RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349917/oprahs-commencement-confusion-charles-c-w-cooke

What do you get if you cross a collection of witless Hallmark platitudes, a fairly strange and inordinately rich woman who has lived in a bubble for 30 or so years, and a congregation of people virtually begging to be told that they are wonderful?

The answer? Oprah Winfrey’s recent commencement address at Harvard University.
As one might expect, Winfrey’s rambling lecture featured the same series of fatuous prosaicisms that almost all university commencement addresses contain. And yet, somehow, it was worse. “In our political system and the media,” Winfrey proclaimed self-seriously at the outset,

we often see the reflection of a country that is polarized, that is paralyzed, that is self-interested. And yet I know you know the truth. We all know that we are better than the cynicism and the pessimism that is regurgitating throughout Washington and the 24-hour cable-news cycle.

This is what the English delicately call “total bloody tosh.” It appears not to have dawned on Winfrey that “the media” and “our political system” are “reflecting” those things because they are there. That is what the word “reflection” means. The country is “polarized”; it is “paralyzed” because it is polarized; and human society is — and always will be — “self-interested.” Our constitutional republic is designed to diffuse that self-interest and polarization peacefully, but that it does so extremely effectively should not be taken as a sign that our politics will be serene. They will not.

Nevertheless, judging by her words, Oprah evidently thinks she’s above all that. And, as is customary, she elected to flatter the group assembled in front of the dais by pretending that they are above all that, too. For some inexplicable reason, all groups of graduating students are ostensibly invested with magical powers the moment that they pull on a gown; moreover, for at least the duration of the address, they are informed that they belong to a generation that is better than any other generation has ever existed before in the history of the world. “Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any before it,” President Obama rather brazenly told Morehouse College graduates last month. Nobody bothered to ask, “Why?” Nobody dared to stand up, like George Harrison in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and to say, “I’m not!”

Mercifully, my graduation ceremony did not feature a commencement speaker, the birthday clown of the academic world. Instead, I stood for an hour in a cold hall and was subjected to an ancient ceremony conducted almost entirely in Latin. This had the welcome effect of making all of the attendees feel extremely small and insignificant, and of reminding us that, while great people had gone through these Oxford halls, we had not yet done anything even close to being of note. It was wonderful.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/larry_king_carrying_soviet_water.html

Larry King Carrying Soviet Water

Last week was a truly extraordinary one at the borders of the Putin dictatorship. Passing through the outward-bound turnstiles on a one-way trip into neo-Soviet exile were a trio of dissidents named Sergei Guriev (an economist), Masha Gessen (an author), and Oleg Kashin (a reporter). And passing them on the way in, to join international pariah Julian Assange on Kremlin-controlled propaganda TV network Russia Today, was the doddering Larry King.

The background for all this immigration activity was a trial taking place in the city of Kirov. There, Russia’s dissident #1, Alexei Navalny, was facing charges that could send him to prison in Siberia for ten years. Navalny, who now has over 350,000 followers on Twitter, irked the Kremlin by leading a street protest movement that at its height saw over 100,000 Russians flood the streets of Moscow chanting anti-Putin slogans and calling for his ouster. The Kremlin responded to Navalny just as it did to Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the latter announced his intention, as Navalny has done, to seek Putin’s job. It lobbed a barrage of embezzlement charges and followed up with a classic neo-Soviet show trial.

Rather than follow in Navalny’s footsteps, Guriev, Gessen, and Kashin are heading for the exits. Imagine that Paul Krugman was calling for Barack Obama’s ouster instead of his sainthood, and you’ll have an American version of Guriev, one of Russia’s most high-profile and respected economists. Leading Western expert Russia economist Anders Aslund calls the MIT- and Princeton-trained Guriev “a truly outstanding individual” as well as “one of the greatest Russian networkers and public performers,” and Guriev was the central figure at the New Economic School, Russia’s leading center of economic learning.

