RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jonah Goldberg was never among those conservatives (names withheld in order not to humiliate the guilty) who were positively ecstatic about the “Arab Spring”- some even getting into hyperbole and calling it a parallel of the American Revolution. Sharia loving Jeffersons and Madisons….rsk
The Arab Spring is over, and tweeting slogans won’t change the chaos that has followed it.
The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring.

Across a huge swath of what, up until recently, had been known as Iraq and Syria, a transnational movement of Sunni Islamic extremists has taken control. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has conquered — without much effort — Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, along with most of the province of Nineveh. It’s also taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Along the way it has ransacked banks (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), pillaged weapon stockpiles (including the stuff we left behind for the Iraqi army), and recruited ever more fighters from Iraq, Syria, and abroad.

ISIS started out as an al-Qaeda franchise, but in 2011 it broke off to become an independent dealer of Islamist mayhem. If anything, it is more extreme than al-Qaeda — though that fine distinction probably means little to the Shiites and Christians it slaughters.

Sunday in Pakistan, Taliban militants attacked the airport in Karachi, the country’s busiest and most important travel hub. They followed up with an attack on an airport security-training facility, showing that there was no area of Pakistan it could not threaten. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came into office seeking an accord with the Taliban. But the Taliban won’t abandon its key objective: a total Islamist state. After the attacks, most observers think Sharif will have little choice but to unleash the army on the insurgents.

On Thursday, buoyed by the international warm bath he received for making a pact with the devil Hamas, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned Israel for a “grave escalation of violence.”

Abbas was responding to Wednesday’s joint Israel Air Force and Shin Bet security agency strike on targets in Gaza, following a rocket attack that barely missed a major highway in the southern part of the country. Luckily, the missile landed in an open area, missing its mark, innocent civilians. But the message was as clear as the air raid siren and subsequent explosion: Terrorism pays.

If Israelis are killed, or merely sent running to bomb shelters with children in tow, the mission is a success, particularly if Israel does not retaliate, since rendering the Zionist enemy powerless is a key aim.

But even when Israel does take action, as it did this week, the terrorists also win, through propaganda.

Indeed, residents of Gaza who witnessed the Israeli strike claimed that a man on a motorcycle had been assassinated and three others seriously wounded. This is enough to set the “international community” and Israeli leftists on their hind legs.

Never mind that the biker happened to be Mohammad Awwar, a well-known jihadist who had worked as a Hamas policeman and participated in several rocket launches against Israel. Forget the fact that he had been planning to down an Israeli helicopter. Imagine that he was just a harmless biker.

This is how Abbas would like the “narrative” to play out, of course, which is why his office issued a statement for foreign consumption.

“We hold Israel responsible for this escalation, which we consider an attempt to exacerbate the situation and pull the region into violence,” it read.

As usual, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu found himself having to refute the charge. During a meeting on Thursday with the visiting former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, Netanyahu explained that the attack on Gaza was made necessary by Abbas’ failure to curb terrorism in the first place.

Obama Claims Al Qaeda Takeover in Iraq Caused by his Foreign Policy, Proves his Foreign Policy Right

While the White House is focusing on the awesome magic of Obama’s first Tumblr and the meme they’re desperately trying to push, the First Kid had to take some time out to address a serious issue caused by the time he tried to pretend that Iraq was no longer a problem because he decided to ignore it.

At least he hasn’t blamed Al Qaeda’s rampage across Iraq on…

1. Global Warming

2. Income Inequality

…yet. I’m sure that will be the hot talking point on Slate/Salon/Atlantic/New Republic/HuffPo/MSNBC shortly.

Anyway Obama is finally springing into action after years of ignoring Al Qaeda’s rise in Iraq after his botched withdrawal. And he’s considering all options.

Like the option to do nothing. Or roll out a hashtag. Or credit himself for his foresight in claiming that the disaster caused by his policy of pretending Al Qaeda in Iraq no longer existed.

But first his team is trying to figure out how to help. They’re still trying to figure out how to help Ukraine. And they’re still wondering whether they can do anything for Pompei after the volcano went off.

