RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘We’re in a very dangerous period,” former vice president Dick Cheney said in a recent interview, “and I think it’s more threatening than the period before 9/11.” Islamic State terrorists beheading Americans, Iranian mullahs charging up centrifuges, Putin rattling his shasqua — dangerous times, indeed. So naturally the Department of Defense thought Monday an appropriate time to release its “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap,” which outlines the U.S. military’s plan to fortify itself against the ravages of oncoming climate change.

The “Roadmap” points to climate change’s many potential threats to military operations: Coastal installations could face flooding from rising sea levels; wildfires and increased temperatures could hinder training activities; topographical changes might obstruct supply chains; more intense drought and famine could increase the need for humanitarian assistance; more severe weather might alter battlefield tactics. To confront those challenges, the department will “identity and assess the effects of climate change on the Department,” “integrate climate change considerations across the Department and manage associated risks,” and “collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on climate change challenges.” Whatever any of that means.

The New York Times write-up does its best to prop up the DOD plan by quoting George Washington University professor Marcus King, who claims that climate change might already be wreaking geopolitical havoc. According to King, climate change could be at least partly responsible for the rise of the Islamic State: “Climate change and water shortages may have triggered the drought that caused farmers to relocate to Syrian cities and triggered situations where youth were more susceptible to joining extremist groups.”

Environmental factors certainly influence geopolitics, but it seems fairly apparent that the remedy to the jihadist threat is weapons investment, not hardier seeds.

But the Department of Defense is simply tailoring its mission to mirror that of the president. Even the Times is frank on this point:

Obama’s unfortunate Middle East legacy was predicated on six flawed assumptions:

(1) a special relationship with Turkey;

(2) distancing the U.S. from Israel;

(3) empathy for Islamist governments as exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;

(4) a sort of non-aggression agreement with Iran;

(5) expecting his own multicultural fides to resonate in the region;

(6) pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Let us examine what has followed.

Obama’s special relationship with Recep Erdogan proved disastrous from the get-go, as Erdogan immediately began to provoke Israel and promote Islamist revolutionaries. Turkey today not only dislikes the U.S., but also poses an existential problem for the West. It is a NATO member that is antithetical to everything NATO stands for: the protection of human rights and constitutional government against the onslaught of aggressive totalitarian regimes. Turkey is now operating like the old Soviet Union in using murderous proxies to enhance its own stature; for example, it finds ISIS useful in whittling down the Kurds. As a rule of thumb, any enemy of Erdogan’s Turkey — Israel, the Kurds, Greek Cyprus, Greece, Egypt — is likely to be far more friendly to the U.S. and NATO than are other nations in the region. If Turkey were attacked by ISIS, Syria, Iran, or the Kurds, would Belgium or Greece send in its youth under NATO’s Article V?

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced a new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap at the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas in Peru today, saying the Pentagon has “nearly completed a baseline survey to assess the vulnerability” due to global warming of more than 7,000 bases, installations, and other facilities.

The 20-page document details three “broad adaptation goals”: “Identify and assess the effects of climate change on the Deparment,” “integrate climate change considerations across the Department and manage associated risks,” and “collaborate with internal and external stakeholders on climate change challenges.”

“Initial analysis indicates that four primary climate change phenomena are likely to affect the Department’s activities: Rising global temperature, changing precipitation pattern, increasing frequency or intensity of extreme weather events, rising sea levels and associated storm surge,” the report states. “…The changing climate will affect operating environments and may aggravate existing or trigger new risks to U.S. interests.”

The report complies with a 2013 executive order in which President Obama ordered agencies to prepare the U.S. “for the impacts of climate change.”

“Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’…because it has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we already confront today from infectious disease to armed insurgencies and to produce new challenges in the future,” Hagel said in his remarks, which touched on organized crime and the illegal migration of minors yet focused on global warming.

“The loss of glaciers will strain water supplies in several areas of our hemisphere. Destruction and devastation from hurricanes can sow the seeds for instability. Droughts and crop failures can leave millions of people without any lifeline, and trigger waves of mass migration,” he said. “We have already seen these events unfold in other regions of the world, and there are worrying signs that climate change will create serious risks to stability in our own hemisphere. Two of the worst droughts in the Americas have occurred in the past ten years…droughts that used to occur once a century.”

THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL IS ANOTHER OF THOSE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES WOEFULLY UNPREPARED TO DEAL WITH ANYTHING BUT FATUOUS PRESS CONFERENCES. REMEMBER THE ANTHRAX SCARE? THERE WAS A SHORTAGE OF CIPRO….AND SINCE THEN THE CDC HAS DONE NOTHING TO ADDRESS THE ISSUES OF EPIDEMIC, STOCKPILING OF VACCINES, EMERGENCY TREATMENT CENTERS, THE NECESSITY TO CLOSE OUR BORDERS …RSK
President Obama added an afternoon Ebola meeting to his otherwise open Columbus Day schedule after a nurse was confirmed to have contracted the virus from a now-deceased Liberian patient in Dallas.

