RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Mortal Threat From Iran
“Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. If cocaine can be smuggled into the U.S. without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of an Iranian nuke ending up in Manhattan.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203518404577096851732704524.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
To assume that Iran will not close the Strait of Hormuz is to assume that primitive religious fanatics will perform cost-benefit analyses the way they are done at Wharton. They won’t, especially if the oil that is their life’s blood is threatened. If Iran does close the strait, we will fight an air and naval war derivative of and yet peripheral to the Iranian nuclear program, a mortal threat the president of the United States has inadequately addressed.
A mortal threat when Iran is not yet in possession of a nuclear arsenal? Yes, because immediately upon possession all remedies are severely restricted. Without doubt, Iran has long wanted nuclear weapons—to deter American intervention in its and neighboring territories; to threaten Europe and thereby cleave it from American interests in the Middle East; to respond to the former Iraqi nuclear effort; to counter the contiguous nuclear presences in Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. in the Gulf; to neutralize Israel’s nuclear deterrent so as to limit it to the attrition of conventional battle, or to destroy it with one lucky shot; to lead the Islamic world; to correct the security imbalance with Saudi Arabia, which aided by geography and American arms now outclasses it; and to threaten the U.S. directly.
In the absence of measures beyond pinpoint sanctions and unenforceable resolutions, Iran will get nuclear weapons, which in its eyes are an existential necessity. We have long known and done nothing about this, preferring to dance with the absurd Iranian claim that it is seeking electricity. With rampant inflation and unemployment, a housing crisis, and gasoline rationing, why spend $1,000-$2,000 per kilowatt to build nuclear plants instead of $400-$800 for gas, when you possess the second largest gas reserves in the world? In 2005, Iran consumed 3.6 trillion cubic feet of its 974 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves, which are enough to last 270 years. We know that in 2006—generation exceeding consumption by 10%—Iran exported electricity and planned a high-tension line to Russia to export more.

Canadian Oil Project Drifts Closer to China Posted By Rich Trzupek
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/canadian-oil-project-drifts-closer-to-china/

Last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper demonstrated that he’s more than willing to do that which his counterpart in the White House is unable or unwilling to do: display a little backbone when dealing with radical environmentalists and their pet causes. Harper’s administration both commenced hearings on an alternative pipeline that would be used to ship Canadian crude to China, as well as putting the “green movement” on notice that extremism masquerading as environmentalism will no longer be tolerated in the Great White North.

Clearly Canada would prefer to ship crude recovered from massive reserves in Alberta to Texas via the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Unfortunately, the combination of green fear-mongering and President Obama’s predictable dithering has put approval of Keystone XL in doubt. Per his deal with Congress the President has until February 21 to approve the pipeline project or to explain his refusal to do so. Yet, even if the President does approve the project and risk annoying those among his supporters who worship planet earth even more than they do him, there is no guarantee that construction of Keystone XL would start anytime soon.

‘Urinegate’ Spurs Anti-American Hysterics Posted By Bruce Bawer

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/urinegate-spurs-anti-american-hysterics/print/

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel. But over the last few years it’s rollercoastered like the stock market. The invasion of Iraq sent it skyrocketing. It was muted somewhat by the election of a black man as President of the United States. (That Americans, whom Europeans are taught to think of as incurable racists, had done such a thing rendered some veteran America-bashers temporarily mute.) But European anti-Americanism has never entirely gone away, and the troubles America has been through of late have been the occasion for much Schadenfreude, especially given that they’ve provided a pleasant distraction from Europe’s own even more formidable problems.

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom. The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner. “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/agenda-journalism/

Agenda Journalism Posted By David Solway

In Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows cites Homer Bigart, the doyen of the Vietnam War press corps, who “used to tell younger reporters that their first task was to drop the assumption that they understood a story before they reported it”—sage advice that has gone largely unheeded. Indeed, today the media game has changed dramatically. Reporters and news writers not only assume that they understand a story before it unfolds, they approach events with a cookie-cutter mentality, a prefabricated plot line. They come equipped with an entrenched political perspective that enables them to shape the news according to prior specification, a practice that has come to be known as “agenda journalism.”

