RUTHFULLY YOURS

THIS IS A HARROWING TALE OF BARBARISM…AND HERE IS A MOST TELLING COMMENT LEFT BY A TIMES READER NAMED HECTOR WHO COULD BE A PROFESSOR IN AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL OR A FRIEND OF OUR CRAVEN ADMINISTRATION:

“I bet US bombs have decapitated a thousand times more Muslims than ISIS has decapitated Americans. We should quit while we’re ahead.”

ISIS Hostages Endured Torture and Dashed Hopes, Freed Cellmates Say

The hostages were taken out of their cell one by one.

In a private room, their captors asked each of them three intimate questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is still alive in a kidnapping negotiation.

James Foley returned to the cell he shared with nearly two dozen other Western hostages and collapsed in tears of joy. The questions his kidnappers had asked were so personal (“Who cried at your brother’s wedding?” “Who was the captain of your high school soccer team?”) that he knew they were finally in touch with his family.

It was December 2013, and more than a year had passed since Mr. Foley vanished on a road in northern Syria. Finally, his worried parents would know he was alive, he told his fellow captives. His government, he believed, would soon negotiate his release.

What appeared to be a turning point was in fact the start of a downward spiral for Mr. Foley, a 40-year-old journalist, that ended in August when he was forced to his knees somewhere in the bald hills of Syria and beheaded as a camera rolled.

His videotaped death was a very public end to a hidden ordeal.

The story of what happened in the Islamic State’s underground network of prisons in Syria is one of excruciating suffering. Mr. Foley and his fellow hostages were routinely beaten and subjected to waterboarding. For months, they were starved and threatened with execution by one group of fighters, only to be handed off to another group that brought them sweets and contemplated freeing them. The prisoners banded together, playing games to pass the endless hours, but as conditions grew more desperate, they turned on one another. Some, including Mr. Foley, sought comfort in the faith of their captors, embracing Islam and taking Muslim names.

Deal for at least 8,000 missiles and 300 launchers comes amid border tensions with China and exchanges of fire with Pakistan

India has opted to buy Israel’s Spike anti-tank guided missile, a defence ministry source said on Saturday, rejecting a rival US offer of Javelin missiles that Washington had lobbied hard to win.

India will buy at least 8,000 Spike missiles and more than 300 launchers in a deal worth 32bn rupees ($525m), the source said after a meeting of India’s Defence Acquisition Council.

Prime minister Narendra Modi’s five-month-old government wants to clear a backlog of defence orders and boost India’s firepower, amid recent border tensions with China and heavy exchanges of fire with Pakistan across the Kashmiri frontier.

“National security is the paramount concern of the government,” the source quoted Defence Minister Arun Jaitley, who also holds the finance portfolio, as telling the procurement panel. “All hurdles and bottlenecks in the procurement process should be addressed expeditiously so that the pace of acquisition is not stymied.”

Among other business cleared by the panel, India will issue a request for proposals to supply six submarines, added the source, who was not authorised to comment on the record and did not elaborate.

The terror attacks in Montreal and Ottawa Canada should have not surprised anyone.

The recent jihadist attacks attacks in Montreal and Ottawa came after years of repeated calls to fight the infidel by Canadian Islamist religious and “civic” leaders-including Imams and new coverts to Islam. They use mosques, Islamic centers, demonstrations, YouTube, print, online and social media. Though most state they are not supporting the ISIS, they advocate the very same ideology.

And despite ISIS proven brutality and heightened recruitment campaigns, many in the West, including the U.S. and Canada continue to chronically suffer from Political Correctness, refusing to identify the jihadist as Muslims. They all but ignore jihadist yelling Allah- Akbar while spraying bullets into crowds, or stabbing to death pedestrians. Instead, they claim these are misguided, or meanly ill individuals, refusing to acknowledge that while not all Muslims are jihadists, all jihadists are Muslims.

Muhammad Robert Heft, the Toronto based convert to Islam, seems to be well guided and very well funded.

