RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to the Washington Post, weapons and ammunition are in such short supply at the centers where Iraqi army units receive training to fight ISIS that the trainees are yelling “bang-bang” instead of shooting.

Last August, when President Obama announced that the U.S. would undertake a mostly proxy war against ISIS, I would have said that yelling “bang-bang” is the perfect metaphor for his anti-terrorism campaign. Today, whispering “bang-bang” is more like it.

Iraq, where trainees lack weapons and ammunition, is the site of America’s most robust anti-terrorist activity. Elsewhere, our efforts are even more pathetic. The Post’s editors write:

In Libya, the job of stemming an incipient civil war has been left to a feckless U.N. mediator, even though the Islamic State is known to be operating at least one training camp with hundreds of recruits.

In Nigeria, where a new offensive by the Boko Haram movement has overrun much of one northeastern state, a U.S. military training program was recently canceled by the government following a dispute over arms sales.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/01/strangest-diplomatic-initiative-ever-youve-got-a-friend.php
Let’s cut Kerry a little slack. In Vietnam he was apparently shot in the butt…and in esoteric cases that injury could result in brain damage….rsk
Strangest Diplomatic Initiative Ever: You’ve Got a Friend!

The administration has acknowledged that it erred by not participating in a meaningful way in the giant pro-free speech demonstration in Paris, so it has tried to make amends by sending John Kerry to France. Apparently thinking that he needed reinforcements to convey a full sense of the administration’s symbolic support, Kerry brought along…James Taylor.

For you youngsters, Taylor is a folk musician whom people our age listened to in 1970–a mere 45 years ago. Here is Taylor performing “You’ve Got a Friend” while Kerry looks on in a state of acute discomfort. Don’t feel obliged to watch to the end; I didn’t:

God only knows what the French made of this. Maybe James Taylor is still popular there, like Jerry Lewis. Before we mercifully draw down the curtain on this episode, let’s turn the floor over to the genius of Iowahawk, on Twitter:

During this week’s Golden Globes ceremony, Hollywood made numerous gestures in support of our freedom of expression. Referencing the computer hack of Sony Pictures in response to the film “The Interview” and the horrific murders at the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, Hollywood voiced support for fearlessly standing up for the right to insult. It is now time for Hollywood to act courageously by creating films that authentically portray the life of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.

Opinion leaders need not get lost in balancing rights to criticize, satirize and insult with our natural calls for civility and responsible dialogue. No civilized Westerner can argue against truth and its pursuit. U.S. defamation law generally holds truth as a complete defense. It is a noble cause in itself and justice is intended to flow from it.

With Islam’s Sharia law, however, truth, like non-Muslims themselves, is subordinate to the primacy of Islam and Mohammad. Defending Mohammad’s pre-eminence at all costs has deeply implanted “war is deceit,” taqiyya and other forms of dissimulation throughout Islam; avenging the Prophet, as seen in the Hebdo murders, is Sharia’s justice.

There simply is no way to understand Islam without full comprehension of Mohammad’s life. Islam declares Mohammad the best of all Muslims; therefore a seriously engaged Muslim looks to Mohammad’s life for the best guidance on how to be a “good” Muslim. And because Mohammad is also the self-declared final prophet, no one can come after him to change, reform, or revolutionize Islam. The Quran, unlike the Bible, is not made up of stories. Rather, it comprises the words of Allah, and its verses are presented non-chronologically based on length. The Hadith, the vast collections of sayings and acts of Mohammad, also lack any context. Neither can be meaningfully understood except against the background of Mohammad’s life.

In 539 BCE, Babylonian King Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall – as interpreted by the Prophet Daniel – and was, therefore, annihilated by the Persians (Book of Daniel, Chapter 5).

In 2015, Western civilizations must read the writing on the wall, desist from ambiguity, denial and political correctness and embrace clarity, realism and political incorrectness, in order to survive and overcome the clear and present lethal threat of Islamic takeover, which gathers momentum via demographic, political and terroristic means.

While medical ambiguity, and the failure to diagnose lethal disease, cause personal misfortune, policy-making ambiguity and denial could trigger national and international calamities.

History proves that Western ambiguity and the refusal to identify enemies – due to ignorance, gullibility, oversimplification, appeasement, delusion and wishful thinking – have taken root, yielding major strategic setbacks and painful economic and human loss. When it comes to reading the writing on the wall, Western eyesight has been far from 20:20, dominated by modern day Belshazzars, ignoring modern day Prophet Daniels.

A COMMENTARY Editorial

The jihadist siege of a kosher grocery store in eastern Paris on January 9 was not the beginning of a new threat to French Jews and the Jews of Europe. Rather, it was the culmination of a decade of crisis. And it will not be the end.

The new era of deadly anti-Semitism in France began with the January 2006 murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi. He was coming from a Shabbat meal with his mother when he was ambushed by a gang in a Paris slum. The gang held him captive for 24 days, during which time he wasbeaten, stabbed, burned with acid, mutilated, lit on fire, and tortured to death. Halimi’s murderers were African and North African Muslim immigrants with ties to Islamic extremists. They called themselves the Gang of Barbarians. And they chose Halimi because he was a Jew.

France’s 5 million Muslims account for 10 to 12 percent of the country’s total population. It is the largest Muslim population in Europe; it is also the most problematic. Several factors contribute to thisreality.

