RUTHFULLY YOURS

Following Omar Mateen’s massacre of forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, professors of Middle East studies reacted predictably by blaming guns, American homophobia, Christians, Deep South bigotry – anything but Islamic terrorism. Never mind that Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS, depicted himself as an Islamic soldier during the attack, had taken two trips to Saudi Arabia, and was interviewed three times by the FBI in connection with terrorism. Excuses must be made, willful ignorance enforced, and the American public bamboozled.

Immediately after the attack, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole announced, “I don’t think it probably was terrorism in any useful sense of the term.” His reasoning? Mateen didn’t “make demands about U.S. government policy,” and hitting soft targets is “not a form of classical strategic terrorism.” The victims of terrorist attacks – many issued without demands – on cafés, malls, restaurants, resorts, schools, social services, and countless other soft targets would beg to differ.

Cole questioned Mateen’s allegiance to the Islamic State, given reports that Mateen frequented the Pulse nightclub regularly and drank heavily, claiming that “puritanical Muslim fundamentalists of the ISIL sort don’t behave that way.” In fact, Mateen’s libertine lifestyle is a hallmark of Islamic terrorists in the West, who are instructed to blend in. In his case, there may have been several motivating factors, but Cole advanced only one conclusion: “To put all this on Muslims and Islam in general is frankly absurd.”

University of Denver Center for Middle East Studies director Nader Hashemi placed the emphasis on the American public, predicting the worst: “There is a huge danger that in the coming days and weeks that American Muslims/Islam will be collectively targeted and blamed for today’s massacre in Florida.” He claimed, “The 1,400-year-old Islamic faith in itself has little to do with the modern jihadist movement.”

Meanwhile, Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, decried “[t]he sickness, the homophobia, the violence, and the ease of access to war-grade guns that brought about this vile terrorist attack,” predicting that “the solution” will come about only when Americans “confront this xenophobia and violence in our own society.”

Safi revealed his own bigotry and provincialism by chalking up the attack to imagined Southern perfidy: “Let us not lose sight of the fact that this horrible attack took place in the South, after years of demonizing gays and lesbians.” Aside from the fact that Orlando is hardly a bastion of Southern culture, there is no moral equivalency between the debates over same-sex marriage and transgender bathroom use he cited and the mass murder of gays.

Sticking with the theme of blaming anyone but the perpetrator, Safi noted that “[t]he killer worked for the G4S security firm with a history of abuse in American prisons and the Occupied Territories/Israel.”

After a slow start, the influx of Syrians to the U.S. has accelerated in recent months, and annual arrivals are likely to reach 10,000 by the end of September, the amount that was promised by the Obama administration.

Last year, the U.S. pledged to resettle 85,000 refugees from all over the world in the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, including at least 10,000 Syrian refugees.

By March 31, halfway through the fiscal year, only 1,285 Syrians had arrived, according to official data. By June 30, the Syrian number had jumped to 5,211. Overall refugee admissions had reached 49,791.

Among Syrians admitted this year, 20% are adult men, 20% are adult women and 60% are children. The vast majority of the men are in a family unit, said a State Department spokesman.

The deployment of additional staff and resources in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq has enabled both the Departments of State and Homeland Security to review more applications and complete more security checks in recent months, he said.

For instance, between February and April, Homeland Security officers in Amman, Jordan, interviewed about 12,000 individuals referred by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.
ENLARGE

The U.S. resettled 1,682 Syrians in fiscal year 2015 and only 105 in 2014. So far this fiscal year, Michigan, California and Illinois have been the top three recipients of Syrian refugees.

Due to security checks, it takes about two years for a refugee to be admitted to the U.S. Typically, the vetting includes several interviews of family members, together and apart, background checks, fingerprinting and iris scans, among other things. CONTINUE AT SITE

Rumors are swirling about a Trump and Clinton pick for a running mate. It’s no small matter. An active Vice-President can influence policy, be an effective spokesman for legislation, and if necessary take over the administration and finish an interrupted term. A vice president is also poised to run for election and complete the agenda of a successful predecessor.

The Vice President is first in the line of succession to a President who is removed, resigns, becomes incapacitated or dies. The Vice President as designated by our Constitution, is also the President of the Senate and can break tie votes. That can be crucial in a closely divided Congress.

In the past, electors in the Electoral College, were permitted two votes and the candidate who came in second became the Vice President almost automatically but since 1940 the candidate chooses the potential Vice-President.

