RUTHFULLY YOURS

MANILA—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the southern island of Mindanao following fighting between the army and an Islamic State-linked militant group.

The declaration, in effect for 60 days, follows a battle between government troops and militants from the armed rebel Maute group, which took place in a small southern city on Tuesday.

Fighters from the group clashed with the country’s police and army after gunmen seized several buildings in Marawi, including the city jail and a hospital, subsequently setting them on fire and parading the black Islamic State flag through the city streets.

Martial law marks an escalation in a longstanding battle between authorities in the Philippines and several heavily armed Islamist groups in the southern provinces, whose jungle strongholds and deep community links in predominantly Muslim areas have made them hard to defeat despite years of efforts.

In a separate incident in Marawi on Tuesday, police and army units exchanged fire with gunmen while seeking to serve an arrest warrant on Isnilon Hapilon, a militant seen as a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group, another Islamist organization that has declared allegiance to Islamic State.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said during a news briefing in Moscow, where Mr. Duterte is in the middle of a four-day official visit, that the martial law was possible “on the grounds of existence of rebellion because of what is happening in Mindanao.” He didn’t give details about what conditions martial law would include.

The declaration is likely to be controversial in the Philippines, where martial law is remembered by many for its adoption by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted by popular revolt in 1986 after a 21-year rule. Mr. Duterte floated the idea of martial law several times in the past, mostly in the context of justifying additional powers for police to continue a bloody antinarcotics campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

In April, a defiant group of self-identified “apostates” convened in downtown Portland to revel in the joys of brew culture, bacon burgers, and atheism. Nine ex-Muslims from several states in the region gathered for a local meeting of the Ex-Muslims of North America.

EXMNA is a nonprofit that provides support to individuals who have left Islam. Some of its members have faced disownership and death threats from family members for renouncing their religion.

Chapter gatherings across the United States and Canada are closed-group meetings for safety reasons. Individuals who wish to join the organization go through a screening process to authenticate their identities, explained Sarah Haider, who co-founded EXMNA in 2013. “Unfortunately, it is not paranoia that requires us to be careful,” Haider said. “In the Muslim world, we are openly persecuted and regularly meet grisly ends. In the Western world we are safer, but even here open meetings can be a big risk.”

In traditional interpretations of Islam, apostasy — the act of leaving one’s religion — is punishable by death or imprisonment. Across the globe, apostasy from Islam remains a capital offense in 13 Muslim-majority countries.

Haider, who immigrated from Pakistan as a child, said that the unique experiences of ex-Muslims often leave them beyond the reach of typical secular or atheist support groups. “We have specific needs in terms of security and privacy,” Haider said. “Some ex-Muslims have more to fear from their local Muslim communities and families than others, so EXMNA provides a space for those who do not feel safe attending any public event.”

Sarah Haider is scheduled to speak at Portland State University on May 26. “Yazid” (not his real name), a PSU alumnus, organized the local chapter meeting. He explained that a pub setting was intentional. “It’s actually symbolic,” he said. “A bar represents all the things that were haram [forbidden] to us when we were Muslim.”

The vast majority of Muslims view the consumption of alcohol or pork as deeply haram. In Saudi Arabia, where Yazid is from, drinking or producing alcohol is punishable with fines, lashings, and imprisonment.

Underneath the laughter and lighthearted chatter of the evening laid a somber reality: Each person, though a freethinker, had a religious identity or family to return to at the end of the night.

“Shadi” is a 39-year-old immigrant from Egypt. He became an atheist about a year ago, but his wife only recently found out. “She begs me to pretend to pray in front of the children,” he said with a mournful look.

This was the first time he had seen so many ex-Muslims together, as it was for nearly everyone at the event.

“Amina” is a 27-year-old graduate student from East Africa. She held on to her boyfriend’s arm while they ate a slice of banana cream pie. “I haven’t told my family about him yet,” she said with an uneasy smile. Amina’s green-eyed American boyfriend spoke with a soft southern drawl. He stands in stark contrast to the type of man her family expects her to marry, she lamented.

Across all schools of jurisprudence in both Shiite and Sunni Islam, marriage between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim male is prohibited. Muslim men are permitted to marry non-Muslim women, but their children are traditionally assigned their father’s faith.

