RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Barach Obama came to the Presidency with a radical domestic agenda and with little interest, or understanding, of global political matters. While he did assume office at a time of financial crisis, it is important to understand that much of the corrective work had been done by the time he took the oath of office. The TED spread, indicating banks’ ability to lend had narrowed dramatically from where it had been in the fall. The yield on high yield bonds began coming down in November. While we were still in recession, the bottom was only four months away. The patient was still sick, but the crisis was over.

He was elected, he claimed, to institute a liberal program. He had no interest in negotiating with those he had defeated. “I won,” was the way he put it. In the meantime, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel noted that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” An $840 billion stimulus bill was rammed through Congress during the honeymoon period. The Affordable Care Act was passed unilaterally a year later, while Democrats still controlled both chambers. Not one Republican voted for the bill, something that had never before happened with such a consequential piece of legislation. The President didn’t care; he was on a roll.

In terms of his liberal domestic agenda, Mr. Obama never considered what their consequences might mean in the global world. For example, in the energy sector where a combination of horizontal drilling and fracking technologies were changing the role of America in the production of fossil fuels, he chose to go with “green” energy, solar and wind companies. His EPA, catering to deep-pocketed environmentalists, inflicted burdensome regulations, delaying construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline for four years and preventing any drilling on federal lands. We have become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, but that is in spite of Mr. Obama’s policies, not because of them. Had Mr. Obama worked with the industry, instead of against it, we would today have surpassed Russia as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, and events in Ukraine and Europe might well have unfolded in a way far more pleasant for the West, democracy and the people of Ukraine.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-lost-spring-a-new-book-on-us-mideast-policy?f=puball

This month, my book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid will be in libraries across America and online. This new book, published by Palgrave-McMillan in New York, is an analysis of the evolution of the Arab Spring and its future. It also addresses other democratic revolutions, upheavals and civil wars in the Middle East, including events in Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and beyond.

In Future Jihad (2005), a book that was selected for the U.S. House of Representatives Summer Readings 2006, I projected the rise of the global Jihadist movement, including its surge in the West. My previously most recent book published in English, The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East (2010), predicted the Arab Spring, its successive waves, and the civil wars it would cause. I projected three cycles before they even happened: the rise of civil societies, the takeover by Islamists, and the comeback of the seculars to push back against the Islamists. And this is the very pattern we witnessed in both Egypt and Tunisia. My book in French, Du Printemps Arabe a l’Automne Islamiste (From the Arab Spring to the Islamist Fall), which was published in November 2013 in Paris and launched at the European Parliament in Brussels, described the global race between Islamists and seculars in the region.

My new book of 2014 is taking analysis and projections even further. It explains why the West and the United States failed to predict the Arab Spring and why they failed to handle it effectively. The book also addresses the direction these upheavals are headed and how to correct U.S. policy before irreparable catastrophe strikes the region. From bloody and expanding civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya to the fight against terror in Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia; from genocide in Sudan, Darfur and beyond to the persecution of Christian and ethnic minorities and the rise of al Qaeda and Hezbollah; so much in the region appears hopeless, but one must also recognize the emergence of reformers, women, minorities and civil societies.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4789/an_indian_immigrant_s_view_leftist_indoctrination_in_europe
An Indian immigrant’s view: Leftist indoctrination in Europe
The Leftwing narrative is running unopposed on European campuses. The institutions of higher learning that once heralded the age of enlightenment are looking more and more like Leftwing, neo-totalitarian Seminaries, and I say that coming from India

While giving finishing touches to his Ph.D. dissertation the Dutch student Jerke de Vries had a seemingly harmless idea. A believing Christian that he was, he decided to thank God in his dissertation acknowledgement.

What seemed like a nice gesture to him, did not sit well with the members of the Dissertation Committee at the University of Wageningen (The Netherlands). They gave him a choice between God and the doctoral title.

He was ordered to blacken the sentence acknowledging God in several hundred printed copies of his dissertation, or face a certain rejection of his thesis.

Apparently in the committee’s view, it is one thing to acknowledge a favorite pub, a regular hang-out or even the local soccer team, like other batch mates, but by mentioning God the student had clearly crossed the norms of acceptability.

Finally, Jerke de Vries did bowed down to the dictates of the committee, but kept his pride by physically removing the entire acknowledgment page from several hundred copies of his dissertation, instead of blackening out the ‘objectionable’ sentence, as the committee had instructed.

