RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the conservative movement, 2015 started out poorly and continued to be tough all year long. It wasn’t a legislative defeat. It wasn’t political tumult. It was the deaths of too many conservative luminaries who helped build the movement. As conservatives, we need to remember and honor these scholars, because it is all too easy to fall into the fallacy that the movement is defined by what current political candidates say it is. We cannot forget that the conservative movement predates politicians and was, in fact, built by great thinkers.

The conservative movement was built by intellectuals who developed not only the policies but, more important, the critical thinking that so powerfully influenced America’s future. Reflection on 2015 makes clear that we lost some titans, including Martin Anderson, Walter Berns, Harry Jaffa, Ben Wattenberg, Robert Conquest, Amy Kass, and Peter Schramm. They have left in the conservative movement a hole that will be difficult to fill.

Deterrence makes someone not do something. A parent promotes good teen behavior not just by providing cars and smartphones, but also by the explicit specter of graduated punishments that an adolescent does not wish to repeat, and thus chooses instead to abide by the house rules.

In terms of world affairs, a clear display of overwhelming military strength, and the real probability of being willing to use it, remind would-be aggressors not to start stupid conflicts — given that the possibility of winning something through war is overshadowed by the risk of losing far more. A world where everyone knows the unspoken rules as well as the moral and material relative strength and weakness of the various nations is a safer place for all involved.

Or put another way, deterrence, in the famous formulation of the 17th-century British statesman George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, means that “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” Translated, that means that nations do not go to war just over Czechoslovakia, but that other nations are not swallowed up like Czechoslovakia.

When German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann, in a notorious 1917 telegram, offered the government of Mexico all sorts of rewards for attacking the southwestern United States and thereby sidetracking American support for the allies on the Western Front, Mexico balked. But its reason for backing off was not that it liked Americans or thought a preemptive attack would be unfair. Rather, President Carranza worried that Mexico lacked the military clout to take American territory. And even if it could have grabbed, say, Texas, Mexico did not have the power to control it — given a rowdy and armed English-speaking state population, one that Carranza worried was “better supplied with arms than most populations.” In other words, the Second Amendment and a frontier attitude helped to deter Mexico from taking up Zimmermann’s offer.

When South Florida Muslim leader Sofian Zakkout wants people to believe he is a man of peace, he speaks or writes it in English. But when Zakkout wants to show his true colors and curse Jews or call for violence against people, he does so in Arabic. This month, Zakkout’s real self came out once again, as he labeled Jews the “grandsons of monkeys and pigs,” while commemorating the 28th anniversary of Hamas.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout is the Director of the American Muslim Association of North America or AMANA. While the organization may not be very well known outside of South Florida, AMANA is a major player for the Muslim community in the local area. In fact, Zakkout and his group have firm ties to two dozen mosques in the vicinity.

Because of Zakkout’s position of leadership, when he makes a statement, it needs to be taken seriously. In English, he will tell media outlets about how he is a man of peace, about how he was, for years, the co-chair of the Jewish Arab Dialogue Association (JADA). In Arabic, he will make statements which are quite the opposite, supporting and inciting hatred and terror.

This month, Zakkout has been hard at work spreading the vilest of anti-Semitism in Arabic.

The Muslim Brotherhood is to Islamic terrorism what a virus is to disease. Major terrorist leaders from the Caliph of ISIS to Arafat have the Muslim Brotherhood on their resume. And the current leader of Al Qaeda led a Muslim Brotherhood splinter terror group. But its linkages to Islamic terrorism are only a secondary aspect of the organization whose focus is on Islamizing nations through more subtle means.

Paradoxically the Brotherhood has met with far less success in the Muslim world than in the West. Its greatest victories in the Arab Spring would not have happened without Obama’s backing and its takeovers of Egypt and Tunisia were rolled back by popular uprisings while its efforts in Libya, Syria and Yemen were stymied by armed conflict with other Muslims.

The Muslim Brotherhood is unpopular in Egypt these days. It’s also unpopular with Americans.

In one poll, 61 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only 11 percent had a positive view of the Islamic supremacist organization. Only 5 percent of Americans saw the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Egypt as a positive development.

The war is now on American soil, and everybody except Washington, D.C. knows it:

An alleged jihadist arrested in June on charges that he plotted to blow up Times Square may also be the fiend who stabbed a 9-year-old Staten Island boy in the neck five months earlier in what some investigators now believe was a botched ISIS audition. But NYPD detectives investigating the Jan. 9 knife attack have been frustrated by the feds, who won’t give them access to terror suspect Fareed Mumuni, said a source familiar with the probe.

Mumuni, 21, lived only 600 yards from Jermaine Culver, who was stabbed as he walked to school in the Mariners Harbor section of Staten Island. A surveillance camera on a home across the street captured a stocky attacker as he stalked the boy from behind on Union Avenue before grabbing him around the neck and stabbing him in his back, head, neck and arm.

