RUTHFULLY YOURS

Saadiq Long is an American-born Muslim (convert) and a US Air Force veteran. Per an exclusive report by Patrick Poole at PJM, Long and several family members have been detained in a Turkish jail under suspicion for being part of an ISIS cell. Here’s the back story:

Two years ago Long wanted to return to Oklahoma from Qatar, where he had been living with his wife and child, teaching English for a living. But he was unable to get back to the United States because his name was on the no-fly list. He claimed the only reason his name was on the list was because he was Muslim, that no-fly lists were “Islamophobic,” and that he had no affiliations with anyone that would raise suspicion about him.

Long got a lot of media attention as leftists rushed to his defense. Naturally CAIR got in on the act and successfully advocated for having Long’s name removed from the list long enough for him to return to Oklahoma. (Geez, what’s the point of being on this list if your name can be removed temporarily so you can fly?)

The Obama administration is pulling out all the stops to deny Christians in the Middle East any relief from their horrific plight. The door to the United States has been closed using an obscure bureaucratic angle that withholds recognition of official refugee status for Christians fleeing ISIS. And now an unnamed State Department representative has signaled that Middle Eastern Christians may be excluded from an official declaration of genocide. Per a report at NRO, Yazidis will be officially recognized as victims of genocide. And rightfully so. But Christians are not slated to be. And while this may seem like meaningless bureaucratic garbage compared to the reality that is unfolding in the Middle East, the implications are significant.

First, it would continue to render invisible the genocide that is being committed against Christians in the Middle East. There are no words to describe this disgrace, but sin comes to mind. For an overview of the savagery that has been, and continues to be, inflicted upon Christians in the Middle East, see the short summary of part of NRO article, below.

The State Department and the other US security agencies are telling us to be afraid. Not quite like that, but they’ve issued a dire “travel warning” and “terror alert.”

They overheard “chatter.” Obviously in Arabic and it wasn’t Happy Thanksgiving. Paris wasn’t enough. They want New York, again, though no place is safe.

This is the real deal. Should we be worried? Yes and no.

At a time when our president scoffs at Republicans and makes Jews and Christians feel like second-class citizens, it’s comforting to know that our national security officers (FBI, CIA) care for all of us equally. It is gratifying to know that somebody likes us and means to protect us from the barbarians who keep storming our borders.

That’s a relief, if only we knew exactly what to do about these warnings.

In Israel they don’t need “terror warnings” because the terror is with them every moment of every day.

If I’m being Islamophobic, very well, they made us that way. They made Brussels that way. The capital is on total lockdown because Islam came to town.

From time to time, something will leap out to me as an illustration of the fact that blacks and whites often inhabit separate realities. I’ve often told the story of the editorial in a black neighborhood newspaper in Philadelphia warning African-Americans to flee urban areas in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential elections because George W. Bush was planning to — this was presented as unquestionable fact – use nuclear weapons against the inner cities to suppress the black vote. This wasn’t somebody ranting on Twitter — this was in print, in a regularly published newspaper that was, in the early days of the 21st century, still a going concern.

I’ve come to call this sort of thing (with apologies to Richard Hofstadter) the paranoid style in African-American politics. Mild versions of conspiracy theories play a large role in mainstream American politics in the form of folk beliefs about how government works, the role of lobbyists and campaign contributions, and the like. For right-wing populists, it’s the “Establishment” and the “donor class,” for left-wingers it’s the Koch brothers, Big Oil, Big Money, Big Bigness, etc. We’ve all heard the story of how we could be running our automobiles on seawater if not for the fact that the petro-billionaires are suppressing the technology. The closer you get to the fringes, the more prominent the role of conspiracy theories. But it seems to me that conspiracy theory plays an outsize role in mainstream African-American political discourse.

Years after the initial rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the American people, the health-care industry, and the courts still struggle to navigate the law. Its heavy regulations and new tax burdens have generated numerous consequences, many of which are harmful to patients and families. Although supporters point to the millions of newly insured under the law, the truth is, that as many as 90 percent of those are estimated to have enrolled into Medicaid, second-class coverage that, according to a 2014 Merritt Hawkins report, most doctors do not even accept.

