RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/top-us-general-dempsey-israel-went-to-extraordinary-lengths-to-protect-gaza-civilians?f=must_reads

Defenders of Israel’s conduct of this summer’s war in Gaza got a significant boost Thursday when General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed Israeli policies and procedures saying that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to prevent civilian casualties.

The Times of Israel reported the comments made at a forum at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in New York City. “I actually do think that Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties,” said General Dempsey. “In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you’re going to be criticized for civilian casualties,” he added.

Dempsey’s comments contrast with those of Amnesty International, who issued a report Wednesday accusing Israel of war crimes in conducting operations in Gaza. AI said Israeli forces “brazenly flouted the laws of war” and showed “callous indifference to the carnage” caused by attacks on civilian targets. In some cases, said AI, Israeli airstrikes on inhabited Palestinian homes “amount to war crimes.”

israel blasted the AI report as being one-sided Hamas propaganda.

Dempsey stressed that Israel faced some special dangers in Gaza. The Hamas tunnels, he said, “caused the IDF some significant challenges.” Dempsey added that the Israelis “did some extraordinary things to try to limit civilian casualties, to include… making it known that they were going to destroy a particular structure.”

Dempsey listed Israel Defense Forces measures such as the “roof-knocking” (dropping small bomblets on the roof of a building to let those inside know the building was going to be hit soon) and the dropping of warning leaflets in neighborhoods and buildings where military targets existed as part of Israel’s attempts to protect civilian lives.

“The IDF is not interested in creating civilian casualties. They’re interested in stopping the shooting of rockets and missiles out of the Gaza Strip and into Israel,” Dempsey argued.

In fact, revealed Dempsey, an American delegation visited Israel three months ago to learn about how Israel handled the particular challenges of the war, particularly to learn about methods for preventing civilian casualties and how to counter Hamas tunneling.

If you follow big time college sports as I do, the latest news out of the University of North Carolina about bogus classes and inflated grades involving more than 3000 students over two decades has to be of great concern.

It has been apparent that the student-athlete in Division I schools is an oxymoron. There are occasional stories of the college graduate who reads at the third grade level or the football star who couldn’t find a classroom on campus. Now, however, a scandal has been reported bigger than any previously mentioned.

According to the report by former federal prosecutor Kenneth Wainstein, football and basketball players took no-show courses in the college’s African and Afro-American Studies programs earning passing grades. Students didn’t have to show up for what was deemed a “shadow curriculum” in the 1993 to 2011 period. Within this period the cherished N.C. basketball team won three of its five national titles. And Coach Dean Smith was virtually beatified by alumni members as a venerable state leader.

Two people at the center of the controversy, former department chairman Julius Nyang’oro and retired administrator Deborah Crowder, have been cooperating with Mr. Wainstein after criminal charges were dropped. School Chancellor Carol Folt characterized the matter as “a case where you have bad actions of a few and inaction of many more.” This latest inquiry comes on the heels of an investigation by former Governor Jim Martin who found there were lecture classes in the 1990’s that never met.

Ms. Crowder claimed she simply wanted “to help students” who weren’t supported by the university. This, of course, is a curious way of providing assistance. Mr. Nyang’oro admitted to “leniency,” but dereliction of responsibility goes beyond leniency. This was a case of awarding high grades for little or no performance. And despite protestations of innocence, every administrator in the university and every coach in the football and basketball programs had to know what was going on.

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind, and convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmieh Yousef Odeh learned that the hard way on November 10 when a Detroit jury found her guilty of committing immigration fraud. She faces up to 10 years in a federal penitentiary and deportation following her incarceration.

The story began on Friday, February 21, 1969 when two unsuspecting Israeli university students, Leon Kaner, 21, and Edward Jaffe, 22, stopped at a Jerusalem supermarket to pick up some last minute provisions for a hike the two were planning to take. They never made it and were blown to bits by a bomb placed in coffee cans on a shelf. Nine others were injured in the blast. Jaffe and Kaner, as well as the nine injured civilians, were targeted for no other reason other than the fact that they were Jews with the temerity to live in their ancestral land.

A second bomb, timed to go off just as first responders arrived, was diffused by security forces. A third bomb placed near the British consulate office in Jerusalem was also discovered and destroyed in a controlled detonation, though another bomb placed near the same vicinity some days later did manage to cause structural damage.

