RUTHFULLY YOURS

Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with overwhelming popular goodwill and solid majorities in both houses of Congress. He chose not to translate that political heft into passing “comprehensive immigration reform” (i.e., open borders and amnesties) or more gun control.

He opposed gay marriage. He warned that he could not use presidential fiats to grant amnesty, close down Guantanamo, or remake the EPA in his own image. He borrowed as never before, in vain hopes of kick-starting a natural recovery that he would soon abort through his own anti-business jawboning, more regulations, growth in government, and tax increases.

So far Obama’s legacy is a sudden crash in energy prices and an unforeseen huge expansion in U.S. oil and gas production that came despite — not because of — his efforts.

Indeed, Obama scarcely succeeded in ramming through Obamacare — and only through untruths that it would lower costs and premiums, expand coverage, and ensure continuance of existing plans and patient doctors — and then wisely quit trying to strong-arm other legislation that could have cost him the 2012 election.

A Christmas Day fire at a storefront mosque in Houston that Muslim organizations were quick to blame on “anti-Muslim sentiment” was actually set by a regular attendee of the mosque, Gary Nathaniel Moore. He was arrested by authorities yesterday.

Amazingly, I reported here at PJ Media last year that the 2014 Christmas Day mosque arson attack in Fresno, CA, also turned out to have been committed by a long-time attendee.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

A Houston man has been arrested in connection with a suspected arson at a mosque on Christmas Day.

A spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirmed that the man was arrested early Wednesday, sometime after midnight, and appeared in court 7 a.m. Wednesday.

The suspect, Gary Nathaniel Moore, 37, of Houston, appeared in court at 7 a.m., spokeswoman Nicole Strong said.

According to a charging instrument released by the Harris County District Clerk, Moore told investigators at the scene that he has attended the mosque for five years, coming five times per day to pray seven days per week.

“New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said the news was “sobering” as New York and the nation deal with the “new normal” of terrorism.Via Rusty Weiss of the Mental Recession, Cuomo took the left’s “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality to new, absurd heights when he linked the “new normal” of terrorism to global warming.“We talk about the ‘new normal’ with climate and extreme weather … there’s also a ‘new normal’ when it comes to terrorism,” he said.“Just the way we’ve adjusted to weather … this is part of the new world order,” the governor added. “We’re up to it, but it’s going to take every citizen to do their part also.”

A 25-year-old ex-con from Rochester, New York, was arrested Wednesday on charges he was planning to attack a bar on New Year’s Eve to prove to ISIS he was worthy to join the terror organization in Syria.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that Emanuel Lutchman, a Muslim convert, has been charged “with attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State in what authorities described as a plot to attack civilians.”

Prosecutors say Lutchman was snared in an FBI sting. He faces 20 years in prison if convicted.

Creeping sharia no longer creeps.
There is a bill before Congress (HR569) that singles out hate speech against Muslims. And then some. As of this writing, the resolution, which is nothing short of sharia law, has 82 co-sponsors. All of them are Democrats. And while the bill has little to no chance of passing, it is a window into our future if we don’t change the self-destructive course we are on with respect to how we understand and relate to the Quran and those who follow its teachings.

The Gates of Vienna reports on this chilling reality – one we may have called creeping sharia in the not so distant past but is advancing at such a rapid pace and across such a broad spectrum of our society that “creeping” is now an outmoded term. It’s racing, and it’s infecting every nook and cranny of our culture.

HR569 is just one of the latest stabs aimed at the heart of America. It is Islamic supremacy and dhimmitude in action, as it elevates Muslims to a protected class, superior in position to all others.

Here is what the resolution says:

Condemning violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.

Heather MacDonald: Today, I’m going to talk about the mass illegal immigration and its effect on American society. This summer the nation experienced a horrible murder in San Francisco. A young woman, Kate Steinle, was fatally shot by an illegal alien who had been deported five times already for various felonies. I wanted to deport him a sixth time, but was foiled in doing so by the San Francisco Sheriff, who alleged that this murderer should be let out.

As the country was trying to digest this information and what it meant for our immigration policies residents of Los Angeles, if they relied exclusively for their information from The Los Angeles Times, would have been largely clueless. Because The Los Angeles Times barely covered it. Only several days after Donald Trump had brought this to the national attention did the LA Times get around reporting what had happened and the underlying policy of sanctuary cities that led to it.

