RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/the_tragic_irony_of_the_rushdie_stabbing_at_chautauqua_.html

I started getting texts Friday morning from people on the scene at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, one from my sister-in-law, an ER nurse at a nearby hospital: “Salman Rushdie was stabbed at Chautauqua, flown to Erie, could not get bleeding stopped.” I know the area well. I have a summer home in Chautauqua (pronounced sha-TAWK-wa.) County, the site of my 2000 novel, the then futuristic 2006: The Chautauqua Rising.

A celebrated writer, the 75-year-old Rushdie has been living under a fatwa since February 14, 1989, the day that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini decided that Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was “blasphemous against Islam.” He was a regular visitor to the Chautauqua Institution. The fact that Rushdie would be stabbed at Chautauqua is perversely and tragically ironic.

In the way of background, a Methodist minister founded the institution on Chautauqua Lake in 1874. It served as a campground meeting for summer school teachers and proved popular enough that by century’s end, traveling “chautauquas” were bringing progressive enlightenment to citizens around the nation.

I set the climatic scene of 2006 at the institution itself. The book tells the tale of a grassroots “rising” that anticipated the Tea Party insurgency of 2009-10 and the MAGA movement of more recent years. When I wrote the book I was unaware that a quiet insurrection was brewing on the institution grounds. A group known as Chautauqua Christian Fellowship (CCF) had emerged to correct the Institution’s political and theological leftward drift.

The same year that my novel was published, 2000, the institution accelerated that drift by selecting the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell to be its director of religion. A longtime apologist for Fidel Castro, Campbell had made news the year before her appointment by orchestrating the forced return of Elian Gonzalez to Communist Cuba. At the time of Campbell’s retirement in 2013, one of her woke acolytes toasted Campbell, saying, “When Janet Reno is looking for someone really tough to get on the [Elian] case you have some sense of whom we are dealing with here. Don’t Mess With Joan.”

Upon her arrival at Chautauqua, Campbell embarked on two contradictory missions, one public, one private. Publicly, she championed “interfaith dialogue,” specifically an outreach to Muslims known as the “Abrahamic Initiative.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-low-can-gutter-politics-go-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-democrat-attack-ad-treatment-mental-health-herschel-walker-senate-11660309595?mod=MorningEditorialReport&mod=djemMER_h

Mr. Walker, a retired National Football League running back, is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia and author of “Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

My former wife, Cindy, and I gave a TV interview in 2008 to share our story—not about the glory days of football but about the pain of my mental-health struggles and their effect on our marriage. It was uncomfortable to bare our souls like that. Mental illness carried more of a stigma back then. It was hard to admit you needed help and even harder to get it.

She helped me through the hardest time of my life. Because our story ultimately was one of healing, forgiveness and redemption, I knew that if we came forward, we could convince others that there is no shame in asking for help. I hoped we would help people who were struggling and maybe even save a few lives.

I think we did. That interview was part of my life’s mission to advocate for mental-health awareness and treatment. I wrote a book about my experience—every painful detail. I visited military bases around the world to deliver the message that seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder isn’t a sign of weakness but of self-awareness and strength. I met with youth groups and mental-health organizations. I continue to do everything I can to end the stigma. I always say I would much rather listen to a friend talk about his struggles than go to his funeral.

Now I’m running for office, and my struggle has become the subject of a dishonest attack ad. Produced by a group that calls itself the Republican Accountability Project and supports my Democratic opponent, the ad uses clips of the 2008 interview in which my former wife describes things I did when we were married and my mental health was at its worst.

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/the-attack-on-salman-rushdie-is-an-ominous-warning/

The news coming from New York State that the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed onstage is both frightening and grim.

It is frightening because, without full details of how seriously injured Rushdie has been, it is tempting to fear the worst. Media reports initially suggested that Rushdie was well enough to walk off stage, but the news that he has been transported by air ambulance to a hospital after being stabbed in the neck suggests his injuries are severe. It is grim because any violence being done to a public figure is abhorrent, but in the case of Rushdie, it is almost inevitable that this particular incident has been occasioned by one of the most notorious cause celébrès that has ever been seen in the publishing world, namely the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.

When the book was published, Rushdie was already an established literary novelist, a Booker Prize winner for Midnight’s Children, whose every book was making waves in both British and American publishing. It was therefore either a bold or provocative move to write a novel that led to Rushdie being accused of blasphemy. A fatwa was declared upon him at the beginning of 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, which began a tidal wave of violence that included Rushdie’s Japanese translator being murdered, his Italian translator being seriously injured and his Norwegian publisher being shot. There was even a massacre in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of 37 people, and the intended target, Rushdie’s translator Aziz Nesin, only escaped death because his would-be assailants were unable to recognize him.

Leaving aside the literary merit of The Satanic Verses — it is not Rushdie’s most accessible, though certainly his most discussed — it represents a truly vile step for totalitarian thought that an author could be forced into hiding from his would-be killers, as Rushdie was for many years.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privately-demanded

Alex Berenson

Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal.

In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” a Twitter employee wrote.

The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.

Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/garland-wray-clam-trump-search-after-information-free-all-ongoing-jan-6-probe

By John Solomon and Natalia Mittelstadt

Stoic like a judge delivering a verdict from the bench, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared Thursday he was playing things by the book and wouldn’t talk about the raid and ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“The Department of Justice will speak through its court filings and its work,” he said, declining to answer any of the multitude of questions Americans have, except that he approved the Monday raid on the 45th president’s home and doesn’t object to releasing the search warrant.

Garland, however, was hardly as tight-lipped about the other major ongoing investigation that has consumed his department: the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In testimony, speeches and news interviews he has talked expansively about the nature of the probe, the forced collections of evidence and who and how many are being investigated — even as many defendants have not yet had their day in court.

Usually, it is taboo for federal prosecutors to talk about anything related to grand juries. But in his one-year anniversary speech, Garland gave the total number of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants executed, the amount of video footage collected, and the number of electronic devices seized through warrants and subpoenas. It was a rare moment of transparency in an evidence collection process normally shrouded in the same secrecy as the raid on Trump’s home and office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/why-arent-our-generals-learning-daniel-greenfield/

A third of the way into his article, “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way”, David Petraeus, former head of Central Command, who led forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then headed the CIA, admits the war was never going to end.

“Some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to ‘flip’ the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning,” he writes.

“When we recognized that we couldn’t ‘win’ the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just ‘manage’ it,” Petraeus complains.

Managing the war would mean a permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

There was never any serious plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nation building, Petraeus argues, “was not just unavoidable; it was essential”. “How else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow you to hand off crucial tasks—such as denying sanctuary to terrorists, securing the population and infrastructure, and running the country and its myriad institutions?”