RUTHFULLY YOURS

The overriding, terrible theme of the 21st century is the suicide of cultures. Small civilizations die for any number of reasons; great civilizations die because they want to. My book on the subject was reasonably well received in the U.S. but made no real impact on the public debate, although it seems to have had some influence in Hebrew translation.

The suicide of cultures is incomprehensible to liberalism, which places the human condition in a Petrie dish for the edification of social scientists. It is also incomprehensible to the main currents in American conservativism, that is, the Straussian and Catholic versions of natural right and natural law. We flounder in the face of suicidal cultures because we lack the intellectual tools to confront them. Men do not always seek the good, as Aristotle opines in at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics: often they seek nothingness. When in history have so many volunteered to commit suicide to murder civilians, as the jihadists now do? When in history has a combatant tried to maximize the number of casualties among its own civilians, as does Hamas? The liberal mind reels with horror at the phenomenon of mass suicide.

We learn how to grapple with cultural suicide from Ecclesiastes, from Augustine’s reflections on Ecclesiastes, and from Goethe’s reflections on Ecclesiastes in Faust, which take us to Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig and Heidegger. The latter’s embrace of “Non-Being,” as Michael Wyschogrod observed in his masterwork The Body of Faith, is consistent with his support for Hitler. Our highbrow culture averts its gaze from the philosophical inquiry into Non-Being; our popular culture cannot take its eyes off the personification of self-destruction in the form of zombies and vampires. Our popular culture is infested by existential horrors which our intellectual culture refuses to acknowledge.

The Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine chapter, Hamas) and ISIS are the Arabic-language branches of the NSDAP, and they employ the same theater of horror to demoralize their enemies. Mere rationalism quails before such horrors. We require a phenomenology of the irrational to address it.

Among the many lies and failures of Barack Obama, ultimately the most dangerous, the most lethal for humanity, is his meretricious and pathetic pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. In negotiation, Obama and his minions have been treating the mullahs as if they were the leaders of Denmark, even to the point of sending fawning multiple mailings to Ayatollah Khamenei, as absurd an approach as it is asinine.

If Obama really wanted a deal, he would have gone about it in a very different manner, strengthening sanctions rather than weakening them, treating the mullahs as the autocratic religious fanatics that they are. What Obama seems to want instead is the appearance that he seeks to deprive Iran of the bomb, not the actual result. (He may even want the reverse, unconsciously or even semi-consciously. That would be more in line with his anti-imperialist views.)

Sunday evening, a day in advance of the conclusion of this round of talks, the AP [1] is already reporting the “shocking” news that U.S. negotiators are floating yet another extension to the Iranians. The Wall Street Journal similarly posted “No Iran Deal Seen by Monday” [2] later in the evening. This is such a predictable end to the hapless negotiations I imagine London bookmakers wouldn’t even have offered a hundred-to-one against it, maybe not a thousand to one. Betting on the West would have been like betting on a horse with two broken legs and heart condition. It is clear the Iranian leadership is getting precisely what they wanted yet again — more time to build a bomb and improve their nuclear delivery capabilities, including ICBMs, which have no other use other than for nuclear attack. (Note for those who still think this is all about Israel. The Iranians do not need ICBMs to reach Israel. They would be for other purposes.) Meanwhile, the Iranians continue their work on the plutonium-producing Arak facility and on stockpiling low-enriched uranium in oxide form. Undoubtedly, they are up to a whole lot more than that we don’t know about. They allow the IAEA to see exactly what they permit and nothing more. Everything is under their control — or at least the ayatollah’s control.

One of the more interesting passages of the WSJ report is as follows:

U.S., European and Iranian officials said they have made progress over the past year in negotiations that have crisscrossed the world from Oman to New York. But Obama administration officials increasingly are questioning whether Iran’s most powerful political player, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has empowered Mr. Zarif and other negotiators to make the necessary concessions for a deal. Mr. Zarif has repeatedly said he’s empowered to negotiate but that Mr. Khamenei is the ultimate decision maker.

Just now they are questioning this? It would have seemed elementary from the outset to anyone paying the slightest attention to how the Islamic Republic of Iran works and always has since 1979 without interruption. Only a narcissist like Obama could think otherwise, think that his force of personality could overcome Khomeinist Shiite ideology.

