RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamic State combatants were no doubt jumping with joy following botched airstrikes against them by American, Australian and British warplanes in Syria that accidentally killed at least 60 Syrian soldiers and wounded more than 100.

The 15-member United Nations (UN) Security Council met on 17 September after Russia demanded an emergency session to discuss the American-led airstrike fiasco.

The U.S. ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, chastised Russia for the move:

“Russia really needs to stop the cheap point scoring and the grandstanding and the stunts and focus on what matters, which is implementation of something we negotiated in good faith with them”

Russia made no bones about its feelings:

“We are reaching a really terrifying conclusion for the whole world: That the White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that,” the RIA Novosti news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova as saying.”

The boot was however on the other foot with America blaming Russia for an airstrike a few days later that killed 20 Syrian Red Crescent aid workers and truck drivers delivering humanitarian aid relief to 78000 civilians trapped in Aleppo province.

Islamic State no doubt relishes these recriminations and counter recriminations that will guarantee the end of the current tenuous ceasefire.

This disastrous state of affairs could have been avoided had Russia, America and their respective cohorts agreed to concentrate on jointly destroying their common agreed enemy – Islamic State – under a UN mandated Security Council Resolution, rather than acting independently of each other.

President Obama’s decision to intrude uninvited upon Syrian sovereign territory in September 2014 without the backing of a Chapter VII UN Security Council Resolution has seen America behind the eight ball ever since.

President Putin warned in his speech at the UN just one year ago of the perils of operating outside a UN Security Council resolution:

“Russia stands ready to work together with its partners on the basis of full consensus, but we consider the attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. They could lead to a collapse of the entire architecture of international organizations, and then indeed there would be no other rules left but the rule of force.”

The chickens are now coming home to roost for America as the consequences of its by-passing the UN unfolded this past week.

Three months ago, Britain voted decisively to leave the European Union. Britain’s integration into a federal Europe has been a fixed — and wrong-headed — article of faith of American foreign policy for more than half a century. Across the spectrum of U.S. foreign-policy experts, opinion was united in favor of Britain’s continuing EU membership. Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal informed British voters that it would be imprudent for them to vote for independence. A couple of days after the vote, the dean of foreign-policy pundits, the Council on Foreign Relations’s Richard Haass, predicted that the United Kingdom would disappear within five years. Closer to home, military historian Anthony Beevor warned that in the event of a vote to leave that accelerated the EU’s unravelling, “We will instantly achieve most-hated nation status, not just in Europe but far beyond.” One doesn’t Brexit in polite society.

The immediate aftermath of the referendum tended to bear out the Brexit Cassandras. A political vacuum was created when David Cameron announced he was quitting as prime minister but would stay in place until September. Leave campaigners behaved as if they were a provisional government, and London had an air of St. Petersburg in 1917 between the March and October revolutions. Meanwhile north of the border between England and Scotland, there was a huge spike in favor of Scottish independence. To some observers, it seemed like the United Kingdom was falling apart.

Contrasting the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum with the remain vote in the referendum on Scottish independence two years earlier, a Northern Irish Catholic friend was closer to the mark. “The English had the strength of their convictions to vote for what the Scots didn’t dare to do,” he told me three days after the referendum. By early September, a poll showed that support for Scottish independence had retreated back close to the level of the 2014 referendum and only 37 percent of Scots wanted a second referendum on leaving the United Kingdom. In fact, the main effect of Scottish nationalism has been to destroy Labour’s historic dominance of Scotland, making Labour’s path to a majority at Westminster extremely difficult. A mere 19 days after David Cameron had announced his resignation, a new Conservative prime minister was stepping through the door of No. 10. As in May 1940, Britain’s constitution was ruthlessly efficient at ejecting a failed prime minister and providing fresh leadership.

It was England that had led the Brexit vote, with Wales following, opposed by Scotland and Northern Ireland. One month after the referendum, Cambridge historian Robert Tombs provided an alternative historical interpretation to Beevor’s. “If England is exceptional,” Tombs wrote in the New Statesman, “its exceptional characteristic is its long-standing and settled scepticism about the European project in principle, greater than in any other EU country.” The argument, constantly trotted out, that European integration was necessary to prevent war received less support in Britain, especially England, than elsewhere. Britain’s experience of the 20th century had been far less traumatic; “loyalty to the nation was not tarnished with fascism, but was rather the buttress of freedom and democracy.”

