RUTHFULLY YOURS

THE LONDON CENTER FOR POLICY RESEARCH

The Islamic State dealt a crushing blow to the Iraqi army in Iraq’s largest province (Ambar), including the city of Ramadi – once home to nearly half a million people. What this victory revealed is the fragility of the Iraqi army, despite vigorous U.S. efforts to train it.

The deterioration in Ramadi was so rapid, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi was left flat-footed. He immediately called in the Shiite paramilitary force to recapture lost territory, but altering the situation on the ground seems fruitless.

President Obama – in his what me, worry stance – indicated this setback will not change the tempo of U.S. operations, i.e. large scale response by American troops is unlikely. Nonetheless, the White House signaled last month that it is coordinating a plan to reclaim Mosul, Iraqi second largest city. Certainly that plan would have to be reevaluated on the basis of current events.

So complete was the Islamic State victory that Iraqi police and security forces were ordered to withdraw completely in order to prevent massive casualties. Naseer Nori, head of the defense ministry’s media office, suggested that deeper U.S. involvement is the only way to save Iraqi sovereignty. At the moment, there are 3,040 U.S. personnel in Iraq.

Colonel Steve Warren, speaking in behalf of the Pentagon and obviously the present administration, said, “ISIL seems to have the advantage. They will use this for their own propaganda purposes, but it doesn’t give them a significant tactical advantage.” Yet most of the support for ISIL terrorists comes through Ambar.

This overwhelming defeat put Mr. Abadi in a ticklish position: He could have either called the Shia militia forces that were critical to stability elsewhere in the country or he could have reinforced Ramadi with regular forces. He chose to do the former which may undermine his hold on significant parts of the country and even control of the government.

What this situation reveals is that despite the White House assertion that ISIL is being pushed back and the situation is improving incrementally, there is scant evidence to back up the claims. Airstrikes targeting extremist positions have been ineffective, in large part because there are relatively few sorties and, in most instances, ISIL forces are notified when U.S. plans are about to take off.

U.S. Special Forces have engaged in successful raids such as the one that killed Abu Sayyef, Islamic State’s finance leader. But as talented as our forces have proven to be, they are hampered by constrained rules of engagement and by fighting against an army of more than 100,000.

While most field officers contend a dramatic increase in Special Forces is the only way to win, Mr. Obama is reluctant to get “bogged down” in another Middle East war, to use the vernacular of the president’s spokesmen. There is the hope that with the president’s accommodative position on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Iran will land major support to the Iraqi cause thereby stabilizing the region.

Of course an Iran more deeply involved in Iraq than is presently the case, also means Iraq will be converted into a full blown pawn in the Shia empire. Sometimes it is best to not get what you wish for. But there are very few options if President Obama retains his recalcitrant position. There is also little doubt that Iraqi officials wish openly for real U.S. engagement in their dissembling nation.

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Heart surgery saves baby from East Timor. Surgeons from Israeli charity Save A Child’s Heart (SACH) successfully operated to repair the congenital heart defect in baby Lisa from East Timor. The Southeast Asia country is the 50th country to send its patients to Israel. SACH doctors have saved over 3,500 children’s lives.
http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/71579-150518-a-baby-from-east-timor-an-ethiopian-doctor-and-an-israeli-charity-come-together

How ALEH Negev was founded. I visited the special facilities for the disabled at ALEH Negev in Oct 2012. This new video features Maj Gen Doron Almog, who gave up his army career to found the village.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psPkBNtbx7s&feature=em-uploademail

Sensors for Japanese hospital beds. Israel’s EarlySense makes sensors that detect when patients are at risk of falling from beds or chairs. EarlySense has just announced a strategic cooperation agreement with Japanese giant Mitsui that will help launch the distribution of EarlySense products in Japan.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-earlysense-teams-with-japans-mitsui-1001028418

Advancing cancer detection. Israeli biotech Rosetta Genomics boosted its molecular diagnostics capability by purchasing PersonalizeDx in the United States. Rosetta also received US patent protection for its cancer tests.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150414005159/en/Rosetta-Genomics-Completes-Acquisition-PersonalizeDx#.VVzo8VIpqSp http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150513005723/en/Rosetta-Genomics-Receives-Additional-U.S.-Patent-Protection#.VVzpr1IpqSp

Never too late. 65 year-old Chaya Sarah Shahar of Bnei Brak gave birth to her first child, after 46 years of marriage. The healthy baby boy was born at a Kfar Saba hospital. Last year, a 61 year-old woman gave birth to her first child in Jerusalem. Chaya is the second oldest woman in the world to give birth.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/195589#.VV2XeFIpqSp

ReWalk makes paraplegics healthier. Israel’s ReWalk exoskeleton not only enables paraplegics to walk upright, it also improves their overall fitness. It allows users to exercise, use the toilet, boost their self-image and improve their mental health.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/rewalks-benefits-go-beyond-ambulation-company-says/

The BDS movement and Islamic supremacism are birds of the same anti-Semitic feather.

There is a troika of movements that’s coalescing into one ugly phenomenon, a phenomenon that may rival what the world witnessed in the 1930’s in Germany. They are a virulent anti-Semitism promoted by the Progressives and the left, its appearance on college campuses and in university classrooms, and the assault on freedom of speech in the guise of being combating “Islamophobia.”

A Jihad Watch article of May 23rd, “Campus Watch: Legitimizing Censorship – ‘Islamophobia Studies’ at Berkeley,” by Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, details the pitiful and organizationally inept efforts of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project to pass itself off as a major mover and shaker in the fight against Islamophobia.

