RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the Obama administration struggles to address the threat from ISIS and plans to go to Congress in the coming weeks to up its commitment against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, multiple media reports indicate that the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) is operating openly with ISIS and other designated terrorist groups. And yet financial and military support for the FSA is the keystone to the administration’s policy in Syria.

Some background is essential.

It was just over a year ago that the Institute for the Study of War’s Liz O’Bagy was opining in the Wall Street Journal about her travels to Syria and purported discovery that the Syrian “rebels” really weren’t bloodthirsty jihadists, but moderates worthy of U.S. financial and military support — in particular, heavy weapons. Her claims about the Syrian rebels, particularly the FSA, were cited and praised by Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain.

That view, of course, quickly came crashing down as O’Bagy came under fire for failing to disclose that she was also a paid agent of a Syrian rebel front. (She had also lied about her academic credentials.) Within two weeks of her op-ed appearing, she was fired from the Institute for the Study of War, though she was hired two weeks later by Senator McCain as a Senate staffer.

At the same time that O’Bagy’s career was taking a hit, the narrative that the Syrian “rebels” were all secular moderates was quickly collapsing. A Rand Corporation study appeared two weeks after O’Bagy’s op-ed saying that nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hardline Islamists (as if there were a discernible difference). Meanwhile, the FSA was under serious pressure from the very jihadist groups that Ms. O’Bagy had assured were not a problem.

Another practical problem developed with providing weapons to the FSA. As soon as weapons shipments from the CIA were arriving in Syria, the FSA weapons caches were being raided by jihadist groups, including ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, under very suspicious circumstances. The problem got so bad that by last December, both the U.S. and the UK had stopped weapons shipments to the FSA.

But by April of this year, the Obama adminstration’s CIA weapons spigot was turned back on, with the FSA now receiving heavy weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. And in late June, President Obama asked Congress for $500 million to arm and train the FSA.

Under the headline “The World in Flames,” Henry Kissinger warns in a London Sunday Times op-ed of the consequences of state failure and anarchy in the Muslim world. Read it carefully: Kissinger reviews the collapse of America’s idea of exporting democracy during the Arab Spring and its dire consequences. He suggests that the US needs to work with Russia to put out the fire:

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the US, in turn shaping relations between them.

Russia’s goals are largely strategic: at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger, global scale, to enhance its position vis-à-vis the US.

America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds — correctly — but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the US needs to oppose strategically.

Neither Russia nor America has been able to decide whether to co-operate or to manoeuvre against the other — though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes.

Political Islam has brought large parts of the world into something resembling the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, Kissinger says (and of course I agree: I have been citing the 30 Years War example for a decade):

Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of central Africa — where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighbouring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasise similarly — a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of falling out of the international state system altogether.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to — but broader than — Europe’s 17th-century wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological and traditional national- interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponised” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation.

Some conventional wisdom about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is easily debunked. One such bit of nonsense is that Palestinians have or will turn on Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank after the losses in the recent fighting with Israel. After suffering over 2,000 casualties, seeing 32 tunnels destroyed, and losing two-thirds of its rocket inventory by firing them with little effect or having them destroyed by Israel, the perception is that Palestinians, deep down, have had enough, and see no benefit from the Hamas strategy of confronting Israel every two years.

Of course, this theory suggests that anything any Palestinian in Gaza believes or desires has anything whatsoever to do with who governs the territory, and in what fashion. If you subscribe to the notion that all politics is local, then Hamas is now stronger than ever. That seems to be the message explaining why Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is now by far the top choice [1]to become the head of a unified PA-Hamas government, securing a 61% to 32% victory over Mahmoud Abbas if elections were held today. Most remarkable is that support for Hamas has soared in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), which escaped the fighting. Palestinians in the West Bank are demonstrating that resistance is easy to support when someone else, somewhere else is fighting and getting hit. This “courageous” support for Hamas from Palestinians in the West Bank mirrors the “courage” shown by Hamas leaders who hid below ground while allowing the locals to be killed as human shields.

Of course there is an easy explanation out there for Hamas’ popularity, and the lagging support for Abbas, Fatah, and his Palestinian Authority. That would be the purported “land grab” by Israel in the West Bank, all of 988 acres, which naturally will destroy the chances for peace and reconciliation and the two-state solution. Muslim extremists can massacre people in one country after another in the Middle East and Muslim world, but Israel taking land it already controls to build houses, pending any legal challenges (got that?), is the ultimate threat [2] to the survival of the world.

