RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Barack Obama visited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he said: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.”

While Obama has been President, Muslims have murdered non-Muslims, avowedly in the cause of Islam, at Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, and attempted to do so in many, many other places. Imagine if armed Baptists screaming “Jesus is Lord” had committed murder, and explained that they were doing so in order to advance Christianity, in four American cities, and had attempted to do so in many others. Imagine that those killers were supporters of a global Christian movement that had repeatedly called for attacks on U.S. civilians and declared its determination to destroy the United States.

Imagine how incongruous it would be in that case for the President of the United States to visit a church and say: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Christian Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.” And imagine how unlikely it would be that Barack Obama would ever have done that.

But his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore was the apotheosis of the Muslim victimhood myth, as he signaled yet again to the world (and worldwide jihadis) that in the U.S., Muslims are victims, victims of unwarranted concern over jihad terror, and thus that concern is likely to lessen even more, as Obama dismantles still more of our counter-terror apparatus.

— Ben Sasse is the junior Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska and former president of Midland University. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, was formerly a Republican U.S. senator from South Carolina.

The land of the mostly free and the home of the brave.”

That sounds wrong, and it is. But “mostly free” is how the U.S. economy rates in the recently released 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. This is bad news for Americans in general, and especially unfortunate for our poorest, most vulnerable citizens.

A joint research product of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, the Index measures the economic freedom of nations based on ten criteria, including the rule of law, size of government, regulatory efficiency, and market openness. These factors affect how easily Americans from Nebraska to New York can climb ladders of opportunity, start businesses, and make a better life for their families. These are the things that really matter.

Nations such as Switzerland and Australia continue to rank among the ten freest economies in the world, while North Korea and Cuba remain on the bottom rungs — their citizens the victims of crippling economic repression.

The good news is that the average score for the 189 nations analyzed rose again this year. In other words, economic freedom overall advanced globally for the fourth year running. The bad news: Economic freedom declined here in the United States.

Our 2016 score is only 75.4 out of a possible 100 — well below the 80 points required to earn a “mostly free” rating. Indeed, the new score ties our previous worst — set in 1998. Put another way, all U.S. advances in economic freedom logged in the last 18 years have now been wiped out. As Americans, we shouldn’t have to settle for anything short of excellence — that’s not who we are.

America is exceptional because we are free. We are unique in history because we haven’t stood in line to ask a king, a court, or a bureaucracy for our freedoms. We have invented and invested, collaborated, and created great products, businesses, and services without government micromanagement.

rack Obama suffers from serious case of the real Islamophobia — fear of telling the truth about Islam. Even though a “progressive,” he says nary a word about the rampant misogyny and homophobia in Islam or about Sharia law whose medieval strictures are preferred by 51% of American Muslims. Nor does he seem to care that so few of these same American Muslims actively oppose radical Islam. The president prefers the Hamas-linked CAIR to courageous reformers like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. But that’s no surprise. For Obama, radical Islam doesn’t even exist.

Instead, he claims American citizens are mistreating their Muslim brothers and sisters when anyone with a web browser can see that simply isn’t true and is yet another Obama lie. In fact, anti-Muslim acts in the USA are few and far less than those against Jews. According to the FBI, in 2014, 57% of hate crimes targeted Jews, only 16% Muslims. Moreover, hate crimes themselves are extremely infrequent in this country, only 1140 (again from 2014) in a nation with a population well over 320 million. Compare hate crimes to burglaries — 2,159,878, according to the FBI, in 2010 — and it becomes obvious how minuscule the threat is, particularly to Muslims. It’s almost non-existent.

Yet Obama continues to hector us about our anti-Muslim bias. Actually what he is demonstrating is an unconscious contempt for Muslims, treating them like children who need to be coddled. And as most parents know, coddling children is a sure way to ratify, even encourage, bad behavior.

Obama’s choice for his first mosque visit did just that. From Investor’s Business Daily:

President Obama is conferring legitimacy on a Baltimore mosque the FBI just a few years ago was monitoring as a breeding ground for terrorists, after arresting a member for plotting to blow up a federal building.

As the body count at the hand of Islamic extremists continues to rise in America, shouldn’t the president be trying to come up with a way to defend Judeo-Christian types, who cling to guns and the Bible, from Islamic jihadi types who cling to machetes and the Quran?

Guess not, because for his first visit to a U.S. mosque, Obama chose a congregation where a Sudanese native and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Adam el-Sheikh, was chief imam for almost twenty years.

Why would a U.S. president even give credence to a congregation once led by a man who also lent a hand in founding the Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood-established organization interested in advancing sharia law?

Does Obama not care that in his spare time, the current executive director of the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Islamic legal scholars, also helped found the notorious Dar Al-Hijrah mosque, led by the late al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki? Or that in 2004, while still serving as imam of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, el-Sheikh discussed Palestinian suicide bombers with the Washington Post?

