RUTHFULLY YOURS

Try figuring out the maze of enemies, allies, and neutrals in the Middle East.

In 2012, the Obama administration was on the verge of bombing the forces of Syrian president Bashar Assad. For a few weeks, he was public enemy No. 1 because he had used chemical weapons on his own people and because he was responsible for many of the deaths in the Syrian civil war, with a casualty count that is now close to 200,000.

After Obama’s red lines turned pink, we forgot about Syria. Then the Islamic State showed up with beheadings, crucifixions, rapes, and mass murders through a huge swath of Iraq and Syria.

Now the United States is bombing the Islamic State. Sometimes Obama says that he is still seeking a strategy against the jihadist group. Sometimes he wants to reduce it to a manageable problem. And sometimes he says that he wants to degrade or even destroy it.

The Islamic State is still trying to overthrow Assad. If the Obama administration is now bombing the Islamic State, is it then helping Assad? Or when America did not bomb Assad, did it help the Islamic State? Which of the two should Obama bomb — or both, or neither?

Iran is steadily on the way to acquiring a nuclear bomb. Yet for now it is arming the Kurds, dependable U.S. allies in the region who are fighting for their lives against the Islamic State and need American help. As Iran aids the Kurds, Syrians, and Iraqis in the battle against the evil Islamic State, is Teheran becoming a friend, enemy, or neither? Will Iran’s temporary help mean that it will delay or hasten its efforts to get a bomb? Just as Iran sent help to the Kurds, it missed yet another U.N. deadline to come clean on nuclear enrichment.

Hamas just lost a war in Gaza against Israel. Then it began executing and maiming a number of its own people, some of them affiliated with Fatah, the ruling clique of the Palestinian Authority. During the war, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian state, stayed neutral and called for calm. Did he wish Israel to destroy his rival, Hamas? Or did he wish Hamas to hurt his archenemy, Israel? Both? Neither?

As President Obama laid out his “strategy” last night for dealing with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and as bipartisan leadership in Congress push to approve as much as $4 billion to arm the Syrian “rebels,” it should be noted that the keystone to his anti-Assad policy — the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) — is now admitting that they, too, are working with the Islamic State.

This confirms our reporting about the FSA’s alliances with Syrian terrorist groups here at PJ Media last week.

On Monday, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted a FSA brigade commander saying that his forces were working with the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate — both U.S.-designated terrorist organizations — near the Syrian/Lebanon border.

“We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army’s gatherings in … Qalamoun,” said Bassel Idriss, the commander of an FSA-aligned rebel brigade.

“We have reached a point where we have to collaborate with anyone against unfairness and injustice,” confirmed Abu Khaled, another FSA commander who lives in Arsal.

“Let’s face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values,” he added.

In my report last week I noted that buried in a New York Times article last month was a Syrian “rebel” commander quoted as saying that his forces were working with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in raids along the border with Lebanon, including attacks on Lebanese forces. The Times article quickly tried to dismiss the commander’s statements, but the Daily Star article now confirms this alliance.

Among the other pertinent points from that PJ Media article last week was that this time last year the bipartisan conventional wisdom amongst the foreign policy establishment was that the bulk of the Syrian rebel forces were moderates, a fiction refuted by a Rand Corporation study published last September that found nearly half of the Syrian “rebels” were jihadists or hard-core Islamists.

Another relevant phenomenon I noted was that multiple arms shipments from the U.S. to the “vetted moderate” FSA were suspiciously raided and confiscated by ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, prompting the Obama administration and the UK to suspend weapons shipments to the FSA last December.

Pity Barack Obama. Our hapless chief executive must be suffering from a cognitive disorder the size of Alpha Centauri. The poor guy grew up on the anti-imperialist mouthings of lefty poet Frank Marshall Davis, schoolboy revolutionary Bill Ayers and later anti-Israel professor Rashid Khalidi [1], not to mention the well-known anti-American excrescences of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and now he has to go to war — as an imperialist — against the very Third World people he was told again and again we colonized and destroyed. His head must be about to explode.

No wonder he insisted in his Wednesday night speech that the Islamic State is not Islamic — what is it? Hindu? Zoroastrian? A lost tribe of Hasidic Jews? — and that we are fighting an amorphous “terrorist group” (the Irish Republican Army? Basque separatists perhaps?), not the jihadism whose violent ideology has so obviously metastasized across several continents under many guises during his administration with no end remotely in sight. He dares not name our enemy, although it’s almost impossible to imagine how we could win without doing so. He cannot say anything that’s true because he doesn’t know what is true or, perhaps more likely, is terrified to know and then have to admit it. If he did, everything would unravel, not just the jejune Marxism of Frank Marshall Davis. Everything.

