RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the world descending into chaos driven in no small measure by the incoherent, contradictory and frequently non-existent foreign policy of the Obama administration, it was difficult this year to narrow the field for this year’s biggest national security blunders. The task seemed so formidable, I nearly abandoned the endeavor.

But undaunted, I present to you the National Security “Not Top 10” of 2014, in no particular order.

1) Befriending “moderate Al-Qaeda” in Syria:

There are some ideas so at war with reason and reality they can only exist in the fetid Potomac fever swamps of DC think tanks and the foreign policy community. Such was the case in January when three of the best and brightest from those ranks published an article in Foreign Affairs (the same publication that in 2007 brought us the “Moderate Muslim Brotherhood”) contending that the US needed to “befriend” the Syrian jihadist group Ahrar al-Sham as some kind of counter to more extreme jihadist groups, like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. The precedent they cited was the US failure to designate the Taliban (!!!) after 9/11.

Mind you, at the time they wrote this, one of Ahrar al-Sham’s top leaders was a lieutenant for Al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri who openly declared himself a member of Al-Qaeda. After most of their leadership was wiped out in a bombing in September, they gravitated closer to the jihadist groups they were supposed to counter and their positions have been bombed by the US – much to the consternation of other “vetted moderate” rebel groups. So ridiculous was their proposition that the original subtitle of their article, “An Al-Qaeda Affiliate Worth Befriending,” was changed online to “An Al-Qaeda-Linked Group Worth Befriending” in the hopes of minimizing the absurdity of their case.

2) Obama administration deploys three hashtag divisions in response to Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As Ukrainians made their bid to free themselves from Russia’s interference, Putin responded by deploying tanks and troops into Ukraine in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Obama’s rejoinder was to give a speech and to deploy three divisions of State Department employees all armed with a #UnitedForUkraine hashtag. Hilarity ensued as the Russian Foreign Ministry counterattacked by hijacking the hashtag, prompting State Department spox Jen Psaki to decry, “Let’s hope the Kremlin will live by the promise of hashtag,” leaving many asking: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

When television showed police turning their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio recently, many viewers instinctively rotated in their chairs along with the police.

After all, Mayor de Blasio’s pandering to race-oriented special-interest groups has appalled many voters. More than half of New Yorkers recently told Quinnipiac pollsters that they disapprove of the way the mayor handles the police department. The next move, a strike by the policemen, may already be underway informally: Summonses and arrests have dropped dramatically since the murder of two patrolmen by a man who had said he would “put wings on pigs.” And if the police formalize and escalate their strike to make their point that de Blasio is anti-police, many New Yorkers will likely back them up.

But they shouldn’t. That’s the takeaway from a similar labor action, the Boston police strike of 1919.

The stories of New York today and Boston after World War I have some similarities. In Boston in 1919, the policemen also had compelling reason to complain: Inflation had climbed wildly after World War I, but police pay was not keeping up. Strapped after the war, the authorities neglected upkeep of police-station houses, which were becoming unbearably filthy. In at least one house, vermin actually chewed on officers’ helmets. Back then, as now, authorities agreed to serious negotiations with the police. The man at the top of the chain of command, Governor Calvin Coolidge, was famous for his ability to get along with just about any ethnicity, including the mostly Irish Catholic patrolmen. One of the few differences between Boston then and New York now was that in Boston the police commissioner reported to the governor, not the mayor.

When the policemen walked out in Boston, riots ran wild, with looting and fighting all across the city. In response, Coolidge called out the National Guard. The guard did not approach the troublemakers gingerly: In a famously controversial move, soldiers rounded up gamblers on Boston Common. Coolidge was a Republican, and Mayor Andrew James Peters, a Democrat, was furious. Yet Coolidge delved into the law books and quoted chapter and verse to make clear that he, not the mayor, was in charge. Coolidge backed up Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis’s decision to fire the striking policemen.

Hollywood film producer Oliver Stone has said he wants to make a four-hour documentary telling the “dirty story” of the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in what he believes was a “coup” organized with the help of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.

