RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jihadists consciously choose to “kill themselves” in order not to die, in order to achieve immortality. The struggle is not about land, it is about God.

“Blessed be your quality weapons, the wheels of your cars, your axes and kitchen knives, because they are being used according to Allah’s will. We are the soldiers of Allah (Sultan Abu Al-Einein, Abbas Senior Advisor and Member, Fatah Central Committee, November 19, 2014).

To be sure, there was nothing subtle or coincidental about the latest Palestinian-inflicted carnage in a Jerusalem synagogue. Once again, the ritualistic attack with knives and axes was an example of crude religious sacrifice masquerading as revolutionary terror. Yet again, the Islamist perpetrators were animated by the belief that in shedding “infidel” blood “according to Allah’s will,” their homicidal mission would represent individually sacred acts of redemption.

Above all, the murderers sought to overcome their own dreaded mortality, lasciviously, by dispatching defenseless and praying Jews, to an unspeakable death.

In reality, Hamas terrorists and their many kindred Palestinian comrades in arms are not indifferent to dying. On the contrary, their mock-heroic posturing is simply pretense, a grotesque misrepresentation of core cowardice as authentic courage.

In fact, verifiable, and also unhidden, the Palestinian terrorists’ own personal fears of death are overwhelming and tangible.

These utterly primal fears are the reason they so eagerly seek a unique “death” as martyrs; that is, to best ensure that they will never “really” die. Although counter-intuitive, these Jihadists consciously choose to “kill themselves” in order not to die. More than anything else, perhaps, this strange decisional calculus now needs to be more fully understood.

How does a human being (or two) walk into a synagogue and begin hacking at worshippers who are immersed in prayer, leaving behind a trail of blood, victims, grief and horror?

The question is misplaced because no “human being” could do such a thing. It would have to be a beast in human form, a relic from primitive times before true humans became civilized. The Arab-Muslim animals that span the globe chopping, hacking and merrily decapitating – from Iraq to Jerusalem to New York to Oklahoma, and places in between and beyond – are a discredit even to the term “animal.” Most animals are not that brutal.

The real issue confronting Israel for decades and the civilized world today is what to do about the proliferation of savages who lust for blood and derive inspiration from their religious texts? One example not to follow is that of President Obama’s. In one of his more ludicrous statements in the last few months – amid a healthy competition – he decried the attack, the loss of life “on both sides (!),” and then added this gem: that the “overwhelming majority of Palestinians…want to live in peace.” Really? And based on what data was that determination made? That only tens of thousands of “Palestinians” rejoiced after the massacre, singing and dancing in the streets, distributing candies and sweets, praising the vicious slaughter and the slaughterers – and not hundreds of thousands? Polls in the PA reveal widespread support for the murder of Jews so what exactly is he talking about??

Obama seems to be as much an expert on “Palestinian” society as he is about Islam generally. His incessant protestation that ISIS distorts Islam is based on…what exactly? ISIS and sundry other radical groups seem to feel that they are fulfilling the dictates of Islam – and the few Muslims who disagree meet their fate at the business end of a machete. Actions speak louder than words. Obama’s expertise in Islam has led him to cede the Middle East to the most ruthless forces, embrace the radical Muslim Turk Erdogan as an American ally, and facilitate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Perhaps with a nuclear weapon, Iran will be civilized, or so the thinking goes.

Little can or should be expected from Obama or from the Europeans, mired as they are in cultural deterioration, moral relativism, population decline and Muslim-inspired Jew hatred. Sweden just became the latest country to recognize “Palestine.” Sweden (!), which willfully encourages those who favor the shechita of Jews even as they themselves ban the shechita (ritual slaughter) of animals. How is that for misplaced priorities and corrupt values? And we should be clear, as the wave of recognition sweeps Europe in the coming year: any country that recognizes a “Palestine” is endorsing the mass slaughter of Jews.

Calls and campaigns against Israeli-made commodities and companies allegedly owned by Jewish businessmen, including Turkish Jews, fill Islamist newspaper pages every day.

“Moses is Moses. Jesus is Jesus. And Business is business.” — Western Ambassador in Ankara.

Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, expressed pride on Nov. 11, that “Turkey was the [world’s] loudest voice against Israel’s actions.”

“From here, I once more call on Israel and Israel’s brutal rulers: Don’t you dare considering resuming these attacks against al-Quds [Jerusalem] and the al-Aqsa Mosque, regarding … internal turmoil and tension in the Islamic world as an opportunity. Even if everyone remains silent, the government of the Republic of Turkey will not keep silent,” Davutoglu said.

“Moses is Moses, Jesus is Jesus and business is business,” a Western ambassador in Ankara said after shyly smiling at Davutoglu’s televised speech. He was right.

In a recent article in this journal, this author reminded that:

“At an international donors’ conference for Gaza in March 2009, the Turkish pledges stood at a mere $93 million. That pledge accounted for only 2.1 percent of all international pledges made at that conference.

$32 million had been collected in Turkey for Gaza for humanitarian aid. Thirty-two million dollars make 0.00004 percent of the world’s 17th biggest economy.”

