RUTHFULLY YOURS

No Western leader strides out to the TV cameras and says that much the best response to the butchering of his or her citizens is to do not much, then wait to see what happens.

If we really do think that ISIL has no place in our century, let us start to give that idea substance: create a master-register of suspected war criminals; block companies that do business with ISIL from Western markets; cut diplomatic relations with supporters of ISIL.

At a recent conference, I found myself bemoaning the ineffectiveness of Western military action against the Islamic State (ISIL). We in the West had decided to attack ISIL, but seemed to be pulling our punches. Why were their banking, propaganda and other facilities that support their terrorist operations not being blown to bits?

Imagine the surprise when a senior U.S. expert on these issues replied that by far the best thing to do with ISIL was precisely nothing: the Middle East and wider “Muslim world” was doomed to a massive revolting civil war, so let them get on with it and take stock of the situation once it clarified.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida and aspirant for his party’s presidential nomination, has a very poisonous pill he is seeking to add to Iran legislation this week before the Senate.

No, it’s not his much discussed amendment saying Congress would not lift its sanctions on Iran unless Iran recognized Israel. Rather Rubio just wants the Iran deal to conform to the president’s own description of a nuclear framework agreement. As Rubio said Wednesday, “It requires this final deal be the deal the president says it is.”

On the surface, this seems like small ball. On April 2, the White House released a fact sheet that spelled out Iran’s obligations to modify some of its nuclear facilities and limit its enrichment. The fact sheet said sanctions would be phased out over time as Iran complied with the terms of the framework.

Rubio’s amendment simply quotes that fact sheet verbatim and says the president may not waive or lift any Congressional sanctions until he certifies Iran has met the White House conditions.

Back when Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to cut off municipal funds to the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibition that included, among other controversial works, a collage of the Virgin Mary made by Chris Ofili from pornographic magazine images and shellacked clumps of elephant dung, the NYTimes ran several columns defending the freedom of art to offend.

This is from Michael Kimmelman’s Critic’s Notebook: Cutting Through Cynicism in Art Furor (NYT9/24//99): “In the end, there can be no underestimating the genuine pain that works like those in “Sensations” can cause people, most particularly Christians who may find the art world’s refined justifications for Mr. Ofili and his colleagues inadequate, if not callous. Roman-Catholics, Italian-Americans and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among others, sometimes argue that they are treated by artists as acceptable targets while certain other groups are taboo. And it is a fair question: would the defenders of art react the same if the offending image were of Rosa Parks rather than the Virgin Mary? But no race or issue is actually untouchable in the arts.”

An Al Qaeda terrorist guilty of murdering a U.S. Army sergeant and “transferred” from Guantanamo to Canada by the Obama administration has been released from an Alberta prison while he appeals his conviction for war crimes.

His name is Omar Ahmed Khader and he’s a member of Canada’s “first family of terror,” according to an international news report that confirms Khader’s father was an associate of Osama Bin Laden who moved his family to Pakistan to support the Afghan mujahideen in its war against the Soviet Union. In 2010 Khader was convicted of five war crimes, including throwing a grenade that killed Army Sergeant Christopher Speer in Afghanistan during a 2002 combat operation.

Khader spent around a decade at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in 2010 cut a deal to serve the majority of his sentence in Canada. Under the terms, he admitted being an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” and throwing the grenade that killed Sergeant Speer. In 2012 Khader was taken to Canada, where he evidently began working on an appeal. This month a Canadian judge ordered the release of the jihadist while he appeals his U.S. convictions. Canadian government officials argue that the judge has no jurisdiction to hear the unprecedented bail application from an offender convicted abroad and returned to Canada, according to a national news story.

This airhead never heard of Mengele, or the high number of high level Arab terrorists who are physicians? Dr. George Habash a leader of one of the Palarabs most deadly groups was a pediatrician who bombed a nursery school in Israel. …rsk

Sarah Nakhleh, who won the title of Miss Arab Syria 2014 and was third-runner up in the Miss Arab World Pageant, expressed vehement support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in interviews to both an Egyptian TV channel and a radio show within a day of each other.”Bashar al-Assad is a leader and an ophthalmologist,” Nakhleh said in a video interview translated by MEMRI, “and no ophthalmologist in the world is capable of harming an ant.”
She reiterated her stance in a radio interview the next day, saying of Assad “I support him,” and “at the end of the day he is a doctor and no doctor can possibly be a butcher.”

(CNSNews.com) – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the United States must look to Qatar, an ally of the terrorist group Hamas, for advice in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“And we have to confer with the Qataris, who have told me over and over again that Hamas is a humanitarian organization,” she told CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley.

As CNSNews.com reported last week, Qatar is a strong supporter and funder of Hamas. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal operates from Qatar, and has so far rejected ceasefire proposals put forward by Egypt and promoted by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The new Whitney Museum, located at the beginning of the High Line below 14th street, is a Renzo Piano creation that cost $422 million. The building has received glowing reviews from the Times and the WSJ, neither of which mentioned some oddly perverse absences in a museum intended for heavy traffic. The first is that there is no interior staircase from the 8th floor down to the 5th. Instead, there is an outdoor staircase from the terraces of those floors – something totally impractical in a city that gets very cold and snowy winters, that has rainy springs and that fronts the Hudson River, one of the windiest spots in lower Manhattan. If you check your coat in inclement weather, you would be forced to wait for the over-crowded elevators, of which there are only a handful to handle a very large number of visitors. It remains to be seen how many intrepid people will venture outdoors past November. From the 5th floor down, there is an enclosed staircase that feels too narrow for the mass of users.

The Islamic State’s attraction to young Muslim females and males continues to mystify Westerners, especially non-Muslims. They wonder, ”Why would educated and mostly well-off young Westerners be willing to join ISIS?” This follows by search for the ubiquitous “root-causes.” Thus lack of assimilation, alienation, religious piety, mental illness, boredom, and, of course, poverty and unemployment are mentioned. These, however, fail to explain why a young person would leave a family, the relative comfort and safety he or she enjoys in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Denmark or the United States, not to mention other places in favor of the repressive, violent ISIS.

Iran’s agenda is clear. It wishes to use its growing regional network to control the region, and use its proxies to indirectly attack any countries that stand in its way — all the while portraying itself as a reasonable partner for the U.S. and the West in the war against the Islamic State.

The Islamic Republic’s aggression goes largely ignored.

The international community is failing to respond to Iran’s weapons and terrorism networks.

In recent years, Iran’s networks have been expanding significantly, most often with deadly results for the region.

It is most important to keep on challenging these would-be censors, so that people with Kalashnikov rifles do not make our customs and laws.

One of the false presumptions of our time is that people on the political left are motivated by good intentions even when they do bad things, while people on the political right are motivated by bad intentions even when they do good things.

When people prefer to focus on the motives of the victims rather than on the motives of the attackers, they will ignore the single most important matter: that an art exhibition, or free speech, has been targeted.

It does not matter if you are right-wing or left-wing, or American, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or French. These particularities may matter greatly and be endlessly interesting to people in the countries in question. But they matter not a jot to ISIS or their fellow-travellers. What these people are trying to do is to enforce Islamic blasphemy laws across the entire world. That is all that matters.