Main Characters-

1.A woman – let’s call her Carola, who lost a national election who colludes with the media and an octogenarian Hungarian gray eminence to bring down the legally elected President. Her henchman is her husband with whom she ran a corrupt foundation that enriched them and cemented relations with the world’s tyrants in exchange for big bucks.

2. Editors of two major print publications, and a senior correspondent at a television news channel who agree to peddle half truths and fake news to stoke up scandals which hint of corruption, obstruction of justice, and leaking of “classified information” to foreign antagonists. They rig polling to suggest that even his own party is abandoning the besieged President.

3.A mole in the White House who leaks information on meetings to the above through a friend in the previous administration.

4. Two harridans in Congress from California who begin the murmurings of “impeachment” and the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

5. A young DNC staffer who is the source of the WikiLeaks exposure of the woman WikiLeaks exposure of Carola’s emails. He is tragically killed by being shot in the back. Nothing is stolen, but the local police take his laptop, and declare this a robbery. The media ignore this story.

6.A special prosecutor is chosen-a poker face former official. Will he conduct and impartial investigation?

End of Season 1 of House of Curs

Political violence by leftists is on the rise – not only in the United States, but in Iceland as well, it appears. Robert Spencer, who has devoted his life to combating the global jihad, was poisoned by a political antagonist, it appears. Writing in Front Page Magazine, he reports on his brush with assassination:

Last Thursday, I gave a lecture on the jihad threat at the Grand Hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland. Shortly thereafter, a young Icelandic Leftist registered his disapproval of what I said by poisoning me.

It happened after the event, when my security chief, the organizers of the event, and Jihad Watch writer Christine Williams, who had also been invited to speak, went with me to a local restaurant to celebrate the success of the evening.

At this crowded Reykjavik establishment, I was quickly recognized. A young Icelander called me by name, shook my hand, and said he was a big fan. Shortly after that, another citizen of that famously genteel and courteous land also called me by name, shook my hand, and said “[F—] you.”

We took that marvelous Icelandic greeting as a cue to leave. But the damage had already been done. About fifteen minutes later, when I got back in my hotel room, I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet. I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.

What had happened quickly became clear, and was soon confirmed by a hospital test: one of these local Icelanders who had approached me (probably the one who said he was a big fan, as he was much closer to me than the “[F—] you” guy) had dropped drugs into my drink. I wasn’t and am not on any other medication, and so there wasn’t any other explanation of how these things had gotten into my bloodstream.

For several days thereafter I was ill, but I did get to Reykjavik’s police station and gave them a bigger case than they have seen in good awhile. The police official with whom I spoke took immediate steps to identify and locate the principal suspects and obtain the restaurant’s surveillance video.

Iceland is a small country. Everyone knows everyone else. And so as it happened, I was quickly able to discover the identity, phone number, and Facebook page of the primary suspect, the young man who claimed he was a “big fan.” I don’t intend to call him. Icelandic police will be contacting him soon enough, if they haven’t done so already.

You can expect our American mainstream media to completely ignore this horrifying tale of an attempted political assassination.

In “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe satirized the tendency of prosecutors and the media to label every black child victimized by crime an honor student He must be smiling at the legacy that tendency has spawned which can be seen in the title of this piece. It is a portion of a NYT headline for an article about an ex-con who recently graduated and is pictured smiling and shaking hands with another graduate, both in the full regalia of cap and gown. (Walking the Long Road From Isolated in Prison to Magna Cum Laude, Katharine Q Seelye, NYT 5/14/17). Kyle Gathers, now 31, has spent the better part of ten years in prison, two in isolation, for drug-dealing and shootings. Since being released, he enrolled in a program at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, specializing in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology; it is this program to which the title refers.

In googling such programs, I discovered that they vary from two to four semesters for which students earn a certificate or technical certificate. It is laudable that Mr. Gathers seems to have turned his life around and is now qualified to get a bona fide job and become a law-abiding member of society. It is ludicrous to apply the honorific of magna cum laude to this endeavor. It is universally accepted that students must have a GPA between 3.8 – 3.9 and be in the top 3- 5% of their graduating class in order to qualify for this honor. Until recently, this was reserved for students who completed a B.A. , B.S. or equivalent degree. Now it is used for students who complete two semesters of a technical course and perhaps soon it will apply to those who get certified as cosmeticians, hairdressers, manicurists and health care aides.

