RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/358486/man-who-keeps-new-york-safe-deroy-murdock

Stoic.

That word best describes New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly. In an increasingly juvenile nation, Kelly’s granite temperament can be a tad daunting. But if you knew what Kelly knows, you might not smile much, either.

“The threat of terrorism is as great, if not greater, today than it was before the World Trade Center was destroyed,” Kelly recently said. “Do not think for a second that al-Qaeda and those who share its ideology have forgotten about New York,” he continued. “Images of the World Trade Center and scenes of the City are regularly displayed on jihadist websites and al-Qaeda publications. Its propagandists call on followers in the United States to take up the battle at home and use bombs, guns, and poison to indiscriminately kill.”

In a breakfast speech at the New York Hilton that made last Monday tougher than most, Kelly told the Association for a Better New York and the Council on Foreign Relations that America’s financial and media capital remains militant Islam’s target of choice.

“In the mind of al-Qaeda and its acolytes, New York is the symbol of all they hate about America and the West,” Kelly added. “In just the past ten months there have been several plots with a nexus to New York City.”

• Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, 23, arrived from Bangladesh on a student visa. He conspired to blast Manhattan’s Federal Reserve Bank last October. On August 9, he received a 30-year prison sentence.

• Raess Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, two Pakistani-born brothers, were nabbed in Florida last November 29 after plotting to detonate theaters and restaurants in Times Square.

• NYPD undercover efforts prompted the arrest of Justin Kaliebe, 18, as he boarded a jet for Yemen, allegedly to join Ansar al-Sharia, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Kelly observed, “There’s little doubt that his handlers would have sent him back here to their number-one target, New York City.”

• An unnamed, Iranian-trained al-Qaeda agent met a conspirator here. Among other objectives, they planned to attack a train between New York and Canada. So much for the myth that Sunni al-Qaeda and Shiite Iran will not cooperate to kill Americans.

• Just days after allegedly bombing the Boston Marathon last April, killing three people and wounding 264, the Tsarnaev brothers drove towards Manhattan with pipe bombs and explosive pressure cookers. Had their hostage not escaped, Kelly explained, “They would have arrived in Midtown in time to launch a devastating attack at the morning rush hour.”

“Again,” Kelly emphasized, “these all are events in the last ten months.”

Kelly has led the NYPD into becoming what Heritage Foundation national-security scholar Cully Stimson calls “the best city police department in terms of counterterrorism in the USA.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358550/print Prostitution. Bribery. Blackmail. Thuggery. Hypocrisy. Those were just some of the incendiary words thrown around the U.S. Senate last week, and that doesn’t count what people said in private. The Senate may still have a reputation as a genteel club, but lawmakers seemed to abandon rules of decorum completely last week in arguments about […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/center-for-security-policy-to-honor-author-diana-west-as-recipient-of-the-mightier-pen-award?f=puball The Center for Security Policy announced today that the 2013 recipient of its Mightier Pen Award will be Diana West, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, co-author of Shariah: The Threat to America, and most recently author of American […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/putin-upstages-obama-as-man-of-peace?f=puball I can appreciate a good joke. But Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Op-Ed in the New York Times of September 11th, “A Plea for Caution,” which I’m sure caused him to smile as he penned it, is not funny. It isn’t even a bad joke.  On one hand, there is some humor in seeing President […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/remembering-9-11-how-far-have-we-come-what-still-needs-to-be-done On the twelfth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on United States soil, we reflect back on those who were lost on that fateful day.  We remember the heroes and where we were.  How far have we come in the journey of grief and how far must we continue to go in striving to protect […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/revisiting-the-diana-west-controversy/

The controversy currently raging among conservative luminaries over the substantive nature and scholarly status of Diana West’s new book, American Betrayal, need not be rehearsed in detail here; its features are by now reasonably familiar to most readers of the political sites. But it will do no harm to offer a schematic overview of the broad contours of the “debate”—to give it the politest of tags.

It began when David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine scrubbed Mark Tapson’s favorable account of the book and replaced it with Ron Radosh’s intemperate and distressingly ad hominem demolition masking as a “review.” Indeed, Radosh’s logomachic intervention read more like a personal vendetta than a scrupulous assessment. As a seasoned writer and veteran debater, Radosh should have known better. From that point on, a war of words was launched and the psychodrama shows no signs of tapering off. West published her Rebuttal and was heatedly defended by the notable historian Andrew Bostom and by many of the talkbackers to Horowitz’s own site. Meanwhile Horowitz and Radosh, and even the orotund Conrad Black, continued to pummel both book and author.

