RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s getting lonely out here, Dear Israel. Around here in the United States we don’t have too many friends, either. We look to you to pick it up. Drop the Gaza malaise. Pick up the Entebbe Spirit. We are counting on you. Who else do we have out there in the big world?

People we don’t know now rule your neighborhood, and strangers in this very country of ours now push us around.

At a restaurant in a small town in Vermont, Winooski, a sign that promoted bacon offended a Muslim lady. She demanded that the sign get taken down. It was, immediately. That wasn’t enough. Terrified owners of the restaurant apologized and said it would never happen again. Imagine that – in the land of the free, home of the brave.

We turn to you, Dear Israel, to get us back on track. We share the same values as articulated in our Liberty Bell: “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” This was borrowed from The Book of Leviticus and we do not take that summons lightly.

We have fought and died to preserve those liberties and so have you. That was before. This is now. You have had your setbacks. We have ours.

If you don’t have the moxie to properly defend your own people, Netanyahu, in other words, if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for our sake, here in America.

In 1967 and again in 1973 as you defeated the Arab armies you shared with us the booty of captured Soviet tanks and fighter planes. Our generals say that this exchange of Intel was so vital that it absolutely turned the tide of the Cold War in our favor.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/failure-and-opportunity

A unique confluence of forces has arisen in the Middle East that represents an historic opportunity. It will take vision, courage, and a willingness to cast aside traditional mistrust and enmity. It will require inspirational leadership in religiously skeptical populations, but it represents the possibility of a final break from a colonialist past to an independent future.

In six short years, Barak Obama has squandered 60 years of assiduous diplomacy and expanding American influence in the Middle East. For nearly a century, successive presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, carefully navigated the esoteric alleyways of shifting Middle Eastern politics to American advantage. American primacy was solidified by the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving a uni-polar sphere of influence. If there is one principle underlying Middle Eastern political culture, it is an acute sense of the importance and consequences of power and alliances. Until now, the sole exception in America’s policy continuum was Jimmy Carter, whose ideal driven incompetence was responsible, in large measure, for the rise of Islamic radicalism and the loss of one of our most reliable allies in the region. &;

Anwar Sadat initiated Egypt’s gradual gravitation toward the United States and by the mid-1970’s, America’s reliable allies in the Middle East included all of the largest and richest nations in the region. Carter’s craven abandonment of the Shah, though, revived regional instability and consigned Iran not only to the ranks of American enemies but the Iranian people to oppression far worse than any ever imposed by the Shah. It also provided a home for Islamic radicalism, the intellectual and cultural foundations for fundamentalist Islamic revival and the subsequent rise of the organized Jihadis with whom the world has had to struggle ever since.

The convicted shooter in the Fort Hood massacre has written a letter to the leader of the Islamic State saying he wants to become a “citizen” of the caliphate, in the latest example of the terror group’s reach inside the U.S.

The letter from Nidal Hasan, obtained by Fox News, comes after two Americans reportedly died fighting for ISIS in Syria. Sources late Wednesday identified the second as Abdirahmaan Muhumed, of Minneapolis. Fox affiliate KMSP-TV in Minneapolis reported that Muhumed was killed in the same battle as Douglas McArthur McCain, who grew up outside Minneapolis in the town of New Hope and most recently lived in San Diego.

The State Department said Thursday it could not confirm Muhumed’s death and efforts to reach his family were unsuccessful.

In the undated letter, Hasan — who fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 at Fort Hood in 2009 in what the Defense Department called “workplace violence”– tells ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that he wants to join the caliphate.

“I formally and humbly request to be made a citizen of the Islamic State,”Hasan says in the handwritten document addressed to “Ameer, Mujahid Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

“It would be an honor for any believer to be an obedient citizen soldier to a people and its leader who don’t compromise the religion of All-Mighty Allah to get along with the disbelievers.”

The two-page letter includes Hasan’s signature and the abbreviation SoA for Soldier of Allah.

