RUTHFULLY YOURS

November 24, 2014, looms as a strategic date in world history. At that time, a deadline for a deal with Iran will be reached. And, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, has said “no deal is better than a bad deal,” it appears as if President Obama’s team and the so-called P5+1 group – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China, plus Germany – are seeking any deal rather than no deal.

There is no surprise at the rising confidence of the Iranian government. Without the slightest fanfare or notice by the international press, Shia rebels supported by Iran captured the capital city of Sana’a in Yemen. This extraordinary geostrategic move gives Iran entrance to the Red Sea. Along with its command of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Iran will be in a position to control the sea lanes surrounding the Arab world.

With Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and Sana’a under Iranian control and influence, the dream of a Shia Crescent appears as a reality. Moreover, with Yemen on the door step of Saudi Arabia, Iran has an ideal staging area for attacks against its main Sunni rival.

Through its virtual silence, the United States is complicit in these actions. Since Mr. Obama will not deploy U.S. ground forces in the war against ISIS, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is considered a surrogate army, even though no one in the U.S. State Department will admit to the concession. Iran’s role as a putative “stabilizer” in the roiling Middle East offers it enormous latitude at the Vienna negotiating table where a decision will be made about Iran’s nuclear capability.

Despite a bipartisan U.S. Congressional declaration opposing any deal that permits Iran to have or develop nuclear weapons, it appears as if the negotiating team representing the U.S. and most of the Europeans are willing to split the difference. In other words, there is a growing consensus that if Iran agrees not to weaponize its missiles at its Parchin military base, it would be allowed to retain enough enriched uranium to build a bomb at a later date. That’s what I have described as the “Japanese solution,” i.e. Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution prohibits the development of nuclear weapons, but it does not prohibit the storage of fissile material that could be used for nuclear weapons.

There are several ways to see the National Cathedral’s decision to host Islamic Friday prayers this week.

First, the facts. The service is the brainchild of the Rev. Canon Gina Campbell, the Episcopal cathedral’s director of liturgy, and South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, a Muslim, who is delivering the sermon. Invitation-only guests include Masjid Muhammad of The Nation’s Mosque, representatives of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

That’s some roster if playing “Spot the Muslim Brotherhood Front” is a hobby. Clearly, it’s not the professionals’ pursuit. On being quizzed by the Daily Caller, for example, cathedral spokesman Craig Stapert had no idea that two of the invited groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing trial.

A kewpie doll to the reader who can pick out the unindicted co-conspirators in the cathedral’s guest list (ISNA and CAIR — right!). A cigar to anyone who knows the name of the man who is both ISNA president and ADAMS executive director (Mohamed Magid). And which group tops the “list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in the Muslim Brotherhood document explaining the “Civilization-Jihadist Process” underway in the U.S.?

Here’s another hint. The U.S. government entered this “Explanatory Memorandum” into evidence during the 2009 Holy Land Foundation trial. It explains that the organization’s secret “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by (Westerners’) hands and by the hands of believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” The answer, of course, is ISNA.

Speaking of the Muslim Brotherhood, here’s a bonus question: Where did the first delegation of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to visit the U.S. make a beeline from the airport to visit? The residence of South Africa’s Ebrahim Rasool, reports South African news site City Press.

Conservative media, noting the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas links of the cathedral invitees, quickly dubbed the prayer service “Islamist,” which they define as a radical fringe separated from Islam’s vast mainstream by the “Islamist’s” adherence to sharia.

Modern feminism is getting embarrassing. There’s a reason why so few women identify as feminists: It’s less a true “women’s movement” than the public face of hysterical leftist intolerance — combined, of course, with utterly bizarre (and bizarrely stupid) ideas.

While I had numerous brushes with extremist feminists in law school — women who declared that all (heterosexual) sex was rape and often responded with literal screams to classroom speech they didn’t like — it all felt fashionably fake. Surely no one took that level of extremism into the real world, did they? Then my wife encountered a lesbian couple in Ithaca, N.Y., who was raising their child to be “genderless.” They refused to call him a boy or girl, allowing him to “choose his gender” identity during his teenage years. And, apparently, they are not alone.

