RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite enduring thousands of Hamas rockets in the past ten weeks, the whole of Israel is far safer now than it was a decade ago, and safer than many American cities. Indeed, two initiatives long favored by American conservatives, namely missile defense and a border fence, have made the current unpleasantness with Hamas little more than an unfortunate distraction from the true existential threat, which is Iranian nukes.

Since the Hamas attacks began June 13, the rockets from Gaza have killed seven people in all of Israel while wounding only a few dozen more. An August 19–20 tour of both the fence and of an Iron Dome missile-defense installment, guided by top retired Israeli military officials, amply demonstrated why Israeli civilians and tourists feel comparatively safe amid so many terrorist attacks.

One of those rockets set off sirens in Jerusalem just before midnight on Tuesday, August 19, while I was there. Everybody in my hotel seemed to take the attack seriously, by dutifully gathering in the designated safe zone — but, remarkably, the only person who showed fear rather than mere annoyance was a three-year-old scared by the noise. Perhaps the confidence can be attributed to some compelling numbers.

The statistics were supplied by retired Israeli Colonel Danny Tirzia, a member of the 16-member Israeli delegation at President Clinton’s failed Camp David meeting in the year 2000 who later was tasked with designing and overseeing construction of Israel’s 451-mile-long security barrier. From 2000 through 2006, he said, Israel suffered more than 3,000 terrorist attacks (apart from rockets) within its borders, with 1,629 fatalities. Post-fence, from 2007 until today, only 25 such attacks (not counting Gazan rockets) have occurred, with only 18 deaths.

The big difference is the fence, which snakes in a bewilderingly complicated route along Israel’s border with the Palestinian Authority–controlled West Bank. Its precise route and design was determined, Tirzia said, by the oft-competing demands of topography, the political allegiances of affected communities, the desire to provide for cross-border employment in some areas, and the location of sites of religious or other historic significance. (The employment numbers might surprise Americans: Each day, some 70,000 Palestinians are allowed to cross into Israeli territory for their jobs, through security checkpoints that take just 20 minutes to traverse.)

For many, the British accent of the Islamist who executed American journalist James Foley was almost as shocking as the barbaric murder itself. In the days that follow, critics of American foreign policy will assert that the Islamic State’s audacious act was merely a symptom of “blowback,” the unintended consequence of Western military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. But above all, they will relentlessly stress that the participation of a European Muslim in foreign jihad marks a new development in domestic radicalization. And they will be deeply mistaken.

It is easy to write off the Islamization of European Muslims as an inadvertent and unprecedented outcome of the War on Terror. Alas, the savage exploit performed on the barren dunes of Mesopotamia and broadcast via social media represents the continuation of a relatively longstanding trend. European domestic radicalization and, specifically, the willingness of British Muslims to wage jihad abroad, began in earnest at least 20 years ago.

During the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, British Muslims traveled to Bosnia to assist their co-religionists in the face of Serbia and Croatia’s genocidal campaign. Some assisted relief organizations, which collected and distributed food, water, medicine, and blankets. Some smuggled weapons and ammunition. Others, however, fought on the frontlines. What started as a largely protective mission transformed into an international offensive to secure the future safety of Muslims through the reestablishment of the caliphate.

A cohort of London-based Islamists, primarily funded by Wahhabi sources, orchestrated a grassroots campaign that seized the hearts of countless young British Muslims. It created and propagated the conspiracy theory that Europe’s unwillingness to intercede in the Balkans was proof of a Christian plot to extinguish Islam. Unfortunately, in retrospect, the Islamist yarn does not seem so far-fetched. A flight from Rome to Sarajevo is only a few hours, meaning that the killing fields were virtually in Europe’s backyard. Three years passed before the West intervened. It was only after the massacre at Srebrenica that NATO air strikes were carried out against Ratko Mladić’s forces. And even then, the response was essentially led by the United States, not Europe.

IS ISIS THE MUSLIM TERRORIST GROUP DUJOUR? WHERE HAVE ALL THESE COMMENTATORS BEEN? AL QAEDA, TALIBAN, ABU SAYAAF, AL SHABAAB, HEZBOLLAH, HAMAS, FATAH, BOKO HARAM…..THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME JIHADIST IDEOLOGY…EMANATING FROM THE KORAN….RSK

In Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s “caliphate” has already become a reality. All women in the city are required to wear the niqab veil and pants are banned. Thieves have their hands hacked off and opponents are publicly crucified or beheaded, with the images of these horrific acts then posted on social networks.

