RUTHFULLY YOURS

De-gendering society inspires shrieking enthusiasm in womyn’s studies classrooms, where academic notions of equality make minimal contact with the real world. In a foxhole things are different, which explains why the feminist push to “reform” the armed forces is so very worrying
In an epochal change in late 2011, Labor’s Defence Minister Stephen Smith announced that virtually all remaining military restrictions on women in combat would be lifted before 2016. Women in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) are now available to kill or be killed at the bleeding edge

This followed the ADF’s own announcement in April, 2011, to the same effect. Those signing off on it were General David Hurley, Chief of the Defence Force; Navy chief Vice-Admiral Ray Griggs; Army chief Lt-Gen David Morrison (current Australian of the Year); Air Force chief Air Marshall Geoff Brown; and Major-General Gerard Fogarty, Head, People Capability. Hurley began it:

After thirty-five years in the Infantry, I know the rigours of life as an infantryman. My decision to support the opening of combat positions in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to women comes from experience and knowledge … A robust and agile ADF relies on every member having the opportunity to contribute fully and equally to Defence operations and capability.

We all share the responsibility to work towards a fair, just and inclusive ADF. After all, gender equality is the whole community’s responsibility.

The statement was emphatic that standards would not be lowered for women’s entry. It was accompanied by a “Risk Management Plan” of high formality but little substance (maybe the nitty-gritty details are for military-eyes only). Meanwhile, Defence got a new employee, a “permanent full-time cultural change manager to assist with implementing cultural change within Army.”

France today is one of the main enemies of Israel — maybe its main enemy — in the Western world. France’s disregard of the threats faced by Israel is more than simple willful blindness. It is complicity.

At a time when Mahmoud Abbas constantly encourages terror and hatred against Israel, and when murders of Israeli Jews by Palestinian Arabs occur on a daily basis, France’s anti-Israel relentlessness can only be seen as the latest extension of France’s centuries-old anti-Semitism.

France’s “Arab policy” has gone hand-in-hand with a massive wave of Muslim immigration. France has quickly become the main Muslim country in Europe. More than six million Muslims live in France, and make up approximately 10% of the population. The Muslim vote is now an important factor in French politicians’ decisions; the risk of Muslim riots is taken into account.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, Hassan Rouhani, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran — a regime that denies the fact that the Holocaust occurred and does not hide its intention to commit another holocaust — arrived in Paris for an official visit.

Two days earlier, Rouhani had been in Rome, where the Italian authorities, in a gesture of submission, covered up the nude statues of Rome’s Capitoline Museum.

Rouhani thanked Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for his “hospitality”. He did not thank President François Hollande for having hosted him on January 27.

According to the court decision, pointing out the totalitarian and cruel aspects of Islam itself is now a criminal offense, considered “insulting and demeaning” to Muslims in Denmark and therefore constituting “racism.” In effect, this means that the court is conflating what might possibly constitute blasphemy with racism.

Conversely, when a Danish imam called Jews “the offspring of apes and pigs,” he was officially reported to the police for breaching § 266b, but no legal charges were ever filed against him.

In Denmark, apparently, it is a crime to criticize Islam and “Islamists,” but calling Jews the “offspring of apes and pigs” and inciting their murder in a packed mosque (and calling non-Muslims in general “animals”) can be done with impunity.

Last week, a Danish district court ruled that what a Danish citizen had written on Facebook in November 2013 violated the Danish criminal code.

In response to a debate about the local activities of a radical Islamic organization, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which works for the re-establishment of the Islamic caliphate, he wrote: “The ideology of Islam is as loathsome, disgusting, oppressive and as misanthropic as Nazism. The massive immigration of Islamists into Denmark is the most devastating thing to happen to Danish society in recent history.”

According to § 266b of Denmark’s criminal code, it is prohibited and punishable by fine or prison publicly to threaten, insult or demean a group of persons because of their race, skin color, national or ethnic origin, faith or sexual orientation.

As the ostensible cease-fire deal agreed upon during a security conference in Munich last week was supposed to take effect in Syria a few days from now, some 50 civilians were killed Monday in Russian airstrikes on two medical facilities.

This kind of deadly paradox is par for the course in the Middle East, particularly when none of the parties involved actually signed any agreement about what European brokers called a “cessation of hostilities.”

Russia, for example, which has been fighting ferociously to rescue the regime of Syrian dictator President Bashar Assad, announced that such a “cessation” would not apply to its bombing of opposition targets.

