RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/our-enemy-that-beheads-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Monty Morton, Nonie Darwish and Karen Siegemund.

The guests gathered to discuss, Our Enemy That Beheads, analyzing how Islam spawned Foley’s fate — and our culture’s inability to accept it.

The guests also tackled Ferguson, Foley and a Radical-in-Chief’s Double Standards, focusing on how Obama and the media support a lynch mob while engaging in willful blindness to Islamic jihad.

While the world’s attention is focused on the Islamic State, and its jihadis tell Americans that they will “drown all of you in blood,” jihad activity continues in the United States – although hardly anyone notices through the fog of mainstream media obfuscation.
Here are some recent acts of jihad on American soil that you may have missed – all from this spring and summer:
1. Seattle Muslim “on a jihad to kill Americans” prime suspect in four murder cases

Seattle Muslim Ali Muhammad Brown, reported KING 5 News last Tuesday, is “currently in jail on $5 million bail for the alleged murder of a college student in late June.” He has “already been charged with gunning down two men at 29th and King Street in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood on June 1.” And he is “now the prime suspect in a fourth homicide.”

The report noted laconically in its fifth paragraph, without elaboration, that “multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation say Brown told police he carried out the murders because he was on a jihad to kill Americans.” NJ.com added [2], also deep in its story on Brown’s murders: “Prosecutors say Brown is a devout Muslim who had become angered by U.S. military intervention in the Islamic world, which he referred to as ‘evil.’”

If these news outlets were committed to informing Americans about the true nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, this seemingly insignificant detail would be in the headline and central to all the reporting on this case. But this myopia they share with the mainstream media in general.

Recently uncovered information about what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demands from those to whom she deigns to speak tells us all we need to know about how “progressive” leaders and wannabes really view the rest of us. From President Obama on down, it’s clear that it’s not as their equals.

To be graced with her presence, Mrs. Clinton expects to be treated like a rock star, and arguably even better. In doing so, she has effectively appropriated the three-letter abbreviation “HHH,” once the exclusive property of 1968 presidential candidate and selflessly driven [1] Democrat Hubert Horatio Humphrey, for herself — as Her Highness Hillary.

Public records obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal show [2] that our 21st century HHH extraordinarily obligates [3] those who run the events at which she delivers a contractually limited 90-minute address.

On the financial side, the events must, among other things, provide round-trip private jet transportation on “a Gulfstream 450 or larger jet.” The going rate for the use of a G450 is over $6,000 — per hour [4]. She also requires “a presidential suite” for herself and three to five additional rooms for her staff. Mrs. Clinton has quite an entourage, including an advance team of two to scout the event site, as well as several travel aides. Naturally, she demands expensive room, board and perks for all of them. All of these expenses, and more, are over and above Her Highness’s $300,000 standard speaking fee, which was marked down to a rock-bottom $225K for the UNLV Foundation.

HHH’s controls over the proceedings, as described by the Review-Journal, are particularly galling. They include:

Final approval of all moderators or introducers.
Being “the only person on the stage during her remarks.”
No more than 50 photos with no more than 100 people.
No press coverage or taping of her speech.
No physical record of what she said, except for a transcript to be given to her — prepared by a stenographer the event must hire and pay.

What can help account for the racist character of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri? Is racism justified? Is black racism a new phenomenon?

I remember these scenes vividly.

Sometime in the mid-1950’s, when I was about ten years old, I was in the family car with my foster father on some errand. My foster father was an Italian-American Lutheran truck driver who married into an Irish-German family. We had to stop on Perrysville Avenue (this was in Pittsburgh), right in front of Perrysville High School (as it was known then). A black cop was directing traffic at the five-way intersection, which had no traffic light. My foster father remarked angrily, “Damned niggers are taking over everything!”

Now, I had never seen a black man before, and did not understand my foster father’s anger. But the seething malice was evident in the way he uttered the words. I gave him what I guess he perceived to be a “dirty look,” but which was simply my astonished but mute inquiry.

When we got home, he beat me with the strap of his belt. I guess he saw reproach in my glance.

In another episode of “misunderstanding,” the family had company over. We were in the living room and there was a lively conversation on politics, in which I did not participate. I don’t recall exactly what the subject was, and I think I was in my pre-teens. But either my foster father or foster mother asked me: “What color are we, Eddie?”

I answered: “Beige.” Well, I was the only member of the family who read books. My foster parents had conniption fits every time I consulted the pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana they had bought for show and shelved in a glass-door cabinet. I had encountered the term somewhere, and it seemed more appropriate and truer than was “orange” or “white.” The term was in my vocabulary, not my family’s.

So, “beige” was not the answer any of the adults expected to hear. I think they all sat stunned, and my foster parents looked embarrassed.

When the company left, I again heard the swoop and felt the sting of my foster father’s belt.

I do not know who they are, these people. They are not my people.
My sister is writing her memoir about what happened. In Toulouse, Sarah woke up one morning to find everything changed.

None of that brotherhood with Hitler spared anyone from the ovens.
Germans were directing traffic in this fabled French town. Quite a sight for a 9-year-old on her way to school. I was born a month after Hitler invaded, July 20, 1940. After a tortuous sequence of events, we escaped over the Pyrenees. My father carried me on his back in a backpack. My mouth was stuffed with cotton in case I cried out and alerted the Gestapo, which were hounding our footsteps.

My parents, Noah and Ida, never fully recovered. I provide details of this elsewhere.

