RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Where do you suspect the girls are now?” I asked Joseph, a pastor from northeastern Nigeria, as we chatted in a small, empty office building in north-central Nigeria. We were sitting in the dark because the electricity had cut out, as it intermittently does in Africa’s most populous country.

“I can’t imagine,” Joseph said, bursting into tears. “They have most likely been separated. But there is little chance we will get them back.”

I traveled to Nigeria a few days after the abduction of 276 Christian girls from a secondary school in the village of Chibok in Borno State. I was there with a small team of Christian humanitarian volunteers from the United States. My plan was to shoot a short documentary about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

But after we learned of the mass abduction, I refocused much of my attention on the lost girls, a story that had initially attracted little international attention but that was now making headlines. Our travels would take us to Abuja and Jos in the middle belt of Nigeria and to Yaounde and then Mokolo in northern Cameroon, about ten miles from Sambisa Forest, where Boko Haram, many believe, took the girls after abducting them.

I interviewed Philip, whose home in Chibok was destroyed by Boko Haram the very day the girls were abducted. Philip, who works in government security, has 15 family members among the kidnapped. He made a startling claim that highlights the government’s unwillingness to combat the extremist Islamist group. “After the mass abduction, the Nigerian government came out publicly to say that the girls had been found and returned home,” he said. “They even spoke to the secondary school’s principal to try to pressure her into backing the claim. She did not.” Of course, none of the girls had been rescued — only a handful had escaped, on their own.

“Some local citizens formed a vigilante group shortly after the abduction, despite the protests of the government,” Philip said. “They searched for the girls within Sambisa Forest. At one point they saw the girls with Boko Haram at their campsite in the forest. The group reported this to the military, but the military didn’t go.”

I’m a longtime fan of the Wall Street Journal. But I confess to mystification over why a paper with a staunchly pro-Israel editorial line consistently allows its news pages to be used for anti-Israel smear campaigns–and I do mean smear campaigns, not just “critical reporting.” A classic example was its assertion in an April 7 news report that Israel had agreed “to release political prisoners” as part of the U.S.-brokered deal that restarted Israeli-Palestinian talks last summer. The Journal was sufficiently embarrassed by this description of convicted mass murderers that it issued a correction in print, yet the online version still unrepentantly dubs these vicious terrorists “political prisoners.”

A more subtle example was last week’s report titled “On Middle East Visit, Pope Will Find a Diminished Christian Population.” While Israel is the glaring exception to this Mideast trend, reporter Nicholas Casey elegantly implies the opposite in a single sentence that’s dishonest on at least three different levels: “Syria has seen an exodus of nearly half a million Christians, and in Jerusalem, a population of 27,000 Christians in 1948 has dwindled to 5,000.”

First, while Casey never says explicitly that Jerusalem’s shrinking Christian population reflects the situation in Israel as a whole, it’s the obvious conclusion for the average reader–especially given the juxtaposition with Syria, which implies that both countries are treating their Christians similarly and thereby causing them to flee. This impression is reinforced by the only other statistic he gives about Israel: that Christians have declined as a percentage of the total population.

The truth, however, is that Israel’s Christian population has grown dramatically–from a mere 34,000 in 1949 to 158,000 in 2012, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That’s an increase of almost fivefold. And while Christians have fallen as a share of the total population, that’s mainly because they have significantly lower birthrates than either Israeli Jews or Israeli Muslims.

Second, even his statistics on Jerusalem are dubious. Since he doesn’t source them, it’s not clear how Casey arrived at his figure of only 5,000 Christians nowadays. But the most recent figure published by Israel’s internationally respected statistics bureau, in 2013, put the city’s Christian population at 14,700 as of the end of 2011. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that after remaining stable at about that level for 44 years (more on that in a moment)–decades punctuated by repeated wars, vicious terrorism and deep recessions–the Christian population would suddenly plunge by two thirds in a mere two years at a time of strong economic growth and very little terror.