“A dirty story through and through, but in the tragic aftermath of this coup, the West has maintained the dominant narrative of ‘Russia in Crimea,’ whereas the true narrative is ‘USA in Ukraine.’ The truth is not being aired in the West,” Stone wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday.

Stone said he had already spent four hours interviewing Yanukovych in Moscow for the project, in addition to several “police officials,” all of whom believe “foreign elements” were responsible for the violent Maidan protests in Kiev that culminated in February with the overthrow of the Russia-backed president.

“Details to follow in the documentary, but it seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 policemen, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators,” Stone wrote.

The Hollywood director’s interpretation of events echoes the Russian government’s suggestions that the regime change was a “color revolution” funded by foreign governments.

President Vladimir Putin in a security council meeting earlier this year said that the situation in Ukraine was partly the work of “outside forces” and warned that Russia must do all it can to prevent a similar uprising on its own turf.

France is a country where so-called “anti-racist” organizations, heavily subsidized by the government, fight for the most part only a single “racism”: “Islamophobia.”

It is now a country where the only people allowed to speak freely of Islam to large audiences are those who describe it as a religion of peace and unlimited love.

People prosecuted and fined for uttering critical remarks on Islam, such as Christine Tasin, say out loud what thousands think without daring to speak.

Polls show that French citizens in ever-increasing numbers are concerned about the rising proportion of unintegrated Muslims in the country, the endless expansion of no-go zones, the increasing number of Islamic converts, and the “replacement” of the French people.

“Mental patients,” screaming “Allahu Akbar,” are storming France.

France is now a country where critical remarks on Islam are systematically banned from mainstream media and where any negative sentence about the Muslim religion leads to fines, payment of damages, and censorship.

And it is a country where so-called “anti-racist” organizations, heavily subsidized by the government, fight for the most part only a single “racism”: “Islamophobia.”

Words such as “Islamism” or “radical Islam” have disappeared from the vocabulary of journalists and politicians, and are replaced by fuzzy words: “radicalism” and “extremism”.

The only people apparently allowed to speak freely of Islam to large audiences are those who describe it as a religion of peace and unlimited love.

(The posting of this article has become an annual tradition of historical proportion at this blog.)

The next year sweeps around the earth like the hand of a clock, from Australia to Europe and across the great stretch of the Atlantic it rides the darkness to America. And then around and around again, each passing day marking another sweep of the hours.

In Times Square crowds of tourists gather in clumps behind police barricades, clutching their corporate swag beneath video billboards shifting and humming in the cool air. And the same scene repeats in other squares and other places even if it doesn’t feel like there is a great deal to celebrate.

While the year makes its first pass around the world, let us leave it behind, open a door in time and step back to another year, a century past.

December 31, 1912.

The crowds are just as large, though the men wear hats. The word gay is employed with no touch of irony. Liquor is harder to come by because the end of the year, one hundred and two years ago, has fallen on a Sunday.

There are more dances and fewer corporate brands. Horns are blown, and the occasional revolver fired into the air, a sight unimaginable in the controlled celebrations of today’s urban metropolis.

The Hotel Workers Union strike fizzled out on Broadway though a volley of bricks was hurled at the Hotel Astor during the celebrations. New York’s finest spent the evening outside the Rockefeller mansion waiting to subpoena the tycoon in the money trust investigation. And the Postmaster General inaugurated the new parcel service by shipping a silver loving cup from Washington to New York.

One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

For Australians, the anxious question about the Martin Place attack, which has grabbed the attention of everyone, is whether this atrocity is but harbinger of a further series of deadly attacks on Australian soil, or whether it will pass into memory as an exceptional one-off event, much as the 1915 New Year’s day massacre in Broken Hill did.

Alma Cowie, killed in Broken Hill 1915, and Katrina Dawson, killed in Sydney 2014
On New Year’s Day, 1915, two Muslim men, Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah, shot and killed four people and wounded several others before finally being killed by police. They had both come to Australia more than a decade previously.