The first is radical Islam. Since the late-20th century, a Saudi-funded, anti-Semitic strain of Islamist radicalism has spread to all corners of the Muslim world. Many of France’s recent Muslim immigrants from North Africa have brought their Islamist and jihadist sympathies to Europe.Indeed, a 2013 poll found that a startling 27 percent of French Muslims younger than 24 support ISIS.

AS the English writer George Orwell well understood, you can invariably rely on members of the Western intelligentsia to make profoundly silly comments and to ignore difficult facts. The responses by barrister Julian Burnside and journalist/historian Paul Ham to the Islamist murders in Paris illustrate the point.

In the immediate aftermath of the most recent terrorist attacks in France, 7.30presenter Leigh Sales interviewed the Paris-based Ham. In response to the first question, Ham recounted how he had attended “the huge meeting in the Place de la Republique last night” following the attack on Charlie Hebdo . He added that this area “is the symbol of the revolutions of 1830, of 1848, of 1870 and it is the strongest, most powerful recognition of the values the French hold dear — of equality, of liberty, of fraternity”.

The answer to French anti-Semitism

January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.

On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.

Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.

They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.

The late, great illustrator Charles M. Schulz — creator of the famous comic strip Peanuts — is not around to comment on the jihad against satirists and Jews in Paris less than two weeks ago. But the words of his characters, which have rung true since their debut in the 1940s, give us an idea.

One musing, uttered by the hero of the series, the lovable and self-deprecating Charlie Brown, is particularly apt. “It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black,” he said, making a humorous play on a more uplifting adage. What is happening in the Islamist world today, however, is no laughing matter.

Nor should any of us take comfort in the “unity rally” in France on Sunday, attended by an estimated 3.7 million people, many of whom were waving “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) banners. Referring to the targeted slaughter of 10 staff members at the anarchist weekly Charlie Hebdo — and incidentally to the murder of two policemen stationed outside the newspaper’s headquarters, another police officer in a separate incident, as well as four Jewish hostages at a kosher supermarket — most of the demonstrators and world leaders who joined them were missing the point.

Even while calling the related killings of 17 people at the hands of Islamist terrorists “France’s 9/11,” officials and journalists across the West were rushing to condemn and warn against anti-Muslim sentiment. Indeed, though the post-massacre edition of Charlie Hebdo was purchased in the millions, most American and European TV media outlets decided not to show its cover, which depicts Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign below the headline “Tout est pardonne” (“All is forgiven”).

The Pope, too, was more concerned about not arousing the wrath of angry Muslims by taking free speech too far than about the mass murder of his flock at their hands.

Now it seems a media spell has been broken and even some of the neo-cons who cooed and gushed about the “Arab Spring” as if it were the dawn of democracy among barbarians are now acknowledging left, right and middle that Islam is the source of the violence and evil warring against the civilized West. And, perhaps- just perhaps- it is also the source of the ongoing Arab war against Israel. True some still use the words “Islamist” or “radical” for cover.
I confess that prior to 9/11 I was not really familiar with the word “jihad” or the Koranic imperatives against all infidels. I knew the word “dhimmi” which I learned from my late friend Joan Peters and I was lulled by the false narratives of Bernard Lewis, that there was some “golden age” of comity between Arab/Moslems and Jews…..And then I met and befriended Andrew Bostom.
Andy, a physician and Professor of Medicine (who is also my go-to second opinion on everything from gall stones to cholesterol) introduced me to the real Islam- he introduced me to Robert Spencer and Gisele Bat Ye’or and Geert Wilders, and Diana West and Ibn Warraq, and the writing of the late Saul Friedman and the realism of Professor Moshe Sharon of Israel. He opened my eyes and mind to the reality that Arab terror against Jews and Israel was faith driven Jihad. While others were struggling with naming the villain, Andy wrote major volumes:
The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History May 30, 2008 by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq
The Legacy of Jihad Dec 29, 2010
by Andrew G. Md Bostom and Ibn Warraq
Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism Nov 6, 2012
by Andrew G. Bostom
Check out his amazon.com page
http://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Bostom/e/B00NWX8HIO/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1421409912&sr=1-2-ent

The liberal way of life is remarkably fragile. Is the West willing to fight for it?

Last week, the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were not the only journalists targeted for affronting Muslim doctrine. Raif Badawi, founder of the Free Saudi Liberals website, who was convicted of blasphemy by a Saudi court in 2012 and later resentenced, more harshly, to ten years’ imprisonment, a fine of 1 million riyals, and 1,000 lashes, received his first flogging two days after the massacre in Paris. Although the Saudi regime joined the worldwide condemnation of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French cartoonists wouldn’t have fared much better had they made the Gulf state their publishing base. The only difference was the lack of official imprimatur on their execution: they were murdered by Islamist vigilantes, not an Islamist judiciary.

Neither the criminalization of blasphemy in Muslim countries nor the murder of blasphemers in Europe by Islamists is a new phenomenon. On the contrary: from Pakistan to Algeria via Iran and Egypt, blasphemy laws are rigorously enforced. Even in free countries, ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, dissenters have had to fear for their lives. But the coincidence of last week’s events is noteworthy for what it reveals not only about the state of Islamism in the world today but about the state of liberal democracy. Briefly: rather than the West exporting liberal democracy to the Middle East, as many had fantasized during the late lamented “Arab Spring,” it is the Middle East that is exporting Islamism to the free world.