Heft, founded and runs the Paradise Forever, (P4E Support Group Inc.), as a part of his Da’wah (proselytization efforts). Heft is also the Canadian representative for Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Charity and Humanitarian Establishment based in Dubai UAE, (مؤسسة محمد بن راشد آل مكتوم للأعمال الخيرية والإنساني) -https://www.facebook.com/mrheft/info?ref=page_internal), a member of the Union of Good, an umbrella organization that supports Hamas. The Union of Good was declared an “unlawful organization” in 2002 by the Israeli government and The U.S. Treasury Department designated it an SDGT in 2008 because of its ties to Hamas.

On his Facebook, Heft blames “Westerners” of “terrorism” aimed at the Muslim world. He argues that “Islamic terrorism” is an “oxymoron” because Muslims “use the Quran and the Sunnah [Muhammad’s way of life] as their guide.” Moreover, western capitalism is prone to terrorism by its nature, because “terrorism can be very profitable,” he claims.

Incredibly, Heft also serves as a community outreach liaison on Islamist radicalization for Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

PARDONS FOR PEDOS

Covering up for Gutman’s sexual abuse of children would have been about more than just the State Department’s usual white wall of silence. Like many European ambassadors in the new administration, Gutman was not a diplomat — he was a donor. A man like Christopher Stevens might be sent to Libya, but positions in European capitals were mostly reserved for major contributors to the Democratic Party.

When it came to money, Howard Gutman, a top Washington lawyer, brought in the cash by raising $500,000 for Obama’s campaign committee and another $275,000 for his inauguration committee. And Gutman was not just an Obama boy. He had donated the legal maximum to Hillary’s presidential bid.

That was a lot of money. Enough to let a donor molest as many children as he cared to.

Clinton’s Pardons for Pedophiles

Palestinian Authority President’s Advisor: Murderer of American-Israeli Baby is “Heroic Martyr”

COWARDICE AND CRUELTY

ISIS is using the same tactics with America as it did with the Iraqi Army. Beheadings and humiliations of captured prisoners. It is showing its members and its supporters that it is stronger than America.

This is what terrorists do.

ISIS hasn’t won battles against enemies that stood and fought. It broke the morale of its opponents by humiliating them. This is a powerful thing in the Middle East’s honor/shame cultures where fighting forces have poor professionalism and draw their morale from a false sense of confidence. You’ve seen all those videos of Jihadists running out of cover or accidentally blowing themselves up.

This is the attitude that keeps the enemy going. They don’t really follow orders. They don’t really learn how to do things. What unites them is a sense of inevitability. Puncture that by humiliating them and they collapse. Their macho shows are all hat and no cattle. There’s nothing underneath the bravado except cowardice and cruelty.

Why is ISIS Provoking America? To Humiliate It.

There is a striking contrast today in world politics between the West’s submission to Islam and its assault upon Israel; this, ironically enough, occurs while we witness an Islamic assault upon Europe.

Unable to contend with Islam’s massive penetration of the continent, or to deal effectively and morally with its barbaric warfare against peoples in the Middle East, Europe has chosen to stalk Israel, embattled and attacked on many fronts.

The abandonment of the Jews in 1939-1945 in Europe and the murder of six million of them by the Germans represent a historical theme and modern chapter of the old hatred. Europe is not cleansed of this madness and fury; and it is incapable of seeing the justice and reasonableness in Israel’s existence and policies, bashing her over Jerusalem, settlements, human rights, and military operations. Nietzsche said that Europe would be a boring place without the intellectual ferment and cultural contributions of the Jews, but it would apparently be a happy place for some Europeans.

Now, with the blatant eruption of a reinvigorated anti-Semitism in Europe, the political campaign against Israel acquires its explicit racial underpinnings. The more vitriolic the attacks on Israel, running the spectrum from censure, defamation, to delegitimization, the more transparent the European culprit aflame with concentrated racist hatred of the Jews and their Jewish state.

