RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=257245
Into the Fray: As the 2012 elections approach, the Republican Party owes America and its allies a persuasive paradigm.
For a while, we were concerned that the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were not saying much about national security and foreign affairs. Now that a few have started, maybe they were better off before. Certainly, the Republican hopefuls have put to rest any lingering notion that their party is the one to trust with the nation’s security… the candidates offer largely bad analysis and worse solutions, nothing that suggests real understanding or new ideas… American voters deserve thoughtful answers. They’re not getting them.
Republicans and Foreign Policy – New York Times editorial

From the derogatory tone of a recent tirade from the “paper of record,” one might get the impression that the foreign policy endeavor of the current Democratic administration was reaping staggering success.

Pot calling the kettle black?

Indeed, as the editorial itself points out, “China is rising, relations with Pakistan are plummeting, Iran and North Korea are advancing their nuclear programs. The Middle East is in turmoil,” – leaving the reader to puzzle over who ought to shoulder the blame for all this.

Shouldn’t much of the culpability for these woes be attributed, in large measure, to the incumbent administration, already well into the final year of its term?

With the much-heralded centerpiece of Barack Obama’s foreign policy strategy – “outreach” to the Muslim world – launched with his lofty June 2009 speech at Cairo’s Al- Azhar University, in ruins, what basis is there is to believe his party “is the one to trust with the nation’s security”?

A poll conducted in mid-2010 for the Arab American Institute by James Zogby, himself closely affiliated with the Democratic Party, underscores just how miserably the administration’s grand design has failed. According to Zogby’s findings, “US favorable ratings across the Arab world have plummeted. In most countries they are lower than at the end of the Bush administration.”

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1343

David M. Weinberg Ready for statehood?

The Palestinians keep telling us and insisting to every international interlocutor that they are ready for statehood, and supposedly this means a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.Well, I wonder – on both accounts.

The Palestinian government(s) I see are far from being “ready” for statehood or peace with Israel, for reasons that range from impotency to insolvency and raw anti-Semitism.

Let’s start with impotency. Faced with riots and death threats, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad this week was forced to shelve his plan to actually tax PA businessmen. Why should Palestinian stock market profits, real estate deals and civil service salaries be taxed? Why should 26,000 of the over 150,000 redundant civil servants and security personnel currently on the PA payroll be eased into early retirement? Why? Because the PA has a budget deficit of over $1 billion and almost no self-generated income?

So what?! The international community will continue to pay.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

It’s not often that the Democratic Party’s working class religious base collides with its progressive radical left base, mainly because the leaders of the first group rarely concede that there is a conflict between the radical left’s agenda and their own. The contraception mandate was one of those unique events when the collision happened and the left backed down.

That the collision happened at all is a testament to the arrogance and cluelessness of the Obama elite which operates in its own bubble. Even the input of insiders like Biden who understood exactly what was going to happen did not prevent the ship from sailing. It took some aggressive pushback for the administration to reverse itself, while pretending that there was no reversal, but the real story is how tone deaf the insiders in this administration really are.

The last thing you want to do before a national election is pick a fight with a major section of your own base which is a bit skeptical about you anyway. Giving them a reason to turn on ObamaCare and the administration was the dumbest thing possible. And it happened because the people running things did not understand it would happen. They assumed that they could put on their paternalistic attitude, smile dismissively, spin up some talking points and everyone would go along.

This stupidity is our best hope. If the Republican Party establishment insists on arrogantly making a mess of things, the Obama Administration’s arrogance and heavy-handedness exceeds their own and may succeed in the battle of alienation.

The Contraceptive Mandate’s Shaky Justification By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290844

The first thing to understand about the Department of Health and Human Services’ birth-control mandate, and the last, is that it is an assault on both faithful Christians and the Constitution by leftists who consider themselves at “war” — their word — with bourgeois America. It has nothing to do with guaranteeing access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.

Don’t think so? Are you buying the Obama party line that the administration is merely protecting people who work for religious organizations — such as Catholic schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations? Ensuring they are not denied these “reproductive services” that are covered under health-insurance plans ordinary businesses arrange for their employees? These claims do not pass the laugh test. Nobody in America is denied access to abortion, let alone birth-control pills

Owing to its totemic status in the Kulturkampf, abortion is among the most heavily subsidized of medical procedures. In the first trimester, it generally costs less than $400. If the unborn child is in the second trimester, the price of ending his or her life is a bit steeper. Still, like life, death is cheap, generally under $600.

Why Saudi Prince Bin Talal Funds Middle East Studies in America

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2012/02/why-saudi-prince-bin-talal-funds-middle-east

HIS LARGESSE IS SPREAD THROUGHOUT ACADEMIA INCLUDING MEDICAL AND LAW SCHOOLS. HE WOULD NOT BE AS SUCCESSFUL WERE IT NOT FOR THE MIDDLE EAST STUDIES ASSOCIATION WHICH PREPARES ITS MEMBERS…..ALL FACULTY TEACHING THE SUBJECT….TO HATE ISRAEL, LIE ABOUT ITS HISTORY, THROW IN ANTI-AMERICAN SENTIMENTS, AND PROMOTE THE “RELIGION OF PEACE” BLATHER…..BIN TALAL HAS VERY WILLING ACCOMPLICES IN ACADEMIA……RSK

Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal–million dollar benefactor of Middle East studies programs at Harvard University, Georgetown University, and beyond–spoke at Harvard this past Wednesday. The prince touts himself as a model of liberalism in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia–in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he advocated for reform among Middle Eastern monarchies in response to the demands of the “Arab Spring”–and he has always claimed that his funding for Middle East studies in the U.S. springs from nothing more than a desire to promote cross-cultural understanding.

