RUTHFULLY YOURS

At sixes and sevens

In a recent novel entitled ‘I am Pilgrim’, British-born writer Terry Hayes describes a jihadist plot to smuggle deadly pathogens into the United States. The plot is narrowly foiled by the modern version of super-hero: a brilliant secret agent, who saves the day – and the lives of tens of millions of Americans.

It’s fiction, of course; but it’s not far-fetched. In fact, it’s very likely that, somewhere in the Middle East, jihadists are busy plotting some version of a chemical or biological attack. After all, 9/11 has proven that for jihadists mass murder is a worthy deed; and that they are capable of careful planning and executing complex operations.

Well, I guess we should not worry too much. Bond-like secret agents may be fictional; but Her Majesty’s Government is diligently dealing with the challenge posed by jihadists. Isn’t it?

Six days of political wheeling and dealing; six hours of speech-making; six Tornado warplanes to attack ISIL in Iraq. The other side of the equation is not known yet: will it be 600 dead civilians? 6,000? 60,000?

In a press statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu re-affirmed his support for UK’s right to defend itself against incessant rocket attacks coming from Iraq. However, Mr. Netanyahu also expressed ‘deep concern’ for the large number of Iraqi casualties and called on the British government to do more to protect civilians. The Israeli Prime Minister asked Britain to act in a proportional way, in strict compliance with International Law. He called on both sides – UK and ISIL – to show restraint, avoid further escalation and negotiate an immediate ceasefire. The Israeli leader has also expressed support for the mediation efforts by North Korea. A British delegation is expected to arrive in Pyongyang, for indirect talks with a joint delegation of ISIL, Al-Nusra and the Mahdi Army.

One can and should joke. But the only laughable thing is yesterday’s decision itself.

Firstly, because it is so ineffective as to merit the description ‘much ado about nothing’. What exactly are six warplanes supposed to achieve?? How will they make a difference – ANY difference – against guerrilla fighters spread over a large territory and able to easily ‘hide in plain view’, being indistinguishable from the general population?

Secondly, because of the pathetic efforts to portray the decision as ‘ethical’ and ‘legal’. Of course, nobody (not even Al-Qaeda!) disputes that ISIL are a bunch of berserk murderers and that the world would be a more habitable place without them. Yet, to a weak leadership and a political class plagued by moral relativism, that’s not reason enough.

Having slayed, or helped to slay, a dragon, they spend their days stalking the land and looking for ever more glorious fights — but with a diminishing supply of dragons. Eventually they may be caught either swiping at thin air, identifying friends as foes — or mistaking foes for friends.

So fixated were they on trying to stop the opposition from getting any electoral support that they used their energies to suppress a film that would have brought the first-hand testimonies of raped children to wider public attention at the first possible moment.

Cases such as the gang-rape of 1400 girls in Rotherham, England often cause a media fuss for a week or so, then the fuss tends to die down. But it ought not to. Otherwise those responsible are never held to account and few of the lessons that should to be learned ever are.

Police Commissioner Shaun Wright, who presided over much of that disgrace, has done an amazing thing and actually resigned. Many of us had assumed that he would stay in his highly-paid office until his term was up, just as Joanna Simons of Oxfordshire County Council managed to stay after presiding over an identical case in her area a year ago (she subsequently offered a self-pitying “lessons have been learned” apology of her own). But welcome as it is, one resignation does not address a systemic and indeed societal, failure.

In all the recriminations and brief national soul-searching over Rotherham, there is one thing that has hardly been focused on at all: the role of radical, “far-left” organizations.

This is not meant lightly. There remains, of course, an important place in any society for genuine anti-fascist organizations. But it is possible, as noted before, for “anti-fascist” organizations to go badly wrong – indeed, to become deeply “fascistic” themselves.

