RUTHFULLY YOURS

In this next phase of my life I have lots more time to get out across America to meet and speak with great people. This past weekend was the beginning of that trek, and it started in Atlanta where I addressed Dr. Michael Youssef’s 25th anniversary luncheon for his “Leading The Way” ministry.

As always, it is special to be home. I even had the chance to drop by my old stomping grounds, Henry Grady HS, and to visit with the JROTC Cadet Battalion staff. What a treasure it was to gaze into the eyes of those who continue a legacy I was able to be part of from 1976 to 1979. (The Allen West Foundation has established a scholarship fund for the Cadet Corps.)

After speaking in Atlanta, and watching a classic SEC football game between Georgia and LSU, I flew to Lafayette, Louisiana, on Sunday. Being a good southern fella, I arranged to attend church services Sunday morning at the First Baptist Church of Lafayette. Before the service, I met with Pastor Steve, who told me the sermon would not be terribly exciting because it would be about stewardship. Well, he was wrong. The service was lovely, the hymns were uplifting, and I found Pastor Steve’s terrific sermon worth sharing here.

The topic was “Five Principles of Christian Stewardship,” and the accompanying biblical reference came from the Book of Acts 4:32-5:11. He succinctly articulated these principles: unity, generosity, necessity, personal integrity, and accountability.

I recall thinking this was a message every single person on Capitol Hill, including the occupant of the White House, should hear.

Anyone who may have thought that, after the Holocaust, antisemitism would be passé is revealed in retrospect as naïve.

Sixty-eight years after the genocide, antisemitism remains rampant in the Arab world and much of the Muslim world. It’s back with a vengeance in Europe, largely—but not solely—Israel-focused. Today the world’s only country to be subjected to a global delegitimization and BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaign is the Jewish one.

A study released last spring by Tel Aviv University found that worldwide antisemitism rose 30 percent in 2012 compared to the previous year. That particularly involved “violent acts against Jews,” with “273 attacks on persons of all ages; in addition, 190 synagogues, cemeteries and monuments were desecrated, and over 200 private and public properties damaged.” Most of the attacks occurred in countries having the largest Jewish communities outside Israel—in descending order of attacks, France, the U.S., the UK, Canada, and Australia.

The report also “noted the rise of anti-Semitic parties on the far right in Greece, Hungary and the Ukraine” and observed that in those countries,

vociferous representatives of these parties openly incite in parliament against local Jewish communities. Blatant anti-Semitic and anti-Israel expressions appeared to ignite violent activity in Hungary, and a significant rise in desecration of cemeteries and Holocaust memorials was recorded in Poland.

This series, counting down from 10 to 1, will profile ten of the worst purveyors of antisemitism—whether individuals or groups—in the world at large; an ensuing series will focus on U.S. antisemitism. In our era, antisemitism is most endemic in the Arab and Muslim sphere; outside of that domain, it tends to be most concentrated on the far right (both religious and political) and far left. All the categories will be “represented” in the series.The Anti-Defamation League calls David Irving “one of the world’s most effective purveyors of Holocaust denial.” He is indeed probably the most effective in the English-speaking world. Though perhaps best known for his failed libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, the scope of his activities goes far beyond that episode.

Unlike classical liberals, the liberals of today hew to doctrine in the face of the evidence.

A classical liberal was characteristically guided by disinterested logic and reason. He was open to gradual changes in society that were frowned upon by traditionalists in lockstep adherence to custom and protocol. The eight-hour work day, civil rights, and food- and drug-safety laws all grew out of classically liberal views. Government could press for moderate changes in the way society worked, within a conservative framework of revering the past, in order to pave the way for equality of opportunity in a safe and sane environment.

Among elite liberals today, all too few are of this classical mold — guided by reason and empirical observation. By far the majority are medieval and reactionary. By medieval I mean that they adhere to accepted doctrine — in this case, the progressive doctrine of always finding solutions in larger government and more taxes — despite all the evidence to the contrary. The irony is that they project just such ideological blinkers onto their conservative opponents.