Yet, as the following excerpt from this Harvard Crimson article reveals, the underlying reason for his largesse likely has more to do with promoting a positive image of Islam in the West. Hence the whitewashing of Islamic history that routinely occurs in the programs he funds and via the professors, such as Georgetown’s John Esposito and Harvard’s Ali Asani (both are quoted in the article) whom he has tapped to direct them:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/how_incompetence_and_malfeasance_infect_the_voting_process.html Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department, a recent book by J. Christian Adams, provides shocking evidence of DOJ racial bias toward minorities and the failure to apply federal law in a race-neutral fashion. A five-year DOJ Voting Rights Section veteran, Adams cites his firsthand experience with officials who sought to […]

A Kosovo Model for Syria Bill Clinton stood up to Milosevic. Barack Obama can confront Assad.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204369404577211143509449410.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

I AM NO ADVOCATE FOR MILOSEVIC WHO WAS A THUG…BUT A COMPARISON WITH ASSAD IS OUTRAGEOUS! AND WHAT HOLBROOKE, HALBRIGHT AND CLINTON DID IN THE BALKANS WAS TO DESTROY SERBIAN INFRASTUCTURE WHEN MILOSEVIC WAS ALREADY ON HIS WAY OUT, AND PAVE THE WAY FOR KOSOVO WHICH WAS LEGALLY AND HISTORICALLY AN INTEGRAL PART OF SERBIA, TO BECOME ANOTHER MOSLEM STATE, WHOSE LEADER, MONSTER HACIM THACI WAS ACCUSED OF HUMAN ORGAN TRAFFICKING…..THIS IS AN AJAMI DELUSION….SHAME ON HIM…..RSK

The bloodshed and the brutality of the dictatorship in Syria are at long last beginning to challenge the passivity of the Obama administration. The word is out that the Pentagon has launched a “scoping exercise” to determine what could be done should the president want to respond to the Syrian catastrophe.

For months, the administration pursued the mirage of a United Nations Security Council condemnation of Damascus, when there was no chance that Russia and China would go for it. The administration persisted even though a similar effort last October ended in failure. There was no need to court the Russians. We granted them the pride of being treated as a great power, and they played it for all it was worth, at home and abroad. The time wasted on the courtship of Russia should have been put to use “scoping” ways the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad could be brought down.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203554104576655280219991322.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

KABUL—U.S. taxpayers paid Afghan entrepreneur Ajmal Hasas millions of dollars as part of a plan to win over villages in the country’s insurgent heartlands.

Instead, Mr. Hasas’ seven-mile road construction project went so awry that his security guards opened fire on some of the very villagers he was trying to woo on behalf of his American funders.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/880/abu_qatada_is_an_extremist_so_why_won_t_the_bbc_tell_the_truth_
Abu Qatada is an extremist so why won’t the BBC tell the truth?

Calling Abu Qatada an extremist may well be a value judgement but it would be the right value judgement and more importantly than this it would also be the truth

According to notes shown to the Daily Telegraph, BBC journalists have been told by the corporation’s managers that they should avoid referring to the al-Qaeda preacher Abu Qatada as ‘an extremist’. This, they were told, would be to make a ‘value judgement’ and rather they were to describe Qatada as ‘a radical’.

Yet this seems an incredible position for the BBC to have adopted, and it’s incredible because it very clearly appears that the BBC is instructing it’s journalists to avoid telling the truth.

Abu Qatada is quite demonstrably an extremist. Calling him a radical just doesn’t suffice. You might say that Roy Jenkins was a radical Home Secretary or that Ayn Rand with her views on the virtue of selfishness was a radical. They were radicals because, to varying degrees, they went against the grain of the prevailing orthodoxies that had existed. But Abu Qatada sits at the extreme end of what is in itself an overtly extreme and violent ideology.

Good old Auntie has done its best not to offend this man and his advocates
Good old Auntie has done its best not to offend this man and his advocates

This is after all the man who essentially acted as Bin Laden’s ambassador to Europe. He is known to have acted as a mentor to shoe bomber Richard Reid, Abu Hamza and Zacarias Moussaoui; the so called ‘20th hijacker’ of 9/11. And Qatada has been a fundraiser for terrorist activities and linked with terror groups whose networks stretch from as far as Algeria to Chechnya. Indeed, the immigration judge who thought it would be a good idea to rule that Qatada should walk free from Long Lartin high security prison had already been advised by his security team that the preacher posed a ‘grave risk’ to national security.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/882/on_iran_the_right_lesson_is_hitler_not_mao
On Iran, the right lesson is Hitler, not Mao

History is an imperfect teacher. But when push comes to shove, it would be more prudent to take Hitler’s Germany, as opposed to Mao’s China, as a precedent for today’s Iran

History is an imperfect teacher. The lessons from events of the past often contradict one another, leaving policymakers the challenge of deciding which ones are most relevant to the issues of today.

That challenge lies at the heart of the debate over what to do about Iran’s quest for nuclear weaponry.

On that issue, history offers conflicting lessons that derive from two earth-shaking events of the last century.