RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘The bear is loose!” President Obama has been saying, whenever he leaves the White House to visit Starbucks, or sandwich shops, or burger joints, or BBQ shacks, or neighborhood diners, in his increasingly rote and pathetic attempts to “connect” with “real people.” Obama, we have been told, is frustrated, “restless,” bored with the responsibilities and chores of office. He thinks of himself as the bear — intimidating, wild, untamed, roving — escaping his den. But he is flattering himself. Obama is not the bear. He is the cub: aimless, naïve, self-interested, self-indulgent, irresponsible, irresolute. The bear is in Moscow.

One can trace a line from any global hotspot to Russia and its authoritarian ruler. Iran? Russia has assisted its nuclear program for decades. Syria? Russia is Bashar Assad’s arms dealer. Iraq? Russia is sending men and materiel to the central government. Afghanistan? Putin muscled nearby Kyrgyzstan into closing our air base there, crucial for transport, resupply, and reconnaissance in the war against the Taliban. The contretemps between the United States and Germany is the result of Edward Snowden’s breach of national security. Where is Snowden? In Russia, where he has just asked to have his visa renewed. I wonder if Vladimir Putin will say yes.

Then there is Ukraine, where Putin has been driving events since March, when he illegally annexed Crimea. The West thought sanctions would intimidate Putin, would force him into retreat. For a time, he drew down his troops on the Ukrainian border, leaving the fighting in eastern Ukraine to separatists trained, armed, and led by Russian special forces. The West thought it could ignore the situation. A guerrilla war in the east, it was assumed, does not threaten democracy in Kiev. The Ukrainian economy returned to its lethargic equilibrium. The Ukrainians elected a president. President Obama, in his speech at West Point, trumpeted his Ukraine policy as an example of “our ability to shape world opinion” and “isolate Russia.”

Some isolation. Even as Western attention turned to the Middle East, Russia continued to act unimpeded, and the Ukrainian war went on. Recently, when Petro Poroshenko, the new Ukrainian president, retook the city of Sloviansk, Putin’s hand was forced. Russian soldiers reappeared along the border — more than 10,000 at last count. The weapons systems supplied by Russia to the insurgents became more sophisticated. Earlier this week, a rocket brought down a Ukrainian cargo plane. The rocket was fired from Russia. Thursday brought us only the latest unintended consequence of Russia’s war on Ukrainian independence: the destruction of a Malaysian airlines flight carrying 295 souls. The attack is revolting, the loss of life infuriating, but the downing of Flight MH17 is not the first unanticipated outcome of the war Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine. Nor will it be the last.

Make no mistake, the president has instigated the present influx of illegal aliens.
It is a grave error to view the swarming of illegal aliens across our southern border as anything other than a challenge to our sovereignty — a challenge abetted, rather than repulsed, by a president who vows to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” The challenge brings into sharp relief a question I’ve repeatedly pressed (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here): If the states cannot or will not defend themselves, are they still, in any real sense, sovereign?

As expected, the president’s mainstream-media allies portray Obama as a man struggling to manage a crisis beyond his control, a crisis their thin and exhausted playbook instructs them to blame on George W. Bush. Nonsense.

In Faithless Execution, I detail Obama’s immigration lawlessness — at least the very extensive record compiled as of mid-spring 2014, when I had to stop writing in order to make an early June publication date. If you’re keeping track, mid-spring was before the ramping up of the ongoing invasion, which already involves close to 300,000 illegal aliens (less than 20 percent of whom are, according to the New York Times, “unaccompanied minors”). It was, however, months after what we now know was the Obama “Homeland Security” Department’s solicitation of escort services to help handle an anticipated arrival of 65,000 illegal-alien minors.

As one would expect, the usual Obama apologists claim that the administration was not conspiring in the invasion. Rather, it was preparing for a humanitarian crisis it had heard alarms about but was somehow powerless to avert. On its face, this is laughable: The executive branch has many ways of discouraging and stopping attempts by foreigners — whether as an armed force or in overwhelming numbers — to enter our country. More significantly, the facts here point unmistakably to willful administration collusion.

The January 2014 solicitation published by DHS’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement foretells (a) the arrival of 65,000 “unaccompanied alien children,” and, tellingly, (b) the administration’s intention to transfer them to “Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.” Weasel Zipperspoints out the glaring fact, largely ignored by the press, that by planning to dispatch the new arrivals to ORR, the administration implicitly presumed that they should be deemed refugees, not excludable or deportable illegal aliens.

