Displaying the most recent of 90901 posts written by

Ruth King

A Sublime Christian Masterpiece of a Film By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-tree-of-life-masterpiece-film-director-terrence-malick/

Set aside your devices and diversions for two hours, and you’ll see something wonderful.

‘There are two ways through life — the way of nature and the way of grace,” remarks the saintly mother at the outset of The Tree of Life, one of the most awe-inspiring films of the 21st century. She continues:

Grace doesn’t try please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it. . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things.

I wonder what the TV Guide capsule of Terrence Malick’s inspired, autobiographical meditation on a Christian existence might say. How about: “Three members of a midcentury Texas family deal with an unbearable loss over the course of years. Also, there are dinosaurs.” Malick makes some daring, strange, brilliant choices whose connections reveal themselves only gradually and obliquely.

Starting with an epigraph from Job (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”), Malick meditates on a family much like his own, shifting among the perspectives of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), a strict and sometimes brutish disciplinarian; his wife (Jessica Chastain), an angel in a housedress; and Jack, one of their three sons (played by Hunter McCracken as a boy and Sean Penn as an adult). Malick wends his way through the interior monologues of these three as they reflect on their lives together in the 1950s, their responses to a catastrophic event, and the mystery of consciousness.

Indict the ‘ISIS Bride’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

She may not push the citizenship issue if she faces prison time here.

I had a column in the New York Post yesterday morning about the so-called “ISIS bride,” Hoda Muthana, who is detained in a Syrian refugee camp and now pleading to come back home to her family in Alabama. I argued that, despite the fact that she has treasonously waged war against our country, she had a right to be readmitted if she tried to enter because she was — according to the facts available at the time — a natural-born American citizen.

Now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that Muthana will not be allowed to reenter the U.S. because she is not an American citizen: While born in America, she was the daughter of a diplomat and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. As the secretary put it in his statement, “Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”

This conclusion is disputed by Muthana’s family and allies, and they may have a case. I would strongly urge the Justice Department to file an indictment against Muthana for treason, material support to terrorism, and any other readily provable offenses. She is less likely to press the issues of citizenship and right to enter if she understands that she faces prosecution and, very likely, lengthy imprisonment if she succeeds in coming here.

But it’s worth taking a closer look at the citizenship question itself. To my mind, the concept of citizenship implies not just the benefits of being a full-fledged member of the body politic, but also a duty of fealty to the nation. In a rational world, then, a citizen who made war against the United States would be stripped of citizenship.

TAU develops blood test to detect genetic disorders in early pregnancy By Eytan Halon

https://www.jpost.com/Jpost-Tech/Business-and-Innovation/TAU-develops-blood-test-to-detect-genetic-disorders-in-early-pregnancy-581252

The research, led by Prof. Noam Shomron of the university’s Sackler School of Medicine, was published Wednesday in the Genome Research journal.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new blood test to detect genetic disorders in fetuses as early as 11 weeks into pregnancy.The simple blood test enables doctors to diagnose genetic disorders
caused by minuscule impairments in the fetal genome by sequencing small amounts of DNA in the mother’s and the father’s blood.

A computer algorithm processes the sequencing results to produce a “map” of the fetal genome, identifying countless mutations with atleast 99% accuracy, depending on the mutation type.

FLASHBACK: Comey’s FBI Embraced American ISIS Terrorist, Helped Him Get DOJ Job By Patrick Poole

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/flashback-comeys-fbi-embraced-american-isis-terrorist-helped-him-get-justice-department-job/

One of the biggest questions for Western governments that has played out in recent days in the American media is what to do with Western ISIS recruits who are now in the custody of U.S.-backed forces as the Islamic State’s geographical military presence collapses into nothing.

At least one previous case involving disgraced former FBI Director James Comey — where the FBI under his direction welcomed back an American ISIS terrorist from Syria and gave him a job working with the Justice Department — may be an example of how *not* to handle such cases.

The American media are now rallying around the plight of Alabama ISIS bride Hoda Muthana, who left the U.S. for Syria to marry an ISIS fighter in 2014.

