RUTHFULLY YOURS

Michael Ledeen ends another year touting the allegedly Good “opposition” movement of former Iranian prime minister Mousavi, the “Green Revolution” leader under house arrest since 2009.

Ledeen concludes:

If we had a foreign policy team worthy of us, we’d be supporting the Iranian opposition, but Obama has proven that he prefers Khamenei to Mousavi.

I was baffled by this same sentiment back in 2009, and remain so today.

How might it be “worthy” of the United States to back a man who wants to turn Iran, as Mousavi declared in 2009, “to the pure principles of the Islamic revolution”? Lest there be any doubt, that “Islamic revolution” would be the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, meanwhile, is the perfect sharia-state-mate. Author of the hejab-boosting “Beauty of Concealment and Concealment of Beauty,” Mrs. Mousavi “had a major role in forming `Gasht-e Khaharan-e Zeinab,’ the female street police units that harass women to enforce `Islamic behavior.’ ”

The facts suggest that what we were looking at in Iran then and and are looking at now is just another power struggle among competing Islamic blocs — not the romantic struggle, as our most prominent pundits have insisted, for a Western concept of liberty that literally does not exist within Islam.

But there is something in the Mousavi case that is even more disturbing. How is it possible to imagine that a man almost certainly involved in the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut is now or ever a candidate for US support?

Back in 2009, Robert Baer wrote in Time magazine:

Before we go too far down the road cheering the forces of Iranian democracy, let’s not forget that its public face, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has American blood on his hands. He was Iran’s Prime Minister during most of the 1980s, a time when the country was waging a terrorist campaign against the U.S.

There’s an old Cold War joke — pre-pantyhose — that to defeat communism we should empty our B-52 bombers of nuclear weapons and instead drop nylons over the Soviet Union. Flood the Russians with the soft consumer culture of capitalism, seduce them with Western contact and commerce, love bomb them into freedom.

We did win the Cold War, but differently. We contained, constrained, squeezed, and eventually exhausted the Soviets into giving up. The dissidents inside subsequently told us how much they were sustained by our support for them and our implacable pressure on their oppressors.

The logic behind President Obama’s Cuba normalization, assuming there is one, is the nylon strategy. We tried 50 years of containment and that didn’t bring democracy. So let’s try inundating them with American goods, visitors, culture, contact, commerce.

It’s not a crazy argument. But it does have its weaknesses. Normalization has not advanced democracy in China or Vietnam. Indeed, it hasn’t done so in Cuba. Except for the U.S., Cuba has had normal relations with the rest of the world for decades. Tourists, trade, investment from Canada, France, Britain, Spain, everywhere. An avalanche of nylons — and not an inch of movement in Cuba toward freedom.

In fact, one could argue that this influx of Western money has helped preserve the dictatorship, as just about all the financial transactions go through the government, which takes for itself before any trickle-down crumbs are allowed to reach the regime-indentured masses.

My view is that police-state control of every aspect of Cuban life is so thoroughly perfected that outside influences, whether confrontational or cooperative, only minimally affect the country’s domestic trajectory.

So why not just lift the embargo? After all, the unassailable strategic rationale for isolating Cuba — in the Soviets’ mortal global struggle with us, Cuba enlisted as a highly committed enemy beachhead 90 miles from American shores — evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet empire. A small island with no significant independent military capacities, Cuba became geopolitically irrelevant.