What happened last week in a Dutch University is not an isolated case of academic overreach by overzealous members of a committee. Universities throughout Europe and North America are increasingly turning into hostile places, not only for believing Christians, but for anyone holding convictions other than the ones approved by the leftwing establishment.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304554004579421550829470192?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop&mg=reno64-wsj The M-302 rocket is a Syrian-made munition that can launch a 375-pound warhead as far as 125 miles. In a Red Sea raid Wednesday, Israeli naval commandos intercepted a shipment of these rockets that had been loaded on a freighter in the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and were destined for Gaza. The rockets […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/being-beastly-to-the-germans

I was going to open this column with remarks on the plight of the German Romeike family, who in 2008 fled Germany to the U.S. to escape the prohibition there against homeschooling and the severe penalties, such as harsh financial fines and the removal of children from their homes, for not obeying the state.

But, unexpectedly, and for unknown reasons, the Department of Homeland Security called the organization representing the Romeike family, the Home School Legal Defense Association, and said the Romeikes had been granted permanent asylum status and would not be deported back to Germany.

World War II has been over nearly seventy years, but apparently Germany still has a Nazi law on the books that requires German parents to send their children to state schools. In Germany, your children are not your own, neither to teach nor to claim. They are the state’s. You, the parents, are mere stewards of your children, and if they are not raised to be good, docile citizens, they will be reclaimed by the state and removed from your deleterious influence.

Among other blogs, the Free Republic reported the astounding and unexpected news:

“Today, a Supervisor with the Department of Homeland Security called a member of our legal team to inform us that the Romeike family has been granted “indefinite deferred status”. This means that the Romeikes can stay in the United States permanently (unless they are convicted of a crime, etc.) “This is an incredible victory that can only be credited to our Almighty God.

“We also want to thank those of who spoke up on this issue-including that long ago White House petition. We believe that the public outcry made this possible while God delivered the victory.

Up until yesterday, the issue has been reported in one fundamentally wrong way: that the Romeikes were escaping from “religious persecution.” Todd Starnes of Fox News, for example, feared the worst for the Romeike family after the Supreme Court refused to listen to their appeal, which would have resulted in almost instant deportation of the family back to Germany. On March 3rd, in his article, “Team Obama wins fight to have Christian home-school family deported,” he wrote:

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike came to the United States in 2008 seeking political asylum. They fled their German homeland in the face of religious persecution for homeschooling their children.

They wanted to live in a country where they could raise their children in accordance with their Christian beliefs.

The Romeikes were initially given asylum, but the Obama administration objected – claiming that German laws that outlaw homeschooling do not constitute persecution.”The goal in Germany is for an open, pluralistic society,” the Justice Department wrote in a legal brief last year. “Teaching tolerance to children of all backgrounds helps to develop the ability to interact as a fully functioning citizen in Germany.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Romeike’s appeal – paving the way for the Christian family of eight to be deported.

Why didn’t the Justice Department call with the good news, instead of the DHS? What was the motive behind the reversal? That remains unknown, but very likely it was the “negative” publicity of a callous, behemoth government picking on a single family. The federal government isn’t scoring high in the likeability polls, lately.

The issue is not one of mere religious persecution. Certainly the German law accomplishes that, but isn’t it more than just “religious” persecution? It’s more than that. It is the negating of one’s convictions, religious or not, by fiat law backed by government force.

Fundamentally, the Romeike family fled to the U.S. to escape ideological persecution. That their reasons were religious are secondary.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/03/anti-judaism/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=5d68df65c3-2014_3_7&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-5d68df65c3-41165129

In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay “On the Jewish Question.” This wasn’t an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with the sociology of German Jews. Its occasion was the contemporary debate about Jewish emancipation, but its real purpose was to call for the overthrow of the capitalist order. The call was expressed in a language that is probably not surprising to readers today and that was entirely familiar to readers in the nineteenth century. Still, it is a very strange language. Capitalism is identified by Marx with Judaism, and so the overthrow of capitalism will be, he writes, “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” The argument is worth quoting, at least briefly:
walzer_1-032014.jpg Hermitage, St. Petersburg/Bridgeman Art Library Rembrandt: Portrait of an Old Jew, 1654

The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way…not only insofar as he has acquired financial power, but also insofar as, through him and without him, money has risen to world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews.

“Through [the Jew] and without [the Jew]”—mostly without him: as Marx certainly knew, Jews made up a very small part of the moneyed elite of England, the most advanced capitalist country, and an even smaller part of the “rising” German bourgeoisie. His own father had converted to Protestantism in order to facilitate his entry into bourgeois society, where Jews were not welcome in the early nineteenth century.