The terrorists had chosen Friday to carry out their act of depravity because they knew the supermarket would be packed with civilians shopping for the upcoming Sabbath. It was their intent to cause a bloodbath and inflict maximum civilian casualties. In a testament to Israeli resiliency, the supermarket, belonging to the “Supersol” supermarket chain, opened for business just two days later.

On March 1, 1969, Odeh, her sister and three others were arrested for the bombings. All were members of the notorious Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist group designated by the United States as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO).

Odeh was convicted of all charges and spent the next 10 years in an Israeli prison. She was released in 1979 as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP and spent the next four years living in Lebanon. Following that, she moved to Jordan and then made her way to the United States where her father lived.

CHECK OUT CAIR’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA FEATURING ILLINOIS SENATOR DICK DURBIN:

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/03/24/dick-durbin-the-cairing-illinois-senator/

DURBIN RANKS A + 5 ON THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE’S SCORECARD FOR LEGISLATORS INDICATING A VERY PRO-ARAB VOTING RECORD. HE RECENTLY GRATIFIED HIS SUPPORTERS BY ATTENDING A CAIR 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA.
CAIR has been designated by the FBI and several in Congress as a supporter of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.
“For more than 10 years, CAIR-Chicago has enhanced the understanding of Islam within our communities by facilitating dialogue, protecting civil liberties, empowering American Muslims, and building coalitions which promote justice and mutual understanding. I applaud your commitment to guaranteeing that our country’s ideals are fully respected and realized for all.”
– Dick Durbin
U.S. Senator, State of Illinois

On the night of Saturday, November 8, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of CAIR held its 20th Anniversary Banquet at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It was fitting that two out of three of the event’s featured speakers have been associated with terrorism, as 20 years ago CAIR was founded as a main component of a Palestinian terrorist enterprise inside the United States.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been in existence for 20 years — since June 1994 — when it opened up its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The group was established as being a part of the American Palestine Committee, an umbrella organization run by then-global Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, who was based in the U.S. at the time and who now operates out of Egypt as a spokesman for Hamas.

The other members of the umbrella included a Hamas financing wing, Holy Land Foundation (HLF); a Hamas propaganda wing, Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP); and a Hamas command center, United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which was then led by Ahmed Yousef, who later left the U.S. for Gaza to become Senior Political Adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya.

The founding and current National Executive Director of CAIR is Nihad Awad. Just prior to co-founding CAIR, Awad held the position of Public Relations Director for the IAP. As the propaganda wing of Hamas, the IAP had been involved in distributing Hamas terrorist videos and publishing vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel materials, including the Hamas charter in different languages.

Only months before the creation of CAIR, Awad announced his support for Hamas.

It would be difficult to imagine any Attorney General nominee who could guarantee a more seamless transition from the Eric Holder years than Loretta Lynch, who has been the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York since 2010. Her uncanny ability to detect phantoms of white racism lurking ominously around every corner is proof-positive of her fitness to serve as Holder’s successor in the Obama administration.

Lynch believes that voter ID laws are part of a racist effort to suppress minority turnout at the polls. “Fifty years after the civil rights movement,” she avers, “we stand in this country at a time when we see people trying to take back so much of what Dr. [Martin Luther] King fought for … and [to] reverse the [gains] that have been made in voting in this country.” Consequently, Lynch is eminently “proud” that the Justice Department has filed suit against states which have enacted voter ID laws “seek[ing] to limit our ability to stand up and exercise our rights as citizens.” Lynch also supports efforts to restore the voting rights of (disproportionately black) convicted felons who “have served their debt to society”—a measure that would “en[d] the chain of permanent disenfranchisement that visits many of them.”

By Lynch’s reckoning, school discipline policies that result in higher rates of suspension and expulsion for nonwhite children than for whites, are racist as well. “Zero-tolerance programs,” she told a mostly black audience in 2013, “are often used [to] take our babies, minority children, black children, Hispanic children, and they put them out of school before they have a chance to learn.” Building on this theme, Lynch praised the Justice Department for having “gone into the South, although we’re looking further, and brought the first … ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ cases against school districts in Alabama.” The question of whether black youth exhibit disproportionate levels of disruptive behavior in the classroom—perhaps partially as a consequence of the black community’s high rate of father-absent households—did not spark Lynch’s curiosity in the least. The tidy, all-purpose explanation of racial insensitivity was sufficient for her purposes.

