RUTHFULLY YOURS

WHO IS ANDRE CARSON?
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will appoint the first Muslim member to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which deals with sensitive information on America’s war against terrorism.

International Business Times reports that Rep. André Carson, D-Ind., the second Muslim elected to the House, following the election of Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., in 2006, will take a seat on the committee.

Politico reported that Carson’s nomination was announced by Pelosi in a closed-door weekly Democratic caucus meeting and would be announced publicly “in the coming days.”

Carson was first elected to the House in 2008 and converted to Islam 10 years before taking office, IBTimes reports.

In 2014, Carson came under fire for being scheduled to appear on a panel entitled, “Ferguson is Our Issue: We Can’t Breathe,” at a convention of the Muslim American Society/Islamic Circle of North America in Chicago, along with Mazen Mokhtar, a webmaster and fundraiser for al-Qaida, the Center for Security Policy reports.

However, after delivering a keynote speech, without explanation, Carson did not appear on the panel.

Why didn’t President Obama go to Paris?

Monday brought a lot of quickly discarded excuses. 1) The excuse that the United States was adequately represented, as suggested by Kerry’s claim that critics were “quibbling” because the U.S. ambassador attended. White House press secretary Josh Earnest eventually retreated on that one. 2) The claim that there were security concerns, which suggested the security measures taken to protect the French president, U.K. prime minister, and Israeli prime minister were somehow insufficient. Also note that the entire point of the march was to send a message to the world that leaders will not be intimidated by extremists who threaten to kill them. 3) Complete and total staff incompetence: “White House aides were so caught off guard by the march’s massive size and attention that they hadn’t even asked President Barack Obama if he wanted to go.”

— Representative Jim Bridenstine (R., Okla.) is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, a naval aviator, and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rep. Bridenstine is a veteran, a conservative stalwart, and his priorities as candidate (unopposed) were to repeal Obamacare, build the Keystone Pipeline, and oppose blanket amnesty in immigration….rsk

The Obama administration’s ramped-up efforts to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainees are yet another instance where the president refuses to acknowledge Gitmo’s value and compromises national security. Congress should move to thwart the president’s strategy and retain Guantanamo so American troops do not have to fight the same enemy twice.

In in an open letter in early December, Uruguay’s President Jose Mujica wrote to President Obama, offering to resettle six Gitmo detainees and actually accusing the United States of “kidnapping” detainees. On December 7, American military planes landed in Montevideo with their terrorist cargo. Mujica waited exactly one day to announce his true intentions, telling Uruguayan state TV, “The first day that [the detainees] want to leave, they can leave.”

Many of the Left’s favorite unratified treaties are aspirational fantasies.

Those nasty Republicans are at it again.

Dennis Jett, former U.S. ambassador to Mozambique and Peru, writes in The New Republic that GOP senators are blocking “even the most reasonable international treaties.” As opposed, apparently, to that mythical entity, the domestic treaty.

The ambassador proclaims the virtues of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which will somehow supposedly prevent nations controlled by dictators and terrorists from arming dictators and terrorists. If you want to read the case against it, you can start here. But for now, let’s talk process, not substance.

Jett is outraged that there are “36 treaties awaiting action by the Senate,” and implies that the ATT is one of them. He even helpfully links to a list of pending treaties. But the ATT’s not on it. That’s because the administration hasn’t sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification.

Jett’s also angry that another treaty — the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — is supposedly stalled in the Senate. But it’s not. Though President Clinton signed the CRC in 1995, no administration — Democrat or Republican — has submitted it. That’s why the CRC wasn’t included on the Obama administration’s 2009 Treaty Priority List, at a time when Democrats were only seven votes away from the two-thirds majority needed to ratify it.

President Obama is officially at war with the Islamic State, yet he is not fighting to win. He is fighting to contain it and “degrade” it over a period of years. Practically speaking, this means: helping the Islamic State develop itself at home, and helping it inspire more terrorists worldwide — something the terrorists have brought home to country after country in recent weeks. Obama’s strategy is barely different from fighting to lose.

As long as the Islamic State is fighting America without losing — as long as it continues to control a large swath of territory — its roots deepen at home and its charisma grows among Muslims everywhere. Here finally is an Islamic entity that is able to fight “the Empire” and succeed in holding it off! It attracts adherents from a global base — a base of many thousand aspiring jihadists and many million supportive Islamists.

The U.S. has announced that it has killed a thousand Islamic State fighters — this, in all these months of containing and “degrading.” Meanwhile, by conservative counts, the Islamic State has recruited more than twice that number of additional fighters. Leftists argue that we are building up the IS by fighting it, so stop fighting. They would be right, if they put it this way: We are building it up by fighting pro forma without trying to win.

