RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=63060
HARMONY
The European and Eurasian Unions confuse large Muslim populations with international influence. Obama made that same mistake when he asserted proudly that the United States was one of the world’s biggest Muslim countries. Having a large Muslim minority is a source of conflict, not power.

Advanced countries with large Muslim minority populations include the United States, France, Thailand and Israel. In all of these countries, the Muslim minority has been an explosive element spurring conflict, terrorism and cycles of violence that are never broken.

China understands that stability is more important than size. The younger world powers trying to compete with it would do well to learn that simple lesson.

Islamerica, Eurabia and Eurasia

Saudi Cleric Forbids Muslims From Traveling to Mars

HE’S GOT A MILLION OF EM

Sadly Oliver Stone is too stupid to be cynical. Too red and too brain dead to feel any shame when pounding out sentences like, “Whatever moral authority the United States gained for helping the Soviets defeat Germany in World War II.”There are so many things wrong with that sentence, it’s almost hard to list them all. If anything it was the Soviets, former allies of Hitler, who helped the United States defeat Hitler. The Soviet Union was losing a war of attrition that it survived with the help of American supplies. The idea that Soviet troops could have singlehandedly made it to Berlin without a western front is worth less than the leftover cocaine in Stone’s vest pocket.
Worse still, Oliver Stone thinks that the United States gained moral authority from turning over Eastern Europe to brutal dictatorships, rather than from the liberation of Western Europe.

But that’s just one sentence and Stone has a million of them. Or dozens at any rate.

Every Time Oliver Stone Writes About History, History Dies

Muslims Complain About Lack of Mosques in Korea

HIT HARD OR GO HOME

If anyone expected Joe Lhota to be able to play Giuliani, they were disappointed. Like so many Republicans, including Mitt Romney, Lhota, despite being down over 40 points, was too afraid to hit a man whom the media decided was “likable”.And so Lhota is going to lose. Unless the welfare class and the unions licking their lips at being able to eat the city whole and spit out the crumbs on what’s left of Detroit somehow decide to stay home on election day, New York City will have a radical left-wing mayor.

And it’s Lhota’s fault.

Bill de Blasio was a political activist for a murderous Communist regime that burned churches and synagogues. And the media will make a federal case out of a Lhota sneeze.
That’s what Lhota is up against and he is only slowly coming to that realization, which, like too many Republicans, has only made him more timid.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=63057
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

PLANLESS IN OBAMALAND

HITTING BOTTOM
The Saudis, who had always been noted for being subtle, stopped being subtle when a member of one of their think tanks openly declared, “We are learning from our enemies now how to treat the United States.”
There is no better metric of contempt in a region where everyone wears a false face than honesty like that. The Saudis have decided that we are no longer even worth lying to. They believe that we have become so worthless that they can tell us what they really think of us.
There’s no easier way to tell that you’ve hit bottom than when the people who have been sponging off you decide to move on like lice fleeing roadkill or rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Obama Loses the Middle East
Pentagon Declares War on White Privilege

STUPID IS AS SHEILA JACKSON LEE

Sheila Jackson-Lee is one of the dumbest people in America and the fourth dumbest person in Congress. If Sheila Jackson-Lee and Joe Biden played chess, the pieces would come to life and run away.
Sheila Jackson-Lee thought that America planted a flag on Mars and won the Vietnam War. Apparently she also thought that when she was passing discrimination laws, the Constitution would keep them from applying to her because she was a politician.

Sheila Jackson-Lee: Constitution Gives Me Immunity to Discriminate Against the Disabled

Did China get its September 11?

YOU DIDN’T BUILD THAT
The Jewish Iraqi Archive, a collection of bibles and other religious books, as well as personal material like schoolbooks from the former Jews of Iraq, confiscated by the Iraqi security services and then transported to the United States after the fall of Saddam, has been in the news lately.

Some senators and congressmen would like the Jewish archive returned to the Jewish community. Iraq meanwhile firmly wants the archive.

According to an Al-Arabiya story, Iraq wants them because “Israel is keen on obtaining the manuscripts in order to prove their claim that the Jews had built the Tower of Babel as part of its attempt to distort the history of the Middle East for its own interests.”

The Jewish archive is part of a dastardly Jewish plot to claim ownership of the Tower of Babel… which doesn’t exist anymore.