What Marx is doing here, David Nirenberg argues in his brilliant, fascinating, and deeply depressing book Anti-Judaism, is exactly what many other writers have done in the long history of Western civilization. His essay is a “strategic appropriation of the most powerful language of opprobrium available to any critic of the powers and institutions of this world.” That sentence comes from Nirenberg’s discussion of Martin Luther, but it applies equally well to Marx. Still, we should be more surprised by Marx’s use of this language than by Luther’s, not only because of Marx’s Jewish origins but also because of his claim to be a radical critic of the ideology of his own time. He might, Nirenberg says, have questioned the association of Judaism and capitalism and written a critical history aimed at making his readers more reflective about that association. Instead, he chose to exploit “old ideas and fears about Jewishness.”

Consider another famous use of this language of opprobrium, this time not in support of but in fierce opposition to revolutionary politics. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke compared what was going on in France to previous revolutions (like England’s in 1688) that were led by noblemen “of great civil, and great military talents.” By contrast, he wrote, the revolutionary government in Paris is led by “Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.”

In Burke’s case, the choice of this language was probably not “strategic.” The choice was structural—anti-Judaism was a feature of the worldview with which Burke was able to recognize what Marxists later described as a “bourgeois” revolution. “Given the complete absence of Jews from the actual leadership, whether political, pecuniary, or philosophical, of the French Revolution,” Nirenberg writes, the line about “Jew brokers” (and also Burke’s proposal to help the revolutionaries by sending English Jews to France “to please your new Hebrew brethren”) may, again, seem very strange. In fact, it is utterly common; only Burke’s ferocious eloquence is uncommon.

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/03/07/another-tack-krake-zuckerberg/

Most German publications no longer even pretend any wariness about coming off as anti-Jewish. Gone are the days when Germans had to at least appear a tad more cautious than their fellow Europeans. The latter reverted quickly enough to their old Jew-baiting habits but the Germans have willy-nilly caught up.

A cogent example is being consistently provided by Munich’ s left-liberalSueddeutsche Zeitung, which also happens to be Germany’s largest broadsheet daily. It recently featured a cartoon lampooning Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg after his outfit had acquired WhatsApp. The idea was to show Zuckerberg as a voracious octopus that swallows up everything around it. The caption at the bottom left-hand corner of the cartoon clearly read “Krake Zuckerberg” (German for Octopus Zuckerberg.) Up to this point, it’s tolerable criticism.

But the octopus, as drawn by cartoonist Burkhard Mohr, was also given quite a distinctive face. Its function, presumably, was to make sure we don’t lose sight of the fact that young Zuckerberg – innovative enough to have given the world a social network which millions of Germans also use – is a Jew. To that end, Mohr portrayed him with a preposterous hook-nose and thick fish-lips – as per the freakish stereotype sinisterly ascribed to Jews by their tormentors.

The most glaring example was Julius Streicher’s Nazi-era Der Stürmer which surpassed all competitors in caricaturing Jews as hook-nosed spiteful grotesques. However, while Der Stürmer was the worst, it wasn’t alone. In fact, it’s still seemingly unobjectionable all over the globe to gratuitously picture Jews in Der Stürmer style.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4206/nigeria-middle-belt

During a priority-setting session, “equal opportunity for all tribes or groups,” “job creation,” “better education,” and “recognition of excellence” were rated significantly higher than “defeat of Boko Haram,” perhaps because that is seen primarily as the job of the military.

The security situation across northern Nigeria is unstable-to-terrible. The Islamists of the Boko Haram group have threatened to eradicate Christianity through a campaign of violence against Christians and churches, and have killed 2,000 people including moderate Muslims in four years.

Further, the next federal elections are planned for just twelve months’ time; during the last ballot in 2011 the re-election of Christian presidential candidate, Goodluck Jonathan, resulted in the death of 800 Christians and other minorities and the destruction of up to 300 churches at the hand of rioting Muslim protestors in the twelve northern Sharia states.

Nonetheless, Dr. Bala Takaya, vice-president of Nigeria’s Middle Belt Forum, former head of the Department of Political Science at Jos University and alumnus of the London School of Economics, is hopeful. Speaking to the media outside the second Stefanos Foundation conference for the country’s northern ethnic minorities — an initiative of Gatestone Institute held in Abuja recently — he claimed that the northern minorities are becoming stronger and more united. “We have come of age,” he said.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4207/obama-budget-israel-missile-defense Missile defense buys time and the Administration should appreciate — and fund — that. When the President is leaning hard on Israel to be forthcoming and flexible on issues of its own short and long-term security, the signal that missile defenses are expendable sends the wrong signal to both friends and adversaries. Does […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4205/britain-immigration “The free market to which our EU partners are fundamentally committed has turned out to have rather different and serious implications in the UK. The fundamental mistake was to expand the EU to include 100 million people with a standard of living of about one quarter of ours.” — Migration Watch UK. Net immigration […]