RUTHFULLY YOURS

By the end of the new film “Trumbo,” there is the feeling that restitution has been made to the blacklisted writer whose career was relegated to writing scripts signed by noms de plume, or more appropriately, noms de guerre. Trumbo’s name appears triumphantly as the screenwriter of “Spartacus” and “Exodus” and Hollywood and the world know that it is his craftsmanship that won the two previous Oscars for “Roman Holiday” and “The Brave Bull.” Though we see the toll that the blacklist has taken on the lives of many people in the industry, we also see that the “evil forces” of HUAC and the anti-communist witch-hunters of the private sector have been defeated and freedom of speech and the sanctity of individual rights have triumphed.

This movie was released during the same week as the protests at the University of Missouri resulted in the resignation of the president, the chancellor and the football coach. Their crimes were far less egregious than govt subpoenas to self-incriminate and name other names. At Missouri and other colleges across the country, we are now dealing with issues of micro-aggression, insensitivity, hurt feelings and the black student demand for higher black faculty quotas. One student complained about the discrimination she felt when her roommate asked questions regarding her hairstyle and what products she used. The issue of Halloween costurmes such as Mexican sombreros and ponchos received the attention of Yale administrators who cautioned students to be mindful of ethnic sensibilities. A professor’s article calling for more levity and free expression for this holiday was met with calls for her dismissal. These newly heightened sensibilities have been responsible for craven administrative cancellations of speakers on campus or total disruption of the event if an undesirable speaker shows up.

President Obama on Sunday promised to “redouble” U.S. efforts against Islamic State, which shows he isn’t deaf to the political impact of Friday’s murderous assault in Paris. But why should anyone believe him? After years of dismissing the rising terror threat, Mr. Obama needs an epiphany if he doesn’t want to be remembered as the President who allowed radical Islam to spread and prosper.

“It is an act of war that was waged by a terrorist army, a jihadist army, by Daesh [the Arab name for Islamic State], against France,” said French President François Hollande on Saturday, in words that met the moment. Contrast that to Mr. Obama, who on Friday morning told ABC News that “we have contained” Islamic State. Some are saying Mr. Obama is guilty of bad timing, but the truth is worse: The remark is what he believes, or at least what he has wanted Americans to believe.

Watching the pundits turn themselves into human pretzels to avoid blaming Muslims for the atrocities in Paris is as funny as watching Inspector Clouzot looking for a perpetrator in a priceless Bechstein grand piano. The words “alleged” or “reportedly” are their permanent fig leaf….as in it is alleged, that the terrorists shouted “allahu akbar” which is just a term for “god is great”-or”reportedly” this was another “jihad.”

Who are the members of Al-Shabbab, Boko Haram, Abu-Sayef, Hamas, Hezbollah….and all the other “alienated and frustrated and poor youths” who wreak havoc throughout the globe? A teeny, tiny microscopic minority of badies who have hijacked “the Religion of Peace.” rsk

A graphic that appeared in the summer 2015 issue of al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine

“House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said “we do not yet know what specific group is responsible, but their strategy of attacking soft targets, spreading terror and uncertainty, and using the fear they create to further radicalize and recruit is one we will have to get much better at confronting.”

Congressional leaders said Friday night that it still wasn’t clear which terrorist group was responsible for coordinated terror attacks that killed more than 150 people.

Al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula was behind the January attacks in the city on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a grocery store. The terror group talked about their operation in the summer issue of Inspire magazine and threatened new attacks on France, “the party of Satan.”

“It is France that has shared all of America’s crimes. It is France that has committed crimes in Mali and the Islamic Maghreb. It is France that supports the annihilation of Muslims in Central Africa in the name of race cleansing,” said the magazine. “They are the party of Satan, the enemies of Allah the Almighty and the enemies of His Prophets – peace be upon them.”

‘These filthy money matters are the curse of my life and my only worry,” the 24-year-old Winston Churchill complained to his mother in 1898. Money troubles dogged Churchill throughout his life, as David Lough reveals in “No More Champagne,” his fascinating study of Churchill’s finances. On several occasions, the author shows, Churchill was “bailed out” by friends with gifts or loans when his debts threatened to push him into bankruptcy.

