RUTHFULLY YOURS

A friend and brave colleague awaits trial in an Azerbaijani prison, the charges against her so patently ridiculous they would be laughable if a courageous reporter did not face the prospect of an extended stint behind bars. Her real crime? Daring to shine a light on the business dealings of her country’s President and its First Family
Below is a letter from imprisoned Azeri journalist Khadija Ismayilova (left). Apparently written on February 6, it was smuggled from her Azerbaijan prison and published last week in the Washington Post. Ms. Ismayilova is a reporter and commentator for the Azerbaijani service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Frank Csongas, one of her former colleagues at RFERL (where I also worked for much of the last decade), e-mailed it to me in case I hadn’t seen it.

According to the Post, Ms. Ismayilova was a put in pre-trial detention for two months after being accused of inciting a colleague’s suicide. Additional charges have since been brought against her. It seems pretty clear that these charges are a punishment for her reports on the financial dealings of the Azeri President and his family. Without more ado, though, let’s read the letter:

Please forgive my long silence. I was put in solitary confinement after my last letter was passed through these prison bars and published. My cell was searched and all my notes, including lists of things I was requesting from home, were taken. I have not received these back. I guess there are many devoted readers of mine at the penitentiary. They are taking turns reading my notes. That is why it is taking them such a long time to return what they have taken from me.

Having read so many recent stories of schoolchildren around the world being radicalized by Islamic extremists, here is a collection of contrasting education-related activities and news articles I’ve collected over the past few weeks concerning the Jewish State.

I will begin in the Israeli school system itself. Whereas 100 countries marked Feb 11 as Safer Internet Day, Israel’s Ministry of Education, on Feb 8, launched Annual National Week for Online Safety Education in Israel. Throughout the entire state educational system, students engaged in classroom and online activities designed to increase awareness for Internet safety, reduce potential risks, and deal with any harmful online incidents.

100,000 Israeli kids attend a Sci-Tech school – that’s 10 percent of all Israeli high school students (including Muslims, Christians and Druze). The Sci-Tech network builds curricula based on the demand for professionals in various Israeli industries, and it currently has 18 industrial vocational schools. This Bloomberg report shows how Israeli-Arabs (especially women) continue to flourish educationally, at Technion Institute of Technology – one of Israel’s top class higher education establishments.

So Rajendra Pachauri has finally announced his resignation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a decision at once momentous and spectacularly irrelevant.

It’s momentous because the IPCC is one of the world’s most powerful organizations, with presidents and prime ministers across the globe in thrall to its prognostications of climate doom, and the fate of nations and economies partly decided by its ongoing insistence (against all evidence) that “global warming” remains a credible crisis which can only be solved by throwing stupendous quantities of taxpayer money at it.

And it’s spectacularly irrelevant because the bearded, cricket-loving, ice-shunning groper was never more than an empty figurehead, probably chosen – a bit like UN Secretaries General – because he fitted the right ethnic and socio-political profile rather than because he had a particular skill set which qualified him especially for the job.

He was, after all, a railway engineer by training, not a physicist or a meteorologist or a climatologist.

Carson is rated +5 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record. (May 2012) rsk
For More Information Contact:
Alex VanNess | vanness@securefreedom.org | (202) 719-2421

CENTER RELEASES DOSSIER DOCUMENTING A HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE MEMBER’S EXTENSIVE TIES TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

(Washington, D.C.): House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently appointed Rep. André Carson (D-IN) to a coveted position on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This panel is charged with oversight of the United States’ most sensitive national intelligence capabilities and operations. These include any directed at Islamic supremacists seeking to impose worldwide – through violent and, where necessary, through stealthy forms of jihad – the totalitarian program they call shariah.

Many Arabs and Muslims see the meeting between Obama and Qatar’s al-Thani as a gift to Qatar for its continued support of Islamic radical groups across the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

On the eve of Obama’s meeting, Egyptian sources revealed that Qatar was providing weapons and ammunition to members of the Islamic State in Libya. The sources said that 35 Qatari aircraft were involved in the resupply.

Arab political analysts are also concerned about Obama’s ongoing attempts to appease Iran, which continues to expand its presence in Arab countries such as Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon — as well as in Syria, where it is deeply involved in backing Hezbollah and operating along the border with Israel. A Reuters report revealed that Iran also has hundreds of advisors in Iraq.