The mission of the ORR is to settle “new populations” within the United States, not to detain them pending expulsion. Clearly, the plan was — is — to seed thousands of illegal aliens in cities and towns throughout the country. That is perfectly consistent with other aspects of the administration’s radical agenda, such as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” Obama’s plan to have the executive branch engineer the racial and ethnic composition of American neighborhoods.

The confirmed death toll now approaches 300 from the missile attack by Russia-backed Ukrainian rebels against a Malaysian Airlines jet. We can stipulate that the foreign policy of President Barack Obama, who works against American interests in both the domestic and the international sphere, is a catastrophe – a frighteningly real study in what happens when America empowers her enemies.

Still, the failure to recognize Putin’s Russia as a hostile power; the delusion that we are part of an “international community” that functions like a global body politic with universal values and common interests under a recognized “rule of law”; and the consequent conceit that figuring out what our strategy should be hinges, like a prosecutor’s case, on proving the rogue’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt – these are not merely Obama fantasies. They are the gospel according to the bipartisan ruling class. With some honorable exceptions like John Bolton, the GOP’s transnational progressives have been nearly as infatuated with Vladimir Putin’s regime as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry.

The international realm in which we actually live is a jungle, not a community. Order is imposed by power, not law. A body politic operating under agreed upon principles that promote freedom and punish crime can afford to take the position that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. This is not so in the international arena, where there are few if any universal animating principles, where freedom is widely denied, and where the criminals are often the rulers. In the international realm, the United States is better off remaining strong and acting in accordance with the wisdom of U.S. Marine General James Mattis: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” To the extent the global order has been reasonably orderly for much of the past half-century, it is because American power—when exercised in furtherance of American interests—is a force for good. It is not because we’ve strengthened international institutions, which serve the interests of authoritarians and are designed to allow rogue nations to even the playing field against American power.

There are now at least twice as many young British Muslims who have gone to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and other such groups than there are fighting for Queen and country here in the British armed forces.

The Israel-haters are no real problem for Israel, but they are the greatest possible problem for Europe.

The barricades are up again outside the Israeli Embassy in London, as they are across many capitals of Europe. Given that even more rockets than “normal” have been raining down on Israel in recent days, any sane country would need further barricades outside the Israeli embassy in order to contain yet another demonstration of support for Israel. But no, another day in London and another Palestinian-ist and Socialist Worker party protest is going on against the Israeli state.

The protestors are not, of course, demonstrating because they especially care about the lives of the people of Gaza. If they cared about the lives of Palestinians — or the people of the region in general — they would have spent night after night outside the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian embassies, among others. They would be sore from sleeping outside Belgravia townhouses. But they are not. They are fresh and raring for the fight.

I have watched them a bit in recent days, watched the contorted hatred on their faces as they scream at the embassy and then watched their friendly sociability as the headscarfed women are driven away by their menfolk, often with their children in tow — a family day outing in “diverse” modern London. Behind their smiles and the increasingly competent public relations that the pro-Hamas faction is managing in Britain, it is possible for some people to forget that what brings these people out is one simple thing: a hatred of the Jewish state and a desire to see it annihilated by the terrorists of Hamas or anyone else at hand.

There are those who will say this is not a not-sufficiently-nuanced observation, that the motives of those protesting Israeli action are motivated by something other than a great hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. But if this were true, why would their posters say, “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza?” There is no “Holocaust” in Gaza. Anybody can see there is no similarity between the organized and systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the precision targeting of some Hamas rocket sites, some of which are deliberately hidden under hospitals, in the Gaza strip. Why do the protestors say “Holocaust” then? They know that this way they will hurt Jews as deeply as possible. By using the term “Holocaust” for this, they will either give the impression that the Holocaust was a small and minimal thing in the history of war – such as the confrontation between Hamas and Israel currently is – or else that the Israelis are, in their view, currently carrying out precisely the same barbarism which made the creation of the state of Israel such an added necessity for Jews in the 1940s, and that by supposedly becoming the Nazis they are meant to abhor, the Jews have forfeited any right to be regarded as part of acceptable humankind.

