RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration’s response to the church attack in Normandy, France, framed it as a religious liberty issue without mention of ISIS.

During morning Mass today in the town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, two armed men took five people hostage: two nuns, two parishioners and a priest. They slit the throat of the priest, Rev. Jacques Hamel, 86. One of the hostages was critically injured.

The two terrorists, one who tried to go fight in Syria after the Charlie Hebdo attack but was stopped and briefly imprisoned, were shot dead by police. Another man suspected to have a connection to the attack was arrested.

ISIS’ Amaq news agency quickly claimed responsibility for the attack: “The two executors of the attack on a church in Normandy, France, were soldiers of the Islamic State. They executed the operations in response to calls to target countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

French President Francois Hollande sent out a tweet “to the families of the victims and to all the Catholics of France” with “the solidarity and compassion of the nation.”

“Daesh has declared war on us,” Hollande told reporters, using the pejorative Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We have to win that war.”

“Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them,” the French leader added.

One of the nuns, identified as Sister Danielle, told France’s BFM TV of Father Hamel’s murder: “They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened. They recorded themselves. They did a sort of sermon around the altar, in Arabic. It’s a horror.”

An Italian politician called on Pope Francis to “immediately proclaim him St. Jacques” as a “martyr of the faith.”

Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said in a statement, “We are particularly shocked because this horrible violence took place in a Church, in which God’s love is announced, with the barbarous killing of a priest and the involvement of the faithful.”

The White House reaction, issued after the ISIS claim of responsibility, came from National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.

“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific terrorist attack today at a Catholic church in Normandy, France. We offer our condolences to the family and friends of the murdered priest, Father Jacques Hamel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the other victims of the attack as well as the parishioners and community members of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray,” Price said.

“France and the United States share a commitment to protecting religious liberty for those of all faiths, and today’s violence will not shake that commitment,” he added. “We commend French law enforcement for their quick and decisive response and stand ready to assist the French authorities in their investigation going forward.”

An ISIS-linked Telegram account posted in French after the attack that “Hitler took 10 years to shake the French… but our state shook France in a hour north to south. Allah bless you o Soldiers of the Caliphate.”

ISIS has had a special target on the Vatican since the inception of their caliphate, detailing in an ebook how critical the sacking of Rome is in their plans for apocalyptic conquest.

The 2015 book predicted “recruits” sympathetic to their cause “will give intelligence, share weapons and do undercover work for the Muslims to pave the way for the conquest of Rome.”

They’re also counting on ethnic minority soldiers defecting from European armies and passing their skills on to others as they raid weapons caches, while “lone wolves from within the community will rise” including “especially ex-gang members who also have access to weapons.” CONTINUE AT SITE

PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS

Forget what the history textbooks told you about martyrdom being a thing of the past. Christians are being persecuted and slaughtered today.

Raymond Ibrahim unveils the shocking truth about Christians in the Muslim world. Believers in Jesus Christ suffer oppression and are massacred at the hands of radicals for worshipping and spreading the gospel of the Lord.

Discover the true-life stories that the media won’t report in Ibrahim’s Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians

Apr 29, 2013

by Raymond Ibrahim

Our president continues to embrace the travesty known as the UN Human Rights Council.

Reforming United Nations institutions is often a fool’s errand. Yet, the Obama Administration chooses to draw no lessons from its attempt to improve the UN Human Rights Council, which just concluded its 10th anniversary session this month.

Ten years ago, the Human Rights Council was formed to replace its corrupt and discredited predecessor, the Human Rights Commission. Then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described the Commission as having “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole” due to its biased selectivity, politicization, and corrupt efforts to shield its members from due scrutiny.

It’s easy to see why. At its end, the Commission included six of the most politically repressive regimes — China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Vietnam.

A genocide in Darfur was being perpetrated by Sudan, which had been elected a member of the Commission. The Syrian regime that has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens was proposing to investigate U.S. war crimes in Iraq. And the U.S. itself had been kicked off the Commission.

A satirist could scarcely conceive so perverse a record. But has its successor been an improvement?

