RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referenced his upcoming address to a joint session of Congress in remarks at today’s cabinet meeting, stating that he has a duty without borders to keep Iran from going nuclear.

“In the coming weeks, the major powers are liable to reach a framework agreement with Iran, an agreement that is liable to leave Iran as a nuclear threshold state, which would endanger – first and foremost – the existence of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said at the outset of the meeting. “This is the same Iran that has taken over Lebanon and Syria and is now taking over Yemen and Iraq. This is the same Iran that is preparing an active front against us both on the Golan Heights and in southern Lebanon. This same Iran cannot advance toward nuclear weapons.”

Iran’s Press TV reported Saturday that a Revolutionary Guard commander threatened to open a new front against Israel across the West Bank.

“We will certainly consider a special retaliation for this issue,” IRGC’s second-in-command, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, told al-Alam of the recent strike that killed six Hezbollah members and an Iranian general in the Golan Heights. “This is part of a new reality that will gradually unravel.”

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001511.html

For those pressed for time, I recommend reading at least the first two. The first is a tough critique of the Saudi regime, and the second a good round-up of the sycophantic tributes paid to this despot.

CONTENTS
1. “King Abdullah embodied the wickedness of Saudi Arabia’s regime” (By Andrew Brown, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2015)
2. “Why is Westminster Abbey honouring the king of a country where Christianity is banned?” (By Ed West, The Spectator, Jan. 23, 2015)
3. “Our ally Saudi Arabia beheaded 10 people this month” (By David Keyes, The Daily Beast, Jan. 18, 2015)
4. “King Abdullah, a feminist? Don’t make me laugh” (By Anne Perkins, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2015)

***“SAUDI’S INFLUENCE ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS ALMOST WHOLLY MALIGN”
King Abdullah embodied the wickedness of Saudi Arabia’s regime

Change may be looming for Saudi Arabia, but reforming a country where torture, corruption and judicial murder are commonplace won’t be easy

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The Fox news segment, on the show “Shepard Smith Reporting,” began with a response to a quote from Martin Indyk from The New York Times on Thursday wherein the former US ambassador to Israel and the former US envoy to the peace process says: “Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign and the Republicans are using Bibi for their campaign against Obama…Unfortunately the US relationship will take the hit. It would be far wiser for us to stay out of their politics and for them to stay out of ours.”

Wallace said he agreed completely with Indyk and that he was “shocked” by the whole affair.

Smith queried whether Netanyahu would back out of the speech because, “Members of his own Mossad have come out and said this is a horrible idea and so have members of his own political party. Of course his political opponents are screaming up and down, the newspapers over there are going wild over this,” he added.

When Boston Was the Frontier Colonists thought the New World was a place to be discovered. It was also a place where they discovered themselves as Americans.More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a long-standing version of American self-explanation that went back at least to the 18th century, when John Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in his “Letters From an American Farmer” famously asked: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”

Migration to a strange land inevitably changes people, but “American exceptionalism” insists upon a stark, indeed a complete, transformation in which Americans became the utter inversion of Europeans. Shades of gray will not do. In his lively “Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans,” Malcolm Gaskill seeks to qualify, but not forsake, the exceptionalist story by applying a shiny coat of ambiguity and contradiction.

First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?
It’s hard to know who had most to gain—and the least to lose—from the death of Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. I’d say it’s Iran.

Nisman was scheduled to testify last week to the Argentine Congress about his investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85. In 2006 he indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the crime. None have been captured, though the Lebanese suspect was killed in 2008 in Syria.

Earlier this month Nisman filed a criminal complaint in an Argentine court, alleging that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had crafted a secret agreement with Iran to let the terrorists off the hook in exchange for Iranian oil largess and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Nisman claimed he had a solid case against la presidenta and her alleged co-conspirators, and he released a summary of a 300-page report on his investigation. He promised to reveal more at the hearing.

Argentina is a lovely country if you forget all the dictators, juntas, strongmen, and assorted socialists, fascists, and communists who have run the country ragged, or that Fidel Castro’s favorite killer, Che Guevara, was an Argentine. It’s a far nicer country than is Saudi Arabia. I have been to Argentina, stayed in Buenos Aires and visited the Alpine-like resort town of San Carlos de Barilochi on Nahuel Huapi Lake in the west near the Chilean border.

