RUTHFULLY YOURS

The House Select Committee on Benghazi released it long-awaited report on the 2012 terrorist attack Tuesday morning, detailing an array of administration deceptions, miscues and blunders. Among the bombshells to come out in the 800-page document is the conclusion that the Americans were saved by Gaddafi’s “Libyan Military Intelligence” — not a “quasi-governmental militia” as previous reports had found.

“There were only three assets that ever made it to Benghazi; two unarmed drones and the team from Tripoli who deployed themselves. They weren’t ordered to go; they deployed themselves,” Chairman Trey Gowdy said during today’s press conference.

Glen Doherty was on that plane from Tripoli to Benghazi and Glen Doherty not only flew from Tripoli to the Benghazi, but he negotiated at the airport with Libyans that were supposed to be our friends to get to the annex so he could help defend that facility and he got there just in time to join his fellow Navy SEAL, Tyrone Woods, minutes before they both died.

The report also concluded that Hillary Clinton and other administration officials pushed the video explanation for Benghazi despite knowing the truth because eyewitness accounts were immediately available.

Republicans on the committee charge that Clinton and the State Department acted in a “shameful” manner in refusing to hand over requested emails from her private email server and pointed out that President Barack Obama skipped his daily intelligence briefing one day after the attacks.

The report also said that the investigation by the so-called Accountability Review Board was tainted by the influence of Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.

In the final weeks of spring the Islamic State finally seemed to be in serious trouble. Its capital of Raqqa came under simultaneous pressure from forces supported by the Syrian government advancing from Palmyra in the southwest, and from the U.S.-supported (mainly Kurdish) Syrian Democratic Forces to the north. The scene was set for a 1945-style “race to Berlin.”
Then, on June 17, came the “leak” of an internal memo by 51 middle- and low-level State Department officials criticizing the Obama administration’s policy in Syria and advocating U.S. military attacks on the government of Bashar al-Assad, to “undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.” The memo—filed in the “dissent channel” set up in the Vietnam era as a way for employees to register their protest without fear of reprisal—did not offer a scenario for a post-Bashar Syria. It simply asserted that “the moral rationale” for ending the death and suffering is “evident and unquestionable.” The memo advocated “a credible threat of military action to keep Assad in line” (as his downfall was being arranged) and to bolster the fight against the Islamic State by helping the “moderate Sunni” forces.
Reportedly, many of the “dissidents” are Hillary Clinton’s liberal-interventionist appointees from her tenure at the State Department. In view of her vocal support for “robust” U.S. action is Syria, their memo appears to be a preemptive bid to curry favor in advance of her anticipated victory in November. The document reflects all the flaws, inconsistencies, and outright idiocies of Mrs. Clinton’s Middle East policies, past and present.

Since the drafting of the Cessation of Hostilities agreement—signed by the United States and Russia last February—over 800,000 Syrians have been receiving aid that was previously denied them. Any U.S. attack on Assad’s forces would sever this lifeline, escalate the war, and dramatically increase death and suffering. It would be a boon not only to the Islamic State but to jihadists of all hues and to their abettors in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. Worse still, it would risk an unpredictably hazardous escalation with the Russians—who have major military assets in Syria—with no commensurate strategic benefit to Americans. It would prompt Tehran to terminate its tentative anti-IS cooperation with the United States in Iraq. It would destroy American credibility with the Kurds, without compensating for the loss of their hitherto effective boots on the ground by the addition of imaginary Sunni Arab “moderates.” Perhaps the authors of the memo imagine they will convert non-ISIS jihadists and Salafi fanatics (such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam, who are firmly allied with Al Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra) into “moderates.” But there was no mention of any of them and their routine cease-fire violations in the memo.

After meeting in Orlando, Fla., with law-enforcement officials investigating ISIS terrorist Omar Saddique Mateen’s June 12 massacre, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told journalists, “Our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity and love.”