Apparently, Turkey is not the only country reflecting the Islamist hypocrisy when it comes to trafficking money with the Palestinians — and Israelis.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/11/barack-obama-american-caudillo-113041.html#ixzz3JhiFUcmE

“The president and his supporters pretend that the Immigration and Nationality Act contains a gigantic asterisk that says, notwithstanding the elaborate legal infrastructure set out in the law and the distinctions among different categories of immigrants, the president can do whatever he wants.

No Congress would ever write the law this way. And even if it did, it wouldn’t pass constitutional muster. ”

“No one heretofore has thought this leeway could be used by a president as warrant to eviscerate an entire statutory scheme.
Again, if the reporting is accurate, the administration will announce a class of people numbering in the millions that can get work permits, Social Security numbers, and legal identification, at clear variance with the laws passed by Congress.
This isn’t prosecutorial discretion—making enforcement decisions based on limited resources—it is affirmatively expending resources not appropriated by Congress for this purpose to administer a new system.
Under the Obama precedent, future presidents can use the pretense of prosecutorial discretion to dispense with swaths of the federal code and unilaterally come up with alternatives.”

“No matter how much the president’s defenders stretch for a legal justification and for a precedent, the conclusion is unavoidable that no one has done this before. President Obama is said to want to build his legacy, and he will—as a man who is shamefully careless of his oaths and constitutional obligations. “

Never Waste a Crisis
How was the city of Medellín transformed from the murder capital of South America into a thriving urban center? Escalators.

We’ve just had an election that was in part about government competence in dealing with crises. Think ISIS, health care, Ebola. So perhaps it’s the perfect moment for a book that carries the subtitle “Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong.”

The title of the book is “The Resilience Dividend,” a phrase coined by the author, Judith Rodin, who defines it as “the capacity to bounce back from a crisis, learn from it, and achieve revitalization.” Most of the examples she offers pertain to cities and governance, though she also discusses businesses overcoming unexpected challenges. She is especially worried about the problems created by urbanization, climate change and globalization, which she sees as the “three disruptive phenomena” of the 21st century.

Ms. Rodin is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which runs a program called 100 Resilient Cities from which she draws a number of the examples she cites. She is also a psychologist with an academic background—she was president of the University of Pennsylvania—and her professor’s tendency to overanalyze gets a little tedious. But she is a good story teller, and her stories from the United States and around the world form the heart of the book.

The most compelling of them focus on success—that is, on positive examples of how communities have responded to “disruptions” such as severe weather, a terrorist attack or a health scare. In some cases, the disruptions grew into full-blown crises; in others, they were contained before they got worse. Either way, they provide models from which others can learn.

One is the example with which Ms. Rodin begins: the transformation of the city of Medellín, Columbia, into a thriving urban center and international tourist destination. Anyone who remembers Medellín from the 1980s and 1990s, when it was the drug and murder capital of South America, will understand just how impressive that city’s reinvention is.

There are many reasons for the revival of Medellín, above all the integrated nature of the effort, which involved government, businesses and NGOs. The revival entailed a lot of creative thinking, such as that which led to the construction of giant escalators up and down a hillside slum, making it possible for residents to connect easily with the city’s public transportation system and travel safely and quickly to jobs that had previously been inaccessible. The social and economic effect of the escalators was enormous.

Russia’s military assault on Ukraine threatens the survival of an independent state and peace in Europe. Often overlooked is what the invasion—and that’s what it is even if President Obama and the Europeans are afraid to utter the “i word”—has meant for Ukrainians in lands taken by Vladimir Putin ’s forces.

In a report Thursday, the United Nations provided a bracing look behind the new Putin curtain. Life for people there is brutish and dangerous. The “cease fire” signed in early September in eastern Ukraine is a farce: In that time, 957 people have died, or about 13 every day, says the U.N.Altogether, since well-armed men in camouflage came out of nowhere in April and claimed to rule the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk on Russia’s behalf, 4,317 people have been killed and 9,921 wounded. All these lives are on the docket, if not conscience, of Russian President Putin. His spies, soldiers and media disinformers conjured a conflict in eastern Ukraine from nothing.

“New Russia,” per Moscow’s preferred phrase, is in the hands of Russian soldiers, mercenaries and local gangsters. The U.N. reports that their rule is bringing about “the total breakdown of law and order.” This is Mad Max territory of summary executions, kidnappings and torture. Monitors found evidence of three mass graves.

The situation in Crimea, which Russia claimed to annex in March, is underreported but also grim. The victims of Moscow’s satraps in the peninsula are the remaining opponents of Russian rule, primarily the Muslim Crimean Tatar minority. Their leaders have been expelled, their media outlets threatened.

The immigration order is an abuse of power that fails as a policy reform.

President Obama ’s decision to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by his own decree is a sorry day for America’s republic. We say that even though we agree with the cause of immigration reform. But process matters to self-government—sometimes it is the only barrier to tyranny—and Mr. Obama’s policy by executive order is tearing at the fabric of national consent.