There are several reasons for that. Being an anti-fascist in the 1930s, like being an anti-communist, was a noble and sometimes brave thing to be. People risked injury and worse when it came to taking on the people who wanted to take over the country. But today, while some of the older types involved in groups in the whole “anti-fascist” area, such as Searchlight Magazine, have seen some genuinely nasty stuff, such as Britain’s National Front stoking anti-black and anti-Jewish racism in its comparative heyday, the younger ones tend, thank goodness, to be running out of enemies. They suffer from what the late conservative thinker Ken Minogue once identified as the “St. George-in-Retirement Syndrome.”

Many Europeans who would laugh at the idea of negotiating with ISIS or al-Qaeda say that Israel should negotiate with Hamas.

Almost nobody sees that the invention of the “Palestinian people” has transformed millions of Arabs into a genocidal weapon to be used against the Israelis, and even, as in Europe recently, the Jews. Transforming people into a genocidal weapon is a barbaric act.

Israel was urged to find ways to coexist peacefully with people who did not want to co-exist with it. Terrorism against Israel fast became acceptable: a “good” terrorism.

Hamas’s stated aim is the destruction of Israel. Its stated way to achieve this aim is terror attacks, called “armed struggle” by Hamas leaders. To this day the Palestinian Authority has not ceased praising and promoting terrorism.

If hatred of Israel is increasing in the U.S., it is largely confined to academics and other extreme radical circles, many of which are funding or receiving funding from Soviet-style agitprop organizations. Journalists are recruited to disseminate descriptions of “facts” as if they were real facts. Pseudo-historians rewrote the history of the Middle East. The falsified version of history replaced history.

Understanding radical Islam requires going back to its roots.

The Christian idea of rendering “unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” never existed in Islam. Its absence has had consequences, including, possibly, the decline of the Muslim civilization and the feeling of humiliation that resulted.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Muslim clerics observed that that the Islamic world was not keeping pace with the West and was on the verge of collapse, they may have decided they needed answers.

Some of these clerics turned to the West, where they chose to study Western political ideas. They spoke of necessary reforms, and created secret societies and nationalist organizations.

Other clerics chose dogmatic, strict readings of the Quran. They found inspiration in the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab and in the established fundamentalist movements.

As the past few weeks have, shown, hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians would rather risk their lives at sea than live under Palestinian governments and leaders whose only goal is to enrich their bank accounts.

Instead of creating job opportunities for young men and women, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority [PA] have spent the past 7 years fighting over money and power. They are now busy planning how to lay their hands on the millions of dollars that are supposed to go to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Hamas wants to use the PA as a tool through which the international community channels funds to he Gaza Strip — a move that would ultimately empower Hamas to tighten its grip over the Palestinian population there.

They said that Hamas officials are providing the emigrants with forged visas and travel documents to enable them to enter Europe.

Over the past few weeks, dozens of Palestinian migrants from the Gaza Strip have been killed or injured while trying to reach Europe by sea.

At least 500 Palestinians have gone missing after the boats carrying them sank in the sea. Some reports have suggested that rival gangs deliberately sunk the boats. The gangs are fighting for the cash the Palestinians are prepared to pay to leave the Gaza Strip. Palestinians refer to the situation as their “Death Boats” scandal.

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Manufacturing safe cancer treatments inside the body. Technion scientists are the first in the world to build cancer-killing chemicals whilst inside the tumor. Their system will allow chemotherapy treatments to be tailored for the patient and concentrated only where it is necessary, thus escaping the usual harsh side effects.
http://pard.technion.ac.il/cancer-treatment-on-target/

100% accurate spine surgery. There is a 10% error rate in standard (unassisted) spinal surgery, resulting in about 4% cases of permanent nerve damage. But the robots from Israel’s Mazor Renaissance ensure a perfect outcome every time. A highlight in this new video is a pole-vaulter competing six months after robotic surgery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3pY9q3yMTI&feature=youtu.be

Star Trek medical technology today. A detailed IBA news report about the medical holograms that Israel’s RealView Imaging projects straight into the hands of surgeons in the operating room.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Sx_I_dsgAdY

Unraveling the mystery of circRNA. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem together with the Max Dellbruck Institute in Berlin, has discovered how circular RNA is produced. The findings increase knowledge of degenerative diseases both in muscle and the brain, and eventually can help their treatment.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140918130940.htm
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/23245

