RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/09/10/day-two-highlights-from-the-world-summit-on-counter-terrorism/

Some interesting and provocative discussions during Day 2 of the World Summit on Counter Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel (my Day 1 overview is here). Some of the highlights from the second day of proceedings:

A report released at the conference announced an estimate that the Assad regime in Syria has 1,000 tons of chemical weapons.

Syracuse professor William Banks offered his assessment, in line with one offered the previous day, that while the Syrian regime may have violated international law with the use of chemical weapons (even though they are not a signatory to the chemical weapons convention), the remedies do not include the use of force, much as President Obama is proposing.

Qanta Ahmed warned against the virulence of Islamist ideology, claiming it was more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and stressed the importance of moderate Muslims unmasking the “wolves in sheeps’ clothing,” i.e., so-called “moderate” Islamists.

Undoubtedly the most lively discussion of the day involved Canadian columnist and author Tarek Fatah. During his speech, which you can see in the clip below, he notes that missing from much of the debate over the use of chemical weapons by Syria, and even Iran’s budding nuclear program, is that Pakistan already possesses 100+ nuclear weapons.

Fatah also added that two of the top Islamic partners in the “war on terror,” Turkey and Pakistan, are among the biggest purveyors of the jihadist ideology we are confronting globally (Saudi Arabia could also be added to that list).

Brian Jenkins of RAND Corp noted the diminishing effectiveness of strikes aimed at decapitating terrorist organizations. According to his research, a terrorist group that suffers decapitation in the first year of its existence is 8.5 times more likely to disintegrate than if the leadership continues; after 10 years existence, that rate is cut in half; by 20 years (al-Qaeda would fall in this category) the effect of a leadership decapitation strike is negligible.

Syria vs. North Korea: The Calculus of Mass Atrocities Posted By Claudia Rosett On September 10, 2013 @ 1:52 pm In Uncategorized | 6 Comments The news of U.S. policy on Syria is, at this stage, moving in such loops and spirals that Russia — major arms supplier and supporter of the Assad regime — […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/col-allen-west-remembering-911/

Today we remember the 12th anniversary of the horrific attacks of 9/11. We also remember the four Americans who were murdered in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

In 2001, I was a major serving at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on an exchange assignment to the U.S. Marine Corps. On that fateful morning, I had just completed morning PT and hygiene, and was in my office preparing to suck down some chow. I then received a call from a fellow operations staffer at the Marine Forces Atlantic (MARFORLANT) headquarters in Virginia. I was admonished to get to a television set.

I rushed down to our current operations area just in time to see the second plane hit.

I knew on that day we would be called upon by our country to avenge this attack — the Pearl Harbor of our time.

That night, when I finally got back to my quarters, I gazed into the heavens. For the first time ever … I heard nothing. I saw no airplane lights. It was an eerie feeling.

Last year, we all watched in horror during the assault on our American consulate in Benghazi. Still more terrifying was the fact that we abandoned Americans who were under attack.

Even today, a year later, some ask regarding the incident: “What difference does it make?” Even today, some say that Benghazi is a “phony scandal.”

Those who say and believe this are just as much of a threat to the safety and security of our constitutional republic as are the attackers. In their shameful attempts to deceive, they are evenly complicit in the loss of American lives.

On this day, we should not pause to consider multiculturalism and negating offense to others. On this day, we should not entertain insidious conspiracy theories. Instead, remember the enemy who attacked us — and who will continue to attack us — just because we are a nation and a people who believe in individual liberty.

Remember those who lost their lives.

And lastly, remember those who abandoned Americans a year ago and — to this day — seek to deceive the American people.

God bless the greatest nation the world has ever known, these United States of America.

http://www.france24.com/en/20130911-russia-renew-offer-supply-300s-iran Russian President Vladimir Putin will offer to supply Iran S-300 air defence missile systems as well as build a second reactor at the Bushehr nuclear plant, the Kommersant business daily reported Wednesday. Putin will renew an old offer to supply Iran with five of the sophisticated ground-to-air missile systems at a meeting with Iranian […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ For a while, the eyes still seemed to see them there, perfect straight lines rising into the sky, an empty space on the horizon that your mind filled in without even thinking. You walked past, and thought, “Of course they’re there. They’re always there” and you saw them as they were, grey ghosts of […]

THE FIRST PARAGRAPH GIVES EVIDENCE TO CONRAD BLACK’S IDIOCY: ” I am not one of those whom she can possibly include as making an ad hominem attack on her; I don’t know her, and have never commented on her as a person. She expends considerable space and robust vocabulary attacking “conventional, tightly blinkered historiography” and especially historians from several eminent American universities. Again, this has no possible application to me. I am a stand-alone Roosevelt biographer.”

