RUTHFULLY YOURS

I must be thick. The very many official assurances we keep hearing that Islam is the religion of peace just don’t seem to ring true, not to my ill-educated ears, not with so much bloody hate being spewed and perpetrated in its name

Is it believable? Is it happening? I am afraid it’s true. A former great nation, the birthplace of the civilised modern world, is in the throes of having any remaining shreds of greatness and integrity stripped away by the latest in a succession of weak-kneed, mediocre at best and traitorous at worst, political leaders.

David Cameron is standing in the British Parliament — where giants have stood who must surely be weeping – rightly deploring the latest, most God awful, atrocity committed by Islamists. Is it possible to imagine anything worse than rampaging through a school, deliberately killing 132 children, as happened in Pakistan? How low can human beings sink? Under this destructive Islamic ideology there appear to be no limits.

But apparently, according Mr Cameron, none of this is down to Islam proper. Islam he tells us is a ‘great religion’. It is, he says, a ‘religion of peace’. What we are seeing is a ‘perversion’ of Islam.

So let me get this straight because I didn’t go to a fancy public school or undertake the kind of deep study of Islam that Mr Cameron has evidently undertaken. Each of the now-thousands of modern-day atrocities committed by those loudly claiming that Allah is great are all the result of those owing allegiance to a Mr Hyde version of Islam. The Dr Jekyll version is the true faith.

Here is the pattern as observed in 2006:

… Above all else, understanding jihad and dhimmitude is crucial to understanding what we call the war on terror.

Jihad, of course, means “holy war.” Many Muslims will tell you that it also means “inner struggle,” which is nice and everything, but it’s “holy war” that we, in the non-Muslim world, have to deal with.

Dhimmitude is what follows every successful jihad–if, that is, you happen to be a non-Muslim “dhimmi” who finds himself living under Islamic rule. The term, coined by historian Bat Ye’or, defines a culture of fearful inferiority – legal, social and religious –inhabited by non-Muslims according to sharia, or Islamic law. What is particularly alarming about dhimmitude, as Bat Ye’or has also chronicled, is that this same pattern of deference to Islam has imprinted itself even in non-Islamic countries. Just think back to the craven reaction to Cartoon Rage when most Western media outlets submitted to Islamic religious law (dhimmitude) out of fear of attack (jihad) by not publishing the Mohammed cartoons. …

We can now watch as a new progression of jihad-to-dhimmitude potentially unfolds by taking a look at what’s going on this week [August 2006] in Great Britain.

Last week, we had the disrupted Airplane Plot–an act of jihad averted. We had the ensuing police round-up of Muslim Britons. We had, and have, intense public panic, and an ongoing rupture in “normal” life–in a way, almost as if the plot had gone off as planned.

Then what? I would argue that what’s going on in GB today may be seen as an attempt by British Muslim leaders to use the ongoing threat of jihad by British Muslim terrorists to intensify Islamic influence, which necessarily deepens non-Muslim British dhimmitude.

The Dutch public prosecutor announced today that legal proceedings will begin against Party for Freedom (PVV) leader Geert Wilders “on charges of insulting a group of people based on race and incitement to discrimination and hatred.”

“The decision to prosecute me is incomprehensible,” Wilders has said in a statement.

Yes it is; but only in a moral, rational Judeo-Christian — i.e., Western — world.

In our world, circa 2014, the decision is perfectly comprehensible. In our world, powerful global elites seek to destroy the indigenous cultures of Europe (and their descendants here) through “multicultural” — read: Marxist and anti-nationhood — policies that ride the pressure plates of expansionist Islam and, additionally in our hemisphere, Hispanic south and central America and beyond.

In a statement released by PVV, Wilders said, “I have said what millions of people think …. For the second time, [the state] apparently wants to deal with someone who speaks the truth. It is a travesty that I have to defend myself in court for this. The Public Prosecutor would do better to devote his time to prosecuting jihadis instead of me. The Party for Freedom is the largest party in the polls. Apparently the elite does not like that.”

PBS, who operates partly on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer, just ran a one-hour special on the terror-sponsoring dictator who shrieked that “war with the U.S. is my true destiny!” and who came within a hair of nuking millions of PBS’ involuntary donors during the gravest military threat against the United States in modern history.