The few hair salons that are still open are required to black out the pictures of women on the packaging for hair dye solutions. Weddings are only permitted to take place without music. And at livestock markets, the hindquarters of goats and sheep must be covered in order to prevent men from viewing their genitalia and having uncomely thoughts.

Any person caught out on the street during the five daily prayer times is risking his or her life.

The jihadists with the Islamic State, or IS, are acting out their fantasies of omnipotence in the name of God. They’re murdering, torturing and forcing families to give their daughters away for marriage to Islamist fighters coming in from abroad. One girl whose family agreed to marry her off took her own life.

In Syria, IS militants and their predecessors have killed countless people in recent years, and over 160,000 in total have died during the Syrian civil war. Yet it is only now that the world is waking up, now that the conflict has spilled into Iraq, where the Islamic State also appears to be spreading its tentacles without much resistance.

Pictures were needed in order for the international community to understand the scale of the horror unfolding in Iraq and just how inhumanely the Islamic State terrorist militia is acting. Images allowed the global community to become witnesses to the plight of the Yazidis, followers of one of the world’s most obscure religions, as they were forced to flee into the mountains, begging for help as they died of thirst. In the eyes of the IS fanatics, the Yazidis are “devil worshippers,” people who deserve to die.

A few days ago, James Foley was beheaded by an ISIS jihadist, apparently British by upbringing and passport, if not in his primary identity. The decapitation of an American by an outfit he’d previously dismissed as the “jayvees” of jihad was sufficiently serious for President Obama to postpone his tee time, although not to any useful effect. Aside from the fake, tinny chumminess (all “Jim” this, “Jim that, just as for Ambassador Stevens it was all “Chris” this, “Chris that”) the commander-in-chief reserves for the victims of an enemy he assured us was on the run, Obama’s remarks were fatuous even by his own recent standards, and did not long delay his arrival at the links. As his courtiers at The New York Times assured us with touching if unwitting accuracy:

Obama, Outraged Over Beheading, Vows to Stay on Course

While he stays on the course at the Vineyard Golf Club, the rest of us have to make do with the pabulum of his prompter:

“One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.”

As I was driving back from Quebec to New Hampshire today, I heard a host on CJAD express agreement with the President on this. And why not? It demands nothing of one. It makes ISIS sound like a social faux pas: one thing we can all agree on is that no one wears white after Labor Day or saws your head off after the year 2000.

In America justice is supposed to be blind not our commander-in-chief. In Obama’s topsy-turvy America justice is not blind but our President is-and willfully so-when it comes to threats facing Americans. Will he remove his blinders? Only if he is forced to and by then it may be too late.

Charles Krauthammer, one of America’s smartest columnists, said it best regarding President Obama and the threats to America coming from ISIS:

“I don’t think the issue is the president was unaware or taken by surprise. I think this was willful blindness to the nature of the threat.”

“For the 5 and a half years he’s been in office, he’s tried to minimize the whole idea of the War on Terror,” the columnist explained. “He abolished the term. He gave a speech six months ago saying the War on Terror must end, it’s damaging our country — as if he can unilaterally declare an end to a war when the other guy hasn’t declared an end on his side.”

He has said the tide of war is receding,” Krauthammer continued. “But he did that by defining the threat and the enemy as al-Qaida central, as if the enemy is a club that lives in Pakistan or parts of Afghanistan and that’s it. So whenever you had an explosion of Islamic radicalism in Mali or Libya or elsewhere, it was considered something else, as he said, a jayvee team.”

“This is a willful attempt to actually will away the war that we were looking at.”

Even before Barack Obama became president he whitewashed threats from abroad — especially those emerging from the Islamic world.

