RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two years ago to the day, in September 2013, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry compared Bashar Assad to Adolf Hitler, after the Syrian dictator once again used chemical weapons against his own people. “This is our Munich moment,” Kerry said at the time.

As far as the Americans were concerned, Assad had crossed a line. In those days (more like in those hours, actually), Washington briefly believed that a failure to respond to Assad’s actions would send a dangerous message to Iran regarding its nuclear ambitions.

“Will [Iran] remember that the Assad regime was stopped from those weapons’ current or future use, or will they remember that the world stood aside and created impunity?” Kerry asked at the time. History and retrospect have turned what may have been Kerry’s greatest speech into remarks entirely detached from reality.

Tell that to Ka’b ibn Ashraf, whose head was cut off. for The prophet of Islam allowed his followers to lie to the Jew to slaughter him.

Muslims deceived non-Muslims not because they were being persecuted for being Muslim — according to the Washington Post’s definition of taqiyya — but in order to make Islam supreme.

Dr. Ben Carson got it right when he said that taqiyya “allows, and even encourages, you to lie to achieve your goals.” The prophet makes that clear.

Dr. Ben Carson’s recent assertion that the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya encourages Muslims “to lie to achieve your goals” has prompted the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler to quote a number of academics to show that the presidential candidate got it wrong:

The word “taqiyya” derives from the Arabic words for “piety” and “fear of God” and indicates when a person is in a state of caution, said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and a leading authority on Islam.

The failed foreign policies of the EU and the US under President Obama, have brought the Arabs to the brink of chaos, and destroyed regimes which, even though they were not democratic utopias, at least provided governance and public order. These failed policies have abandoned the Arabs to the atrocities of the Sunni Islamists and to the murderous proxies of the Iranian Islamic Revolution — and are ultimately the cause of the tsunami of refugees beating at the gates of Europe.

Now the EU and Obama want to bring the catastrophe of Gaza to the West Bank.

The American FDA is more careful with experiments on animals than the White House is with experiments on the people of the Middle East.

Every time the Palestinians have taken steps against the Israelis, we have hurt no one but ourselves, and are left with — nothing.

The Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories know, although it is a bitter pill to swallow, that we have been favored by fortune, because under the State of Israel we live in security.

In the face of ongoing mass murder in the Middle East, what arcane consideration, apart from Federica Mogherini being a racist, could possibly bring the EU to deal with something as marginal to global issues as boycotting Israeli face-cream and cookies?

It would appear, on the surface, to be one of the dumbest ideas on earth — falsifying or editing military intelligence reports to conform to the wishes of political leaders. Not surprisingly, the outcome is rarely positive.

One of the starkest examples occurred in the early days of June, 1967. Much of the world was taken aback when Israel, outnumbered in every strategic category, scored a completely one-sided victory against four much larger nations — Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. The element of surprise helped and the Israeli military was better trained, but a key factor can be gleaned from Michael Oren’s 2002 book, “Six Days of War.”

Mr. Oren interviewed military participants on both sides and disclosed a diametrically opposed use of intelligence. Egyptian officers feared giving bad news to their superiors and especially to their leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. So after Israel’s initial attack that destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on the ground, the Egyptians falsely reported to their superiors and their allies that the opposite had occurred, that they had inflicted huge Israeli losses. This left Syria open to the same fate and brought Jordan into the war.

Israel’s population explosion is cause for economic optimism, not woe, says the author of several studies on the demographic make-up and forecast for the Jewish state.

Responding to a report in i24 News on Saturday, according to which Israel’s “baby boom” spells bad news for the tiny country, Yoram Ettinger told The Algemeiner on Sunday that he is not surprised the doomsayers who used to predict Israeli’s downfall due to the Jewish-Arab birthrate ratio are now using evidence that disproves their theories to reach equally bleak conclusions.

“It is crucial to note that the trend of Jewish fertility is higher than that of Arab fertility,” said Ettinger, a consultant on U.S.-Israel relations and chairman of special projects at the Ariel Center for Policy Research. “In addition, among Jews in Israel, ultra-Orthodox fertility is decreasing, while secular fertility is exploding.”

Newt Gingrich, who is not above cultivating a little bit of mythology about himself, used to say that when he was a youngster considering a life in politics, he didn’t want to grow up to be president of the United States — he grew up wanting to be speaker of the House. Which he did, achieving a measure of modest but genuine success in the role: Those weren’t Clinton budget surpluses, but Gingrich surpluses. (Transitory though they were.) Gingrich has a weakness for thinking of himself in world-historical terms, and he may in fact find his final repose in an interesting footnote: the last speaker of the House to be a figure of any significance.

