RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.

You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.

If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.

Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.

This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.

Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.

Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.

To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.

In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.

On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.

“A hundred years ago the attacks of September 11 would have marked the beginning of a war, but in this century they only marked a day of pain and sorrow…”

Time brings distance to all events. No pain is as fresh twenty years later as on the day it happened. The shock of the impossible becomes the new normal and then it becomes more background noise.

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin said. The statisticians in Doha, Tehran and Riyadh know it quite well when they count up their numbers. Compound death is more than a statistic; it is incomprehensible.

The banal media coverage of September 11 grapples with a story too big to tell that can only be broken down into human fragments of personal stories.

This is true for most of the dark footprints of history. There is no story of the Holocaust, there are only countless personal stories of survivors and the procedural story of the Nazi killing machine. These perspectives never come together into a single story only human fragments and procedural details, the departments and mechanisms, how many milligrams of Zyklon B it takes per kilogram to kill a person and how many people can be loaded on a train in how much time.

The coverage of 9/11 breaks down into these same mini-stories, survivors describing how they escaped, the families of the dead relating how they reacted to the news, the stories of firefighters and officers, and the procedural questions, how long it takes a falling body to achieve terminal velocity and what happens to the human body when it breathes in enough ash and soot. On the other side are the killers who plotted and planned, checked flight schedules, got their boxcutters and their korans and killed thousands for Allah.

The story of the attacks cannot be told because there is no boundary to it. Where do we begin, with a handful of upper class Muslims in Hamburg? With a scion of the Bin Laden clan becoming a Ghazi or with Hassan Al-Banna finding inspiration in Third Reich propaganda to modernize Islamism? With the Gates of Vienna, the Shores of Tripoli or Mohammed in Mecca? All but the last are incomplete, and even the last leaves too much out.

When a murder happens we trace back the motives of the killer. Was he abused as a child, did the authorities fail to act in time, what made a once sweet boy turn into a killer? To do the same for September 11 is to travel back over a thousand years and still come away with few answers except that sometimes human evil can be congealed into an ideology and passed along from generation to generation like a virus of hatred and cruelty.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/9-11-thirteen-years-ago-we-vowed-never-forget-but-do-we-still-mean-it

“If September 11, 2001, was a wake-up call, clearly America has fallen back to sleep.”

Stephen Flynn

As we come up on the 13th anniversary of 9-11 we should take a moment to think about the significance of that fateful day, the courage displayed by average citizens and professional responders alike, and the legacy they have left us. Have we been good stewards of their sacrifice, their memory, that legacy?

Some might argue that rebuilding a tower, and placing memorial fountains at Ground Zero, as well as creating the 9-11 Museum are all evidence of our gratitude. No argument there. But it must go further.

For many of us, 9 – 11 has always been very personal, as thoughts turn to the friends and colleagues we lost that fateful day, after having made the ultimate sacrifice. We owe their memory much more than a passing thought. 9-11 reminds us of the work of preparedness we embarked upon, the firefighters and responders to Ground Zero we treated, and the resolve with which we all pledged “never again on my watch.” That was the motto for so many of us who headed various forms of terrorism, bioweapons, or general preparedness enterprises.

Perhaps that was because some of us remembered all too well the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. It was not the random act of madmen. It should have been the wake-up call that America and the West were facing an adversary unlike any we had ever encountered. Instead it was all too readily forgotten. Recognizing the effort, and resolve it took to mount such a concerted attack on the United States in 1993 and again in 2001 gives us pause to think about our own efforts and resolve to counter future attacks.

Unfortunately it took the second and fatal attack of the World Trade Center to spark, albeit it seems in hindsight a fleeting recognition that 9-11 was just the beginning. Even with the Boston bombing on 4-15-13 as a reminder, we as our nation retain a persistent disbelief about the reality of facing an organized, dedicated, resource rich, and hate-filled enemy committed to punishing, taming, perhaps even conquering the West. In spite of three loud, high profile, and deadly attacks in 21 years, we as a society don’t seem to fully grasp the notion that not everyone thinks as we do, believes in what we hold sacred, shares the same goals in life, or wants to peacefully coexist in a ‘live and let live world.’

