RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barronelle Stutzman runs a flower shop on Richland, Washington. After a friendly relationship with customer Rob Ingersoll for some ten years, she declined to provide the flower arrangements for his wedding to another man. When the state attorney general’s office heard about the case, it moved against her, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, who are both currently suing Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers. Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, she awaits news from a federal court about whether she can continue what she describes as the work of her heart. — KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What does your flower business mean to you?

Stutzman: I have worked in the floral industry for nearly 40 years. I bought the business from my mom. It is my way of using God’s gift to convey personal messages. Many times people can’t say what they mean, but flowers can say it all when words fail. It is a mission field in many ways because it allows me to use my artistic skill to bless others.

Lopez: Is winning or losing a matter of your livelihood?

How the Obama-Sharpton Alliance Began-Obama dispatched Valerie Jarrett in 2008 to woo the reverend.

Near the end of 2007, Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett met with Al Sharpton in New York City and began to cement a relationship that would eventually make the inflammatory activist the president’s “go-to man” on race, according to multiple sources.

The backdrop to the incipient Obama-Sharpton alliance was the then-senator’s 2008 presidential campaign, which still hadn’t locked away the black vote, and the political cross-currents created by two other controversial reverends, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright.

That tentative relationship has now grown into a full-blown partnership that has vastly increased the once-shunned Sharpton’s influence and prestige and elevated him into a key White House ally at a time of heightened tension over policing and race.

HuffPo reports:

The chant, known as “adhan,” will resound from the Duke Chapel bell tower every Friday beginning Jan. 16, echoed by members of the Muslim Students Association, the university announced via Duke Today. The chant will sound for three minutes at a “moderately amplified” level to announce the Jummah prayer service, held Friday afternoons in the chapel basement.

The Adhan will be sung in Arabic, then followed by an English translation, according to a Facebook event announcing the call.

“This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission,” Christy Lohr Sapp, the chapel’s associate dean for religious life, told Duke Today. “It connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation.”

The announcement comes one day after the White House clarified that their anti-terror summit would not cover acts of radical Islamic terror, having determined that those acts are only part of a greater War on Muslims.

HAS ANYONE COMPILED A LIST OF THE CONGRESSIONAL CRETINS?…RSK

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) excused President Obama’s absence from a Paris march on Sunday because last Wednesday’s terrorist attack there was a “spontaneous” event.

At a news conference with her caucus’ new policy and communications committee today, Pelosi elaborated a bit on Obama’s meeting with “a chunk of” House and Senate Democratic and Republican leadership. She said one of the issues he pressed with leaders was Iran negotiations, likely trying to dissuade them from taking legislative action on sanctions while talks with Tehran drag on.

Pelosi said there was no discussion about Obama’s no-show among nearly 50 world leaders who linked arms in Paris in a show of solidarity against terrorism. “That didn’t come up at the meeting,” she said.

“I think that what happened had a spontaneity to it. And presidential travel was not a spontaneous action. I do think that present there or not, our presence on that issue has been widely felt,” she said.

“I think we in Congress had a moment of silence. Many of us — some of us have spoken on the floor to it. We have spoken in public events, I in my own district on Sunday.”

UPDATE: Here’s the criminal complaint.

USA v Christopher Lee Cornell – Complaint by Nathaniel Pruitt
An Ohio man inspired by ISIS was arrested today for planning to target the U.S. Capitol with pipe bombs, and then to shoot anyone fleeing the building.

ABC News reports:

The FBI has arrested an Ohio man for allegedly plotting an ISIS-inspired attack on the U.S. Capitol, where he hoped to set off a series of bombs aimed at lawmakers, whom he allegedly considered enemies.

Christopher Lee Cornell, 20, of Green Township, was arrested today on charges of attempting to kill a U.S. government official, authorities said.

According to government documents, he allegedly planned to detonate pipe bombs at the national landmark and open fire on any employees and officials fleeing after the explosions.

The FBI first noticed Cornell several months ago after an informant notified the agency that Cornell was allegedly voicing support for violent “jihad” on Twitter accounts under the alias “Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah,” according to charging documents. In addition, Cornell allegedly posted statements, videos and other content expressing support for ISIS — the brutal terrorist group also known as ISIL — that is wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria.

A month ago, U.S. Marine veteran Amir Hekmati pleaded with President Obama to help end his ordeal in Tehran’s Evin prison on trumped-up espionage charges.

Now, held for 1,235 days by Iran, he has appealed directly to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for his release — and revealed chilling details about his captivity in the process.

Amir, born in Flagstaff, Ariz., was visiting extended family for the first time in August 2011 when he was seized. “As many other Iranians born in the US, I dreamed of visiting my parents’ homeland and learning more of my Iranian heritage. Unfortunately, after receiving assurances from the Iranian Interest Section in Washington DC, after only three weeks I was arrested, sentenced to death, and subsequently ten years to only discover that the Iranian Interest Section was an accomplice in my arrest. I have been imprisoned for three years now, enduring miserable prison conditions that cause great damage to my physical and mental health,” he wrote.

