RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Daesh of hope at the Obama-Hillary-Kerry State Department.

After last week we must conclude that not everyone in the State Department is an idiot. That conclusion — guarded, reluctant, and certainly temporary — is based on a truly earth-shattering event.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, fifty-one State Department officials, all of whom are or were advisors on the State Department’s policy on Syria, authored a “dissent channel cable” (State’s grandiose term for an email) petitioning for military strikes against Bashar Assad’s government and urging regime change in Damascus as the only way to defeat the ISIS terrorist network.

The petition, in part, says, “Failure to stem Assad’s flagrant abuses will only bolster the ideological appeal of groups such as Daesh [ISIS], even as they endure tactical setbacks on the battlefield.”

There is no modern equivalent to that petition. One can only imagine such events. The Harvard faculty could endorse Donald Trump. Al Gore could admit that global warming is a hoax. Or Hillary Clinton could confess to the federal crime of intentionally mishandling top secret information. Nothing else would come close.

Can it be that, after nearly eight years of gladly helping sell America’s national security down the river that a few of the State Department’s bureaucrats have seen the error of Obama’s, Kerry’s, and Clinton’s ways? That’s one way to read it.

It’s entirely appropriate to view the petition with skepticism. It could easily be that a bunch of these folks, coming near their retirements, want to pave their way into the book world. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to detect a whiff of opportunism in it as well as a healthy dose of unreality.

Some or all of these people must have participated — with Hillary Clinton and Vichy John Kerry — in crafting the disasters of foreign policy we and our allies have endured since 2009. As “experts” on the Middle East, they must have aided Obama’s and Kerry’s dogged efforts — over almost two years — to bully Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians on terms that would have sacrificed Israel’s national security to false promises.

They must have been there through Obama’s negotiations with Iran, helping craft the nuclear weapons agreement that is everything Obama and Kerry assured us it was not, guaranteeing Iran will have nuclear weapons and the intercontinental missiles to deliver them, as soon as it wants them.

And these same people must have been there, helping Obama and Kerry craft the Syria policy that willfully ignored the facts on the ground and assured that Russia and Iran can control the outcome in the so-called Syrian civil war.

I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read ‘Down with Israel.’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible….why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya’ and leave Israel alone.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife (1986)

While reading Alvin Rosenfeld’s formidable, encyclopedic, and terrifying collection of essays entitled Deciphering the New Antisemitism, I kept wondering what Hannah Arendt would make of it. Her classic study of the subject, called simply Antisemitism, was written in the late forties and published in 1951 as the first volume of her three-volume Origins of Totalitarianism. She ended Antisemitism with this remarkable statement:

Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible result [of the Dreyfus Affair] was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.

Were Hannah Arendt to publish this statement today, she would immediately disqualify herself for employment in most American or European universities. Can one imagine Vassar College, in which even the Jewish Studies faculty is knee-deep in the muck of Israel-hatred, hiring the Arendt of 1951 to teach about Zionism, or even to give a lecture on campus? Would she be allowed to set foot on the grounds of Brandeis University? And what about Rutgers, which long ago established a Hannah Arendt Professorship of Sociology and Political Science but now hires semi-literate crackpots like Jasbir Puar, who travels about the country lecturing at elite colleges on how Israelis “shrink” Arab children and steal organs from dead Palestinians in order to carry out their bloodthirsty program of “weaponized epigenetics.”

When Arendt wrote Antisemitism—a book whose effect on him Norman Podhoretz (in Ex-Friends) likened to that of a great poem or novel—her vision was as yet unclouded by the haughtiness towards established Jewish institutions and “those coarse Israelis” which her research assistant at Schocken in 1947 (a young literary critic and socialist named Irving Howe) had already noticed when he worked for her. Neither had it been distorted by what a German-born Israeli named Gershom Scholem called the “heartlessness” that permeated her Eichmann book of a decade later, in which she accused Jewish leaders of collaboration with the Nazis.

