RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65571
It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of the Obama administration’s inept approach to the Middle East than the pictures of the black flag of al Qaeda flying once more from the rooftops and minarets of Ramadi and Fallujah.

At the height of the sectarian violence that erupted in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s ousting, these Iraqi cities—situated in the country’s western Anbar Province—became synonymous with attempts by al Qaeda-backed militants to thwart Iraq’s transformation into a functioning democracy.

Disaffected local Sunni tribes that had previously pledged their loyalty to Saddam’s regime allowed al Qaeda militants, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to undertake a murderous terror campaign against coalition forces. Their efforts involved murder, kidnappings and the occasional public beheading.

An estimated 1,300 American troops died trying to crush the violent insurgency in Anbar. It ended when the Sunni tribes, angered by Zarqawi’s uncompromising pursuit of a radical Islamist agenda, turned on the al Qaeda interlopers and, as part of the so-called “Sunni Awakening,” backed U.S. efforts to eradicate al Qaeda. Zarqawi was killed by a U.S. missile strike on his hideout in the outskirts of Baghdad in 2006. The remainder of Iraq’s al Qaeda network was rolled up, and its black flags removed from public display, during the military surge masterminded by retired U.S. Gen. David Petraeus.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65568The so-called Arab Spring unleashed forces that have been dormant for a century. Like their counterparts throughout the region, Israel’s Arabic-speaking minorities are changing in profound ways. But our leaders fail to grasp the implications of what is happening.

Consider the Christian community.

Father Gabriel Nadaf, a Greek Orthodox priest from Nazareth, has become the symbol of this new period. Nadaf is the spiritual leader of an Israeli Christian movement calling for Israeli Christian youth to serve in the IDF. He is responsible for the 300 percent rise in Christian Arab enlistment in the IDF in the past year.

Nadaf does not hide his goal or his motivation. His seeks the full integration of Israel’s 130,000 Christians into Israeli society. He views military service as the key to that integration.

Nadaf is motivated to act by the massive persecution of Christians throughout the Arab world since the onset of the Arab revolutionary wave in December 2010.

As he explained in a recent interview with Channel 1, it is “in light of what we see happening to Christians in Arab countries, how they are slaughtered and persecuted on a daily basis, killed and raped just because they are Christians. Does this happen in the State of Israel? No, it doesn’t.”

Shahdi Halul, a reserve captain in the Paratroopers who works with Nadaf, declared, “Every Christian in the State of Israel should join the army and defend this country so it will exist forever. Because if, God forbid, the government is overthrown here, as it was in other places, we will be the first to suffer.”

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65564What is so weird here is that Al-Ahram effectively admits this is a conspiracy theory. It’s basically a Jews-poisoning-the-wells type story, but with a camel-droppings angle. Weird…

Today, the most widely circulating Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, has run a front-page report headlined in red and bold, ”Israeli conspiracy on Sinai’s underground water.”

In a black bold lead, the report stresses that ”liberating Sinai and restoring its territories from Israeli occupation was not merely our dream; the dream was to develop this region to be our real exit from all economic troubles.”

However, the report claims, ”the ship of the state is always besieged with conspiracies.” (Our italics)

“Unsatisfied with their crimes in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 in Sinai, Palestine, and South Lebanon; Zionists brought Prosopis juliflora, a kind of Mesquite [shrub or tree] which is considered so dangerous, to Sinai.”

Next, the newspaper goes on to explain the dangers of the tree and how it was brought to Egypt.

First, it says that an Israeli tourist, who works in the agricultural sector, had given some of the plants (which can be poisonous, produce hundreds of thousands of seeds and which take over pastoral grasslands, use scarce water, and, with their thorns and many branches, form impenetrable thickets that prevent animals from accessing the land they occupy) to a Sinai Bedouin as a “gift”.

”Mesquite has colonized thousands of hectares of the governorate’s land, having severe economic and environmental impacts”, the report claimed.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65561Has there ever been a better story? It’s like a version of Titanic where first class cheers for the iceberg

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sustaining-the-triad-the-enduring-requirements-of-deterrence

On November 8, 2013, the Commander of the US Strategic Command, General C. Robert Kehler gave his final public speech before his retirement, at the Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, St. Marys, Georgia, at an event I planned and hosted. Given the growing discussion in Washington over the future of our nuclear deterrent, Russian and Chinese nuclear modernization and the major push the administration and others are making to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranian government, his remarks are very appropriate. They are here in their entirety.

General Kehler: Thank you, Peter. Good morning everybody.

My objective is to not become more famous in the last week of my tenure as the Commander of Strategic Command. [Laughter]. But I must say, it’s a pleasure and a delight to be here.

To Admiral Tofalo and Admiral Breckenridge, thanks for taking an active leadership role in sponsoring this. There are lots of folks in the room that made this happen, and many of you have traveled here from around the country to include communities that are located adjacent to the bases that form the bulk of the strategic deterrent force support network today.

Let me just say to all of you, thank you for what you do. The young men and women who serve our country, wearing the country’s uniform, directly sense the support of the American people through you. So thank you for what you do, especially around bases like this. I know, I talked to some of you last night. You make a great investment in your own time and energy to make sure that in this case the United States Navy feels welcome in Georgia and I can tell you, it works. Because, we see that direct support translates into a young sailor being able to go into the community here and feel comfortable and feel like they’re welcome and appreciated. So thank you for all of that.