Argentina is a country settled and populated by people from a variety of European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, and by Jews from the same nations. It is as nearly a “melting pot” as is the U.S. From the late 19th century until the early 20th Argentina was an industrial nation that rivaled the U.S. and Great Britain in GNP and productivity and wealth. Then, around 1930, it caught the European collectivist/nationalist disease that was half Fascism and half Marxism, spiced with Latin American passion, and it has been in decline ever since.

But then the U.S. caught the same bug just a little earlier than that.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is an arid, hot country. Or is it an inflated tribal fiefdom in thrall to a Wahhabist theocracy? Was the Vito Corleone crime family ever recognized as a nation? Go figure. I would never set foot in Saudi Arabia even had I been forgiven all the critical things I’ve written about Islam. Saudi Arabia is a country that thrives on loot extorted from industrialized nations. It has been doing so since the end of WWI.

Saudi Arabia is not a “melting pot” populated by people from other nations. It is overwhelmingly Arab in population. Immigration to the place is severely limited, if not outright prohibited. Non-Muslim foreign nationals residing there, such as diplomats, engineers, and the like, are there on sufferance, and are restricted in where they can go and what they can do, confined to kaffir ghettoes. Freedom of speech does not exist there. The slightest squawk about Islam or the slightest infraction of Sharia law earns one horrific punishments. The 1,000 lashes “earned” by Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger who offended the theocrats on the Internet, is a measure of the utter irrationality and barbarity of Islamic “justice.” It hangs gays, amputates the hands of thieves, and strives to keep women under wraps, literally, not to be seen, nor even heard.

Saudi Arabia is not a “republic,” nor a “democracy,” nor even a “people’s state.” It is Saudi property, lock, stock and barrel.

Days before the opening of the a long-anticipated public inquiry into the circumstances of the murder of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, in London, the Telegraph UK reported that “American spies” of the NSA had intercepted communications between London and Moscow, fingering those involved in his murder in November 2006, which they provided to British authorities. The inquiry itself, much of which will be held in secret and will hear evidence inadmissible in a trial, is scheduled to last for two months.

Litvinenko’s murder by poisoning with a difficult to detect, rare and highly radioactive isotope, polonium-210, was described by many as a “Russian-backed” state execution. The Russians did not hesitate to use this radioactive weapon on British soil, perhaps because they knew they could get away easily.

So much for the Islamist “Lone Wolf” nonsense. ISIS propaganda is finally getting some attention. Even the New York Times published First Amendment litigator, Martin London’s op-ed “Why Tolerate Terrorist Publications?” citing “Patrick Henry’s famous liberty-or-death choice “in the short run, one cannot enjoy freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom of the press unless one first enjoys the freedom to live.”

The use of the media to call for jihad in the name of the prophet Mohammad and Allah is nothing new. The Palestinians, long before ISIS, have perfected it. Yet, neither the New York Times nor any major publication in the United States, not to mention Europe, has made the logical leap of acknowledging that the Palestinians are no different than ISIS. See for yourself:

My friend and e-pal novelist, commentator Chet Nagle writes…”Jewish outrage? Where just a little goische outrage? The largest ship in the world is named for an SS officer — a Nazi but a “good businessman” — by a son stamped from the same mold, and is arranged to arrive in Europe at this time of remembrance? So it may be time for Jews to ease out of Europe, taking their brains, their talents, their assets, and their courage to Israel. Armageddon is coming. ”

Jewish outrage as ship named after SS war criminal arrives in Europe

As Holocaust day nears, anger erupts at arrival in Rotterdam of the Pieter Schelte, the world’s largest vessel

Leaders of Jewish communities and Holocaust memorial groups in Britain and the Netherlands have reacted with rage and despair at the arrival in Rotterdam of the world’s biggest ship, the Pieter Schelte, named after a Dutch officer in the Waffen-SS.

It is a few weeks past 140 years since a boy christened Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was delivered at England’s Blenheim Palace. He survived the trenches of France, political reversals, and even being struck by a New York City driver to lead Britain from its greatest peril in May 1940 to victory over Nazism five years later. This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of his death. In the age of radical Islam, can we draw inspiration from his career?

Yes, but only, it seems, from his finest hour. Until his moment arrived in 1940, Churchill was frequently dismissed even within his own party as an imperialist adventurer with baroque ambitions, a throwback to an earlier epoch, an author of military debacles, out of touch with a supposedly emergent world of international comity. In short, he was regarded then as most contemporary liberals might view Ted Cruz or Benjamin Netanyahu today.