RUTHFULLY YOURS

Amongst the wheat fields of Iraq’s Fertile Crescent, the battle for the nation’s future and the safety of the Kurdistan regional capital of Erbil, continues to rage.

In this sector of the 650-mile Kurdish front Against ISIS (or its Arabic acronym- DAESH, as it is referred to locally) the fight is close quarters, intimate, and fought between relatively small groups of men. The terrain is wide, open, and grassy with features Americans would associate more with the state of Nebraska than with Iraq.

Just a few days ago this area was completely under the control of DAESH militants. They had taken over peoples homes, held local women captive for months, and implemented their own brand of Sharia Law. That just changed due to the brave actions of the Kurdish Peshmerga (with the help of closely coordinated US airstrikes) who liberated the town of Makhmour and several neighboring villages.

I met with the commander of Peshmerga forces in the area, General Najad, who candidly explained the situation from the Kurdish point of view. Holding a BA in political science and his masters in Foreign Policy, the general spoke (in English) with an air that was as much statesman as it was field commander. He was understandably busy; men under his command just retook 6 villages each with 25-30 ISIS fighters in them over the last 48 hours.

When asked if US airstrikes were helping his forces on the ground, his leathered and serious face produced a child like grin. “They have taken out their heavy weapons.” He went on to explain that DAESH has proven to be deadly accurate with artillery, armor, and mortars alike. Is that because some of its members had specialized military training or had experience from foreign armies? He simply replied, “I don’t know, no prisoners have been taken.”

A speech made up of shameless lies, crazy lies and evil lies.
Obama’s previous State of the Union address claimed last year would be a “breakthrough year.” In this year’s State of the Union address he announced that he would turn the page.

Turning the page on last year’s grandiose and dishonest claims is what Obama does with each new address. Each year terrorism has been permanently defeated and the economy has recovered; Al Qaeda is on the run, unemployed dentists from Poughkeepsie are learning to install solar panels and illegal aliens from Los Angeles are teaching sex ed to kindergarteners.

And then next year he comes out to announce once again that the country has recovered from the crisis that he had already announced that it had recovered from last year.

And everyone applauds.

What exactly is Obama turning the page on? Two lost wars and the lowest employed population since 1977… under his predecessor Jimmy Carter?

About mid-way through a desultory conversation [7] with two Muslim apologists for jihad [8], Bill O’Reilly opined (beginning at 3:34 [7]), emphatically:

I don’t believe the prophet Muhammad wanted a world war to impose Islam on everybody. I don’t believe that.

This Islamophilic sentiment was endorsed by the two apologetic mediocrities O’Reilly hosted, and the thoroughly unenlightening January 16, 2015 discussion [7] soon drew to a merciful end.

But O’Reilly’s entirely counterfactual statement [7] about Islam’s prophet and prototype jihadist—no matter how self-assuredly believed—demands a corrective if there is any hope of restoring rationality and clarity to the public airwaves’ discourse about the impetus for the murderous contemporary global scourge of jihad [8] (i.e., nearly 25,000 jihadist attacks [9] since 9/11/2001, and counting).

Islamists set the time machineto the Dark Ages. Putin dreams of czarist Russia. A common enemy: America.

The recent terror attacks in Paris at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and at a kosher supermarket, leaving 17 people dead, represented the latest offensive in a struggle that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place.

Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital and labor. Simultaneously this has led to globalization across time, as the 21st century collides with cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society.

Boko Haram on Sunday killed three people and kidnapped 80, many of them children, in a raid on villages in northern Cameroon. After years of rampaging unchecked across its home base in Nigeria, Africa’s version of Islamic State is now terrorizing neighboring countries.

By the next day Cameroonian troops had freed 24 of the captives in a counterattack, pursuing Boko fighters back to Nigeria across the porous frontier, according to Cameroon’s Defense Ministry. Troops from Chad are also assisting in the anti-Boko fight.

The insurgency launched by Boko Haram—the name means “Western education Is forbidden”—is stretching into its sixth year, and the group has distinguished itself as a resilient fighting force. Its kidnapping of some 300 Nigerian school girls triggered an international campaign last summer. The girls weren’t brought back, and many are believed to have been married off to Boko’s jihadists. Does anyone remember Michelle Obama ’s #BringBackOurGirls?

AP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

The mayor of Paris is threatening to sue Fox News for segments she claims have insulted her city.

The mayor of Paris told CNN on Tuesday that she will sue Fox News.

Why?

Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour that she must sue to preserve the honor of her fair city.

“The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced,” Hidalgo said. “I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed.”

Hidalgo was responding to some segments on Fox News in which various commentators stated that there are parts of Paris and other European cities where Muslims predominate and where there is so much uncontrolled violence that police are afraid to venture. These areas have been referred to as “no-go zones” for non-Muslims.

“For some this may be a sad, perhaps even a tragic conclusion. These are feelings I can understand. But I also remind myself that what France loses, Israel will gain.”
As the sound of “Death to the Jews!” filled the streets this summer, much of the French elite averted its gaze or blamed the Jews for their own misfortune. Do Jews still have a future in France? On July 13, the eve of Bastille Day (a national holiday in France), a mob laid siege to the Don Abravanel synagogue in the Eleventh district of Paris. The “protesters,” mainly of North African Arab origin, had broken off from a larger demonstration supported by a small band of left-wing allies—Communists, militant anti-Zionist Trotskyists, a few environmentalists, and trade unionists—waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to the Jews” (Mort aux Juifs) along with the Islamist battle cry, Allahu Akbar!

What drove the great writer to employ a “harem” of translators? A new film tells much, but not all.

Writers have their way with the world until they depart from it, and then they are at the mercy of those who interpret them. This mischievous turnabout would have appealed to Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991), possibly the most prolific and certainly the most famous Yiddish writer of the 20th century, whose reputation is now in the hands of types he once turned into fiction. But if The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a new documentary movie by the Israeli directors Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser, is any portent, the afterlife of this particular writer may be graced by the same improbable good fortune he enjoyed on earth.

Would the world rather dodge news of Alberto Nisman’s death?

The AMIA bombing is a marker for the West’s failure in the war on Islamist terror over an entire generation. Its resistance to tackling Islamic terror mirrors its myopia over communism.

The death of Alberto Nisman the night before he was supposed to testify before Argentina’s congress on the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires is an incredible development in one of the seminal stories of the past generation. How is the world going to dodge news that the Argentine federal prosecutor in the AMIA bombing case should fetch up dead just before he was due to testify on his accusation that President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner covered up Iran’s link to the bombing that took 85 lives?