RUTHFULLY YOURS

1. According to Defense News, “Touted by US and Israeli officials as a new milestone in decades-long defense-industrial cooperation, state-owned Israel Aerospace Industry (IAI) inaugurated a production line on Tuesday to provide wings for Lockheed Martin-produced F-35 joint strike fighters. Under an estimated $2.5bn industrial cooperation deal, the new facility at IAI’s Lahav Division will produce up to 811 wing sets through 2030 at a rate of four per month. Current plans are earmarking Israeli-built wings for fighters on order for the US and Israeli Air Forces and future export customers…. The decision to entrust IAI with critical wing builds follows three decades of successful cooperation on the F-16 and T-38 programs…. It takes [bilateral] cooperation to a new level and launches a new era in shared commitment…. Israel-built wings for the F-35 along with the selection of [Israel’s] Elbit Systems for helmet-mounted displays are a show of strength and growing strategic ties…. The new facility [said IAI’s Chairman] will establish IAI as a global center of excellence for wing companies.”

2. 2014 has been a record year (and it’s not over yet): $3.6bn have been raised by 26 Israeli companies on the New York Stock Exchange in initial, and secondary, public offerings, compared with $335mn in 1994 (Globes, October 31, 2014).

3. 2014 has been a record year (and it’s not over yet): $3.5bn invested by global companies (such as Pratt and Whitney, Qualcomm, 3D Systems, Erickson, Google and Yahoo) in the acquisition of Israeli companies (Globes, October 31). In addition, Israel’s DiWip was acquired by Canada’s Imperus Technologies for $100mn (Globes, October 20). France’s Publicis acquired a 25% controlling interest in Israel’s Matomy for $82mn (Globes, Oct. 14).

4. Jordan concluded a $15bn, 15 year contract with Houston’s Noble Energy for the supply of natural gas from the offshore Leviathan field in Israel (Globes, September 4). Turkey and Israel explore the possibility of constructing a natural gas pipeline from Israel’s offshore fields to Turkey.

Shelly Moore Capito (R)

Represented District 2.

http://www.capitoforsenate.com/welcome/ http://capito.house.gov/#dialog

http://www.ontheissues.org/house/shelley_moore_capito.htm**

Rated -2 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

HEALTHCARE Congresswoman Capito has championed policies to increase access to affordable and quality health care for all West Virginians. Before coming to Congress, she was a leader in the State Legislature in establishing West Virginia’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Early in her tenure, Congresswoman Capito was a leader in establishing Medicare Part D, a program that today provides prescription drug coverage to over 31 million seniors, including more than 60 percent of West Virginia Medicare beneficiaries, and earns the support of 90 percent of its enrollees. Congresswoman Capito continues to champion medical liability reform to root out frivolous lawsuits that drive up the cost of health care. She has also co-sponsored legislation that would allow health insurance policies to be sold across state lines in order to reduce the cost of health insurance. Capito voted against President Obama’s health care reform legislation (the Affordable Care Act) because the law increases taxes and government mandates, while doing nothing to address the ever increasing cost of health care. Once fully implemented, the health care reform law will impose 21 separate tax increases which collectively impose over $1 trillion in new taxes over the next 10 years. The regulations included in the law force government into the doctor-patient relationship.

Congresswoman Capito will continue to support efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of health care through patient centered reform, rather than a government takeover of our health care system.

IMMIGRATION Congresswoman Capito believes that a strong immigration policy is important to our nation’s security, as well as to the security of our economy. As a member of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, Capito has worked to secure our borders, prevent amnesty, and enact sound immigration reform. Cracking down on illegal immigration begins with protecting our borders which leads to a secure nation. Capito fully supports efforts to build a security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, including efforts to build a virtual fence that uses cameras, sensors, and motion detectors. Capito wants to make sure border officials have the resources and the manpower necessary to successfully patrol the border and fund the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) During the 112th Congress, Capito voted for the Border Tunnel Prevention Act of 2012, legislation that was passed into law that will strengthen the laws against construction of border tunnels as well as charge individuals who conspire to build or finance a border tunnel with harsh penalties.

Since her first term in 2001, she has supported the employee verification program that allows America’s small businesses to have confidence that their employees are legally eligible to work in the United States. She wants to ensure that millions of jobs are not taken from hardworking Americans by illegal immigrants and believes that employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants should be penalized. Capito opposes amnesty for the estimated 7 million illegal immigrants working in the United States. She has cosponsored legislation that excludes illegal immigrants from receipt of social security benefits, as well as opposed the Administration’s announcement to bypass Congress in them granting amnesty.

