RUTHFULLY YOURS

Memo to the State Department: It’s time to think twice about knee-jerk criticism of Israel. You never know when it might turn around and bite you.

Just that happened when Associated Press reporter Matt Lee caught deputy State spokesman Mark Toner by surprise at a briefing this week. Lee asked about Saturday’s US bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that left 22 patients and staff dead.

The administration has called the attack a tragic mistake. But Lee recalled Israel’s August 2014 shelling of a UN school in Gaza — which State immediately labeled “disgraceful,” adding: “The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”

Jerusalem’s Jewish connection dates back more than 3,000 years. Even after Jews lost control of the city in 70 CE, a Jewish spiritual and physical bond with Jerusalem remained unbroken, despite 2,000 years of dispersion.

Although Islamic dynasties controlled Jerusalem for some 1,300 years, they never once made it the capital of an Arab state. Even Jordan, which controlled part of the city for 19 years, until 1967, refrained from making it its capital. Furthermore, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran, Islam’s most holy book.

Following in Yasser Arafat’s footsteps, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas used an international stage to unleash yet another round of terror attacks against Israel.

As international criticism against his personal corruption mounted, Arafat used the conclusion of the Camp David meeting on July 25, 2000, to launch the Second Intifada. Earlier that month, Imad Faluji the Palestinian Authority’s communications minister

told a PLO rally in the Ein Hilwe refugee camp in South Lebanon, that as part of that plan all the PLO “military action groups of the 1960s 1970s and 1980s are returning to work to escalate the fighting against Israel.”

His predecessor Abbas, used his speech at U.N. General Assembly on September 30, 2015, in which he declared his intention to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state, thus abandoning the Oslo Accord, to instigate escalation in the deadly attacks against Jews in the West Bank, Jerusalem and even among Israeli Arabs. Abbas probably hopes that the violence and political chaos would mask Hamas harsh criticism against him and his government.

Saudi Arabia recently invited the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood to an event sponsored by the Kingdom in Riyadh, in a signal that the country’s government may be trying to bury the hatchet with the Islamist group. Reuters reports:

Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based cleric whose fiery sermons have strained ties with Gulf neighbors, appeared alongside the Qatari prime minister and the Saudi ambassador at an event in Doha to celebrate Saudi Arabia’s national day.

The accession to the Saudi throne in January of King Salman, who is more sympathetic to religious conservatives than his predecessor King Abdullah, caused glimmers of hope among Muslim Brotherhood exiles in Qatar that the Middle East’s political winds had started to shift in their favor, potentially giving the Islamist group more space to act.
Salman, while stopping short of befriending the Brotherhood, has worked to reduce tensions with the movement’s own allies, strengthening Riyadh’s ties with Turkey and Qatar and reaching out to Islah, the Islamist group’s offshoot in Yemen.

Note: Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra is the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Shillman senior fellow. This article originally appeared at Newsmax.

NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd in a recent exchange with a presidential candidate raised an issue that should be discussed not only by all of the candidates, but debated and analyzed by the American people.

Is Islamic law (Shariah) compatible with the U.S. Constitution?

The question has no simple answer, but we have three recent examples of where regime change forced national leaders to determine Shariah’s role in their governance, all failing to reach a definitive conclusion.

The first two followed interventions by the Obama administration, in one case actively and in the other passively, that facilitated the overthrow of stable authorities.

In Libya, NATO precipitated the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year dictatorship. In Egypt, the U.S. sent clear and unambiguous indications that replacing President Hosni Mubarak with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood would be acceptable, if not desirable.

On Sunday night, the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem was nearly empty. Though it was the eve of Simchat Torah, when thousands of Jew normally congregate at the holy site to celebrate the holiday by dancing with Torah scrolls, the Palestinian terrorist attack that took place in the area 24 hours earlier served to scare off even those people who believe that everything is in God’s hands.

No one could possibly be blamed for such fear.

The stabbing of an Israeli family by a 19-year-old Ramallah resident and Jerusalem law student — culminating in the death of 22-year-old Aharon Bennett and 41-year-old Rabbi Nehemia Lavi, who came to the rescue; the critical wounding of 21-year-old Adele Bennett; the injury to the couple’s two-year-old boy and trauma to their physically unscathed baby daughter — was not merely brutal. It was documented on the cellphones of Arab onlookers, who laughed and spit at the young mother covered in blood, begging for help as she tried to flee the scene with a knife wedged in her shoulder.

