RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/israel-arab-youth-facebook-peace-messages-idf.html

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/05/from-baghdad-with-love-for-the-idf/
It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

M. is an Israeli Arab Muslim who served in the IDF. He spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Last year, he came across a series of billboards sponsored by the Balad Party as part of its campaign against the recruitment of Israeli Arabs into the IDF. He decided to fight back. “I saw the signs that were hung in Arab villages, and I kept track of the Facebook campaign being run by activists of Balad and the other Arab parties under the name ‘TZaHaL ma bistahal’ [‘The IDF isn’t worth it’]. It infuriated me,” he said.

“Activists would show up in the main square of Shfaram with bits of rubble, as if the rubble were from Gaza. They carried big signs too, as if they were trying to say, ‘Look what the army that is calling on you to enlist is actually doing in the Gaza Strip.’ Some of the activists would even paint their faces red, as if they were injured, while they tried to relay their message of ‘Don’t enlist!’ to young Bedouin, Druze, Christians and Muslims. I decided to respond to them on Facebook, so I made a page called ‘TZaHaL bistahal’ [‘The IDF is worth it’], but instead of getting responses from the young Arabs to whom I was directing my personal campaign, I started to get photos and texts from young people around the Arab world. My jaw dropped.”

Churchill would have recognised in an instant what Russia’s mischief in Ukraine portends, most particularly its brazen disregard for national borders and neighbours’ sovereignty. His appraisal of the nasty and brutish is lost on those who fail to notice that quoting the law leaves outlaws unimpressed.

We imagine we know everything that Winston Churchill thought. He wrote volumes of history, reminiscence and current controversy. Quotations from him fill bookcases of books. Some of them are justly titled “The Wit and Wisdom of …” And both his bon mots and solemn geopolitical warnings are littered throughout the writings of others. So it is a pleasant surprise to come across a Churchill quotation that is fresh, memorable, and seemingly directed to our current concerns.

Such a quotation appears in the Winter issue of the American Interest in an article by Professor Eliot Cohen, himself a distinguished historian, whose works include an important study of political leadership in war. It is taken from an account of a 1935 luncheon-party discussion by the then-famous American foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean. It shows Churchill, relaxed but combative, responding across the table to clever people who thought he was attaching too much weight to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. He demurred: the problem was neither Italy nor Ethiopia.

“It’s not the thing we object to,” he said, “it’s the kind of thing.”

When asked by his shrewd hostess if the British had not committed the kind of thing many times before, Churchill responded that Britain had done so in “an unregenerate past”. But since the Great War a large fabric of international law had been established to restrain nations from infringing on each other’s rights. That was now at risk:

In trying to upset the empire of Ethiopia, Mussolini is making a most dangerous and foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure, and the results of such an attack are quite incalculable. Who is to say what will become of it in a year, or two, or three? With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent—Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for your children?

Churchill’s prescience was, as always, remarkable: what followed was the Second World War. Whether or not the children of Churchill’s hostess were among its victims, Mussolini ended up hanging upside down in a Milan piazza.

Like Churchill, however, Professor Cohen is less concerned with the thing than with the kind of thing—in his case not so much Putin’s de facto invasion of Ukraine as its impact upon the post-Cold War structure of international order. Whatever the rights and wrongs, or risks and gains, of NATO expansion, the Soviet-era transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, and the Maidan revolution, the rules of international life clearly prohibit subverting, invading, occupying and ultimately either conquering or dismembering a sovereign state. Such actions are “the kind of thing” that signal a wider breakdown in civilised international conduct and increased insecurity for all states.

Non-citizens are voting in American elections, and the federal government refuses to do anything to stop it.

Worse, the current administration seems to be doing everything they can to prevent the states from trying to stop it. First, they sued states that asked people to present ID before voting. Now, the administration will not let states even ask people to establish they are citizens when they register to vote.

That’s the underlying plot in the latest major case in election law that has just been presented to the Supreme Court. Federal law says that states must accept and use a federal form for registering voters. But the federal form doesn’t require any proof that the person submitting the form is a citizen.

The form just asks the registrant to check a box.

Meanwhile, federal law mandates that voter registration forms be made available and pushed everywhere from licensing branches to welfare offices.

Hillary Clinton gave a speech yesterday, and Vox.com published a puff piece about it. The next part is hard to believe: The Vox puffer, Jonathan Allen, did not give Mrs. Clinton enough credit.

Mrs. Clinton was the keynoter at Columbia University’s 18th annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum. Her campaign website headlines the speech “It’s Time to End the Era of Mass Incarceration,” and the headline of Allen’s piece reads “Hillary Clinton Just Gave One of the Most Important Speeches of Her Career.” Here’s how Allen begins:

Fair or unfair, Democrats’ chief criticism of Hillary Clinton has been that she doesn’t truly share their most cherished values, particularly when it comes to addressing inequality. They also worry that she’s not ready for prime time—that she’s too stilted, too programmed, too cold on the stump.

On Wednesday she answered both points.

Her first major policy address of the 2016 campaign was Clinton at her finest, showcasing both strong policy chops and a deep sensitivity to Americans who are heartbroken over the deaths of young black men at the hands of police officers.