Beginning in 1860, many Muslim cameleers came to Australia to help open up the arid outback. Today a famous train from Adelaide to Darwin is known as ‘The Ghan’ to commemorate the contribution to the ‘Afghans’ – as they were known (although they came from many different places across the Middle East and South Asia) – to the development of Australia.

The jihad attack was staged against a picnic train which was taking 1200 picnickers out on a New Year’s Day in open ore trucks. Bashda Mahommed Gool and Mullah Abdullah first made inquiries at the station beforehand to make sure they would be in the right place at the right time to attack this particular train. They then positioned themselves on the side of hill around 30 meters from the tracks, and opened fire as the trucks passed. Among the victims was Alma Cowie, aged 17, shot dead. By the end of the incident the jihadi cameleers had themselves been killed by police.

What seems like staggering hypocrisy is actually remarkably consistent from liberals’ perspective.
Many conservatives finished the year angry about the same thing they were angry about at the beginning of the year: liberal double standards.

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one common response on social media is instructive. Countless conservatives want to know: Why the double standard? Barack Obama was friends with a domestic terrorist, Bill Ayers. His spiritual mentor was a vitriolic racist, Jeremiah Wright. One of his administration’s closest advisers and allies is Al Sharpton, a man who has inspired enough racial violence to make a grand dragon’s white sheets turn green with envy.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party venerated the late senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansmen himself. He was one of 19 senators (all Democrats) to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration. One of his co-signers was William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s mentor.

When Republicans are in power, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” When Democrats are in power, dissent is the racist fuming of “angry white men.”

Peaceful, law-abiding tea-party groups who cleaned up after their protests — and got legal permits for them — were signs of nascent fascism lurking in the American soul. Violent, anarchic, and illegal protests by Occupy Wall Street a few years ago or, more recently, in Ferguson, Mo., were proof that a new idealistic generation was renewing its commitment to idealism.

When rich conservatives give money to Republicans, it is a sign that the whole system has been corrupted by fat cats. When it is revealed that liberal billionaires and left-wing super PACs outspent conservative groups in 2014: crickets.

When Republicans invoke God or religious faith as an inspiration for their political views, it’s threatening and creepy. When Democrats do it, it’s a sign they believe in social justice.

The first time I ever spoke to Steve Scalise, it was in the context of his helping me and his cousin, state senator Ben Bagert, block the political career of David Duke. In the quarter-century since that 1989 phone conversation, Scalise has given no indication that he holds any views anywhere near as odious as Duke’s racist and anti-Semitic garbage, and plenty of indications directly to the contrary — indeed, compellingly so.

Scalise, the House majority whip now under fire for having spoken back in 2002 to a white-supremacist group tied to the former Klansman Duke, says he did not know the nature of the group to which he spoke. The Duke lieutenant who invited him confirms that account, as does another attendee. Indeed, he says that technically Scalise spoke not at the supremacist group at all, but to a civic-association meeting just before the supremacist conference began.

By all accounts, Scalise spoke not on racial issues, but on taxes and spending.

In short, the more we find out about that event, and about Scalise, the more this whole “scandal” looks like a case of guilt not just by association, but by unintentional, second-degree association — a guilt wrongly assessed against a man with a long record of working not to divide the races but to bridge the differences between them.

Scalise deserves the benefit of the doubt.

I take very seriously the moral imperative to “give no quarter” to Duke and his ilk. I was a founding board member of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a group formed specifically to block Duke’s political rise. I fought him tooth-and-nail within the Republican party. Later, as a journalist, I broke award-winning stories demonstrating Duke’s continuing Nazi ties.

And I’ve watched Scalise’s whole career since that phone conversation in 1989 – which was even before it was clear Scalise would enter politics. (He had just finished college at LSU, where he was speaker of the student assembly. I was organizing Republican caucuses against Duke’s coming bid for the U.S Senate.) If a whole career spent without racial taint doesn’t earn someone the benefit of the doubt about an event of some confusion and dispute, there’s no hope for any of us.

