RUTHFULLY YOURS

A month ago, U.S. Marine veteran Amir Hekmati pleaded with President Obama to help end his ordeal in Tehran’s Evin prison on trumped-up espionage charges.

Now, held for 1,235 days by Iran, he has appealed directly to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for his release — and revealed chilling details about his captivity in the process.

Amir, born in Flagstaff, Ariz., was visiting extended family for the first time in August 2011 when he was seized. “As many other Iranians born in the US, I dreamed of visiting my parents’ homeland and learning more of my Iranian heritage. Unfortunately, after receiving assurances from the Iranian Interest Section in Washington DC, after only three weeks I was arrested, sentenced to death, and subsequently ten years to only discover that the Iranian Interest Section was an accomplice in my arrest. I have been imprisoned for three years now, enduring miserable prison conditions that cause great damage to my physical and mental health,” he wrote.

He spent the first four months in a cell just over three feet by three feet. For 17 months, he “endured a tiny cell with little access to sunlight, little to no contact with family, no access to legal representation, starvation, malnutrition, sensory deprivation, threats, and ridicule and insults to my family and country by Ministry of Intelligence personnel.”

Charlie Hebdo has been avenged, by the French authorities, by Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff, and even by the French public. But is this in issue of vengeance? Of tit for tat? Of an eye for an eye?

Force, Blasphemy, and Freedom of Speech

Blasphemy is in the news. Blasphemy and Mohammad and Charlie Hebdo, most of whose staff was executed by Muslim terrorists in Paris on January 7th, including its defiant editor, Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”), who prided himself in publishing cartoons that mocked Mohammad and implicitly Islam.

The terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and “The Prophet is avenged!” The killers were hunted down and in turn killed.

The new Charlie Hebdo issue, its front page featuring an ironic cartoon of Mohammad shedding a crocodile tear and holding a sign that reads Je Suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”), has sold out in France.

Charlie Hebdo has been avenged, by the French authorities, by Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff, and even by the French public.

But is this in issue of vengeance? Of tit for tat? Of an eye for an eye?

No. it is an issue of force – of the initiation of force, and of retaliatory force. The Muslims who massacred twelve people at Charlie Hebdo initiated force in “protest” of the paper’s continued mockery of a religious icon. Not a single Muslim was ever coerced to look it the cartoons. They did not write letters to the editor objecting to the depiction of Mohammad as a laughable, pathetic “prophet,” they did not start their own magazine and publish their own outrageous cartoons. No. They invaded the offices of Charlie Hebdo and murdered twelve people. One of the killers subsequently invaded a Jewish food shop and murdered four Jews.

History has shown that where Jews can’t live safely, everyone is at risk.

In an interview conducted before the recent Paris massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned that “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

For this to be avoided, we must concentrate less on the result—a mass Jewish exodus—and far more on the means of prevention. European Jews who survived millennia of discrimination, persecution, the Inquisition and the Holocaust are growing increasingly insecure. But the question of how to fight for survival isn’t one that should be posed to law-abiding citizens of a Western democracy. It is for their governments and authorities to keep Jewish communities secure and allow them to live in normalcy.

Congress Should lead with hearings on the enemy and how to prevail.

The United States has been at war with radical Islamist terrorism for at least 35 years, starting with the November 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taking of 52 American hostages. President Jimmy Carter , in his State of the Union address two months later, declared the American captives “innocent victims of terrorism.”

For the next two decades, radical Islamist terrorism grew more powerful and more sophisticated. On Sept. 11, 2001, a remarkably sophisticated effort by Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and western Pennsylvania.

In response to the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

Middle East Turns Back Clock as Remnants of Old Regimes Rise Again
Egypt, Gulf Monarchies Increasingly Project Power

Four years after the Arab Spring began, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—but worse.

For decades, the bleak choice in the region was between dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Islamist militancy that they always invoked when pressured by the West to liberalize.

The uprisings of 2011—often spurred by liberal and secular activists—produced fleeting hopes that the jihadists and autocrats would no longer be the only alternatives.
Middle East Crossroads

But today, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi oversees a regime that is seen as more repressive than Mr. Mubarak’s in many ways.

This new Egypt and its main financiers and allies—the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates—increasingly project power and influence across the region.

On the other side of the equation, Islamic State has seized a Britain-size chunk of Syria and Iraq, and now is spawning affiliates in Libya and Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula. It is outmatching al Qaeda of old in wanton barbarity and military prowess.

Underscoring the growing terror threat to the West, al Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen claimed responsibility for last week’s attack on a satirical magazine in Paris, while a French follower of Islamic State killed first a policewoman and then four hostages at a kosher grocery.

