RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s funny how President Obama is always talking about “I” and “me” whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it’s “they” and “we” when mistakes are made.

For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq War and how he withdrew American troops. “You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama’s decision to pull all our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops].”

On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes noted comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Clapper said, “We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight.”

“That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” Obama replied. “Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a “former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq,” who was, in Lake’s words, “flabbergasted” by the president’s remarks. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls****ing,” the official said.

It’s almost surely the latter. Lake and others have gone on to detail how the intelligence and defense communities were briefing the White House and Congress about the threat even when Obama was still dismissing the Islamic State as the “jayvee squad” of terrorism.

Fort Bliss: Moms at War Myer’s movie offers a satisfying completion of the Long War Trilogy started by The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor. It would be a shame if Fort Bliss isn’t given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience.

America has been at war for over a decade. In that time, Hollywood has managed to make only three films worthy of the people who do our fighting—The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, and Fort Bliss. In one way or another, all three stood apart from mainstream Tinseltown. They reached the big screen more because of the passion and vision of the filmmakers than the Hollywood suits who usually pick and choose what gets released to the corner cinema.

Take the The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s story tracing the harrowing experiences of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Iraq. Big studios were not that interested in it. As Bigelow noted in a 2009 New York Times interview, “I’ve never made a studio film.” But audiences loved this movie. The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008.

Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013) performed equally well at the box office, but was snubbed by Oscar. Although Berg has made his share of standard Hollywood fare, this film was anything but mainstream cinema. The director struggled to find support and financing to bring the story of an ill-fated Special Operations mission in Afghanistan to the screen. “Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you do something,” Berg said in one interview, “It’s just better when you care.” Audiences cared. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Less well-known is Claudia Myers’ Fort Bliss. It recently opened with only a very limited theatrical release. The movie follows an Army medic—a single mom who returns home and struggles to reconnect with her young son only to be confronted with the possibility of being deployed once again.

In addition to the fierce commitment of their creators, the films have something else in common. They are all small movies about long, difficult wars. Yet each is virtually devoid of the politics of war. They aren’t films for the right wing or the left wing. They are smart enough to recognize that, for the people who fight our wars, politics are left at the war’s edge. It is not possible to make an authentic American war film and wrap it in a political agenda.

Further, each of these movies could have been transported to any American war, and the stories would have worked just as well. They each focus on the quintessential and timeless experience of Americans at war. They are studies rooted in why we fight and the impact that service has as it ripples through the lives of men and women in uniform and their families.

This summer saw an eruption of anti-Semitism across Europe that included firebombs thrown at synagogues and cries of “Jews to the gas!” Now the European Parliament has named an Egyptian activist notorious for violent rhetoric against Israel to the list of nominees for its annual Sakharov Prize, named after the great Soviet dissident.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a Web developer and blogger, was among the secularist leaders of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak . He was sentenced to 15 years in prison earlier this year for violating the restrictive new protest law enacted by the regime of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. He is out on bail, pending a retrial.

Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. “One should only debate human beings,” he tweeted in 2009. “Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.” In late 2010 he tweeted: “Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians.”

“My heroes have always killed colonialists,” Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: “Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.”

Mr. Abdel Fattah’s nomination is part of a pattern of subverting the Sakharov Prize to embarrass certain unpopular supporters of global freedom, such as the U.S. and Israel. The Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, or GUE/NGL, the parliamentary bloc that put forth Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name, nominated Edward Snowden for last year’s prize.

Such stunts sully the legacy of Andrei Sakharov who, according to his wife, the dissident Yelena Bonner, once said that “all wars that Israel has waged have been just, forced upon it by the irresponsibility of Arab leaders.” The European Parliament should uphold this distinction and remove Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name from the list.

Double Trouble Carbon Regulation
The D.C. Circuit will hear an important challenge to EPA abuse.

President Obama prophesied at the United Nations last week that climate change is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” and perhaps this vision of Apocalypse explains why he thinks he can disregard the law to regulate carbon. Whatever they think about warming, the courts may pay more respect to statutes.

This month a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new climate rules under the Clean Air Act. The order was unusual because the courts generally review rules only after they are finalized, which could take another year or more. The Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy and a dozen states are suing under the All Writs Act of 1789.

Murray drew a D.C. Circuit panel including a liberal (Judge Sri Srinivasan ), a moderate (Judge Thomas Griffith ) and a conservative (senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg ). Murray also happens to be correct on the legal merits.

The EPA wants to reorganize U.S. electric power generation and drive coal and eventually natural gas out of the energy mix under a rarely used backwater of the Clean Air Act called section 111(d), whose mandates apply state by state. The problem is that the law also includes a clause meant to prevent double regulation: Air pollutants that are controlled at the national level under the act’s section 112 are therefore specifically excluded from section 111 control. Carbon emissions, under a separate 2012 rule, are already subject to 112, but the EPA wants to have it both ways.

