RUTHFULLY YOURS

As we mentioned a week ago, I’m none too well at the moment, and it so happens my preferred position in which to write causes me severe pain – which is presumably some kind of not so subtle literary criticism from the Almighty. But I’m back, more or less, with lots to catch up on. There were two big elections in recent days, with dramatic results: in Alberta, the Tories were wiped out; in Scotland, the Labour Party was slaughtered; in England, the Liberals were crushed. Strange times.

I’ll have more to say about the elections in the days ahead, but for now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered to “outlaw Islamophobia”. That was the British political establishment’s contribution to a rough couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass murder in Garland, Texas.

“Carter Causes Consternation with Election Call for Palestinian Arabs”

Former US president Jimmy Carter has created a stir with his call for Palestinian Arabs to hold elections to end the internecine struggle between Hamas and the PLO in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza.

Speaking at a joint news conference with PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah – after cancelling his stop in Gaza where he was supposed to meet Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh – Carter – now a member of the independent Elders Group of global leaders – declared:

“We hope that sometime we’ll see elections all over the Palestinian area and east Jerusalem and Gaza and also in the West Bank”

It is not just the Arab-Israeli conflict that fuels anti-Semitism. It works the other way around too: the old-fashioned anti-Semitism is the reason behind a biased narrative of the conflict in the Middle East.
The rise of anti-Semitism in U.S. colleges has alarmed conservative groups for quite some time, yet it was largely ignored by the liberal media until recently. The turning point was a spate of shocking, high-profile incidents involving student government bodies, normally bastions of political correctness and darlings of the radical left, which were covered by the New York Times, CNN and other news outlets. Forced to address this seemingly awkward issue, the media offers two rationalizations. The first argues that the Jewish students make up a largely successful group, and therefore, are not on the list of “protected species.” This argument is rather weak. Indeed, the Chinese students make up an even more successful group, but no public expression of anti-Chinese sentiments would be tolerated.

Syria’s Scud-C ballistic missiles put several big Turkish cities “within range.”

Half of the Turkish squadrons that would fly over Syrian skies may not be able to return home safely.

Turkey simply does not have a long-range anti-missile defense architecture to counter the Syrian (and/or Iranian) missiles.

On June 22, 2012, a Turkish RF-4E military reconnaissance aircraft took off from an air base in eastern Turkey. It flew at low altitude, as most spy planes do, and violated Syrian airspace before it was hit — most likely — by a missile fired from a Syrian- or Russian-operated air defense system.

Two Turkish pilots were killed. Their bodies were later recovered from the Mediterranean Sea with help from a US ship.

“After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who (sic) institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems. … The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?” — Emmanuel Ogebe, Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C.

“In the same week that the State Dept says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously … it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.” — Chris Seiple, President, Institute for Global Engagement.

Late on the evening of May 8, Newsmax TV announced that pressure from Americans acquainted with Sister Diana Momeka’s visa rejection has just caused the State Department to reverse its decision and permit her entry into the United States. Until then, however, she and others were barred

Daniel Greenfield wrote on FrontPage about the absurdity of the news media in accusing Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin of encouraging violence by conducting a drawing Mohammad contest and inviting others to the event:

“The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists ‘take the bait’ from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.”

But, this is the actual motive of Islamic terrorists; they are fiends looking for “bait” to take in order to be killed by their intended victims (or by a lone policeman, as in Garland) so their names can be publicized as “martyrs for Allah.” The only time terrorist outfits like ISIS, Al Qaeda, et al. value and recognize such self-sacrificing fools (aka “brothers”) is when they’re dead. This policy reduces the average jihadist to the level of a passive receptor, or a human lemming, who just can’t help himself for wanting to die, of seeking immediate if not eventual death.

But then, Islam is a nihilist ideology, chock full of absurdities.

Listening to Laura Ingraham’s interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller’s right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not “helpful.”

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham’s earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we will enforce it again and again and again.

Ingraham replies with a list of her own bona fides regarding freedom of religion, persecuted Christians, the war in Iraq, also professing her own Roman Catholic faith. She then says she doesn’t think the US effort to combat the Islamization of the globe is “necessarily helped” by putting on Mohammed art contests, although she supports PG’s right to do so. She then intimates that PG was merely grandstanding, which PG takes exception to. (PG: Where did I say I was “brave,” LI: I didn’t say you said that — although LI did imply exactly that.)

Constant blame being thrown at US president for many difficulties Israel is currently facing is in reality a distraction from fact that Israel itself is not functioning like a full-fledged sovereign state.

Similarly, after more than 20 years of the disastrous Oslo “peace process” and all the carnage and suffering that it brought, as well as in the face of a strengthening international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel, many Israelis are perturbed by Obama’s continued insistence that Israel must work towards the fulfillment of the two-state solution.

Together these point to Obama’s unwavering belief that the source of all the instability in the region is not Arab/Islamic terror or Arab/Islamic hatred of Israel and the West, but rather previous western injustices that need to be rectified. In the case of Iran, this means the fostering of positive relations after years of America treating Iran like a pariah state while in the case of Israel this means the ending of its supposed unlawful occupation of Judea and Samaria in order to help bring to fruition the creation of yet another Arab state in the region.

An article by Christopher Carson in the April 27 edition of Daily Mailer.FrontPage, titled, A Mad Max Nation with No Electrical Grid, is enough to scare the bejabbers out of anyone.
In predicting what America would be like during a major outage of our electrical grid, Carson tells us: “It’s been one year since a white-hot study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The government study concluded that coordinated attacks on only nine electrical transmission substations in the United States could bring down the entire trinity of grids (called interconnections) that supply electricity to America. Terrorists would have to physically destroy only four in the East, three in the West, and two in Texas, plus one large transformer production plant, and ‘the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.’

WASHINGTON – Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce-Justice-Science on Thursday to discuss the Justice Department’s funding request, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told lawmakers that Baltimore police had made some progress in dealing with the public but acknowledged that “more may need to be done.”

“We’re currently in the process of considering the request from city officials and community and police leaders for an investigation into whether the Baltimore City Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations,” she said. “And I intend to have a decision in the coming days.”

That decision came quickly. She announced [1] Friday that the Justice Department should commence an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department amid claims that the agency has employed excessive force and violated individuals’ civil rights in carrying out its duties.