I also have to say, Peter mentioned when we started to work together and I’ll say something a little bit more about that era here as I go on. If all of you listened carefully to General Welsh last evening and to Frank Miller this morning, you’ve heard the bulk of my speech. All I can do is stand here right now and say what they said. [Laughter]. However, that would leave us 29.5 minutes for questions and answers and I have Captain Pam Kunze who is my new public affairs officer sitting over here, it’s her job to explain later what the general meant to say. [Laughter]. So I’m not going to burden her with that. I’m going to go ahead and give a speech anyway. Then I’ll go ahead and take some questions.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65556The Left sees it as a disease; the Right sees it as a symptom.

Democrats are revving up for a huge national “conversation” on income inequality. This is in no small part because the Obama administration and congressional Democrats would rather talk about anything other than Obamacare.

But it would be unfair to say this is all a cynical effort to gain partisan advantage. For instance, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is certainly sincere in his desire to take “dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities” in the Big Apple. He and his team want to fix the distribution of income in New York by distributing it differently.

This in itself points to the different perspectives on the left and right when it comes to income inequality, perspectives worth keeping in mind if you’re going to try to follow the conversation to come.

As a broad generalization, liberals see income as a public good that is distributed, like crayons in a kindergarten class. If so-and-so didn’t get his or her fair share of income, it’s because someone or something — government, the system — didn’t distribute income properly. To the extent conservatives see income inequality as a problem, it is as an indication of more concrete problems. If the poor and middle class are falling behind the wealthy, it might be a sign of declining or stagnating wages or lackluster job creation. In other words, liberals tend to see income inequality as the disease, and conservatives tend to see it as a symptom.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65550Around 2007, I gave a lecture at the Defense Department. One of the attendees presented a scenario suggesting that the “problem of Islam” was not political but a problem of verbiage.

There was a secret debate happening in the Defense Department and the CIA in which some people thought that all Muslims were a problem, some believed that only al-Qaeida was a problem, and still others thought the Muslim Brotherhood was a problem.

The main problem, however, was that all Islamism was a political threat, but it was the second position that eventually won over the Obama administration. Take note of this; since 2009, if you wanted to build your career and win policy debates, only al-Qaeda was a problem. The Muslim Brotherhood was not a threat; after all, it did not participate in September 11. This view was well-known in policy circles, but it was easy to mistake this growing hegemony as temporary.

Actually, it only got worse.

A Muslim Foreign Service officer recounted how some U.S. officials were trying to persuade the powers that be that al-Qaeda was split from the Muslim Brotherhood. Imagine how horrified he was. Still other officials told me that there was heavy pressure and there were well-financed lobbyists trying to force officials into the idea that al-Qaeda was the only problem. Some high-ranking Defense Department officials — for example, one on the secretary of Defense’s level — were pressured to fire anti-Muslim Brotherhood people. I know of at least five such incidences.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65547Now that he’s been re-elected by a landslide, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is gearing up to run for President, and right behind him comes the scrutiny. That’s why his handling of a blooming scandal about political payback by his staff against Fort Lee, New Jersey’s Democratic mayor has national resonance.

In September a series of lane closures slowed traffic onto the George Washington Bridge, a main commuter artery from New Jersey into New York City. The Governor’s appointees at first said that the lanes were closed as part of a bungled traffic study. Mr. Christie, for his part, alternated between dismissing the story and joking about it.

Now emails subpoenaed by New Jersey’s Democratic-led Assembly suggest that the closures were intended simply to create problems in the town that sits on the Jersey side of the Hudson River crossing. “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” a top Christie aide wrote in August to a Christie ally at the Port Authority, which controls the bridge. “Got it,” he responded.

Once the delays began the following month, Mr. Christie’s appointees emailed each other to confirm that Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich’s urgent phone calls would not be returned. The mayor had declined to endorse Mr. Christie for re-election.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=65543One scholar says being denied access to the West Bank violates her ‘rights as an American citizen.’ Huh?

Save for some college students refusing to buy Israeli hummus, the “boycott, divestment and sanctions” movement against the Jewish state has had very few successes over the past decade. That changed last month when the American Studies Association voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Now the Modern Language Association (MLA), a far more prominent group, is poised to condemn Israel at its annual meeting in Chicago. Anyone interested in academic freedom should pay attention.

Scholars at academic conferences are expected to offer original research and analysis in their presentations. That certainly can’t be said of one MLA session this Thursday, called “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine.”

All the scheduled panelists are outspoken supporters of the boycott Israel movement: University of California, Riverside Prof. David Lloyd, Wesleyan Prof. Richard Ohmann, University of Texas Prof. Barbara Harlow, and Omar Barghouti, who has compared Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany. Even the moderator, University of Texas Prof. Samer Ali, is a boycott supporter. In essays and public statements I have read, their message was clear: Israel, the worst human-rights violator on the planet, deserves to be made a pariah among nations.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-ny-times-benghazi-myths-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s special edition of The Glazov Gang was hosted by Superstar Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Titans Morgan Brittany, Dwight Schultz and Michael Chandler.

The Gang gathered to discuss The Hidden Fees of ObamaCare. The discussion occurred in Part II and focused on how, step by step, Americans are now learning that, surprise, surprise, Obama’s health care plan isn’t really free. The segment also included a discourse on Dennis Rodman’s Kim Jong-Un Romance.

Part I dealt with Obama and The Muslim Brotherhood, The NY Times’ Benghazi Myths and A Day in the Life of Saeed Abedini.

Don’t miss both parts of this Blockbuster 2-part episode below:

Part I: