RUTHFULLY YOURS

DAMN WRONG!!!RSK

With the Bergdahl-Taliban swap, the administration elevates moral narcissism over objective reality.
This week on Fox News (here and here), the estimable Charles Krauthammer argued in favor of President Obama’s decision to swap detainees with a terrorist organization, indulging the administration’s portrayal of a “prisoner of war” exchange though the trade involves unlawful-combatant jihadists (two of them wanted for mass-murder war crimes) and a deserter.

I respectfully disagree.

Charles’s theory is that the West routinely engages in these sorts of swaps and should do so, despite always coming out on the short end, because it is a beneficial exhibition of the higher value we place on human life. I do not for a moment doubt Dr. K’s sincerity in stressing the value of human life, but I believe he is confounding the value and the exhibition — the high-minded display of good intentions. After all, as we shall see, his argument is a loser from a humanitarian perspective.

Charles appears to find the demonstration of our veneration of life beneficial because the so-called war on terror is, in part, a war of ideas. That is, even though these typically one-sided exchanges are a tactical victory for the terrorists, our cause is advanced over the long haul because the superiority of our values attracts convincible people to our side.

It is a nice thought, of a piece with the Lawyer Left pipe dream that we advance our security by bringing terrorists into our civilian criminal-justice system and abandoning such heavy-handed practices as coercive interrogation, military commissions, and indefinite law-of-war detention. Here’s the problem: These pieties do not correlate to real-world experience. Irresolute responses to barbarism beget more barbarism.

It is delusional to believe that most people in the Muslim Middle East view the conflict through our self-absorbed lens and perceive a contest between savage and noble principles. They have their own lens, and through it they see the strong horse versus the weak horse. You don’t win a war of ideas against a culture that brays, “We love death more than you love life!” by showing them how much you love life. To think otherwise is an example of what Roger Simon wrote about this week: the elevation of moral narcissism over objective reality.

Charles Krauthammer, of course, is no pie-in-the-sky progressive. So not surprisingly, he also cites a more concrete benefit of demonstrating our reverence for human life: It breeds a knowledge that we never abandon our captured troops, which is essential to the esprit de corps of the world’s most effective fighting force.

In principle, I agree. But in the Bergdahl-Taliban situation, the principle is inapposite. Charles, it turns out, is conflating some importantly distinct concepts. To begin with, there is a huge difference between how detainees are treated (a) in the midst of hostilities and (b) in an armistice at the conclusion of hostilities.

While combat is still raging — especially combat by terrorist methods that violate civilized norms — detainees should be held until the conclusion of hostilities unless there is some strategic advantage in releasing them. There can be no strategic advantage in replenishing the Taliban with five of its most capable commanders at a time when the Taliban, along with its al-Qaeda and Haqqani confederates, is still conducting offensive jihadist operations against both our troops in harm’s way and civilians.

PJ Media and The New Criterion recently teamed up to bestow the 2013 Walter Duranty Prize for mendacious journalism. Presenters once again included Roger Simon, Roger Kimball, Claudia Rosett … and Ronald Radosh.

How could they? Seriously, the only word for this is cruel. How could SImon and KImball and Rosett not have been the least bit aware of the ordeal they were undoubtedly subjecting Radosh to? Have they no feelngs? You’ve heard the old adage, Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. That’s nothing. How about Always a presenter, and never a recipient? In short, this Duranty Prize dinner, soigne, chi-chi, and officiated over by the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, was nothing less than a crime. Radosh, as so many readers well know, is the author of last year’s “McCarthy on Steroids,” which, tipping the scales at 7,000 words, includes more lies, distortions, smears and fabrications than the entries of all of the official prize-wnners put together. In plain Brooklynese: Radosh wuz robbed. The question is not only, Is there no justice? It is also, Have his peers no judgment?

Apparently not. Watch the videos of the event, and you can see it on their faces — heartless insensitivity to the suffering, the pain of their peer. Grinning, preening, dropping bon mots a la mode, they stand oblivious to this heir to Duranty beside them. But shoulder to shoulder, he carries on, gamely, bravely — just as if he had never written “McCarthy on Steroids” and many other worthy entries such as “Why I Wrote a Take-Down of Diana West’s Awful Book.” We know, though, even if they don’t, which is something. For shame. “Have they left no sense of decency?” No recognition, no peace.

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Rather than dwell on the sordidness of journalism today, I would like to harken back to the sordidness of journalism yesterday — to the time of Walter Duranty, the lying, fabricating NYT Pulitzer Prize winner best known for failing on purpose to report the state-engineered Ukraine terror famine by which Stalin killed some five or six or more million people by starving them to death, now immortalized in this rather dubious annual dinner in Manhattan.

Duranty’s perfidy is also covered in American Betrayal, but it’s worth noting that this perfidy was not Duranty’s alone. He had journalist-peers who put out similar lies, and who cooperated in a scheme to suppress the truth about the famine as told by one remarkable truth-teller, Gareth Jones.