Most people — including most liberals — believe that kind of behavior is insane. NPR, by contrast, writes a glowing profile of women raising their “boychicks.” It’s hard to craft a more nauseating self-parodic paragraph than this self-identified “queer-identified male-partnered monogamist’s” description of her son:

She describes her boychick, born in March 2007, as a “male-assigned at birth — and so far apparently comfortable with that assignment, white, currently able-bodied, congenitally hypothyroid, cosleeper, former breastfed toddler, elimination communication graduate, sling baby and early walker, trial and terror, cliched light of our life, and impetus for the blog. Odds are good he will be the most privileged of persons: a middle class, able bodied, cisgender, straight, white male.”

The true insanity is not that there are crazy people in this world — there always are (I can tell some stories after 45 years in church) — but that modern feminism actually strives to elevate the crazy, the stupid, and the just plain hysterical into the realm of actually relevant cultural and political commentary. Consider these examples:

1. A woman (who likely identifies as a feminist herself) quite sensibly writes that college girls should drink responsibly as a form of defense against sexual assault, and other feminists call her a ”rape denialist.”

The last #but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.

Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to the old IRS, GSA, VA, Secret Service, NSA, NASA, EPA, or Justice Department? All seem now mere appendages to a larger agenda of fundamentally transforming America.

We are mired in the slowest recovery in modern times, alleviated only by recently falling oil prices, which came despite, not because of, the president’s efforts. Fiscal sobriety is now redefined as a $600 billion annual deficit rather than the usual $1 trillion, again brought about by efforts other than Obama’s own. Yet the president has an unfortunate habit of taking credit for the good that he opposed and fobbing off on others responsibility for the bad that he embraced. There is interest in watching Obama’s press conferences, but mostly in appreciating how ingeniously he serially blames others for his own blunders.

Our foreign policy is such a wreck that it makes the mess of the Carter administration seem inspired in comparison. Europe is pouting because it finally, after a half-century, found what it wanted in Obama, and yet it rues the fact that he is turning the United States into Europe — without a United States left to protect either. By Putin’s sheer force of malice and Obama’s paralysis, Russia is now sowing havoc from its borders to the Mediterranean. China is hesitant only to the degree that it cannot quite fathom whether such presidential ineptness could be real, or whether it is instead some intricate American feint designed to entice a cocky Beijing into overstepping its bounds.

Failed Marxism characterizes a Latin America that not long ago looked northward for help in making the transition to free-market democracy. There is little left to be said about a Middle East that now bears no resemblance to what it was prior to 2009 — an estranged Israel, a duplicitous Turkey, all labor for naught in Iraq, Iran smiling its way to a bomb, Syria as a desert, Libya from “lead from behind” to Benghazi, and on and on.

In Brisbane, the president went out of his way to undermine Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

President Obama over the weekend made a bizarre decision to attack and damage his closest ally in Asia, and one of the most committed supporters of U.S. foreign policy.

The president was in Australia for the G-20 Summit in Brisbane. Unlike Britain’s David Cameron , China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi, he apparently had no interest in speaking to the Australian Parliament or making a formal, bilateral visit to Australia while in town.

Instead, Mr. Obama made a speech to an Australian version of his political core audience back home—undergraduates at a metropolitan university. Much of the speech at the University of Queensland in Brisbane was boilerplate. It lacked a plot but hit a few reliable notes, such as the U.S. commitment to Asia, defense of gay rights and the like.

But the longest passage was an extraordinary riff on climate change that contained astonishing criticism—implied, but unmistakable—of the government led by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Mr. Obama lavished himself with praise for signing, a few days earlier, a climate-change agreement with China that imposes no obligations on Beijing until 2030, when the Chinese will notionally reach a peak in their carbon emissions. The U.S., on the other hand, under this deal will greatly reduce its emissions by 2025, though Mr. Obama won’t be in office then and Congress may be inclined not to authorize such cuts.