Positive trials of cancer treatment. Israel’s Biocancell Therapeutics has reported a successful clinical trial on high-risk (specific) cancer patients. It will allow the company to proceed to a Phase III trial of its BC-819 product, which is administered together with BCG, the standard treatment.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-biocancell-share-jumps-on-positive-cancer-trial-results-1000974326

Innovative treatment for Glaucoma. Israel’s XLVision Sciences manufactures the IOPtiMate CO2 laser treatment for severe Glaucoma sufferers. The treatment has just made its first sale in Hong Kong. (Warning the video – although only an animation – may be unsettling to some readers)
http://www.bio-light.co.il/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/First-Sale-in-HK.pdf

Oddly Gillibrand insists on living in the United States instead of in the more progressive Pakistan under the notoriously feminist Sharia law.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, appointed to her position via Senator Schumer as a favor for a politically connected clan, changed all her political positions and is working hard to pretend that she’s a serious legislator.

Mainly by repeating stupid things that other people have said.

The most animated speaker was Gillibrand, who condemned opposition to expanding paid family leave across the country.

The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act would establish a national paid family and medical leave insurance program so workers would not have to choose between a paycheck and caring for themselves or a family member, said Gillibrand.

“In every other industrialized, wealthy country in the world they have paid leave,” the senator said. “Europe has up to six months. Even Afghanistan and Pakistan have paid leave, but we do not have paid leave in this country, and because of that when forced to meet a family need, an urgent care need, often times women are forced to leave the workplace because they cannot take that time off unpaid.”

Sure Pakistan and Afghanistan are fantastic for women.

Liberals never seem to realize that just because Third World Failed State #44 ratified their UN Treaty on the Protection of the Rights of Transsexual Penguins and added the laws to the books doesn’t mean that those laws mean anything or apply to people.

We’re being had. Again.

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continue advancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly wants a mercenary army to supply the ground forces in the latest installment of the War on Terror.

And it seems the smart set can’t stop laughing. The Washington Post’s media blogger, Erik Wemple, called it an “insane” idea and suggested that allowing O’Reilly to peddle the idea on CBS This Morning was an “insane departure from that show’s standard.” The whole spectacle, Wemple opined, proved that O’Reilly will “never be much of a thought leader in policy circles.”

It’s true that on the left and the right, O’Reilly’s idea is being scorned fairly mercilessly. That’s understandable on the left. Arguably the most hated host at the most hated news network (in large part because both are so successful), O’Reilly could come out in support of the law of gravity and the usual suspects would run the headline, “Fox Host Supports Law Requiring Babies and Puppies to Fall from Great Height When Dropped.”

And while I have nothing but respect for both my Fox News colleague Charles Krauthammer and Naval War College professor Tom Nichols — both of whom have rejected O’Reilly’s idea with much gusto — I wish people would give it a bit more thought.

Let’s back up.

Ever since 9/11, Americans have been debating the limits of war, the rules of war, the purpose of war, even the definition of war. Weeks after it had already started bombing the Islamic State, the Obama administration was still struggling with whether or not we should call a sustained military assault “war.”

Brutal hammer-and-tongs politics have made that conversation difficult enough. But what has made things all the more frustrating is that while we debate a thousand points of view internally, it is still a one-sided conversation. That’s because, for our enemies, there’s nothing to debate. They know exactly what they mean by war, and they aren’t remotely confused about whom they’re at war with or what the rules of engagement are. That’s because there are no rules for them, save those they divine from Allah. Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their various imitators are not signatories to any international treaty, they observe none of the rules of war, and they have contempt for the opinions of what is called the international community. Islamic terrorists deliberately slaughter civilians, even proudly carving them up on camera. But on our end, we afford them rights “consistent” with the Geneva Conventions.

Amy Chozick covers Hillary Clinton for the New York Times. She is an enterprising and dedicated reporter, and many of her stories have annoyed the 2016 presidential front-runner. This week Chozick covered a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. It was her turn to be annoyed.

