RUTHFULLY YOURS

It has been assumed, since the end of the Cold War, that globalization is irreversible and that technologies, cultures, and markets are spreading, merging, and interacting at an ever quicker pace. This is certainly true. But what if, in addition to globalizing, the world is also splitting into separate and antagonistic sub-worlds? Two of them in particular, which ironically came into existence and have been growing as free riders in the Western-shaped universe, now pose a threat to the West.
First, there is what we might call the Wastelands. These are the many countries that have descended into chaos in the last quarter-century, and those that may follow them at any moment. As early as the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington pointed out that disorder was sprawling in the border zones between civilizations. In the ensuing years, Robert D. Kaplan wrote even more specifically about what he termed the “coming anarchy.” The 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which originated at least in part from chaos zones, drew the attention of global decisionmakers to the strategic threats implied by these areas. The “Arab Spring” revolutions of 2011 and events such as the terrorist attack in Benghazi were reminders that chaos is spreading rather than receding, and that, in the space of some twenty years, it has become a permanent fixture of the world.

Foreign Policy has been running for several years a “Failed States Index” (FSI)—renamed the “Fragile States Index” this year—that lists those countries where government and society do not work, or work very badly. According to the 2013 index, at least sixty out of one hundred and seventy-eight countries fit into that category. In other words, one out of three.

The Hebrew Bible is the blueprint of Jewish civilization. And it’s the foundational document of some of the best in civilization as we know it. There in the Bible is the pledge of the Jewish people, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning.’ And then, in our lifetime, that pledge was realized, when the Jews regained their sovereignty in the land of Israel, after it had been under foreign domination for almost 2,000 years. And what’s more, they did it in the 1940s, in the same decade when one-third of the entire Jewish people had been eradicated in Europe. Now that is a miracle of truly biblical proportions.”

Thus, with great solemnity, Ruth Wisse of Harvard introduces Body and Soul: The State of the Jewish Nation, the latest documentary by Gloria Greenfield and her company, Doc Emet. The film, which will have its premiere later this month in numerous American and Canadian cities, as well as in Jerusalem, is an intensely moving experience, documenting — one is tempted to say “once and for all” — that Israel is, was, and always will be, the land of the Jewish people.

Greenfield deftly uses the format developed in her previous films, a succession of prominent “talking heads,” their authoritative commentary accompanied by historic photographs and films, paintings, and archeological objects, all conducing to the ocular proof of Israel’s history in its own promised land.

Wisse leads off the film’s chronological format with the longest and richest section of the film, the biblical evidence, “In the Beginning.” Wisse is succeeded by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the UK, who tells us that “Jewish identity is born in the land of Israel. It begins with two momentous journeys, of Abraham and Sarah from Mesopotamia, and the other, several centuries later by Moses and the Israelites from the Egypt of the Pharoahs; and ever since, in a sense, to be a Jew has meant to be on a journey to the Promised Land.”

The story continues. Author and historian Robert Wistrich points to the fact that though it is hard to document exactly when the special relationship of the Jewish people with the land began, it was at “the very minimum close to 3,000 years” ago, and possibly much longer.

Geert Wilders on “The West’s Battle For Freedom” – on The Glazov Gang.
A titan and courageous truth-teller crystallizes the only way the West will be able to preserve itself.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/geert-wilders-on-the-wests-battle-for-freedom-on-the-glazov-gang/

Would General Allen — or any other general today — recommend contracting out his country’s defenses if it were his country at stake? Of course not.

The Iranian regime remains dedicated to undermining and ultimately destroying the State of Israel. The Islamic State also has Israel in its sights and would certainly use the West Bank as a point from which to attack, if it were open to them.

There can be no two-state solution and no sovereign Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan, however desirable those things might be. The stark military reality is that Israel cannot withdraw its forces from the West Bank.

Fatah leaders ally themselves with the terrorists of Hamas, and, like Hamas, they continue to reject the every existence of the State of Israel.

If Western leaders actually want to help, they should use all diplomatic and economic means to make it clear to the Palestinians that they will never achieve an independent and sovereign state while they remain set on the destruction of the State of Israel.

When in 1942 American General Douglas MacArthur took command of the defense of Australia against imminent Japanese invasion, one of the plans he rejected was to withdraw and fight behind the Brisbane line, a move that would have given large swathes of territory to the Japanese.