Mr. Abbott is a sensible conservative, along the lines of Canada’s Stephen Harper . He accepts that climate change is a problem and that greenhouse-gas emissions should be reduced. He is skeptical of climate alarmism and does not believe that the solution lies in onerous carbon taxes or trading schemes in carbon permits, which are notoriously open to corruption and inherently ineffective.

For those charged with gathering the information our government needs to keep us safe, the news has been grim. Following the leaks by Edward Snowden beginning in June last year of highly classified intelligence gathering techniques, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Matthew Olsen, disclosed in September that terrorists tracked by U.S. intelligence services have started encrypting their communications in ways that defeat detection, and that the government has lost track of several.

Meanwhile, Islamic State terrorists continue to rampage across Syria and Iraq, even as the group, also known as ISIS, uses sophisticated Internet communications to swell its ranks with recruits bearing U.S., Canadian or European passports who can easily slip back into their native countries and wreak havoc.

In that threat environment, one would think that the last thing on the “to do” list of the 113th Congress would be to add to the grim news. Yet Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that he will bring to the floor the extravagantly misnamed USA Freedom Act, a major new bill exquisitely crafted to hobble the gathering of electronic intelligence.

For starters, the bill ends the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of what is called telephone metadata. This includes the date, time, duration and telephone numbers for all calls, but not their content or the identity of the caller or called, and is information already held by telephone companies. The bill would substitute a cumbersome and untried process that would require the NSA, when it seeks to check on which telephone numbers have called or been called by a number reasonably associated with terrorist activity, to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court, and then scurry to each of the nation’s telephone-service providers to comb through the information that remains in their hands rather than in the NSA’s.

With Russian tanks and troops swarming into Ukraine, the president finally sees the light.

As headlines go, “ Obama Moves Close to Calling Russian Action in Ukraine an Invasion,” from a weekend story in the New York Times , must surely rank among the year’s most revealing. The Obama presidency has long been at odds with the obvious. Once this was called hope.

Now it is generally recognized as farce.

Mr. Obama’s move comes after eight months of semantic obfuscation conducted in the service of political expediency. “I consider the actions that we’ve seen in the last week a continuation of what’s been taking place for months now,” Mr. Obama palavered in late August, as columns of Russian tanks moved into eastern Ukraine. And what, exactly, had been “taking place for months”?

It was, he said, “this ongoing incursion,” as if the Russian seizure of Crimea was just a temporary problem. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki helpfully explained why “a discussion about terminology” was all but beneath administration notice. “Our focus is more on what Russia is doing, what we’re going to do about it, than what we’re calling it,” she said.

Now the president is toughening his tone. Speaking to reporters in Australia on Sunday, Mr. Obama deployed the “i” word with the same delicacy an Orthodox Jew might use to spell “G-d.” “We’re also very firm on the need to uphold core international principles, and one of those principles is you don’t invade other countries.”

That’s nice. The only pity is that the statement came days after NATO confirmed that Russia was pouring “multiple columns” of tanks and troops into Ukraine, thereby violating a September cease-fire agreement. If Ms. Psaki can now explain what the administration’s previous rhetorical cartwheels accomplished, it would be good to hear it—other, that is, than to convince the Kremlin that an American president too timid to call an invasion an invasion is no serious impediment to Russia’s territorial ambitions.

Calling on the Brooklyn College Administration
Academic and administrative bias have, in the last few years, spread like a virus throughout the CUNY system. Stop the lies!

It all started when I took out some info sheets. This was something you’d expect of any student opposed to the anti-Israel views being expressed at this Brooklyn College-sponsored event featuring the founder of the BDS movement. I planned to challenge the speakers’ views by taking notes as they spoke and asking questions during the Q&A period. However, I never got the chance to participate in the Q&A period. A member of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the primary event organizer, had other plans for my sheets and me. He had the view that this wasn’t the time or the place to voice opposition, so I should either hand over my sheets or be kicked out. When I refused, he had official CUNY security escort me and two other kippah-clad students out of the event, no questions asked.