Do not be fooled by Hillary Clinton’s attempt to rehabilitate her term as Secretary of State ahead of the 2016 presidential election. From 2009 to 2013, Clinton embodied U.S. foreign affairs even as President Obama’s avowed policy of self-effacement descended into listless, desultory abdication. Notwithstanding her recent critiques of Obama’s performance, Clinton’s failures as Secretary of State helped bring war to Europe, an arms race to Asia, and inferno to the Middle-East. The U.S. and its international standing are weaker for Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

Clinton’s mistakes began early, with her contribution to the misconceived and poorly executed Russia Reset. President Obama campaigned on a sunshine foreign policy platform, and one of his first foreign policy priorities was to improve relations with Russia. Bilateral relations froze when Russia invaded Georgia in August, 2008, and President Bush deployed warships into the Black Sea and facilitated Georgia’s recall of its combat troops from Iraq. Secretary Clinton’s first major assignment was meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva in March, 2009. They drank, ate, talked, and posed for now-infamous photos in which the pair “pushed” a kitschy, red, plastic button mislabeled with the Russian word for “overcharge” instead of “reset.”

To give substance to the show, Clinton and Lavrov discussed the U.S.’s “flexibility” on plans made during the Bush administration to build installations housing missile defense interceptors in Eastern Europe. Russia vehemently opposes locating interceptors in Eastern Europe, and Poland and the Czech Republic incurred Russia’s wrath for agreeing to host the systems anyway. Six months after the Geneva meeting, the U.S. cancelled deployment of the systems, leaving Poland and the Czech Republic bereft of the economic and security benefits of the installations but still saddled with Russian anger.

In the first of what would become a pattern, the U.S. sacrificed allies’ interests to a rival in the fatuous hope that the rival would feel some sort of gratitude or obligation in return. The Wall Street Journal’s scathing editorial has proven prescient. TheJournal warned that bowing to Russian pressure would only encourage it to demand ever more concessions and that “[n]ext time, perhaps, the West can be seduced into trading away the pro-Western government of Georgia, or even Ukraine.” The Journal continued that “inclusion in NATO and EU was supposed to have [ended great power use of Eastern and Central Europe as bargaining chips], but Russia’s new assertiveness, including its willingness to cut off energy supplies in winter and invade Georgia last year, is reviving powerful fears.” The Journal and a litany of foreign policy commentators rightly predicted that Putin would take such gestures only as an invitation to aggression.

Breaking her calculated silence on the issue, Hillary Clinton said young Michael Brown was a victim of police brutality in Ferguson, Mo., the latest in a long line of helpless black victims mowed down by racist cops who are part of America’s corrupt criminal justice system.

It’s just more left-wing sloganeering, staples of which are knee-jerk cop hatred and making excuses for black criminals.

Clinton, wife of the man some used to call America’s “first black president,” has a long history of race-baiting and race-based pandering. She patronized black Americans in her insultingly awful mock African-American accent when she gave her infamous “I don’t feel no ways tired” speech.

The all-but-declared candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president’s media-hyped public epiphany about Ferguson and Michael Brown comes days after 18-year-old Brown was laid to rest following a grotesque political rally led by the abominable racial arsonist Al Sharpton.

The former U.S. secretary of state embraces the politically correct lie that a helpless 6’4″ 292-lbs. Brown was shot in cold blood, arms raised while attempting to surrender to white police officer Darren Wilson, instead of the less convenient truth that Brown was trying to crush the decorated cop’s skull with his bare hands and reaching for the man’s handgun. Left-wingers like Clinton also prefer to ignore that fact that minutes before he attacked Wilson, Brown was captured on video bullying a much smaller East Indian shopkeeper during a robbery, an act that some might consider a hate crime. And the public is still waiting for Brown’s not-yet-released postmortem toxicology report.

The myth that Brown was a gentle giant won’t die. The racial-grievance industry, egged on by President Obama and his fellow radicals, won’t let it go. They need rampant racial tension and cop-hatred to persist in order to motivate their political base if Democrats are to have any hope of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate after the November congressional elections.

Clinton, the Benghazi bungler whose studied nonfeasance on Sept. 11, 2012, got four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, killed by Muslim terrorists, told a San Francisco audience:

“This summer, the eyes of our country and indeed the world have been focused on one community in the middle of the American heartland, Ferguson, Missouri. Watching the recent funeral for Michael Brown, as a mother, as a human being, my heart just broke for his family, because losing a child is every parent’s greatest fear and an unimaginable loss.

But I also grieve for that community and for many like it across our country. Behind the dramatic, terrible pictures on television, are deep challenges that will be with them and with us long after the cameras move on. This is what happens when the bonds of trust and respect that hold any community together fray. Nobody wants to see our streets look like a war zone, not in America. We are better than that.”