Instead, he adopted a policy of forward defense: advancing northwards out of Australia to attack the Japanese on the island of New Guinea. MacArthur then went on to play a pivotal role in the defeat of the Japanese empire.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/bus-ride-in-france-provides-a-snapshot-of-islamization?f=puball

The reality of a warning, sounded for years about a process Europe is undergoing, overtly manifested itself recently on a bus ride in France.

To understand what happened requires understanding Islamization.

This occurs when a nation’s majority native population gradually relinquishes influence to a fast growing-through sustained high birth rates and immigration-Muslim population that becomes more vocal and violent the stronger it gets, ultimately imposing its will upon the host country.

As Islamization runs its course, its negative impact on natives occurs from a combination of factors which they could have acted upon to prevent the loss of influence but, sadly, failed to do so.

Factors include reluctance, prompted by political correctness, to speak out against a tightening noose around their necks caused by Muslim application of sharia over domestic law, establishment of no-go zones where non-Muslims-not even police-dare tread, belief their government will protect them, apathy when it fails to happen, and, ultimately, fear.

The event occurring on a bus in France represents a microcosm of what is eerily taking place throughout most of Europe.

As reported by Mad World News in an October 7th article: “A French man was keeping to himself on a train ride-simply just trying to make it to his destination safely-when he was senselessly beaten to a pulp by a gang of rogue Islamists. The Muslim men didn’t stop at just one target, they also terrorized other innocent passengers.”

The bus security video reveals the following evolution of events:

All appears quiet aboard the bus. A group of at least five Muslim youths exchange hand-slapping greetings. Muslim youth #1 appears to have previously stolen someone’s wallet, sharing it with youth #2. After removing its contents, #2 returns the wallet to #1 who tosses it on the floor near a passenger standing with his back to the group.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/late-to-the-challenge-diminishing-american-leadership-in-the-age-of-terror?f=puball

INTRODUCTION:

A year ago, in trying to make the case for a much diminished role in foreign affairs for the United States, a well known conservative institute in Washington argued our current policies were still linked to our perception of the then Soviet Cold War threat, not the new realities of today.

They even argued: “Soviet war plans for Europe that are now public were primarily defensive; they assumed Soviet forces would be responding to a NATO attack.”

Their claim was two-fold: Not only were they claiming our policy today was based on a threat that no longer existed, but the threat we thought existed during the Cold War was in their view equally bogus.

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The conventional wisdom is that Americans are “war weary”. Many on both the right and left want to eliminate what has been described as America’s “hegemonic pretensions”, what is sometimes referred to as putting an end to our “seeking dragons to slay” or as President John Adams put it “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”. More colloquially, Americans do not want to be the “world’s policeman”. Fair enough.

It is one thing to analyze the extent of our security challenges of the past and differ with conventional wisdom. It is quite again another matter to invent a history to use such a distortion to justify a new policy for today that minimizes threats, promotes isolationism, and to put it bluntly, is blind to reality.

As such, we may be entering the most dangerous and momentous time since the end of World War II at the same time when we are very much unprepared.

Just as we were late after 1945 in understanding the nature of the challenge of what would become known as the Cold War, so we today have not been willing to honestly face the serious security challenges of our time, especially the poisonous coalition of rogue state sponsors of terror and their jihadi affiliates.

Just at the time this threat is getting more serious, the United States and its allies have been content to push for declining defense budgets and meeting fewer security obligations. This has and is making it increasingly difficult to find the leadership necessary to lead a coalition of nations to defeat the threats we face.

How has the tumult in the Middle East affected the debate over Israel’s territorial requirements? For an answer, Mosaic approached Dore Gold, head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, who has long promoted the concept of defensible borders primarily as a means of meeting Israel’s security needs in the West Bank. Our exchange was conducted by email.

Q. Before we get to the idea of “defensible borders” itself, can you begin by telling us about your involvement in it?

A: I became immersed in this issue when I was serving as foreign-policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in the late 1990s. I was tasked with converting the IDF’s “Interests Map” for the West Bank into a form that could be presented to President Bill Clinton; I joined the prime minister for that presentation in the White House Map Room. Four years later, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon asked me to condense the work for his meeting in the Oval Office with President George W. Bush.

This formed the nucleus of what, starting in 2005, would become a series of monographs on the subject published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Copiously illustrated with maps and photographs, they featured essays by such prominent authors as Moshe Yaalon, now Israel’s defense minister, Yaakov Amidror, until recently Israel’s national security adviser, and Major General (ret.) Uzi Dayan. The latest edition in the series was released this year, by coincidence just prior to the Gaza war. [Mosaic linked to a number of chapters here— Eds.]