It’s a good thing Najibullah Zazi didn’t have access to a modern iPhone or Android device a few years ago when he plotted to blow up New York City subway stations. He was caught because his email was tapped by intelligence agencies—a practice that Silicon Valley firms recently decided the U.S. government is no longer permitted.

Apple , Google, Facebook and others are playing with fire, or in the case of Zazi with a plot to blow up subway stations under Grand Central and Times Square on Sept. 11, 2009. An Afghanistan native living in the U.S., Zazi became a suspect when he used his unencrypted Yahoo email account to double-check with his al Qaeda handler in Pakistan about the precise chemical mix to complete his bombs. Zazi and his collaborators, identified through phone records, were arrested shortly after he sent an email announcing the imminent attacks: “The marriage is ready.”

The Zazi example (he pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and awaits sentencing) highlights the risks that Silicon Valley firms are taking with their reputations by making it impossible for intelligence agencies or law enforcement to gain access to these communications. In September, marketers from Apple bragged of changes to its operating system so that it will not comply with judicial orders in national-security or criminal investigations.

“Unlike our competitors,” Apple announced, “it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants.” This encryption was quickly matched by Google and the WhatsApp messaging service owned by Facebook.

In a private meeting last month, Deputy Attorney General James Cole asked the general counsel of Apple why the company would want to market to criminals. As the Journal reported last week, Mr. Cole gave the hypothetical of the police announcing that they would have been able to rescue a murdered child if only they could have had access to the killer’s mobile device. Apple’s response was that the U.S. can always pass a law requiring companies to provide a way to gain access to communications under court orders.

Since then, U.S. and British officials have made numerous trips to Silicon Valley to explain the dangers. FBI Director James Comey gave a speech citing the case of a sex offender who lured a 12-year-old boy in Louisiana in 2010 using text messages, which were later obtained to get a murder conviction. “There should be no one in the U.S. above the law,” Mr. Comey said, “and also no places within the U.S. that are beyond the law.”

Robert Hannigan, the head of Britain’s electronic-intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters, warned in a Financial Times op-ed earlier this month: “However much they may dislike it,” Silicon Valley firms “have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals.”

Regular readers of this column will remember that in July the U.S. asked local officials here to arrest Venezuelan Gen. Hugo Carvajal and to extradite him on suspicion of drug trafficking with Colombian guerrillas. He was detained but the Netherlands stepped in, refused the extradition request and let him go.

The general had been sent here to become Venezuelan consul and spread Bolivarian propaganda. He would have been an important intelligence grab for the U.S. So it wasn’t too surprising that Venezuelan foreign minister Elias Jaua and Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, celebrated the Dutch decision by meeting his plane when he returned to Caracas.

The third person in the high-level greeting party at the airport—the governor of the state of Aragua, Tareck Zaidan El Aissami Maddah—seemed out of place because he is not in the national government. That is until you consider his résumé: One part master of Middle-Eastern networking, one part honorary Cuban revolutionary, and one part highly ambitious chavista, Mr. El Aissami is a dream come true for Tehran and Havana. That makes him a powerful man in Venezuela.

That sound you are hearing is laughter at America, except this time it’s coming from across the Pacific. “Chinese rulers and Beijing [are] laughing at us,” writes Stephen Moore, since “President Obama and the ‘green’ lobby actually think China is going to honor the new U.S.-China climate-change agreement” (see below).

Once again, Mr. Obama unilaterally disarms America. He did it with START II – i.e., the nuclear arms reduction treaty signed in February 2011 with Russia – in which Russia was allowed to arm while the US disarmed, and he’s done it now in the new climate-change agreement with China.

Then it was unilateral nuclear disarmament, and today it’s unilateral economic disarmament.

And so thanks to Mr. Obama, America continues to be the laughingstock of the world. Expect more laughter in the coming days, most likely from Iran.

Obama Just Got Punked by the Chinese: They Won’t Honor New Climate Change Deal By Stephen Moore http://dailysignal.com/2014/11/23/obama-just-got-punked-chinese-wont-honor-new-climate-change-deal/

That sound you’re hearing from across the Pacific is the Chinese rulers and Beijing laughing at us.

President Obama and the “green” lobby actually think China is going to honor the new U.S.-China climate-change agreement that pushes both nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the next 15 years.

China agreed to a “target” of deriving 20 percent of its energy needs from renewable resources “around” 2030. In exchange, Obama agreed that American families and businesses will aim to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by at least 26 percent by 2025 from 2005 levels.