The script that Muthana and her attorneys appear to be following is the case of Brooklyn ISIS terrorist Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, who joined the terror group in Syria in June 2014 and defected back to the U.S. with FBI assistance later that same year.

Bhuiya was charged with material support for terrorism upon his return and faced 25 years in prison, but a federal judge last June sentenced him to supervised release with no jail time thanks to the intervention and recommendation of his Justice Department co-workers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now works with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. CONTINUE AT SITE

Vandals Attack Wrong Statue of General Lee — Deface World War II Hero, Not Confederate By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vandals-attack-wrong-statue-of-general-lee-deface-world-war-ii-hero-not-confederate/

William C. Lee led black paratroopers in fighting the Nazis.

Earlier this week, vandals targeted the statue of General William C. Lee, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II — a unit made famous by the show Band of Brothers. Following a spate of vandalism targeting statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, this seems a disgusting case of mistaken identity.

“I think it was a big mistake,” Mark Johnson, the curator of the General William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn, N.C., told ABC 7 News. “Why would you do something like this? It really just irritates people.”

Police told the local outlet that a suspect doused the statue in an unidentified flammable liquid and set it on fire.

Johnson said he was familiar with the spate of vandalism directed against Robert E. Lee statues but never suspected a case of mistaken identity would direct people to his museum’s statue.

“Never even thought it would affect us in any way at all,” he said. “This is a hometown grown boy here that turned out to be an international hero of World War II so to come and try to destroy his statue is just an insult to everybody.”

The curator suggested the vandals wanted to make a statement about slavery and racism and were sorely mistaken.

The New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-timess-islamic-flimflam-man/

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Last November, the Times published a piece by Akyol entitled “True Islam Does Not Kill Blasphemers.” Anyone who is even a patchy awareness of Islam knows just how dishonest a claim this is; as Robert Spencer dryly observed at the time, “if Akyol denied the death penalty for blasphemy in any Sharia state, he could end up being executed for blasphemy himself.”

In keeping with his practice of blatantly lying about his faith and its adherents, Akyol’s latest Times piece was headlined “The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam.” It began as follows:

Since 9/11, a recurrent theme in the far-right circles of America has been “creeping Shariah.” It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death.

Implicit here is that such concerns are outrageous and that only an extremist – a member of the “far right” – would profess them. Never mind that as the number of Muslims in Western Europe has proliferated, so have burkas. Never mind that it’s a core tenet of Islam that adulterers – like blasphemers – must be put to death. Akyol continues:

In this scenario, American Muslims, who make up only 1 percent of the population, will pursue this grand scheme because they are here not for freedom and opportunity, but to form a fifth column in it, as Steve Bannon seriously claimed in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why Don’t Democrats Want The Census To Find How Many Noncitizens Live In The United States? Democrats have found a sneaky way to tilt the political playing field in their favor without having to reform the immigration system. by Ben Weingarten

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/dont-democrats-want-census-find-many-noncitizens-live-united-states/

Democrats’ unwillingness to secure our borders is evidenced in their grimaces during the immigration portion of President Trump’s most recent State of the Union and scores of their members hocking superficial “smart walls,” calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and supporting sanctuary cities. This all underscores their antipathy toward national sovereignty and citizenship.

Yet to the left’s credit, they persistently push such policies until they achieve victory, which means more political power, territorial integrity, and fidelity to Americans and legal immigrants be damned. Exhibit A, which has flown largely under the radar, is Democrats’ opposition to the Trump administration’s plan to reinstate a citizenship question in the 2020 census.

As a reflection of how big of a priority this is for Democrats, Sens. Bob Menendez, Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with a coterie of presidential contending cosponsors, reintroduced the deceptively dubbed “Every Person Counts Act” as one of their earliest actions in this new congressional session. This bill dovetails with leftist activist groups’ ongoing litigation against the Trump administration on the citizenship question, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) has successfully asked be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court.