This is a story that reeks morally, but it is important to come to grips with it for what it tells us about the way media work in the modern age — the modern age that began in the 1930s with the election of FDR: Ideology and/or expedience over all. Maybe it all began one spring night in 1993 in a Moscow hotel room in an incident we only know of because it is recorded in a chapter in Assignment in Utopia, the memoir of the ex-Socialist journalist Eugene Lyons, another truth-teller. The chapter is called: “The Press Corps Conceals a Famine.”

From American Betrayal, pp. 101-103:

By 1936, after civil war broke out in Spain, George Orwell could sense a sea change in the writing of history, of news, of information, of the handling of what he called “neutral fact,” which heretofore all sides had accepted. “What is peculiar to our age,” he wrote, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.” Or even that it should be, I would add. For example, he wrote, in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on World War I, not even twenty years past, “a respectable amount of material is drawn from German sources.” This reflected a common understanding—assumption—that “the facts” existed and were ascertainable. As Orwell personally witnessed in Spain, this notion that there existed “a considerable body of fact that would have been agreed to by almost everyone” had disappeared. “I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History ended in 1936,’ at which he nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism generally, but more specifically of the Spanish Civil War.” He continued, “I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed . . . I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”

Then he hits it precisely: “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’ ” (emphasis added). Ideology over all.

The hijacking of the Puerto Rican Day Parade began when New York’s radical leftist Attorney General purged its board of directors. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had promised during his campaign that Al Sharpton would have “an annex in Albany for the first time in the history of this state.”

When Schneiderman announced the results of his investigation, standing by his side was City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. Mark-Viverito had called for the Schneiderman “investigation” and its results predictably gave her and her radical allies control over the parade.

Her handpicked board took over and Melissa Mark-Viverito became one of its grand marshalls, along with her close ally, Red Bill de Blasio.

Melissa Mark-Viverito is a class warrior who owns $1.5 million in land back in Puerto Rico. She is a top public official in one of the biggest cities in the United States and also a Puerto Rican separatist who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The retooled Puerto Rican Day Parade honored FALN terrorist leader Oscar Lopez Rivera and alcoholic separatist poet Julia de Burgos who served as a top official in the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party before dying of cirrhosis of the liver

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was responsible for numerous acts of violence including the attempted assassination of President Truman and an armed attack on Congress. (The surviving perpetrators of both attacks were pardoned by Jimmy Carter.) The latter terrorist attack had been carried out in the name of “our apostle of independence, Don Pedro Albizu y Campos.”

Campos returned the favor by calling the terrorist attack on Congress an act of “sublime heroism”.

PRNP leader Pedro Albizu Campos served on the National Committee of the International Labor Defense which had been set up as part of the Comintern’s International Red Aid network and Communist literature had been found in the apartment of one of the terrorists.

On YouTube there is a video of the punishment for adultery that will soon be meted out to Sudanese Christian Dr. Meriam Yahya Ibrahim unless the United States government intervenes on her behalf. But some disturbing information revealed by Meriam’s husband, Daniel Wani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, suggests that “not leaving behind” this wife of an American citizen may not even be contemplated by the Obama Administration without strong pressure from caring advocates.

The video, featuring a terrified young Sudanese woman being whipped in front of onlookers at a Khartoum police station is so disturbing that it has been age-restricted by YouTube. Even her distress anticipating the flogging looks physically painful itself. Meriam has already had weeks to anticipate her upcoming flogging. She is to receive 100 lashes for her marriage to a South Sudanese Christian. Because the Shariah court in Khartoum considers her a Muslim, it does not recognize her marriage to Wani.

Meriam’s suffering will not end with the agony of lashes. That punishment will be followed within two years’ time by her execution for apostasy. The delay is because the court will wait until her newborn baby, Maya, has been weaned. Meriam will then be killed, according to Shariah, for the crime of refusing to renounce her faith in Jesus Christ and “revert” to Islam.

While waiting to be hanged, Meriam, 27, is shackled to the wall of the Omdurman Women’s Prison, along with her 20 month-old son, Martin. On May 27, when she gave birth to Maya, she was forced to endure labor on a filthy floor while still in leg irons, according to her distressed husband. Now, nursing Maya keeps her from the gallows, but she is not even permitted to nurse her baby and care for her toddler in peace. She has to suffer the continuous visits of Muslim clerics, attempting to pressure her into conversion.

Current photos of the gaunt inmate Meriam holding baby Maya are shocking after viewing photos of Meriam as Daniel’s beautiful bride. Traded-for-Taliban-terrorists Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl looks in the pink after his five years with Islamists (in spite of President Obama’s excuse for negotiating a deal with the devil being concern for the soldier’s health), compared to Meriam’s deteriorating appearance after just five months in Islamist captivity.

Where are the President’s grand gestures to rescue this young Christian wife of an American? Will President Obama be Meriam’s knight in shining armor, as he has been for Bergdahl?