ENERGY Voted for the keystone XL Pipeline without limiting amendments West Virginia is an energy state. Supporting an all of the above energy policy that includes West Virginia coal and natural gas, oil produced in North America, together with renewable energy, is one of Congresswoman Capito’s most important legislative initiatives. As a co-chair of the Congressional Coal Caucus, Congresswoman Capito is a leader in the fight against excessive and unnecessary regulations from the EPA and other federal agencies aimed at reducing both the production of and the demand for West Virginia coal. She was a co-sponsor of the Stop the War on Coal Act and has fought to protect the jobs of miners as well as the truckers, contractors, railroad employees, utility workers, and many others whose jobs have been placed at risk by the current regulatory efforts targeting coal. Congresswoman Capito has authored legislation that would require the EPA to perform an economic assessment of any regulation that would negatively impact employment and hold public hearings in local communities adversely affected by regulatory decisions.

Let’s just say it up front and avoid tip-toeing around with politically correct language. President Obama and his administration are the most anti-Israel to have held office and likely the most anti-Semitic. Forget about his public declarations of friendship and support for Israel. For six years Obama has demonstrated his antipathy toward the only democratic nation in the Middle East, the Jewish state.

That’s why an anonymous administration official felt free to call Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a “chickenshit” and “a coward” while being interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg for an article inThe Atlantic.

He or she had to know the comment would go public. Netanyahu was accused of only being interested in his political survival and afraid to launch an attack on Iran to slow or end its nuclear armament program. In an effort to comply with U.S. demands, Netanyahu actually had put himself at political risk at home. None of Obama’s demands were rewarded or acknowledged and, for now, those days are over.

It is, of course, the Obama administration that has led the most servile negotiations to date with Iran, granting all manner of concessions in order to get an agreement that would put that terror-sponsoring nation within three or four months of having a nuclear warhead for its missiles or bomb for its aircraft.

Speaking to the Israeli Knesset, Netanyahu responded to the insulting name-calling saying, “I am under attack simply because I am defending the State of Israel. If I didn’t stand firm on our national interests, I would not be under attack.” And then, typical of the diplomatic dance, he said, “I respect and cherish the deep connection with the United States.”

If he was speaking in an historic context, he is right, but the six years of Obama’s terms in office have been a succession of insults and demands that would make Israel vulnerable to the constant presence of its enemies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, two terror organizations that are proxies for their sponsor, Iran. During the recent military operations to end months of continued rocketing from Gaza, the U.S. repeatedly called on Israel to stop. When it was over, countless tunnels whose sole purpose was for Palestinian terrorists to attack Israelis were found.

Although the birth of the Islamic state and the herald of the caliphate are often regarded as some of 2014’s “big shockers,” they were foretold in striking detail and with an accurate timeline by an al-Qaeda insider nearly one decade ago.

On August 12, 2005, Spiegel Online International published an article titled “The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaeda Really Wants.” Written by Yassin Musharbash, the article was essentially a review of a book written by Fouad Hussein, a Jordanian journalist with close access to al-Qaeda and its affiliates, including the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who pioneered the videotaping of beheadings “to strike terror into the hearts” of infidels (Koran 3:151).

As Hussein explained in the introduction of his book Al Zarqawi: Al Qaeda’s Second Generation: “I interviewed a whole range of al-Qaeda members with different ideologies to get an idea of how the war between the terrorists and Washington would develop in the future.”

And in fact the book details the master plan of al-Qaeda-in its “second generation” manifestation known as the “Islamic State” which follows much of Zarqawi’s modus operandi-to resurrect a caliphate. This plan is sufficiently outlandish that Yassin Musharbash, the author of the Spiegel article reviewing Hussein’s book, repeatedly casts doubt on its feasibility. Thus al-Qaeda’s plan is “proof both of the terrorists’ blindness as well as their brutal single-mindedness”; there is “no way” al-Qaeda can follow the plan “step by step”; “the idea that al-Qaeda could set up a caliphate in the entire Islamic world is absurd”; and the following “scenario should be judged skeptically.”

Yet it is all the more remarkable that much of this plan-especially those phases dismissed as infeasible by Musharbash (four and five)-have come to pass.

In what follows, I reproduce the seven phases of al-Qaeda’s master plan as presented in Musharbash’s nearly ten-year-old article (in bullet points and italics, bold for emphasis), with my commentary interspersed for context. Phases four and five are of particular importance as they describe the goals for recent times, much of which have come to fruition according to plan.

