RUTHFULLY YOURS

By the summer of 2013, President Obama had convinced several key Israelis that he wasn’t bluffing about using force against the Iranian nuclear program. Then he failed to enforce his red line against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad—and the Israelis realized they’d been snookered. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, recalls the shock inside his government. “Everyone went quiet,” he said in a recent interview. “An eerie quiet. Everyone understood that that was not an option, that we’re on our own.”

Reading Oren’s new memoir Ally, it’s clear that Israel has been on her own since the day Obama took office. Oren provides an inside account of relations between the administration of Barack Obama and the government of Bibi Netanyahu, and his thesis is overwhelming, authoritative, and damning: For the last six and a half years the president of the United States has treated the home of the Jewish people more like a rogue nation standing in the way of peace than a longtime democratic ally. Now the alliance is “in tatters.”

I have started Laudato Si, Pope Francis’s newly release papal encyclical on global warming, and it’s something of a slog. As one of my colleagues put it, popes never seem to use one word when 500 will do.

I feel somewhat free to take things slowly when analyzing these documents. There’s something about an institution that’s been around for 2,000-odd years that makes you feel less beholden to the 24-hour news cycle (or the 5-minute news cycle of the Twitter era). But I’m ready to make one preliminary observation, which stands out with particular clarity in the early sections of Laudato Si.
These are the sections in which Francis lays out what he sees as the facts about a global environmental crisis, and it is a series of blatantly one-sided errors and exaggerations, including many which have been well-discussed and refuted, even in the New York Times.

President Barack Obama responded to the horrific shooting at a historic black church in Charleston that left nine dead with an earnest statement—well, other than that contention that was completely untrue.

Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. … We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.

Let’s set aside the assertion that it’s too easy to obtain guns in America and deal with the implication that we are somehow uniquely violent or that “mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” The president has made this claim in various ways and with various qualifiers.*

Parlez vous Hebdo? Because surely the president recalls that in January of this year two gunmen entered the office of a satirical magazine in France with an assortment of guns and murdered 11 people (and injured 11 more). After leaving, they killed a police officer. And in a marketplace catering to Jews another five were murdered and 11 wounded. France is, allegedly, an advanced country, is it not? Perhaps if Obama had attended the anti-terror rally in Paris like every other leader of advanced countries did, his recollection would be sharper.

Bill Nye, most notably of children’s television fame, is now taking his personal insight to the millions populating the social media world. Take this recent pearl of disciplined scientific speculation on Twitter:

“@BillNye: [Tropical storm] Bill floods Texas. Alaska is on fire. Just a little global warming and climate change. Nothing to worry about…”

Honestly, the anthropogenic global warming peddler’s ease in promoting his doctrine would make Egyptian priests, Native American shamans, and voodoo witch doctors sick with jealousy. Nearly everything can easily be blamed on the “global warming” gods’ wrath, it seems — and the devoted flock will buy the narrative, and assume a position of shame and guilt with little or no genuine thought. The devoted just require blind faith that the smart guys comprising the supposed scientific “consensus” have done the heavy lifting of analysis for them, and are telling them what they ought to be doing to save themselves and the world.

He could hear from inside his room where he was hiding the gunmen opening doors and inquiring if the people inside were Muslims or Christians.

“The motorbike riders got down from their bike and started beating [Christian journalist] Shamim Masih and… warned him that if he did not stop reporting on Christian issues, they knew his family and home and would teach him and his family a lesson.” — Nazir S. Batti, Pakistan Christian Congress Party.

“The city of Mosul alone had 45 churches. Now there is not a single one. The buildings have been destroyed. Four hundred churches have been destroyed in Syria. … The same is happening in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Northern Africa.” — Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia

“What happened to Christians in Iraq and Syria… does not receive Arabic media coverage that befits human beings, whatever their religion.” — Hani Naqshabandi, Saudi writer.

The British don’t need your advice any more than they needed your DVDs.
In the course of his recent European tour, President Obama decided to intervene in the domestic politics of the United Kingdom — and not on a minor matter. A referendum on whether the British should remain in the European Union is scheduled to be held by the end of 2017 under legislation now being debated in the British Parliament. This question goes to the heart of the U.K.’s democratic sovereignty, and opinion polls suggest that the electorate leans towards staying in, but by a modest margin. For the British it is a massive constitutional battle& on the order of the Glorious Revolution or, well, 1776.

Killing off military commissions has been an obsession of the Lawyer Left for over a dozen years. It may, at long last, be “Mission Accomplished” thanks to last week’s ruling by a deeply divided federal appeals court.

In al-Bahlul v. United States, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit threw out the terrorism conspiracy conviction of Osama bin Laden’s personal aide and propaganda director, an al-Qaeda jihadist who bragged about his Goebbels-like role in the killing of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

The court, nearly a year ago, had already thrown out Suliman al-Bahlul’s other convictions for providing material support to terrorism and soliciting terrorism against the United States. Sitting en banc on that occasion, the Circuit’s seven judges ruled that al-Bahlul had an American constitutional right against prosecution on ex post facto crimes. These findings, consistent with recent Circuit precedent, were a remarkable measure of the Lawyer Left’s progress in expanding judicial protections for America’s enemies given that (a) the jihadist is a Yemeni whose only connection to our nation and its Constitution is to make war against them, and (b) congressional statutes criminalizing material support and solicitation of violence long predated al-Bahlul’s commission of those offenses.

Has the United States ever had a weirder president than Richard Nixon? The fact that his only close competitors in this regard are his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and his indirect successor, Jimmy Carter, could help to explain why the ’60s and ’70s were such troubled times for this country. But even LBJ (who loved to lecture aides while sitting on the toilet) and Mr. Carter (who claimed to have been attacked by a “killer rabbit” and to have experienced “lust in his heart”) could not match Nixon for sheer bizarreness. Evan Thomas’s terrifically engaging biography contains many choice examples.

The story of IRS targeting of conservative groups that disagreed with Obama Administration policy isn’t over. On Friday the IRS lost another big battle, as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a viewpoint discrimination lawsuit against the agency can proceed. Next stop, discovery.

The lawsuit began when the Pennsylvania-based pro-Israel group Z Street applied for tax-exempt status in 2009. When Z Street called to inquire about its application, it says an IRS agent said the agency had a policy that required Israel-related applications to get extra scrutiny in a special unit in Washington. Z Street sued in federal court but the IRS claimed the Anti-Injunction Act prevents suits meant to evade the collection of taxes and because the IRS was protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity. The IRS lost in district court but appealed.

Professors reacted to the budget move as if lawmakers had tried to ban tweed jackets with elbow patches.

On a sunny, early summer day, Memorial Union Terrace on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is idyllic. The high, cloudless skies and cool blue water of Lake Mendota serve as a backdrop to coeds drinking beer, sunning themselves and studying for exams.

Yet for weeks now this utopian campus has been awash in dyspepsia, ever since the state legislature’s Joint Finance Committee passed a budget motion concerning faculty tenure. Wisconsin is the only state where the university tenure framework is codified in statute. Under the new plan, tenure would be instead administered by the University of Wisconsin system’s governor-appointed Board of Regents.