RUTHFULLY YOURS

Reza Kahlili is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double-life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, April 2010. A Time to Betray was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award and the 2011 International Best Book Award.

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Despite President Obama’s outreach to the new president of Iran, Islamic radicals walked over a U.S. flag and spat on Obama’s image on their way to prayers on Friday.

Mashregh, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards, published a photo of the image of Obama alongside the U.S. flag laid on the ground and radicals walking over them. The picture shows one individual spitting on Obama’s image.

And while the Obama administration and U.S. media have generally portrayed the phone call and Twitter exchange between Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as evidence of warming relations, in September the website of the Quds cyber officers posted an image of Obama, wearing a Nazi field marshal’s uniform, surrendering with his hands on his head. The caption reads, “In the not too distant future…. One [Gen. Qasem] Soleimani is enough for all the enemies of this country.”

In an effort to emphasize the Islamic Republic’s view of the United States as the “Great Satan,” mass rallies will be held across Iran to shout “Death to America” and assail worldwide Zionism on the anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover of November 4, 1979, Brig. Gen. Seyyed Masoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of the Joint Armed Forces Headquarters, announced on Saturday.

Colonel Ken Allard is a widely known commentator on foreign policy and security issues. For more than a decade, he was a featured military analyst on NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. That experience provided the backdrop for his most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/perilous-dalliance-with-egyptian-extremists#ixzz2h7oYL2x4
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

“No way!” sniffed the money-honey at Washington Dulles International Airport as she refused to exchange my stack of Egyptian pound notes. “That currency is so unstable, we can’t even establish an exchange rate in real money. It’s worthless paper.” Badly jet-lagged, I testily replied that some humility might be in order since the American government, backer of the aforementioned “real money,” was at that very moment, technically insolvent. While I won the debate on points, those Egyptian pounds are still with me as rueful souvenirs of last week’s whirlwind fact-finding trip to Egypt.

Organized by the Westminster Institute, a McLean-based think tank, our small delegation of media and military analysts was given extraordinary access to Egypt’s top decision-makers, the first such private visit since last summer’s overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Our principal interlocutors included the minister of defense, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi; Theodoros II, pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church; and Amr Moussa, drafter-in-chief of the new Egyptian Constitution. We also interviewed business leaders, journalists and student revolutionaries, street-wise veterans of the back-to-back uprisings that toppled the authoritarian regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Mohammed Morsi.

A few chapters back in the Cory Booker story, the dashing young mayor of Newark, New Jersey was actually dashing into a burning building to save a helpless woman.

Now here we are, a few plot twists later, and Cory Booker’s halo is looking kind of mucky. Take those flirty tweets he sent to an impressively tattooed stripper, the one and only Ms. Lynsie Lee. Did the public react to this naughty news with prudish gasps of disgust?

Nope. Instead, cynics, who were getting used to Booker’s antics, pointed out he may have deployed those tweets to scotch rumors of certain other…. proclivities.

Now, really, tell me. How well is your campaign going when your best-case scenario is you really did mean to tweet that stripper?

It’s getting hard not to notice that Cory Booker likes to lie. A lot. Which is why New Jersey’s special Senate election on October 16 is tightening fast. Booker’s lead over businessman Steve Lonegan has collapsed from a princely 30-point advantage to a mere 3. People are starting to whisper Booker may lose.

Let’s start with the Great T-Bone Fantasia, unearthed by crack reporter Eliana Johnson of NRO. T-Bone was baaaaad. T-Bone sold drugs and threatened to shoot Booker dead. But, wouldn’t you know, T-Bone had a vulnerable side, too, sobbing out his heartrending story in Booker’s car.

What drama! What inner-city realism! What a crock. T-Bone never existed, no matter how many times Booker told his made-up tales to enthralled audiences at Yale and other upscale venues.

And that teen gunshot victim who died operatically in Booker’s arms? He died in the hospital. And witnesses say Booker grandstanded at the crime scene, moving the victim around in “a big act,” endangering what was left of his ebbing life. As for Booker’s mentor, who supposedly died in “a truly poetic way”…”at school in front of a roomful of kids,” her grandson debunks that death scene as a complete fabrication.

But all this dying and shooting and sobbing and drug dealing has made the Ivy League-educated Booker into a big star on the speaking circuit, raking in piles of dough, which, by the way, he lied about, too.

