RUTHFULLY YOURS

“As heaven knows, good cannot overcome evil unless both are acknowledged and only one fought for.”

As his five-day visit to the United States comes to an end, Pope Francis continues to receive the undivided attention of audiences as major in number as in stature.
It is not clear whether the head of the Holy See is worried about the danger of succumbing to the sin of pride from having his ring kissed so readily by so many illustrious figures.
Something for which the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church ought to hang his head in shame, however, is his repeated sins of omission.
While Christians across the Middle East are being terrorized, tortured, sold into slavery and slaughtered, the pope spoke before the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, at Ground Zero and other venues about peace and justice.

Bill Clinton blasts media for overblowing Hillary email scandal: ‘Never seen so much expended on so little’

President Clinton isn’t buying into the scandal swirling around his wife’s use of personal emails during her time as Secretary of State.
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the 42nd President of the United States said the controversy is merely “catnip” that the Republican Party is tossing at his wife in order to distract voters from the real issues like student loan debt, income inequality, mental health care and more.
“I actually am amazed she’s borne up under it as well as she has; I’ve never seen so much expended on so little,” Clinton said.

There are some decisions which I simply cannot fathom how anyone could make. We’ve discussed here the issue surrounding U.S. Army Special Forces Green Berets Captain Dan Quinn and Sergeant First Class Charles Martland. These men were relieved of their positions by the chain of command because they physically assaulted an Afghan police officer who had raped a young boy and beaten his mother.

We reported on SFC Martland’s appeal regarding his involuntary discharge from the Army because of the adverse actions taken against him and placed in his personnel record. Captain Quinn left the Army.

We shared with you earlier this week how the U.S. Military has issued orders to troops in Afghanistan to disregard the instances of sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan officials – even if they occurred on U.S. Military bases. We know three Marines lost their lives in Helmand province when one of these “chai boys” took the AK-47 of the pedophile Afghan police chief and gunned them down while they worked out in the FOB gym.

And now we get this news.

As reported by The Daily Caller, “The U.S. Army has just rejected the appeal of Green Beret Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, who received a discharge scheduled to take effect Nov. 1 for shoving an Afghan rapist to the ground. “Consequently, your request for an appeal and continued service is disapproved,” U.S. Human Resources Command (USAHRC) said in a Sept. 14 memo sent to Martland. The reason for the denial? The office said that Martland’s appeal attempt “does not meet the criteria” because it brings no new information to the table.

The European Union’s plan to force poorer nations to accept thousands of refugees.

On Tuesday, national sovereignty gave way to mandatory multiculturalism in the European Union. A plan to relocate an additional 120,000 Middle Eastern migrants was imposed by EU ministers over the objections four Eastern European countries adamantly opposed to the plan. Slovakia’s Robert Fico illuminated the resistance. “As long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory,” he declared in Bratislava.

Slovakia was joined by the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary. Finland abstained from the vote. Yet despite the quartet’s disapproval, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, led by France and Germany, pushed through the plan proposed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during his annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg earlier this month. The plan called for 160,000 migrants to be forcibly redistributed from Italy, Greece and Hungary to all other member states, save Britain, Ireland and Denmark, who remain exempt from EU treaties. In addition, Junker called for a review of the “Dublin system” that determines which EU nation is responsible for asylum claims.

In order to make the plan more politically palatable, 66,000 migrants are currently slated for relocation, joining 40,000 migrants approved for asylum in July. The remaining 54,000 had originally been allocated to Hungary where they are currently camped out. But Budapest refused to abide a plan it characterized as an invitation to economic migrants. Thus, those migrants will be reallocated in 2016, possibly among Greece, Italy, Croatia and Austria, bringing the overall total of relocated migrants to 160,000. The plan is ostensibly limited to Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum-seekers, but the details have yet to be worked out. All of those migrants are people who have purportedly crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey and northern Africa, fleeing the unrelenting violence in Iraq and Syria.

Republican presidential candidates will keep Iran front and center as proof of the Obama administration’s national-security malpractice. But they don’t all seem to grasp why the Iran nuclear accord is flawed and why it matters so much.

Among the main criticisms is that the deal reflects President Obama’s lack of negotiating skill. But he knows how to negotiate — look at how he handled Congress on this matter. The accord is weak because along the way he changed his goal; he decided to paper over the nuclear problem in order to pursue a broader partnership between America and the clerical regime in Tehran.

Not long ago, President Obama promised to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. He demanded that Iran dismantle its relevant facilities. And he implied (“all options are on the table”) that he would use military power, if necessary, to block Iran.

But after a while, he saw he couldn’t talk Iran’s clerical leaders out of their nuclear ambitions. Without admitting as much, Mr. Obama gave up on stopping Iran. Instead, he aimed simply to slow them down for a while.

That was a momentous reversal. He signaled it by changing the way he talked. One couldn’t always hit home runs, he said. One had to bend to reality. What was important was getting the best deal possible.

The unique demands of the nation’s highest office conflict with orthodox Islamic teaching.Does Charles Krauthammer get Islam wrong because he gets the Constitution wrong? Or does he get the Constitution wrong because he gets Islam wrong?

This conundrum comes to the fore — and not for the first time — after Dr. Krauthammer’s serial denunciations of Dr. Ben Carson. In a Sunday Meet the Press interview, Carson opined that Islam is inconsistent with the United States Constitution and, therefore, that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation” — meaning he would not recommend that voters elect a Muslim president.

Dr. K decries Dr. C’s remarks as “morally outrageous,” albeit “sincerely felt.” With Democrats in distress, the columnist fears Republicans are undermining their golden 2016 opportunity: “It is certainly damaging to any party when one of its two front-runners denigrates, however thoughtlessly, the nation’s entire Muslim American community.”

But what loseth a man if he denigrates a tiny community — a large percentage of whose members are Islamists reliably aligned with Democrats — but gains the esteem of a vast political base convinced that Washington is insane on matters Muslim?

Donald Trump got roundly booed Friday when the businessman, near the beginning of his Values Voters Summit speech, dissed Marco Rubio, calling the Florida senator “a clown.” Rubio had said some unkind things about Donald the day before, but had not resorted to ad hominems.

During the booing, Trump, although clearly taken aback, went on, citing a litany of Rubio’s sins in the immigration area, emphasizing the senator’s participation in the Gang of Eight, as if coaxing the audience to agree with him. They didn’t much. The Donald compounded the error by later insisting the boos were “cheers.”

On The Kelly File, pollster Frank Luntz — no fan of Trump’s — said Donald casting these kind of aspersions on a U.S. senator was not presidential and possibly a turning point as it showed the public, indeed a decidedly conservative part of that public, growing unhappy with Donald. Perhaps. I’m not sure. It wasn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Still, it showed someone who is really not learning as much as one would expect from the experience of running for office. You would think Trump, a casino owner, would know “there’s time to hold ‘em and a time to fold ‘em.” Apparently not.

A very sharp analysis of the Syrian situation from the New York Observer’s John Schindler, who lays out a case that Russian influence in the Middle East is on the rise while America’s is being frittered away by the incompetents at the White House.

How incompetent?

The forces Mr. Putin has just deployed to Syria are impressive, veteran special operators backed by a wing of fighters and ground attack jets that are expected to commence air strikes on Assad’s foes soon. They are backed by air defense units, which is puzzling since the Islamic State has no air force, indicating that the Kremlin’s true intent in Syria has little to do with the stated aim of fighting terrorism and is really about propping up Russia’s longtime client in Damascus.

The White House is left planning “deconfliction” with Moscow—which is diplomatic language for entreating Russians, who now dominate Syrian airspace, not to shoot down American drones, which provide the lion’s share of our intelligence on the Islamic State. The recent meeting on Syrian developments between Mr. Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who clearly finds dealing with the Russian strongman preferable to parleying with President Obama, indicates where power is flowing in today’s Middle East.

The progressive creed as it relates to foreign policy, and as represented most notably by our Progressive-in-Chief, President Obama, holds that the impact of United States behavior in the world has largely been negative. It casts American foreign policy as a variation on European colonialism: exploitative, indifferent to the peoples subjected to American attention and intervention, and inexorably engendering anti-American sentiment among those peoples.

The translation of this comprehension of the world into a progressivism-informed foreign policy has had the effect of making the world safer for mass murder.

President Obama has offered apologies for past American policy to Europeans, to Arabs and the Muslim world more broadly, to the peoples of Central and South America. Various media outlets have noted that, according to a 2011 Wikileaks publication, only a negative response by the Japanese government prevented Mr. Obama from going to Hiroshima in September, 2009, and offering apologies for America’s atomic bomb attack on the city.

But whatever the President’s erstwhile intentions vis-a-vis Hiroshima, the broader focus of his apologetics has been on those nations and peoples that are hostile to America. His key foreign policy syllogism, and that of America’s progressive camp, is that anti-American sentiment is essentially a product of American abuses and that American self-reform and accommodation, a kinder, gentler United States, will bring an end to current hostility and engender a new comity between this nation and its long-time victims.

These are people behaving in a way that does not deserve being rewarded with anything, let alone a state. They far more resemble all tyrannical thugs throughout history who spend their lives telling other people how to live, and using violence, or threats of violence, to coerce anyone who does not agree. Sadly, we already have too much of that kind of muscling in our Arab and Muslim world, as Egypt’s forward-looking President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as well as many others, regularly point out.

We have now reached the same stage as Germany’s Nazis — the same thing, ironically, we falsely accuse the Jews of being — where the appearance of a Jew on a Palestinian television show is considered as an act of “treason” and a “crime.” In reality, it is we who are the New Nazis.

A Palestinian TV talk show host is facing strong condemnations and threats for hosting an Israeli Jewish singer who is extremely popular among Palestinian youths.

The condemnations expose the ugly face of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), whose followers are vehemently opposed to any form of “normalization” between Palestinians and Israelis.

The BDS activists are demanding that those who brought the singer, Zvi Yehezkel, to the TV show in Ramallah be punished. The activists do not even seem to care that the singer supports peace between Israel and the Palestinians.