There is no URL here. This was sent directly by Professor Harari who is currently the Chair of the Board of the Davidson Institute of Science Education at the Weizmann Institute and Chair of the Management Committee of the Weizmann Global Endowment Management Trust in New York. He was the President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his presidency, the Weizmann Institute, entirely dedicated to basic research, became one of the leading academic and scientific organizations in the world. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. rsk

These lines are written ten days after the beginning of the latest Gaza conflict and thirteen years since the Hamas started launching thousands of rockets from Gaza exclusively into Israeli civilian targets. It has also been nine years since Israel completely left the Gaza strip, and a few hours since the Hamas rejected two Egyptian cease fire proposals, and Israel launched a ground operation aimed at destroying Hamas offensive facilities.
In Israeli towns, near the Gaza border, 13 year old children celebrated their Bar Mitzvah without experiencing, since their birth, even one day free of fear of rockets, always having 15 seconds to reach for an improvised cover. High school graduates, the class of 2014, never went to school or returned from school, since kindergarten, without a real threat of a Hamas rocket hitting them on the way. It is debatable whether the children’s stress or their parents’ anxiety has more damaging long term effects. It is a hard competition.

The Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, is openly committed to the annihilation of the State of Israel and to the extermination of all Jews, wherever they are. The United States, The European Union, Egypt and Israel consider the Hamas a terrorist organization. The Palestinian authority and most Arab countries treat the Hamas with suspicion, if not with animosity. They would be delighted if Hamas were destroyed, although they would not say so publicly. The amazing fact is that the only solid support of the Hamas comes, in recent years, from two countries: Qatar, an alleged staunch ally of the United States, home of the American Forces in the Gulf, and Turkey, a member of NATO, whose mask of moderation was lifted when the hot-headed Mr. Erdogan recently started making openly anti-Semitic statements, in the best traditions of Nazi Germany and the Muslim Brothers. The most disturbing factor of this unusual alliance is the mind boggling attitude of the United States and its President Barack Obama. The United States, “leading from behind”, as its current policy dictates, has consistently avoided helping the Egyptian negotiators, who tried to broker a cease fire between Israel and the terrorists. The Egyptians openly stated that President Obama has joined forces, in an unholy partnership, with Qatar and Turkey, supporting the Muslim Brothers, under the faint excuse of “they won the democratic election in Egypt”. They won? So did Hitler, after all.

Life in much of Israel is progressing on the basis of an unusual oxymoron: The Emergency Routine. This means going about your normal business, and getting, from time to time, into a barely protected area, not a real shelter, within 15 or 60 or 90 seconds, depending on the distance the rocket has to travel from Gaza in order to reach your area. Parents bring their children to their place of work, if possible; grandparents are drafted as babysitters; little children are taught to lie face down on the floor when an alarm catches them outdoors, and they are more than a few seconds away from cover. A few minutes later, explosions are heard. Perhaps a rocket falling in an empty area; Often the protective “Iron Dome” defensive missile intercepts the intruder from the sky; sometimes a rocket falling in a built area, causing damage and bodily harm. And then life goes on till the next siren sounds.

In the New York Times last week, columnist Nicholas Kristof officially became an Islamophobe. More precisely, he finally adopted somewhat the same stance toward Islam as the Cassandras whom Kristof and his ilk relentlessly demonize as Islamophobes – all the while trying to distance himself from them.

“In country after country,” a concerned Kristof begins, “Islamic fundamentalists are measuring their own religious devotion by the degree to which they suppress or assault those they see as heretics, creating a human rights catastrophe as people are punished or murdered for their religious beliefs.” No, really? Surely it is no surprise to him that writers such as those of us at FrontPage have been expressing our concern about Islamic fundamentalists for many years. We’ve noted repeatedly that the most numerous victims of Muslims are other Muslims, many of whom are ostracized (at best) or killed (at worst) precisely because they aren’t sufficiently hardcore believers.

But Kristof dismisses such writers as “Islam-haters in America and the West,” who “denounce Islam as a malignant religion of violence, while politically correct liberals are reluctant to say anything for fear of feeding bigotry.” It’s not bigotry or hate to point out that orthodox Muslims themselves demonstrate its malignance and violence every day around the world. Moreover, “politically correct liberals” aren’t silent only because they don’t want to feed bigotry; the most radical are silent because they see Islam as an ally in their multiculturalist siege of the West.

