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2016

Ground Zero for the Iran Deal: Rosenthal Versus Nadler ” By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Rosenthal is outraged: “This district is literally Ground Zero and our representative supported the Iran Deal? Is no one paying attention?

More Jews live in New York’s tenth congressional district than in any other district in the United States. Philip J. Rosenthal – the kind of guy who could easily be a character on television’s The Big Bang Theory – wants its citizens to elect him as their representative.

Jerry Nadler, however, has been representing that area of New York, first in Albany beginning in 1977, and for the past 14 years in Washington, D.C.

So ma’neesh tanah ha this year ha zeh? Nadler voted for the Iran Deal, that’s why.

And if you don’t recall, the Iran Deal was the one issue behind which nearly all of the organizational Jewish world united against. The Iran Nuclear Deal which many Americans, especially Jews, and most especially Jewish New Yorkers, realized at the time was a deal only for Iran but a disaster for the safety of the United States, Israel and much of the West.

And yet, thumbing his nose at his constituents, Cong. Jerrold Nadler came out in support of the disastrous Iran Deal. Many folks in his district felt badly betrayed by Nadler. Some saw him as bowing to the wishes of the Democratic administration while ignoring their wishes and their safety. Nadler was the only Jewish member of the New York delegation who came out in favor of the deal.

Into the breach now steps Philip J. Rosenthal, a shiny example of a Bronx boy made and does good.

Rosenthal grew up facing a train yard and across the street from Bronx High School of Science, from which he graduated (“salutatorian, my father would want me to tell you,” he says.) Rosenthal went on to graduate from Yale University with a degree in Physics, “summa cum laude, phi beta kappa,” he says, sheepishly, again hearing his father’s voice echoing in his head).

Where next? The California Institute of Technology, where Rosenthal studied string theory and cosmology, garnering both a master’s degree and a PhD. Ouch.

American Campuses And Jews Who Know Not Zion By: Kenneth Levin ****

As another academic year begins at American colleges and universities, one can expect to see a continuation of the pattern in recent years in which many Jewish students either take a neutral stance in the face of the currently rampant campus assault on Israel or actually join in the assault.

Among the latter, some embrace the self-described “pro-Israel” but, in fact, Israel-bashing campus incarnation of J-Street, while others go further and enlist in the ranks of groups less coy than J Street, groups that, for example, more unambiguously promote the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) agenda against Israel.

These include the explicitly anti-Israel Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). A number of Jewish students even join the cadres of the often openly anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), founded as an offshoot of the General Union of Palestinian Students and now the premiere BDS-cheerleading, Israel-demonizing organization on American campuses.

Significant voices in the Jewish community, looking at this phenomenon, and perceiving as well in some quarters beyond the universities a decrease in American Jewish identification with Israel, correlate these developments with supposed Israeli government failure to take steps towards advancing peace.

This argument has been made by, among others, Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week, a newspaper produced with the support of the UJA-Federation of New York.

In an article that appeared earlier this year under the title “Frustration with Israel Growing Here at Home,” Rosenblatt discusses what he reports as having heard from members of the Jewish community, including community leaders, of grievances against Israel. Seemingly topping the list, and reflecting a view clearly shared by Rosenblatt, is “The hard fact… that Israel’s leadership is moving in a direction at odds with the next generation of Americans, including many Jews, who want to see greater efforts to resolve the Palestinian conflict and who put the onus for the impasse on Jerusalem.”

In the same vein, Rosenblatt observes, “Whether or not it is fair, the strong perception today is that the Israeli government is moving further right, and intransigent…” And “One national leader told me he’d like to fly to Israel, with a group of his top colleagues, to try to convince Netanyahu in dramatic fashion of the need for ‘a plan, any plan’ to break the impasse.”

And while these statements are couched as representing what Rosenblatt has heard from others, it is in his own voice that he states near the end of the piece “… Netanyahu and his government will continue to make decisions based on their own narrow and immediate political interests, and we can only hope they will coincide with national interests as well.”

The obvious implication is that the author does not see the prime minister as having been acting in Israel’s national interest, and that – reflecting the thrust of the article – Rosenblatt is referring specifically to the prime minister’s not being forthcoming enough in the quest for peace.

But can the falling away from Israel observed among many Jewish students on American campuses and among others in the American Jewish community genuinely be correlated with Israel’s not doing enough to advance peace?

