RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374273/print

A federal jury in Manhattan has convicted Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s confidant, spokesman and son-in-law, of a terrorist conspiracy to kill Americans and providing material support to al Qaeda. It did not take long: the jury’s announced its verdict during the second day of deliberations in the three-week trial.

Some quick observations:

This case was very strong, made all the stronger by the risky defense strategy. Under federal law, once a conspiracy is proved to exist, very little evidence is required to link a conspirator to it—basically, the prosecutor just needs to show that the defendant knew about the conspiracy’s objectives and joined in them as something he wanted to achieve. Abu Ghaith conceded the existence of the al Qaeda conspiracy, admitted he knew that killing Americans was one of its objectives, and intentionally performed acts—including putting out menacing statements from bin Laden after 9/11—that were helpful to the conspiracy. The hair he tried to split was that his motive was to speak out on behalf of Muslims globally rather than al Qaeda specifically. Aside from being untrue, that’s not a defense: From a strictly legal standpoint, there’s nothing inconsistent in being subjectively motivated to help Muslims worldwide and joining al Qaeda’s jihad against the West.

Abu Ghaith attempted the same defense that the Blind Sheikh tried when I prosecuted him back in the Nineties: namely, that the jury should understand that his threats and incitements in al Qaeda’s cause not as co-conspirator statements but as the preachments of a theologian performing the traditional role of an imam. Sadly, there is nothing inconsistent in these two things, either: There are commands to brutality in Islamic scripture, and if one resorts to them in the course of inciting jihadist violence, one is furthering a terrorist conspiracy even if one also happens to be an imam. Moreover, even if there were anything to the “theology” claim, several of Abu Ghaith’s assertions (e.g., announcing three weeks after 9/11 that “the storm of airplanes will not abate”) were black-and-white extortionate threats and difficult to rationalize as “theology.”

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/03/26/not-even-wrong-about-russia/

Wolfgang Pauli once said of a young physicist’s work, “It is not even wrong.” The put-down applies to Republican thinking about Russia: my conservative colleagues don’t even know what the ruckus is about. The Germans know, and that’s why Chancellor Angela Merkel today opposed sanctions against Russia except in the case of further aggression. Her position was echoed by former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Sanctions would throw B’rer Putin into the Briar, er, Bamboo Patch.

A specter is haunting Europe, and that is the specter of a Russian-Chinese alliance at the expense of Europe. China is dynamic, and its dynamism is transforming the “Silk Road” countries that lie across Russia’s southern border. China is building high-speed rail and high-speed internet south to Rangoon and eastward to Istanbul, intent on transforming its neighbors into an export market for high-value-added manufacturing and high-tech products. It’s one of the most remarkable ventures in world economic history, and the most underreported story of the year. My conservative friends have been predicting China’s economic demise every year for the past dozen, and have been wrong each time. They notice the elephant dung, but ignore the elephant.

China’s appetite for Siberian resources, including hydrocarbons and perhaps including water, is limitless. The Russians and Chinese have every reason to suspect each other. But if they put their differences aside, the economic synergies would be extensive. What should worry the West is the prospective synergies in military technology as well. Russia is rolling out the S500 air defense system. We shuddered at the prospect that Russia might provide its 20-year-old S300 system to Damascus or Tehran; we really don’t know how much better the new iteration is, but it might be a great deal better. Chinese rocketry already is good enough to sink any American ship within several hundred miles of its coastline. We really don’t want them to get together.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2014/03/26/review-of-schamas-history-of-the-jews.html

Schama is a historian but one more at home as a modern television personality where authentic history is not always apparent.

Schama started what he called the story, strangely not the history, at a period some 3,000 years ago. But that timeline was already ancient Jewish history, which essentially is nearer 4,000 years old.

Schama should have started a program about the History of the Jews with the first Jew, Abraham, he who is called the Holy Convert, and portray his arrival from Ur of the Chaldees to Hebron with his purchase of the burial plot in the field and nearby cave of Machpela. That was already one thousand years before Schama began his “story.”

