RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rubio’s proud restating of the obvious
On Thursday, two days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s landslide re-election, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) delivered a 15-minute tribute to the Jewish state and a simultaneous tirade against President Barack Obama’s treatment of it.

Though Rubio has yet to announce whether he will be running for president in 2016 (another Republican of Latino origin, Ted Cruz, on Monday became the first candidate to throw his hat in the ring), Rubio deserves a standing ovation at this moment for jumping in to defend Netanyahu’s assertion that a “two-state solution” is not possible anytime soon.

There’s precious little point in trying to get Americans’ attention these days except for speculation about who’s ahead or behind in the race to the presidential election that’s still twenty months away. Though twenty months is an eternity in politics – especially geopolitics – we are so befogged with the daily horserace that it’s almost impossible for the media to cover anything else.

But we must. Now that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx) has formally entered the race and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) is soon to follow, we have to spur the Republican Party to do a much better job of vetting their candidate than they have in the past two races. Here are just few of the basic questions. Let’s make it easier by posing a few questions and giving the right answers.

President Obama is about to announce a ten-year deal with Iran that is, as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told congress, is a very bad deal. It won’t bar Iran from uranium enrichment or the development of atomic bomb technology, especially including the intercontinental ballistic missiles by which nuclear weapons can be delivered. It won’t mandate unlimited inspections and thus can’t guarantee Iran won’t cheat its way to a nuclear arsenal. Forty-seven Republican senators wrote to the ayatollahs and told them the senate would regard the agreement as voidable by the next president. If you’re elected, what will you do with the Iran nuclear weapons agreement?

Apparently the British don’t care much for their daughters. That can’t be true. But I only know what I read in the papers.So I’m reading that it’s beginning to dawn on British parents that their daughters are being sexually assaulted at a rate that can only be called an epidemic.

Here’s a snippet:

“The scale of the abuse in Oxfordshire, a county in southeast England, mirrors similarly shocking accounts of the sexual exploitation of white British girls by Muslim gangs in Bristol, Derby, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, and implies that the problem is not isolated, but endemic.”

We expect this to be happening in Muslim countries like France, Denmark and Sweden. But the English speak our language.

My own introduction into the crisis came some time ago from a report about Rotherham, where the locals took it in stride, that their girls, some as young as 8, were being sexually molested by Pakistani Muslim men. People were afraid to speak up. They’d be labeled Islamophobic. So they let it go, and the raping of thousands continued. Read this for the timeliest drama about the clash of civilizations.

President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won’t see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days. Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me.

The leaders of almost all the other 28 NATO member countries have made time for Stoltenberg since he took over the world’s largest military alliance in October. Stoltenberg, twice the prime minister of Norway, met Monday with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa to discuss the threat of the Islamic State and the crisis in Ukraine, two issues near the top of Obama’s agenda.

SEOUL — If international sanctions on Iran are lifted pronto — a condition Iran is demanding as part of any nuclear deal — how hard might it be to reimpose them, in the likely event that Iran cheats? For a glimpse of just how tough it could be, take the case of Iran’s Bank Mellat, headquartered in Tehran, but with a branch in Seoul — where, during a recent trip to South Korea, I dropped by for a look.

Occupying spacious quarters on the 13th and 14th floors of a high-rise office building in Seoul’s busy Gangnam district, this branch of Bank Mellat appeared to have no customers on the premises. That was no surprise, because for several years now, Bank Mellat in Seoul has been under sanctions by the U.S., United Nations and the South Korean government.

You’ll have to forgive President Obama. The leader of the free world is still having difficulty accepting that the Israeli people get to choose their own prime minister, never mind his preferences.

The latest White House tantrum in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week took the form of a speech delivered Monday by Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, in which he declared that “an occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end.”

When a chief of staff speaks in public, especially as the keynote speaker at a scheduled event, the President has signed off. In this case the audience was also carefully chosen: the annual conference of J Street, a left-leaning Jewish lobbying group that has never met an Israeli concession it didn’t like. Which makes it all the more distressing that Mr. McDonough would talk about Israel in language usually associated with Palestinian terror groups.

For thousands of years the Jews dreamed of reclaiming their country. The left had another dream.

It dreamed of a country run by bureaucrats that worked only three days a week. It dreamed of unions running monopolies that worked whenever they liked and charged whatever they wanted. It dreamed of children raised on collective farms without parents and of government as a Socialist café debate.

Most of all it dreamed of a country without conservatives. It still hasn’t gotten that wish.

Netanyahu’s victory hit hardest in Tel Aviv where, as Haaretz, the paper of the left, reports, “Leftist, secular Tel Aviv went to sleep last night cautiously optimistic only to wake up this morning in a state of utter and absolute devastation.”

My friend and e-pal DPS sent me a column posted below on Stephen Decatur- a hero of the Barbary Wars.

As President Obama bows in fulsome tributes to Moslem nations but guts our military, I harken to the words often incorrectly attributed to Patrick Henry or Charle Pinckney, but stated by Senator Robert Goodloe Harper- Federalist from Maryland- in response to the millions in tributes that America was paying to the Arab pirates of the Barbary Coast.

“”Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”

Robert Goodloe Harper (January 1765 – January 14, 1825), a Federalist, was a member of the United States Senate from Maryland, serving from January 1816 until his resignation in December of the same year. He also served in the South Carolina House of Representatives (1790–1795), the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina (1795–1801), and in the Maryland State Senate.

Free speech is dandy, writes London Review of Books’ Mary-Kay Wilmers, who nevertheless reckons that riling the head-lopping acolytes of a seventh-century warlord goes beyond the pale. By her logic, it is safe to label her a coward and cultural quisling because she won’t reach for a sharp knife.

Dear Ayatollah, Yes, I know your lot commits butchery on a grand scale; engages in the most godawful terrorism; executes people for the merest trifles; ill-treats women; and, given half a chance, would have us with our posteriors uppermost paying homage five-times a day to a vengeful deity conjured up by a seventh-century illiterate warlord. But, still and all, there is no excuse for our use of hurtful words. Yours Ingratiatingly…

I was skimming through the February 5 edition of the London Review of Books when I came across a letter expressing disappointment with the tepid response of the magazine to the Charlie Hebdo attack. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers responded to the letter. She began this way: “I believe in the right not to be killed for something I say, but I don’t have a right to insult whomever I please.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/why-the-left-never-looks-back-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ari David, the host of the Ari David Show Podcast.

Ari discussed Why the Left Never Looks Back, analyzing how the Left’s schemes engender mass human suffering — and why progressives learn and admit nothing. The discussion occurred within a focus on Finding Out I Was a Communist and How I Escaped, in which Ari shared how he found himself imprisoned within the political faith — and how he found his way out.