First, is it true that Israel is responsible for the impasse vis-a-vis peace?

Any objective look at the history of efforts to achieve peace and at the reality on the ground today can only conclude that the claim of Israeli culpability is not credible.

Palestinian leadership is currently divided between Hamas, which rules Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, which governs in Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank.

Hamas is openly dedicated not only to the killing of all Jews in Israel but all Jews worldwide. With Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians living there were free to turn the territory into another Singapore or Hong Kong and would have had wide Arab world and other support for doing so. That their leaders have chosen instead to eschew pursuing the building of a prosperous state for the sake of hewing to their genocidal priorities can hardly be blamed on Israel and cannot be remedied by any Israeli concessions.
The agenda of the Palestinian Authority differs little from that of Hamas. Abbas and his PA and Fatah associates insist on Israel’s illegitimacy and assert constantly that Jews have no historical, authentic connection to the land and are merely colonialist usurpers whose presence must be extirpated. The message hammered in their media, preached in their mosques, and taught in their schools is lurid defamation of Jews and the promotion of dedication to Jew-killing and to Israel’s destruction as the obligation of every Palestinian.

Abbas himself has repeatedly insisted that he will never recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state within any borders. He has rejected every offer of territorial compromise because proposals of a settlement have been conditioned on such Palestinian recognition of Israel and explicit acceptance of an agreement as a final status document. He and those around him refuse to forego future additional claims against Israel with the ultimate objective of the Jewish state’s dissolution. This was the same reason why Arafat in 2000 rejected Ehud Barak and President Clinton’s offers of a settlement and instead launched his terror war against Israel.

Video: Yale Students Scream at Faculty Member for Violating Their Safe Space By Katherine Timpf

New video has surfaced from last fall showing a group of students yelling at Nicholas Christakis, the former master of Yale University’s Silliman College, accusing him of promoting violence because he didn’t support one of their social-justice causes.

In case you’re not familiar with Christakis, the story goes like this: Last fall, his wife sent out an e-mail criticizing Yale for telling students not to wear culturally insensitive Halloween costumes because she didn’t think it was the administration’s job to tell students what to wear, and then Christakis agreed with her and refused to apologize. The anger and protests that ensued over it eventually resulted in both of them having to resign last spring.

Immediately after the controversy, video surfaced of a student screaming in Christakis’s face that he should be fired. That was bad enough, but the newly publicized videos show that the hysteria went way, way beyond that.

The things that these videos show are beyond parody: One student says the real reason he didn’t remember her name was because he’s a racist. Another student compares the pain she endured from his supporting his wife on that issue to getting a soccer ball kicked in your face and having your nose broken.

Throughout, Christakis is clearly trying to remain calm. He says things like “I’m doing my best,” “One of my limitations as a person which I always had was I wasn’t very good with memorizing names,” “That’s a good argument,” and “I’d like to apologize for having hurt your feelings.”

Their response? They insist his difficulty with names is a personal, racial issue. They gang up on him, snapping and laughing and shouting over him as he tries to speak, and accuse him of lying when he tries to make amends.

Hillary’s Hidden Burden Both third-party nominees weigh her down. By John Fund

If Hillary Clinton loses in November, two reasons will be Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green-party nominee Jill Stein. Almost every national polls shows Hillary doing worse when the two third-party candidates are added to the mix. Even Johnson, perhaps because he is emphasizing his “social tolerance” more than his “fiscal conservatism,” is hurting Hillary more than he’s harming Donald Trump.

Stein’s impact on the race is clear. Polls show the Massachusetts physician winning between 3 percent and 5 percent of the vote, with strong appeal to former Bernie Sanders voters and leftists of all stripes. On the ballot in 44 states this fall, she is this year’s Ralph Nader, who polled 2.7 percent nationwide as the Green party’s standard-bearer in 2000. It’s generally assumed he cost Al Gore the electoral votes of Florida — and thus the election.

The impact of Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, is more nuanced. Traditionally, people voting Libertarian are dismissed as “Republicans who like to have fun,” i.e., as right-wingers with liberal social views. But Johnson’s appeal is much broader than the million or so people who usually vote Libertarian in presidential contests. Nationally, Johnson polls between 5 percent (in a YouGov poll) and 13 percent (Quinnipiac) of the vote, scoring particularly well in Western states and among young people. He will appear on the ballot in all 50 states.