Everything began with Abraham’s relationship with God and the profound earth shattering acceptance of the Oneness and Unity of Him – the essential and utterly pure Jewish belief in monotheism which precludes attribution of divine powers to any other than the One and Only Supreme Being; invisible and indivisible.

The following events in the lives of Isaac and Jacob, who with their wives, the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, at the very least, should have been accorded the importance they demand. They were the very progenitors of the Jewish people. But they were barely mentioned.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/steven-plaut/lessons-for-israel-from-americas-civil-war-in-coping-with-treason/

Israel is currently under a worldwide assault, one whose foundations are anti-Semitism. The campaign of demonization and delegitimizing has many forms, including the economic warfare of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement or BDS. The goal of the campaign is the annihilation of Israel and its population, and victory for the movement of Arab terrorism and Islamofascism.

It is impossible to understand fully this assault against Israel and the Jews without an appreciation of the role of Israeli leftwing traitors, collaborating with anti-Israel Arab nationalists. From the beginning, the initiatives calling for worldwide boycotts of Israel have come from a small group of disloyal radical leftist Israelis, many of them holding tenured positions at Israeli universities. These lead the calls for boycotts against their own country and their own employers. They provide a figleaf of respectability for anti-Semites around the world who can claim that even “progressive” Israelis are endorsing their campaign to boycott Israel and Israeli institutions. The disloyal tenured radicals are also the inventors of the canard that Israel is an apartheid regime. They are the moral equivalents of Vichy French and other European collaborators with Nazi Germany during World War II. Their aim is to provide legitimacy, aid and comfort to the enemies of their own country.

The belligerence of the Israeli Radical Left is not restricted to endorsements of BDS. Radical Leftists in Israel have led campaigns for mutiny and insurrection among soldiers designed to persuade Israelis to refuse to serve in the military. The Radical Left wants to impose its political agenda on the country undemocratically, by conditioning army service on the adoption of its own political agenda. (Some rightwing groups have also called upon Israelis to refuse to serve in the military unless their own political agenda is adopted.) In some cases, the radical Leftists have openly endorsed terrorism and violence. In almost all cases the Radical Left opposes freedom of speech for non-leftists.

The Mideast Test — on The Glazov Gang at the West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes
Caroline Glick, Robert Spencer and Raymond Ibrahim grapple with the threats emanating from the Islamic Middle East.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-mideast-test-on-the-glazov-gang-at-the-west-coast-retreat-in-palos-verdes-2/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-moss-covered-rolling-stone

Suppose someone buttonholed you on the street, a fellow wearing an aluminum pyramid for a hat, a blue jumpsuit with numerous pockets even on the pants legs, and L.L. Bean hiking boots, and who had intense, glazed-over eyes that sent a zing of fear up your spine but which invited you to enter his realm of demons and jins and unicorns. He begins spouting that the world is flat, that the moon is just a big mottled silver disk in the sky which if you stare at out of focus long enough you’d see the face of God smiling down at you, and that the stars were but pinholes filtering through the light of an alternate universe.

You know this fellow is more than a crackpot and that not much of the real universe is filtering through to his mind. You might listen to him for a while, more from pity than from anything else. You would throw glances around at passersby, wanting to communicate in embarrassment that you’re not really with this fellow, but you don’t want to tell him to buzz off, and please let go of the lapel of your jacket, because he just might have a gun or a knife in one of those pockets and not granola bars and packets of Trail Mix on which he seems to have been subsisting. You listen to him with effort, with a patient courtesy that is costing you sweat and physical strength because you’re also restraining a desire to laugh in his face.

To make the experience endurable, you imagine you’re Cary Grant, tied to a chair in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace, and that your seemingly lucid captor is Raymond Massey, an escaped lunatic from a mental asylum for the criminally insane who’s claiming he’s a master murderer….