Over the past week a number of articles have appeared in mainstream Western publications, penned by respectful Western authors, which are (in all likelihood unwittingly, I must add) out-Trifkovicing Trifkovic in their assessment of the tragedy in Ukraine. Having made many of the same points over the past nine months, I am glad to say that Chronicles is no longer providing a lone voice of sanity regarding this unnecessary, avoidable and solvable crisis.

Sir Anthony Russell “Tony” Brenton, KCMG, served as Britain’s ambassador in Moscow from 2004 to 2008. His other credentials are too long to quote. On September 10 he published an article in The Daily Telegraph (“It’s time to back away from the Russian wolf: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin won’t be thwarted by NATO or economic sanctions and his aim of a neutral Ukraine is acceptable”) which opens with the Russian proverb that if you can’t face the wolf, you should not go into the forest. The West has blundered into the Ukrainian forest and enraged the Russian wolf, Brenton says, “only to discover that we cannot face him. We should now be looking for the path out.” He says that Western policy has been built on two false premises: “The first is that we must stop a revanchist Russia. As this narrative runs: yesterday Russia took Crimea; today Eastern Ukraine; tomorrow – who knows – Estonia, Poland? This precisely mirrors the Russian nightmare of predatory NATO expansion; yesterday Poland and Estonia, today Georgia, tomorrow – who knows – parts of Russia itself?” The mutual suspicions of 1914 spring worryingly to mind, Brenton warns:

In fact, before what the Russians (with some justification) saw as a Western grab last February for control in Kiev, there was no evidence of Russian revanchism. Those who point to Georgia are wrong – it was the Georgians who started the 2008 war. Meanwhile, Ukraine is a uniquely sensitive case for Russia; the countries are bound by deep social, cultural, and historical ties. Kiev is known as the “mother of Russia cities”. And even in Ukraine the Russians want influence, not actual territory. The “we must stand up to Putin as we did to Hitler” line is pure schoolboy politics. Putin, of whom I saw a fair amount as UK ambassador to Moscow, is not an ideologically driven fanatic, but much closer to Talleyrand – the calculating, pragmatic rebuilder of his country’s status in the world.

The idea that sabre-rattling is necessary to convince Russia of NATO’s seriousness is ridiculous, Brenton writes: “If the Russians didn’t take the NATO security guarantee seriously, why would they be so worried about Ukraine joining?” He is entirely right on his second key point, that sanctions will not work: “There was an air of desperation around claims at last weekend’s NATO summit in Newport that sanctions pushed Russia into the current ceasefire. In reality the US, UK and Ukraine resisted a ceasefire that left Russia in command of the field in East Ukraine. As it happens, Ukraine only moved to accept the ceasefire because it suddenly started losing the war:

Sanctions are a potemkin policy, deployed in the absence of any effective alternative. They have probably done some economic damage, but their sole political effect has been to rally the Russian people behind their president, and reinforce Putin’s conviction that this is a struggle he cannot afford to lose, whatever the cost. Even the Russian opposition doesn’t support them.

At least it is better than ” religious” indoctrination by radical Moslem Imams….rsk
Spending time in prison shouldn’t be so miserable that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, but that doesn’t mean that prisons should be luxurious. An overview of spending by the Federal Bureau of Prisons suggests that excessive taxpayer dollars are being spent just to make prisoners’ lives more enjoyable.

