RUTHFULLY YOURS

Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using.

Last weekend, with the ink on the Iran nuclear deal still being deciphered, the Obama Doctrine fell out of an interview between President Obama and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times.

“You asked about an Obama doctrine,” Mr. Obama said. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

In nine words, Mr. Obama explained what has been going on the past six years, culminating in what we now see is the nucleus of the Obama worldview, an accommodation with Iran.

Hard to credit are the breadth and depth of this President’s blunders, of which his craven capitulation to Tehran is but the latest. Unlike the mess in Libya, the pointed alienation of Israel and so many other debacles, the consequence of this greatest folly is apt to be measured in megatonnage.

President Obama could be right to believe the promises of the despots in Tehran, but this would be the first time his thinking on the Greater Middle East has worked out. Obama was foolhardy to appoint Turkey’s Erdogan as his point man in the region, misguided to back the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, unfounded in his enthusiasm for the Arab Spring, mistaken describing the Republic of Iraq as “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” in December, 2011, ineffective when fulminating against civil war in Syria, hubristic describing America’s role in Libya as a “model intervention”, erroneous portraying the Islamic State group (ISIS/IS) as a “JV team” (junior varsity team) days after it captured Fallujah, lacking judgement in Yemen and imprudent countenancing Turkish and Qatari assistance to negotiate an end to the 2014 Hamas-Israel conflagration.

The report shows how the increasing influence of Sharia law in Britain today is undermining the fundamental principle that there must be equality for all British citizens under a single law of the land.

“I feel betrayed by Britain. I came here to get away from this and the situation is worse here than in the country I escaped from.” — Muslim woman interviewed for the report.

The report concludes by calling on the British government to launch a judge-led inquiry to “determine the extent to which discriminatory Sharia law principles are being applied within the UK.”

“The government’s response will be a litmus test of the extent to which it genuinely upholds the principle of equality before the law or is so dominated by the fear of ‘giving offense’ that it will continue to allow these women to suffer in ways which would make our suffragettes turn in their graves.” — Baroness Caroline Cox.

Modern American universities used to assume four goals. First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

From cost to employment prospects, the state of American higher education is dismal for students.

Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.

Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.

Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money. The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.

California’s drought provides a useful lesson. I am glad California is having a drought. Not because I hate California (I love California) or Californians (I hate them only a little, for what they’ve done to California) or Central Valley farmers (some of my best friends . . .) or even Governor Jerry Brown, droll disco-era anachronism that he is, but because the episode presents an excellent illustration of the one fundamental social reality that cannot be legislated away or buried under an avalanche of government-accounting shenanigans and loan guarantees or brought to heel by politicians no matter how hard the ladies and gentlemen in Sacramento and Washington stamp their little feet: scarcity.

Federal district court judge Andrew Hanen slammed the Obama administration with a solid one-two punch late last night. In one order, he refused to lift the preliminary injunction barring implementation of the president’s immigration amnesty plan. In a second order, Hanen said that the “attorneys for the Government misrepresented the facts” about the implementation to the court. On February 23, the Justice Department filed a “Motion to Stay” the injunction pending an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Hanen denied that motion, saying not only that his original ruling was correct, but that subsequent events had “reinforced” the correctness of his original decision. Hanen cited President Barack Obama’s own words as part of this reinforcement. Speaking at a town hall after the injunction order had been issued, the president said that any government official who did not halt the deportation of anyone who qualifies under his new plan would suffer the “consequences.”

Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), a United Kingdom-based radical Islamist front organization, is openly bragging about its close relationship with both the Tory and Labour political parties, the UK’s Telegraph reports. The group’s chief executive, Sufyan Islamil, characterizes MEND as “kingmaker” in the May election, claiming to influence up to 30 seats.

In a speech at Bolton’s Zakariyya Central Mosque, Ismail compared British Jews fighting for the Israeli military with British Muslims fighting for Syrian rebels, including the Islamic State.

“…British Muslims going to Syria fighting against Assad…will definitely face interrogation. Now do you think that if we landed those 20 seats or 30 seats he [Prime Minister Cameron] would have the audacity to say that (foreign fighters should be prosecuted] to the Muslim community? Not a chance!”

According to the Arab News, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter recently participated in an official Carter Center delegation to Saudi Arabia, where he met with Saudi billionaire and prolific funder of Middle East studies in the U.S, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal. The prince’s largesse has resulted in the Islamist apologist-dominated Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University (headed by chief apologist John Esposito) and Harvard University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, whose faculty, although less controversial, is equally tendentious.

Any time the name Netanyahu comes up, the bell rings and somebody has to take a shot; this time it is Sen. Diane Feinstein.
Any time the name Netanyahu comes up, the bell rings and somebody has to take a shot; this time it is Sen. Diane Feinstein.

This is like a contest. Everybody gets to throw a dart to see who will be first to make Bibi buckle and drop.

The topic, naturally, is Iran, and the deal Bibi won’t buy because what’s good for Iran cannot be good for Israel.

Iran gets to keep its ICBM program, according to a framework that had John Kerry pleased with himself as he left Tehran with the ayatollahs laughing behind his back. All that remains is for Bibi to join the celebration in what is surely the dumbest gamble of the century.

On a recent trip to Germany I took a day off to visit Sigmaringen, on the upper Danube some 20 miles north of Lake Constance. This town of ten thousand with a massive castle towering over it – or, more precisely, this castle with a town attached – interested me as the site of a little known, eight-month long melodrama at the end of Second World War.
It was here that Marshal Philippe Pétain, Chef de l’État Français, and several hundred Vichy government officials and prominent German sympathizers and collaborators of different hues, were brought by the Wehrmacht on 8 September 1944, as the Allies advanced across France. The leaders were installed in the castle, other ranks in the town below. They were followed by their wives, hangers-on, and mistresses. By the end of September a veritable French enclave was in place, some two thousand strong, which survived until the long-dreaded arrival of de Gaulle’s First French Army on 24 April 1945.