RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember the “Mission Accomplished” speech?

You know, the one where the president declared the war in Iraq over, only to have to eat his words as he sent the U.S. military to fight terrorists in Iraq who were taking over vast swaths of the country?

No, I’m not talking about President George W. Bush’s May 1, 2003, speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. I’m talking about President Obama’s speech at the White House on Oct. 21, 2011, in which he boasted about his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and bring “the long war in Iraq” to an end. It’s still on the White House Web site under the (now ironic) headline “Remarks by the President on Ending the War in Iraq.”

“As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama solemnly declared, “[And] today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.”

“The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops,” the president continued, adding “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

“I, however, beg to differ.Words are extremely important. And Netanyahu’s reiteration of certain truths that are under global assault is more crucial than ever, especially with a hostile administration in the White House and difficult opposition at home.But it is because words matter that I have to take issue with the last part of his tour de force on Monday. Concluding that the only way to achieve peace with the Palestinians is to create regional cooperation with the Arab world and international community, Netanyahu asserted that he is “ready to make a historic compromise” in the form of territorial withdrawals.Though he said that this is not because Israel is an occupier in its own land, and added that any peace deal would have to be “anchored in mutual recognition and enduring security arrangements,” he actually repeated that any peace agreement “will obviously necessitate a territorial compromise.”

Announcements like that, particularly in the context of an increasingly radicalizing Middle East and Europe, only serve to embolden the worst elements of Palestinian society. Offering “land for peace” is the best way to convey to Israel’s enemies that they should continue clinging to what Netanyahu himself called the “branches of the same poisonous tree” from which Hamas and ISIS cultivate their “fanatical creed.”He, like all Israelis, ought to know this by now.”

…….As he set off for New York to address the 69th U.N. General Assembly on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he would be delivering a “razor-sharp” speech. Given his oratorical track record, there was little doubt that he would make good on his promise.

He did not disappoint.

Indeed, the Israeli leader’s 35-minute monologue from the podium of the hornet’s nest in midtown Manhattan was a masterpiece. And it took a great performer to be able to pull it off, particularly since the plenum was nearly empty, and the only people present cheering him on were members of his entourage and some of his Jewish-American supporters in the balcony.

But Netanyahu is a pro, and he knows how to talk into a camera, with his sights on a far wider audience.

What he did on Monday, with a mixture of resolve and elegance, was to use the consensus about combating the Islamic State terrorists to warn against militant Islam in all its permutations, emphasizing the danger of a nuclear Iran — the original and ultimate “Islamic State.”

He began by likening militant Islam to a cancer that “starts out small … but left unchecked … grows, metastasizing over wider and wider areas.”

When they’re taken as the literal and eternal truth, words can lead to beheadings.

Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, but even before he beheaded one co-worker at a food-distribution center in central Oklahoma last week, then began stabbing another, presumably someone had considered that Alton Nolen was . . . off.

Nolen — whose attack last Thursday at the workplace of his ex-employer, Vaughan Foods, seemed more suited to Mosul, Iraq, than Moore, Okla. — was not your garden-variety felon recently out of prison. Following his conversion to Islam while in prison, he was a fiery Facebook presence, writing under his Muslim name, Jah’Keem Yisrael. Sample prose:

SHALOM ALHAKEIUM (O YE MUSLIMS) ALLAH (sWT) SAYS IN THE LAST DAYS “PEOPLE WILL BE LOVERS OF THEMSELVES, PROUD AND UNHOLY”. SO TO ALL OF U THAT’S MASTURBATING WHICH I THINK IS 80% OF THE WORLD AND FOR WHATEVER THE DESIRE IT IS IN YOUR HEART THAT U DOING IT FOR-U CAN GET! (WARNING) THIS IS THE LAST DAYS . . . 2ND TIMOTHY 3:2 ****InfoFromAMuslim****

There’s much more of that, supplemented by arguments about the finer points of Muslim doctrine in the comments. For Islamic Facebook evangelism, Nolen is, in part, what one might expect: He prophesies coming judgment; he declares that Sharia will sweep over the world; he castigates women of loose morals. But Nolen also takes the opportunity to declare that hunting and paying taxes are sinful, to rail against paper money, and to warn about the Illuminati. His posts are regularly accompanied by cartoon graphics — clipart, screenshots from Aladdin, the Star of David outlined against the all-seeing eye. He also posts photographs — of the Twin Towers burning and Islamic militants holding grenade launchers, but also of Katie Holmes (in garb that is decidedly haraam).

Better advice would be to channel Ronald Reagan…George Bush was a decent, likeable, patriotic President…but like Obama he babbled about “the religion of peace” hijacked by a few meanies and failed to understand the existential threat of Islam, the evil ambitions of Putin, the dangers of a nuclear Iran ruled by a mad man, and a nuclear North Korea also run by a mad man…..the calamity resulting from the Gaza
withdrawal, and the duplicity of the Saudis whose robed thug he invited to “broker” an Israeli/Arab “peace process” only three months after 9/11….rsk
Talk to your predecessor. It will show contrition, humility and real bipartisanship—things you could use to salvage your presidency.