The political backlash against Israel from the summer war in Gaza testifies to the moral bankruptcy of Europe and the loss of any equitable sense of justice. Now the Palestinian aggressor, undefeated and unrepentant, is to be rewarded with Gaza’s reconstruction. Mahmoud Abbas, unwilling to recognize the Jewish state of Israel, is to be rewarded with his own Palestinian state, according to sentiments in Sweden, Britain, and no doubt elsewhere.

The discourse of peace surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum remains as divorced from morality and reality as could ever be imagined in this lopsided political universe. The laws of sociology and the lessons of history make the two-state solution a non-starter. After 47 years, the settlement map of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, their size and spread, preempt an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 armistice lines. The idea of a Palestinian state over all of the territory is not in the demographic and geographic cards. Moreover, the embedded friction between the Jews and the Arabs, after so much bloodshed, enmity, and mistrust, is a visible obstacle to a mutually satisfactory agreement between them on all outstanding issues – borders and refugees, water and security, and Jerusalem. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intractable and unsolvable according to the current modalities of proposed peace-making.

The Pentagon says that North Korea likely has a nuclear weapon that can be mounted on a missile. Hats off to Wendy Sherman, architect of the 1999 nuclear deal with North Korea that was supposed to prevent this sort of thing. In return for hundreds of millions of dollars of food and oil at a time a million or more people were starving to death under the North Korean regime, the United States received meaningless concessions that did little or nothing to stop North Korea’s nuclear program. That deal was described by former Secretary of State James Baker as “appeasement.”

The only positive thing that could be said about the latest agreement is that it will probably avert a short-term crisis. But at what price? It will make the United States even more reluctant to adopt a more muscular approach toward Korea and thus could actually increase the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula. And the North Koreans may well conclude that their bad behavior will continue to be rewarded.

And so they did and so it was.

For her part, Ms. Sherman displayed a disturbing tendency to gush about Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator with whom she negotiated. Apparently flattery of politically powerful people was a career strategy she mastered. Foreign Policy Magazine noted in 2011:

Sherman, who served as State Department counselor and North Korea policy coordinator under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, traveled to Pyongyang with Albright in 2000. Here’s how the NPR obit on Kim, who died this past weekend, described her take on Kim:

Wendy Sherman, a special adviser to President Clinton on North Korea, accompanied then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2001, and met Kim along with Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.

“We shared similar impressions of meeting him. He was smart and a quick problem-solver,” Sherman says. “He is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.”

General Suspects North Korea at Point of Capability to Build, Deliver Warhead By Bridget Johnson

The commander of U.S. forces in Korea, who met in Washington this week with South Korean officials, said at a Pentagon press briefing today that they fear “uncontrolled escalation” of the nuclear threat on the peninsula as North Korea continues its weapons program.

“Kim Jong Un remains in control of an isolated, authoritative regime that’s willing to use violence and threats of violence to advance its interests, gain recognition as a nuclear power, and secure the regime’s survival,” Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said.

In recent years, he said, Pyongyang “has focused on development of asymmetric capabilities,” including “several hundred ballistic missiles, one of the world’s largest chemical weapons stockpiles, a biological weapons research program, and the world’s largest special operations force, as well as an active cyber-warfare capability.”

North Korea violated UN Security Council resolutions by conducting its third nuclear test last year and “significantly increased their frequency of no-notice ballistic missile launches this year.”

“We are concerned that such events could start a cycle of action and counteraction, leading to an unintended, uncontrolled escalation. This underscores the need for the alliance to work together, to be vigilant and to be ready to act,” Scaparrotti said.

The general said the U.S. and South Korea have been working together to enhance readiness in the areas of “combined and joint command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, an alliance countermissile defense strategy, and the procurement of precision-guided munitions, ballistic missile defense systems, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms.”

Scaparrotti cautioned against reading too much into North Korea’s moves in which they’ve “reached out more,” including sending a representative to the UN or softening rhetoric.