The 52–48 margin for Leave, Tombs argues, understates the public’s disengagement from the EU. “What galvanised the vote for Brexit,” Tombs writes, “was a core attachment to national democracy: the only sort of democracy that exists in Europe.” Only 6 percent of Britons supported deeper European integration — the lowest level of any member state — while two thirds wanted powers returned to Britain from Brussels, with a majority even among the relatively Europhile young. Tombs’s conclusion is stark: “In retrospect, joining the Common Market in 1973 has proved an immense historic error.”

Tombs’s Brexit essay forms a coda to his extraordinary The English and Their History, published two years ago. In a December 2015 review in The Atlantic, David Frum called it “spectacular,” a book crammed with explosives “carefully arranged to blow to smithereens three-quarters of a century of accumulated conventional wisdom.” It is a history of a people, of a nation, and of a civilization that changed the world, one stretching back to well before the ninth century when an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to record the national history was commissioned, most probably by King Alfred, to be written in English.

This article is not meant to, or intended to be interpreted as a political endorsement, or lack thereof, of any political candidate. Family Security Matters takes no political point of view whatsoever.

I am gravely concerned that the Obama-Clinton team is involved in an ongoing subversion policy not only on a national scale but on a global one. Certainly, as far as Israel is concerned there is a grand deception going on.

In his UN General Assembly speech, President Obama spoke about “deep fault lines in the existing international order.” He’s right. He’s responsible for a lot of the mess.

Unfortunately, politicians like Obama like to see what they want to see and ignore gross realities that do not jive with what they want to achieve. Take the Israeli-Palestinian issue, for example. At the UN podium Obama said, “Surely Israelis and Palestinian will be better off if Palestinians reject incitement and recognize the legitimacy of Israel, but Israel recognizes that it cannot permanently occupy and settle Palestinian land.”

To the uninitiated (i.e. the progressives who live in a virtual world that enables them to block out sounds and truth that invades their cocooned ‘safe spaces’), massive and ongoing Palestinian terror coming at Israeli civilians from the Hamas political front based in Gaza and the Fatah political front based in Ramallah is ignored, tippexed out of his song sheet. In his narrative, it simply doesn’t exist.

In this he is backed by Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who sang off the same song sheet. “Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion. Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness. This is madness.”

Yes it is, Ban Ki. It’s madness not to see the violent passion to destroy Israel. He spoke as Israel endured another weekend of Palestinian terror attacks, eight in number. It’s madness for them to talk about Israel “illegally occupying Palestinian land” when 2000-year-old Jewish coins were recently dug up on land that was evidently Jewish.

On Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, on the sidelines of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Having just signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the “largest-ever” military-aid package granted to Israel by an American administration, Netanyahu had no choice but to grin and bear it when Obama issued a typical, not-so-veiled threat to the Jewish state.

Though the precise words that were exchanged between the two behind closed doors are not known, Netanyahu was well aware of what to expect ahead of the tete-a-tete — likely, and thankfully, the last he needs to have with the hostile American president. And if he had harbored any illusions about being spared yet another of Obama’s tiresome lectures on the plight of the Palestinians, Obama dispelled them while talking to reporters, just before the meeting.

“There is great danger of terrorism and flare-ups of violence, and we also have concerns about settlement activity,” Obama said, creating moral parity between evil deeds and benign ones. “We want to see how Israel sees the next few years … because we want to make sure that we keep alive this possibility of a stable, secure Israel at peace with its neighbors, and a Palestinian homeland that meets the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

What Obama meant to say — and surely did say behind closed doors — was that Israelis living in any areas that the Palestinian Authority wants cleansed of Jews are the cause of the stabbing attacks, shootings, car-rammings, Molotov cocktail-throwing and bombings to which they have been subjected for decades. And now that he has given them a pile of money with which to protect themselves over the next decade, Netanyahu had better start capitulating to any and every Palestinian demand. You know, just as Obama did last year with the mullah-led regime in Tehran.

Netanyahu, too, spoke in code prior to the meeting. “The greatest challenge is, of course, the unremitting fanaticism,” he said. “The greatest opportunity is to advance peace. That’s a goal that I and the people of Israel will never give up on. We’ve been fortunate that in pursuing these two tasks, Israel has no greater friend than the United States of America.”