On Monday, two millionaires showed off their latest inequality talking points as Obama used Elizabeth Warren’s student loan bill to bash congressional Republicans.

“If you’re a big oil company, they’ll go to bat for you,” Obama sneered. “If you’re a student, good luck.”

Good luck indeed. Warren’s bill cynically piggybacks on a lower interest rate plan from last year that the House passed 392 to 31. The Republicans, who only care about oil companies, unlike Obama who doled out billions in Green Energy loans to the companies of his donors, voted for it almost en masse.

Unlike it, Warren’s bill isn’t really about student loans and isn’t meant to pass. Like her Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act, it’s political theater by a lifelong fraud who began her career as a fake Indian, was a fake Republican and is now a fake Socialist. It would be easier to find a garden spot on Mars than a single honest moment in the career of Elizabeth Ann Herring.

Warren’s bill is cynical manufactured outrage trying to link two unconnected things, supposed tax breaks for the rich to student loans, so that her equally corrupt colleagues can hold on to their fiefdom in the Senate by dragging out the overexploited youth vote for the midterm elections.

Elizabeth Warren, a tenured celebrity professor who jumped into politics, and Barack Obama, an untenured law school instructor, who made it big in politics, know exactly why student loan debt is so high and why their measures do nothing to address its real causes.

Harvard Law paid Warren $350,000 to teach a single course. When Scott Brown brought it up during a debate about student loans, she protested. “I want to talk about the issues. Senator Brown wants to launch attacks.”

But Warren’s outrageous compensation is the issue. Harvard pays the adjuncts who teach many of its undergraduate classes an average of $11,037. Elizabeth Warren, who likes comparing the salary of a company’s employees to its CEO’s, isn’t comparing the $429,981 that Harvard paid her before she ran for office to an adjunct’s salary. And unlike a CEO, all Warren did was show up for a little bit and then go back to her real business as a lawyer and government consultant.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Superstar Josh Brewster and joined by titans Nonie Darwish, author of “The Devil We Don’t Know,” Michael Hausam, a conservative writer and activist, and Karen Siegemund, founder of Rage Against the Media.

The Gang discussed: Obama’s New Bow to the Islamic World, analyzing who the Radical-in-Chief really wants to be admired by the most.

The dialogue occurred within the context of Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap.

Don’t miss it:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-new-bow-to-the-islamic-world-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

It isn’t that the barbarians are at the gate. The barbarians control the gate. I don’t know what else to call a president and attorney general who have opened the U.S. border to literally tens of thousands of “children” – some described as “sexually active” teens, some even suspected of ties to gangs. This not only breaks laws, it breaks trust. Opening the border this way also opens the most outrageous front to date in what increasingly looks like a kind of war aimed at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” And the people’s elected representatives do nothing.

Children are usually just children, but when 130,000 of them are expected to storm the border in the coming year, they more closely resemble an advancing column, a kind of foreign legion of child-mercenaries raised abroad with cynical promises of booty in the form of cradle-to-grave taxpayer charity.

But who will fight “children”? This is the audacity of this latest Obama “crisis”: Trojan horse as “humanitarian crisis.” For the literary set, call it “Camp of the Saintlets,” a twist on the prophetic “Camp of the Saints,” the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic “invasion” of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals, which is today old news out of Spain, Italy and other nations.

Of course, there is an undeniable genius to this form of border attack. All “the kids” from the rest of the world (do you really think Central America is the end?) have to do is serve as pitiful proxies of the assault. Once vanquished by pangs of conscience, however false, we’ll support them forever. We’ll have to. Have you taken a look at your local police department’s massive and bristling military hardware lately? Just shut up and watch as this newfangled children’s crusade turns our border, the concept of nationhood itself, into dust. Welcome to Obamaland.

Of course, even the 17-year-old gangbangers among the youngsters aren’t the masterminds or generals. Like American citizens, they are pawns, dupes, lured by promises Washington may indeed extract from Us, the People. “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away,” one Guatemalan mother told a radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. She is right. Come one, come all.

Once they are over the increasingly irrelevant line, Obama officials welcome the invading junior armies, shepherding them straight into an enfolding and enlarging federal safety net from which they may never have to emerge. These are just the newest wards of a brave new state that bears no resemblance to the republic as defined by those antique documents kept under glass in the dim light of the National Archives.

President Obama is being blamed for this fiasco. The truth is that the Georges (Bush One and Two) are equally to blame. With all the grandiloquent names given to incursions on Iraq (Operation Freedom, Shock and Awe) there was no plan for victory, no recognition of Radical Islam and Jihad as the enemy. Shock and Awe became Aw Shucks…let’s get out of here…..rsk
The magnitude of the debacle now unfolding in Iraq is becoming clearer by the day, with the terrorist army of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, marching ever closer to Baghdad. On Tuesday the al Qaeda affiliate captured Mosul, a city with a population greater than Philadelphia’s, a day later it took Tikrit in the Sunni heartland, and on Thursday ISIS commanders announced they plan to attack the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.

No one should underestimate the danger this presents to the stability of the region and to America’s national and economic security. An extended civil war seems to be the best near-term possibility. More dangerous is ISIS’s ambition to establish a Muslim caliphate in the heart of the Persian Gulf, which would mean a safe haven for Islamic terrorism that would surely target the U.S. The danger to Iraq’s oil exports of three million barrels a day is already sending prices up and global equities down.

***

The threat to Baghdad is real and more imminent than is widely understood. Four Iraqi divisions have melted away before the 3000-5,000 ISIS force, which is gaining deadlier weapons as it advances. One source says Iraqi soldiers who are supposed to protect Baghdad are dressing in civilian clothes beneath their military uniforms in case they have to flee. Iraq’s air power, such as it is, could soon be grounded if civilian contractors are endangered.

President Obama finally addressed the spreading chaos during a photo-op with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday, noting “a lot of concern” but making no commitments to help. The White House turned down an urgent appeal from Baghdad to intervene with air strikes, leaving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki little choice but to turn to Iran to fill the breach—and extend its influence. Meanwhile, Vice President Joe Biden is said to be on top of things from the Situation Room. Inshallah.

The prospect of Iraq’s disintegration is already being spun by the Administration and its media friends as the fault of George W. Bush and Mr. Maliki. So it’s worth understanding how we got here.

Iraq was largely at peace when Mr. Obama came to office in 2009. Reporters who had known Baghdad during the worst days of the insurgency in 2006 marveled at how peaceful the city had become thanks to the U.S. military surge and counterinsurgency. In 2012 Anthony Blinken, then Mr. Biden’s top security adviser, boasted that, “What’s beyond debate” is that “Iraq today is less violent, more democratic, and more prosperous. And the United States is more deeply engaged there than at any time in recent history.”

Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, is the author of “Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind” (Dana Press, 2008).

The government and media alliance advancing the transgender cause has gone into overdrive in recent weeks. On May 30, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the “reassignment” surgery sought by the transgendered—those who say that they don’t identify with their biological sex. Earlier last month Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he was “open” to lifting a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Time magazine, seeing the trend, ran a cover story for its June 9 issue called “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.”

Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

The transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

With body dysmorphic disorder, an often socially crippling condition, the individual is consumed by the assumption “I’m ugly.” These disorders occur in subjects who have come to believe that some of their psycho-social conflicts or problems will be resolved if they can change the way that they appear to others. Such ideas work like ruling passions in their subjects’ minds and tend to be accompanied by a solipsistic argument.

The Terrorist Army Marching on Baghdad

The Iraqi military simply may not be capable of launching a sufficient counteroffensive.

We’re losing Iraq. Mosul, a great city in northern Iraq, now belongs to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The world has changed overnight as a former al Qaeda affiliate wrested a major city from a state by force—and without a fight. Within two days of taking Mosul, ISIS pushed south toward Baghdad, collapsing the Iraqi security forces like dominoes in cities from Mosul to Tikrit. ISIS also attacked the Shiite holy city of Samarra. Baghdad is within their sights.