Unlike many conservatives, I was not outraged when President Obama directed the Justice Department to end the pretense of “defending” the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). I feel the same way about the president’s decision not to join dozens of world leaders in Paris last Sunday to march in favor of free speech and against Islamic-supremacist terror. I’m glad he stayed home. I’m glad he didn’t send Vice President Biden (whose main job is to attend such exhibitions), Secretary of State Kerry (whose main job escapes me), or Attorney General Holder (who was in Paris but still didn’t go).

It’s not too often that the “most transparent administration in history” is, what’s the word? . . . transparent.

To be sure, in the immediate time frame of these decisions, Obama was moved more by frivolity than by principle. On DOMA, he needed to make a gesture to well-heeled donors on the left who, in their frustration over the president’s too-slow “evolution” on gay marriage, were withholding campaign cash. As for Paris, I suspect Obama wanted to watch the pro-football playoffs (which is why — shades of Benghazi! — the White House refused to reveal what the Leader From Behind Of The Free World was doing in lieu of attending the free world’s march).

In less than a week the free world seems to have lost the United States’ leadership, and the media lost its courage. The winners are the Islamists, whose ‘sensitivities’ apparently weigh more than those of Christians, Jews, Hindus, and all other “infidels.” Could this be attributed to the fact that only the offended Muslims take machetes to slit the throats of those who allegedly offended them?

French President Francois Hollande, who called for this weekend’s rally in Paris, managed to turn the message of the biggest symbolic protest against Islamist, anti-Semitic terrorism into farce.

Hollande’s national security adviser, Jacques Audibert, delivered a message to the Israel’s Prime Minister office, saying, “Hollande would prefer that Netanyahu not attend because his presence would be ‘liable to divert attention to other controversial issues, like Jewish-Muslim relations…’.” When Netanyahu did not comply, Hollande immediately invited the Palestinian Authority’s (not a state) anti-Semitic Chief Mahmoud Abbas, who earned his Ph.D. in Holocaust Denial from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University and who sends his al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to kidnap and murder Jewish children just because they are Jews. His presence was complemented by his supporter Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Lavrov’s attendance occurred as the Moscow police arrested “Je suis Charlie” sign-carrying demonstrators.

Hypocrisy and fakeness on clear display.
Commentators on both the left and the right are slamming President Obama for missing the march in Paris last Sunday. Even a stalwart courtier like CNN’s Jake Tapper sniffed that he was “ashamed” that the U.S. was represented by an ambassador––one, by the way, who got her appointment by bundling money for the president’s political campaigns. But who’s surprised at this latest display of diplomatic incompetence? This is the same president who gave the queen of England an I-Pod loaded with his speeches, banished a bust of Churchill from the White House, bowed low to the Saudi King, blew off Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and insulted on an open mike the prime minister of Israel, our most important ally in the Middle East. Missing the march is just Obama being Obama.

More significant is the fact that these complaints are just distracting us from more important questions about the march. The first is, what took the French so long? In 2012, to take just one example, a jihadist killed 7 people, including 3 Jewish children, in Toulouse and Montauban. Why did those deaths not merit a large display of “solidarity” and multicultural togetherness? Some will argue that the Charlie Hebdo killings deserve more attention because they struck at a foundational belief of liberal democracy, free speech. Indeed it did.

This week’s Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by PolitiChicks.com Editor-in-Chief Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Becca Keating, Author of Impact Your World, Shari Goodman, Chapter Leader of Calabasas-West Valley ACT!, and Steve Amundson, president of the Counter Jihad Coalition.

The guests discussed The Charlie Hebdo Massacre and Jihad-Denial, analyzing the deceit and deflection about yet another Islamic terrorist attack. The panel also focused on Preaching Allah in Our Schools, unveiling the Islamic brainwashing that is occurring in American schools.

As a deeply religious person, I don’t like blasphemy. My religion and its holy books are sacred to me. And I understand perfectly well why a Muslim would not care for a cartoon of a naked Mohammed.

But the debates over freedom of speech and the sensitivity of religious feelings also miss the point.

For non-Muslims, the right to blasphemy is also the right to believe. While we may think of blasphemy in terms of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, each religion is also mutually blasphemous.

Muslims argue that the West should “respect prophets” by outlawing insults to Mohammed and a panoply of prophets that it gathered from Judaism and Christianity. But Islam considers the Christian view of Jesus to be blasphemous and Christianity considers Islam’s view of Jesus equally blasphemous.

If we were to truly prosecute blasphemy, the legal system would have to pick a side between the two religions and either prosecute Christians for blaspheming against Islam or Muslims for blaspheming against Christianity. And indeed in Muslim countries, Christians are frequently accused of blasphemy.