Q. What was the original idea, and has it changed at all in light of regional developments over the years?

A: The idea was first put forward by Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon after the Six-Day War of 1967. As commander of the pre-state Palmah, Allon was one of the architects of Israel’s national-security doctrine, and had also been a mentor of Yitzhak Rabin. His essential point was, and is, simple enough: Israel must retain certain territories on the West Bank for its security.

Q: What about the Palestinians? That land, after all, is increasingly referred to as occupied Palestinian territory.

It’s a sign of how far America has been corrupted by political correctness, subjectivism in ethics, and relativism in the arts that a shoddy opera that romanticizes murdering terrorists can be put on by a major cultural institution, the Metropolitan Opera of New York City.

I am not an aficionado of heavy weight opera. I won’t go into my esthetic tastes here, because those are irrelevant. What is relevant is the obscenity of John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which debuted at the Metropolitan Opera last night (October 20th), whose libretto is a long-winded, atonal propaganda piece for the Islamic jihadists who hijacked a cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a passenger because he was a Jew. Listen to the sing-song screeching here and also a trailer.

But even the discordant singing and jumbled orchestral score are irrelevant. Even had Adams’s opus been written in the disciplined and original style of Georges Bizet or Giacomo Puccini or Giuseppe Verdi, Klinghoffer remains a sucker punch to all standards of moral decency and civilized taste.

More importantly, staging The Death of Klinghoffer is in conformance to the prescriptive steps for “cultural jihad” promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood in its 1991 memorandum for “transforming” America from a free republic into a bastion of totalitarian Islam. The Brotherhood’s “master plan” calls for “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, composer John Adams, and director Tom Morris I guess don’t mind lending their hands to the PLO, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamic gangs.

The Death of Klinghoffer is fundamentally a U.S. State Department and New York taxpayer-funded exercise in malodorous agitprop for anti-Semitism and Islam. John Adams and the Met may as well have staged an adaptation of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will as a musical with dialogue. Better yet, he could have turned “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers into a serious, Wagnerian style opera, with no dancing and no plumbing for laughs. Why not?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/not-destroying-the-islamic-state-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie came on the show to discuss Not Destroying the Islamic State, analyzing why Obama does not really want to defeat ISIS and why we don’t see any “moderate” Muslim armies killing ISIS terrorists (starts at 14 minute mark). The dialogue was preceded by Nonie focusing on Tricking and Dividing the Muslim World, shedding light on the best strategies to confront and outsmart our enemy in the terror war.

Last August 14 the Wall Street Journal reported that, in July, after Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, Washington had surprised Israel by turning down an Israeli request for “a large number of Hellfire missiles.” Hellfires are an important air-to-surface precision weapon, suited to the kind of warfare Israel was waging against Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza.

But as Amir Rapaport, a veteran Israeli military-affairs writer and editor of the Israel Defense site, now reports:

The full truth…is much more severe: apparently, during Operation Protective Edge, the USA had completely stopped all connections with Israel’s defense procurement delegation based in the USA. For days, no item whatsoever could be shipped. The expected airlift of US ammunition had never even arrived at its point of departure.

The crisis began about ten days into Operation Protective Edge, pursuant to allegations that the percentage of uninvolved civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip was extremely high (IDF admitted that about one half of all Palestinian deaths were probably civilians who had not been involved in the fighting).

At that stage, the Israeli defense establishment submitted to the USA a request for various types of munitions, including Hellfire missiles, to replenish the dwindling inventories of IDF….

The order to stop the processing of all Israeli requests came from a senior echelon—probably the White House, among other reasons, because Israel had ignored the initiatives of Secretary of State John Kerry and preferred to end the operation through a direct channel with the Egyptians. The State Department had been annoyed with Israel for several months, since it was revealed that Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had referred to Kerry as “Messianic” in closed sessions.

No less than three reasons are given here for Washington’s ire toward Israel. Regarding the first—the allegedly high Palestinian civilian casualties—an ongoing study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Information Center has found, so far, that the death rate was indeed about 50%-50% between Palestinian combatants and civilians. This compares favorably with ratios of three civilians killed for every one combatant in Afghanistan, and four civilians for every one combatant in Iraq and in Kosovo.