RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some inexplicable response seems to take hold of the French when the subject concerns Jews in general, and Israel in particular. Whatever has induced the French government to choose this moment to hold a conference in favour of a Palestinian state? The absence of Palestinians and Israelis is confirmation that the self-importance of the French is the sole subject here. Secretary of State John Kerry has already proved that the peace process is dead for the time being; perhaps the Quai d’Orsay wanted only to rub the American nose as usual deep into humiliation.

Contempt for Jews and their state is the other side of France’s continuous pro-Arab policy. When a French ambassador a few years ago called Israel “a shitty little country,” he was only voicing ingrained institutional prejudice. Since the days of Yasser Arafat, France has always supported the cause of Palestine unconditionally, in spite of, or because of the harm to Israel. It is the sole Western country, for instance, to allow its financial subsidies to be paid without supervision, so that the money finishes in the hands of terrorists. Muslim immigrants numbering in the millions are on the edge of lawlessness. France has suffered more Islamist violence and murder than every other country except the United States. In response, Jews are leaving in their thousands for Israel. This has prompted Christophe Barbier, editor of the prestigious magazine L’Express, to accuse them of a cowardly failure to stand their corner. This in a country from which in the last world war at least 75,000 Jews were deported to be murdered — and this in a magazine once edited by Raymond Aron who polemicized against General de Gaulle for observations about Jews as “dominating people.”

At which point, I happened to read a book with the title “The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks la République.” The author, Nidra Poller, is an American living in France. She is the researcher who exposed that photography of a small boy supposedly killed by Israeli gunfire in battle, and therefore a symbol of Palestinian victimhood, was merely a “lethal narrative,” her term for propaganda designed to generate hatred of Jews and Israel. Israel’s self-defense in the recent campaign against Hamas in Gaza gave rise to plenty more lethal narratives that is classic anti-Semitism in a contemporary expression. As if it wasn’t enough to be misled by its government and its media about the reality of Islamism, France also has to endure Socialism. Strikes and riots are already bringing the whole country to the edge of lawlessness. Nidra Poller is in the role of Cassandra.

Iran, the nation that has built a well-deserved reputation as the world’s premier state-sponsor of terrorism has a new lobbyist and he is none other than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the Obama administration inked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in January, Kerry has been busying himself with ensuring that European banks start doing business with the Iranians. Yes, you read that correctly. Not only has the United States and its European allies agreed to lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the administration is now encouraging the private banking sector to do the same. It appears however, that their intense lobbying efforts are being received with a healthy dose of skepticism.

HSBC’s chief legal officer, Stuart Levey confirmed that Kerry had requested that HSBC start opening its banking doors to the Iranians and transact business with them. Levey criticized Kerry’s misguided initiative noting that the U.S. still maintains other non-nuclear related sanctions against the Islamic Republic and that doing business with Iran runs the risk of running afoul of those sanctions. HSBC has had prior negative experience with the U.S. Treasury and Justice departments. In 2012, the bank was forced to fork over $1.9 billion to U.S. authorities to settle allegations involving money laundering for Mexican drug barons.

Levey also noted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls large swaths of the Iranian economy, has been slapped with sanctions by both the U.S. and Europe because of the central role it plays in illicit regional and international activities. Doing business with Iran will almost certainly result in facilitating IRGC operations. Adding to the uncertainty, Iran has over the years developed a penchant for hiding money, engaging in shady deals and money laundering thus making it difficult, if not impossible for banking institutions to engage the Iranians in legitimate business transactions without being complicit in their illegal dealings.

The Obama administration had many tense exchanges with reporters as it pursued diplomatic talks with Iran on its nuclear program. But it revealed on Wednesday that at least one of those exchanges, from 2013, had been deliberately deleted from the State Department’s public online video archives.

A State Department editor erased a portion of the Dec. 2, 2013 briefing before posting the footage online, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday.

The editor did so after receiving a phone call from another employee in the State Department’s public affairs bureau transmitting the request, Mr. Kirby said, adding that the deletion probably happened on the same day as the briefing and he didn’t know who specifically requested the footage be erased. Earlier this month, a different State Department official had attributed the deletion to a “glitch.”

In the tape, which has since been restored, a Fox News reporter asked then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki whether her predecessor had been truthful when responding to questions in 2013 about secret contacts with Iran.

The backstory: In February 2013, the reporter, James Rosen, had asked previous State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland whether the U.S. was holding secret bilateral talks with Iran outside of the formal channel between Iran and six world powers. She said the U.S. wasn’t.

It was later reported that the U.S. had done just that. CONTINUE AT SITE

From a personal perspective, “lusty” is not an adjective I would have used, but some things in May did go “blissfully astray,” and a few provoked smiles: The man in New York’s Times Square, with a sign “Free Hugs,” who punched a woman in the face for naively believing the sign meant what it said. India reported that it was doing its bit for global warming; they are developing a feedstock that will make cows and other ruminants less flatulent. President Obama, claiming equality for transgenders, demanded that public high school bathrooms and showers be available to students based on gender identity, rather than gender at birth. (The Sidwell Friends School in Bethesda, I am sure, will be exempt.)