In the New York Times/CBS News poll released Thursday this week, Trump and Clinton are tied at 42 percent each among likely voters. Johnson captures 8 percent of the vote and Stein 4 percent. But among voters younger than 30, Clinton has 48 percent, Trump 29 percent, and 21 percent plan to vote for Johnson or Stein or not vote at all. That level of non-support for the Democratic candidate among young people is a warning signal for Clinton. By comparison, Barack Obama won 60 percent of their votes in 2012.

Some polls show Johnson doing far better with young voters than he does in the NYT/CBS poll. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showed that among Millennials, Hillary is winning 31 percent, 29 percent favor Johnson, 26 percent pick Trump, and 15 percent choose Stein.

Clinton’s problem with young voters is that while few of them can remember the relative prosperity of Bill Clinton’s presidency, many of them associate her with a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. Stanley Greenberg, a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times this summer, “They think she’s a typical politician . . . aligned with the elites . . . aligned with the big money and Wall Street.”

After 8 Years of Obama, Time to Reset the U.S.-Israel Alliance The key steps the next president must take to undo nearly a decade of damage to U.S.-Israel relations. Ari Lieberman

It is no secret that the U.S.-Israel alliance has been under a severe strain for the last eight years, principally due to the non-friendly and often hostile positions of the Obama administration. The United States and Israel have had their differences under previous administrations and, at times, there were sharp disagreements but they rarely made it to the front pages. This is because leaders of both nations understood that disagreements, to the extent that they existed, were best addressed behind closed doors and away from prying eyes.

Obama changed all that during his first year in office with his infamous apology tour when he went to the Mideast to visit various Muslim countries to apologize for contrived wrongs and deliberately skipped over Israel despite the fact that he was a mere 20-minute plane ride away. It was a spiteful snub designed to show the Israelis and Arabs that Obama intended to fundamentally change the nature and dynamic of the U.S.-Israel alliance. The snub was followed by additional indignities including shabby treatment by the Obama White House of visiting Israeli dignitaries and guttural name-calling by anonymous White House aides. The person (likely Ben Rhodes) responsible for hurling the “Chicken-sh*t” vulgarity was never disciplined.

Obama’s plan to realign America’s alliances backfired miserably. He expected Israel to grovel but under the steady stewardship of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel did not cave into the pressure. Instead, Israel sought new alliances forging strong bonds with India, Africa, the Balkan countries and various eastern European countries. Relations also warmed between nations harboring traditional enmity toward Israel, like Russia and China.

By contrast, the Muslim world spiraled further into medieval backwardness. Arab nations that were spared the chaos brought upon by the so-called “Arab Spring” sought new alliances. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf nations watched as a feckless Obama appeased the Islamic Republic and allowed the mullahs to run amok and have their way. They too moved closer to Israel as a result.

The next president will be presented with daunting Mideast challenges. ISIS, the catastrophic Iran deal, Iran’s regional meddling and the Muslim migrant crisis. The list seems endless but there is one thing the next president can and must address upon assuming office and that is to reset the U.S.-Israel alliance. These two great democracies share ethical values and strategic interests, and the alliance must be strengthened for the sake of regional stability and moral clarity.

An Illegal Immigrant Sexual Predator Terrorizes Austin, Texas Nicodemo Coria-Gonzalez, rapist of a 68-year-old Texas woman — and previously deported five times. David Paulin

Nicodemo Coria-Gonzalez, a 26-year-old illegal alien from Mexico now in custody in Austin, Texas, is thought by detectives to be a violent serial sexual predator who since December had terrorized women in North and Northeast Austin. Previously deported five times, he could serve as Donald Trump’s new poster boy for get-tough deportation policies and a massive border wall — replacing San Francisco’s Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the undocumented Mexican immigrant facing murder charges for shooting 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle as she strolled with her father along a trendy pier. That crime inspired “Kate’s Law.” Like Austin’s Coria-Gonzalez, Lopez-Sanchez had a long rap sheet and had been deported five times.

One of Coria-Gonzalez’s reported victims was a 68-year-old woman who walks with a cane. He had spotted her sitting at a bus stop and offered her a ride to the store. She was sexually assaulted.

