RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is Saudi Arabia still providing “Alms for Jihad”?http://spectator.org/suing-the-saudis/

On May 17, the Senate passed legislation that would enable private citizens to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and other Saudis possibly connected to al-Qaeda for damages incurred in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that took nearly three thousand lives.

Predictably, the Saudis took an apocalyptic view of the bill. Before it passed the Senate, the Saudi foreign minister reportedly threatened to pull hundreds of billions of dollars of investments from the United States. One Saudi newspaper headlined it as a “satanic bill” that would “open the gates of hell.” In truth, the bill would open a window on the Saudis’ involvement in the 9/11 attacks that they, and our government, have made extraordinary efforts to conceal.

President Obama has threatened to veto the measure.

Famous by now are the twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report that reportedly describe the connections between the Saudi government (including the Saudi royals and other Saudi citizens) and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Obama administration says it’s considering releasing the pages, but it’s a good bet it won’t because of Obama’s obsequious relationship with the Saudis.

What else do we know that could justify lawsuits against the Saudi government, and Saudi individuals, banks, and charities?

A December 30, 2009 State Department cable labeled “Secret/No Forn” (meaning no disclosure to foreign governments) published by WikiLeaks, says that, “…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources…”

If a nation that pretends to be our ally is still funding al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11, we have to ask are they still?

Equally valuable information, and a ton of it, is contained in Alms for Jihad by J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins. It details the enormous and complex web of Islamic charities and banks, many funded by prominent Saudis, that are directly involved in funding terrorism.

Recently my wife and I drove past the house in New Hampshire where I grew up. It looked lonely, in need of repair and, to anthropomorphize the place, hesitant about the future – a metaphor for our nation, with its flagging leadership, crumbling infrastructures and doubt that the future can be as good as the past – a past, admittedly, more idyllic in memory than in reality.

When my newly-married parents came to the house in 1938 the country was mired in an eight-year-old depression, Europe was on the verge of falling to the Nazis, and Japan had occupied large swaths of China. With a future so uncertain, it would not have been surprising if my parents had decided that prospects were too bleak to bring another person into the world. Instead, the first of nine children was born eleven months later – about as positive a bet on the future that a couple can make! Educated people (and my father had a Harvard education) don’t bring children into a world for which they have no hope.

Yet, today, amidst living standards our ancestors could not have imagined, we seem to have lost confidence that the future can be better than the past. Why? And why have we, as a nation, reached a nadir in terms of national confidence, while our leaders are at an apex in terms of supercilious arrogance? Is there a connection between the descent of the former and the ascent of the latter?

As a nation, we should be more confident. We should be able to look back over the past hundred years, with pride and relief in equal measures. The great domestic issues of segregation, civil and women’s rights were addressed and largely resolved in the last seventy-five years. Geography, abundant natural resources, a literate electorate, a penchant for innovation and hard work, and a democratic political system have made our nation the most powerful (and most decent) the world has ever known. What, for example, would have happened had Communism spread to the United States, as looked possible in the two decades following the Russian Revolution? What if Hitler had prevailed in Europe in the 1940s? What if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War in the 1980s? What would have happened to liberty and individual human rights? Would standards of living be as high? Would declines in global poverty have been as rapid as they were? Would there be a United Nations, or a World Bank? What would have happened to the world’s great centers of learning – to the Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, Harvard’s and Yale’s? Would the environment be as clean? Would science have advanced for the benefit of mankind, or would it have been used to sustain dictatorial governments? Those rhetorical questions and their answers should give confidence to Americans that their country is exceptional. America is not perfect and hubris is a sin, but confidence, which stems from self-reliance, a belief in one’s capabilities and faith that the nation’s laws will protect personal and property rights, is critical for a bright and sustained future.

For a century progressives have argued that History and a more scientific understanding of human behavior have required a new, “living” Constitution interpreted “according to the Darwinian principle,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. The technocrats, whom Wilson called “the hundreds who are wise,” were gradually empowered by an expanded federal government to guide the millions he dubbed “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” This concentration of power in the federal Leviathan has subjected both individuals and the states to its ever-expanding, intrusive reach.

In other words, we now have a kind of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. To quote George Orwell, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation, however, is much more that an intelligent restatement of the Constitution’s protections. A member of the board of directors of the Claremont Institute, and a contributor to the American Thinker and the Federalist websites, Curry corrects various misconceptions and recovers influences on the founders that are too often forgotten.

He pays special attention to the influence of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment on men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Curry clearly and briskly sets out the key insights of philosophers Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, as well as of Protestant clergyman John Witherspoon, who immigrated to America, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served as president of what would become Princeton University, where his students included three future Supreme Court Justices and 28 senators.