And, of course, he ended up wanting to be president.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has announced his intention to retire, which has those members of the House Republican leadership who are fool enough to want the job — which is to say, the members of the House Republican leadership — grasping at his gavel. The plot of the Shakespearean succession drama is fixed as the stars: The entertainment wing of the conservative movement prepares to rain brimstone upon Republican whip Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive front-runner among House leaders, or Paul Ryan, a conservative hero until the day before yesterday now cast into the outer darkness for various heresies related to his being an elected lawmaker rather than the host of a radio program. Expect Louie Gohmert or another conservative standard-bearer to shine for a moment before opinion settles on some disappointment or another, and expect the vast majority of the American electorate to go on not knowing who the speaker is or what he does regardless of who is elected.

Bassem Tamimi, father of the infamous Pallywood star “Shirley Temper,” was invited to speak to a classroom of third graders in Ithaca, New York. Legal Insurrection broke the story:

An uproar is brewing in Ithaca, New York, after anti-Israel activists bragged on Facebook how they managed to bring Palestinian activist Bassem Tamimi to a third-grade class as part of a presentation on the suffering of Palestinian children at the hands of Israel.

According to the activists, the event took place on Friday morning, September 18, 2015 at the Beverly J. Martin Elementary School.

…Tamimi’s connection to Ithaca runs through Ariel Gold, an anti-Israel activist who used to work as a community organizer for the anti-Israel Sabeel Int’l – North America. Gold now self-describes her occupation as a Community Activist “delegitimizing zionism.” Like Tamimi, Gold involves her children (ages 12 and 14) in her anti-Israel activism, promoting them through radio and speaking appearances, as well as Facebook and videos.

Next month, the Obama administration may roll out the most expensive regulation in history, ignoring scientific data that cutting ozone rates will not improve public health.

In the name of fighting asthma, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requested permission to decrease the ozone standard [1] — the amount of ozone allowed in the atmosphere — to a level some scientists say is physically impossible to achieve [2]. One organization estimates the cost to implement these new rules will be $1.1 trillion. Even worse, data shows that as ozone levels in the U.S. have decreased, asthma cases have increased.

This regulation may be the most expensive in history, and bring absolutely no health benefits.

Ozone (O3) is a gas “formed when sunlight falls on nitrogen oxides (naturally formed by bacteria, volcanoes and lightning), together with volatile organic compounds emitted by trees and other natural sources,” as explained by public health professor Tony Cox [3] in the Wall Street Journal. This gas is also a by-product of cars, trucks, factories, power plants and even a wide range of consumer products. Regulating it more harshly would impact a huge swath of the economy.
Ozone Does Not Cause Asthma

When a trace gas and plant food is denounced as a pollutant, it comes as no surprise that a cabal of climate careerists is calling for sceptics to be charged and, presumably, jailed. Much better to silence doubters than have them draw attention to money-grubbing nepotism and careerist corruptions
The global warming community has stepped up its call for the prosecution of sceptics. The latest: 20 US scientists wrote this month to President Obama calling for prosecutions of sceptics under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), previously used against the mafia and the tobacco industry (for suppressing evidence of dangers of smoking).

This letter has become an own-goal for two of the signatories, who have been double-dipping big-dollar salaries from their government-funded climate foundation, additional to their salaries as professors.

Noted climate scientist Judith Curry[i] responded to the letter:

“What you have done is the worst kind of irresponsible advocacy, which is to attempt to silence scientists that disagree with you by invoking RICO.”

She wrote that the 20 scientists damage not only their own reputations, but also the public perception of scientists as trustworthy sources of information: “Most seriously, the coercion of scientists implied by this letter will discourage objectivity in scientific research and will discourage scientists from entering/staying in the field of climate research.”

Publication day is a proud moment for most authors but it turned into a nightmare for Michel Houellebecq. The French writer’s sixth novel, “Submission,” which will be published in the U.S. next month, had been heralded as his most topical. The book imagines France in 2022 under the rule of an Islamic political party headed by a Muslim president.

On Jan. 7, the day “Submission” came out in France, the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo ran a caricature of the author on its cover. Bleary-eyed and sporting a wizard’s hat, the novelist was portrayed as a lugubrious prophet spouting asides like “In 2015 I’ll lose my teeth” or, more pointedly, “In 2022 I’ll observe Ramadan.”

On the same day two gunmen of the Islamic faith attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. Mr. Houellebecq, who lost a friend—the economist Bernard Maris—in the attack, has been under round-the-clock police protection since.

The 59-year-old author, who declined to be interviewed for this article, first ran afoul of Islam in 2001 when he described it to the French magazine Lire as “the dumbest religion.” After saying this he was taken to court by four Muslim associations “for insulting a group of people due to their religious beliefs.” The charges were dismissed.

His third novel “Platform,” which was published in 2001, foreshadows today’s headlines. The book features an Islamophobic anti-hero, Michel, who becomes a sex tourist in Thailand. “I had a vision of migratory flows crisscrossing Europe like blood vessels,” the protagonist says. “Muslims appeared as clots which were only slowly reabsorbed.”