“Yet there is a real issue here of religious tolerance,” Kristof continues, “affecting millions of people, and we should be able to discuss it.” No kidding. As I mentioned above, the freedom fighters that the left dismisses as Islam-haters have been trying to discuss the Islam problem for decades, but have been relentlessly attacked and delegitimized for it. Now however, Kristof decides we need to have an open discussion, as if it’s his idea.

He was apparently prompted to address this topic by the murder of a Muslim friend at the hands of his friend’s co-religionists. “Such extremists,” he posits, “do far more damage to the global reputation of Islam than all the world’s Islamophobes put together.” This is his grudging way of admitting that orthodox Muslims themselves are the ones responsible for Islam’s dismal reputation. Now if only he would connect the dots and acknowledge that perhaps the world’s “Islamophobes” have legitimate concerns.

But Kristof hedges his newfound realistic perspective on Islam with an historical aside: “The paradox is that Islam historically was relatively tolerant… Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today, but, for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were.” He cites the Holocaust and “the killing of Muslims by Christians at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina” as evidence for this. First, anti-Semitism has always run deep in Muslim lands, not just today, because Jew-hatred is endemic to Islam itself. Secondly, Islam has not been “tolerant” for most of its history, and whatever its historical sins, Christianity has evolved and Islam has not; the pressing issue is that Islam remains violently intolerant today.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/easy-meat-inside-the-world-of-muslim-rape-gangs-on-the-glazov-gang/

Don’t miss The Glazov Gang’s special 2-part series with Gavin Boby of the Law and Freedom Foundation. In Part I, he shares his battle against “Muslim Rape Gangs in the U.K.” and in Part II, he discusses his report on this horrifying phenomenon, ‘Easy Meat,‘ and takes us “Inside the World of Muslim Rape Gangs”:

The fundamental incoherence of multiculturalism comes from its cultural relativism that posits no one way of life is better than another, but then singles out the West as a uniquely oppressive global villain. Even more contradictory, at the same time that multiculturalists slander the West for its alleged crimes, they praise and promote political and social ideals––democracy, freedom, equality, and law-based justice–– that flourish only in the West. This cognitive dissonance is made possible by massive historical ignorance of just where such ideas originated and developed. The great value of Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom lies in its recovery of that history, and the role that the “Anglosphere,” the English-speaking countries, played in recognizing and nurturing those ideals for over 1500 years.

Hannan is a writer, blogger, and currently the Conservative representative of Southeast England in the European Parliament, where he vigorously monitors and battles the dirigiste excesses and autocratic impulses of the European Union functionaries. He is also a stalwart friend of the U.S., a throwback to the days when the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S. was instrumental in turning back the fascist, Nazi, and communist assault on everything that comprises the liberal democratic ideals universally admired and imitated, even by those illiberal regimes who must pay lip-service to democracy and freedom even as they work to subvert them. Readers will find in Inventing Freedom an immensely readable, clearly argued survey of those ideals, the history in which they struggled to survive, and the great heroes whose sacrifice and commitment to them ensured that we enjoy them today.

First Hannan defines the core political ideals and virtues that create the bonds between England and America, the Anglosphere’s most spectacular success story. “Elected parliaments, habeas corpus, free contract, equality before the law, open markets, an unrestricted press, the right to proselytize for any religion, jury trials” all find their modern origins in England, from where they have spread not just to America, but to the whole world, along with the English language and its rich vocabulary that makes for precise, concrete expression. Protestantism is another inheritance from England that shaped the political order and mores of the United States. The notion that individuals can read scripture unmediated by a hierarchical, centralized authority reinforced the bond between religious and civic freedom, both of which are predicated on individual freedom and equality. “Free speech, free conscience, and free parliaments”––Protestantism, Hannan argues, was the guarantor of all of them. Finally, the principles of the American Revolution codified in the Declaration of Independence were seen by the Colonists as theirs by right as Englishmen, for they were grounded in the common law, Magna Carta, and the English Bill of Rights created by the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Hannan reminds us that the Colonists did not understand “revolution” as the destruction of the old and the creation of the new, as would happen in France and later Russia, but rather as a “turn of the wheel” to restore traditional political rights and institutions that had been violated by a tyrant.

Israel deployed ground forces in Gaza Thursday night both because Hamas’s terror tunnels into Israel have become an unacceptable threat, and because it had to break the deadlock that had developed between it and Hamas.