Austin, the state’s capital, is a trendy liberal enclave in a red state, as well as being a hi-tech mecca, college town, and veritable sanctuary city. It attracts many undocumented immigrants seeking work from employers who have no qualms about hiring them. Austin prohibits police from reporting illegal aliens to immigration authorities. The Travis County sheriff’s office, on the other hand, cooperates with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and holds jailed suspects in the Austin area on “immigration detainers” made by ICE. That may change in the near future, however, because the popular Democratic candidate for Travis County sheriff, Constable Sally Hernandez, has pledged to follow the same policy as San Francisco and stop cooperating with federal immigration authorities. This would make Austin the first full-blown sanctuary city in Texas. “I just don’t think you solve the criminal justice process by deporting them,” the liberal Democrat told the Texas Tribune. “We talk about being progressive. I believe we need to lead the way.”

ICE says Coria-Gonzalez was previously deported five times between 2012 and 2015. During those years, his rap sheet included three drunken driving arrests and tampering with a government record. After his arrest last month, ICE quickly filed an immigration detainer against him, thereby ensuring he remains in jail even if he makes his $890,000 bond.

Police believe Coria-Gonzalez may have assaulted at least 10 women and are asking victims to come forward. He presently faces two counts of kidnapping, two counts of aggravated assault, and one count of aggravated sexual assault – all related to three attacks. One of his victims was stabbed several times. She had pulled out a knife when fighting off Coria-Gonzalez, but he turned it on her. She escaped with her life.

Police tracked down and arrested Coria-Gonzalez for allegedly kidnapping a prostitute and trying to set her on fire after dousing her with gasoline. He had offered to give her a ride to a gas station to buy cigarettes. She escaped unharmed. Detectives subsequently connected Coria-Gonzalez to other violent sexual assaults after identifying his car in the gas station’s surveillance video. In all, he assaulted at least six women at a favorite location – a remote area he called his “garden,” police said.

David Limbaugh and Extolling the Never-Trumpers What exactly are the high “conservative” principles of Romney and McCain that Trump has failed to express? Paul Gottfried see note please

I don’t want to identify with anything Pat Buchanan does or says or thinks…he is a nasty anti-Semite and the worst of old guard conservatives…. Read Andy McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, and Bruce Thornton for the cream of the crop of those who choose Trump for the right reasons…..rsk
A few days ago David Limbaugh, a widely-syndicated Republican commentator (and Rush’s less fiery younger brother) posted a commentary intended to deescalate the tensions between Trump’s supporters and the “never-Trumpers.” Limbaugh defines himself as a “reluctant Trumper,” who decided to support the Donald as the lesser of two evils after his preferred candidate Ted Cruz stumbled in the primaries. Limbaugh does not hide his dislike for Trump’s free-wheeling rhetoric and believes that the GOP nominee’s critics on the right may be fully justified in doubting his “genuine commitment to conservative policies.”

Despite these doubts, Limbaugh endorses Trump for reasons that one also hears from Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Larry Elder, and yours truly. Trump has “many incentives to implement our [conservative] policies,” while Hillary Clinton has absolutely none. He is also, not incidentally, bestowing on the Republican Party a large working class constituency; and even among racial minorities, he is doing at least as well, and in the case of prospective black voters, better than his GOP centrist predecessors, Mitt Romney and John McCain. Moreover, it is hard not to see Trump’s focusing on the problems of illegals and sanctuary cities as anything other than a “conservative” issue. That remains the case even if most of his primary competitors and certainly the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal might wish those issues had never been brought into the primaries.

Although Limbaugh dutifully provides the reasons that someone claiming to be on the right should vote for Trump, he still can’t resist extolling the never-Trumpers. (Although they’re not my buddies, they may be his.) These supposedly principled conservatives deeply believe that “the best chance of saving the nation in the long run is to avoid elevating Trump to president and leader of the party because he could forever destroy conservatism and the Republican brand.” Although Limbaugh concedes that some establishment Republicans may be found among these noble idealists, most of the never-Trumpers “shared our frustration” about where the party was headed in the hands of unprincipled operators. Limbaugh closes his remarks with this statement: “I respect the never-Trumpers and will not presume to judge them as abandoning the nation’s best interests.”