21st century Americans have come to take democracy for granted as one of the comforts of modern life, like electricity or plastic, a thing that exists unconsidered as the foundation of their convenience. You hit a light switch and the light turns on. You push a button and politicians carry out your will.

The wars of the last century were defined as wars for democracy and the wars of this century have also been fitted into that mold, becoming not wars against external enemies, but wars for the assertion of the popular will of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. All wars have become wars of democracy.

19th century America exported religion. 21st century America exports democracy.

Internally however democracy has degenerated into billion dollar elections fought with armies of consultants, polling firms and volunteers who expertly divide and conquer the populace through their infinite identity politics subdivisions on behalf of the wealthiest men in the country fighting to preserve and promote their status quo of a powerful central government and its oligarchic corporations.

The ruling left vocally demands that its leader fulfill their demands by violating the Constitution. They assert that since he won the popular vote in two elections, he can disregard the mere process of ancient laws. Democracy trumps republic just as the Democratic Party trumps the Republican Party.

It is this political climate of Obamaphones and attack ads, free stuff and mob rule, that Bruce Thornton enters with his new book, Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents. Thornton sees a country that has tilted too far toward the populism of the voting booth and too far away from the structure of a republic. Our collision of tyranny and greed has come from the mangling of a carefully constructed lawful structure.

Freedom requires firewalls, not only against the direct power of government, but also against the indirect power of the popular vote through government on the freedom of the individual. We need defenses not only against the tyranny of a tyrant, but also against the tyranny of King Mob.

1. Nice fences do not stop missiles, rockets, and mortars.

2. Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from an area merely signals Israeli weakness and invites escalated Arab terror and aggression.

3. Hamas (and Hezb’Allah and ISIS) cannot be defeated with air strikes. There is no effective alternative to ground invasion and ongoing military control of the ground retaken.

4. Unless the Israeli military controls the ground on the other side of fences, those fences achieve nothing.

5. Goodwill gestures by Israel increase terror.

6. Goodwill gestures by Israel never produce moderation of Arab goals and demands. They also do not win Israel friends in the West but rather encourage outbursts of anti-Semitism.

7. Terror is not caused by Israeli settlements but by the removal of Israeli settlements.

8. Terror is not caused by Israeli military occupation but by the removal of Israeli military occupation.

9. It is impossible for two sovereign entities to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

10. No matter how many concessions Israel makes, the world will always justify Arab terrorism because there will always be still one more capitulation Israel failed to make.

A young New Jersey man who was visiting Israel to study at a yeshiva and went missing shortly before Shabbat has been discovered dead in the Jerusalem Forest.

Aaron Sofer, 23, of Lakewood, N.J., was hiking in the forest on Friday when he disappeared. Search teams have been looking for him since 6 p.m. that day.

He was hiking with a friend, who says he lost sight of Sofer as the New Jersey man walked ahead of him down an incline. That was about noontime.

His parents flew to Israel and offered a 100,000 shekel reward for their son’s return. The FBI was involved in the search because Sofer is an American citizen.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Sofer’s body was found today by a United Hatzalah volunteer.

“Soon after beginning our search we came across a man’s body among the shrubbery that seemed to match the missing student’s description,” Yisrael Erlich, a United Hatzalah worker, told the paper. “We immediately notified the police via our phone app, and a large group of police and rapid-responders quickly appeared on the scene. I was not expecting the incident to end in such a horrific tragedy.”

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said in a statement that with the discovery of Sofer’s body “our worst nightmare has come true.”

“Ever since Aaron went missing, communities throughout the United States, Israel, and beyond gathered in worship on behalf of Aaron. During this period of mourning, I hope the Sofer family can be comforted with the knowledge that countless people, friends and strangers alike, prayed for Aaron’s well being and those acts of devotion will only continue,” Menendez said of his constituent. “It has become clear to me that everyone who knew Aaron saw tremendous promise in this young man who was committed to his family, his Jewish faith and his community of Lakewood.”

“I understand a full, complete, and thorough investigation is underway. Throughout this process, I stand ready to assist in every way possible and Aaron’s family will have no greater advocate working on their behalf.”

The conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton will make her announcement that she is trying for a second time to become the Democratic nominee for president sometime in 2015. She will then go on to easily get nominated, and coast to a solid victory in the 2016 general election against any Republican nominee.

Clinton’s presumed path to victory relies on a number of factors, including that her candidacy will enable Democrats to excite another key element of their base — female voters, particularly single women, much as Obama did in 2008 and 2012 with African American voters. If she runs, she will have no serious opposition, unlike in 2008, when she was heavily favored, but led Obama in the year before the primaries began (2007) by only 10-15 points, not the roughly 50-point lead she now holds [1]over any potential opponents for the nomination. So too, Obama , even while trailing, represented a real threat to Clinton, with his ability to pull away black voters, and even women once he was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey. Obama also appealed to the anti-war left of the Democratic Party due to his early opposition to the Iraq war, which Clinton had supported as a senator. One study has calculated that Winfrey’s support may have shifted [2] a million votes in the tight Democratic nominating contest from Clinton to Obama, undoubtedly the decisive factor, if the numbers are even close to accurate.

With no serious opposition this time, Clinton’s already established national fundraising base, plus what she can absorb from the Obama campaign and DNC apparatus in terms of voter targeting and online fundraising, will enable her to fire away at any of her potential GOP opponents from the start of the campaign season. If any Republican candidate catches fire and begins to emerge in the early primaries, negative attacks and a character assassination effort can be financed, similar to what Obama’s campaign did to Mitt Romney in the spring of 2012. Clinton, in essence, will have all the fundraising and organizational advantages normally associated with an incumbent running for re-election.

Clinton is well-known to voters, and seems less divisive as a candidate this time around. Bill Clinton has struggled to restore some dignity to his name, achieved through his “work” with the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation, whatever they may actually do. The Clintons will welcome a grandchild into the world later in the year, a great send-off to Hillary’s campaign if her goal is to help soften her image a bit. All the $200,000 and up speeches by the two Clintons have reconnected both of them to a very wealthy donor base, among both individuals, and corporations seeking to cement relationships with the likely next president.

There is one other major reason for delaying any announcement that her candidacy is official. Her national rollout campaign tour, disguised as a book tour, fell flat and at times proved embarrassing. Clinton seemed tone deaf about her family’s financial fortunes when Bill left office and she seemed defensive about her record as secretary of State, in particular the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012, which spoiled an otherwise nearly risk-free tenure as America’s chief diplomat.

Tuesday’s ambiguous, open-ended cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas felt like a huge let-down. Up until the very last minute (and even after it took effect), air raid sirens were wailing endlessly, and the sound of rockets exploding or being intercepted by the Iron Dome continued to permeate the air.

To make matters worse, a mere hour prior to the announcement of the cease-fire, two people from Kibbutz Nirim were killed in a mortar attack. This happened just a few days after a four-year-old boy from Kibbutz Nahal Oz suffered a similar fate.

In addition, since the many cease-fires to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed throughout the 50 days of Operation Protective Edge all ended abruptly with a Hamas breach, Israelis were hard pressed to believe that this one would be any different. And there was a general sense of malaise about aborting the operation before rendering Hamas totally powerless.

So, while Hamas leaders emerged from their bunkers to declare victory — with a few thousand Gaza residents dancing in the streets, shooting in the air and chanting songs about killing Jews — Israelis sat at home (or remained in temporary lodgings away from the Gaza border), deflated, disillusioned and angry.

On Wednesday evening, Netanyahu gave a joint press conference with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to assure the public that the government had given in to none of Hamas’ demands — and to reassure us that no subsequent “drizzle of rockets” would be tolerated. Netanyahu stated unequivocally that the IDF would hit Gaza even harder if Hamas pulled any stunts.

Residents of the south were furious, fearing that the war had not made them any safer than they had been before. They continue to worry not only about a resumption of rocket-fire, but about the possibility that not all the terror tunnels leading into their area were destroyed — something that would put them at risk of slaughter while they sleep or abduction in broad daylight.

Debates about whether the current situation constitutes a victory or a defeat for Israel began to rage, as did arguments over the long-term goals of the government where the Palestinians are concerned. The unity that characterized society at the beginning of the war in July seemed a thing of the distant past, with Netanyahu’s popularity at 38 percent, down from 85 percent six weeks ago.