RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“There are police forces in the Muslim world, but they’re tasked with arresting blasphemers, jailing runaway brides and conducting virginity tests on women found alone in the same room with a man. And occasionally hanging the homosexuals, who as Messr Ahmadinejad assured us don’t exist, because as soon as they exist, they are killed, resolving the paradoxes of Islamic morality and Schrodinger’s cat in one instant.”

June has been a banner month for Muslim lawsuits against the NYPD. First “Muslim Advocates” filed a lawsuit against the NYPD on behalf of some New Jersey Muslims attending mosques that the NYPD had assessed as a potential terrorism risk. The “Muslim Advocates”, like every other Muslim “civil rights” group, has a history of covering up and defending terrorism.

The media is full of sympathetic interviews with Muslims, who are baffled as to why the NYPD might be surveiling mosques and Imams. Farhoud Khera, the head of Muslim Advocates, complains, “There was explicit reference to the fact that they weren’t targeting Syrian Jews or Iranian Jews or Egyptian Christians, but really, the focus was on Muslims.”

The extensive Coptic Christian and Persian Jewish terrorism sprees aside, the goal here is to get the NYPD to play the same “Three Blind Monkeys” game that Federal law enforcement has taken up. And the only answer is the TSAization of the NYPD, as the last remaining counterterrorism force will prove that it isn’t singling out Muslims, by surveiling Methodist churches and Chassidic synagogues for signs of terrorist sympathies.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/saudi_arabia_to_lead_un_counter_terrorism_initiative.html

If the UN were to form an anti-terrorism group dedicated to attacking the menace on a global scale, who do you think would be asked to lead it? A nation with a proven track record of anti-terror initiatives? A nation that esteems human rights and freedoms above all else? Unfortunately, in the case of the UN Centre for Counter Terrorism (UNCCT), the answer is emphatically neither.

The UNCCT was formed in September 2010 with the purpose of executing the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, adopted by the General Assembly in 2006. In a move more befitting Alice in Wonderland than the United Nations, Saudi Arabia was named chair of the organization.

The Resolution that created the UNCCT highlighted four key “pillars” in the fight against terrorism. The first of these pillars, “tackling the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism,” was undermined almost immediately upon the organization’s establishment. Three months after the UNCCT’s formation, WikiLeaks exposed a trove of diplomatic cables in which Secretary of State Hilary Clinton wrote “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas.” Clinton’s US embassy cables also revealed Saudi resistance to prioritizing the issue in terms of its own domestic policy.

These revelations are perhaps not so surprising in light of the Saudi kingdom’s lukewarm response to terrorism funding and recruitment within its borders. Remember when, in the months following the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia denied the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, before eventually confirming the undeniable truth in 2002? Even worse, this past February two former US senators involved in the 9/11 inquiries suggested in separate affidavits that the Saudi government may have played a direct role in the attacks themselves.

It’s an ironic twist that the UN appointed Saudi Arabia, a country historically labeled by groups like the CATO Institute as a state sponsor of terrorism, to chair the flagship effort to end such practices. The UN’s actions speak to a certain cluelessness it exhibits as a governing body: the organization bows to diplomatic and political courtesies while ignoring what’s happening on the ground.

The designation is also farcical in another sense. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record blatantly contradicts the UNCCT’s fourth pillar, “ensuring respect for human rights against the backdrop of the fight against terrorism,” as evidenced by the nation’s treatment of its own citizens. Amnesty International’s 2012 Report details the state’s numerous abuses: public demonstration is forbidden, females face harshly oppressive discrimination in both the law and society, citizens are subject to torture and confinement for excessive periods of time without due process of law, etc. And the Amnesty International report is not even comprehensive. For example: it fails to mention LGBT rights or the fact that homosexuality in the Saudi kingdom is a capital offense.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored curriculum continues to foster a learning environment of intolerance and discrimination. As detailed in the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom’s recently published report, the Saudi Kingdom’s academic curriculum for grades 1-12 contains textbooks that disparage Christianity and Judaism and tutors on the subject of jihad and war against nonbelievers. In 2010, a special investigation by the BBC’s Panorama discovered that part-time schools “teaching the official Saudi national curriculum” in the United Kingdom were imparting messages of anti-Semitism and homophobia to young Muslim students, as well as illustrating how to punish thieves by cutting off the criminal’s hand or foot.

It is no secret that Saudi Arabia holds a strong anti-democracy stance, as exemplified in March 2011 when the kingdom sent troops into Bahrain to help repress protests during a government crackdown. Freedom of expression is nearly non-existent; a draft of the nation’s own anti-terror law leaked in July 2011 would suppress free speech and could punish blasphemy with death.

