RUTHFULLY YOURS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande came to Moscow last Friday night to discuss the outline of what was heralded as their peace plan for Ukraine. They spent five hours talking to President Vladimir Putin, but left for the security conference in Munich early Saturday without making a breakthrough. Their effort will yield another meeting in Minsk in the next few days, with Poroshenko joining the troika, but it appears to be doomed for three main reasons.

First of all, the United States government will not allow the Europeans to make any deals of their own. In March 1992 the U.S. torpedoed the European Union’s peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina, brokered by Portugal’s foreign minister José Cutileiro, which provided for a loose federation of three self-governing ethnic units. U.S. Ambassador in Belgrade Warren Zimmermann flew post haste to Sarajevo to tell Alija Izetbegovic that America would support the Muslim side if he reneged on the deal and reverted to the demand for a centralized, unitary state in which the Muslims would dominate by virtue of their plurality. The old Islamist was only too happy to oblige and promptly withdrew his signature.

It didn’t take long.

Less than a month after the Charlie Hebdo murders and the slaughter of four Jews at a kosher supermarket in Paris, Islamic State (IS, or ISIS) has sent a warning now to Belgium: “This,” they wrote in a letter to Het Laatste News (HLM), “is only the beginning.”

The letter, received by HLN’s editors on Feb. 4, referred also to a series of attacks in France that pre-dated the Paris massacres: “What happened in France will happen, too, in Belgium,” the typewritten letter stated in perfect French, “and from Belgium, IS will conquer all of Europe.”

According to HLN, counterterrorism officials are taking the letter seriously and believe it is the legitimate work of an IS jihadist. More, they claim that the writer is aware of current events in Belgium, down to small details. (The full text of the letter has not been released.)

The same day, news arrived in the Netherlands that Dutch jihadist Abu Hanief had just blown himself up in Fallujah – the fourth Dutch Muslim to commit a suicide bombing in Syria or Iraq. Hanief, 32, had been among the leaders of pro-IS demonstrations last summer in the Hague in which demonstrators called for the death of Jews. Though he was arrested on charges of hate speech after the protest, he was soon released; and evidently, despite government efforts to confiscate or cancel the passports of Dutch Muslims suspected of planning to join the Syrian jihad, he shortly thereafter slipped out undetected.

This is Europe now, poised at a moment when, while anti-Semitism is at record highs in France and the UK, Muslim groups call for “anti-Islamophobia” policies and boycotts against Israel; when officials in Wolfsburg, Germany, are investigating an alleged jihadist cell with ties to IS and as many as 50 members, most of them living in Germany; when Belgian police have arrested 15 people in the town of Verviers (population 56,000) and several others throughout the country, all since the Paris terrorist attacks that ran from Jan. 7-Jan. 9.

And no wonder, as some so-called “mainstream” Muslims now refuse to distance themselves from the acts of Muslim terrorists – including the atrocities committed by the Islamic State: Noted Shabir Burhani, a religious Muslim in his 20s and a student at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, “We have to accept Islam in its entirety, not try to adjust it to the times. Sharia is part of it, as are jihad and the Islamic state.” But Burhani, who previously served as spokesman for the now-defunct Sharia4Holland, does not view ISIS as the ideal, he told Dutch daily Trouw. It’s not the murders themselves he rejects, he said, but “the way IS does it, and shows it off to the world can be counterproductive. Does that really benefit Islam?”

The head of the Gallup polling firm recently backpedaled on his claim that the official unemployment rate being trumpeted by the White House, Wall Street and the media is a “big lie.”

Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, recently told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans, Wall Street on Parade reported.

“I think that the number that comes out of BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] and the Department of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight.”

But he contended that the percent of full time jobs in this country as a percent of the adult population “is the worst it’s been in 30 years.”

His appearance on CNBC came days after he claimed the official unemployment rate being trumpeted by the White House, Wall Street and the media is a “big lie.”

Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise & ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.

[Israeli] security experts didn’t anticipate one major event in the Middle East in the past 50 years.
– Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, Saban Forum, December 2014

Allow me to begin this week’s column with three somewhat lengthy excerpts from an essay, “Israel: The Case for Defensible Borders,” published in the influential journal Foreign Affairs.