The unwillingness of The Los Angeles Times to report on this murder honestly is emblematic of how mass illegal immigration is distorting our cultural discourse and resulting in a whole series of taboos about what can be said in polite discourse.

Islamophobia is everywhere. Literally everywhere.

Like the mosque vandalized in Fresno on Christmas.

Fresno police say a lone suspect vandalized the Islamic Cultural Center in Northeast Fresno on Christmas morning. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer says it is clear the incident is a hate crime which is why the FBI is also investigating this case.

Except the Islamophobic incident turned out to be the work of… Asif Mohammad Khan, who had “posted on social media that Osama bin Laden was the “most inspirational person in his life.”

But surely the Islamophobic Houston mosque Christmas fire had to be real. It just had to be.

Mustafaa Carroll, who is the executive director for the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on law enforcement to investigate, citing a recent spike in vandalism to mosques that have prompted hate crime investigations.

“We urge law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this fire,” he said in a statement.

The campaign to deny the murder and shooting spike in many American cities continues apace. The latest effort is a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, which the press has hailed ecstatically as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the “Ferguson effect”—the phenomenon of officers backing off of proactive policing and thereby emboldening criminals. In fact, the report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.

The Brennan Center researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation’s 30 largest cities for the period January 1, 2015, to October 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso, and Nashville.) The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015’s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October 2015, compared with the similar period in 2014.

The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11 percent. (By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16 percent increase in homicides by September 2015. On Monday, the Brennan Center revised its own estimate of the 2015 murder increase to 14.6 percent.) An 11 percent one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11 percent increase as trivial. They employ several strategies for doing so, the most important of which is simply not disclosing the actual figure. An Atlantic article titled “Debunking the Ferguson Effect” reports: “Based on their data, the Brennan Center projects that homicides will rise slightly overall from 2014 to 2015.” A reader could be forgiven for thinking that that “slight” rise in homicides is of the order of, say, 2 to 3 percent. Nothing in the Atlantic write-up disabuses the reader of that error. Vox, declaring the crime increase “bunk,” is similarly discreet about the actual homicide jump, leaving it to the reader’s imagination. Crime & Justice News, published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, coyly admits that “murder is up moderately in some places” without disclosing what that “moderate” increase may be.

The news reports about the National Security Agency snooping on foreign leaders show a White House intent on abusing NSA capabilities for political purposes. As a veteran of the George W. Bush White House, I’m persuaded that had we done this, the Democrats in Congress would have called it a major scandal and held endless hearings designed to attack the administration.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument — and in order to avoid disclosing any classified information — that the United States has the capability to monitor telephone conversations and emails of foreign leaders. There are at least two kinds of communications that we should not monitor.

The first would be communications of our close allies — people like British prime minister David Cameron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and top leaders of countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, France, and Israel. To snoop on them is a betrayal of trust, of the assumption that we are dealing with each other directly as close allies. Because they are close allies, if we want to know what they are thinking and doing, we should ask them — not spy on them as a matter of course.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/30/the-presidential-candidates-and-the-war-were-in-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Michael Finch, the president and Chief Operating Officer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Michael interviewed Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

The two discussed The Presidential Candidates and the War We’re In, focusing on: Who dares to say “Sharia” and “Jihad”?

Don’t miss it!

The publication of several news stories in the Wall Street Journal late Tuesday, Dec. 29, produced a subterranean tremor in the crowd that closely monitors U.S.-Israel relations. The articles, on the surface, revealed information that was not all that astonishing: The Israelis spied to obtain information on the U.S. and the U.S. spied on Israel regarding the recent Nuclear Iran Deal negotiations. Big news for naifs, but not so for close and constant observers.

But just below the words looms a much bigger story, one not quite completely spelled out by the Journal reporters, Adam Entous and Danny Yadron. But that story may well, or at least should, lead to a whole new political firestorm harkening back to the furor that led to the Church Committee hearings in the 1970’s.

Because, really, who did not already know that U.S. President Barack Obama and his team were furious with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the Nuclear Iran Deal? And wasn’t it already known that the Israelis received information about the presumably “secret” back-door negotiations between U.S. intermediaries and Iran about a nuclear deal? And why would anyone be surprised that such tensions between two traditionally rock-solid allies would create or further encourage less than desirable activity to reveal what the other was doing?