Reactionary is a good adjective as well, since notions of wealth and poverty are frozen in amber around 1965, as if the technological revolution never took place and the federal welfare state hadn’t been erected — as if today’s poor were the emaciated Joads, rather than struggling with inordinate rates of obesity and diabetes, in air-conditioned apartments replete with big-screen TVs, and owning cell phones with more computing power than was available to the wealthy as recently as the 1980s. Flash-mobbing sneaker stores is more common than storming Costcos for bags of rice and flour.

In the medieval-liberal worldview, gun control stops violence like that in Chicago or Detroit. Solar panels are the energy way of the immediate future; fracking is not. Voting fraud is almost nonexistent and mostly a right-wing conspiracy trope. High-speed rail is an efficient and economical means of transportation. The problem with public assistance is that there is too little of it, not too much. Affirmative action ensures fairness. Climate change is proven; further debate is counterproductive, and disturbing data to the contrary are little more than propaganda of the ignorant.

Like a medieval bishop, the new medievalists also seek to avoid the ramifications of their own ideologies. Like residents of a walled medieval city or religious order, they prefer enclaves and cloisters filled with others of their kind.

In California, the medieval liberal thinks it is terrible that the state’s public schools test near rock bottom in science and math. Cannot such testing be postponed? Are multiple-choice tests sufficiently sensitive to the contours of class, race, and gender? He senses that teachers’ unions and politicized mandates from the state may have something to do with the decline. Perhaps privately he is fearful that the vast migration of illegal aliens from Latin America, coupled with the inability of many African-Americans to achieve social parity, might be a contributing factor to the implosion in public schools, as well as the degeneration of the nuclear family across class and racial lines. Yet, in his projection, he accuses others of such blasphemous thoughts, even while he is usually guided by them in decisions he makes for his own progeny. For now, ensuring that the transgendered can use either public-school restroom is about all that he can offer to raise test scores and create a safe high-school campus.

‘I just don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish.” So says Jim Hagen, South Dakota’s secretary of tourism, about the federal government’s blocking off not only the entrance to the Mount Rushmore monument but also roadside viewing areas outside the park. “They won’t even let you pull off on the side of the road,” he says, noting that this particular act of shutdown theater is damaging his state’s tourism economy and ruining the plans of countless travelers. Shutdowns are strangely labor-intensive things: After setting up traffic cones to block off the Mount Rushmore viewing areas, the feds had to pick them up again because of a blizzard, but apparently had plans to put them right back down again after the plowing is done. Perhaps Mr. Hagen has too gentle a cast of mind to appreciate just what the Obama administration is trying to accomplish: It is an act of political theater, a gross and possibly illegal abuse of political power, an assault on private property, and a wanton subjugation of responsible governance to the political interests of President Obama and his party.

Consider the case of Ralph and Joyce Spencer, 77 and 80 years of age, respectively, who were evicted from their home on Lake Mead in Nevada by an officious park ranger who told them they had 24 hours to vacate the premises. The Spencers own their home outright, but it sits on land leased from the federal government. A lease is a legal contract, and the government shutdown presents no legitimate reason for the violation of that contract. Even if it did, the place to settle such a dispute is in a court of law — not through the arbitrary exercise of federal police power. This is not a blunder: It is the malicious harassment of private citizens in their own homes by an administration intent on creating hardships and then using them for propaganda purposes. You own your home right up until the moment when that the fact becomes inconvenient to President Obama.

After a week of controversy over Labour leader Ed Miliband’s Marxist father, we need to focus on the core issue: the historical reality of communist oppression [See update at the bottom of the piece]

Why isn’t the Black Book of Communism on the curriculum of every school in Europe? Because it isn’t exhaustive enough? Because its authors lack credibility? Because there is still more to be understood and researched on the matter?

At more than 850 pages of carefully sifted evidence by a group of top-level scholars from a variety of countries and disciplines, the Black Book is as solid a piece of scholarship as any other you’ll find being taught in our schools.