A month after becoming prime minister in 1940, Churchill ran out of money to pay his household bills, his taxes and the interest on his large overdraft. His personal assistant, Brendan Bracken, approached Sir Henry Strakosch, an Austrian-born banker who supported Churchill’s anti-Nazi stance. Strakosch promptly wrote out a check for £5,000, which the author estimates to be equivalent to $250,000 today. (Each page includes a helpful multiplier for calculating the rough modern equivalent of financial figures quoted in the book.) “The amount reached Churchill’s account on 21 June,” Mr. Lough writes. “Thus fortified, he paid a clutch of overdue bills from shirt-makers, watch-repairers and wine merchants before he turned his attention back to the war.”
No More Champagne

By David Lough
Picador, 532 pages, $32

Strakosch had also had to rescue him two years before, in the same week Hitler’s troops marched into Austria and Churchill gave an impassioned speech to Parliament warning that Britain “would soon have to choose between resisting Hitler’s campaign of aggression or submitting to it.” On that occasion, Mr. Lough reveals, Strakosch bought Churchill’s entire portfolio of shares, which had been plunging in value, at their original price of £18,000 (equivalent to $1.2 million today), even though their value had fallen precipitously in the market’s panic at the impending war. He never asked for the money back.

India has banned this documentary that tells the story of a brutal gang rape in Delhi.

It is only one of the great distinctions of this film by Leslee Udwin, now officially banned in India, that the outrage it describes, among the oldest of crimes, comes with the force of the new, the unfathomable, the unforgettable. In December of 2012, a 23 year old Delhi resident just about to embark on her long dreamed of medical career, decided to see a movie with a male friend—her last chance for recreation for a good while before beginning her internship, she thought. The movie Jyoti Singh chose was “Life of Pi”. It was the last movie she would ever see, the last hours of a life brimming with happiness at the hard won goal she was about to reach. She was now about to become a doctor: to begin rewarding her parents, poor people who had willingly sacrificed all they had, sold their ancestral land, to pay school fees for their child—a daughter.

In Objective Troy the New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane tells two intertwined stories. One recounts the life path of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The second recounts Barack Obama’s troubled love affair with the drone as an instrument of war, which is part of a larger story about the president’s tortured attitude toward the use of American power in the world.

Anwar al-Awlaki has to be counted as the greatest English-speaking pied piper in the history of radical Islam. His sermons and disquisitions, distributed first on C Ds and later far more widely on social media, influenced—and continue, posthumously, to influence—scores of aspiring terrorists. The Boston Marathon bombers, the Fort Hood shooter, and the Charlie Hebdo gunmen in Paris all pointed to Awlaki’s summons to violence as inspiration for their deeds. As Shane also makes plain, Awlaki’s reach extended well beyond the ranks of such active jihadists.

For every young Western Muslim who crossed the line and began plotting violence or traveled to Yemen or Pakistan to join al Qaeda, there were hundreds or thousands more .  .  . intrigued by the battle with the supposed enemies of Islam but too fearful or ambivalent to act. By sweeping huge numbers into that recruiting pool, Awlaki added new recruits to the small minority who would take the next step and join the battle.

Shane adduces case after case, like that of Roshonara Choudhry, a 21-year-old honor student who in 2010 stabbed a member of British Parliament, Stephen Timms, with a six-inch kitchen knife in retribution for his vote in support of the Iraq war. She had been listening, obsessively, to Awlaki’s recordings for more than a hundred hours.

Drawing on exhaustive research and a wealth of interviews, Shane traces Awlaki’s movements and intellectual evolution through various stations on his lethal path. Early childhood in the United States was followed by a spell, from age 7 to 18, in his parents’ native Yemen. He then returned to the United States for a college degree in civil engineering, pursued with no distinction but punctuated by a visit with anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and followed by a burgeoning career as an imam in various American locales.

Shane argues persuasively, and against what some U.S. government investigators continue strongly to suspect, that Awlaki was not in on the 9/11 plot, despite the fact that he had been in close touch with two of the hijackers who had worshipped at his San Diego mosque. In the late 1990s, Awlaki was already flirting with extremist ideas, but by September 11, 2001, was not yet fully under their spell, calling the attacks “horrible” in a private communication to his brother, a sentiment repeated in some public utterances.

We live in a weary age of fable.

The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled Truth. But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.

In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his 60 Minutes team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.

The fabulist movie comes on the heels of the Benghazi investigations. An e-mail introduced last month at a House Benghazi committee hearing indicated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — just hours after the attacks on the consulate that left four Americans dead — knew almost immediately that an “al Qaeda-like group” had carried out the killings.

Clinton informed everyone from her own daughter to the Egyptian prime minister that the killings were the work of hard-core terrorists. Yet officially, she knowingly peddled the falsehood that a video maker had caused spontaneous demonstrations that went bad.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-duel-of-despots-1447285581 The widening Syria conflict reminds us every day of the dangers of the argument, ironically calling itself “realist,” that a Middle East of dictators is perforce the safest version of that region we may hope for. Like the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the argument refuses to slink off into the historical night. Pierre Razoux’s […]