Take a look at this list of questionable prison spending over the past two years:

Flat-screen TVs — $119,244.20. That is, $59,068.80 for 120 flat-screen 42-inch LCD televisions, $40,776.30 for 90 wide-screen 42-inch plasma HDTVs, and $19,399.10 for 74 40-inch LED HDTVs.
Workout equipment — $49,490.26. Taxpayers funded three treadmills, a commercial rower, and slam balls, perhaps so prisoners could “let out some aggression during [their] cardio work.”
Beauty-salon equipment — $30,410.23. Spent on manicure and pedicure stations, reclining shampoo chairs, wig dryers, and massage tables.
Magazine subscriptions — $15,820.23. To provide, for prisoner entertainment, magazines including Sports Weekly, Sports Illustrated, American Football, Basketball Digest, ESPN, Hot Rod, NASCAR Illustrated, Fitness Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People, People Español, Star Magazine, and Esquire.
Hair-styling supplies — $25,928.20. For professional straightening irons, hair-coloring supplies, curler sets, and hair-styling chairs.
Books — $13,560.00. Including 2,750 fiction books, 2,750 science-fiction books, and 2,750 mystery books.
Sports equipment — $9,959.57. For 144 Ping-Pong balls, 30 softball gloves, 30 yoga mats, ten sets of poker cards, and 15 sets of the board game Monopoly.
Stair steppers — $12,488.75.So prisoners can stay in shape by providing them with high-end commercial fitness steppers.

Marc Levin, director of the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, tells National Review Online that this type of spending “definitely raises some questions.” He explains, “Our view is that prisons shouldn’t be Holiday Inns, but they also shouldn’t be cruel and inhumane.” One way to maintain balance, he suggests, is to provide less-sophisticated health facilities. “If you’ve got a yard and track,” Levin notes, “there are ways for prisoners to exercise without having a full-scale health club.” He maintains that “the Bureau [of Prisons] needs to be able to explain to the public why this spending is necessary and in the interest of the taxpayers. If they can’t explain that, then we need to question what the real purpose is for the amenity they’re providing.”

— Caroline Craddock is an Agostinelli Fellow and research intern at National Review.

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb — or both, or neither?

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and as bipartisan leadership in Congress push to approve as much as $4 billion to arm the Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State.

This confirms our reporting about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups here at PJ Media last week.

On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border.

“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade.

“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal.

“Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance.

Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December.

Pity Barack Obama. Our hapless chief executive must be suffering from a cognitive disorder the size of Alpha Centauri. The poor guy grew up on the anti-imperialist mouthings of lefty poet Frank Marshall Davis, schoolboy revolutionary Bill Ayers and later anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi [1], not to mention the well-known anti-American excrescences of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and now he has to go to war — as an imperialist — against the very Third World people he was told again and again we colonized and destroyed. His head must be about to explode.

No wonder he insisted in his Wednesday night speech that the Islamic State is not Islamic — what is it? Hindu? Zoroastrian? A lost tribe of Hasidic Jews? — and that we are fighting an amorphous “terrorist group” (the Irish Republican Army? Basque separatists perhaps?), not the jihadism whose violent ideology has so obviously metastasized across several continents under many guises during his administration with no end remotely in sight. He dares not name our enemy, although it’s almost impossible to imagine how we could win without doing so. He cannot say anything that’s true because he doesn’t know what is true or, perhaps more likely, is terrified to know and then have to admit it. If he did, everything would unravel, not just the jejune Marxism of Frank Marshall Davis. Everything.

But he does know what his poll numbers are and they aren’t good. So we are where we are. Half way in and half way out. Forget Winston Churchill. Forget Douglas MacArthur. The USA is going to war with a nowhere man who no longer knows what he stands for — and who originally stood for very little more than widely discredited and tired left-wing drivel masquerading as hope and change. Now even that’s gone, a distant memory.

We all remember the Beatles’ lyrics:

He’s a real Nowhere Man
Sitting in his Nowhere Land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

Two days ago, according to reports, Obama was still reluctant to do anything about the beheaders of ISIS, but was finally driven to act because of those disastrous polls and broad hints from some of his party members that he was leading them to electoral disaster. Others in that same party were mortified he might actually go to war, so, being Barack Obama, in other words a nowhere man, he split the difference — no boots on the ground (except for a piddling 475 advisers — let’s hope there won’t be any “mission creep”).

