RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Cold War that had existed between it and the U.S. since the end of World War Two came to an end, but there was ditritus, loose ends like Cuba and it has taken until now for an end to the diplomatic obstacles whose roots reach back to the Eisenhower administration. In 1960 it had approved a CIA plan to arm and train a group of Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Cuban dictator, Flugencio Batista, fled Havana on January 1, 1959 and Fidel Castro and his rebels entered the capital a week later on January 8. One sees the world through the prism of one’s own life and, that event was six months prior to my graduating from the University of Miami.

Among my friends in college were young men who were the children of well-to-do Cubans, so I was more aware of what was occurring than most my age when Castro took over. In 1960 I was inducted into the army and it was big news when the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred on April 14, 1961. President Kennedy had moved ahead on the CIA plan, but it was a failure and it was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The nation was literally on the edge of nuclear confrontation.

In the lead up to that the Second Infantry Division of which my unit was a part ceased its training mission and converted to one of battle readiness. In my case, however, I had already been discharged in April 1962. Kennedy declared a blockage of Cuba which had installed the Soviet missiles. Wisely, the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev agreed to remove them.

Staggering.

The United States of America – Earth’s sole remaining superpower – capitulated to both Cuba and North Korea in one day. Final Score: Open-air Museums of Stalinism – 2; Land of the Free and Home of the Brave – 0.

Obama announced on Wednesday that Washington and the Castro regime would resume diplomatic relations after a 53-year estrangement. This platinum-medal prize for totalitarian legend Fidel Castro, 88, and his brother Raul, a sprightly man of 83, came at a cost to them of . . . nothing!

Normalization might have made sense in exchange for the Castros’ liberating all political prisoners from their dungeons. (In 2008, Obama promised that normal relations only would happen after the Castros’ political jails were emptied.) A strict timetable for free elections might have merited Obama’s move. So might have Cuba’s adoption of freedoms of movement, speech, press, property, and religion – for starters. The Castros still offer their people none of the above. Fidel and Raul get to eat their dictatorial cake and have it, too, with diplomatic-relations frosting on top. Free of charge.

Obama’s Christmas present to these aging autocracts lacks the geopolitical genius and strategic benefits of President Nixon’s February 1972 overture to China. Instead, it’s just one young strongman handing the ultimate bucket-list item to two ancient strongmen. The only strings attached to Obama’s gift are the ribbons around the wrapping paper.

America’s surrender to North Korea and its hackers is even more bothersome.

Baden-Baden has been a spa town since Roman times, drawing tourists for its therapeutic waters, and more recently for a festival hall that features prominent classical artists. It also has a Faberge museum, which seems appropriate at this time of year: Christmas in Germany is like a brightly decorated eggshell with no egg inside. The forms of the holiday are merrily observed, but not the faith. To declare one’s belief in a personal God counts for proof of mental defect here as well as in most parts of Europe, especially among educated people. Nonetheless there is more faith left in Germany’s Protestant establishment than among America’s mainline Protestant churches, and it’s something for a visiting Jew to rejoice about here at Christmas time.

The Presbyterian Church USA, the flagship church of America’s fading Protestant mainline, voted to boycott the state of Israel earlier this year, and nearly voted to prohibit the use of the word “Israel” in its prayers. The new Marcionism of the mainline churches justifies its aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies by rejecting a link between the living Jewish people and the God of Abraham. By contrast, both Pope John Paul II of blessed memory and Benedict XVI emphasized that God’s covenant with the Jewish people never was revoked.

That is also the firmly-stated view of the German Evangelical Church, the main body of German Protestantism, and it was front-page news in Die Welt, one of the country’s quality dailies, this morning. Its new chairman, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, told the newspaper,

Barack Obama has proven to be a determined man when it comes to achieving goals he really cares about. He may not get everything he wants when he wants it, but he has shown that there is often more than one way to advance his agenda, and he can be patient when the political environment is unfavorable. This has been true on both the domestic front and in foreign policy.

Obama has used federal agencies such as the EPA and NLRB to move aggressively to favor Obama interests (bashing coal producers, making it easier for workers to organize into unions) when Congress did not adopt climate change legislation or “card check” legislation. The Department of Health and Human Services has regularly changed the rules of Obamacare, seemingly making the rules up as they go along when it became clear that certain provisions were either very badly conceived or politically unpalatable to important Obama interest groups.

There has also been subterfuge to make it seem that the abuse of the separation of powers and routine bypassing of Congress has not really occurred. The president says he has issued far fewer executive orders than prior presidents, when in fact he has issued far more when you include his memoranda [1] – which serve the same purpose.

In foreign policy, the administration has pursued several policies with the same doggedness. One of these has been to damage the historically close ties between Israel and the United States. The alternative way to say this is that so long as Israel elects leaders who do not see things the way the administration does, it will be very much out of favor with the White House.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/isiss-sex-slave-pamphlet-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Scholar of Islam Louis Lionheart and joined by Dr. Mark Durie, a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Dr. Durie came on the show to discuss ISIS’s Sex Slave Pamphlet, explaining the Islamic references in the Islamic State’s new “rulebook.”

