RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few days ago, James Foley was beheaded by an ISIS jihadist, apparently British by upbringing and passport, if not in his primary identity. The decapitation of an American by an outfit he’d previously dismissed as the “jayvees” of jihad was sufficiently serious for President Obama to postpone his tee time, although not to any useful effect. Aside from the fake, tinny chumminess (all “Jim” this, “Jim that, just as for Ambassador Stevens it was all “Chris” this, “Chris that”) the commander-in-chief reserves for the victims of an enemy he assured us was on the run, Obama’s remarks were fatuous even by his own recent standards, and did not long delay his arrival at the links. As his courtiers at The New York Times assured us with touching if unwitting accuracy:

Obama, Outraged Over Beheading, Vows to Stay on Course

While he stays on the course at the Vineyard Golf Club, the rest of us have to make do with the pabulum of his prompter:

“One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.”

As I was driving back from Quebec to New Hampshire today, I heard a host on CJAD express agreement with the President on this. And why not? It demands nothing of one. It makes ISIS sound like a social faux pas: one thing we can all agree on is that no one wears white after Labor Day or saws your head off after the year 2000.

In America justice is supposed to be blind not our commander-in-chief. In Obama’s topsy-turvy America justice is not blind but our President is-and willfully so-when it comes to threats facing Americans. Will he remove his blinders? Only if he is forced to and by then it may be too late.

Charles Krauthammer, one of America’s smartest columnists, said it best regarding President Obama and the threats to America coming from ISIS:

“I don’t think the issue is the president was unaware or taken by surprise. I think this was willful blindness to the nature of the threat.”

“For the 5 and a half years he’s been in office, he’s tried to minimize the whole idea of the War on Terror,” the columnist explained. “He abolished the term. He gave a speech six months ago saying the War on Terror must end, it’s damaging our country — as if he can unilaterally declare an end to a war when the other guy hasn’t declared an end on his side.”

He has said the tide of war is receding,” Krauthammer continued. “But he did that by defining the threat and the enemy as al-Qaida central, as if the enemy is a club that lives in Pakistan or parts of Afghanistan and that’s it. So whenever you had an explosion of Islamic radicalism in Mali or Libya or elsewhere, it was considered something else, as he said, a jayvee team.”

“This is a willful attempt to actually will away the war that we were looking at.”

Even before Barack Obama became president he whitewashed threats from abroad — especially those emerging from the Islamic world.

He said back in 2008 that Iran did not pose a serious threat to America and that we do not need to worry about “tiny” countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Iran. He especially dismissed any threat from Iran since that nation spent 1/100th of what America does on defense. Of course, Iran is not tiny at all — but it has long been known that Barack Obama is geographically challenged (Hawaii, his home state(!), is not in Asia; they don’t speak Austrian in Austria); there are 50, not 57 states. Did Senator Obama not know that Iran had long been designated as the number one state sponsor of terror in the world (so designated by Bill Clinton via one of those executive orders Obama is so addicted to using) and has the blood of many Americans on its hands (its proxies are responsible for the murders of our Marines in Lebanon, our soldiers in Iraq and Saudi Arabia).

THE hostilities in Gaza between Israel and Hamas persist and the diplomatic war at the United Nations continues, also without resolution. While there is no shortage of opinions on the way forward, the most obvious solution is strikingly absent — the need to disarm and isolate Hamas, the radical Palestinian Islamist group.

Since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, Hamas has dragged us into three rounds of major assaults, and more than 14,800 rockets have been fired into Israel by the group or its proxies. The discovery of dozens of tunnels packed with explosives, tranquilizers and handcuffs that end at the doorsteps of Israeli communities should be enough to convince anyone that Hamas has no interest in bringing quiet to Gaza or residing alongside Israel in peace.

It says a great deal that Hamas’s former Arab backers, which historically have included Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, long ago abandoned the terrorist group. Only a few nations still stand by Hamas. Among the most prominent is the tiny Persian Gulf emirate Qatar.

In recent years, the sheikhs of Doha, Qatar’s capital, have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza. Every one of Hamas’s tunnels and rockets might as well have had a sign that read “Made possible through a kind donation from the emir of Qatar.”

Sitting atop 25 billion barrels of crude oil reserves and enormous natural gas reserves, Qatar has the highest gross domestic product per capita of any country in the world. The emirate is known for international shopping sprees that have included the funding of six American university campuses in Doha, the purchase of the iconic Harrods department store in London, and ownership of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer club.

For many years, the gas-rich gulf peninsula tried to avoid attracting attention lest it found itself in the same situation as oil-rich Kuwait, which was invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces in 1990. About 10 years ago, however, Qatar changed tactics. To ensure the country’s survival, the ruling House of Thani has spent extravagantly on increasing Qatar’s presence and prestige on the global stage.

