RUTHFULLY YOURS

Even in today’s interconnected world, a lot of news is bundled by region — and so it often works with rogue states and their neighborhoods. The past few months have been an especially lively period for wayward states in the Middle East, where by diplomatic sleight-of-hand the regimes of Damascus and Tehran have been transformed from terrorist-sponsoring WMD proliferators into erstwhile or potential partners of the U.S. in nonproliferation. In August the big focus was on Syria, the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons and the ensuing deal — in which Russia’s President Vladimir Putin translated Assad’s nerve gas into a bargaining chip for re-expanding Russian influence and a dwindling role for the U.S. in the Middle East (in which Secretary of State John Kerry is now praising Syria’s President Bashar Assad [1]).

September brought the Iranian regime’s “charm” offensive, in which President Hassan Rouhani traveled to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, snubbed President Obama’s offer to meet in person, and lectured the world on Iran’s right to enrich uranium. He was rewarded with a presidential phone call, the return to Iran of a million dollar griffin-shaped silver drinking cup [2] and plans for nuclear talks next week in Geneva.

While that’s been going on, Americans have had plenty of distractions on their home turf, between news of the federal shutdown, debates over what’s actually been shut and footage of news anchors trying unsuccessfully to log onto the new government healthcare web sites.

Amid all this, there hasn’t been a lot of focus on North Korea. It’s been eight long months since Pyongyang’s third nuclear test — way back in February. It’s been three years since North Korea advertised to the world that along with its plutonium path to the bomb, it had installed at its Yongbyon complex a uranium enrichment facility (which on satellite imagery appears to have since doubled in size). Given the tempo of the modern news cycle, that’s prehistoric.

In The Grand Jihad, my book about the Muslim Brotherhood, I noted the Brothers’ affectation of non-violent moderation when, in reality, their ideology preaches, prepares for, and practices forcible jihad. How, I rhetorically asked, does the Brotherhood pull this trick off? Well, it is pretty easy in the West, where the Brothers have the fortuity of dealing mainly with appeasers who are desperate to believe their lies. But for the most part, I argued, “the answer, very simply, is extortion.”

When not pretending to distance themselves from flat-out terrorist outfits like al Qaeda (the better to have Kool-Aid gulpers at the White House regard them as “moderates”), the Brothers leverage the atmosphere of intimidation created by violent jihad to advance the stealth jihad. Where necessary, the Brothers — while piously disavowing violence — will stoke the violence themselves. Remember, the Hamas terrorist organization is the Muslim Brotherhood — the global organization’s self-proclaimed Palestinian branch whose support has been a top priority of the Brotherhood’s international franchises (very much including in the United States) since Hamas’s inception.

For the most part, though, the Brothers exploit the mass-murderous proclivities of other Islamic supremacist organizations, essentially finishing the job for them. The job? Yes, it is all one job — sharia.

We would grasp this if we were not so mulishly uninformed about the enemy’s ideology. Islamic supremacists do not engage in wanton violence; they brutalize in order to advance sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal code. Even if they occasionally disagree on tactics, al Qaeda and the Brotherhood are in complete harmony on the ultimate goal of imposing Islam on societies. To focus myopically on the tactical disagreements, as the West’s moderate-mania does, is to miss the forest for the trees. The Brotherhood is like the well-dressed mafia capo who knocks on your door — and whom you pay the loan-shark vig in the hope that the next visitor won’t be the al Qaeda button-man who breaks your knees before torching the place.

Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book,’Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, 2012). His articles and blogs are published in several foreign journals and his new work, ‘How the West was won’ is due out next year

The Independent (laughable name, we know) is a very poor UK leftist relation to the Guardian. Talk about defensive over Israel and anti-Semitism…

The Independent, refuting claims that it demonized Israel as a matter of policy, scored a hapless ‘own goal’. You don’t select your blatant game spoiler, your serial offender if you want to hoodwink referees that you play a clean game.

“Our coverage of Israel is led by our multiple award-winning Middle East Correspondent, Robert Fisk. Mr Fisk, in three decades reporting on that region, understands it better than most of those who slander him, and has been at pains to distinguish between opposition to Israeli policy and anti-Semitism.”

Oh, their man has been at pains all right. But the devil is in the detail, and when Fisk’s record is a mile long the detail scuppers the best laid plan to cast your dirtiest player as a model exponent of clean football.