But Guriev was also a tough critic of Putin, which was unsurprising, given the dismal economic performance of the Putin government in recent years. Following a massive recession in 2009, Russia’s economic growth has fallen precipitously while inflation has soared. Unable to tolerate criticism on the key bulwark of his power, Putin forced Guriev out of the NES and made it clear that the next step would be incarceration. Guriev was forced to flee.

On economics, Putin is the man behind the curtain, and he knows it. He must liquidate any Toto he spots, and quick. He has circulated the propaganda that his vicious crackdown on civil liberty was necessary to save the country from economic collapse due to the failed policies of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, but that’s simply false. In Yeltsin’s last year in office, the Russian economy was roaring, with over 6% growth, and the next year it was 10%. When Putin’s policies took effect the year after that, growth fell by half. Now mired again in recession, Putin’s public support is shattering, and he is doing all he can to silence critics and hang on to power.

Hasan denies suggesting that our government should change foreign policy because angry Muslims don’t like it. Yet this is hard to square with the overall tenor of his argument

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3683/mehdi_hasan_s_suicidal_solution_to_islamic_extremism

Mehdi Hasan is the political editor of UK version of The Huffington Post and the presenter of Al Jazeera English shows The Café and Head to Head…..Another “moderate”…..not to be confused with the late Pakistani tenor Mehdi Hassan …..rsk

Mehdi Hasan likes nothing better than to launch sanctimonious tirades against Western foreign policy. Whether it’s Iraq, Afghanistan, the ‘War on Terror’, or support for Israel, Hasan is usually ready to pounce with a scathing and ill-informed diatribe.

So it’s hardly surprising that he has chosen to exploit the tragic murder of Drummer Lee Rigby for his latest rant.

In an article this week for the Huffington Post, Hasan rebukes the political class, particularly David Cameron, for denying its own role in this act of terror.

He accuses David Cameron and others of trying to “zealously police the parameters of the debate, pre-emptively warning off those who might dare connect the dots between wars abroad and terror at home”. He then goes on to quote from Michael Adebolajo’s vengeful tirade and his claim that he hacked a soldier to death because “Muslims are dying daily…This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Hasan thinks that we are deceived by our political masters. Foreign policy is purportedly a recruiting sergeant for terror yet it has become “the issue that dare not speak its name”.

For starters, Hasan should become familiar with the Islamic notion of taqiyya, the idea that Muslims can legitimately conceal their beliefs and deceive others if circumstances require it. Nowadays, radicals usetaqiyya to promote the view that terrorism is a cry of despair from the anguished and the aggrieved, a device for fighting back against the perceived wickedness of western foreign policy. They know that such victim-centred narratives play out well among our sceptical and often war-weary liberal commentariat, Hasan included.

In reality, jihadis everywhere entertain dreams of recreating a global Islamic caliphate ruled by sharia law. They detest any ‘apostate’ Muslim government which has not been thoroughly purged of its ties to western governments. Above all, they view all western interference in Muslim lands as automatically illegitimate and colonialist. For them, there is no legitimate self-defence against Islamist assault and even terrorists blown up in drone strikes are regarded as innocent.

The Australian National University has banned the satirisation of Islam after a student newspaper published a Quranic passage as a “rape fantasy”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3669/university_introduces_blasphemy_law_for_fear_of_muslim_violence

The Australian National University (ANU) has apparently banned the satirisation of Islam for fear of inciting violence and creating a backlash.

The Australian newspaper reported this week that the ANU cited international violence in the wake of the Danish cartoons and Innocence of Muslims film to justify its decision to force student newspaper Woroni to pulp a satirical infographic which described a passage from the Qu’ran as a “rape fantasy”.

The university also reportedly threatened student authors and editors of the infographic with disciplinary action, including academic exclusion and the withdrawal of the publication’s funding. Critics have argued that the university is effectively introducing a “blasphemy law” seeking to protect Islam from criticism.

The piece was the fifth in a satirical series entitled “Advice from Religion” which had previously discussed Catholicism, Scientology, Mormonism and Judaism – none of which drew complaint or university action.