The first question to address is Mr. Obama’s legal rationale. At least he finally rolled out a memo from the experts on presidential power in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, but it’s fair to wonder how much time he gave them. The OLC made its justification public about an hour before the speech.

The President’s rationale is “prosecutorial discretion,” but he is stretching that legal concept beyond normal understanding. The executive branch does have discretion about whom to prosecute. But this typically extends to individual cases, or to setting priorities due to limited resources such as prosecuting cocaine but not marijuana use.

Mr. Obama claims he is using his discretion to focus on such high deportation priorities as criminals, but he is going much further and is issuing an order exempting from deportation entire classes of people—as many as five million. Justice’s OLC memo claims there is no such categorical exemption, and that immigration officials can still deport someone if they want to, but the memo offers no measures by which to make that “complex judgment.” In practice it will almost never happen.
The Reagan and Bush precedents cited by the Obama lawyers are different in kind and degree. They involved far fewer people and they were intended to fulfill the policy set by Congress—not, as Mr. Obama intends, to defy Congress. That is why their actions were done with little controversy.

On Thursday, Ashkelon Mayor Itamar Shimoni announced that he would suspend the work of Arab laborers renovating bomb shelters in a small number of nursery schools in his city. He also said he would be posting security guards at kindergartens near construction sites where Arabs are employed.

The storm that ensued makes the snowfall in Buffalo look like a flurry. Ironically, it is a tempest that resulted in a rare case of consensus among Israeli politicians, nearly all of whom immediately denounced Shimoni.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that there was “no place in Israel for discrimination against its Arab citizens.”

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni asked Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to investigate Shimoni for violating the Equal Opportunities in the Workplace Law.

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, Economy Minister Naftali Bennet and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon stressed that “only a tiny minority” of Israeli Arabs are violent and warned against the evils of discrimination and racism.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz bemoaned the souring of relations between Arabs and Jews over the actions of a few jihadists.

Opposition Leader MK Isaac Herzog declared that even during difficult times, Israel has never taken discriminatory measures against its Arab citizens.

Meretz leader MK Zehava Gal-On called Shimoni’s edict illegal and immoral.

Ra’am-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi said that security should not constantly serve as an excuse for racism and apartheid.

The Israeli media also went ballistic, accusing Shimoni not only of criminal racism, but of engaging in it to “regain the spotlight he lost” when Operation Protective Edge ended and he was no longer in the news every day.

First, He Waves ISIS Flag on Campus. Watch What Happens When He Switches to An Israel Flag.

Read more at http://conservativevideos.com/first-waves-islamic-state-flag-campus-switches-israel-flag/#mCMRWXOftp7CELhA.99
I have always thought that there was no connection between intellect and wisdom. To put this theory to the test, I headed out to the University of California, Berkeley. Students at Berkeley clearly have a lot of intellect; it is one of the most prestigious and selective universities in the country. But do they have wisdom? I went to the bucolic campus armed with a flag that represents the greatest evil known today, ISIS. If these are our best and brightest then we should all be afraid, very afraid. The shocking video above unfortunately proves once and for all that there is in fact no connection between intellect and wisdom.
Read more at http://conservativevideos.com/first-waves-islamic-state-flag-campus-switches-israel-flag/#mCMRWXOftp7CELhA.99

Giving thanks for the counter-jihad network

I am giving special thanks this year for the hard work of patriots who toil without recompense to expose the many vectors of Islamic subversion currently eroding the already hollowed-out institutions of Western society.

To this end, I will tell a story about a story. It concerns the first Muslim prayer service ever held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. As I wrote last week, this weirdly “invitation-only” service, which took place on Friday, Nov. 14, gathered representatives of Muslim groups with proven links to Hamas and to Hamas’ parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood. This means that, however briefly, jihad-linked groups took over the National Cathedral, where presidents and other great Americans have lain in state. These terror links led some media to label the event overall a “Muslim Brotherhood event,” or an “Islamist” or “extremist” event. As the service itself demonstrated, however, it was all strictly Islamic.

How do I know that? Not from 24/7 media, national or local. Not from the armies of think tanks that occupy Washington and its environs. Not from religious or political leaders, either. No professional organization with experts or a newsroom that I am aware of bothered to analyze the Muslim service at the National Cathedral, even though it was live-streamed on the Internet and available to all.

I am able to tell you about the contents of the service only thanks to the incredible international counter-jihad movement. This movement lives and breathes in the ether of the Internet, on an array of blogs, on YouTube. This case of Islam at the cathedral shows how the network works.

First, the blog Vlad Tepes captured the streaming footage of the 80-minute Muslim service. Next, Arabic translator Rita Malik assessed the English and Arabic service for Gates of Vienna and provided a summary that was posted there. Enter Islamic expert Andrew Bostom, author of several indispensable books on Islamic jihad, anti-Semitism and Islamic totalitarianism, who analyzed several of the Quranic verses used in the service by consulting some of the essential Quranic commentaries Muslims use to understand their religious book. Bostom posted his findings at his blog, AndrewBostom.org.