RUTHFULLY YOURS

By now it should be readily apparent to all concerned parties that the United States, led by Barack Obama, will not resort to the military option to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions nor will he employ economic sanctions. In dealing with the Islamic Republic there are essentially three options and Obama has foreclosed two of them.

Option one favors a trilateral approach involving diplomacy coupled with crippling sanctions and the credible threat of use of force should sanctions fail to persuade the mullahs to change course. This option enjoys bipartisan support in Congress and is favored by many notable policy analysts.

Option two involves immediate military action to destroy Iran’s vast nuclear program. No one doubts that the United States either acting alone or in coordination with Israel can accomplish this task. Nonetheless, few but the most hawkish of hawks believe that this option represents responsible foreign policy.

Yesterday an angry leftist supporter of the Ground Zero Mosque shot three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina over a parking dispute. Jibril Hough, the spokesman for the Islamic Center of Charlotte, called the parking space shooting “domestic terrorism.”

Which “domestic terrorist” group did Craig Stephen Hicks, the shooter, belong to? His Facebook likes give us a partial clue. Maybe it was “Liberals Against Conservative Propaganda,” “LGBT Activism” or “The Rachel Maddow Fan Page.”

There’s no doubt that the Islamic Center of Charlotte has a great deal of expertise when it comes to terrorism. It was owned by the North American Islamic Trust which the FBI described as supporting Jihad in the United States. NAIT was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case over that charity’s funneling of money to Hamas.

Four years ago, Hough had defended Hamas. Instead he claimed that America and Israel were the real terrorists.

The recent massacres in Paris of the staff of Charlie Hebdo and the Jews in a kosher supermarket, and the increasing incidences of butchering young people coming out of pubs have made more people concerned about the rise of terrorism. Tens of thousands have come out to demonstrate.

Since the 9/11 attack on New York and the Pentagon in 2001, there have been close to 25,000 terrorist attacks worldwide, all of which were perpetrated in the name of Islam. That is about 5 terrorist attacks every day. So far two million people have been killed and a similar number are maimed and injured. These attacks are becoming more frequent. Yet something is not changing.

By Ron Radosh
Today, the world is mourning the death of Kayla Mueller, the supposed humanitarian aid worker who was captured by ISIS. They claim that she was killed in a Jordanian airstrike. The Jordanian military authorities say that the building they bombed was an ISIS weapons storage facility, and hence a legitimate target. In any case, the blame rests with ISIS, who kidnapped her and put her in harm’s way.

Her family and friends, the New York Times [1] reported [1], described her as “a deeply idealistic young woman eager to help those less fortunate.” President Obama sent condolences to the family, and at an emotional statement made on the Senate Floor, John McCain [2] mourned the loss of a young woman who was a native of Prescott, Arizona:

After graduating from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 2009, Kayla committed her life to helping people in need around the world – first in India, then Israel and the Palestinian territories and back home in Prescott, where she volunteered at an HIV/AIDS clinic and a women’s shelter. (my emphasis)

John Lennon’s 1971 hit single “Imagine” asks us to imagine a world without “possessions,” a world in which “There’s no countries…Nothing to kill or die for.” The song urges us to “Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world,” a “brotherhood of man” committed to “living life in peace.” We may be forgiven for wondering if this vision of irenic inclusiveness would have embraced that other Brotherhood, the Muslim one, as well.

Lennon did not live long enough to witness the re-emergence of Islam as a virulent and conquering ideological force, whether via terrorist atrocities or demographic infiltration. Moreover, the Lennon who died in 1980 had travelled some distance from his peacenik persona. Dave Swindle notes, citing several informative sources, that “in his final years before his murder, the songwriter abandoned his famous progressive faith, enjoyed arguing with radicals, and supported Ronald Reagan.” According to Swindle, “Lennon was not a very serious leftist. He was just an artist too heavily influenced by some of the other dominant personalities of his age—the ones most skilled at manipulating talented people into becoming their political pawns, their useful idiots.” The lame-brained Yoko Ono might have had something to do with it as well.