This was February 2013, and a violation of our constitutional rights not only by SJP, but of every Brooklyn College department supporting that event, including the office of the president. After an internal investigation, and months of talks and mediation, I and the two others were vindicated, apologized to and promised that such a silencing would never happen again.

So mark our very surprised faces when we were informed of the following event to be held by our very own alma mater Brooklyn College, hosted by the very violators and co-sponsored by the same departments:

“Join Students for Justice in Palestine and allies on November 20th for a conversation with Professors Steven Salaita and Katherine Franke, moderated by Professor Corey Robin, about Academic Freedom in the context of conversations about Palestine/Israel and the constant push by Zionists to silence academic discourse on the Palestinian struggle and criticisms of Israel.”

REP. LEE IS TRULY A CON (STITUTIONAL) SCHOLAR—-IN MARCH OF 2014 SHE SAID THE CONSTITUTION IS 400 YEARS OLD (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/13/the-constitution-is-400-years-old-and-more-pearls-from-sheila-jackson-lee.html)…SHE ALSO HAS A WAY WITH WORDS AND TREATMENT OF STAFF:

‘You Stupid Motherfucker and Other Friendly Nicknames Jackson Lee has a well-documented history of being the worst employer on Capitol Hill. With plenty of job security representing a safe Democratic district, she goes out of her way to demean and abuse members of her staff. As Jonathan Strong, then of the Daily Caller documented in 2011, she constantly referred to one staff member as “You Stupid Motherfucker,” threw her cell phone at another and demanded to be chauffeured by car when travelling between House office buildings (which are connected by tunnels) and that staffers run to the supermarket at 2 a.m. to buy garlic supplements for her. “….AND THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE GIVES HER A +4 FOR HER ANTI ISRAEL POLICIES…..ALL IN ALL SHE IS A GEM….RSK

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said the GOP is delivering “an insult to the American people’s intellect” through its opposition to immigration reform.

Jackson Lee, the ranking member on the Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee, rallied with local leaders in Houston on Sunday for President Obama’s promised executive action on immigration.

The congresswoman argued that schools, hospitals, the arts, businesses and families were suffering because Congress hadn’t passed comprehensive immigration reform.

On Saturday, she told CNN that ”it’s interesting that when it serves the will of the Republican Party, not the will of the American people, they are able to use lame duck politics, they are willing to go against the president.”

“But when it serves a broader view, such as comprehensive immigration reform, there is no interest, if you will, in working with the president. It is quite a story for the American people to understand,” she said. “Every movement to improve the lives of Americans Republicans have been against. And they have been against it if the president has been for it.”

The White House (H/T Breitbart News) released the following statement on the beheading of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, presented here in its entirety:

Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter. We cannot begin to imagine their anguish at this painful time.

Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity. Like Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff before him, his life and deeds stand in stark contrast to everything that ISIL represents. While ISIL revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction, Abdul-Rahman was a humanitarian who worked to save the lives of Syrians injured and dispossessed by the Syrian conflict. While ISIL exploits the tragedy in Syria to advance their own selfish aims, Abdul-Rahman was so moved by the anguish and suffering of Syrian civilians that he traveled to Lebanon to work in a hospital treating refugees. Later, he established an aid group, SERA, to provide assistance to Syrian refugees and displaced persons in Lebanon and Syria. These were the selfless acts of an individual who cared deeply about the plight of the Syrian people.

ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own. Today we grieve together, yet we also recall that the indomitable spirit of goodness and perseverance that burned so brightly in Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and which binds humanity together, ultimately is the light that will prevail over the darkness of ISIL. [Emphasis added]

What a curious thing to say.

I can’t think of any religion with beheading as a fundamental tenet. Beheading has been used as a form of execution in various places with various religions at various times. France’s last execution was about 30 years ago, using the guillotine. In Saudi Arabia, swordsmen still perform the ultimate punishment, and all too often.