But he does know what his poll numbers are and they aren’t good. So we are where we are. Half way in and half way out. Forget Winston Churchill. Forget Douglas MacArthur. The USA is going to war with a nowhere man who no longer knows what he stands for — and who originally stood for very little more than widely discredited and tired left-wing drivel masquerading as hope and change. Now even that’s gone, a distant memory.

We all remember the Beatles’ lyrics:

He’s a real Nowhere Man
Sitting in his Nowhere Land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody

Two days ago, according to reports, Obama was still reluctant to do anything about the beheaders of ISIS, but was finally driven to act because of those disastrous polls and broad hints from some of his party members that he was leading them to electoral disaster. Others in that same party were mortified he might actually go to war, so, being Barack Obama, in other words a nowhere man, he split the difference — no boots on the ground (except for a piddling 475 advisers — let’s hope there won’t be any “mission creep”).

The United States and Western Europe are confronting the increasing threat of their citizens traveling to the Middle East to join the worldwide Islamic jihad. Over the past few months, numerous news reports have shed light on disaffected citizens from America and Britain joining the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or other terrorists groups and leaving to train and fight in the Middle East. ISIS is adept at using social media to correspond with Western nationals from Europe and North America predisposed to radicalization.

Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, the ISIS militant filmed beheading American journalists Steven Sotloff last week and James Foley three weeks ago, is a former British citizen. Abdel Bary is one of up to 500 Britons believed to have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight with Islamist groups.

Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha — a man born and raised in Florida — carried out a suicide bomb attack in Syria in May of this year. Before he completed his terror strike, Abu-Salha came back to America on his United States passport. Later, he appeared in a video released by Al Qaeda showing him destroying his passport and leaving a disturbing message for America: “We are coming for you.”

In late August, two men from the Minneapolis, Minnesota region — Abdirahmaan Muhumed and Douglas McAuthur McCain — were killed fighting with ISIS in Syria. Before Muhumed left America to join ISIS, he was employed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport refueling commercial airliners. He also had a security clearance, giving him access to sensitive areas of the airport. Douglas McAuthur McCain was a high-school classmate of Troy Kastigar, a Muslim convert, who was killed fighting with Islamic militants in Somalia in 2009.

The latest report of a person to leave the U.S. and travel to Syria to fight for ISIS is of a 19-year-old Somali woman from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Many Americans believe that the effort by Islamic militants to recruit young men and women from the United States and Western Europe to fight on behalf of fundamentalist Islam is a recent phenomenon. However, I have personally watched many troubled people be targeted by Islamic radicals since I was a child. My experience has given me an up-close and personal look at Americans who, whether they realize it or not, are offering aid and comfort to the enemy in cities and towns all across our country.

When I was a child, my mother rejected traditional values and morality to join the counter-cultural movement of the 1970’s. Soon after I was born, my mother changed her name from Annette to a completely Islamicized name. I was unlucky when it came to fathers and father figures. My biological father abandoned my mother right after I was born. Like many poor inner-city African Americans, I know very little about my father.

After revolving around the fringes of the radical left in Buffalo, New York – my mother converted to Islam and joined an Islamic cult.

Thirteen years after 9/11, there is one thing that virtually all our politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainstream media guardians of opinion know: that attack had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and neither does any other jihad terror attack, anywhere, no matter how often its perpetrators quote the Qur’an and invoke Muhammad. Islam, we’re told again and again, is a good, benign thing – indeed, a positive force for societies, and to be encouraged in the West. Jihad terror is an aberration, an outrage against the Religion of Peace’s peaceful teachings. These lessons from our betters are coming more and more often in light of the advent of the Islamic State.

The caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has a PhD in Islamic Studies. But Barack Obama is unimpressed with his Islamic erudition: “ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf emphasized that Obama meant what he said: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion. The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said that for some members of the international coalition he hopes to build against the Islamic State, joining it “will mean demolishing the distortion of one of the world’s great peaceful religions.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron chimed in:

What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Where is “Islam” actually battling these “extremists who want to abuse Islam”? Cameron didn’t say.

Showing as much grasp of the situation as Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared: “Isil’s so-called caliphate has no moral legitimacy; it is a regime of torture, arbitrary punishment and murder that goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” On the opposite side of the aisle, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper complained that Islamic State “extremists are beheading people and parading their heads on spikes, subjugating women and girls, killing Muslims, Christians and anyone who gets in their way. This is no liberation movement — only a perverted, oppressive ideology that bears no relation to Islam.”