Iraq Wants Jewish Archive to Prove Ownership of the Tower of Babel

EXPRESS TRAIN TO THE BRONX

The New York Times/Siena College Poll for October 21-26 shows that while only 9 percent of white voters feel they haven’t heard enough about Bill de Blasio, 20 percent haven’t heard enough about Joe Lhota. Among Black and Hispanic voters, those numbers rise to 38 and 35 percent.There’s something very wrong when a third of minority voters don’t know much of anything about a candidate in a mayoral election not long before it wraps up.

Bill de Blasio’s huge lead is largely that of minority voters. De Blasio is at 55 percent among white voters, but at 90 percent among black voters and at 76 percent among Hispanic voters.

The huge lead is really a lead of uninformed minority voters swayed by class warfare and racial appeals and a media blockade on any negative coverage of Bill de Blasio or positive coverage of his opponent.

Bill de Blasio does best in the Bronx with 76 percent of the vote. That’s appropriate because his policies will turn all of New York City into the Bronx.

The Real Story About Bill de Blasio’s “Huge Lead” is Uninformed Minority Voters

No, it was never intended to be an “insurance” program.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=63054

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy — or is it mythology? — lies at the center of an emerging chasm on the right. His domestic statism bequeathed us the modern American welfare state. His World War II leadership was largely responsible for victory over Nazi and Japanese totalitarianism, yet set the stage for the brutal Soviet conquest of half the world — and whether “set the stage” means “passively indulged,” “actively facilitated,” or something in between, is the nub of the argument.

At the peril of oversimplification, I would contend that neoconservatives — an important bloc of the conservative movement, and one that is extraordinarily influential in the Republican party — recall FDR more fondly than do more traditional conservatives. As Charles Krauthammer observes in Things That Matter, a terrific new collection of memorable Krauthammer columns, many neoconservatives have made the political journey from left to right, as Charles himself has. They harbor sympathy for liberal aspirations to a more egalitarian society, even as they recognize the damage wrought by New Deal and Great Society programs. They see FDR as the heroic trailblazer of a true Pax Americana, a world stabilized by U.S. engagement, leadership, and strength.

To the contrary, more traditional conservatives (I count myself in this camp), seethe over the evisceration of limited-government constitutionalism and the blurring of lines between prudent foreign interventions and international adventurism, between sovereignty and multilateralism. It makes for a healthy intramural debate — as long as we try to remember that it really is intramural, as we often forget when it gets as heated as it is at the moment.

Ronald Radosh, the former Marxist and accomplished neoconservative historian, has lately been the spear’s point in defending the FDR legacy on both the foreign-affairs and domestic-policy sides. His blistering review of Diana West’s American Betrayal vigorously champions Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II. I believe Ron gives Diana’s book a bad rap, and I will explain why in another column, coming soon.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=63050
Fox News’s Catherine Herridge has been reporting that Senate Republicans have been pushing the Obama administration’s State and Justice Departments about their stonewalling on the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor, quite correctly contends that these agencies must not be permitted to “hide behind a criminal investigation … That’s not a good reason to deny the Congress witness statements 48 hours after the attack.” We can reasonably suspect these statements, as well as other information to which the administration has been obstructing congressional access for over a year, would corroborate existing proof that the Obama administration, from the president on down, (a) well knew that the Benghazi operation was a jihadist attack by al Qaeda affiliated terrorists, and (b) that the administration perpetrated a massive fraud on the public in (c) pretending the attack was somehow caused by a bogus anti-Muslim video (as if that would be a justification for mass-murder), and (d) orchestrating the outrageous spectacle of a prosecution against the video producer in order to convey to Muslims that the United States of America was enforcing sharia law proscriptions against speech critical of Islam.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, a former New Hampshire state prosecutor, further emphasizes that a terrorist attack on our ambassador and on American facilities in Libya, an act of war by enemies of the United States, is not supposed to be handled like a run-of-the-mill criminal prosecution.

Meanwhile, House Republicans led by Trey Gowdy, a former South Carolina federal prosecutor, adds the Obama-friendly press to the indictment, citing its remarkable lack of curiosity about Benghazi – apparently indifferent to why Ambassador Stevens was there, why Americans were still operating in such a deadly environment after jihadists had conducted multiple attacks, and why requests for additional security by American diplomats were denied by then-Sec. Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/stealthy-moves-against-freedom-of-speech
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=63046

Advocates and defenders of the First Amendment and freedom of speech are strung out like the three Roman legions that were ambushed and ultimately annihilated by barbarians in the dense Teutoburg Forest in Germany in 9 A.D. Out of a force of about 36,000 fighting men, the Romans suffered between 16,000 and 20,000 casualties.

