RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are no sure things in politics, but Hillary Clinton is the closest thing to a sure thing to become the Democrats’ candidate for president in 2016.

This is one of the painful but inescapable signs of our time. There is nothing in her history that would qualify her for the presidency, and much that should disqualify her. What is even more painful is that none of that matters politically. Many people simply want “a woman” to be president, and Hillary is the best-known woman in politics, though by no means the best qualified.

What is Hillary’s history? In the most important job she has ever held — Secretary of State — American foreign policy has had one setback after another, punctuated by disasters.

From the 1960s to the late 1990s, John Barrett Kelly was one of the most influential advisors, writers, and commentators on the Middle East. In 1980 his book Arabia, the Gulf, and the West was prophetic in its analysis of the strategic importance of the Middle East and the need for a Western “forward policy” in the Gulf in order to protect U.S. and European interests, particularly oil and its transport, against both Soviet adventurism and the greed of Middle Eastern potentates. Like all his writing, his advice was based on an intimate knowledge of the region and its culture, especially the tribal mentality intertwined with Islam, a faith historically hostile to Western civilization.

Groucho Marx used to ask contestants, “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

A number of Republican candidates showed that they still hadn’t mastered that one when the media came asking them about the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

Like so many chumps undone by Groucho, they thought that they were showing off how noble they were, when all they did was answer, “Yes, I did stop beating my wife. And I mostly oppose it now.”

Instead of looking like heroes, they looked like guilty men confessing to a crime.

A beautiful young girl is the grand prize in the ISIS Ramadan Koran contest. A teenage girl is the prize for 2nd and 3rd place winners.

Terrorists from Da’esh (ISIS) have come up with a new way to pump up enthusiasm in the ranks.

A Qur’an (Koran) Contest offers a “beautiful young girl” to tempt group members to compete for the top three grand prizes, “or at least a few hundred dollars” to be awarded as seven consolation prizes.

The beautiful young girls and teenagers are prisoners that are being held as sex slaves by Islamic State.

Though stretched thin by the aftermath of two wars and the current fight against the Islamic State, the Obama administration has enlisted the Pentagon to measure the shrinking ice in the Arctic in the latest example of the president’s climate agenda being extended to the military.

A recent Government Accountability Office report examined the Defense Department’s role in the Arctic, which increasingly will include “monitoring the changing Arctic conditions,” such as ice levels.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations issued a scathing condemnation of the UN Human Rights Council’s report on last summer’s war with Gazan terrorists, branding council members as “the soldiers of Hamas.”

Ambassador Ron Prosor noted that the findings of the committee – which censured Israel while largely ignoring Palestinian abuses – supplemented moves by the Palestinian Authority to attack Israel diplomatically.

“Deranged Lone Assassin” Mows Down, Stabs 37 Austrians, Answering ‘IS’ Call to Balkan Muslims: “Either Join, or Kill Over There”

Is it a coincidence that earlier this month, the following call to Jihad by IS was issued specifically to Balkan Muslims: IS to Balkan Muslims: “Either join, or kill over there”

Well, Alen Rizvanovic killed over there. Not exactly “lone” or “deranged” (beyond the mental disorder otherwise known as Islam which, yes, is lame. And now so are 34 Austrians, plus three dead).

Austria is of course very vulnerable to feeling the effects of the call of the wild, thanks to the Bosnian Muslims it welcomed back when it served as the financing center of the Bosnian Jihad, known to Westerners as the Bosnian war, or “Serbian genocide against Bosniaks.” Official Austria was front and center in helping make the war go in favor of the Muslims who demanded to carve their own Islamic state in Europe out of Yugoslavia.

It’s alarming that a university is quicker to condemn an academic for an off-colour remark than a terrorist

On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab blew himself up in an aeroplane bound for Detroit. Luckily the bomb, placed in his underpants, did not work properly, and hurt only him, but it was intended to kill all 289 people on board. Abdulmutallab had recently graduated from University College London (UCL), where he had been president of the student Islamic Society.

On June 10 this year, it was announced that Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, had resigned as UCL’s honorary Professor of Life Sciences because of remarks he had made about girls in labs: “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.”

When it was pointed out to UCL’s authorities that Abdulmutallab’s radicalisation might have had quite a lot to do with what happened when he was a UCL student and perhaps they should be more careful about the extreme speakers who addressed the Islamic Society, they vaulted on to the high horse of “academic freedom” and refused to intervene.

“So even if, as Edward Grossman suggests, we today aren’t quite the giants our grandparents were, if necessary we will do the same in this case, too. Because if we aren’t willing to protect ourselves by ourselves, there’s really no reason to have a Jewish state at all.”

Jews have long been able to thrive while under threat. Today’s Israelis, living in the face of a nuclear Iran, are the latest example.

“Worried and Happy”: that was the title on the advance copy of Edward Grossman’s essay sent to me by Mosaic’s editors. Reading it, however, I couldn’t help feeling that for Grossman, Israel’s current mood is mainly worry and very little happiness. After all, about 90 percent of the essay focuses on a single major worry: Iran’s nuclear program. And Israel has no lack of other worries as well: Hamas, Hizballah, the Palestinian Authority, international isolation, the cost of living, Arab and ḥaredi integration, and on and on.

It seems the fishing vessel Marianne of Gothenburg, leading this year’s flotilla to Gaza stunt, may be heading for a scuppering.
According to a press release just issued in Tel Aviv:

‘The Israeli civil rights group, Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, has sent a warning letter demanding that the Swedish bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) cease in providing financial services to Free Gaza and Ships to Gaza, which are helping to arrange a flotilla to breach Israel’s lawful naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

In particular, SEB holds a maritime lien on the Marianne of Gothenburg, the lead ship in the planned Gaza flotilla. The bank issued a mortgage to the owner of the boat, Charles Bertel Andreasson, a veteran anti-Israel provocateur who has engaged in illegal efforts against the Jewish State in the past.

In a letter to SEB’s president and group chief executive, Annika Falkengren, Shurat HaDin’s president, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, made clear that the flotilla ship might be destroyed or confiscated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and that the Stockholm-based bank is at serious risk of losing its collateral: the boat.