It is of course possible to be so principled that one refuses to settle for politicians who don’t entirely live up to one’s ideals. About ten years ago I addressed a club named for the great conservative Republican of an earlier era Robert A. Taft. During my interaction with members I found that some of them would only vote for a leader who patterned himself on the organization’s namesake. Although I continue to refer to myself as a “Taft Republican,” I thought some of the young people I spoke with held unrealistically high expectations.

But in the case of the never-Trumpers, I would never make this criticism. Here we are dealing mostly with GOP shills who four years ago were drooling on cue over Mitt Romney and who four years earlier were gilding the lily for John McCain. What exactly were the high “conservative” principles that these candidates of the never-Trumpers articulated that Trump has failed to express? Indeed Trump has raised social issues that Romney and McCain, who were hailed as “conservatives” refused to even touch on the campaign trail. Unlike them, he has promised to appoint “conservatives” to federal judgeships and to protect the religious liberty of devout Christians, who have been beaten from pillar to post by Obama and who are not likely to be treated any better under a Clinton presidency.

Good Walls Make Good Neighbors Instead of bringing countries together, open borders create conflicts. Daniel Greenfield

The UK is building a wall to keep the denizens of the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp from invading cars and trucks after some 22,000 breaches of the port road. The “Jungle” is a nightmare for the local population which has been terrorized by the mob of migrants aspiring to invade the UK.

The French have blamed the British and the British have blamed the French. But the migrant invasion is not the fault of either alone. In a sense it is the fault of everyone in the European Union.

Merkel’s open invitation to a migrant invasion occasioned the same round of finger-pointing, often, as with the Calais crisis, not at those countries that let the migrants in, but those who did not wish to take them in. Eastern European countries were most frequently blamed for not doing their “share” to maintain the wonderful open borders which required accepting anyone wandering through them.

Instead of bringing countries together, open borders create conflicts.

The Schengen Area didn’t unite Europe. Even before the mob of Muslim migrants arrived, the ability of foreign workers to just show up in the UK was generating some of the tensions that led to Brexit.

The biggest source of tension between America and Mexico remains the open border. Not only is the open border bad for America, but it’s bad for Mexico. As profitable as the remittances might be, the cost of the cartels and migrants drawn to that border end up offsetting it.

What globalists fail to understand is that good walls really do make for better neighbors. Countries with walls may occasionally invade each other, but a lack of walls means that the invasion never stops. Walls are torn down in the name of peace, but the lack of walls is what makes peace impossible.

In war, a bunch of foreigners show up to take your entire way of life. The citizens of countless countries are asking whether this is really any different than the peace offered by the borderless world.

When countries control their own borders, they can negotiate an end to conflicts. But when they don’t, all they can do is assign blame. In the absence of the state, borders and nations are recreated by mass migration. The millions of Muslims invading Europe are but one example. There has been a similar mass movement out of Africa along the Middle East for some time. The end result isn’t integration, but tribalism. The borderless world was meant to banish tribalism, but instead it’s stronger than ever.

Tribalism does not go away when you eliminate borders. The ability to limit tribal conflicts does.

How to Celebrate Islamic Eid : Edward Cline

Here are some excerpts from The Black Stone, a detective novel set in 1929 San Francisco, in which the hero, Cyrus Skeen, discovers the bizarre, brutal, and murderous nature of Islam. The volume of information available to us today about Islam did not exist in 1930. But what he was able to find caused him, his wife, Dilys, and Mickey Kane, a top rank newspaper reporter, to make disbelieving, defamatory, and wonderfully blasphemous remarks about Islam. Skeen is investigating the horrendous murders of a young Jewish girl and a newspaper reporter who had stolen the “Black Stone” of the Kaaba. He is pursued and murdered by members of The Muslim Brotherhood. Skeen encounters an agent of the Brotherhood, and deals with him in his typical no-nonsense style. He discovers another murder in his own office building. Enjoy the excerpts.

Cover Illustration: Leader of Ikhwan Sultan bin bajad Al-Otaibi, who allied himself and his tribe with the Sauds to conquer the Arabian Peninsula. The Sauds did not wage war against the Ottomans, but sat out WWI sipping tea with the British. The Sauds are erroneously depicted in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia as following Lawrence to attack and slaughter a Turkish column.

“You go ahead,” said Skeen when they returned two hours later. They stood outside their bedroom door. “I want to look up something. It’s something Professor Lerner mentioned. It won’t take a moment.”

“Don’t be long, Cyrus. You look tired in spite of your energy.

