RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that 99.9 percent of Muslims are peaceful.

Employing the Islamic device of teqiyyah (the Koranic requirement upon Muslims to be deliberately deceptive in what they say to non-Muslims) the president predictably spewed this inversion of the truth to the Crescent News Network’s prime enabler, Fareed Zakaria.

The tragic truth is that what Barack Hussein Obama says is 99.9% illusion or cynical deception. We are all still waiting for that mythical 99.9% of Muslims to take to the streets to denounce the jihadists, terrorists and fellow Muslims who espouse violence and a culture of death. But don’t hold your breath.

As we approach the dreaded tax filing deadline of April 15th, many Americans are ill-prepared for the news they are going to receive from their tax preparers or tax preparation software. Between three and six million people are going to be affected by penalties, an “Individual Shared Responsibility Payment,” associated with the Affordable Care Act. And most of those affected have no idea how much financial pain they are going to feel.

When the Obama Administration was selling Obamacare to the American people – you remember, “It’s not a tax,” “If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it,” “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it,” etc. – they alluded to the existence of penalties for those Americans who did not purchase ACA compliant health insurance. The amount for the first year non-compliance penalty was routinely quoted as $95. For many the choice was clear: keep the non-compliant health insurance, pay the $95 penalty (read: non-compliance tax), and hope that a Republican-led Congress would affect relief for the taxpayer as soon as they took control in Washington, DC.

Scott Walker is the new flavor of the week, the new dish on the Republican menu. He brought crowds to their feet in Iowa over the weekend and placed first in an important regional poll to identify favorites for 2016.

For someone derided by the smart guys as dull and unexciting, the governor of Wisconsin is suddenly the flash and splash of midwinter. Such flash and splash, synthetic by definition, is usually the work of pundits dulled by the lethargy of January, the most useless of the months, eager to find something “new and entirely different.”

But January ennui (pundits suffering lassitude of their own always often throw in something French in the third paragraph) sometimes uncovers the real thing, and Mr. Walker looks like authentic. Voters, both Republican and Democrat, seem to be bored with the pale and stale, the old and not so bold. Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee and the gang, worthies all, are from a movie sent from Netflix. Hillary Clinton, the freshest face the Democrats can find, only reminds everyone of scandals, some more sordid than others, from the previous century.

Hijab: from privacy to slavery

What began as the seventh century Bedouin woman’s attempt at privacy and protection from the desert has become a veil symbolic of a woman’s indignity and servitude. As Nonie Darwish so aptly explained in her book, Cruel and Usual Punishment, women have come to represent the totality of evil and inferiority in Islamic teaching.

Considered lacking in intelligence and religion, women are seen as half the worth of men in a Shari’a court; in the case of rape, her accusation has no worth without four witnesses. Women may be raped for wearing “indecent” clothing, and beaten by their husbands for leaving the house unaccompanied by a male relative. If her behavior further irritates, he may imprison her without food and clothing, and arrange for stoning until dead. In this despotic society, women bear the honor of the male, so that girls and women may be killed by a father who fears his esteem has been sullied.

Conjuring images of the dying who had clawed at the dank walls of the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Jordanian Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh grabbed at his head, screaming out in agony as he fell to his knees, his body burning, his brain slowly cooking. His Daesh (Islamic State) captors had abruptly abandoned disingenuous negotiations with the Jordanian government for his release, their hostage having actually been killed many days before. Instead, they decided to record al-Kaseasbeh’s purposeful immolation. Having drenched him in accelerant, the savages lit the liquid fuse that set the young lieutenant ablaze. As he writhed, they filmed, indignant to his agony; his humanity. Barbarity for the purpose of terrorist propaganda had been achieved.

Just a month earlier, tens of thousands had taken to the streets in major Middle Eastern cities in support of Islamofascist assassins who slaughtered the staff at Charlie Hebdo. Turkey’s president, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, publicly intimated that the attacks in Paris were justified due to the magazine staff’s transgressions against Muslim sensibilities. And he went further than that, stating, obtusely, that Muslims have “never taken part in terrorist massacres.” Erdogan made these alarming statements as Boko Haram waded through the blood of the 2,000 people they slaughtered in the Nigerian town of Baga, in the name of Islam. So, violent, intolerant Islam is on the march.