RUTHFULLY YOURS

Communism may have collapsed in Russia, but the people who brought you the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall haven’t. Now they are classed as biznessmen. Now, they court Western politicians and use their oil money to lubricate international diplomacy. And they’re rushin’ with rubles to make friends.

Bill Clinton is one of those friends. The Russians paid him $500,000 to deliver a speech. Even Joe Klein in TIME Magazine calls the Clintons’ money-grubbing from the heirs of Stalin and Brezhnev troubling. Klein refers to the Clintons’ “blind spot” in accepting vast sums from the former masters of the Gulag.

As president, Bill Clinton signed the International Religious Freedom Act. But as former president, he has had no problem associating himself with – and collecting large checks from – some of the worst violators of religious freedom. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) issues annual country reports. It says this about Russia:

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Praetorian Guard of Iran’s regime, controls most of the economy, as well as the black-market, alternative economy. The IRGC therefore actually benefits from sanctions; it is private firms, such as those involved in international commerce, that suffer. Why would IRGC operatives want to see the playing field made more level by private investment, transparency and a competitive economy?

Sanctions never hurt the regime’s ruling class; lifting them only helped the regime solidify its power over its people.

The objective of these two demands [an immediate lifting of all sanctions and no, or severely limited, inspections] is either to have them accepted, or to render it untenable for the Obama administration to offer Congress any deal that could be accepted – thereby shifting blame for the collapse of the talks to the U.S.

The U.S should also be on guard against the mullahs’ belief that the Obama administration is weak both politically and its aversion to using force. The mullahs might find great pleasure in humiliating Obama, as they did President Jimmy Carter, by dragging out hostage crisis negotiations by running out the clock until his term was over. They clearly believe that the Obama administration, simply to say it got “a deal,” is ready to sign anything.

Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat who was stationed in Washington for many years, said that US President Barack Obama’s interview on Channel Two earlier this week was a showcase for his complete lack of understanding on the situation in the Middle East.

“After all, this is the president who claimed that the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere would lead to democracy in the Arab world,” he told Arutz Sheva.

“This is the president who, in his famous speech in Cairo five years ago, proclaimed that ‘Islam has always been part of American history,’ when of course any grade school student knows that this is not the case,” Ettinger asserted.

Mosaic Magazine, Neal Kozodoy’s website of Jewish ideas, published last month an essay by Tikvah Fund president Eric Cohen entitled “The Spirit of Jewish Conservatism,” and invited an enormous range of Jewish and other conservative thinkers to comment. I couldn’t finish Cohen’s rambling essay, but the responses make for pithy reading. Cohen proposes to nudge American Jews away from liberalism towards conservatism on the strength of nationalism, historical identity and wealth creation. Like his mentor Leon Kass and many of the Chicago political philosophers of the past generation, Cohen wants to reproduce the benefits of religion without the unpleasant bit about fear and trembling. It’s an unsuccessful as well as a dated view, and most of the respondents invited by Mosaic to comment shredded Cohen’s argument.

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/?mc_cid=4691e46bf2&mc_eid=1b65c1689e

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/EYEontheUN/antisemitism/schabas/?l=101&p=2910&parent=2909&mc_cid=4691e46bf2&mc_eid=1b65c1689e

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is international humanitarian law?
Where is international humanitarian law to be found?
What if the parties are not bound by the Conventions or Protocols?
Who is obligated to follow international humanitarian law?
What are the basic rules and principles of international humanitarian law?
How does international humanitarian law apply to the 2014 Gaza War?
What is international humanitarian law?

The recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has provided more questions than answers. According to the DIA, a preliminary report informed then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sept. 12, 2012 that the previous day’s Benghazi, Libya, terrorist attack that left four Americans dead had been planned “at least ten days in advance” by al -Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood-linked terrorists, according to a statement released on Thursday by Special Operations OPSEC, a public-interest group of retired special operations military veterans.

In a heavily redacted memorandum dated Sept. 12, 2012 — the day after the Benghazi slaughter of four Americans including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens — the DIA informed Hillary Clinton, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, President Obama’s National Security Council and the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Islamic terrorists planned their attack about 10 or more days prior to the slaughter that occurred on the day the U.S. acknowledged the 11th Anniversary of the attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania that killed about 3,000 innocent people.

Suleiman the Magnificent reached greatness when his Ottoman Empire controlled everything from what would be today Vienna, to Istanbul, to Syria to Yemen, and everything between.

Arabs and Jews lived in the Middle East area which was called Palestine. Some worshiped many gods; some followed the Torah; after Jesus Christ some were Christians; after Muhammad some were Muslims. Cities were Damascus, Jerusalem, Bagdad and more. Nation states did not exist. There was never a Palestine State. Successive rulers that controlled the region included Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Byzantines, and the Ottoman Empire.

Ottomans had ruled for centuries when Arabian King Hussein guardian of Mecca and Medina; wanted an Arab state without Ottoman control.

~Back in the impeachment era, the otherwise unreadable Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime”. Other black Americans picked up the shtick – Congressman Eddie Bernice Johnson, for example, at some big awards night honoring Clinton.

But the point about lines like this is that they’re something the other guy has to say about you. If you’re white, you need an actual black to hail you as the first black president. If you’re straight, you need a lesbian or pre-op transwoman to salute you as the first LGBT president.

Unless, that is, you’re Barack Obama:

You know, I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.

Some of his best friends are Jews, and as he is own best friend he is own best Jew.

He said this to David Axelrod, apparently. Axelrod himself said this about Benjamin Netanyahu:

“The world of politics everywhere is divided into two categories: the first and more common is the people who run for public office because they want to be somebody,” he explained. “A smaller group is made of respectable people who run for public office because they want to do something – something positive. Shape the future in a positive way. I think Benjamin Netanyahu completely falls in the first category. He is a great politician. He knows what he needs to do to get through the next election. But it seems to me that Israel has to think about what they need to do to get through the next generation.”

In The Atlantic recently, an in-depth interview by Jeffrey Goldberg with Barack Obama that begins:

‘On Tuesday afternoon, as President Obama was bringing an occasionally contentious but often illuminating hour-long conversation about the Middle East to an end, I brought up a persistent worry. “A majority of American Jews want to support the Iran deal,” I said, “but a lot of people are anxiety-ridden about this, as am I.” Like many Jews—and also, by the way, many non-Jews—I believe that it is prudent to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of anti-Semitic regimes. Obama, who earlier in the discussion had explicitly labeled the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an anti-Semite, responded with an argument I had not heard him make before.

“Look, 20 years from now, I’m still going to be around, God willing. If Iran has a nuclear weapon, it’s my name on this,” he said, referring to the apparently almost-finished nuclear agreement between Iran and a group of world powers led by the United States. “I think it’s fair to say that in addition to our profound national-security interests, I have a personal interest in locking this down.”….’

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov [pictured] has called on America to end its attempt to remove Syria’s President Assad from power in return for Russia’s co-operation to militarily confront Islamic State.

Lavrov reportedly told Bloomberg on 2 June 2015:

“The U.S.’s “obsession” with [Syria’s President] Assad isn’t helping in the common fight against the threat from Islamic State…

People put the fate of one person whom they hate above the fight against terrorism. Islamic State can go “very far” unless stopped, and air strikes alone “are not going to do the trick.

If people continue to acquiesce with what is going on and continue to acquiesce with those who categorically refuse to start the political process until Bashar Assad disappears, then I’m not very optimistic for the future of this region…”

America is part of the Friends of Syria core group known as the London Eleven that has been assisting rebel forces in Syria attempting to overthrow Assad.