Anybody can make a mistake, and that certainly appears to be what led to the Obama White House’s exposure of the top CIA official in Afghanistan this weekend. Unfortunately, as Roger Kimball details, this is not an isolated incident. In year six of the Obama administration, it speaks volumes about not just incompetence but immaturity and the skewed priorities that come with it.

Exactly because anyone can make a mistake, large organizations — presidential administrations included — build layers of vetting into the disclosure of information to the public. In this instance, because the commander-in-chief made a surprise visit to Afghanistan over Memorial Day weekend, the White House put out a list of government officials the president met with. Somehow, that list included the intelligence official’s name with the designation “chief of station.”

This error is so basic that it grabbed the attention of Scott Wilson of the Washington Post, the “pool reporter” who received the list. Regrettably, he’d already sent out the pool report by the time he noticed the station chief designation and thought to ask whether the White House press office had really intended to put out that information.

That’s how the administration learned about what it had done — from a reporter. Think about that. In the composition and disclosure of this list, many people on both the military end and White House end have to have known that such information should never be circulated. That’s not only true as a matter of principle and common sense; it’s empirically true: Fox News reports that this administration has already had to remove a CIA station chief in Pakistan (in 2010) because of an exposure incident. It is astonishing that such an obvious error was not caught.

It is, moreover, tough to be sympathetic because Democrats never are when the shoe is on the other foot. When Valerie Plame was outed as a CIA operative — apparently inadvertently, by senior State Department official Richard Armitage — Democrats turned the error into a major controversy that damaged the Bush administration. Ms. Plame had a desk job at Langley and there are no indications that her exposure caused much harm. (There were reports at the time suggesting that she had been exposed long before through a bureaucratic screw-up.) By contrast, the official just exposed by the White House is the current top CIA official in a war zone that presents tremendous challenges to the United States, one where intelligence gathering is at a premium. The gravity of this error thus appears far more serious than the one over which Democrats spent years demanding a Bush administration scalp.

Those looking for the real war on women–as opposed to the one promoted by the American left and their media enablers—should focus their attention on Pakistan and Sudan. In the former nation, a 25-year-old pregnant woman has been stoned to death by members of her own family, with her father dubbing the atrocity an “honor killing.” In the latter nation, a 27-year-old woman has been sentenced to death for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. She was also pregnant, and has given birth while awaiting her sentence to be carried out. The common thread in both cases is as predictable as it is disturbing: the religion of Islam and the endemic mistreatment of women practiced by far too many of its followers.

Farzana Parveen was killed in broad daylight by nearly 20 members of her family before a crowd of onlookers outside the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore, Pakistan. As she walked up to the court’s main gate with her husband Mohammad Iqbal, relatives waiting for the couple’s arrival fired shots in the air and attempted to snatch her away. When she resisted, the attackers, who included her father, two brothers and her former fiancé, started beating her and her husband, before escalating the attack with bricks obtained from a nearby construction site.

Parveen subsequently sustained severe head injuries and was pronounced dead at the hospital, according to police.

All of the attackers but her father, Mohammad Azeem, escaped. He surrendered to the police and admitted taking part in the killing. He had no remorse. “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it,” the father was quoted as saying by police investigator Rana Mujahid.

Parveen had been engaged to her cousin, but married Iqbal instead, following an engagement of several years. In response, her family registered an abduction case against Iqbal, and Parzeen was to appear in court to argue that she had married him of her own free will, according to her lawyer Mustafa Kharal. Arranged marriages are the norm among conservative Pakistanis. Marrying for love is a transgression that ostensibly dishonors the family.

Iqbal, who started seeing Parveen following the death of his former wife with whom he had five children, claimed the couple was “in love.” He further alleged that her family wanted to extract money from him before allowing the marriage to take place. Instead, “I simply took her to court and registered a marriage,” Iqbal explained.

First Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates with a knife, hammer and machete. Then he shot eight people, three of them fatally, and tried to run over several others in his car.

After the bodies were taken away, everyone on television agreed that it was the fault of the guns.