After an interval of astonishment, Representative Jeff Duncan (R., S.C.) expressed his dismay at Lynch’s words.

“‘All you need is love’ may be a great Beatles song, but it’s a terrible foreign policy,” Duncan declared. “She further proves that this Administration has no idea what it takes to fight Islamic terrorism. She should resign immediately.”

Representative Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) also denounced Lynch’s olive branch.

“No, the most effective weapon against Islamic Extremism is not ‘love,’” Blackburn said. “It is a clear strategy to destroy ISIS.”

Duncan, Blackburn, and Lynch’s other critics really are being too harsh.

Like other brave leaders before her, Lynch merely was offering love as the most powerful weapon that ever can be wielded in the faces of tyrants and evil-doers. Lynch echoed the loving words of equally courageous and inspiring figures throughout history.

Who could forget the example of American Revolutionary Captain Nathan Hale of the Continental Army? Moments before British soldiers hanged him on Manhattan Island as a spy for General George Washington, Hale said on September 22, 1776, “I only regret that I have but one love to give for my country.”

Well, it worked! The British swam home in 1783, and America got busy becoming a country.

Two centuries later, and across the Atlantic, the existential threat from Adolf Hitler seemed almost insurmountable. Undeterred, Winston Churchill rallied the British people in June 1940 by urging them to lead with their hearts.

It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies
by Mary Eberstadt
Harper, 158 pages, $25.99

Members of traditional religions became moral outlaws in the United States once equal rights for sexual preference and gender choice were enshrined in regulation and law. To believe that homosexual relations are sinful, as does biblical religion, defines the believer as a bigot in the view of liberal opinion, which is backed by the federal regulatory apparatus and the regulators of most American states, as well as by most of the judicial system.

As Mary Eberstadt reports, expressions of religious belief that society considered innocuous and normal until quite recently are now grounds for dismissal from jobs, denial of employment, and boycotts by the media. Devout Christians believe they must choose between their faith and job security, and they commonly conceal their faith in the workplace to avert discrimination. (Muslims are exempt because liberals consider them a threatened minority and make allowances for their misogyny and gay-bashing.)

Actions or speech (quoting a Bible verse or leaving a religious symbol in plain view) elicit persecution. In some cases, evidence of past incorrect opinion is sufficient: The CEO of the software firm Mozilla, Brendan Eich, was hounded from his post in 2014 for a $1,000 contribution to a 2008 California referendum campaign against gay marriage, evidence of a position he shared at the time with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Eberstadt is a wonderful writer. She has written passionately and with insight on faith and demographics, for example in her 2013 volume How the West Really Lost God, which I reviewed with enthusiasm. She has a great ear for anecdotes, and her field reports of Christians persecuted for ideological heresy entertain as much as they alarm. But her book is not only testimony to the gravity of the problem, but evidence as well: It betrays weakness within the Christian camp. She quotes friends who ask sadly, “Where can we [Christians] go?” and ponders the “Benedict Option,” forming small closed communities of Christians shut off from the world.

Eberstadt calls the persecution of traditional religion a “witch-hunt”—a critical error. A witch-hunt is a search for malefactors who pretend to be good people but really are intent on doing evil. There is a witch-hunt going on today, namely the search for secret racists at American universities. The witch-hunters pillory teachers and administrators who claim to hold politically correct views but allegedly betray their secret racism through wicked actions, for instance by correcting bad grammarin minority students’ term papers. Loyal liberals who commit no aggressions are said to be guilty of micro-aggressions.

By contrast, the purge of traditional Christians and Jews is a heretic hunt, an Inquisition, whose objective is to isolate and punish individuals who actually profess opinions contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy. There can be some overlap between an Inquisition and a witch-hunt, to be sure. But today’s liberal Inquisitors are not searching for individuals secretly in communion with God—yet.