In a legal memorandum, the EPA claims that “a literal reading of that language would mean that the EPA could not regulate any air pollutant from a source category regulated under section 112,” and thus such a reading is “not reasonable.” In other words, obeying the law would not let the agency do what it wants to do, so the law must go.

In 40 years of covering national elections, I’ve never seen anything like this effort to keep Senate control.

In Kansas, Democrats persuaded their Senate candidate, Chad Taylor, to drop out of the race against incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. Mr. Taylor was running third in polls behind Mr. Roberts and independent Greg Orman. Soon after Mr. Taylor’s early-September withdrawal, Democratic lawyers went to court to keep his name off the ballot.

In Montana, after Democratic Sen. Max Baucus announced that he would not seek re-election in 2014, Democrats feared that an open seat would be an easy win for Republican Steve Daines. So Mr. Baucus resigned and went to China as U.S. ambassador. Lt. Gov. John Walsh was appointed senator. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, pressured another Democrat to drop out and allow Mr. Walsh to win the primary without a challenger. Mr. Walsh later quit the race in a plagiarism scandal.

All that maneuvering only begins to suggest the lengths to which Democrats are going to retain control of the Senate in the midterm election on Nov. 4. Candidate switches have happened before. Democrats replaced New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli, who had won the primary, with Frank Lautenberg as their candidate in 2002. But that pales next to Democratic machinations in 2014.

Republicans aren’t above ruthless tactics, but in 40 years of covering national elections I’ve never seen anything like the extraordinary efforts of Democrats to prevent Republicans from picking up the six seats to gain Senate control.

Mr. Reid is the leading architect of the Democratic campaign and its unprecedented tactics. He has sought to protect incumbent Democrats from votes that might imperil their re-election. And he is determined to keep Republicans from demonstrating that they’re not opposed to every Democratic initiative. To manage this, he has slowed Senate business to a near halt.

When POTUS Is Among Us
White House security might be lax, but when Obama comes to New York, much of the town goes into lockdown.

Maybe President Obama should move to New York. A guy with a knife can jump the White House fence, sprint across the lawn and get all the way to the East Room before anyone stops him? In New York last week, as I can attest, this guy with a dog couldn’t walk down the street in his own neighborhood because Mr. Obama happened to be in the vicinity.

How do I know the president was on the Upper West Side? The rooftop snipers were a giveaway.

Sharpshooters were only one sign that POTUS was among us, for a fundraiser at the home—as I later learned from three people in the building—of a private-equity investor who lives in the Eldorado co-op on Central Park West.

The streets surrounding the turreted building were blocked off, with sand-filled sanitation trucks parked at both ends. Rows of blue NYPD barriers extended for a 10-block stretch. Helicopters buzzed overhead and fire-department ambulances idled conspicuously nearby. Residents of the Eldorado and nearby apartments were locked down for hours—and instructed not to look out their windows.

The police presence on Columbus Avenue and Central Park West rivaled what you see for the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, with dozens of cops milling about, neither confirming nor denying the guest of honor’s identity. A couple of people I chatted with verified seeing the president go into the Eldorado, but all I saw was a white tent erected over the building’s West 90th Street entrance, the kind of tent you see during Fashion Week. It was quickly dismantled after the affair was over, around 7:30.

It’s hard to begrudge a presidential security detail, but I remember the days when Bill Clinton would mingle freely whenever he came to New York in the 1990s. I ran beside him twice at the Central Park Reservoir, with Secret Service agents trotting alongside. As maddening as President Obama’s visits to the U.N. can be, with traffic flows stymied to let his motorcade move without interruption, at least those expeditions have an official purpose.

I understand Isis being your idol, but this is ridiculous. Maybe the girls below were just confused? I mean, the goddess Isis was Egyptian, not Syrian:

Austrian teenage girl jihadist ‘killed in Syria’ (Telegraph, Sept. 15)

One of a pair of Austrian [ahem, Bosnian] teenage girls who left Vienna homes in April to join Syrian jihadists reportedly killed

Sabina Selimovic, 15, (left) and Samra Kesinovic, 16, travelled to Syria Photo: INTERPOL

One of two young Austrian women who travelled to Syria to fight with Islamic extremists has reportedly been killed just months after arriving in the country.

[No!]

Sabina Selimovic, 15, and Samra Kesinovic, 16, both the daughters of immigrant families from Bosnia, left their homes in Vienna in April with the apparent intention of fighting for Syrian rebels.

They are thought to have travelled to Turkey and then to have crossed the border into Syria, having become radicalised after attending a local mosque in Vienna and reading about jihad on the internet.

[Vienna? You don’t say!]

They posted on social media photographs of themselves handling assault weapons and wearing black, full length burkas.

But Austrian authorities now think one of them – they have so far refused to divulge which one – may have been killed during fighting.

Refused to divulge which one. Does it really make a difference?

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/canadian-isis-fighter-threatens-to-behead-netanyahu-video/2014/10/01/

He joined the ISIS after opening the Koran.
By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

A Canadian who joined ISIS in Iraq threatened to behead Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Abu Usamah Somali, thought to be Canadian Farah Mohamed Shirdon of Calgary and who had been considered killed showed up in an interview with ViceNews.com and said “maybe” ISIS will stop fighting after lopping off the Prime Minister’s head.

