RUTHFULLY YOURS

India has banned this documentary that tells the story of a brutal gang rape in Delhi.

It is only one of the great distinctions of this film by Leslee Udwin, now officially banned in India, that the outrage it describes, among the oldest of crimes, comes with the force of the new, the unfathomable, the unforgettable. In December of 2012, a 23 year old Delhi resident just about to embark on her long dreamed of medical career, decided to see a movie with a male friend—her last chance for recreation for a good while before beginning her internship, she thought. The movie Jyoti Singh chose was “Life of Pi”. It was the last movie she would ever see, the last hours of a life brimming with happiness at the hard won goal she was about to reach. She was now about to become a doctor: to begin rewarding her parents, poor people who had willingly sacrificed all they had, sold their ancestral land, to pay school fees for their child—a daughter.

In Objective Troy the New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane tells two intertwined stories. One recounts the life path of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born imam killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. The second recounts Barack Obama’s troubled love affair with the drone as an instrument of war, which is part of a larger story about the president’s tortured attitude toward the use of American power in the world.

Anwar al-Awlaki has to be counted as the greatest English-speaking pied piper in the history of radical Islam. His sermons and disquisitions, distributed first on C Ds and later far more widely on social media, influenced—and continue, posthumously, to influence—scores of aspiring terrorists. The Boston Marathon bombers, the Fort Hood shooter, and the Charlie Hebdo gunmen in Paris all pointed to Awlaki’s summons to violence as inspiration for their deeds. As Shane also makes plain, Awlaki’s reach extended well beyond the ranks of such active jihadists.

For every young Western Muslim who crossed the line and began plotting violence or traveled to Yemen or Pakistan to join al Qaeda, there were hundreds or thousands more .  .  . intrigued by the battle with the supposed enemies of Islam but too fearful or ambivalent to act. By sweeping huge numbers into that recruiting pool, Awlaki added new recruits to the small minority who would take the next step and join the battle.

Shane adduces case after case, like that of Roshonara Choudhry, a 21-year-old honor student who in 2010 stabbed a member of British Parliament, Stephen Timms, with a six-inch kitchen knife in retribution for his vote in support of the Iraq war. She had been listening, obsessively, to Awlaki’s recordings for more than a hundred hours.

Drawing on exhaustive research and a wealth of interviews, Shane traces Awlaki’s movements and intellectual evolution through various stations on his lethal path. Early childhood in the United States was followed by a spell, from age 7 to 18, in his parents’ native Yemen. He then returned to the United States for a college degree in civil engineering, pursued with no distinction but punctuated by a visit with anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and followed by a burgeoning career as an imam in various American locales.

Shane argues persuasively, and against what some U.S. government investigators continue strongly to suspect, that Awlaki was not in on the 9/11 plot, despite the fact that he had been in close touch with two of the hijackers who had worshipped at his San Diego mosque. In the late 1990s, Awlaki was already flirting with extremist ideas, but by September 11, 2001, was not yet fully under their spell, calling the attacks “horrible” in a private communication to his brother, a sentiment repeated in some public utterances.

We live in a weary age of fable.

The latest Hollywood mythology is entitled Truth. But the film is actually a fictionalized story about how CBS News super-anchor Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes producer supposedly were railroaded by corporate and right-wing interests into resigning.

In reality, an internal investigation by CBS found that Rather and his 60 Minutes team — just weeks before the 2004 election — had failed to properly vet documents of dubious authenticity asserting that a young George W. Bush had shirked his duty as a Texas Air National Guard pilot.

The fabulist movie comes on the heels of the Benghazi investigations. An e-mail introduced last month at a House Benghazi committee hearing indicated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — just hours after the attacks on the consulate that left four Americans dead — knew almost immediately that an “al Qaeda-like group” had carried out the killings.

Clinton informed everyone from her own daughter to the Egyptian prime minister that the killings were the work of hard-core terrorists. Yet officially, she knowingly peddled the falsehood that a video maker had caused spontaneous demonstrations that went bad.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-duel-of-despots-1447285581 The widening Syria conflict reminds us every day of the dangers of the argument, ironically calling itself “realist,” that a Middle East of dictators is perforce the safest version of that region we may hope for. Like the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the argument refuses to slink off into the historical night. Pierre Razoux’s […]

http://news.yahoo.com/joined-by-blood–a-bone-marrow-donor-meets-the-man-whose-life-she-saved-031404592.html

This is an incredibly moving story. The young lady is a friend of my daughter and granddaughter….rsk

Every day for a year, Avi Ruderman, 54, of Tel Aviv, Israel, wondered, Who saved my life? Every day for a year, Molly Allanoff, 24, a medical student in Philadelphia, wondered, Who got my stem cells, and is he OK?
Molly’s own father had received a bone marrow transplant — but didn’t survive a year. Maybe now she had saved a life, sparing some other daughter the agony of losing her father.

But the bone marrow registry requires a recipient survive a year before he can contact his donor.

So both waited.

***

At age 50, Avi, who runs convalescent homes with 1,200 beds and 1,000 employees, got non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells. After unsuccessful treatment with conventional chemotherapy, his only hope was a bone marrow transplant. This involves high-dose chemotherapy to destroy the patient’s diseased bone marrow, then replacing it with healthy stem cells from a compatible donor. If the transplant succeeds, the patient recovers and his bone marrow begins making healthy blood cells.

