RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the world reacts with shock and horror at the increasingly savage deeds of the Islamic State (IS)—in this case, the recent immolation of a captive—U.S. President Obama’s response has been one of nonjudgmental relativism.

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Obama counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that Christians have been equally guilty of such atrocities:

Unless we get on our high horse and think this [beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting humans] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

There is so much to be said here. First, the obvious: the wide gulf between violence and hate “justified in the name of Christ” and violence and hate “justified in the name of Muhammad” is that Christ never justified it, while Muhammad continuously did.

This is not just a theoretic point; it is the very reason that Muslims are still committing savage atrocities. Every evil act IS commits—whether beheading, crucifying, raping, enslaving, or immolating humans—has precedents in the deeds of Muhammad, that most “perfect” and “moral” man, per Koran 33:21 and 68:4 (see “The Islamic State and Islam” for parallels).

Amid all the giggling and the the Twitter hashtags, something dark is going on in France and Britain. None of these areas is a place where non-Muslims are “forbidden” to go. But they do exist. They are places where behavior that is commonplace in wider society would certainly be discouraged, sometimes intimidatingly so.

Last year in the UK, we discovered that a portion of Birmingham’s secular state schools had been taken over by Islamic fundamentalists. The results of these discoveries — which included teachings that Muslims were to distance themselves from non-Muslims, look down on then and not take them as friends — shocked the nation. It is still shaken. Yet most Muslim leaders in the UK simply denied the findings of successive government-led inquiries. Instead of tackling the outrages, they dismissed them as some “Islamophobic” plot.

It seemed we were witnessing an example of “displacement:” it is so much easier to laugh at a foreign news station than to deal with the jolting nugget of truth that may have been exaggerated. So much easier to choke on your porridge at the “idiocy” of an American than to stop your schools from being lost to extremist ideologies. And so much easier to talk of “suing” a news channel than to prevent atrocities of the kind we saw last month from happening again in your city.

‘Hamilton’ Is the Hottest Ticket in New York

“Hamilton,” a hip-hop influenced musical about Alexander Hamilton at New York’s Public Theater, has quickly become the buzziest show of the spring, with a sold-out run off-Broadway, ecstatic tweets from tastemakers and a likely Broadway transfer—all before it’s even opened.

The show, written and composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also plays Hamilton, is based on the biography of the founding father by Ron Chernow. The show began previews at the Public Theater on Jan. 20 and officially opens on Feb. 17 and closes May 3. It has captured both the industry’s and the public’s attention even before being reviewed. It is sold out through April 5 and already has extended its run three times.
The mobile-ticket site, Today Tix, has between 1,500 and 2,000 entries daily for a lottery to two tickets offered for $10 each. Sporadic tickets are available on StubHub for exorbitant fees: a single ticket is listed for $485 for this Saturday.

A demigod of the old guard even gave his stamp of approval on Twitter this week:

“Just seen #Hamilton; it raises & changes the bar for musicals. Brilliant lyrics, staging, cast. Creator/lead @Lin_Manuel is special. ALW.” tweeted Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose musicals “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera” changed the look and sound of Broadway when they premiered in the 1980s.

Expiring Section of Law, Targeted by Critics of NSA Phone Program, Underpins Requests for Hotel, Credit-Card Bills

WASHINGTON—U.S. officials and some lawmakers are worried that key tools used to hunt down terrorists and spies could fall victim to the fight over the government’s controversial phone-surveillance program.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, using authority conveyed by a soon-to-expire section of the 2001 Patriot Act, is currently allowed to seek “tangible things’’ to aid in terrorism or intelligence probes, such as hotel bills, credit-card slips and other documents. Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the FBI, with a court order, to take “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.’’

The authority is often used as a way to secretly collect evidence on suspected foreign spies operating in the U.S., according to current and former officials. Unlike a grand-jury subpoena, a person or company receiving a Section 215 order to provide documents is barred from revealing to anyone that they received such a request, these people said.