For example, former head of India’s counter-terrorism agency Bahukutumbi Raman, writing for the South East Asia Analysis group, refers to “agenda and motivated journalism.” Jonathan Tobin writing in Commentary deplores the “agenda journalism” at The New York Times, which has “graduated into agitprop style distortions of the truth,” and Simon Plosker at Honest Reporting skewers the “Guardian’s agenda journalism.” More recently, Tom Blumer at PJ Media takes issue with the Associated Press’ promotion of something called “The New Distinctiveness” or “Journalism with Voice” which, as Blumer shows, quoting several salient examples, “has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with spin.” In short, “Journalism with Voice” is merely a fancy term for “agenda journalism.”

The Cancellation of a U.S.-Israeli Drill Posted By P. David Hornik

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/17/why-was-the-u-s-israeli-drill-called-off/

Are Israel and the U.S. fighting again? The news from the last several days gives that general impression. Is the cancellation of a major joint U.S.-Israeli military drill part of the frictions? Media reports are open to interpretation.

Last Wednesday Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, director of uranium enrichment at the Natanz facility, was assassinated in Tehran. Iran quickly blamed Israel and the U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, however, hastened to “categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland added that the “United States strongly condemns this act of violence and categorically denies any involvement in the killing.” Clinton, for her part, also said the U.S. was seeking an understanding with Iran on stopping its uranium enrichment.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2757/golden-age-of-islam

The period from the death of Muhammad through the 13th Century marks the glory days of the Islamic empire. It was a period of commerce, industry and intra-cultural synergies and a flourishing of the sciences, art, medicine and architecture. It was the epitome of what civilization should be. Just ask Obama. In his 2009 Cairo speech the president said that Islam “carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and praised the “innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.”

While Central Europe languished in the Dark Ages of ignorance, fear and superstition following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century (so the story goes), it was the Islamic world that carried the torch of Classical civilization to a Europe finally stumbling out of the Dark Ages in the 15th century.

By contrast the Islamic world flourished during the Dark Ages: by the 13th century, both Africa and India had become great centers of Islamic civilization, and soon after, Muslim kingdoms were established in the Malay-Indonesian world while Chinese Muslims flourished throughout China.

Islam therefore is a religion for all people from whatever race or background they might be: Islamic civilization is based on a unity which stands completely against any racial or ethnic discrimination. Such major racial and ethnic groups as the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Africans, Indians, Chinese and Malays in addition to countless smaller units embraced Islam and contributed to the building of Islamic civilization.

Moreover, so the story goes, Islam was not opposed to learning from the earlier civilizations and incorporating their science, learning, and culture into its own world view. Each ethnic and racial group that embraced Islam made its contribution to the one Islamic civilization to which everyone belonged.

The global civilization created by Islam also succeeded in activating the minds and thoughts of the people who entered its fold. As a result of Islam, the nomadic Arabs became torch-bearers of science and learning. The Persians, who had created a great civilization before the rise of Islam, nevertheless produced even more science and learning in the Islamic period than before. The same can be said of the Turks and other peoples who embraced Islam. The religion of Islam was itself responsible not only for the creation of a world civilization in which people of many different ethnic backgrounds participated, but it also played a central role in developing intellectual and cultural life on a scale not seen before.

Quite a story. And it is a story being fed to US students from k-12 on through graduate schools. Quite a story? More like a fairy tale.

Victor Davis Hanson has taken down Obama’s version of the Golden age of Islam:

In his speech last week in Cairo, President Obama proclaimed he was a “student of history.” But despite Mr. Obama’s image as an Ivy League-educated intellectual, he lacks historical competency in both facts and interpretation. … Obama … claimed that “Islam . . . carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.” [In fact] medieval Islamic culture … had little to do with the European rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin values. Europeans, Chinese, and Hindus, not Muslims, invented most of the breakthroughs Obama credited to Islamic innovation. … Much of the Renaissance, in fact, was more predicated on the centuries-long flight of Greek-speaking Byzantine scholars from Constantinople to Western Europe to escape the aggression of Islamic Turks. Many romantic thinkers of the Enlightenment sought to extend freedom to oppressed subjects of Muslim fundamentalist rule in eastern and southern Europe.

Andrew Bostom has skewered the myth that Cordoba was a model of ecumenism:

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

After having exhausted the indignant possibilities of protesting the extinction of whales, pelicans and polar bears, the left has found a new endangered species to be outraged about. Iranian nuclear scientists. It’s one thing to hug a polar bear or a tree, but it’s another to embrace an Iranian nuclear scientist, who may well be a jolly and colorful fellow with a family and a paint by numbers coloring kit of an atom, but also happens to be a participant in a plot to kill millions of people.

