RUTHFULLY YOURS

What’s worse than a United Nations agency that provides massive welfare and support services to a Palestinian enclave run by terrorists?

Well, how about having that same agency run by a loquacious Swiss national who apparently believes that UN “neutrality” consists of blaming Israel for the local mayhem, while ignoring the terrorists?

That’s pretty much the scene right now at UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Following the latest bout of war between Israel and the Hamas terrorists who rule Gaza, UNRWA’s Swiss commissioner-general, Pierre Krahenbuhl, has been talking and tweeting about a “crying need for financial assistance to help the people of Gaza.” Krahenbuhl has also been accusing Israel of war crimes, and calling for Israel to be immediately and thoroughly investigated and called to account (as I detailed in “The U.N.’s Grotesque Gaza Inquiry,” the UN Human Rights Council is delighted to oblige). Krahenbuhl wants to address “underlying causes” — by which he apparently means Israel’s attempts to protect itself against Hamas rocket and mortar bombardments and miles of attack tunnels that were dug (right under UNRWA’s nose) from Gaza into Israel.

It appears to have escaped Krahenbuhl’s attention that Israel ended its occupation of Gaza in 2005, and that this enclave so pervasively serviced by UNRWA is run by Palestinian terrorists — variously trained and bankrolled by the likes of Iran and Qatar. The priorities of Hamas are not the well-being of women and children, or peace and prosperity, or anything of the kind. Hamas specializes in repressive rule (including summary executions), thrives on cultivating hate, and prefers pouring resources into making war on Israel (which Hamas aspires to obliterate), rather than cultivating Gaza as a productive entrepot on the Mediterranean.

UNRWA’s Krahenbuhl runs an agency that is troubling enough for its policies of extending refugee status plus a cornucopia of welfare benefits to succeeding generations of Palestinians — fostering a vast and chronically aggrieved population permanently on the dole. UNRWA has kept itself in business for 64 years by creating its own ever-expanding clientele — now numbering more than 5 million “refugees.” Does Krahenbuhl’s brief also include inserting himself into the complex Middle East scene as an arbiter of policy, war and the complexities of seeking peace in the Middle East?

“Hold On, They Got a White Dude” in Memphis Posted By Colin Flaherty

“Hold on, they got a white dude.” And it sure seemed like fun, if the laughing and shrieking on this latest video of black mob violence is any indication.

This racial mayhem happened Saturday night in Memphis at a Kroger’s department store. WMCA Channel 5 out of Jackson, Mississippi picks up the story, all of it except the central organizing feature of the violence: All of the hundreds of people involved in the mayhem and violence are black. Except the victims. They are white:

“Three people were jumped by a large group of teenagers who were chanting “fam mob.” The group, who came from CiCi’s Pizza, reportedly attacked a 25-year-old customer as he left his car to enter Kroger. Two employees, ages 17 and 18, were attacked while trying to stop the fight. Both were “struck several times in the head and face, while being knocked to the ground.” The victims say large pumpkins were thrown at their heads. They both eventually were knocked unconscious.”

However serious it seemed to the victims, the predators and their videographer were having a good time. Laughing and running.

Former prison psychologist Marlin Newburn has been on the front lines of racial violence for more than 30 years. Newburn said the laughing is part of the large scale violence, something he has seen many times before:

“These predators were merely living out their preferred lifestyle, a primary part of the black culture, as opposed to a subculture,” said Newburn. “This lifestyle of one of sadistic and primitive impulse where they believe themselves to be 10 feet tall, bullet proof, very smart, good looking, gifted, and tougher than anyone. If you’re thinking that’s the narcissism common among pre-adolescent children, ages 6 through 12 inclusive, you’d be correct.”

While President Obama dithers about whether to “destroy” ISIS or “manage” them, the Christian left is urging him to engage the butchers in nonviolent, “community-level peace and reconciliation processes.”