Katie Gorka of the Council on Global Security has released an important report [1], “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy,” and events of this week show that it couldn’t be more timely. The separate terror attacks in Canada and a long string of terror attacks here in the U.S. show that the counter-terrorism policies of Western governments are fundamentally broken, and are directly responsible for getting their citizens killed. Even as I write this there are breaking reports of yet another attack [2].

The primary targets of Gorka’s new report are the various fictitious narratives and bogus social science models that drive Western counter-terrorism efforts. Chief among these is the “countering violent extremism (CVE)” narrative that has been the centerpiece for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.

CVE has been a colossal disaster because it has no roots in reality. It was always intended as a convenient fiction for politicians, bureaucrats, media and academics to avoid talking about [3] the problem of the ideology that supports Islamic terrorism.

There has never once been a recorded case of anyone on the planet swearing their allegiance to the ideology of “violent extremism” and their willingness to kill others and die in the cause of “violent extremism.” It is a null set. There is nothing to counter, which is the whole point. And yet there are academics and institutions who are the beneficiaries of mountains of taxpayer cash to pursue the elusive CVE unicorn.

CVE has been used to smuggle all kinds of crackpot theories into not just our counter-terrorism policy, but also our foreign policy.

One crackpot theory has been that there are good Islamists that we can use against the bad Islamists. This was the keystone of the Obama administration’s Arab Spring policies. And this theory put into practice in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places has left the Middle East in even worse shape than Obama found it.

““I’ve been through that. My husband gave working families a raise in the 1990s,” Clinton said, saying she herself voted for raising the minimum wage when she served as a senator from New York. “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.”
This video is sure to make a glorious return in a couple of years. In it, Hillary Clinton disparages the entire capitalism system in one revealing sentence.

Aside from Hillary’s actual words, notice how she’s dry-washing her hands as she winds up to the line. It’s not an off-the-cuff mistake. It’s obviously a line that she knows is coming and is preparing to deliver with relish.

Politico plays this quote as a Hillary vs. Elizabeth Warren thing, which it undoubtedly is. Hillary spends a lot of time in the story driving a knife in Warren’s back while smiling that smile of hers the whole time.

But it tells us so much about Hillary Clinton.

Nathan Cirillo and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.

As I noted yesterday, the moral contrast between these two men — the Ottawa terrorist and the guard he shot — couldn’t be more stark. Cirillo gave his life in the service of country and honor. Zehaf-Bibeau gave his life in the service of tyranny and murder.

All those who have died serving Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. have made a great sacrifice for those respective democracies. Most Westerners honor them with gratitude. Tragically, however, some Westerners are betraying that honor by joining the Islamic State’s global movement.

This societal struggle — against a very small minority of extremists — speaks to a profound philosophical divide.

While the Islamic State claims to represent a new, just, and holy order, its hyper-Salafi jihadist ideology is antithetical to democracy. Where we stand for individual freedom, they stand for totalitarianism. Where we stand for the rule of law, they stand for the tyranny of one psychotic man.

Yet hundreds of Britons, around 100 Canadians, 50 Australians, and 15 Americans are now known to serve the Islamic State. The terror is spreading, and not just in Canada. As events in Australia and Britain attest, Islamic State terrorists in the Mideast and elsewhere are inspiring terrorism from their supporters in the West. Persuading them that serving the Islamic State doesn’t require travel to Syria or Iraq, ISIS offers ordained purpose to those Westerners who detest their democratic society. In basic terms, it turns hateful minds toward violent terrorism. And because of the detection challenge that homegrown terrorists pose for intelligence services, they represent an urgent threat to Western nations’ security. That threat must be met head-on. Treason charges offer one answer.

Of course, it is not a simple answer. While the U.K. is considering treason charges against citizens who join the Islamic State, there is no recent precedent there. The last man convicted of treason in Britain was a Nazi propagandist, Lord Haw-Haw, way back in 1946. Public reaction to new treason trials would obviously be complicated.