RUTHFULLY YOURS

Desmond Tutu was once a hero in the eyes of freedom fighters around the world. But talk about a tragic flaw: he’s now best known for having fallen in with the bigotry amongst bigotries — irrational hatred of the Jewish State of Israel. It keeps getting worse. Someone should pray for his soul

It is always a moment of amusement to read the latest fulmination of the venerable archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu. On June 17, 2015, he beguiled us again with his message to his dear sisters and brothers in the United Church of Christ, which is holding its general synod in Cleveland June 26-30, 2015.

He assured the congregation of his support for its divestment resolution targeting the “Israeli occupation.” He fully endorsed the proposal to use the powerful nonviolent tools of economic leverage against the State of Israel.

We’re going to keep this simple and short, because the message just doesn’t seem to get through.

In the wake of the horrific massacre by an Islamic terrorist of (mainly British) holiday-makers on a beach in Tunisia, UK Prime Minister David Cameron came out with a line we have heard from him, Barack Obama, France’s Francois Hollande, Australia’s Tony Abbott, and so many others in the wake of Islamist mass murder.

This is what Cameron said just after news of the massacre broke: “This is not in the name of Islam; it’s a perverted ideology and we must fight it,”.

We have made the point many times about Mr. Cameron’s qualifications to speak about Islamic theology — he doesn’t have any. In any case, it’s idiotic to say it’s not in “the name” of Islam, because the people who do such things are quite explicit that they are doing it precisely in “the name” of Islam.

Last week’s decision in King vs. Burwell, in which Chief Justice John Roberts magically conjured ambiguity out of straightforward language, has troubling implications beyond the further erosion of the separation of powers. From ancient Athens to George Orwell, the violation of the integrity of language by sophistical legerdemain has been recognized as the eternal enabler of political tyranny.

The 6-3 decision, which legitimized giving federal subsidies to people living in states without an exchange, obviously contradicts the law as written. What the majority of the Court did was to rewrite legislation in clear violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, which gives the law-making power to Congress. As Justice Scalia wrote in dissent, the majority “ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress ‘[a]ll legislative Powers’ enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them.”

These days Obama following the law would be news. Obama not following the law is just business as usual. So this is another case of Obama doing what he can to help terrorists while ignoring the limits on his powers.No wonder he likes the PLO. It too is run by an unelected dictator.

Here’s what the issue is…

Two lawmakers are warning the Palestinian Authority (PA) that its economic assistance from the United States could be suspended because of its decision to initiate charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“By formally submitting allegations against Israeli forces to the ICC Chief Prosecutor, President [Mahmoud] Abbas has triggered a provision in U.S. law that suspends all economic assistance to the PA,” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

The negotiations will only end with a nuclear test.

It is quite possible that no matter how many concessions Obama makes, there will never be a final agreement with Iran. The deadlines have already been extended so many times that the only reliable thing about the negotiations is that somewhere near the edge, the negotiators will declare that they are close and extend the formerly final deadline some more. And then some more again.

There is currently disagreement over the last agreement that was agreed to in order to extend the deadline. If you find that confusing, so does everyone else.

According to the British Foreign Minister, “There are a number of different areas where we still have major differences of interpretation in detailing what was agreed in Lausanne.”

All the Republican candidates, announced or unannounced, should stop what they are doing and band together over the July 4 weekend to stop the Iran Deal. In so doing, they should reach out not just to their fellow Republicans, but to all Americans, including especially their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. This is an emergency.

Sometimes world events reach a level that petty politics must be put aside and true patriotism come to the fore. September 11, 2001, and Pearl Harbor were such instances. The about-to-be-signed (between June 30 and July 6) nuclear deal with Iran is another. According to the Corker-Menendez bill, Congress only has thirty days to review the deal and (unfairly) needs to muster a two-thirds majority to overthrow it.

The fictional and cinema hero Forrest Gump somehow always managed to turn up at historic moments in the latter twentieth century. But whereas Forrest usually had a positive role to play at the hinges of fate, the equally ubiquitous Hillary Gump usually appeared as a bit player who made things far worse.

Take the issue of government abuse, ethics, and public transparency. The modern locus classicus of government overreach was the Watergate scandal. Over forty years ago Hillary was there as a young legal intern purportedly advising the House Judiciary Committee during the congressional investigations. She was also reportedly let go by her superiors for unethical conduct — quis custodiet ipsos custodes? From Watergate to Travelgate to Filegate to Whitewater to the current quid pro quos of the Clinton Foundation to her recent destruction of private emails and her private server while serving as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has been at or near lots of government scandals of the last half-century. Twenty years ago Hillary Clinton was brazenly evading federal law by hiding her legal records from a court-ordered subpoena for documents — in the same fashion that in 2015 she destroyed all traces of her email correspondence on her private server, in violation of State Department protocol and most likely federal law.

Like Islamists, so-called progressives are obsessed with state power and its draconian use against those who decline to conform. That feminists or gay activists say little or nothing about Islam’s intolerance comes as no surprise. They are sub-species of the same statist monster.
Who is doing all the heavy lifting in the escalating battle against terrorism? Who is taking the hard legislative and political decisions? Who is confronting the reality of home-grown jihadism, Islamic fundamentalism, the radicalisation of moronic Muslim adolescents, and the carefully calibrated campaign of global terrorism and Islamist subversion funded by Saudi Arabia, as the recent Wikileaks disclosures reveal, and as I analysed in detail years ago in several articles that led to my persecution and exclusion from academia.

It is certainly not the progressive left, that Green-Left amalgam of radical academics, grandstanding lawyers, moral absolutists, racial supremacists, environmental apocalypticists, radical feminists, old-style Stalinists, LGBTI life-style utopians, rent-a-crowd mobs, media show ponies, union racketeers, political careerists, and born-to-rule bureaucrats entrenched in publicly funded sinecures

One week before the June 30 deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made a series of demands about the final terms. Among them: He called for an immediate end to all United Nations Security Council and U.S. economic sanctions on Iran; he said Iranian military sites would not be subject to international inspections; he declared that Iran would not abide a long-term freeze on nuclear research; and he ruled out interviews with individuals associated with Iran’s nuclear program as part of any enforcement plan.

The New York Times headline read “Iran’s Supreme Leader, Khamenei, Seems to Pull Back on Nuclear Talks.” That’s one explanation. The more likely one: Khamenei understands that Barack Obama is desperate for this deal and will agree to just about anything to make it a reality. In private remarks caught on tape, top White House foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes likened the Iran deal to Obamacare in its importance to the administration. And on April 2, the president held a press conference to celebrate the preliminary “historic understanding with Iran” that, he said, was “a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives.”

‘We welcome war with the U.S., as we believe that it will be the scene for our success to display the real potentials of our power.” So said Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the lieutenant commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), via state-run Iranian television last month.

What makes Salami so confident about going up against the world’s most extensive military? Maybe it’s the increasing clout of IRGC’s elite terrorist division, the Quds Force, in the Middle East, including its very public involvement in the fighting against ISIS in Iraq — as America’s influence lessens in that conflict.