The Catholic, Washington-based Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns recently posted a letter addressed to President Obama and other White House officials at the end of August. Signed by 53 national religious groups (including Maryknoll), academics, and ministers, the letter urged the White House to avoid warfare in Iraq by resorting to “a broader set of smart, effective nonviolent practices to engage hostile conflicts.” The strategies are part of “a fresh way to view and analyze conflicts” offered by an emerging ecumenical paradigm called “justpeace” (a cutesy combination of justice and peace). This approach was initiated by the Faith Forum for Middle East Policy, a “network of Christian denominations and organizations working for a just peace in the Middle East.”

The signers expressed their “deep concern” not so much over “the dire plight of Iraqi civilians” being slaughtered by ISIS as “the recent escalation of U.S. military action” in response. “U.S. military action is not the answer,” they claim, sounding a pacifist note common among left-leaning Christians. “We believe that the way to address the crisis is through long-term investments in supporting inclusive governance and diplomacy, nonviolent resistance, sustainable development, and community-level peace and reconciliation processes.”

Good luck with that. It doesn’t take a diplomatic genius to know that ISIS’ response to such flaccid tactics would be the same as the one they delivered recently in a video warning to the U.S.: “We will drown all of you in blood.”

But the left deals in wishful thinking, not reality. Thus the signers affirm, with Pope Francis, that “peacemaking is more courageous than warfare” – a statement that makes a great bumper sticker for Priuses but has no basis in fact. “It is licit to stop the unjust aggressor,” concedes Pope Francis, but “stop” does not mean wage war, which he calls the “suicide of humanity.”

Typical of the blame-America-first left, the letter’s signers faulted “decades of U.S. political and military intervention, coupled with inadequate social reconciliation programs,” for “the current crisis in Iraq.” More violence, they believe, will simply lead to “a continual cycle of violent intervention” that does not address “the root causes of the conflict.” You know that when the left speaks of “root causes,” they mean poverty, social injustice, imperialism – all of the familiar grievances whereby the left legitimizes “freedom fighters” such as ISIS. The left is also fond of the notion of the “cycle of violence” – as if both sides are equally to blame, and if one side takes the bold step to end that cycle, the other side will stop as well.

“We… deeply share the desire to protect people, especially civilians,” the letter continues, but “there are better, more effective, more healthy and more humanizing ways” to do that. Those steps include the following recommendations:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-managing-of-isis-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest hosted by Michael Hausam and joined by Mark Tapson, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, Mike Munzing, a Tea Party Activist and Jennifer Van Laar, a writer at Independent Journal Review.

The guests gathered to discuss Obama’s ‘Managing’ of ISIS, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief’s disdain for American victory:

Obama often boasted that Al Qaeda was on the run. However it was Obama who had been running away from Al Qaeda ever since he took the job.

The botched surge in Afghanistan, where his own intelligence people had told him there were barely a 100 Al Qaeda fighters left, had been an attempt to escape Al Qaeda.

Not the terrorists themselves, but the issues they raised.

September 11 had disrupted the multicultural consensus by raising serious questions about immigration and Islam. It had also thrown away the consensus that the collapse of the USSR had made American military power obsolete. Obama had come to revive these consensuses and as recently as the last election dismissed Romney as a reactionary warmonger who didn’t understand the new world order.

Obama had declared victory over an undefeated enemy. He had passed off a strategic withdrawal as a victory. His wars, victories and withdrawals were a series of blatant lies that are catching up with him.

His administration tried to blame the takeover of Libya by Islamist militias after his disastrous regime change intervention on a YouTube video. But there isn’t a YouTube video big enough to blame ISIS on.

Obama was determined to go on pretending that ISIS didn’t exist. Even while drones were hitting Al Qaeda leaders in Yemen and Pakistan, Al Qaeda in Iraq’s Caliph got a free pass from our drones and our custody. When ISIS took Fallujah, he dismissed it as a JV team. Now he’s trying to build a coalition, but his air strikes are a belated response to a threat that he should have been on top of all along.

Even without boots on the ground, the United States could have continued suppression operations against Al Qaeda in Iraq after the withdrawal. Drones would have ruled out the problem of Americans being tried in Iraq, the supposed reason for the total withdrawal.

A responsible administration wouldn’t have had to scramble for a strategy at the last minute because it would have been on top of the problem all along. But Obama cared more about being able to check the Iraq box and the Al Qaeda box in the election than about stopping the rise of Al Qaeda.