Netanyahu was actually conveying that Israel — a liberal democracy like America — has never been at fault for its enemies’ extremism. The trouble with this assertion is that Obama believes the United States is just as much to blame for the wrath of those bent on its destruction as Israel.

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, a senior U.S. official said that during the meeting, Obama raised “profound concerns about the corrosive effect that settlement activity, which continues as the occupation enters its 50th year, is having on the prospect of a two-state solution.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted in his address to the United Nations General Assembly today that “the days when UN ambassadors reflexively condemn Israel, those days are coming to an end.”

But he spared no withering criticism for the world body, reminding members that what was “begun as a moral force has become a moral farce.”

“What I’m about to say is going to shock you: Israel has a bright future at the UN,” he began the speech. “Now I know that hearing that from me must surely come as a surprise, because year after year I’ve stood at this very podium and slammed the UN for its obsessive bias against Israel. And the UN deserved every scathing word – for the disgrace of the General Assembly that last year passed 20 resolutions against the democratic state of Israel and a grand total of three resolutions against all the other countries on the planet.”

Netanyahu called the UN Human Rights Council a “joke” and noted that the UN’s Commission on Women condemned only Israel this year — “Israel, where women fly fighter jets, lead major corporations, head universities, preside – twice – over the Supreme Court, and have served as speaker of the Knesset and prime minister.”

He touted the diplomatic, economic and security relationships Israel has with various nations outside of the UN framework, underscoring that “world leaders increasingly appreciate that Israel is a powerful country with one of the best intelligence services on earth.”

“Because of our unmatched experience and proven capabilities in fighting terrorism, many of your governments seek our help in keeping your countries safe,” he said. “…Governments are changing their attitudes towards Israel because they know that Israel can help them protect their peoples, can help them feed them, can help them better their lives.”

Netanyahu said he had one key message for the delegates: “Lay down your arms. The war against Israel at the UN is over.”

Even should nuclear brinkmanship not result in Armageddon, it can lead to abject defeat and a complete reordering of the international system. The extraordinarily complicated and consequential management of American nuclear policy rests upon the shoulders of those we elevate to the highest offices. Unfortunately, President Obama’s transparent hostility to America’s foundational principles and defensive powers is coupled with a dim and faddish understanding of nuclear realities. His successor will be no less ill-equipped.

Hillary Clinton’s robotic compulsion to power renders her immune to either respect for truth or clearheaded consideration of urgent problems. Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state once said that he was “pure act” (meaning action). Hillary Clinton is “pure lie” (meaning lie), with whatever intellectual power she possesses hopelessly enslaved to reflexive deviousness.

Donald Trump, surprised that nuclear weapons are inappropriate to counterinsurgency, has a long history of irrepressible urges and tropisms. Rather like the crazy boy-emperors after the fall of the Roman Republic, he may have problems with impulse control—and an uncontrolled, ill-formed, perpetually fragmented mind.

None of these perhaps three worst people in the Western Hemisphere, and few of their deplorable underlings, are alive to the gravest danger. Which is neither Islamic State, terrorism, the imprisoned economy, nor even the erosion of our national character, though all are of crucial importance.

The gravest danger we face is fast-approaching nuclear instability. Many believe it is possible safely to arrive at nuclear zero. It is not. Enough warheads to bring any country to its knees can fit in a space volumetrically equivalent to a Manhattan studio apartment. Try to find that in the vastness of Russia, China, or Iran. Even ICBMs and their transporter-erector-launchers can easily be concealed in warehouses, tunnels and caves. Nuclear weapons age out, but, thanks to supercomputing, reliable replacements can be manufactured with only minor physical testing. Unaccounted fissile material sloshing around the world can, with admitted difficulty, be fashioned into weapons. And when rogue states such as North Korea and Iran build their bombs, our response has been either impotence or a ticket to ride.

Nor do nuclear reductions lead to increased safety. Quite apart from encouraging proliferation by enabling every medium power in the world to aim for nuclear parity with the critically reduced U.S. arsenal, reductions create instability. The fewer targets, the more possible a (counter-force) first strike to eliminate an enemy’s retaliatory capacity. Nuclear stability depends, inter alia, upon deep reserves that make a successful first strike impossible to assure. The fewer warheads and the higher the ratio of warheads to delivery vehicles, the more dangerous and unstable.

