RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/27/dissolving-iraq/print
“Forseeably and inevitably, Iraq is falling apart. It’s the bonfire of the neocons burning brightly in Baghdad.”

What are our permanent interests? Conservatives will need to get it right before Election Day.

Less than two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta presided over the final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Since then, Iraq has been dissolving as quickly as an Alka-Seltzer tablet in warm water.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government issued an arrest warrant for the Deputy PM, Tareq al-Hashemi, promptly after the last U.S. truck convoy rolled across the border into Kuwait. Maliki, a Shiite, accuses Hashemi, a Sunni, of involvement in terrorism. Hashemi fled to the north, taking refuge in the Kurdish region under the protection of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. Hashemi has admitted that some of his guards were involved in attacks, but denied involvement and refused to return to Baghdad for trial on the ground that Maliki exercised political control over the courts.

Last Thursday, in a series of coordinated attacks, more than seventy people were killed in Iraq. The Thursday attacks spurred speculation that al Qaeda in Iraq had been revived, though other terrorist groups were probably capable of the planning and coordination that had previously been al-Qaeda’s trademark. Another attack, a suicide bombing at Iraq’s Interior Ministry, killed at least six the day after Christmas.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/obama-shifting-to-mideast-conflict-management/

Obama Shifting to Mideast ‘Conflict Management’? Posted By P. David Hornik

Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, a deep thinker and close colleague of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, claimed to a Jerusalem audience this week that Israel has talked some sense to President Barack Obama about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“We convinced the American administration,” Yaalon said, “that there is no way to solve the conflict in one or two years…. The US is trying to manage the conflict now, rather than solve it.”

Reporter Gil Hoffman notes that “there has been no public indication that the Americans have given up their hope of solving the conflict, and the US helped draft the Quartet position that aims to solve the conflict by the end of 2012.”

And just a few weeks ago Defense Secretary Leon Panetta sounded as sure as ever that the conflict could be solved if the parties would just “get to the damn table” and Israel would “reach out” to its neighbors and be more pliable.

Yaalon, for his part, gave Obama less credit on Iran, saying that “France and Great Britain are leading the West now in calling for crippling sanctions on the Iranian central bank and preventing Iran from exporting oil, while the US is unfortunately leading from behind.”

A Terrorist Returns Posted By Matthew Vadum

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/a-terrorist-returns/

Convicted terrorist collaborator Lori Berenson is fortunate that in the United States citizenship is not a license that expires upon bad behavior.

Berenson is back in America for the holidays, nearly two decades after the trust fund baby left to advance communism in Latin America.

A Peruvian court convicted her in 1996 of aiding a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that even now aspires to overthrow Peru’s government by force, but the 42-year-old New Yorker is free on parole. She was granted permission to visit the U.S. and has promised to return to Peru next month and remain there until her sentence is completed.

Berenson was paroled in 2010 after serving 15 years of a 20 year prison term for collaborating with the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) or MRTA. Along with Shining Path, a brutal Maoist guerrilla group, MRTA has long waged war against Peru’s democratically elected government.

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/12/27/diplomatic-supping-with-jihadist-devils-2/print/

While Western diplomats wring their hands over trivial insults to Islam, a slow-motion genocide of Christians has been unfolding in the Muslim world. The latest attack occurred on Christmas day in Nigeria, where the terrorist sect Boko Haram bombed two Catholic churches in the towns of Abuja and Jos, killing at least 39 worshipers. This same group killed 32 Christians last Christmas Eve. In this year alone, Boko Haram has murdered 491 people.

The killings in Nigeria are just one example of continuous violent attacks on Christians and their churches. Yet our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been nearly silent about this war on Christianity. When the Egyptian military participated in the murder of 25 Egyptian Copts, her State Department rejected a request from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to put Egypt on its list of countries that violate religious freedoms. Instead, Secretary Clinton issued a generic warning to the generals ruling Egypt “to ensure that the fundamental rights of all Egyptians are respected, including the rights of religious freedom, peaceful assembly and the end of military trials for civilians, and that efforts be made to address sectarian tensions.” Compare this reflexive diplo-speak to her more passionate reaction to the recent beating of Egyptian women during a demonstration, one of whom was publicly stripped: “This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonors the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people,” she said. Apparently, exposing a woman’s blue bra is a more heinous crime than running over a Copt’s head with a military vehicle.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1685/pub_detail.asp Hamas calls for an Arab Army to Liberate Jerusalem Nigerians Fear More Attacks After Muslim Terrorists Kill 35 Catholics at Christmas Mass [CNS] 2011 New Home Sales: 2011 Will Likely End up as the WORST YEAR for Sales in History [AP] Degree of frustration with cost of college: Outcry grows on soaring tuitions [WT] […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203391104577122330360675426.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

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Demystifying the Myths of WarInterview with Andrew Roberts, Author of “The Storm of War” Rael Jean Isaac

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10965/pub_detail.asp
Europe Cries Wolf, Britain Calls Its Bluff David Cameron’s veto of Europe’s proposed fiscal union does not spell doom for the U.K. Quite the contrary.
‘Bye-bye England,” shouts the Bild. In Der Spiegel, a cartoon shows Prime Minister David Cameron being dropped into a rowboat as the great European liner steams ahead. Headlines in the New York Times and Financial Times agree: Britain is “isolated” from the euro zone. What could make a Briton feel warmer this Yuletide, or more nostalgic?