But these are not really funny. The first reflects a lack of civility necessary for society to function smoothly. The second, a questionable government expenditure in a country that is home to the world’s largest population of poor. And the third, identity politics substituting for common sense.

On the other hand, Boris Johnson’s winning limerick about Turkish President Recap Tayyip Erdogan’s fictional love affair with a goat was funny. London’s mayor had submitted his poem to The Spectator’s “President Erdogan Offensive Poetry contest.” The limerick, which cannot be repeated in this PG publication but which will elicit a smile from all but the most politically correct, can be found by googling “Johnson,” “limerick,” “Erdogan” and “goat.” Mr. Erdogan had asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to allow a lawsuit under some dusty 19th Century law that forbade German citizens from insulting foreign leaders. With eyes focused on Turkey’s large number of refugees and not wanting to upset its authoritarian leader, Ms. Merkel permitted the suit against German comedian Jan Bohmermann.

Rep. Randy Forbes speaks out on the Farsi Island incident and other threats to our diminishing seapower.

On January 12 two U.S. Navy riverine boats were sailing south through the Persian Gulf to Bahrain near Iran’s Farsi Island. One of the boats had broken down and the other stayed with it. Six Iranian boats surrounded them and demanded their surrender at gunpoint. The Americans did. They were forced to their knees and taken into captivity on the island.

It’s not clear how the Iranians treated the U.S. sailors, but we know a few key facts. The Iranians seized Navy computers aboard the boats and copied their contents. The sailors were interrogated individually — constantly — and paraded before Iranian television crews. In footage broadcast internationally, they were apparently compelled to admit that they were in the wrong for entering Iranian waters — though the evidence showed they had not — and to apologize for doing so.

But every American soldier, sailor, airman and Marine is trained to refuse to aid the enemy in that manner. It’s a violation of their duty to do so. So were they abused? Tortured? Threatened with immediate execution? We don’t know because the Obama administration has classified everything about how the sailors were treated.

They were released after about sixteen hours. The only reaction from President Obama was a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry thanking the Iranians for their cooperation and patting himself on the back for effective diplomacy. There was never even a word condemning the Iranians for violating international law by seizing the American boats in international waters.

Two weeks ago Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) got our attention when he said that the classified information about the incident, if made public, would shock the American people. He said that we would be shocked by not only how Iran treated our sailors but also how the Obama administration responded. As Forbes pointed out, Obama did nothing at all to help the sailors while they were in captivity.

I am getting a tad annoyed at the high dudgeon of the #Never Trumpsters. I did not want Trump but I will vote for him. Those high minded friends might remember a previous campaign when Senator John Kerry, now our Secretary of State, ran for the white House and got the endorsement of the Democrats in 2004 and appointed John Edwards as his running mate. But never mind all that.
On April 22, 1971, When Kerry was 27 years old and dressed in his green fatigues and Silver Star and Purple Heart ribbons, he addressed Congress and libeled and maligned American soldiers who fought in Vietnam.He accused them of war crimes “with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
Quoting soldiers he elaborated: “They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.They told stories that, at times, they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”
Veterans of both parties – high ranking officers as well as clerks- accused him of lies and launched a campaign against his election. Other than that there were no #Never Kerryites.
Even his medals were questioned- he won a Purple Heart for getting shrapnel in his buttocks….which could explain his brain damage.
Kerry never apologized, and he should never have been elected a Senator, no less a presidential candidate. rsk

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: A SEAL’s Story is a new book by former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie. Higbie was on the Navy SEAL assault team that in the summer of 2007 captured the most wanted man in the Middle East (apart from Osama bin Laden) – Ahmed Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, known as the Butcher of Fallujah. But afterward, Higbie and others in his unit were charged with prisoner abuse when Al-Isawi alleged that they had bloodied his lip.

Suddenly, the “mission accomplished” became a much more challenging ordeal as Higbie et al were threatened with courts-martial over supposedly roughing up a ruthless terrorist. When he went public with his account of what happened, the Navy pushed back hard to save face and protect careers. But Higbie pushed back harder.

Higbie, also the author of Battle on the Home Front: A Navy SEAL’s Mission to Save the American Dream, became a SEAL in 2003 and deployed twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is now a political commentator in national media including the Fox News Channel, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Daily Caller, and Breibart. He graciously agreed to answer a few questions for FrontPage Mag about his lates book, Enemies, Foreign and Domestic.

Mark Tapson: About the mission to capture and extract this high-value target, the Butcher of Fallujah. You and your unit accomplished the mission, handed him over, and all seemed good – but then what happened afterward?

Carl Higbie: After turning over custody to the Master at Arms (MP), the MP admittedly left his post. During this time the prisoner bit his lip (as testified by an oral surgeon) and spit blood on his clothing. Out of fear for his own career, the MP concocted a story that he saw many of us abuse the prisoner. This story was fabricated, as was apparent from his numerous changes in his official statement.