The Land of Enlightenment is fast becoming the land of darkness for France’s Jewish citizens.

And many in the French Jewish community have been aware of this sad situation for some time, a realization that was reinforced by the attack on two synagogues by Muslim rioters in Paris last summer during the Gaza conflict. But the latest shocking, anti-Semitic crime that occurred early in December in the same city has deepened the community’s feeling that the possibility of living peaceful lives with a Jewish identity in France is rapidly disappearing.

The latest outrage produced by France’s growing anti-Semitic climate, found especially in its Muslim community, concerns the brutal and horrifying robbery of a Jewish family in their home in Creteil, a Parisian suburb. Three gloved and masked men, armed with pistols and a sawed-off shotgun, gained entrance to the family’s apartment after ringing the doorbell. Present in the apartment were a young man, 21, and his 19-year-old girlfriend, who answered the door. Both were immediately tied up and robbed of jewellery, cellphones, computers and bank cards.

“They said they knew we had cash in the flat ‘because Jews have money and they never keep it in the bank’,” the young man, identified only as Jonathan, said in an interview on French radio.

But the worst was yet to come. While one of the robbers left to use the bank cards, the man and his girlfriend were placed in different rooms, and the young woman was then raped.

The FBI accused the North Korean government last week of perpetrating the devastating cyberattacks against Sony’s computer network for which a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace took responsibility. The North Korean government denied the charge and warned of serious consequences if the United States launched any counter-attack. President Obama ignored the threat, declaring that the U.S. would respond “proportionally” to what he characterized as cyberspace “vandalism.”

This Monday, North Korea experienced a total Internet outage for a bit less than ten hours. “I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at DYN Research, told North Korea Tech, referring to North Korea’s Internet country code top-level domain. “Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently.”

North Korea’s Internet access, which it obtains through China-based facilities, has since been restored.

Some observers have attributed the temporary Internet outage to the fulfillment, in part or in whole, of Obama’s “proportional” response, which a White House National Security spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny. Whether China may have played a role in the temporary outage is unknown, but doubtful.

“You have a cross on… Do you know what we do to people like you?” — Muslim in Denmark.

Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way into the church, cut [the pastor], his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the building on fire… We only found the charred remains of the three of them in the morning. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any traces of Christianity in the town.” — Eyewitness account, Nigeria.

Each year, approximately 1,000 women in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Whenever a case of this nature reaches the law courts, those women, under threat and blackmail, often declare that their conversion and marriage were decisions freely made, and the case is closed.

The Muslim persecution of Christians in September started making prominent appearances not just in the Islamic world, but also in the West—in America, Australia and Europe.

In the United States, in Columbus, Indiana, three churches were vandalized on the same night. The words most frequently sprayed were “Infidels!” and “Koran 3:151.” The verse from the Koran states, “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or “infidels”] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

Like many other Americans, I have always had a desire to travel to Israel and visit firsthand the many historical sites of spiritual significance. I was recently afforded the opportunity to fulfill that desire and was not disappointed.

In addition to being greatly inspired, I had an opportunity to speak with numerous Israeli citizens from a variety of backgrounds. One of the overwhelming themes in those conversations was the feeling of abandonment by the government of the United States. Some of the more diplomatic individuals said they felt sidelined by a U.S. government that had more important issues to deal with. Of course, they had not forgotten the times that our military and financial aid saved them from utter defeat at the hands of their numerous local enemies.

We must remember that Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey with only 8 million people. It is surrounded by Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, with several other hostile nations in proximity. Enemy forces are in control of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which consists primarily of Samaria and Judea and is home to many elements that are less than friendly toward Israel. If not for the Iron Dome missile defense system, the multitudinous rockets that were launched at Israel this summer from Gaza would have wreaked unimaginable damage on the tiny country. Many Israelis believe, probably correctly, that the aggressiveness of the hostile nations surrounding them is increased when the perception exists that we in the United States are not seriously committed to their protection.

Whatever happens to the movie “The Interview” – a Sony Pictures flick that parodies an assassination of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – is not quite as important as our nation’s response to the North Korean attack on Sony, but nearly so. At this point, the Obama administration appears undecided on what, if any, our response should be.

What happened was an attack – purportedly by a group calling itself the “Guardians of Peace” – aimed at blackmailing Sony to not release the film. Sony’s computer networks were infected with malicious computer code which enabled the hackers to steal private data including emails, employee records and even the script for the next James Bond movie. It also enabled them to erase data, bringing the company to a standstill. The computer networks of Sony’s accounting firm, Deloitte, according to a confidential source were also attacked.

Then came threats of attacks against movie theaters showing the film, at which point Sony cancelled its release. (It has since announced a limited release in approximately 200 theaters and to stream it online.)

Last week, the FBI issued a statement which said that they had enough information to conclude that the North Korean government was responsible for these attacks. President Obama said on Sunday that, “I don’t think it was an act of war, it was an act of cyber-vandalism that was very costly, very expensive.”

Obama is right in one respect. An act of war must be defined as an act which causes physical harm to people or property. But he is wrong to say that it was merely an act of vandalism.