RUTHFULLY YOURS

“As a Muslim immigrant from the great blue state of California, I’ll be a triple threat to Donald Trump. I’m running for office to fight against him, and to fight for our families.”

That was Dr. Asif Mahmood, a Democrat, last Wednesday outside ICE headquarters in Los Angeles, announcing that he is running for lieutenant governor of California.

The 56-year-old physician was born in Pakistan, but as he explained, “I wanted to live in America because of my children. I wanted them to grow up in a place that celebrates diversity and tolerance. . . Donald Trump continues to attack people like me – immigrants and people of color and Muslims. I say President Trump has it all wrong. It’s time to get tough on hate. California must be the leader of the Trump resistance and I will fight every step of the way.”

CAIR representative Danna Elneil told reporters, “We’re not 100 percent sure whether he’s the first Muslim to run.” Many Muslim countries, organizations and scholars would not be 100 percent sure if the candidate is a Muslim.

Dr. Asif Mahmood is a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, founded in 1889 on the belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) was the long-awaited Messiah. Allah sent him, the Ahmadis believe, to end religious wars, condemn bloodshed and reinstitute morality, justice and peace.

According to the Congressional Record, in 2012 Democrat representatives Brad Sherman and Zoe Lofgren welcomed to Congress “His Holiness, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad.” Based in Britain, he is “the worldwide spiritual leader of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, which has tens of millions of adherents around the world in 190 countries and tens of thousands of adherents here in the United States.” Sherman commended the Ahmadi motto, “Love for all. Hatred for none.”

Sherman also welcomed “distinguished leaders” Dr. Asif Mahmood and Kareem Ahmed

who show such leadership of the Muslim community in the Los Angeles area. As Dr. Stephen M. Kirby noted in 2015, the Sunnis who represent nearly 90 percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims would have a problem with the Ahmadi claim that they represent the “true” Islam.

In 1984, Dr. Mahmood’s native country of Pakistan added Section 298 to the penal code, prohibiting the Ahmadis from calling themselves Muslims, posing as Muslims by reciting Koranic verses, referring to their faith as Islam, and preaching or propagating their faith. The Pakistani law even prohibits Ahmadis from sounding the call to prayer.

Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan deploy similar prohibitions and in 1997 Sheikh Ali Bin Abdur Rahman Al Hufaifi, chief Imam of the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, condemned the Ahmadis as “traitors” spouting “false Quranic commentary.” As Dr. Kirby noted:

Former President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice asked for the names of Trump transition officials to be unmasked and made public in raw intelligence files, according to media reports, a move apparently carried out to harm the incoming Trump administration.

As recently as March 22, Rice denied knowing anything about the intelligence reports. In an appearance on “PBS Newshour,” she said pretty definitely, “I know nothing about this.” The new news reports paint Rice as a liar.

The evidence we know about in the Trump-Russia saga so far seems to be pointing at Obama.

Adam Housley of Fox News reports:

The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.

The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.

The spreading of the unmasked names was carried out for “political purposes that have nothing to do with national security” or foreign intelligence, Housley said. “It had everything to do with hurting and embarrassing Trump and his team,” he said, citing his sources.

What is incidental collection, by the way?

Incidental collection “happens when an individual is in contact with the target of surveillance,” or is communicating “about” the target, according to Robyn Greene. “So if Bob were being targeted for surveillance and Alice called or emailed Bob, Alice’s communications with him would be collected incidentally.”

In this example, “if Bob is targeted for surveillance and Alice contacts him during that surveillance, resulting in the incidental collection of her communications with him, her name should be redacted or ‘masked’ unless leaving it unredacted provides foreign intelligence value.” Masking is done to protect U.S. persons (i.e. U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, etc.) who get inadvertently caught up in the electronic dragnet from being falsely accused of crimes or otherwise improper behavior.

A recent report in Spain’s El País touts “the Spanish connection with Trump’s Russia scandal”:

On February 1, Alexander Porfirievich Torshin, 63, a Russian politician and banker who is close to Vladimir Putin and whom the Spanish anti-corruption prosecutor and the Civil Guard define in their reports as a godfather from a notorious Russian mafia organization, had in his diary for the next day an appointment to meet in Washington with the world’s most powerful man: Donald Trump.

The meeting never took place, but according to El País, Torshin, who is currently the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia and is suspected by Spanish authorities of being part of a Russian money-laundering operation, has other links to the administration: Last May, he sat beside Donald Trump Jr. during a private dinner in Louisville, Ky.

Links between the new administration and the Kremlin are not hard to come by. There are the legitimate (e.g., Jeff Sessions’s visit with the Russian ambassador), the dubious (e.g., ousted NSA director Michael Flynn’s many communications with the same), and the alarming (e.g., nearly anything involving campaign advisers Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, or Carter Page). But after months of “explosive” revelations, it remains unclear precisely what the charges against the White House are. Has the new president simply been too friendly to Vladimir Putin? In his stupendous ignorance, has he permitted his egotism to reshape American foreign policy? Or — more troubling — has he wooed the Kremlin to advance his overseas business interests? Or — most troubling — did he work with Russian sources to manipulate November’s election? Prominent critics of the president have suggested that Donald Trump is “a Kremlin stooge,” “a pawn of Putin,” and a “collaborator” with Russian intelligence. But what the president is being accused of is always left hanging in a cloud of insinuation.

This is likely because, as of now, there is no concrete charge to make. There is no evidence that the president or his close advisers have broken the law in their communications with Russian officials. There is no reliable evidence that anyone “collaborated” with Russian officials to influence the election, or that Russian influence was more than indirect (i.e., votes may have been swayed by WikiLeaks’s exposure of the DNC e-mails, but Russia did not “hack the election,” in the sense of manipulating voting machines). Even Manafort, Stone, and Page, the three advisers with the closest and most troubling ties to the Kremlin, have not been shown to have done anything prosecutable. All of this is provisional, of course — and must remain so until the congressional intelligence committees complete their investigations — but it’s noteworthy nonetheless, as critics on right and left compare Donald Trump to Richard Nixon and whisper about impeachment.

What, then, is the problem with the administration’s Russia ties? The news from El País is instructive.

Part of Donald Trump’s appeal was that he would keep out of the White House Hillary Clinton and her whole network of should-be felons. The Right’s chief concern about the Clinton Foundation and the Clintons’ “charitable” work was that it provided a veiled way for parties — especially foreign parties — with alarming agendas to purchase White House influence. Right-leaning voters were convinced that the Clintons would not surround themselves with responsible, ethical public servants, but with people happy to sell American policy to the highest bidder.

There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.

Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.

Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).

In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.

The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.

A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.

Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.

True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.

So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.

His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.