The First Amendment, appended to the Constitution with nine other Amendments which became known collectively as the Bill of Rights, reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And that Amendment is all Americans have at present protecting them from censorship and a dictatorship. We are marching into an ambush by secular advocates of censorship and Islamic ones. Our political leadership is either as ignorant of the perils as were the Roman army’s generals, or just as careless in its defense, or oft times even hostile to it.

No European nation has the equivalent of the First Amendment. As Bruce Bawer, an American journalist who has lived in Europe for years, noted in his October 2010 column on the trial of Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who stood trial for “blaspheming” Islam (and who was subsequently acquitted of all charges):

One of the most bizarre aspects of being an American in Western Europe – at least if you’re an American who has opinions and is used to expressing them freely – is getting accustomed to the fact that there’s no First Amendment over here. Some of us grew up thinking of Western Europe as part of the “Free World.” But how free is a country if it doesn’t recognize freedom of speech as a fundamental right?

For the past few days I have been regretting my inability to sell two op-eds I wrote when Barack Obama was first running for president. Both failed to win the favor of the editors of the Wall Street Journal and other fine venues — I suspect because they were, essentially, novelistic insights offered as journalism. But as it turned out (since I’m really quite a good novelist [1]!) they were both rather perspicacious and I wish I had gotten them into print.

One of them was about the peculiar way Barack Obama lies, which is not like the way other politicians lie. Our own Roger Simon [2] has just posted a thoughtful and insightful essay on this very subject. And I, when I couldn’t sell my op-ed, put some of my observations into my Klavan on the Culture video series “Talking Crap” (see above). So the idea is now pretty well covered.

The other unpublished op-ed, however, is more to the point of the present moment. It was based on Obama’s answer to the usual campaign question: “Why do you want to be president?” His answer, which I can no longer find to quote verbatim, had to do with how inspiring it would be to black children to see him sworn in on Inauguration Day.

That, I wrote at the time, is not a reason to be president. It’s a reason to play the president, as an actor plays a role. In this long-ago unpublished op-ed, I used my novelistic x-ray vision to look into the then-candidate’s soul and point out that this was not a man who actually wanted to do — or was even capable of doing — the work of a chief executive. He just thought it would be an all around Good Thing if he could live out his fantasy of being in that part.

“Today, the pressing question is no longer whether racial uplift will come from gradualism and self-improvement or impatient political activism. Instead, it is about how politics can encourage black self-improvement by removing the real as opposed to the imagined obstacles to its realization.”

The central debate in black social thought from Reconstruction until the 1960s was whether the advancement of the race should be pursued through political agitation for civil rights and equal treatment or through self-help in separate institutions. The former position tended to look outward, seeing bias, discrimination and oppression combined as the major obstacle; the latter position emphasized black self-help from within to overcome deficiencies within the black subculture. Each of these warring ideologies had a towering advocate: The former position was advanced by one of Harvard University’s first black graduates, the founder of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois; the latter was advanced by the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington.

Today, in large part because of the success of the civil rights movement and the iconic status it now enjoys, the older clusters of commitment have broken apart and become virtually reversed: Separatists are now among the most vocal and belligerent activists, while integrationists often preach the gospel of quiet self-improvement. Today the central controversy is still whether blacks are mainly disadvantaged by bias, discrimination and a history of oppression, a moral deficiency in the political culture of the nation; or by their own lack of skills and initiative, a practical deficiency in black culture.

Two recent books carry on this debate. In Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics, University of Chicago Professor Michael C. Dawson describes a political culture that consigns black people to the “bottom of the social order” and to lives of “crippling disadvantage.” Mainstream politicians and the mass media routinely disparage and stereotype blacks and belittle or ignore their concerns, reinforcing a political and economic order that exploits most Americans—especially but not exclusively blacks—for the benefit of a privileged few. For Dawson today, as for Du Bois near a century ago, the solution is a revitalized black politics that can “mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials . . . in the service of black interests.”

Nothing could be further from Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell’s argument in Intellectuals and Race. Rather like Booker T. Washington, Sowell argues that today’s racial inequalities are the fault of a black culture that encourages the most talented to squander their time and energy mastering esoteric social theories that blame others for their problems, rather than learning the practical skills that will help them solve those problems themselves. He complains that a malcontented “intelligentsia have demanded an equality of outcome and of social recognition, irrespective of the skills, behavior or performance of the group to which they belong or on whose behalf they spoke.”