She would not have been surprised to learn that the “new antisemitism” is largely a left-wing enterprise, or that it flourishes openly on university campuses in student organizations (Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine, BDS) and in those academic departments and programs, based on nothing more than the revolution du jour, which threaten to turn many colleges and universities into Goshens of mediocrity. Neither would she have been shocked to learn that “progressive” Jews (examined in Doron Ben-Atar’s essay in this book) play a huge role, as modern “apostates,” in “kosherizing antisemitism.” But she would have been surprised to learn that, in an anachronistic reversal of cause and effect that now permeates progressive thought, the single movement in which Jews took antisemitism seriously is held to be the sole cause of “worldwide hostility” against them, of Middle Eastern chaos, and indeed, in such bogus (if not demented) academic enterprises as “intersectionality,” the cause of every evil on the planet, ranging from race riots in Missouri or underpaid teaching assistants in Manhattan, to man-made global warming and avian flu. This is especially the case in Middle East Studies, where, as Martin Kramer long ago pointed out, if you expect to acquire wisdom from the majority of its professors, you should also try warming yourself by the light of the moon.

Last Friday I took a really long train trip to the South. I had a seat next to a nurse from Baltimore who was bound for Chicago. We chatted about many things including politics. She told me that she had goose bumps at the election and presidency of Obama and goose bumps at the potential election of a woman- namely, Hillary Clinton. She asked what I thought. I told her that my answer might anger her – I do not admire President Obama, and I will be voting for Donald Trump.

Her response was immediate….verbatim: “Honey….Why would I be angry? This is not Russia and you are entitled to your opinion.” It sounded like music after the political rancor among my friends in the Northeast.
And in magnificent Albemarle county in Virginia, we came upon:

TRUMP VINEYARDS

Planted in 1999 and nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Trump Winery is situated on a 1,300-acre estate just a few miles from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the birthplace of American viticulture, and James Monroe’s Ash Lawn-Highland in Charlottesville, VA. Planted with nearly 200 acres of French vinifera varieties, Trump Winery is Virginia’s largest vineyard and the largest vinifera vineyard on the East Coast.

Is there any doubt that ISIS is or can be placing terrorists among the Syrian refugees entering this country, and that the entry into this country of such terrorists “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”? And further, that our government has no means of vetting all such refugees to eliminate those who are terrorists.

Section 212(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (still the law):

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. ”
Mr. Walpin is the author of ” The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution- You Don’t Have to be a Lawyer To Understand How Supreme Court Justices Have Substituted Their Own Elitist Views for Constitutional Guarantees That Protect the Average American’s Security and Values”

President Obama is very upset at his critics, who are taking him and his administration to task for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe our enemy in the terror war.

During his speech on Tuesday, in referring to the term “radical Islam,” the president stated angrily:

What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.

It is interesting to note that our enemy has quite a preoccupation with this very same “political distraction.”

Indeed, back in 2011, Muslim Brotherhood front groups approached the Obama administration and demanded to look at the training materials for the FBI and law enforcement agencies to see what words they were using. It’s curious that instead of telling the Brotherhood to go away with the explanation that labels didn’t “accomplish” or “change” anything, the administration docilely obliged. More curious still, when the Brotherhood returned and demanded that all mention of words connected to Islam, such as “jihad,” “Sharia” and “radical Islam,” be purged from the manuals, the administration again docilely obliged.

So we have an intriguing situation: when people who want to protect America implore Obama to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the force waging war on us, he refuses and angrily responds that “different” names don’t make things go away. But when a totalitarian ideology that seeks to destroy our civilization (and boasts that it will do so by our own hands) tells us not to use the label “radical Islam” when we were doing that, Obama follows the orders.

And so, as author Stephen Coughlin has documented in his work Catastrophic Failure, the Obama administration rooted out all references to jihad and Islam from U.S. intelligence agency manuals. And this action and attitude has affected every realm of government. That’s why in the State Department, for example, an official is not even allowed to ask an immigrant about his views on jihad or Sharia law before approving his visa application. In fact, a “counterterrorism” government guide counsels that keeping Muslims out of the country for supporting Sharia law violates the First Amendment.

Such is the devious mentality behind Obama’s “defense strategy” in the terror war, which demands that American officials and investigators are to consider only violent or criminal conduct when trying to keep America safe. Radical ideology is to be ignored, particularly if it has the veneer of “religious expression.”

