RUTHFULLY YOURS

CHECK OUT CAIR’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA FEATURING ILLINOIS SENATOR DICK DURBIN:

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/03/24/dick-durbin-the-cairing-illinois-senator/

DURBIN RANKS A + 5 ON THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE’S SCORECARD FOR LEGISLATORS INDICATING A VERY PRO-ARAB VOTING RECORD. HE RECENTLY GRATIFIED HIS SUPPORTERS BY ATTENDING A CAIR 10TH ANNIVERSARY GALA.
CAIR has been designated by the FBI and several in Congress as a supporter of U.S.-designated terrorist groups.
“For more than 10 years, CAIR-Chicago has enhanced the understanding of Islam within our communities by facilitating dialogue, protecting civil liberties, empowering American Muslims, and building coalitions which promote justice and mutual understanding. I applaud your commitment to guaranteeing that our country’s ideals are fully respected and realized for all.”
– Dick Durbin
U.S. Senator, State of Illinois

On the night of Saturday, November 8, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of CAIR held its 20th Anniversary Banquet at the Santa Clara Convention Center. It was fitting that two out of three of the event’s featured speakers have been associated with terrorism, as 20 years ago CAIR was founded as a main component of a Palestinian terrorist enterprise inside the United States.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been in existence for 20 years — since June 1994 — when it opened up its national headquarters in Washington, D.C. The group was established as being a part of the American Palestine Committee, an umbrella organization run by then-global Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, who was based in the U.S. at the time and who now operates out of Egypt as a spokesman for Hamas.

The other members of the umbrella included a Hamas financing wing, Holy Land Foundation (HLF); a Hamas propaganda wing, Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP); and a Hamas command center, United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which was then led by Ahmed Yousef, who later left the U.S. for Gaza to become Senior Political Adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniya.

The founding and current National Executive Director of CAIR is Nihad Awad. Just prior to co-founding CAIR, Awad held the position of Public Relations Director for the IAP. As the propaganda wing of Hamas, the IAP had been involved in distributing Hamas terrorist videos and publishing vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Israel materials, including the Hamas charter in different languages.

Only months before the creation of CAIR, Awad announced his support for Hamas.

It would be difficult to imagine any Attorney General nominee who could guarantee a more seamless transition from the Eric Holder years than Loretta Lynch, who has been the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York since 2010. Her uncanny ability to detect phantoms of white racism lurking ominously around every corner is proof-positive of her fitness to serve as Holder’s successor in the Obama administration.

Lynch believes that voter ID laws are part of a racist effort to suppress minority turnout at the polls. “Fifty years after the civil rights movement,” she avers, “we stand in this country at a time when we see people trying to take back so much of what Dr. [Martin Luther] King fought for … and [to] reverse the [gains] that have been made in voting in this country.” Consequently, Lynch is eminently “proud” that the Justice Department has filed suit against states which have enacted voter ID laws “seek[ing] to limit our ability to stand up and exercise our rights as citizens.” Lynch also supports efforts to restore the voting rights of (disproportionately black) convicted felons who “have served their debt to society”—a measure that would “en[d] the chain of permanent disenfranchisement that visits many of them.”

By Lynch’s reckoning, school discipline policies that result in higher rates of suspension and expulsion for nonwhite children than for whites, are racist as well. “Zero-tolerance programs,” she told a mostly black audience in 2013, “are often used [to] take our babies, minority children, black children, Hispanic children, and they put them out of school before they have a chance to learn.” Building on this theme, Lynch praised the Justice Department for having “gone into the South, although we’re looking further, and brought the first … ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ cases against school districts in Alabama.” The question of whether black youth exhibit disproportionate levels of disruptive behavior in the classroom—perhaps partially as a consequence of the black community’s high rate of father-absent households—did not spark Lynch’s curiosity in the least. The tidy, all-purpose explanation of racial insensitivity was sufficient for her purposes.

In April 2014, Lynch participated in a panel titled “Strengthening the Relationship Between Law Enforcement and Communities of Color” alongside Eric Holder and none other than Al Sharpton, who has never been known to squander an opportunity to depict white police officers as trigger-happy bigots when dealing with black suspects. One of the panel’s “action items” stated authoritatively: “Remember that racial bias is pervasive. Research has shown that people who are not consciously mistrustful of African Americans or intentionally racist can still behave in a way that is influenced by racial bias.” In other words, even well-meaning whites in law-enforcement are little more unwitting Klansmen.