Bill Clinton made news earlier this month when he revealed, at a joint appearance with George W. Bush, that the 43rd president used to call him twice a year during his troubled second term “just to talk.”

“We talked about everything in the right world,” Mr. Clinton said of the conversations, which lasted anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes. “He asked my opinion, half the time he disagreed with it. But I felt good about that, I thought that was a really healthy thing.”

Maybe President Obama also calls Mr. Bush every now and then, just to talk, and one day we’ll find out about it. But I suspect not. No president has so completely built his administration with a view toward doing—and being—the opposite of his predecessor. Long private talks wouldn’t just be out of character for this president. They’d be awkward.

But having a long conversation with Mr. Bush is what Mr. Obama needs to do if he means to start salvaging his failing presidency. It would be an act of contrition: for six years of vulgar ridicule and sophomoric condescension. Also, humility: for finally understanding that the intel is often wrong (and that doesn’t make you a “liar”), that the choices in war are never clear or simple, that the allies aren’t always with you, and that evil succumbs only to force.

And it would be an act of bipartisanship: not the fake kind to which the president pays occasional lip service, but the kind that knows there is no party monopoly on wisdom, and that there is no democracy without compromise, and that there can be no compromise when your opponents sense you hold them in contempt.

“Mr. President,” Mr. Obama could begin, with an emphasis on formality, “I’d like to borrow that portrait you did of Vladimir Putin so I can hang it in my private study. I need to be able to stare my enemy in the face every day.”

That should break the ice.

So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.

The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.

So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.

PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.

As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”

As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.

For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.

Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.

At least since the early part of the 20th century, aside from oil, the Arab world has produced and exported two products.

It has produced essentially no technology, medicine or anything else in the world of science. It has almost no contributions to world literature, art or to intellectual development.

According to the most recent United Nations Arab Human Development Reports (2003-2005), written by Arab intellectuals, Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates five times more books from English than the entire Arab world, population 370 million. Nor is this a new development. The total number of books translated into Arabic during the last 1,000 years is less than Spain translates into Spanish in one year.

ArabianBusiness.com reports that about 100 million people in the Arab world are illiterate; and three quarters of them are between the ages of 15 and 45.

As for Arab women, the situation is even worse. Nearly half of the Arab world’s women are illiterate, and sexual attacks on women have actually increased since the Arab Spring, as have forced marriages and trafficking. And the exact number of women murdered by family members in “honor killings” is not knowable. It is only known to be large.

In Egypt, the largest Arab country, 91 percent of women and girls are subjected to female genital mutilation, according to UNICEF. Not to mention the number of women in the Arab world who must wear veils or even full-face and full-body coverings known as burkas. And, of course, Saudi Arabia is infamous for not allowing women to drive a car.

Another unhappy feature of the Arab world is the prevalence of lies. To this day, Egypt denies that it was the Egyptian pilot, Ahmed El-Habashi, who allegedly crashed an EgyptAir jet into the ocean deliberately. Vast numbers of Arabs believe that Jews knew of the 9-11 plot and avoided going to work at the World Trade Center that day.

So, then, is there anything at which the Arab world has excelled for the past two generations? Has there been a major Arab export?

As it happens, there are two.

Hatred and violence.

Kobane — a town in northern Syria, not the dead rocker — is one of the focuses of President Obama’s war against ISIS. The fighting is confused by the fact that there aren’t just two sides, but at least six or seven. Obama told the UN last week that “the terrorist group known as ISIL must be degraded, and ultimately destroyed.” Our effort to do so, aided by a coalition of sorts, is going at a glacial pace that will not foreseeably grow faster.

First things first. I’d guesstimate that we’re applying about 2-5 percent of the combined airpower of the U.S. Air Force and Navy to the president’s effort to destroy the Axis of Evil 3.0. That may be because we lack the actionable intelligence to do it faster. And it may be that neither we, nor our coalition members, are willing to do more.

Second, it’s always been clear — as we can see in areas of fighting from Kobane to Iraq’s Kurdish region — that ground forces are needed to drive ISIS from the ground it has taken by force and remains in control of. Either we or our allies will have to provide those troops if Obama’s plan is to succeed. Our allies aren’t willing to do that, and President Obama’s plan to train Syrian “moderates” cannot succeed because that plan is to train too few soldiers and it will take too long.

As Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said last week, the plan is to train only about 5,000 Syrians, and it will first take about five months to vet the possible trainees and another six months or more to train and deploy them. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said recently that at least 12-15,000 such troops would be necessary to force ISIS out of Syria even with the help of American airpower. The creation of such a force — whether it’s 5,000 or 15,000 men, making it effective and integrating it with American airpower — would take decades if it were even possible, which history tells us it’s not.

