RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Kurdistan-The-one-state-solution-for-regional-stability-in-the-Middle-East-372301 This development – not the silly idea of an “Arab spring/awakening,” or the establishment of another Arab Palestinian state – will change geopolitics in the coming decades. One of the most important hopeful and positive developments in the modern Middle East, at least since the establishment of Israel, is the emergence of a de […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15570#.U_4Km2P4Kc1 It is a settled matter that the IDF are tops in bravery and ethical warfare. Give them any job, and it’s done. But when politicians run the war, Chelm is likely to happen – Chelm being the town inhabited by those fabled “wise men” loved by tradition for their well-meaning but bumbling ways, like […]

This dispatch can also be read here:
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001481.html

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“STICKS AND STONES WILL BREAK MY BONES — BUT WORDS WILL INDEED HARM ME”

[Note by Tom Gross]

Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit’s new book “My Promised Land” has been gaining a great deal of attention in recent months. Another new book, which has so far garnered less attention from the likes of the New York Times, because unlike Shavit, it hasn’t made dubious claims about Israel’s actions at the 1948 battle of Lydda – an historian writing in the Daily Beast for example, called Shavit’s claims “a gross historical distortion” – is Joshua Muravchik’s “Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel,” published by Encounter Books.

Below, with the permission of Joshua Muravchik and of Roger Kimball of Encounter Books, I attach one of the shorter chapters from “Making David Into Goliath”.

Before that, I attach some other links of interest.

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NEW YORK TIMES CORRESPONDENT USED PICTURE OF YASSER ARAFAT AS HIS FACEBOOK PROFILE PHOTO

I posted all these items on my public Facebook page at the time they appeared, and if you want to see similar items in future, please “like” this page: http://www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia

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* Among the points made in this lengthy essay by Richard Behar in Forbes magazine is that the New York Times Gaza correspondent used a picture of Yasser Arafat as his Facebook profile photo (hardly an indication of neutrality). (Towards the end of the piece, Richard Behar, who is also a subscriber to this list, mentions and links to my own reporting.)

The videotaped beheading of photojournalist James Foley shocked us, but it should not have. The Islamic fascisti such as ISIS have always preyed on the innocent and defenseless. Twelve years ago, a like group of barbarians kidnapped and murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. They did the same to him as ISIS did to Foley: an innocent American reporter was kidnapped, held incommunicado, and then beheaded on videotape for the propaganda and shock value.

History abounds with such events, barbaric murders on scales both large and small. A particularly notable one began one hundred years ago tonight.

In its murderous rampage through Belgium at the outset of World War One, the German army commonly committed mass murders of civilians. As historian John Keegan recounts, 211 were murdered in the town of Andenne, 384 in Tamines, and 612 in Dinant. And then, on the night of August 25, the Germans began the burning of Louvain.

In Keegan’s description, three days of sacking and burning left the Fifteenth Century town deserted. More than 200 civilians were murdered, 42,000 forcibly evacuated, and the library of 230,000 books — Louvain was “the Oxford of Belgium” — was burned. For three days, the Germans rampaged and at the end the town was in ruins.

These atrocities weren’t conducted by special troops of barbarians. They were committed by several of the most elite Prussian regiments. Whatever seed of evil existed in their minds lived on in the death squads of Hitler’s SS and Gestapo which were also comprised of ordinary Germans. It was a big step between Louvain and Auschwitz, but not a step that was too tall for ordinary soldiers to climb. Ordinary Japanese soldiers, at least officers armed with swords, took pleasure in decapitating American prisoners. What they did was the same as what ISIS did to Foley. Evil can become ordinary, even celebrated, within the armies of some nations.

We now have dire warnings about ISIS from the Pentagon and Congress. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has said ISIS is unlike any other terrorist group we have encountered, better funded and even more radical than al-Qaeda, if that is even possible. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey says we would have to use military force not just in Iraq but also in Syria to inflict major damage on ISIS. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, warns that ISIS is a major threat to us at home. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) says they are developing a method to blow up a U.S. city.

Austria figures prominently in a map produced by the IS that outlines the group’s five-year plan for expanding its caliphate into Europe, and has emerged as a central hub for jihadists seeking to fight in Syria.

“The spectrum of recruits for the conflict in Syria is ethnically diverse. The motivation, however, appears to be uniformly jihadist.” — Austrian intelligence agency BVT.