Yesterday afternoon a young woman stood by the side of a road holding up a sign. It read “Gush Etzion.” Those two words summon up spittle-flecked rants about Zionist settlements from the anti-Israel left.

But for Dalia, it was just home. And then it wasn’t.

Dalia caught a ride to a bus stop on the way home from her job as a children’s occupational therapist. Her next stop was a shift at Yad Sarah, a volunteer organization for the elderly and disabled. But before that could happen, a Muslim attacker did what songs, cartoons and posters distributed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas encouraging “Car Jihad” had been telling him to do.

He ran her over with a Mazda van.

With the 26-year-old woman on the ground, the courageous Islamic Jihadist stabbed her as she lay dying. Then shouting Allahu Akbar, he began slashing at an unarmed man who had stopped to help. When the unarmed man fighting him off with his bare hands proved too much for the knife-wielding Jihadist, the killer fled, was wounded and taken into custody.

Dalia’s father, a volunteer with Magen David Adom, Israel’s Red Cross, heard that there had been an attack. He did what countless Israeli fathers and mothers began doing right after they heard the news.

He called his daughter. There was no answer.

Despite being only in her twenties, Dalia knew what was coming. This wasn’t her killer’s first act of terrorism and it wasn’t her first time as a victim of Islamic terrorism.

When she was seventeen years old, Dalia was attacked by a knife-wielding terrorist in the same place. But the terrorist didn’t have a van and there were armed men at the scene.

“I stood on February 28, 2006 at Gush Etzion Junction when a terrorist came and began to stab those standing at a hitchhiking station,” she would later write.

She described terrorists for whom prison life is “like a hotel”, who watch television, take courses and contact their lawyers. “Those who stab Jews have their rights and privileges. The injustice cries out to Heaven.”

“Punish and expel those who threaten us,” Dalia wrote, “no matter the cost to them. They must pay the price for their terror. That is the only way the terrorism will end.”

What the Ploughshares Fund is actually doing with its proposed budget cuts, it appears, is trying to camouflage the objectives of permanently disarming America of key parts of its nuclear capability.

Describing the U.S. nuclear force structure as a “Cold War relic” says nothing about whether the force is still needed. Oddly, the nuclear cuts being proposed do not require any reciprocal Russian reductions.

Cutting $20 billion a year from the current U.S. nuclear deterrent would require killing all modernization, plus all the work of extending the life of nuclear warheads. In 20 years, the U.S. would be left with no effective nuclear deterrent, while China, Russia and North Korea are modernizing their nuclear deterrents across the board.

“You have to invent a ‘Dragon’ to slay.” — U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks, explaining how to kill defense programs.

In Washington, a delay often has the same impact as killing a program.

It has been 33 years since the U.S. last embarked on a nuclear modernization program.

Both the Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of Defense have called for a debate over what the future costs of the nuclear deterrent enterprise should be and what investment is needed to keep the peace and prevent nuclear war.

At issue is whether the United States can afford to spend 4% of its defense budget and 0.6% of all federal spending to modernize its nuclear deterrent over the next decade and beyond.

Two widely divergent views are emerging.

The first is that a plan is necessary to modernize the U.S. nuclear capability to keep it a robust and credible deterrent in the face of advances currently being made by China and Russia and North Korea in their nuclear programs

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve, where he served as a Military Attaché to Israel.

The goal of the Islamic State might be to create enough chaos in the capital city of Baghdad to cause a mass exodus of its Shia population southward, this ceding Baghdad to the Sunnis by default.

Is it still possible to salvage if not Iraq, at least Baghdad? Sunni Muslim troops, led by ISIS (now the so-called Islamic State, or IS) and fighting against the Iraqi government, have virtually surrounded Baghdad. Iraq’s largest province, al-Anbar, is almost totally occupied by anti-regime forces. Only a portion of Fallujah remains outside of occupation by the IS-led forces. After the IS took over the city of Hit, regular Iraqi units fell back into a defensive posture at al-Asad, the largest military facility in Anbar. Several key population centers to the north and northeast have also fallen, and there is still heavy fighting around the oil refineries of the northern city of Baiji.