The 10 Most Important Jihad Stories of 2014
10. The abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls
Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Nigerian jihad group named the Congregation of the People of the Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad and better known as Boko Haram (“Western Education Is Sinful,” or “Books Bad”), disgusted and horrified the world last May, and even provoked a Michelle Obama hashtag, by abducting over three hundred schoolgirls and selling them into sex slavery. Shekau even published a video in which he gloats about the abduction, telling the girls’ grieving families:
I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah….There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.
Shekau had a point: the Qur’an really does allow for the owning of sex slaves. Muslim men can take “captives of the right hand” (Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 33:50). It also says: “O Prophet! Lo! We have made lawful unto thee thy wives unto whom thou hast paid their dowries, and those whom thy right hand possesseth of those whom Allah hath given thee as spoils of war” (33:50). 4:3 and 4:24 extend this privilege to Muslim men in general, as does this passage:
Certainly will the believers have succeeded: They who are during their prayer humbly submissive, and they who turn away from ill speech, and they who are observant of zakah, and they who guard their private parts except from their wives or those their right hands possess, for indeed, they will not be blamed (Qur’an 23:1-6).
None – absolutely none – of the extensive international coverage of the abduction discussed the justifications for this practice within the Qur’an. This refusal to deal with the root causes only ensured that the practice would happen again, and it did later in the year, when the Islamic State pressed Yazidi and Christian women into sex slavery.
9. Britain’s capitulation on Muslim rape gangs
Britain’s Birmingham Mail reported in November that Birmingham’s City Council buried a report about Muslim cab drivers exploiting non-Muslim girls back in 1990.
A researcher, Dr. Jill Jesson, drafted a report on this issue. But, she explained,
the report was shelved, buried, it was never made public. I was shocked to be told that copies of the report were to be destroyed and that nothing further was to be said. Clearly, there was something in this report that someone in the department was worried about.
Authorities were worried because Jesson’s report illustrated that virtually all of the exploitative cab drivers were “Asians,” the British media euphemism for Muslims, and their victims were “white,” i.e., non-Muslim. The exploitation of these girls stems from Qur’an-based religious beliefs, but British officials were terrified because stopping this exploitation would appear “racist.”
Jesson elaborated:

Members of Congress come and go, and many leave Washington no better or worse than they found it. A few make a mark, and Congress is losing one of them: Tom Coburn.

The senator doesn’t leave behind him a stack of legislation with his name, or grand bipartisan deals. He doesn’t leave stunts, public tantrums, an adoring press corps, or, for that matter, many adoring GOP colleagues. Mr. Coburn didn’t really “do” legacy. Which is why this rather humble Oklahoman will have one.

What Mr. Coburn does leave is a more informed electorate and a better Republican Party—two groups that benefited enormously from his focus on first principles: adhering to the Constitution, limiting federal government, and protecting individual liberties. In his three terms in the House and 10 years in the Senate, he became most known for forcing Congress (in particular his own caucus) to reconcile its actions against those principles. His long-term efforts to decode the federal government—voluminous reports on waste and fraud, demands for more transparency—were likewise aimed at giving voters the tools they need to hold members true to those principles.

The real key to Mr. Coburn’s success was a skill too little valued in Washington today: hard work. He was an accountant and then an obstetrician before coming to D.C., and never lost that belief that he needed to earn his paycheck. He was in the office every morning by 7:30. He’d read every word of every report his staff gave him—and send it back with typos circled. He read every bill and objected if he wasn’t given the time to do so before a vote. He’d dive into monstrous sections of the federal government—the budget, veteran affairs, disability payments, the tax code—and not re-emerge until he knew it front to back. He was a policy innovator, in particular on health care.

Many was the time this reporter would stumble across some government outrage, and call Mr. Coburn’s office for his take—only to discover he’d written a bill to fix the problem a year earlier. That knowledge was power; he was a formidable opponent because he knew more than the appropriators, the negotiators, the bills’ authors. An all-time favorite line came from one of his staffers who, in the middle of a Coburn budget fight with Congress, wryly commented: “I don’t know why they bother. Fighting with Coburn over the budget is like waging a land war in Asia. You can’t win.”

Another Coburn strength was his skill at practicing politics, without being political. He knew every arcane rule in the Senate and was willing to use them to force a clarifying moment. When he first arrived in Washington, some accused him of grandstanding—until they realized his interest was in shining a light on everyone but himself. The pity is that history rarely hands out awards to those who stop bad things. Tom Coburn blocked more bad ideas and lousy legislation in Congress than most Americans will ever know.

An influx of new Security Council members means a likely ‘yes’ vote—and a veto dilemma for Obama.

Long-standing Palestinian efforts to use the United Nations to achieve internationally recognized statehood status nearly succeeded early Wednesday. Just after midnight, the Security Council narrowly rejected a Jordanian draft resolution fixing a one-year deadline for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, requiring Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 lines, and declaring Jerusalem the capital of “Palestine.”

Because the U.N. Charter requires nine affirmative votes from among the Security Council’s 15 members (assuming no vetoes) to pass a resolution, Jordan’s proposal failed—by one vote. There were eight in favor, two against, and five abstentions. Nonetheless, a pro-Palestinian, U.N. Charter-compliant majority may soon exist.

And absent more-effective U.S. diplomacy, the Obama administration could soon face making a choice that it would dearly like to avoid: whether to veto a biased, anti-Israel resolution. The Palestinian Authority has already significantly upped the ante by moving, later on Wednesday, to join the treaty creating the International Criminal Court.

