RUTHFULLY YOURS

Saudi Arabia has been dominating the Middle Eastern news recently. Its bombing of the Shia Houthis in Yemen, supported by Washington, and its ambivalent stand on ISIS, concealed in Washington, should raise questions about the nature and long-term ambitions of the desert kingdom. On those key issues there is an apparent conspiracy of silence in the American mainstream media and the policy-making community.

Saudi Arabia, the most authentically Muslim country in the world, is a polity based on a set of religious, legal, and political assumptions rooted in mainstream Sunni Islam. To understand its pernicious role in the ongoing Middle Eastern crisis, and to grasp the magnitude of its ongoing threat to America’s long-term strategic interests and security, we should start with the early history of that strange and unpleasant place.

The Saudi military intervention in Yemen was launched, according to Riyadh, to “restore the legitimate government” and protect the “Yemeni constitution and elections.” This sudden desire to fight for constitutions and elections sounds odd, coming from an absolute monarchy which is consistently combating efforts at democratization at home or in its neighborhood.

As Ali Alahmed, once the youngest political prisoner in Saudi Arabia (at 14) explained in a CNN commentary on April 12, the real Saudi objective in Yemen reflects its determination to prevent the rise of any popularly supported government in the region. The U.S. has adopted the Saudi-Gulf narrative on Yemen, effectively placing Saudi ambitions to control that country above previous American priority of destroying al Qaeda’s safe haven there. This was underscored when State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki endorsed Saudi bombing (the “Saudis have legitimate concerns about the possible impact of current events in Yemen on their security”), thus implying that any country “concerned” about its neighbors can bomb them. “[T]he excuse of ‘resisting Iran’s influence,’ meanwhile, appears to be nothing but sectarian bluster,” Alahmed concludes. “By supporting a self-interested Saudi campaign, the U.S. may actually empower an al Qaeda with the potential still to do great harm to the United States.”

President Bush, Peanut Butter Sandwiches, and the American Dream By Monica Crowley

During the latter years of President George W. Bush’s presidency, I remember watching a petite wisp of a woman step to the podium of the White House briefing room and answer the pointed barbs and hostile questions of a profoundly belligerent press corps. I admired her poise as she faced the daily barrage — and the deep loyalty she so obviously felt for her boss. As one who had worked with an equally reviled former president, Richard Nixon, I felt an affinity with Dana Perino, so I am delighted to now call her a colleague at Fox News — and a friend.

Dana’s new book, “And the Good News Is : Lessons and Advice from the Bright Side,” is part memoir, part guide to life. I spoke with her about her own journey from a corner of the West to the White House.

Question: You were born in Wyoming and grew up in Colorado. How did the Western experience shape your values and character?

Answer: We were taught from a very young age that we were blessed to be Americans and that our freedom should be cherished and protected. We also knew we were not better than anyone else, to care for the innocent, and to be grateful for our blessings.

In David Brooks’ hortatory sermon on what parental love should be, he preaches that “it is supposed to be oblivious to achievement. It’s meant to be an unconditional support – a gift that cannot be bought and cannot be earned. It sits outside the logic of the meritocracy, the closest humans come to grace.” (Love and Merit, NYT 4//24/15) In his essay, he refers to current trends in child-rearing involving greater praise and greater honing, compared with an earlier generation that stressed greater obedience. He might have stretched his imagination further and realized that as far back as recorded history, there have been different modes of parenting and few (if any) considered unconditional love a necessity or even a factor. Open favoritism figures prominently in the Bible from Abraham’s preference for Isaac over Ishmael to Isaac’s preference for Esau over Jacob to Jacob’s love for Joseph over all his brothers. Cultural outlooks produce very different modes of parenting as well; the tiger mother considers it a sign of the greatest love to push her child to excellence so that child’s life will offer more rewards that come with personal achievement.

That the Hillary! candidacy is doomed is now a foregone conclusion. Madame Defarge has no aptitude for the job, only a taste for it, and a venomous certainty that it is somehow rightfully hers. But when you’ve lost Jon Chait:

The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse. All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.

The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:

Bshara Nassar — a self-described “peacebuilder and social entrepreneur, a graduate of Bethlehem University, Palestine,” with “a master’s degree in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University” – leads a campaign for a “Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope” in order to “bring the Palestinian refugee story to Washington, DC.”

The campaign, supported by Nonviolence International with Nakba Museum and Indiegogo, a crowd-funding organization, was launched in 2014 and seems to enjoy some popularity. A would-be parallel between “Nakba” (the dislocation of Palestinian Arab society in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of 1947-1948) and the Holocaust (the genocide of Jews operated by Nazi Germany) has been, for decades, a recurrent trope in the anti-Israel narrative. Concurrently, many anti-Israel activists, especially in the Islamic world, claim the Holocaust to be a hoax, while many others urge a “new Holocaust” or a “real Holocaust” against present-day Jews in Israel or elsewhere.

Alexander Soros’s announcement, first published in Politico, reads in part:

…other politically active American Jews have joined me to launch the Bend the Arc Jewish Action PAC, which will focus the passion and political power of American Jews on supporting those progressive politicians who truly speak to the core values of Jewish voters.

We’re not only progressive in our views. We’re also among the most politically engaged groups in America. In our local communities, American Jews are active, fighting for the issues we care about. Right now, we’re joining with other religious groups to protest so-called “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas, Louisiana, and elsewhere that would allow discrimination against LGBT people. We’re supporting efforts to empower home health care workers to organize for better wages and working conditions. And we’re rallying behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Last December, on the first night of Chanukah, thousands of American Jews gathered across 15 U.S. cities to protest police brutality against African Americans.

Prosecutors allege that, among other plots, the group was planning to kidnap a random member of the public, dress their victim in an orange jump suit, and then film him or her being beheaded.

Catalonia not only has the largest Muslim population in Spain, it also has the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe, and is a main center for Salafi-Jihadism on the continent.

“But what they do not know is that, once they allow us to vote, we will all vote for Islamic parties because we do not believe in left and right. This will make us win local councils and as we begin to accumulate power in the Catalan autonomous region, Islam will begin to be implemented.” — Abdelwahab Huzi, Salafist preacher, Lleida.

Police in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia have arrested eleven members of a jihadist cell that was planning to behead a random person in Barcelona.

The cell, which prosecutors say was actively recruiting jihadists for the Islamic State, is also accused of planning to bomb public and private buildings in Catalonia, including a Jewish bookstore in Barcelona.

For nearly four decades Saul David Alinsky – lived Jan 30, 1909 – Jun 12, 1972 – was an American community organizer and a writer. In his work career, Barack Hussein Obama is known to have been an American community organizer as well. Alinsky is considered to be the founder of modern community organizing business. Obama followed in his footsteps.

Alinsky’s organizing of people skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s years, he began turning his attention to improving conditions for American blacks in their ghettos, beginning with Chicago, Illinois, and later on in California, Michigan, New York City and a dozen of other social “trouble spots,” as he called them.

Despite the growing menace and media savvy of the terrorist Islamic group ISIS, the FBI appears to be, once again, failing in its investigative and enforcement responsibilities. The agency that let us down with 9/11 and, afterward, reacted mainly in a flurry of political correctness and appeasement toward Muslims is now trying to reassure the American public that we have nothing to fear from ISIS on the North American continent.

This despite warnings from the nonprofit Judicial Watch of ISIS activism in Mexico, and recent ISIS-related arrests in Minnesota. More is needed from the nation’s top domestic intelligence and security agency than this whistling in the dark if we are to be safe in our own country.