IS’s gains north of Baghdad last month prompted U.S. aircraft bombing sorties. Since June, the central government also has lost ground east of the capital; Diyala Province barely remains under Shia control. After the collapse of government forces in Hillah, south of the capital, and IS’s mid-June seizures of Iskandariyah and Mahmoudiyah, barely six miles south of the Baghdad, routes to Iraq’s Shia heartland have also now been jeopardized.While the fall of the capital is certainly not imminent, IS’s strategy appears clear. Opposition forces will likely continue to tighten the noose around Baghdad in an attempt to create a sense of isolation. IS will avoid, for now, any large-scale assault on Baghdad for three reasons: it does not have the manpower; Shia militias outnumber enemy forces and will fight zealously to keep the Shia in control of the capital; and a major attack might cause remaining U.S. ground forces to become actively involved in the conflict.

At noon on Monday, 18-year-old terrorist Nur a-Din Hashiyeh tried to wrest the rifle from 20-year-old IDF Staff Sgt. Almog Shiloni at a train station in Tel Aviv. When Shiloni resisted, Hashiyeh, from the Palestinian Authority-controlled area of Nablus, stabbed him. Onlookers immediately tried to resuscitate Shiloni. Others tried to overpower Hashiyeh, who managed to run away, until police caught up with him in a nearby building.

Shiloni was transferred to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where he died on Monday night.

Hashiyeh, who sustained minor injuries, was brought to Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. Fearing revenge attacks from the mob of Israelis who had gathered around the train station yelling “Death to terrorists,” the police covered him from head to toe and whisked him off in an ambulance.

Hashiyeh is a member of Hamas. One photo that has been circulating shows him holding a sign that reads: “We are a people whose passion for death is like our enemies’ desire for life.”

Early Monday evening, as Shiloni was still fighting for his life, 30-year-old Maher al-Hashlamoun, an Islamic Jihad member from Hebron, set out to commit the kind of vehicular attack against innocent Israelis that has become popular among Arabs in the PA. But when he arrived at the hitchhiking stop next to the Judean settlement of Alon Shvut (opposite the very spot where three Israeli teens were abducted and slaughtered in the summer), his car crashed into a concrete block.

Undeterred, he exited the car and began stabbing the people at the stop, among them a young man. He also slashed the throat of 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus from Tekoa, who died at the scene.

While Hashlamoun was on his rampage, a passing driver stopped to intervene. He ended up getting stabbed in the jaw, but did enable the guard at the entrance to Alon Shvut to shoot Hashlamoun. Like the two innocents he attempted to murder, Hashlamoun was brought to an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem.

Since the outbreak of the latest Middle East war a few years back, we have been chronicling the Washington political class’s Syria Fairy Tales. In particular, there is the story line that Syria is really teeming with secular democrats and authentic moderate Muslims who would have combined forces to both overthrow Assad and fight off the jihadists if only President Obama had helped them. But his failure to act created a “vacuum” that was tragically filled by Islamist militants and gave rise to ISIS. At this point in the story, you are supposed to stay politely mum and not ask whether it makes any sense that real democrats and actual moderates would agree to be led by head-chopping, mass-murdering, freedom-stifling sharia terrorists.

In point of fact, there simply have never been enough pro-Western elements in Syria to win, no matter how much help came their way. There was never going to be a moderate, democratic Syrian state without a U.S. invasion and occupation for a decade or more, an enterprise that would be politically untenable — and, as the Iraq enterprise shows, unlikely to succeed. The “moderate rebels” had no chance against Assad unless they colluded with the Islamist militants, who are vastly superior and more numerous fighters. And they would have even less chance of both knocking off Assad and staving off the jihadists.

The Obama administration and the Beltway commentariat have done their best to obscure these brute facts. Their main tactic is to exploit the American public’s unfamiliarity with the makeup of Syria. Obama Democrats and much of the Beltway GOP continue to invoke the “moderate Syrian rebels” while steadfastly refusing to identify just who those purported “moderates” are. They hope you won’t realize that, because of the dearth of actual moderate Muslims and freedom fighters, they must count among their “moderate rebels” both the Muslim Brotherhood (which should be designated as a terrorist organization) and various other Islamist factions, including . . . wait for it . . . parts of al-Nusra — i.e., al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise.