Unfortunately, for every Islamic State atrocity she enumerated, there is Qur’anic sanction:

A federal grand jury investigation going on all summer in St. Paul, Minnesota has been focused on a group of 20-30 Somali-Americans allegedly conspiring to join the fight with ISIS in Syria. Most of the youths being investigated have been going to the Al Farooq Youth and Family Center and mosque in Bloomington, where sources told the Star Tribune that 31-year-old Amir Meshal, an American of Egyptian descent, may have influenced them to join the jihadist movement.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been aware of Meshal for quite some time. The native New Jerseyan was detained and interrogated by the agency in 2007 in Kenya, following his escape from Somalia. Meshal admits he attended a terrorist training camp in Somalia, but insists he isn’t a terrorist, claiming he went to that war-torn nation to enrich his study of Islam.

A 2009 lawsuit filed by the ACLU on his behalf alleged that after being arrested in a joint U.S.-Kenyan-Ethiopian operation along the Somalia-Kenyan border, Meshal was transferred between jails in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia without ever being charged or having access to counsel. During that time he was allegedly interrogated by two Supervising Special Agents of the FBI more than 30 times, during which he said he was repeatedly threatened with “torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm” in order to coerce a confession. He was ultimately brought back to the United States and released without being charged.

Despite the ACLU’s contention that Meshal’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights were violated, along with the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, the case was dismissed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on June 13. Despite buying the government’s argument that national security considerations abroad preclude judicial remedies for the mistreatment Meshal allegedly endured, Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, was distressed by the decision. “The facts alleged in this case and the legal questions presented are deeply troubling,” he contended, before conceding his hands were tied. “Although Congress has legislated with respect to detainee rights, it has provided no civil remedies for US citizens subject to the appalling mistreatment Mr. Meshal has alleged against officials of his own government.”

This past summer, Meshal began occasionally showing up at the Al Farooq Youth and Family Center, where hundreds of Muslims show up for prayer on Fridays at one of the largest mosques in the Twin Cities. He was known for having lots of money and driving a fancy BMW. In June, a parent at the center complained about Meshal promoting radical Islam. That aroused the suspicion of mosque director Hyder Aziz, who was so concerned about Meshal’s intentions he went to the police that same month and obtained a no-trespass order. “I made a decision that he needs to be removed from the premises,” Aziz said. “I will call police if he ever shows up and they will arrest him.”

It may be too late. Federal authorities believe that at least a dozen Somali men and three women have traveled to the Middle East to join in jihad directly, or aid the terrorists in some capacity, including two people who attended Al Farooq and disappeared, presumably to Syria. One is a 19-year-old Somali woman from St. Paul who was not identified. The other is 20-year-old Abdi Mohamed Nur who played basketball at the center and attended the Bloomington mosque. He disappeared around the same time the no trespass order against Meshal was issued.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-isis-and-willful-blindness-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest hosted by Michael Hausam and joined by Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Mike Munzing, a Tea Party Activist and Jennifer Van Laar, a writer at Independent Journal Review.

The guests gathered to discuss Obama, ISIS and Willful Blindness, analyzing a Radical-in-Chief’s denial about Jihad — and its deadly price. The dialogue occurred within a focus on Obama’s ‘Managing’ of ISIS, which shed light on the administration’s discomfort with American victory:

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Samuel Johnson said. A few centuries later his fellow Englishman, Winston Churchill, quipped, “The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative.”

It’s not true of the United States, but it is true of Barack Obama who, having exhausted every alternative that involved appeasement or pretending that ISIS wasn’t a threat, has decided to do the right thing.

As long as he gets enough applause for doing it.

With his approval ratings, particularly on American leadership and national security, lower than Assad’s, he decided to exploit September 11 to butch up his foreign policy image.

After spending the last few years ignoring ISIS, he delivered a carefully timed speech vowing to take it on. The speech might have been a little more credible if it had not come from the man whose inaction allowed ISIS to take over parts of Iraq and Syria and who early this year was dismissing it as a JV team.

The scoundrel who lied and claimed that he had defeated Al Qaeda has been reborn again as a patriot who is promising to… defeat Al Qaeda. Even his usual boast of defeating Al Qaeda has been carefully walked back to a claim of having defeated “much of al-Qaida’s leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

That brief moment of near honesty is diminished only by the fact that the war on Al Qaeda had moved on to the Middle East long before Obama even took office. It was Obama who decided to divert away from fighting Al Qaeda in the Middle East on a failed attempt to defeat the Taliban and an even more failed attempt to negotiate peace with the “moderate” Taliban.