This is a critical distinction. Witch-hunters eventually discover that burning a few old hags does not prevent cows’ milk from souring. Inquisitions, by contrast, usually succeed: The Catholic Church succeeded in stamping out broadly held heresies, as in the Albigensian Crusade of 1220-1229, which destroyed between 200,000 and 1,000,000 inhabitants of Cathar-controlled towns in Southern France. In many cases a town’s entire population was killed, just to make sure. For its part, the Spanish Inquisition eliminated all the Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, although it sometimes drove heretical opinions underground, with baleful consequences for the Catholic faith.

Because Eberstadt confuses the present persecution with mere witch-hunting, she hopes that the witch-hunters will realize their error and do the decent thing. She compares the persecution of Christians to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here is the nub of her argument:

[I]t was the actions of people on McCarthy’s own side that were decisive—those of the political right who disassociated themselves from his bullying tactics, beginning with seven Republican senators.

No time to waste in taking the initiative — including a Trump announced new trade agreement with the UK.

The importance of last week’s “Brexit” vote cannot be diminished, even by those on our side of the Atlantic who insist on seeing only its possible effects on our November presidential election.

In defining the importance of Brexit, the reactions within the EU are a good place to start. Brit PM David Cameron, having staked everything on his campaign to remain in the EU, has said he’ll resign in October. Cameron wants the UK to wait until a new leader is chosen to begin the formal process of getting out of the EU under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s primary treaty.

The first members of the EU — France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands — reacted in panic. They fear, quite rightly, that the Brexit vote presages other nations’ exits from the EU. They insist that the Brits immediately invoke Article 50 to start the clock on its two-year deadline for any nation exiting the EU to negotiate its way out.

The 27 remaining EU nations will want to penalize Britain for its exit. Only Germany’s Angela Merkel has said the split from Britain needn’t be nasty. But she won’t be able to control the others.

The EU’s primary members will, as the negotiations roll out, insist on imposing tariffs and other trade restrictions on the UK. That they want to penalize the second-largest economy will affect them all negatively (as Merkel realizes). But the EU “powers” will make it as costly as they can, in economic and political terms.

They will try to insist on some form of open border agreement and with it some version of the EU’s human rights laws.

That will make it enormously difficult for the UK to succeed in its exit negotiations. Or will it?

Now that the UK Parliament is in control of the matter, it can do several things that will unwind the UK from the EU. It should begin immediately and proceed deliberately.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.”

L. Mencken (!880-1956)

Liberty is more easily lost than discovered. It is not generally lost in revolutions. Its demise more typically resembles the ancient method of Chinese torture and death by a thousand cuts. Like boiling a lobster, liberty’s death comes slowly, subtly, almost invisibly – unfelt by the victim. The autocracies of Lenin and Stalin arose from revolution, but Hitler emerged from a democratic election. Read Victor Klemperer’s diaries (I Shall Bear Witness and To The Bitter End) to understand the insidious nature of a country’s transformation into authoritarianism, and the helplessness of those who realized their predicament too late.

In the West, the threat to liberty is not another Hitler. Today, liberty is imperiled by the rise of the administrative state and the bureaucracy of elites that populate it. For fear of offending other cultures (and to our shame), we have stopped promoting democracies. According to Freedom House’s 2015 survey almost twice as many countries saw freedom decline as saw freedom increase in 2014 – the ninth year of such trends. Concern about the loss of liberty, however, is not new. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798. Lincoln suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus in 1861. Wilson suppressed free speech during World War I, and FDR interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. In July 1914, when prohibition was being discussed in the United States, the Virginia Law Register included the headline: “The Decline in Personal Liberty in America.” In the body of the report were written words that sounded remarkably modern, if not in tone, at least in meaning: “Today…liberty is the right of part of the people to compel the other part to do what the first part thinks the latter ought to do for its own benefit.”[1] The words ‘elitism’ or ‘establishment’ were not used, but the message is familiar. These are but a few examples of how our freedoms have been curtailed during extraordinary times; they should make us more vigilant today.

