RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/discredited-in-benghazi?f=puball

The abandonment of the State Department-CIA mission in Benghazi that came under attack on September 11, 2012 marked the failure of the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward the Muslim world. That American generals and admirals raised no protest to the decision not to go to the American contingent’s defense dishonored our military and undercut its sense of duty, responsibility, and self-respect. The discredit brought upon the United States by foolish, dishonest foreign policies is dangerous and hard enough to live down. But history teaches that militaries whose moral qualities have been undermined court disaster, and that restoring those qualities is very hard.

Public discourse has focused on whether the destruction of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was spontaneous or a planned terrorist attack, as well as on why the mission had not been provided with adequate security. But these questions are important chiefly from the standpoint of domestic politics.

Of greater importance to our nation is that the so-called consulate annex was destroyed by a regular, conventional military assault and finished off by very accurate mortar fire. This annex, a CIA outpost, seems to have been facilitating the transfer of weapons to Syrian rebel factions-something that the Obama administration was doing quietly while publicly debating whether to do it- as well as engaging in other covert activities in the region. More likely than not, this is how it could become the target of a regular military attack. This may also explain why a CIA team swept the ruins of the annex for two weeks before FBI investigators were allowed to enter it.

As bloody bodies and smoke rise into the air after a cry of Allahu Akbar and a bomb detonation, each Muslim terrorist attack is followed by “Muslimsplaining” why the latest act of Islamic violence had nothing to do with Islam.

Sometimes the Muslimsplainers are Muslims. Often they aren’t even Muslims.

When Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist group aligned with Al Qaeda, kidnapped Nigerian girls, the media’s Muslimsplainers sprang into action to explain why it had nothing to do with Islam.

Time featured “5 Reasons Boko Haram is Un-Islamic”; a listicle friendly article from one of those non-Muslim experts on why Islam is feminist

“With their sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings, the members of Boko Haram conduct themselves in a manner that could barely be more alien to the Prophet Muhammad teachings,” the article claimed.

Mohammed spread Islam through a sustained campaign of murders and kidnappings. Claiming that murder was alien to Mohammed is like claiming that pledge drives are alien to PBS.

As proof, Time cited a statement from Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, that Boko Haram was “set up to smear the image of Islam.”

This is the same Sheikh al-Sheikh who called for destroying all the churches in the region and marrying off 10-year-old girls. Destroying churches and raping schoolgirls is exactly what Boko Haram stands for. If you believe the media, the same grand mufti who supports raping children in Saudi Arabia as Islamic… opposes raping them in Nigeria as un-Islamic.

The only reason the double Sheikh who speaks out of both sides of his mouth denounces Boko Haram and other Al Qaeda groups is because he is a mouthpiece for the Saudi ruling family which opposes them.

Saudi Arabia isn’t opposed to Al Qaeda because it’s un-Islamic. It’s opposed to Al Qaeda because the Islamic group wants to replace the House of Saud, upsetting the deal between Wahhab and Saud that created a balance between the tyrannical royal family and the mosque.

In the beginning, when Britain ruled Palestine, mere glimpses emerge: of twenty-three Jewish frogmen and their British commander disappearing without a trace on a seaborne mission against Vichy Lebanon (1941);1 of Jewish soldiers learning naval skills at the British naval base in Haifa (1943); and of Jewish workers posing proudly next to two minesweepers they have constructed for the Royal Navy in Tel Aviv harbor (1944).

The historian, however, begins his labors where he will, and our story commences not in British Palestine but at Fleet Landing in distant Newport, Rhode Island. It was here in April 1946 that a motorized liberty launch put in carrying crewmembers of the USS Massey and their guests—a group of Annapolis midshipmen who had come aboard for two weeks of drills. On reaching land, some of the midshipmen and crewmembers bounded ashore only to be summoned back to the launch, where they received an informative lecture from Lieutenant Paul Shulman, the Massey’s engineering officer. The topic was standard disembarkation from a naval vessel, and the take home message was this: If the sailors wanted to do things according to regulations, then officers were to debark first, followed by midshipmen (since they were destined to be officers) and finally crewmembers. While highly enlightening, the lecture seems not to have been appreciated by men anxious to begin their liberty—although they did do a commendable job of applying their new knowledge when Shulman finally let them leave the launch.2

Gruffness was nothing new to Paul Shulman. His biographer, J. Wandres, relates that five years earlier, while an Annapolis midshipman himself, he had had a terse exchange with a revered houseguest at his parents’ home. The visitor had remarked that he was delighted that Jewish boys like Shulman were studying to be naval officers since an independent Jewish state, once it came into being, would require men with such skills. Shulman snapped back that he intended to be a career officer in the U.S. Navy and wished the houseguest luck with recruitment elsewhere.3 The houseguest, David Ben-Gurion, found Shulman’s sense of commitment impressive and did not forget him.

