RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2342

Here’s a factoid about the Middle East that may have slipped by you while focusing on Iran’s nuclear program, Syria’s massacres, Egypt’s Islamization and Israel’s response to Mitt Romney’s recent visit: The highest consumption of beauty products and cosmetic surgery in the world today exists in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

This is surprising on many levels, and I admit to having been puzzled when I heard about it — since the only benefit I see in veils is the freedom not to wear make-up. This is particularly true these days, as was pointed out brilliantly by the late, great Nora Ephron, who bemoaned the endless time a woman has to spend on hair, nails and skin so as not to feel ungroomed. Personally, I can’t think of anything better than a burka for solving that particular problem. Apparently, however, rich Saudi ladies view it differently.

To add giggle to guffaw, the country in the region with the biggest booming cosmetic surgery tourism industry is Lebanon. This necessitates travel from Riyadh to Beirut to have “work done.” And since a Saudi woman needs her husband’s permission to get a passport, it makes sense that she would want to look her best for him when she removes all her coverings. One false move, or new wrinkle, and such a privilege might be revoked without as much as a by-your-leave.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-assault-on-us-energy?f=puball For the second time in two days, hundreds of millions of people across India have been plunged into darkness when its electrical grids collapsed. This is a warning of what could occur here in America. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/selling-our-souls-for-the-sake-of-tolerance?f=puball Western cultural adaptations of the basic theme of selling one’s soul to the devil abound. While having certain entertainment value, the idea of selling out your own values and ethics (and/or those of the society from whence you came) was, until recently, considered abhorrent. Unfortunately, we (as a nation) appear to have done just […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/department-of-justice-sputters-on-censorship

I emailed this letter to Thomas Perez, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, at the Department of Justice:

27 July 2012

Thomas Perez
Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division
Department of Justice
Washington, DC

Mr. Perez:

Your astoundingly evasive and nearly comical response to Representative Trent Franks’s direct, simple question today, during a session of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, about whether or not the Justice Department would criminalize speech against any religion (Franks: “Will you tell us here today that this Administration’s Department of Justice will never entertain or advance a proposal that criminalizes speech against any religion?” and three other variations of the same question) tipped your hand and that of your boss, Attorney General Holder, that you and your cohorts would certainly “entertain or advance” the criminalization of any and all such speech, especially in regards to your friends, the Islamic supremacists and lobbyists who apparently hold more sway in Washington than do Americans who value their freedom of speech. I have watched the video of that exchange, as have countless other Americans, and like them wonder just what level of disgusting and craven dhimmitude you and your ilk have stooped to.

You kept begging for “context” but the context was a question that required a simple, honest, straightforward denial or affirmation. That you could not answer such a simple question without sounding like a malevolent Elmer Fudd and fidgeting like a criminal suspect being given the third degree, telegraphed your sleazy, weasel character and informed anyone with a modicum of character judgment that lying is an integral part of your makeup. No decent person could watch your behavior with feeling revulsion. It was with great satisfaction to me that Representative Franks would not let you scurry from your corner and allow you to change the subject.

Be forewarned: I write extensively on the perils of Islam and its barbaric and nihilist nature, and in particular about the brutality of Sharia law – which so many Islamic supremacists have boasted will replace our Constitution, the loudest having been the doyens of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic organizations in this country – if the Justice Department ever does issue such a totalitarian measure, I shall continue to write what I wish about Islam, which is simply a totalitarian ideology garbed in religious dogma. You are obviously, like your boss, and his boss, and all their advisors, of the Left, and there is an ideological symbiosis between the Left and Islam.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget to mention Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her “close” advisor, Huma Abedin, and their efforts to silence criticism of Islam, most notably in partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to have speech critical of Islam treated as legally enforceable “hate speech,” whatever its form or intent.

You are a coward, a traitor, and a discredit to your country. You are a perfect fit for this administration. In the context of the principles on which this country was founded, you and your cohorts are the “blasphemers.”

The letter is self-explanatory and contains all the information one would need to grasp the context that Perez attempted to evade and switch.

I sent a copy of it to Representative Trent Franks, as well. There has been no response from Perez, and none is expected, although it is likely that my blog articles, here and elsewhere, will come under scrutiny. But I take that scrutiny for granted, because the federal government is already monitoring blog sites for “national security reasons.”

The threat contained in Perez’s waffling responses extends of course to any kind of speech, particularly speech the government deems “hate speech” or “seditious speech” or “revolutionary speech” directed against its growing powers to regulate, stifle, gag, and destroy. If the Department of Justice criminalizes speech “against religion” (specifically Islam) or imposes any kind of “anti-blasphemy” law, that in itself would be anti-Constitutional, but would, of course, open the door to prohibitions against any kind of speech deemed “dangerous” or “harmful” or “defamatory.”

It is clear from the video that Perez did not care for Rep. Franks’s context, and wished to switch the focus from an admission of totalitarian ambition to one that would rationalize totalitarianism.