“Islamophobia studies” is the latest addition to the academic pantheon of politicized, esoteric, and divisive “studies” whose purpose is to censor criticism of differing views by stigmatizing critics as racist or clinically insane. The University of California, Berkeley’s recent Sixth Annual International Islamophobia Conference—organized by the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP)—was titled, “The State of the Islamophobia Studies Field.” The fact that this “field” doesn’t yet formally exist in the U.S. may explain why speakers the first day of the conference barely mentioned it. As in years past, the conference featured victimology, academic jargon, and anti-Western rhetoric.

Mucahid Cihad Han is a Muslim televangelist of sorts. On Turkey’s 2000 TV Sunday, he sat there with his laptop answering questions about what’s haram or halal, and received one question that, based on the uproarious Twitter reaction, may have just been thrown out at the cleric as bait.

The concerned viewer told the “self-styled” cleric, as described by Hurriyet Daily News, that he can’t help himself — he’s married but masturbates all the time, even while on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Han mulled the concern and figured he could, indeed, help the Mecca masturbator:

After repeating the question a few times, Han claimed that Islam strictly prohibits masturbation as a “haram” (forbidden) act. “Moreover, one hadith states that those who have sexual intercourse with their hands will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife, complaining against them to God over its rights,” he said, referring to what he claimed to be a saying of Prophet Muhammad.

As an image for countering anti-Semitism, I once used to keep tacked over my desk the Polish proverb, “It’s lousy to swim upstream in a filthy river.” Happily, upstream swimmers who now overtake me seem better shielded from the pollution. I’m enormously grateful to Ben Cohen, Douglas Murray, and Bari Weiss for essays that make it feel as though we are within sight of the open sea.

Ben Cohen enlarges the historical context by reminding us that ours is not a new story. Hitler’s attempt to establish the Third Reich in 1930s Europe gained legitimacy when leaders in Western democracies excused the Nazi assault on democratic institutions as long as it aimed at Jews alone. Prominent among such leaders were presidents and faculty of American universities who extended a welcome to Nazi alumni and officials, and maintained cordial relations with anti-Semitic institutions. The universities’ appeal to academic decorum as a reason for tolerating German anti-Semites finds its equivalent in today’s invocation of “free speech” as the excuse for sanctioning Arab and Muslim anti-Israel incitement.

But comparing the 1930s with today also reveals how the shift of anti-Semitism from the right to the left of the political spectrum has allowed Arab and Muslim grievance to penetrate deeper into the American academy than Nazi racialism ever did. Key to this change are the Palestinians who were relegated by their fellow Arabs to permanent refugee status so that they might serve as eternal proof of Jewish “usurpation” and guarantors of Israel’s eventual destruction. It is well known that even as Israel strove to integrate the Jews who were driven from Arab lands, the Arab world refused to accept the partition of Palestine, prevented the resettlement of those Arabs who fled Israel, and with unspeakable cruelty consigned generations to refugee camps so that Jews could be blamed for it.

Amid all the Islamic State’s atrocities — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we’ve heard appalling testimony from women who escaped the Islamic State’s clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence.

Zainab Bangura, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week with the Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.

Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing — the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15 — contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

The Saudi deal was one of dozens of arms sales approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department that placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire, an International Business Times investigation has found.

While presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was America’s top diplomat the Department of State that she oversaw approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments forked over millions of dollars to the now-embattled Clinton Foundation.

According to an International Business Times [2] report by David Sirota and Andrew Perez, “at least seven foreign governments that received State Department clearance for American arms did donate to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary.” The article identified the seven nations as Algeria, Australia, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, and Thailand.

Mainstream media’s surprisingly probing coverage of the unfolding Clinton Foundation donations-for-favors scandal suggests that reporters have turned on the Clintons in the age of Obama.

America’s business and labor leaders agree: President Obama and Congress can do more to modernize the permitting process for infrastructure projects—airports, factories, power plants and pipelines—which at the moment is burdensome, slow and inconsistent.

Gaining approval to build a new bridge or factory typically involves review by multiple federal agencies—such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Interior Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Land Management—with overlapping jurisdictions and no real deadlines. Often, no single federal entity is responsible for managing the process. Even after a project is granted permits, lawsuits can hold things up for years—or, worse, halt a half-completed construction project.

Consider the $3 billion TransWest Express, a multistate power-line that would bring upward of 3,000 megawatts of wind-generated electricity from Wyoming to about 1.8 million homes and businesses from Las Vegas to San Diego. The project delivers on two of President Obama’s priorities, renewable power and job creation, so the administration in October 2011 named the TransWest Express one of seven transmission projects to “quickly advance” through federal permitting.

Offering vistas previously limited to photographs from helicopters.

The first time I visit—propelled upward a quarter of a mile in an elevator to One World Observatory—it is clear that something momentous is being promised. The observatory, which opens on May 29 at One World Trade Center, calls these five elevators “Sky Pods.” They are enclosed with three walls lined with floor-to-ceiling LED screens so bright and crisp, they could be windows on lower Manhattan. But as we whoosh from the bedrock to the 102nd floor in 47 seconds, instead of seeing the cityscape receding below, we see time-lapse images representing 500 years of history. Lenape wigwams and longhouses give way to early Dutch settlements, and onward: the growth of Wall Street, the evolution of the Battery, the proliferation of skyscrapers and the sounds of contemporary life. For a few seconds, as decades of the 20th century race by, one of the World Trade Center towers fills the eastward screen, then suddenly disappears.