Until the ground invasion, Israel and Hamas were in a holding pattern. Hamas would not accept a ceasefire deal because Egypt’s offers provided the Iranian sponsored, Muslim Brotherhood terror army with no discernible achievements. And absent such achievements, Hamas prefers to keep fighting. Israel for its part is unwilling to make any concessions to Hamas in exchange for its cessation of its criminal terror war that targets innocent civilians in Israel as a matter of course. As Hamas sees things, it has three ways of winning.

First, if Israel had agreed to ceasefire terms that left Hamas better off than it was when it started its newest round of indiscriminate missile attacks against Israeli civilian targets, then it could have declared victory.

Hamas’s terms for a ceasefire included, among other things, an open border with Egypt, egress to the sea, open access to the border zone with Israel, an airport, a sea port, and the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons. Obviously, if Israel agreed to even a few of these terms, its agreement would have constituted a strategic victory for Hamas.

The second way for Hamas to win is if it able to accuse Israel of killing a large number of Palestinians at one time In that case, Hamas can expect for the US to join with the EU and the UN in forcing Israel to accept ceasefire terms that require it to make significant concessions to the Palestinians in Gaza as well as in Judea and Samaria.

This is what happened in Hezbollah’s war with Israel in 2006. During the fighting, Hezbollah alleged that Israel killed a great number of Lebanese civilians in Kfar Kana. Those allegations caused then US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to effectively end US support for Israel’s war effort. Rice quickly coerced Israel into accepting ceasefire terms that paved the way for Hezbollah’s takeover of the Lebanese government.

If Hamas is able to create a similar situation in Gaza, it will likely achieve the same sort of strategic victory over Israel.

Yesterday, the conflict between Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government may have escalated to its most dangerous level to date. A Malaysia Airlines passenger jet carrying 295 people was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine, approximately 35 miles from the Russian border. All 280 passengers and 15 crew members on board were killed, and burning wreckage and bodies were scattered over a 10-mile radius near the town of Shakhtars’k. Responsibility for the downing has yet to be determined, but separatist groups who have reportedly blocked Ukrainian officials from the scene claim the plane’s flight data recorder has been sent to Moscow.

The Ukrainian government claims Russia was behind the atrocity. “According to the General Staff of Ukrainian Armed Forces, the airplane was shot down by the Russian Buk missile system as the liner was flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters,” said a statement from the Foreign Ministry in Kiev. “Ukraine has no long-range air defense missile systems in this area. The plane was shot down, because the Russian air defense systems was affording protection to Russian mercenaries and terrorists in this area. Ukraine will present the evidence of Russian military involvement into the Boeing crash.”

Defense Minister Valery Heletey and National Security and Defense Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko reminded the world that this was not an isolated incident. On Monday, Heletey alerted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that a AN-26 military transport plane had been shot down in the Luhansk region during an anti-terrorist operation. Heletey insisted that the plane’s altitude of 6.5 kilometers put it above the threshold of a man-portable air defense system, meaning “the plane was struck by another, more powerful missile that was probably launched from Russian territory.” Lysenko insisted that Russia was also to blame for a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter plane shot down Wednesday. “A military aircraft of the Russian Armed Forces launched a missile strike against an SU-25 aircraft of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which was performing tasks on Ukrainian territory,” he said.

Those assessments cannot be confirmed. Furthermore, it is being reported a social media site attributed to Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov that took credit for downing the AN-26 on June 14, killing 49 government soldiers, also claimed to have downed an additional “army transporter” yesterday—at the location where the Malaysia airliner crashed. An earlier post removed from the same site claimed they had seized the Russian-made Buk missile system from the Ukrainian army. The Buk is capable of downing an airline at the altitude at which the Malaysian airliner was flying. The deleted post had also noted that separatist fighters “had warned (the Ukrainian armed forces) not to fly in ‘our sky.’ And here is a video confirming that a ‘bird fell,’” it stated.

American intelligence confirmed that a surface-to-air missile was fired at the plane, but remained divided over its source of origin. Another separatist leader, Alexander Borodai, told Russia’s state-run Rossiya 24 TV that the plane was “truly shot down by the Ukrainian Air Force,’’ but offered no proof in that regard. He was aware of the reports about fellow rebels seizing the Buk missile, but noted that even if they did, no one was capable of operating it.