RUTHFULLY YOURS

The indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert provides a good opportunity to weigh in on a subject that is especially apt for a blog called “Ordered Liberty”: over-criminalization. It is one that has gotten a good deal of attention on the right and the left — even bringing Rand Paul and Al Sharpton together, notwithstanding their disagreements on most everything else.

The ever-more sweeping regulation of human activity and concomitant diminution of liberty are elements of the “democratic despotism” problem foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville, as Roger Kimball eloquently observes (see, e.g., here).

Students of the criminal law learn early on the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum — i.e., conduct that is wrong in and of itself (e.g., murder, theft) versus conduct that is considered wrong only because we have chosen to legislate against it. The structuring of cash transactions is an excellent example of the latter.

“Black Lives Matter.” At first blush, it seems difficult to imagine anyone taking issue with the obvious, self-evident truth articulated by those three simple words. But when we peel away the veneer of deception, we find that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is in fact one of the most destructive, hateful, racist movements in living memory. Founded by a core group of revolutionaries who detest the United States and revere the nation’s most devoted radical enemies, BLM is, at its essence, an ideological reincarnation of the Black Panther [2] movement that flourished in the Sixties.

Black Lives Matter was established [3] two years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the “white Hispanic [4]” who was tried for murder and manslaughter vis-à-vis the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. According to BLM, Zimmerman’s act was but a microcosm of the “virulent [5] anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society” and continues to exacerbate [6] “the deep psychological wounds of slavery, racism and structural oppression.”

The president’s dangerous release of almost 100,000 criminal illegal aliens.

For patriots knowledgeable of the Immigration & Nationality Act, such as immigration judges, ICE attorneys, and litigators who fight for greater immigration enforcement like myself, the day President Obama told the American public he would “re-prioritize” the statute’s mandatory removal provisions was one of astonished disbelief that still endures.

Nowhere in the Act did Congress give the President the authority to “re-prioritize” illegal alien and criminal alien-removals. The INA is a deterring statute and it’s been continuously amended to better deter illegal immigration since it was originally enacted in 1952.

As the results of the 2012 and 2014 “executive actions” show, re-entries and recidivism among convicted criminal aliens (legal and illegal aliens convicted of crimes) has spiked and, as a result, we’re pushing deeper and deeper into immigration anarchy. Unsurprisingly, Obama’s lawlessness is leading to ever greater lawlessness.

While Americans yawned through another weekend, watching television or playing catch with their kids, the greatest human rights violation in our nation’s troubled history took place in the sky above Chicago.

Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim chaplain at Northwestern University who has participated in MSA and ISNA events, and gotten her photo taken with Obama, was denied an unopened Diet Coke.

“Muslim Chaplain Tahera Ahmad Denied Diet Coke,” NBC News blared. “I Can’t Help But Cry,” the CNN headline declaims. “’No Diet Coke for you’: Islamophobia at 30000 feet,” bleated The Guardian.

“Outrage after United Airlines refuses Muslim woman Diet Coke,” the Mirror chimed in.

The Diet Coke crisis was upon us. Islamists called for a boycott of United Airlines and #unitedfortahera became a trending hashtag as random idiots denounced racism and commiserated with the horror of being denied a Diet Coke and pledged not to fly United until they actually need to use their airline miles.

Notable & Quotable: The Russian Threat to Nato Lithuania and Poland ask for permanent U.S. military bases to fend off an aggressive Putin.
Reporter Niels Lesniewski writing online for Roll Call, May 29:

Officials in Lithuania and Poland told Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin they’re concerned enough about the threat posed by Russia that they want to host U.S. military bases.

The Illinois Democrat traveled to the two NATO member states, as well as to Ukraine, during the Memorial Day break, meeting with officials in the three countries. Durbin told reporters Friday he met in Lithuania with the country’s president and prime minister, as well as members of Parliament.
“They went so far to say they want the United States, if they will consider it, to put in a permanent military base in Lithuania, which I thought was an interesting request,” Durbin said.

At a subsequent stop in Poland, Durbin said he heard similar sentiments from officials there, including from representatives for Polish President-elect Andrzej Duda.

Fabius talks tough about inspections, but he’s fallen in line before.

The Iranian nuclear talks are resuming with the June 30 deadline approaching, and right on time here come the French talking tough. If history repeats, however, our Gallic allies will take a hard line right up until they agree to whatever President Obama wants.