“Allah also gives you the opportunity to wage jihad in Austria.” — Austrian jihadist Firas Houidi.

“We are proud that Allah has chosen us. We feel like lions.” — Austrian jihadist Abu Hamza al-Austria.

The Austrian government has announced plans to improve its intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities in an urgent effort to crack down on would-be jihadists in the country.

The decision by Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner to recruit 20 new intelligence officers to focus exclusively on the threat posed by radical Islam comes after police in Austria arrested nine Chechen immigrants who were on their way to wage jihad in Syria.

The move also comes amid growing concerns that Austria’s shiftless Muslim youth are becoming increasingly radicalized and vocal in their support of the jihadist group Islamic State.

The Chechens—eight men and one woman, ranging in age from 17 to 32—were purportedly planning to travel to Syria over a land route that would take them from Austria through the neighboring Balkans and on into Turkey. Four of the individuals were arrested in the southeastern Austrian province of Styria, and five others were detained in the province of Carinthia. Both provinces border Slovenia.

According to an analysis published by the newspaper Der Standard, Austria has emerged as a central hub for jihadists seeking to fight in Syria because Austria’s geographic location provides easy access to land routes through the Balkans.

Austrian intelligence officials say that most of the 130 Austrians who are thought to have travelled to Syria are Chechens. The rest are immigrants from Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey. Approximately 60 Austrian jihadists are currently on the front lines, 50 have already returned to Austria and 20 have been killed in actio

http://www.amazon.com/Islams-Reign-Terror-Edward-Cline/dp/1500920770/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408976225&sr=1-1&keywords=islam%27s+reign+of+terror+cline

Islam’s Reign of Terror chronicles the war waged against the U.S. and the West, resulting in over 24,000 acts of terror and tens of thousands of deaths in a campaign to force the world to submit unconditionally to Islam and Sharia Law. It also discusses the West’s anemic, evasive response to the war declared against it since 9/11, and how that insipid response only encourages terrorists and states that sponsor terrorism, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Islam-dominated nations to continue to attack the West. From the numerous executions and murders of individual Westerners to the cowardly Western response to Islamic attacks over the Mohammed cartoons to the latest mass slaughters by jihadists of non-Muslims, this book attempts as broad a pallet of the destructive machinations of Islamic terror possible in a brief document.

“America is seizing up. A country that was once a byword for dynamism and energy has chosen not decline but something closer to suicide.”

While Obama golfed: Over the weekend, Tripoli Airport fell to the jihad boys. I was there some years ago, and thought it compared favorably with, say, Logan. Now it’s a smoking ruin – part of the blowback from Obama’s leading with his behind, or whatever he calls it. As things stand, this guy will end his presidency with a chain of failed states for al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, ISIS and the Taliban to gambol and frolic in stretching from West Africa to the Hindu Kush. But you can’t see them from Martha’s Vineyard, so who cares?

~Can you see Burger King from the Vineyard Golf Club? America’s second-biggest burger chain is the latest US corporation to vote with its feet – by wooing Tim Hortons:

Burger King Worldwide Inc. said it is in talks to buy the Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain and relocate to Canada to take advantage of the country’s lower corporate tax regime.

Like Pfizer and other companies, Burger King has figured out that the quickest way to escape Obama’s America is to buy a business in another western nation and order up a new set of letterheads with a foreign address. President Tee-Time will doubtless give a speech at a fundraiser demonizing Burger King and reminding them that in this burg there’s only one king and his slogan is “Have it my way!”

America is seizing up. A country that was once a byword for dynamism and energy has chosen not decline but something closer to suicide.

~The empire-building talk-show host Glenn Beck has apparently offered to buy Headline News from CNN. As Ed Driscoll points out, the news report at The Wrap manages to miss the main point of interest – which is that, before his present eminence, Beck was a minor host at HLN, one of several CNN anchors whose talents the network had no idea how to exploit, as opposed to the gate-delay deadbeats they keep on for decades. So the fun part of the story is the element of sweet revenge – as when former RKO contract player Lucille Ball returned to the studio lot and bought it for her production company.

Egypt and the United Arab Emirates respond to a jihadist takeover — while the U.S. stands in their way.

