RUTHFULLY YOURS

Soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is “distressed [1]” by the new deal on “climate change” (née ”global warming”) made between China and the U.S. on Obama’s trip to Beijing.

I know McConnell is from Kentucky and takes energy policy seriously, but he should relax. There’s about as much chance of this agreement being honored as I have winning next year’s Derby… as the horse. The reason is so simple I will abandon propriety and put it in caps: NO ONE BELIEVES IT!

And there are so many reasons for that I could fill several posts but I’ll give just a few. You can add more.

1. Most Americans don’t think Obama tells the truth about anything, let alone something as controversial as climate. They just made that clear by voting him down in about 237 elections, if you believe Obama’s own assertion that his own policies were on trial.

2. No one really knows if “climate change” exists or, if it does, whether its danger is remotely worth the money to correct it, although we do know that “global warming” has not occurred for eighteen years and counting and there is, if anything, global cooling with record lows being set everywhere, the Antarctic ice cap also at record levels, etc. (Yes, yes, climate is not weather, blablabla. Climate is… anything you want to say it is.)

3. Anyone who still believes in “climate change” is likely to be: a. a profiteer (like the financial wizards who put together those “carbon exchanges” a few years back, making off with billions before they went belly up), b. a scientist looking for a handout, c. a bureaucrat or official of a Third World country looking for a handout, d. an official of the UN (virtually the same as c), e. a moral narcissist, preferably rich, who thinks he knows better than us idiots, scientific training not required (cf. Tom Steyer, this year’s George Soros wannabe), f. a true-believing liberal camp follower of the sort that doesn’t care when Nancy Pelosi says you have to pass Obamacare in order to know what’s in it (this is the largest group), or g. a journalist blinded by panic about losing their job if they dare to tell even part of the truth or wander off the reservation.

A “moderate” Muslim assumes a new position.

Imam Suhaib Webb is the new Resident Scholar for MakeSpace, a Washington, DC, area mosque meeting in Alexandria, Virginia’s Dunya Restaurant, MakeSpace announced October 29. Both Webb and MakeSpace have radical backgrounds belying their “moderate” Muslim pretensions.

An Oklahoma convert to Islam, Webb came to America’s capital from a Resident Scholar position at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC). Previously he served as the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City’s (ISGOC) imam. Praised by MakeSpace as a “world-class visionary,” Webb’s reputation as a modern Muslim thinker has placed him in “The Muslim 500: The World’s Most Influential Muslims.”

Yet examination of Webb reveals a radicalism suggesting more than coincidence in the fact that Oklahoma City beheader Alton Nolen and Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended ISGOC and ISBCC’s sister mosque, respectively. Webb had been an associate of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a senior Al Qaeda propagandist killed by a September 30, 2011, American drone strike in Yemen. Webb appeared with Al-Awlaki two days before September 11, 2001, at a fundraiser for the legal defense of H. Rap Brown, an Atlanta Muslim later convicted of shooting two Georgia police officers. The Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) group, meanwhile, runs ISBCC.

Webb himself has denounced “secularism…a radical, lunatic ideology” in contrast to the “dynamic, empowering, pluralistic Islam of the prophet’s era.” “I love CAIR,” Webb says of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical faux civil rights group and an unindicted terrorism financing coconspirator. Webb also critiqued his “demonization of others,” having “compared ISIS to Ebola. While I don’t agree with ISIS, al-Qāida, certain progressives and others, I…apologize to anyone that I have spoken ill towards or demonized.” Denunciations of America and Israel (e.g. “America’s Frankenstein monster”) along with anti-Semitism also appear in Webb’s views.

Webb “is hailed as a moderate,” anonymously wrote a former Muslim convert who attended ISGOC. Webb, though, “explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad.” ISGOC members like Webb “try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.”

Khair al-Din Hamdan from Kafr Kanna in the Galilee was an Israeli Arab terrorist who was minding his own business a few days ago and attempting to stab Israeli policemen to death. Kafr Kanna is where the Biblical town of Cana stood and according to the New Testament it is where Jesus turned water into wine. The tomb of the great Jewish sage Simeon ben Gamliel is nearby, attesting to the Jewish origins of this town now under Arab occupation.

The intended police victims of the terrorist were not amused and were unappreciative of the symbolic value of their being stabbed to death to protest the grievances of Hamdan and his terrorist comrades. Instead, the police selfishly and immoderately shot Hamdan to death as Hamdan attempted to murder them with his knife.

Israel’s Arab fifth-column and its fellow travelers then took to the streets and violently protested this “murder in cold blood” of the gentle giant Hamdan. He instantly became the poster boy for those loyal Arab citizens of Israel who seek the annihilation of Israel and its Jews. The neutral and objective foreign media were also outraged at the violation of the Miranda rights of Hamdan, who was killed by the police without legal representation and a trial. Khair’s father expressed the outrage of the family that his son had been prevented by the police from murdering Jews — and was not simply stopped with tear gas or at most a bullet in his thigh. And the heroic appeasers of the Likud government decided to order an official commission of investigation into the interruption by the cops of the murder attempt by Khair.

At the same time, some of Israel’s finest leftists are also taking to the airwaves and the streets to show their solidarity with the young dead terrorist. The Khair lobby claims that video footage shows that, after attempting unsuccessfully to stab the cops, he was in fact backing away from them when he was shot. Just why his backing away could be interpreted as any reason NOT to summarily shoot and execute him on the spot with extreme prejudice has never been explained by anyone.

Some of the car crash murderers in Israel in recent days have been shot on the spot AFTER crashing intentionally into people. The only thing wrong with that is that Israel’s weenie government refuses to pass a law proclaiming that instant execution without trial of ALL terrorists at the scenes of their murders and attempted murders is not only legal but downright laudatory and deserving of a medal of valor.

Why supporters of Palestinian terrorists have made common cause with the rioters in MO.

The same violent protesters in Ferguson, Missouri demonstrating against the killing of Michael Brown have also been taking it to the streets in Detroit and elsewhere to press for the release of a Palestinian terrorist who killed two Israelis.

Activists are blackmailing the grand jury that is now hearing evidence against Wilson. If the grand jurors refuse to indict Wilson, radical activists are promising even more mayhem. The message is unmistakable: indict the cop, and there will be peace; don’t, and Ferguson will burn.

Brown is the young, black, 6’4″, 292-pound man who was killed by white police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. When media outlets describe Brown they usually omit the fact that he viciously assaulted Brown and tried to seize his handgun, presumably in an effort to do the officer harm. Journalists also tend to downplay the fact that minutes before Brown attacked Wilson he robbed a convenience store.

The Palestinian terrorist is Rasmea (also spelled Rasmieh) Odeh who was convicted by a Detroit jury on Monday of immigration fraud. Prosecutors accused Odeh of killing Israelis in the Sixties and then lying about it in U.S. immigration papers.

Odeh was previously convicted in Israel “for her role in the 1969 bombings of a supermarket and the British Consulate in Jerusalem, which were carried out on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist organization,” according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Prosecutors said one of the supermarket bombs killed two people and injured others. Odeh received a sentence of life imprisonment but was released after 10 years as part of a prisoner swap.

Writing for The Times of Israel, senior staff writer Avi Issacharoff criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for scapegoating Abbas as the cause for the recent disturbances in Israel and for failing to point the finger at the real culprits, Hamas. He posits that Netanyahu, in a quest to avoid negotiations with Israel’s “peace partners,” has painted Abbas as a purveyor of violence and thus, an obstacle to peace. He also notes that as a result of the disturbances, “an entire country is in a panic.”

I submit however, that the only people who are “in a panic” are Issacharoff and leftists of like-mind who detest Netanyahu, seek his demise and will stop at nothing to disparage him. Israel has in the past witnessed and endured far worse violence and each time weathered the storm calmly and resolutely. The people of Israel in the instant mini-crisis are neither panic-stricken nor hysterical though many on the left would like to have us think that. What better way to produce an “intifada” than by talking about it incessantly in the hope of producing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Issacharoff’s analysis is fundamentally flawed on a number of levels. First, it is Abbas and his Palestinian Authority who are primarily responsible for the uptick in violence. No doubt that Hamas shares some responsibility but it is the PA’s continued campaign of incitement, where Jews are compared to the descendants of apes and pigs and Palestinians are continuously urged in TV broadcasts to confront the “barbaric monkeys” and “wretched pigs” aka Jews, that has led to the current state of affairs.