‘One does not have to be a military expert…’

The selected excerpts relate to three topics:

(a) The indefensible pre-1967 lines “One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967. A considerable part of these lines is without any topographical security value; and, of no less importance, the lines fail to provide Israel with the essential minimum of strategic depth. The gravest problem is on the eastern boundary, where the entire width of the coastal plain varies between 10 and 15 miles, where the main centers of Israel’s population, including Tel Aviv and its suburbs, are situated, and where the situation of Jerusalem is especially perilous…”

(b) The territorial imperative in the age of modern longrange weaponry “The purpose of defensible borders… is to provide Israel with the requisite minimal strategic depth, as well as lines which have topographical strategic significance… there are some who would claim that in an era of modern technological development such factors are valueless [and] that the appearance of ground-to-ground missiles, supersonic fighter-bombers, and other sophisticated instruments of modern warfare has canceled out the importance of strategic depth and topographical barriers… this argument is certainly invalid regarding Israel… where the opposite is true… the innovations and sophistication in weaponry… not only fail to weaken the value of strategic depth and natural barriers but in fact enhance their importance.

How and why the West needs to spearhead the effort to undercut the Sharia narrative.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/to-undermine-sharia-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/143014/mitchell-a-orenstein-peter-kreko-and-attila-juhasz/the-hungarian-putin

ALMOST half the Jews in the world find themselves today under the Nazi heel. It is impossible to determine the rate at which their physical destruction is proceeding. Nor is it possible to visualize the condition in which the Jewish masses of Poland, Rumania, occupied Russia and even Hungary will be found when the pall of darkness is finally lifted from Nazi-occupied Europe. Tragic as is the position of the Polish peasant, he is rooted in his native soil — at least where he has not been dragged away from it and made to slave in an armament factory. The Jew in his Ghetto, on the other hand, finds himself despoiled of everything. Deprived of his meagre possessions, driven from his home, torn from his family, he has become the most abject of all the abject victims of the terror. In the reconstruction of a new and — let us hope — a better world, the reintegration of the Jew will thus present a peculiarly difficult problem, and one which is likely to tax both the energies and the good will of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.
The experience of the past twenty years, and the vexed problem of “minorities” which has caused so much trouble in Europe, hardly give much ground for hope of a satisfactory solution on the spot. No doubt many Jews will return and re-adapt themselves to the new conditions; but there will be vast masses which will have to emigrate. It would probably be unduly optimistic to assume that countries like the United States, Canada, and some of the South American republics, will radically change their immigration policy after this war — particularly in the strained economic conditions then to be expected. The hunted and disinherited will once more be faced with the eternal question: “Whither?” And little promise can be held out for them unless decisive steps are taken towards a radical solution of their problem.
It is a complex problem, which means that it will have to be faced with courage, imagination and sympathy. After the agonizing experiences through which European Jewry has passed in the last eight years, no makeshift or temporary expedients can suffice, and indeed such would be unworthy of the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the principles so often enunciated by the leaders of the democracies. Responsibility for the solution will rest with those charged with the task of reconstruction, and also with the Jewish communities which have escaped the fate of their European brethren. Of the latter, it is estimated that the Jews in the Western Hemisphere number about five millions; in the British Empire about half a million; in Palestine about half a million; and there are smaller communities in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, ‘Iraq, India and French North Africa, totalling perhaps a further half-million (though some of them can hardly be ranked as “free” communities).

Marshall McLuhan’s claim that ‘the medium is the message” is a rule of thumb adopted by today’s news media. Truth is optional, and the means by which it is delivered to the public has become a matter of “style” and bias. If truth does not fit comport with an established narrative, falsehood is permissible. After all, the public, to whom the news is directed, doesn’t know the difference.

Truth, in the news media, is becoming more and more as rare as a halal hamburger in Riyadh, or a wine list in a Tehran restaurant. If a news event doesn’t fit the New York Times’s printable meme or mantra, it isn’t going to be reported without slanting and bias so severe that even a cursory examination of it will capsize the story to reveal the rust and barnacles on its hull. The same rule of thumb goes for most news organizations and outlets, including the Washington Post and other “major” dailies. Almost every one of them delivers messages, not news.

New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

The European Union’s opposition to Israel’s West Bank settlements is well known. Preventing Jews from having homes on the biblical hills of Judea and Samaria is apparently a top foreign-policy priority for Brussels. Of course in attempting to justify their fixation with this matter the Eurocrats generally appeal to international law, making mention of its stipulations in the gravest tones. But now it turns out that the EU has been flouting international law and backing illegal West Bank settlements after all. In fact, it’s been funding and building them directly. Only these West Bank settlements aren’t for Jews, they’re for Palestinians. So apparently the rules don’t apply.

A report by the Israeli NGO Regavim has revealed that in recent years the EU has funneled millions of euros into constructing more than 400 housing units in 17 illegal settlements. Somewhat bizarrely these outposts fly the EU federal flag and are staffed by EU personnel boldly dressed in EU uniform. But unlike Israel’s West Bank settlements which have a disputed legal status, there can be no doubt that these EU settlements are in clear and open breach of international law.