For now I mention this to indicate that Holocaust survivors come in various shades. None of us “owns” the Holocaust.

I make it a practice never to judge Holocaust survivors, mainly those who endured the camps. They have special rights.

But do those rights extend to openly blaspheme the Jewish State? As these purported Holocaust survivors go public in their denunciation of Israel, have they lost their immunity? Do I have the right to strike back? I don’t know. It is risky. But I cannot remain silent.

I am reading about certain Holocaust survivors who have grouped together to blame Israel for everything under the sun. To further rub it in, they openly declare their love and pity for the Islamist terror group Hamas. The slander was gladly picked up by the BBC and Britain’s The Guardian, whose headline reads like this: “Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants Accuse Israel of Genocide.”

By outsourcing the Ukraine problem to Germany, the U.S. echoes 19th century mistakes that led to repeated conflicts.

Hapless in response to Vladimir Putin’s wars, successive American leaders are left puzzling over the Russian’s place in time. “Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century,” said President George W. Bush in August 2008, after Russia’s invasion of Georgia. When the Russian force of “little green men” took Ukraine’s Crimea last February, Secretary of State John Kerry exclaimed, “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.”

Mr. Putin has proved impervious to complaints about his outdated behavior. On Monday morning, Ukraine reported that a column of 10 Russian tanks and a couple of armored vehicles charged over Ukraine’s southeastern border into areas held by Russian rebels. Russian artillery now fire at Ukrainian military positions from inside Ukraine’s territory, NATO said on Friday. Ignoring objections from Kiev, Russia announced its intentions to send a second “humanitarian aid” convoy in a week of military trucks dressed in white, bringing and taking who knows what.

As the military pressure grows on the pro-Western government in Kiev, the Europeans are adding their own. Plainly anxious that these latest escalations risk a replay of 20th century wars, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday turned up in Kiev to push for an accommodation with Moscow. The chancellor pressed the Ukrainians to cease fire and ruled out new EU sanctions against Russia. So Mr. Putin comes into talks Tuesday in Minsk with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko with fresh leverage.

The crisis in Ukraine revives one of the oldest clashes in the heart of Europe—the “bloodlands,” to use Timothy Snyder’s phrase—between autocracy and liberalism. For centuries this region was shaped by “the Polish Question”—what should happen to the difficult, independent-minded people between Russia and Germany. With the end of communism, and EU and NATO membership, Poland was taken off the chessboard. Ukraine is now on it.

ISIS makes liberals rediscover the necessity of hard power.

So now liberals want the U.S. to bomb Iraq, and maybe Syria as well, to stop and defeat ISIS, the vilest terror group of all time. Where, one might ask, were these neo-neocons a couple of years ago, when stopping ISIS in its infancy might have spared us the current catastrophe?

Oh, right, they were dining at the table of establishment respectability, drinking from the fountain of opportunistic punditry, hissing at the sound of the names Wolfowitz, Cheney, Libby and Perle.

And, always, rhapsodizing to the music of Barack Obama.

Not because he is the most egregious offender, but only because he’s so utterly the type, it’s worth turning to the work of George Packer, a writer for the New Yorker. Over the years Mr. Packer has been of this or that mind about Iraq. Yet he has always managed to remain at the dead center of conventional wisdom. Think of him as the bubble, intellectually speaking, in the spirit level of American opinion journalism.

Thus Mr. Packer was for the war when it began in 2003, although “just barely,” as he later explained himself. In April 2005 he wrote that the “Iraq war was always winnable” and “still is”—a judgment that would have seemed prescient in the wake of the surge. But by then he had already disavowed his own foresight, saying, when he was in full mea culpa mode, that the line was “the single most doubtful” thing he had written in his acclaimed book “The Assassins’ Gate.”

Anti-Semitism in Norway, where I have lived for twelve years, is over the top. I have never quite gotten used to it. Every now and then I hear or read something that reminds me that I am living in Europe, in a country that was occupied by the Nazis, and where a lot of people were perfectly okay with that. I think it is fair to say that anti-Semitism in Norway is most virulent among the cultural elite – the academics, intellectuals, writers, journalists, politicians, and technocrats – although thanks to the media and schools, it has trickled down to many ordinary Norwegians, some of whom may never even have met a Jewish person.

This anti-Semitism manifests itself in various ways. When Obama became president, former Norwegian prime minister Kåre Willoch said things did not look promising because Obama had “chosen a Jew as chief of staff.” The chief rabbi of the Oslo synagogue reportedly receives a pile of hate mail every day. During the Gaza War, a major Norwegian newspaper had trouble finding Norwegian Jews who were willing to comment on the record about the war: they said they were scared of repercussions. Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. There is terrible anti-Semitic bullying in the schools. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist or famous author will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews. Nothing could be safer for them to say; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise – as opposed to what would happen if, say, they made certain public statements about Islam. And they know this. Norway’s most respected newspaper cartoonist, Finn Graff, who has admitted that he never draws cartoons about Islam because he is scared for his life, has frequently drawn cartoons comparing Israelis to Nazis; he knows Jews will never harm him. These anti-Semitic op-eds and speeches and cartoons are never remotely fresh, witty, or original; all they ever do is recycle tired cultural-elite clichés. And their creators get nothing but praise from their colleagues, who celebrate them as courageous truth-tellers. It is much more acceptable to scream “kill the Jews” at an anti-Israeli protest than it is to criticize Hamas.