The presidency of James Monroe is often recalled as a period of political quiescence between the heroic age of the Founders and the era of muscular national expansion that followed him. Of course, his presidency is mostly remembered for the Monroe Doctrine. Proclaimed in 1823, it declared that the United States would consider any European action against the newly independent states of the Americas as an affront to itself.

Beneath the surface, the Monroe years and the decade that preceded them—roughly, 1810 to 1825—were anything but placid, at least with respect to Americans’ political discovery of Latin America. The turbulent visions and new ideological affinities of this period are the focus of Caitlin Fitz’s superb “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.” Ms. Fitz, a history professor at Northwestern University, argues that the Monroe era not only laid the foundation for U.S. policy toward Latin America but shaped North Americans’ ideas about the place of the United States in the world. It is a fascinating and often surprising story.

“Our Sister Republics” is not a history of Latin America’s revolutions, although Ms. Fitz tells us enough to enable us to distinguish the fleeting Republic of Pernambuco from the new regimes in Buenos Aires or Caracas. Rather, she focuses on North Americans’ passionate, if short-lived, identification with the aspirations of their South American neighbors.As instructive as Ms. Fitz’s narrative is, it is also a pleasure to read. She has a gift for the sparkling phrase that both enchants and illuminates. North American newspapers were “foreign agents’ strongest weapons, their pages scraping away at Portuguese authority with the accumulated force of a thousand paper cuts.” News of revolutions was carried by “merchants, sea captains, and other international men of motion.” Monroe, in the weeks before proclaiming his doctrine, sat “in Washington’s crisp autumn, holding foreign policy in his thoughts like a jeweler appraising a diamond, turning it around, inspecting it from all sides.” It is a rare historian who can bring politics alive with such verve.

President Obama has surrounded himself not with military strategists but rather with fiction writers, wide-eyed diplomats whose strategy is “don’t do stupid shit,” and law enforcement officials who believe that “Our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity and love.”

Only “rightwing extremism” is obvious to the Obama Administration. Everything else is apparently too complex and nuanced for labels. Even Micah Xavier Johnson, who said that he was motivated by “Black Lives Matters” rhetoric and hatred of white people, is a conundrum to the president, who bizarrely asserted that it is “hard to untangle the motives of this shooter.”

The Obama era is one of willful blindness to the jihadist movement that has declared war on America. CIA Director John Brennan purged the word “jihad” from the agency’s vocabulary. Obama’s two Attorneys General have done the same at the Department of Justice.

The federal government has spent the last 8 years pretending that “rightwing extremists” are more numerous and dangerous than the careful and intelligent jihadist attackers, whom it insists are just “madmen” or “troubled individuals.”

Anyone surprised by President Barack Obama’s recurring attempts at exploiting jihadist attacks in his efforts to restrict gun ownership should read the earliest known document concerning terrorism assembled by his administration. The unclassified assessment by Department of Homeland Security (DHS), titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” is dated April 7, 2009 — a mere 77 days after Obama’s inauguration.

The document was leaked shortly after its release to law enforcement officials across the country and made public by Roger Hedgecock on April 13, 2009. It laid out the new president’s legislative and executive priorities on terrorism, guns and immigration. Uniquely combining these three issues would become a predictable, coordinated pattern during Obama’s two terms in office.

It’s official: U.S. now relies on Russia and Iran in Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal report that Russian aircraft had bombed a supposedly secret U.S.-British base on the Syrian border with Jordan last month should raise the hackles of everyone in the presidential race and Middle East policymakers everywhere. It proved, redundantly, the comprehensive failure of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, particularly his more than two-year war against ISIS.

The base was reportedly used by U.S. and British special forces to stop ISIS fighters from coming to Syria from Jordan and for other anti-ISIS missions. A British special forces unit had apparently left the base less than a day before the attack. There were no reports of U.S. or allied casualties, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any.

The attack had the objective of goading us into sharing more intelligence information with the Russians. Sure enough, it worked. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Moscow last week to offer greater sharing of U.S. intelligence with the Russians. (Kerry added a clause to the document he signed stating that if the Russians bombed our bases again we could — might, maybe, perhaps — suspend cooperation.)