A firmer U.S. strategy might have prevented the dilemma from arising. The White House’s opening diplomatic error was in sending strong signals to the media and U.S. allies that Mr. Obama, wary of offending Arab countries, was reluctant to veto any resolution favoring a Palestinian state. Secretary of State John Kerry took pains not to offer a view of the resolution before it was taken up. Such equivocation was a mistake because even this administration asserts that a permanent resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict requires direct negotiations and agreements among the parties themselves.

No draft resolution contrary to these precepts should be acceptable to the U.S., or worth wasting time on in the diplomatic pursuit of a more moderate version. This American view, advocated for years and backed by resolute threats to veto anything that contradicted it, has previously dissuaded the Palestinians from blue-smoke-and-mirror projects in the Security Council.

Remembering the Pro-Israel Work of a 104-Year-Old Oscar Winning Actress By Daniel Greenfield

Luise Rainer, an actress who won two Oscars back to back after emigrating from Germany, died at the age of 104. While she is remembering for her place in old Hollywood, often overlooked is the pro-Israel work of this Jewish actress.

Rainer participated in the United Palestine Appeal’s Night of Stars (Palestine was the British Latin designation used for a colonial territory that included Israel). She was the chairwoman of the American tour of the Habima Theater, which stood to reason as her acting aspirations had begun as a young girl when she planned to join the Habima Theater.

Newspaper accounts show her continuing to appear at Combined Jewish Appeal events alongside Israeli speakers. While coverage of her largely vanished when she walked away from Hollywood as a young woman, it would appear that she remained active in pro-Israel coverage.

There have been few interviews of Rainer in recent years even though she remained articulate and clearminded.

A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reveals that nearly 6 in 10 people believe race relations are bad, with 23% saying they are “very bad.” The causes of these perceptions are many, including nationally publicized police killings of two black men, disorderly and violent demonstrators ignoring the facts of the cases to brand the police “racist,” a lazy media neglecting to dig up and then publicize those facts, and a president, Attorney General, and mayor of New York willing to exploit and widen racial division and consort with hustlers like Al Sharpton.

What we see at work in these events is the long established racial narrative in which endemic white racism accounts for all the ills that afflict black people. Not just individual whites harbor this original sin, but our educational, political, social, justice, and economic institutions are racist as well, favoring white people and hence conferring on them “white skin privilege.” The wide scope of racism means that no matter how well meaning towards blacks, or how socially and economically disadvantaged, individual whites cannot purge themselves of racism. Only radical transformation of all our institutions can redeem America from racism.

This fairytale regularly ignores numerous facts. The decline in black poverty, for example, calls into question the notion that there is “institutional racism” warping the economy. Thanks to postwar economic growth, the black poverty rate decreased from 87% in 1940 to 28% today. Similar improvement can be seen in the growth of the black middle class and increases in black home ownership. And the claim that blacks are shut out of the job market is hard to square with the fact that millions of illegal aliens are working in this country, and immigrant entrepreneurs are creating small businesses.

Similarly, the idea that the police are an “occupying army” targeting blacks, a cliché we heard repeatedly during the recent demonstrations over the police shootings in Ferguson and Brooklyn, is exploded by simple statistics that show about 200 blacks a year––most shot while possessing a gun or knife––are killed by police officers, while almost 6,000 a year are killed by other blacks. It’s a strange “army” that endangers itself in order to protect and save the lives of those it’s allegedly “occupying.”

Then there’s the “voter suppression” charge, the assertion that attempts by states to ensure only legal voters cast ballots really are designed to discourage black voters. The increasing numbers of black people registering and turning out to vote belie this claim, as does the much greater number of blacks holding elected office. Indeed, in 2012 the proportion of black voters turning out in the national election was greater than that of white.

A media darling who became the face of so-called peaceful protesters in Ferguson has been arrested for arson, proving once again that nonviolent left-wing protest remains the rarest of unicorns in the age of Obama.

The black teenager, Joshua Williams, who marched shoulder-to-shoulder with radical left-wing professor Cornel West, was dubbed a peace activist by his many admirers in the fourth estate. As a National Review Online article described the situation,

“Williams has been portrayed in the media as an innocent victim fighting back against authority; he has been held up as the quintessential Ferguson protestor, decrying police brutality as he is time and again brutalized by police.”

Williams came to Ferguson, Mo. to protest what happened to 18-year-old Michael Brown. Brown, a young black man, was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson. The Aug. 9 shooting of Brown, who tried to seize Wilson’s gun, set off riots nationwide. The local grand jury’s Nov. 24 finding that no probable cause existed to charge Wilson with murder or any other crime touched off a new wave of unrest.