Assad echoed this in a televised address on Monday, saying that a cease-fire would not include a halt to the use of weapons by the warring parties. No, he explained, the real aim of a “cessation of hostilities” would be to prevent his enemies “from strengthening their positions. Movement of weapons, equipment or terrorists, or fortification of positions, will not be allowed.”

Sebastian Junger’s memorable book, we learned that weather systems, which usually work to cancel each other out, can in that once-in-a-century circumstance combine to create a perfect and awesomely destructive storm.

The same can be true of political and historical forces that we are compelled to conclude have combined to create the perfect refugee storm now rapidly destroying the European Union.

The immediate cause is, of course, the so-called civil war in Syria. It’s not a civil war because Russian and Iranian forces have long since replaced the Assad regime’s forces as one side’s primary belligerent against the Saudi-led effort to overthrow Assad. The risible new “truce” so expertly negotiated by John Kerry does not include Russian air forces in it, so the most devastating part of the fight will continue uninterrupted.

Vladimir Putin couldn’t have foreseen the exodus of people from Syria, but his forces are continuing the pressure that caused it. The fighting around the city of Aleppo alone has produced as many as three hundred thousand refugees, most of whom are gathered on the Syrian-Turkish border. Putin sees the opportunity to destabilize Western Europe by pushing more refugees into its borders. It’s a very useful (to him) byproduct of his military intervention in Syria.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-china-sea-missile-deployment-entrenches-u-s-chinese-positions-1455729019

The Obama administration sharply criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday after charging that China’s military had deployed batteries of advanced missiles on a disputed South China Sea island.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the missile deployment was at odds with a pledge made by Mr. Xi while visiting the White House last year to refrain from militarizing clusters of disputed islands throughout the South China Sea.

Chinese officials, while not directly confirming or denying U.S. and Taiwanese claims about the missiles, said they plan to keep strengthening defensive capabilities in the South China Sea.

While both sides have no appetite for open conflict, their entrenched positions are narrowing their options for a diplomatic solution, while fueling the potential for dangerous flare-ups.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that they had confirmed commercial satellite imagery appearing to show the deployment of surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel chain. The commercial images, from the firm ImageSat International NV, indicate the missiles were deployed sometime after Feb. 3.

The U.S., which in recent months challenged Beijing by sailing warships and flying bombers near Chinese-held islands, had warned against China’s buildup in a region where both sides increasingly find themselves locked into opposing positions.

“When President Xi was here in Washington, he stood in the Rose Garden with President Obama and said China will not militarize in the South China Sea,” Mr. Kerry said on Wednesday. “But there is every evidence, every day that there has been an increase of militarization of one kind or another. It’s of serious concern.”

The rebuke appeared to douse any lingering warmth from Mr. Xi’s state visit to the U.S. For its part, just a month after the Obama-Xi summit, the U.S. started testing China’s posture with what it labeled as freedom-of-navigation patrols near islands controlled by Beijing. READ MORE AT THE SITE

Islamist extremists are waging a religious persecution so severe that, as Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill stated in their historic joint statement last week, “whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated.” Nowhere does this obtain more than in Iraq and Syria, where Christian communities, a groundswell of prominent voices is now acknowledging, face genocide. On February 4, the European Parliament, with near-unanimity and solid socialist support, passed a resolution declaring that ISIS “is committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis” and “other religious and ethnic minorities.”

Despite a foreign-policy mandate to speak out against religious persecution, the United States government has so far been silent on whether this epic religious cleansing of Christians,Yazidis, and other minorities from the heart of the Middle East ranks among the gravest of crimes.

With pressure mounting, the State Department in October leaked word that an official genocide designation would be forthcoming but made clear that State would recognize only a Yazidi genocide and not one against Christians. This prompted Congress to mandate that Secretary John Kerry make a determination by March 16 on the precise question of whether “persecution . . . of Christians and people of other religions in the Middle East by violent Islamic extremists . . . constitutes genocide.”

For Abbas and the Palestinian leadership, the death of more than 170 Palestinians and 26 Israelis in the past five months occurred in the context of a “popular and peaceful uprising.” One can only imagine what the uprising would have looked like had it not been “peaceful.”

Abbas assured his people that those who die defending their holy sites would go straight to heaven. “Every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood,” he stressed.

According to the Palestinian Authority, these youths are acting out of despair — over settlements, checkpoints and lack of progress in the peace process. The attackers are in fact targeting Jews because they have been incited and brainwashed by the same leaders who are now denouncing Israel for protecting itself.