Abbas’s inflammatory rhetoric adds fuel to the fire. Responsible leaders don’t incite their populace to attack the citizens of another state, and that is precisely what Abbas has done, over and over again. Responsible leaders don’t pay condolence calls to the families of assassins and refer to them as martyrs who will ascend to heaven, and that is precisely what Abbas has done. Responsible leaders don’t name squares and streets after people, who in normal societies, would be locked up in institutions for the criminally insane, but Abbas’s Palestinian Authority has done so repeatedly.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/child-marriage-in-islam-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Louis Lionheart, a scholar of Islam who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd. Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. His website is: TruthDefenders.com.

Louis came on the show to discuss “Child Marriage in Islam,” dissecting the case of Mohammed and Aisha in Islamic texts. The evidence deals with the prophet of Islam’s marriage to a 6-year-old girl, and his “consummation” of that marriage when she was 9. Louis analyses the Islamic theology that describes this marriage and how the Islamic and non-Islamic world has dealt, and not dealt, with the Islamic reality of this case.

Brookings Institution’s New Idea: Try Failed Solutions Again

Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Institution’s Intelligence Project, published a piece in the Daily Beast last Sunday with the provocative title, “Why’s Al Qaeda So Strong? Washington Has (Literally) No Idea.” That is certainly true, but Riedel’s recommendations for how the political establishment can get a clue and finally defeat the jihadis are nothing but tired retreads of analyses that have been tried and have failed again and again. Coming from a think tank as influential as Brookings, this goes a long way toward explaining why neither party seems able to reevaluate and discard political points of view and plans of action, no matter how many times they lead to disaster.

Riedel rightly faults the U.S. for not meeting the ideological challenge that groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State pose, but then he advocates essentially what mainstream analysts on both the Left and the Right have advocated for years: establishing a State of Palestine, supporting “reform and justice” in Muslim countries, and working to end Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism. These solutions have been tried, repeatedly, and every time they failed abysmally.

While Riedel is correct that the U.S. hasn’t countered the ideology of jihad groups, he shows no sign of knowing what that ideology really is. In fact, he demonstrates that he shares the same false premises that have led the U.S. government to its abysmal failure to understand why jihad groups are so strong and how they can be countered. Both Riedel and Washington policymakers assume that the appeal to Muslims of the stated goals and motivations of jihad groups — establishment of the caliphate, destruction of non-Sharia regimes, and ultimately global Islamic dominance — can be blunted, if not extinguished altogether, by essentially giving jihadis and Islamic supremacists some of what they want. They assume that in that event, the larger aggregate of Muslims will respond the way Westerners in secular democracies would respond: by accepting the compromise and rejecting more extreme solutions.

We have the record of the last thirteen years and more to show that this assumption is false.

First and foremost among Riedel’s faulty analyses is his scapegoating of Israel for the failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians. “Unfortunately,” Riedel laments, “for six years the Obama team has tried to push the two-state solution without any success. It rightly blames both Israeli and Palestinian intransigence for its failure. But the core issue is Israel’s refusal to end the occupation of the West Bank.”

One word exposes the falsity of this analysis: Gaza. Anyone who still thinks after the Gaza withdrawal that a Palestinian state would bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians (and yes, I know they are legion, and in both parties, and in all the corridors of power in the U.S. and Europe) hasn’t been paying attention. We were told in 2005 that “occupation” was the problem, and if Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Gazans would turn to peaceful pursuits. Only a few people, including me, warned that Gaza would just become a jihad base for newly virulent attacks against Israel. Events proved us correct.

Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, who designed the Affordable Care Act, used to be the symbol of the Democrats’ technocratic bona fides, and an example of how big government with its “scientific” experts can solve social and economic problems from health care to a warming planet. Yet a recently publicized video of remarks he made at a panel in 2013, along with 2 other videos in the same vein, has now made him the poster child of the elitist progressives’ contempt for the American people, and their sacrifice of prudence and reason to raw political power.

In the video Gruber explains the spin and lies the Dems used to give cover to their Congressmen so they could vote for Obamacare. Especially important was avoiding the “t-word.” So, Gruber crows on the video, “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” He also explained how the bills’ writers covered up the obvious redistributionist core of the legislation, which to work has to take money from the healthy young to pay for health care for the sick and old. “If you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

Then this handsomely paid consultant to the “most transparent administration in history” revealed the foundational contempt progressives have for the “people” whose champions they claim to be: “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” As David Horowitz tweeted, “Progressive totalitarianism: We know what’s good for you and will lie, cheat and then compel you to agree with us.”

