RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Egypt and Syria, misguided food and water policies set the stage for revolt and civil war.

Mr. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and the London Center for Policy Research.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578597502771627238.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Sometimes economies can’t be fixed after decades of statist misdirection, and the people simply get up and go. Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, 10 million poor Mexicans—victims of a post-revolutionary policy that kept rural Mexicans trapped on government-owned collective farms—have migrated to the United States. Today, Egyptians and Syrians face economic problems much worse than Mexico’s, but there is nowhere for them to go. Half a century of socialist mismanagement has left the two Arab states unable to meet the basic needs of their people, with economies so damaged that they may be past the point of recovery in our lifetimes.

This is the crucial background to understanding the state failure in Egypt and civil war in Syria. It may not be within America’s power to reverse their free falls; the best scenario for the U.S. is to manage the chaos as best it can.

Of Egypt’s 90 million people, 70% live on the land. Yet the country produces barely half of Egyptians’ total caloric consumption. The poorer half of the population survives on subsidized food imports that stretch a budget deficit close to a sixth of the country’s GDP, about double the ratio in Greece. With the global rise in food prices, Egypt’s trade deficit careened out of control to $25 billion in 2010, up from $10 billion in 2006, well before the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

In Syria, the government’s incompetent water management—exacerbated by drought beginning in 2006—ruined millions of farmers before the May 2011 rebellion. The collapse of Syrian agriculture didn’t create the country’s ethnic and religious fault lines, but it did leave millions landless, many of them available and ready to fight.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4404153,00.html Are we going back in time when Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews by depicting them as animals? A recently published cartoon by the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung portraying Israel as a monster “Moloch” devouring weaponry is just another confirmation that anti-Semitism is still in vogue, but with a new more dangerous twist.   Before the creation […]

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=19795&m=18301&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce The Quran-derived “Taqiyya” concept is a core cause of systematically-failed US peace initiatives in the Middle East; 1,400 years of intra-Muslim/Arab warfare and the lack of intra-Muslim/Arab comprehensive peace; the tenuous nature of intra-Muslim/Arab agreements; and the inherently shifty, unpredictable and violent intra-Muslim/Arab relations, as currently demonstrated on the chaotic, seismic Arab Street. The […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353328/obamas-rule-decree-andrew-c-mccarthy

The collapse of law is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal.

Barack Obama has never been clear on the distinction between sovereign and servant, between the American people and those, including himself, elected to do the people’s business. We saw that yet again this week with the president’s unilateral rewrite of the Bataan Death March known as the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. For this president, laws are not binding expressions of the popular will, but trifling recommendations to be ignored when expedient.

The collapse of law — not just Obamacare but law in general — is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal. With the IRS here, Benghazi there, and Eric Holder’s institutionalized malevolence crowding the middle, it gets little direct attention. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous, so quotidian, that we’ve become inured to it.

Above all else, though, the office of the president was created to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. For this president, to the contrary, law is non-existent — and not merely law in the traditional sense of our aspiration to be “a nation of laws not men.” Obama has contorted the law into a weapon against our constitutional order of divided powers and equal protection for every American.

As with most things Obama, this Olympian outrage springs from a kernel of propriety. We want our laws enforced, particularly when they reflect basic obligations of government in a free, civil society. Nevertheless, we know that the resources of government are finite, that laws are numerous and elastic, and that a federalist system implies a significant enforcement role for states. Thus, our legal system is premised on executive discretion. Not every law can or should be enforced to its fullest extent — nobody would want to live in that sort of society. To execute the laws faithfully is to remain mindful of the federal government’s essential but finite role in our framework and to concentrate its limited resources on enforcement of the most vital laws.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353322/dagger-heart-justice-mark-steyn

The Zimmerman case has achieved its sublime reductio ad absurdum.

Just when I thought the George Zimmerman “trial” couldn’t sink any lower, the prosecutorial limbo dancers of the State of Florida magnificently lowered their own bar in the final moments of their cable-news celebrity. In real justice systems, the state decides what crime has been committed and charges somebody with it. In the Zimmerman trial, the state’s “theory of the case” is that it has no theory of the case: might be murder, might be manslaughter, might be aggravated assault, might be a zillion other things, but it’s something. If you’re a juror, feel free to convict George Zimmerman of whatever floats your boat.

Nailing a guy on something, anything, is a time-honored American tradition: If you can’t get Al Capone on the Valentine’s Day massacre, get him on his taxes. Americans seem to have a sneaky admiration for this sort of thing, notwithstanding that, as we now know, the government is happy to get lots of other people on their taxes, too. Ever since the president of the United States (a man so cautious and deferential to legal niceties that he can’t tell you whether the Egyptian army removing the elected head of state counts as a military coup until his advisers have finished looking into the matter) breezily declared that if he had a son he’d look like Trayvon, ever since the U.S. Department of so-called Justice dispatched something called its “Community Relations Services” to Florida to help organize anti-Zimmerman rallies at taxpayer expense, ever since the politically savvy governor appointed a “special prosecutor” and the deplorably unsavvy Sanford Police Chief was eased out, the full panoply of state power has been deployed to nail Zimmerman on anything.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2576/Can-a-Globalist-Be-a-Patriot.aspx

Something a little different: Instead of writing a column opposing the nomination of Samantha Power to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, I appeared on a panel in Washington, D.C., last week to state the case. My co-panelists were some very illustrious Americans, including organizer Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West, former U.N. Ambassador Jose Sorzano, Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin (U.S. Army retired) and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America.

