RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to Israeli defense officials, it’s only a matter of time before Islamic State terrorists perpetrate a major attack on the Jewish state.

You don’t have to be a Hezbollah or Hamas rocket scientist to have figured this out. ISIS has been increasing the frequency of its warnings to Israel on YouTube. And by now, anyone who doesn’t take such threats seriously is an idiot, a left-wing ideologue or the president of the United States.

This is not to say that Israel needs further proof that Islamists mean business when it comes to executing plans or innocent people. Nor do we Israelis really care what the jihadis in our midst or along our borders are called. “Daesh” is just another group to which terrorists out for our blood attach themselves. The fact that rivalries exist among them only matters where cutting their funding or other self-defense strategies are concerned.

But the rest of the world likes to categorize terrorists as “moderates” or “extremists,” and rank panic levels accordingly. The current bogey man happens to be ISIS, not only due to its flamboyant videos of beheadings and other atrocities, but because it took responsibility for the Paris, Mali and San Bernardino massacres.

Last year’s release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century catapulted Thomas Piketty to international stardom. In the 700-page tome, the French economist argued that inequality is a grave social evil and capitalism is the root of all inequality. Now he’s added a spurious spin to his thesis: inequality is responsible for the rise of ISIS. As the Washington Post reports, Piketty asserts in a recent Le Monde column that “Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month—and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality.” Piketty’s supposedly revelatory argument is symptomatic of the materialist mindset that transfixes the Western elite and thus leaves the West vulnerable to—and hapless against—the global jihad.

Piketty claims that Middle Eastern wealth, concentrated among several oil monarchies governing small populations in “semi-slavery,” has created conditions ripe for jihadism. In Piketty’s reading of history, the West is responsible for driving oil “to the emirs” through military interventions such as the first Gulf War, and then backing such petro-regimes “militarily and politically.” The Obama administration was derided earlier this year for promoting what critics called “jobs for jihadis” as a means of tackling the “root causes” of terrorism. But while poor economic conditions may typify Europe’s most fertile jihadist breeding grounds, poverty in itself isn’t the cause of jihadism. Throughout history, billions of people have lived in squalor without strapping on suicide bombs or taking up arms against “the infidel.” Wealthy Muslim regimes in Saudi Arabia have financed jihadist groups, and Osama bin Laden was born to a wealthy family.

Now the Israelis are trying to circumvent us by means of agreements with the Arab countries. They may not have much to offer the Arabs, except for advances in technology, agriculture and medicine, but now they all have a common enemy: Iran.

Our demands are the result of the greed of our leaders, who do not want a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they want a Palestinian state instead of Israel. Recently we openly exposed our desire to destroy the Jewish state. That is why we demand Jerusalem for ourselves, insist on the right of Palestinians refugees to “return” and threaten the Jews.

Like Hezbollah, we interpret Israel’s political left as a sign of weakness and dissention. We all sense their hypocrisy, arrogance, disdain, and how they patronize us as if we were stupid. That is why the Palestinians have always respected the Israeli right: they always tell us the truth.

The Europeans attempt to weaken Israel with territorial concessions that would make it possible for the Palestinians to fire rockets at Israel’s main cities and airport from the West Bank.

After seeing the results of their withdrawal from Gaza, the Israelis doubtless think one would have to be crazy ever to give up control of the border with Jordan.

Before Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s trip to the United States to meet President Barack Obama, administration officials there said they had given up hope of establishing a Palestinian state during the president’s term of office. One could only think that if as the Palestinian project failed during the current administration, which supports the Palestinian cause, and with a secretary of state as highly motivated as John Kerry, the probability of its ever succeeding was fading away.

Instead of eliminating the invaders, Nehru made a deadly mistake: He took the matter for mediation to the United Nations.

UN member states have never even been able to agree on a definition of terrorism. Some of the states, such as Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, overtly or covertly practice, promote or fund terrorism.

Emboldened by international and Indian inaction, Pakistan has continued masterminding terror strikes against India.

New Delhi might do well bear in mind a central message from the history of wars: The dialogue of peace and non-violence alone is futile with those who understand only the language of power and punishment.

India, like Israel, would do better to fight its own war on terror.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/12/massive_worldwide_support_for_sharia_law_among_global_muslim_community.html#ixzz3tj0ovVzB

In the aftermath of the uproar caused by Donald Trump’s press release “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” the Pew Research Center released some truly astonishing polling data on the support among Muslims worldwide for sharia law.

Have a look at these numbers:

Everywhere we look around the globe, there are substantial – and generally dominant – percentages of Muslims who favor making sharia the official law in their country.

