RUTHFULLY YOURS

This must be Obama’s idea of gun control for the military.

Actually, it’s quite serious. The Air Force chief of staff, General Mark Welsh, said in a statement that we’ve dropped 20,000 bombs and missiles on ISIS since the war began 15 months ago and the supplies are not being replenished at a fast enough rate.

CNN:

As the U.S. ramps up its campaign against the Islamist terror group in Iraq and Syria, the Air Force is now “expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force chief of staff Gen. Mark Welsh said in a statement.

“B-1s have dropped bombs in record numbers. F-15Es are in the fight because they are able to employ a wide range of weapons and do so with great flexibility. We need the funding in place to ensure we’re prepared for the long fight,” Welsh said in the statement. “This is a critical need.”

The bombing campaign has left the U.S. Air Force with what an Air Force official described as munitions depot stocks “below our desired objective.”

1. Chanukah’s historical context according to the four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus and The War of the Jews by Joseph Ben Mattityahu (Josephus Plavius): In 175 BCE, the Seleucid Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies of Syria (one third of the disintegrated Greek Empire) wished to exterminate Judaism and forcibly convert Jews to Hellenic values, suspecting that the Jews were allies of his chief rival, Egypt. In 169 BCE, upon his return to Syria from a war against Egypt, Antiochus (IV) devastated Jerusalem, massacred Jews, forbade the practice of Judaism and desecrated the Temple. The 167 BCE Jewish rebellion featured the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family: Mattityahu, a priest from the town of Modi’in, and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan and Elazar. The heroic, creative battle tactics of the Maccabees, were consistent with the reputation of Jews as superb warriors, who were frequently hired as mercenaries by Egypt, Syria, Rome and other global and regional powers. The battles of the Maccabees inspired the Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire from the battle against Pompey in 63 BCE through the end of the Bar Kokhba Rebellion in 135 CE.

2. Israel’s Founding Father, David Ben Gurion: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history…. The Maccabees overcame one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history due to the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment ….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953).

3. Chanukah has been a universal role model of national and religious liberation struggle against all odds, the victory of principle-driven faith and liberty over convenience-driven cynicism and opportunism, tenacious optimism over pessimism.

President Obama sold his nuclear deal with Iran with promises that the accord would be based on “unprecedented verification,” and this week we were reminded of how much that promise was worth. Witness the latest report on Iran’s nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The IAEA is the U.N. outfit that is supposed to monitor Iran’s compliance with the agreement, which requires Tehran to answer the agency’s questions on its past nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief. On Wednesday the agency produced its “final assessment”—the finality here having mostly to do with the U.N. nuclear watchdog giving up hope of ever getting straight answers.

Hence we learn that “Iran did not provide any clarification” regarding experiments the agency believes it conducted on testing components of nuclear components at its military facility at Parchin. “The information available to the Agency, including the results of the sampling analysis and the satellite imagery, does not support Iran’s statements on the purpose of the building,” says the report. “The Agency assesses that the extensive activities undertaken by Iran since February 2012 at the particular location of interest to the Agency seriously undermined the Agency’s ability to conduct effective verification.”

Modern human accomplishments seldom outstrip miracles of the past, but those who light the candles for Hanukkah beginning Sunday night are involved in an even greater struggle for political and religious freedom than the Maccabees in their time.

The festival commemorates the recapture and rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem almost 22 centuries ago, initiating eight decades of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. Today’s defenders of Israel fight not only for their own restored political and religious freedom but for the right of all nations to freedom from increasingly violent and maddened enemies.

Jewish political history is well represented by the emblematic legend of the oil that was required to consecrate the Temple after its defilement at the hands of the Hellenistic Seleucid rulers. Thought to be enough to last only a single day, the oil burned for the eight days needed to obtain a new supply.

The new movie Youth is a feast for the eyes, but it’s far more than that. It’s about two old men, a famous composer (played by Michael Caine) and a famous film director (Harvey Keitel) on summer vacation at a gorgeous resort in the Swiss Alps — during which they confront truths about their lives and about people and things they have lost. Yes, I am well aware that with that last sentence I have made the movie sound unspeakably boring to most readers — but stick with me for a minute: It is, in fact, the exact opposite of boring, because, for the film’s two hours, the screen is always full of life, incident, emotion, and color. One scene was notable for me because it was a solitary exception to this rule: Rachel Weisz, as Caine’s daughter, gives a speech about how Caine was an absentee father and didn’t show an interest in his family even when he was home. I can’t fault Weisz’s performance — she delivers the monologue quite convincingly – but it’s a scene that really belongs in another movie, a much talkier melodrama.