The ADL was a fundamentally flawed organization under Abe Foxman, but at times it occasionally broke ranks with the left on Jewish issues, though not for very long. It did more harm than good, but now it’s going to be marching fully in step with the left.

Replacing Foxman will be Jonathan Greenblatt, a Clinton official who bummed around NGOs during the Bush years and then became Obama’s director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.

It’s strange that a top official at a Democratic administration with the worst relations with the Jewish community since Carter is being appointed to head the Anti-Defamation League. Especially at a time when the administration is openly abusing Israel and Jews.

But Greenblatt’s gruesome resume doesn’t end there… as Aaron Klein reported a few years ago.

The newly appointed chief of President Obama’s Social Innovation and Civic Participation Council doubles as the director of a social justice group funded by George Soros.

The organization, the Aspen Institute, works closely with Soros and even was reportedly used by the billionaire in a failed attempt to engineer the defeat of President Bush in the 2004 elections.

Greenblatt also serves as director of the Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute. Soros has provided significant funding to the Aspen Institute. His Open Society Institute has provided more than $400,000 to the group since 2004.

The choice of Greenblatt is an odd one. He has no obvious background in the Jewish sector. His NGO experience was the usual collection of phony liberal philanthropies, not to mention a really expensive brand of Starbucks water. He’s the kind of guy whose job it is to make people feel good about wasting money on expensive bottled water while convincing them that they’re saving the world.

A man with ties to a Nazi collaborator waging war on Israel and America has been appointed to head the ADL.

Almost every anti-establishment firebrand is the same. Elected to break the chokehold that Beltway elites have on the republic, they come to Washington with their constituents’ concerns foremost. They are eager to heave overboard the dead weight that sinks the balance of powers, and ready to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Then it happens. One taste of the waters of forgetfulness on Capitol Hill and suddenly their goal is something called “incumbency,” and their allegiance is to the powers that be — “the leadership.” It hardly matters which party’s.

After the earthquake election of 2014, in the wake of a historic mandate against the Obama agenda — from “executive amnesty” for millions of illegal aliens to Obamacare — it seems as if the Republican leadership in Washington isn’t even waiting for the usual inside-the-Beltway conversions to take place.

They are thinking, it seems, “What if this new class of freshmen members is more Constitution-minded than before? What if they won’t support us Republican custodians of status quo government who are practically indistinguishable on the issues from Democratic custodians of expanding government? What if the 114th Congress means business — the people’s business?”

The question puts the fear of powerlessness into Beltway elites. And so, as American polls closed, Beltway elites closed ranks. It was clear there was no appetite on high for the red-meat message of Obama-rejection that the electorate sent. Indeed, House Speaker John Boehner reacted to this stupendous Republican victory as “not a time for celebration.” He expressed hope for “bipartisan steps,” and working with President Obama. It’s hard to imagine how his statement would have differed had he been responding to GOP losses instead of gains.

Anyone who believes in the Constitution and the primacy of individual rights and freedom should be relieved after the electoral beat-down administered to Harry Reid’s do-nothing Senate. Over the last 6 years the federal Leviathan has grown fatter and fatter, every pound coming at the cost of our freedom and autonomy, not to mention the trillions of borrowed dollars burned in various Keynesian stimulus fires. At the same time, the imperial presidency of Obama, abetted by his courtiers in the Senate, has trampled the Constitution’s limits on government power, and extended intrusive, inefficient, wasteful federal bureaucracies into the business of the states and the rights of the people.

Anything that slows down or challenges this expansion in the next two years will be welcome. The President should be made either to sign or to veto legislation on reforming taxes, securing the border, and correcting the flaws of Obamacare, to name a few issues voters are concerned about. And every piece of legislation should make clear that its ultimate goal is to restore to our politics the ideals of freedom, and the virtues of self-reliance, self-responsibility, and prudence.

Yet there is a danger that many Republicans in the Senate will heed the siren song of “getting things done” and “bi-partisan cooperation” already being sung by the usual progressive mouthpieces. Here’s Tom Brokaw, mouthpiece emeritus of NBC news, on the implications of the Republican victory:

“They [the voters] are thinking that they would like to have Washington get something done. And the question is not just which party can get it done, but how can they change the tone in Washington so they can work together . . . The question then is what are they [Republicans] prepared to give to the Democrats to meet them at middle ground? What they are going to do about immigration? What are they are going to do about the minimum wage?”

