RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-collapse-of-communism-the-untold-story/print/

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Buchar, an associate professor and author of the Cinematography Program at Columbia College in Chicago. A political refugee from former Czechoslovakia, he is the producer of the documentary, Velvet Hangover, which is about Czech New Wave filmmakers, how they survived the period of “normalization” and their reflections on the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989. He is also the author of Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews and And Reality be Damned… Undoing America: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About the End of the Cold War and Fall of Communism in Europe. He just currently finished the new feature length documentary film, The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story.

FP: Robert Buchar, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Congratulations on your new documentary film.

Buchar: Thank you Jamie for the opportunity to talk about it. It took eight years to finish but it’s finally done.

FP: Let us begin with this question: Why should we talk about the fall of communism? Why does it matter?

Buchar: Right, why talk about something that happened some 23 years ago? The word communism is even in our vocabulary anymore and the new generation has no idea what it even means.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/rael-jean-isaac/global-malarkey/

In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama said that in his second term the most important policy he could address was climate change. Given the damage he has done to fossil fuels in his first term (and the vast sums he has squandered on the will o the wisps of sun and wind), one shudders to think what is in store for our energy supply if he turns full attention to the subject. Senator John McCain, his defeated Republican rival, was also a true believer in the global warming apocalypse, the notion that man-made global warming, if unchecked, will destroy the planet. In fact, now that so many governments have clambered on board, global warming theory, if unchecked, is going to destroy the economies of the Western world. Which underscores the importance of books like this one, compact, brief, easy to read, by a layman for a lay audience, that serve as antidotes to the prevalent hysteria.

In his new book, Global Warming: Trials of an Unsettled Science, author David Solway begins with a succinct review of the large body of scientific evidence throwing doubt on the claims of those who insist that global warming, as he puts it, is leading “to a latter day man-made global holocaust.” He makes the effort while acknowledging that evidence is a hard sell for believers invested in this apocalyptic faith. He quotes Jonathan Swift, “What a man has not been reasoned into, he cannot be reasoned out of.”

Indeed reasoned discussion is the last thing global warming zealots have in mind. They are every bit as impassioned and out of control as the rabid Moslem defenders of Mohammed from every conceivable slight. Solway cites (among others) Canadian global-warmer-in-chief David Suzuki telling a conference on sustainability at McGill “to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” for their failure to act and British lawyer Polly Higgins who petitions the UN to prosecute “climate deniers” for “crimes against peace.” My personal favorite is the obsessively anti-Israel English Labor party activist Clare Short who declares Israel, by distracting politicians from the weather, may cause the “end of the human race.”

Solway shows what we have here is an offshoot of liberal environmentalism that has become “the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics.” Environmentalism has also become an anti-human religion. Solway has some telling quotes here. A couple of samples: Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics postulates “Given the total, absolute disappearance of Homo sapiens, then not only would the Earth’s community of Life continue to exist, but in all probability, its well-being enhanced.” Or John Davis, editor of Earth First: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Or Paul Watson, Greenpeace co-founder, who described human beings as the “AIDS of the Earth.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-obama-doctrine-exposed/ On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took President Obama to task for his administration’s disastrous handling of American foreign policy, which has had catastrophic consequences — most recently in the form of the heinous attacks against our embassies in Libya and Egypt. To understand what happened in Benghazi or in Cairo requires more […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-rebuke-of-sam-slick/?print=1

In an acutely reasoned article [1] for American Thinker, economist and member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute Monty Pelerin warns that the United States is “one election away from tragedy.” Pelerin is not alone in mounting this argument; many commentators and political analysts are in agreement that November 6, 2012, may be one of the most fateful dates in the entire pageant of American history, no less crucial than another resonant date, April 12, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln responded to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. For there is a growing—though perhaps insufficient—consensus on the part of a notable segment of the American public, Republican candidates for office, and a number of disaffected Democrats that the coming election is essentially a plebiscite and that the future security, coherence, and prosperity of the nation will be decided on the first Tuesday of November of this year. “There are but a few weeks left,” writes Andrew McCarthy in a review [2] of David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic [3], “before the nation either dramatically alters course or cruises on to the abyss, perhaps irreversibly.”