“The best agreement, if you cannot verify it, it’s useless,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told our Journal colleagues in an interview on Monday from Nigeria. “Several countries in the region would say, OK, a paper [has been signed] but we think it is not strong enough and therefore we ourselves have to become nuclear.” He no doubt means Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and perhaps Egypt and the Gulf Sunni Arabs.

Ubiquitous but opaque. Powerful but unaccountable. Ostensibly public spirited but relentlessly mercenary. Often shamed but unshakably shameless. Let us count the ways in which the Clinton Foundation resembles the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA.

Last week we learned that FIFA had made a donation to the Foundation in the range of $50,000 to $100,000. But for the Clintons that kind of money is hardly worth mentioning, so the suggestion of some sort of unseemly financial linkage between the two organizations is doubtful. You don’t get to roll with Bill, Hill or Chelsea for less than seven figures.

We also learned that the “Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee,” tasked with organizing the forthcoming World Cup in the Arab kingdom, gave the foundation as much as $500,000, while the Qatari state itself gave up to $5 million.

Social welfare fraud of the kind perpetrated in Denmark is being repeated throughout Europe.

Because Anjem Choudary’s welfare payments are not taxed, his income is equivalent to a £32,500 ($50,000) salary. By comparison, the average annual earnings of full-time workers in Britain was £26,936 ($41,000) in 2014.

A Swedish soldier deployed in Afghanistan said that he was likely to get less help when he came back to Sweden than returning jihadists were.

More than 30 Danish jihadists have collected unemployment benefits totaling 379,000 Danish krone (€51,000; $55,000) while fighting with the Islamic State in Syria, according to leaked intelligence documents.

The fraud, which was reported by Television 2 Danmark on May 18, comes less than six months after the Danish newspaper BT revealed that Denmark had paid unemployment benefits to 28 other jihadists while they were waging war in Syria.

The disclosures show that Islamists continue to exploit European social welfare systems to finance their activities both at home and abroad — costing European taxpayers potentially millions of euros each year.

According to Television 2 Danmark, the welfare fraud was discovered after the Danish intelligence agency PET began sharing data about known Danish jihadists with the Ministry of Employment to determine if any of these individuals were receiving unemployment benefits.

As a percentage of the overall population, Denmark is the second-largest European source of foreign fighters in Syria after Belgium. At least 115 Danes have become foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq since Syria’s civil war broke out in March 2011, according to a recent report by the Center for Terrorism Analysis, an agency of PET. The report states:

“CTA assesses that approximately half of those who have gone abroad are now back in Denmark, while a quarter of them remain in the conflict zone. CTA assesses that two thirds of these individuals have been in the conflict zone for more than a year. The remaining travelers are located elsewhere abroad. CTA assesses that at least 19 travelers from Denmark have been killed in Syria and Iraq.”

The CTA admits that, “the number may be higher” than 115. The comment is a tacit recognition that it does not know exactly how many Danes have become jihadists abroad.

In April, it emerged that the parents of Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein — a Danish-Jordanian jihadist responsible for the terror attacks in Copenhagen in February 2015 in which two people died — have been welfare recipients in Denmark for more than 20 years. Omar’s parents received a total of 3.8 million krone between 1994 and 2014, amounting to roughly 500,000 euros or $560,000.

Social welfare fraud of the kind perpetrated in Denmark is being repeated throughout Europe.

One’s first inclination is to laugh – laugh heartily or perhaps in despair – at the idea that college students, or students of any kind, require “trigger warnings” that they will encounter “upsetting” material in the books they are reading. I nearly laughed out loud when I read an article, which is linked in a Daniel Greenfield book review of a title produced by an especially repulsive writer, David K. Shipler. Greenfield wrote in “Shameless Liar: The Strange Dishonest World of David K. Shipler”:

Freedom of Speech [Shipler’s book] instead sets out an imaginary struggle in which the conservatives are censors while those on the left are defenders of free speech. There are bad parents who think their children shouldn’t be assigned novels filled with graphic sexual acts and good leftist teachers who teach children that free enterprise is evil. It’s a comfortable lefty talking point from a few generations ago.

Sadly, the UCC delegates’ choices regarding Israel will be based on documents, “proofs,” and appeals built upon a foundation of lies, false choices and political fantasies that accuse Israel of being an “Apartheid State,” and an “illegal occupier of Palestinian land.”

“The Palestinian people [do] not exist… In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” — PLO Executive Committee member Zahir Muhse’in, quoted in the Dutch newspaper Trouw.