RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358436/hostage-foreign-extremists-andrew-doran

As the secretaries of Defense and State testified before the House Armed Services Committee about American military intervention in Syria on Tuesday, I spoke with two Syrians to discuss the war in their homeland. It was a perspective few in the West have heard, one that complicates the U.S. government’s intervention storyline. With President Obama’s announcement that war will be averted for the time being, there is an opportunity to examine the realities on the ground for the Syrian people.

The Syrians, whose names are withheld for their safety, fear reprisal. The Syria they describe is a more complex place than that seen on the news by Americans.

Prior to the outbreak of civil war in Syria, the Sunni majority, Alawi, Shia, Druze, Kurds, and Christians lived in peace. When the protests began in 2011, “the idea of change was welcomed by all Syrians,” says one of the Syrians. “But there was an external agenda.” The other interjects: “Saudi Arabia . . . the Wahhabi, the Salafi.” As peaceful protests gave way to rebellion, violence, and civil war, Syria began to splinter into sectarian and tribal affiliations. “Most of my friends are [Sunni] Muslim,” says one. “Today, you cannot even say hello.” But it was not so simple as Syrian Sunnis versus religious and ethnic minorities.

Not long after protest gave way to rebellion, the influx of foreign fighters to Syria began, coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and even Europe and North America. Syria became the front line of a broader conflict: Sunni versus Shia, Islamist versus secular, an intra-civilizational civil war. These foreign Sunni jihadists flocked to make holy war as the mujahedeen had done in Afghanistan a generation earlier. “Most of them come through Turkey . . . their weapons stamped from Saudi and Qatar.” They quote a report from Jacques Bérès, of Doctors Without Borders, who claimed that “at least half” of the wounded rebels he treated were not Syrian.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358427/liberals-retreat-john-fund Three elections in the last week have challenged long-held liberal premises about how elections are fought and what the public wants. It’s worth examining those results in such widely separated places as Australia, Norway, and the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In Colorado, liberals are already in denial about the fact that two Democratic state […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/13/pruden-measuring-putin-for-mount-rushmore/ But ridding Syria of its chemicals won’t be easy If you’re reading or listening in the wrong places, you might think they’re already measuring a place for Vladimir Putin on Mount Rushmore, sandwiched between Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. That’s where Barack Obama, who may have to give Mr. Putin the Nobel Peace Prize […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5697

The philosopher George Santayana wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The current global situation proves him wrong.

Take this week, for example — a biggie where commemoration is concerned. It marks 40 years since the Yom Kippur War, 20 since the signing of the Oslo Accords, and 12 since the 9/11 attacks. Though different in nature and scope, these three events share a crucial element: the refusal of Western democracies to read and interpret the Arabic writing on the wall — even when it is translated into their own languages.

In spite of all the looking back for the purpose of avoiding particular pitfalls in the future, the repetition remains in full throttle. This is both perplexing and pleasing to the enemies of the West. They are amazed at how easy it is to hoodwink Americans, Europeans and Israelis, without even having to update their rhetoric.

Nor could the despots of the world have hoped for a better patsy in the White House than Barack Obama. In one fell swoop, the U.S. president gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to two vipers whose power on the world stage was in question: Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and former KGB honcho Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was a twofer worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

To prevent the United States from taking military action against the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons against its opposition, Putin — a long-time chum of the mass murderer in Damascus and his supporters and suppliers in Iran — stepped in to “broker a deal.” Like his radical-Muslim friends, who received propaganda training in the Soviet Union, Putin knows how to talk like a diplomat while loading his cannons.

This is not something that requires heeding Santayana’s warning by remembering the past. It is happening right now, in front of everyone’s eyes.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/saul-landau-death-of-a-propagandist/ Saul Landau died Monday at 77, receiving laudatory obituaries in major media outlets like The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Landau was an award-winning filmmaker of dozens of documentaries that addressed issues ranging from war and poverty to racism. He was also, in his own words, a propagandist for socialism whose famous […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-youtube-wars/ Last September, Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly to denounce a YouTube video, calling it “crude and disgusting” and assuring Muslims everywhere that this particular YouTube video did not represent America. Finally Obama delivered what is surely one of the most famous YouTube negative video comments ever, “The future must not belong […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/orwell-obama-and-totalitarianism

Reading many of George Orwell’s essays leaves one with the impression that he was an integrated man, that is, his mind was steadfastly anchored to reason and reality. It wasn’t. His prescient essays on totalitarianism may lead one to believe that he was 100% rational and had no chinks in his intellectual armor. He wasn’t, and the chinks are evident.

The most visible chink in Orwell’s intellectual armor was his steadfast belief in the beneficent advantages of socialism, while at the same time he detested communism. Communism, he wrote, is but totalitarianism by another name. Totalitarianism, or Communism, embraces the totality of an individual’s existence, from what he pays for necessities to his social relationships to what goes on in his mind. Orwell observed this totality in Stalin’s Russia, also in Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and, to a lesser extent, in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy.

Stalin and Hitler were the inevitable heirs to every wistful vision from time immemorial that men could be organized into benign collectives, communes, or “cooperatives” to corral and control the selfish nature of men to live their own lives for their own reasons. We could begin with the ethics of St. Augustine or Marcus Aurelius, but would need to go back to Plato. Among the minor contributors to the ideal of a collectivist paradise were Auguste Comte and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Along came Karl Marx who distilled all those wishes into a system which reduced individuals into mere insensate atoms of an impersonal evolution towards perfect, stateless, selfless socialism. Or, stateless communism.

Orwell never grasped that his ideal, “stateless socialism,” is a contradiction in terms. Socialism cannot be imposed on men except by force. And whether the force compels men to accept socialized medicine, or the redistribution of their private wealth to alleviate state-caused poverty, or mandated florescent light bulbs, or any other altruistic scheme that shackles men together and compels them to become dependent on fiat law and legislated extortion, it must be employed by the agency of a state. A “mixed economy” of economic and even social controls, must, if not opposed and corrected, lead to total regulation and control.

The ideal of a “classless society” might have been reached by undisturbed tribes in the most inaccessible reaches of the Amazon jungle, but even they have their pecking orders. In any industrialized or semi-industrialized society, under socialism, classes emerge defined by how much loot one gang can accumulate, extort, or seize from another. Ayn Rand dramatized the progress from “socialism” to totalitarianism in We the Living and Atlas Shrugged.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/israel-sobered-by-syria-debacle/print/ Saturday marks Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar and, this year, the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the greatest trauma in Israeli history. On the morning of October 6, 1973—the day on which Yom Kippur fell that year—Chief of Staff David Elazar met with Prime Minister […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/venezuela_from_crazy_to_insane.html A couple of stories from Venezuela bring home the reality that the country is falling apart and freedoms are disappearing. President Maduro has just announced that the government launched a news network to tell the public the truth about the situation in the country: “Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced on Tuesday at a public event […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/lessons_of_oslo_after_twenty_years.html Twenty years ago today, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat signed the initial Oslo agreements in a ceremony on the White House lawn that captured the world’s attention and seemed to many the start of genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinians.   Later that day, on Jordanian television, Arafat explained to his Palestinian constituency […]