Not a single senior Palestinian official has condemned the targeting of innocent civilians in this “peaceful” uprising. They are too busy glorifying the assailants and naming streets after them.

The blood of the Palestinians who are being shot and killed while attacking Jews is on the hands of Abbas and his senior officials.

It is a puzzle: are the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) playing dumb, or do they believe their own ridiculous rhetoric?

The UN’s assertion that the Saudi-led coalition has committed war crimes in Yemen is unlikely to be true. UN experts have not been to Yemen, depending instead on hearsay evidence and analysis of photographs.

The UN has a pattern of unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes against the armed forces of sovereign states. Without any military expertise, and never having visited Gaza, a UN commission convicted the Israel Defense Force of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in the 2014 conflict. It was an assessment roundly rejected by America’s most senior military officer, General Martin Dempsey, and an independent commission.

The Houthis have learned many lessons from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, groups also supported by Iran. Those lessons include the falsification of civilian casualty figures and their causes. The UN swallowed the fake Gaza figures hook, line and sinker, and are now making the same error in Yemen.

The Houthis exploit gullible or compliant reporters and human rights groups to facilitate their propaganda, including false testimony and fabrication of imagery.

Forensic analysis shows that rather than deliberately targeting civilians, the Saudis and their allies have taken remarkable steps to minimize civilian casualties.

The sisterhood is grimly determined to see women in every unit of the armed forces, objections on grounds of physical capability, logistics, group psychology and lowered standards being dismissed as mere phallocratic prattle. Let us hope that peace prevails while commonsense does not
“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”

–Rudyard Kipling

Western feminists are getting a good scorecard on feminizing the Western military, starting with the all-powerful US forces. The Sisterhood’s pack, apart from the likes of our own Lt-General (Retd) David Morrison and politicians, include the human rights bureaucracies, the Left, and “diversity” advocates. The plan, branded as “equality”, is to have women promoted to one-star rank (roughly Colonel/Brigadier-General) and beyond. Those so elevated can then drive the feminizing from atop the system.

There is a problem, though. Currently, women without prior combat experience struggle to secure the loftiest promotions, so the campaign is on to lower combat fitness standards. “Equality” to the Left – and the current crop of top brass — means “discrimination” if women don’t represent suitably proportionate numbers in elite units. To conservatives, “equality” means equal opportunity to pass a necessary military test. If women don’t get through, too bad.

So, do women do well at war? From 2001 to 2013, 154 US servicewomen were killed on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, many by IEDs which, admittedly, do not discriminate. Nineteen mothers returned to their toddlers and children, but in body bags.[1] All studies suggest that women’s casualty rates become disproportionate the closer women get to combat – and close to half US women troops reported hostile action in those two war zones. But to the Sisterhood, these are trivial issues compared with the need for equality, “fairness” and “civilizing” the rude military. If the push leaves the West less able to deal with, say, ISIS and/or Iran, North Korea, Islamic “caliphates” and thousands of lone-wolfers, well, thAt’s just tough for the West. Feminists, so seemingly reluctant to denounce Islamic misogyny while Western men persist in looking at their watches or wearing blue ties, have maintained a prolonged and remarkable silence. Perhaps their hope is that they and their sisters will be the last consigned to sexual slavery and life in a burka’d sack.

Last December, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced lifting of all gender-based restrictions on combat and infantry roles, most in infantry and armor units[2] and including the elite Rangers and SEALS.[3] The Marines had wanted the toughest jobs, such as machine-gunner and field reconnaissance, to stay male-only. They lost partly because the US, conveniently for politicians, has faced no serious opposition in the field since Vietnam. There has been no extreme combat to test the fragility of mixed-sex combat units. [4]

Carter’s professed rationale – prompted by females’ lawsuits and pressure from the Obama White House — was to increase the pool of potential recruits for 220,000 new unrestricted roles. Low ability of women to pass existing physical tests (developed from generations of combat experience) may shrink the pool to just a birdbath, hence the push to drop standards.

Prior groundwork has included such comical stuff as rolling out courses for US non-commissioned officers and combat veterans, starting on Japanese Marine bases. The instructors donned fake 12kg bellies and boobs and, thus clad, went through the PT regime in order to feel greater empathy with pregnant soldiers. These courses were mandated whether or not a team actually had any pregnant soldiers. To watch the gym session, click on the video below [5].