In April 2014, Lynch participated in a panel titled “Strengthening the Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color” alongside Eric Holder and none other than Al Sharpton, who has never been known to squander an opportunity to depict white police officers as trigger-happy bigots when dealing with black suspects. One of the panel’s “action items” stated authoritatively: “Remember that racial bias is pervasive. Research has shown that people who are not consciously mistrustful of African Americans or intentionally racist can still behave in a way that is influenced by racial bias.” In other words, even well-meaning whites in law-enforcement are little more unwitting Klansmen.

Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion.” Those two words summon up spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.

But for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t.

Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home from her job as a children’s occupational therapist. Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a volunteer organization for the elderly and disabled. But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did what songs, cartoons and posters distributed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car Jihad” had been telling him to do.

He ran her over with a Mazda van.

With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the courageous Islamic Jihadist stabbed her as she lay dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the unarmed man fighting him off with his bare hands proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody.

Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross, heard that there had been an attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and mothers began doing right after they heard the news.

He called his daughter. There was no answer.

Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what was coming. This wasn’t her killer’s first act of terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim of Islamic terrorism.

When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked by a knife-wielding terrorist in the same place. But the terrorist didn’t have a van and there were armed men at the scene.

“I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion Junction when a terrorist came and began to stab those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would later write.

She described terrorists for whom prison life is “like a hotel”, who watch television, take courses and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out to Heaven.”

“Punish and expel those who threaten us,” Dalia wrote, “no matter the cost to them. They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism will end.”

What the Ploughshares Fund is actually doing with its proposed budget cuts, it appears, is trying to camouflage the objectives of permanently disarming America of key parts of its nuclear capability.

Describing the U.S. nuclear force structure as a “Cold War relic” says nothing about whether the force is still needed. Oddly, the nuclear cuts being proposed do not require any reciprocal Russian reductions.

Cutting $20 billion a year from the current U.S. nuclear deterrent would require killing all modernization, plus all the work of extending the life of nuclear warheads. In 20 years, the U.S. would be left with no effective nuclear deterrent, while China, Russia and North Korea are modernizing their nuclear deterrents across the board.

“You have to invent a ‘Dragon’ to slay.” — U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, explaining how to kill defense programs.

In Washington, a delay often has the same impact as killing a program.

It has been 33 years since the U.S. last embarked on a nuclear modernization program.

Both the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense have called for a debate over what the future costs of the nuclear deterrent enterprise should be and what investment is needed to keep the peace and prevent nuclear war.

At issue is whether the United States can afford to spend 4% of its defense budget and 0.6% of all federal spending to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next decade and beyond.

Two widely divergent views are emerging.

The first is that a plan is necessary to modernize the U.S. nuclear capability to keep it a robust and credible deterrent in the face of advances currently being made by China and Russia and North Korea in their nuclear programs

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve, where he served as a Military Attaché to Israel.

The goal of the Islamic State might be to create enough chaos in the capital city of Baghdad to cause a mass exodus of its Shia population southward, this ceding Baghdad to the Sunnis by default.

Is it still possible to salvage if not Iraq, at least Baghdad? Sunni Muslim troops, led by ISIS (now the so-called Islamic State, or IS) and fighting against the Iraqi government, have virtually surrounded Baghdad. Iraq’s largest province, al-Anbar, is almost totally occupied by anti-regime forces. Only a portion of Fallujah remains outside of occupation by the IS-led forces. After the IS took over the city of Hit, regular Iraqi units fell back into a defensive posture at al-Asad, the largest military facility in Anbar. Several key population centers to the north and northeast have also fallen, and there is still heavy fighting around the oil refineries of the northern city of Baiji.

IS’s gains north of Baghdad last month prompted U.S. aircraft bombing sorties. Since June, the central government also has lost ground east of the capital; Diyala Province barely remains under Shia control. After the collapse of government forces in Hillah, south of the capital, and IS’s mid-June seizures of Iskandariyah and Mahmoudiyah, barely six miles south of the Baghdad, routes to Iraq’s Shia heartland have also now been jeopardized.While the fall of the capital is certainly not imminent, IS’s strategy appears clear. Opposition forces will likely continue to tighten the noose around Baghdad in an attempt to create a sense of isolation. IS will avoid, for now, any large-scale assault on Baghdad for three reasons: it does not have the manpower; Shia militias outnumber enemy forces and will fight zealously to keep the Shia in control of the capital; and a major attack might cause remaining U.S. ground forces to become actively involved in the conflict.