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/atty-general-holder-wont-charge-woman-who-voted-for-obama-6-times/

Voter fraud doesn’t exist. It can’t exist if you don’t charge the perps.

Last week Al Sharpton embraced convicted vote fraudster Melowese Richardson at a “voting rights” rally in Cincinnati. The United States Department of Justice under Eric Holder has done nothing to Melowese Richardson 410 days after she admitted on camera that she committed multiple federal felonies by voting six times for President Obama’s reelection.

Federal law makes it a felony to vote more than once for President. In fact, 42 U.S.C. Section 1973i(e) subjects Richardson to twenty-five years in federal prison for her six votes for Obama.

The lack of DOJ action against an unrepentant federal vote fraudster combined with Richardson’s lionization by Sharpton and the organization that sponsored the rally demonstrates how the Justice Department is facilitating a culture of brazen criminality on the eve of the 2014 midterm elections.

If Obama and Holder helped out the New Black Panther Party’s racist voter intimidation, what were the odds that they would change one of their own activists for voting early and often?

It’s the Chicago way.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-world-war/print/

The Saudi Monarchy and Putin aren’t afraid of Barack Obama or even of an F-35; they’re afraid of fracking.

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal said that “North American shale gas production is an inevitable threat.” And Putin suddenly turned into an environmentalist when it came to fracking warning that it makes “black stuff comes out of the tap.”

The Russians and the Saudis are both threatened by American energy production for economic reasons and political reasons. America’s import of oil turned Saudi Arabia from a backward country of goat herders not that much more advanced than Afghanistan into a world power whose armies are the legions of Muslim settlers and terrorists spreading across the world.

Without Saudi oil, the Clash of Civilizations with Islam might not even be happening. Energy also allowed Putin to shore up a flailing government and put it back on the path to becoming an expanding empire. But it wasn’t really the KGB oligarchy or the Saudi monarchy that made those things happen.

It was our own environmentalists.

Islam is spreading terror worldwide fueled by oil and dreams of a global Caliphate. Asian countries face a war with China over oil in the South China Sea. Russia is rebuilding the Soviet Union at gunpoint and gaspoint. As Russia, China and Islamic groups gain more confidence; the scale of their conquests will only increase. And all three have become serious threats because of environmentalism.

Environmentalism drove Western nations to export dirty jobs and industries abroad. China gobbled up American manufacturing while Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE took up American energy production. Putin arrived late to the party, but still managed to do to Europe what the Saudis had done to the US. Europe won’t do anything about Russia’s expansionism because it has come to depend on it.

US imports of crude oil quadrupled between 1970 and 1980 while domestic crude oil production continued to fall. Not that long ago the United States was importing 60 percent of its petroleum. Among other economic and social factors, the rise in crude oil imports aligned neatly with the rise of the environmental movement. By the seventies, environmental fanaticism was written into Federal law.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/valerie-jarretts-influence-on-obama/print/

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. His latest book is 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative.

FP: Paul Kengor, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Valerie Jarrett, her background, her relationship with Barack Obama, and her influence in the Obama White House.

Let’s begin first with who Valerie Jarrett is — and her relationship with Barack Obama.

Kengor: Thanks Jamie.

Valerie Jarrett is President Obama’s single most important and influential adviser. No one else in the White or the entire administration is as close to Obama. She has been described as everything from his “right-hand woman” to like a sister and even a mother to Obama. To cite some mainstream/leftist sources: The New York Times says she’s Obama’s “closest friend in the White House,” his “envoy,” his “emissary,” and his “all-purpose ambassador.” The Times calls her the “ultimate Obama insider.” Dana Milbank says her connection to Obama is “deep and personal” and that she’s “the real center of Obama’s inner circle.”

Obama himself calls her one of his “oldest friends” and says “I trust her completely.”

