RUTHFULLY YOURS

Killing comes ahead of antigovernment protest march in Moscow on Sunday

MOSCOW—Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on a bridge next to the Kremlin late on Friday, in what authorities said appeared to be a contract killing.

“The president said this brutal killing bears all the hallmarks of a contract murder and is of an exclusively provocative character,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin , told Russian news agencies.

He said the president asked to monitor the investigation personally, and had offered his deepest condolences to Mr. Nemtsov’s family.

It was the highest-profile killing of political figure in more than a decade, more typical of the violent years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 than of today.

The White House condemned the “brutal murder” and called for a “prompt, impartial & transparent investigation,” in tweets posted by the U.S. National Security Council.
Mr. Nemtsov, 55 years old, was killed just yards from Red Square and the Kremlin wall in the shadow of the multicolored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, as he walked across the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge around midnight, on an unseasonably warm winter night.

Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress this week that no one should pre-judge a nuclear deal with Iran because only the negotiators know what’s in it. But the truth is that the framework of an accord has been emerging thanks to Administration leaks to friendly journalists. The leaks suggest the U.S. has already given away so much that any deal on current terms will put Iran on the cusp of nuclear-power status.

The latest startling detail is Monday’s leak that the U.S. has conceded to Iran’s demand that an agreement would last as little as a decade, perhaps with an additional five-year phase-out. After that Iran would be allowed to build its uranium enrichment capabilities to whatever size it wants. In theory it would be forbidden from building nuclear weapons, but by then all sanctions would have long ago been lifted and Iran would have the capability to enrich on an industrial scale.

On Wednesday Mr. Kerry denied that a deal would include the 10-year sunset, though he offered no details. We would have more sympathy for his desire for secrecy if the Administration were not simultaneously leaking to its media Boswells while insisting that Congress should have no say over whatever agreement emerges.

France’s Anti-Terror, Free-Market Socialist Prime Minister Valls talks about ‘Islamofascism,’ his personal experience with rising anti-Semitism, and the necessity of economic reform.

Paris

‘France has been struck very much at its heart by terrorism—jihadist terrorism and radical Islamism, because let us call things like they are.”

So begins French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as we sit down Tuesday in his office at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s elegant compound in the French capital’s 7th arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine. Mr. Valls speaks English, but in the interest of precision he uses an interpreter for this meeting. A portrait of President François Hollande, Mr. Valls’s boss, looks down from a corner.

When Mr. Valls says “let us call things as they are”—this is his first interview with an American publication since the terrorist atrocities in Paris last month—the contrast with the U.S. president is hard to miss. But when I later ask why other world leaders seem reluctant to acknowledge the Islamist nature of the terror threat, the prime minister says with a sly smile: “It’s up to you to draw the analysis.”

Dressed in a slim-fitting white shirt, and with his deep, firm voice, Mr. Valls exudes an intense confidence. You might say the 52-year-old Socialist embodies energy in the executive, a quality his compatriots have come to admire in an age that calls on leaders to “always start with the real situation, not an imaginary world,” as Mr. Valls puts it.

The “real situation” in France is perilous. When Mr. Valls was appointed interior minister in spring 2012, authorities were monitoring 30 possible jihadist cases, he says. “Now we have more than 1,400 people identified as a potential risk in terms of jihadism. And we have 90 French citizens or people who resided in France who died in Iraq or even more so in Syria. And the intelligence services now have to monitor some 3,000 individuals in relation to jihadist networks, which is huge and unprecedented in the history of counterterrorism.”

Product Details

Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947Feb 24, 2015 | Deckle Edge
On July 22, 1946, seven milk churns containing concealed bombs exploded in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Six floors of British government and military offices collapsed, and 92 people were killed, most of them Arab, British and Jewish civilians. What was at the time the most lethal terrorist attack in history was perpetrated by the Irgun Zvai Leumi (Hebrew for National Military Organization) headed by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel. The organization’s main aim was to force the British out of Palestine, which they had ruled since 1917.

Bruce Hoffman, the director of the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, uses the story of the Irgun as a test case. At a time when terrorism seems to have an increasing and devastating effect on the course of history, Hoffman’s opening question is riveting: “Does terrorism work?” His answer is that in contrast to what most governments claim, terrorists can attain at least some of their fundamental aims, provided they operate under “the right conditions and with the appropriate strategy and tactics.” Indeed less than two years after the attack on the King David, the British were gone and the State of Israel was in existence. This sequence of events is misleading, however. Terrorism may work, as Hoffman suggests in this thought-­provoking book, but to prove his contention, more solid evidence is needed than the case of the Irgun in Palestine.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=EDWARD%20ALEXANDER%20JEWS%20AGAINST%20THEMSELVES

EDWARD ALEXANDERS I AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING BOOK AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER: Jews Against ThemselvesMay 31, 2015
by Edward Alexander
Is it possible that American journalists are so ignorant of the recent past that they have failed to remark upon John Kerry’s scandalous rewriting of history in his attack upon Israeli prime minister Netanyahu during his congressional testimony on Wednesday (February 25)? To illustrate Netanyahu’s poor political judgment Kerry angrily alleged that the Israeli PM may be wrong about Iran’s nuclear program and intentions, just as he had been wrong in 2003 in his support of the invasion of Iraq—“and you remember how that turned out,” he sarcastically added.

