RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Democrats have a plan to crush ISIS. All you have to do is tweet #CrushISIS, make it a trending topic and then ISIS will be crushed. If not, we can always bring back #BringBackOurGirls.

A party that is hesitant to fight ISIS in real life has become a movement of keyboard warriors convinced that the key to defeating the Jihadists lies somewhere in cyberspace.

It doesn’t. The internet is a medium. Dead men can’t tweet. Corpses can’t create hashtags.

But the Democrats are convinced that they can’t defeat ISIS in real life, only on the internet. And they’re probably half-right. They can’t defeat ISIS in real life or on the internet.

Obama told the Pentagon, “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. This broader challenge of countering violent extremism. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

When the USSR wanted excuses for allying with the Nazis, it claimed that an ideology couldn’t be defeated militarily, even though its entire existence was proof otherwise.

As Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov put it, “One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other ideological system; that is a matter of political views. But everybody should understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force, that it cannot be eliminated by war.”

The point — one of them — that Niall Ferguson raises in the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger is that any coherent arrangement for world order must give more freedom of action to the major powers which created that order in the first place
Kissinger: Volume One: 1923–1968: The Idealist

by Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 2015, 1008 pages, $79.99

Henry Kissinger’s career has unquestionably made him one of the leading statesmen not only of the United States but also of the Western world for much of the last third of the twentieth century. That fact alone ensures that he has been, and will continue to be, the subject of unstinted admiration as well as virulent hatred. Both kinds of comments have centered on the two decades from 1960 to around 1980, when Kissinger was effectively in charge of the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power.

To write his life story, he has commissioned Niall Ferguson, previously known for his major books—such as Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World—and for his lectures and television appearances. But this time he has written, with meticulous care, the first half of what may yet turn out to be his masterpiece. In writing it, he has been able to make full use of the huge Kissinger archive—it weighs several tons—at the Library of Congress.

The story begins with the experience of the Kissinger family in Fuerth, northern Bavaria, and in what became the Third Reich before they managed to emigrate. Ferguson has identified at least twenty-three close family members who perished in the Holocaust arranged by Adolf Hitler, who believed, quite literally, that Jews were sub-human. The Kissingers were lucky. They had a relative in the United States who could help with money, visas and passports, so they were able to leave in 1938 and settle in the Washington Heights section of New York.

At school young Henry was notably studious. After the Second World War began, he joined the army, which in turn slowly recognised him as uncommonly able. He served in the 84th Infantry Division and went through the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, where he escaped injury. He then joined the Counter-Intelligence Corps, where he became a most effective hunter of Nazis. He even came across a Nazi death camp, an experience he never forgot, and managed to find, and “take care of”, a group of ex-Gestapo officials trying to form a resistance group in post-war West Germany.

Our leaders refuse to name the enemy, much less fight the war. Our southern border is not protected and secured. Our military has been diminished and undercut. We’re admitting tens of thousands (soon to be hundreds of thousands) of people who embrace an ideology that is at direct odds with our Constitution and our very lives. Our presence on the world stage has receded to a dangerous level where we abandon our allies, align with the enemy, and let evil flourish.

And that’s the short list.

So what is our national security policy at this point, particularly with respect to the Islamic advance?

As far as I can tell, it’s comprised of luck. And water.

Luck

We’ve all been lucky. Our lives have not been snuffed out by Islamic blades, bullets, or bombs.

We weren’t at the World Trade Center in 1993. Nor were we there in 2001 or on any of the planes jihadists crashed

We weren’t at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. We weren’t at Ford Hood or at either of the military installations in Tennessee or at a recruiting center in Arkansas when Islamic terror struck.

