RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ft.com/intl/uk-edition

Well our peripathetic Sec. of State has been so busy processing peace in the Middle East that he’s put China, North Korea, Japan, Ukraine all on the back burner….rsk

The US fears that Japan’s departure from postwar pacifism will provoke Beijing

It is fairly easy to assess the relationship between Shinzo Abe’s Japan and Xi Jinping’s China. Neither likes the other very much. Both are using nationalism as a prop to further policy aims. Both conceivably find it useful to have a “tough man” on the other side, the better to push against.

Less easy to calibrate is the state of relations between Japan and the US. This ought to be far easier to decipher. Japan is, after all, the US’s most important ally in Asia, the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that has hosted US fighter aircraft and troops since the end of the second world war. Now, in Mr Abe, it has a leader who, after decades of American prodding, is finally willing to adopt a more robust defence posture and revisit the “freeloader” defence doctrine that pacifist Japan has long embraced. Yet having attained what it has long been after, Washington is showing signs it is getting cold feet.

One sign of that was its expression of “disappointment” after the December visit of Mr Abe to Yasukuni shrine, which is regarded as a symbol of Japan’s unrepentant militarism by China and South Korea. In the past, Washington has privately voiced its displeasure at Yasukuni visits, but has not publicly reprimanded Japan. Tokyo was taken aback by the use of the word “disappointed” – translated as shitsubo – which sounds harsh in Japanese.

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/115752/interview-naftali-bennett-london “If you say the right things, then you’re very popular,” says Economy Minister and Habayit Hayehudi leader Naftali Bennett with an ironic smile. “The media embraces you, the world embraces you, but in the end it will be my children and me paying the price. I’m not prepared to give up the truth for […]

It has come to my sad attention that Saul S. Friedman- a scholar, historian, Zionist and truth teller died in March 2013. Among his many books and columns on the Holocaust and Jewish history and Palestine is “Land of Dust”-Palestine at the Turn of the Century” (1982)Professor Friedman was among the first of the few […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/days-of-infamy?f=puball#ixzz2txKCaoDu

The infamy perpetrated by the Muslim Waqf, occurring daily upon Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, cries out for speedy denunciation by the entire world. Tragically it will not happen for a veritable veil of deception has fallen across what is left of the West.

As Giulio Meotti, a journalist with the Italian newspaper, Il Foglio, wrote back in 2012: “The Waqf is now attempting to deliberately destroy all archaeological evidence of Jewish claims to this site, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the Temple Mount. The Waqf has removed every sign of ancient Jewish presence at the site. At the entrance, a Waqf sign says “The Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyard and everything in it is Islamic property.

“Today Jews are barred from praying on the Mount and are not even allowed to carry any holy articles with them. With Muslim observers supervising visits, Israeli police, to their shame, have frequently arrested Jews for various “violations,” such as singing or reciting a prayer even in a whisper.”

What may well be one of the worst crimes against civilization is the ruthless and relentless destruction of Jewish and Christian artifacts and antiquities by the Moslem authorities, the Waqf, who were foolishly given permission by Israel’s Moshe Dayan to control the Temple Mount in 1967.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/after-olympics-putins-real-games-begin-in-ukraine?f=puball

Job No. 1? Ukraine.

You can only imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin is none too pleased about the civil unrest there — and the less than flattering spotlight it’s shining on Russia — not to mention distracting attention from his signature sports event in Sochi.

But oozing confidence as the Olympic Games draw to a close, you can bet that once the snow and ice-making equipment are switched off at the balmy Black Sea resort, Putin will turn his full attention to those pesky protesters next door.

You see: Losing Kiev from Moscow’s orbit is simply a non-starter for the Kremlin & Co.

Russia wants to hold Ukraine firmly under its sway. Moscow sees the country as protecting its soft strategic underbelly where hopeful conquerors of the past (e.g., the Nazis) invaded Mother Russia.

Ukraine is a central part of Russia’s perception of its own history and security. It’s a critical buffer state between Russia and American-led NATO, surprisingly still part of the Kremlin’s paranoia two-plus decades after the end of the Cold War.

To keep Ukraine as a loyal part of its periphery and locked into its sphere of influence, Russia is willing to use whatever influence is necessary to ensure success.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/02/20/the-washington-post-notices-that-iran-harbors-al-qaeda-as-al-qaeda-leaves-iran/?print=1

The Washington Post finds it newsworthy that senior al-Qaeda figures are leaving (or being shown the door in) Iran. Obviously, it is an interesting development … but one is constrained to ask why the Post did not seem to think it much of a story that Iran was harboring al-Qaeda leaders in the first place.

Iran, as our friend Michael Ledeen has repeatedly observed (most recently, here), is the chief sponsor of jihadism in the world. That it is a Shiite jihadist regime has not made much difference where the West is concerned: the mullahs have trained, supplied, financed and harbored Sunni jihadists – al-Qaeda and Hamas prominently among them – for over 20 years. This is the most outrageous aspect of the U.S. government’s negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program, negotiations conducted by both the Bush and Obama administrations. The regime’s nuclear ambitions have been compartmentalized from its terror facilitation, notwithstanding that it is the regime’s propagation of revolutionary jihad that makes its potential acquisition of nukes so intolerable. We do not sit up at night worrying about, say, India’s nuclear weapons. We have anxiety over Iran because for its regime, “Death to America” is not a slogan, it is a ruthlessly pursued goal.

