RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/sirhan-sirhan-forgotten-terrorist-assassination-of-robert-kennedy/He assassinated Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week. Young Americans might not even know his name.

What was the first act of Arab terrorism committed inside the United States?

If you were thinking of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded 1,000, you’d be off by almost a quarter-century. It actually occurred 50 years ago this week, when Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy — an act that subverted the American electoral process and altered the history of the United States.

Kennedy had just won the California presidential primary on the night of June 5, 1968, when he thanked a huge crowd of enthusiastic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and made his way out through the kitchen. Waiting for him there was Sirhan, 24 years old, holding a .22 caliber revolver. Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, shot the presidential candidate three times — twice in the back and once behind his ear. It was the last shot that proved fatal. Kennedy died 26 hours later at the young age of 42. Five other people in the crowd were wounded but survived.

Because the assassination came just over four years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, and just two months after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, the nation focused on gun violence and hatred of the Kennedy family in its aftermath. Many blamed right-wing racists, since the Kennedys had supported the civil-rights movement. I was in school back then, and I remember the most common phrase: “They killed another Kennedy.” The “they” was generic. It wasn’t an individual; it referred to a supposed violent streak that ran through American culture and mythology all the way back to our frontier days.

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/the-barbary-pirates-islamic-terrorism-and-americas-first-military-victory/

Many Americans erroneously trace the roots of Islamic terrorism against their nation to September 11, 2001. In reality, the United States’ very first conflict with Muslim terrorists was also its very first war as a nation — and it won that war 213 years ago, on June 10, 1805.

Centuries before that, the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa — specifically Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis — had been thriving on the slave trade of Europeans abducted from virtually every corner of coastal Europe, including Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland. These raids were so successful, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.

The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that they were “infidels” and their owners Muslims. As Robert Playfair (b. 1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained: “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b. 1516) had written this in his Book of Martyrs: “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/from-rats-to-rainwater-a-tour-of-new-york-public-housing-1528497745

Last week the story broke that the New York City Housing Authority, by far the nation’s largest system of public housing, will be forced to operate under a federal monitor. The city also will be required to spend $1 billion on repairs and renovations.

Crisis has come to NYCHA-land, as New York magazine once called the city’s public housing system to underscore the sheer isolation of many of its large projects. This past winter, more than three-quarters of the housing authority’s 400,000 tenants, in 176,000 apartments, went without heat and hot water. Mandatory lead-paint inspections were not performed, and then falsely claimed to have been done. The chairwoman of NYCHA’s board resigned under fire. Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared an official state of emergency and went to visit the projects for himself.

Readers may not be surprised, given the terrible reputation of public housing. But for years, a few utopian believers have insisted that New York is different. Take “Public Housing That Worked,” a 2009 book by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a professor at the New York Institute of Technology. “The New York story provides a fresh perspective on familiar stories of housing failure,” Mr. Bloom writes, “by showing that, rare as it may be, a housing authority dedicated to everyday management can maintain housing even under trying conditions.” He describes NYCHA as having “comparatively tidy grounds” and “well-maintained high-rise buildings.”

That would be news to tenants such as Yajaira Cariani, a 36-year-old single mother of three who lives with her own mother in the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn. She points to stained and leaking plaster and says there are days she must put out buckets in her living room to catch water pouring in from the roof. A woman on staff at a Baptist church in East New York monitors the Linden Houses, where, she says, “they just don’t pick up the garbage,” and thus rats abound. She tells of nonworking stoves and peeling paint—certified as lead-free, but who knows for sure?

https://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/columns/marc-a-thiessen-obama-took-lying-to-new-heights-with/article_3162e8c6-6b1c-11e8-bb09-83e6f2650005.html

When it comes to the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration increasingly appears to have been a bottomless pit of deception.

First, President Barack Obama failed to disclose to Congress the existence of secret side deals on inspections when he transmitted the nuclear accord to Capitol Hill. (They were only uncovered by chance when then-Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., learned about them during a meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency officials in Vienna.) Then, we learned that the Obama administration had secretly sent a plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in Swiss francs, euros and other currencies on the same day Iran released four American hostages, which was followed by two more secret flights carrying another $1.3 billion in cash.

Now, in a bombshell revelation, Republicans on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, have revealed in a new report that the Obama administration secretly tried to help Iran use U.S. banks to convert $5.7 billion in Iranian assets, after promising Congress that Iran would not get access to the U.S. financial system — and then lied to Congress about what it had done. (Full disclosure: My wife works for Portman).