The distinctively Scottish belief in innate human faculties of “moral sense” and “common sense,” Curry argues, left their mark on the American Enlightenment that produced the Declaration and the Constitution. The moral sense, as Hutcheson explained, is the instinctive faculty for recognizing right and wrong. It is as much a part of human nature as is hearing or seeing, providing access to elementary morals through feelings of pleasure and pain innate to a social animal; and a political community is impossible without it. Reid expanded this notion to include common sense, which Curry defines as “an endowment of human nature that makes possible both moral knowledge and human knowledge in general.” Common sense unifies the reports of the other senses, both physical and moral, into a full picture of the real world. With it we are able to make rational judgments on everything from technical knowledge to moral questions, in order to determine what is both useful and morally right. Rather than being John Locke’s tabula rasa, a “blank slate” upon which experience writes ideas and concepts, people are born with both common sense and the moral sense upon which popular sovereignty must be founded.

One week into office, President Barack Obama apologized to the Muslim world declaring, “we have not been perfect.” Traveling the globe as president, he continually blames America for the world’s ills.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, veterans groups opposed Obama’s May 27 visit to Hiroshima, Japan, where America dropped the world’s first atomic bomb, bringing an end to World War II.

Although Obama promised he would not second-guess President Harry Truman’s August 6, 1945 decision to use the weapon, he did. This should not be surprising—it was proffered by self-confessed liar (concerning the Iranian nuclear deal) Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

At Hiroshima, Obama said the “scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Supposedly, the morality of dropping the bomb was lost upon Truman. Later, Truman challenged critics to stand upon the keels of Pearl Harbor’s sunken battleships where remains of thousands of young men, never given a chance to live full lives, are entombed and opt for a costly invasion.

Basking in the peaceful sunshine of the hard fought freedom won by our Greatest Generation 71 years ago, Obama easily moralized about Truman’s decision. But, by not dropping the bomb, a million-plus more American lives would have been lost by invading Japan. Planners knew Operation Olympic, set to begin in November 1945, would be the bloodiest seaborne attack of all time.

Unlike Obama who, today, pontificates as an idealist, the situation back then demanded a realist as U.S. president.

Obama chastised Truman’s decision with the statement, “How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He later added, “We shall not repeat the evil” of Hiroshima.

A VERRAY PARFIT GENTLE KNIGHT BY MALCOLM FORBES
Amid the celebratory hullaballoo marking the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, it is worth remembering that 400 years ago another writer died, one whose greatest work also transformed literature and created a new way of seeing the world.

On publication in 1605, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha became an international bestseller and brought Miguel de Cervantes, an aging, crippled veteran of Spain’s wars, fame and fortune after years of moderate artistic success, financial loss, imprisonment and disillusionment. Readers delighted in the picaresque scrapes and adventures of Cervantes’ comic double-act: Don Quixote, a humble nobleman whose obsession with chivalric romances has deluded him into thinking he is a knight errant; and Sancho Panza, his dumpy, trusty squire who is “a little short of salt in the brain-pan”. The book was such a hit that Cervantes sent his characters out on fresh sallies in a sequel ten years later. Both volumes became one classic, an imperishable cornerstone of Western culture, and a source of pleasure and inspiration for generations of readers and writers.

Chiming with the anniversary of Cervantes’ death comes a book on him and his famous creation. The Man Who Invented Fiction is not a traditional biography of Cervantes. In his introduction, William Egginton, a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University, explains that his book explores Cervantes’ life in order to demonstrate how the author achieved his “innovation”. “I hope to cast a new light on what fiction is,” Egginton writes, “and to show how it was that Miguel de Cervantes came to invent it.”

Much of Cervantes’ life consisted of encountering and surmounting hard knocks, and weathering the debilitating fug of desengaño, or disappointment, which plagued late-16th-century Spain. His father was hounded by creditors and eventually jailed, which resulted in a childhood spent largely on the move and blighted by poverty and dishonour. Egginton’s early chapters depict an adolescent Cervantes seeking solace by writing poetry.

However, the book truly takes off when he trades his native Spain and relative peace for Italy and war. He participates in great battles, makes treacherous voyages and suffers many injuries, including the permanent loss of feeling in his left hand. Egginton argues that Cervantes’ later fiction is shot through with ambivalence towards war: a deft seesawing whereby a character is seen lauding or enacting individual deeds of valour while in the same breath condemning the practice of warfare and skewering the state for its merciless treatment of soldiers.

