RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288778/sinking-west-mark-steyn

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

http://www.mererhetoric.com/

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Clenched On Assad’s Side, Supplying Him With Weapons
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran supplying weapons to Syria crackdown: US officials: The United States believes Iran is supplying munitions to aid Syria’s bloody protest crackdown in an initiative spearheaded by Tehran’s revolutionary guard supremo, according to senior US officials. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps elite Quds force, was in…

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Clenched Against The EU For Being A “US Client”
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran cautions EU on acting as US client: Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast describes the European Union (EU) as a major rival of the US, cautioning the bloc against the consequences of acting as a Washington client. The US seeks to beat out its rival, Mehmanparast told reporters during…

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Clenched And Pouring Billions Into Anti-US Latin American Alliances
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran seeking to expand influence in Latin America: Iran is quietly seeking to expand its ties with Latin America in what U.S. officials and regional experts say is an effort to circumvent economic sanctions and gain access to much-needed markets and raw materials. The new diplomatic offensive, which comes amid…

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Clenched Confidently Thanks To Obama’s “Pathetically Weak” Response To Provocations – Elliott Abrams
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran’s Obligations, and Ours: President Obama’s reaction to the looting of the Embassy is pathetically weak. He said today that “for rioters, essentially, to be able to overrun the embassy and set it on fire is an indication that the Iranian government is not taking its international obligations seriously.” Not…

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Clenched And Openly Mocking Obama With Offers Of A Toy Drone
Posted on January 19, 2012
Iran: State radio says Iranian company will give US a toy model of downed American drone: State radio says an Iranian company is sending the United States a model of the American surveillance drone captured by the Islamic Republic. Tuesday’s report said the company will send the miniature of the…

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Clenched Against The Imprisoned Christians They Attacked Over Christmas
Posted on January 18, 2012
Concern over condition of four detainees arrested in AOG church of Ahwaz : Following an attack on the Assemblies of God Church of Ahwaz which resulted in the arrest of a number of Christians and their children, concerns are growing over the conditions of four of these detainees. According to…

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Pleading the Fifth: Gunwalker Witness Refuses to Testify Posted By Bob Owens
http://pjmedia.com/blog/pleading-the-fifth-gunwalker-witness-refuses-to-testify/?print=1

Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona, is invoking his Fifth Amendment rights and declining to testify about Operation Fast and Furious in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Fast and Furious is one of ten suspect “gunwalking” operations carried out by the Department of Justice — this operation armed the Sinaloa drug cartel with more than 2,000 weapons. Those firearms have been blamed in the deaths of at least 300 Mexican civilians, and two of those firearms were recovered at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder in Peck Canyon, AZ.

Cunningham’s attorney Tobin Romero suggests his client is being scapegoated:

“Department of Justice officials have reported to the Committee that my client relayed inaccurate information to the Department upon which it relied in preparing its initial response to Congress. If, as you claim, Department officials have blamed my client, they have blamed him unfairly.”

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www.afsi.org; afsi@rcn.com
Contact: Helen Freedman, Executive Director

Today marks the day seventy years ago, Jan. 20, 1942, when the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, Germany resulted in the “final solution of the Jewish question,” – the genocide of six million Jews.

Lawrence Kadish writes in today’s Jan. 20, 2012 NY Post article, Planning genocide in plain sight, “Let us contemplate how a disbelieving world can stand idly by as evil regimes coolly harness their bureaucracies to methodically achieve horrendous goals.” He concludes that, “History consistently reminds us that indifference in the face of an implacable enemy invariably leads to disaster. Further, more often than not, our enemies tell us exactly what they mean to do before they do it. Acting on their warning requires our collective insight, personal courage and national will.”

Sadly, today, we are watching the Obama regime demonstrate its total failure to act on warnings from implacable enemies, and to divert Americans from heeding these warnings, and from using their collective will to prevent the disasters that are looming before us.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/288757
Newt Gingrich’s ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latter’s unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDR’s aphorism, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina.
Asked at a campaign appearance whether he’d ever consider endorsing a Muslim for president, Gingrich sensibly answered that he would not rule it out — “it would depend on whether [the hypothetical Muslim candidate] would commit in public to give up sharia.” Naturally, the usual suspects are in full fury, with CAIR the loudest among them. They’ve trotted out the rote response, dutifully echoed by Fox, that sharia, Islam’s legal code, is simply a set of spiritual guidelines — one that, in CAIR’s portrayal, “teaches marital fidelity, generous charity, and a thirst for knowledge.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577170733817181646.html?KEYWORDS=CHARLES+MURRAY

The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated.
Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.