He said back in 2008 that Iran did not pose a serious threat to America and that we do not need to worry about “tiny” countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. He especially dismissed any threat from Iran since that nation spent 1/100th of what America does on defense. Of course, Iran is not tiny at all — but it has long been known that Barack Obama is geographically challenged (Hawaii, his home state(!), is not in Asia; they don’t speak Austrian in Austria); there are 50, not 57 states. Did Senator Obama not know that Iran had long been designated as the number one state sponsor of terror in the world (so designated by Bill Clinton via one of those executive orders Obama is so addicted to using) and has the blood of many Americans on its hands (its proxies are responsible for the murders of our Marines in Lebanon, our soldiers in Iraq and Saudi Arabia).

THE hostilities in Gaza between Israel and Hamas persist and the diplomatic war at the United Nations continues, also without resolution. While there is no shortage of opinions on the way forward, the most obvious solution is strikingly absent — the need to disarm and isolate Hamas, the radical Palestinian Islamist group.

Since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, Hamas has dragged us into three rounds of major assaults, and more than 14,800 rockets have been fired into Israel by the group or its proxies. The discovery of dozens of tunnels packed with explosives, tranquilizers and handcuffs that end at the doorsteps of Israeli communities should be enough to convince anyone that Hamas has no interest in bringing quiet to Gaza or residing alongside Israel in peace.

It says a great deal that Hamas’s former Arab backers, which historically have included Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, long ago abandoned the terrorist group. Only a few nations still stand by Hamas. Among the most prominent is the tiny Persian Gulf emirate Qatar.

In recent years, the sheikhs of Doha, Qatar’s capital, have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza. Every one of Hamas’s tunnels and rockets might as well have had a sign that read “Made possible through a kind donation from the emir of Qatar.”

Sitting atop 25 billion barrels of crude oil reserves and enormous natural gas reserves, Qatar has the highest gross domestic product per capita of any country in the world. The emirate is known for international shopping sprees that have included the funding of six American university campuses in Doha, the purchase of the iconic Harrods department store in London, and ownership of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club.

For many years, the gas-rich gulf peninsula tried to avoid attracting attention lest it found itself in the same situation as oil-rich Kuwait, which was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces in 1990. About 10 years ago, however, Qatar changed tactics. To ensure the country’s survival, the ruling House of Thani has spent extravagantly on increasing Qatar’s presence and prestige on the global stage.

If there’s one thing I know from watching MSNBC*, even before Barack Obama took office, is that any criticism of him — any criticism, no matter how mild — was at its core, entirely “about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up,” as a guest on the show hosted by the MSNBC anchor** Keith Olbermann said in April of 2009.

And any reference to golf is definitely racism double-plus straight up, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell declared on August 29th, 2012, on a show hosted by the MSNBC anchor*** Martin Bashir.

So when Maureen Dowd goofs on the president with a collection of bad golf jokes (link safe, goes to Twitchy), by the standards of her fellow Democrat operatives with bylines, it can mean only one thing: racism of the vilest sort.

How should the president respond? Perhaps the January 2010 issue of Golf Digest, which featured on its cover Tiger Woods caddying for Mr. Obama — the issue went to press about five minutes before the pristine MSM-airbrushed narratives of both men imploded for good — holds a clue. Golf Digest contributing editor John Feinstein wrote that one of the “10 Things Obama Might Learn From Tiger” was “How To Step On Their Necks:”

What makes Tiger Woods the most dominant athlete in the world (with apologies to Michael Phelps) isn’t so much his golf swing as what he does between golf swings. He’s cerebral in the sense that he lives to wear opponents out mentally every chance he gets.

President Obama surely knows how to compete. And yet, if you watched him debate John McCain, it was clear that Obama didn’t have Woods’ sense of the kill — knowing when an opponent is weak and the time is right to step on his neck. If Obama versus McCain had been match play, Obama wouldn’t have closed out his opponent until the 17th hole. When Stephen Ames made the mistake a few years ago of saying that he didn’t think Woods was quite as unbeatable as he had once been, he had the misfortune of facing Woods in the first round of a match-play event soon after. Woods won, 9 and 8. Asked post-match if he had anything to say about Ames’ comments, Woods smiled and said, “Nine and eight.”

President Obama should learn from Tiger. Sometimes you beat a guy 9 and 8, not 2 and 1. Teach him a lesson.****

That’s right — it’s time for Mr. Obama to teach Maureen Dowd a lesson, as her fellow MSMer demands of the president.