This “logic” depends on the badly mistaken notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central explanation for the behavior of Islamists anywhere. If only Israel would stop building houses, then peace would be achievable between Israel and the Palestinians, and all the myriad Muslim grievances in dozens of countries on every continent would miraculously disappear. Such is the obsession with what Jews do, but more to the point, the intensity of the hatred [3] of Jews and the state they control — a cause that journalists the world over, many parts of what might be called the “global left,” have signed onto. U.S. President Barack Obama seems to have been immersed in the holy waters of rage at Israel as well, according to spokesmen [4] in his administration, most notably Martin Indyk:

And Mr. Obama — No Drama Obama, the president who prides himself on his cool, a man whose emotional detachment is said to explain his intellectual strength — is enraged. With Israel. Which has just been hit by several thousand unguided rockets and 30-odd terror tunnels, a 50-day war, the forced closure of its one major airport, accusations of “genocide” by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, anti-Semitic protests throughout Europe, general condemnation across the world. This is the country that is the object of the president’s rage.

St. Louis is now Ground Zero for the “war on black males”: So named by Spike Lee after a white cop shot a black teenager, unleashing ten days of riots and rage and free shopping in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

But here is what Spike Lee did not say: Black people are winning the war. At least in St. Louis.

Black-on-white crime is an everyday fact of life in this once vibrant city. And more and more people — the ones who are left, anyway — are wondering why local media refuse to tell the truth about it.

The latest example came Sunday evening. A group of black people on bicycles surrounded, threatened, and robbed two horse-drawn carriages — the kind you find in the nicer parts of town where tourists congregate.

A place where black mob violence used to be rare. Not anymore. Not for a long time. Not in St. Louis.

The local CBS affiliate reported that two suspects have been arrested, and the owner of the carriage company put on a brave front, saying crime is unusual in that part of St. Louis:

“We’ve been there seven nights a week for 35 years and never had an issue with anything,” Jerry Kirk says. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had an incident this way, and I’m not aware that there’s ever been an incident like this ever before.”

To its credit, the news station allowed readers in the comments section to tell the full story of racial violence and denial that its own reporter did not — or could not — say. And they did, by the hundreds:

“I’m from St. Louis,” said one reader at the CBS St. Louis web site. “This happened in the big tourist area called the Riverfront, right along the Mississippi. Right across the river is East St. Louis, Illinois, totally crime ridden. The truth is that rampaging “teen” boys come streaming across the bridge all the time to beat people, rob them and terrorize families, especially during big festivals. Yes, I’ve seen it personally and it was damned scary. I’m shocked to hear this carriage owner say this has never happened to his employees before. They’re either very, very lucky, or he’s lying. The area needs cops stationed down there along the Riverfront 24/7. Thank God Missouri finally has concealed carry.”

In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”

This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.

In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.

Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.

In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men in the mass.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/telling-the-truth-about-islam-on-the-streets-of-l-a-on-the-glazov-gang-1/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Nonie Darwish and joined by Samira Tamer, L.A. ACT Chapter Leader, who joined the show to discuss, Telling the Truth About Islam on the Streets of L.A., focusing on how her group, along with the Counter-Jihad Coalition and Truth Defenders, is confronting Islamic supremacism on 3rd Street Promenade:

Don’t miss this week’s second Glazov Gang episode with Dr. Jim Tolle, the Senior Pastor at El Camino Metro Church in Los Angeles. Pastor Tolle joined the show to discuss The Notion of “Sin” in Islam and Christianity, analyzing how the stark contrast in two religions’ values fosters peace and forgiveness in one — and violence and killing in the other:

As shocking as the Muslim-run sex ring in Rotherham, England may seem to some—1,400 British children as young as 11 plied with drugs before being passed around and sexually abused in cabs and kabob shops—the fact is that this phenomenon is immensely widespread. In the United Kingdom alone, it’s the fifth sex abuse ring led by Muslims to be uncovered.

Some years back in Australia, a group of “Lebanese Muslim youths” were responsible for a “series of brutal gang rapes” of “Anglo-Celtic teenage girls.” A few years later in the same country, four Muslim Pakistani brothers raped at least 18 Australian women, some as young as 13. Even in the United States, a gang of Somalis—Somalia being a Muslim nation where non-Muslims, primarily Christians, are ruthlessly persecuted—was responsible for abducting, buying, selling, raping and torturing young American girls as young as 12.

The question begs itself: If Muslim minorities have no fear of exploiting “infidel” women and children in non-Muslim countries—that is, where Muslims themselves are potentially vulnerable minorities—how are Muslims throughout the Islamic world, where they are dominant, treating their vulnerable, non-Muslim minorities?

The answer is a centuries-long, continents-wide account of nonstop sexual predation. Boko Haram’s abduction and enslavement of nearly 300, mostly Christian, schoolgirls last April in Nigeria is but the tip of the iceberg.