Nancy Salvato is the Director of Education and the Constitutional Literacy Program for Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan research and educational project whose mission is to re-introduce the American public to the basic elements of our constitutional heritage while providing non-partisan, fact-based information on relevant socio-political issues important to our country. She is a graduate of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Academy for Civics and Government. She is the author of “Keeping a Republic: An Argument for Sovereignty.” She also serves as a Senior Editor for NewMediaJourna.usl and a contributing writer to BigGovernment.com and FamilySecurityMatters.org.

As The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes explained, absent a rule of law, man is dictated by a state of nature in which humans are in perpetual war. As rational beings, we can agree we’d rather be in a state of peace. As a matter of fact, Hobbes would assert that Laws of Nature impel us to seek peace. Hobbes suggested that man would transfer sovereign power to a ruler who would provide protection and safety. The framers embedded this objective, to “insure domestic tranquility” into the preamble of our US Constitution.

Serving as a catalyst to writing the US Constitution was Shay’s Rebellion. This particular event, which I’m certain many will remember learning about during American History, frightened the Framers because they were reminded that our freedom, which we’d fought for and won from England, was vulnerable. Our sovereignty as a nation could easily be lost due to internal dissention and inability to fend off attack from foreign nations who would eventually realize we were unable to defend our new nation against aggression under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation.

All were in agreement that our first constitution was weak and ineffective; the question that needed their attention was one of how much power to bestow on our new government. This was given tremendous consideration and there was a deliberate effort to check and balance the ability to wield a great nation against those who might fall prey to abusing their authority. Though this was a gargantuan task, the Framers employed their knowledge of political philosophy and history, as well drawing from their English heritage and most recent experiences under British rule.

The enumeration of particular powers was designed to prevent overreach of authority and the separation of powers was to safeguard against any branch or person from becoming tyrannical. Finally, everything was written into a constitution, ensuring a rule of law and not men.

Anyone watching current events through a constitutional lens has clearly identified we are experiencing great insecurity as a nation. Our borders are not safe. Law enforcement agencies are unable to protect us against potential rioters in Ferguson, Missouri, who want vigilante style justice, as opposed to following laws and procedures put in place to protect us against our own passions. Terrorists are beheading Americans on foreign and domestic soil. Our own president invited illegal aliens across our borders and now wants to provide them amnesty, blatantly dismissing the division of powers which grants the legislative branch legislative authority and the executive branch the responsibility of executing the law.

In the musical, West Side Story, one of the many melodies was, “They’re Coming to America.” Neil Diamond made it a hit song. However, those immigrants from Puerto Rico were understood to be arriving legally. Now we have illegal aliens infiltrating our 1,989-mile-long southern border, but many coming to the sound of a very different and horribly discordant tune; one tinged with Islamic and/or Arabic overtones.

According to recently released data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 5,063 individuals from nations that harbor Islamic terrorists were arrested last year alone trying to cross into America from Mexico. None of these were Mexicans, Guatemalans, or Hondurans; they were citizens from far-away nations consumed by militant Islam.

Afghanistan, where U.S. troops battle the Taliban, is the home of 70 people arrested at the southern frontier in 2013 alone.

Syria, birthplace of ISIS and a civil war ravaged nation with over 200,000 dead saw 72 of its countrymen captured at our border.

Sudan, designated by the State Department as an official “state sponsor of terrorism,” where Christians in the south have been the subject of massive genocide by the Arab Muslim north, was the starting point for 168 individuals who were stopped en-route to the U.S.A.

Iran, the ultimate Islamic state sponsor of terrorism, is busy trying to build an atomic bomb. A total of 257 Iranians got caught on our border.

Nigeria — headquarters of al-Qaeda offshoot Boko-Haram, which practices child-sex slavery and anti-Christian genocide — is the nation from which 492 people departed before getting snagged on the way into America.

But these are only the culprits that were caught. Those that have escaped capture and successfully infiltrated the U.S. may now well run into the thousands and constitute numerous sleeper cells waiting to unleash atrocities in our towns and cities in the name of Allah.

Just as in previous cycles of negotiations between the P5 + 1 (Security Council permanent members U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, and France, plus Germany) and Iran, the parties are butting up against another deadline. It’s November 24 this time around, and many issues remain.

Should the parties not reach an agreement, it is all but certain that the talks will be extended for another six- or twelve-month period rather than break down. Just as with the 21-year “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians, no one is willing to accept that failure is not only an option, but reality.