To what pains did he go to distinguish between someone who is an opponent of Israeli policy from another who simply can’t stick the Jews? Let the eloquent Fisk tell, in his own characteristic style, of the pains he went to.

“Don’t (speak badly of Israel) or you’ll be an anti-Semitic Nazi”.
“How to shut up your critics up with a single word”.
“… filth and hate mail designed to end any glimmer of truth emerging from the Middle East.”

Fisk has gone to a lot of pain; but for what gain? Do the sample writings (there are more of the kind) distinguish an honest critic from a blind hater of Israel? Who can see the difference?

As scepticism grows across the European Union and debate thickens in Britain, former Czech President Vaclav Klaus says the EU is in any case doomed, like empires of the past, including communism

The architect of formerly communist Czechoslovakia’s economic transition from communism has called for his country (now the Czech Republic) to quit the European Union.

One time finance minister, prime minister and president of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus made his appeal at the launch of his new book in Prague, the Czech capital. Mr. Klaus caused ructions within the EU during his time as a senior politician but he has rarely been so bold as to compare the European Union with his country’s former imperial masters, including the Soviet Union.

The Czech news agency CTK quoted Mr. Klaus, the country’s leading voice on the political centre-Right, as saying: “It would be a great victory for our country if they did not control us from Moscow, Vienna, Berlin or Brussels.”

Echoing the views of eurosceptics in Britain, which is due to hold a referendum on quitting the EU in 2017, he said:

“Absolutely nothing”, would happen if the Czechs gave up their EU membership,” CTK reported. Mr. Klaus added, in remarks that will cause consternation in Brussels:

“The whole Europe will leave the EU sooner or later and it will leave (European Commission President) Jose Barroso and (European Council President Herman Van) Rompuy sitting alone in Brussels. And the continent would develop in a different way.”

Vaclav Klaus is among the last of the generation of political intellectuals that inaugurated and then saw through the transition from Communism to Capitalism. He is an avowed supporter of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

He is also a professor of economics, and he is regarded in Brussels as a trouble maker, a description which he openly acknowledges. His book has not yet been translated into English.

His remarks will cheer eurosceptics in Britain.

Rep. Darrell Issa must be at the top of the White House’s enemies list. His House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has released copies of emails from former IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram indicating exchange of information with White House officials that is by law confidential.

The Daily Caller has broken the story:

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials – including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew – contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

The emails released by the committee contain numerous redactions of the names of specific groups, containing the notation “6103” which refers to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Service code, which:

forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.”

That means that Ingram was discussing specifics with the White House that she was forbidden by law to disclose to anyone.

The exact content of the redactions remains unknown at the moment, but Rep. Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, “citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 ‘for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry,'” according to the Daily Caller.

During her testimony, Ingram claimed she couldn’t remember the contents of the redacted portions, as opposed to taking the Fifth Amendment, like her former colleague Lois Lerner.

This scandal has explosive potential. Disclosure of confidential taxpayer information is a felony.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520704579125580451142834.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Charter-school parents march in New York to secure a civil right: education.

It’s too bad every New Yorker who plans to vote in the city’s mayoral election Nov. 5 couldn’t be at the Brooklyn Bridge Tuesday morning. They would have seen the single most important issue in the race between Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota. It’s not stop-and-frisk.

Thousands and thousands of charter-school parents with their young children—most looked to be in the first to fourth grades—marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to save their schools.

When Bill de Blasio won the Democratic nomination for mayor, the first question many asked was whether Mr. de Blasio’s intention to heavily regulate the police department’s stop-and-frisk program would put the city’s years of low-crime calm at risk.

But this big Brooklyn Bridge march of mothers, fathers and kids alters the calculus of next month’s vote. The crime issue, though important, is ultimately about self-interest.

By contrast, most New York voters—especially better-off white voters who’ve already made it here—have no direct stake whatsoever in New York City’s charter schools. They do, however, have a stake in the integrity of their political beliefs.

For decades, New York’s inner-city schools sent wave after wave of students into the world without the skills to do much more than achieve a minimal level of lifetime earnings, if that. This failure, repeated in so many large cities, remains the greatest moral catastrophe in the political life of the United States.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579123403196916722.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

A staggering $250 billion per month, 80% of spending, runs on autopilot without congressional control.

