RUTHFULLY YOURS

The toll of Islamist carnage keeps growing: 130 killed and 352 injured in Paris; 229 mostly Russian airline passengers killed in the skies over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; 19 dead in Bamako, Mali, at the Radisson Blu, a hotel favored by Westerners. Germany has confirmed that plots to kill hundreds more were disrupted in the nick of time. France has extended its state of emergency for three months. Over the weekend, Brussels was virtually locked down as police hunted for suspects linked to the Paris attacks, who may be preparing another operation in Belgium, home of the European Union. Such assaults throughout the Middle East, Africa, and now Europe prompt an all-too-familiar question: Can militant Islamist terrorists strike the United States again?

Before French president François Hollande had even addressed his traumatized nation, President Obama was downplaying the terror threat. At a conference in Asia, he characterized what he called the “sickening” assault in Paris as a “setback.” His strategy for containing ISIS was working, he insisted. Echoing the theme, FBI director James B. Comey said that he knew of no “credible threat of a Paris type attack here.” In New York, NYPD commissioner William Bratton stressed that there was no reason to be afraid, dismissing a new ISIS video warning that New York was its next target as old footage and, hence, old news. Still, Bratton urged New Yorkers to be “vigilant” and embrace his department’s counterterrorism credo, “If you see something, say something.”

If New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is at all chagrined to find himself the target of public criticism from nearly every direction, he shows little sign of it.

He has alarmed free-speech advocates by his intention to sue companies for speaking out on climate issues. He has earned the wrath of his fellow state attorneys general for torpedoing agreements they’ve carefully crafted. He is alienating the young and tech savvy by harassing digital innovators like Uber and Airbnb. He is even trying to outlaw fantasy-football prizes, which I doubt will endear him to many Jets and Giants fans.

There is no better example of his excesses, poor judgment and headlong pursuit of a political agenda than the vendetta he is still pursuing against Hank Greenberg, the former chief of insurance giant AIG. The case, now more than 10 years old, hinges on the accusation—made by Eliot Spitzer, Mr. Schneiderman’s disgraceful predecessor—that Mr. Greenberg in 2000 fraudulently arranged for AIG to purchase an obscure financial instrument called “finite reinsurance.”

In the afternoon of Nov. 13, when news of the horrific Paris attacks began to reach the U.S. and the fear and chaos there began to sink in, many Americans asked one important question: Could a similar attack by jihadists linked to Islamic State occur in a major American city? The answer is yes.

To understand why, it is vital to deconstruct the Paris attack and the factors that enabled it and then see if they can be mapped onto an American urban environment. During my tenure as director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department, this is what we did after any major attack around the world to stay ahead of ever-evolving terrorist threats.

While more operational details of the Paris attack will be uncovered, four necessary ingredients have already emerged: First, European citizens willing to kill themselves and their countrymen. Second, material for the attack, including assault weapons and hydrogen peroxide for suicide bombs. Third, the technical and paramilitary skills to make improvised explosive devices and operate assault weapons. And fourth, a “permissive environment” in which the national and local security and intelligence agencies were not able to detect the plot in advance.

The president vowed to “destroy” ISIS: “a bunch of killers with good social media.”

President Obama stressed at a press conference today in Malaysia that “the United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.”

He also hit at critics — namely, the Politico headline “Obama’s Asian Distraction?” — who have suggested that his focus on the Asia pivot came at a bad time with new ISIS and al-Qaeda attacks.

“This region is not a distraction from the world’s central challenges, like terrorism. The Asia Pacific is absolutely critical to promoting security, prosperity and human dignity around the world,” he said. “That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my foreign policy to deepening America’s engagement with this region.”

Obama said the American victims over the past several days — Nohemi Gonzalez in Paris and Anita Datar in Mali — “remind me of my daughters, or my mother, who, on the one hand, had their whole life ahead of them, and on the other hand, had devoted their lives to helping other people.”

Here is a list of a few trendy words, overused, politicized, and empty of meaning, that now plague popular communications.