Even though achieving members of society have been told to check their privilege, we don’t call every college graduate “doctor” just as we don’t use the terms “Officer, senator, justice or maestro” indiscriminately. By buying in to the charade that students who complete a non-academic program are deserving of the ceremonial trappings of academe, we devalue the achievement of those who have earned those merit badges the hard way – appropriately. The tradition of wearing caps and gowns dates back to 12th century early European universities in which clerics, who were the scholars of that time, wore their robes for warmth in unheated buildings. The caps, known as mortarboards, reputedly derive from the birettas worn by scholarly clerics to signify their intelligence and superior accomplishment. In succeeding centuries, this garb became popular for other educated people down into the 21rst century But since both the clothing and the honorifics are symbols of academic scholarship, they don’t belong in completion ceremonies for technical certification. The sombrero is a Spanish hat adapted in the 15th century from those worn by Mongolian horsemen for several previous centuries. Yet wearing one on Halloween has been deemed an act of cultural appropriation by today’s snowflakes and their academic leadership. Their voices have not been raised to protest the use of clothing and terminology traditionally reserved for high scholarship in ceremonies for technical certification. This is not only cultural appropriation – it is more specifically fraudulent misrepresentation.

Last night after binging on”Fauda” a terrific Israeli series on terrorism and counter-terrorism, I reluctantly turned on the news….CNN to be exact, and Anderson Cooper to be more exact. The news, as everyone not settled down in Mars knows by now is that the Washington Post and the New York Times issued reports that President Trump gave “highly classified” information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office the day after firing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey. General McMaster, the National Security adviser said” I was in the room, it did not happen.”

General McMaster’s denial was streamed in the news feed under the blathering of the CNN panel which agreed that McMaster’s denial proved that the story was true. Huh??? They then went on to speculate that Trump’s conversation with the Russians endangered lives. What a leap.

When the media dust-up settles we will know the truth, but the way CNN reports it, I prefer the fiction in Fauda to the fiction on CNN which passes as journalism. rsk

This occurred three years after World War Two ended. When it was over one in every three Jews in the world were killed. Today, Israel, with a population of 8,304,088 (.11% pof the planet’s population) is a thriving democracy with advanced and state of the arts scientific and medical institution which makes outsize contributions to the health, safety and welfare of the entire world. Happy Birthday to Israel- a miracle nation.rsk

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

Thomas Paine, a founding father of our nation ( 1737-1809) famously wrote: ” These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

The leftist media and their acolytes are now shrieking about President (not theirs) Donald Trump and his firing of James Comey. More troubling is the number of “summer and sunshine” Republicans who are wringing their hands and speaking in hushed tones of impeachment. I don’t deride their patriotism but marvel at their buckling knees.

Donald Trump makes it easy for the them. He twitters and sputters, and he is often crude with a tin ear for public relations, but he has broken no law….and James Comey deserved to be fired.

Tom Bailey writes in Spiked online http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/comey-hero-of-the-resistance-please/19810#.WRbggcYpCUk

Before the firing, however, Democrats were condemning Comey, and even calling for his head. A few days before the presidential election, Comey wrote a letter to Congress saying the FBI would reopen its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Back then, Schumer said he’d lost confidence in Comey. Democratic lawmakers were outraged by his actions. Democrat representative Steve Cohen even called for him to resign.

Comey’s decision to reopen the Clinton investigation gave him top billing on the Democrat establishment’s list of extenuating circumstances that cost it the election. He was the man who cost Clinton her crown. Clinton herself partly blamed him for her loss.

He was a Trumpist in a federal windbreaker jacket, people suggested. Some even said the FBI itself was politically compromised and out to get the Clintons. As a writer for the liberal magazine Mother Jones argued, ‘The FBI is full of middle-aged white guys’ with an anti-Clinton bent, due to their listening to ‘lots of Rush Limbaugh’.

Now, post-firing, as if he were entering the federal witness protection programme, Comey is viewed entirely differently; he’s becoming an almost legendary figure. He’s no longer a Trump stooge – he’s a fallen member of the #Resistance. He’s been reimagined as the man who was about to bring down Trump.”