Is it definitive? How could it be? Communist regimes went to great lengths to conceal their crimes, and one of the most oppressive of all, North Korea, still exists to this day. What the book does is use the best available evidence to give a sense of the scale of what we are dealing with.

In introducing the Black Book, lead author Stephane Courtois, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, offers the following rough breakdown of the numbers of people that communism killed:

USSR — 20 million

China — 65 million

Vietnam — 1 million

North Korea — 2 million

Cambodia — 2 million

Eastern Europe — 1 million

Latin America — 150,000

Africa — 1.7 million

Afghanistan — 1.5 million

Communist movements, parties not in power — 10,000

In total, this is not far short of 100 million deaths at the hands of a single ideology. Nothing like this has ever happened before. (As an aside, my personal view is that the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews was the greatest single crime of the modern era, while communism was the greatest criminal system.)

If a 9 year old Palestinian girl had been shot by Israel, and the government had gloried in it, this would be headline news, worldwide. The BBC is shameless in its bigotry

Some readers may have little daughters of nine, younger or older. Regardless, you have the capacity for empathy? Palestinian children count just as much as any other. They suffer under the currents of history, in our view mainly due to their own leaders.

But no matter, a child is child. Unless she’s an Israeli Jew, the BBC and most of the Western media appears to believe. We will keep this brief, but it is truly shocking and disgusting. As we reported here, a nine year old girl was shot by a Palestinian sniper while the supposedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority circulated on Facebook a celebration of the would-be child murderer, thus:

“The sniper of Palestine was here. He saluted Hebron, and rested in El-Bireh. He left the signature of [real] men in different parts of the homeland. He saluted and left, and moved on to a different place, with a new signature, as he tells the stories of those who love the homeland.”

If Israel had sent a sniper to kill a little Palestinian girl that on its own would have been major international news. If the Israeli Cabinet had gloried in it, this would have been top news for days or weeks on end. A UN resolution would not have been out of the question.

BBC headlne? Not at all.

Since she’s a 9 year old Israeli Jew, no-one cares. The BBC isn’t biased. It’s possessed with hate. And since they know this story — from us and others — there can really be no other conclusion than that.

Or do you have a better explanation? Journalistic integrity just ain’t one of them…

Diplomats gravitate from all over the globe to New York City for United Nations week. Traffic is snarled and barriers block midtown streets so the panjandrums of the globe can determine the fate of Syria, nuclear weapons in Iran and a Palestinian state. But this is only part of the reality.

These so-called diplomats representing every form of tyrannical regime are in New York to indulge themselves. Strip joints are filled to capacity. African “statesmen” in Brioni suits are preoccupied with jiggling strippers. And prostitutes are booked solid. New York is Gomorrah and the U.N. officials love it.

Moreover, so do their wives and significant others. Bergdorf Goodman has a queue in front of its Fifth Avenue store as women line up for baubles and beads, threads and make-up, aggregating to impressive five figure numbers. Even Arab women in black burkas buy Prada gear to keep under their make-shift effort at phony modesty.

The veneer of respectability is accepted by most New Yorkers because the cash registers are on over-time, but there is a perverse dimension to this decadence. Most of these national representatives wouldn’t be able to recognize a human rights issue if it bit them in the rear end.

When they do speak in the U.N. forum, they mouth the words that were assigned to them. In more instances than one might guess, the representatives are recovering from stupor induced revelry. There aren’t any issues in the U.N., only interests. Most of the states are dictatorships placed in the ironic position of deciding the political liberty of others. At the General Assembly every state has the same influence whether it be Micronesia or China. To call it a farce, does not do justice to farce or fairness or even common sense.

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double-life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, April 2010. A Time to Betray was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award and the 2011 International Best Book Award.

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Despite President Obama’s outreach to the new president of Iran, Islamic radicals walked over a U.S. flag and spat on Obama’s image on their way to prayers on Friday.

Mashregh, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards, published a photo of the image of Obama alongside the U.S. flag laid on the ground and radicals walking over them. The picture shows one individual spitting on Obama’s image.