“Intersection” How many times have we read a writer, columnist, pundit, or job applicant self-describe himself with this strange word? Here’s an example: “Joe Blow is a social theorist working at the intersection of class oppression, racial stereotyping, and transgendered emergence.”? Or: “Amanda Lopez writes at the intersection of Latina identity, Foucauldian otherness, and social media.” Most of the time “intersection” exists only in the grandiose mind of the writer. It is a patent though feeble attempt to become a threefer or fourfer on the race/gender/generic victim/revolutionary activist scale. The intersected topics are individually irrelevant — and all the more so when cobbled together. The use of “intersection” is a postmodern way of plastering bumper-sticker narcissisms without writing, “I am an identity-studies person without much knowledge of literature, history, or languages, but am desperately trying to convey expertise of some sort by piling up a bunch of pseudo-disciplines that credential my victimhood activism.”

“Diversity” The noun was rebranded in the 1980s, and does not mean what it by nature should — “a range” or “multiplicity.” No one furthers the goals of “diversity” by ensuring plenty of conservatives, liberals, radicals and reactionaries on campus, or welcoming lots of Christian fundamentalists as well as atheists and Muslims. The word instead is a euphemism for non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-Christian, and non-liberal. It is a relative and entirely political noun. The University of Missouri football team can both be 52% African-American and proof of diversity, even if African-Americans make up less than 12% of the population — in a way that all white and elderly Democratic primary candidates are honorifically diverse by virtue of their homogeneous left-wing politics.

Three other observations: First, racial and ethnic diversity, without assimilation and integration into one culture, and when identity becomes essential rather than incidental to a nation (i.e. a salad bowl society rather than the melting pot), leads to Armageddon, whether in Austria-Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Iraq.

In an alleged hate crime, a Jewish passenger was attacked by a Muslim driver of a yellow New York taxi on Saturday night. The driver was held for questioning by police.
In an interview on Sunday with Israel National News, victim Moshe Indig told reporters about the attack. “I took a cab from Manhattan to Brooklyn Saturday night at 8 PM. I asked the driver to make a phone call. He refused but then relented and put the call on the speaker. When he saw that I was speaking Hebrew, he said: ‘I hate the people and the language you are speaking. If I had known that you were a Jew, I would not have given you the call.’”

The World Government so beloved of American national socialists looms ever closer. Fox News reports:

EXCLUSIVE: The chief United Nations human rights agency, with the Obama administration’s apparent blessing, is creating a new “regional hub” for itself in Washington, to use as a center for organizing against the death penalty, among other things, and for affecting the legal frameworks, policies, and strategies of American counterterrorism.

In a management plan covering its activities through 2017, the agency, known as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or OHCHR, puts the U.S. in the same category for that counterterrorism “alignment” effort as countries like Iraq and Uganda.

The fast-tracked human rights “hub” also has a number of more nebulous “thematic” objectives for the U.S., which include, according to an OHCHR information document, “the establishment of national participatory bodies for reporting and implementing recommendations of human rights mechanisms” and the aim of “widening the democratic space” with the aid of undefined “National Human Rights Institutions.”

Would you spend money to find out what people in Spain think about their medical insurance or what people in Austria think about their government? That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing, using millions of Americans’ tax dollars.

Since 2007 the U.S. State Department has spent over $36.5 million to survey citizens in foreign countries on a wide range of topics, including general public opinion polling on how their own governments — many of them U.S. allies — are performing. And the biggest spike in that spending occurred on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s watch as secretary of state.

The polls included such topics as a “survey of medical insurance in Spain” costing $24,727, an “Elite Survey in Russia” that cost $117,000 and a “Public Opinion Poll Survey to Address Public Attitudes Toward Domestic and International Affairs in Austria,” costing $50,728.

The examples were compiled by federal spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.com in a larger oversight report on federal public opinion polling to be published after Thanksgiving.

Spending watchdogs say these polls, while informative, should be conducted and funded by private research organizations, not the U.S. taxpayer.

http://www.openthebooks.com/
Showcased in today’s Washington Times, the State Department is awarded the “Golden Hammer Award” for the most egregious weekly example of waste, fraud, corruption and abuse in the nation.

The State Department spent $36.5 million polling the opinions of foreigners — even our allies, i.e. England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Japan, etc.

Read the Golden Hammer Award at Washington Times, click here

Where did tens of millions of ‘foreign polling expenditures’ flow?
Learn how the State Department hid $34 million in survey and polling under a category of ‘miscellaneous foreign vendors.’

What would Hilary do? Did Secretary of State Hilary Clinton increase or decrease expenditures on foreign polling? Did Clinton increase the transparency of State Dept spending?

Why was State polling countries like Suriname?