Rodger had been in therapy since he was eight and was seeing therapists every day in high school. He had a history of violent threats and psychical assaults and the police had already gotten involved. He was on multiple prescription medications and had therapists whom he alerted to his plans by sending them his manifesto.

A therapist reacted by notifying his mother who drove out personally. By then even more people were dead.

In a country where a little boy with a pop tart chewed in the shape of a gun triggers immediate action, the professionals who cashed in on the killer’s wealthy family were in no hurry to call the police. One even reassured his mother while the shootings were going on that it wasn’t him.

So it was obviously the fault of the guns… which he bought with $5,000 from his family. The BMW he used to commit some of the attacks was given to him by his mother.

Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and guns for her nephew’s massacre. “What kind of a society allows this? How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.”

Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now the fault of an entire foreign country.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new book out. In keeping with the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity” the title will not be mentioned. However, Clinton Inc. sycophants will do everything possible to hype her book onto any best seller list that they can think of or, at least at a minimum delay it from the very embarrassing remainders table at books stores.

Here is her Amazon introduction:

“All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center of world events. “Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become.”

She is exactly right, so it is only appropriate that American Thinker readers look at her past participation in world events when she was the First Lady. In that role she directly engaged with the Peoples Republic Of China (PRC).

Johnny Chung was born in Taiwan but living in Southern California when he was given $300,000 by Chinese Gen Ji of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) Military Intelligence because, “We like your president very much.” Among Chung’s objectives in using the money were to go directly to Hillary Rodham Clinton and request:

A tour of the White House

Lunch at the White House Mess

A photo op with the First Lady.

An invitation to attend the president’s radio address

He was very successful, and on March 11, 1995, Johnny Chung and his PRC friends attended President Clinton’s weekly radio address after Chung handed a check for $50,000 made out to the DNC to Hillary’s chief of staff following a March 9 1995 photo op with the first lady.

Dr. Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School.

“Proponents of the Affordable Care Act have long used the VA to showcase the benefits of federally planned and run health care. Doctors know otherwise—and it is no surprise that a majority of them have opposed a mammoth federal regulatory apparatus to control health care in this country. The systemic problems with the VA bureaucracy are a harbinger of things to come.”

With the recent revelations about the disgraceful treatment of patients by the Veterans Affairs hospitals, the public is discovering what the majority of doctors in this country have long known: The VA health-care system is a disaster. Throwing more money at the system, or demanding the scalps of top bureaucrats—Washington’s reflexive response to any problem of this sort—won’t repair the mess. What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking of how to provide medical care for America’s veterans.

The federal government runs two giant health-care programs—Medicare and the VA system. Medicare is provided by private physicians and other providers. Its finances are a mess, but the care that seniors receive is by and large outstanding. The VA health-care system is run by a centrally controlled federal bureaucracy. Ultimately, that is the source of the poor care veterans receive.

U.S. doctors are well aware of the problems with VA hospitals because many of us trained at them. There are 153 VA hospitals. Most of them are affiliated with the country’s 155 medical schools, and they play an integral role in the education of young physicians. These physicians have borne witness to the abuses and mismanagement, and when they attempt to fight against the entrenched bureaucracy on behalf of their patients, they meet fierce resistance.

The Supreme Court has done its best to kill a harmful theory that merges the worst instincts of the tort bar and green lobby, but the idea won’t stay dead. The Justices now need to polish off this legal zombie for good.

For years environmentalists have sued utilities on the claim that their emissions are a “public nuisance” under common law and therefore the courts should make U.S. climate change policy. In 2011 an unusual 8-0 majority of Justices held in American Electric Power v. Connecticut that this question belongs to the political branches and the Court “remains mindful that it does not have creative power akin to that vested in Congress.”

That case turned on federal common law, but class-action plaintiffs revived the nuisance doctrine under state common law—and for some reason the Third Circuit Court of Appeals accepted this nondistinction. In GenOn Power v. Bell, a group of homeowners argued the traditional air pollutants of a local Pennsylvania power plant damaged their property values, but if allowed to stand the decision could also apply to carbon dioxide.

