RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

As a faith, and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate

Some hours after the arrest on 18 September of fifteen IS sympathizers alleged to be planning violence in Australia, the Attorney-General Senator George Brandis QC, in an interview with Raf Epstein on ABC Radio Melbourne, declared — correctly — that people of the kind arrested constitute only a “tiny minority” within a large and largely law-abiding community. He went on to reject the suggestion that violence, or support for it, is any way “intrinsic” to Islam. Then he went further. “The suggestion that mainstream Islam is anything other than a religion of peace is arrant nonsense,” he insisted.

How convincing is this claim? Can we, in the face of threatened Islamist violence, find reassurance in that assertion?

The truth is that, both as faith and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate.

The dramatic emergence of the so-called Islamic State in northern Syria and western Iraq (ISIS) and, with it, the foundation, even restoration after a ninety-year hiatus, of a universal Islamic caliphate, brings modern-age militant Islam to a new level. Radical fundamentalist Islam is no longer seeking simply to infiltrate a state, or intimidate a state through terror, or to suborn and then capture and control an existing state. In the bleak borderlands of Syria and Iraq, violent Islamists are now creating a state of their own. And not just any state.

Their task, they claim, is not one of modern institutional innovation but of divinely ordained historical restoration: the restoration of Islam’s worldly sovereignty and universality. They see themselves as erecting the basic framework of a regime and overarching political structure that, they intend, will eventually encompass not only all the world’s Muslims but the entire world. Initially that will be a world of non-Muslims under Muslim governance, but ultimately a world entirely Muslim by faith and in identity and destiny.

This development poses a threat that requires an adequate and effective response.

Alicia Keys’ timing on this probably couldn’t be worse. She strips down and paints a peace sign on her belly at the same time an Islamist army threatens the world and a monster beheaded an innocent woman in Oklahoma. Only a good guy with a gun stopped him.

Yet here she is, being all empowered. Naked, to push for gun control.

Try confronting an Islamist madman like this.The New York Times praises Keys, without noticing something awful.

ALICIA KEYS is a superstar singer who has mostly kept her clothes on and gossip off. So what is she doing in this photo, dressed only in a peace sign?

Her answer has to do with the purpose of life. Last month, as she was sickened by grim news — from the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to the toll in Gaza and Syria — a friend of hers lobbed a provocative question about the meaning of our existence: Why are you here?

“Nobody had asked me that question before,” Keys recalled.

READ: “THE FERTILE SOIL OF JIHAD- TERRORISM’S PRISON CONNECTION” BY PATRICK DUNLEAVY 2012 AND AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/interview-with-patrick-t-dunleavy

We don’t know details yet of the murder of a woman [1] at Vaughan Foods — an Oklahoma distribution center — by a co-worker, but we do know that it was a beheading and we do know the alleged suspect — Alton Nolen, 30 — was a new convert to Islam.

We also know that other workers at Vaughan say the suspect had tried to convert them to that religion.

Some MSM outlets are emphasizing that the suspect was recently fired (it’s workplace violence, doncha know?), but the number of firings that lead to revenge beheadings is minuscule. In fact, I don’t know of any previous. But we don’t have to look too far back, not more than a day or two, to find a popular motivation for beheadings in general — jihad.

Was Nolen motivated by jihad or workplace revenge or a cocktail of both? Probably both. He had a checkered past. He had been convicted in January 2011 of “multiple drug offenses, assault and battery on a police officer and escape from detention,” according to state records. He was released from prison in March 2013.

We don’t know the extent to which Nolen’s conversion to Islam occurred in prison, although it is highly likely most of it did. This is surely worth investigating. Such conversions are a monumental powder keg in the process of going off. From Wikipedia [2]:

J. Michael Waller claims that Muslim inmates comprise 17-20% of the prison population in New York, or roughly 350,000 inmates in 2003. He also claims that 80% of the prisoners who “find faith” while in prison convert to Islam.[1] These converted inmates are mostly African American, with a small but growing Hispanic minority.[2] Waller also asserts that many converts are radicalized by outside Islamist [3] groups linked to terrorism, but other experts suggest that when radicalization does occur it has little to no connection with these outside interests.[3][4][5]

Oh, really? Or should I say, “What difference does it make?” Those “other experts” are being naïve or tendentious. It’s not as if the Islamic extremist playbooks are a secret. They are the basic texts of the religion itself, studied by all adherents in or outside prison, in large groups or by themselves. These same texts call for the extermination or, at best, dhimmitude of the infidel who does not convert. So the behavior of the ummah is regulated across borders. You don’t have to be a card-carrying member of ISIL to know how to behead. Anyone can do it.

This makes our prisons veritable training grounds — petri dishes, if you will — for fanatic killers of the type of the Oklahoma suspect, not to mention recruitment centers for whatever murderous Islamic sect happens to be in vogue that week or month. The only difference between New York and Oklahoma prisons would be one of scale.