This modern version of the Platonic “guardians,” who possess superior knowledge but who must camouflage their tyrannical rule with lies, is now over 100 years old, and has become deeply embedded in our politics. It was the fundamental assumption of American Progressivism, which argued that modern technology and social change had rendered the old constitutional order a dangerous relic. The native common sense and wisdom of ordinary people to know their own interests and pursue them primarily at the local and state levels were now replaced by the allegedly scientific knowledge of “experts,” who alone could solve the problems created by the modern world. As Progressive Theodore Roosevelt said in 1901, the “very serious social problems” confronting the nation could no longer be solved by “the old laws, and the old customs,” especially the power given to state governments and laws, which “are no longer sufficient.” Woodrow Wilson agreed, complaining in 1913 that “the laws of this country have not kept up with the change” of economic and political circumstances. To achieve “social justice” and eliminate income inequality, the “laws,” particularly the Constitution, had to change.

Both Turkey’s President Erdogan and its Prime Minister Davutoglu have declared countess times that Gaza and Jerusalem (in addition to Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Somalia, and the Maghreb) are Turkey’s “domestic affairs.”

In truth, there is no mention of any city’s name in the Qur’an.

Turks have a different understanding of what constitutes an occupation and a conquest of a city. The Turkish rule is very simple: The capture of a foreign city by force is an occupation if that city is Turkish (or Muslim) and the capture of a city by force is conquest if the city belongs to a foreign nation (or non-Muslims).

For instance, Turks still think the capture of Istanbul in 1453 was not occupation; it was conquest.

In a 2012 speech, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (then Prime Minister) said: “Just like Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul are cities of the Qur’an.” In truth, there is no mention of any city’s name in the Qur’an. Never mind.

“Conquest,” Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Professor Mehmet Gormez, declared in 2012, “is not to occupy lands or destroy cities and castles. Conquest is the conquest of hearts!” That is why, the top Turkish cleric said, “In our history there has never been occupation.” Instead, Professor Gormez said, “in our history, there has always been conquest.” He further explained that one pillar of conquest is to “open up minds to Islam, and hearts to the Qur’an.”

It is in this religious justification that most Turkish Islamists think they have an Allah-given right to take infidel lands by the force of sword — ironically, not much different from what the tougher Islamists have been doing in large parts of Syria and Iraq. Ask any commander in the Islamic State and he would tell you what the jihadists are doing there is “opening up minds to Islam, and hearts to the Qur’an.”

Lost and written off in the jungles and mountains of Timor after the island fell to the Japanese, the men of Sparrow Force thought medico Roger Dunkley deserved a Victoria Cross. He received only a mention in dispatches and today is all but forgotten

American and Australian veterans of World War II have rightly honoured the heroic doctors of World War II – the Australian surgeon “Weary” Dunlop probably pre-eminent among them – who worked miracles in Japanese prison camps. But a West Australian doctor with achievements at least as heroic has been largely forgotten, except by the few surviving members of the 2nd/2nd Independent Company. He does not even have an entry in The Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Lost and written off in the jungles and mountains of Timor after the island fell to the Japanese, the 2nd/2nd, numbering about 278 men, with a few stragglers from other units, fought a guerilla war at odds of around 100-to-1 for nearly a year. “Little-known but great in spirit are the men of Timor,” said Winston Churchill later. “They alone did not surrender.” They did more: they killed an estimated 1,500 enemy for the loss of 40 of their own men. They tied up about 30,000 Japanese and supporting resources which would otherwise have been available for the invasion of New Guinea. It is not unreasonable to suggest that they saved New Guinea and possibly northern Australia and saved countless American and Australian lives thereby. Further, they played a part in distracting Japanese forces that could otherwise have been used against the Americans struggling to establish a foothold in the Solomons.

Their campaign was one of the greatest feats of arms in the entire history of war. Without Dr C. R. “Roger” Dunkley, the medical officer (who was my uncle), their survival would not have been possible. He had served as a private in the First World War with the 28th Battalion and took a medical degree in Melbourne after the war. As well as general practice he became a radiologist and Honourary Assistant Surgeon at Fremantle Hospital. His experience as both a fighting soldier and a surgeon would stand him in good stead later. His step-father was Sir Frank Gibson, Fremantle’s long-serving mayor (all Sir Frank’s children and step-children served as officers in the Army, Navy and Merchant Marine).