RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-coalition-of-the-unwilling/

In 2004 and 2008, John Kerry and Barack Obama ran for office on a platform of repairing our diplomatic relations with Europe that they claimed George W. Bush had shattered with his unilateral cowboy antics.

Fast forward nine and five years respectively and the diplomatic dream team of Kerry and Obama, one of whom even speaks French, has assembled a Coalition of the Unwilling that mostly consists of France.

Obama and Kerry may have gained France, whose loss under Bush occasioned much agonizing from the Democrats, but they lost the United Kingdom, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland the Ukraine and the Czech Republic; all members of Bush’s Coalition of the Willing in Iraq.

Prime Minister Cameron lost a vote in the House of Commons over Syria; a defeat that the British paper The Telegraph blamed directly on Obama’s failures of international leadership.

George W. Bush, that rogue cowboy, had gone to the United Nations and reached out to his European allies to encourage them to stand with the United States. Faced with the need to rally Europe, Obama went to play another few rounds of golf and counted on his ambassador to do the work for him. That ambassador, an obnoxious creature named Matthew Barzun whose only qualification for the posting was the amount of money he raised for Obama, was too busy offending the Brits to be of much help.

Obama and Kerry made it clear that they would not bother with the United Nations; dramatically reversing their old position. They assumed that Europe would follow them. They were wrong.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/1_in_5_flagged_job_applicants_at_cia_hail_from_terror_groups.html

Gee. You’d think they were interested in infiltrating our intelligence agencies or something.

Washington Times:

An estimated one-fifth of a subset of all applicants for Central Intelligence Agency positions had significant ties to the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda, a newly released document from the Edward Snowden collection revealed Monday.

The document — released by Mr. Snowden as part of his National Security Agency intelligence dump — said the terrorist groups worked hard to infiltrate America’s top security agencies. CIA officials uncovered thousands of applicants, roughly one in five of a subset, with “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” the document states, as Ynet News reported.

The specifics of those ties were not revealed, but the groups most often cited as attempting to infiltrate the U.S. intelligence network were al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.

The NSA, in response, launched investigations into 4,000 instances of suspected abnormal staff activity, Ynet News said. Those investigations included the tracking of employee keystrokes on agency computers and the recording of document downloads.

“Over the last several years, a small subset of CIA’s total job applicants were flagged due to various problems or issues,” one unnamed agency official said, as Ynet News reported. “During this period, one in five of that small subset was found to have significant connections to hostile intelligence services and-or terrorist groups.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/the_democrat_moral_superiority_complex.html I recently met a man who cycled from his home in California to Maryland.  When I exclaimed how interesting it must have been to talk with Americans across the country, he looked at me as if I had two heads.  “Are you crazy?  I didn’t talk to anyone,” he told me.  “They’re all red-necks.” […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323324904579044962264410266.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion “I’ve not made a decision.” That was President Obama‘s very first answer in a Wednesday interview with “PBS NewsHour.” A day earlier, the Onion anticipated that comment in a story titled “Obama Weighing His Syria Option.” It included this pretend quote from Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff: “The president recognizes that […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324432404579049170642934080.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Betting that the focus on a GOP rift will divert attention from how many Democrats won’t support the president. The most telling line in President Obama’s Saturday Syria address came near the end, when he (once again) lectured Congress about its duty to rise above “partisan differences or the politics of the moment.” Having […]

www.geraldahonigman.com Hey, television fans, did you hear the news? That popular game show from the 1950s and reincarnated both in the ’70s and ’80s, Name That Tune, is set for yet another rebirth. This time, with slight change in title, it will be led by none other than former Secretary of State Hank Kissinger–Change That […]

www.powerlineblog.com/ Walter Duranty was the New York Times Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who covered up Stalin’s mass starvation of millions of Ukrainians. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize and even though there is no question that Duranty knew the truth and willingly lied to his readers. The Times refuses to return the prize. […]

www.jewishledger.com

The Connecticut Jewish Ledger is the best Jewish interest newspaper in America….rsk

Israel’s intelligence is important to the West

When Israeli intelligence disclosed that it believed Bashir Assad’s government introduced MWD-chemicals into the conflict in that country, those who always see Israel at the root of everything evil in that part of the world were quick to rush to judgment. Another example of Israel trying to push the United States into a war to benefit Israeli interests, they said. A national talk show host did exactly that when he read the news that the source of the most recent intelligence on Syrian Chemical use was Israel and then, almost in the same breath inferred that Israel was pushing us to war. He wasn’t alone and was echoed in other places almost as quickly.