In the hard-bitten culture of the U.S. Army, praying soldiers were shunned and professionally unrewarded.

When she heard that “Stonewall” Jackson had died in Virginia at the midpoint of the Civil War, Martha Ann Haskins wrote in her diary: “I felt as miserable as if I could shut myself in some dark place where I could see no one and there cry, weep, mourn until the war was over.” At the time, Haskins was a 16-year-old schoolgirl far away in Tennessee, but her wail of mourning was anything but solitary. Jackson’s death occasioned an outpouring of grief throughout the South.

Little wonder, given Jackson’s legendary feats on the battlefield. But the man who occasioned such grief was a bundle of contradictions, and some of his most striking qualities were far from flattering. By all accounts he was a very unsocial man, who (according to his staffer Henry Kyd Douglas ) “kept himself always very much apart.” At the dinner table, he was “as grave as a signpost” and any staffer who ventured to tell “some little jokes” had to be sure they were “very plain ones for him to see them.”

Though Jackson’s soldiers were in awe of him, he was a camp-and-battlefield tyrant who arrested and court-martialed subordinates for the slightest disappointment of his expectations. J. William Jones, an army chaplain and biographer of Robert E. Lee, believed that Jackson “probably put more officers under arrest than all others of our generals combined.” In August 1862, Jackson put a brigadier-general and five regimental commanders under arrest after discovering that some of their men had purloined, for firewood, a few rails from “a certain worm-fence at a little distance.”
But Jackson was also, for all his maniacal furies, a man of unusually intense Christian piety. James Power Smith, a member of Jackson’s staff, recalled that he “was that rare man . . . to whom religion was everything.” Beverley Tucker Lacy, a Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain-at-large for Jackson’s troops, remembered that Jackson thought “every act of man’s life should be a religious act,” even “washing, clothing, eating.” Religion opened up in Jackson what amounted to a different personality. His prayers were “unlike his common quick & stern emphasis,” Lacy recorded. They were “tender, soft, pleading” and full of “confession of unworthiness.” He prayed with a self-effacement that carried “the doctrine of predestination to the borders of positive fatalism.”

This piety made an odd man odder still, since the profession Jackson had chosen for himself did not, at the time, look favorably on soldiers fiddling with religion. Jackson was a West Point graduate (Class of 1846) and fought with well-noticed valor as a junior officer in the Mexican War. But in the hard-bitten atmosphere of the Army, praying soldiers were often socially shunned and professionally unrewarded. Jackson, though, rose to a generalship: From the time he was given independent command of a minor Confederate field army in July 1861 until his death in May 1863, he managed to execute some of the most extraordinary military operations in American hist

This is the outcome of charlatans who flood the internet with false information about vaccines, statins, medications and so called “natural supplements” which often interfere with certain critical medicines….to an uninformed and gullible public…..rsk
Whooping cough, mumps and measles are making an alarming comeback, thanks to seriously misguided parents.

Almost 8,000 cases of pertussis, better known as whooping cough, have been reported to California’s Public Health Department so far this year. More than 250 patients have been hospitalized, nearly all of them infants and young children, and 58 have required intensive care. Why is this preventable respiratory infection making a comeback? In no small part thanks to low vaccination rates, as a story earlier this month in the Hollywood Reporter pointed out.

The conversation about vaccination has changed. In the 1990s, when new vaccines were introduced, the news media were obsessed with the notion that vaccines might be doing more harm than good. The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism, we were told. Thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury containing preservative in some vaccines, might cause developmental delays. Too many vaccines given too soon, the stories went, might overwhelm a child’s immune system.

Then those stories disappeared. One reason was that study after study showed that these concerns were ill-founded. Another was that the famous 1998 report claiming to show a link between vaccinations and autism was retracted by The Lancet, the medical journal that had published it. The study was not only spectacularly wrong, as more than a dozen studies have shown, but also fraudulent. The author, British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, has since been stripped of his medical license.

But the damage was done. Countless parents became afraid of vaccines. As a consequence, many parents now choose to delay, withhold, separate or space out vaccines. Some don’t vaccinate their children at all. A 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that between 1991 and 2004, the percentage of children whose parents had chosen to opt out of vaccines increased by 6% a year, resulting in a more than twofold increase.

Today the media are covering the next part of this story, the inevitable outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, mostly among children who have not been vaccinated. Some of the parents who chose not to vaccinate were influenced by the original, inaccurate media coverage.

Al-Qaeda will once again become legal in Switzerland in 2015 because a further extension of the ban of the group is not possible under Swiss Law.

“[It is] debatable whether Switzerland possesses an adequate legal framework to mitigate this [jihadist] threat.” Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point.