This is why last week’s election in Britain was important, that a free people will resist efforts to cauterize liberty. While the favored narrative of supercilious “Remains” was that Brexit was driven by xenophobia, nativism and hate, the truth was that the 52% of the electorate who democratically voted to leave were concerned that the EU had become undemocratic, creeping toward socialism. Keep in mind, the turnout at 72% was the highest in years. Immigration, no doubt, played a role, but this vote was more significant than the establishment would like to admit. Like millions of dissatisfied Americans who see their lives managed by an elite cadre of bureaucrats in Washington, millions in England saw Brussels dictating rules by which they must abide. Sixty percent of the UK’s laws, including for example the curvature of bananas, are now created by unaccountable mandarins working out of Brussels. Those who wanted to maintain the status quo are a cadre of politicians, academics, lawyers, bankers, big business leaders, most in the media, as well as an increasing number of people grown dependent on the largesse of government. The existing system has served them well – ignored have been the middle classes and small businesses.

The easiest route to political control isn’t brute force: Sure, you can stick a gun in somebody’s face, but that’s always a risky business. The easiest route to political control is economic control. It’s cleaner, it’s safer, and it works.

There are some spectacular examples of that in India. In order to “protect” pepper farmers from being exploited by the ruthless profiteers of the free market, political bosses decided that farmers could sell their produce only to a government-approved buyers’ cooperative, the representative of which was usually — because every protection racket takes roughly the same shape — the uncle or brother-in-law of the local political boss, who often was the local money-lender, too. It’s a long and complex scheme (a story told brilliantly by P. Sainath in Everybody Loves a Good Drought) that ended in pepper farmers’ being kept in intergenerational debt bondage . . . for their own protection, of course.

Ahmad Zaatari saw a fair amount of that sort of thing growing up in Lebanon, where his well-to-do family of entrepreneurs and professionals were on the outs with the local political boss. Uncles and cousins of his father saw their factories closed on this or that pretense, and their land taken by the government. Zaatari himself ended up at a high school controlled by that same political boss, who maneuvered to make life miserable for the young man. In the end, Zaatari did what hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have done over the years: He moved to the United States. There are an estimated 3 million Americans of Lebanese origin living in the United States today; there are only 4.5 million Lebanese in Lebanon.

“My grandfather invested in real estate,” Zaatari says. “He was initially in textiles in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Those investments saved the family, and that’s how I was able to come to the United States. I’ve always known real estate was a smart investment — it’s ingrained in me.”

Naturally, he bought a house. He bought that house in Austin, where he was involved with a number of technology start-ups after getting his master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas. His wife worked as a consultant, and they had a baby, and things were looking pretty good at the start-up where he worked developing high-tech equipment for the oil-exploration business. Buying a house in the Rockdale Circle section of Austin, far from the most expensive or most fashionable part of town, wasn’t a huge stretch.

Until the bottom fell out of the oil market, as it does, from time to time. Zaatari’s company lost a $6 million order, and pretty soon it didn’t have enough money to pay its engineers. Zaatari had a pretty good-sized mortgage and had drawn down some of his investments to make the down payment, and he is not rich. “Working in start-ups,” he says, “I’ve gained a lot of experience — not a lot of money.” Those obligations weren’t too bad for a two-income household, but they were going to be pretty rough on a one-income household.

He didn’t want to sell his house. He also didn’t really want to go get a clock-punching, steady-paycheck job, either — an energetic entrepreneur, he already had a proposal in to the National Science Foundation for an education-technology project he was developing. All he really needed was a little financial breathing room until he figured out his next step. That is one of the many faces of the so-called gig economy: It isn’t just people who can’t get a regular job, but also people who don’t want one, people who are working on something else and just need a bit of income for a while. Albert Einstein worked at a patent office, but he didn’t plan on making a lifelong career of it.