PBS, who bills itself as America’s “most-trusted source for news and public affairs programs,” aimed their documentary on the “turbulent life” of the “controversial Cuban leader” at a U.S. audience and titled it, The Fidel Castro Tapes.

But PBS pulled off its documentary without mentioning the apparent trivialities cited above. That the subject of their program came closest of anyone to blowing up the world seems to strike PBS as a real snoozer.

Now when it came to their one-hour program on a freely-elected and immensely popular U.S. lawmaker (Senator Joe Mc Carthy) PBS shuddered with fear and loathing. In fact the program was titled, “Politics of Fear.” “His zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics,” gasped the documentary. “These proceedings remain one of the most shameful moments in modern U.S. history.”

Apparently for PBS the term “controversial” seemed too mild when more villainous ones were handy for describing one of America’s most popular elected lawmakers during his time (lest we forget.) But the mild term served amply to describe a megalomaniacal, blood-lusting, war-mongering, missile-rattling dictator who jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than did Stalin during The Great Terror and murdered more of them in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered during his first six.

Oh, forgive me for an oversight. PBS also uses the term “contentious” and “provocative” to describe Fidel Castro.

‘It’s a sad day for freedom,” Marco Rubio told Bret Baier after President Obama announced he would normalize relations with Cuba. Not a sad day, senator: a sad year.

If there was a theme to 2014, it was Obama’s persistence in bailing out dictators and theocrats from political scrapes and economic hardships, his tenacity in pursuit of engagement with America’s adversaries no matter the cost to our strength, principles, credibility, or alliances.

In this president the thugs in Havana and Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, Moscow and Naypyidaw and Beijing have no better friend. For these bullies, these evildoers, these millenarians and sectarians, Barack Obama is more than a dupe. He is an insurance policy.

Cuba is but the latest example of this president’s failing to exercise leverage in the pursuit of American strength, security, and prestige. Here are the Castro brothers, decrepit and spent, their revolution a joke, their economy in peril thanks to the collapse in oil prices brought on by a strong dollar and increased U.S. supply.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (including you feckless, sniveling crapweasels hiding under your desks at Sony),

Freedom makes a lot of things harder. It is more difficult to raise children of good character in a society that tolerates and often celebrates bad character. It is often harder to build big and important things in a society where everybody gets a vote. That’s why so many people of a “pragmatic” bent have always looked longingly at evil countries where the people are less of an impediment to “getting things done.” Fighting climate change, if that’s your thing, is much tougher when everyone has private property rights. Fighting a war is more difficult when dissenters get to have their say. Maintaining a guild and the wages that go with it is harder when you have free competition.

The true lover of liberty acknowledges these things. He doesn’t say freedom is always more efficient or always yields superior outcomes (though it usually does). The true lover of liberty acknowledges that freedom has costs — cultural costs, economic costs, political costs, national-security costs. And then, do you know what he says?

“I don’t care.”

Well, sometimes I care. At home, when arguing with other Americans, there’s a lot of room to debate how liberty should be used and how it can be abused. A government grounded in protecting liberty depends on self-government and self-government requires restraint. Remember the line from “America, the Beautiful”?

Republican leaders don’t want them to derail Obama’s amnesty.

Last weekend, Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee forced every senator to vote, on the public record, regarding the constitutionality of President Obama’s unilateral decree of effective amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. The resulting Republican establishment hissy fit further confirmed something I’ve been arguing here for some time: Republican leaders in Washington endorse President Obama’s amnesty policy.

Their stated opposition to the imperial manner of the policy’s imposition is poseur stuff. When push comes to shove, when the time comes to do something about presidential lawlessness, what do we get? Childish tantrums over being forced to work on a mid-December weekend — the poor dears having spent a whopping 135 days in session this year . . . and, by last Saturday, facing the crushing burden of another two or three days’ waltzing between the Hill and the nearest studio before their next three-week vacation.

We get party leaders who, despite having decried Obama’s lawlessness during the recent midterm-election campaign, actually whipped against a legislative rebuke of executive lawlessness. We get 20 mindboggling Republican votes in favor of the president’s usurpation of Congress’s legislative authority . . . even as GOP leaders look voters in the eye and promise to persuade the courts that the president has overstepped his constitutional bounds. (I don’t know how many of these guys have ever appeared before a federal judge. “Your Honor, I rise today to urge that this court condemn the president of the United States for taking actions I have voted to endorse and pay for with public funds.” Good luck with that.)

