RUTHFULLY YOURS

World events in the last few years have a habit of making President Obama look foolish.

Take the president’s speech Monday before the U.N. General Assembly. There, Obama spoke solemnly about the limits of U.S. unilateral military power and the importance of international cooperation. Half a world away in Afghanistan, the Taliban took the major city of Kunduz.

Kunduz fell this week, and remains contested, because of the absence of unilateral U.S. military power. In Obama’s second term, he decided on a military strategy to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the time he left office. With conventional forces leaving, the U.S. special operations forces left places like Kunduz to the Afghan local police.

Leaving Afghanistan

The U.S. trained and fought alongside these local police to harness the strength of local fighters to stabilize rural villages and provinces. The program expanded in 2010 when Gen. Stanley McChrystal focused his strategy on earning the trust of the local population.

But without the U.S. special operations forces on the ground, the Afghan local police became bandits. In theory, they were supposed to be under the authority of the national police and the ministry of interior. The reality didn’t work out that way. The International Crisis Group reported in June that the local police, more often than not, contributed to instability and were often outside the reach of the government in Kabul.

Breitbart News has learned that President Obama called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power into a video conference before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.

“Ambassador Power and Secretary Kerry were unable to attend Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before the General Assembly because they were called into a meeting with President Obama, which they participated in via video teleconference,” a State Department Official told Breitbart News.

Although they were both in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings, the two high-ranking U.S. officials were notably absent for the entirety of the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech.

“The United States was represented at the speech by Ambassador David Pressman, Alternate Representative of the United States to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs, Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, and Ambassador Richard Erdman, Alternate Representative to the UN General Assembly,” the official added.

RCP contributor Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science and the founder and director of the Program on International Politicis, Economics and Security at the University of Chicago.

A small incident during Bernie Sanders’ recent talk at the University of Chicago reveals how the progressive left has turned against Israel. The venue was the largest on campus, and it was packed with enthusiastic supporters. During a Q&A, one student said that he and his friends liked Bernie’s progressive politics but didn’t much like his views on the Middle East. Bernie’s response, and the crowd’s, are worth pondering.

First of all, Bernie said, Israel has a right to exist. It was supposed to be an applause line, but it fell flat. There was only a smattering. That changed when he said he strongly favored a Palestinian state. For that, the applause was loud and sustained.

It’s only a small incident, but it captures a movement that has been developing for years at elite universities and is now spreading to cultural and media institutions. Their views are surely encouraged by President Obama’s diffidence toward the Jewish state. But he is less a leader than an accurate weather gauge. The left loves Israel about as much as it loves fracking, the Keystone pipeline, Goldman Sachs, voter IDs, Clarence Thomas, and deer hunting.

What has happened on campus, aside from the well-documented suppression of pro-Israel views, is the formation of a durable coalition opposed not only to Benjamin Netanyahu and specific Israeli policies but to Israel itself. The coalition is composed of the two fundamental groups on all elite campuses: the self-professed “victims” and the self-flagellating “guilty.” One of the main purposes of orientation week is to sort students into one of these two groups and to educate them in their assigned roles.

What is the name of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world? It is Europe.
As one pagan people after another in the European continent were converted to Christianity, an infection of anti-Jewish bigotry and hatred was also tragically spawned.
From the late Fourth and Fifth centuries, the all-powerful Church, with few exceptions, turned upon the stateless and hapless Jewish communities throughout the European landmass.

As the great British and Catholic writer, Paul Johnson, writes in his epic work, The History of the Jews:
“The policy of the Church was to allow small Jewish communities to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence.”
But as Paul Johnson continued:
“However, the leading Greek theologian, John Chrysostom (354-407) delivered eight hostile sermons against the Jews at Antioch and these became the subsequent pattern for increasingly anti-Jewish Christian tirades and persecution, making the fullest possible use (and misuse) of key passages in the gospels of St. Matthew and John.”
No longer were masters in their biblical and ancestral homeland of Judea, the Jews scattered and stateless without an army to defend themselves or with alliances with friendly nation states.
In Europe, they were constantly at the mercy of temporal and ecclesiastical powers, which dispensed ruthless discrimination, persecution, blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and the pitiless onslaught of ravening mobs of peasants urged on to commit murderous extremes by malicious and malevolent friars and priests.

The answer to aggression from the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians is to act in ways that make their violence and blood-lust counter-productive.

On Sept. 30, 2015, Mahmoud Abbas, the so-called President of the non-existent “State of Palestine” slouched towards the podium at the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a spiteful, anti-peace tirade full of lies and deceits. He stood there falsely representing a state that has never existed in all of recorded history either as an independent or a sovereign nation.

The gathered international delegates listened raptly because the putative leader of the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” promised he would deliver a “bombshell.” Well it came, but it wasn’t much of a bombshell.

According to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians no longer consider themselves bound by the 1993 Oslo Accords. Of course, in reality and in all practicality, the fraudulent Arabs calling themselves “Palestinians” have never abided by one letter of one word of that accord.

But what Abbas would never admit to is such an empirical truth. Instead, the miserable terrorist in a suit – and unrepentant Holocaust denier – predictably blamed Israel for the lack of peace with a raft of anti-Israel fantasies.

