin.” Meanwhile, the Economist asks, “Is Berlin the new Jerusalem?”

There’s not much new to report about Israelis in Berlin, which has been a “thing” for years. Fania Oz-Sulzberger, the daughter of Israeli novelist Amos Oz, wrote a book about the phenomenon, straightforwardly titled Israelis in Berlin, nearly 15 years ago. Modern Hebrew, she pointed out to me in a recent phone interview, was spoken in Berlin in the early 20th century, long before it became the official language of the Jewish State. In the 1960s, around the time that official diplomatic relations were established between the postwar Federal Republic and Israel, a “trickle of Israelis” began returning to West Germany, many of them German Jews “who couldn’t live with their longing,” for the land of their birth, as well as “hard-core socialists” who moved to the German Democratic Republic in the East.

“Israelis in Berlin” has all the components of a perfect media meme: a once oppressed people returning to, and thriving in, the country that attempted to exterminate them. And it’s one that Germans, hungry for any angle that reflects positively on their relationship to world Jewry, are eager to trumpet. In 2012, Der Spiegel published a long feature titled “Young Israel’s New Love Affair With Germany,” which heralded the Israeli millennials and Gen-Xers, now at least two generations removed from the Holocaust, flooding to the German capital for the cheap rent, pulsating nightlife, and world-renowned arts scene. “For them, Germany is not just a country like any other—it also happens to be one of their favorites,” the weekly boasted. The previous year, the magazine ran a story titled “UnKosher Nightlife and Holocaust Humor: Israelis Learn To Love the New Berlin.” You get the picture.

Irrespective of Israel’s policies and existence, Iran’s pursuit of mega-capability (nuclear) aims at removing the mega-obstacle (the US power projection), which would enable the Ayatollahs to attain their mega-goal: the domination of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to the domination of the Muslim World and then the entire globe.

According to the fact-driven “Guilty until proven innocent school of thought”– and in contrast to the hope-driven, fact-dismissing “Innocent until proven guilty school of thought” – a nuclear Iran would compound the clear, present and lethal threat posed by a conventional Iran to critical American and Western interests, to the survival of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab oil-producers and to global sanity.

Moreover, the Ayatollahs’ track record (e.g., sacrificing 500,000 of its own youth on the altar of clearing minefields during the 1980-88 war against Iraq) suggests that a nuclear, apocalyptic Iran would not be contained, while tolerating Iran as a threshold nuclear power could trigger a nuclear world war.