But now after months of loudly protesting the supposed injustice done to Brown, Williams stands accused of starting multiple fires at the QuikTrip store in Berkeley, Mo., a couple miles from Ferguson. The venue choice is significant. Brown committed a strong-arm robbery at the QuikTrip store in Ferguson, roughing up a much smaller man, just minutes before he attacked Wilson. QuikTrip itself has become a kind of rallying point for rioters, looters, community organizers, and other criminals in the wake of Brown’s death.

Williams reportedly confessed his crimes to police in a videotaped interview and was charged Dec. 26 with “1st degree arson, 2nd degree burglary and misdemeanor theft.”

In the beginning of his career as a Ferguson protester, Williams paid lip service to nonviolence as a means of effecting change.

A court in Pakistan upheld the death penalty for Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of four. She is accused of having made derogatory remarks about Islam after neighbors objected to her drinking water from their glass, because she was not a Muslim and therefore “unclean.”

A successful Christian school in the United Kingdom was warned that it would be downgraded by inspectors and might even face closure after failing to invite a leader from another religion, such as a Muslim imam, to lead assemblies. “A Government consultation paper… makes clear that even taking children on trips to different places of worship would not be enough to be judged compliant.”

“They then told me that since I refused to [convert to Islam] they would kill me…. They pinned me down and told me they will make death painful and slow, as they are not prepared to waste bullets on me. They said, ‘Be warned that if any of you Muslims dares to assist him, he is also an infidel and we shall make sure that he too is killed.'” — Adamu, a Christian; Nigeria.

They are searching [for me] to cut my throat. When I go to mass, I say I am going to English classes because I plan to travel.” — “Tarek,” a convert to Christianity in Lebanon.

The police, far from interfering, actually incited the Muslim man.

“With no one on hand to know what is going on, it’s easier to mistreat them.” — Jason Demars, President, Present Truth Ministries.

About 100,000 Christians die every year because of their religious beliefs. — The Center for the Studies of Global Christianity in the United States.

In just two months, from August to October, nearly 200 Christian churches were destroyed in Nigeria by the Islamic organization Boko Haram and its Muslim allies, after their capture of towns and villages in the north-eastern states of Borno and Adamawa. In the words of Reverend Gideon Obasogie, the director of Catholic Social Communication of Maiduguri Diocese in Borno State: “The group’s seizure of territory in both states has seen 185 churches torched and over 190,000 people displaced by their insurgency.”

Many people were shocked when they first heard of the Islamic State (IS), a small terrorist group that took over large parts of Iraq and Syria and declared itself a new caliphate in June 2014. The rise of IS-inspired terrorist activity in France, Canada and Australia has only enhanced this shock.

However, those who heard the constant warnings coming from Israel about the dangers of the Middle East have anticipated such an event for a long time.

In this article, I want to look at the various lessons that the rise of IS can teach us about the Middle East. One can quickly discern that these are exactly the things Israel has been talking about for the past few decades, shattering many Western myths.

1. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the central conflict in the Middle East.

For the past few decades, the Western world has acted as if the root of all problems in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If only we could solve this one problem, they thought, we could bring about peace in the Middle East.

The events of the past few years prove that the problems in the Middle East are much deeper than the one conflict between the Jewish state and the Arab world.

The struggle between Sunnis and Shi’ites far predates the struggle between the Arab world and Israel. It is specifically this struggle that is at the heart of the battle between IS and the government forces in Iraq. The struggle between secular and religious forces lies at the heart of many of the conflicts in the region, including the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian government, and the internal conflict in Syria. There is also an age-old battle with various groups in the region trying to gain some form of autonomy, or at least some equal rights: the Kurds, the Alawites, the Yazidis, the Druse and the Christians.

These historical conflicts, some dating back over 1,000 years, are much deeper than the Jewish-Arab one. These conflicts were silenced by strong dictatorships in the region that did not allow for any opposition. However, with the Arab Spring and the weakening of these dictatorships, these conflicts are now coming back to life.

In just the past few years, hundreds of thousands have died in these conflicts – many more deaths than resulted from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Let us make what is already clear even more blunt: The building of Jewish houses in the Jewish historical homeland of Judea and Samaria, in Israel, has absolutely nothing to do with these conflicts, and no peace deal between Palestinians and Jews could ever help solve them.