When politicians seek to restrict speech, they are invariably trying to protect their own incumbency.

Liberals often deplore efforts to amend the Constitution, particularly the Bill of Rights and especially when the outcome would narrow individual liberties. Well, now we know they don’t really mean it.

Forty-six Senate Democrats have concluded that the First Amendment is an impediment to re-election that a little tinkering can cure. They are proposing a constitutional amendment that would give Congress and state legislatures the authority to regulate the degree to which citizens can devote their resources to advocating the election or defeat of candidates. Voters, whatever their political views, should rise up against politicians who want to dilute the Bill of Rights to perpetuate their tenure in office.

Led by Majority Leader Harry Reid, these Senate Democrats claim that they are merely interested in good government to “restore democracy to the American people” by reducing the amount of money in politics. Do not believe it. When politicians seek to restrict political speech, it is invariably to protect their own incumbency and avoid having to defend their policies in the marketplace of ideas.

This scheme is doomed to fail when it comes to a vote in the Senate, perhaps as soon as Monday. The Constitution’s Framers had the wisdom to make amending the Constitution difficult, and Mr. Reid’s gambit won’t survive a filibuster. But Senate Democrats know their proposal is a loser. They merely want another excuse to rail against “money in politics” and Supreme Court justices they don’t like.

The rhetoric of these would-be constitutional reformers is focused on two Supreme Court decisions: Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014). In Citizens United, the court struck down a law prohibiting unions and corporations from using their resources to speak for or against a candidate within a certain time period before an election.

The Obama administration conceded during oral argument that the law would permit the government to ban the publication of political books or pamphlets. Pamphlets and books ignited the revolution that created this country and the Bill of Rights. In pushing to overturn the court’s decision, Mr. Reid and his Democratic colleagues apparently wish they had the power to stop books, pamphlets—as well as broadcasting—that threaten their hold on their government jobs.

Al Qaeda has a new franchise: Qaedat al-Jihad in the Indian Subcontinent. On Wednesday, Ayman al-Zawahiri, widely believed to be in hiding in Pakistan, appeared in a video announcing the creation of the jihadist group’s latest offshoot. It will be led by Asim Umar, a somewhat obscure militant best known for an online video calling on Indian Muslims to sign up for a global jihad. Zawahiri says the group will “raise the flag of jihad, return Islamic rule, and empower the Sharia of Allah across the Indian subcontinent.”

Mr. Zawahiri’s threats should be taken seriously. However, the bigger danger to India is al Qaeda’s rival for leadership of global jihadism: the terrorist group ISIS, also known simply as Islamic State. Al Qaeda may well have deeper networks in the subcontinent. But in terms of both sophisticated messaging and raw appeal, the 63-year-old Egyptian doctor’s outfit cannot match the ISIS upstarts who burst into the public eye after capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June.

Consider the evidence. At least four Indian Muslims have reportedly signed up to fight with ISIS in Iraq. Last week, one of them, a 22-year-old engineering student named Arif Majeed, was reported killed, possibly in a U.S. airstrike. He left behind a letter to his family in which he explained his reasons for traveling from his home outside Mumbai to Iraq: “It is a blessed journey for me, because I don’t want to live in this sinful country.”

Meanwhile, police in the southern state of Tamil Nadu arrested a Muslim cleric after a group photo of young Muslim men posing outside a mosque in ISIS T-shirts began to circulate on social media.

These may be isolated incidents, and the vast majority of Indian Muslims shows no signs of being attracted to any jihadist group. But ISIS has arguably made a bigger splash in India in three months than al Qaeda could manage in the 26 years since it was founded in Pakistan by Osama bin Laden.

Instead of tackling a complex new investment mission, the Fed should establish a clear portfolio wind-down process.

The Federal Reserve recently made clear it is planning to maintain its enormous balance sheet—roughly $4.5 trillion in Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities—for many years, while keeping interest rates near zero at least into 2015.