Another factor obstructing an official ban appears to be bureaucratic confusion. Swiss authorities are impeding progress by “blocking” each other. Berner Zeitung

If the NDB’s estimates are correct, they would imply that—in terms of percentage—there are now more Swiss jihadists in Syria than French jihadists, even though France has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

“IS shows us that modern terror threats can only be combatted through prevention.” Thomas Hurter, President of the National Security Commission.

Swiss lawmakers have filed a motion calling on the Swiss Parliament formally to ban the jihadist group Islamic State [IS] from operating in Switzerland.

The measure—signed by more than 40 politicians from across the political spectrum—is in response to new revelations that the IS has established a network of cells inside Switzerland to raise money and recruit fighters for the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

The jihadist cells are primarily focused on providing financial, logistical and propaganda support to help the IS establish an Islamic theocracy in the Middle East, according to a report published by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) on September 21.

But terrorism analysts are warning that the cells could easily be used to perpetrate terror attacks inside Switzerland.

According to the NZZ, Swiss authorities are investigating at least three Iraqi nationals who are the alleged ringleaders of IS activities in Switzerland.

In response to the report, the Swiss public prosecutor’s office confirmed that it is currently investigating at least 20 separate cases involving jihadist operations in Switzerland, including at least four directly related to the jihad in Syria.

Many leaders have been stating that the Islamic State’s actions are ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’, or even ‘eccentric’. Western leaders who are intervening in the Syria-Iraq conflict justify their actions by declaring the Islamic State to be uniquely evil. In announcing military action and increased security measures, Australian Prime Ministry Tony Abbott said of the Islamic State that “To do such evil — and to revel in doing such evil — is simply unprecedented”. David Cameron stated that “ISIL is a terrorist organisation unlike those we have dealt with before.” Osama Obama claimed “these terrorists are unique in their brutality.”

The actions of Islamic State’s adherents are morally repugnant in the extreme, but only by applying historical amnesia and selective vision could one claim that their evil is unique or unprecedented.

In recent decades, not dissimilar horrors have regularly been reported from around the world, for example the abuses of the ‘Lord’s Resistance Army’, or the genocide currently being pursued by the government of Sudan against Nubian Christians.

The Islamic State’s actions are also not unique in history. Quite apart from the horrors of Nazism and Communism, Andrew Bostom has rightly pointed out that the atrocities of the Ottoman Caliphate in exterminating Christians under their rule were greater in magnitude than what is currently being experienced in Syria and Iraq. He writes:

“Notwithstanding the recent horrific spate of atrocities committed against the Christian communities of northernIraq by the Islamic State (IS/IL) jihadists, the Ottoman jihad ravages were equally barbaric, depraved, and far more extensive. Occurring, primarily between 1915-16 (although continuing through at least 1919), some one million Armenian, and 250,000 Assyro-Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox Christians were brutally slaughtered, or starved to death during forced deportations through desert wastelands. The identical gruesome means used by IS/IL to humiliate and massacre its hapless Christian victims, were employed on a scale that was an order of magnitude greater by the Ottoman Muslim Turks, often abetted by local Muslim collaborators (the latter being another phenomenon which also happened during the IS/IL jihad campaign against Iraq’s Christians).”

Bostom also points out that the Yazidi’s recent sufferings at the hands of the IS are nothing new, but are consistent with a a pattern of genocidal assaults against them which stretches back to Ottoman times.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has a growing list of enemies. “Among his targets” at a recent address to a Turkish business group “were The New York Times, the Gezi events of 2013, credit rating agencies, the Hizmet movement, the Koc family and high interest rates,” Zamanreported September 18. Erdoğan earlier had threatened to expel rating agencies Moody’s and Fitch from Turkey if they persisted in making negative comments about Turkey’s credit.

Turkey’s financial position is one of the world’s great financial mysteries, in fact, a uniquely opaque puzzle: the country has by far the biggest foreign financing requirement relative to GDP among all the world’s large economies, yet the sources of its financing are impossible to trace.

Source: Bloomberg

Source: Central Bank of Turkey

I have analyzed sovereign debt risk for three decades – including stints as head of credit strategy at Credit Suisse and head of debt research at Bank of America – and have never seen anything quite like this.

At around 8% of GDP, Turkey’s current account deficit is a standout among emerging markets. It is at the level of Greece before its near-bankruptcy in 2011. Where is the money coming from to cover it?

A great deal of it is financed by short-term debt, mainly through borrowings by banks.

Little of this appears on the Bank for International Settlements tables of Western banks’ short-term lending to other banks, which means that the source of the bank loans lies elsewhere than in the developed world. Gulf State banks are almost certainly the lenders, by process of elimination.

Recently, as the above chart shows, the rate of growth of bank borrowing has tapered off. What has replaced bank loans?