Itai Reuveni, who is holding a Masters Degree in political science, has been working for NGO Monitor Israel Desk for the past three years. Recently Itai was on a private visit in Southern California and I happened to have had an opportunity to meet with him and have an interesting, fascinating, friendly, unofficial, but most congenial conversation with him from which I have learned much about what his organization is doing that is so crucially important. They constantly expose the truth about the NGOs, mostly financed by European states, and are helping to fight Israel’s fight of survival.

Itai and I “get it” now we need others to get it too.

NGO Monitor is exactly what it is, monitoring the NGOs activities, especially those who inject their activities into the life of Israel and thus effect the life of every Israeli.

The NGOs is a complex and ambiguous network which we need to understand in order to be able to act and help Israel to rebuttal them.

In this article I put on paper what I heard from Itai and where it is possible I give some solutions.

Angelina Jolie has made a movie of the remarkable book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and RedemptionJan 20, 2011 by Laura Hillenbrand about Louis Zamperini….rsk

What sad pre-holiday news: American Olympian track star and WWII hero Louis Zamperini passed away last night at age 97, just one day short of Independence Day. It’s somehow poignant that Zamperini’s shadow hovers over the July 4th holiday; it comes half a year before the Universal Pictures release of Unbroken, the Angelina Jolie-directed adaptation of the Laura Hillenbrand bestseller about a man whose unwillingness to break despite the most difficult of circumstances in a Japanese POW camp made him the personification of struggle and heroism. Part of that struggle included getting a movie made on his extraordinary life; imagine, Universal’s first attempt at a Zamperini film came in the 1950s, when Tony Curtis sparked to playing Zamperini as his follow-up to Spartacus.

louzzMany know Zamperini’s story because of the superb book by Seabiscuit author Hillenbrand, and the world will celebrate him at year’s end when Universal releases the film in Oscar season, with Jack O’Connell playing Zamperini. I have been obsessed with Zamperini since I saw a segment on his ordeal broadcast by CBS during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and have written about the movie at Variety and Deadline since then at the slightest provocation, because it seemed such a worth screen story. When CBS chronicled his story, Zamperini returned to Japan to run with the Olympic torch, covering ground not far from where he spent an unimaginably brutal stretch in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. That is only a small part of Zamperini’s legend.

EXCLUSIVE: As it begins to dawn on everyone in Hollywood the reality that Sony Pictures was the victim of a cyberterrorist act perpetrated by a hostile foreign nation on American soil, questions will be asked about how and why it happened, ending with Sony cancelling the theatrical release of the satirical comedy The Interview because of its depiction of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. One of those issues will be this: Why didn’t anybody speak out while Sony Pictures chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton were embarrassed by emails served up by the media, bolstering the credibility of hackers for when they attached as a cover letter to Lynton’s emails a threat to blow up theaters if The Interview was released?

George Clooney has the answer. The most powerful people in Hollywood were so fearful to place themselves in the cross hairs of hackers that they all refused to sign a simple petition of support that Clooney and his agent, CAA’s Bryan Lourd, circulated to the top people in film, TV, records and other areas. Not a single person would sign. Here, Clooney discusses the petition and how it is just part of many frightening ramifications that we are all just coming to grips with.

DEADLINE: How could this have happened, that terrorists achieved their aim of cancelling a major studio film? We watched it unfold, but how many people realized that Sony legitimately was under attack?

GEORGE CLOONEY: A good portion of the press abdicated its real duty. They played the fiddle while Rome burned. There was a real story going on. With just a little bit of work, you could have found out that it wasn’t just probably North Korea; it was North Korea. The Guardians Oof Peace is a phrase that Nixon used when he visited China. When asked why he was helping South Korea, he said it was because we are the Guardians of Peace. Here, we’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have. This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have. That’s the truth. What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. Sony didn’t pull the movie because they were scared; they pulled the movie because all the theaters said they were not going to run it. And they said they were not going to run it because they talked to their lawyers and those lawyers said if somebody dies in one of these, then you’re going to be responsible.