The left which has all the moral sense of a squashed peanut would like us to feel outraged because someone somewhere has been knocking off the engineers of death in a project whose goal is genocide. Yet if you point out to them that just last week a member of the Iranian backed Hezbollah terrorist group was arrested in Thailand for plotting a terrorist attack, you can wait a week until they shrug.

At The Atlantic, Ali Vaez and Charles Ferguson assure us that assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists makes a nuclear Iran more likely. The left specializes in irrational conundrums like this. Every time we kill a terrorist, they lecture us that this will only lead to more Muslims turning into terrorists to take their place. But really now are we to believe that Muslims will respond to the deaths of nuclear scientists by becoming nuclear scientists? Even if they do it will take them a while to get their degrees and by then Iran may not be run by a bunch of homicidal loons.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11236/pub_detail.asp

What’s another billion anyway?
The story of the U.S. State Department funding mosques overseas was uncovered in July 2010 when reporter Justin Farmer from ABC affiliate WSBTV Channel 2 in Atlanta Georgia did an investigative report. Farmers’ story focused on how the U.S. was spending its tax payer dollars while supposedly trying to cut the budget.

I’ve written on this in the past, but I think it needs a re-visit. I don’t think that at a time when our own administration, Congress and Senate have to fight just to come to a 2 month budget agreement we as American taxpayers need to be funding mosques overseas.

What’s more, I would bet my Burqa that most Americans have no idea that there hard earned money is going to rebuild mosques.

President Barack Obama announced on January 5, 2012 his administration’s new military strategy, saying it will include cutting at least $487 billion in defense spending.

The U.S. budget is so bad that we need to cut $487 billion in defense spending, but Hillary Clinton signed a check for $770 million from the U.S. State Department’s USAID program to rebuild Egypt’s sewer system. Funny I thought our own infrastructure here in the U.S. is in dire need of repair.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11238/pub_detail.asp
In early 2011 I became involved with the Florida Textbook Action Team with information that was supplied to us by Dr. William A. Saxton, Chairman of the Citizens for National Security (CFNS). Based on this groups 13 month research into the History/Social Studies books being used in Florida schools today, we as a group engaged in contacting our local school boards protesting the textbooks favor of Islam over Christianity and Judaism and presentation of an unfair view of history, particularly with regard to the policies of the U.S. and Israel.

The report identified approximately 30 textbooks used in Florida public schools with instances of bias, inaccuracies and purposeful omissions. It alleges that students are being given flawed information about the history of Islam, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Middle East, and Islamist extremist threats worldwide. It includes showing over 200 quotations from the list of textbooks that CFNS shows are biased and/or inaccurate.

One example in the report is when a textbook states, “Women, as wives and mothers, have an honored position in Saudi society.” Another article states, “The land now called Palestine consists of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

Dr. Saxton stated, “Although agenda-based campaigns to shape textbook content have existed for some time, the past decade has seen particularly aggressive, intense overt and stealth efforts by proponents of Islam to inject their beliefs into K-12 classrooms via textbooks.”

Just last year parents in Bedford, NH pulled their son out of his local high school after the teen was assigned a book that refers to Jesus Christ as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.” “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” was a required reading assignment for the High School’s Finance class. The book is a first-person account of author Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to make ends meet while working minimum wage jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11234/pub_detail.asp
One of the mistakes that the West makes is that it doesn’t listen to what the Islamists are saying. If only we listened, we could hear their strategy. On November 20, Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, the top Muslim Brotherhood theologian and arguably the most influential Sunni cleric in the world, called on Muslims to embrace “gradualism.”

The doctrine of gradualism is successful because we fail to appreciate the ability of the Islamists to be skillful political strategists. Gradualism is an intelligent form of jihad based on pragmatism, patience, long-term planning and self-evaluation. The Islamists evaluate their performance and recalibrate their strategy accordingly. The West misinterprets this as being “moderate,” when in reality, not all Islamists are as reckless as Al-Qaeda.

“Gradualism in applying the Sharia is a wise requirement to follow,” Qaradawi declared, stating that Mohammed followed it.

The Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, have always worked in stages. In December, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohamed Badi, outlined six phases: Sharia over the individual; Sharia over the family; Sharia over the society; Sharia over the government; the resurrection of the Caliphate and finally, “mastership of the world.” The Muslim Brotherhood is in the process of completing the fourth phase in Egypt.