The swap of probable deserter Bowe Bergdahl for 5 “high-risk” Guantánamo detainees is about more than political public relations. By releasing some of the worst murderers, this deal prepares the ground for Obama’s long-term goal of shutting down the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and releasing the remaining detainees. According to Britain’s Daily Mail, a senior Pentagon official claims Obama nixed plans to rescue Bergdahl because “the president wanted a diplomatic scenario that would establish a precedent for repatriating detainees from Gitmo.” Given that on his second day in office Obama issued an executive order shutting Gitmo down, and as recently as this year’s State of the Union speech repeated this pledge, his failure to do so has aroused serial complaints from his progressive base. With his reelection behind him, Obama may now think he can fulfill this promise, no matter the danger to our efforts to protect ourselves against terrorism.

For Obama’s liberal base, Gitmo has been part of a larger narrative of American tyranny, particularly George Bush’s alleged lawlessness in waging an “illegal” and “unnecessary” war in Iraq. Once Howard Dean’s anti-war presidential primary insurgency took off after the war began in 2003, mainstream Democrats began endorsing the far-left “Bush lied” analysis of the war that John Edwards, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton had voted for based on the same intelligence that led to the Bush administration’s decision. With the anti-war movement providing the visuals for television news, the left’s distorted history of Vietnam was resurrected to provide the template for the war in Iraq, particularly the charge that the Bush administration had lied about Hussein’s WMDs, just as Lyndon Johnson had allegedly fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Soon the whole litany of American militarist evils was applied to Iraq and the war against terrorists and their enablers. Torture, illegal detention, and abuse of prisoners were staples of that catalogue, and for leftists Gitmo fit the bill.

Soon we were hearing that Gitmo was a “gulag,” “the Bermuda Triangle of human rights,” a “shocking affront to democracy,” and a “national disgrace.” The New York Times, paying heed to charges by detainees trained to lie, said Guantanamo exemplified “harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse” and recalled “the Soviet Union’s sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies.” Such hysteria, of course, has no basis in fact.

Obama Inc. keeps insisting that Qatar could be trusted when it was already concluded by the 9/11 Commission that the Islamist tyranny had ties to the attack on the United States.

Since then Qatar has become so out of control in its backing of Jihadists that it has been disavowed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, but that just made Obama embrace it even harder.

Consider this. Obama is hugging a regime that the Saudis think is too extreme. That’s how bad things are. This latest revelation is no surprise at all.

The New York Times had already let slip that even Obama Inc. was uncomfortable with whom the Qataris were arming.

Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

It’s called plausible deniability. Now we know what was being denied.

The Obama administration isn’t only giving the Taliban back its commanders — it’s giving them weapons.

Miliary records and sources reveal that on July 25, 2012, Taliban fighters in Kunar province successfully targeted a US Army CH-47 helicopter with a new generation Stinger missile.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah/Palestinian Authority has just cemented a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, the terrorist movement that seized Gaza from Fatah in 2007 and whose charter calls for the murder of Jews. U.S.-brokered Israeli/Palestinian negotiations have foundered in a predictable round of recriminations. But events commemorated in recent weeks provide the clue to understanding why such talks invariably lead to an impasse. On May 15, Palestinians marked what they call the naqba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) – the day Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

That juxtaposition of Israeli independence and naqba is not accidental. We are meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.

But the truth is different. A British document from early 1948, declassified last year, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered … overwhelming defeats[.] … Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”

In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already at war, and Arabs fleeing, even before Israel came into sovereign existence on 15 May 1948.

Thus, what is now called the naqba consisted not of Israeli forcible displacement of Arabs, but of neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responding to Israel’s declaration of independence and Britain’s departure with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air, and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment – the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents – and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes. As Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, writing in Arab News, put it the other week, “[i]t was a defeat but the Arabs chose to call it a catastrophe.”

This past week with the swearing in of the so called unity government, two sides of the same coin were joined together in maniacal matrimony.  With an unrepentant charter sworn to annihilation of not only Israel but world Jewry, Hamas and the equally corrupt and hateful Fatah have ratified their reconciliation agreed to this past […]

Why Obama Did the Prisoner Swap — on The Glazov Gang
A glance into the heart of a leftist administration’s darkness.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-did-the-prisoner-swap-on-the-glazov-gang/

One thing is certain: both Hamas and Fatah are hoping to use the unity government as a ploy to attract financial aid from the international community, particularly Western donors. The unity government, which is backed by Fatah and the U.S.-terrorist-designated organization Hamas, actually serves both parties as a front for receiving funds from the international community.

Less than a week after its inauguration, the Hamas-Fatah unity government is already facing its first crisis as it remains unclear which party will pay salaries to tens of thousands of Hamas employees in the Gaza Strip.

It turns out that Hamas was hoping that the reconciliation deal it signed with Fatah in April, which led to the formation of the unity government, would absolve the Islamist movement of its financial obligations toward its employees.

That plan was, in fact, the main reason Hamas agreed to the reconciliation accord with Fatah. Over the past few years, Hamas has been facing a severe financial crisis, particularly in the wake of Egypt’s decision to destroy smuggling tunnels along its border with the Gaza Strip.

Hamas says that the new unity government is responsible for paying the salaries of its employees, but Fatah and Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas insist that this is not their responsibility.

The dispute between the two parties erupted into violence last week when hundreds of angry Hamas employees attacked a number of banks in the Gaza Strip after discovering that the unity government had failed to pay their salaries.