The plant was permitted and in full compliance with all federal and state standards under the Clear Air Act, which Congress passed in the 1970s precisely to pre-empt such common-law pollution nuisance suits. The point was to establish one uniform, predictable regulatory regime, and—whatever its faults in practice—this system is preferable to ad hoc, case-by-case injunctions that substitute the judiciary’s judgment for that of Congress and federal agencies.

Green torts copying the Bell argument have already proliferated within the Third Circuit, and the tort bar is bidding to import the same logic into the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh and Ninth Circuits as well. Failing to reverse the decision could expose U.S. industry to billion of dollars of liability and lead to a state-by-state chopped salad of pollution controls as judges make what are quintessentially political decisions. The Bell defendants are asking the Supreme Court to take the case, and the Justices should take the opportunity to close the state common-law loophole before more damage is done.

If colleges won’t stick up for free speech, why would they oppose the implicit censorship of ‘trigger warnings’?

For those who have not yet caught up with it, in the academic world the phrase “trigger warning” means alerting students to books that might “trigger” deleterious emotional effects. Should a Jewish student be asked to read “Oliver Twist” with its anti-Semitic caricature of Fagin, let alone “The Merchant of Venice,” whose central figure is the Jewish usurer Shylock? Should African-American students be required to read “Huckleberry Finn,” with its generous use of the “n-word,” or “Heart of Darkness,” which equates the Congo with the end of rational civilization? Should students who are ardent pacifists be made to read about warfare in Tolstoy and Stendhal, or for that matter the Iliad? As for gay and lesbian students, or students who have suffered sexual abuse, or those who have a physical handicap . . . one could go on.

Pointing out the potentially damaging effects of books began, like so much these days, on the Internet, where intellectual Samaritans began listing such emotionally troublesome books on their blogs. Before long it was picked up by the academy. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, the student government suggested that all course syllabi contain trigger warnings. At Oberlin College the Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to steer clear of works that might be interpreted as sexist or racist or as vaunting violence.

Movies have of course long been rated and required to note such items as Adult Language, Violence, Nudity—ratings that are themselves a form of trigger warning. Why not books, even great classic books? The short answer is that doing so insults the intelligence of those supposedly serious enough to attend college by suggesting they must not be asked to read anything that fails to comport with their own beliefs or takes full account of their troubled past experiences.

Trigger warnings logically follow from the recent history of American academic life. This is a history in which demographic diversity has triumphed over intellectual standards and the display of virtue over the search for truth. So much of this history begins in good intentions and ends in the tyranny of conformity.

Supporters of a deal with Iran assume three things, all questionable.

The clandestine production of nuclear weapons by rogue states promises to create what Yale Professor Paul Bracken terms an “exceedingly volatile poly-nuclear Middle East.”[1]

Against the backdrop of negotiations between the United States, Russia, China, France, Great Britain and Germany, (known as the P5+1), on the one hand and Iran on the other, his warning is particularly important.

In 1961, a leading defense analyst, Fred Ikle, wrote, “In entering into an arms-control agreement, we must know not only that we are technically capable of detecting a violation but also that we or the rest of the world will be… in a position to react effectively if a violation is discovered.”

At least five states have sought to build nuclear bombs clandestinely: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea. All are or were signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT], which prohibits all except the permanent five members of the UN Security Council from acquiring nuclear weapons.

During the past few decades they were given clean bills of health by the International Atomic Energy Administration, [IAEA], the UN organization monitoring nuclear energy programs to prevent them from being secretly transformed into parallel nuclear weapons programs.

The reason Iraq and Syria did not succeed in becoming nuclear weapons states was due to Israeli air strikes on their nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007.

Iraq failed again in its quest for nuclear weapons because — in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 Desert Storm campaign, which ousted Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from the occupation of Kuwait — the U.S. discovered and destroyed Baghdad’s nuclear program.