With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist attack by devout Muslims against Americans, as it happens. It was an eminently jihadist act of murderous aggression by self-starting, home-grown Muslim terrorists.
Enough already of Obama and his ilk. The war against sudden jihad self-generated by Muslim immigrants and their offspring, threatening literally every American, is by now both real and present. It can and must be won, in spite of Obama and his ilk. From now on every Muslim is a legitimate suspect and every non-Muslim is a potential victim, with self-defense strategies understood and applied.

I confess to watching some pretty cretinous TV shows. Whenever they include any politics the conservative is always shown as a lout- an oaf who offends and blusters and lies under the false umbrella of “patriotism.”

He/she will insult the courage of prominent war heroes, mock another person’s looks, incite with trumped up statistics, offend a disabled reporter with wild hand gestures and, as The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler probably summed it up become “a fact checker’s dream…and nightmare. He spouts off so many ‘facts,’ often twisted or wrong, that it takes a lot of time to hack through the weeds.”

Sometimes he/she stumbles on some truth, but is so wrong on foreign policy- dealing with terrorism, North Korea, the Middle East with simplistic solutions.

I never would have thought that a candidate like that could emerge, and more incredible- I never thought that some of my friends- intelligent and politically savvy people could support a mountebank ( : a boastful unscrupulous pretender : charlatan)for the highest office…rsk

Americans used to laugh at the bereted Iraqi Information Minister screaming, “I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad”, even while they could be seen moving into the city.

Now Baghdad Bob’s rhetoric has been transplanted over from Baghdad to Washington D.C.

Last year, Obama said, “I want to be clear: the American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission.” A good way to get stinking drunk is to drink a shot every time Obama precedes a blatant lie with an “I want to be clear.” And this time was no different.

The year before that he told the American people, “I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria.”

No word on whether soldiers in the “Specialized Expeditionary Targeting Force” will be wearing sandals or slippers as they carry out raids into Syria to free hostages and capture ISIS terrorists.

Obama had assured Americans that the mission “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Did he annex Syria and Iraq as new states while Congress was in recess?

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Cynthia E. Ayers is currently Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. Prior to accepting the Task Force position, she served as Vice President of EMPact Amercia, having retired from the National Security Agency after over 38 years of federal service.

I recently had the pleasure of participating in a meeting held by the local chapter leaders of three rather prominent organizations of security professionals (mostly cyber-security). These organizations are generally known for keeping their membership up-to-date with current threats to national security; thus, I was utterly shocked when one of them told me that his members didn’t care about foreign policy. When pressed, he assured me that nobody outside the Washington DC beltway cared about foreign policy.

Having worked national security issues my entire life, I see foreign policy and our country’s national security as inextricably linked. With acts of terrorism from foreign and domestic sources making the news on a daily basis, reports of massive numbers of increasingly successful cyberattacks, acknowledgment of an ever-expanding nuclear threat as well as attacks (physical and cyber) on critical infrastructure, can anyone convincingly argue otherwise? Especially after Paris and San Bernardino?

A January 2015 announcement by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists proclaimed that it is now “3 Minutes to Midnight” on the Doomsday Clock, a change — as they noted — that is reflective of an international leadership problem. As indicated, practically every threat we now face (and they are legion) is of international concern. Our foreign policy is driven by what goes on internationally.

According to a sensitive International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report leaked to the press today on possible past nuclear-weapons-related work by Iran (click here to read), the agency found that Iran engaged in “coordinated” nuclear weapons activities until 2003, and some nuclear-weapons work continued until 2009. This contradicts a widely cited intelligence estimate declaring that Iran had given up nuclear-weapons work completely in 2003.

The IAEA said there were no “credible indications” of nuclear-weapons-related activities in Iran after 2009, though this is not the same as having positive evidence that they stopped. The IAEA also said that Iran’s nuclear-weapons work was limited to feasibility and scientific studies and to acquiring nuclear-weapons-related capabilities.

This IAEA report follows an investigation of the possible military dimensions (PMD) of Iran’s nuclear program, an issue that the IAEA has been struggling to resolve for several years. Although this investigation was agreed to in the nuclear talks that produced the July 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it was formally separated from the nuclear accord at Iran’s insistence. For this reason, sanctions against Iran can be lifted regardless of the PMD investigation’s outcome.