Apparently Mr. Kerry takes his views of history from people who blame Israel for every misery on the planet except avian flu. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, for example, blamed Israel for talking President Bush into that invasion, though even those two conspiracy theorists knew that Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was PM at the time. In 2007 Lawrence Wilkerson, a member of the US State Department’s policy planning staff and later chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that “the Israelis were telling us Iraq is not the enemy—Iran is the enemy.”

House (23)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) — Wrote a Jan. 29 column in The Huffington Post explaining his decision, saying the Constitution “vests the responsibility for foreign affairs in the president.”

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (N.C.) — The head of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) focused on Boehner undermining Obama in a statement and emphasized he’s not urging a boycott.

Rep. Andre Carson (Ind.)

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.) — Clyburn is the highest-ranking Democratic leader to say he’ll skip the speech.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/u0j4Vm-XVIY?feature=player_detailpage

The crisis between the United States and Israel has been manufactured by the Obama administration. Building a crisis up or down is well within the administration’s power, and it has chosen to build it up. Why? Three reasons: to damage and defeat Netanyahu (whom Obama has always disliked simply because he is on the right while Obama is on the left) in his election campaign, to prevent Israel from affecting the Iran policy debate in the United States, and worst of all to diminish Israel’s popularity in the United States and especially among Democrats.

Suppose for a moment that the Netanyahu speech before Congress is a mistake, a breach of protocol, a campaign maneuver, indeed all the bad things the White House is calling it. Grant all of that for a moment for the sake of argument and the behavior of the Obama administration is still inexplicable. Clearly more is behind its conduct than mere pique over the speech.

On June 7, 1981, Prime Minister Begin ordered the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor, shortly before it became operational and on the eve of the June 30 Israeli election. In the short run, Begin was condemned and punished globally, accused of politicking and undermining US-Israel relations. However, in the long run Begin’s defiance dramatically enhanced Israel’s power projection, upgraded US-Israel strategic cooperation and spared the US a nuclear confrontation in 1991.

In 2015, Prime Minister Netanyahu is urged to cancel his address at the March 3 Joint Session of Congress – on the eve of the March 31 deadline for an agreement with Iran and the March 17 Israeli election – lest it undermine US-Israel relations and fuels the rift between him and President Obama. Netanyahu is told that the President – and not Congress – possesses the authority to conclude/reject an agreement with Iran.

However, a February 16, 2015 CNN poll documents a rift between Obama and the American people over foreign policy in general and the attitude toward Netanyahu in particular: 51%:41% disapprove of Obama’s foreign policy; 43%:25% think that it is appropriate for Netanyahu to address the Joint Session of Congress before the March 31 deadline for an agreement with Iran; and 47%:32% oppose Obama’s handling of the Netanyahu’s address. At the same time, the annual February, 2015 Gallup poll, reaffirms vast public support of Israel (70%), in sharp contrast to the lack of support for the Palestinian Authority (17% – similar to Iran, Syria and North Korea).

A REVIEW OF “THE MORAL CASE FOR FOSSIL FUELS” BY ALEX EPSTEIN

In the anti-fracking film Gasland, producer Josh Fox proclaims that the process of extracting previously inaccessible oil and gas from shale pollutes water supplies, increases the incidence of cancer and leads to higher levels of seismic activity, despite ample contrary evidence. This self-proclaimed environmental watchdog and anti-fracking crusader has led extensive efforts to end or prevent fracking throughout the United States by obfuscating the truth and stopping communities from reaping the benefits of America’s shale boom. Josh Fox and others like him are uninterested in looking for improvements in fracking technology and safety. Instead they seek to shut down shale exploration and other fossil fuel extraction altogether.

In his recent book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein challenges the ethical bias of environmentalists who oppose fossil-fuel use and deftly argues that fossil fuels have vastly improved the planet and the lives of its human inhabitants. He contends that a human-centric moral value that supports the well-being and prosperity of human beings ranks on a higher ethical plain than the utopian, environmentalist ideal of a “wild” earth or environment absent little or no human impact. Epstein’s moral position is that man should serve human beings, not nature, and that it is wrong-headed and misguided to view man as a destructive force meriting punishment for cultivating the environment for his benefit. With fossil fuels, limiting their use creates reduced economic prosperity, higher levels of human starvation, lower life expectancies and higher rates of infant mortality.