I have always had a certain sympathy for libertarianism and it has only grown during the Obama administration. Who could believe in big government living under the fiasco of this man’s presidency?

And I am certainly not alone. Libertarianism, if we are to believe none other than The New York Times [1], has become quite chic.

But paradoxically, during this same time frame, it has become perhaps even more evident that one of the apparent tenets of libertarianism — a kind of neo-isolationism — is, well, to put it bluntly, insane. In the era of the Islamic State (not to mention a dozen other similar murderous, increasingly global organizations we could name or are being invented as I write), anyone who believes we can roll up the gangplanks to create the perfect libertarian state and everything will be just ducky is living in dreamland.

But a fair number of libertarians are. As an example, one of the leading spokesmen for the movement (I’ll be gracious by not naming him, because he’s probably embarrassed at this point) was quoted as likening the problem of Islamic terrorism to herpes — I guess he meant an annoyance you can live with if you find the right partner (who doesn’t behead you).

Do those same isolationist libertarians think that one Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, current leader of the Islamic State, was kidding when he said “See you in New York [2]” when let out of detention camp in Iraq in 2009? If not, what do they propose to do about it? Wait until he is in New York? Maybe Eric Holder will arrest him. Or maybe he’ll blow up the Stock Exchange and sink the free market. Or one of his now thousands of minions will. Do you want to sit back to wait to find out? And what about all the unknown unknowns lurking out there?

One of the myths about the Middle East is that there would be peace if only Israel courted Palestinian moderates. This might be possible if any Palestinian who harbored such a thought wasn’t summarily executed.

On Friday Hamas shot 18 fellow Palestinians on suspicion that they had collaborated with Israel. Here’s how a Journal dispatch put it:
“In one instance, about 20 militants dressed in black and with their faces covered brought six of the condemned men, their heads covered with cloth bags, to an alley near the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after midday prayers, witnesses said. A militant shot the men in the head one at a time with a pistol, after which he sprayed them with automatic rifle fire, the witnesses said. The bodies were loaded into government ambulances and taken away.”

That followed three previous executions carried out a day earlier. The killings followed Israel’s attack that killed three senior commanders of Hamas’s military wing after Hamas broke another ceasefire by shooting more rockets into Israel. It’s possible that one or more of those executed did provide information to Israel, but you can be sure that none of them received anything more than a summary trial after a brutal interrogation that would have made any man confess to something.

In any case Hamas considers the public demonstration to be more important than guilt or innocence. The public killings are intended to show anyone who dissents that they will suffer the same fate.

The practice goes back to the days of the British mandate when the mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini killed Palestinians open to a Jewish presence. During the anti-Israel uprisings in the 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction that still rules the West Bank murdered some 800 Palestinians for alleged collaboration. The Palestinians will never have peace as long as they keep murdering anyone who wants it.

Dawn of Libya Says It Has Seized the Country’s Capital and Airport After Weeks of Fighting

Libya’s Islamist militias said Sunday they have consolidated their hold on Tripoli and its international airport, driving out rival militias to the outskirts of the capital after a weeks-long battle for control of the strategic hub.

The umbrella group for Islamist militias, calling itself Dawn of Libya, said it has also taken hold of other locations in the capital that were controlled by rival militias. The move draws to a close one chapter in a prolonged confrontation between the Islamist-allied militia, largely from the city of Misrata, and the powerful militia from the western mountains of Zintan.

The fight has largely destroyed the airport and scarred the capital, prompting diplomats, foreign nationals and thousands of Libyans to flee.

The violence in Libya is rooted in the empowerment of militias after successive transitional governments, since the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, depended on them to maintain order in the absence of a strong police force or a unified military.

It also comes as part of a backlash by Islamist factions after losing their power in parliament after June elections and in the face of a campaign by a renegade military general against extremist Islamic militias in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.

The recent violence has been the worst in Libya since 2011. Mysterious airstrikes have struck the positions of Islamist militias, sparking accusations by them that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which oppose Islamists in the region, were behind them.

A field commander of the Dawn of Libya militia said Sunday his forces were in control of Tripoli and adjacent cities, having pushed back the rival Zintan forces some 90 kilometers (56 miles) south of the capital. It wasn’t immediately possible to reach members of the Zintan militias.