Obama’s mosque visit demonstrates tacit acceptance of a form of gender apartheid

To Muslim women’s rights activists fighting for equal access to mosques as part of a broader campaign for reform, President Obama’s visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore represents a step backwards.

This past weekend, dozens of girls and boys as young as about 8 years old ran up the stairwell to the main entrance of the musallah, or main prayer hall, of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Obama visits Wednesday in his first presidential visit to a U.S. mosque. As the children rounded the corner, a stern mosque Sunday school teacher stood before them, shouting, “Girls, inside the gym! Boys in the musallah.”

The girls, shrouded in headscarves that, in some cases, draped half their bodies, slipped into a stark gymnasium and found seats on bare red carpet pieces laid out in a corner. They faced a tall industrial cement block wall, in the direction of the qibla, facing Mecca, a basketball hoop above them. Before them a long narrow window poured a small dash of sunlight into the dark gym.

On the other side of the wall, the boys clamored excitedly into the majestic musallah, their feet padded by thick, decorated carpet, the sunlight flooding into the room through spectacular windows engraved with the 99 names of Allah, or God, in Islam. Ornate Korans and Islamic books filled shelves that lined the front walls.

As President and Michelle Obama argued decades ago in the context of the U.S. civil rights movement, separate is indeed unequal. To Muslim women’s rights activists fighting for equal access to mosques as part of a broader campaign for reform — from equal education for women and girls to freedom from so-called “honor killings” — the president’s visit to a mosque that practices such blatant inequity represents a step backwards. While it may be meant to convey a message of religious inclusiveness to American Muslims, the visit demonstrates tacit acceptance of a form of discrimination that amounts to gender apartheid. For that reason, we will be standing outside the mosque on Johnnycake Road, as close as the Secret Service allows, to protest the separate and unequal standards inside and advocate for equal rights.

FROM MIDEAST OUTPOST FEBRUARY 2016

Editor’s note: This prescient article was written in 2004, long before the current Muslim invasion which is overwhelming Europe and, thanks to Obama’s policies, will have a major impact here. While Steinlight believed American Jewish organizations were waking up to the dangers of Muslim immigration, this has turned out to be wildly over-optimistic. This is an edited version of a much longer essay—well worth reading in its entirely—at www.cis.org/articles/2004/steinlight2.html

Dr. Stephen M. Steinlight is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. For more than six years he was the Director of National Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.

Among the articles of faith in the waning culture of secular liberalism that has served as an ersatz religion for many mainstream American Jews, the most vulnerable tenet is belief in “generous legal immigration,” the euphemism for open-borders immigration in the lexicon of American-Jewish public affairs agencies. This is not to accuse them of crude hypocrisy and double-talk so much as engaging in intellectual and moral trimming, self-deception, and denial.

Promulgating self-deception isn’t merely bad ethics; it’s untenable as a matter of policy: it conflicts with the interests, security and values of American Jewry. Survey research, plus mountains of anecdotal evidence, reveals a profound change in attitude among American Jews. Opinion polls in the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001 show a plurality favoring lowered immigration, 70 percent the introduction of a secure national identity card, and 55 percent believing Muslims are the most anti-Semitic group in the United States. It may not require another domestic terrorist enormity for respondents to discern simple cause-and-effect relationships; more ambitious efforts to persuade might suffice.

My experience at the grassroots suggests Jews know little about the history of their own immigration, immigration policy, the scale of immigration, or the engines that drive it. Frequently, all that’s required to effect attitudinal change is apprising them. When I began my efforts, the Jewish media spoke of Jewish attitudes in favor of open-borders immigration as “monolithic;” now it’s commonplace to speak of “a raging debate.” If this could be accomplished essentially by one person, what might a concerted, well-funded effort achieve? Among the community’s organizational leadership, enthusiasm for this dangerous anachronism is a mile wide and an inch deep.

“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

— Article I, Section 1, U.S. Constitution

The federal government is broken. And while there is plenty of blame to go around, only Congress can fix it.

We don’t mean this as an indictment of any one leader or party, because the dysfunction in Washington today has accreted over decades, under Houses, Senates, and presidents of every partisan combination, as well as the many different justices of the Supreme Court.

To be sure, not every misguided, dysfunctional federal policy is a direct act of Congress. But that points toward the root problem.

The stability and moral legitimacy of America’s governing institutions depend on a representative, transparent, and accountable Congress to make its laws. For years, however, Congress has delegated too much of its legislative authority to the executive branch, skirting the thankless work and ruthless accountability that Article 1 demands and taking up a new position as backseat drivers of the republic.

So today, Americans’ laws are increasingly written by people other than their representatives in the House and Senate, and via processes specifically designed to exclude public scrutiny and input. This arrangement benefits well-connected insiders who thrive in less-accountable modes of policymaking, but it does so at the expense of the American people — for whose freedom our system of separated powers was devised in the first place.