Career plans enunciated by 18-year-olds are apt to change. And so it was in the case of young Shulman. The Holocaust—and Britain’s subsequent refusal to allow the survivors of that catastrophe to immigrate to the Jewish National Home in Mandatory Palestine—made a deep impression on the maturing officer. Obtaining his release from active naval duty in 1946, he helped front an organization that purchased decommissioned U.S. and Canadian naval vessels for use in smuggling European Jews to Palestine in the teeth of Britain’s draconian blockade. (Unfortunately, the Royal Navy intercepted most of these vessels, sending the passengers back to Europe or to internment on Cyprus.)4

In April 1948, the 25-year-old Shulman accepted an offer to serve as Chief-of-Staff for naval training in the nascent Israeli Navy.5 Weeks later—on May 15th—five Arab armies crossed the frontier of the newborn Jewish state intent on annihilating it. Within the navy, at this time, there existed two competing operational philosophies. The Palyam—a frogman-based commando unit—believed that commando operations could meet all of Israel’s naval requirements, including staging attacks, keeping sea-lanes open, blockading enemy ports and transporting marines.6 Shulman adhered to the rival view, outlined by former Royal Navy officer, Robert Stephenson Miller, that a traditional navy would better serve Israel’s needs.

“The Che Guevara of the Palestinians” is set to visit Palestinian Authority-controlled Judea and Samaria next week, beginning in Bethlehem, and the city of Jesus’s birth is already in high excitement. The bearer of that illustrious title is none other than Pope Francis. According to Israel National News, “Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a member of the Argentinian parliament and close friend of Pope Francis…said that the pope intends to define himself as the ‘Che Guevera of the Palestinians’ and support their ‘struggle and rights’ during his visit.”

If the Pope or anyone around him has expressed a similar intention to speak out about the Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, it has not been recorded – in sharp contrast to the abundance of signals that the Pope has sent to Palestinian Authority officials. Fr. Jamal Khader of the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem explained: “He is taking a helicopter directly from Jordan to Palestine — to Bethlehem. It’s a kind of sign of recognizing Palestine.” In anticipation of his doing just that officially, Palestinian officials have put up posters proclaiming “State of Palestine” and depicting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

Not only that, but while in Bethlehem, Pope Francis will meet with Abbas; he also plans to celebrate Mass there rather than in Jerusalem, a move that Israel National News says “has been called a show of support for the PA.” He then plans to visit a Palestinian “refugee camp.”

Khader predicted: “Knowing who he is, and his sensitivity for all those who suffer, I am sure that he will say something defending all those who are suffering, including the Palestinians who live under occupation.” Ziyyad Bandak, Abbas’s adviser for Christian affairs, was enthusiastic: “This visit will help us in supporting our struggle to end the longest occupation in history….We welcome this visit and consider it as support for the Palestinian people, and confirmation from the Vatican of the need to end the occupation.”

All this comes after a Church official in Jerusalem criticized Israeli authorities for asking that a sign announcing the Pope’s visit be taken down from a historic site on which such signs are prohibited for preservation reasons. The unnamed official referenced recent Hebrew-language hate graffiti spray-painted on mosques and churches, saying that he and other Church officials “question the fact that the police, instead of taking action against the extremists who paint hate slogans on mosques and churches, choose to remove a sign with a positive message that welcomes the pope in three languages. We hope the police will act with the same determination to prevent the growing incitement and violence against Christians.”

While referring to the graffiti as “incitement and violence against Christians,” however, Church officials have been much more reticent regarding Muslim persecution of Palestinian Christians, even when it has included actual violence. According to Israel National News, “Christian Arab residents of the village of El-Khader in the Bethlehem area were savagely attacked by local Muslims as they celebrated a Christian holiday two weeks ago. A report by CAMERA, an organization which monitors anti-Israel bias in the media, reported that Christians attempting to enter Saint George’s Monastery in the village were intimidated and attacked with rocks and stones.”