Cervantes was held captive for five years in Algiers (during which time he made four unsuccessful escape attempts) and later wound up in jail in Seville. According to Egginton, both internments provided valuable first-hand material to draw on for Don Quixote. Cervantes’ stinking cell in Seville exposed him to the wild stories and perspectives of numerous rogues and outcasts. Algiers engendered the intercalated “Captive’s Tale”. Egginton goes on to make the convincing claim that while capitalising on the traumatic memory of his captivity to create fiction, Cervantes was in turn using fiction as a means of helping himself overcome that trauma. What’s more, in writing invented stories to deal with his personal pain, “Cervantes was inaugurating a particularly modern use of literature.”

On Memorial Day, the flowers bloom. A dozen towns in a dozen states all claim that it began there when after the long weary struggle of the Civil War, the mothers and sisters of the lost and the fallen brought fresh cut flowers to bring a touch of life to the dead men entombed in the cold, gray stone.

“From the silence of sorrowful hours, The desolate mourners go, Lovingly laden with flowers, Alike for the friend and the foe,” reads the famous Francis Miles Finch poem which helped popularize the practice.

Today the wars are no longer fraternal. The First World War is the last war that had anything brotherly in it. It was a war where soldiers from both sides could observe a Christmas truce and hurl nothing deadlier than snowballs at each other. The end of that terrible war on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” became Armistice Day and then, when the “war to end all wars” did not end them, but instead gave way to wars fought against terrible evils, Nazism, Communism, Islam, it became Veteran’s Day to remember those who would go on sacrificing in this eternal struggle against evil.

But while wars are no longer fraternal, the flowers are laid now on the graves of foes, not friends.

The men and women who die fighting for the cause of freedom are not accorded a fraction of the tender affection from the press that it lavishes on a single imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist. We live today in an America in which the butchers of the Jihad in Guantanamo Bay receive better medical care than veterans waiting endlessly at the VA. While Obama cut off hot meals for Marines in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorists in Guantanamo Bay were enjoying lemon baked fish, honey glazed chicken, lyonaise rice, tandouri chicken breast, okra, hummus, dates, honey and seasoned lentils.

While veterans died at the VA, the men they had fought and helped capture were gifted with a $750,000 soccer field. This treatment is an obscene echo of the days of segregation when German POWs were allowed to sit inside at eateries while the African-American soldiers who guarded them had to wait outside. This segregation no longer occurs by race, but by patriotism and creed.

Obama denies that Islamic terrorism exists and suppresses any training materials about the role of Islam in Islamic terrorism while his administration warns of domestic terror threats from veterans. Muslim migrants from Syria receive lavish social benefits while health care for veterans is slashed. The Muslim migrants, many of whom support Islamic terrorists, benefit from job programs while veterans head for the unemployment line. This hatefully discriminatory attitude has become pervasive on the left.

Hollywood bends over backward to avoid accurately portraying Muslim terrorists, but depicts returning veterans as unstable killers and ticking time bombs. The media gushes over each petty Islamophobia grievance, like Tahera Ahmad, who claimed that she didn’t receive a Diet Coke can on a plane only because she was Muslim, while sweeping the sweeping the thousand veterans who died because of the VA scandal under the progressive prayer rug. A Muslim Diet Coke matters more than a thousand dead veterans.

State John Kerry, said Friday that the doctoring of several minutes of videotape from a State Department press briefing about the Iran nuclear negotiations was “clumsy and stupid and inappropriate”…..Could have described himself….rsk

WASHINGTON—State Department officials tried Friday to address the widening fallout from their admission this past week that a videotaped press briefing had been doctored to remove contradictory public statements about the Obama administration’s secret negotiations with Iran.

Congressional Republicans demanded documents related to the episode and called Friday for an investigation by the department’s inspector general. But senior Obama administration officials were unclear about just how much cooperation they would lend to Capitol Hill investigators or whether an additional internal review was warranted.

State Department officials confirmed this past week that a lower-level civil servant was asked to expunge roughly nine minutes of tape from a Dec. 2, 2013, briefing during which a Fox News reporter quizzed then-State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, about whether the administration had lied about holding secret negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Earlier that year, Ms. Psaki’s predecessor said there had been no secret, one-on-one talks between the U.S. and Iran. Asked about that assertion, Ms. Psaki replied indirectly, saying that sometimes “diplomacy needs privacy.” That was the portion deleted from the video, though it remained in a text transcript.

State Department officials have said Ms. Psaki didn’t herself order the doctoring of the tape. But they haven’t determined which official in the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs made the request, and have suggested they might never find out.