I do not wish to enter into the vortex of the dispute. I readily admit that I am no expert on the subject West’s volume addresses. Was Harry Hopkins the infamous KGB agent 19 or was it Laurence Duggan? Was American WWII policy subtly shaped and surreptitiously directed by Soviet espionage and penetration of the inner circles of the White House—and if so, to what degree? Was Eastern Europe lost to “Uncle Joe” Stalin owing to American ineptitude or to Communist infiltration of the decision-making process? I am in no position to weigh in on the matter. These issues may—or may not—be satisfactorily settled in the future, provided an honest, impartial, and intellectual debate is permitted to flourish without rancor and personal vituperation.

I can only say that Diana West’s thesis is surely deserving of scholarly consideration, whether pro or con. Whether one agrees with her conclusions or not, one must recognize that her argument is meticulously researched and abundantly footnoted. It seems to me that David Horowitz was wrong to remove a review that he had originally vetted and, furthermore, to substitute a largely personal imprecation in its stead rather than, say, to post a countervailing review and let the reader decide. Whatever his motive, the decision leaves an editorial stench that is not easily dissipated.

This is unfortunate, for Horowitz is one of the great conservative writers of our time who has done yeoman service in defending the principles of liberal democracy, in both the political and educational domains. No less unfortunate, there has been far too much name-calling on either side of the embroilment. But it needs to be candidly said that the unseemly fracas began with Radosh’s and Horowitz’s ill-advised, adversarial tactics.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/09/15/obama-then-and-now-the-rashomon-effect-first-in-a-series/?print=1 Sometimes it is worth stepping back from the fray to gain a little perspective. A shipped tossed about in a mighty gale looks one way to the passengers aboard, quite another way (as Lucretius pointed out [1] in his great poem) to the lucky person watching from the comfortable safety of the hilltop overlooking […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ari-lieberman/palestinians-deserving-of-a-state/ On November 20, 2012 six Palestinian civilians, accused of collaborating with Israel, were dragged from their homes in Gaza City by Palestinian gunmen. The butchery that followed represented depravity in the extreme, even by Palestinian standards. The six were summarily executed before an approving crowd that included children and at least one was dragged […]

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/156181

Only when we recognize the fundamental role Islam plays in the region can we begin to craft sensible policies that put U.S. interests first.

The revolutions against dictators in the Middle East dubbed the Arab Spring have degenerated into a complex, bloody mélange of coups and counter-coups, as have happened in Egypt; vicious civil wars, like the current conflict in Syria; a resurgence of jihadists gaining footholds in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sinai; and a shifting and fracturing of alliances and enmities of the sort throwing Lebanon and Jordan into turmoil. Meanwhile, American foreign policy has been confused, incompetent, and feckless in insuring that the security and interests of the United States and its allies are protected.

A major reason for our foreign policy failures in the region is our inability to take into account the intricate diversity of ideological, political, and especially theological motives driving events. Just within the Islamist outfits, Sunni and Shia groups are at odds—and this isn’t to mention the many bitter divisions within Sunni and Shia groups. Add the other players in the Middle East––military dictators, secular democrats, leftover communists, and nationalists of various stripes––and the whole region seems embroiled in endlessly complex divisions and issues.

Yet a greater impediment to understanding accurately this bloody and complex region is our preconceived biases. Too often we rely on explanations that gratify our own ideological preferences and prejudices, but that function like mental stencils: they are a priori patterns we superimpose on events to create the picture we want to see, but only by concealing other events that do not fit the pattern. We indulge the most serious error of foreign policy: assuming that other peoples think like us and desire the same goods as we do, like political freedom and prosperity, at the expense of others, like religious obedience and honor.

One persistent narrative attributes the region’s disorder to Western colonialism and imperialism. The intrusion of European colonial powers into the region, the story goes, disrupted the native social and political institutions, imposing in their place racist norms and alien values that demeaned Muslims as the “other” and denigrated their culture to justify the exploitation of resources and markets. This process culminated after World War I in the dismantling of the caliphate, and the creation of Western-style nation-states that ignored the traditional ethnic and sectarian identities of the region. As a result, resentment and anger at colonial occupation and exploitation erupted in Islamist jihadism against the oppressor.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-egyptian-pyramid-scheme/print/ Deserts are funny things. A big wide open space in which nothing moves can play tricks on the mind. Spend enough time looking at a desert and you will see things moving in it because your mind needs to believe that there is life in it. Look hard enough and you will see democracy, […]