Canadian law professor William Schabas resigned this week as chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry into the 2014 Gaza conflict. He did so after Israeli diplomats revealed he was paid by the Palestine Liberation Organization to render an opinion on the legal consequences of a U.N. General Assembly resolution upgrading “Palestine” to a nonmember state. Now there’s a nonsurprise.

When the conflict of interest came to light last week, Mr. Schabas insisted his 2012 work for the Palestinians was purely “academic.” But by Monday he had resigned his U.N. post. In his resignation letter, he blamed his departure on “Israel’s campaign against the Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza Conflict” rather than his own failure to disclose a material conflict of interest.

Please watch the 6 minute bullet video: http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

Conventional wisdom suggests that US-Israel ties constitute a one-way-street: The US gives and Israel receives. However, in recent years the one-way-street has been transformed into a two-way-street, mutually-beneficial, win-win set of ties:

1. US special operations units trained in Israel before arrival to Iraq and Afghanistan;
2. Israel armor plating technology protects US soldiers;
3. Israel is a cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory for the US defense industries;
4. Israel provides the US more intelligence than all NATO countries combined;

If several alarming media reports are true, US President Barack Obama
is moving perilously closer to a nuclear deal with Iran that will
endanger Israel and all of Western civilization.

Far away from the glare of the cameras, it appears that the
commander-in-chief and his colleagues are swiftly caving in to the
ayatollahs, hoping to buy some short-term quiet by allowing Iran to
remain a threshold nuclear state.

Is Annexation a Near Term Option?

By Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis). 5 February 2015

On February 3, 2015, Bayit Yehudit (Israeli political party) distributed a short video describing Naftali Bennett’s plan to annex Area C, the area where Jewish communities are located, while leaving the remainder as a Palestinian autonomy with Israel making great efforts to facilitate improved conditions in the autonomy. Palestinians in Area C would each have the choice of full Israeli citizenship or permanent resident status.

Minister Bennett’s Facebook page introduced the video with the line “Give us 20 mandates”

The end of the video has the line ”Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria today”.

The clip didn’t get much media attention or discussion.

And Bayit Yehudi itself doesn’t seem to have initiated any follow up (at least as of now).

I hope it does. Because annexation deserves serious consideration. And not just for some far off time.

In 2002, a group of Harvard students and faculty circulated a petition calling for the university to divest from corporations that do business with Israel. Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, rejected the petition. In response to today’s renewed calls to boycott Israel on college campuses, including Harvard, and the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities, Summers addresses the issue once more:

January 29, 2015
I am delighted to help inaugurate this forum on academic freedom. Academic freedom is essential if universities are to succeed in their missions of creating and disseminating knowledge. Universities excel when they are governed by the authority of ideas rather than the idea of authority. And more perhaps than at any other moment in history, the work of universities–transmitting knowledge and values from one generation to the next, and creating new knowledge — determines the future of nations.
It speaks to the importance of universities in the life of nations that George Washington very much wanted to devote his farewell address to a proposed American national university until he was dissuaded from the idea by Alexander Hamilton, not because Hamilton did not like the idea but because he thought the farewell address was the wrong occasion for its presentation. So Washington instead bequeathed a substantial part of his not inconsiderable fortune to the proposed university.

In a column for NRO earlier this week, we wrote about the tax proposal currently being put forward by Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah). We admire both senators and think their plan has some great components — particularly the reforms to the corporate tax code. But, as we wrote in our column, the plan fails to do enough to promote economic growth, instead emphasizing “pro-family” initiatives such as a greatly expanded child tax credit. People are inherently entrepreneurial and need to be offered the same hope that corporations would get under the Rubio-Lee plan.

Responding to our column with two blog posts, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru defends the expanded child credit and accuses us of being inconsistent in our criticism of the Rubio-Lee plan. The core of Ponnuru’s criticism is that we call for a much lower top marginal tax rate while opposing the child credit and wanting to “keep a bunch of tax breaks.”