The centenary of the artistic movement known as Dada is coming up in 1916 and it ought to produce a lot of nonsense. The word “Dada” is supposed to come from the Kru language in Africa, and refers to the tail of a sacred cow. Up till then, the purpose of art had been to say something about humanity, and how to be a human being. Dada had the contrary purpose that there is nothing to say about human beings. The artist’s mockery and nihilism is supposed to be proof of his superiority to the stupid public.
The moving spirit was the Romanian Tristan Tzara (a pseudonym meaning “sad in the country”). He had fled to the safety of Zurich, neutral in the First World War, and there he attracted like-minded writers and painters from almost all European backgrounds. They sat in cafés and argued and wrote manifestoes. Of them all, James Joyce was the only one with real talent, but Finnegan’s Wake, that unreadable effusion, shows how Dada had got to him. In the wake of Dada came Surrealism, Socialist Realism, and today’s conceptual art in which humanity doesn’t feature at all. Adolf Hitler gave all such work a longer hold by calling it degenerate and having it destroyed. Unfortunately, his view that the purpose of art was to inspire racism is a kindred absurdity. Tzara and his coterie were preparing to make the world a worse place at the very same month that a million men were being killed or wounded in the Battle of the Somme so that the world could be a better place. Their centenary is likely to be celebrated with lots of anger expressed against the politicians who got Europe into that war. The city of Zurich, I notice, is already planning visits to cafes, readings, and who knows what. It is only fitting that the final word on Dada should go to tourism.

Robert Joseph is senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy and a former undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. William Tobey is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University and a former deputy administrator for nuclear nonproliferation at the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Obama administration’s negotiations over nuclear matters are a disaster. The administration’s defenders are vigorously rebutting allegations that President Obama has made too many concessions in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Their defense is a simple statement of fact: There is no agreement yet, so how can the critics be right? They assert that we must wait until the outcome is agreed upon before we can assess it. The concern, however, is both bipartisan and international — with many Democrats voicing alarm and with Israel and the Arab states alike frustrated that a seemingly desperate administration has placed Iran’s interests above those of its allies. While Obama’s defenders are technically accurate in that Iran has not yet agreed to what has been placed on the negotiating table, press reports citing U.S. officials have provided information on the status of all key issues under consideration and the likely provisions of an agreement, if Tehran is ultimately able to take yes for an answer. Of course, if current negotiating trends continue, the terms could get even worse than described below. They certainly won’t get better. The concessions already acknowledged by U.S. officials include:

The U.S. is admitting too many immigrants from high-risk countries. This week al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamic terrorist group, advertised its intent to attack the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., among other targets. Whether al-Shabaab has the capability or adherents in the area to carry out such an attack isn’t clear. But one thing is: Our federal government doesn’t do nearly enough to keep potential allies of groups like al-Shabaab out of the United States. Especially notorious is the flow of refugees from war-torn, predominantly Islamic Somalia, but a whole raft of refugee and asylum programs present concerns.
There are several documented instances of Somalis who, given safe haven by our country, left America to join and fight with al-Shabaab in Somalia, that lawless and lost land, and even with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Liban Haji Mohamed, a former Somali refugee who later naturalized, is the most recent addition to the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list, for his activities in support of al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda. One of the Kenya mall attackers was a former refugee who had lived in Minnesota. Unfortunately, turncoat Somalis are not alone, as refugee communities go. Here are just a few other examples: Six Bosnian Muslims from St. Louis, Chicago, and Utica, N.Y., were arrested a few weeks ago for providing material support to ISIS.

We need a meritocratic, ethnically blind system — the opposite of the status quo. A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Obama’s executive order that overrode existing immigration law. The result is more acrimony and chaos. It is a good time to remember that there are more than just two types of immigration — legal and illegal. There also exist liberal and illiberal approaches to immigration. Take liberal immigration. It is governed by laws passed by Congress and signed and executed by the president.
Nearly all Americans accept that no individual can pick and choose which federal statute he chooses to obey, depending on his own perceived self-interest. Liberal immigration would be entirely legal, meritocratic, and ethnically blind. Skills and education would matter more than proximity to the border or political clout. The numbers of immigrants would be balanced by liberal considerations: the need for skilled newcomers to avoid dependency on American society, and concern that their arrival not harm the economic aspirations of poor working citizens.

Federal officials today charged three New York residents on charges of trying to join ISIS, with one offering to assassinate President Obama for the Islamic State.

Two Uzbekistan citizens — Abdurasul Hasanovich Juraboev, 24, and Abror Habibov, 30 — were charged, along with one Kazakh, 19-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov. Each faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

The New York office of the FBI said authorities began watching Juraboev in August 2014 when he posted on an Uzbek-language jihadi website. He and Saidakhmetov forged a plan to travel to Turkey to join ISIS, and the latter was arrested today at JFK trying to board a flight to Istanbul.