RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wait till Putin gets going on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Since one tribe of cavemen began to observe another, it’s been the norm for one tribe or nation to covertly gather information on another. We live in the age of spy satellites and the interception of telephone, email and social media conversations. But these are (unless Hillary Clinton has access to them) kept secret both from our adversaries and the public.

It’s very rare for a new window on our adversaries to open to the public. For years, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been giving us a view into the otherwise unavailable, untranslated media of the Arab world and Iran. Its translations of newspaper articles, speeches by nations’ leaders — and in the case of many Islamic nations, their terrorist proxies — has been an enormous gift to journalists who take the trouble to avail themselves of them.

Thanks to MEMRI, we have been able to read and research materials that told us, for example, that while Yassir Arafat was preaching peace to the United Nations, he was also, at home, shouting in Arabic that Arabs would go to Jerusalem as “martyrs by the millions.” We knew that Iran’s ayatollahs demanding that crowds chant “death to America” wasn’t like Americans singing “take me out to the ballgame,” it was a religious statement demanded of their people. The vast majority of the source material of my book In the Words of Our Enemiescame from MEMRI.

Now, our friends at MEMRI have opened another window, this time on Vladimir Putin’s Russia through MEMRI’s “Russian Media Studies Project.” Like MEMRI’s studies of Middle Eastern media, MEMRI-Russia provides a lot more than propaganda published at home to the Russian people. It gives considerable insight into what Russian leaders are arguing to each other and to the Russian oligarchy.

Deployments of U.S. forces continues despite the claims of drawdown and withdrawal. The numbers may be on the decline and the use of Special Forces may be on the rise, but the issue that is emerging is why are our military forces in harms way at all. From Rand Paul to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, many are asking a fundamental question: What is the benefit to the United States of overseas deployments? It was once a question easily addressed within the context of the Cold War. But at a time when there is a quagmire in the Middle East and modest European expenditures for self-defense, the question emerging directly, and often inadvertently, is why the U.S. is burdened with defending the civilization. Why is President Obama now sending an additional 250 troops into Syria?

Isolationists from Robert Taft to Charles Lindbergh have asked the question and their answer came in Nazi jack booted invasions across Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Today the threat is more complicated and subtle. It does not necessarily rely on nation states. There is also a backdrop of weapons of mass destruction. And much of the enemy’s imperial drive is promoted through religious prescriptions. Hence conventional war may have its place, but it is not likely to be dispositive.

Moreover, the internationalists are also in an odd position. Former Vice President Cheney said we should clean out the “swamp” to prevent attacks here in the United States. The problem, of course, is that attacks have already occurred, “sleepers” are probably in our midst and whatever we do in the Middle East may not forestall future violence at home. The threat has metastasized making it far more difficult to confront. It is also a threat that manifests itself on and off the battlefield. Radicalization of individuals is often as notable a challenge as those firing AK47s.

What has emerged is a void, a giant whole in the foreign policy apparatus. Military officials deploy their troops efficiently and effectively, but they are not engaged in the making of policy. Policy is in the realm of an uninvited guest at a dinner party.

In March, the State Department quietly released records relevant to the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attack. Included are transcripts of the telephone call then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had on September 12, only hours after the attack ended, with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil. As explained by Judicial Watch, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the “most transparent administration in history” forced the belated disclosure, Mrs. Clinton flatly told Mr. Kandil, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.”

Kandil responded, “You’re not kidding. Based on the information we saw today, we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this is affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

Of course, “the film” Clinton was referring to was “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure anti-Islamic video trailer that she, President Obama, and the administration tirelessly blamed for the attacks despite – let’s quote Clinton again – “know[ing] the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.”

The al-Qaeda affiliated group to which the Egyptian prime minister referred as having claimed responsibility was Ansar al-Sharia. (On ties between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda, and between al Qaeda affiliates and Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the only suspect charged in the Benghazi attack, see Tom Joscelyn’s Long War Journal reports, here and here.) The fact that a jihadist organization tied to al-Qaeda had carried out the attack, in which jihadists killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans working at U.S. government facilities (the purpose of which has still not been adequately explained), was also well known to Clinton from the earliest hours of the siege – while she and the Obama administration were publicly blaming the video.