A victory for Mitt Romney would allow the nation to return, if only partially, to its historical roots as a constitutional republic and free market economy. But if Barack Obama should win re-election, America will inexorably go the way of the crushingly indebted, under-employed, imploding European Union, as well as gradually surrendering much of its autonomy to an advancing Islamic presence and the inroads of Shari’a law. It would continue to rely on the dubious expedient of soft power and international diplomacy (aka, accommodation and concession) to defend its interests, thus subsiding into political desuetude. A second term for this president will yield a nation drowning in debt, undergoing a rapidly declining material equity, and increasingly vulnerable to Islamic subversion.

To cite Roger Kimball’s objective recapitulation [4], this is the president who is defined by “the $16 trillion federal debt, the 8.3 percent unemployment when he promised to have it down to 5.6 percent, the annual deficit, which he promised to halve, hovering around $1.5 trillion,” as well as “the disaster that is Obama’s Islamophilic Mideast policy—our consulate overrun in Benghazi, our ambassador murdered, Obama is told 90 minutes into the assault, he goes to bed….” One might also mention Obama’s empowering of the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the hospitality extended to Islamic organizations and individuals at home.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/ Retired Saudi commodore Abdulateef Al-Mulhim is evidently a thoughtful and courageous realist. Last year he wrote the very well-received article I referred to here, and now (hat tip: reader Jean) he reprises his wise counsels. Inter alia, he writes: ‘…. I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/08/csi-benghazi Three weeks after the terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the FBI finally was permitted to bring its formidable forensic investigative capabilities to the burned-out husk of a building. The FBI’s efforts won’t be entirely futile. Their expertise and methodical approach will certainly yield some evidence of what […]

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001310.html

www.arabnews.com/arab-spring-and-israeli-enemy

* Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, columnist for ‘Arab News’: “On the anniversary of the 1973 War between the Arab and the Israelis, many people in the Arab world are beginning to ask many questions about the past, present and the future with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The questions now are: What was the real cost of these wars to the Arab world and its people. And the harder question that no Arab national wants to ask is: What was the real cost for not recognizing Israel in 1948 and why didn’t the Arab states spend their assets on education, health care and the infrastructures instead of wars? But, the hardest question that no Arab national wants to hear is whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people.”

* Al-Mulhim: “I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned ancient Aleppo souk in Syria, the under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the destroyed buildings in Libya.”

* Al-Mulhim: “If many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy Israel? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure. Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail an Israeli-Palestinian?”

* Fred Hiatt: “Obama likes to say that ‘the tide of war is receding,’ but saying so doesn’t make it so, and withdrawing America from the field of battle doesn’t necessarily end a war… The longer a president holds America back from its expected role as leader and shaper of events, the messier the dilemmas will be.”

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fred-hiatt-no-escape-from-the-middle-east/2012/10/07/35fc9204-0f1c-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328978/neurotic-middle-east-victor-davis-hanson Let us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of displaced East Prussians […]

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/10/08/pre-91112-benghazi-attack-pentagon-report-al-qaeda-jihadists-significant-threat-to-libya/ The nonpareil national security investigative reporter Bill Gertz [1]brings to our attention an internal 54 pp. Pentagon report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon., “AL-QAEDA IN LIBYA: A PROFILE [2]—A Report Prepared by the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress under an Interagency Agreement with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office’s Irregular Warfare Support […]

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/10/06/robert-fulford-anti-semitism-without-jews-in-malaysia/

In Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, politicians and civil servants devote a surprising amount of time to thinking about Israel, 7,612 km away. Sometimes they appear to be obsessed by it. Malaysia has never had a dispute with Israel, but the government encourages the citizens to hate Israel and also to hate Jews whether they are Israelis or not.

Few Malaysians have laid eyes on a Jew; the tiny Jewish community emigrated decades ago. Nevertheless, Malaysia has become an example of a phenomenon called “Anti-Semitism without Jews.” Last March, for instance, the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department sent out an official sermon to be read in all mosques, stating that “Muslims must understand Jews are the main enemy to Muslims as proven by their egotistical behaviour and murders performed by them.” About 60% of Malaysians are Muslim.