Perez is one of those political creatures whose careers have been solely in government “service.” It would not be fair to claim that he knows nothing about the First Amendment of the Constitution. Creatures like him always know what absolutes they are dodging. It was a “hard” question to answer, Franks allegedly “threatened” Perez, and Perez was obviously in need of rescue. Some member of the committee came to his rescue by interrupting Franks on some procedural matter. The video ends there, and we don’t know how the questioning ended.

Perez’s nomination for the post of Assistant Attorney General was endorsed or recommended to the Senate Judiciary Committee by literal menagerie of collectivist groups and statist politicians. And there is this revealing “credit” in his “vitae”: “He also served as Special Counsel to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, and was Senator Kennedy’s principal adviser on civil rights, criminal justice and constitutional issues.” Kennedy also endorsed his nomination for the position. That speaks for itself, and is nearly as much an indictment of him as his wanting to leave the door open to censorship.

Instances of Perez’s friendliness towards Islam and his willingness to criminalize any speech that smacks of “religious intolerance” (the term preferred by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Hillary Clinton) are numerous. In June of 2012, The New English Review, for example, offered these tidbits about Perez’s inclinations:

On October 7, 2010, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Thomas E. Perez, paid a visit to the US Attorney Nashville office and met with local Muslim groups including members of the board of the ICM. Perez told the group that included the Imams the both the ICM and Nashville mosques [about the controversial Murfreesboro mega mosque} that “his office has their back if it turns out that opponents [of the mosque] aren’t as interested in zoning esoteric as they are in sidelining the practice of Islam in Murfreesboro.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/the-mega-mosques-boom/

“From Markham in Canada down to New York City, and from the West Midlands in the United Kingdom to Sydney, Australia; cities around the world are facing the same threats to their communities. For Muslim states the mega mosque is a tool of power giving them the ability to centralize control of overseas Muslims with a single facility in a single city. For non-Muslim countries, the mega mosque is a center of subversion and terrorism.”

Murfreesboro, a city in the heart of Tennessee, and, Marseille, France’s second-largest city and its largest city on the Mediterranean coast, have few things in common. The two cities are separated by nearly 5,000 miles, and by equally wide divisions of language and culture. And yet Murfreesboro and Marseille are connected by a common challenge. Both cities have struggled against the creeping rise of the mega mosques.

The mega mosque in Marseille has been the subject of an extended legal fight going back a decade. The one in Murfreesboro had a briefer history of being on the wrong side of the law. But in both cases elected officials did their best to aid the mega mosques while ignoring local residents and the law.

The mega mosque business is booming around the world. The Marseille mega mosque has a proposed capacity of 7,000 seats which would make it the largest mosque in France, overshadowing the Ervy mosque which has a mere 5,000 seats. Both of these French mega mosques would have been dwarfed by a proposed London mega mosque with 12,000 seats and usability targets as high as 40,000. If the London mosque is ever built, it will dominate the Mosque of Rome, currently the most mega of all the mega mosques of Western Europe.

The Ground Zero Mosque, located near the site of the most brutal Muslim atrocity inflicted on the West in centuries, had a more modest 2,000 seating capacity plan, but would be vertically taller than most of the mega-mosques with a proposed 100,000 square feet of space. This would make it larger than the Marseille mega mosque, the Murfreesboro mega mosque and the London mega mosque. But despite their differences in size, all four mega mosque projects have followed the same pattern of lawsuits, public protests, exposures of shady mosque backers and public officials eager to look the other way.

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frank-crimi/al-qaeda-in-iraq-returns-with-a-vengeance/
GEEZ, AND I BELIEVED THE STATE DEPARTMENT’S HILLARYAOUS REPORT THAT AL QAEDA WAS SERIOUSLY DIMINISHED BY BIN LADEN’S DEATH….RSK

Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), is making a viscous return to terror prominence as it launches a bloody offensive against the Iraqi government, joins the fight in Syria, and threatens to commit terrorist strikes inside the United States.

In a recording posted July 22 on a jihadist website, the ISI announced its official return atop the terrorist totem pole when it unveiled its new strategic terror plan, “Destroying the Walls,” one whose overarching aim is to reestablish the group’s power in Iraq by retaking the territory it had lost during the war.

To achieve that end, ISI leader Abu Bakr El-Baghdadi promised a violent campaign against the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, one focused on bombing military installations and police posts, assassinating Iraqi judges and prosecutors, and breaking Islamist prisoners out of Iraqi jails

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/dealing-with-the-devil-in-syria/ A video circulating this week of Syrian rebels shouting “Allahu akbar” and executing four Assad partisans has horrified many in the West, but there have been numerous indications before this that the resistance to the Assad regime is not made up of the democratic pluralists of mainstream media myth. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t stopped […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313035/desert-rose-affair-returns-jonathan-foreman

ANNA WINTOUR, LATELY THE STAR OF AN AD FOR OBAMA IS MOST AT FAULT….SHE IS EDITOR IN CHIEF….SEE HER COO FOR OBAMA:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/06/04/anna_wintour_obama_ad_vogue_editor_makes_fundraising_pitch_for_president.html

Early in 2011 the Vogue writer Joan Juliet Buck took a lot of stick for a profile she wrote of the glamorous wife of the Syria’s dictator Bashir Assad. As you might expect of such a piece, “A Rose in the Desert” focused on Mrs. Assad’s good looks, elegant wardrobe, and charitable hobbies, rather than the Assad regime’s harsh way with dissidents or its equally wholehearted hospitality to terrorists.