The collapse of the West is accelerating. The secular, leftist, multiculturalist elites have subverted Europe so successfully that the clash of civilizations is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. The continent’s leaders have imported a violent, virulently anti-Western horde in the form of mass male Muslim migration; a rape culture and terrorist mayhem are becoming the new normal; and the best self-defense the Europeans can muster is ragtag bands of vigilantes. Here in America the cultural decay is less dramatic but gathering momentum as the radical left’s half-century war on American exceptionalism takes its toll.

As the West commits slow-motion suicide, and fundamentalist Islam advances, the questions arise: what can we do to recover our cultural self-confidence? How can we restore the vigor and greatness of Western civilization? How do we revive the unique values of our culture and push back against the barbarians at (and within) the gate?

A new book from Canadian publisher Mantua Books addresses these urgent concerns: Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, by Diane Weber Bederman. Bederman is a multi-faith endorsed, hospital-trained chaplain who contributes regularly to CanadaFreePress and the Times of Israel, as well as maintaining her own blog.

Back to the Ethic is both a personal memoir and a broader cultural prescription. From the author’s own death-defying struggle with illness and depression to her meditations on a secularized culture that itself is mortally ill, the book stresses our need to return to the Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism that is at the root of Western civilization’s success.

Bederman begins by simply stating what I noted at the outset of this review – that “our belief systems are under attack.” Those belief systems, she writes, derive from our “foundational story,” the Bible. “The Hebrew Bible, filled with these teachings, the Gospels, and the New Testament make up the backbone of the Judeo-Christian ethic as practiced today in the Western world.”

Ethical monotheism, the 3500-year-old value system that began with Moses and the Israelites wandering in the desert, spread outward from that humble beginning to transform the earth. “And the world’s greatest transformation,” claims Bederman, “has been the knowledge that we humans are individually accountable for our actions.” It taught us that “we each have intrinsic value – we matter because we exist.”

Every age preceding ours sanctioned acts that we find morally stupefying. So it is reasonable to assume that there are at least some things we are presently doing — possibly while flush with moral virtue — that our descendants will regard with exhalations of “What were they thinking?” Anyone interested in our age should wonder what these modern blind spots might be — those things akin to slavery or the Victorians’ shoving children up chimneys. As an entry into this category, you could do worse than consider the case of Nathan (born Nancy) Verhelst.

This was a Belgian who as a little girl felt that her brothers were favored over her. In adulthood she chose to “transition” into a man. She underwent hormone therapies as well as surgical operations. These were insufficiently successful for Nancy’s liking and left considerable scarring. Nathan — as he then was — became depressed. In September 2013, when Nathan was 44 years old, the Belgian state killed him by lethal injection because of his “unbearable psychological suffering.”

Perhaps we can leave the ethics of trying to turn women into men for another day. But it seems likely that any future civilization will look back on the practice of euthanasia in the Western liberal democracies in the early 21st century and sense an awesome moral chasm: “Let me get this right, the Belgian health service tried to turn her into a man and then killed her?” Strangest of all might seem the fact that this killing was done in a spirit not of malice or cruelty, but of kindness.

Several advanced Western countries now practice some form of euthanasia. The State of Oregon allows a version that was much cited in the United Kingdom last year, when there was an unsuccessful attempt to introduce a euthanasia bill in the parliament. But nothing yet equals the practice of euthanasia in the two most liberal democracies of Western Europe: Belgium and Holland. In both countries, deciding (or, in cases of dementia, having decided for you) the date of your death has become, in the eyes of euthanasia advocates, a positive — indeed a liberal — act. The generation of Baby Boomers in the Low Countries that led the way in advancing the rights of sexual and other minorities are the same generation that then advanced the “right” to die. For them, it is the last right. As with some other rights arguments, the case puts the rights of the individual over those of the community irrespective of the impact this may have on wider society.

Even so, no other “right” can be said to have anywhere near the implications of this last one. The “right to death” makes every other right look like a plaything by comparison, because enjoying the right to death changes almost everything about the way a society views not only death but also life and the very purpose (or otherwise) of existence.