Britain has been warned ever since the European Coal and Steel Community was created by Jean Monnet in the 1950s that if she didn’t get onto the “top table”—sometimes it was “in at the ground floor”—then terrible things would happen. Europe would surge ahead without her

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/12/27/main-feature/1/apologia-for-ben-gurion/e

“Between Weizmann and Jabotinsky, it’s hard to know whom Ben-Gurion hated more. He schemed with Weizmann against Jabotinsky—but had contempt for Weizmann’s hesitancy and ultimately sidelined the elder statesman. True differences of principle separated Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion favored class struggle and an agrarian economy; Jabotinsky was a classical liberal who wanted to foster an urban middle class. Ben-Gurion also scorned Jabotinsky’s demand for the territorial integrity of Eretz Israel. But it went deeper: Jabotinsky died of a heart attack in 1940 in New York; when the state was founded, Ben-Gurion refused to allow his adversary’s remains to be reinterred in Israel.”

At this year’s yahrzeit ceremony in Sde Boker for David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with Iran clearly on his mind, emphasized—eight times—Ben-Gurion’s capacity for making hard decisions. This theme permeates Ben-Gurion: A Political Life. The book is a “conversation” between the author, advocacy journalist David Landau, and Israeli President Shimon Peres. Landau calls it a “fusion of memory and history and multiple competing narratives.” Here we have truth in labeling, for what this slim volume is not is reliable history.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The masses weeping over the death of Kim Jong Il and the frantic online defenders of Ron Paul have something in common, it isn’t the man they care about. It’s what he represents.

The course of events that took a cranky Texas congressman and turned him into the made man of a motley crew of online gambling entrepreneurs, racists, conspiracy theorists and the whole big circus tent filled with offshore accounts, UFO landing sites and copies of the Turner Diaries is an odd one, but not a completely unusual one.

Cults of personality are not about the man, but about the need that he fills in his followers. There is a point at which every dictator, rock star and celebrity realizes that it is the people who adore him that are in charge and all he can do is ride the wave of adulation. The men don’t matter, the reasons why people seize on them do matter.

Why Ron Paul? Because like so many at the center of a cult of personality, he is everything to everyone. The big tent he presides over is full of people who don’t agree on very much. They are a nexus of opposition to ‘everything’, but they’re also a collection of groups that splinter faster than old wood in a thunderstorm.

http://times247.com/global
Egypt turning into a ‘house of dust’
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Monday, December 26, 2011
Commentary
German poet Heinrich Heine famously warned, “Where they have burned books, they will end by burning people.” But the December 17 burning of Cairo’s Institut d’Egypte on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of the Tunisian vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, which sparked the Arab Spring, stands the oft-used dictum on its head. Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/global

MAURER: Limiting government limits on our speech
The Washington Times
12/27/2011 12:21 AM
Commentary

Sen. Bernard Sanders has proposed an amendment to the Constitution to remove First Amendment protections from individuals who gather together to form corporations. New advocacy groups, run by influential media and political figures, are springing up to overturn “corporate personhood” so they cannot participate in elections.
Read more…

Read more at: http://times247.com/global

President says he won’t abide by spending bill he signed
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/dec/26/obama-blows-off-congress/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
When the president of the United States signs a bill into law, it’s expected that he will abide by it. That’s not the case with President Obama, who has a sudden interest in novel legalistic interpretations getting him off the hook from laws he doesn’t like.

On Friday, the president signed the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill, which funds the government for the remaining nine months of the fiscal year. Afterward, he released a statement saying he won’t abide by the law because the Justice Department had advised that certain provisions are “subject to well-founded constitutional objections.”

House Speaker John A. Boehner’s spokesman Kevin Smith told The Washington Times, “This president used to condemn the type of signing statements he is now embracing to ignore the will of Congress and the American people.”

One of the presidential pet peeves is that Capitol Hill put the kibosh on his czars. Those high-level White House appointments aren’t confirmed by the Senate but are central to implementing Mr. Obama’s liberal agenda. Lawmakers specifically blocked funding for salaries and offices for four of his nine czars: health care (who coordinates Obamacare), automobile industry (“car czar”), urban affairs and climate change.