The only modern Presidential candidate who did not pick a Veep and had Congress do it for him was Adlai Stevenson, a pompous poseur who lost to Dwight Eisenhower whose Vice President was Richard Nixon.

The qualifications for Vice President are exactly like those for President ….an individual must:

Be a natural born U.S. citizen
Be at least 35 years old
Have resided in the U.S. at least 14 years

Too bad. That leaves Ileana Ros- Lehtinen the doughty Representative from Florida (District 18) out. She is a she, is savvy, great on defense and foreign policy and Hispanic. But, she was born in Cuba.

Although the President is limited to only two terms, a Vice-President has no limit of terms. Thus, Joe Biden could be Vice-President for life as long as a Democrat is President. And Al Gore could have done so too.

In fact, Al Gore could have become President if Bill Clinton had been removed from office after the impeachment. He would have had almost two full years to cool America.What a chilling thought.

The office of Vice President has evolved greatly. At one time it was seen as ceremonial and virtually a sinecure. However, the influence and prestige of the office grew markedly in the last century. Perhaps because a seemingly unprepared and unprepossessing figure like Harry Truman became a worthy successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt who was ill for much of his time in office actually had two Vice Presidents before Harry Truman. John Nance Gardner, a governor of Texas was the Veep in the first two terms (1933-41). Gardner did not think much of the office. He is quoted as saying “the office is not a bucket of warm piss.”

Henry A. Wallace, a Republican progressive served during Roosevelt’s third term (1941-1945). Wallace was an apostle for the “New Deal” and an apologist for Russia. Fortunately President Roosevelt dumped him in 1944 and selected Harry Truman. Imagine America if Wallace had become President. He certainly would have attempted a radical transformation and one can only guess at how the war in the Pacific would have ended.

In 1947 when Wallace tried to run for President a writer described his effort as “”the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”

Harry S Truman of Missouri was elected Vice President for Roosevelt’s fourth term, but served only a few months (Jan-May 1945) before becoming president. The office of the Vice President became vacant when Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency in 1945 and remained so until 1948 when Alben Barkley of Kentucky, was elected.

The more we think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent public outbursts, the more we wonder if the 83-year-old Justice can still perform her duties on the Supreme Court. Her fellow Justices need to stage an intervention and suggest that she make way for someone who knows how a judge is supposed to behave.

We say this more in sadness than anger; Justice Ginsburg would never have talked this way 20 years ago and there’s no joy in seeing a reputation implode. She’d also probably be replaced by another, much younger progressive. But as she indulges her inner Bernie Sanders in public, she is hurting the reputation of the Court and setting a terrible example for other judges.

It’s important to understand how far out of bounds Justice Ginsburg was in her comments to the New York Times. She barged into the presidential race by saying “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president,” joking that her late husband would say they should move to New Zealand if he won. The Justice kept it up in an interview on Monday with CNN, calling Mr. Trump “a faker” and wondering “how has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns?”

Such overt partisanship from a judge should disqualify her from hearing any case related to the presidential election—such as voter ID laws. It would also raise doubts about her fairness in judging executive-branch actions if Mr. Trump becomes President.

Justice Ginsburg further violated judicial norms by lecturing the Senate for not confirming President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. “That’s their job,” she said. “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“We are not as divided as we seem, President Barack Obama told a Dallas memorial for five police officers killed by a black sniper enraged at the alleged mistreatment of African-Americans by white police.

But a different Barack Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at a White House barbecue last July 4. Details of Lamar’s performance are not available, but it is unlikely that he repeated this line (from a recent Saturday Night Live appearance): “I put a bullet in the back of the back of the head of the police….It’s a war outside, bomb in the street, gun in the hood, mob of police,” Lamar’s rap continued.

Of course, the president does not endorse the killing of policemen. But a White House invitation to a rapper who brags about such things is a macabre gauge of America’s national mood. Another frequent White House guest is rapper Jay-Z, a former drug dealer who, like Kendrick Lamar, chants about street violence. Homicidal impulses are so common prevalent among black Americans that they have been naturalized into mainstream culture.

There is endless hand-wringing about the source of the fragility of African-American life in America, but one of the causes surely is the notion that homicidal rage is an acceptable response to social problems. A generation ago, it was still possible for a leading black clergyman, Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, to denounce rappers from the pulpit and dump a truckload of rap CD’s in front of the offices of the Sony Corp. in Manhattan. Rev. Butts has been ridiculed in the interim by the likes of Jay-Z and would not attempt this again.

