RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349624/back-front-patrick-k-odonnell

“Here, 95 years ago, the U.S. Marines stopped the German army’s last great offensive of World War I.”

At Belleau Wood, just outside Paris, the scars of war are everywhere: shell holes so large they could hold a car, the remains of trenches, pockmarked stone walls and trees that still contain pockets of mustard gas trapped deep in their trunks.

Here, 95 years ago, the U.S. Marines stopped the German army’s last great offensive of World War I.

This week, as an unpaid volunteer historian, I accompanied 20 men and women of the U.S. Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment as they carefully tramped back to the front where their Marine forebears fought nearly a century ago. Later in the week, I will give them a guided tour of Pointe du Hoc and the other crucial beaches and airborne-drop zones of Normandy.
All the Marines on this trip received severe wounds in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Three were wounded in both conflicts. For some veterans, intense firefights and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) took their arms and legs. Many carry scars that vividly arc across their bodies.

As we rode to the battlefield, they shared memories of fighting as intense as any that I had heard from the thousands of World War II soldiers and Marines I have interviewed over the years. Several of the Marines showed me pictures of their spines and legs that resembled erector sets.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349610/obamas-chicago-way-john-fund The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how “hope and change” seem to have been supplanted by “arrogance and fear.” Perhaps it’s time they revisit one of their original premises about Barack Obama: that he wasn’t influenced by the Chicago Daley machine. You know: the machine that […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/349640/road-europe-mark-steyn

A man has been arrested for the stabbing of a French soldier last weekend. A native of France, Alexandre Dhaussy is a convert to Islam — like the two men who hacked Drummer Rigby to death in Woolwich, like the young wife of the Boston Marathon bomber, and the young Canadian jihadist the bomber hooked up with in Dagestan, and the Belgian teenagers who ran away from home to fight in Syria.

These young “reverts” (as Islam calls converts) have made a bet on where the future lies. These photographs from Cable Street in East London show how sound the bet is: Two churches each built to hold a thousand worshippers now have between them 32 graying parishioners; the mosque, meanwhile, overflows, so that each Friday the streets are full of the faithful on their knees pointed toward Mecca. I was in Spitalfields last year, and saw the scene for myself — and was almost overwhelmed by the sense of loss: In the nihilism of multiculturalism, the great imperial metropolis is now the colony.

Unless something changes, that last photograph is Europe’s future. And Europe’s past will be as abandoned as those churches. In the Nineties, in his famous and controversial book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, V. S. Naipaul wrote of the eastern lands conquered by Islam that “converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past.” In the West, in the nation states that built the modern world, that process is well under way. And Islam is Europe’s future. Which is to say, for Europe, there is no future.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/29/the-facebook-of-terror/ Political correctness dominates response to London attack A pair of Islamic extremists butchered British soldier Lee Rigby on the streets of south London last week, and the response has been one of political correctness. Instead of tackling the dangerous job of rooting out the sources of terrorism, cops have been cracking down on anyone […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/29/obamas-surrender/ The White House billed last week’s address by President Obama as a major foreign policy address. Indeed, it was. It was tantamount to a surrender speech in what is most accurately described not as the War on Terrorism, but as the War for the Free World — for that is what is at stake […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/29/gop-chairman-press-holder-discrepancies-testimony/ The House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation Wednesday into whether Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. lied under oath in testimony about the Justice Department’s surveillance of journalists, while the White House declared again that President Obama “absolutely” has confidence in Mr. Holder. Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, and Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578513343077739104.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop When the President speaks on national security, it is hard to distinguish between personal belief and political calculation. More than anything, what one should want from an American president on matters of U.S. strategic interests is clarity. Clarity minimizes unwanted mistakes and miscalculations by both friends and foes. Then there’s a speech by President […]

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=47498a2e1ad97dd3d09ae19c5&id=2b4b520e4b&e=ce445aaf82

Mark Durie is an Anglican vicar in Melbourne, Australia, author of The Third Choice, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle Eastern Forum.

This is the second in a four part series of posts written in response to Geert Wilders’ visit to Australia in early 2013.

In a previous post I contrasted Geert Wilders’ view that ‘Islam is the problem’ with the claims of many Muslims who preach with equal conviction that ‘Islam is the solution’, and examined evidence of the negative characteristics associated with belief in Islam, including disadvantaged human development outcomes.

These days many leaders in the West find it convenient to sweep the ‘problem’ of Islam under the carpet. Long gone are the days of Theodore Roosevelt, Wilders’ hero, who declared in Fear God and take your own part that values such as freedom and equality only existed in Europe because it had the military capacity to ‘beat back the Moslem invader’.

However, given the negative outcomes associated with Islam, one of which is Geert Wilders’ need for constant armed guards (some others were enumerated in the previous post), the question whether Islam is the problem or the solution is not something to be just swept under the carpet.

In the fourth and final post of this series we will consider Wilders’ policies for managing ‘the problem’. The third post, the next after this, will review an on-going dispute between critics of Islam as to whether there can be a moderate, tolerable form of Islam. On one side stand those, like Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer, who consider Islam to be essentially irredeemable. On the other side stand those, like Daniel Pipes and Barry Rubin, who argue that there are different Islams and the ‘solution’ to radical Islam is moderate Islam.

Of course there are many opinions about Islam. In this, the second post in this series, we consider two widely-held secular – and positive – perspectives on Islam which have been influential in shaping the response of secular-minded westerners to Islam. These are universalism and relativism.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/05/nbc_newss_new_president_has_history_of_israel-bashing.html Deborah Turness, the British journalist who has been editor of Independent Television’s ITV News since 2004 and was named the president of NBC News on May 20, 2013, has a history of involvement with anti-Israel media bias.   Most alarmingly, Turness and two ITV colleagues won an Amnesty International UK Media Award in 2008 […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/reflections-on-my-ex-muslim-friends/ Some of my best friends are Muslims. Or rather, some of my best friends were Muslims—not that they are no longer Muslims but that they are no longer my friends. The problem I had over years of friendship had to do with certain personal attributes which I value highly, namely, consistency and the ability […]