C-SPAN covered the press conference, which may be watched at the C-SPAN website. So did Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who wrote: “Their technique was straightforward: They would impugn the patriotism of the Irish-born nominee. … I asked the speakers whether they really believed that she was an enemy of the United States or whether they merely disagreed with her politics.”

Milbank’s technique was clear, too. He would use push-button terms to fry the mental circuits of the reader: How hateful conservatives are for impugning the patriotism of anyone they merely disagree with!

When Milbank did venture into substance, he misrepresented it, maybe to keep readers a-boil over those “impugning” conservatives. For example, regarding a statement Samantha Power made in 2002 – by the way, a horrendous time of Palestinian intifada terrorism against civilians in Israel – Milbank forgot to mention that besides calling for “billions” in U.S. aid for “a new state of Palestine,” Power also called for “a mammoth [U.S.] protection force” to protect Palestinians from Israelis.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

TRIAL AND ERROR

Think of the Zimmerman trial from the perspective of a bunch of lowly state officials. D.C. made it clear that they wanted Zimmerman’s head on a plate and that is what the prosecution in the case has done its best to deliver.

They have done it clumsily and unprofessionally because the case would never have been pursued by professionals. And while the people pursuing it now may be the same ones who would have done it then, they’re doing it for political motives. They’re not there to do their jobs, but to look good to Barack Obama, Nancy Grace and the legion of angry influential people who want a conviction.

They may get their conviction, even if they do it in ways that will make an appeal all too easy.

But that’s not their problem. The headlines will read, “George Zimmerman Found Guilty”. If the verdict is eventually tossed into the trash, that will just “prove” that the American justice system is racist and needs more cleansing and purging. Either way the racism-for-profit lobby wins.

There’s no sportsmanship here. In the last few days, the judge and the prosecution have displayed all the professionalism of a kangaroo court staffed by actual kangaroos. They haven’t been following the law, instead they’ve been playing to a particular audience, and they expect to be rewarded for their theatrics.

The circus will shortly come to an end and whatever happens to Zimmerman, the people who made this movie, who wrote its script, shot it and wrapped it, will have gotten their way. That’s not just the depressing reality of Obama’s America. It’s the depressing reality of a country smothered by a liberal elite that made everything since 2008 possible.

PLAN B

The White House still wants the Muslim Brotherhood to win. It couldn’t head off the mass protests and military action that toppled Morsi, but its Plan B is meant to salvage that disaster by paving the way for a second round of Muslim Brotherhood political victories.

What Team Obama couldn’t manage to do within the military deadline, they hope to be able to manage in the coming weeks and months as Egypt’s new government struggles with economic problems that require international aid. As the Brotherhood’s protests grow, the new government will be caught between a rock and a hard place. And the State Department will be playing the familiar game of forcing a wounded government to make concessions to its worst enemies in exchange for American support.

These are the tactics that turned over China to the Communist Party and Iran over to the Ayatollahs. The treason of the diplomats did not begin in 2008. It began far earlier and hit its peak during the Cold War. And those same reliable tactics will be employed to compel a second Muslim Brotherhood victory.

Disciplined Hezbollah troops http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/ With Obama Administration Presiding Over UN Security Council Hezbollah Escapes Criticism The Obama administration, which this month holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council, has circulated a Security Council “presidential statement” on the deteriorating situation in Lebanon. The unusually lengthy statement was supposed to be a catalogue of what’s really […]

http://www.gulf-times.com/region/216/details/359277/egypt-muslim-brotherhood-protest-shows-staying-power

They came in their thousands, bussed in across the desert from thousands of kilometres down the Nile, marching into the square with toddlers on their shoulders, insisting they were prepared to die.

Men in white robes and skullcaps held umbrellas over the heads of women in black niqab full-body veils to shield them from the sun. They carried huge Egyptian flags and chanted “our souls, our blood for Islam”.

The ability of deposed president Mohamed Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood to deliver protesters from across Egypt to an extended demonstration in the capital shows that a government crackdown has done little to weaken its organisational might.

The rally near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in northeast Cairo began before Mursi was toppled and is now in its third week. Crowds have stayed in their thousands round the clock, swelling to tens of thousands when the Brotherhood calls special days like yesterday’s “day of marching on”.

Passions have been as hot as the brutal summer sun.

“They killed our martyrs while they were praying!” screamed Soraya Naguib Ahmed, tears down her face visible through the slit of her full-face veil, referring to a clash on Monday when troops killed 53 protesters near a Republican Guard barracks.

“If bullets is what they have to face our people, then they will find us standing in front of the tanks!”

http://www.gulf-times.com/qatar/178/details/359198/residents-urged-to-respect-qatar-customs,-values By Joseph Varghese/Staff Reporter Hand gestures which do not agree with the norms and values of Qatar are treated as an offence and therefore punishable by law,  Captain Rashid Mubarak al-Khayareen of the Community Police Department has said. He also said that Qatari laws and regulations prohibit begging and there is harsh punishment awaiting […]