RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thanks to Snowden and other self-imposed harm, we know less about the enemy than at any time since 9/11.

It is alarming enough to see the rapid advance, almost unhindered, of radical Islamist armed groups and terror across the globe, but the paralysis in Washington—exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security budget deadlock—compounds the crisis. Moreover, such political failure masks another unsettling problem. As al Qaeda and Islamic State gain strength, U.S. intelligence is relatively weaker and more challenged than at any time since the 9/11 attacks. Most of this weakness is of our own making.

The intelligence challenges couldn’t be clearer. Every day seems to bring news of more horror from the Middle East, Nigeria and the heart of Europe. Yet the terrorists appear to operate with near impunity, exploiting the world’s information connectivity for their social-media campaigns. Their sophisticated propaganda helps inspire and recruit. According to the National Counterterrorism Center, enemy combatants in Syria and Iraq include 20,000 foreigners from 90 countries. More than 3,400 of these recruits are Western passport holders who may return to the West, including the U.S., to continue their war.

Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.

With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.

Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.

You may understandably think of it as an ISIS jobs fair, but the ongoing confab in Washington is officially known as President Obama’s “summit” on “Countering Violent Extremism.” That being the case, many Americans seem surprised at the appearance of Salam al-Marayati, leader of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). After all, the White House is having a public hissy fit over the upcoming speech to Congress by Obama’s bête noire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
An odd time, one might think, for the POTUS to be so chummy with a Muslim activist best know for theorizing, right after the 9/11 attacks, that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” But National Review readers will not be surprised.

While the world obsesses over its distorted perception of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it does not focus on where the real injustice – and mass murder – is taking place.
President Barack Obama’s “random folk in a deli” comment sounded stupid when he said it last week, referring to the victims, all four of them Jewish, in the January attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris.
We should be thankful for small mercies.

When a similar pattern of attack on a meeting of caricaturists in Copenhagen was followed a few hours later by a deadly assault on a bat-mitzva party at a synagogue in the Danish capital on February 14, the American president who has such trouble enunciating the words “Islamist terror” did not, at least in public, pretend that death of a Danish Jewish guard was just a matter of bad karma.

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama – who professes Christianity – proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

The Psychology of Left-Wing Jews — on The Glazov Gang
Three Jewish thinkers reflect on the reasons why.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-psychology-of-left-wing-jews-on-the-glazov-gang/

How does a government “get beyond the crisis” without a plan to resolve the crisis?

The Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) is an odd document, not yet debated Congress. Among other points, it prohibits “enduring offensive ground operations,” but without defining them.

President Obama seems to want it both ways — to oppose American participation in large-scale battles in Iraq, but to have the “flexibility” to order them; to prohibit ground operations but to have American troops in place to carry them out.

The administration thus appears to remain without an articulated strategy to prosecute the war IS launched against us, our allies and a broad range of civilian non-combatants.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker took another step toward a White House bid, hiring Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer Mike Gallagher and DCI Group director and Capitol Hill veteran Kristin Jackson to lead his foreign- and domestic-policy teams, respectively. In that role, Gallagher will serve as the day-to-day lead on all foreign-policy issues, working to bring outside experts before the governor for briefings and to develop the governor’s foreign-policy platform. Jackson will do the same on the domestic-policy front. A spokeswoman for Our American Revival, Walker’s political-action committee and campaign in waiting, confirmed the hires.

70 years ago this past weekend, the Royal Air Force destroyed the city of Dresden and killed about 25,000 of its inhabitants. The exact number was impossible to determine, and Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s skilled minister of propaganda, immediately claimed that an atrocity had occurred, with at least a hundred thousand victims. Ever since, the Left has liked to maintain that whatever the Nazis did, the bombing of Dresden shows that the Allies were just as bad, or worse. In the course of extensive unfavorable coverage of the anniversary, the BBC naturally condemned the bombing as a war crime. In a ceremony in Dresden, Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury no less, said that the bombing “diminished all our humanity” and left him with “a profound feeling of regret and deep sorrow.” While he was apologizing for victory in the war against Nazism, Islamic State killers were beheading 21 Christians in Libya, in a current war about which he has nothing to say, so he may well find himself having to make a genuine apology in the future. Also naturally on this occasion, no mention was made of Frederick W. Taylor’s definitive 2004 book Dresden, which explains that Stalin had requested the bombing of Dresden’s strategic railhead as it brought reinforcements to the Wehrmacht, and which furthermore exposes Goebbels’s manipulations.

Obama and European leaders are repeating the mistakes of their 1930s predecessors. World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it? The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over. Like-minded, violent dictators of otherwise quite different Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and the Communist Soviet Union all wanted to attack their neighbors. Yet World War II could have been prevented had Western Europe united to deter Germany. Instead, France, Britain, and the smaller European democracies appeased Hitler. The United States turned isolationist. The Soviet Union collaborated with the Third Reich. And Italy and Japan eventually joined it. The 1930s saw rampant anti-Semitism. Jews were blamed in fascist countries for the economic downturn. They were scapegoated in democracies for stirring up the fascists. The only safe havens for Jews from Europe were Jewish-settled Palestine and the United States. Does all this sound depressingly familiar? The aftershocks of the global financial meltdown of 2008 still paralyze the European Union while prompting all sorts of popular extremist movements and opportunistic terrorists. After the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, America has turned inward.