RUTHFULLY YOURS

Investors sell as hostility to innovation rises in Washington.

Health-care stocks suffered an ugly tumble on Monday, dragging down the overall Dow Jones Industrial Average by nearly 2%. The selloff was particularly marked in biotech, with Nasdaq ’s industry index plunging 6%, extending a 13% drop last week, and erasing all gains so far this year, as the nearby chart shows. Thus does politics injure the real economy.

Analysts attributed the slide to a letter that socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and House Democrats sent Monday to Valeant Pharmaceuticals threatening a subpoena and demanding the drug maker justify price increases for two heart rhythm medications. Valeant shares were off 17% for the day.

The letter illustrates the larger problem of growing political hostility to drug research and development. Last week Hillary Clinton joined the children’s crusade, rebuking “price gouging” and promising to introduce price controls on pharmaceuticals. Enthusiasm for such central planning is rising among Democrats, and even some Republicans, on Capitol Hill.

This political campaign has been dishonest and virtually fact-free, with a focus on list prices that are negotiated down and that the critics know are rarely paid in full. Name-brand prices are rising only modestly after rebates and discounts, and costs over time are rising more slowly than the historical trend.

A TV ad highlights the racial inequality of New York’s public school system.

When Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York in 2013, he came in riding two progressive narratives.

The grand narrative was his “Tale of Two Cities,” a New York where elites grow rich while millions of others are left struggling for basics. Running through this tale was the subtheme of race, especially of young African-Americans being unfairly deprived of their rights. So when the #BlackLivesMatter movement exploded in New York last year, Mr. de Blasio naturally embraced it.

“They’ve said ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ” he declared at a church in Staten Island. “And they said it because it had to be said.”

Today, however, the mayor is finding that his progressive measures are being turned against him. For nowhere in New York is the divide between haves and have-nots—or between black and white—as stark as it is on equal access to a decent education. It is this divide the pro-charter Families for Excellent Schools will highlight on Wednesday as mothers and fathers march across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand “school equality,” i.e., great schools for all children.

“If this isn’t genocide, I really don’t know why we bother to have international treaties and conventions.”

With this grim statement, Kurdistan Regional Government Representative to the United States Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman opened a Sept. 10 panel at the Washington, D.C.Heritage Foundation to discuss the horror inflicted on Iraq by the Islamic State.

Fellow panelist Hudson Institute religious freedom expert Nina Shea described in detail a “religious genocide directed against the various religious groups that do not conform to ISIS’ vision of Sunni Islam” – factions such as Christians. Heritage national security expertSteve Bucci agreed, saying that his findings during an extensive study of the Islamic State provided the “clearest example of genocide that I have ever read or seen since World War II’s Nazis.” “We should not be afraid of using that word,” Rahman said, of the term “genocide.” While she acknowledged lawmaker concerns regarding the political drawbacks to utilizing such strong wording, she adamantly declared, “We should call a spade a spade.”

Shea spoke about the Islamic State’s rise in the context of Saudi education’s intolerance of the religious other that has created “immeasurable damage throughout the Sunni world with this brainwashing and these directives of hatred.” She referenced Quran 9:29’s traditional three choices for Christians and other monotheists subjugated by Islamic conquest: death, conversion to Islam or payment of the humiliating jizya poll tax, and pointed out that with ISIS, the latter option is a “bogus kind of arrangement, because the tax keeps rising.”

Dear Glenn Kessler,

First of all, how come your “Fact Checker” column of 9/22 awarding Dr. Ben Carson “Four Pinnochios” for his statement regarding “taqiyya” is running for a second time? It first appeared last week, but there it is again in today’s paper, 9/27, on p. A5.

Oh well, I missed it the first time. It’s definitely worth revisiting.

Dr. Carson said the following: “`Taqiyya’ is a component of sharia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals.”

You then write: “In other words, he appeared to be saying that this tenet of Islam offered some kind of loophole that would allow the Muslim to lie about his or her religious beliefs to pursue other objectives. Is this the case?” (Emphasis added.)