THIS BOOK IS ONLY AVAILABLE FROM THE PUBLISHER

http://www.wilkinsonpublishing.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=500

Perhaps you have had the experience: enter a bookshop, ask for a politically incorrect tome and be told, quite possibly by some pierced young thing with a tattoo and a sneer, that such books are not welcome on the premises. Or, if the shop is carrying the title, you’ll be directed to a rear shelf where a single copy is displayed spine-out on the shelf and very hard to find.

Andrew Bolt is Australia’s most prominent and controversial commentator. In this second book of columns and reflections, Bolt is again in the front lines of our most urgent political and social debates, from Islam and immigration to the green movement and the rise of the slacktivist. But he also reveals his more personal side – the experiences that have shaped his values and love for this country. For some this book is ammunition. For others it’s fair warning. But for everyone it’s a test of their own values – and the reasons they hold them. Bolt’s columns are published nationally in News Corp newspapers, including Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Brisbane’s Courier Mail. He also runs Australia’s most-read political blog and hosts two week night shows – The Bolt Report on Sky News and a national Macquarie Radio show with Steve Price.

From the author of Still Not Sorry.

A response from an e-pal:

During the last 12 months nobody has won any money betting against Donald Trump. As I understand it the gravamen of Mr. Suissa’s argument is that some method should be found to deny the will of the primary voters either before or at the Republican convention in July. This suggestion would have been more beneficially applied to Obama’s candidacy in 2008. Had it been successful the likelihood of a populist Trump candidacy, which seems to horrify Mr. Suissa even more than the 8 mirthless, poisonous and treacherous years of Obama’s presidency, would have been remote. Denying the will of the people is a conceit of the political elite as Prime Minister Cameron just discovered on Thursday.

Those conservatives and Republicans who will not support Donald Trump because they imagine themselves to be too politically pure, too morally superior, too well educated and too sophisticated because they consider Trump to be an unprincipled quasi-liberal vulgarian are committing a costly form of sanctimony which will hand over America and the Supreme Court to a political party which has abandoned Israel, supports the hate-group Black Lives Matter and whose members have moved so far to the left they would be unable to see the center if they were standing on top of a ladder looking through a pair of binoculars.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Schnee

West Hollywood

“Obama certainly has that reverse Midas touch. Recall his efforts to secure the Olympics for Chicago that ended in embarrassing failure. After nearly eight years in the White House, President Obama can’t understand that the influence he has as president is a precious resource not to be wasted unless he is sure that he can make a difference. That includes efforts to influence domestic as well as foreign policy.”

UKIP leader Nigel Farage gave a backhanded compliment to President Obama when he said that many voters supported leaving the EU because Obama told them not to.

The Hill:

Threatening people too much insults their intelligence,” the United Kingdom Independence Party head said.

“A lot of people in Britain said, ‘How dare the American president come here and tell us what to do?’ ” Farage continued on Sirius XM’s “Breitbart News Daily,” citing Obama’s U.K. trip in April.

“It backfired. We got an Obama-Brexit bounce, because people do not want foreign leaders telling them how to think and vote.”

Britain on Thursday voted to leave the EU in a move experts predict will lead to worldwide financial uncertainty.

British Prime Minister David Cameron promptlyresigned Friday morning.

Obama warned Britain against leaving the EU during a visit in April, saying it could hurt potential trade deals with the U.S.

“The U.K. is going to be in the back of the queue,” he said during an appearance alongside Cameron.

“Not because we don’t have a special relationship but because given the heavy lift of any trade agreement, us having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements is hugely inefficient.”

Donald Trump on Friday mocked Obama for being on the losing side in the Brexit vote.

“The world doesn’t listen to him,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said during a press conference in Turnberry, Scotland.

Trump said he wholeheartedly backed Britain’s decision to leave the EU and once again forge its own path.

“You just have to embrace it,” he said. “It’s the will of the people. What happened should have happened, and they’ll be stronger for it.”