RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/middle-east-is-double-dealt/?print=1

Boo-hoo, Middle East

About every day or so, a throat-clearing Middle East pundit weighs in to warn us of the Obama’s administration’s dereliction of traditional American engagement. They rightly lament “lead from behind” in Libya. After Benghazi, Libya has turned into something like Somalia. Far more are dying there from sectarian chaos than during the latter years of the hated Moammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship.

The Sunni reactionary establishment of the Gulf is right to deplore Obama’s incoherent flip-flop-flips in Egypt and Syria. The oil lords logically conclude that a directionless president will do nothing to stop Iran’s race to get a bomb — and all the subsequent Middle East WMD catch-ups to match it.

Even Obama’s pet Turkey seems confused that its favorite administration is now nowhere to be seen. The Iraqis were given a fresh start after the surge and hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. aid — and still claimed that they wanted the U.S. out. Obama gladly called their hand. Now, left to themselves, they are reverting to the pre-surge violence, whining about security and sectarianism — and back asking us for even more money. Rule One: never bluff an isolationist to yank all his forces from your country.

After twelve years, it is clear that triple-dealing President Hamid Karzai never made the reforms in Afghanistan that he promised. Now he will soon be on his own too, as Kabul comes to resemble [1] the disaster of Saigon, 1975. He is correct in lamenting U.S. withdrawal, and yet about the most unsympathetic of the many unattractive dependents American has acquired in the Middle East.

Visitors from an alien planet might conclude of the region that Saddams come and go. Arab Springs and Cedar and Green Revolutions rise and fall. Socialists and fascists, Islamists and Baathists all wax and wane. All the while, the Middle East — statist, authoritarian, anti-democratic, religiously intolerant, tribal, misogynist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and exploitive — stays mostly the same and so in a way earns the wide varieties of awful government that it suffers from.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/363051/hillarys-odyssey-victor-davis-hanson

From Senator Clinton’s tergiversations on Iraq to Secretary Clinton’s lies on Benghazi

Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and walked away with a reported $400,000 in fees. Such compensation is almost as profitable as Hillary’s long-ago cattle-future trading, in which as a talented rookie speculator she beat one-in-several-million odds by parlaying an original $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit.

That Goldman’s shenanigans were central to the 2008 housing and financial meltdown — and were empowered, in part, by Bill Clinton’s own prior twofer of deregulating Wall Street and appointing to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae greedy, though liberal, incompetents of the likes of James Johnson, Franklin Raines, and Jamie Gorelick — apparently meant nothing to Hillary.

Her current frenetic speaking career is consistent with the ethics that allowed Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, to freelance as a six-figure private “consultant” while simultaneously working as Hillary’s aide and representing the U.S. State Department. With the Clintons, government service is never quite inseparable from private lucre. The more public anguish is voiced over fairness, and the more loudly the undue influence of big money over big government is criticized, the more both are drawn to just that. The Clintons must think of Wall Street the way the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart used to talk of “the Devil” — a dark force that nonetheless always alights on their shoulders, improperly but successfully seducing them.

Soon Hillary may even outpace Bill in speaking fees, especially after she finishes up her private-equity rounds at places like KKR and the Carlyle Group and follows his footsteps abroad. So much for the revolving door, influence peddling, and all the other Obama reform blather we’ve been saturated with since 2008. I don’t think we are going to see any Occupy Wall Street protesters break into mahogany-paneled rooms to decry Hillary’s post-public-service profiting, doing so little work for so much money from a firm that did so much damage to so many.

In Hillary’s defense, she is not doing anything differently from the host of other former Obama hope-and-change reformist influence peddlers, from Peter Orszag and Larry Summers to Robert Gibbs and Anita Dunn. Her efforts are just more lucrative. Of course, revolving high-finance politics is a bipartisan habit. Yet when one tries to simultaneously pose as an egalitarian, the additional smell of hypocrisy is overwhelming.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/giles-udy/british-labor-and-the-gulag/print/

The British Left today presents itself as the defender of minorities and the vulnerable. Not so long ago, though, the British Labor Government’s enthusiasm for Soviet Communism led it to support the regime’s persecution of peasants and religious believers. When hundreds of thousands died in the Gulag, or ended up slave laborers in the camps, they preferred to turn a blind eye to their Russian comrades’ crimes.

The Labor Party welcomed the Russian Revolution of October 1917: C.T. Cramp, the railwaymen’s leader and Labor Chairman, proclaimed in 1924, ‘Capitalism has got to be smashed as it is smashed in Russia. Those of us who are revolutionaries are determined to do it.’