America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.

Related Link: http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/4249

An ‘Axelrod-esque’ Moment for Gingrich By Frank Salvato

Almost on the eve of the South Carolina GOP Primary, ABC News is set to televise an interview with Newt Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, where she claims the presidential contender asked her for an “open marriage” so that he could see the woman that would become his third wife, Callista. Truth be told, this is a re-hashed interview, the original having run in Esquire Magazine in 2010. Which leaves us this to consider: the execution and airing of this interview is either an attempt by a woman scorned to even the score, a politically motivated hit-piece, or both. Whichever it turns out to be, the one thing it won’t be is a game changer.

That Newt Gingrich has had marital issues in his past is common knowledge. Anyone shocked by this news should not consider themselves well-informed. Anyone offended by the marital transgressions of his past should heed the words from a follow-up Esquire Magazine article:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11269/pub_detail.asp
Islam Commands Individual Jihad Clare M. Lopez
According to Islamic law, Jihad is warfare to spread the religion and is obligatory for all Muslims everywhere until such time as “there is no more Fitna [resistance to Islam] and the religion will all be for Allah alone.” (Q 8:39) Jihad against the infidel (kuffar) is of two types: offensive and defensive. The offensive kind, called “Fard Kifaya,” is conducted under the leadership of the Caliph and is for the purpose of defending the borders of Islam and sending out the armies of Islam at least once a year to terrorize the enemies of Allah. Offensive Jihad is a collective duty and when enough Muslim fighters respond to the call of the Caliph, the remainder of the Muslim population is relieved of this duty.

Defensive jihad is a compulsory duty upon all Muslims primarily when the kuffar enter Muslim lands. It is considered so critical to repulse the invader that Ibn Taymia even asserted it took precedence over making the hajj. This defensive jihad duty is called “Fard ‘Ayn” and means that there is a personal obligation for all Muslims in the land which has been attacked to join the fight. The scholars agree that children may march forth without permission of their parents, wives without permission of husbands, and slaves without permission of their masters. If the Muslims of the land attacked by the kuffar cannot expel the enemy for whatever reason, then the Fard ‘Ayn obligation expands outward to include other Muslims nearby and then at increasing distances from the center of the invasion. Eventually, Fard ‘Ayn can become obligatory across the entire world until the kuffar is expelled from Muslim land.

Three Days of Anti-Israel Venom at U Penn Posted By Sara Dogan

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/20/three-days-of-hate-at-u-penn/

What do the administrators at the University of Pennsylvania know about the 2012 National Conference of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement about to take place at Penn and when did they know it?

“BDS,” as this virulent anti-Israeli hatefest is commonly called, is coming to the Penn campus on February 3-5, but university officials have hid from the implications of hosting such an event. They say that the university is on record as not supporting this movement, yet they let the event go forward, providing space and possibly funding, despite the fact that the sponsors may not meet school requirements as a recognized group and that their anti-Semitic message is deeply hostile to academic freedom and basic human decency. The university appears to be bending rules that would be rigidly enforced for sponsors of another cause.

U Penn’s willingness to enable the BDS conference is particularly inexplicable given the fact that this growing movement to boycott Israel and Israeli-produced goods, force divestment from any companies that do business with Israel, and establish sanctions against Israel due to its supposed violations of human rights, was created by nations and groups seeking to delegitimize and destabilize Israel such as the terrorist-sponsoring nation of Iran and the terrorist groups Hezbollah, and Hamas.

http://blog.american.com/2012/01/al-qaeda-terror-training-manual-found-at-gitmo/
Al Qaeda terror training manual found at Gitmo

Authorities at Guantanamo Bay recently began reading privileged attorney-client communications in an effort to prevent terrorists from passing messages and receiving unauthorized information from their brethren on the outside. Detainee advocates have responded with outrage, but we may now have learned what sparked the new procedures—an al Qaeda terrorist training manual has been found at Gitmo.

The Miami Herald reports this morning:

A copy of Al Qaida’s fiery magazine Inspire somehow got inside the prison camps at Guantánamo, a prosecutor disclosed at the war court Wednesday.

Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart blurted out the embarrassing disclosure in defending the prison camp commander’s plan to give greater scrutiny to legal mail bound for alleged terrorists. She was discussing a system used by civilian lawyers to send materials to Guantánamo captives who are suing the U.S. for their freedom through habeas corpus petitions in Washington, D.C.