RUTHFULLY YOURS

After a morning with Pope Francis at the White House, President Obama marked Eid al-Adha with a lengthy statement noting that “regardless of race, religion, and gender we are reminded that our rich diversity is what strengthens our nation.”

Eid al-Adha — the “Feast of the Sacrifice” — begins this evening.

“As more than 2 million Muslims from around the world and across the United States mark the end of their holy pilgrimage of Hajj in Mecca, Michelle and I extend our warmest wishes to Muslims around the world celebrating Eid al-Adha,” Obama said.

“This pilgrimage and Eid is about sacrifice, almsgiving, and equality. Thousands of Muslims around the world travel to Mecca and Medina, leaving behind all that is valuable and dressed in a simple white cloth – all standing shoulder-to-shoulder and equal before God. This experience signifies that no single person is more worthy than another. It is reminiscent of the principle upon which this country is built: e pluribus unum – out of many, one.”

Jews against Themselves
As a new book shows, hatred of Jews can be infectious—and some of the worst carriers are Jews who defame their own people.

J Street is an organization that describes itself as “pro-Israel” and proclaims itself “devoted and committed to Israel’s future.” Yet, as Edward Alexander observes in an important new book, J Street “misses no opportunities to blacken Israel’s reputation and very few opportunities to encourage campaigns to delegitimize it.”

And J Street is not alone. Similar Jewish organizations, some without J Street’s pretensions to Zionist commitment, have been proliferating in recent years both here and abroad. In the United States, they include, among others, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Free Palestine, Jews for Justice in the Middle East, and a multitude of local chapters, offshoots, and branches.

In Jews against Themselves, Alexander takes up the curious and disturbing phenomenon of his volume’s title. A professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Alexander is a distinguished student of American and English literature and an essayist whose erudition is ornamented by a coruscating wit. Among his highly regarded books is The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies (1988), an examination of the various intellectual strands—liberalism, rationalism, relativism—that, emerging from the Enlightenment, have long been in tension with, or in outright opposition to, central tenets of the Jewish tradition.

In Jews against Themselves, Alexander engages in a related project but one that entails turning over a rock. His inquiry examines the disfiguring yet critical subject of Jews who defame their own people. Over the centuries, Alexander writes, there has been “fruitful interaction” between Jewish apostates and the world’s anti-Semites, making for a distinctive Jewish contribution to “the politics and ideology of anti-Semitism” itself.

Jeb Bush has had these strongly held views . . . for at least seven days.

Jeb Bush has come out swinging against multiculturalism.

In this Drudge Report-linked story, Bush hammers the multicultural dogma that differences between Americans should be talked about and treasured:

“We should not have a multicultural society,” Bush said, before beginning a longer explanation of his views of what comprises culture in the U.S. “When you create pockets of isolation – and in some places the process of assimilation has been retarded because they’ve slowed down – it’s wrong,” he added. “It limits people’s aspirations.”

Jeb Bush has had these strongly held views . . . for at least seven days.

Just last week, Bush sent a fundraising letter praising the virtues of his “modern” and “multi-cultural family.”

So, Ben Carson is in the dock because he said he would not advocate for, or support, a Muslim for president because of his concerns that Islam, of which Sharia is an indispensable part, is not compatible with the United States Constitution. First, it is nearly impossible without ignorance or ill will to misunderstand Dr. Carson’s clear and carefully chosen words. He did not say a Muslim could not be president, but only that he personally would not advocate for or support such a candidate due to issues of incompatibility. However, for those since who have relied upon the purposeful misstatement or reinvention of his words, we should be asking why they lie, and what they seek to achieve if they get away with it.

Many Americans are no longer religious, but cannot deny that our nation and our culture are direct products of Judeo-Christian history, experience, and law. The Ten Commandments are the bedrock of our legal system. There is the firmness of the Old Testament, with the temperance and forgiveness of the New Testament. Most of our ancestors were raised with the Bible. For the most part, those who emigrated to the United States through most of the 20th Century also came predominantly from Christian countries, bringing their faith with them. In America, one can accept religion or reject it, but Judeo-Christian history is woven into our culture.

In the spring of 2011, I heard about a dazzling young conservative, the former solicitor general of Texas, who was running for a soon-to-be-open U.S. Senate seat. Brilliant and charismatic, he was a Princeton and Harvard Law graduate who seemed to relish rubbing that pedigree in the faces of Ivy League liberals who couldn’t fathom why he wasn’t “one of them.” But Ted Cruz would never be “one of them,” and that gave him the makings of a conservative superstar.