Throughout the 1920s a succession of squabbles and disagreements between Labor and British and Soviet Communists failed to dim Labor enthusiasm for what Fenner Brockway, soon to be a Labor Member of Parliament (MP) and a future peer, called the ‘heroic achievements in building up the Workers’ State’.

In May 1927 a police raid on the Soviet trade mission in London uncovered stolen military documents, and the Conservative Government expelled the entire Soviet trade and diplomatic missions. Labor MPs were outraged. In the House Commons, James Maxton MP, a leading Labor MP, left the House in no doubt about where his allegiance lay: ‘My sympathies are absolutely with the ultimate aims and objects of the Russian Soviet Government.’

A.J. Cook, the miners’ leader, whose union had received over £250,000 ($11m today) from the Soviets during the General Strike, expressed similar sentiments, this time adding a hint of menace: ‘I am proud of Russia, and I owe more allegiance to Russian workers than to Mr Baldwin (the Conservative Prime Minister) and his government. The Labor Party and the trade union movement is out to do what Russia has done. It is not for me to say just how it will be accomplished, for the necessities of the moment will decide what action we shall take to achieve that end, but undoubtedly it will be accomplished.’

Labor MPs responded to the expulsions by hosting a lunch in the Soviets’ honor in the House of Commons, presided over the President of the British trade union movement. A few days later an official Labor delegation went to Victoria Railway Station to bid them farewell. At its head was Arthur Henderson, twice party leader, who would be in office two years later as Foreign Secretary (minister) in a new Labor Government.

By 1929, the year that Labor won the British general election, Stalin was setting about formalizing the Soviet penal system into what has now become known as the Gulag and brought in punitive new measures to eradicate religion, nationalize agriculture and neutralize the countryside as a base for future counter-revolution.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by titans Mell Flynn, a Hollywood actress and the president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, Kai Chen, a former basketball star on the Chinese national team and the author of One in a Billion, and Monty Morton, a Conservative Entrepreneur and walking Encyclopedia of Economics.

The Gang gathered to discuss Sean Penn’s Call for Ted Cruz and Tea Party Members to be Institutionalized. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 14:25 mark) and focused on how the Left has learned well from the Soviet regime’s incarceration of political dissidents in mental asylums. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of The Disaster of “Access” in ObamaCare, What The $17 Trillion Debt Really Means and Mao’s Kitchen in Los Angeles:

Part II:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-american-iron-curtain/

In March 1946, Winston Churchill told a Missouri audience, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia.”

Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain lie New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and countless others.

It covers a million streets and hundreds of millions of people. Its shadow passes over stores and factories, homes and schools. It is not a physical wall. There are no border guards with rifles to shoot those wanting to leave.

It is a wall of words, of laws, regulations and mandates. The 2012 Federal Register had 78,961 pages. There are 11 million words of ObamaCare regulations alone. With so many regulations, everyone violates a few of them without even knowing it. Assemble all the millions of them together and you have a great wall that would dwarf anything in China

The American iron curtain is still made out of paper, but in time it will be made out of cement and iron. Tyrannies begin with paper, but end with metal. The state begins by imposing bureaucracy on a free people and ends by imposing tyranny on them. When they will not obey the paper, it resorts to steel, iron and lead.

Four decades after Churchill invoked the Iron Curtain, in his Evil Empire speech Reagan named the Soviet enemy as those who “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the Earth.”

“They are the focus of evil in the modern world,” he said.

That is the struggle now before us.

Conservatives have lost the ability to lay out the stakes in the clear and simple language of a Churchill or a Reagan, to let the people know that they are not choosing between politicians, but choosing whether they will be able to have the car of their choice, the doctor of their choice, the meal of their choice and the book of their choice.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-world-ive-known-has-come-to-an-end There was a time not so long ago when I could select my own doctor. There was a time when I could choose my health insurance company. There was a time when everyone believed Marxism was a failure, an idea relegated to the ash heap of history. There was a time when class warfare […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304527504579172030037107074?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

A U.N. panel hears good advice from a prison survivor.

A United Nations commission is finally investigating human rights in North Korea, and last week it opened a window on the gruesome facts it is discovering.

The commission has traveled to several countries to hear the testimony of North Korean exiles and experts who follow the Hermit Kingdom. On Monday in New York, Michael Kirby, the retired Australian judge who is leading the probe, said the evidence points to “large-scale patterns of systematic and gross human-rights violations” in North Korea.

One first-person account was delivered in Washington on Wednesday by Jo Jin-hye. The young woman described how most of her family had died of starvation in North Korea, including an infant brother who succumbed in her arms. An elder sister went to China, where the family believed she was sold as a bride to a man in another part of the country.

