RUTHFULLY YOURS

Before seeing “Mr. Turner,” written and directed by Mike Leigh, it would be wise to get some background information on JMW Turner, the great British painter who transformed seascapes into ephemeral swirls of impressionistic light and color decades before impressionism became a movement. In the movie, Turner is played by Timothy Spall who creates a persona not unlike the hunchback of Notre Dame – a man whose default facial expression is a tight-lipped scowl, underscored by frequent grunts and inappropriate gropes. Though he wears a top hat and is clearly an acclaimed member of the Royal Academy, it’s hard for his peers and the audience to know what to make of his behavior. Does he suffer from Tourettes syndrome or some personality disorder? What accounts for his attractiveness to the kind and caring Mrs. Booth who doesn’t know that he is the famous painter until well into their relationship? Leigh does little to try to explain Turner’s peculiarities, wanting us to accept him at face value – an eccentric genius and a riddle for which there is no answer.

We discover halfway through the film that the artist who claims to have no children does indeed have a living daughter and one who has just died yet there is no filial sentiment aroused by either nor any compassion for the grieving woman who bore them. Lest we suspect that he is someone who can’t form emotional connections, we see his deep attachment to the elderly father whom he still calls “daddy” and whom he respects and adores. Later, we see the domestic tranquility of his secret life with Mrs. Booth but it’s an enigmatic contrast to his ongoing brutal relationship with his awkward housekeeper, almost his female counterpart.

Chuck Hagel’s abrupt departure from the Pentagon on November 24 became inevitable after weeks of disagreement with the White House over strategy against the Islamic State (IS). The split had become public a month earlier, when Hagel’s blunt two-page memorandum on Middle East policy was leaked to the press. Addressed to national security advisor Susan Rice, the memo warned that the campaign against the Islamic State would unravel unless there was greater clarity regarding Washington’s intentions in Syria.

Hagel was ambivalent. On the one hand, he was uncomfortable with the insistence of humanitarian bombers on Obama’s team—notably Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power—that targeting the regime of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad should be an integral part of anti-IS strategy. On the other, he was aware that the nascent anti-IS coalition could unravel if its stridently anti-Assad members, such as Saudi Arabia, decided that the effort was no longer worth their while. All along he was unable to spell out what would constitute victory against the Islamic State and how the current strategy is going to achieve it.

To make things worse for Hagel, his relations with Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had become strained because of the latter’s doubts about Obama’s “no boots on the ground” approach to the Islamic State. On several occasions last fall Dempsey indicated that eventually American ground troops may be needed in anti-IS operations in Iraq—“we’re certainly considering it,” he told the House Armed Services Committee in testimony on November 13—but the White House remained adamant that this would not happen. In addition, Dempsey is believed to favor rapprochement with Bashar’s regime as the only viable anti-IS force on the ground, but Hagel was unwilling to support such a radical policy shift. In the end Hagel looked almost irrelevant: When Dempsey testified in the House in mid-November, some congressmen behaved as if Hagel was not in the room; and he acted as if he did not have much to say.

KANO, Nigeria (AP) – A 13-year-old says her father gave her to Boko Haram extremists and that she was arrested after refusing to explode a suicide bomb in Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city in the north.

Nigeria has suffered numerous suicide bombings in recent months carried out by girls and young women. That has raised fears that the insurgents are using kidnapped girls.

The girl told a news conference Wednesday night that she saw many people being buried alive at the Boko Haram camp where her father took her in Bauchi state, east of Kano.

She said her captors asked if she wanted to go to paradise and, when she said yes, explained she would have to be a suicide bomber.

“When I was told I would have to die to enter paradise, that I would have to explode a bomb and die, I said I cannot do it,” she said.

When they threatened to kill her, she allowed them to strap her into a vest primed with explosives, saying “I was afraid to be buried alive.”

Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl.

—Che Guevara, Motorcycle Diaries

President Obama’s recent move to cozy up to Communist Cuba is a crucially important moment not just diplomatically, but as a moral one in regards to human rights, dignity and justice. As we witness a Radical-in-Chief throwing an economic lifeline to a barbaric tyranny, it is our duty and obligation to shine a light on the dark tragedy of the Cuban Gulag — and to reflect on the unspeakable suffering that Cubans have endured under Castro’s fascistic regime.

Until July 26, 2008, Fidel Castro had ruled Cuba with an iron grip for nearly five decades. On that July date in 2008, he stood to the side because of health problems and made his brother, Raul, de facto ruler. Raul officially replaced his brother as dictator on February 24, 2008; the regime has remained just as totalitarian as before and can, for obvious reasons, continue to be regarded and labelled as “Fidel Castro’s” regime.

Having seized power on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro followed the tradition of Vladimir Lenin and immediately turned his country into a slave camp. Ever since, Cuba has distinguished itself as one of the most monstrous human-rights abusers in the world.