As for Jarrett, she says that she and Obama have a “shared view of where the United States fits in the world.” She says they “have kind of a mind meld.” She’s says that “chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.”

FP: Ok, so that begs the next question: What is it exactly that they want to do?

Kengor: That’s a very good question. I think the best I can say, which is admittedly at times vague from a policy standpoint, is that both favor some form of leftist “fundamental transformation.”

In domestic policy, we can expect them to desire and pursue the kinds of policies that Obama was able to implement in 2009-10 when he had a leftist Pelosi-Reid Congress. The current Republican majority in Congress gets a lot of heat from conservatives, but at least it has slowed the radical push to the left that occurred under Obama, Pelosi, and Reid during those first two years of the Obama presidency. Those first two years were an Obama-Jarrett policy fest. That what an Obama-Jarrett agenda looks like.

In terms of foreign policy, here again it’s difficult to track down precise ideological statements and actions from Jarrett, though she has said unequivocally that her worldview fully reflects Barack Obama’s. It may even be worse than Obama’s, if the reports of her intervention on Osama Bin Laden are correct.

My sense is that both Obama and Valerie Jarrett prefer a weaker America on the world stage. The pandering to Putin in the first term was probably a reflection of Obama-Jarrett thinking, and thus so is the humiliation at the hands of Putin in the second term.

I’m also suspicious of Valerie Jarrett’s possibly having provided negative input into Obama’s statements on Iran, including his terrible Carter-like reaction to the initial uprising in the Iranian “street” in June 2009. Did Obama’s behavior in that period, which was initially so weak that even Democrats were aghast, reflect Valerie Jarrett’s input? I can’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

FP: How much influence does she actually have on policy?

Kengor: Her influence is highly significant. She has her hands in every major decision, if not every small one. She’s constantly monitoring things, inserting her input and protecting her Barack. I could give a bunch of examples, but here are two.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/03/sunday-christians-dying/

Irene Petros is the pseudonym of Christian university student. She chooses not to use her real name for fear of harassment on campus

As Muslim slaughter Christians, the supine West soothes its conscience with relativism and myths about “the religion of peace”. Today heads roll and blood flows in Syria and Libya. How long before Islam’s emboldened legionaries take their campaign directly to the West?

The most heartbreaking, yet overlooked repercussion of the Arab Spring has been the intensified suffering of Christians at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Horrific accounts of persecution are commonly documented by both Christian and Middle Eastern media, but are rarely reported outside the region. Thus, little is known in the West about such occurrences, despite the persecution of Christians having doubled in 2013 on the numbers for the previous year, according nondenominational group Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians.

Open Doors’ annual World Watch List, which ranks the countries where Christians face the most persecution, lists North Korea as the most dangerous country. However, 36 out of the top 50 nations are Islamic, indicating that Islamic fundamentalism is the biggest overall threat Christianity currently faces.

One recent example out of Somalia (ranked second on the World Watch List), sheds light on the deplorable circumstances Middle Eastern Christians face. Militants from the terrorist entity Al-Shabab reportedly beheaded a mother of two girls, ages 8 and 15, and her cousin upon discovering that they were Christians. The girls were forced to watch their own mother be martyred at the hands of savages. This has been only one of the many vile acts experienced on a daily basis by the Christians in the Middle East.

In Nigeria, terrorist group Boko Haram (meaning “Western teaching is forbidden”) has continuously targeted Christians for over four years. It’s attacks have cost the lives of thousands and destroyed and churches and schools, leaving Nigerians in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity. These attacks have been in keeping with Boko Haram’s professed goal of wiping out the Christian population and establishing an Islamic state in Nigeria. if the rest of the world continues to turn a blind eye and with the Nigerian military struggling to counter the menace, Boko Haram appears well on its way to acvhieving its goals.

Nor is Boko Haram the only group targeting Christians in Nigeria. Iin March, Muslim Fulani herdsman took the lives of over 100 Christians and destroyed homes and churches in Kaduna.