Indeed, she read the names—Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin—and said “the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” without specifying what the disparate and in some cases uncertain fact patterns in these cases have in common.

“She freely moved between prose and statistic,” gushes Allen, referring to her invocation of the Fox Butterfield fallacy: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t offer much by way of policy proposals, apart from body cameras for police and “community mental health centers.” “I don’t know all the answers,” she said. “That’s why I’m here—to ask all the smart people in Columbia and New York to start thinking this through with me.” But she was clear about the goal of turning many prisoners loose: “It’s time to change our approach. It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe.”

An electromagnetic-pulse attack from North Korea or another U.S. enemy would cause staggering devastation.

Amb. Cooper is the former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the EMP Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Pentagon is moving the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) back into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., a decade after having largely vacated the site.

Why the return? Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP. America’s military planners recognize the growing threat from an EMP attack by bad actors around the world, in particular North Korea and Iran.

An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years. The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine.

“I’m not sure that it is any business of Congress to determine who should be running for public office.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417760/fec-goes-far-outside-its-mandate-hold-women-politics-forum-hans-von-spakovsky?target=topic&tid=3264

One of the biggest problems in Washington is the overreach of federal agencies, many of which go far beyond their limited mandates. Instead of simply carrying out the duties assigned to them under federal laws, they invade the province of Congress, which is supposed to hold hearings, formulate public policy, and create the federal laws that these agencies enforce.

Take Federal Election Commission chair Ann Ravel’s May 12 forum on “Women in Politics.” The FEC was created in 1975 to enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which governs the raising and spending of funds in federal elections for president and Congress. The federal statute that authorizes the FEC (2 U.S.C. § 437c) lays out its duties very succinctly: 1) enforce federal campaign-finance law, 2) issue regulations implementing the law, and 3) provide advisory opinions to affected individuals, candidates, and political organizations that explain the requirements of the law. Congress also very specifically made the FEC a bipartisan agency.

Dear Black Thugs: To each of you I echo what actor Terrence Howard’s character told his gangbanger brother in the Academy Award–winning film Crash: “You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.” From Ferguson to Baltimore, the whole world is watching as you run wild. Thanks to you, plate-glass store windows shatter into shards. You pry ATMs from walls to drain them of cash. One of you joy-rode a car through flaming debris along a smoldering street. You set homes, workplaces, and shops ablaze. You burned a 60-bed nursing home for seniors, still under construction, and literally knifed Baltimore firefighters’ water hoses as they tried to douse this inferno. And you enjoyed a 100-percent-off shopping spree — damn the consequences. How does ripping off a bottle of whiskey from a smoldering liquor store help us overcome?

In 1850, French economist Fredric Bastiat, of whom you bums probably are oblivious, wrote an essay titled That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen. You can see the devastation that you have created: You burned to the ground 17 businesses worth an estimated $4.6 million in Ferguson. You torched a CVS Pharmacy in Baltimore. Thanks to your violence, the Orioles beat the Chicago White Sox inside an empty Camden Yards stadium Wednesday. For safety’s sake, the next three Orioles home games, against the Tampa Bay Rays, will shift to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Obama’s solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years.

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise. President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.

Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair. We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government. The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.

Prospective Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush clashed with National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry over immigration policy on Thursday, telling Lowry “I love you. I just think you’re wrong on immigration.” In an interview at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit,at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., the former Florida governor spoke about his policy positions and his plans for a potential presidential administration.

Lowry and the audience were in broad agreement with the governor on foreign policy and most economic issues. Bush voiced his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and stressed the need to confront Islamic terrorism — poking fun at “the girl with the really cool glasses in the State Department,” Foggy Bottom spokeswoman Marie Harf, for refusing to accurately characterize the threat. And he decried economic over-regulation and “the New Normal” of a deflated American economy. “’The New Normal’ makes me nauseous,” he said.

The [Conservative] Government has drafted legislation designed to give the Charity Commission greater powers to shut down charities linked to terrorism. Some critics argue, however, that many of the government’s promises are largely bluster.

If Labour wins the upcoming elections, the next government will include a number of Ministers with strong Islamist ties.

The UKIP’s foreign policy, however, seems tolerant of the Russian-Iranian axis.

“We have been impressed by the warm and welcoming attitude of the SNP.” — Azzam Tamami, Hamas’s “special envoy” to the UK.

On May 7, the British electorate will go to the polls in the 2015 general election. Voters will elect their local members of parliament. It seems voters may not, however, be able to choose their next government.

As in 2010, current polling data suggests a hung parliament, in which no political party can achieve an outright majority. Governance requires the confidence of the House of Commons. Of the 650 parliamentary seats, then, a ruling coalition requires the backing of at least 326 MPs.

For the past five years, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party has retained the confidence of the House through a reasonably successful and stable coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

This time around, however, things are not so simple. For the first time, special interest and minor parties look set to have a powerful influence over the next government. If, as looks likely, neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party is able to achieve an outright majority, coalitions with smaller parties will become a necessity.

The Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party, the Green Party, the Scottish National Party, Wales’s Plaid Cymru a