RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11390/pub_detail.asp
In a 1983 all-star pirate comedy, Yellowbeard, basically an expensively sewn grab bag of sight gags, one-liners, and pratfalls, there is one scene in which most of the principal characters, in search of Yellowbeard’s treasure, form a kind of conga line on a beach, crawling on their hands and knees, following cryptically written directions on a piece of paper that may lead them to the buried chest. As a yawner, it was a low point in a sequence of low points. We were not amused.

I was reminded of that scene while reading another low point of political enquiry, the British Home Affairs Committee report, The Roots of Violent Radicalisation. In search of the reasons why British-born Muslims and immigrant Muslims turn to terrorism, this lengthy report asks many questions but answers none, tip-toeing as it does around the central ideological content of Islam that is at radical (and violent) variance with Western values, and could be characterized as a conga line of magnifying class-equipped twits examining every little grain of sand and pebble and tide-swept debris in search of those answers. The committee was chaired by a Muslim, Member for Leicester, Keith Vaz, a scandal-soaked politician who, among his many other offenses, in 1989 lead thousands of Muslims in a demonstration to demand the banning of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

Two Decades Too Late
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290450

For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed working-class concerns at the center of the election debate. Nevertheless, Santorum remains in third place in the GOP race. Does this suggest that Republican efforts to address working-class angst are politically ineffective?

No, it doesn’t. The problem is twofold: Santorum has not emphasized this aspect of his campaign enough, and the agenda he has presented seems designed to resurrect an idealized past rather than to lead worried workers into a new future.

Santorum is trying to resurrect the Reagan general-election strategy of 1980 — first and foremost, to win over the conservative base on fiscal and social issues by portraying himself as a man of principle, the only candidate who will not waver. This means that for most Republican-primary voters, Santorum is a strong conservative first and an advocate of the working class a distant second, if at all.

But Santorum’s greater problem is that he is out of touch with today’s blue-collar reality. His message presumes that white-working-class voters are essentially the same as they were in 1980. Reagan Democrats in the Midwest — the Santorum target — were characterized in 1980 by their religion and their occupations. They were disproportionally Catholic, serious about their faith, and likely to work in manufacturing or live in manufacturing-dependent neighborhoods and towns.

‘It’s Your Fault’: U.S. Gets the Israel Treatment Over Iran Posted By Shoshana Bryen http://pjmedia.com/blog/its-your-fault-u-s-gets-the-israel-treatment-over-iran/ Israel is often in this position. Its enemies threaten it in unacceptable ways or commit acts of violence just under some unspoken-but-very-real threshold of tolerance (not Israel’s threshold, mind you, but that of the U.S., the UN or the EU). […]

‘Iran must attack Israel by 2014’

http://www.jpost.com/IranianThreat/News/Article.aspx?id=257112

Khamenei strategist releases document providing legal, religious justification for annihilation of Jewish people.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s strategist provided the legal and religious justification for the annihilation of Israel and the Jewish people, in a document published on conservative Farsi website Alef. Reports of the document began to circulate the internet this week.

The document, written by strategy specialist Alireza Forghani, outlined the reasons why, “In the name of Allah, Iran must attack Israel by 2014.”

Claiming to only represent the personal opinion of its author, and not the Iranian government, the doctrine was published on a website believed to have close ties with the Ayatollah.

Forghani called the Jewish state a ‘cancerous tumor for the Middle East” and reminded his readers that “All our troubles are due to Israel!”

“Every Muslim is obliged to equip himself against Israel,” he urged, reasoning that if the Muslim world does not attack Israel in the near future, “the opportunity could be lost and it may not be possible to stop them.”

The document explained that the war against Israel must be carried out in the name of “defensive jihad” – or the protecting of Islam against aggressors “who want to gain domination over the Muslims and kill them.”

It also clarified that although Israel had yet to strike Iran, their occupation of Palestinian lands already justifies an attack as Islam dictates that “the political borders [of the world] cannot divide Muslims and the earth is divided into two parts – Muslim countries and non-Muslim countries.”

Army Chaplains Stopped From Reading Bishop’s Letter
http://news.investors.com/Article/600583/201202081901/catholic-chaplains-barred-from-reading-letter.htm

Constitution: The Air Force removes a reference to God from its logo as the Army forbids Catholic chaplains from reading an archbishop’s letter to those in uniform. What’s next, the crosses at Arlington National Cemetery?

‘It is a blow to a freedom that you have fought to defend and for which you have seen your buddies fall in battle,” read the letter from Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who leads the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services to the Catholic chaplains in the U.S. military.

The letter that the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains kept from being read to Catholic soldiers concerned the recent Health and Human Services mandate requiring Catholic institutions to provide contraceptive services.

http://news.investors.com/Article/600452/201202080802/government-dependence-jumps-under-president-obama.htm

The American public’s dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation.

The conservative think tank’s annual Index of Dependence on Government tracks money spent on housing, health, welfare, education subsidies and other federal programs that were “traditionally provided to needy people by local organizations and families.”

The two-year increase under Obama is the biggest two-year jump since Jimmy Carter was president, the data show.

The rise was driven mainly by increases in housing subsidies, an expansion in Medicaid and changes to the welfare system, along with a sharp rise in food stamps, the study found.

“You can’t get around the fact that policy decisions made over the past two years, on top of those made over the past several decades, are having a large effect on the pace of growth of the index,” said William Beach, who authored the Heritage study……..READ THE REST AT SITE

http://melaniephillips.com/the-prisoners-dilemma So what should be done in Britain about foreign terrorist suspects and the European Court of Human Rights? In the wake of the decision yesterday by Britain’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission to free the al Qaeda mastermind abu Qatada on bail (true to indefensible form, the BBC reportedly instructed its journalists not to make […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ By combining an opposition to free enterprise with an opposition to industrialization, the left has adopted not one, but two platforms that doom the economic survival of their host societies. Even the Soviet Union and Communist China, systems which were the worst embodiment of leftist economic ideology did not throw out the industrial baby […]

http://balkanstudies.org/articles/fyrom-new-kosovo  An Orthodox church was set ablaze in the southwestern part of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on January 30. The incident reflects raising tensions between local Christian Slavs and Albanians, more than a decade after an Albanian rebellion brought FYROM to the verge of an ethnic war. It also evokes memories of […]

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2834/muslim-persecution-of-christians-january-2012 She was flogged — given 40 lashes as hundreds of Muslim spectators jeered — for embracing a “foreign religion.” The beginning of the New Year saw only an increase in the oppression of Christians under Islam, from Nigeria, where an all-out jihad has been declared in an effort to eradicate the Muslim north of […]