RUTHFULLY YOURS

The leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee told Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken this morning that “there really can’t be any marginalization of Congress” on Iran nuclear negotiations.

“Any attempts to sidestep Congress will be resisted on both sides of the aisle,” Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.

Engel also announced that lawmakers have crafted another Iran letter and are ready to send it to the president — signed by 360 members. It began circulating around Congress earlier this month.

He and chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) are hoping to get “a prompt response from the White House.”

The letter to Obama notes that “of the 12 sets of questions that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been seeking, Tehran has answered just part of one. Just last week, the IAEA reported that it is still concerned about signs of Iran’s military related activities, including designing a nuclear payload for a missile.”

In the Israeli elections on Tuesday, an Arab party whose voters were primarily Arab Israelis won 13 parliamentary seats out of 120. The other 107 seats were divided among primarily Jewish Israeli voters.

Of those 107 seats, 24 went to Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni’s left-wing Zionist Camp, five to the far-left Meretz, and 11 to Future (Yesh Atid), a center-left party—for a total of 40 votes for the left-wing camp.

The other 67 votes all went to right-wing and center-right parties, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud far ahead of the pack at 30 seats.

In other words, among the predominantly Jewish voters, the right beat the left 67-40. This is known as a landslide.

It’s a particularly dramatic landslide for a couple of reasons. One is that Netanyahu had already served two consecutive terms, as well as a term in the late 1990s. The conventional wisdom was that Israelis were “tired of him” and looking for a change.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/03/19/marco-rubio-shreds-obamas-treatment-of-israel-video/?print=1 Whatever misgivings some have about him, Rubio’s foreign policy chops are strong and getting stronger. Article printed from The PJ Tatler: http://pjmedia.com/tatler URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/03/19/marco-rubio-shreds-obamas-treatment-of-israel-video/

Perhaps the biggest, most persistent and successful lie about Barack Obama is that he’s a nice guy who cares.

He isn’t.

He doesn’t.

But the last place one expects to hear this myth eviscerated is the New York Times.

Mr. Obama’s strained association with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, who has clashed with other American presidents as well, has been difficult from the start. But the absence of any real connection between them underscores the rule, not the exception, for Mr. Obama, who has only occasionally invested time in cultivating foreign leaders.

Even his opponent in the last presidential race bought into the lie, choosing to label Obama as nice, but incompetent. Mitt Romney apparently convinced many. Among voters who most valued a candidate who “cares about people like me,” 8-in-10 picked Obama in 2012. Majorities of people who prioritized a candidate who “shares my values,” “is a strong leader,” or “has a vision for the future” all voted for Romney.

If there’s one area of the president’s job where being a “nice guy who cares” matters most, and holds the greatest consequences for failure, it’s international diplomacy. Building trusting relationships with allies requires personal engagement, concern about the needs of others, and genuine warmth. The mythical Obama that we were sold embodies all of these qualities.

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.
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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.