But only 4 in 10 people who need a bone marrow transplant ever get one, partly because finding a match is so difficult. There are 10 markers in the blood of donor and recipient that must match, and each marker has thousands of variations. With 26 million people listed on all bone marrow registries worldwide, Avi had only one perfect match: Molly Allanoff, a medical student at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

When he received his transplant, on Oct. 15, 2014, Avi was told only that his donor was a 23-year-old American woman. He would dream about meeting her. He had four daughters. In his mind, she was now his fifth.

Reprinted from Investors.com.

A long-touted motion picture on prominent Hollywood screenwriter and communist Dalton Trumbo debuts in theaters this weekend. I will see the film, but first I’d like to share some background on Trumbo. I do so not as a film critic, but as a historian of the Cold War and communism, including the Hollywood front for which Trumbo was extremely active.

For starters, it’s crucial to keep in mind that communism was responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century, double the combined tolls of World War I and II.

It’s also vital to know that most American communists (small “c”) did not actually join the Party. Only the hardcore went that far. Those who joined the Party took a major leap of faith. They became loyal Soviet patriots.

Regardless of their American citizenship, Communist Party members in the Stalin era (when Dalton Trumbo joined the Party) swore an oath: “I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union. . .. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that ensures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.”

They wanted the “triumph” of Soviet power in America. They truly took marching orders from the Kremlin. The most fanatical among them (Trumbo included) remained in the Party even after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that launched World War II. Stalin aided and abetted Hitler in that apocalyptic action, enabling history’s deadliest war and the Holocaust.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter argued at the Reagan Defense Forum on Saturday that Russia and China pose a “potentially more damaging” threat than terrorist groups like ISIS because of “their size and capabilities.”

“Russia appears intent to play spoiler by flouting these principles and the international community. Meanwhile, China is a rising power, and growing more ambitious in its objectives and capabilities,” Carter said. “Of course, neither Russia nor China can overturn that order, given its resilience and staying power. But both present different challenges for it.”

He reminded the Reagan Library audience that his recent trip to Asia was his third as Defense secretary.

Carter stressed that “in the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.”

Russia, he said, “violated sovereignty” of Ukraine and Georgia and is “actively trying to intimidate the Baltic states,” while “throwing gasoline on an already dangerous fire” in Syria.

So, this is what we have come to in the Bill O’Reilly KillingIcons series. First, a book that entertainingly hypothesizes an assassination out of thin gruel (Killing Patton) and now a book about a failed assassination attempt (Killing Reagan). Except very little about O’Reilly’s most recent book is even about the assassination attempt on President Reagan—unless you want to count the character assassination by O’Reilly and his (actual) writer, Martin Dugard. It’s little more than the latest attempt by Bill O’Reilly to gain mainstream acceptance.

Not long ago, I wrote that comparing Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump was the biggest insult imaginable to Reagan’s legacy. Not any more. This garbage far surpasses it, in no small part because the big breaking news that O’Reilly claims justifies his rush job on this sloppy, poorly constructed book was already discussed—and mostly discarded—in 1988.

That’s right, Bill, the 1980s called and they want their breaking news back.

The big breaking news (in Bill O’Reilly’s mind) is an internal investigation conducted by then chief of staff Howard Baker into the condition of White House operations in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair. Baker asked his longtime staffers James Cannon and Thomas Griscom to give him an assessment of the situation.

“It is only when the Western chancelleries break out of their delusional bubble and acknowledge the Manichean and irreconcilable nature of the challenge posed by their Islamist adversaries that their policies will stand the slightest chance of success.”

Efraim Karsh, professor emeritus at King’s College London and currently professor of political studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, has written a tour de force on the follies of great-power Middle East policies over the past century, down to the disastrous misconceptions and blunders of President Barack Obama.

The Tail Wags the Dog [1] begins with some myth-busting about the Sykes-Picot agreement, now ritually denounced as a British-French imperialist grab of the Middle East from which its current woes originate. Actually, Karsh demonstrates from the historical record, Britain and France sought to construct a unified Arab empire that would replace the Ottoman Empire. Instead they were outmaneuvered by local actors—namely Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah—into forging what are now Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, of which the latter two (at least) were undoubtedly problematic entities from the start.

Readers who remember Mel Brooks‘ hilarious routines as the Two Thousand Year Old Man — the quintessential old Jewish codger who has seen it all, knows it all, and is going to tell you all about it — will have no trouble enjoying “People!,” veteran journalist Sol Sanders‘ rambling, far-reaching and often moving memoir. While not two thousand years old, Mr. Sanders is pushing 90 … and has he got a tale to tell.

Although it ranges around the globe, his story is a uniquely American one, and of a special kind: that of small-town Southern Jewry. As a Jewish friend of mine from New York once remarked, “What you’ve got to understand about Southern Jews is that they’re very Jewish, but they’re also very Southern.” Such is Sol. Raised by immigrant parents in a small community in rural North Carolina where his parents, the only Jews in town, ran a successful variety store, young Sol’s love of woods, streams, farm animals and local characters was sometimes overshadowed by a sense of otherness, of apartness from his surroundings and those populating it. This gives his early reminiscences both an authentic feel and a critical objectivity that might otherwise have been lacking. Perhaps it is this same ability to absorb and appreciate the world around him while viewing it with an outsider’s eye that made Sol Sanders a born journalist long before he knew anything about the profession. It is also possible that his homosexuality, which he discusses candidly but, mercifully, not at excessive length or in morbid detail, enabled him to understand and empathize with people, places and situations very different from himself over a long, globe-trotting career in Europe, Asia and Latin America for major publications including the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and The Washington Times, among others.