Around the world millions of Christians joined together to celebrate the birth of Jesus and to pray for “peace on Earth, good will toward men.”

The 2015 World Almanac puts the number of Christians in the world at 2,347,171,000, by far the largest group sharing the same spiritual beliefs. It puts the number of Muslims at 1,633,173,000. Of the seven billion residents of planet Earth, more than six billion identify themselves as part of one of the many different faiths, to include Hindu, Buddhist, and others.

As it has for 1,400 years, Islam continues to pose the greatest threat to peace on Earth and is not displaying much good will even toward other Muslims. A website, TheReligionofPeace.com maintains an on-going, virtually daily record of those slaughtered around the world in the name of Islam and Allah.

The killing is daily, but earlier this month, Canon Andrew White, a clergyman known as the ‘vicar of Baghdad’, reported that Islamic State militant Islamists had beheaded four Iraqi Christian children, all under the age of 15, for refusing to convert to Islam. The barbarity of the ISIS killings and the numbers of others by Islamists add up to a record of atrocities that rival any in history.

The silence from Muslims condemns this so-called religion.

The Jewish genocide of the last century is being matched by the Christian genocide that is continuing in this century.

The human price paid for the Islamic fascism currently adds up to more than 57 million displaced refugees in 22 countries, a humanitarian disaster equal to the entire population of Great Britain. The UN’s emergency aid chief is asking for $16 billion in funding to address the crisis of the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and South Sudan, in addition to places like the Central African Republic, Somalia, and Ukraine.

There are other events that undermine the prospect of peace. One need only watch as Western nations attempt to negotiate a deal to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons. It is an exercise in futility. Iran is tempting an attack from those nations that understand the enormity of the threat that represents. The Obama administration seems oblivious to it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/europes-year-of-the-jihadist?f=must_reads

Among the trends of 2014 – “Gone, Girl,” Lena Dunham, and $55,000 potato salad – was another the list-makers seem to have missed: it was also a very good year for Islamic jihad. And while this was true on the battlefields of Syria and the cities and villages of Pakistan, it was true, too, in more subtle ways throughout the West – and especially in Europe. It was, for instance, the year of Mehdi Nemmouche’s slaughter of four Jews at the Jewish Museum in Brussels.

It was the year that Belgium itself was named a “terrorist recruiting hub” by the Wall Street Journal. And in Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands, pro-Islamic State demonstrations laid bare the growing support of terrorism and Islamic jihad among Europe’s expanding Muslim population – all while politicians either stood back or even contributed to the praise.

Throughout 2014, Europeans faced pro-IS, anti-Jew demonstrations in Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London and The Hague, and the establishment of “sharia zones” in London, Wupperthal, and elsewhere. True, such zones do not necessarily delineate areas in which sharia law, rather than state law, applies. But the term helps them define those largely-Muslim neighborhoods whose residents tend to be radical and who often support jihadist movements both at home and abroad.

Combined, these events signal the increasing success of Islamists who are working to change Europe from within – sometimes through violence, but more often through strategies known as “stealth jihad” – a way of applying social and political pressures to transform the current culture.

Take, for instance, the response of Josias van Aartsen, mayor of The Hague, to radical Muslims who called for the death of Dutch non-Muslims and Jews during pro-IS rallies in August: then on holiday, Van Aartsen declined to return home, ignoring even the throwing of stones at non-Muslims and the police. Only when a counter demonstration against IS was planned in the same, Muslim-majority neighborhood did Van Aartsen take action: he forbade it. “Too provocative,” he said.

Or there are the recently-leaked intelligence briefs in France, as reported by the Gatestone Institute, that “Muslim students are effectively establishing an Islamic parallel society completely cut off from non-Muslim students,” while “more than 1000 French supermarkets, including major chains such as Carrefour, have been selling Islamic books that openly call for jihad and the killing of non-Muslims.”