At noon on Monday, 18-year-old terrorist Nur a-Din Hashiyeh tried to wrest the rifle from 20-year-old IDF Staff Sgt. Almog Shiloni at a train station in Tel Aviv. When Shiloni resisted, Hashiyeh, from the Palestinian Authority-controlled area of Nablus, stabbed him. Onlookers immediately tried to resuscitate Shiloni. Others tried to overpower Hashiyeh, who managed to run away, until police caught up with him in a nearby building.

Shiloni was transferred to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he died on Monday night.

Hashiyeh, who sustained minor injuries, was brought to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Fearing revenge attacks from the mob of Israelis who had gathered around the train station yelling “Death to terrorists,” the police covered him from head to toe and whisked him off in an ambulance.

Hashiyeh is a member of Hamas. One photo that has been circulating shows him holding a sign that reads: “We are a people whose passion for death is like our enemies’ desire for life.”

Early Monday evening, as Shiloni was still fighting for his life, 30-year-old Maher al-Hashlamoun, an Islamic Jihad member from Hebron, set out to commit the kind of vehicular attack against innocent Israelis that has become popular among Arabs in the PA. But when he arrived at the hitchhiking stop next to the Judean settlement of Alon Shvut (opposite the very spot where three Israeli teens were abducted and slaughtered in the summer), his car crashed into a concrete block.

Undeterred, he exited the car and began stabbing the people at the stop, among them a young man. He also slashed the throat of 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus from Tekoa, who died at the scene.

While Hashlamoun was on his rampage, a passing driver stopped to intervene. He ended up getting stabbed in the jaw, but did enable the guard at the entrance to Alon Shvut to shoot Hashlamoun. Like the two innocents he attempted to murder, Hashlamoun was brought to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem.

Since the outbreak of the latest Middle East war a few years back, we have been chronicling the Washington political class’s Syria Fairy Tales. In particular, there is the story line that Syria is really teeming with secular democrats and authentic moderate Muslims who would have combined forces to both overthrow Assad and fight off the jihadists if only President Obama had helped them. But his failure to act created a “vacuum” that was tragically filled by Islamist militants and gave rise to ISIS. At this point in the story, you are supposed to stay politely mum and not ask whether it makes any sense that real democrats and actual moderates would agree to be led by head-chopping, mass-murdering, freedom-stifling sharia terrorists.

In point of fact, there simply have never been enough pro-Western elements in Syria to win, no matter how much help came their way. There was never going to be a moderate, democratic Syrian state without a U.S. invasion and occupation for a decade or more, an enterprise that would be politically untenable — and, as the Iraq enterprise shows, unlikely to succeed. The “moderate rebels” had no chance against Assad unless they colluded with the Islamist militants, who are vastly superior and more numerous fighters. And they would have even less chance of both knocking off Assad and staving off the jihadists.

The Obama administration and the Beltway commentariat have done their best to obscure these brute facts. Their main tactic is to exploit the American public’s unfamiliarity with the makeup of Syria. Obama Democrats and much of the Beltway GOP continue to invoke the “moderate Syrian rebels” while steadfastly refusing to identify just who those purported “moderates” are. They hope you won’t realize that, because of the dearth of actual moderate Muslims and freedom fighters, they must count among their “moderate rebels” both the Muslim Brotherhood (which should be designated as a terrorist organization) and various other Islamist factions, including . . . wait for it . . . parts of al-Nusra — i.e., al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise.

We’ve also noted that a new wrinkle has recently been added to the Beltway’s Syria Fairy Tales: Obama’s Khorasan Fraud. In a desperate attempt to conceal the falsity of Obama’s boasts about destroying what is actually a resurgent al-Qaeda, the administration claimed that the threat to America that impelled Obama to start bombing Syria was not ISIS (supposedly just a “regional” threat), not al-Qaeda (already defeated, right?), but a hitherto unknown terrorist organization called the “Khorasan group.”