Even worse, the government’s Department of Health and Human Services reported in December 2014 that 51 percent of doctors on official Medicaid state lists are not available to new beneficiaries. Meanwhile, millions of other families have lost their previous private insurance directly because of ACA decrees. For new private coverage, insurance premiums have continued to skyrocket. Most alarmingly, the premiums of what were low-cost high-deductible plans are accelerating faster than any other coverage after the passage of the ACA, directly countering the promise of more affordability when the bill was passed. Choice of doctors and hospitals through the government’s exchange-based coverage has also narrowed compared with pre-ACA individual market plans.

Ahead of President François Hollande’s visit to the White House this morning, a French diplomat told CBS News that the French leader will deliver a clear message to the American president: “The imminent threat from ISIS is an emergency that requires urgent action.” So far, Obama has refused to acknowledge that the Islamic State’s bloody assault on Paris demands a change in his approach to the threat. “We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through,” the president told reporters just three days after the massacre. Yet now, some of the administration’s closest supporters are challenging the weakness of the president’s effort to degrade and destroy ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh).

On Sunday, former secretary of defense Leon Panetta told NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think we have got to be much more aggressive and much more unified in the effort to take on ISIS.” “I think that the resources applied to that mission, frankly, have not been sufficient,” observed Panetta. “We need to increase the tempo of our air strikes, we need to organize ground forces, particularly the Sunnis and the Kurds, and arm them so that they can take territory back from ISIS.” Doing more to stop ISIS is urgent, Panetta explained, because “they are a clear and present danger, not only to Europe, but to this country as well.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed a similar sense of urgency, saying “we have to be prepared” for an ISIS attack on the U.S. homeland. “I’ve never been more concerned,” Feinstein said. “I read the intelligence faithfully,” she added. “ISIL is not contained. ISIL is expanding.” Her comments served as a direct rebuttal to the president’s statement, just hours before the Paris massacre, that “from the start our goal has been first to contain [ISIS], and we have contained them.”

On the Glenn Beck show, Friday, incoming Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin explained in two words how he will push back against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate the coal mining in his state: “pound sand.”

The governor elect’s plan to use the 10th amendment to thwart President Obama’s goal of destroying the coal industry is beautiful in its simplicity.

“The powers not given to the federal government are the responsibility of the states and of the people. Every time this has been adjudicated in the past 150 + years – it has been tested in the courts – it has come down on the side of the states,” Bevin explained.

“Never in the history of the world has there been more consumption of coal than there is right now,” he noted, adding that Kentucky, with its rich coal resources, should be allowed to get in on that.

“To my way of thinking, we will tell the EPA and other elected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state – to pound sand.”

From Afghanistan to Iraq and around the world, the military manages to always get Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings to all the force. That’s admirable. Not nearly as cheery is the state of the American armed forces and Washington’s lackluster effort to deliver the troops, equipment, and maintenance the military needs.

The annual edition of the Heritage Foundation Index of U.S. Military Strength rated the state of the armed forces as marginal. Meanwhile, Washington’s treatment of its responsibilities for providing for the common defense has been anything but stellar. “The best thing that could happen for all the services, at least in my view, would be for us to have predictable, on-time budgets,” complained the outgoing Secretary of the Army John McHugh last month before he fled the Pentagon. He continued: “The challenges that all the departments face are significant, but we would be better postured to meet them, even with declining resources, were we assured that we would have a budget on time. That it would be a figure that is known, that we could plan for, and that our industrial partners can plan for as well.” It has been years since Congress and the president passed a defense budget—let alone got one done on time.

With the death of Jihadi John less than two weeks ago in a Raqqa airstrike, the Islamic State lost one of the most recognizable masked men of their P.R. jihad: an executioner who would introduce the West to murder ISIS-style, an English-speaking killer eager to behead Americans and Brits.

But even before the passing of Kuwait-born, London-raised Mohammed Emwazi, ISIS had incorporated other English-speakers into their videos — with American or Canadian accents.

And unlike some of the Jihadi John videos where the knife-wielding Emwazi isn’t shown actually beheading his victims, a recent ISIS video shows a masked American beheading a Kurdish prisoner.

An ISIS member with an American accent tells President Obama they’re beheading Peshmerga prisoners in revenge for airstrikes.
The Peshmerga Killer

This fair-skinned jihadi appeared at the end of a late October video that was mostly in Arabic, spoken by a narrator walking through the decimated compound near Hawija, Iraq, where Kurdish and U.S. forces rescued dozens of Iraqi prisoners facing imminent death.

Then the 15-minute video cut to four Peshmerga prisoners in orange jumpsuits kneeling before the rubble, and the black-clad killers wielding knives behind each Kurd.