The Oval Office meeting was small, including Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa Monaco.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden joined via phone.

The White House said that the meeting was “to receive an update on the response to the diagnosis of a second Ebola case in Dallas, Texas.”

“The President was briefed on the status of the investigation into the apparent breach in infection control protocols at the Dallas hospital and remedial actions underway to mitigate similar breaches in the future,” the readout of the meeting continued. “Secretary Burwell and Dr. Frieden described the surge in personnel and other resources to Dallas to assist in the investigation as well as other measures to heighten awareness and increase training for healthcare workers throughout the country.”

“The President reinforced that this investigation should proceed as expeditiously as possible and that lessons learned should be integrated into future response plans and disseminated to hospitals and healthcare workers nationwide.”

Obama, who has a week of fundraising activities planned as the calendar closes in on midterms, told donors at a Democratic National Committee event in L.A. on Thursday that “the likelihood of any epidemic in the United States is extraordinarily small.”

The White House also released the details of call with French President Francois Hollande, who plans to build new Ebola treatment centers in Guinea.

5 Islamic Scholars Who Say They’d Demolish Me in Debate – But Don’t Dare Try By Robert Spencer

With the world on fire from Islamic jihad, the proclamations from Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron and so many others that the Islamic State’s atrocities have nothing to do with Islam, “a religion of peace,” are looking increasingly ridiculous. The academics who further this view with their fantasy pictures of Islam are likewise running scared, despite the fact that they have made this the dominant mainstream view in America’s universities. They’re covering up their abject inability to defend this point of view with a haughty refusal to do so, and an insistence that those who challenge them are not worthy of their attention.

This is a peculiar stance for academics in particular to take, as they are supposed to be professionally dedicated to the discussion and debate of ideas. It illuminates the unhappy fact that our nation’s universities are increasingly not places where genuine intellectual inquiry takes place, but centers of leftist indoctrination, not interested in pursuing truth or examining ideas, but only in turning out cadres of thoroughly propagandized worker ants who will ever after unthinkingly toe the party line.

My own experience with academics in the fields related to study of Islam and the Middle East is that they contemptuously refuse to engage in any discussion or debate with me, generally claiming that I am either too stupid or too evil, or both, to engage. This is despite the fact that my books generally sell far better than theirs (as I write this I have three of the top ten books in Amazon.com’s Islam category, and all three are at least eight years old) and thus, by proving that I am indeed as intellectually and morally bankrupt as they claim, they could go a long way toward ending what they regard as my baneful “Islamophobic” influence over the American public.

But none of them dare to try. Here are five academics who have loudly crowed that they could best me in debate or that my work is easily refuted – only to clam up and run when I give them an opportunity to prove it.

If you think 2014 has been a year of unraveling and disorder, just wait.

So Paul Krugman , who once called on Alan Greenspan “to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble”; who, a few months before the eurozone crisis erupted, praised Europe as “an economic success” that “shows that social democracy works”; who, as the U.S. fracking revolution was getting under way, opined that America was “just a bystander” in a global energy story defined by “peak oil”; and who, in 2012, hailed Argentina’s economy as a “remarkable success story”—this guy now tells us, in Rolling Stone magazine, that Barack Obama has been a terrific president.

Which can only mean that the next two years are going to be exceptionally ugly. How to get through them?
***

I ask the question not as an exhortation to subscribe to Survivalist magazine, stock up on tuna fish and Zithromax, and master the arts of homolactic fermentation. In fact, if you’re a resident of the U.S., you’ll probably be OK. What Americans call a recession is what the rest of the world considers affluence. What we call disaster is what others know as existence.

But imagine if you are one of the pro-democracy student leaders in Hong Kong; or the president of Estonia or another country in Vladimir Putin ’s sights; or an anti-ISIS Sunni tribal sheik in Iraq; or a commander in the Kurdish Peshmerga; or a fighter in what remains of the Free Syrian Army; or the new president of Afghanistan; or the prime minister of Israel: What are you going to do then? How do you navigate a world in which you can no longer expect the U.S. to serve as a faithful ally and reliable buffer between you and your enemies?

Don’t think those questions aren’t on foreign minds. The other day, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil oligarch turned political prisoner turned (since his release earlier this year) democracy activist, paid a visit to the Journal’s offices in New York. We asked him how Vladimir Putin would react if the U.S. were to arm the Ukrainians or send forces to the Baltics.

Jews are being cast in various roles with respect to their response to the Klinghoffer opera: Bold, Terrorist-Humanizing, and Meek

Peter Gelb has generated a drama worthy of an important new opera about the American Jewish community. And here, in The Jewish Press, is an exclusive of the cast and the story line.

Gelb is the managing director of the Metropolitan Opera. It was Gelb’s decision to stage John Adams’ opera about the terrorist murder of a disabled, elderly American man, Leon Klinghoffer. The Arab terrorists shot Klinghoffer in the head and in the chest and had him and his wheelchair thrown overboard as evidence of their unyielding position to swap innocent lives for convicted terrorist Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.

