RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you seek to understand Barack Obama and his views, the best place to go is his speeches. But you have to read them in their entirety, not rely on hearing them or on the media’s summary of them. When you do, you come to realize how often what Obama says is morally and intellectually confused and even untrue.

The most recent example was his speech last week at a mosque in Baltimore. In addition to reassuring Muslim Americans that they are as American as Americans of every other faith — a point that any president, Republican or Democrat, would and should make — President Obama spoke a lot of nonsense, some of it dangerous nonsense.

President Obama: “So let’s start with this fact: For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself, ‘Islam,’ comes from ‘salam’ — peace.”

Why did Mr. Obama say this? Even Muslim websites acknowledge that “Islam” means “submission” [to Allah], that it comes from the Arabic root “aslama” meaning submission, and that “Islam” is the command form of that verb.

That’s why “Muslim” means “One who submits,” not “One who is peaceful.”

The racial spoils industry survives on several requisites.

One, Americans must be readily identifiable as being non-white or white. Two, once non-white claimants pass the racial litmus test, they must think and speak in a particular progressive manner, in dutiful obeisance to those who set up and perpetuate the racial spoils system. And three, racialism must remain defined as a one-way bias.

The problem with the first criterion is multifold. America today truly is a multiracial, intermarried society in which the old rubric “white” no longer equates to “of European descent.” Obama’s racist former minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright appears whiter than many Americans of Mediterranean heritage.

Lots of Americans of various hues are de facto classified as white, either by themselves or by the government that refuses to make them eligible for affirmative action. Over the years I had hundreds of students who were clearly non-white in appearance, first-generation Americans of Arab, Armenian, and Punjabi background, who did not qualify for any racial set-asides. The vast majority of them were as dark as or darker than third-generation Mexican-Americans who did.

Many whites of European descent are indistinguishable from so-called Latinos. Certainly a Sicilian-American can look more “Latino” than someone of Mexican or South American descent. If Ted Cruz took his mother’s name, no one would know that Ted Wilson was Latino. If George Zimmerman had used the name Jorge Mesa, the Trayvon Martin confrontation never would have made front-page news. Such a rigged system cannot even defend its own biases. Accordingly, it retreats toward the subjective category “diversity” to make up prejudice and its remedies, in ad hoc fashion, on the basis of career and political expediencies.

Why would NASA ban the use of the word “Jesus” by a Christian group that advertises its meetings in an agency newsletter?

They’re only following federal guidelines, they say, about preventing the “government endorsement” of a religion.

Fox News:

“It was shocking to all of us and very frustrating,” NASA engineer Sophia Smith told me. “NASA has a long history of respecting religious speech. Why wouldn’t they allow us to put the name Jesus in the announcement about our club?”

Liberty Institute, one of the nation’s largest religious liberty law firms, threatened to file a federal lawsuit unless NASA apologizes and stops censoring the name ‘Jesus’.

The JSC Today newsletter is distributed electronically and includes a number of Space Center events – from salsa dancing lessons to soccer camp.

NASA issued a statement late Monday – that did not refute Liberty Institute’s charge.

“NASA does not prohibit the use of any specific religious names in employee newsletters or other internal communications. The agency allows a host of employee-led civic, professional, religious and other organizations to meet on NASA property on employee’s own time. Consistent with federal law, NASA attempts to balance employee’s rights to freely exercise religious beliefs with its obligation to ensure there is no government endorsement of religion. We believe in and encourage open and diverse dialogue among our employees and across the agency.”

Tonight I walked onto the subway and saw the car was half-empty because a stinking bum was lying on a seat, and no one wanted to smell him.

Rome fell. New York is falling down. It is filled with illegalities and filth as a result of the good intentions and failed ideas of liberals. Politicians pretend to want the best while they deliver the worst.

De Blasio and New York City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Mark-Vivirito have decriminalized public urination and quality-of-life offenses. Are they kidding? De-civilizing a beautiful city is not a positive. It is a fall from grace.

The Broken Windows theory states that small crimes lead to major crimes. De Blasio and Mark-Vivirito should study sociology. Their ignorance is ruining our city.

They pretend to be kind to the poor while they destroy their lives and leave them scantily clothed with no toilet paper on street corners. They whisper sweet things in bums ears while they throw their lives into sewers.

De Blasio and Mark-Vivirito want to lower the quality of life in New York. They are doing a good job at making New York into a third-world country.

When I get on a subway, there are small Mexican bands singing and break-dancers stepping on my feet. I don’t interfere with their solitude; why should they bother me? And I’m supposed to tip them for failing to entertain me?

From the executive summary of “Beach Books: 2014-2016,” a report released Feb. 9 by the National Association of Scholars on its study of more than 350 universities’ “common reading” programs—usually books assigned to freshmen to read the summer before starting school:

Colleges presume students regard reading as a strange and difficult activity, to which they must be introduced with careful thought and great caution. Since these colleges usually do not dare to enforce consequences for not reading the books, they instead have to allure the students with the sweetener of easy, exciting reading. The colleges therefore tend to assign no-fuss digestibles—memoirs and nonfiction, young adult books, science fiction, and comic books, books with young protagonists and books where the students might already have seen the movie, and affirming books that make the students feel good about themselves and what they can do with their college education.

Mission statements for common reading programs further limit the selected texts. Common reading programs that require an author available for a campus visit have to select a recent work, and probably from an author associated with a book publisher specializing in the commercial genre of common reading books. The desire to create community limits the common readings to the most anodyne of topics, excludes any intellectual topic interesting enough to be controversial, and has a marked tendency to redefine community around a shared catechism of belief rather than around a shared love of inquiry into truth. The emphasis on fostering non-academic values such as community, civic engagement, and social justice leads to selecting books that emphasize collective effort for non-academic pursuits rather than the solitary disengagement that is a fundamental component and delight of the life of the mind. College, this sort of common reading tells the incoming student, is a place to indulge a jolly, earnest desire to change the world for the better—and nothing more.

