RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Over the weekend, at an event marking the two-year anniversary of his election, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared that “we have achieved a big victory for the Iranian nation.” He was talking about the emerging nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers. Iran justifiably believes that it has managed to con the West, having gained the upper hand thanks to its “smile diplomacy” as led by its articulate lead negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Rouhani believes Zarif’s strong command of the English language and of European etiquette has charmed his counterparts and produced a favorable outcome.

Many columns have been written about President Obama’s fixation with climate change. Few- if any- have tackled the serious underlying issue which antedates the Obama Administration, namely, the underlying anti industry and anti capitalist agenda.

In 1983, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac prophetically wrote “The Coercive Utopians: Social Deception by America’s Power Players” describing the progressive and anti industry goals of the burgeoning environmental movement.
In 2013 Rael Isaac wrote :”Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (New, Revised…Nov 25, 2013)

“Roosters of the Apocalypse” describes predictions of looming catastrophe from global warming as an apocalyptic prophecy with a scientific gloss, making it palatable to the modern mind. The book’s title comes from Richard Landes’s study of millennial movements: Landes calls those who crow an exciting new message demanding urgent action “roosters.” In this case, the action is to sacrifice fossil fuels, the lifeblood of our economy. Dire consequences do indeed loom as a result of “climate change” but they are economic and the book describes them: billions wasted on uneconomic “green energy,” millions forced into “fuel poverty” by green levies, jobs lost as industries are destroyed or forced abroad. The damage thus far is greatest in Europe, but the United States under President Obama, a committed climate rooster, is heading down the same path. Distinguished climatologist Richard Lindzen (professor of atmospheric science at MIT) has written the foreword: he notes that the book, appropriately in his view, places the current concern over climate in the realm of social anthropology rather than science.
Nothing written on the subject says it better….And yes….I am honored because it is dedicated to me….rsk

LONDON Anne Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. She is also the Director of the Global Transitions Program at the Legatum Institute in London.

Several times lately — often enough for it to have become a distinct pattern — I’ve found myself part of a heated discussion, somewhere in Europe. Maybe it’s at a dinner or a conference; maybe the topic is Russia, Libya or the economic crisis in Greece. But at some point, someone looks up in wonder. “Isn’t it odd: We haven’t mentioned the United States once!” Yes, everyone agrees, it’s odd! And then the subject changes again.
Few here doubt that American influence in Europe is shrinking, along with American engagement in the world, though the explanations differ. Some date the decline quite precisely, to the Iraq war in 2003 and to the Bush administration that launched it. That was the moment when Europe divided over whether to support the United States; worse, those who did paid a high price afterward. Certainly Tony Blair never quite recovered from his decision to join the invasion, and Britain’s newly reluctant foreign policy is partly a product of the war, too.

Others blame the current administration, with equally good cause. President Obama’s failure to defend his own “red line” in Syria and his admitted lack of strategy against the Islamic State have left many wondering whether he’s interested in the Middle East at all. The same problem exists with regard to Russia, where there is a strange split between NATO military leaders, who are publicly very blunt in their assessment of Russian maneuvers over the Baltic Sea and Scandinavia, as well as in Ukraine, and the strangely sanguine White House. While Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, warns of “revanchist Russia,” Obama lightly dismisses Russia as a weak “regional power” that poses no larger threats.

‘We need to stop the flow of secret, unaccountable money,” Hillary Clinton said Saturday during her vaunted campaign “do over.”

That she said this without a trace of irony is no real surprise. Ever since the release of “Clinton Cash” — which documented the Clintons’ love of secret and unaccountable money — the couple’s reaction has been to pretend the scandal has nothing to do with them.

Appearing on CNN, Bill Clinton claims that the millions the Clintons made from speeches paid for by foreign individuals and entities who had business before Hillary’s State Department were innocent and coincidental.

“[Hillary] was pretty busy those years,” Clinton said. “I never saw her study a list of my contributors, and I had no idea who was doing business before the State Department.”
Bill added: “No one has ever asked me for anything…I never thought about whether there was any overlap.”

Besides, as Bill explained, in a Bloomberg interview last week, “Has anybody proved that we did anything objectionable? No.”
Modal Trigger

Well, there you have it. Everything is on the up-and-up. Americans should just move along.

But they can’t. And they won’t. Not until, that is, Hillary Clinton begins explaining her myriad conflicts of interest in granular detail, especially since there are no e-mails or server to corroborate Bill’s claims of her innocence.

Separated from the throng of Clinton supporters, journalists shuffled forward like livestock through a cattle chute, smiling Hillary volunteers watching their every move.

Blocked by yellow tape, metal barriers, and security officers, reporters could see — but not speak to — the crowds lined up along the shoreline of New York City’s Roosevelt Island for the Democratic frontrunner’s triumphal campaign relaunch. Black SUVs with tinted windows streamed past checkpoints manned by men in suits, while journalists and supporters ran a gauntlet of airport-style security, complete with metal detectors and police bag checks.

At the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the island’s southern tip, journalists were corralled into a press area fenced in by metal barriers on all four sides. Without “special clearance,” one staffer informed a reporter, mingling with the crowd was strictly forbidden.

In America, class resentments center on money.
‘Yes, I am ‘nouveau riche,’ but then, it’s the ‘riche’ that counts, now isn’t it?” So declared Jim Williams in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And in the American context, that is broadly true: There are at least two senses of the word “class,” and Americans in general care a great deal less about either of them than we do about money. Rich is rich is rich is rich: You can be a rich vulgarian in a line of rich vulgarians (Donald Trump) or a striver from Brooklyn (Jay Z) or a Chicago bus driver who figures out that options traders don’t actually know what they’re doing and makes a truly gigantic pile of money (Joe Ritchie), and in each case Americans will celebrate your success.

Forget that she lies incessantly and stands for virtually nothing that’s discernible other than her own self-interest, Hillary Clinton is one of the most boring public speakers extant. I have heard better speeches at high school, maybe even grammar school, graduations than HRC gave in New York Saturday in the second — or is it the third — debut speech of her campaign.

It was problem after problem, cliché after cliché until you couldn’t listen anymore. Needless to say, there wasn’t a fresh idea. No new solutions to these problems on offer, only generalities. (In case you didn’t know it, she’s for equal pay for women and supports people with disabilities.) This was a generic speech out of the last twenty years. I kept wondering who were these automatons waving their flags in the audience. Maybe they were worried about the high cost of Ambien. Elect Hillary and we won’t need a sleeping pill ever again.