Ms. Jo fled with her mother and a younger sister to China, where they were arrested by Chinese police and repatriated to North Korea. She was taken to a detention center, where guards wearing boots “stomped on my bare feet.” She testified that she observed guards place a plastic bag over the head of another detainee: “They did this several times until he confessed.” His crime? Like Ms. Jo, he had left North Korea without permission.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303482504579177651057373802?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEAD

TopClimate-change alarmists warn us about coming food shortages. They said the same in 1968.

Warming is becoming a major problem. “A change in our climate,” writes one deservedly famous American naturalist, “is taking place very sensibly.” Snowfall, he notes, has become “less frequent and less deep.” Rivers that once “seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.”

And it’s having an especially worrisome effect on the food supply: “This change has produced an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold, in the spring of the year, which is very fatal to fruits.”

That isn’t a leaked excerpt from the latest report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but it may as well be. Last week, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise of the website No Frakking Consensus posted a draft of a forthcoming IPCC report on the alleged effects climate change will have on food production.

“With or without adaptation,” the report warns, “climate change will reduce median yields by 0 to 2% per decade for the rest of the century, as compared to a baseline without climate change. These projected impacts will occur in the context of rising crop demand, projected to increase by 14% per decade until 2050.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4045/allies-adversaries-self-defense

Critics of those who defend the free world from its adversaries accuse governments and security forces of wiretapping public figures, including friendly governments, and of conducting drone-executed targeted killings as an accepted form of warfare.

But is anyone looking at who, exactly, is criticizing the Western world’s actions that defend it against terrorism? Do they really believe that terrorism can be successfully fought without violence? Criticism, even if justified, can sabotage a just battle and people’s right to self-defense.

According to the Arabic proverb, “If you honor and respect a noble man, he will become your friend, but if you honor and respect a villain, he will rise up against you.”

One view of diplomacy, deemed misguided by leaders such as Churchill, is to abandon one’s friends and court one’s enemies in the assumption that the friend is yours and will not abandon you. The United States deserted the Shah for the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards; it abandoned Mubarak for the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist Mohamed Morsi, and it has abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan to domestic chaos, growing terrorism and the approaching Islamist takeover.

Now, voices from the West and the Middle East have suggested that the status of the United States may be in jeopardy in countries where it previously had influence, such as Egypt.

The U.S. is withholding funding from the new Sisi regime, which may be the only chance of keeping Egypt from slipping back into the religious autocracy of the Muslim Brotherhood. America explained that its decision to cut funding to Egypt was due to lack of democratic process in Sisi’s advancement to power. Ironically, however, America has weakened the defenses of the world against violent Islamism, which can be defined as a militant political version of Islam, that outspokenly desires to take over the Arab-Muslim countries and turn them into a united base from which to bring Islam to the rest of the world. This goal, according to the Islamists, can be accomplished through irhab, or terrorism, with the eventual aim of converting everyone to Islam, using force if necessary. As it is written in the Noble Qur’an, Al-Anfal 8:60, “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war to strike fear into (the hearts of) the enemies of Allah, and your enemies…” Neutralizing the fight against Islamism in the name of democracy and pluralism sounds like justifying theft and drug dealing in the name of freedom to earn a living.

Neutralizing the fight against religious autocracies and the terrorists they sponsor exposes to attack the right to life, the democratic institutions and the freedom that every citizen of the Western world enjoys, and that others, lately from North Africa, have risked, and often lost, their lives on broken-down boats in the hope of enjoying as well.

http://www.romirowsky.com/13990/aaup-and-bds

In 1915, John Dewey of Columbia University and Arthur Lovejoy of Johns Hopkins University came together with other educators to establish the American Association of University Professors, an organization designed to preserve academic freedom and professional values.

The association’s 1915 Declaration of Principles set the guidelines for the foundation of what academic freedom should be stating that, “the freedom of the academic teacher entail[s] certain correlative obligations … . The university teacher … should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators … and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves.”

Today, however, academic freedom is incorrectly equated with unrestricted faculty free speech and the “correlative obligations” or presenting “divergent opinions” have been swept away. As the late Gary Tobin put it, “Academic freedom has evolved from protection against political influence to job security — an employment contract rather than an intellectual contract.”

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and Israeli academics.

Here academics have taken the lead in attempting to condemn and restrict access to an entire country through vilification, through lies and exaggeration, and by efforts to restrict the free speech of others.

The latest edition of the Journal of Academic Freedom — the AAUP’s flagship journal — edited by Ashley Dawson, who takes this to fairly Orwellian new heights with an entire issue devoted to the BDS campaign against Israel. This is hardly mitigated by a passing statement from the journal’s editor that, “in view of the association’s longstanding commitment to the free exchange of ideas, we oppose academic boycotts.”