The major difference between the Israeli-Palestinian track and the nuclear negotiations is that Israel is not a party to the nuclear talks. The nation most impacted by Iran becoming a nuclear power has to rely on other nations to represent its interests by preventing that from occurring. The danger is that an agreement that Israel considers an imbalanced and dangerous deal might be eagerly signed by an American government now anxious for some positive foreign policy achievement. The Obama administration has a very long losing streak both domestically and overseas, which now includes a second wipeout in a midterm election.

Obama has, throughout his six years in office, eagerly sought to change the American relationship with Iran, and for that matter, with Israel: one up, one down. At this point, Iran is cooperating with the U.S. in the fight with ISIS in Iraq and — to a lesser extent — in Syria (where the U.S. is less involved). Both parties seem eager to achieve stabilization in Iraq in particular. If that goal is achieved, Iran will have secured one more nation for its growing collection of Shiite-friendly regimes to add to Lebanon, Syria, and now Yemen. If ISIS is defeated in Iraq, then it will also be easier for Iranian proxy armies, such as Hezbollah and its own militias, to concentrate on wiping them out in Syria. Then Iran could get back to its primary interest: leading and supporting the fight against Israel.

The BBC has been accused of “shameful hypocrisy” over its decision to spend £200,000 blocking a freedom of information request about its reporting in the Middle East.

The corporation, which has itself made extensive use of FOI requests in its journalism, is refusing to release papers about an internal inquiry into whether its reporting has been biased towards Palestine.

BBC chiefs have been accused of wasting thousands of pounds of licence fee payers money trying to cover-up the findings of the so called Balen Report into its journalism in the region, despite the fact that the corporation is funded by the British public.

The corporation is fighting a landmark High Court action, which starts next week, in a bid to prevent the public finding out what is in the review, which is believed to be critical of the BBC’s coverage in the region.

BBC bosses have faced repeated claims that is coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been skewed by a pro-Palestianian bias.

The corporation famously came under fire after middle-east correspondent Barbara Plett revealed that she had cried at the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

The BBC’s decision to carry on pursuing the case, despite the fact than the Information Tribunal said it should make the report public, has sparked fury as it flies in the face of claims by BBC chiefs that it is trying to make the corporation more open and transparent.

Politicians have branded the BBC’s decision to carry on spending money, hiring the one of the country’s top public law barrister in the process, as “absolutely indefensible”.

They claim its publication is clearly in the public interest.

What is the Obama administration allowing to be broadcast all over the Middle East? We cannot know without broadcasts in English. Taxpayers must demand to know. Is Alhura TV and Radio Sawa worth the cost? Does it provide any value to us, or does it harm our allies and therefore ultimately harm Americans? Demand answers. Demand accountability. Begin with the members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Does anyone know about the Alhurra Network? About Radio Sawa? Most will be shocked to learn that little known Alhurra costs American tax papers, including many American Israelis up to $100,000,000.00 (one hundred million dollars) a year, or more!

What is this U.S. government-funded operation’s mission? It is “to broadcast accurate, timely and relevant news and information about the region, the world and the United States to a broad, Arabic-speaking audience.” Sounds good, that is, until you ask questions that go below the surface. Broadcasting from Alhurra began February, 2004. The objective was to counter media campaigns terrorists use by accurate news reporting and analysis as well as to explain U.S. policies.

Alhurra is sponsored by the United States government and supported by United States tax dollars, so why are broadcasts not translated into English in order to share it with the American public? After all who is paying the bills? I wish this were a fairytale, but unfortunately, it is not. Alhurra is real and operates out of state-of-the-art studios right in the heart of Jerusalem. Yet, neither Israelis nor Americans know much about it. I saw the operation with my own eyes. American tax-payers gift their hard-earned dollars to Alhurra. But, ten years after her birth, Alhurra is still not available to the English-speaking world. Why? Alhurra is regulated by a law that prohibits a government-funded news service dedicated to providing news to a foreign audience from broadcasting to the domestic audience of the United States.

This type of news service falls under the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the BBG. The Smith-Mundt Act regulations were eased by the recent passage of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act. However the BBG still insists that it is only allowed to create programs for foreign audiences. The BBG “does not seek to change that.” Why? What are they sending out to foreign audiences that Americans and Israelis might not like? There is very little oversight over Alhurra’s reporters and commentators.