RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://nationalreview.com/node/359148/print

This is the United States of America,” declared President Obama to the burghers of Liberty, Mo., on Friday. “We’re not some banana republic.”

He was talking about the Annual Raising of the Debt Ceiling, which glorious American tradition seems to come round earlier every year. “This is not a deadbeat nation,” President Obama continued. “We don’t run out on our tab.” True. But we don’t pay it off either. We just keep running it up, ever higher. And every time the bartender says, “Mebbe you’ve had enough, pal,” we protest, “Jush another couple trillion for the road. Set ’em up, Joe.” And he gives you that look that kinda says he wishes you’d run out on your tab back when it was $23.68.

Still, Obama is right. We’re not a banana republic, if only because the debt of banana republics is denominated in a currency other than their own — i.e., the U.S. dollar. When you’re the guys who print the global currency, you can run up debts undreamt of by your average generalissimo. As Obama explained in another of his recent speeches, “Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt.” I won’t even pretend to know what he and his speechwriters meant by that one, but the fact that raising the debt ceiling “has been done over a hundred times” does suggest that spending more than it takes in is now a permanent feature of American government. And no one has plans to do anything about it. Which is certainly banana republic-esque.

Is all this spending necessary? Every day, the foot-of-page-37 news stories reveal government programs it would never occur to your dimestore caudillo to blow money on. On Thursday, it was the Food and Drug Administration blowing just shy of $200 grand to find out whether its Twitter and Facebook presence is “well-received.” A fifth of a million dollars isn’t even a rounding error in most departmental budgets, so nobody cares. But the FDA is one of those sclerotic American institutions that has near to entirely seized up. In October 1920, it occurred to an Ontario doctor called Frederick Banting that insulin might be isolated and purified and used to treat diabetes; by January 1923, Eli Lilly & Co were selling insulin to American pharmacies: A little over two years from concept to market. Now the FDA adds at least half-a-decade to the process, and your chances of making it through are far slimmer: As recently as the late Nineties, they were approving 157 new drugs per half-decade. Today it’s less than half that.

But they’ve got $182,000 to splash around on finding out whether people really like them on Facebook, or they’re just saying that. So they’ve given the dough to a company run by Dan Beckmann, a former “new media aide” to President Obama. That has the whiff of the banana republic about it, too.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/israels_bright_future.html Israel is undoubtedly one of the most hated countries on Earth.  Hatred against Israel is deeply rooted in the Arab world and in the Muslim world at large.  It has also progressed quickly in Europe over the last decades.  Although less common in North America, it is gaining ground, especially in universities, and “anti-Zionist” […]

FROM JANET LEVY:
The Islamists of the Al Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab, that stormed an upscale Israeli-owned shopping mall today armed with grenades and AK-47s are still in a standoff with security personnel. So far, they’ve killed 59 people and injured a couple of hundred.
The jihadists reportedly told Muslims to leave the facility and said that non-Muslims would be targeted. Shoppers were asked their religion and some were asked to name Mohammed’s mother.
(It may not be relevent for the next attack but memorize this: Aminah Bint Wahb is Mohammed’s mother).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/horror-in-kenya-alshabaab-claim-responsibility-as-nonmuslims-targeted-in-terror-attack-on-nairobi-shopping-centre-8831413.html
Nairobi attack: Death toll rises to 59 as shots are fired on troops preparing hostage rescue operation

Kenyan minister says ‘we have access to CCTV and are in complete control’, adding more than 1,000 people have been rescued from the Westgate shopping centre since the terrorists started shooting

The Kenyan military are preparing to storm the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi where terrorists are holding an unknown number of hostages, following an attack yesterday which the Interior Ministry now says killed at least 59 people.

Gunmen armed with grenades, AK-47s and ammunition belts opened fire inside the affluent mall during a children’s cooking competition, with witnesses saying the terrorists numbered up to 10 men – some of whom looked as young as 18.