While media attention has focused of late on the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), which has seized large swaths of territory in Syria and northern Iraq, jihadists are also on the march in Libya. A coalition of jihadists, operating under the name Dawn of Libya, has claimed to have taken control of Libya’s main international airport in its capital city Tripoli as well as some other locations in the capital city itself. Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, is already in the hands of other jihadists including Ansar al-Shariah, some of whom may have participated in the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans nearly two years ago.

“We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,” a statement issued last week by an alliance of Benghazi-based jihadists, including Ansar al-Shariah, declared.

Whatever excuses the Obama administration may try to make with regards to the chaos brought about by ISIS in Iraq, including continued finger-pointing at the Bush administration, the mess in Libya has happened entirely on President Obama’s watch. It stems from President Obama’s decision to back the rebels in forcibly removing Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from power without any thought about the destabilizing consequences for Libya, North Africa and the entire Middle East region. Obama himself admitted that there were lessons to be learned from the Libya regime change operation. “Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’” Obama said to New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman on Aug. 8th.

Qaddafi was of no strategic threat to the United States. Indeed, one of the positive byproducts of the Iraq war launched in 2003 was the fear Qaddafi had of a similar invasion that led to his decision to give up entirely his nuclear arms program. But Obama got sucked into a military conflict in Libya that morphed from a limited humanitarian rescue operation into a war to bring about regime change. Obama yielded to pressure from France, the United Kingdom and the Arab League to expand the objectives of the operation. Members of his own administration characterized his role as “leading from behind.”

Sunday in New York City, Al Sharpton led at least 2,500 marchers in a rally condemning “a society where police are automatically excused” for wrongdoing. At issue was the recent death of Eric Garner, a black New Yorker who resisted arrest and subsequently died from what a medical examiner described as an interplay between a white police officer’s chokehold and Garner’s multiple chronic infirmities. A featured speaker at Sunday’s demonstration was the mother of Amadou Diallo, a black man who was killed in a 1999 shooting by four NYPD officers. “Police cannot judge our sons and execute them for no reason,” she declared.

In a similar vein, Sharpton portrays the recent shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown in Missouri as an example of law-enforcement “devaluing the lives of people,” and he vows to make that incident a “defining moment on how this country deals with policing.” His contention is that too many African Americans are being unjustifiably killed in the streets by white police. If he’s correct, then we’ve got a monumental national scandal on our hands that surely deserves to be addressed. So let’s examine the facts and see what they tell us.

The most comprehensive information we have on this issue comes from a landmark 51-page report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001. This study examined incidents where police used deadly force to kill criminal suspects during the 23-year period from 1976 through 1998.[1] The study did not distinguish between whites and Hispanics,[2] but instead categorized all members of those two demographics as “white.” So, for the moment, let’s refer to this group as “W&H” (Whites & Hispanics) rather than “whites.”

Much has been said and written about the terror tunnels that Hamas built in Gaza. But too little has been said about who it was that put the cement into Hamas’ hands, thus making the construction of the tunnels possible in the first place.

Until now.

In a bombshell revelation, Dennis Ross, the senior Mideast policy adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 2009 to 2011, has admitted that it was he who was assigned the task of pressuring Israel to ease up on its military blockade of Gaza, in the events after Israel’s withdrawal from that region in 2005.

“I argued with Israeli leaders and security officials, telling them they needed to allow more construction materials, including cement, into Gaza so that housing, schools and basic infrastructure could be built,” Ross revealed in the Washington Post on August 10. “They countered that Hamas would misuse it, and they were right.”

Not that Hillary’s State Department had been acting independently of the White House on the issue of cement. For example, Vice President Joe Biden told interviewer Charlie Rose, on Bloomberg TV in 2010: “We have put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can to allow them to get building materials” and other forbidden items into Gaza.

But now that Mrs. Clinton is attempting to distance herself from the president’s debacles in foreign affairs, Ross’s admission shows that it was she who sent her personal envoy to push for a policy that ultimately enabled Hamas to build the terror tunnels.

Israeli officials have long been justifiably concerned about the danger of dual-use items such as cement. On the one hand, cement could be used for innocent purposes such as home construction, in the hands of a peace-seeking, trustworthy government. But in the hands of untrustworthy elements — such as the Hamas terrorist regime that rules Gaza — it could also be used for other purposes. Such as terror tunnels.

President Obama recently remarked, in his much-discussed interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: “Because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival.” Secretary Clinton evidently shared that dismissive attitude when she sent Ross on his mission to put cement into Hamas’ hands.