“You should die, too,” they chanted, while she stumbled ahead in the direction of Israeli Border Police.

Hillary Clinton has a new gun agenda that is the same as the old gun agenda.

We all are appalled and heartsick over the country’s mass shootings, which aren’t any less shocking for their routine occurrence. But that doesn’t mean we know how to stop them. The Pavlovian Democratic reaction is to offer a raft of familiar gun-control proposals, whether or not they have any bearing on mass shootings.

Hillary’s ideas are a testament to the essential sterility of the gun debate, no matter how much heat it generates. There is no way around the fact that marginal changes will do little or nothing to stop mass killers, while more sweeping changes — even if they were practicable or wise — run afoul of the Second Amendment.

Among other things, Clinton wants to renew the assault-weapons ban, which we had for 10 years before it lapsed in 2004. The ban never made any sense, and a push to revive it is nostalgia for a meaningless gesture. To review: A so-called assault weapon is a semi-automatic rifle tricked out with frightening-looking cosmetic features. It is functionally indistinguishable from any other semi-automatic rifle.

In a rare burst of independence and self-interest, the California Legislature, led by largely Latino and Inland Democrats, last month defeated Gov. Jerry Brown’s attempt to cut gasoline use in the state by 50 percent by 2030. These political leaders, backed by the leftovers of the once-powerful oil industry, scored points by suggesting that this goal would lead inevitably to much higher fuel prices and even state-imposed gas rationing.

Days later, however, state regulators announced plans to impose similarly tough anti-fossil-fuel quotas anyway. This pronouncement, of course, brought out hosannas from the green lobby – as well as their most reliable media allies. Few progressives today appear concerned that an expanding, increasingly assertive regulatory state, as long as it errs on the “right side,” poses any long-term risks.

Welcome to the new age of authority, in which voters’ mundane concerns are minimized, and the bureaucracy – backed by an elected executive – rules the roost, armed with full confidence that it knows best. Nor is this merely a California phenomenon. Rule by decree has become commonplace in Washington, D.C., as President Obama seems to dictate policies on everything from immigration to climate change without effective resistance from a weak Congress and a listless judiciary.

While no modern leader since President Richard Nixon has been so bold in trying to consolidate power, this centralizing trend has been building for decades. Since 1910, the federal government has doubled its share of all government spending to 60 percent and grows ever more meddlesome in people’s daily lives. Its share of GDP has now grown to the highest level since the Second World War.

“In sum, the region is North Korea cubed, an Islamic shoot-’em-up Tombstone or Dodge City where punks with nuclear six-guns, not sober classical deterrence, will make the rules.”

There are several scenarios the Obama administration may be entertaining as it pursues its diplomacy in the Middle East. It may believe that the new agreement with Iran will lead to “engagement” with reform-minded theocrats. The idea is that this will insidiously liberalize the regime, empower a younger generation of pro-Western reformers, and put the theocracy on “an arc of history” back into the “family of nations.” Or perhaps an Obama-inspired second green revolution will overthrow the regime, and we will see a Euro-socialist Iranian republic renounce nuclear weapons — or at least, having inherited custodianship of the existing arsenal, oversee it in the fashion of democratic Israel or France.

Alternatively, the administration may imagine that a Shiite Axis — Iran, Syria, Iraq, Hezbollah, Hamas — empowered by Putin’s Russia, will balance the region, either, strategically, convincing the Sunni monarchies to accept the new balance of power, or, morally, ensuring that formerly outlaw anti-American radical regimes find parity with the pro-American conservative and right-wing regimes in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf monarchies. Or, less concretely, the United States may simply wish to abdicate the Middle East and let the players there all fight it out, reentering when the players are worn out and defeated.

The Obama administration plans to create a global police force that counters “violent extremism” in the United States and elsewhere.

The problem is that in Obama-speak “violent extremism” refers not only to jihadists wishing to harm Americans but also to conservatives and Tea Party activists. Just ask all the law-abiding right-of-center nonprofit groups targeted by Lois Lerner’s IRS during the Obama presidency.

Ominously, President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch unveiled the Strong Cities Network last week at the United Nations.

America’s chief executive, who speaks in hushed and reverent tones when discussing the Muslim faith, said the U.S. will use “all of our tools” to fight Islamic State terrorists.

“This is not an easy task,” Obama said. “This is not a conventional battle. This is a long-term campaign — not only against this particular network, but against its ideology.” The United States and a coalition of 60 other countries are “pursuing a comprehensive strategy” for dealing with Islamic State, he said.