The greatest irony of all is the UN’s failure to come up with a legal definition for the act of terrorism while purporting to fight it with projects like the UNCCT. While the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has been in the works since 2000, the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee (Legal) has reached an impasse in negotiations. The result is that the UNCCT exists without any clear international definition the word “terrorism.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/14/jew-hatred-in-norway/

On Wednesday, June 13, during an Internet search, I ran across a left-wing Norwegian blog with which I was previously unfamiliar. The posting I stumbled upon dated back to February and was concerned with what it described as my many lies about Norway. Chief among these lies, apparently, is my claim that “there is strong antisemitism in Norway’s ‘elite.’” The blogger claimed to find this claim outrageous. “Does he not know the labour party [sic] has historical strong ties with Israel? That a recent prime minister was a devoted friend of Israel?”

Less than an hour later, I followed a link in my inbox to a just-posted Jerusalem Post article by Benjamin Weinthal headlined “Norwegian student in Oslo burns Jewish pupil.” The story, which was originally reported on June 12 by a Norwegian Jewish blog, Med Israel for Fred (With Israel for Peace) – MIFF for short – was straightforward enough: on June 11, at an Oslo secondary school barbecue, an ethnic Norwegian student had burned a Jewish classmate with a red-hot coin, leaving “a very visible burn on the boy’s neck.” In a letter to Norway’s Minister of Justice, Grete Faremo, the Simon Wiesenthal Center complained that “this child has been the subject of anti-Semitic bullying and violence for the past two years, reportedly, because his father is Israeli,” but that “there has been no reaction by the school, the police or governmental authorities.” The Wiesenthal Center complained that “the silence of the school, the police and your government is too reminiscent of another Norway, under the WWII Nazi collaborator, Quisling.”

Vebjørn Dysvik, Norway’s chargé d’affaires in Tel Aviv, told the Post in an e-mail that he knew nothing more about the case than what had already been reported and insisted that “the Norwegian government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to bullying in schools.” But Dysvik didn’t leave it at that. He also took the occasion to complain that the letter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center “contains several extreme statements that lack any foundation in reality. We take exception to the attempt of painting a picture of Norway and Norwegian society as being anti-Semitic. This is a gross distortion of facts for which the Center must bear responsibility.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/14/obama%e2%80%99s-presidency-and-the-pathologies-of-progressivism/print/

Obama’s presidency has failed miserably, but it has accomplished one thing: it has revealed for all to see the lethal pathologies of progressive ideology. This doesn’t mean progressivism will go away. We thought the New Democrat Bill Clinton had put progressive ideas to rest when he said that the era of big government was over, and then reformed welfare and cut government spending from 23.5% of GDP to 19.5%. Yet despite the success that followed his rejection of failed liberal policies, here we are in the fourth year of Obama’s term, saddled with $5 trillion in new debt, a stalled economy, a National Labor Relations Board carrying water for the unions, a blatantly politicized Department of Justice, and rapidly metastasizing entitlement programs. Meanwhile the president indulges in class-warfare rhetoric young a century ago, and calls for even more redistributionist deficit spending to benefit his political cronies and clients.

The worst economic recovery since World War II that Obama and the Democrats midwifed has exposed the failure of the notion that the government can create economic growth and wealth rather than merely expropriating it from the creative and productive, and that centralized planning and regulating by “experts” can more efficiently allocate resources than the free market does. But more important is the underlying idea of progressivism that Obama’s policies is predicated on: Perfect justice, prosperity, and equality are possible if enlightened elites are given the power to organize and run society according to “scientific” knowledge about human nature and behavior. For two centuries this hubristic idea has led to failure, misery, and murder on a vast scale, yet progressives continue to increase government power in order to create this impossible utopia. Obamacare is just the latest iteration of this frequently demonstrated fallacy that complex human behavior, which reflects the unpredictable free will of millions of unique individuals, can be organized, controlled and regimented in order to achieve some dream-world utopia. That progressives still cling to this exploded idea despite the evidence of history and a disintegrating E.U. shows just how reactionary and blinkered they are.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/ In my post over the weekend about the folly of pushing for a special prosecutor on the Obama administration’s intelligence leaks to the New York Times, I argued that holding the president politically accountable is far more important than indicting the leakers; therefore, Congress should do its job and shine intense light on this […]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/06/11/homeland-security-funded-study-on-the-hunt-for-tea-party-terrorism/?singlepage=true

In an era of agenda-driven academic research, who watches the watchers? Or more accurately, who gets to designate and categorize the “objective” data? This is the question raised after examining a study and related dataset recently published by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.

START was launched in 2005 with a $12 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, and is recognized by DHS as one of its “Centers for Excellence.” In December, DHS announced it had renewed START’s funding to the tune of $3.6 million.

A recent START study titled “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008” puts the “excellence” description in question. A press release announcing the report states the study concluded that nearly a third of all terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2008 occurred in just five major metropolitan areas. The study was based on a START database called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States,” and both the report and database are supported by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division.