Obama’s strategy is a kitchen sink approach that promises air strikes for the patriots and multilateral coalitions for the appeasers. There will be coalitions with Sunni Arabs and with a new “inclusive” Iraqi government. There will be coalitions with everyone. A UN session will be chaired. Syria will be bombed and “terrorists who threaten our country” will be hunted down.

And all of it will happen without a single American soldier being put at risk.

It’s an utterly incoherent and calculatedly unobjectionable speech by a failing politician that fails to address why we’re in this mess and what past policies we have to rethink to get out of it.

THIS COLUMN IS FROM APRIL 2014. IN MAY RABBI LICHTENSTEIN RECEIVED ISRAEL’S HIGHEST HONOR….WELL DESERVED INDEED….RSK

Among this year’s recipients of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, is the eminent thinker and educator Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. To those many Jews in Israel and elsewhere who are acquainted with or have been touched by his life and work, this award, to be conferred on May 6, Independence Day, will signify one of those rare instances when government committees get things right.

In America, where he was raised and educated, Rabbi Lichtenstein’s name is bound to resonate much more faintly. Within the Orthodox community, it may be familiarly known that he is the leading sage of “modern” or “centrist” Orthodoxy; that he holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard; that he is clean-shaven; and that he is the son-in-law of Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), the towering figure widely regarded as the founder of modern Orthodoxy. In other Jewish circles, most will have never even heard of him. In mentioning his name a few years ago, the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg cited “Orthodox informants” to the effect that the rabbi was “quite the genius of Jewish law” and a “great dude of halakhah.”

With this in mind, my goal here is less to summarize his achievement, a daunting and ultimately futile task, than to offer a portrait of the man sufficient to motivate readers to learn more. (A place to begin might be the online bibliography of his myriad published essays, books, and lectures.)

Aharon Lichtenstein was born in Paris in 1933. Eight years later, his family fled Vichy France to the United States on visas arranged by the courageous American diplomat Hiram Bingham, Jr. After brief stops in Baltimore, where the young boy was already recognized as a prodigy of traditional learning, and then Chicago, they settled in New York in 1945. There he entered a yeshiva before his bar mitzvah and subsequently went on to undergraduate studies and rabbinic ordination at Yeshiva University (YU). The following years, spent studying English literature at Harvard, were crucial to the development of his particular strain of religious humanism; Boston also afforded the opportunity to study closely with his future father-in-law.

Upon returning to YU in a teaching capacity, Rabbi Lichtenstein oversaw the rabbinical school’s program for its most advanced students. Then, in 1971, he accepted an offer to join with Rabbi Yehuda Amital in heading a new yeshiva south of Jerusalem in the Etzion Bloc (in Hebrew, Gush Etzion, with Gush pronounced goosh as in “push”). He has been there ever since. Formally known as Yeshivat Har Etzion but universally called “the Gush,” the school represents his (and Rabbi Amital’s) vision for the role of the yeshiva as a unique educational institution within Jewish society; it is perhaps his greatest legacy.

Israel’s prime minister has indicated it might shelve the two-state solution. How would the world react, and how much would it matter?

Why do people cling so passionately to political opinions, even when a preponderance of facts suggests their views might be wrong or incomplete? To the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (2012), the arguments and narratives we present in defense of our positions are, in fact, “mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.” As such, those constructions are often impervious to new information or alternative narratives. “Intuitions come first,” Haidt writes; “strategic reasoning second.”

So far as I know, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon do not have any special training in the fields of psychology or social theory. Yet these two politicians, who stand at the apex of Israel’s foreign and defense establishment, seem to have internalized Haidt’s conclusions years ago. Having done so, both have regarded with equanimity—some would say with disdain—the cacophony of righteous indignation and overweening certainty with which many pundits at home and abroad pronounce the coming fall of the Jewish state, the irreversible alienation of American Jewry, and the steady collapse of Israeli democracy.

In conversations with diplomats and journalists from abroad, someone in my business quickly learns how unassailable these narratives have become. It isn’t just that they are accepted universally and completely; they are accepted by many who lack the means or the will to summon the knowledge necessary to support such sweeping assurances.

How, then, are we to assess these prevailing theologies, which drive so much of the world’s perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? According to researchers like Haidt who study the human mind, all of us are at least partly lying our way through our politics. Should we then treat these warnings, however unexamined, with at least enough humility to consider whether they might be at least partly true?