RUTHFULLY YOURS

ANY day now, Hillary Clinton is expected to declare that she is running for president. For most Americans this will be as surprising as the news that Cinco de Mayo will once again be on May 5th. Mrs Clinton has had her eye on the top job for a long time. She nearly won it in 2008 and is in many ways a stronger candidate now. She and her husband have built a vast campaign machine. The moment Mrs Clinton turns the key, it will begin openly to suck up contributions, spit out sound bites and roll over her rivals. Some think her unstoppable: Paddy Power, an Irish bookmaker, gives her a 91% chance of capturing the White House in 2016.

Steady on. The last time she seemed inevitable, she turned out not to be. The month before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, she was 20 points ahead of other Democrats in national polls, yet she still lost to a young senator from Illinois. She is an unsparkling campaigner, albeit disciplined and diligent. This time, no plausible candidate has yet emerged to compete with her for the Democratic nomination, but there is still time. Primary voters want a choice, not a coronation (see article). And it is hard to say how she would fare against the eventual Republican nominee, not least since nobody has any idea who that will be. The field promises to be varied, ranging from the hyperventilating Ted Cruz to the staid Jeb Bush. Rand Paul, a critic of foreign wars and Barack Obama’s surveillance state, joined the fray on April 7th (see article). Still, Mrs Clinton starts as the favourite, so it is worth asking: what does she stand for?

Iran has violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty time after time, often undetected; it also continues to violate Article 2, clause 4, of the United Nations Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state…”

During the British Mandate, the entire area was known as Palestine. The official listing for “Place of Birth” on all passports at the time — for everyone, including Jews — was Palestine.

One can only hope that what clearly seems such a fatally dangerous deal — that threatens the existence of not only Israel, the Middle East and Europe, but, with Iran’s intercontinental ballistic missile program, also the United States — will not be allowed to happen.

The notion of Israel’s “right to exist” has been in the news twice in recent days.

It’s not all Iranian nukes and other harmless fun. Before they fade from view, here’s a few news items I wanted to note:

~This is a Canadian story, but it’s not irrelevant to what’s going on in Indiana and beyond. The gist of Robyn Urback’s column is captured by the headline:

On A Day About Inclusivity, Anti-Bullying Activists Protest Laureen Harper’s Support

This is in reference to the so-called “International Day of Pink”, which is supposedly to protest the bullying of LGBTQ students. Something called “the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity” (CCGSD) invited Mrs Harper, the Prime Minister’s wife, to be an official “ambassador” for the event, and she accepted. Don’t ask me why.

But next thing you know big chunks of the LGBTQWERTY machine announced they would have no truck with the Day of Pink on the grounds that Mrs Harper is married to a big transphobic bully:

Critics called the CCGSD’s decision to appoint Laureen Harper a spokesperson as a “major misstep,” a “huge mistake,” “gross” and “totally offensive.” One tweeter said she is “married to a huge bully of LGBQT folk,” and thus, shouldn’t be offering her support, and many pointed to the government’s stalled progress on Bill C-279 — a transgender rights bill — as the reason why the prime minister’s wife has no business showing support for gay and trans youth.

It’s not only at the nuclear talks that Iran is goose-stepping right over those polite U.S. diplomats to grab all it can get. At the United Nations, Iran has just won a seat on the governing board of — what else? — UN Women.

Yes, you read that right. On Friday, at the UN, Iran won a three-year term, starting Jan. 1, 2016, on the board of UN Women [1] — the UN’s self-described agency “for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.” Never mind that the UN’s own special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, reported last month [2] that under President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s oppression of women is worse than ever.

How did this happen? In procedural terms, it was the latest product of the toxic UN system in which seats on governing boards are allocated to geographic blocs. Each bloc gets a quota of seats to fill, and puts forward a slate of candidates. Iran belongs to the Asia-Pacific States, which in this case avoided such awkward democratic customs as competition by putting forward five candidates for five seats: Samoa, United Arab Emirates, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Iran.

The Islamic State has released a new 11-minute video called “We Will Burn America” that calls for supporters to attack the American homeland and promises another 9/11.