Reinforcements arrived this morning, according to the ministry, with armoured vehicles bringing more soldiers to join in the rescue operation. At approximately 11am (9am BST), fresh barrages of gunfire were heard from within the shopping centre, reportedly as security forces ran in a line and crouched along the front of the building.

Speaking to reporters today, Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku said the police and army were in complete control of the situation, and that they now had remote control of the shopping centre’s CCTV systems.

Mr Lenku said the official number of injured had increased to 175, but he added that he was thankful for the fact that they had been able to get more than 1,000 people out of the mall safely.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/09/20/sexual-jihad-tunisian-women-return-syria-pregnant-rebels_n_3960370.html

Huffington Post UK

Tunisian women are travelling to Syria to partake in a “sexual jihad” by comforting rebel fighters, a minister has claimed.

“They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100 militants”, Interior Minister Lofti Bin Jeddou reportedly told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday.

“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of ‘jihad al-nikah’ (sexual holy war), they come home pregnant,” he added in quotes provided by AFP.

While he did not put a figure on the number of women allegedly partaking, Bin Jeddou claimed 6,000 Tunisians had been banned from travelling to Syria since March, and that 86 individuals had been arrested on suspicion of forming “networks” to send them there, Al Arabiya reports.

Hundreds of Tunisian men have also gone to join the ranks of jihadists fighting to overthrow the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Sexual jihad fatwas typically allow armed members to have sexual intercourse with women as part of a temporary contract. It also allows women to sleep with more than one man a day, Fars News explains.

It is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war.

It emerged the practice was occurring in Syria some months ago.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Former Mufti of Tunisia Sheikh Othman Battikh complained in April that 13 Tunisian girls were “fooled” into traveling to Syria to offer sexual intercourse to rebel fighters, in order to create an army strong enough to topple the regime.

The origins of these “temporary marriages” have been attributed to Saudi Arabian scholar Sheikh Mohammed al-Arifi, Iranian channel Press TV reported in December last year.

Al-Arifi was claimed to have issued a fatwa permitting militants to engage in short-term marriages with Syrian women as young as 14 to “satisfy… their sexual desires and boost their determination in killing Syrians.”

According to CNS.News, al-Arifi later disowned the fatwa, though some Arab commentators are sceptical, with one source telling Al-Bawaba in March: “Then again, one might backtrack, standing accused of selling young innocents to militant Muslims.”

Al-Arifii has sparked controversy with previous fatwas, including one which demanded daughters do not wear revealing clothing or sit alone with their fathers, lest they incite his lust.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ We are not a violent society. We are a society sheltered from violence. No one in Rwanda spends time wondering what kind of man would murder people. They probably live next door to him. If your neighborhood is diverse enough, you might be unfortunate enough to live next door to war criminals all the […]

‘Hitler’s Reign Of Terror,’ First U.S. Anti-Nazi Film, Found In Belgian Film Archive Cinematheque

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/hitlers-reign-of-terror_n_3963354.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl22%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D378938

By Robert-Jan Bartunek

BRUSSELS, Sept 20 (Reuters) – The first U.S. film to warn about the dangers of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime has been found in a Brussels film archive, having lain unnoticed for some 75 years.”Hitler’s Reign of Terror” was produced by Cornelius Vanderbilt, an heir to the wealthy American industrialist family, who visited Germany as Hitler was voted into power in 1933.

The film revolves around footage that Vanderbilt shot and smuggled out, showing Nazi party rallies, book-burnings and the ransacking of Jewish shops.At its premiere in New York in 1934, the film was a big success, said Bruno Mestdagh, head of the digital collections at the Belgian film archive Cinematheque.

“The German embassy in the United States protested, so the film was censored and adapted. It was then shown in other cities but with much less success,” Mestdagh said.The version uncovered by the archive was most likely ordered by someone who wanted to show it in Belgium but never collected it, so the reel survived the war, and Nazi occupation, in the Belgian customs office.In the 1970s, it was transferred to the archive, which holds some 70,000 titles in its vast vaults in Brussels, 80 percent of them foreign. But it was only two years ago that the curators realised they had the only surviving copy.

