RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York, N.Y. — A sign with a flower outside the cathedral at what has to be one of Manhattan’s busiest intersections, 34th Street and Second Avenue, stands as a subtle reminder of genocide. One wonders how many diplomats on their way to and from the United Nations headquarters, VIPs on their way to or from one of the airports, and daily commuters have passed St. Vartan’s Cathedral this year without noticing the banner outside proclaiming, “Centennial of the Armenian Genocide: 1915 to 2015. United We Stand Against Genocide.” I confess, I had been among the passers-by until I finally stopped in to pray there for the persecuted during the Christmas octave — and before the centennial year was through.

Perhaps the banner would have more impact if it read, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

That’s how Adolf Hitler made his case for invading Poland in 1939 — and seeking to rid the world of Poles.

Even 100 years on, the Armenian Genocide still goes largely unacknowledged throughout the world. As Philadelphia archbishop Charles J. Chaput put it in a speech last spring: “This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians were the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity, in a.d. 301. Starting in 1915, Turkish officials deliberately murdered more than 1 million members of Turkey’s Armenian minority. The ethnic and religious cleansing campaign went on into the 1920s. The victims were men, women, and children. And they were overwhelmingly Christian. Turkey has never acknowledged the genocide. It’s one of the worst unrepented crimes in history.”

“”This is why it’s so important not to just go after one organization called ISIS, but to recognize this radical Islamist ideology that’s driving ISIS, that’s driving al-Qaeda, al Nusra and these groups that go by other names. That’s the only way that we’re actually going to be able to defeat this threat.”

A congressional Iraq War veteran doubted that the gains made against ISIS in Ramadi will be able to hold.

Iraq claimed victory over ISIS in the capital of Anbar province, but sections of the city still remain under the control of Islamic State jihadists.

About 80 percent of the city that once housed 200,000 people is in ruins, Iraqi officials say.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told CNN that the question is, “Will this be able to be sustained?”

“And if you look at it, the battle was actually, I think, the easier question. The tougher question is, unless there is a plan in place for the Sunni territory to be governed and secured by the Sunni tribes, then I think the likelihood is very high that you will see an opening for ISIS to make their way back in,” Gabbard warned.

For those who may not know, it was 57 years ago today that Batista fled Cuba and Fidel Castro filled the vacuum created. It did not happen as depicted in Godfather II, but he did leave in a military plane with Mrs. Batista, a few friends, and lots of personal belongings. In other words, people were not running for their boats or revolutionaries willing to blow up themselves for the cause. In fact, most Cubans heard the news on radio or TV, as my parents did.

On January 1st, the Cuban government will celebrate another anniversary. Usually, Fidel Castro gave a multi-hour speech that you had to watch on TV unless you had a radio that could pick up a Miami AM music station.

This year, Raul Castro, who is filling in for sick brother, is telling Cubans to get ready for very hard times ahead. My friend Dr. Carlos Eire brought this speech to my attention today and commented this:

Well…. as unpleasant as it is to say “we told you so,” it’s appropriate to do so after reading today’s article in the Washington Post.

In December Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” unfolded on the world stage as the representatives of 190 countries gathered together in Paris solemnly proclaimed they all saw the intricate fabric the climate warriors had woven — the “settled science” of global warming that forecast an uninhabitable planet if man did not scale back his use of fossil fuels to close to zero by the end of this century. Unfortunately there was no little child to prick the bubble. The Heartland Institute was in Paris with an alternate conference designed to do just that, but no one was paying attention. Too much money and hype had been invested in the global warming tailors. “Success” was ecstatically proclaimed far and wide as, by universal agreement, the 190 countries each pledged to sharply cut back carbon emissions and to meet every five years to up their pledges.

There were a couple of clear-cut winners at the conference. One was the rulers of the so-called developing nations who, as their price for signing on, held up the developed nations (notably the U.S. and the EU) for pledges of over $100 billion per year as penance for their historic responsibility in causing the supposed problem in the first place. In a specially absurd feature of the conference, Zimbabwe’s brutal despot Robert Mugabe, officially banned from entering the EU for his human rights record (and who has literally destroyed his once prosperous country), was not only in Paris, but as chairman of the African Union, the chief representative to negotiate Africa’s demands. One of those demands was for channeling those billions directly to African leaders rather than having them supervised by donor countries who might seek to make sure they actually went to the projects for which they were scheduled. To assorted African dictators all that money is a potential grand slush fund for everything from palaces to Maseratis to Hermes handbags (for the multiple ladies in their lives).

With an obstinate atmosphere failing to warm as predicted, another peril was needed to sustain the junk-science industry and keep lazy reporters supplied with bogus scoops. No problem! Conscript a Disney character, garnish with misrepresentations and there you have it: ocean acidification
How scary is “ocean acidification”? Very scary. The previously scary “global warming” stopped 19 years ago, but do stay scared because all that CO2 since 1997 has instead been “acidifying” the oceans. Please imagine baby oysters dissolving in the equivalent of battery acid, and hermit crabs raising a nervous feeler to discover that their protective shells have disappeared. Curse you, horrible human-caused CO2 emissions!

In one celebrated episode involving Climate Science™, a lone oyster farmer in Maine put his oysters into a bucket and then found that the bivalves at the bottom were crunched because their shells were weakened.[1] Can any reasonable person ask for better scientific proof of ocean “acidification”?