And while the Obama administration and U.S. media have generally portrayed the phone call and Twitter exchange between Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as evidence of warming relations, in September the website of the Quds cyber officers posted an image of Obama, wearing a Nazi field marshal’s uniform, surrendering with his hands on his head. The caption reads, “In the not too distant future…. One [Gen. Qasem] Soleimani is enough for all the enemies of this country.”

In an effort to emphasize the Islamic Republic’s view of the United States as the “Great Satan,” mass rallies will be held across Iran to shout “Death to America” and assail worldwide Zionism on the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover of November 4, 1979, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Masoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters, announced on Saturday.

Colonel Ken Allard is a widely known commentator on foreign policy and security issues. For more than a decade, he was a featured military analyst on NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. That experience provided the backdrop for his most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/perilous-dalliance-with-egyptian-extremists#ixzz2h7oYL2x4
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

“No way!” sniffed the money-honey at Washington Dulles International Airport as she refused to exchange my stack of Egyptian pound notes. “That currency is so unstable, we can’t even establish an exchange rate in real money. It’s worthless paper.” Badly jet-lagged, I testily replied that some humility might be in order since the American government, backer of the aforementioned “real money,” was at that very moment, technically insolvent. While I won the debate on points, those Egyptian pounds are still with me as rueful souvenirs of last week’s whirlwind fact-finding trip to Egypt.

Organized by the Westminster Institute, a McLean-based think tank, our small delegation of media and military analysts was given extraordinary access to Egypt’s top decision-makers, the first such private visit since last summer’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our principal interlocutors included the minister of defense, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi; Theodoros II, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church; and Amr Moussa, drafter-in-chief of the new Egyptian Constitution. We also interviewed business leaders, journalists and student revolutionaries, street-wise veterans of the back-to-back uprisings that toppled the authoritarian regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi.

A few chapters back in the Cory Booker story, the dashing young mayor of Newark, New Jersey was actually dashing into a burning building to save a helpless woman.

Now here we are, a few plot twists later, and Cory Booker’s halo is looking kind of mucky. Take those flirty tweets he sent to an impressively tattooed stripper, the one and only Ms. Lynsie Lee. Did the public react to this naughty news with prudish gasps of disgust?

Nope. Instead, cynics, who were getting used to Booker’s antics, pointed out he may have deployed those tweets to scotch rumors of certain other…. proclivities.

Now, really, tell me. How well is your campaign going when your best-case scenario is you really did mean to tweet that stripper?

It’s getting hard not to notice that Cory Booker likes to lie. A lot. Which is why New Jersey’s special Senate election on October 16 is tightening fast. Booker’s lead over businessman Steve Lonegan has collapsed from a princely 30-point advantage to a mere 3. People are starting to whisper Booker may lose.

Let’s start with the Great T-Bone Fantasia, unearthed by crack reporter Eliana Johnson of NRO. T-Bone was baaaaad. T-Bone sold drugs and threatened to shoot Booker dead. But, wouldn’t you know, T-Bone had a vulnerable side, too, sobbing out his heartrending story in Booker’s car.

What drama! What inner-city realism! What a crock. T-Bone never existed, no matter how many times Booker told his made-up tales to enthralled audiences at Yale and other upscale venues.

And that teen gunshot victim who died operatically in Booker’s arms? He died in the hospital. And witnesses say Booker grandstanded at the crime scene, moving the victim around in “a big act,” endangering what was left of his ebbing life. As for Booker’s mentor, who supposedly died in “a truly poetic way”…”at school in front of a roomful of kids,” her grandson debunks that death scene as a complete fabrication.

But all this dying and shooting and sobbing and drug dealing has made the Ivy League-educated Booker into a big star on the speaking circuit, raking in piles of dough, which, by the way, he lied about, too.

No, he didn’t keep “very little of it, if any,” as he told the New York Times, claiming he’d “given away hundreds and hundreds of thousands” to charity. He kept most of his speaking fees for himself, thank you very much. 88.7% of it, to be exact, adding up to more than a million dollars.