In the last two decades, New York City has made tremendous strides in helping people move off welfare dependency, according to a new study by E. J. McMahon for the Manhattan Institute, “Trends in Assistance and Dependency: Tracking Programs for New York City’s Poor, 1956–2014.” In the last 19 years, there has been a 71 percent drop in New Yorkers on welfare. McMahon, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership and president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, Inc., talks with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the history and future of welfare policy in the Big Apple and elsewhere.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is the most significant take-away from a study of welfare in New York City over the past 19 years?

E. J. McMAHON: The decrease in welfare dependency has been as striking and dramatic as the decrease in crime in New York City, which started just a few years earlier. During Mayor John Lindsay’s heyday in the 1960s, New York City became known as the nation’s welfare capital. Not by coincidence, it also was the epicenter of what became a national “welfare rights” movement. The welfare rolls increased from about 400,000 to over a million people in the early 1970s, which so alarmed Governor Rockefeller and the legislature that they started pulling in the reins from Albany, with little effect. Even at the peak of the city’s economic recovery in the late 1980s, the caseload never dipped below 810,000. By 1995, Rudy Giuliani’s second year as mayor, the number of New Yorkers essentially on the dole was back to 1.16 million. By the time he left office, it was at 462,000, and it’s now about 339,000. This is essentially the baseline for assessing Bill de Blasio’s welfare policies over the next four years.

LOPEZ: What explains the city’s drop in welfare dependency?

McMAHON: The 1996 federal welfare reform — Bill Clinton’s bargain with a Republican Congress to truly “end welfare as we know it” — was the big trigger, of course. But that was not the whole answer. Rudy Giuliani and Jason Turner, who became the city’s commissioner for welfare and Medicaid eligibility in 1998, were deeply committed to the principle that getting poor people into a job, any job, is better than simply writing them a check. And in pursuing that goal, they adopted the same sort of performance-driven, stat-focused approach the city had applied to policing. Mayor Bloomberg basically stuck with that all the way. In fact, the welfare commissioner for most of Bloomberg’s tenure, Robert Doar, previously had been Governor Pataki’s state welfare commissioner, and had done a lot to promote key reforms at the state level.

LOPEZ: Is this all good news? Do we know how people are doing once off welfare?

McMAHON: What we know for sure is that poor people are much better off working, even in an entry-level job, than on welfare. As the report points out, a nonworking single mother with two children can collect cash benefits or cash substitute worth $16,032, well below the federal poverty level, but she can more than double that, earning about $34,000, by working. One big part of the difference consists of $8,787 in federal, state, and city earned-income tax credits, which is a very important means of support for low-income workers.

The city’s official poverty rate went down every year for five years after welfare reform, and stayed essentially flat for the next eight years. Although the poverty rate has risen since 2008, it still hasn’t returned to the levels of the mid 1990s. Child poverty, in particular, is appreciably lower than it used to be, which reflects the city’s emphasis on providing support for working parents with dependents. And New York has a lower poverty rate than Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, or San Antonio. The city’s alternative measure of poverty, which starts at a higher income threshold and counts cash income supports from public sources, is actually slightly lower than the official measure, which is based on census data.

LOPEZ: The number of people on food stamps and Medicaid is at an all-time high in New York City. What do these numbers say to you?

McMAHON: There have been several things going on. Eligibility for the federal food-stamps program was expanded in a big way starting around 2002, and New York State began expanding its Medicaid program to families well above the poverty level around the same time, years before Obamacare arrived and started doing the same thing. But there also was a deliberate effort under Mayor Bloomberg to sign more people up for food stamps and Medicaid. He viewed these as “work supports” rather than welfare. The idea was that it was better for a poor person to be working, with the help of food stamps and Medicaid, than to be unemployed and cashing checks. Of course, the ideal would be complete self-sufficiency, and too much of the population is still far from that.

Here’s the implication of Rand Paul’s speech on Wednesday: Barack Obama orders Anwar al-Awlaki killed, while Rand Paul would have sent the late al-Qaeda operative a subpoena and transformed him into a human shield for his fellow jihadists.