No, he didn’t keep “very little of it, if any,” as he told the New York Times, claiming he’d “given away hundreds and hundreds of thousands” to charity. He kept most of his speaking fees for himself, thank you very much. 88.7% of it, to be exact, adding up to more than a million dollars.

REMEMBER “IRAN/CONTRAGATE” IN 1986 WHEN AMONG THE INDUCEMENTS OF ARMS SENT TO THE AYATOLLAH, THERE WAS SUPPOSEDLY A CAKE BAKED IN THE SHAPE OF A KEY? RSK

The threat of force will do far more than gifts and sweet talk.

‘We know that deception is part of [Iran’s] DNA.” So said Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman last week, testifying to Congress about the next round of negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programs. So why is Ms. Sherman pleading with Congress to delay imposing additional sanctions for the sake of what she called “confidence building”?

How depressingly predictable: Iran lies and prevaricates—about the breadth of its nuclear programs; about their purpose; about the quality of its cooperation with U.N. nuclear watchdogs; about its record of sponsoring terrorism from Argentina to Bulgaria to Washington, D.C.; about its efforts to topple Arab governments (Bahrain) or colonize them (Lebanon); about its role in the butchery of Syria; about its official attitude toward the Holocaust—and the administration thinks priority No. 1 is proving its own good faith.

Last month, the administration returned to Iran a 2,700-year-old silver cup shaped like a mythological griffin, which had been stolen from a cave in Iran a decade ago before it was seized by U.S. customs. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei must have been moved to tears.

At least the griffin beat the key-shaped cake National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane brought with him in the 1980s in what would become the Iran-Contra debacle. That episode provides a useful lesson in how not to negotiate with Iran, and from the most unexpected source: Hasan Rouhani, now Iran’s president, then deputy chairman of the Majlis, the Islamic Republic’s parliament.

“If you want to understand why the government is shut down or why elected Republicans would even consider doing something as reckless as using a debt default to extract policy concessions from the White House–without necessarily even knowing which policy concessions they want–Stan Greenberg has a memo for you,” writes Francis Wilkinson, a Bloomberg View editorial board member.

Of course if you begin with the supposition that Republicans are “reckless” and ignore the fact that debt-ceiling brinksmanship is nothing new, what you want is probably to have your prejudices reinforced, not to understand. And Greenberg does deliver. His organization, Democracy Corps, “issued a report this week on six focus groups conducted with Republican subgroups–two each with Tea Partiers, evangelicals and moderate Republicans.”

According to Wilkinson, “the results somehow manage to be unsurprising and shocking at the same time.” We’d say they manage to be utterly banal and unsurprising. The utterly banal part is that Republicans turn out not to care for Barack Obama–who is, after all, a Democrat and a highly partisan one at that.

The unsurprising part–the part Wilkinson finds “shocking”–is that some of them, specifically the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans, speak in rather harsh terms about the president. If Wilkinson actually finds this shocking, he must be about 17 years old, which is to say too young to remember how liberals (including elite ones in academia, arts, entertainment and journalism) spoke contemporaneously of President Bush.

According to Wilkinson, the Tea Party and evangelical Republicans’ “default position” toward Obama “is essentially abject terror.” In truth, some of the examples he cites are actually quite anodyne: “What is he really thinking?” asks one “Tea Party Man.” Another simply says: “Background.” An “Evangelical Woman” says, “His motives behind his actions,” which would be a tautology if it were a complete sentence. An “Evangelical Man” says: “He wants to fundamentally change the country.” If our theory is right, Wilkinson isn’t old enough to remember that Obama himself said the same thing.

The Attorney General tries to reverse a Supreme Court ruling by the back door.

For Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.

The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver’s license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote.

According to Mr. Holder, this amounts to a shocking return to the Jim Crow era. He describes these modest measures to secure the integrity of the ballot as “aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans.” And he is suing the state to bring it back under the federal supervision of the Voting Rights Act for all of its future voting-law changes.

Regarding Miley Cyrus’s sketch on SNL the other night, in which John Boehner was caricatured as gay and Michele Bachmann was, to say the least, over-sexualized, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if a (conservative) pop singer did the same thing to left-wing politicians? We already know the answer, of course. The pop singer would immediately be scathingly denounced for his/her homophobia, misogyny, bigotry and hate.

However, it’s perfectly acceptable to suggest that there is something wrong with being gay — and engaging in the sexualization and objectification of women (one of the Left’s favorite topics) if the targets are conservative and the people engaged in the mockery are liberals.

