RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-suspension-of-disbelief/?print=1

Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan second term. Katrina’s incompetent local and state reactions, coupled with a tardy federal effort — and the insurgency in postwar Iraq — ended the viability of George W. Bush [1] in his second term.

Second, well apart from scandal, the perception of presidential lying usually ends presidential agendas. Richard Nixon resigned after never telling the truth about the Watergate cover-up. “Read my lips: no new taxes” cost George H.W. Bush his reelection [2]. “I did not have sex with that woman” made Bill Clinton’s impeachment likely.

Yet Barack Obama on more than 20 occasions assured the American people that they could keep their existing health care coverage and their present doctor — and still save $2,500 a year per family. He knew those fables were absolutely untrue when he repeated them serially in the reelection cycle of 2012. Yet Obama has not faced any of the fallout of the sort that greeted his predecessors, even as the wreckage of the Affordable Care Act will affect the health of Americans in ways that transcend taxes or Oval Office sex.

Instead, the healthcare falsity — in the manner that the NSA disclosures were just more of the same old IRS and AP scandals — joins a litany of other untruths: the constant insistence that the Benghazi deaths were due to a video, dissimulation about ending the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, the closing of Guantanamo, the “summer of recovery” after the stimulus, halving the national debt by the and of the first term, and the promised plunge in unemployment. Again — so what that the president does not tell the truth?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/the-cuban-hostage-crisis-day-1460/

On December 3rd, 2009, Castro’s KGB-trained police arrested Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen working in Cuba on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mr. Gross has languished in a KGB-designed prison cell ever since. His crime was bringing cell phone and Internet equipment into Castro’s fiefdom to help Cuba’s tiny Jewish community communicate more freely with the outside world.

A reminder: Pre-Castro Cubans enjoyed some of the most advanced communications systems in the world. In 1958 Cuba boasted more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries. Today, Castro’s fiefdom has fewer Internet users per capita than Uganda, and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

By the way, introducing cutting-edge communications equipment into Cuba didn’t always land Americans in torture chambers. In 1957 ATT presented Cuban “Dictator” (according to every media mention) Fulgencio Batista with a Golden Telephone for his regime’s enthusiastic welcome of all of their latest technology. This Cuban “dictator” reveled in the fact that Cubans had better, more abundant and cheaper means of communications than most Europeans. You might recall the scene from Goldfather II where Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone pass the Golden telephone around Batista’s conference table. This one scene contains an element of historically accuracy.

In March 2011, after he had lost almost 100 pounds from his prison ordeal, a Castroite court finally got around to actually trying their American hostage Alan Gross. They condemned him to a prison sentence of 15 years for working for an agency of the U.S. government “that aimed to destroy the Revolution through the use of communication systems out of the control of authorities.”

And there’s the hitch: “control of the authorities.” Not even Gadaffi’s late regime, or Assad’s in Syria or Hu Jintau’s in China seek to control cell-phone and Internet access.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-soffer/palestinian-nazis/print/

WHY THE BIG SURPRISE? VIRAL JEW HATRED INFECTED THE MOSLEM WORLD LONG BEFORE THE ADVENT OF THE NAZIS WHO WERE AIDED AND ABETTED BY THE MUFTI: READ
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The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What the Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslim Pope’ by Andrew G. Bostom (Nov 16, 2013)

Just over a week since an American university severed ties with the Hamas-linked Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, after pictures emerged showing a Nazi-style on-campus rally by Islamic Jihad in November, further evidence of fascist-style events at the flagship Palestinian Arab institution has emerged.

Video footage, posted by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), shows clips from two separate rallies at Al-Quds University, in which Islamic Jihad members, cheered on by other students, take part in a live performance at which they brandish imitation assault rifles and black Islamist flags, and give Nazi salutes.

The live “show” features terrorists killing Israeli soldiers and executing a “collaborator”, who is denounced as a “traitor” and a “spy”, and suggests that the initial pictures, which were first released by British journalist Tom Gross, were not from a one-off incident but evidence of a much wider phenomenon.

Speaking to Arutz Sheva, Tom Gross said that the footage proved that attempts by Al-Quds to excuse the November 5th rally as an isolated event were disingenuous:

“The emergence of a video showing another Fascistic-style, militaristic Islamic Jihad rally, on what appears to be the main campus of Al-Quds University this past May – together with Palestinian students at Al-Quds who have informed me that the student factions of both Hamas and the PFLP held similar rallies at Al-Quds University this semester a few weeks ago – calls into question the claims by the Al-Quds university authorities that the November 5 rally was a one-off event, which they claim they didn’t know about until they saw the photos of it.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-post-american-world/   What do the riots in the Ukraine, Iran throwing its weight around in the Persian Gulf and China’s new air defense zone all have in common? Barack Obama and his Post-American world. Nations exercise power within spheres of influence. As the American sphere of influence shrinks to nothing; Iran, China and Russia are using the opportunity to […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4407/sharia_law_advances_in_france_halal_in_the_prisons

As France advances to a 20-50 percent Muslim country over the next few decades, it should not be surprising that Islamic law is on the march. The times they are a-changin…

Just a quick one in case you missed it. Islamic law is now being implemented in French prisons. France has a Muslim population of 10-15 percent. By 2050 this is projected to grow to between 30-40 percent of the entire population.