When broken down by region, the numbers are even more troubling:

The $800 million the Prime Minister is diverting from foreign aid might have done real and genuine good in the Third World. Instead of funding clinics and clean water, that cash is underwriting a cynical exercise in climate showmanship and green-eyed moral vanity
Malcolm Turnbull, by way of making a splash at the Paris Climate Conference, has just pledged a billion dollars to help poor countries meet the challenge climate change. This forms part of a broader promise by ‘rich nations’ to provide $100 billion a year in ‘climate aid.’ What Turnbull was less keen to emphasise is that $800 million of the funds would be redirected from the existing foreign-aid budget. That means $800 million less for disaster relief, treatment for preventable diseases, access to clean drinking water and malnutrition. That list is bad enough, but the worthy causes shouldered aside in the name of warmism number many more than that.

How many people died from climate change last year? Directly, none.

But what about indirectly? That’s a tougher one. The earth’s weather patterns have defied prediction since long before multilateral climate love-ins became an annual entry in every posturing world leader’s travel diary. So we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that isolating the impact of carbon emissions on natural disasters, bushfires and draughts is anything more than educated guesswork.

This is welcome news…both Venezuela and Argentina- where Iran has wielded great influence have overturned tyrants….rsk

It isn’t every day that a police state takes such a beating at the polls that it has to admit defeat in its own rigged election. So kudos to the Venezuelan opposition, which thrashed the government’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in Sunday’s national assembly election, even taking the two-thirds supermajority needed to pass major economic and judicial reforms.

After 16 years of repressive left-wing rule, this is cause for hope in Venezuela and across the Americas. An impressive 75% of the electorate turned out to vote, driven by plummeting living standards. Hyperinflation, food shortages, crumbling public works and soaring murder rates have made the country miserable.

President Nicolás Maduro, the late Hugo Chávez’s handpicked successor, accepted the vote—at least for now. It’s doubtful he would have done so without pressure from the military, which also seems to be fed up with the country’s accelerating decline.

Number of fighters from North America steady but number from Western Europe more than doubled since 2014, report says

WASHINGTON—More than a year of international efforts to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq have fallen short, with the number of militants taking up arms for Islamic State and other extremist groups more than doubling in that time frame, a report released Monday found.

Between 27,000 and 31,000 people from at least 86 countries have traveled to the Middle East to join the extremist movement, according to the report, by the security consulting firm The Soufan Group, founded by a former federal official who investigated the 2001 terrorist attacks. By comparison, a June 2014 by the firm issued identified approximately 12,000 foreign fighters from 81 countries who had traveled to Iraq and Syria.

Week one of COP 21, the UN climate conference in Paris, concluded with the adoption of a draft “outcome.” You can read it at CFACT.org.

This was the must-have first step if the UN is to have a chance of adopting a full treaty this week.

While the COP (Conference of the Parties) reached a milestone, the draft is riddled with unresolved divisive issues. The draft contains multiple versions of many key provisions within square brackets and placeholders for future text.

For instance, did the UN adopt a draft of a binding treaty or a toothless nonbinding agreement? No one in Paris can say for sure.

Resolving these disputes is what the negotiators in Paris will be working on as they reconvene at a ministerial level.

It remains to be seen whether the COP can bridge all divides and agree to a final text.

Two factors argue the UN might pull it off.

“Round up the usual suspects” was the brunt of President Obama’s address to the American public after last week’s San Bernardino massacre. Obama offered nothing new, only “airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” in the Levant. Like his French counterpart Francois Hollande, Obama thinks that a certain level of terrorism is tolerable, and far preferable to the bloody and difficult work of rooting out jihadist terrorism entirely. There is something to be said for the notion of a tolerable level of terrorism, but neither Obama nor Hollande are likely to achieve this as matters stand.

“Since the attacks in Paris,” the President said, “we’ve surged intelligence-sharing with our European allies. We’re working with Turkey to seal its border with Syria. And we are cooperating with Muslim-majority countries — and with our Muslim communities here at home — to counter the vicious ideology that ISIL promotes online.” None of this is new and none of it is persuasive.

The trouble is that number of terrorist attacks is rising exponentially, along with the number of countries affected, according to the 2015 Terrorism Index of the Institute for Economics and Peace. The notion of a tolerable level of terrorism applied to a world in which Muslims killed each other far from the West. The recent attacks in Paris and California as well as Israel suggest that the old approach to containing terrorism has collapsed, along with the credibility of leaders who advanced it. More than 30,000 people died in terror attacks in 2014, compared to fewer than 8,000 in 2011. More important, 17 countries lost more than 250 people in terror attacks in 2014 vs. only 5 countries in 2011.