In December 2011, former House Speaker and presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich made the following observation regarding the Palestinians;

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community…

That comment set off a firestorm of debate and criticism but is in actuality, grounded in historical fact. As noted historian Benny Morris pointed out in his acclaimed book, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, at the turn of the 20th century, most Arabs residing in the Land of Israel or “Palestine” considered themselves to be subjects of the Ottoman Empire. There were some Palestinian Arabs with vague nationalistic tendencies but even this minority considered itself to be part of Greater Syria. There simply was no reference to an independent Palestine for a distinct group of people calling themselves “Palestinians.”

Morris also perceptively notes that the residents of Palestinian villages routinely failed to come to the assistance of nearby villages that were under attack by Jewish forces thus reinforcing the view that Arab villagers felt little loyalty to all but clan and village. The notion of a “Palestinian people” was an alien concept to the common Palestinian villager who was not bound by any sense of duty to assist a neighboring village.

The song “ I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is about an overseas soldier during WWII, writing a letter to his family. He tells the family that he will be coming home, and to prepare the holiday for him with “presents on the tree” but ends on a melancholy note, with the soldier saying “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” It was composed by Walter Kent a Jewish American composer who also wrote wrote the music for the wartime classic ” The White Cliffs of Dover”.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by scholar of Islam Louis Lionheart and joined by author and lecturer Dr. Edward L. Dalcour.

Dr. Dalcour came on the show to discuss To Kill a Kafir, explaining Islam’s true teachings on “freedom” of religion. The discussion occurred within the context of Sharia Law: Draconian Legal System, in which Dr. Dalcour unveiled the nightmare spawned by Islamic “theocracy.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/to-kill-a-kafir-on-the-glazov-gang/

Meet Jack Taylor, the Hollywood dentist turned SEAL who was captured behind enemy lines.

Seventy years ago, Jack Taylor, arguably America’s first Navy SEAL, spent Christmas being tortured and beaten in a small, dank cell in a Gestapo prison. “I broke down. It was the only time during all of my captivity,” he says.

Taylor was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Maritime Unit, the group that pioneered the technology and tactics that were the origins of today’s U.S. Navy SEALs. It was an extraordinary and eclectic group of men that also included an archeologist who could have been the model for Indiana Jones and Sterling Hayden, one of Hollywood’s leading stars.

One man close to the organization described the ideal OSS operative as “a Ph.D. who could win a bar fight.” Jack Taylor personified that ideal.

As one of the OSS’s most experienced operatives, this first SEAL planned and executed a parachute mission deep into the Third Reich in the fall of 1944. After Taylor and his team were captured far behind German lines in Austria, he found himself with other high-level prisoners in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

The stories of Taylor and the other OSS frogmen are captured for the first time in my new book, First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America’s Most Elite Unit.

For the first time in 1,400 years, there will be no Christmas celebrations in Nineveh province, home to Iraq’s largest remaining Christian community and largest non-Muslim minority, and a site of great biblical significance. This northern province, whose area is over three times larger than that of Lebanon, is now part of the Islamic State’s caliphate, and its Christians and churches are no longer tolerated.

What has become of Nineveh’s Christians? What will be their fate?

These should be pressing concerns for America, especially its 247 million Christians. Yet the mainstream media rarely cover this story — a New York Times reporter in a recent e-mail says it’s of “limited interest,” explaining that “most of our readers have only vague notions of who they are anyway and why their issues are relevant to the United States.” A better explanation would be that the Times and other establishment elites are reluctant to focus on the goals, rather than just the tactics, of Islamist extremist ideology. A main goal is total Islamization — and it is on the verge of being realized in Iraq.

Iraq’s Christians, who in recent years have clustered in their ancestral Nineveh homeland to escape persecution in Baghdad and Basra, are important culturally and politically. With authentic roots in the earliest years of the faith, they constitute one of the largest remaining native Christian communities in Christianity’s cradle. It was these communities that first structured the sacred liturgy, developed religious music (leading to Gregorian chant), brought to the West monasticism for men and women, and otherwise provided great treasures of Christian patrimony.

Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, has authored a number of books about celebrating Christmas while at war. His latest, about a war he served in, is A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War. He talks about the book, war, and writing history with National Review Online. – KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What turned your attention to Korea for your latest book?

Stanley Weintraub: I was a young Army officer in wartime Korea for 17 months, over two Christmases.

Lopez: How is A Christmas Far from Home “a narrative of two fantasies”?

Weintraub: MacArthur’s fantasy, fed by poor intelligence and personal hubris, was that he could unify all of Korea by Christmas without Red Chinese intervention. He fed the unrealistic hopes of his troops that they would be on the way home by Christmas 1950.

Lopez: Why is the Korean War considered “the Forgotten War”?

Weintraub: The Korean War, only five years after the close of World War II, was almost a continuation of that war. Further, memories of it were overwhelmed by the catastrophe of Vietnam.