RUTHFULLY YOURS

The U.S. makes more concessions to Iran in a prelude to a nuclear deal.

The Obama Administration has long insisted that any nuclear deal will have no effect on U.S. determination to stop Iran’s regional ambitions or support for terrorism. As the political desire for a deal grows more urgent, however, this claim is proving to be hollow.

Consider Hayya Bina, or “Let’s Go,” a Lebanese civil-society initiative founded in 2005 by publisher and producer Lokman Slim. Hayya Bina works largely with Lebanon’s Shiites on a variety of health, environmental and citizenship issues, largely as a way to offer a moderate alternative to Hezbollah’s efforts to dominate that community. The group has received modest funding from the State Department and groups like the International Republican Institute.

But as the Journal’s Jay Solomon reported last week, the State Department sent Hayya Bina a letter, dated April 10, which “requests that all activities intended [to] foster an independent moderate Shiite voice be ceased immediately and indefinitely.” To underscore the point, the letter added that Hayya Bina “must eliminate funding for any of the above referenced activity.”

“Mrs. Clinton’s speech should bust any remaining illusions that she will return her party to her husband’s 1990s centrism. She is running as an Obama-Warren Democrat, which means that is also how she would govern.”

Any doubt about Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy was put to rest on Saturday when she re-launched her presidential bid with a speech that Elizabeth Warren might have given. The former Secretary of State is running to the left even of President Obama, embracing Mr. Obama’s identity politics of race, sex and class but adding Senator Warren’s economic themes.

“The financial industry and many multinational corporations have created huge wealth for a few by focusing too much on short-term profit and too little on long-term value—too much on complex trading schemes and stock buybacks, too little on investments in new businesses, jobs and fair compensation,” she said on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

So here is Mrs. Clinton’s answer to the dilemma that any Democrat faces after the Obama Presidency: How do you explain seven years of historically slow economic growth and stagnant incomes?

One answer would be to return to her husband’s economic pragmatism, but that would put Mrs. Clinton at odds with most of today’s Democratic Party. So she’s going for the Warren-Obama strategy of blaming economic underperformance on the wealthy, big business, Wall Street and the Republican Party.

In theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.

Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern Studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand [3], most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––“a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written [4], “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”­­––Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.

Though many have declared the Occupy Wall Street movement a failure, it won a major propaganda victory when it forced the phony political issue of “income inequality” into the national political debate, according to one of its leaders in a new article.

The article, titled The Triumph of Occupy Wall Street [2], appears at the Atlantic, the home of radical leftists, market participants in the racial grievance industry, and mushy moderates.

It was written by radical left-winger Michael Levitin, a co-founder of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, an OWS “affinity group.” (Its website [3] had not been updated in 1,000 days at time of writing.) The article is a mixture of truth and bald-faced lies that slavishly defends a philosophy of failure and a movement that is based on Marxist lies, as David Horowitz and John Perazzo demonstrated in their pamphlet Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn [4]. Despite the various problems with Levitin’s article, he points to an unfortunate side-effect of the short-lived movement: the left has become more bold in its open promotion of communist themes and ideology and is pushing them into mainstream politics like never before.

With a little help from her friendly Dad (Paul) Stella McCartney has made quite a name for herself as an ultra-chic fashion designer. This week she introduced her spring line on Manhattan’s Elizabeth Street with a Cuba-themed garden party.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara featured among the main props of the soiree, both as mannequins and as live costumed humans who walked around posing for pictures with the ultra-chic models and guests along with the delighted vegetarian hostess.

In keeping with Stella McCartney’s “anti-cruelty” beliefs the event featured strictly vegetarian foodstuffs. None of that musty “generation-gap” stuff for Stella. That stuff is “SOOOO ’60’s” after all. Instead she’s a proud daddy’s girl, and as such a proud vegetarian and PETA spokesperson. Indeed, Stella ritually denounces many fellow fashion designers as “heartless” should leather or– heaven forbid!—fur show up in any of their creations.

One of the speakers slated for the Vatican rollout of the long-awaited Papal document on climate change once said the earth is overpopulated by at least 6 billion people.
The teaching document, called an encyclical, is scheduled for release on June 18 at Vatican City. Perhaps with the exception of the 1968 encyclical on contraception, no Vatican document has been greeted with such anticipation.

The political left is hoping for a document that ties belief in global warming to a religious obligation. Climate skeptics have already started criticizing the document.

Hillary Clinton decided to deliver her first major policy speech on Welfare Island; the site of a notoriously brutal prison and lunatic asylum.

Like Hillary, Welfare Island has gone through many identities to try and fix its image problem. It was Blackwell’s Island when it was the site of the New York City Lunatic Asylum described by Dickens as a place of “naked ugliness and horror.” You can see the grim ruins [2] of the Smallpox Hospital which some have claimed is haunted [3] by the ghosts of those who suffered and died there.

And the ghosts, those of Welfare Island and of the Clintons, were out in force during her appearance.

The Smallpox Hospital was a wonderful example of the socialized medicine advocated by Hillary Clinton. Patients died there by the thousands while the nurses held their families hostage for bribes. Like the NHS horror stories today [4], patents starved and begged for a drink of water, but were given nothing.

Destroying churches is permissible — as long as the destruction does not bring harm to Muslims, such as false claims that Muslims are persecuting Christians….” — Dr. Yusuf al-Burhami, leading Salafi cleric, Egypt.

“The children were isolated and put in cages. Adults who do not deny their faith will be decapitated, and their children burned alive in the cages.” — Sister Monique of the Vincentian Daughters of Charity, Syria.

“[T]he police detained my son Zubair and tortured him in front of me. When Zubair cried with pain, they told him that he would be released only if I confess the theft…. I repeatedly told the police that I had no connection with the said theft, and then they threw me out of the police station… The next day we found Zubair’s dead body outside our house.” — Aysha Bibi, on the Pakistani police’s attempt to extract from her a confession to a theft she did not commit.

“Black lives matter” became the slogan of the anti-police protests that followed the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Do they? Does yours? Parts of black America appear determined to destroy themselves—black men, that is, rather than black women, who graduate from university at twice the male rate and hold more full-time jobs. Call it genosuicide, the self-willed extinction of a people, and it happens all the time, especially when young men decide that to matter, they must assert themselves violently. There is nothing uniquely “black” about the inner-city catastrophe now unfolding in America, as some historical examples will show.

In the reasonable fear of legal persecution, police in America’s inner cities have stepped back from aggressive enforcement of the law, and the result is a sudden surge in homicides that have killed hundreds of people, almost all of them black. As Heather MacDonald reported in the Wall Street Journal May 29, “Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years. In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.”

You wouldn’t expect conspiracy theories about Jews and their control of world events to be promoted in a church today. But that is exactly what was preached last month in Washington.
It was a clear May morning, and the sun streamed into DC’s Sixth Presbyterian Church through colorful mosaic windows, splashing off the stone columns and saturating the dark wooden altar. Handwritten signs directed a steady trickle of attendees into the room, where they exchanged greetings before scattering among the pews. In the end, there were over 60 people gathered.

There was an air of anticipation as the choir reached its final crescendo and a young man rose to the pulpit. Introduced as the Rev. Dr. Heber M. Brown III, he was a senior preacher at a Baptist church in Baltimore. He had been involved in the protests that rocked the city after the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, and spoke of walking side by side with a diverse coalition of faith groups and street gangs. The Crips and Bloods, the Fruit of Islam, and Christians of all stripes had united on Baltimore’s streets in pursuit of social justice. Brown painted vivid pictures of a community rising up in rebellion to defend its dignity.