At this juncture I would note the New York Times’ front page article on December 29 that described how America’s top war fighters, namely Special Operations Command, freely admit that they don’t understand the ideology driving ISIS and other Islamic terror groups:

WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?

Riddle me this, fellow Republicans. An NBC survey April 9 reports that a huge majority (70%) of Americans doubt that Iran will abide by any agreement to limit its nuclear arms–but a majority (54%) still thinks Obama will do a better job than the Republicans in dealing with Iran!

A majority of Americans – 54 percent – trust Barack Obama to do a better job handling an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, compared to 42 percent who say they trust the Republicans in Congress. But nearly 7 in 10 Americans say that Iran is not likely to abide by the agreement that has been reached.

In videos and news reports related to the Middle East, one can often find this chant: “Khaybar, khaybar ya yahud, jaish muhammad saya’ud,” meaning, “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Mohammad’s army will return.”

The chant means little to people who are unfamiliar with the history of Muhammad’s religion, yet it needs to be understood because it is a chilling reminder of one of the major atrocities he committed against the Jews when he attacked their oasis of Khaybar. People who chant these words today do so to warn Jews that they intend to repeat Muhammad’s horrors against them — and everyone else who is not a believer for that matter.

Like everything involving the Muhammad story, there is a complex background, but here it is in condensed form: The attack on Khaybar, a wealthy date-producing valley 90 miles north of Yathrib (Medina), was part of a broader strategy Muhammad had devised to subjugate all of Arabia, and the key to pulling it off involved neutralizing the Meccans, his chief enemies, 230 miles to the south with whom he had fought several major battles. The last was the battle of the Trench (A.D. 627), a failed Meccan attack on Muhammad’s stronghold in Yathrib.

Long ago, before my teens – I forget my precise age – I experienced a moral epiphany. Looking across the valley from my bedroom window at home I could see the thin finger of the 1,000-foot radio/television broadcasting mast secured to the earth from wind and storm by four even longer guy cables. I loved looking at that tower. I marveled at the skill and tenacity of the men who had erected it.

I did not credit God with its existence.

I was attending a Catholic parochial school at the time. God was everywhere there; in the crucifixes in the classrooms, in the habits of the nuns, and, indeed, the school was located for a time in the basement of the long, black stone edifice of the Nativity Church. At home, God was partially present in a few crucifixes, in the faith of my foster parents and grandparents, and in their strict observance of Catholic holidays, saying grace at supper, and not eating meat on Fridays. Among other things.

Dr. Harold Rhode served for 28 years as an analyst covering Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs at the US Department of Defense. Dan Diker hosts the National Security radio program at voiceofisrael.com. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Counter Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, and a Foreign Policy Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Iranian regime backing for the deal with the US-led Western powers should be a cause for profound concern to the US and its allies.What came out of the US-led talks with the Iranian regime? The Iranians and the American-led Western alliance left the framework agreement negotiations disagreeing on virtually all major core issues on which they reportedly agreed. And now the Iranians have gained international legitimacy as a negotiating partner in good standing with the Western powers. In short, Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, pursuing the world most dangerous weapons, has outmaneuvered the US – the world’s bastion of freedom and democracy. The Obama administration also seems to have rendered the Iranian regime immune to Western military assault. So far, its Iran 1, US-led Western powers 0.

The Turkish ISIS is an ideological inspiration by an Islamist poet, who happens to be President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s favorite.

“From now on, life in Turkey will be difficult for the occupying seculars.” — Editorial, Taraf, August 1993

Is it still too hard to understand why Erdogan’s “fight” against radical Islamists in Syria and Iran cannot be serious?

If a “mere” 11.3% of Turks think so generously of ISIS, it means there are nine million Turks sympathetic to jihadists. And if only 10% of those decide to support ISIS’s jihad, that comes to nearly 900,000 potential Turkish jihadists (even 5% would mean an army of nearly 450,000).

Most Turks had not heard of the magazine Adimlar [“Steps”] until March 26, when a bomb blast ripped through its Istanbul offices. A bomb left at its entrance exploded when the door opened, killing a writer and wounding three, including its editor-in-chief, Ali Osman Zor. The dead victim was his brother.