RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Sunday, March 15, as Christian churches around the world were celebrating morning mass, two churches in Pakistan were attacked [1] by Islamic suicide bombers. At least 17 people were killed and over 70 were wounded.

The two churches (located in Youhanabad, Lahore’s Christian quarter) were St. John’s Catholic Church and Christ Church (Protestant). The Taliban claimed responsibility. It is believed that the group had hoped for much greater death tolls, as there were almost 2,000 people in both churches at the time of the explosions.

According to eyewitnesses, two suicide bombers approached the gates of the two churches and tried to enter them. When they were stopped — including by a 15-year-old Christian who blocked them with his body — they self-detonated. Witnesses saw [2] “body parts flying through the air.”

Imagine if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016. What would it actually be like?

Roughly forty percent of the country will consider the incoming first-term president an extreme serial liar with a sense of entitlement the size of Australia. Another forty percent will think, yes, she may be dishonest, but all politicians are and we support her anyway. The middle twenty percent will be some muddle of the previous two views.

And this is before she is even inaugurated. And unlike with Obama, she will not ride the crest of being the first black (or mixed race) president. The whole “first woman” thing reeks of moral narcissism and grandiosity. Israel had its first woman prime minister decades ago (Golda Meir, 1969) as did the UK (Margaret Thatcher, 1979). Even benighted Pakistan elected Benazir Bhutto in 1988. It’s no big thing. In fact, the idea of electing Clinton because she is a woman is both sexist and insulting.

By Nicholas Casey andCarol E. Lee Israel’s Netanyahu Reverses Position on Palestinian State Again Conditions for one today are not achievable, prime minister says

No surprise here….there are many pressures but,…..Netanyahu succumbed to the considerable charms of Madeleine Halfbright when he surrendered Hebron, the cradle of the Jewish faith, at the Wye Plantation. Proves that calling him Israel’s Churchill is really fatuous…..rsk

TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reversed himself for the second time in a week on support for a Palestinian state and said he would back it under the right conditions, a turnaround that the U.S. and Palestinians dismissed as unconvincing.

On Monday, the day before parliamentary elections, the Israeli leader said he was in danger of losing and made a hard shift to the right—abruptly reversing his 2009 declaration of support for a two-state solution to the decades old conflict with the Palestinians. His victory on election day, which defied pre-election polls, was widely attributed to the late shift in strategy.

The U.S. responded Wednesday by upending decades of American policy when it left open the possibility that it might stop using its veto to shield Israel in the United Nations.

U.S. officials said Thursday that Mr. Netanyahu’s sharp departure on Monday from his long-held public position on the two-state plan made it difficult for President Barack Obama’s administration to accept his clarification on Thursday.

No one who supervised the shooter has been held to account, but the victims are denied pay and benefits.

It was more than five years ago that the gunshots rang out, but those of us who survived can still hear their echoes. On Nov. 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist named Nidal Hasan—an American radicalized by extremist Islamic beliefs—opened fire on his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 14 people, including an unborn child, and wounding 32.

I was there. A beloved friend, Capt. John Gaffaney, died at my knees. I was slated to become the shooter’s direct supervisor and later learned I was at the top of his hit list.

That day has faded from the minds of most Americans. But the survivors and the families of the deceased continually relive its horror. They also continue to face betrayal by the government they served.
***

At about 1:34 p.m., Hasan, seated in a building on base and armed with an FN five-seven pistol and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, paused to bow his head. Then he stood up from behind a cubicle, shouted “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) and began spraying bullets throughout the room. Soldiers, including my friend John, charged the shooter but were gunned down before they could reach him.

A decade ago ISIS was on the front page of every major newspaper. Then Obama won and declared victory over Al Qaeda and it went away. ISIS, then Al Qaeda in Iraq, didn’t actually go away, but the administration and its media allies began pretending that it had.

They went on pretending until it began advancing in force on Baghdad.

Today the media deniers scramble to explain ISIS as an “Un-Islamic” organization. Erick Stakelbeck, author of multiple books on Islamic terrorism, including The Brotherhood: America’s Next Great Enemy and The Terrorist Next Door, takes on ISIS with his latest book, ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam.

Stakelbeck’s experience with the domestic Islamic threat naturally turns the book’s focus toward the ISIS iceberg in America and Europe, from its foreign fighters, both immigrant and convert, traveling from Western airports into the teeth of the Jihad, to its social media operation, its propaganda and its plans.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a resounding victory at the polls on March 17th. His party Likud will have an expected 30 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, compared to 24 seats for its closest competitor, the Zionist Union. As a result, Mr. Netanyahu is in the strongest position to form a new right-of-center coalition government.