We weren’t at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. We weren’t an employee at a food distribution center in Moore, Oklahoma or a student in West Orange, New Jersey. Nor were we Coptic Christians in the same state.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Captain, Cool Hand Luke, 1967

In terms of understanding Islam, that would include a failure, or an outright refusal, to grasp and integrate the truth about Islam and its movers and shakers by especially those charged with the responsibility of fighting the “War on Terror” and securing the safety of this country. Given such a “war,” it is incumbent upon the government, the military, and intelligence assessment agencies to “know the enemy.” As things stand now, in their eyes Islam is not an enemy, but an “innocent” bystander upon which is heaped the “calumny” of associating it with terrorism.

“Islamophobia” in Americans is more the enemy than is the fearful enemy. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines.”

And to paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke – the Captain, while a villain, is certainly a quotable character – “Some men you just can’t reach.” The men who can’t be reached have already submitted to Islam, and accepted the “war” on Islam’s terms, and they are in our government. And they are not only losing the war, but aiding in the enemy’s advance.

A single column review of Stephen Coughlin’s vitally important Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, would not do justice to the book. I can only highlight some of the important, interlinked and salient information presented by Coughlin. Therefore this review will run to two or more columns. Coughlin’s book is literally vital, as vital as the blood that courses through our veins. Catastrophic Failure brings to light everything we should know about Islam and its advocates’ determined campaign to conquer the West, and especially America, and impose Sharia law on the world – and everything our government has consistently refused to know or evaded to a degree that amounts to criminal negligence.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro is, like the London square drawn on its cover, tumultuous, dark and teeming with life. In the cover art, unruly crowds throng the streets, prodded and chased by authorities struggling to maintain order. In the foreground, a horse drags a traitor bound to a wicker sled toward the focus of the public’s attention: a gallows, where a man is being hung. Nearby, another man is being quartered; an executioner throws his leg, severed at the thigh, into a fire pit for cremation.

I dwell on the book’s cover art for two reasons. First, because The Year of Lear is unusually well-illustrated from start to finish, from the jacket—with gold foil details and ye olde printing press lettering—to the glossy insert with portraits of the book’s major players. (It is one of those rare books that is worth the surcharge to buy in hardcover.) Second, I mention the cover art because it distills the book down to one poignant, violent image.

This is no mean feat. The Year of Lear, for its seemingly limited scope, is an epic. Shapiro, a Columbia professor and governor at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has written a book brimming with detail about 17th century England, if not necessarily about Shakespeare.

David Evanier’s Woody: The Biography is an engaging account of Woody Allen’s life and works. It’s not a biography in a traditional sense, like Marion Meade’s 2000 The Unruly Life of Woody Allen or Eric Lax’s 1991 Woody Allen, the only biography for which Allen fully cooperated. Nor is it like the many books, most recently Richard Schickel’s 2003 Woody Allen: A Life in Film, which focus on Allen’s movies. What Evanier has done is marry the two approaches, weaving between Allen’s life and his creative output, which makes sense given that Allen is so enmeshed in his films. Evanier notes that Allen is “the only comedian in Hollywood history to insert the same unchanging comic persona into every genre of his filmmaking: comedy, satire, melodrama—and yet work himself effectively into the plot.”

Of Allen’s early life we learn he was a peculiar, if talented child. Peculiar, for instance, in his reaction to learning about death when he was five. He apparently never recovered from the shock. Evanier notes the scene in Annie Hall where the mother takes her son (obviously meant to be a young Allen) to the doctor because he has become depressed. The reason—he has learned that the universe is expanding. “Someday it will break apart,” the boy says, “and that will be the end of everything.”

Only some aspects of Woody’s on-screen persona are true of the real-life Allen. Yes, he was funny, hypochondrial, introverted, shy with girls—“a nerdy type of person,” a childhood friend says. But, like Allen’s other biographers, Evanier emphasizes that in crucial respects Woody is unlike the character he plays. Lax calls him “a business tycoon.” Evanier says: “Allen is not a schlemiel, a nebbish, a sad sack, or a Kafkaesque character.” Unheard of in Hollywood, he has total artistic control of his films. Even his appearance belies the movie image. Evanier quotes Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, who saw Allen on the street: “I was struck by how utterly different his posture was from his image: strong, stiff, upright.”