Wow…no ad-hominem attacks? Is he kidding? In his NRO hissing he did not refute a single one of her assertions but called her “a right wing loopy” who might have “been house trained.” Refined scholars don’t speak that way….maybe convicted fraudsters like him do.

And his comments on Yalta “She ignores the fact that Yalta gave the West all it wanted, including independent and democratic states in Eastern Europe, and that Stalin had to violate that agreement to impose Soviet occupation, starting the Cold War.” He is a historian? No he is a stand alone cur….rsk

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358122/print

Diana West has exercised her right of rebuttal to the heavy barrage of criticism her book American Betrayal attracted, and mentioned my column in this space on the subject several weeks ago as one to which she was replying. I was deemed to be in the “echo chamber” of a number of critics most of whose comments I have not read. Her book made some startling assertions and attracted severe rejoinders, including mine. I don’t know most of those whom she purports to contradict, and I will not join the minute, line-by-line connection she draws between passages of her book and specific charges by Ron Radosh. I am not one of those whom she can possibly include as making an ad hominem attack on her; I don’t know her, and have never commented on her as a person. She expends considerable space and robust vocabulary attacking “conventional, tightly blinkered historiography” and especially historians from several eminent American universities. Again, this has no possible application to me. I am a stand-alone Roosevelt biographer.

The basic rebuttal process she uses, of miring the exchange in dogmatic argument about the precise meaning of particular words, is a time-honored method of breaking even in the opinion of readers and onlookers by boring everyone in equal-opportunity, no-fault, total-immersion nitpicking. But it is not really successful. Ms. West rises up like a cobra in self-righteous anger at the imputation to her of the opinion that “the FDR administration was ‘run’ by Soviet agents.” But she affirms that “the strategic placement of hundreds of agents of Stalin’s influence inside the U.S. government and other institutions amounted to a de facto occupation. . . . The vast and deep extent of Communist penetration, heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto Communist occupation of the American center of power.”

Precisely these words were among those to which I objected. There were Communist sympathizers and outright Soviet agents in all American administrations from Woodrow Wilson to George H. W. Bush, as there were in all foreign governments (and as there were Western agents in the Soviet government, because naturally and ideologically adversarial regimes do spy on one another), and there were probably more such agents in the Roosevelt administration than in other American governments, which is unsurprising given economic conditions in the Thirties and the common war effort from 1941 to 1945. But there is no evidence, in Ms. West’s book or elsewhere, that they materially influenced policy, any of them, on either side.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/09/converted_on_the_road_to_damascus.html The swiftness with which attention is now being focused on collecting and destroying chemical weapons located in Syria has been truly breathtaking. Last Friday 6 September President Obama was waving a joint declaration signed by Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/911-twelve-years-later/print/

9/11 was a moment of utter moral clarity that has been succeeded by twelve years of moral chaos. Twelve years of duplicity, flim-flam, double-dealing, humbug. Twelve years of timorousness, incompetence, impotence.

Thousands of lives have been sacrificed in vain; inconceivable amounts of money have gone to waste. America’s financial security and its international standing have been imperiled. And all for one simple reason: because, from the very beginning, the powers that be, in both political parties, chose to lie about the nature of the enemy we were up against.

In the years before World War II began, Winston Churchill spoke up again and again in the House of Commons about the danger that the Nazis represented. His colleagues responded to his eloquent, passionate warnings with ridicule. He was considered a bore, a nag. Some of his fellow Tories viewed his preoccupation with Hitler as an embarrassment. But he didn’t waver. He knew whereof he spoke, he saw what was coming, and he did what he saw as his duty.

On September 11, 2001, only a couple of hours after the planes struck the World Trade Center, President Bush went on TV and promised the nation that we’d get the “folks” who did this. “Folks”? Would Churchill ever have called the Nazis “folks”? The tone was wrong, right from the start. Tone matters.

In the same TV address, Bush asked everyone to join him in a moment of silence. But it was not a time to bow one’s head in silence. It was a time to be enraged, to speak the facts firmly and clearly, and to plan appropriate retributive action. It was time for a moment of truth.

But nobody wanted to speak the truth.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-bombing-syria-will-not-help-israel/print/ One of the more familiar arguments for bombing Syria is that it will help Israel. Israel doesn’t need that kind of help. Israelis successfully destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. During the Syrian Civil War, Israel has carried out a number of strikes against Syrian targets. If anything, NATO intervention will stifle Israel’s […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/subverting-the-cultural-occupation/ In a recent National Review piece, Jim Geraghty pondered the alliterative question, “Can Conservative Comments from Celebrities Change the Culture?” He’s worried that by touting two celebrity quotes that espoused conservative values, the right is wading into the shallow waters of pop culture and degrading the serious business of politics. His concern couldn’t be […]