If there’s one thing I know from watching MSNBC*, even before Barack Obama took office, is that any criticism of him — any criticism, no matter how mild — was at its core, entirely “about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up,” as a guest on the show hosted by the MSNBC anchor** Keith Olbermann said in April of 2009.

And any reference to golf is definitely racism double-plus straight up, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell declared on August 29th, 2012, on a show hosted by the MSNBC anchor*** Martin Bashir.

So when Maureen Dowd goofs on the president with a collection of bad golf jokes (link safe, goes to Twitchy), by the standards of her fellow Democrat operatives with bylines, it can mean only one thing: racism of the vilest sort.

How should the president respond? Perhaps the January 2010 issue of Golf Digest, which featured on its cover Tiger Woods caddying for Mr. Obama — the issue went to press about five minutes before the pristine MSM-airbrushed narratives of both men imploded for good — holds a clue. Golf Digest contributing editor John Feinstein wrote that one of the “10 Things Obama Might Learn From Tiger” was “How To Step On Their Necks:”

What makes Tiger Woods the most dominant athlete in the world (with apologies to Michael Phelps) isn’t so much his golf swing as what he does between golf swings. He’s cerebral in the sense that he lives to wear opponents out mentally every chance he gets.

President Obama surely knows how to compete. And yet, if you watched him debate John McCain, it was clear that Obama didn’t have Woods’ sense of the kill — knowing when an opponent is weak and the time is right to step on his neck. If Obama versus McCain had been match play, Obama wouldn’t have closed out his opponent until the 17th hole. When Stephen Ames made the mistake a few years ago of saying that he didn’t think Woods was quite as unbeatable as he had once been, he had the misfortune of facing Woods in the first round of a match-play event soon after. Woods won, 9 and 8. Asked post-match if he had anything to say about Ames’ comments, Woods smiled and said, “Nine and eight.”

President Obama should learn from Tiger. Sometimes you beat a guy 9 and 8, not 2 and 1. Teach him a lesson.****

That’s right — it’s time for Mr. Obama to teach Maureen Dowd a lesson, as her fellow MSMer demands of the president.

I have always had a certain sympathy for libertarianism and it has only grown during the Obama administration. Who could believe in big government living under the fiasco of this man’s presidency?

And I am certainly not alone. Libertarianism, if we are to believe none other than The New York Times [1], has become quite chic.

But paradoxically, during this same time frame, it has become perhaps even more evident that one of the apparent tenets of libertarianism — a kind of neo-isolationism — is, well, to put it bluntly, insane. In the era of the Islamic State (not to mention a dozen other similar murderous, increasingly global organizations we could name or are being invented as I write), anyone who believes we can roll up the gangplanks to create the perfect libertarian state and everything will be just ducky is living in dreamland.

But a fair number of libertarians are. As an example, one of the leading spokesmen for the movement (I’ll be gracious by not naming him, because he’s probably embarrassed at this point) was quoted as likening the problem of Islamic terrorism to herpes — I guess he meant an annoyance you can live with if you find the right partner (who doesn’t behead you).

Do those same isolationist libertarians think that one Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, current leader of the Islamic State, was kidding when he said “See you in New York [2]” when let out of detention camp in Iraq in 2009? If not, what do they propose to do about it? Wait until he is in New York? Maybe Eric Holder will arrest him. Or maybe he’ll blow up the Stock Exchange and sink the free market. Or one of his now thousands of minions will. Do you want to sit back to wait to find out? And what about all the unknown unknowns lurking out there?

One of the myths about the Middle East is that there would be peace if only Israel courted Palestinian moderates. This might be possible if any Palestinian who harbored such a thought wasn’t summarily executed.

On Friday Hamas shot 18 fellow Palestinians on suspicion that they had collaborated with Israel. Here’s how a Journal dispatch put it:
“In one instance, about 20 militants dressed in black and with their faces covered brought six of the condemned men, their heads covered with cloth bags, to an alley near the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after midday prayers, witnesses said. A militant shot the men in the head one at a time with a pistol, after which he sprayed them with automatic rifle fire, the witnesses said. The bodies were loaded into government ambulances and taken away.”

That followed three previous executions carried out a day earlier. The killings followed Israel’s attack that killed three senior commanders of Hamas’s military wing after Hamas broke another ceasefire by shooting more rockets into Israel. It’s possible that one or more of those executed did provide information to Israel, but you can be sure that none of them received anything more than a summary trial after a brutal interrogation that would have made any man confess to something.

In any case Hamas considers the public demonstration to be more important than guilt or innocence. The public killings are intended to show anyone who dissents that they will suffer the same fate.

The practice goes back to the days of the British mandate when the mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini killed Palestinians open to a Jewish presence. During the anti-Israel uprisings in the 1980s, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction that still rules the West Bank murdered some 800 Palestinians for alleged collaboration. The Palestinians will never have peace as long as they keep murdering anyone who wants it.

