RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/31/v-print/137428/new-us-intelligence-assessment.html

WASHINGTON — Iran’s top officials now may be more willing to sponsor attacks in the United States, the top U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday in a warning that reflected rising tensions over Tehran’s suspected nuclear weapons program.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper also said that while al Qaida remained a danger, the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other key figures had seriously degraded the core terrorist organization’s ability to mount major strikes.

Testifying before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the findings of an annual report on threats facing the United States, Clapper said that continued “robust” U.S. counter-terrorism efforts could further reduce the Pakistan-based group’s status to one of “largely symbolic importance” and fragment the global jihadist movement that bin Laden had inspired.

Iran and the danger posed by al Qaida after bin Laden’s death in a U.S. special forces raid May 2 in Pakistan dominated the questioning of Clapper and other U.S. intelligence officials at the hearing on the 2012 Worldwide Threat Assessment.

Terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, attacks on U.S. computer systems _ especially by China and Russia _ and the cybertheft of government and corporate secrets constitute “the immediate forefront of our security concerns,” Clapper told the panel.

Islamist stops university debate with threats of violence

http://www.secularism.org.uk/blog/2012/01/freedom-of-expression-under-threat-by-violent-extremists
A talk on sharia and human rights by NSS Council Member Anne Marie Waters’ at Queen Mary University of London was cancelled at the last moment because of an Islamist who made serious threats against everyone there.

Ms Waters was due to give a talk on behalf of the One Law for All campaign on 16 January but before it started, a man entered the lecture theatre, stood at the front with a camera and filmed the audience. He then said that he knew who everyone was, where they lived and if he heard anything negative about the Prophet, he would track them down.

The man also filmed students in the foyer and threatened to murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, apparently there to support him. Students were told by security to stay in the lecture theatre for their own safety.

The President of Queen Mary’s Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society, who organised the event said: “This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/when_the_earth_refuses_to_warm

Global warming: Been there, done that. Forward-looking folks are adjusting their fretting machinery now to something called Cycle 25. Button up your overcoats. Ice is on the way. Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997.

Britain’s Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree, according to the London Daily Mail, that Planet Earth could even be heading for an icy patch “to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the [frozen-over] Thames in the 17th century.” They call this Cycle 25.

http://www.binamica.com/~hebronf/

According to ForeignPolicy, in an article titled: Hard times in Hebron the United States:
has spent $3.4 billion in development funds in the Palestinian territories of West Bank and Gaza
So, it appears that this poor, oppressed, underdeveloped Arab city
has doubled the number of building permits issued since 2006, and is preparing to solicit bids for a road to a new $13 million water treatment facility — financed, of course, by USAID.

Not everyone is happy about spending so much money in the PA.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: By providing the Palestinians with $2.5 billion over the last five years, the U.S. has only rewarded and reinforced their bad behavior.

Sharia creep at the LSE Posted By Roger Kimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/01/31/sharia-creep-at-the-lse/

Ah, the venerable London School of Economics. According to its web site [1], the elite social science institute was “set up to improve society and to ‘understand the causes of things.’” The LSE, continued the bulletin, “has always put engagement with the wider world at the heart of its mission.” What better way to accomplish that than by censoring free expression about sensitive topics? Here we have it, folks: an institution that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of all things modern — and devoted, what’s more, to understanding n”the causes of things — resurrects that icon of medievalism: a law against blasphemy!

Don’t believe me? Check it out here: “The London School of Economics [LSE] Student Union has passed a motion [2] effectively making it impossible for students on campus to criticize Islam.”

Ouch. Remember the Danish cartoon saga? Cartoonists lampoon Muhammed, Islamists go wild, burn embassies, kill a few score infidels, and generally exhibit the extreme anti-social behavior that has made Islam synonymous with insanity wherever reason prevails. The LSE’s bargain with the barbarians was also provoked by a cartoon, though I suspect just about anything less than total acquiescence might have set the, off. A touchy, thin-skinned bunch, these followers of the “religion of peace.”

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/01/hamas-and-the-washington-estab.php
To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America’s collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”

As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians’ main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.

For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates’ debates.

http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2012/01/31/che_guevaras_regime_still_murdering_the_young_and_the_defenseless/print

Last week the regime co-founded by Che Guevara (worldwide icon of youthful rebellion) murdered a young defenseless political prisoner named Wilman Villar for the crime of “disrespect to authorities.”So 53 years into Cuban Stalinism we’re at about 100,000 Cuban deaths at the hands of the regime and counting. (All of this 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Havana swarms with MSM press bureaus and Hollywood producers, by the way.)

“The Cuban regime is a callous band of murderers that once again has blood on its hands,” said Senator Marco Rubio in a bi-partisan Senate Resolution passed on Jan. 26 in Villar’s honor. “Once again, we are reminded of the unintended but negative consequences of this administration’s loosened travel and remittance policies (to Cuba.) They help deliver more hard currency to the Castro regime, making it easier for them to brutalize and even murder the Cuban people.”

Report: Airstrike kills al Qaeda leader in Yemen NewsCore Tuesday, January 31, 2012 News Air raids struck an al Qaeda meeting and control post in southern Yemen, killing up to 12 people including a long-hunted regional militant leader, tribal officials said Tuesday. Among the people killed was regional al Qaeda leader Abdul Monem al Fahtani, […]

Democracy’s Demons Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/31/democracy%e2%80%99s-demons/

When the 2006 Palestinian Arab elections resulted in a decisive victory for Hamas, the advocates of democracy as the solution for all regional ills blamed Israel’s undermining of the Palestinian Authority. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring when the Al-Nahda Islamists swept to power in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists captured a majority in Egypt, some of the same people blamed the United States for enabling dictators.

The excuses were an attempt to place the blame somewhere other than the electorate which had cast their ballots for theocracies, or rather more extreme versions of the existing theocratic elements in the legal and political system. The most convenient target for blame was the scapegoat of Western foreign policy.

If only the United States and Israel had not undermined the “liberal” alternative to the hard core Islamists then the results would have been different, went the refrain. But the United States had done everything possible to back the “liberal” opposition in Egypt, despite it being fueled by a raging hatred of the United States. During the shakedown in Egypt, Western nations had all but ordered the Egyptian military to cede power to El Baradei.

Exposing the Alinsky Party Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/30/exposing-the-alinsky-party/

“Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it.”

– “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” by David Horowitz

When Newt won the battle of South Carolina, he also laid out the stakes for the larger conflict beyond the primaries and even beyond the election. It is the battle for the soul of America. In the 2004 election, John Edwards borrowed James P. Cannon’s Two Americas metaphor to showcase his vision of a divided nation.

“Today under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one. One America does the work, while another America reaps the reward,” Edwards said. And south of the North Carolina senator’s old seat, Gingrich expressed another and truer vision of the two Americas:

I believe the debate we’re going to have with President Obama over the next eight or nine months will be the outlining of the two Americas. The America of the Declaration of Independence, the America of Saul Alinsky. The America of paychecks. The America of food stamps. The America of independence. The America of dependence.

As Obama embarks on an election strategy that makes class into the pivot of a divided nation, Newt shifted the debate from the pivot of class to the pivot of opportunity. The descent of the Democratic Party into the depths of class warfare demagoguery marks the final phase of their transformation into the Alinsky Party. A party whose sole electoral strategy is its economic divisiveness, rather than opportunity creation.