The difference between what happens in Nigeria and what happens in Western nations is based on what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers.” Wherever Muslims grow in numbers, Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, the sexual abuse of “infidel” children and teenagers—comes along with them.

Thus in the United Kingdom, where Muslims make for a sizeable—and notable—minority, the systematic rape of “subhuman infidels” naturally takes place. But when caught, Muslim minorities, being under “infidel” authority, cry “Islamophobia” and feign innocence.

In Nigeria, however, which is roughly 50 percent Islamic, such “apologetics” are unnecessary. After seizing the nearly 300 schoolgirls, the leader of Boko Haram appeared on videotape boasting that “I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah…. There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.”

Hardly a week goes by without some Democratic Party hack putting finger to iPad and swiping out a screed about the Republican Party’s problem with women or minorities.

This week it was Debbie Wasserman Schultz with “The GOP’s Woman Problem.”

Schultz claims that the Republican Party was “rejected again by a bloc of voters that make up more than half of the electorate.” That claim is as real as Schultz’s hair color. The only bloc that rejected Romney was the same bloc that rejected Hillary; the bloc of minority voters who came out in force for Obama.

And unless Hillary Clinton also had a “woman problem” they didn’t do it over gender.

For example in the South Carolina Democratic primary, Obama beat Hillary among women by 54 to 30. That’s a much bigger split than the one between Obama and Romney among women. While Hillary Clinton beat Obama among white voters, Obama won 78 percent of the black vote.

There was no gender gap. There was a racial gap.

Throughout her campaign, Hillary Clinton consistently won the votes of white women in large numbers and lost the votes of women who said that their gender was not important. Obama won the female vote by his largest margins in southern states because he wasn’t really winning by gender, he was benefiting from a large turnout of black women.

Obama won the female vote in Georgia by 32%, but Hillary won 62% of the white female vote. Obama however had won 87% of the black female vote. In Ohio, Hillary and Obama had nearly the same split, but Hillary won the female vote in Ohio by 16% because the racial makeup of the voters was different.

In 2012, Romney won 53% of the white female vote and 3% of the black female vote in Ohio. He didn’t lose women. He lost the same “bloc of voters” that had rejected Hillary, not over gender, but over race.

AN EXAMPLE OF CHICKENS MEETING WITH THE FOX….RSK
Jewish leaders meet with Kerry to discuss ‘prevalence’ of attacks.

Jewish leaders converged on the State Department to discuss rising anti-Semitism across the globe, which is of “deep concern” to the Obama administration, US officials said this week.

Meeting with the group for four hours on Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry shared in worries over “the prevalence and pervasiveness of anti-Semitic threats and attacks,” the State Department said.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Tom Malinowski and Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Ira Forman led the discussions, attended only briefly by the secretary. Several other senior State Department officials participated the meeting.

Jewish representatives included leaders from the Jewish Federations of North America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and European Jewish communities.

While generally satisfied with efforts by the State Department to mobilize against the rising movement, several figures in attendance told The Jerusalem Post that Kerry’s presence was merely a “photo op.”

“The secretary came in only for a photo op in order to show his support for Ira Forman and the endeavor, and to show that this is a serious issue for the US State Department,” a source familiar with the matter said.

US officials say the department is “monitoring reported incidents, reaching out to Jewish leaders to better assess conditions on the ground and working closely through diplomatic channels to encourage governments to speak out against the rise in anti-Semitic threats and violence,” in light of a spike in anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence throughout the summer.

Speaking in Arabic, spokesman for family of slain journalist issues challenge to terror group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The family of Steven Sotloff, the second American journalist beheaded by Islamic State militants, said on Wednesday he was “a gentle soul”, and challenged the group’s leader to a debate on the peaceful teachings of the Muslim holy book, the Koran.

Family spokesperson Barak Barfi ended the statement with off-the-cuff remarks in Arabic, saying “Steve died a martyr for the sake of God.”

He then challenged Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to debate Islam, saying, “Woe to you. You said the month of Ramadan is the month of mercy. Where is your mercy?”

“Abu Bakr, I am ready to debate with you. I come in peace. I have no sword in my hand and I am ready for your answer,” added Barfi, who is an Arabic scholar and research fellow at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington.

Islamic State released a video on Tuesday (September 2) purporting to show the beheading Sotloff, raising the stakes in its confrontation with Washington over US air strikes in Iraq.

Following the beheading of journalist Jim Foley last week, Sotloff’s mother made an emotional plea to Islamic State, requesting they release her son.

The Sotloff family has yet to speak personally to media following their son Steven’s death and requested to mourn privately.