That is why only the president will profit more than radical Islam from Wednesday’s reprise of Senator Paul’s Filibuster Theatre. Obama’s maladministration has intensified the terrorist threat, but Paul’s behavior has him looking like the comparative adult in the room.

Senator Paul was speaking against Harvard law professor David J. Barron, President Obama’s nominee for the First Circuit federal appeals court. As Carrie Severino illustrates in detail at Bench Memos, Professor Barron’s agenda is to undermine the Constitution. For that, he richly deserves to be blocked. If Harry Reid’s nuclear option means that by sticking together Democrats can ram him through, the ones facing reelection should bear the weight of confirming a radical leftist.

Nevertheless, the rationale for Senator Paul’s filibuster is narrow: When Barron was an official at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), he wrote several opinions justifying targeted killings overseas of American citizens who join enemy forces in wartime.

Talk about doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

Barron was not referring to just any American citizens but to the likes of Awlaki — a U.S. national who regarded the American people as the primary enemy in a global jihad. Before he was finally killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, Awlaki was implicated in the 9/11 atrocities, the jihadist massacre at Fort Hood, the attempted jihadist bombing of a plane over Detroit on Christmas 2009, and other terrorist plots.

I agree with Paul on two points. First, he is right to object to the decision of the “most transparent administration in history” to shield Barron’s legal opinions from public scrutiny by classifying them. There is no good reason to resist disclosure of a mere legal theory offered in support of government action.

Western diplomats gloss over the repression and persecution that mark the Iranian regime.

Will the real Hassan Rouhani please stand up? Since his election last summer — and especially since the start of nuclear negotiations with the West last fall — Iran’s new president has become a darling of the U.S. and European diplomatic set. The soft-spoken leader who now serves as Iran’s political face is widely viewed as a “moderate” counterpoint to his firebrand predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as a guarantor of a much-sought-after nuclear deal with the West.

On the latter point, the jury is still out. Nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 powers (the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany) are continuing apace. But it’s far from clear that a durable nuclear settlement, especially one that will be acceptable to both Tehran and the West, is actually in the offing.

Regarding Rouhani’s reputation for being a moderate, however, it is already clear that he has not delivered on his promises. To the contrary, despite campaign rhetoric about the need to promote greater human rights and democracy within the Islamic Republic, Rouhani has presided over a deepening wave of state repression during his time in office.

The most conspicuous indicator has been a surge in executions. In 2013, the Iranian regime executed, it is estimated, a staggering 660 people, with two-thirds of those killings occurring after Rouhani took office in August. In the first quarter of this year alone, the Iranian regime killed nearly 200 individuals — the highest pace of state executions in more than a decade and a half. Iranian officials, moreover, aren’t shying away from this grim tally; to the contrary, according to Mohammad Javad Larijani, the head of the Iranian judiciary’s perversely named Human Rights Council, the international community should “be grateful for this great service to humanity.”

Internet repression has also widened. Two years ago, in his Nowruz address to the Iranian people, President Obama warned that an “electronic curtain” had descended on the Islamic Republic, thanks to the Iranian regime’s systematic efforts to isolate its citizens from the World Wide Web. Today, those efforts are more frenetic than ever; in the past year, Iran has launched a new Internet filtering program, blacked out a number of social-media platforms, including Twitter and WhatsApp, and convened a new “Supreme Council for Cyberspace” to oversee and regulate online access by its citizens. For these efforts, Iran has been named an “enemy of the Internet” by journalism watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

The American Embassy in Prague is financing a new project aimed at promoting Islam in public elementary and secondary schools across the Czech Republic.

The new law removes the requirement that there must be a special reason to sue for defamation or insult. Swedish thought police will be able to prosecute anyone who expresses an opinion about Muslim immigration and much else if that opinion is deemed to be defamation or slander. The Swedish government is also spending 60 million krona ($9 million) to boost voter turnout in Muslim neighborhoods.

“The influx of immigrants is reaching biblical proportions. Italy is fighting a losing battle.” — Admiral Giuseppe De Giorgi, Head of the Italian Navy

In Austria, police say they believe that two teenage girls who vanished from their homes in the capital of Vienna on April 10 may be in Turkey, and that whoever helped them get there is using them as pin-up girls to boost recruitment efforts for the “holy war” in Syria.