President Obama said alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany today that the United States is “still analyzing and assessing with precision the activities that North Korea engaged in over the last several days” before elaborating on any potential response.

South Korea, meanwhile, said Saturday’s submarine-launched ballistic missile launch in the Sea of Japan is an “open provocation” that requires a response, while North Korea called the launch one more demonstration that it can strike the U.S.

“We will take necessary steps in close cooperation with related countries,” South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck said today. “Regardless of whether the test was a success or not, it is a clear violation of UNSC resolutions.”

“The government has warned on various occasions that the North would face stronger and more stern responses from the international community in the event of its additional provocation,” Cho said. “We will further strengthen our efforts to increase pressure on the North through the faithful implementation of the UNSC sanctions resolution and international cooperation.”

The UN Security Council said in a statement today that members “would continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures in line with the council’s previously expressed determination.”

Obama said he’d “let the Pentagon and our intelligence community debrief everyone once we have precise information.”

The administration issued no statements on the launch over the weekend.

“What is clear is that North Korea continues to engage in continuous, provocative behavior; that they have been actively pursuing a nuclear program, an ability to launch nuclear weapons. And although more often than not they fail in many of these tests, they gain knowledge each time they engage in these tests. And we take it very seriously. And so do our allies, and so does the entire world,” Obama said.

In 2012 Barack Obama announced a “pivot” to Asia, which lasted for about five minutes until he pivoted right back to his forte, which is picking largely symbolic culture-war fights with Republicans over domestic issues that play well among affluent white suburbanites.

The “pivot” was, in fact, intended to be the beginning of a marketing push for the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who outlined the essentials of the program in an article in Foreign Policy. The path in this case is sixfold: expanding bilateral security commitments with Asian partners; raising the American profile in Asia’s international institutions; expanding trade; increasing the U.S. military presence in the Pacific; taking a leadership role in Asian human-rights issues; and generally renewing our diplomatic efforts to cultivate richer relationships with China and with Asian powers worried about being dominated by China.

The main policy outcome so far has been the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade-liberalization pact that Mrs. Clinton has been walking sideways away from for months. TPP is a proposal that is good and necessary in its generalities, worrisome and sometimes unpersuasive in its particulars, and currently caught between a Democratic electorate that hates free trade per se and a Republican electorate that is one-third composed of people who hate free trade per se and otherwise dominated by those who believe, not without some reason, that President Obama would not put forth such an agreement without a rascally purpose, occult though it may be. This leaves the United States in the very difficult position of needing to make the case for free trade abroad when it is a minority taste at home.

It all started with “Airport” (1970). Then there was disaster at sea with “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972). And, of course, chaos on land followed with “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno”—both came out in 1974. All cashed in at the box office.

Hollywood’s addiction to disaster movies was born.

Over time, the Tinsel Town formula turned formulaic. Assemble a cast of well-known actors. String together a plot of people in peril. Stir in some stirring special effects. The results have ranged from decent movies like “Twister” (1996) to awful cinematic trash like the recent disaster of a disaster flix—”San Andreas” (2015).

Now comes a film that does not follow the formula. “The Wave” (“Bolgen” in Norwegian) is a new movie from Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug. Last year, it was submitted for Oscar consideration as the best foreign film. Inexplicably, the movie didn’t get nominated. Now, “The Wave” is playing in limited theatrical release around the United States and Canada.

What is at risk from the “wave” in the movie isn’t some metropolis. No—under peril is the picturesque tourist town of Geiranger overlooked by an ominous mountain. Kristian is part of tiny team monitoring the unstable Åkerneset, because when the hillside slides into the narrow adjacent fjord the rock debris will trigger a tsunami. Ten minutes later the wave will wipe out the village. The job of Kristian’s team is to warn the town before the unthinkable (but inevitable) occurs.