So I invited this political unknown with negligible poll numbers to appear as a guest on my national radio show. One of the first — and most dynamic — candidates to emerge from the then-nascent Tea Party movement, Mr. Cruz spiritedly championed limited government, fiscal responsibility and economic freedom. When I asked if we could trust him to stay true to those principles, he replied unequivocally, “I give you my word. I will fight with everything I have for them and for this great country.”

And he did. He waged so many lonely battles against President Obama, the left, the media and many in his own party — over Obamacare, the debt ceiling, taxes, Mr. Obama’s executive orders, gutting of the military and global retrenchment — that I began tweeting, “Must Ted Cruz do everything?”

He was the original outsider.

That earned him the enmity of those who resented how bad his leadership made them look. But he wasn’t sent to Washington to be a party apparatchik, and he’s remained one of the very few who has staunchly resisted that town’s seductive call to sell out.

When a woman accepts a job working for an orthodox Jewish congregation, she knows what values that synagogue espouses and stands for. Alana Schultz worked at Congregation Shearith Israel for 11 years – more than enough time to know full well that Orthodox Judaism frowns upon pregnancy before marriage. Nevertheless, she waited until she was 5 months pregnant and unwed before revealing her condition to her supervisor and several weeks later was fired despite having married in the interim. Typical of today’s default conception of women as victims, this woman has sued the congregation for discrimination, raising some interesting questions.

Should a religious institution be allowed to hold stricter standards than other commercial or government enterprises? Does a congregation that stands for a different moral code than the society at large have the right to expect adherence to that code from its employees?

“He’s rarely been in the headlines, but Marco Rubio has had a fantastic couple of months,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times observed Monday afternoon on Twitter. “Partly because of the headlines,” we rejoined, with a link to our June 9 column, which discussed the Times’s feeble efforts to find scandal in Rubio’s wife’s traffic tickets and in the Rubio family’s past financial struggles.

The Times can’t be blamed for the latest, even feebler effort to gin up a Rubio scandal—an effort so ridiculous that Leonhardt and his colleagues should be proud of getting scooped. It concerns a Rubio fund-raising event held yesterday at the Highland Park, Texas, home of Harlan Crow.

Who is Harlan Crow? The Times archives help provide context. “Donald Trump he is not,” the paper reported in 1996, meaning that Crow is publicity-shy: “He agreed to discuss his operations in detail only after two years of requests.” The gist of that piece was that in the late 1980s, Crow salvaged the real-estate empire built by his father, Trammell Crow, which was “imperiled by perhaps the worst real estate crash of modern times.” Crow père, who died in 2009 at 94, had “spent four decades becoming the nation’s leading real estate developer,” according to the Times.

Hillary Clinton settled the biggest non-mystery of the presidential campaign on Tuesday by formally coming out against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Democratic candidate, and front-runner at least for now, had played coy for months on the years-old issue, but everyone knew she wasn’t going to buck the donor base of the Democratic left.

Her reasoning is still worth noting. “I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone pipeline as what I believe it is—a distraction from important work we have to do on climate change,” she told a community forum in Des Moines, Iowa. “And unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward with all the other issues.”

By “distraction” she probably means the pipeline is the kind of jobs vs. rich green donor issue that is difficult for a Democrat to navigate. The pipeline certainly wouldn’t be a distraction for the 2,000 or so construction and other workers it would employ, as well as the thousands of other indirect jobs it would spin off.
Mrs. Clinton’s belated Keystone candor continues her move to the left as she falls in the polls and Vermont Senator and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders gains. With Vice President Joe Biden looking like he may run, perhaps with the support of progressive heartthrob Elizabeth Warren, Mrs. Clinton wants to narrow his running room and funding base on the left.

The battlegrounds of secular politics may undermine Francis’ moral authority.

The word “politicized” is not generally a compliment. It suggests that a nonpolitical event or subject—a natural disaster or poverty—is being used by a public figure for his own political purposes.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be hurting with the Republican electorate because many think he politicized Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012 by inviting President Obama to see its devastation. Mr. Christie rejects any such idea, but it sits there, a political casualty.

Yet one more in a long line of homegrown Islamic terrorist “wannabes” was nabbed in New Jersey’s Bergen County on Tuesday after the suspect made threats using Internet social media websites against the President of the United States and the White House. The 17-year-old suspected jihadist is reportedly a resident of Bergen’s county seat, Hackensack, according to former police counterterrorism unit detective, Victor Napolitano, Jr.
The Hackensack teen is also accused of making violent statements about being involved in a plot to attack at the 9/11 memorial in New York City, the site of the Muslim terrorist attack that brought down the symbol of America’s wealth and success, the World Trade Center in 2001.