Jermaine is seen stumbling a few steps before he regains his footing and runs.“It looks like he’s trying to kill that kid,” said Luis Padilla, 44, the home’s owner. “He went straight for the jugular.”

Of course he did. Just following the tenets of his “faith.”

No other president has so consciously divided the country by race since Woodrow Wilson.

Clingers 1.0: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Clingers 2.0: “Certain circumstances around being the first African-American president that might not have confronted a previous president, absolutel. … If you are referring to specific strains in the Republican Party that suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, etc., which unfortunately is pretty far out there and gets some traction in certain pockets of the Republican Party, and that have been articulated by some of their elected officials, what I’d say there is that that’s probably pretty specific to me and who I am and my background, and that in some ways I may represent change that worries them…. If you are living in a town that historically has relied on coal and you see coal jobs diminishing, you probably are going to be more susceptible to the argument that I’ve been wiping out the economy in your area .… I think if you are talking about the specific virulence of some of the opposition directed towards me, then, you know, that may be explained by the particulars of who I am.”

Barack Obama in the final stretch of his 2008 primary campaign explained away—off the record in an unguarded moment—his unpopularity in Pennsylvania. The problem then was a biased “them”—not so much the hard-left policies and principles of Barack Obama.

Earlier this month California Gov. Jerry Brown promised to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. This goal will be nearly impossible to achieve with California’s current population, projected to grow by 30% over the next 35 years to 50 million. So ecovangelists are trying to block any economic development that could help support more people.

The Newhall Ranch project in north Los Angeles County, which aims to provide housing for nearly 60,000 people as well as tens of thousands of jobs at stores, schools and recreational centers, is the most recent target. With energy-efficient lighting, comprehensive recycling, bike trails and drought-tolerant landscaping, the 12,000-acre planned community would be a green Levittown. But the proposed development—one of the biggest in state history—has been under siege from its inception in 1994 by environmental activists.

The California Supreme Court recently rejected Newhall’s final environmental-impact report. The court’s legally nebulous decision could delay construction for years—and cast a pall over future development.

Newhall’s report, which the Department of Fish and Wildlife approved in 2010, was more than 5,000 pages, with hundreds of pages dedicated to analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions as required by recent regulatory amendments to the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The state wildlife agency projected that Newhall would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 31% by 2020 relative to the California Air Resources Board’s 2008 “baseline” model. This was a larger reduction than the 29% cut that the board has mandated statewide.

The report also included measures for the developer to restore habitat for species potentially affected by the development, such as the coast horned lizard and Townsend’s big-eared bat. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials would move any unarmored threespine stickleback—a tiny fish protected under state and federal law—out of harm’s way.

No matter. The Center for Biological Diversity, along with other local green groups, sued to block the development, arguing that the state wildlife agency’s methodology for analyzing its greenhouse-gas emissions was flawed. They also contended that the stickleback conservation plan violated California’s prohibition against “taking” and “live transplanting” legally protected species—although state law allows “regulated taking” of threatened species.

Did you call a transsexual person “he” or “she” when they preferred to be called “zhe?” According to a newly updated anti-discrimination law in New York City, you could be fined an eye-watering $250,000.

In the latest, astonishing act of draconian political correctness, the NYC Commission on Human Rights have updated a law on “Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Expression” to threaten staggering financial penalties against property owners who “misgender” employees or tenants.
Incidents that are deemed “wilful and malicious” will see property owners face up to $250,000 in fines, while standard violations of the law will result in a $125,000 fine. For small business owners, these sums are crippling.
It’s not as simple as referring to transmen “he” or transwomen as “she,” either. The legislation makes it clear that if an individual desires, property owners will have to make use of “zhe,” “hir” and any other preferred pronoun. From the updated legislation:
The NYCHRL requires employers and covered entities to use an individual’s preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification. Most individuals and many transgender people use female or male pronouns and titles.
Some transgender and gender non-conforming people prefer to use pronouns other than he/him/his or she/her/hers, such as they/them/theirs or ze/hir

The San Bernardino attacks this month put the spotlight on a type of visa issued to a wide swath of foreigners, from camp counselors to physicians, and how easy it is for recipients to remain in the U.S. after the visa has expired.

A Russian woman who married Enrique Marquez Jr., the man accused of buying rifles used in the Dec. 2 attack, entered the U.S. six years ago on a three-month educational-exchange visa, known as a J-1 visa.

Once that visa expired, she remained for several years in the U.S. without legal status, according to law-enforcement officials.

In late 2014, Mariya Chernykh and Mr. Marquez were married, according to Riverside County, Calif., records. Last week, Mr. Marquez was charged with entering into a sham marriage to enable her to apply for permanent residency in the U.S. Mr. Marquez is also charged with conspiring to support terrorism.

Ms. Chernykh isn’t suspected of involvement in the attack, according to law-enforcement officials. But her case highlights the challenge to deter and identify visa overstays, those who enter the country legally and fail to leave by the stipulated date.