Kerry made this agreement despite the rather loud objection by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and the quieter opposition of Defense Secretary Carter.

Several conclusions must be drawn from Kerry’s actions. First, it is clear that Obama and Kerry have long since decided that Russia and Iran — the two nations whose forces have occupied Syria and protect Bashar al-Assad’s regime — will be the nations who should create a new stability in the Middle East. (Obama said, when peddling his Iran nuclear deal, that Iran could be a force for stability in the Middle East.)

Second, that Obama is entirely comfortable with the fact that the “stability” he wants in the Middle East would be accomplished by the force of arms of our enemies, to our strategic disadvantage and that of our ally, Israel. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that a Russian and Iranian-dominated Middle East means war, not peace, and that such wars could engulf the whole region and us as well. When — not if — Iran achieves its nuclear weapons ambitions, that war could be the first in which nations exchange nuclear strikes against each other.

Obama has misplayed all our cards in the Middle East. There are none left for the next president except to gradually undo what Obama has done.

Exposes of secret agreements signed with Iran regarding its nuclear agenda should come as no surprise.President Obama made no secret that a nuclear deal with Iran was a priority of his, and he determined to keep most of his dealings with the Mullahs from the American people. When the first Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement, which was supposed to freeze “key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for temporary relief from some economic sanctions” was signed in November 2013, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared that the deal recognized Tehran’s “right” to maintain its enrichment program. Shortly afterward, Secretary Kerry was quoted by the Washington Post – a participant in the White House’s “echo chamber” as saying

that the “agreement…states they could only do that by mutual agreement and nothing is agreed on until everything is agreed on.” But skeptics who questioned Kerry’s frequent denials of Iran’s boasting of “victories” with the agreement, should feel vindicated.

Yesterday, a leaked document to the Associated Press revealed a secret agreement allowing Iran to replace 5,060 inefficient centrifuges with 3,500 advanced machines, which are “five times more efficient.” The upgrade , which is supposed to take place in ten years from now, will enable Iran to develop nuclear weapons in six months. So when Obama declared: “Under this agreement, Iran is never allowed to build a nuclear weapon – period,” he was fully aware this was not true.

I was not a supporter of Donald Trump….I preferred Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio….but reality bites…Trump won….fair and square….there were no dead people voting, no voter intimidation, no fraud, and no coercion. Newly registered Republicans stood on line for hours to cast their vote.The alternative is Hillary of Chappaquadick, and that is enough for me to vote for and aver my support for Donald Trump without fear of the self-righteous limo liberals and death by dinner party.

The bitter clingers to # Elections Don’t Matter Trump dumpsters won’t relent. Kasich who called himself “the grownup of the debates” is acting like a spoiled brat by boycotting the convention in his own state; Lindsey Graham is preening; John McCain is posturing; Jeb and the Bushites are pouting; Romney who could not debate the overt lies and distortions of Benghazi, is licking his wounds in New Hampshire.

And today, my favorite conservative National Review Online has the following headlines:

Never Trump, Now More than Ever by David French
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438092/republican-convention-why-never-trump-movement-still-matters

Donald Trump Will Fail the Heroes Who Endorsed Him by David French
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438063/donald-trump-foreign-policy-american-retreat-2016-gop-convention

GOP Convention Has Become a Stomach-Churning Affair by Jonah Goldberg
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438075/2016-gop-convention-failure-donald-trump

Trump’s Weaknesses Are on Full Display in Cleveland by Michael Tanner
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438060/2016-gop-convention-donald-trump-weaknesses-full-display

Donald Trump’s Brand Is Tarnished by His Cheapness by John Fund
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438079/donald-trumps-cheapness-harms-trump-brand

Fortunately in the same issue Jim Geraghty clarifies things:

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/438057/print

“Yes, Donald Trump is a flawed messenger for the case against Hillary Clinton, but that doesn’t make the message any less true or compelling. The decision by a lot of big-name Republican lawmakers to skip the Cleveland convention was a blessing in disguise, because it cleared the stage for ordinary Americans who suffered the cruel, random, and deadly consequences of the Obama administration’s policies.”

Yup! rsk