It’s hard for some minds to grasp, but there are two separate elements to consider here. Israel is the source of intelligence in that part of the world because she is fully focused on it while most other intelligence services aren’t involved to the same extent. This because Israel absolutely has to know what’s going on there since it is in her vital, immediate interest to stay informed so that she may inform her own strategic posture for survival. That she shares that intel with the West does not mean that she is attempting to influence American policy. Without Israel’s Humanintel and her close-up electronic surveillance, the West is blind in many ways to what goes on in a region vital to her existence

Misreading Egypt… again

Nidra Poller

Willful illiteracy has reached new levels in the misreading of recent events in Egypt. The democracy-loving [sic] Muslim Brotherhood replaced the Facebook-Twitter generation in the hearts of journalists, and the Joint Forces for The Good—the United Nations, the European Union, and Leaders of the Western World –demanded the restoration of President Morsi, placing the Good squarely in the Muslim Brotherhood camp. As for the military, they have been given the role usually attributed to Israel: heavy-handed, heartless, trigger happy oppressors. In fact, the narrative fabricated to hide the truth about what is happening in Egypt is a variation on the theme of the “Arab-Israeli” conflict.

When Tahrir Square started filling up again this year, sympathy naturally flowed to the anti-Morsi contingent. The story was that the democratic revolution had been hijacked by the Islamist government that turned out to be not as moderate as expected. Morsi’s destitution was seen from the viewpoint of young secular-looking Egyptians. The army was with the people, as in 2011, using force to ensure their freedom. And the pro-Morsi operation was cutely described as “sit-ins”… one more example of the vibrant democracy that had wafted into Egypt on the petals of the Arab Spring.

Commentators, emissaries, and those ever-present “specialists” who specialize in making sure that no harsh truths about Islam will pierce the intellectual fog, did the peace process routine. Now that the balance of power has shifted, the winners must make concessions, offer the ousted Islamists a seat at the table, release Morsi and let him try on a new pair of political shoes. Never mind that the pro-Morsi camp swelled, agitated, and clearly articulated its position: we won’t disband until our democratically elected president is back in power. We won’t retreat, we won’t compromise, we are ready to die as martyrs [shahid]. Commentators, emissaries, and those comical specialists read the ultimatum as a prelude to negotiations.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3954/recognizing-muslim-brotherhood

It is high time we stopped empowering those who wish us ill: not just to recognize a blood-soaked regime, but to keep on recognizing it.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt [FDR], reversing the policy of four presidents and six of their Secretaries of State not to recognize the Soviet government, in 1933 extended “normal diplomatic relations” to the Soviet Union, the totalitarian slaughterhouse of Josef Stalin. As meticulously researched by Diana West in her new book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character,” the reasoning behind Roosevelt’s decision was never made clear; what was clear, however, since the 1917-1919 Bolshevik seizure of the Russian government by force, was the Soviet reign of blood and terror. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, by the late 1930s, Stalin’s regime was shooting tens of thousands of people per month. Yet, for reasons that remain murky, FDR was influenced, inspired, or somehow persuaded to normalize U.S. relations with Stalin, in exchange for a page of Soviet concessions, not worth the paper they were written on, which pledged that the USSR “would not attempt to subvert or overthrow the U.S. system.”

What West documents is the subsequent process of infiltration, influence, and “occupation” by an army of communist agents and fellow travelers; here, however, the focus is on what that original 1933 decision has meant for future generations, most especially our own, when confronted with decisions about whether or not to recognize enemies who make no secret of their enmity and intention to destroy us.

Whatever FDR’s thinking, West points out that this decision — not just to recognize the blood-soaked communist regime, but to keep on recognizing it — fundamentally transformed what Robert Conquest, the great chronicler of Stalin’s purges, called “the conscience of the civilized world.” And perhaps not just our conscience: as West writes, “[b]ecause the Communist regime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation.” In other words, quite aside from the abdication of objective morality represented by FDR’s decision, there was a surrender of “reality-based judgment,” the implications of which on the ability of U.S. national leadership to make sound decisions involving the fundamental defense of the Republic resonate to the current day.