On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for having, “too much money in our politics, and rising economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation of the “American Declaration of Independence” and claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the murderous Communist dictator.

Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised, his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the opposition, political and religious. When Obama references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps mean Ho’s declaration, “All who do not follow the line laid down by me will be broken.”

Perhaps he means the euphemistically named “land reform” which may have killed up to a million people. Like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh seized land and executed property owners as “enemies of the state”. The original plan had been to murder one in a thousand. But the relatively modest plan for mass murder was swiftly exceeded by the enthusiastic Communist death squads.

Obama has consistently called for wealth redistribution. This is what it really looks like. It’s men being hung from trees or lying in dirt dying of malaria. It’s death squads coming in the night. It’s a declaration that you are to be executed because you are the wrong class in a class war. It’s a man condemned to hard labor in a New Economic Zone and a family starving to death because the regime has commanded that they must be made an example of to other peasants.

What’s wrong with a little wealth redistribution anyway?

As Obama said, on his visit to the brutal Communist dictatorship in Cuba, “So often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist… And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property… you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.”

Does Vietnam’s Communist dictatorship work? Obama seems to think that it does, talking up the, “skyscrapers and high-rises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and new shopping malls and urban centers. We see it in the satellites Vietnam puts into space”. What’s a million dead when you’ve got satellites in space? What does it matter if you don’t have freedom of speech when there are skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh City?

Unlike Pol Pot, whose genocidal crimes leftist activists like Noam Chomsky tried and failed to cover up, the Communist butchery in Vietnam that took place even long before the Vietnam War has largely been erased from common history. The victims of Ho Chi Minh and his successors have become non-persons not just in Vietnam, but in Washington D.C. Instead Obama associates one of history’s bloodiest Communist butchers with Thomas Jefferson.

What of the Declaration of Independence was there in Ho’s concentration camps? The brutal Communist regime whose ideals Obama praises, sent political dissidents to camps. Are those the ideals he shares with Uncle Ho?

Aristotle’s third law of thought, the law of the excluded middle, has enjoyed a long and to some degree controversial history. Briefly, it posits that a statement must be either true or false, excluding any middle ground, which on the face of it makes perfectly good sense. Extrapolating from the domain of logic to the social world, however, the excluded middle takes on a different and indeed opposite connotation, for its absence spells not propositional rigor but cultural disaster.

Consider, for example, the operation of the law in the realm of everyday economic activity. Much has been written about the withering of the middle class in our over-regulated, tax-unfriendly times. See, for example, Vahab Aghai’s America’s Shrinking Middle Class, where we learn that “between 2000 and 2012, the United States lost 10 percent of its middle class jobs.” Meanwhile, low income jobs have grown commensurably.

The fiscal policy of holding interest rates below the rate of inflation wipes out the value of middle class savings. The glut of government regulations garrotes economic initiative while indirect taxes eat up a substantial chunk of the scraps direct taxation has left. Modest businesses cannot compete with large corporations, state-controlled industries and intrusive government bodies, sending many small entrepreneurs onto the welfare rolls. Craftsmen and trades people depend on the black market to avoid the department of revenue and its crushing value-added cash grab. Start-up innovators find themselves snagged in the Byzantine warrens of the patent office. Ranchers and cattle breeders have been targeted by the EPA and BLM (and similar agencies in other countries), whose bureaucrats have run amok in invasive and confiscatory practices with tacit administrative approval. And the rot is spreading. The old adage that the rich and the poor will always be with us skips over the fact that the middle may not.

It is a precept of economic wisdom that when the middle class is put out of business, as it were, economic stagnation and social decay inevitably ensue, and national unity is beset by civil unrest, unsustainable levels of poverty and cultural decline. According to reputable historians, this was one of the major causes of the implosion of Imperial Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries. When the tax burden grew so onerous that remittances began to dry up, “taxes no longer flowed to the seven hills,” writes James O’Donnell in The Ruin of the Roman Empire, “nor did the food supplies sent in lieu of taxes.” The crushing weight of taxation destroyed the farming sector—essentially the middle class of the empire—which formed the backbone of Roman society, and the social apparatus gradually collapsed with it. Famine and revolt were principal factors in facilitating the onslaught of the barbarian hordes, which completed the debacle.

In Grateful Memory of Harold G. King, American Soldier No. 32922362, Who died in the Service of His Country in the European Area, July 10,1944.

HE STANDS IN THE UNBROKEN LINE OF PATRIOTS WHO HAVE DARED TO DIE THAT FREEDOM MIGHT LIVE,AND GROW, AND INCREASE ITS BLESSINGS. FREEDOM LIVES, AND THROUGH IT HE LIVES IN A WAY THAT HUMBLES THE UNDERTAKINGS OF MOST MEN.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States.

Harold King died from wounds received during the Normandy invasion. He was 20 years old. His older brother George also died in the Normandy invasion in June 1944.