“Ocean Acidification”, the evil twin of global warming, is scary because the chemistry is so simple. For example, the Australian Academy of Science in its curriculum for secondary schools, organizes an experiment for 16-year-olds where crushed ocean shells go into a test tube of sea water. You add acid or vinegar or something, and then watch the shells fizz and dissolve!

Every Palestinian knows in his heart that we do not want a state of our own alongside Israel, but rather instead of Israel. This includes all the land of Palestine and Israel. It means that Jews have no right to exist on even one speck of it.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas claims he wants to reach a peace agreement with Israel. But at the same time he and his henchmen incite the Palestinians to stab, run over and shoot Israelis to death, while he idealizes, glorifies and finances — with the funds he receives from the West — the terrorists and their families.

The Palestinian people are already almost totally radicalized, even in the West Bank. They do not seem concerned about living under an Islamist regime run by Hamas or Islamic State.

Abbas’s goal is now, with the help of the international community, to impose a solution on Israel. The solution he seeks – a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines – would pose an existential threat to Israel. It would also just be a matter of time before the Palestinian state will be run by Hamas or Islamic State.

What can be done with these Americans and Europeans? They always seem pining for a dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians that would end in a peace agreement, yet oddly all of them seem aware that the Palestinians have not, in all honestly, met Israel’s most minimal demands: the cessation of incitement (agreed to even under the Oslo accords — and requiring no funding!) and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish State. Many throughout the world still view Israel as potentially the next — and 22nd — Arab state.

BEIRUT—Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for a deadly double suicide bombing in a Kurdish Syrian city, part of the extremist group’s campaign against Kurdish-controlled areas of the country.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights both reported casualties of at least 16 and no more than 20, and about 30 wounded.

The Sunni Muslim militant group claimed the attacks in a statement distributed online, boasting that it had killed 30 people and wounded hundreds more.

Islamic State bombers targeted two crowded restaurants on Wednesday evening in central Qamishli, in the northeastern province of Hasakah, according to Syria’s state news agency and the Observatory, a U.K.-based opposition monitoring group.

They entered and detonated their explosives as people ate, the Observatory said. The majority of the victims were Christian, it added.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ordered his defense minister to expedite development of the country’s ballistic missile program in response to new U.S. sanctions set to be imposed on Iranian defense companies.

Mr. Rouhani’s comments, made on his official Twitter account Thursday, cast fresh doubts on the prospects for the U.S. and Iran to successfully implement the landmark nuclear agreement reached last July.

The Obama administration has said it could begin removing sanctions on Tehran as early as January since Iran has begun taking steps to roll back its nuclear program.

But the U.S. is concurrently preparing to impose new sanctions on Iranian defense firms and officials in the wake of two ballistic missile tests staged by Tehran over the past three months, according to senior U.S. officials.

Mr. Rouhani said Thursday such sanctions are illegal and that Tehran will take steps to retaliate, including accelerating the pace of its missile program.

WASHINGTON—The White House has delayed its plan to impose new financial sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program, according to U.S. officials, amid growing tensions with Iran over the nuclear deal struck earlier this year.

The officials said the Obama administration remains committed to combating Iran’s missile program and that sanctions being developed by the U.S. Treasury Department remain on the table. They also said imposing such penalties was legal under the landmark nuclear agreement forged between global powers and Iran in July.
U.S. officials offered no definitive timeline for when the sanctions would be imposed after the decision was made Wednesday to delay them. At one point, they were scheduled to be announced Wednesday morning in Washington, according to a notification the White House sent to Congress.

Republican leaders on Thursday accused the Obama administration of losing its will to challenge Iran after Tehran countered on Thursday that it would accelerate the development of its arsenal.

“If the president’s announced sanctions ultimately aren’t executed, it would demonstrate a level of fecklessness that even the president hasn’t shown before,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a leading critic of the nuclear deal, in an interview.

“While the Hizballah-loving Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of Britain’s Labor party, Sahra Wagenknecht, one of two leaders of Germany’s hard-left die Linke party, recently made headlines by equating the aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State with the group’s own barbaric deeds. Her opinions are shared by her fellow party members, as Benjamin Weinthal reports:

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn has a socialist doppelganger in Germany. Her name is Sahra Wagenknecht and she serves as co-chairperson of the largest opposition party in the German Bundestag—The Left Party.

Her remarks blanketed the German media on Tuesday because she equated Islamic State terrorism in Paris with Britain’s aerial campaign designed to help destroy the terrorist organisation in the Syrian and Iraqi theatres of war.

‘Of course it is no less a crime to murder innocent civilians in Syria with bombs than it is to shoot them in Parisian restaurants and concert halls. One is individual terrorism, the other state-sponsored,’ Sahra Wagenknecht, an admirer of the now-defunct East German communist state and Stalinism, told the Bundestag on Monday.

The attitudes of Wagenknecht’s Left Party mirror in many respects the enthusiasm of Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn for Hamas, Iran’s clerical regime and Hezbollah. Moral conflation and a bottomless level of cultural relativity dominate the thinking of both hardcore left-wing leaderships. For Wagenknecht, Corbyn brought ‘movement into the sleeping social democracy of Europe’.

The Left Party is a formidable force in German politics. Germany’s Parliament has 630 members, of which the Left Party has 64 seats. This amalgam of West German leftists, trade unionists and East German communists (including many former Stasi officers) catapulted itself into the largest opposition bloc in the 2013 national election.