Precious were the recriminations after the first Democratic presidential debate. Putative nominee Hillary Clinton, amid what is more a coronation than a contest, had proudly boasted of making the Republicans her “enemy.”

“How despicable,” GOP graybeards gasped. After all, this is just politics, not war. At the end of the day, we’re all fellow patriots, all in this together: not “red states and blue states,” as that notorious bipartisan, Barack Obama, framed it in the 2004 convention speech that put him on the map, but “one people . . . all of us defending the United States of America.”

Dinesh D’Souza begs to differ. He would tell you that Hillary hit the nail on the head, and that we’d better get a grip on that or we will lose the country that we love.

D’Souza has come about this realization the hard way, as he explains in his remarkable new book, Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party. For his “experience with criminal gangs,” to which he alludes in the book’s subtitle, the prolific conservative author and filmmaker has the president to thank. The book, part memoir, part polemic, part prescription, and part Kafka, opens with an account — frightening because it is so verifiably true — of one of the grossest abuses of power by this lawless administration: the prosecution of D’Souza for a campaign-finance offense.

It’s official: on October 10, Iran tested an Emad ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. A panel of experts commissioned by the UN Security Council reported that the launch violated Security Council Resolution 1929, which says “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons…”

Iran is also known to have tested yet another nuclear-capable missile on November 21.

That’s one development on the Iran front — continuing to develop potential nuke-carrying missiles in blatant breach of U.N. resolutions.

And the other development is that the board of directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has voted to close the books on ten years of Iran’s illegal nuclear-weapons work, thereby helping open the path — as the Obama administration and its allies devoutly hope — to the lifting of sanctions on Iran in January.

The IAEA’s board of directors gave Iran a clean bill of health even though, earlier this month, the agency’s own investigators released a report that in no way confirmed that Iran hadn’t already been working on nuclear weapons or had stopped working on them. As the Chicago Tribune noted in an editorial, the report — based on the meager information Iran did provide — established that Iran had “secretly worked on weapons design, testing and components needed for a bomb until 2009.” Iran was otherwise brazenly evasive, simply not answering 3 of the 12 questions that the investigators asked, and giving only partial answers to some of the others.

Not content with creating havoc in the U.S. economy, setting Americans against each other, and forcing through a health reform act which has nothing to do with health but everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and an immense increase in governmental interference, President Obama opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. He ushered in a catastrophe not seen since World War 2.

From his notorious Cairo speech to the present time, President Obama speaks and disaster follows. Some commentators still believe that Obama is utterly naïve, which was why he could not understand what would happen in Egypt as a result of his undermining the Mubarak regime. But it is increasingly apparent, even to the most diehard Obama supporter, that there is something truly troubling about President Obama’s mindset.

Obama is not naïve at all. He is an ideologue and knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West and Israel, irrespective of how much innocent blood flows as a result.

Deal or no deal?

As Fox News Channel business commentator John Layfield recently suggested, I googled a November 19 State Department letter to U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kans.). And then, as happens too often these days, my jaw dropped.

Referring to Obama’s vaunted Iran-nuke deal, Julia Frifield, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote: “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

So atop its multifarious pitfalls and Trojan horses, the Iran nuke deal is not even signed.

No American adult would buy a used Chevy without securing a signed contract from the car salesman. And yet Obama — the all-wise alumnus of Columbia University and Harvard Law School — rests the future of Iran’s atomic-bomb program on a sheet of paper that is not even signed?

Iran did not fail to sign the ObamaNuke deal because someone forgot to hand some mullah a pen. This was a deliberate act of omission.

“If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said last August, as NRO’s Joel Gehrke recently noted. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

No problem, Assistant Secretary Frifield insists: “The JCPOA reflects political commitments between Iran, P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) and the European Union.”