Consider two nations, each with 10 warheads on each of 10 missiles. One’s first strike with five warheads tasked per the other’s missiles would leave the aggressor with an arsenal sufficient for a (counter-value) strike against the now disarmed opponent’s cities. Our deterrent is not now as concentrated as in the illustration, but by placing up to two-thirds of our strategic warheads in just 14 submarines; consolidating bomber bases; and entertaining former Defense Secretary William Perry’s recommendation to do away with the 450 missiles in the land-based leg of the Nuclear Triad, we are moving that way.

Supposedly salutary reductions are based upon an incorrect understanding of nuclear sufficiency: i.e., if X number of weapons is sufficient to inflict unacceptable costs upon an enemy, no more than X are needed. But we don’t define sufficiency, the adversary does, and the definition varies according to culture; history; the temperament, sanity, or miscalculation of leadership; domestic politics; forms of government, and other factors, some unknown. For this reason, the much maligned concept of overkill is a major contributor to stability, in that, if we have it, an enemy is less likely to calculate that we lack sufficiency. Further, if our forces are calibrated to sufficiency, then presumably the most minor degradation will render them insufficient.

Nor is it safe to mirror-image willingness to go nuclear. Every nuclear state has its own threshold, and one cannot assume that concessions in strategic forces will obviate nuclear use in response to conventional warfare, which was Soviet doctrine for decades and is a Russian predilection now.

Ballistic missile defense is opposed and starved on the assumption that it would shield one’s territory after striking first, and would therefore tempt an enemy to strike before the shield was deployed. As its opponents assert, hermetic shielding is impossible, and if only 10 of 1,500 warheads were to hit American cities, the cost would be unacceptable. But no competent nuclear strategist ever believed that, other than protecting cities from accidental launch or rogue states, ballistic missile defense is anything but a means of protecting our retaliatory capacity, making a counter-force first strike of no use, and thus increasing stability.

In a nuclear world, unsentimental and often counterintuitive analysis is necessary. As the genie will not be forced back into the lamp, the heart of the matter is balance and deterrence. But this successful dynamic of 70 years is about to be destroyed. Those whom the French call our “responsibles” have addressed the nuclear calculus—in terms of sufficiency, control regimes, and foreign policy—only toward Russia, as if China, a nuclear power for decades, did not exist. While it is true that to begin with its nuclear arsenal was de minimis, in the past 15 years China has increased its land-based ICBMs by more than 300%, its sea-based by more than 400%. Depending upon the configuration of its missiles, China can rain up to several hundred warheads upon the U.S.

As we shrink our nuclear forces and fail to introduce new types, China is doing the opposite, increasing them numerically and forging ahead of us in various technologies (quantum communications, super computers, maneuverable hypersonic re-entry vehicles), some of which we have forsworn, such as road-mobile missiles, which in survivability and range put to shame our Minuteman IIIs. CONTINUE AT SITE

Around 200 migrants from Calais, the principal ferry crossing point between France and England, are successfully smuggled into Britain each week, according to police estimates cited by the Telegraph.

In recent months, masked gangs of people smugglers armed with knives, bats and tire irons have forced truck drivers to stop so that migrants can board their vehicles.

“Before, it was just attempts to get on trucks. Now there is looting and willful destruction, tarpaulins are slashed, goods stolen or destroyed. Drivers go to work with fear in their bellies and the economic consequences are severe.” — David Sagnard, president of France’s truck drivers’ federation.

“They want to go to England because they can expect better conditions on arrival there than anywhere else in Europe or even internationally. … They can easily find work outside the formal economy…” — Natacha Bouchart, Mayor of Calais.

“The asylum seekers could apply for protection in France or the European country they first landed in… they only reached Calais by crossing French borders. France is part of the borderless Schengen Area of the EU, whereas Britain is not.” — James Glenday, ABC News.

Building work has begun on a wall in the northern French city of Calais, a major transport hub on the edge of the English Channel, to prevent migrants from stowing away on cars, trucks, ferries and trains bound for Britain.

Dubbed “The Great Wall of Calais,” the concrete barrier — one kilometer (half a mile) long and four meters (13 feet) high on both sides of the two-lane highway approaching the harbor — will pass within a few hundred meters of a sprawling shanty town known as “The Jungle.”