Far from being neutral or stimulative, these policies have caused huge distortions in financial markets, contributing to slow growth and falling median incomes. Given the tendency of government programs to expand and become permanent, the risk now is that the Fed’s large pool of assets and liabilities evolves into a semi-permanent government-controlled investment fund, a U.S. version of the sovereign-wealth funds created by other governments.

The concept of a sovereign-wealth fund inside the Fed sounds farfetched, but the Fed’s megaportfolio already looks like one in many respects. It is one of the world’s largest and most leveraged bond portfolios, taking massive interest-rate risks. Just to maintain the Fed’s assets as bonds mature will require the Fed to make at least $1 trillion in bond buying decisions over the next five years.

The longer the Fed holds its portfolio, the greater the danger that political forces will nudge its investments away from Treasury securities. The Fed already owns bonds created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, helping them take market share in the mortgage market from the private sector. There have been many proposals in recent years to set up infrastructure banks, for example. Perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency could set up an environment fund that issues bonds for the Fed to buy as a creative way to finance the fight against global warming. Japan, China and others own large holdings of dollar-denominated bonds, and it’s easy to see a future Fed edging its portfolio into euro- and yen-denominated bonds to manipulate the value of the dollar.

Maintaining the large Fed balance sheet raises a host of other concerns too. These include conflicts of interest among the Fed’s monetary, regulatory and investment roles, and the risk of distracting the Fed from its crucial lender-of-last-resort responsibility. Major new problems are inevitable regarding investment transparency and political decisions on the appropriate levels of Fed payments to the Treasury Department and banks.

Exactly as President Obama and Senate Democrats planned, the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has moved to suppress a major challenge to ObamaCare. The gambit is no less remarkable for its nakedness.

Last week the full D.C. Circuit vacated the July decision that some insurance subsidies violate the law’s plain language and agreed to rehear Halbig v. Burwell en banc. ObamaCare’s text authorizes subsidies only through exchanges “established by the State,” so a three-judge panel ruled that the Internal Revenue Service was dispensing them illegally across the 36 exchanges established by the federal government.

Such straightforward statutory interpretation fails the D.C. Circuit’s own high standards for en banc scrutiny. As Washington attorney Adam White recently explained in these pages, since the 1990s the full D.C. Circuit has chosen to rehear merely one or two—and sometimes zero—of the 500 or so cases heard every year. The court’s standard for en banc hearings has been that a panel has overturned a D.C. Circuit precedent, which Halbig does not, or if a matter of “exceptional importance” is implicated, historically meaning some constitutional principle. Reading a statute does not rise to constitutional review.

The difference now is that Harry Reid last year packed the D.C. Circuit with three of President Obama’s nominees, so liberals now outnumber conservatives by eight to five not counting senior judges. The Senate Majority Leader nuked the filibuster rule for judges, allowing them to be confirmed with 51 instead of 60 votes, precisely so the court would become the garbageman to dispose of unpleasant legal challenges to the President’s regulatory decrees. ObamaCare is Exhibit A.

At a press conference on July 22, before the White House had even moved for en banc review in Halbig, Mr. Reid proclaimed that, “It seems clear to me that that decision will be overturned. In a matter of a couple hours, the Fourth Circuit disagreed. Now they’re going to have a hearing en banc.” When asked if Halbig vindicates his filibuster play, Mr. Reid replied, “If you look at simple math, sure does.”

He’ll still write a lawless deportation rule—but not until after November.

So President Obama says he still plans to unilaterally rewrite immigration law—but not until after the election so he can spare Democrats in Congress from the wrath of voters for doing so. And he wonders why Americans are cynical about politics?

White House leakers are saying that Mr. Obama wants to fulfill his June pledge to issue a lawless regulation limiting deportations for millions of illegal immigrants. But he has decided to bow to incumbent Democrats who fear a political backlash that could hand Republicans Senate control in November. Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and even Al Franken, the Minnesota hyper-liberal, have begged Mr. Obama to delay.

“And you know, the truth of the matter is—is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” Mr. Obama said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, referring to the rush of Central American children seeking U.S. asylum at the border. “I want to spend some time, even as we’re getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we’re doing this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the right thing for the American economy.”

He added: “And what I want to do is, when I take executive action, I want to make sure that it’s sustainable.”