In the April 16th edition of Woroni, authors Jamie Freestone, Mathew McGann and Todd Cooper posed the question, “How should I value women?”

Their answers referenced Aisha, the prophet Mohammed’s nine-year-old wife, and described the 72 “houris” – women depicted in the Qu’ran as large-bosomed virgins who are a reward in paradise – as a “rape fantasy”.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324563004578521320645171836.html Justice now says its affidavit against a Fox News reporter wasn’t true. As they try to save Attorney General Eric Holder’s job, not to mention his reputation, Obama Administration officials are employing some strange logic to defend the Justice Department’s investigation of journalists. It’ll be interesting to see if our liberal friends in the […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519482313147400.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop His second term is coming undone not because of scandal but because of decisions made in the previous four years. John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: “Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end.” His observation was made in the 1960s. But it’s true today of Barack […]

www.geraldahonigman.com Most people associate the word these days with Jews wanting to return to lands–beyond Israel’s 1949 UN-imposed, 9 to 15 mile wide armistice line existence–which they have called home, lived on, and owned property in for millennia but which much of the world now declares must once again become Judenrein.    As others have […]

As Laura is fluent in Arabic, she ably informs us of the sharp contrast between the message in the first session – in Arabic and directed to Muslims and their responsibility to perform jihad – and the second session – tailored to recruit non-Muslims.Keep in mind that this undercover work was conducted in 2005, eight years ago.
Janet Levy,
Los Angeles
Laura Mansfield is the pseudonym for an American author specializing in counter-terrorism, the Middle East, Islam, and Islamic terrorism. She is the former Associate Director of the Northeast Intelligence Network. Wikipedia
Published: 04/19/2005 at 1:00 AM

It happened again this week. I came out of the office to find a flyer under my windshield wipers inviting me to a special informational presentation on God and family values, and how to bring them back to the forefront in America.

I’m a parent so the flyer caught my interest. But as an analyst for the Northeast Intelligence Network, my eyes were riveted to the address on the flyer: The session was being held at a nearby mosque.

Curiosity got the better of me, and I decided it would be a good time for some onsite investigations of the mosque. In order to not attract undue attention, I dressed conservatively, wearing a navy jumper with a long sleeve white blouse, and low heels. I debated whether or not to put on a hijab (head scarf) then decided not to – after all, I was going to “learn,” not to pretend I was a Muslim.

I checked the mosque schedule on the Web, and discovered there was going to be an Arabic language session an hour before. So I showed up an hour early. The imam met me at the door, and told me that the presentation didn’t start for an hour, and suggested I come back in an hour. Fortunately, I had anticipated this. I explained that since I had quite a bit of reading to do for a class I was taking. “Can I just sit here and read?”

He hesitated a moment, then agreed. I sat in the back of the room, with my book open, and made a mental note to remember to turn the pages every so often, as I listened to the speakers in Arabic.

The first speaker was the head of the Muslim Students’ Association at the nearby university. Although I missed the beginning of the discussion, I caught up quickly. He was talking about the problems he had encountered on a recent trip, when TSA flagged him for extra screening. He joked about the fact that they had stopped him for extensive screening. He had anticipated that he would be screened and he had filled his carryon luggage with printouts of the Quran from the Internet, and had 15 or 16 CDs labeled in Arabic, and he had a notebook computer with him.

As he expected, he was delayed – he thought it was very amusing that while several TSA personnel were scrutinizing his personal belongings that his classmate from Jordan was able to walk through security, along with his American girlfriend, without any problems whatsoever.

markdurie.com blog The following report comes from Martin Janssen in Amman, Jordan (original in Dutch). The preceding notes and translation from Dutch into English are by Dr. Mark Durie, an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum. In his report Janssen tells of […]

Existential travails On an ordinary workday last week, strident sirens pierced our routine and for a few jarring minutes reminded all of us, throughout the country, of the dangers that lurk ominously beneath our run-of-the-mill existence. The civil defense exercise simulated massive rocket barrages on packed urban centers with an eye to practice responses to […]