Global MPs resolve to defend Israel against ‘discriminatory’ int’l boycotts which threaten her ‘sovereignty and security.’

A delegation of 22 parliamentarians from Canada, countries across Europe, Africa and South America vowed support on Thursday for the Jewish state and resolved to defend Israel against boycotts.

As part of the Israel Allies Foundation Jerusalem Chairman’s Conference this week, the MPs met with senior Israeli officials and toured the country, specifically several sites in Judea and Samaria.

They presented a resolution to Internal Security and Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan on Thursday declaring their support for Israel as well as opposition to economic discrimination against the Jewish state, which the parliamentarians labelled as reminiscent of anti-Semitic persecution of the past.

In accepting the resolution, Erdan noted that “Israel’s enemies have learned that Israel cannot be overcome by conventional warfare or terrorism, which is why they have now “turned to political, economic and legal warfare.”

Erdan thanked the parliamentarians for their support, expressing hope Israel would succeed in bringing down “the towers of lies erected by the BDS campaign” with the help of “great friends and allies around the world like yourselves.”

In his remarks before the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama attempted to dismiss the function of “Death to America” calls by the Iranian leadership in keeping millions of their people energized and busy.
The huge demonstrations in which such statements are made are never spontaneous or cheap. They require careful planning and organizing. These require payments to many people, keeping them busy for a long time before, during and after each event.

Delivering millions of people to the annual event to celebrate the takeover of the American Embassy in Iran in 1979, for example, keeps many thousands of planers, advertisers, street cleaners, bus and truck drivers, graphic designers to create signs, sound systems workers, electricians,media, communication, law enforcement and medical emergency crews, as well as kitchen operators and food suppliers to feed the gathering, to name a few of the “Death to America” demonstration related jobs, very busy. All these and the millions who attend are paid either directly by the sate or by one of the bonyads (charities), which are also under the Ayatollah’s control.

http://www.openthebooks.com/,

EPA WASTING TAXPAYER DOLLARS
FOX News | The O’Reilly Factor | September 30, 2015
Click here to watch our EPA segment with Bill O’Reilly

The EPA spent $92.4 million on mostly upscale furniture purchases and now they’re trying to justify it.

Last night on FOX News, Bill O’Reilly followed-up with an EPA spokesman who claims the furniture purchases actually saved taxpayer money!

Today at Forbes, Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com, answers the EPA’s claim and adds more line-by-line detail further exposing the furniture spending spree.

Data posted at OpenTheBooks.com shows that the Obama administration cut the number of EPA employees by nearly 2,000 positions from 17,500 to 15,492 over the past four years.

But during this period, the EPA approved massive furniture spending sprees benefiting key employees.

Adam Andrzejewski is the Chairman of American Transparency, website: OpenTheBooks.com

The EPA Spends How Much On Office Furniture? Try $92 Million Over The Past Decade

Confronted with our data analysis and hard questions from the Washington Times, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tries to justify $92 million in mostly upscale furniture costs during the past decade.

Data posted at OpenTheBooks.com shows that the Obama administration cut the number of EPA employees by nearly 2,000 positions from 17,359 to 15,492 over the past five years. But during this period, the EPA approved massive furniture spending sprees benefiting key employees.

Based on the EPA’s current workforce, the $92 million in furniture cost was equivalent to $6,000 in furniture allowance per staffer. Since President Obama took office, $3,000 per employee or $45 million went into furniture. That’s quite an office decorating bonus at a time when wage growth is stagnant for many American workers.

Lavish furniture is part of the EPA culture. For example, under George Bush, the EPA spent roughly the same amount on furniture per staffer. The $813 pencil drawer? It was purchased in 2007.

Last night on FOX News, Bill O’Reilly followed-up with an EPA spokesman who tried to justify the spending splurge by claiming that the old furniture just wouldn’t fit into the new office buildings. And, since the new leases were a lot less than the old rent – despite spending tens of millions of dollars on fine furnishings – the EPA actually saved taxpayers money.

President Obama’s continuing focus on removing Syria’s President Assad to secure America’s co-operation with Russia to destroy Islamic State – whilst President Putin has now independently commenced Russian air strikes in Syria – supposedly on Islamic State forces – exposes both leaders lack of credibility and political judgement.

Obama addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 28 September asserted:

“The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict. But we must recognize that there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the pre-war status quo…

… Yes, realism dictates that compromise will be required to end the fighting and ultimately stamp out ISIL. But realism also requires a managed transition away from Assad and to a new leader, and an inclusive government that recognizes there must be an end to this chaos so that the Syrian people can begin to rebuild.”

Obama’s acceptance of Russia and Iran as acceptable partners – but not Syria – makes no sense. Russia and Iran have propped up Assad’s hold on power in Syria for the last five years enabling the bloodshed and carnage in Syria to continue unabated.

Putin however argues for co-operation with Syria’s armed forces:

“We think it is an enormous mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian government and its armed forces, who are valiantly fighting terrorism face to face. We should finally acknowledge that no one but President Assad’s armed forces and Kurds militias are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria.”