RUTHFULLY YOURS

Michael Oren is an American. He’s not an American citizen, of course. He surrendered that passport when he became Israel’s ambassador to Washington in 2009. His combat service in Lebanon in the 1980s took place in an IDF paratrooper’s uniform, not an American marine’s. Indeed, his Israeli credentials are pristine, including even that apotheosis of the Israeli experience, a child wounded in battle. His Hebrew is fluent, his Arabic scholarly. After 36 years in his adopted homeland, it’s hard to think of any sense in which he is not Israeli.

And yet.

Throughout his journey from a dyslexic, frustrated New Jersey teen with knuckles scarred in brawls with anti-Semitic bullies to an ambassador with a Princeton PhD and two New York Times bestsellers to his name, he has framed his remarkable life story in profoundly American terms.

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who since 2010 has won more elections as governor than any other Republican in America, has been making noises of late about running for president next year. Yesterday it became clear that the media regard him as a serious candidate, for a reporter asked him an unserious question. As the Associated Press reports (with, oddly, a Madison dateline): “Walker refused to say Wednesday whether he believes in the theory of evolution, dodging that question and several others about foreign policy after delivering a speech about global trade in London.”

The foreign-policy questions are serious ones, and he promised to get to them in due course: “ ‘I don’t think it’s polite to respond on policy in the United States when you’re in a foreign country,’ Walker said when asked about Islamic State. ‘That’s certainly something I’ll answer in the future.’ ”

But the evolution question—with which the AP story leads—is a silly one. To “believe in” a scientific theory is a contradiction in terms: A theory is not a doctrine to be accepted on faith, but a hypothesis to be tested empirically. That said, it’s fair to describe Walker’s answer at the press conference as a dodge: “I’m going to punt on that one,” he said. “That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”

Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists.In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

The last time the Kremlin signed an agreement to end the war in Ukraine—as recently as September—it promised to withdraw “military equipment as well as fighters and mercenaries” from the war zone, ban offensive operations and abide by an immediate cease-fire. In exchange the Ukrainian government granted unprecedented political autonomy to its rebellious eastern regions.

Moscow and its proxy militias in Ukraine have been violating the so-called Minsk Protocol ever since. Russian troops and equipment have poured across the Ukrainian border to support the separatists. Together they have seized an additional 200 square miles of territory, rained deadly rocket fire on the port city of Mariupol and encircled thousands of Ukrainian troops defending a strategic railway link in the village of Debaltseve.

Muslims need to change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.” Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2015

President Obama’s requested Congressional authorization to indefinitely use U.S. military forces in “systematic campaign of airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria” to “degrade and defeat” it. While ISIL may be degraded in that limited area, it will not be defeated in the rear-end-war fought by the United States in the Middle East, because the organization’s core jihadist ideology cannot be defeated by non-Muslims.

The Arab Sunni states in the Middle East fear ISIL and, like Obama, condemn its jihadist barbarism as “not-Islamic”. But of all the Arab leaders, only Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi recognizes that unless Islam is reformed, groups like ISIL cannot not be defeated. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, el-Sisi repeated his call to Muslims “to modify this religious discourse…and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.” On January 1, 2015, speaking at al Azhar University in Cairo, el Sisi, a devout Muslim, called on “religious clerics” to lead the “religious revolution” “The entire world is waiting for your next move,” he said.

The presumed Islamic State murder victim Kayla Mueller isn’t quite the saintly martyr that President Obama and the media are trying to make Americans believe.

Family and friends told reporters Mueller was “a deeply idealistic young woman eager to help those less fortunate.” A neighbor of hers, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran, said Mueller “represented everything good about being an American. In the outgoing battle between good and evil, she represented the best of the good. She took great risks to help other people.”

Fresh from the golf course, President Obama praised Mueller effusively, saying she was “the best of America,” and adding that she “worked with humanitarian organizations in India, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, compelled by her desire to serve others.” Kayla’s “compassion and dedication to assisting those in need shows us that even amongst unconscionable evil, the essential decency of humanity can live on.”

Only someone with Obama’s twisted, pro-Islamist perspective could lie so passionately on Mueller’s behalf.

[Editor’s note: This article is reprinted from our Valentine’s issue of Feb. 15, 2014. It has been updated and edited to fit this year’s Day of Love.]

This Saturday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the radical Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, Islamic religious leaders and officials in Malaysia have warned Muslims against celebrating Valentine’s Day. In Saudi Arabia, the morality police have, as always, outlawed the sale of all Valentine’s Day items, forcing shopkeepers to remove any red items, because the day is considered a Christian holiday.

Jeremy (“J Street”) Ben-Ami, son of Irgun hero, Yitshaq, refers to it as “a big deal’ that is “not going away”, well, as long he has enough money to advertise it. As he writes to his supporters:

“Defying calls to postpone or cancel his upcoming political speech to Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down. Not only is he still coming, he says, but he’s coming as the representative of all Jews, everywhere.”

For Jeremy, “That’s outrageous. It flies in the face of decades of custom and practice…Suddenly, he speaks for all of us?”

Who knows what drove Brian Williams to embellish his resume with outright prevarication. He is now a laughing stock. I save my rancor for those who have done much more harm.

The New York Times outpaces Williams in bending truth. They bash Israel with misleading news, headlines and information and made-up history. And chief among their “calumnists” is Thomas Friedman whose lies and innuendos contribute mightily to the BDS movement.

And what of those phony climateers whose poster boy is Al Gore? They alter data, air-brush climate charts, and obfuscate scientific evidence to promote their lies as “settled science” ???

What of those spurious warnings that one of every five women has been raped?

What has been raped in America is our national culture, our language, our morality, our economy and our future. And the media and academics must share the blame. Brian Williams is a footnote.

A new human-rights report exposes the group’s horrific crimes.

Former congressman Frank Wolf released yesterday an important new human-rights report on Iraq’s religious minorities, aptly entitled “Edge of Extinction.” Detailing some of the Islamic terrorists’ cruelest practices, particularly with respect to women and children, this documentation should serve as the opening salvo in the long-neglected battle of ideas over Islamic extremism.

Mr. Wolf, who stepped down from his congressional seat last month, just returned from Iraq with the new Christian human-rights group, the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, where he is a distinguished senior fellow. In Kurdistan, less than two miles from the front line, he and his team interviewed Christians and Yazidis persecuted by the Islamic State, banished from their homes, and now huddled with hundreds of thousands like them in abject misery in Iraq’s northernmost province.