Chozick’s most revealing article about the event had nothing to do with the scheduled agenda, or with the opaque, labyrinthine, and seedy finances of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or with the tsunami of clichés from the stage about global warming, gender equality, wellness, empowerment, polarization, Muhammad Yunus, sustainable development, globalization, Palm Oil alternatives, uplift, board diversity, educational access, green energy, Malala, information technology, organic farming, public–private partnerships, and #YesAllWomen. The article had to do with Chozick’s bathroom habits.

Every time she felt the urge, a representative of the Clintons would accompany her to the ladies’ room. Every time. And not only would the “friendly 20-something press aide” stroll with Chozick to the entrance of the john. She also “waited outside the stall.” As though Chozick were a little girl.

If it was not embarrassing enough to be chaperoned to the water closet by a recent college graduate no doubt beaming with righteousness and an entirely undeserved and illusory sense of self-importance, some earnest and vacant and desperate-to-be-hip Millennial whose affiliation with the Clintons, whose involvement in their various schemes, consists of nothing more than her uniform of white shirt and silk scarf — if this was not on its own an indignity and an insult for a correspondent of the New York Times, when Chozick asked for comment on the bathroom police, she received the following response:

Craig Minassian, a spokesman for the initiative, directed me to a press release about American Standard’s Flush for Good campaign to improve sanitation for three million people in the developing world. “Since you are so interested in bathrooms and CGI,” Mr. Minassian said.

Forms of civility, etiquette, and protocol bind Chozick in her dealings with the men and women who work for the subjects of her beat. They do not bind me. And so let me say on behalf of Ms. Chozick, and on behalf of all the other reporters who have been “escorted” to and fro toilets across America so that not for a moment do they escape the scouring eyes of Bill and Hillary Clinton, that Craig Minassian can stick his big obnoxious head in the toilet and Flush for Good.

In urging us to treat others as we would wish to be treated, the PM’s essential decency blinds him to the simple fact that Islam endorses lying as a means of spreading the Prophet’s message and dominion. I know Mr Abbott is a busy man, but there is a book he really needs to read and absorb.

The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom by Mark Durie and Bat Ye’or (Apr 15, 2010)

Mark Durie is an Anglican pastor and research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Islam and Other Faiths at the Melbourne School of Theology. I hadn’t read his book The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom, published in 2010, until the other day. It is a must read for anyone wanting or needing to understand Islam. In the latter category, I would particularly single out genuinely moderate people who are Muslims and also non-Muslim apologists for Islam. Clearly, both groups have no idea what Islam stands for and are in dire need of education.

Durie’s book is far scarier than the scary polemical works of Mark Steyn or even Oriana Fallaci. It is scarier because it is a work of scholarship and authority. It is too late in the date for me to review the book and, anyway, I am not remotely qualified to do so. I have two purposes: one – the main one – is to give a sense of 8¾ of the book’s 9 chapters; the other is to wonder aloud what the heck the remaining one-quarter of the last chapter (“The Way Forward”), to which the book presumably owes its main title, is doing.

Durie refers extensively to the Koran, to the Hadiths, to Muhammad’s life, and to histories of Islam since the 7th Century. He shows conclusively, to my mind, that jihad is central to Islam. Part of jihad is making war and conquering unbelievers. The subsequent part is converting unbelievers or, alternatively, giving them a choice of death or dhimmitude with attendant taxation tributes. And then, by the way, there can be peace. Islam is truly a religion of peace — once it has won the war.

Now if all of this were just an historical perspective on Islam it would be as unconcerning, as are stories of the Inquisition. But Durie finds that dhimmitude is “returning as an integral part of the global Islamic resurgence, which aims to revive sharia”. Think about it. How could any such resurgence be otherwise? Islam is Islam, not some happy-clapper lookalike.

Durie shows conclusively that Islam and jihad go together. Wonder exactly what Islam would look without jihad? Imagine Christianity without the example of Christ’s life and his message? It just seems plain silly to assume a religion can exist without its core essence. This brings me to the problem I have with that one-quarter of the last chapter. Let me explain.