And the media, naturally, overlooks this pernicious hypocrisy and double standard every time.

As someone who fled as a child with his family from a totalitarian socialist country, it always intrigues me to witness who can and cannot be ridiculed in a supposedly free society. For instance, in Cyrus’s SLN skit, replace Boehner in the video with Obama and Bachmann with Hillary. Would Cyrus ever dare engage in such a thing? Even the thought would obviously horrify her and her liberal milieu. And even if she dared to do so — and sacrificed everything in her professional life for this sacrilegious act — SNL and NBC would never allow the skit to air.

Think about this. Think about what it means that a video by Cyrus mocking Obama and Hillary the same way her SNL skit mocks Boehner and Bachmann is simply unfathomable. Consider what this reality means about the Left and its power and its tyranny — and all of it masquerading, as always, behind the face of tolerance and progress.

Obama and Rouhani spoke, but Netanyahu had the last word.

Liberals and Third Worlders are eager to celebrate events that haven’t happened on the assumption that they will. After the speeches President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani gave at the UN the other week they are celebrating the new framework for peace and security in the Middle East that is supposed to erupt from an agreement between Obama and Rouhani.

Obama has spoken to Rouhani and both are evidently enthusiastic about reaching an agreement. But knowing Iran as we do — and knowing Obama’s diplomatic strategy — such an agreement will inevitably be one that bases the new framework on a nuclear-armed Iran that would dominate the Middle East and be able to do what it has often proclaimed its national ambition: the obliteration of Israel.

Rather than celebrate, it would be better to ask, can civilization survive such an Obama diplomatic triumph?

We know after almost five years of his presidency that Obama’s diplomatic strategy is to make concessions without obtaining anything of consequence from the adversary. You need only examine the terms of, for example, his strategic arms treaty with Russia to determine that. You could, if you really wanted redundant proofs, see what he’s negotiated with Putin on Syria, the new UN small arms treaty, and every other agreement Obama’s made.

But let’s not divert our reverie with facts. If a U.S.-Iran agreement comes to pass, liberals say, Obama will have succeeded where America has failed for three and a half decades. There’s even the likelihood, we are told, that Obama will settle the Sunni-Shiite feud that has kept much of Islam at war with itself since the 7th century. While he’s at it, he’ll also make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and probably patch up the crack in the Liberty Bell.

All that is necessary is to achieve the Pax Obama is a deal that verifies Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei’s alleged pledge to not build atomic weapons, as Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes, with provisions that ensure against Iranian uranium enrichment past the point at which Iran can quickly produce a nuclear weapon.

All of this sounds so real, so easily achievable that it feeds the world’s endless appetite for wishful thinking. But standing against all this utopian dreaming are the facts. Facts that are undeniable, facts that anyone knows if they make an attempt to read or listen. All but one of those facts were presented to the UN last week by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Forty years ago yesterday, on the morning of October 6, 1973, Egyptian forces bombarded the Bar Lev Line of Israeli fortifications along the Suez Canal before launching a full-scale crossing of the Canal into Sinai with 1,000 tanks and 70,000 men. They were soon joined by Syrian forces tearing deep into the sparsely-defended Golan Heights, territories lost to Israel by each of the belligerents a mere six years earlier in the 1967 Six day War. Israelis thus found themselves under lethal assault on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which soon came to lend its name to the war. (Being determined by the Hebrew lunar calendar, Yom Kippur, which came some weeks ago this year, rarely recurs on the same date in the Gregorian calendar). It also coincided with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, by which name the conflict is recalled in Muslim societies. For Israelis, it was a rude awakening from complacent confidence as well as a reminder of the vulnerability of their national existence. It put paid to the notion that the fabulous victory and territorial gains of the 1967 Six Day War would result in the losers coming to terms with Israel; that Jordan’s King Hussein, in the words of then-Israeli Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, would telephone an offer of peace and recognition. Arabs were not standing in a line to retrieve lost territory through negotiation. For the Arabs, the 1967 war had been a disaster which Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser needlessly inflicted on himself and others. Yet, no sooner sooner had the disaster become apparent, the Arab states took customary refuge in sulky and defiant non-recognition –– the three noes of the Khartoum Conference (no peace, no recognition, no negotiations). Nor, however, was Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, passively resigning himself to the status quo as some Israelis supposed.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/10723 The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most […]