It is already clear that, regardless of whether Baghdad falls, the ascendancy of ISIS is going to redraw and redefine the Middle East. The Kurdish Regional Government, seeing the rest of Iraq in turmoil and government troops pulling out of Kirkuk, moved on Wednesday to secure the oil-rich province—a prize the Kurds had long sought. With the city now controlled by the Kurds’ Peshmerga military, conditions are ripe for the Kurdish region to secede from Iraq. If that happens, the effects are likely to cascade across neighboring states, erasing Middle East borders established in 1916 by the Sykes-Picot agreement. Nevertheless, the greater threat to Middle East sovereign states is ISIS itself, which seeks to establish a transnational emirate. Yet the government in Baghdad would still need the Kurds even if they splinter off: With the Iraqi army in retreat, Iraq may have to enlist the Peshmerga to try to retake the north from ISIS.

These jihadists present a formidable military foe. Disavowed by al Qaeda for unsanctioned advances into Syria, ISIS is a vicious religious organization that possesses daunting military power. Unlike al Qaeda, ISIS has designated its own Islamic state and is expanding it through force. Seated in the city of Raqqa in northern Syria, ISIS has just gained a second regional capital in Mosul and a third in Tikrit, making their cross-border state a reality. The ISIS military campaign in northern Iraq is already a mighty victory—well-designed, well-prepared and well-executed. The question now is how far ISIS can go.

The extremists are encircling Baghdad and likely planning an offensive. But ISIS may move again to strike Samarra, 70 miles to the north and close to the ISIS front line. If these Islamists, who are Sunnis, seize Samarra’s al-Askari mosque—a revered Shiite monument—the country will be thrown into another sectarian civil war. That has long been ISIS’s aim. In a civil war, ISIS thinks it can emerge as the stronger military power. Then the group would have a state, would be fully armed and ready to expand westward, into Syria’s northern cities beyond ISIS-held Raqqa.

David Hume used to extol “the calm sunshine of the mind.” It radiates a gratifyingly clear and uplifting nimbus, that cognitive luminosity, all the more precious on account of its rarity. My friend Kevin Williamson has been a conspicuous source of such refreshing clarity, and his essay “Catholics Against Capitalism [1]” at NRO is a work of particular scintillation.

The occasion for Kevin’s piece was the meeting in Washington, D.C., last week of some Catholic intellectuals and clergy under the leadership of the Honduran cardinal, His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga [2]. The title of the conference was “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism,” though as Kevin points out, the real object of criticism was not libertarianism particularly but free market economics generally. And as Kevin also points out, the Church has no special grace to pronounce authoritatively on such secular matters and, in the case of its reflections on matters economic, “the best that can be said of the clergy’s corporate approach to economic thinking is that it is intellectually incoherent, which is lucky inasmuch as the depths of its illiteracy become more dramatic and destructive as it approaches coherence.”

Kevin’s longish essay is worth reading carefully, for it is full of wisdom and is expressed with patient brio. The basic position of Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga is the familiar leftist litany: “Capitalism” is bad because it creates great wealth, while it also “destroys wealth, value and jobs. Those ‘wondrous technologies’ also manifest as wrathful deities, efficiently eliminating or reducing the need for labor.” (Kevin quotes from a truly obtuse review [3] of Conscious Capitalism, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s book, in Tricycle). “The implicit economic hypothesis here,” Kevin points out, “is that producing a certain amount of goods more efficiently — in this case, with less labor — makes the world worse off. . . . The reality is the opposite, and that is not a matter of opinion, perspective, or ideology — it is a material reality, the denial of which is the intellectual equivalent of insisting on a geocentric or turtles-all-the-way-down [4] model of the universe.”

Here’s the bottom line: Capitalism is the greatest engine for the production of wealth the ingenuity of man has ever invented. Are you interested in helping the poor? Embrace capitalism. Do you want to help clean up the environment? Embrace capitalism. Are you interested in obliterating the scourge of malnutrition or some ghastly African disease or illiteracy or [fill in your personal do-good desideratum here]: yep, embrace capitalism. The global poverty rate, Kevin reminds us, has been cut in half [5] in the last 20 years. Think about that. Then think about the sorrowful history of our species up to about 1830. How much progress against widespread — really, near total — poverty had there been from the beginning of time until then — until, that is, capitalism started to take off? Not much.