Klinghoffer was selected for the sacrificial murder because he was a Jew. Not an Israeli, but a Jew.

John Adams, along with Alice Goodman (born a Reform Jew, now an anti-Semitic Anglican minister), who wrote the heinous librettos, in their own words, set out to “humanize” the terrorists. That is the goal of the opera.

For the past six months, a stalwart collection of grass roots activists, largely based in the New York City area, have been working to inform a critical mass of Americans that it was a grotesquely offensive decision to stage the Klinghoffer opera (falsely titled: the “Death of Klinghoffer” – he didn’t just die, just as Daniel Pearl did not just die – each was murdered because, as Jews, they were powerful propaganda tools).

Should a dramatist decide to write an opera about the sturm und drang on the streets of New York regarding the Klinghoffer opera, there would be three distinct types being cast.

PROUD KLINGHOFFER JEWS

The first type to be cast would be what we’ll call the Proud Klinghoffer Jews, PKJ. This is a new group of actors/activists on the scene. These are the ones who have been forged in the crucible created by years of passive Jewish leadership and streetwise but unwieldy passion. It has been unleashed by the staging of what many consider an inciteful (not insightful), anti-Semitic, philo-terrorist opera at a time of rising anti-Semitism and global terrorism. There would be starring roles amongst these singers.

Gates of Vienna has published a new essay, posted below, that sets American Betrayal into a novel historical perspective.

Baron Bodissey writes: Regular readers know JLH as our German translator, but he occasionally ventures into original commentary. The essay below connects the dots between Diana West’s American Betrayal and the current Islamization of the Western world.

It Depends on What the Meaning of IS Is”

by JLH

This is about American Betrayal being not only a critical remembrance of things past, but a harbinger of things to come — what I would call a “gateway” event. Following is the event that, for some reason, brought this thought to my mind:

Johann Peter Zenger was a German immigrant to New York and the editor and publisher of the New-York Weekly Journal, in a city whose other newspaper was essentially a house organ for the governor of that time — William Cosby. Cosby lived up to his reputation as a tyrant and resented the Journal’s anonymous, critical editorials. At that time, someone who criticized the government — no matter how truthfully — could be charged with libel and sedition. This is what happened to Zenger, who was arrested in 1734 and tried in 1735 for seditious libel. Since Cosby had preemptively disbarred all the New York lawyers who might have defended him, Zenger was defended by Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia — the most illustrious lawyer of the Colonies. Hamilton by-passed the hostile judge and appealed directly to the jury. The jury in turn, found Zenger and his newspaper not guilty.

Of course, the trial was public knowledge, and the result certainly appeared in print, at least in Zenger’s paper. It was not as sensational and/or violent as other events along the way to the Revolution, but it was a paving stone on the road to the formation of a new country. The attempt to suppress unwelcome opinion, and Hamilton’s advocacy of the right to print it, had combined to establish the principle that the truth is a defense against the charge of libel — a principle not widely evident in the Western world then, and under assault today. It was also a precursor of the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment.

The Top 10 Qur’an Verses to Understand ISIS — on The Glazov Gang
Dr. David Wood unveils the Islamic State’s Islamic inspirations.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-top-10-quran-verses-to-understand-isis-on-the-glazov-gang/

Kafka Was the Rage

The email arrived on the last Friday afternoon of the spring term shortly before 5:00 p.m. Anastasia Coleman, Fordham’s Director of Institutional Equity and Compliance, and its Title IX Coordinator, wanted to meet with me. “It has been alleged,” she wrote, “that you may have acted in an inappropriate way and possibly discriminated against another person at the University.”

I was stunned. My wife, kids and friends have been warning me for years that, in these prudish times, my outrageous sense of humor and intellectual irreverence (my last book is about bestiality) could get me in trouble. I imagined myself brought before an academic disciplinary tribunal from Francine Prose’s Blue Angel, where all my past transgressions would be marshaled to prove that I don’t belong in the classroom. My mind raced, recalling the many slips of the tongue I had in three decades of teaching. I perspired profusely and felt the onset of a stomach bug. What would I tell my mother?

“Did it have anything to do with a student?” I shot back anxiously, hoping to get a sense of my predicament before the director left for the weekend. I was lucky. Coleman responded immediately. “This does not involve students and is about your behavior regarding American Studies.”

What a relief. But it was also very odd. The decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli universities in December 2013 had upset me. I wrote emails, circulated articles, and was pleased that my university president quickly declared his opposition to the measure. I joined a national steering committee that set out to fight the boycott and participated in the drafting of a few statements. As an American historian who delivered in 1987 his first paper at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association and served on the executive committee of Fordham’s American Studies program, I wanted Fordham’s program to sever official ties with the national organization until it rescinded the measure. Other programs have taken this courageous symbolic step, and I thought it proper for the Jesuit university of New York to take the moral stand against what most scholars of anti-Semitism consider anti-Semitic bigotry.