The film has now been remastered and will be shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in October.

The film is arranged much like a newsreel, where Vanderbilt provides a voiceover to his own original footage, and mixes it with newsreel footage from other sources.

“Vanderbilt was able to capture some spectacular footage but he just had a few minutes and they constructed a complete film around it. But that wasn’t done by professional film-makers, so the film has a sometimes amateurish feel to it,” Mestdagh said.

Part of that feel comes from the somewhat clunky re-enactments of a brief interview that Vanderbilt snatched with Hitler as he prepared to address a rally in Berlin’s Sports Palace after winning the 1933 election.

“In the hour-and-a-half that Hitler talked to that packed audience, he was as effective as a barker at a side show, travelling with a circus,” Vanderbilt comments in the voiceover.

He also visits Leonding, the Austrian town where Hitler attended primary school, explaining: “From all I could gather, he was one of the most unpopular kids in the neighbourhood. Nobody had a good word for him.” (Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=6617a40b44&e=ce445aaf82

MIDDLE EAST historian Tom Holland told a briefing in London last night that the world is watching the effective extinction of Christianity from its birthplace.
In an apocalyptic appraisal of the worsening political situation in the region, a panel of experts provided a mass of evidence and statistics for the end of the region’s nation states under the onslaught of militant Islam.
‘In terms of the sheer scale of the hatreds and sectarian rivalries, we are witnessing something on the scale of horror of the European Thirty Years War,’ said Holland.
‘It is the climax of a process grinding its way through the twentieth century – the effective extinction of Christianity from its birthplace.’
The event titled ‘Reporting the Middle East: Why the truth is getting lost’ at the National Liberal Club in Whitehall, sought answers to the ‘anaemic’ coverage of attacks on Egypt’s Christians on 14 August.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/washington-post-distorts-commission-probe-of-benghazi The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB) started off with a powerful message: “We are here and planning on staying until we get the answers we’re seeking.” But, some in the media just don’t get it. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post delivered one of his Dennis the Menace, snarky rants about the view of […]

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/09/20/sukkot-the-autumn-harvest-festival/?print=1 Fifteen days after the stocktaking of Rosh Hashanah, and five days after the more rigorous stocktaking of Yom Kippur, falls the weeklong holiday of Sukkot—one of the most joyous and pleasant Jewish holidays. It began this year at sundown on Wednesday, September 18. In ancient Israel, Sukkot was (along with Passover and Shavuot) one […]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/anti-war-delegation-to-syria-ramsey-clark-cynthia-mckinney-sara-flounders/5350452

The anti-war movement is in a race with the Pentagon to stop the U.S. from its goal — pushed back momentarily — of going to war with Syria.

This urgency is what made the International Action Center (IAC) send a delegation from the United States to Syria.

The IAC’s Sara Flounders gives an audio report (below) on the team’s trip so far, featuring an on-air meeting with members of “Over Our Dead Bodies” — the youth encampment of hundreds of voluntary human shields at Syria’s communications centers.

HEAR INTERVIEW

Leading the trip is former U.S. attorney general and human rights lawyer Ramsey Clark; former six-term Congressperson from Georgia Cynthia McKinney; Dedon Kamathi of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party and Pacifica Radio; and Johnny Achi of Arab Americans 4 Syria in Los Angeles. The International Action Center, which pulled together the delegation, sent key organizers John Parker from Los Angeles and Sara Flounders from New York.

The corporate media shift in tone on Syria, from warlike to congratulatory — falsely applauding the United States for a diplomatic breakthrough — is covering over Washington’s continued war threats.

On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that Washington’s goal is to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power even if all of Syria’s chemical weapons are destroyed.