Somali, 21, added, unsurprisingly, that President Barack Obama also is targeted.

He mocked Canadian authorities as “imbeciles” for not preventing him from leaving the country. “I can’t believe how someone that has extremist terrorist ideologies was sitting in front of you and you didn’t catch them. The next time they saw me, they saw me ripping up my passport,” he said in the video interview conducted by Vice News’ Shane Smith, who aid the ISIS terrorist was located in Mosul, Iraq.

Somali claimed he left Canada on his own initiative. “No one spoke a single word to me. All I did, I opened the newspaper I read the Qur’an — very easy,” he said.

Much of what ISIS’ new YouTube star can be discounted as exaggerated, such as his claim that the terrorist group has 15,000 foreign fighters.

He boasted that ISIS has “a lot of brothers are mobilizing right now” in New York who are “mobilizing for a brilliant attack, my friend.”

One statement was 100 percent true. When Smith asked Somali who is ISIS’ enemy, answered, “The world.”

His threat to behead Netanyahu can be seen and heard at 7:40 in the video below.

In question after question during the state department press briefing, members of the press mischaracterized and ridiculed Netanyahu’s UN Speech. Any ground given by the spokesperson became the headlines.

The State Department press corps continues to spin madly against any statements or positions taken by the Israeli government, as made clear in the daily press briefing comments following Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, Sept. 29.

Those who paid close attention to Netanyahu’s speech will recall that he made one overarching point. That the Islamic terrorist groups now arrayed around the world, but centered largely in the Middle East, share a common ideology that is a danger to everyone who does not share that ideology. And that ideology is global Muslim domination.

Netanyahu labeled them all “Militant Islam.” In this group he named, in addition to ISIS, Hamas and the Islamic State of Iran, “Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabab in Somalia, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Al Nusra in Syria, the Mahdi Army in Iraq, the Al Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere.”

To support the position that all share the same goal of global Militant Islamic domination, he quoted the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; the leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal; and the founding and current rulers of the Islamic State of Iran. All three state clearly as their doctrine that their ultimate goal is for Islam to be the supreme faith of the entire world, and for that goal to be realized through force.

Baghdadi: “A day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master, the Muslims will cause the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and destroy the idol of democracy.”

Mashaal: “We say this to the world: by Allah you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.”

Khomeini: “We will export our revolution to the entire world until the cry of ‘There is no god but Allah’ will be heard throughout the world.’

And this, from the current commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards: “Our Imam did not want the Islamic Revolution for this country. Our duty is to prepare the way for an Islamic world government.” And this, from Iran’s current foreign minister: “We have a fundamental problem with the West, and especially with America. This is because we are heirs to a global mission which is tied to our raison d’être.

“Why are you running away, you sperm of Israel?” — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to a Muslim protestor.

“Being a sperm of Israel in Turkey means… to get used to living on hate speech, insults and curses every day; held accountable for every act of the Israeli government although you may never even have stepped foot in Israel; treated as a ‘foreigner’ in the country where you were born, served in the military and you pay taxes.” — Vedat Haymi Behar, digital marketing solutions coordinator, in Radikal.

Last May an explosion at a mine in western Turkey killed 301 miners. Ankara declared national mourning. But President (then-Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s response to the town’s grief was unusual for a head of a government.

After protestors scolded him, he, with his bodyguards, went into a supermarket and, as video footage revealed, Erdogan grabbed one protestor, a Muslim, by the nape of the neck and yelled: “Why are you running away, you sperm of Israel!” After the incident the man also told the press that he was slapped by Erdogan; then, thinking better of it, the man testified that he had been beaten by Erdogan’s bodyguards, not by the prime minister; and he finally apologized to Erdogan for “forcing the prime minister to insult him.”

The man had been one of the protesters demanding an explanation for the negligence that caused the tragedy. Three months before the accidental explosion occurred, members of the opposition in parliament had claimed that there could be an accident due to bad safety procedures at the mine. Members of the government benches had claimed everything was fine.

A few days ago Erdogan was in the US, and, as Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum put it most realistically, the only content specifically designed for a New York audience was a protracted “I’m not an anti-Semite” defense: “I am very sad to see that my country, myself, and my colleagues, sometimes, are labeled as being antisemitic.” Pipes wrote: “As he [Erdogan] spoke about being labeled an anti-Semite… I was glad to be in New York and not Istanbul.”

Will the real Erdogan please stand up: From “Why are you running away, you sperm of Israel!” to… “I am very sad to see that my country, myself, and my colleagues, sometimes, are labeled as being antisemitic.”
What would an American expatriate think, for instance, if a terrorist organization kidnaps three American teenagers, brutally murders them, then a senior member of the same terrorist organization publicly confesses to the crime, but the local authorities do not even raise a finger to indict the man? This is exactly what happened in Turkey, except that the victims were not American, but Israeli.