Dawn of Libya Says It Has Seized the Country’s Capital and Airport After Weeks of Fighting

Libya’s Islamist militias said Sunday they have consolidated their hold on Tripoli and its international airport, driving out rival militias to the outskirts of the capital after a weeks-long battle for control of the strategic hub.

The umbrella group for Islamist militias, calling itself Dawn of Libya, said it has also taken hold of other locations in the capital that were controlled by rival militias. The move draws to a close one chapter in a prolonged confrontation between the Islamist-allied militia, largely from the city of Misrata, and the powerful militia from the western mountains of Zintan.

The fight has largely destroyed the airport and scarred the capital, prompting diplomats, foreign nationals and thousands of Libyans to flee.

The violence in Libya is rooted in the empowerment of militias after successive transitional governments, since the 2011 ouster of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, depended on them to maintain order in the absence of a strong police force or a unified military.

It also comes as part of a backlash by Islamist factions after losing their power in parliament after June elections and in the face of a campaign by a renegade military general against extremist Islamic militias in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city.

The recent violence has been the worst in Libya since 2011. Mysterious airstrikes have struck the positions of Islamist militias, sparking accusations by them that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which oppose Islamists in the region, were behind them.

A field commander of the Dawn of Libya militia said Sunday his forces were in control of Tripoli and adjacent cities, having pushed back the rival Zintan forces some 90 kilometers (56 miles) south of the capital. It wasn’t immediately possible to reach members of the Zintan militias.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/midair-encounter-of-chinese-jet-and-u-s-surveillance-plane-exposes-limits-of-warming-ties-1408896137?mod=trending_now_2 Some U.S. Officials Say Aggressive Maneuvers Could Involve Rogue Pilots The U.S. says rogue Chinese pilots may be responsible for recent close encounters in airspace above the South China Sea. But as Sam Rogevveen of the Lowy Institute explains, China continues to flex its muscles in pushing its territorial claims in the region. U.S. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Federal agencies understood to play an integral role in protecting the American homeland from terrorist attacks were folded into this bureaucratic leviathan and included, among other federal agencies, the Secret Service, U.S. Customs Service and components of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

The title of the agency, “Department of Homeland Security,” certainly created the appearance that the issue of national security was at the heart of the massive reorganization of federal agencies, but it became readily apparent that this was not the case. In fact, the myriad failures of this agency have caused me to come to refer to the DHS as being the “Department of Homeland Surrender.”

As noted on the official DHS website, the budget for the DHS for Fiscal Year 2015 has been set at more than $60 billion. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been provided with more than 5.4 billion dollars, CBP (Customs and Border Protection) has been budgeted for nearly 12.8 billion dollars while USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) has been budgeted to receive more than 3 billion dollars and the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) will receive more than 7.3 billion dollars.

In his comments on the jihad being waged by the Islamic State in northern Iraq (ISIL), President Obama recycled yet again the shopworn false knowledge about Islam that continues to compromise our response to Muslim violence: “So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day.”

Over at the New York Post, a columnist rightly took the president to task by saying, “You can’t divorce the Islamic State from religion.” Unfortunately, the column is full of numerous misstatements that perpetuate the illusion that there is some peaceful, tolerant version of Islam that has been distorted and twisted by “extremists” or “fundamentalists.”

According to the writer, adherents of any faith can misread sacred texts literally in order to justify violence: “The problem isn’t just literalist interpretations of the Koran: The New Testament, the Jewish Torah and many other religious books contain explicit calls for disproportionate punishments and killing of nonbelievers.” Forget the false assumption that we are supposed to read all sacred texts allegorically rather than literally. I’d like to see the verses from the New Testament that explicitly instruct Christians to kill non-believers rather than try to convert them. On the contrary, Jesus preached, “Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5.38), and “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.43).

Concerning other interactions with non-believers, Jesus instructed his disciples, “And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town” (Matthew 10.14). Because there are no explicit commands to kill non-believers in the New Testament, over the ages Christians who have justified violence with scripture have had to engage in tortuous interpretations and misreadings that over time have not been able to gain traction among all the faithful. That’s why despite widespread persecution across the world today, there is no major Christian terrorist movement.

Compare, in contrast, the Koran’s explicit calls to violence against non-believers, such as Koran 4.76: “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil: So fight ye against the friends of Satan.” This is consistent with the famous command in 9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah.” If someone wants to argue that “fight” is intended metaphorically in these verses, and has been “twisted” by a “literal” reading to serve some fringe interpretation, consider 4.74: “Let those fight in the cause of Allah Who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of Allah––whether he is slain or gets victory––Soon shall we give him a reward.” Obviously in this verse and numerous others “fight” means physical battle in which people are “slain.” Contrary to Christian scripture, in traditional Islamic doctrine non-believers who are invited to convert and refuse the call are not left alone, but killed or, if they are Jews or Christians, sometimes allowed to live in humiliating submission under a treaty that Muslims can break at any time for any reason.