British General Lord Richards, who until last year was Dempsey’s equivalent as head of the British general staff, said that the only way to defeat ISIS is to take back the land it’s now ruling, which would require a campaign by ground troops, and that air power cannot do the job. According to the Sunday London Times, Richards said that meant Western armies have to do it.

If ISIS and other such groups are an immediate threat to American security, shouldn’t we be applying more U.S. airpower and demanding the Arab nations who are members of the Obama coalition supply the troops now, rather than rely on a training program that will only produce too few troops a year from now?

Our deployment of air forces — even if American troops join them — in the fight against ISIS will have to have to be repeated again and again. Even if ISIS is degraded by air power it and its successors cannot be destroyed because other groups just like it will continually arise and achieve the same strength while espousing the same ideology and goals. And it’s not only new groups, but the usual terrorist groups appearing under new names.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4743/reyhaneh-jabbari-execution

by Mina Ahadi, Nazanin AfshinJam, Shabnam Assadollahi and Shadi Paveh

Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.

Reyhaneh Jabbari has been transferred to Rajai-Shahr Prison to be hanged — while the world parties at the UN and gets ready to permit Iran nuclear capability.

While the West is focused on an Iran nuclear deal and defeating ISIS terrorists, the executioner-regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran continues violating human rights.

The regime has just transferred Reyhaneh Jabbari to Rajai-Shahr Prison in Tehran and, as she is transferred to be executed, told her to say goodbye to her mother and family.

The Petition to Save Reyhaneh Jabbari from being hanged has been signed by over 188,000 people, but as usual has been ignored by the Iranian regime.

Reyhaneh Jabbari’s execution may carried out by tomorrow.

A post-scientific look behind the news: We humans, as observers, can’t ever meaningfully experience the full impact of terrorism on victims. We must also acknowledge the real motives of the perpetrators. (Special to israelnationalnews)

“So says science, and I believe in science. But up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man).

Recent videos of ISIS/IS-inflicted beheadings revealed, in conspicuously graphic terms, what has generally remained hidden – that is, the deeply human suffering side of Jihadist terrorism.

Still, unavoidably, even these intensely grotesque images must fail to let us fully understand the victim anguish in such barbarous circumstances, here, the unimaginable terror that screams desperately, but also silently, “from within.” This absence of a genuinely interior perspective on terrorism – a partially irremediable absence, as we shall soon see – must always leave observers with only a limited understanding of terrorist-inflicted harms.

It’s no one’s fault. We are not to blame for this serious absence. After all, we haven’t somehow created or “allowed” such regrettably limited kinds of understanding.

Jihadist terrorists are actually much worse, and much more insidious, than they might appear.
Even today, the best available science is able to illuminate only selectively partial truths. Accordingly, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, in his deservedly modern classic, The Phenomenon of Man, queries insightfully: “I believe in science, but up to now, has science ever troubled to look at the world other than from without?”

Sigmund Freud himself, much more familiar to modern readers than Teilhard, a Jesuit Father and paleontologist, had already understood this “phenomenological” point of view, and, quite naturally, also in much more distinctly therapeutic contexts. He had early recognized, in what was both an utterly primal and spontaneously visceral observation, that useful psychological examination must never neglect intimately private feelings. More precisely, whatever the intrusive limitations of any subjective investigation or healing enterprise, Freud had wisely cautioned, the capable therapist must pay close attention to the human psyche, or “soul.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the United Nations General Assembly today about “militant Islam” and chided those who don’t see the connections between ISIS and Hamas or Iran.

“Last week, many of the countries represented here rightly applauded President Obama for leading the effort to confront ISIS. And yet weeks before, some of these same countries, same countries that now support confronting ISIS opposed Israel for confronting Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

“They evidently don’t understand that ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree. ISIS and Hamas share a fanatical creed, which they both seek to impose well beyond the territory under their control. Listen to ISIS self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” he continued. “This is what he said two months ago. ‘A day will soon come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master. The Muslims who caused the world to hear and understand the meaning of terrorism and destroy the idol of democracy.’”

“Now listen to Khaled Mashal, the leader of Hamas. He proclaims a similar vision of the future. ‘We say this to the west: by Allah, you will be defeated. Tomorrow our nation will sit on the throne of the world.’”

Netanyahu stressed that even if these groups operate in different lands, “they all seek to create ever-expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance; where women are treated as cattle; Christians are decimated; and minorities are subjugated, sometimes given the stark choice: convert or die.”

“The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith,” he said. “They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith.”

The prime minister said “the Islamic State of Iran” is where militant Islam could soon “have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.”

“Iran’s president, Rouhani, stood here last week and shed crocodile tears over what he called the globalization of terrorism. Maybe he should spare us those phony tears and have a word instead with the commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He could ask them to call off Iran’s global terror campaign, which has included attacks in two dozen countries, on five continents since 2011 alone,” Netanyahu said.