NO POSTINGS

If the British vote down the Brexit referendum later next week and choose to remain in the European Union, the results will be unfortunate for the United States in many ways. Britain’s continuing membership in the EU threatens not only America’s economic interests, but also its strategic and military interests. If the architects of the European Union realize their ambitions, it will be impossible for the United States and the United Kingdom to maintain a significant bilateral military and strategic partnership for a simple reason: The United Kingdom will increasingly cease to function as a sovereign state capable of determining its own foreign and defense policy. Instead, it will have to subordinate its own interests to the dictates of a common European foreign and defense policy issuing from Brussels.

The legal (and illegal) precedent for such a shift has been accreting by degrees for some time. After the Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1992, the nature of the “European project,” originally just an economic partnership, began to change. Subsequent treaties — Amsterdam (1999), Nice (2001), and Lisbon (2009) — moved the project more obviously and explicitly toward full political integration. Integral to this objective has been the establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy, operating separately from NATO and beyond the control of Europe’s individual nation-states.

The Amsterdam treaty, signed by all European Union member states, included articles envisioning a continent-wide foreign policy. It also established for the first time an EU foreign minister. The failed European Constitution of 2004 included provisions under which the individual members’ defense and foreign policies — the last remaining areas of national sovereignty allowed by previous EU treaties — would have been completely eliminated. The constitution expanded the role of the European foreign minister, giving the occupant of that office the power to set a continent-wide foreign policy. It would have legitimated and expanded the European Defence Agency, which had already begun to operate under a centralized command structure apart from NATO. Thus it jettisoned the last vestiges of intergovernmental cooperation and “shared sovereignty” in favor of a fully sovereign European super-state.

Though French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution in the summer of 2005, the unelected architects of “ever closer union” have used other means to implement its key provisions. In particular, almost the whole of the defeated European Constitution was enacted in the Lisbon treaty in 2009 after the EU Council of Ministers agreed to the treaty without consulting their voters. Indeed, over 90 percent of the wording in the treaty is the same as that in the failed constitution. The only changes made were cosmetic, notably omitting the references to the EU flag and anthem because these were already part of established EU law. Even before the Lisbon treaty, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers had begun using the “spirit” of those earlier treaties to establish covertly and piecemeal much of what they could not get Dutch and French voters to approve.

In 2001 members of a group of Castroite spies in south Florida known as the Wasp Network were convicted of charges ranging from espionage to conspiracy to commit murder (of U.S. citizens). They were sentenced to terms ranging from 15 years to two life sentences. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the charges against these KGB-trained Communist spies included:

• Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West.

• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.

This past April, on Obama’s orders, some of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers gave an in-depth tour of the Southern Command’s most vital facilities to some of Cuba’s top Military and Intelligence officials—probably to some of the very ones who earlier got this vital information from their WASP charges via “encrypted software, high-frequency radio transmissions and coded electronic phone messages,” as the FBI affidavit showed.

If this sounds impossible or like the plot for the next Austin Powers Movie, here’s the story from The Miami Herald.

And never mind the convicted Cuban spies, some of whom helped murder four U.S. citizens. They’re all living like celebrities in Cuba now after Obama gifted them back to Castro in December 2014, upon commencing his smoochfest with the terror-sponsoring drug-runner who came closest to nuking the U.S.

It gets better:

Coincidently (perhaps) the vital U.S. defense facilities that Obama invited the eager Communist drug-runners to carefully inspect serve as the U.S. Defense Department’s “command center on the war on drugs.”

Coincidently, (perhaps) on top of serving as a base for terrorist group Hezbollah and probably laundering funds for Al-Qaeda as late as two years ago, the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate also help facilitate much of world’s cocaine smuggling. The dots are not overly difficult to connect. Let’s have a look:

*The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) attributes half the world’s cocaine supply to the Colombian Terror group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)

In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.

All of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

King Canute of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede. President Canute stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end. Neither tide nor war obeyed.

In 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the result of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.

But then the Obama Doctrine kicked in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before ISIS declared its caliphate. CONTINUE AT SITE

In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.

The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”

Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.

Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”

Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the

emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.