The United States and Western Europe are confronting the increasing threat of their citizens traveling to the Middle East to join the worldwide Islamic jihad. Over the past few months, numerous news reports have shed light on disaffected citizens from America and Britain joining the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or other terrorists groups and leaving to train and fight in the Middle East. ISIS is adept at using social media to correspond with Western nationals from Europe and North America predisposed to radicalization.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, the ISIS militant filmed beheading American journalists Steven Sotloff last week and James Foley three weeks ago, is a former British citizen. Abdel Bary is one of up to 500 Britons believed to have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with Islamist groups.

Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha — a man born and raised in Florida — carried out a suicide bomb attack in Syria in May of this year. Before he completed his terror strike, Abu-Salha came back to America on his United States passport. Later, he appeared in a video released by Al Qaeda showing him destroying his passport and leaving a disturbing message for America: “We are coming for you.”

In late August, two men from the Minneapolis, Minnesota region — Abdirahmaan Muhumed and Douglas McAuthur McCain — were killed fighting with ISIS in Syria. Before Muhumed left America to join ISIS, he was employed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refueling commercial airliners. He also had a security clearance, giving him access to sensitive areas of the airport. Douglas McAuthur McCain was a high-school classmate of Troy Kastigar, a Muslim convert, who was killed fighting with Islamic militants in Somalia in 2009.

The latest report of a person to leave the U.S. and travel to Syria to fight for ISIS is of a 19-year-old Somali woman from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Many Americans believe that the effort by Islamic militants to recruit young men and women from the United States and Western Europe to fight on behalf of fundamentalist Islam is a recent phenomenon. However, I have personally watched many troubled people be targeted by Islamic radicals since I was a child. My experience has given me an up-close and personal look at Americans who, whether they realize it or not, are offering aid and comfort to the enemy in cities and towns all across our country.

When I was a child, my mother rejected traditional values and morality to join the counter-cultural movement of the 1970’s. Soon after I was born, my mother changed her name from Annette to a completely Islamicized name. I was unlucky when it came to fathers and father figures. My biological father abandoned my mother right after I was born. Like many poor inner-city African Americans, I know very little about my father.

After revolving around the fringes of the radical left in Buffalo, New York – my mother converted to Islam and joined an Islamic cult.

Thirteen years after 9/11, there is one thing that virtually all our politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainstream media guardians of opinion know: that attack had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and neither does any other jihad terror attack, anywhere, no matter how often its perpetrators quote the Qur’an and invoke Muhammad. Islam, we’re told again and again, is a good, benign thing – indeed, a positive force for societies, and to be encouraged in the West. Jihad terror is an aberration, an outrage against the Religion of Peace’s peaceful teachings. These lessons from our betters are coming more and more often in light of the advent of the Islamic State.

The caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has a PhD in Islamic Studies. But Barack Obama is unimpressed with his Islamic erudition: “ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf emphasized that Obama meant what he said: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion. The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said that for some members of the international coalition he hopes to build against the Islamic State, joining it “will mean demolishing the distortion of one of the world’s great peaceful religions.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron chimed in:

What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Where is “Islam” actually battling these “extremists who want to abuse Islam”? Cameron didn’t say.

Showing as much grasp of the situation as Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared: “Isil’s so-called caliphate has no moral legitimacy; it is a regime of torture, arbitrary punishment and murder that goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” On the opposite side of the aisle, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper complained that Islamic State “extremists are beheading people and parading their heads on spikes, subjugating women and girls, killing Muslims, Christians and anyone who gets in their way. This is no liberation movement — only a perverted, oppressive ideology that bears no relation to Islam.”

Unfortunately, for every Islamic State atrocity she enumerated, there is Qur’anic sanction: