RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce-Justice-Science on Thursday to discuss the Justice Department’s funding request, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told lawmakers that Baltimore police had made some progress in dealing with the public but acknowledged that “more may need to be done.”

“We’re currently in the process of considering the request from city officials and community and police leaders for an investigation into whether the Baltimore City Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations,” she said. “And I intend to have a decision in the coming days.”

That decision came quickly. She announced [1] Friday that the Justice Department should commence an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department amid claims that the agency has employed excessive force and violated individuals’ civil rights in carrying out its duties.

As I have reported extensively here at PJ Media over the past year, a growing mountain of evidence confirms that the “vetted moderate” Sunni groups that the U.S. has backed in Syria — backing which includes CIA-provided heavy weaponry – have always been working with the very same jihadist groups that the Obama administration and the Washington, D.C. foreign policy “smart set” have consistently claimed they would counter.

Now, a new report establishes that even more CIA-backed “vetted moderate” groups are collaborating with groups designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. Specifically, they are collaborating with al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, though at times they have also operated jointly with the Islamic State.

Reuters reported last Thursday that two Free Syrian Army (FSA) units — Division 13 and Fursan al-Haq — are fighting side-by-side with the Nusra Front in northern Syria:

Despite the fact that we’re clearly pretty far from colonizing Mars, the social-justice crowd is already freaking out that it’s going to be an oppressive, white-male dominated society and that we must act now to stop it.

“The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of #gamergate nobheads are running Mars,” Martin Robbins writes in a piece for the Guardian titled, “How Can Our Future Mars Colonies Be Free of Racism and Sexism?”

Robbins explains that part of his concern comes from the fact that humans’ colonization of new lands has traditionally been oppressive.

“Destiny is rarely great for the people already at the destination,” Robbins explains.

Um, just one thing about that: As far as we know, there are no people on Mars.

Robins acknowledges that “the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers,” but explains that his freakout is still totally justified because “no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery and oppression. It’s just what we do.”

The dedication of New York City’s new Whitney Museum — a $420 million, nine-story behemoth, under construction in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for the past five years — was an occasion for celebration. Leave it to an Obama to employ the occasion for racial scolding.

The Obama in this case was Michelle, who has long shared her husband’s constitutional inability to refrain from racializing a public occasion: “You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood,” she said at the dedication ceremony. “In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”

A Canadian judge ruled this week that Omar Khadr poses no public-safety threat. Tell that to the children of Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer and the surviving American soldiers who valiantly fought Khadr on the battlefield.

In 2012, Khadr pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty to five charges related to the killing of Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces. This young American hero died in Afghanistan in 2002 during an ambush by al-Qaeda operatives. Just days before he gave his life, Speer had fearlessly walked onto a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children. It was Khadr, born and bred an Islamic jihadist by his terrorist father, who lobbed the fatal grenade in the war zone. Another American soldier, SFC Layne Morris, survived the attack but was blinded in one eye for life.

This so-called “child soldier” and “good kid” was a full-blown Muslim soldier of jihad; he trained one-on-one in weaponry, explosives, and Jew hatred.

Bowdoin College in Maine recently held a student-body referendum for a full academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Unlike more common student-government resolutions seeking “divestment” from a handful of companies, the Bowdoin referendum sought an unprecedented cutoff of all academic and cultural ties. The referendum was initiated by Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), part of a growing national SJP movement on campuses.

I have covered SJP antics at Vassar (the picketing of a classroom because a course involved a trip to Israel, and later posting of a Nazi cartoon), Cornell (a protest leads to physical and verbal harassment of pro-Israel students — and me!), Northeastern University (a protest over suspension included chants of “Long live the intifada,” the bloody suicide-bombing and terrorist campaign), and New York University (the posting of mock eviction notices), and elsewhere.

Wherever I see SJP, I see a messianic absolutism directed at the deligitimization and demonization of every aspect of Israeli society. It is a view that presents Israel as uniquely evil, and Palestinians as uniquely pure victims.

The most messianic of all are some (not all, by any means) left-wing Jews who lead SJP chapters or are fellow travelers like the members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). For that sub-group of left-wing Jews, demonizing Israel has become a religion.

Wherever I see the Students for Justice in Palestine organization, I see a messianic absolutism directed at demonization of every aspect of Israeli society.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

When Republican leaders rationalized confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general — notwithstanding her stated commitment to facilitating President Obama’s lawlessness – they mumbled about how the country needed to end the tenure of Eric Holder. You may remember him as the original Obama attorney general whose confirmation Republicans strongly supported despite extensive evidence of his unfitness.

As a number of us countered, and as anyone with a shred of common sense knows, major Justice Department policy is and has always been set by President Obama. While Ms. Lynch is temperamentally different from Mr. Holder, her confirmation portended no change of direction.

And so . . . no sooner has Attorney General Lynch been sworn in than she has continued Mr. Holder’s crusade against state and local police departments. She announced on Friday that the Justice Department has opened a “pattern or practice” investigation of the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether — actually, to pave the way for the preordained conclusion that — the BPD systematically violates civil rights. The pretext for the investigation is the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 12.

Polling has always been as much art as science, as David Cameron’s decisive victory in Britain’s general election reminds us. For months polls had shown a dead heat between the incumbent Prime Minister and his Labour Party challenger. Yet Mr. Cameron emerged Friday with the first Tory majority in Parliament since John Major was swept from office in 1997.

This is a political opportunity for Mr. Cameron, who was forced into an unwieldy coalition with the left-of-center Liberal Democrats when he came to office in 2010. This time Conservatives took 331 seats in the 650-seat parliament, a gain of 28. Labour lost 25 seats, and the Lib Dems were left politically for dead, losing all but eight of their previous 57 seats. The night’s only other winner was the Scottish National Party, which won 56 seats by routing Labour from its old northern strongholds.

Pressures against non-Muslims in Turkey are actually empowered, motivated and even led by state policies.

There also does not seem to be any interest or pluralistic mentality in enforcing non-Islamic laws.

To understand the root cause of social intolerance and institutionalized violence, it is important to look more closely at how Islamic scriptures refer to non-Muslims. These labels and lies, fed to Muslims from earliest childhood, apparently do not go away easily in the minds of indoctrinated Muslims.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact—except maybe in Illinois. On Friday the Illinois Supreme Court struck down modest pension reforms as a violation of the state constitution in a decision that tees up state taxpayers for years of tax increases.

The court ruled unanimously that pensions are inviolable under the plain text of the state constitution, which holds that “Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”