Many African-Americans believe that they are at war and fighting for their lives. Broadly speaking, they are correct. Something is killing off Black America. It isn’t the police, however. Between 2009 and 2012, though, forty black men were killed by other black men for every black man killed by police, according to Prof. Robert Johnson of the University of Toledo. Policemen killed 491 people in 2015, of whom 132 were black. But American police are more likely to shoot white suspects than black suspects, according to a just-released study conducted by an African-American economist at Harvard University.

There are any number of racist policemen, and there are rare instances of police shootings which amount to deliberate murder, but their impact is small compared to the scale of the problem.

The problem, as Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute reported, is that “blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest US counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.”

This is an autogenocide, or genosuicide, in slow motion. Increasing numbers of black Americans are drawn into patterns of life that lead to more failure and more rage. And it will get worse until African-American leaders tell their constituents to stop blaming white policemen and take responsibility for their own lives.

Only 32% of black adults are married, compared to 51% of adults of all other races. Part of the reason is a shortage of appropriate spouses: only 49% of college-educated black females marry a man of comparable education, compared to 84% of college-educated white women, according to a Brookings study. That, in turn, is the sad result of low college graduation rates among black men: the most recent data show that only 34% of black male college students at public universities and 39% at private universities complete a four-year degree program after six years of trying, compared to 60% for white male students, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education.

The confluence of developments in medical knowledge and military technology enabled doctors to learn a great deal about surgery during the American Civil War. Since, at the war’s outset, very few physicians had any experience treating gunshot wounds, P.J. Horwitz—a Jew from Baltimore and the Union navy’s surgeon general—authored a brief manual on the subject.

At the Start of the Civil War, Few Union Army Surgeons Had Ever Treated a Gunshot Wound By Rebecca Onion

In this three-page, handwritten document, Baltimorean P.J. Horwitz, who served as surgeon general of the Navy for the Union during the Civil War, tries to get his fellow medical officers up to speed on the presentation and treatment of gunshot wounds.

The document is included in an online exhibition,”Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” put together by the Shapell Manuscript Foundation. In introducing Horwitz’s treatise, the anonymous curator notes: “At the outset of the war, the Union medical corps consisted of 83 surgeons and assistant surgeons, few if any of whom had ever treated a gunshot wound.”

The basic information in Horwitz’s treatise, written in January 1862, reflects physicians’ need for rudimentary advice, at this early stage of the war. “One of the first things to be done is to stop the hemorrhage, if there be any, and then carefully examine the wound to see that no foreign body is lodged there in, and then after bathing the flesh in cold water, apply to the wound a piece of lint on which may be spread a little cerate [an ointment],” Horwitz writes.

While the medical corps may have started the war laughably unready for the types and volume of wounds it would see, it would make many improvements in the next four years. “Each side was woefully unprepared, in all aspects, for the extent of the war,” argues Robert F. Reilly, M.D., in an assessment of the performance of physicians and surgeons during the conflict. “Despite this, many medical advances and discoveries occurred as a result of the work of dedicated physicians on both sides”—advances including the safer use of anesthetics, the organization of large hospitals, and the performance of rudimentary neurosurgery.

A transcript follows the document images.

Whoopi Goldberg said on the view that black women wearing blond hair weaves amounts to “cultural appropriation.”

“I think there’s a lot of appropriation going back and forth, the weave . . . the weave doesn’t look like this,” Goldberg said, grabbing her own hair, and then adding “the weave kind of looks like this,” while pointing to the hair of her blonde co host.

“If you are going to talk about appropriating and what’s cool and what’s not, then we are all in deep doo-doo because we are doing it to each other constantly. Everybody is appropriating. Japanese are appropriating. Black folks are appropriating. Spanish people appropriate. We are appropriating each other. It’s not just a black thing.”

In an article for Jet Magazine, Zainib Karim stated that although “to the naked eye, Goldberg’s words might hold some truth,” “what she is speaking of is not cultural appropriation; it’s assimilation.”

“Assimilation is the sister-wife that sprung from white supremacist standards of beauty, living, and social practices,” he writes.

Appropriation is, as another View co host, Sunny Hostin, put it: When “a dominant group in society exploits the culture of a less privileged group without understanding that group’s experience.”

Basically, Goldberg didn’t understand that just because someone uses something from another culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is engaging in “cultural appropriation.”

But is this misunderstanding really that surprising?

After all, it does seem that, particularly in social justice circles and on college campuses, any use of something from another culture – regardless of the circumstances or intent — is fair game for being called out as “cultural appropriation.” Everything from yoga to toe rings to sumo-wrestling fat suits have earned this label, and perhaps it’s time that more people take a look at actual impacts and definitions before knee-jerk shaming others.