Rabbi Dov Fischer is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine (Steimatzky: 1985). His political commentaries have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Los Angeles Times, and in other major American publications. He formerly was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, is an adjunct professor of law at two prominent American law schools, and is Rav of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He is author of Jews for Nothing (Feldheim: 1983) and is in his fifth year as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings can be found at RabbiDov.com As with all of Rabbi Prof. Fischer’s writings, this commentary expresses his own views.

Not to worry about whether Obama will hate Bibi even more and be even more mixed on Israel. There is no “more” that he can hate Bibi, and Obama cannot be worse to Israel than he is because, for reasons beyond his control, he is as bad as he can be.

Bibi absolutely must make that speech. I do not know whether it will do any good, whether it will change anything. But he must make that speech to Congress.

We now have a President in the United States who has absolutely no comprehension as to how to deal with tyrants, dictators, bullies, and thugs. Worse — much worse than that — is that this President does not know what he does not know. He believes he is a genius, the smartest person in the room. He surrounds himself with sycophants who tell him that he is the smartest person in the room. Yes, history will clear it all up, recording him among the five least competent or qualified of all American presidents. Possibly the least of all.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-putin-mystique-by-anna-arutunyan-1423700497 To understand Putin’s power, it is essential to consider the millions of Russians who have molded him ‘into a sort of sacred king.’ When George W. Bush looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, he was, the president famously said, able to get “a sense of his soul.” The president was neither the first nor […]

With Europe weak and distracted, only the U.S. can thwart the Kremlin’s growing ambitions.

The heavy fighting in eastern Ukraine this week isn’t the only reason to be skeptical about the prospects for the peace summit that began Wednesday in Minsk, Belarus. Even if the meeting among Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Russian President Vladimir Puti n, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande produces a cease-fire agreement that holds up—unlike the one signed last fall—the conflict’s underlying reality will remain unchanged: The Russian-backed separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine is part of Moscow’s larger grand strategy.

President Putin, who is consumed by historical humiliations, knows that Russia was invaded not only by Napoleon and Hitler, but before that also by the Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians. And so the Russian president seeks a post-Warsaw Pact buffer zone in Central and Eastern Europe. The Kremlin play book: imperialism by way of forcing energy dependence, intelligence operations, criminal rackets, buying infrastructure and media through third parties, the bribing of local politicians and playing off the insecurities of ethnic minorities.

Jenny McCarthy knows the credibility of science is a house of cards.

An important question that emerges from the rise of the vaccine doubter movement is by what process of persuasion did so many people come to believe what they do about vaccination? They believe the risks of vaccination are much greater than the risk of the diseases it is supposed to prevent.

Life without serious disease for the majority is now taken for granted as the natural order. The young don’t sign up for health insurance because they don’t need it.

Forgotten over time is the extraordinary human effort and intelligence that produced the good life today. The young women turning against vaccination, a decision that potentially imperils the lives of others in their communities, have mothers or grandmothers with personal experience of the last great pre-vaccine disease, which was polio

PBS may also be charged with having broadcast religious propaganda in place of balanced educational, instructional, and public information material, despite elaborate claims to the contrary.

The Muslim Brotherhood, in a 1991 memoir, spoke of its “work in America as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

The role played by radical individuals in a PBS broadcast and website raises many serious questions, not just for the trustees of PBS, but for national agencies responsible for accuracy in the U.S. media.

If PBS does not publicly correct this confusion and revoke its association with the project, may we not ask just how trusted — and publicly financed — this outlet should really be?

For more than ten years, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut has singled out America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) as the country’s most trusted public institution. A 2012 poll for PBS, carried out by independent survey consultants Harris Interactive and ORC Online Caravan found that public trust in PBS (at 26%) was far higher than in any other U.S. institution, such as the courts of law (13%), newspapers (6%), the Federal government (5%) or Congress (4%). That these figures have been consistent for so many years, would seem a strong indicator of PBS’s publicly funded role at the heart of America’s democracy. Almost 90% of US households with televisions watch PBS.