RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nearly 12 years ago I found myself sitting with Bob Simon at Gabriel’s restaurant, a60 Minutes haunt, discussing a possible profile of the Russian maestro Valery Gergiev. Smeeta Sharon, a friend of Bob’s from the Metropolitan Opera had a feeling the brilliant, globe-trotting maestro would make a great profile and Simon acted on it. That lunch was like reaching the peak of Mt. Everest for me: Several months later we were in St. Petersburg attending countless performances at the Mariinsky Theatre and celebrating the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding, as Bob interviewed Gergiev, who was orchestrating the events, and the 60 Minutes crew shot hours upon hours of footage.

34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy AwardsBob Simon was a consummate war reporter and foreign correspondent, to be sure, but he was like a kid in a candy shop when it came to classical music, especially opera. He might not have been intimidated by world leaders, but when it came to meeting one of his favorite singers, you sensed he was in awe. We developed an enduring friendship after that, in part because of his devotion to classical music. In an era when it has become nearly impossible for classical music to carve out even a few minutes on network or cable television, Bob went out of his way to get stories from that world on the air. It’s fitting that the last of his 27 Emmy Awards was for a story about a Congolese children’s orchestra with makeshift instruments.

Bernard Goah came to the United States to escape the violent civil wars that turned Liberia into hell on earth. In the 1990s and early 2000s, approximately 250,000 people died at the hands of Liberian rebel fighters, some of them child soldiers. Acts of rape, torture, and cannibalism were committed with impunity. Goah fled Liberia to escape the perpetrators of those acts, but he says several of them live freely and comfortably in the United States.

The federal government celebrated the high-profile deportation of Liberian warlord George Boley Sr. from New York in 2012 and the 2014 arrest of Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu, a former Liberian defense minister found living quietly in Pennsylvania. Those cases may have been the tip of the iceberg: According to a former special agent for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and several Liberian men — including Goah — who helped to bring Boley down, many more Liberian warlords, foot soldiers, and human-rights violators now live in the U.S. These war criminals appear to have hidden themselves in plain sight, using nonprofit organizations to help conceal their identities.

The president is not on the right side of the battle in his attempts to punish Israel, partner with Iran, and trim America’s role.

At the risk of being melodramatic, it must nonetheless be said: We are in a war for civilization itself, and Barack Obama is not on the right side.

We are in a battle for civilization because the Islamic State, which is darkness and evil personified, has declared war against us — and we in the West and the modernized Orient (Japan, India, Taiwan, and the like) are, despite our flaws, the very repository of civilization. They are backwards; we are enlightened. They are warped; we are well-intentioned. They are inhuman; we are humane. They are soul-less; we are desirous, however imperfectly, of a grace beyond our ken.

The Islamic State, meanwhile, is aided in its anti-civilizational enterprise even by some of its nominal enemies. The Iran of the ayatollahs is a cancer on humanity, while Hamas and Hezbollah are its murderous allies, serving a “prophet” they make into a thug. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates still poison vast swaths of the Middle East and Africa. The Muslim Brotherhood bizarrely enjoys something approaching respectability in left-wing circles, although in reality it’s a vicious virus working toward death. North Korea is, of course, a black hole; Russia is led by a black-hearted villain. And in other places in the world, Marxists still peddle their poison.

Let us start our grand tour of an increasingly out-of-control world in Russia. Putin plays a two-bit Hitler in trying to gobble up his neighbors. The West responds with a one-bit imitation of 1930s Britain and France. ISIS reminds us that beheading and human incineration are contemporary, not premodern, practices. The only difference is that we video them on iPhones now [1] rather hear rumors about them by word of mouth a year later.

Jews are wise to leave Europe [2] in the manner that some of the lucky got out in the 1930s. The danger is not that we are facing a sudden war on any one front, but that all these fronts — the former Soviet republics, the Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the roaming Islamic terrorist gangsters inside the West, and the Iranian soon-to-be-nuclear co-prosperity sphere from Yemen to Lebanon — are combining to create chaos as the new normal.

Whole swaths of the globe are becoming badlands that sane people avoid — the former Soviet republics, Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, and perhaps soon Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus — as if they were the national no-go-zone versions of our own New Orleans or Detroit.

Ceding prior U.S. influence to regional hegemons — China in Asia, Russia in the former Soviet Union, ISIS and Iran in the Middle East — is turning the world into a pre-globalized Wild West. Think of travel plans. See the Parthenon? But will Greece be bankrupt and on strike from the airport to the Acropolis? See the Dead Sea? Will the rockets come in from Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, or Iran? See South America? Tiptoe around the mess in Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, or Venezuela. See Paris or Copenhagen? Just don’t walk near a synagogue or kosher market. See St. Petersburg? Make sure there is not the next war nearby in Tallinn. See Turkey? The Hagia Sophia will probably be a mosque again soon.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest issued a statement tonight on the ISIS mass beheading video in which 21 Coptic Christians were murdered on the Libyan coast:

The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens. ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds. It is unconstrained by faith, sect, or ethnicity. This wanton killing of innocents is just the most recent of the many vicious acts perpetrated by ISIL-affiliated terrorists against the people of the region, including the murders of dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai, which only further galvanizes the international community to unite against ISIL.

Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

In the campus war against Israel, the all too familiar refrain from anti-Israel activists, many of whom form the loose coalition of groups and individuals spearheading the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is that their quarrel is only with Israelis and their government’s policies, not with Jews themselves. But that specious defense has fallen away of late, revealing some caustic and base anti-Semitism, representing a seismic shift in the way that Jews now are being indicted not just for supporting Israel, but merely for being Jewish.

It was not without some historical irony, then, when student council leaders at Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa in early February floated a proposal that suggested, apparently without shame, that Jewish students should be expelled from the institution, that, as the student body’s secretary, Mqondisi Duma, put it, “We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.” This is, one would think, a rather shocking sentiment from students who themselves benefited from a world-wide campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to end South Africa’s racist apartheid system.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/obamas-prayer-breakfast-comeback-moment-on-the-glazov-gang-1/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by movie producer Aaron Shuster (“The Bank Job,”) Ann-Marie Murrell, the CEO of PolitiChicks.com and Ari David, host of The Ari David Show Podcast.

The guests discussed Obama’s Prayer Breakfast Comeback Moment, analyzing a Liar-in-Chief’s revenge.

The Gang also focused on Obama: Liar, Liar, Obama Hosts The Muslim Brotherhood, Brian Williams’ Imagination and Punishment, and much, much more:

Yemen has been an “always almost failing state” for as long as Ambassador Barbara K. Bodine can remember, she affirmed in her February 3 Georgetown University luncheon lecture, “Yemen: If This is a Policy Success, What Does Failure Look Like?” The truth of Bodine’s sobering presentation to a fifty-person conference room packed to standing-room-only was confirmed when, eight days later, America’s embassy in the capital Sanaa fell to Houthi rebels and U.S. Marines were forced to destroy their weapons before fleeing the country to prevent them from falling into rebel hands. The humiliating failure of American policy demonstrated that, President Barack Obama’s wishful thinking notwithstanding, Yemen will not be a policy success anytime soon.

Bodine, a career Foreign Service officer with extensive experience in the Middle East, directs Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. She spoke at the invitation of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). Associate director of ACMCU and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Professor of Islamic Civilization Jonathan Brown moderated and professor emeritus John Voll attended.

The so-called Summit on Countering Violent Extremism comes as President Obama seeks formal authorization from Congress to wage war against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL).

The terrorist-friendly Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), which is a known front for Islamist terrorist groups, operates mosques in and around Boston.

Members of the anti-terrorist community are outraged that officials of ISB will participate in discussions of anti-terrorism best practices on Feb. 18.

In a recent Washington Times op-ed, Charles Jacobs and Ilya Feoktistov of Americans For Peace and Tolerance, warned that ISB “and its political arm, the Muslim American Society, seen as the go-to groups for civic and law enforcement partnerships, have links to many extremists who are either in jail, in flight from federal authorities, or have been killed during terrorist attacks.” The group also ran a full-page ad about ISB’s participation in the summit in the Washington Times under the headline, “Why is Boston a Hub For ‘VIOLENT EXTREMISM?’”

“Is Obama watching? Where is the reaction similar to one where 3 US Muslim students were killed by a disturbed man over a real, if ridiculous, parking dispute, not it appears because of their religious orientation, and the President was soon to express horror over a presumed hate crime? Does this not continue to display a trend here — apologetics for IslamoFascism?
He has recently asked for limited war powers for a stipulated 3 years and no ground troops.. These powers are LESS than those already granted in previous Congressional resolutions…
I am compelled to ask — is the President under a personal fatwa threat,, to explain his manifest biases?
Or is this all a result of his apparent closet Islamic persuasion?
It continues……

‘J.A.
CAIRO — A video released Sunday night by the Islamic State appeared to show the mass beheading of at least a dozen Egyptian Christians by fighters in a recently formed Libyan arm of the militant group.

Identical in style and details to earlier execution videos released by the Islamic State, this one was the first the group has released depicting a killing outside of its core territory in Syria and Iraq. It appeared to show much closer communication and collaboration between the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and its far-flung satellite groups than Western officials previously believed.

As the Obama administration seeks broad approval to use military force in an open-ended war against the Islamic State, the new video may reinforce the concerns among some lawmakers that the legislation could authorize operations in unexpected territories like Libya, where local militants are planting the Islamic State flag as “provinces” of the group.