RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/bill-barr-on-the-forces-of-division-in-america/

EXCERPTS:

Now back in private life, Barr has lost none of his critical acumen. His speech on May 20 for the Alliance Defending Freedom is a case in point. “[T]he greatest threat to religious liberty in America today,” he said, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system.” Barr is right: 

We are rapidly approaching the point—if we have not already reached the point—at which the heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country.

Barr traced the evolution of the dominant attitude about the relationship between religion and government-financed public schools through three phases. In the first phase, which ran from the educational reform movement of the early 19th century through the mid-20th century, public education was seen as inculcating the values of good citizenship and, beyond that, a moral outlook that was grounded explicitly in Protestant Christianity. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington spoke in this context of “Anglo-Protestant values,” a phrase that drew instant obloquy from secularists and other radicals who fell over themselves trying to decide which was worse, the “Anglo” part or the “Protestant” part. 

“The key point,” Barr noted, was that until the 1970s, this “anodyne form of Christianity” offered a “generally acceptable ‘pan-Protestantism’” that was taught in public schools throughout the country. Accommodations were easily made for Catholics, Jews, and members of other religions, but the dominant note were those “Anglo-Protestant” values that Huntington extolled. “Throughout American his- tory,” Huntington noted, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.” 

But things took an ominous turn in the 1960s and 1970s. It was then that the ACLU nuts and other members of the Left “embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground.” School prayer? Out. A crèche at Christmas? Absolutely not. This was phase two: the effort to purge the public square, beginning with public educational institutions of all remnants of religious identity. This is what Barr called “secularization by subtraction.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

“The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.”
— Daniel 2:33

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be “enlightened” by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists. The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia. It wasn’t just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product—educating students—was defective. No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge. More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt. 

But until recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.

All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.

Protect or Proselytize?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/congressional-enablers-genocidal-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/

Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that goal a religious duty. Hamas has sought to translate the genocidal intent into action, including through innumerable missile attacks targeting Israel’s civilian population since the terror group gained control of Gaza in 2007. 

Yet Hamas has a coterie of apologists, supporters, cheerleaders and other enablers in Congress, including those who criticize Israel and are silent about Hamas’s actions and objective.

Hamas missile barrages doubly fit the internationally recognized definitions of war crimes, by virtue of their objective of killing civilians and by virtue of their use of Gazan civilian areas as launching sites for their attacks, thus endangering Palestinians in Gaza. Yet this too has not dissuaded Hamas’s Congressional enablers.

In initiating its latest missile war against Israel, Hamas justified doing so by claiming Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and also that Israel was attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple Mount.

The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. But the tenants have refused to pay and it is in response to this that the courts have for some years ordered the vacating of the property. This is one of Hamas’  justifications for firing over 4,000 missiles at Israeli civilians, a justification parroted by members of Congress.

The other justification, that Israel was threatening Al Aqsa, has been a rallying cry for virtually a century by Palestinian leaders seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews. In 1929, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the most prominent figure among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to choreograph assaults on Jews that took some 130 lives. According to reports at the time, such as those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen, Husseini also produced and distributed bogus photographs of a supposedly demolished Jerusalem mosque in hopes of instigating the murder of Jews in the Mandate territory and beyond.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-brings-islamic-activists-investigate-us-daniel-greenfield/

A decade ago, Hina Shamsi was fighting on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation whose leaders had been convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

As the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Shamsi, a Pakistani citizen, had fought fiercely for the Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “We all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names,” she recently declared.

But now the Pakistani advocate for Islamic terrorists has a new job: going after our soldiers.

Shamsi (pictured above left) is one of the terror lawyers who appears on a list of partners for the Biden administration’s crackdown on “extremism” in the military. The only kind of extremism that Shamsi appears to be an expert on is the Islamic kind and her expertise has been in denying it.

Furthermore, at least as of 2017, Shamsi had described herself as a Pakistan citizen with permanent legal residency in America.

She’s not the only apparent Pakistani citizen tasked by Biden to go after our troops.

Take Faiza Patel, another Pakistani immigrant, who co-wrote an article arguing against designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The article claimed that “the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization, a political party, and a social service provider” and that it had “disavowed violence decades ago.”

That would come as news to Hamas and its other active Jihadist network members.

In another co-written article, Faiza Patel claimed that laws against Sharia were Islamophobic.