This is why Michael and I, among not nearly enough others, have urged for a decade that the problem in Iran is the regime, not the nukes, and that any sensible American foreign policy should make regime change in Iran an imperative. This has never necessarily meant a military invasion of Iran (although that option should always be on the table – not as saber-rattling but as something the mullahs become convinced is a realistic possibility). It has simply meant that we should have organized every aspect of American foreign policy – military, intelligence, economic, and diplomatic – on strangling the regime until it is deposed, hopefully by the Iranian people themselves but by external forces if that’s what it takes.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/harvards-rebel-without-a-clue/

It reads like parody, but it’s not. Appearing the other day in the Harvard Crimson, the article was headlined “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” Its author, a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y.L. Korn, argued that the concept of academic freedom should be replaced by one of academic justice. “When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression,” she proposed, “it should ensure that this research does not continue.” To a large extent, of course, the American academy is already under the thumb of the left-wing Thought Police; Ms. Korn only wants to complete the job. She’d like to see an academy in which, she explains, somebody like Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield – a conservative who would never be hired nowadays, but whose job is secure thanks to tenure – would be given the boot, the better to purify the sweet air of Harvard Yard.

Who is Sandra Y.L. Korn? The contributor’s note identifies her as a member of the class of 2014, a Crimson editorial writer and columnist, and “a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House.” “Concentrator” is apparently Harvardese for “major.” Ms. Korn’s college education consists, then, of courses in Women’s Studies and in “History of Science,” which, according to Harvard’s website, “offers students the possibility of studying the history and social relations of science” but “does not require students to take science courses.” (Which, of course, is ridiculous: how can you begin to understand what science is without actually studying a science?) Ms. Korn, I also discovered, is working on a thesis about “how biologists have tried over and over again to explain gender difference by invoking ‘science.’” In other words, she’s learned about science – without really learning any science – in order to discredit “science,” a word she puts in scare quotes. (Her project is, note well, entirely consistent with Women’s Studies dogma, which teaches that science is “masculinist.”)

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/a-socialism-spill-on-aisle-9/

The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations.

The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don’t know what working for a living entails and don’t even understand the concept.

The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, have a plan to wipe out another 500,000 jobs. Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it’s 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 percent mark.

A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can’t just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren’t making enough money, just raise their salaries.

The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn’t true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn’t take much to push them out from full-time to part-time and from part-time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/progressive-insanity-and-the-global-warming-cult/

Progressives will do virtually anything to advance their agenda. In the arena of global warming, they have resorted to hysteria and angry denunciation of those who dare to question their infallible “wisdom.” And as it is with every aspect of their agenda, such wisdom must be imposed at the expense of liberty.

Leading the charge is Secretary of State John Kerry, who epitomized the above approach in a speech to Indonesian students, civic leaders and government officials in Jakarta, Indonesia. First he laced into one the left’s favorite punching bags, namely the coal and oil industries he accused of “hijacking” the conversation. ”We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” he declared. ”Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits. The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand. We don’t have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society.”

Possibly suspecting that his presentation might be insufficient to galvanize the unwashed masses, Kerry added a dash of fear to the mix. ”This city, this country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry warned. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life here is at risk. In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,” he added.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Walking across the marsh and down to the river in a driving snowstorm a week ago, I marveled at the power of nature. There is nothing that man has devised that can head off a meteor, hurricane, tornado, typhoon or snow storm. We have split the atom, placed a man on the moon and can send messages from one computer to another in milliseconds, yet we can’t divert rain from where it falls in abundance to where it is needed. Despite the bleatings to the contrary from those like Secretary of State John Kerry in Indonesia three days ago, man, as powerful as he is, has been no more successful at trapping nature than was King Canute 1000 years ago. As Professor Mat Collins, a senior scientist associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said this past weekend about the storms and flooding in the UK: they were driven by the Jet Stream moving south “for reasons that are simply unknown…If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.”

President Obama recently blamed the droughts in California on global warming – placing blame on fossil fuels. He responds by unilaterally ordering the development of higher standards for truck manufacturing, rather than re-routing water his EPA had earlier diverted from California farms so that the Delta smelt might live. We may want all species to survive, but food should come first.

Ironically, much of the East Coast has experienced snowier and colder winters than normal. Apart from winter sports enthusiasts, most people are getting tired of the ice and snow; they long for spring. Depending on the town, Connecticut schools have been closed 6 or 8 days so far this school year, meaning that summer vacation will be shortened by a like number of days. USA Today reported last week that since December 1st, 75,000 domestic airline flights had been cancelled. Yet John Kerry, Al Gore and Barack Obama have the arrogance to believe that man is more powerful than nature – that responsibility lies with a small number of Republicans and a few evil oil and gas producers. It is not enough for them to acknowledge that, yes, man does leave his imprint on the natural world, which is the opinion of every sensible person. But they insist that if man would simply adhere to policy recommendations of elitist Washington bureaucrats the world would remain as it is – the oceans would recede, storms would subside, temperatures cool and polar bears would no longer be seen riding ice floes into the sunny regions of Michael Moore’s camera. Tempus cessat.