One critic rather hyperbolically likened Ms. Buck to a journalist going to Berlin in the mid-1930s to fawn over Eva Braun. It was not fair because at the time of the interview and even at the time it was published, Mr. Assad himself had not yet ordered the gunning down of unarmed protesters. It was not yet obvious that Bashir had inherited the ruthlessness of his father, a man who had deliberately slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians.

On the other hand it was fairly well known that, under Bashir’s rule, Syria sent hundreds of “volunteers” to back up the Saddam Hussein regime when the Coalition invaded from Kuwait. It was better known that Bashir provided both a sanctuary and logistical support to Islamist and Baathist Iraqi insurgents attacking U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government for several years after Saddam’s fall. These insurgents were responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians as well as hundreds of Coalition troops.

(Of course, for some Americans on the left, sending militants to kill American troops or elected officials of the post-Saddam government would not be seen as particularly blameworthy. The same goes for Syria’s notorious sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas.)

Putin Expands Crackdown as Obama Clings to ‘Reset’

http://pjmedia.com/blog/putin-expands-crackdown-as-obama-clings-to-reset/?print=1
BUSH ON PUTIN IN 2001: READ http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010618.html

ONE CAN ONLY PRAY THAT MITT ROMNEY WON’T BE BUSH REDUX….RSK

The words [1] George W. Bush spoke at Brdo Castle in Brdo Pri Kranju, Slovenia, in June 2001 are hard to distinguish from those of Barack Obama. Both in their content and their consequences, the devastating impact of these speeches may imperil U.S. foreign policy for ages to come.

In Slovenia, Bush referred to the Cold War as a relic of the past, and declared it was “time to move beyond suspicion and towards straight talk, beyond mutually assured destruction and towards mutually earned respect.” Infamously, he also said he had looked Russia’s new ruler Vladimir Putin in the eye, “got a sense of his soul,” and found him to be a trustworthy partner. We were told that Putin’s long history as a proud KGB spy was irrelevant — this was a new man and a new Russia.

This was just what Putin wanted to hear. Long before Bush’s first term had ended, Putin had launched a vicious crackdown on the forces of democracy in Russia. Dead were Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, arrested were Mikhail Trepashkin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Putin left office just as Obama was coming in, and Obama adopted the Bush doctrine regarding Putin’s supposed successor Dmitri Medvedev, inviting him to Washington and munching cheeseburgers with him. Obama brought in Michael McFaul from the Hoover Institution to implement a “reset” of relations with Russia, a policy which would make the Bush doctrine towards Russia look like that of Ronald Reagan by comparison.

Putin was overjoyed. The Americans had taken the bait and would drop their guard as he used Medvedev to bide his time and return to power as president for life. That now accomplished, Putin has moved on to a second phase of his crackdown.

This week, it was announced [2] that opposition leader Alexei Navalny would go the way of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the only difference being that instead of being accused of stealing oil — as was Khodorkovsky — Navalny would be accused of stealing timber. Same result, though. Ten years or so in Siberia to cool off any thoughts of challenging Putin for power.

Back in June, security forces acting at the order of Putin carried out almost a dozen deeply disturbing raids on leaders of the Russian democracy movement and their families, seizing computers and other things they believed to be evidence of illegal activity. Navalny was included. The move smacked of the USSR, and once again — of course — the Obama administration did nothing. It is clear that the Putin regime took this silence as an invitation to proceed with arrests and prosecutions of key opposition leaders like Navalny.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/fort-hood-congressman-grills-fbi-official-at-what-point-is-it-islamic-terrorism/?print=1

Lawmakers expressed concern that a recently released review of the FBI’s actions in the Fort Hood shootings showed an agency that let “political sensitivities” temper the aggressiveness of their investigation into Army Major Nidal Hasan.“An active duty member of the military communicating with a known radicalizer and recruiter should have been taken more seriously than it was,” said Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies at a hearing to review the findings yesterday.

Former FBI Director William H. Webster led a commission probing the November 2009 shootings that left 13 dead. The commission’s report was released two weeks ago, and included 18 specific recommendations for changes at the FBI but not any recommendations of disciplinary action related to the Hasan case.

Hasan visited the website of radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen, in 2008 and later sent the terrorist messages. A “belated, incomplete and rushed” assessment by the FBI of Hasan concluded that the Army psychologist was not “involved in terrorist activities.”

However, the FBI didn’t interview Hasan about the al-Awlaki connections, didn’t dig deeper to find any further contact between Hasan and al-Awlaki, and let too much time lapse before pursing leads on Hasan, the report concluded.

“While the commission found that the decision not to interview Hasan was flawed, I’m concerned that the current FBI guidelines and culture made this the path of least resistance,” Wolf said.

Wolf said he was disappointed that FBI Director Robert Mueller, who asked Webster to investigate the agency, didn’t come testify; instead, Mark Giuliano, the FBI’s executive assistant director for national security, appeared before the panel.