At its core, the shutdown is part of a much bigger battle to restrain the federal government. It is spending $3.6 trillion per year without a budget, and its expenditures are expected to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the government has piled up $17 trillion in debt and $60 trillion more in unfunded spending promises. The Federal Reserve will borrow $1.1 trillion in 2013 alone to buy bonds—and it reserves the right to borrow unlimited amounts for future bond purchases without congressional or presidential permission.

These are crisis-level problems. Whether the government is open or closed, they are surely grounds for immediate talks between the president and Congress on ways to pare ineffective federal programs, restrain spending and reduce borrowing.

Ducking governance decisions year after year will leave the U.S. too weak to face global challenges. Big government has meant slow growth, painfully high youth and minority unemployment and falling median incomes—except in the Washington, D.C., area, which recent census data show is growing ever richer.

Under current law, the federal government and Federal Reserve are in a sharp upward trajectory in their power and the riskiness of their policies. Federal domination of the economy and financial markets is only increasing. The government shutdown reflects a Republican demand for permanent new checks and balances—to restrain a government that spends wildly without a budget, buys $1 trillion per year in overpriced bonds from an already-rich Wall Street, and micromanages federal medical care but exempts unions and Congress from the sting of regulations that affect others.

http://www.newmediajournal.us/ It is unconscionable. It is rude, insensitivity, callus and unacceptable. With the news that family members of fallen soldiers killed in Afghanistan are not only being denied death benefits, but are being denied transportation to Dover AFB for the arrival of the caskets containing the remains of their loved ones, the Obama Administration has […]

FORGET THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZES….THEY ARE JUST TUTU RIDICULOUS….RSK

IN PHYSICS:

Professor Francois Baron Englert (80) shared a Nobel prize in physics with Professor Peter Higgs of Britain, for their discovery of the Higgs mechanism. Englert is a Belgium Jew and Holocaust survivor. He is also associated with the University of Tel Aviv.

IN MEDICINE: Nobel Prize winners are James Rothman of Yale University and Randy Schekman of the University of California.

IN CHEMISTRY: Professor Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California (USC), a Technion alumnus, Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt. The academy said Levitt, 66, is a British, U.S., and Israeli citizen and a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Warshel, 72, is a U.S. and Israeli citizen affiliated with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Karplus was a child when his family fled from the Nazi occupation in Austria. Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being “an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family” in Vienna

The war of words is over regarding Diana West vs. the Radoshites. She won hands down after the magnificent column defending her by Pavel Stroilov and Valdimir Bukovsky. Conrad Black has decided to ignite more debate in this feeble argument which is not worth a response. Most laughable is Black’s last paragraph:

“We all sympathize with and admire Mr. Bukovsky’s endurance of his ordeal. I do so as one who was also unjustly imprisoned, though for only three years and in the vastly gentler regime of the United States. (It was no day at the beach. And it has not destroyed my regard for the U.S., but it has not made me a compulsive American-flag-waver either.) Whatever injustices any of us may have suffered, they do not entitle us to defame the justly honored dead, invent and deform history, or impugn the righteousness of our civilization, flawed and tainted and often riddled with hypocrisy though it is, but the best the world has had.”

Huh? He dares to use the word “us.” Black was tried, convicted and jailed for fraud. Bukovsky was not tried but convicted for dissidence against a criminal government and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals. Bukovsky is a giant and Black is a gnat…..rsk

Defaming the Cold WarriorsWest, Bukovsky, and Stroilov are wrong. By Conrad Black

It is a painful but implacable duty to return to the dismaying subject of Diana West’s book, American Betrayal, about which she has written, in the last few days, “The war of words is over.” Her authority for this triumphalist expression of relief is that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his co-commentator Pavel Stroilov have described Mrs. West’s book as “huge and brilliant.” Part of their review of her book, and much of the debate, has been a fierce firefight including a considerable, though often somewhat entertaining, volume of recriminations that asperse the rigor, motivations, ideological orientation, integrity, and sanity of the two sides. I do not fit any of the stereotypes erected and riddled with high-explosive projectiles by both sides, and am merely a non-American biographer of Roosevelt and strategic historian (as well as other occupations), of impeccable conservative credentials, who has uttered no personal critique of the protagonists (I have enjoyed the previous work of Mrs. West that I have seen). And I am generally outside the circular firing squad that has been debating these issues, and so have not had to repair to the field hospital or even the dressing station, and am unafflicted in wind and limb by the tremendous exchange of ordnance this debate, if it can be so described, has provoked.