After seeing their hopes for regime change in Israel go up in smoke, Obama administration officials have been attacking what White House spokesman Josh Earnest called Mr. Netanyahu’s “divisive rhetoric” during the election campaign. They did not like that the prime minister rejected a two-state solution as they envision it should be designed. They were unhappy with likely plans by a new Netanyahu government for more settlement construction. And they objected to the prime minister’s last minute efforts to rally his supporters to come to the polls by telling them, in a video posted on social media, that they could lose the election because “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” Finally, Obama is still smarting from Mr. Netanyahu’s historic speech before a joint session of Congress warning about the perils of the bad nuclear deal with Iran that may be in the offing.

The Islamic Society of Santa Barbara (ISSB) is determined to construct a 10,000-square ft. mosque in Goleta, CA. Their effort to do so began in 2001 when they purchased a parcel of land in Goleta, CA, a recently incorporated town in Santa Barbara County. That was followed by an application for construction filed by developers in 2003. In December 2013, the the Goleta City Council unanimously approved the project. “All of us made history today,” ISSB Chairman Jamal Hamdani said at the time. “I am truly proud to be an American, a Muslim, and a member of this community.”

The ISSB was founded in 1984 and according to its website it is a 501(c)(3) independent organization. Their ideological commitments include teaching the Qur’an and the customs of the Prophet Mohammed, and they insist their approach to Islam is one in which they will “educate and remind,” rather than “compel, dictate, judge, or classify.”

Yet there is a bit of disingenuousness attached to one of their statements: “Islam is a set of philosophical and spiritual outlooks; ISSB does not engage in political activities.”

As the saying goes, “to err is human, to forgive is divine,” to which I’d add: “to ignore” is even more human, and the results rarely divine. None of us would be human if we did not occasionally get so wedded to our wishes that we failed to notice — or outright ignored — the facts on the ground that make a laughingstock of our hopes. Only when the gap gets too wide to ignore does policy change. This is where a lot of U.S. policy is heading these days in the Middle East. Mind the gaps — on Iran, Israel and Iraq. We are talking about our choices in these countries with words that strike me as about 10 years out of date. Alas, we are not dealing anymore with your grandfather’s Israel, your father’s Iran or the Iraq your son or daughter went off to liberate.

Let’s start with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party pretty well trounced the Labor Party leader, Isaac Herzog, in the race to form Israel’s next government. Netanyahu clearly made an impressive 11th-hour surge since the pre-election polls of last week. It is hard to know what is more depressing: that Netanyahu went for the gutter in the last few days in order to salvage his campaign — renouncing his own commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians and race-baiting Israeli Jews to get out and vote because, he said, too many Israeli Arabs were going to the polls — or the fact that this seemed to work.

Reza Aslan, the religion writer who claimed that his academic credentials include a Ph.D. in the history of religions (his Ph.D. is in sociology, not history; he teaches creative writing) and two decades’ study of Christianity, will have his own show on CNN, the network that invented cable news but which has lately seen its ratings plummet.

Aslan rose to fame on his 2013 book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, about which the genuine religious scholar Allan Nadler wrote in the Jewish Review of Books:

Aslan’s entire book is, as it turns out, an ambitious and single-minded polemical counter-narrative to what he imagines is the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus Christ.

And

Whichever [New Testament] verses fit the central argument of his book, he accepts as historically valid. Everything else is summarily dismissed as apologetic theological rubbish of absolutely no historical worth.

Nadler’s conclusion nails the real point behind Aslan’s efforts: the ahistorical claim that the three great monotheistic religions share equally violent pasts:

Finally, is Aslan’s insistence on the essential “Jewishness” of both Jesus and his zealous political program not also a way of suggesting that Judaism and Jesus, no less than Islam and Mohammed, are religions and prophets that share a similarly sordid history of political violence; that the messianic peasant-zealot from Nazareth was a man no more literate and no less violent than the prophet Mohammed?

CONTENTS
1. Obama happy to congratulate Russian, Chinese, Iranian despots for their rigged elections
2. Indian PM congratulates Bibi in Hebrew; leaders of other democracies send goodwill messages (but not Obama)
3. Netanyahu’s choices for Israel’s next coalition
4. Netanyahu and Israel’s Arab population
5. “White House: It is wrong to encourage non-Arab Israelis to vote to offset foreign bankrolled encouragement of Arab-Israelis to vote”
6. Haaretz’s bitter post-election coverage
7. “Obama loses his bid to defeat a U.S. ally” (Wall St Journal, March 18, 2015)
8. “The role of the Palestinian Authority in Israel’s election results” (By Alan Dershowitz, Gatestone Institute, March 18, 2015)
9. “Why the media always get Israeli elections wrong” (By Jonathan Schanzer, Politico, March 18, 2015)
10. “Israel chose Bibi over Barack” (By Eli Lake, Bloomberg, March 18, 2015)