Mark Steyn argued that exclusively blaming the other political side for your troubles can provide false comfort. When everything is falling apart the problem is probably bigger than any one point of view. “The point about civilizational collapse is that it’s a civilization that’s collapsing, not merely your political arrangements.” Take the ransomware attacks which paralyzed Britain’s national health service which forced the cancellation of operations and other medical treatments. “A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and infected computers in dozens of other countries on Friday.” Everybody was affected. It didn’t matter how you voted.

The incident revealed at least ten NHS trusts still relied on the Windows XP. The instrusion allegedly relied on NSA tools stolen during the Obama administration from a contractor. “According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world’s most sophisticated software exploits.”

An unnamed US official told the paper that Martin allegedly hoarded more than 75 percent of the TAO’s library of hacking tools. It’s hard to envision a scenario under which a theft of that much classified material by a single individual would be possible.

When Shadow Brokers appeared in October, it published hundreds of TAO-developed exploits, including one that, for years, had exploited what was then a critical unknown vulnerability in a widely used firewall sold by Cisco Systems. Last month, the person or group said it was shutting down in a post that dumped 61 Windows-formatted binary files. Whether Martin was somehow involved with Shadow Brokers or was a compulsive hoarder working alone, the events underscore serious security lapses inside the NSA.

It was a long time coming. The defection of Edward Snowden, the Office of Personnel Management data breach and the now infamous Hillary hacks all predated Trump though the vulnerabilities will probably continue under him. The list of commercial data breaches is also stunningly long. “It is estimated that in 2015 alone, 707 million records were exposed as a result of data breaches”. These suggest that too many of our systems may be built on rotten props or false assumptions. The ice looked solid enough until the weight of civilization stepped on it and things fell through.

One of the weaknesses of the anti-Trump resistance is their inability to address the factors which brought the current administration into existence. Too many think it’s all about one man. This may explain why the Resistance to the Resistance has been surprisingly hard to push off the Hill and why Bernie Sanders is the most popular Democratic politician in America. The key insight into the problem is that people didn’t vote for Trump but against Hillary, PC, and the ending of their world. Charles Sykes in New York Times noted this element of sheer reaction. “Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters don’t have to defend his specific actions as long as they make liberal heads explode”.

A hundred years ago the liberal project seemed easily attainable. “I have seen the future and it works,” wrote Lincoln Steffens, yet it’s proved surprisingly hard to close the sale. The reason why the masses should reject such a brilliant vision were hard to explain. Despite Leftist fears their foes were never more than a coalition of amateurs with no particular ideology. The alt-right didn’t even know it was alt-right until they were properly analyzed and labeled. CONTINUE AT SITE

Two hundred and forty-one years since America’s birth and 226 years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights protecting our freedom of speech, Americans seem to be confused about what free speech actually means. We need a refresher course in what is not free speech, and what it is that speech is free from.

As a free society, we must protect speech in the public square. That’s why the Westboro Church lunatics are accompanied by a sizable police force when they protest military funerals. It is our job as a society to permit speech, even and especially speech we find repugnant, and to protect the speaker from violent reactions to that speech. Additionally, speakers must not face repercussions from the government for what they say. If Donald Trump doesn’t like it when Saturday Night Live makes fun of him, he can tweet about it. He can’t send a police force to arrest Alec Baldwin.

This does not, however, mean that speech comes without consequences. If Westboro Church leader Fred Phelps applied for a job at your company, you would be fully within your rights to turn him down because he is a vile, hateful person whom you do not wish to employ. This general distinction has been difficult for people to grasp in the wake of several recent high-profile incidents.

Last week, Tomi Lahren settled a lawsuit with her previous employer, the conservative network The Blaze. Lahren was fired after an appearance on The View in which she told the audience that she was pro-choice. She had previously proclaimed herself pro-life; her position on abortion is one that matters to both her audience and her (now former) employer. Speaking to Joy Behar and other View co-hosts, she explained:

I’m pro-choice, and here’s why: I am a constitutional — y’know, someone that loves the Constitution. . . . I can’t sit here and be a hypocrite and say I’m for limited government, but I think the government should decide what women do with their bodies.

Of course, her viewers at The Blaze also consider themselves “constitutionals” (if that were a real word), believe in limited government, and yet are pro-life. She called her own audience hypocrites — and then she was fired for it.