Friends of Samra Kesinovic, 16, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, said the girls had become radicalized after attending a local mosque run by a Salafist preacher, Ebu Tejma, and learning about the duty of every Muslim to participate in jihad. The girls were expelled from school after inscribing “I Love Al-Qaeda” on tables and walls.

But the girls’ parents—originally Bosnian refugees who settled in Austria after the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s—say that messages and photographs posted on social media networks which claim that the girls are on the front line and fighting with their new husbands are fake.

In a possible break in the case, Austrian police say they traced a phone call Samra made to her sister in late April to a landline based in Turkey. The search for the girls continues.

At least 100 Austrian citizens or residents have participated in the fighting in Syria, according to Austrian media. Approximately 40 of them are currently on the front lines, 44 have already returned to Austria and 19 have been killed in action.

Also in April, the most senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile in Britain, Ibrahim Munir, denied claims that the group was moving its international headquarters from London to the Austrian city of Graz. The Daily Mail, a British newspaper, reported on April 12 that the Muslim Brotherhood was preparing to move its headquarters to Austria in an “apparent attempt to avoid an inquiry into its activities set up by the Prime Minister.”

The group was expelled from Egypt after a counter-revolution there in July 2013, and recently opened a new headquarters above a kebab shop in London. On April 1, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced an investigation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Britain.

Students who demand emotional pampering deserve intellectual derision.

Dear Class of 2014:

Allow me to be the first to offend you, baldly and unapologetically. Here you are, 22 or so years on planet Earth, and your entire lives have been one long episode of offense-avoidance. This spotless record has now culminated in your refusals to listen to commencement speakers whose mature convictions and experiences might offend your convictions and experiences, or what passes for them.

Modern education has done its work well: In you, Class of 2014, the coward soul has filled the void left by the blank mind.

When I last delivered a commencement address via column to the Class of 2012, I complained about the dismaying inverse relationship between that class’s self-regard and its command of basic facts. This led to one cascade of angry letters, blog posts and college newspaper columns from the under-25 set—and another cascade of appreciative letters from their parents, professors and employers.

Of the former, my favorite came from a 2012 graduate of an elite Virginia college, who wrote me to say that “America has a hefty appetite for BS, and I’m ready and willing to deliver on that demand.” I gave him points for boldness and cheekily wrote back asking if we might consider his letter for publication. The bravado vanished; he demurred.

Well, Class of 2012, I did you a (small) injustice. At least the pretense of knowledgeability was important to you. For the Class of 2014, it seems that inviolable ignorance is the only true bliss.

To compel the switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power is to consign billions of people to a life of poverty and darkness.

At the heart of the computer revolution is Moore’s law, named after Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, who predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. As the Manhattan Institute’s Robert Bryce notes in “Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper,” Moore’s law explains why the average smartphone today carries a quarter-million times the data-storage capacity of the computer onboard the Apollo 11 spaceship that went to the moon in 1969.

Mr. Bryce argues that a similar dynamic, making less do more, drives virtually every technological change that has created the modern world, from cars and airplanes to advanced medicine, strategic metals and the iCloud. Technological innovation, in short, has a particular character—a dynamic of improvement that accelerates and amplifies (“faster”) while requiring, by any consistent unit of measure, less space and material (“smaller,” “denser”) at a lower cost (“cheaper”).

Mr. Bryce’s engrossing survey has two purposes. The first is to refute pessimists who claim that technology-driven economic growth will burn through the planet’s resources and lead to catastrophe. “We are living in a world equipped with physical-science capabilities that stagger the imagination,” he writes. “If we want to bring more people out of poverty, we must embrace [technological innovation], not reject it.” The book’s other purpose is to persuade climate-change fundamentalists that they are standing on the wrong side of history. Instead of saving the planet by going backward to Don Quixote’s windmills, they need to take a progressive approach to technology itself, he says, striving to make nuclear power safer, for instance, and using the hydrocarbon revolution sparked by fracking and deep-offshore exploration to bridge the way to the future.

“Smaller Faster” starts with historical examples of how technology does more with less, like the printing press in the 16th century and, not least, the automobile in the 20th, which combined the power of a technological leap (the internal combustion engine) with the efficiency of mass production. Mr. Bryce focuses in particular on the vacuum tube, designed in 1906 by Lee de Forest, the man also credited with inventing the radio.