RUTHFULLY YOURS

So what does it take to ruin your reputation around Washington these days? The question comes to mind after learning that one of the capitol’s most corrupt bureaucracies has decided to hire one of its most incompetent contractors—and the answer explains a lot about accountability in government.

Only days after the Internal Revenue Service announced that it would throttle back tax-season customer service in retaliation for modest budget cuts, the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee discovered that the agency had an active $4.46 million contract with CGI Federal. You may recall that company as the same outside website-builder-for-hire that was the lead designer for the ObamaCare website rollout fiasco of 2013.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/01/pat-condell-jews-are-being-driven-out-of-europe-by-muslim-anti-semitism?utm_source=Jihad+Watch+Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=56daa31c2d-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ffcbf57bbb-56daa31c2d-123354825

I know we’ve been beaten down by political correctness and relativism, but does anyone have a conscience anymore?”

Brotherhood seeks to rally anti-Sisi support

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

On Wednesday, the American secretary of state, John Kerry, met with the United Nations envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, in Geneva. De Mistura must have been happy to hear Kerry praise his efforts and that Washington hoped the Russian peace plan for Syria “could be helpful.”

However, the experienced diplomat probably listened more intently to another thing Kerry said. “It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” the secretary of state remarked.

Media outlets immediately noticed that Kerry had made no explicit mention of the need for Assad to leave office, long the position of the Obama administration. Instead, he stepped back and resorted to that tiresome American habit of appealing to the reasonable in foreign officials — as if the man responsible for the carnage in Syria had any interest in “putting his people first.”

Amnesty International has condemned the continuation of capital punishment under the new Saudi leader.

Obama’s detour to Riyadh to pay tribute to the dead King Abdullah and congratulate the new King Salman may have succeeded in resetting his relations with the Saudis.

Before his arrival in Riyadh, he let it be known that he would not discuss human rights violations with the new king. Instead, “The best way to deal with Saudi Arabia was [is] by applying steady pressure even as we are getting business done that needs to get done,” he explained in a CNN interview. The progressive media (CNN, NPR, BBC and their ilk) chose not to worry about his callous disregard for human rights; and, perhaps to distract attention, came up with the non-story of Michelle Obama’s uncovered hair, supposedly in defiance of the Saudi law. “Sometimes we need to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns we have in terms of counter-terrorism or dealing with regional stability,” Obama elaborated. “Balance” is the key word here.

http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/vichy-mon-amourthe-more-things-change-ruth-king.html

In 1894 a Jewish military Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment for passing French military secrets to the Germans. He spent five years on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. During his imprisonment the head of French counter espionage, George Picquart, identified the real traitor as Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, but French military officials suppressed the evidence, acquitted Esterhazy and accused Dreyfus of additional crimes. Eventually he was set free but had to wait until 1906 for full exoneration and reinstatement in the French military.

A young Viennese journalist attended the trial and was startled by the anti-Semitic ranting of crowds in France. While one may argue that the Dreyfus incident was not the only one that inspired his turn to Zionism–there were plenty of examples in his own adopted Austria–it certainly contributed to his conviction that Jews could never be safe anywhere but in their own land. His name was Theodore Herzl.

In 1895 he wrote “Der Judenstaat”- (The Jewish State). His words echo today:

“Palestine is our unforgettable historic homeland.”
“We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens, often by men whose ancestors had not yet come at a time when Jewish sighs had long been heard in the country.
“We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilized countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level.”

If failure is a reason to end a policy, here are a number of candidates for the axe.

During his State of the Union address last week, President Obama defended his Cuba policy by pointing out, “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

As it happens, I agree with the president on Cuba. But it seems to me that his advice should be applied to a number of other issues as well. For example:

The War on Poverty: Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in January 1964, just three years after the start of the Cuban embargo. Since then we’ve spent more than $20 trillion fighting poverty. Last year alone, federal and state governments spent just under $1 trillion to fund 126 separate anti-poverty programs. Yet, using the conventional Census Bureau poverty measure, we’ve done nothing to reduce the poverty rate. More -ccurate alternative poverty measures do show some gains during the War on Poverty’s first few years, but little change over the last several decades, despite steadily rising expenditures. And, whatever success we’ve achieved in making material poverty less uncomfortable, we’ve done little to help the poor become independent and self-supporting.

There’s no room in the president’s comfort zone for assessing the practical costs of his ideas. A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama’s game is. That’s because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world.

In his State of the Union address, Obama refused to even take note of the GOP’s historic midterm gains and the fact the House and Senate are now both under Republican control. On foreign policy, Obama talked as if everything was going swimmingly abroad, prompting even the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank to marvel at Obama’s “disconnect” from what is happening in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Russia.

And Obama’s policy agenda — “free” community college, tax hikes, mandatory sick leave — failed to take into account that it was dead-before-arrival in this Congress.

Chantal Lebon last saw her son at a bus stop in Brussels. That was two years ago in October “at exactly 10:25 p.m.,” she says. Abdel had driven his mother there in a car, stopped in a parking spot and lifted her suitcase onto the sidewalk.

“Au revoir, maman,” he said. “Au revoir, mon fils,” she replied. It was only months later that she would again see her son’s face — in a YouTube video. It showed him wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a Kalashnikov. The video was stamped with the flag used by the Islamic State in Syria.

Chantal Lebon is a small, energetic 64-year-old retired nursery school teacher with blue eyes and graying hair. She has come to a café to tell us the story of her son Abdel, the story of a Belgian child who became a radical Islamist fighter at the age of 23. Abdel had nothing to do with the attack plans in Belgium, his mother says. But, she confirms, her son is a jihadist.

On the way to the Brussels café, she saw the soldiers standing guard in front of police stations, court houses and the city hall. The Belgian government raised the country’s terror alert to the second highest level after officials were able to foil attacks targeting police and Jewish schools earlier this month. At the European Parliament, events with more than 100 foreign guests have been banned and a military vehicle guards the entrance to the European Commission.

Since Jan. 15, the day two potential attackers died in Verviers during a police raid and the terror threat in the country became obvious to all, much has changed in Belgium.

Thirteen terror suspects have been arrested in the country this month, but the suspected ringleader of the alleged attack plans, a 27-year-old named Abdelhamid Abaaoud, remains at large and is thought to be in Greece. “I pray that Allah destroys all those who oppose Him,” he said in a video. Like Chantal Lebon’s son, Abaaoud also lived in Molenbeek, a district in western Brussels. Because she is worried that her son Abdel could be behind the next terror plot in Belgium, she would rather remain anonymous and her name, as well as that of her son, has been changed for this story.

Recently Fox News apologized for referring to several areas in Europe as “no-go zones.” The apology followed an interview with Steven Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, who incorrectly claimed Birmingham, England was a Muslim city. The apology claimed the “no-go zone” statement was also incorrect. Julie Banderas asserted, “we have made some regrettable errors on air regarding the Muslim population in Europe, particularly with regard to England and France. To be clear, there is no formal designation of these zones in either country and no credible information to support the assertion there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.” Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, host of “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” also apologized stating, “Last week on this program a guest made a serious factual error that we wrongly let stand unchallenged and uncorrected. The guest asserted that the city of Birmingham, England, is totally Muslim and that it is a place where non-Muslims don’t go. Both are incorrect.”