The squalid camp now houses more than 10,000 migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who are trying to reach Britain. The migrants at the camp are mostly from Sudan (45%), Afghanistan (30%), Pakistan (7%), Eritrea (6%) and Syria (1%), according to a recent census conducted by aid agencies.

Construction of the wall — which will cost British taxpayers £2 million (€2.3 million; $2.6 million) and is due to be completed by the end of 2016 — comes amid a surge in the number of migrants from the camp trying to reach Britain.

Based on a recent Farsi-language news story, a man identified as Ahmad, a devout Muslim from the Islamic Republic, conducted sigheh, a “temporary marriage,” with a woman identifed as Elnaz.

Sigheh is allowed under Iran’s Islamic and Sharia law. After three days Ahmad allegedly stole money from Elnaz’s family and left her. After the marriage contract, it was revealed that he also has another wife and children. Elnaz cannot take him to the court, divorce him, or marry another person because the marriage was Islamic and legal. Iranian officials and media outlets are also blaming her for what happened to her.

Under Iran’s Islamic and Sharia law, there exist two kinds of halal (religiously permissible) marriages: permanent and temporary. The latter is called “sigheh” or “motaa” (enjoyment). Sigheh is a verbal contract that can last as long as desired; an hour, two hours, half day, a week, a year, or more. Although sigheh is sold to women as a real marriage and that the man will truly treat the woman as his wife, the real story is different. Normally, in such a contract, the man gives something to the women (money, place to sleep, etc.) in exchange for sex and complete control over her body and emotions.

Sigheh only increased after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Intriguingly, Iranian leaders and Imams have their own Islamic justification for such an act. They argue that this tradition began with Muhammad during the wars he engaged in for several reasons, including that Muhammad’s troops were away from the wives for a long period and needed to release their sexual desires. As a result, Muhammad said that Allah allows temporary marriages. Iranian clerics also argue that many of Muhammad’s troops were killed during holy wars. Therefore, many women were left without husbands. The story goes that Muhammad allowed the men to temporarily marry as many women as they desired.

The Muslim Brotherhood won seats in Tuesday’s Jordanian parliamentary elections, a mostly symbolic victory that revives the movement’s presence in the country’s legislature for the first time in nearly a decade.

Results of the of the vote were disclosed on Thursday.

The Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm, won eight seats and its political supporters took another seven, making for an alliance of 15 out of the 130 lawmakers in the lower house of Jordan’s parliament. But the alliance’s small numbers would limit its influence in shaping policy or opposing laws promoted by the government.

Governing powers would continue to reside largely with Pro-western monarch King Abdullah II. While usually drafted by the government, the country’s laws must be endorsed by both houses of Parliament.

“Still,” said Oraib al-Rantawi, director of the Al Quds Center for Political Studies in Amman, the Muslim Brotherhood “will create controversy and stimulate heated discussions.”

King Abdullah earlier this year dissolved parliament, swore in a new government and named former foreign minister Hani Mulki prime minister in a bid to bolster confidence in government among Jordanians.

Despite those changes, voter apathy was apparent this week, with just 37% of the country’s 4 million eligible voters casting ballots.

The country is struggling with a range of domestic issues including stagnant economic growth and the cost of absorbing more than 650,000 United Nations-registered Syrian refugees into its population of roughly 8.1 million.

Unemployment for Jordanians under age 30, who comprise more than 70% of the country, has hit 30%, according to a 2015 report by the International Labor Organization. A lack of prospects for youth has led many to consider joining the Islamic State militant group and has aided in the proliferation of extremist ideologies, U.S. officials have said.

The Muslim Brotherhood had campaigned on a message of relative political moderation and fielded a slate of candidates that included Christians and women. “We are the only bloc in parliament who ran on a platform with a program, and we will forge alliances with others,” said Ali Abu al-Sukkar, Islamic Action Front’s deputy head.

Election laws this year were revised to stipulate parliamentary candidates would no longer be listed as unaffiliated individuals and instead would be required to appear on slates defined by political party, geography or a loosely defined political agenda.

Those changes were aimed at encouraging party politics, but people generally voted according to family and community ties.

The composition of new parliament is dominated by tribal candidates and businessmen local to voting districts, in similar fashion to the previous assembly. CONTINUE AT SITE