“We’re in the process of studying the letters. We’re in the process of seeing how to be responsive,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters on Friday, asked about the congressional demands. “We believe we have investigated the incident to the point we can.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Off we go into the wild blue yonder,
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At ’em boys, Give ‘er the gun! (Give ‘er the gun now!)
Down we dive, spouting our flame from under,
Off with one heckuva roar!
We live in fame or go down in flame.
Hey! Nothing’ll stop the U.S. Air Force!

Words and Music by Captain Robert Crawford, ©1939 as the “Army Air Corps Song
This is a memoir of a hero and patriot gifted with memory and insight published by Casemate, a UK publishing firm for military history. Colonel Brim is 93 years old.

In this engaging book we see how an 18-year-old miner shoveling ore from deep in the ground in Utah suddenly found himself, only two years later, 30,000 feet in the air over Nazi Germany, piloting a Flying Fortress in the first wave of America’s air counteroffensive in Europe.

Like thousands of other young Americans, Ray Brim was plucked by the U.S. Army to be a combat flyer, and was quickly pitted against the hardened veterans of the Luftwaffe. Brim turned out to have a natural knack for flying, however, and was assigned to the select squadron developing lead Pathfinder techniques, while experimenting with radar. He was among the first to test the teeth of the Luftwaffe’s defenses, and once those techniques had been honed, thousands of other bomber crews would follow into the maelstrom, from which 80,000 never returned.

This work gives us vivid insights into the genesis of the American air campaign, told with the humor, attention to detail and humility that captures the heart and soul of our “Greatest Generation.” Brim was one of the first Pathfinder pilots to fly both day and night missions leading bomb groups of 600-plus bombers to their targets. At the onset of his missions in the spring of 1943, B-17 crews were given a 50-50 chance of returning. Each of his raids were nerve-wracking forays into the unknown; with struggles to survive the damage to his plane due to flak and German fighter attacks, in order to bring his 10-man crew home, often wounded but still alive.

Mark Twain famously said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” So distorted is the news coverage about the Middle East today, you’re better off uninformed. Whether in the media or academia, treatment of the topic drips with anti-Israel bias and historical ignorance. Dr. Steven Carol’s new book Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East is a necessary antidote. The purpose of the book, according to Dr. Carol, is to “combat the mistaken beliefs, misrepresentations, and outright fabrications that have been perpetrated to the present.” He achieves his object in this impressive work, a nearly 1,000-page volume (with historical maps the author himself made) covering virtually every aspect of the Middle East, from the Arab-Jewish conflict to the history of the Kurds, Sharia law, Islamic culture, and more.

Understanding the Volatile and Dangerous Middle East succeeds both as a reference work and an entertaining read. Even those knowledgeable about Middle East history will learn from this book. For instance, did you know that the secret signal for Egyptian forces to seize the Suez Canal was “Ferdinand de Lesseps” – the name of the chief engineer in the construction of the canal? Egyptian President Nasser embedded the signal in a speech he gave at Mansheyya Square in Alexandria on July 26, 1956. He repeated it “fourteen times in the space of 10 minutes,” Dr. Carol relates, which is amusing as it suggests Nasser didn’t trust his forces to get the message.

It isn’t surprising that the book is filled with such tidbits for Dr. Carol has spent a lifetime studying his subject. The author of six books, including Middle East Rules of Thumb, he will be most familiar to Arizona residents, where he has taught at the high school, college and graduate levels and is the official historian of the Sunday radio program “The Middle East Radio Forum.” He is also Middle East consultant to the Salem Radio Network.

The author’s section on Israel is first-rate, including an overview of Jewish ties to the Land from ancient times. There’s a strong section on population exchanges throughout history where Dr. Carol zeroes in on the double standard applied to Palestinian Arab refugees compared to the vastly greater number of those displaced in other conflicts. Carol also explains the true nature of the conflict: “It is not the ‘occupation’ of various territories that is the issue, but rather the Arab/Muslim pre-occupation with destroying the Jewish state, no matter what borders it has.” All of this will be familiar to readers ofOutpost, but sadly not to the wider public.

The book is refreshingly un-PC, which becomes apparent right from the start when Dr. Carol opens with a list of basic principles. Here are just a few examples: “In the Arab/Muslim culture, pride, dignity and honor outrank truth on any scale of political values”; “The Arab/Muslim world views their history as starting in 622 C.E. Anything that happened before is an irrelevant myth”; and, “In the Islamic Middle East, the rational desire for peace is often perceived as weakness – a despised trait in that culture.”