“We have turned the clock back,” said Maha Azzam, a political scientist who heads the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, an umbrella group of organizations opposed to Mr. Sisi’s rule. “The political space in the middle has not shrunk, it has disappeared. What you are left with in the younger generation is a choice between acquiescing to dictatorship or, for the more radical ones, resorting to violence.”

In his three decades in power, Mr. Mubarak often told visiting American dignitaries that the choice was between him and the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s main Islamist organization with branches across the region. He did prove right: A year after his ouster, the country’s first democratic presidential elections put the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in power.

The Brotherhood under Mr. Morsi alienated many Egyptians by clamping down on dissent, excluding other political movements, and imposing its religious agenda.

Every Friday, Johanna Bettach, a pregnant mother of two, stocks up on weekend supplies at the Hyper Cacher supermarket. Last week, just before she was getting ready to shop, an Islamist militant gunned down four Jewish customers at the kosher store and took many others hostage.

The Hyper Cacher attack, one of the deadliest against France’s Jewish community since World War II, spurred outrage across the country. It was by no means isolated, coming against a backdrop of acts of violence and intimidation.

Just three months earlier, Ms. Bettach said, she found her mezuzah—a box containing a parchment of Torah verses that religious Jews attach to their doors—torn off and thrown out. “It is going from bad to worse in France, and we know that it is not going to stop,” said Ms. Bettach, 33 years old. “I can’t sleep at night anymore. All day when my kids are at school, I worry. I just don’t see any future for my children in this country.”

Three-quarters of France’s roughly half-million Jews are, like Ms. Bettach, of North African origin, Jewish community officials estimate. Their families moved to the safety of France mostly in the period between Israel’s creation in 1948 and Algeria’s independence in 1962, as persecution and discrimination emptied out the once-huge Jewish communities of former French possessions across the Mediterranean.

One out six people all over the world is a Muslim… trying to say anything in general about this huge community – 1.5 billion people – will be wrong… The vast majority of these populations are not involved with all what’s happening with violence and terror all over the world…. I don’t think there is anything essential that connects between this huge and historically important religion and all the terrorism that’s going on
– Sami Abu Shehadeh, secretary-general of Balad, Tel Aviv-Jaffa

With these words, Sami Abu Shehadeh, of the anti-Zionist Arab party Balad, commenced a debate with me on “The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West,” which took place in the i24 News studios last month.

Clearly, the events in Paris on Wednesday, in which 12 people were brutally gunned down, gave the topic new and urgent relevance.

Islam is to terror as rainfall is to flooding

Of course, there is much truth in Abu Shehadeh claim that most Muslims are not actively involved in terrorism. While this claim is factually correct, substantively it is meaningless.

Demanding an end to “the epidemic of racist police murder,” protest organizers with Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition plan to “Take the Movement onto the Trains” on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday this Thursday by shutting down the New York City subways during the morning commute.

Promising to “flood the subways,” AnswerCoalition.org advised “every high school, college and community…to flood the subways with their message, their chants, and their signs…In the name of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and all the victims.”

Wherever you stand on policing issues, and whether or not you think disrupting the subways is an effective way to win support for reform, it’s worth knowing that the ANSWER agenda goes far beyond issues of “racist police murder.”

http://nypost.com/2015/01/13/ray-kelly-calls-for-an-apology-from-de-blasio/

Ray Kelly calls for an apology from de Blasio

Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly declared that Mayor Bill de Blasio should “apologize” for creating a tense environment between New York’s Finest and those in charge at City Hall.

Kelly appeared on Fox’s “Good Day New York,” where he called for the mea culpa for comments and policies by de Blasio that have disgusted cops.

“I think the mayor has to give something. He has to, you know, sort of make amends,” Kelly said.

“I think an apology is appropriate or perhaps a third party gets involved here too to bring them together.”

Kelly stressed the importance of the two sides coming together as the city faces immense challenges after the terror attack on a Paris newspaper last week.

Among the Affordable Care Act’s many economic and political disruptions, the law has unintentionally encouraged employers to convert full-time jobs into part-time jobs. ObamaCare mandates that employers offer health insurance to employees who work more than 30 hours a week, or pay a penalty up to $3,000 an employee. But employers have no such obligation for employees who work less than 30 hours a week, making part-time employment less costly.

It’s a simple fact: Make something more expensive and people will use less of it; make something less expensive and they will use more of it. So naturally employee hours have been reduced, particularly in the retail segment, which has lowered wages and reduced consumer spending.

On Thursday the House addressed this issue by passing by 252-172 the Save American Workers Act, a bipartisan bill that would restore the definition of “full-time employee” to the 40-hour workweek threshold. Now it will head to the Senate, where Republicans will need six Democratic votes to send the legislation to the White House, which has already threatened to veto it. This isn’t Republicans’ first try; in April 2014, the House passed a near-identical measure that, like so many other bills, died in Democrat Harry Reid ’s Senate.