We’ve also noted that a new wrinkle has recently been added to the Beltway’s Syria Fairy Tales: Obama’s Khorasan Fraud. In a desperate attempt to conceal the falsity of Obama’s boasts about destroying what is actually a resurgent al-Qaeda, the administration claimed that the threat to America that impelled Obama to start bombing Syria was not ISIS (supposedly just a “regional” threat), not al-Qaeda (already defeated, right?), but a hitherto unknown terrorist organization called the “Khorasan group.”

Some congressional Republicans have a way to block the executive actions, but it won’t be easy.

When many Republicans were still celebrating the GOP’s historic electoral victory, conservatives on Capitol Hill began meeting in private to develop a plan to stop President Obama’s planned executive action on immigration. The resounding support of the American people at the polls last week appears to have given some House and Senate Republicans new confidence that they can face down Obama and win. Yet that doesn’t even mean they’ll necessarily get their chance: Republican leadership in both bodies may resist putting up the stakes involved.

Conservative members in both chambers want to pass a continuing resolution to fund the whole government with language that expressly prohibits using federal funds to enable any executive action on immigration policy, blocking funding, for instance, of work-authorization documents for illegal immigrants.

Congressmen will work this week on crafting a strategy to pass such a bill, and one working plan would have House Republicans include such language in a continuing resolution that’s needed to keep the government funded past mid-December.

Such an effort will probably run into the objections of Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Even if Republicans can persuade Reid to agree to those conditions — there are a number of Senate Democrats they think would support the idea — they’ll have to persuade the president to sign that CR, too. If Reid refuses to take up an amnesty-blocking bill before the existing continuing resolution expires — as one assumes he will — the plan is for House Republicans to pass a short-term continuing resolution set to expire just after the new Congress is seated, followed by a long-term CR in the new year that includes the anti-amnesty language.

OVER THERE BY GEORGE M. COHAN

Johnnie, get your gun,
Get your gun, get your gun,
Take it on the run,
On the run, on the run.
Hear them calling, you and me,
Every son of liberty.
Hurry right away,
No delay, go today,
Make your daddy glad
To have had such a lad.
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there –
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming
Everywhere.
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware.
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over
Over there.

Johnnie, get your gun,
Get your gun, get your gun,
Johnnie show the Hun
Who’s a son of a gun.
Hoist the flag and let her fly,
Yankee Doodle do or die.
Pack your little kit,
Show your grit, do your bit.
Yankee to the ranks,
From the towns and the tanks.
Make your mother proud of you,
And the old Red, White and Blue.

Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word over there –
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming
Everywhere.
So prepare, say a prayer,
Send the word, send the word to beware.
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over
Over there.

In a fit of postelection modesty, President Barack Obama is offering not to take executive action to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants — provided Republicans do his bidding on immigration.

It is extortion as conciliation. New Jersey governor Chris Christie often invites comparisons to The Sopranos, but it is President Obama who is making a tactic taken out of the HBO mob drama his major postelection initiative. His bipartisan outreach now ends with a pointed “Or else . . . ”

This offer Republicans can’t refuse includes the stipulation that the president will revoke his executive action in the event they pass legislation to his liking. How generous of him. We should all be pleased that he isn’t threatening Republican leaders with the release of compromising photos — yet.

Obama’s tack on immigration speaks to a president who is out of sorts and out of step, and who recognizes his own political impotence. Unable to build a political case for one of his chief second-term priorities, he has to fall back on executive usurpation.

Prior to the election, the president delayed his threatened amnesty — perhaps legalizing millions of immigrants — because it might harm Democrats. It still became an election issue, with Republicans hammering away at it and winning resoundingly. Even a relative dove on immigration such as Cory Gardner, the Republican senator-elect from Colorado, opposed Obama’s executive action.

This electoral rebuke might give a less highhanded president pause. Not President Obama. He rules from an Olympian height above mere election results and mere constitutional constraints on his power.

The president says that he’d still “prefer” that Congress itself change the immigration laws. For him, this is a positively Madisonian expression of respect for the American constitutional scheme.