In Dallas, Obama mentioned the name of dead sex offender Alton Sterling more times than those of the murdered police officers whom he was pretending to memorialize. After quickly dispensing with the formalities of eulogizing the slain officers, Obama demanded that “even those who dislike the phrase ‘black lives matter’” should “be able to hear the pain of Alton Sterling’s family”.

Alton Sterling was a convicted sex offender, burglar and violent criminal who was shot while reaching for a gun. His family may mourn him, just as every criminal’s family mourns their own, but it was obscene to class him together with five police officers who were murdered by a violent racist while doing their duty.

It is even more obscene when Obama’s favorite sex offender displaces the murdered police officers.

And yet that was Obama’s theme in Dallas. Murdered police officers were contrasted with dead criminals. The proper thing for Americans to do, as Obama told us, was to mourn both officers and criminals, to respect the sacrifices of the police and the anti-police accusations of #BlackLivesMatter.

Obama did not come to Dallas to mourn the murdered police officers, but to defend the ideology that took their lives. And this is what he has done from the very beginning.

Before the shootings, Obama expressed his “condolences for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile” and insisted that the criminal justice system was racist. His statements and speeches after the shootings echoed the same talking points and spin complete with the claims that accusing the police of racism is “not to be against law enforcement”.

“When people say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter”, he famously said.

That’s true. Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean that blue lives don’t matter. It means that blue lives are evil. As Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author on Obama’s reading list, wrote of the dead police officers who gave their lives on September 11, “They were not human to me.” That’s the kindest thing that the black nationalists whose cause Obama has championed have said of the police.

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

The result, especially in the first half of this year, has been an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America. Most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black. Now the consequences of this stream of falsehoods about police may be spinning out of control, with the assassination of five police officers in Dallas last week and the attacks on cops in other cities since then.

Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research, published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, confirmed what Ms. James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public.

In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.CONTINUE AT SITE

Multicultural societies — from 19th-century Austria–Hungary to contemporary Iraq, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda — have a poor record of keeping the peace between competing tribes. They usually end up mired in nihilistic and endemic violence.

The only hope for history’s rare multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious nations is to adopt a common culture, one that artificially suppresses the natural instinct of humans to identify first with their particular tribe. America, in the logical spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, was exceptional among modern societies in slowly evolving from its original, largely European immigrant population to a 21st-century assimilated, integrated, and intermarried multiracial society, in which religious and racial affiliations were incidental, not essential, to one’s public character and identity.

But such a bold experiment was always tenuous and against the cruel grain of history, in which the hard work of centuries could be easily torn apart by the brief demagoguery of the moment. Unfortunately, President Obama, ever since he first appeared on the national political scene in 2008, has systematically adopted a rhetoric and an agenda that is predicated on dividing up the country according to tribal grievances, in hopes of recalibrating various factions into a majority grievance culture. In large part, he has succeeded politically. But in doing so he has nearly torn the country apart. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that no other recent president has offered such a level of polarizing and divisive racial bombast.

Most recently, without citing any facts about the circumstances of the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana, Barack Obama castigated the police and the citizenry on their culpability for racial disparity and prejudicial violence. “[T]hese fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal-justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.” Obama did not yet know the race of the policemen involved (as in the case of Baltimore, the Minnesota shooting involved non-white officers), the circumstances that led to the shootings, or the backgrounds of either the officers or their victims.

Shortly afterwards, twelve Dallas law-enforcement officers were shot, and five of them killed, by a black assassin who declared solidarity with Black Lives Matter and proclaimed his hatred for white law enforcement. That outbreak prompted Obama to take to the podium again to recalibrate his earlier message. This time he amplified his gun-control message, and somewhat delusionally added that the upswing in racial polarization did not imperil national unity — in much the same way that, in years past, he had announced that al-Qaeda was on the run, we were leaving behind a stable Iraq, and ISIS was a jayvee organization. Note the Obama editorial method in the case of police incidents, from Skip Gates to Louisiana and Minnesota: He typically speaks before he has the facts, and when subsequent information calls into question his talking points and theorizing, he never goes back and makes the corrections. Nor does he address facts — from Ferguson to Dallas — that do not fit his political agenda. Finally, a police shooting of an African-American suspect is never an “isolated event,” while the shooting of an officer by a black assassin is isolated and never really thematic of any larger racial pathology.