2016 may well be remembered as the year that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel finally died its death—in a clinical sense, at least.

Across the U.S., state legislatures are passing bills that will outlaw state authorities from investing public funds in, and entering into contracts with, companies and other entities that engage in a boycott of Israel. This doesn’t mean that engaging in a boycott of Israel is illegal, but for anyone who cares about their bottom line, the legislation should provide a powerful incentive against its adoption.

These anti-boycott bills should properly be seen as anti-discrimination measures, and welcomed on those grounds. No U.S. state should contract with entities that enforce discriminatory policies—and boycotting Israel in the expectation that doing so will contribute to the Jewish state’s demise is, by definition, an act of discrimination. Why should taxpayer funds subsidize such bigotry? Why should jobs and revenues be sacrificed in the promotion of hatred towards an entire nation?

As we’ve learned over several years, however, in the inverted world of the boycotters, this same hatred is regarded as love and this same discrimination is regarded as justified resistance. Hence the BDS movement’s depiction of the anti-boycott bills as a conspiracy of “special interests” aimed at crushing free speech for Palestinian advocates.

This is, of course, the sort of distortion that we have come to expect from the boycotters. The truth is that, unlike France, which in October 2015 determined that BDS, as a form of discrimination, is outlawed in speech and in action, in America the advocacy of a boycott of Israel remains protected speech. As the Lawfare Project pointed out in an incisive analysis of current objections to the anti-boycott bills, “Individual consumers, acting in their own individual capacities, cannot be punished for refusing to purchase Israeli products, regardless of motivation. Supporters of BDS are also free to stage protests, circulate petitions, and otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights to advocate for boycotts of Israel, Israeli goods, and Israeli persons.” Further, with regard to the specific allegation that the anti-boycott bills violate the First Amendment, the Lawfare Project counters that the statutory prohibitions apply only to business conduct that is discriminatory, and not “advocacy, picketing, or other forms of speech in furtherance of boycotting.”

Nade Conrad’s long black hair disappeared under the cover of a lilac hijab.

“I feel different,” she said.

Conrad, who is not Muslim, had donned the scarf to show support for a Muslim friend at Normandale Community College in Bloomington.

Such acts of “hijab solidarity” are on the rise.

World Hijab Day, a global event inviting people of all faiths to post pictures of themselves in a hijab on social media, is gathering steam. It was at a World Hijab Day event at Normandale — one of several such events held at Minnesota colleges in early February — that Conrad first tried on a hijab.

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges has worn a head scarf when meeting with leaders of the city’s Somali-American community. And a professor at a Christian college in Illinois just resigned after a backlash over her choice to wear the scarf.

You can’t accuse us of conspiracy to commit murder, because we were actually solders engaged in war. That’s the argument offered by a group of five Muslim men from Minnesota who were caught last year attempting to flee the country to become ISIS fighters. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

[The defendants] are asking a federal judge to drop murder conspiracy charges on grounds that they have “combatant immunity” under both common and international law.

They say combatants are immune from criminal prosecutions for acts of war, including murder, against military targets.

…

“ISIL has engaged in atrocious acts,” attorneys for the five said in one motion. “But however one might describe it as an entity, it has an organized professional army engaged in traditional military warfare — an army with which the defendants are alleged to have intended to join in ‘combat.’ ”

Federal prosecutors who brought the case argued in a court filing last month that the men were “grossly mistaken” in claiming ISIL fighters are combatants as part of a regularly constituted military force.

Regardless of how the case pans out, do we need any further evidence that ISIS is a declared enemy of the United States? They’re literally asking to be treated as such.

It’s ironic. On the one hand, you have folks advocating that terror suspects be treated like civilians and given criminal trials with full constitutional rights. On the other hand, you have these guys trying to dodge criminal prosecution by claiming to be non-civilian combatants. Which is it? It can’t be both.

It was strange to see Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng in chains, but there she was: shackled, in purplish county-jail scrubs, heavy chains swinging across her belly. She doesn’t look like much of a menace to society; in fact, she looks exactly like what she is: an unimposing, middle-aged, female doctor in Rowland Heights, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb that is home to a large and largely well-off Asian-American community, mainly of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean background.

She is going away, for 30 years to life, sentenced late last week on three second-degree murder convictions related to deaths in which she did not have a direct hand, at murder scenes she was nowhere near. It’s the rest of the charges that tell the story: 19 counts of unlawful prescription of a controlled substance, one count of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.

Dr. Tseng is the first physician to be convicted of murder for contributing to the current epidemic of prescription-opiate addiction — the motive force behind the national heroin epidemic — through her criminally wanton over-prescription of pharmaceutical painkillers. She probably won’t be the last: Dr. Gerald Klein of Palm Beach, Fla., was charged with first-degree murder under similar circumstances last year, though in the end he was acquitted of all but one relatively minor drug charge. Other cases are in the works.

Dr. John K. Sturman Jr. had his admitting privileges revoked in the state of Indiana in 2012, and he had earlier been disciplined by state authorities in California for his irresponsible handling of opiate prescriptions. Naturally — inevitably, really — he was hired by our corrupt and incompetent Department of Veterans Affairs, to work at a VA hospital in Danville, Ill., where his responsibilities included — can you guess? — implementing an “opioid safety initiative.” Last summer, he was charged with three homicides and 16 felony counts related to improper prescriptions.

He was arrested at a VA hospital management meeting.