Reading through the study, some baffling issues arose. In Table 4 (p. 22), titled “Hot Spots of Religious Terrorism by Decade”, three “hot spot” areas — Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Wasco, Oregon (former home of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) — are identified: But there seems to be some data missing when it comes to known Islamic terrorist incidents in New York City and Los Angeles. The study shows no religious terrorism in Manhattan during the 1990s. How about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Or the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge Jewish student van shooting by Rashid Baz that killed 16-year-old Ari Halberstam after Baz heard a fiery anti-Jewish sermon at his local mosque? Or the 1997 Empire State Building observation deck shooting by Ali Abu Kamal that killed one tourist and injured six others before Kamal took his own life?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/eric-holder-slides-into-the-depths-of-race-politics/?print=1 The nation has seen more than a few odd attorneys general over the years. Among them have been the eccentric John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s man at the Justice Department; Bill Clinton’s peculiar Janet Reno; and the personality-challenged John Ashcroft, who served under George W. Bush. Personal oddness or political partisanship is one thing, but […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/obama-trade-document-leak_n_1592593.html

WASHINGTON — A critical document from President Barack Obama’s free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.The leaked document has been posted on the website of Public Citizen, a long-time critic of the administration’s trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.

“The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of [trade] negotiations,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch in a written statement.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been so incensed by the lack of access as to introduce legislation requiring further disclosure. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has gone so far as to leak a separate document from the talks on his website. Other Senators are considering writing a letter to Ron Kirk, the top trade negotiator under Obama, demanding more disclosure.

The newly leaked document is one of the most controversial of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. It addresses a broad sweep of regulations governing international investment and reveals the Obama administration’s advocacy for policies that environmental activists, financial reform advocates and labor unions have long rejected for eroding key protections currently in domestic laws.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/review-nothing-less-than-victory

The last engaging book I read on the means and ends of warfare before John Lewis’s was a 2009 abridged version of Winston Churchill’s The River War, originally published in 1899. Its original, full title included An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. The term “reconquest” was misleading, because the Sudan had never before been “conquered” by the British, but was under the jurisdiction of Egypt, then a protectorate of Britain. Egypt was unable to deal militarily with the Dervish forces that meant to conquer it. It fell to Britain to extinguish the Mahdist or Islamic threat, which, unchecked, could well have spread from Egypt to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.

General Herbert Kitchener was tasked with that formidable project. Churchill describes the meticulous and determined campaign he waged, which was not just a matter of sending an army into the desert wastes to fight fanatical tribesmen. It meant reforming the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian government, rebuilding the Egyptian army and its Sudanese levies, building a railroad into enemy territory, and mastering the stupendous logistics of supplies and men. The stated objective was to erase the Mahdist regime as a military and political threat in the whole region. The climax of the campaign was the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, in which the Dervish army was utterly decimated and routed.

In the end, over a year later, the successor of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed, Abdallah ibn Muhammad, was killed and the remnants of his forces routed at the Battle of Umm Diwaykarat.

The Sudan Campaign had clear military and political objectives. The British government then had the will to take the necessary actions to destroy an enemy and discredit the ideology that moved it.

Churchill noted in The River War that, “The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.”

In short, Islam, like the Nazi, Fascist, and Shinto ideologies which compelled Germany, Italy, and Japan to invade other countries, must be repudiated by the aggressor and cease to be regarded by its adherents and converts as a feasible and desired ideology that fosters “peace.” This comports with the main theme of John David Lewis’s seminal work on the efficacious “warfighting” policies of the past, Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton University Press, 2010). That “great power” comes in many disguises. Lewis tackles some of them.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/from-russia-with-death

The low point of the American presidency over the past half-century wasn’t Watergate, which is almost trivial compared to the corruption of the Obama administration, from treasonous leaks of classified material to the Justice Department’s assault on honest elections. No, my fellow Americans, the lowest point of the presidency occurred a few months back when President Obama, caught by a microphone he didn’t know was hot, told Russia’s then-president, now prime-minister, Dimitry Medvedev to relay to strong-man Vladimir Putin a request for patience. Essentially, Obama said he needed time to fool the American people until the November elections then he could cut the deals that Putin wanted.

When an American president trusts Russia’s leaders more than he trusts our country’s voters, things in the Oval Office are rotten to a degree far beyond a bunch of clumsy burglars breaking into a campaign office. This is a betrayal that would have been unthinkable even to Bill Clinton.

Now we see the fruits of the poisonous seeds Obama planted yet again: Despite public pleas from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Moscow not only won’t help stop the slaughter in Syria, but is now supplying the Assad regime with additional attack helicopters-perfect weapons to employ against civilian neighborhoods that have no self-defense capabilities. Unlike our own attack helicopters, which emphasize precision, Russia’s helicopters, old and new, are built to maximize destruction.