For the record, your paraphrase is not what Carson said. He invoked “taqiyya” to describe a concept in sharia, or Islamic law, that, as he put it, “allows and even encourages [a Muslim] to lie to achieve [his] goals.”

I note that you have chosen to frame Dr. Carson’s very broad claim about sharia-approved lying by focusing on a literal definition of “taqiyya,” as if Carson were discussing only whether Muslims were specifically permitted to lie about “religious beliefs.”

President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have conceded that some portion of the money released to Iran through the lifting of sanctions will result in “bad behavior,” a euphemism for terrorism. The supposition of the president’s team is that despite the bad behavior, Iran, unconstrained by sanctions, will in time join the community of responsible nations. In other words our concessions will yield a positive response from the Supreme Leader Khamenei and his acolytes.

What is in evidence in these negotiations is the implicit Western belief in rationalism, a stance that suggests our enemies, with the appropriate incentives, will act just as we would. “Trust but verify” is the qualifier President Reagan used in his negotiations with the Soviets. President Obama, on the other hand, has resorted to trust and have faith in rational expectations. What happens when the adversary is irrational remains unclear. A theological belief system and acceptance of taqiyya or a religious lie to promote the interests of Islam, challenge assumptions of rationality.

One of the Glazov Gang’s most popular episodes was joined by Geert Wilders, the founder and leader of the “Party for Freedom” — which is currently the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. Mr. Wilders is best known for his brave stance against, and truth-telling about, Islam. He is the author of Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me.

Mr. Wilders came on the program to crystallize the only way the West will be able to preserve itself.

Did you miss this BLOCKBUSTER episode?

Here it is below:

Britain should not be party to a body that has Saudi Arabia making crucial appointments.
George Osborne has been taking considerable flak for doing trade deals with China despite its oppressive authoritarian regime. Yet his critics have been silent on the elevation of one of the world’s most barbaric tyrannies to a key role in promoting global human rights. Saudi Arabia’s envoy to the UN Human Rights Council has been chosen to head its five-member appointments panel.

This recommends applicants for more than 77 positions shaping international human rights standards and reporting on violations around the world. How crazy is this? Saudi Arabia tyrannises women, dissidents, Christians and gays. Some argue that this year it has beheaded more people than Isis.

For Obama, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

Barack Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding. Al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS was “a jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. The Arab Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya was vindication for the “lead from behind” approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success, a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are good.”

“Overall,” as he told Tom Friedman in August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir Putin was muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for optimism.”

It’s a remarkable record of prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/0928/ISIS-in-America-how-doomsday-Muslim-cult-is-turning-kids-against-parents?

So far, 58 Americans have been arrested in 2015 for plotting violence or attempting to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria. More than half are under 25, and experts say recruits are getting younger.

Washington — American families are under assault from an Islamic extremist group that is quietly turning young minds against their parents, against their religious faith, and against their country.

The group, the self-proclaimed Islamic State in occupied sections of Syria and Iraq, is using social media and the worldwide reach of the Internet in a sophisticated recruitment campaign that is making families feel helpless to stop a slow-motion kidnapping of their children.

So far this year, 58 Americans – more than half under 25 – have been arrested for attempting to travel to Syria or for plotting violence in the US. That is more than twice the number of similar arrests for the entire year in 2014, and more than twice the number for all of 2013, as well.
ISIS IN AMERICA:A seven-part series

Mohamed Rasul is homeless in New York City. But don’t feel too sorry for him, he’s “homeless by choice.” He’s got a free laptop and free Wi-Fi in Bryant Park.

According to Mohamed, he’s “never been as comfortable as under de Blasio” because no one forces him to leave the park where a miniature carousel spins children around on painted horses and a yoga lesson takes place on the main lawn. These things, the carousel, the yoga lesson and the free Wi-Fi, only exist because the park was restored from its old days as Needle Park.

Back then the stretch of park behind the New York Public Library had more crimes than some towns. Cleaning it up took a lot of hard work.

Now that hard work is being undone by a pro-crime mayor.

When you have enough Mohameds in the park then the kids, the coffee, the Wi-Fi, the yoga mats and the lunch break crowd goes away to be replaced by junkies, needles, drug dealers, muggers and rapists.