Anyone familiar with the academic trends of recent decades will recognize some of Sowell’s bêtes noires. Still, one has to wonder which country Sowell is writing about, where “intellectuals can influence the way millions of other people see race.” Is it France, a nation proud of its cerebral culture, where philosophers and social theorists are celebrities? Or perhaps Germany, birthplace of modern post-graduate education, where analytic precision is built into the mother tongue? Certainly not the United States, where folksy vernacular is a sign of moral virtue and erudition is held in contempt; where the ethos of democratic egalitarianism means the uneducated citizen feels entitled not only to his own opinion, but as Tip O’Neill once quipped, to his own facts. Whatever flaws one may find in America’s racial politics—and there are many—it strains credulity to blame them on the dominance of intellectuals. And this makes one worry that Sowell is playing up to a specific audience—an audience that is eager to attack “ivory tower professors” for their supposed “liberal bias.”

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2013/10/arabisraeli_straight_talk_a_bo_1.html

Student, busy lay person, concerned but misinformed news junkie — anyone who would benefit from learning about the Arab conflict with Israel, and not only with the Jewish state but also other minorities in what is often referred to indiscriminately as “the Arab world” — could benefit from reading The Quest for Justice in the Middle East: The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Greater Perspective.

By Gerald A. Honigman (disclosure: a long-time friend of CAMERA’s and of this writer), The Quest for Justice in the Middle East brings the conflict’s fundamentals to life in several dozen short, breezily written but nevertheless appropriately sourced chapters. Whether read straight-through or in brief installments, chapter-by-chapter, the book gives those who didn’t know, or mistakenly thought they did, historical, legal, diplomatic and military basics with which to decipher today’s often misleading news coverage.

Honigman did doctoral studies in Middle Eastern affairs at New York University’s Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies and worked full-time as a consultant on the Middle East and antisemitism before a long career as an educator in Florida. He’s lectured on numerous university campuses and published on Middle Eastern subjects in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and Web sites. In The Quest for Justice (Creation House, Lake Mary, Fla., 2009, 279 pages) he distilled this information to make it accessible for a broad readership.

It is commendable that someone should address the psychological profile of Muslims – that is, of individuals born into the culture of Islam – and Nicolai Sennels does that in his Jihad Watch article of October 30th, “Cultural psychology: How Islam managed to stay medieval for 1,400 years.” I began reading it with some eagerness. Over the years I have had nothing good to say about the psychology or mindset of anyone who was either born into the religion/ideology and never challenged it or attempted to escape it, or who had been converted to it.

Sennels has studied Muslims prisoners in Denmark and has a wealth of insights to offer, one of which is that, from my perspective, at least, Islam provides a purported “moral” base which especially Muslim criminals justify or rationalize their criminal actions. The New English Review published his May 2010 study, “Muslims and Westerners: The Psychological Differences.” I had already read that paper and discussed it in “Islam on My Mind” in May 2013.

Sennels’ Jihad Watch summary, however, was disappointing. There were a number of statements in it with which I could legitimately quibble. Straight off, the very beginning of the article grated against my sensibilities. He began:

While almost all other cultures changed from primitive and medieval to democratic and egalitarian societies, one culture managed to keep even its most brutal and backward traditions and values for 1,400 years until today. (Italics mine)

Sennels, apparently born and raised in socialist Denmark, might be forgiven for employing the highlighted terms. Democracy means “mob rule,” or, the rule of the majority. What a majority may want and vote for is not necessarily rational or desirable by individuals who value their freedom to live their own lives unencumbered by a political or even the social consensus represented by majority rule. Numbers do not establish political or metaphysical truths.

THANKS TO E-PAL S.SANDERS FOR THIS ONE

It is really this bad?: Yes, really and much worse when people begin to learn how Obamacare will affect them…. not good
Bob: “Hey Jim, did you hear about the Obama administration scandal?,

Jim: “You mean the Mexican gun running?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “You mean SEAL Team 6?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Obama saying the avg family would save $2,500 on their premiums?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Forcing businesses to violate their religious beliefs by paying for drugs that abort the unborn?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Violating the rights and sanctity of our Churches?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Spending $634 million on a website that doesn’t work?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Obama calling for an increase in our debt when he lambasted Bush for the very same thing?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”

Jim: “Obama having NSA spy on 124 Billion Phone Calls in One Month?”
Bob: “No, the other one.”