Brokaw’s examples of immigration and the minimum wage tip his hand. The subtext is that “cooperation” and “working together” on these issues really mean that Republicans give ground to pass legislation the other side wants for ideological and political advantage. No matter how much evidence piles up, for example, that raising the minimum wage does little to help those who need it most, like working families––half of minimum-wage earners are 16-24 years old, and a quarter are teenagers–– the progressive mantra of “income inequality” continually exploits this issue for political gain. In Brokaw’s view, then, if Republicans ignore the fact that raising the minimum wage could cost half a million jobs, according to the CBO, and they go ahead and “compromise” with the Democrats and vote to raise it, then they will be doing the right thing. As usual, progressive harping on “gridlock” and “obstructionism” is usually code for the other side’s sticking to its principles.

Wipeout!

Voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected Obama’s über-government. Republicans romped. They picked up (at this writing) seven seats in the Senate and 13 in the House while yielding zero Senate spots and only two in the House. Expected squeakers became GOP blowouts: Georgia’s David Perdue beat Michelle Nunn 53.0 percent to 45.1. Kansas’s Pat Roberts whipped Greg Orman 53.3 to 42.5. Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell trounced Alison Lundergan Grimes 56.2 to 40.7. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton flogged Mark Pryor, 56.6 to 39.4.

In the governors’ races, the loss of Pennsylvania’s Republican incumbent, Tom Corbett, accompanied two major surprises: Maryland and Massachusetts elected GOP governors. Obama’s own Illinois also will enjoy Republican management.

In neighboring Wisconsin, the highly effective governor, Scott Walker, endured his third baptism by fire in four years. He withstood ferocious, free-spending unions and ethically challenged, leak-happy prosecutors, surviving these flames by more than five points. He richly deserves the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

On October 2, Obama said his policies — “every single one of them” – were on the ballot. Voters then repudiated Obama’s in-your-face, deeply invasive, grossly inept, high-cost brand of government. The body politic regurgitated Obama’s poisoned meal. This was the first, convulsive step toward restored health.

Among 3,894 respondents in a Fox News exit poll, 41 percent believe that “Government should do more to solve problems.” However, 54 percent think “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” While 20 percent said they trusted Washington “to do what is right” “Just about always or “Most of the time,” 79 percent believe this occurs “Only some of the time” or “Never.”

November 24, the deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, approaches, and things aren’t looking good. With less than three weeks left, Iran is adopting a hardline negotiating position. And although there’s time left to reach a good deal, President Obama’s current strategy is problematic.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that last month Obama wrote his fourth “secret” letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. According to sources, he did so in an effort “aimed both at buttressing the Islamic State campaign and nudging Iran’s religious leader closer to a nuclear deal.”

No problem, right? After all, what harm can a letter do? Actually, a lot. The Journal quotes a senior White House official who provides context for Obama’s outreach: “We’ve passed on messages to the Iranians . . . saying our objective is against ISIL. We’re not using this as a platform to reoccupy Iraq or to undermine Iran.”

Saying this to Iran is the diplomatic equivalent of telling an ill-reputed used-car salesman, “Money is no object, I don’t need a test drive, and I’m desperate to buy today.” It’s not very clever.

Iran’s hardliners are likely to see the president’s latest letter as a verification of increasing American malleability. But there’s a deeper issue here. As I noted in September, the administration’s willingness to see the best in Iran without challenging the worst manages to inspire only the latter. While we offer friendship, from Beirut to Baghdad, from Sanaa to Washington, Iran forges power through violent opportunism. Members of the Lebanese and Iraqi parliaments recognize Iran’s proclamations of peace for what they are: a thin veil concealing an absolutist agenda. Not incidentally, many American military personnel, through personal experience, share the same skeptical view.

Twenty years ago—on November 25, 1994—Isaiah Berlin accepted the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto. He prepared the following “short credo” (as he called it in a letter to a friend) for the ceremony, at which it was read on his behalf.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.

I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet perhaps I can try.

They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds, jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather, by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of France.

He predicted that the armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form, the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know perfection can be reached.

Let me explain. If you are truly convinced that there is some solution to all human problems, that one can conceive an ideal society which men can reach if only they do what is necessary to attain it, then you and your followers must believe that no price can be too high to pay in order to open the gates of such a paradise. Only the stupid and malevolent will resist once certain simple truths are put to them. Those who resist must be persuaded; if they cannot be persuaded, laws must be passed to restrain them; if that does not work, then coercion, if need be violence, will inevitably have to be used—if necessary, terror, slaughter. Lenin believed this after reading Das Kapital, and consistently taught that if a just, peaceful, happy, free, virtuous society could be created by the means he advocated, then the end justified any methods that needed to be used, literally any.