Let’s just allow a major French media outlet, France 24, to tell the story:

“A French court has ordered Saint-Quentin-Fallavier prison, near Grenoble in southeastern France, to begin making halal meals available to Muslim inmates, it emerged Wednesday, citing detainees’ right to “free exercise of religion”.

It goes on:

“The administrative tribunal in Grenoble in southeastern France ruled that the nearby Saint-Quentin-Fallavier prison must begin serving halal meals in its canteen, citing French laws guaranteeing “free exercise of religion”.

“A Muslim inmate at Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, known only as Adrien K, made a request to the prison’s warden in March this year asking for Muslim detainees to be offered the option of halal meals, according to French media reports.”

Perhaps we can ignore this. The mainstream European media will certainly do that. Or perhaps we can think this all through.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4409/no_honour_in_the_killing_of_women

The UN estimates that 5,000 women are killed each year for “dishonoring” their families. About two-thirds of all murders in Palestinian territories are honor-killings

There are some very active women’s organizations and international units attempting to curb abuse of and violence against women. They work to bring awareness to the cultural, and sometimes religious, norms, laws, and practices that have created and preserve these conditions.

But those efforts are too small-scale. This violence still occurs in many countries in the world, and it is most prevalent, especially in its most acute forms, in countries with a predominantly Muslim population. What is needed is a large-scale attack by national governments and international organizations.

At the base of this violence is the concept of honor, which women supposedly embody. Because of their lack of education and empowerment, women affected by this concept have rarely been able to challenge the nature and consequences of it.

Women are said to dishonor the community; family; and, for Muslim women, perhaps the Islamic religion if their actual or perceived behavior is regarded as violating ingrained cultural or religious norms. They may do this by obvious acts of sexual indiscretions, but also by not abiding by instructions and demands of men, family, or community, such as refusal to enter into an arranged marriage, seeking a divorce, or even wearing Western-type clothes.

Far from being cutting-edge, the British cultural establishment ignores the biggest threat to artistic freedom: radical Islam

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4415/islam_the_subject_artists_won_t_tackle

Delivering this year’s Reith Lectures — the first contemporary artist to do so — the media-friendly transvestite artist and potter Grayson Perry posited the notion that perhaps art had lost one of its central tenets: its ability to shock.

Sure, there was no shortage of claims being made by both the media and the art world: that Tom was “radical”, Dick was “cutting edge” and Harry was “breaking boundaries”. But all this obscured the truth, which was that art was no longer any of these things, that artist and audience had got well and truly used to each other, and familiarity had bred jadedness.

There’s no denying this but, in keeping with art itself, Perry’s observations were rather behind the times. For art has not shocked, provoked or otherwise challenged for years now. The belief that it does, should or could is almost endearingly quaint when one hears it voiced.

Certainly the words used to describe creative activity, such as those above, are a product of the general hyperbolic drift in many aspects of our everyday language. And, rather like racism, the more the arts diminish in relevance in relation to both our personal and national life, the more overblown and indiscriminate are the claims made of it.

Of course the notion that the arts should shock is a thoroughly modern one in historical terms but, even as it became accepted and then entrenched as a cliché, wider social developments throughout the latter half of the 20th century were working to undermine it. The gradual dismantling of social and moral boundaries left art with less and less room for manoeuvre, if to challenge and provoke was its purpose.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/12/does_obama_think_he_is_lying.html In Michael Agar’s book entitled Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation, he asks “[h]ow do you speak and act a lie at the same time?” Agar maintains that there are three characteristics of an act that tell … whether a lie occurred or not: I. The sentence is false; 2. The person knows […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/12/surprise_guess_who_loves_the_iran_deal.html

The Communist Party of the USA is providing some very interesting signals lately. Yesterday, I blogged about CPUSA Chairman Sam Webb offering advice on Obamacare that looks eerily familiar to what we have heard from the DPUSA – the Democratic Party. When all else fails, charge racism.

Today, we have the Communist Party, via its associated news outlet People’s World, enthusiastically endorsing the Geneva agreement with Iran, to permit its continued enrichment of uranium through the most difficult stages, up to 5%.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579234053792268892?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond ‘Private sector velocity and effectiveness.” “An Amazon-like shopping experience.” Suddenly Team Obama is talking up capitalist enterprise as the model for how Healthcare.gov ought to work. After five years of assailing “millionaires and billionaires” and extolling the virtues of “collective action,” this is progress. But it is not enough progress.For an “Amazon-like” experience, it […]