The Epidemic Of Anti-Jewish Hate Crimes In Brooklyn Is No Hoax While the nation was focused on a hoaxed hate crime, Brooklyn’s Jews have been repeatedly and actually attacked. Are we not discussing it because most of the perpetrators are black? By David Marcus

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/the-epidemic-of-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-in-brooklyn-is-no-hoax/

As much of the country was transfixed by a hoaxed hate crime in Chicago over the past month, a very real wave of hate crimes in Brooklyn has been taking place. In New York City overall there have been 36 hate crimes against Jews so far this year, according to The New York Times, compared to only 21 last year. In the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn alone, ultra-orthodox Jews have been violently attacked at least 15 times since October of last year.

In most of these cases there is no apparent motive beyond anti-Semitism. No robbery occurs, and often the attackers — generally black men — and their victims are complete strangers. State and local government, as well as the New York City Police Department, have stepped up measures to protect the community, but the incidents have continued apace.

The spate of anti-Semitic attacks raises some significant questions. First and foremost, why is this happening and how can it be stopped? But also, why have the news media and the nation’s politicians been so quiet about an epidemic of hate crime in our country’s largest city? Why isn’t this a big story?

To get at an answer to the first question, we have to peer back through some troubling Brooklyn history. In 1991, the Crown Heights riots exploded in the Brooklyn neighborhood shared mainly by black and ultra-orthodox New Yorkers. Tensions between the two groups had existed for years. Then, a Jewish driver killed a black child. The crash was clearly shown to be an accident, not intentional or negligent, but deadly violence was the result nonetheless. In the years since, tensions have calmed, but never truly disappeared.

Thiessen: The Left Jumps To Believe Anti-Trump Stories Due To Contempt For Trump, Trump Supporters Posted By Ian Schwartz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/21/thiessen_the_left_jumps_to_believe_anti-trump_stories_due_to_contempt_for_trump_trump_supporters.html

Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen opined on the pattern of news organizations and the political left rushing to judgment on stories that reflect poorly on President Trump and his supporters. From Wednesday’s edition of ‘Special Report’ on FOX News:

MARC THIESSEN, COLUMNIST: There is a pattern here. First, it was the Covington kids that everyone jumped to believe because they were wearing MAGA hats they were some sort of racists and now they are suing some of the news organizations who falsely reported the story.

Now there is this rush to believe Jussie Smollett because he said he was attacked in Chicago by people yelling this is “This is MAGA country” because we all know that Chicago is MAGA country. You had Cory Booker and Kamala Harris who both said this is a modern day lynching. Pelosi who said it was an attack on humanity.

These people jumped to believe him. And why is that? Because it exposes the fact that the political left in Washington has contempt not just for Donald Trump, but for Donald Trump’s supporters. They assume that Donald Trump’s supporters are racist even though 7 to 8 million Trump voters voted twice for Barack Obama.

What happened in the 2016 election is that millions of Americans who are not being listened to by the establishments of either party asserted themselves through the democratic process and instead of listening to them and taking them seriously, they continue to believe that these people are racists and bigots and have to be shunned. And that’s what we’ve seen in both of these cases.

Jussie Smollett’s Hate By E.W. Jackson

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/jussie_smolletts_hate.html

Conservative pundits have pointed out that Democrat elites and the so-called “mainstream” media were quick to accept actor Jussie Smollett’s story of being assaulted by two Trump-supporters.

It is clear now that he lied. Smollett said his attackers were white and that he would have been believed without question if his assailants had been “Muslim,” “Mexican,” or “black.” They were black.

When asked why he thinks this happened, Smollett answered, “I have gone hard against 45, I have gone hard against this administration.” The mainstream media were all too happy to embrace any story that promotes their belief that President Trump and his supporters are racist and “homophobic.”

However, Smollett and the leftist media have a broader focus for their hatred than this president. They hate America. The alleged Smollett attack was designed not merely to prove that this president and his supporters are bigots, but to demonstrate once again that America is a hateful place where racism and homophobia run rampant.

The president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is interpreted as code language for “make America white again.” His opposition to illegal immigration is depicted as a racist ploy to keep nonwhite people out of the country. They know that President Trump is not the originator of what they see as America’s sordid legacy of hatred and bigotry, but in their minds, he is its latest and best representative.