It’s good work if you can get it, this business of lecturing others on what they are morally obliged to do (and pay) if the poor/diseased/downtrodden/oppressed masses of whatever dismal variety you prefer are to be lifted from their benighted misery. The trick is not to get caught being inauthentic.
You might recall the story of the white-as-snow Rachel Dolezal, who lied about her ethnicity and culture to assume the mask, moral privileges and kudos of an oppressed African-American activist. She was an ordinary white woman who, by appropriating the culture and physical appearance of an ethnic group with a goldmine of victimhood cachet, made herself feel very special indeed. Think here of private school kids getting tribal tattoos or Prince Harry affecting the odd glottal-stop or a bit of H-withholding, as in to ‘ow much ‘e ‘ungers for a lager with the lads. It’s the classic case of the outsiders wanting membership of a club to which, presenting as themselves, they can never belong.

Now, with an election looming it’s time to get ready for another cast of political thespians trying to be what they are not, sneaking into our lives and pockets via the belly of the Trojan horse of the Fairness Industrial Complex (FIC). For those who don’t know, the FIC is like the Qantas Club for PFS Operatives — Professional Fairness Spruikers. This is a comfy place where cake-eating clipboard carriers, meeting-minuters, shiny-suited private-school union lawyers, progressive politicians, publicly funded activists and lanyard-wearing, conference-attending, frequent-flyer-points-accruing public servants can relax and thrive in comfort, all courtesy of the proceeds of the FIC and the support it wrings out of others, mostly the taxpayers.

The FIC, unlike its cousin the Military Industrial Complex, is proud to peddle its influence and does so openly. Its foot soldiers often live together and work together, as seen at the ABC, where sharing a bed and daily breakfast with someone already on the national broadcaster’s payroll is always a recommendation on any job application. Their strength is in their numbers. For instance: alone, one member might be thought a poseur or a grievance monger; but as part of the many, an activist or a social justice warrior is more than a mere and clamorous pest. Rich, greedy and lazy, the Western world shrugs and indulges the snivels of what amounts social-issue hypochondria. Should anyone raise an eyebrow or dare to disagree with the narrative, cue a mob pile-on, maybe even a lynching. Supporters of, say, traditional marriage are howled down, interrupted ceaselessly in mid-sentence by Tony Jones, branded “homophobes” for daring to disagree, no matter how politely, with such a fashionable cause and meme.

Membership of this house of smarm and sinecure has its privileges, but there are rules. First and foremost is the possession of a compassionate ‘false self.’ Now we all have ‘false selves’ – split-off bits of our character that represent the sort of people we’d most like to be and be seen to be. Con artists knowingly cultivate such personas for the purpose of criminal enterprise, which at least blesses the then the virtue of honest self-knowledge. Fairness spruikers, by contrast, are often blissfully unaware of their impostiture; they think their false selves represent the totality of their personhood.

“I will serve you in Congress like I served you on the battlefield…without regard for personal gain and without regard for personal sacrifice.”After graduating from South Christian High School in 1999, Mast followed in his father’s footsteps and enlisted in the military, where for over 12 years, Brian Mast served our country as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Brian’s service also included the honor of serving under the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as a bomb disposal expert. Working under JSOC meant that Brian fought at the tip of the spear for the U.S. military in the ongoing war against radical Islamic terrorism. Being a bomb technician in this high level of special operations came with the responsibility of protecting his fellow soldiers from the wars most deadly enemy, the improvised explosive device (IED). For Mast this meant putting himself directly in the line of fire without the use of bomb suits or robots.

While on his last deployment in Afghanistan, Mast was tasked with protecting his brothers from IED’s on a nightly basis. While he was able to detect and destroy most of these IED’s, the very last IED Mast found resulted in him sustaining catastrophic injuries, which included the loss of both his legs.As a result of his service and sacrifice to our country, Mast was awarded medals for Valor, Merit, and Sacrifice, to include The Bronze Star Medal, The Army Commendation Medal for Valor, The Purple Heart Medal, and The Defense Meritorious Service Medal.

While recovering from his injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., Mast’s focus was singular: get better and get back to serving America, which is exactly what he did. Each day for him consisted of 8 hours of grueling physical therapy, after which he would also provide his requested expertise to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), all on top of his ongoing military duties.

Mast recently donned an army uniform again in a show of support for the nation of Israel and the freedom it represents in the Middle East and around the world, as he volunteered along side the Israeli Defensive Forces (IDF).