He spent the first four months in a cell just over three feet by three feet. For 17 months, he “endured a tiny cell with little access to sunlight, little to no contact with family, no access to legal representation, starvation, malnutrition, sensory deprivation, threats, and ridicule and insults to my family and country by Ministry of Intelligence personnel.”

Charlie Hebdo has been avenged, by the French authorities, by Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff, and even by the French public. But is this in issue of vengeance? Of tit for tat? Of an eye for an eye?

Force, Blasphemy, and Freedom of Speech

Blasphemy is in the news. Blasphemy and Mohammad and Charlie Hebdo, most of whose staff was executed by Muslim terrorists in Paris on January 7th, including its defiant editor, Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”), who prided himself in publishing cartoons that mocked Mohammad and implicitly Islam.

The terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and “The Prophet is avenged!” The killers were hunted down and in turn killed.

The new Charlie Hebdo issue, its front page featuring an ironic cartoon of Mohammad shedding a crocodile tear and holding a sign that reads Je Suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”), has sold out in France.

Charlie Hebdo has been avenged, by the French authorities, by Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff, and even by the French public.

But is this in issue of vengeance? Of tit for tat? Of an eye for an eye?

No. it is an issue of force – of the initiation of force, and of retaliatory force. The Muslims who massacred twelve people at Charlie Hebdo initiated force in “protest” of the paper’s continued mockery of a religious icon. Not a single Muslim was ever coerced to look it the cartoons. They did not write letters to the editor objecting to the depiction of Mohammad as a laughable, pathetic “prophet,” they did not start their own magazine and publish their own outrageous cartoons. No. They invaded the offices of Charlie Hebdo and murdered twelve people. One of the killers subsequently invaded a Jewish food shop and murdered four Jews.

History has shown that where Jews can’t live safely, everyone is at risk.

In an interview conducted before the recent Paris massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned that “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

For this to be avoided, we must concentrate less on the result—a mass Jewish exodus—and far more on the means of prevention. European Jews who survived millennia of discrimination, persecution, the Inquisition and the Holocaust are growing increasingly insecure. But the question of how to fight for survival isn’t one that should be posed to law-abiding citizens of a Western democracy. It is for their governments and authorities to keep Jewish communities secure and allow them to live in normalcy.

Congress Should lead with hearings on the enemy and how to prevail.

The United States has been at war with radical Islamist terrorism for at least 35 years, starting with the November 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taking of 52 American hostages. President Jimmy Carter , in his State of the Union address two months later, declared the American captives “innocent victims of terrorism.”

For the next two decades, radical Islamist terrorism grew more powerful and more sophisticated. On Sept. 11, 2001, a remarkably sophisticated effort by Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and western Pennsylvania.

In response to the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

Middle East Turns Back Clock as Remnants of Old Regimes Rise Again
Egypt, Gulf Monarchies Increasingly Project Power

Four years after the Arab Spring began, the new Middle East looks more and more like the old one—but worse.

For decades, the bleak choice in the region was between dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Islamist militancy that they always invoked when pressured by the West to liberalize.

The uprisings of 2011—often spurred by liberal and secular activists—produced fleeting hopes that the jihadists and autocrats would no longer be the only alternatives.
Middle East Crossroads

But today, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi oversees a regime that is seen as more repressive than Mr. Mubarak’s in many ways.

This new Egypt and its main financiers and allies—the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates—increasingly project power and influence across the region.

On the other side of the equation, Islamic State has seized a Britain-size chunk of Syria and Iraq, and now is spawning affiliates in Libya and Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula. It is outmatching al Qaeda of old in wanton barbarity and military prowess.

Underscoring the growing terror threat to the West, al Qaeda’s offshoot in Yemen claimed responsibility for last week’s attack on a satirical magazine in Paris, while a French follower of Islamic State killed first a policewoman and then four hostages at a kosher grocery.

“We have turned the clock back,” said Maha Azzam, a political scientist who heads the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, an umbrella group of organizations opposed to Mr. Sisi’s rule. “The political space in the middle has not shrunk, it has disappeared. What you are left with in the younger generation is a choice between acquiescing to dictatorship or, for the more radical ones, resorting to violence.”

In his three decades in power, Mr. Mubarak often told visiting American dignitaries that the choice was between him and the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s main Islamist organization with branches across the region. He did prove right: A year after his ouster, the country’s first democratic presidential elections put the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in power.

The Brotherhood under Mr. Morsi alienated many Egyptians by clamping down on dissent, excluding other political movements, and imposing its religious agenda.