“In his study, he consulted his several sets of encyclopedias for information on Islam.

None was to be found in the Funk & Wagnall’s, nor in the Collier’s. There was some information on mosques and something called the Kaaba in Mecca in the twenty-volumeNew International Encyclopedia. All the articles he was able to find referred to Moslems as “Mohammedans.”

He was up until two o’clock. He closed the last volume, yawned and stretched his arms. He had acquired some basic information about Islam from the articles, but not nearly enough to satisfy his appetite or his curiosity. He would be taking the roaster back out tomorrow after all, to the library and some book shops. He switched off the desk lamp and went to the bedroom…..

“Did you know,” Skeen asked casually over breakfast the next morning, “that Mohammedans, when they go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, must walk counter-clockwise around the Kaaba seven times, and run between some hills looking for water, and perform a schedule of other rituals, all designed to make them feel like silly, worthless asses?”

“Kaaba?” asked Dilys, who was paying only half attention to her husband. “Sounds like a Greek dish, smothered in the finest feta cheese sauce, and best served with ouzo.” She was reading the morning Observer-World. She had fixed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Skeen had just poured himself a second coffee and was on his first cigarette of the day. He was reading from notes he had made last night in his study and had passed the newspaper over to Dilys.”

The Kaaba,” read Skeen, “is a cube-like structure smack in the middle of an open-air mosque about the size of Kezar Stadium, about forty-four feet high and fifty in length. Other scholars reverse the dimensions. It is built of granite on the outside, marble on the inside. It sits on a spot, according to Mohammedan lore, that Allah designated that Adam and Eve should build a temple, or an altar.” Skeen paused. “Of course, that story must have been concocted after the Kaaba had been a pagan shrine for an undetermined number of centuries, housing scores of other deities. Allah’s own genealogical antecedents seem to be rooted in a moon god of fecundity.”

Obama’s Fantasy Eid al-Adha As he touts Islam’s fellowship and love, ISIS celebrates by hanging infidels from meat hooks. Robert Spencer

Barack Obama’s fantasy Islam made a new appearance Monday, when he issued a statement congratulating and praising Muslims on the occasion of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha:

Michelle and I extend our warmest wishes to Muslims across our country and around the world who are celebrating Eid al-Adha. This special holiday is a time to honor the sacrifice, resolve, and commitment to God demonstrated by Abraham.

In speaking of Abraham, it is important to remember that there is no parallel in the Qur’an to Genesis 22:15-18, in which Abraham is rewarded for his faith and told he will become a blessing to the nations: “by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” The Muslim audiences Obama was addressing don’t read Genesis. They read the Qur’an.

In the Qur’an, Allah says that Abraham is an “excellent example” (uswa hasana, أُسْوَةٌ حَسَنَةٌ, a term applied also to Muhammad in 33:21) for the believers when he tells his pagan family and people that “there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred for ever, unless ye believe in Allah and Him alone” (60:4). The same verse goes on to say that Abraham is not an excellent example when he tells his father, “I will pray for forgiveness for you.” Hatred is held up as exemplary; forgiveness is explicitly declared to be not exemplary.

Obama was thus reinforcing a worldview that takes for granted the legitimacy of everlasting enmity and hatred between Muslims and non-Muslims — and was doing so precisely in the context of trying to build bridges between Muslims and non-Muslims.

…It is also a celebration of the ways faith can transcend any differences or boundaries and unite us under the banners of fellowship and love….

Yes, indeed. Just look at Fort Hood, and Boston, and Chattanooga, Garland, San Bernardino, Orlando, as well as Paris, Brussels, Nice, and all the rest united us under the banners of fellowship and love. Of course, Obama would insist that these had nothing to do with Islam: all the evidence that refutes his politically correct fantasies is waved away. The national conversation that needs to be had about how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism is once again kicked down the road.

As we mark Eid al-Adha this year, we are reminded of the millions of refugees around the globe who are spending this sacred holiday separated from their families, unsure of their future, but still hoping for a brighter tomorrow. And as a Nation, we remain committed to welcoming the stranger with empathy and an open heart—from the refugee who flees war-torn lands to the immigrant who leaves home in search of a better life.

Ahmad al-Mohammed and one other of the jihadis who murdered 130 people in Paris in November 2015 had just entered Europe as refugees.