RUTHFULLY YOURS

“He’s rarely been in the headlines, but Marco Rubio has had a fantastic couple of months,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times observed Monday afternoon on Twitter. “Partly because of the headlines,” we rejoined, with a link to our June 9 column, which discussed the Times’s feeble efforts to find scandal in Rubio’s wife’s traffic tickets and in the Rubio family’s past financial struggles.

The Times can’t be blamed for the latest, even feebler effort to gin up a Rubio scandal—an effort so ridiculous that Leonhardt and his colleagues should be proud of getting scooped. It concerns a Rubio fund-raising event held yesterday at the Highland Park, Texas, home of Harlan Crow.

Who is Harlan Crow? The Times archives help provide context. “Donald Trump he is not,” the paper reported in 1996, meaning that Crow is publicity-shy: “He agreed to discuss his operations in detail only after two years of requests.” The gist of that piece was that in the late 1980s, Crow salvaged the real-estate empire built by his father, Trammell Crow, which was “imperiled by perhaps the worst real estate crash of modern times.” Crow père, who died in 2009 at 94, had “spent four decades becoming the nation’s leading real estate developer,” according to the Times.

Hillary Clinton settled the biggest non-mystery of the presidential campaign on Tuesday by formally coming out against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Democratic candidate, and front-runner at least for now, had played coy for months on the years-old issue, but everyone knew she wasn’t going to buck the donor base of the Democratic left.

Her reasoning is still worth noting. “I think it is imperative that we look at the Keystone pipeline as what I believe it is—a distraction from important work we have to do on climate change,” she told a community forum in Des Moines, Iowa. “And unfortunately from my perspective, one that interferes with our ability to move forward with all the other issues.”

By “distraction” she probably means the pipeline is the kind of jobs vs. rich green donor issue that is difficult for a Democrat to navigate. The pipeline certainly wouldn’t be a distraction for the 2,000 or so construction and other workers it would employ, as well as the thousands of other indirect jobs it would spin off.
Mrs. Clinton’s belated Keystone candor continues her move to the left as she falls in the polls and Vermont Senator and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders gains. With Vice President Joe Biden looking like he may run, perhaps with the support of progressive heartthrob Elizabeth Warren, Mrs. Clinton wants to narrow his running room and funding base on the left.

The battlegrounds of secular politics may undermine Francis’ moral authority.

The word “politicized” is not generally a compliment. It suggests that a nonpolitical event or subject—a natural disaster or poverty—is being used by a public figure for his own political purposes.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be hurting with the Republican electorate because many think he politicized Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012 by inviting President Obama to see its devastation. Mr. Christie rejects any such idea, but it sits there, a political casualty.

Yet one more in a long line of homegrown Islamic terrorist “wannabes” was nabbed in New Jersey’s Bergen County on Tuesday after the suspect made threats using Internet social media websites against the President of the United States and the White House. The 17-year-old suspected jihadist is reportedly a resident of Bergen’s county seat, Hackensack, according to former police counterterrorism unit detective, Victor Napolitano, Jr.
The Hackensack teen is also accused of making violent statements about being involved in a plot to attack at the 9/11 memorial in New York City, the site of the Muslim terrorist attack that brought down the symbol of America’s wealth and success, the World Trade Center in 2001.

Security: After a Muslim teen was arrested for bringing what looked like a bomb to school, police were ripped for “overreacting.” Supporters insisted he “invented” a clock for a “project.” But his only invention was the story.
Turns out that 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed of Irving, Texas, never invented a clock, and had no reason to bring the suspicious-looking device to school. But everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to President Obama was fooled by what appears to have been a hoax designed to muster sympathy for Muslims accused of terrorism, while putting police on their heels and undermining the “see something, say something” directive for citizen vigilance. Here’s the real story:

• There was no “school project” or science assignment to justify Mohamed bringing the device to school .

• Just three weeks into his freshman year, Mohamed was no “science whiz well-known by high school teachers for tinkering.”

• The “clock” wasn’t made from scratch but just the guts of a mass-manufactured digital clock, complete with AC cord and 9-volt backup battery connection.

Knowledge is power, and whoever can influence knowledge and what is taught our youth, influence our future and our democracy. I have no doubt that universities which are depending on money from Islamic countries are more reluctant to critizise Islamic law, the brutal Sharia, and the abuse of human rights in these countries.

A few days ago, the president of the Sorbonne, Philippe Boutry, signed an agreement with the attorney general of the state of Qatar. Within the next three years, the Islamic monarchy will finance the studies of hundreds of Syrian immigrants at the Parisian academic jewel.The Sorbonne has accepted 600,000 euros per year for three years.

Tonight is the eve of Yom Kippur the most important Jewish Holiday. Yoram Ettinger explains its meaning and Ruthie Blum expresses the faith and sense of gratitude when we wish for ourselves and those we love and admire to be inscribed in The Book of Life.

May the new year, 5,776 and still counting, bring us all peace and health. In observance of the holiday there will be no posting tomorrow….rsk

The Middle East Studies Association passed a resolution earlier this year praising calls for anti-Israel boycotts.

It has been a while since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region, whose 2,700-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout the world, dropped its original designation as a “non-political learned society” to become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. So deep has the rot settled that the association seems totally oblivious (or rather indifferent) to the fact that its recent endorsement of the anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign, and attendant efforts to obstruct the containment of resurgent anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, have effectively crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew-baiting.

On February 15 of this year, a MESA referendum approved a resolution, passed by the membership during the association’s annual meeting three months earlier, which not only lauded the “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions [BDS]” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action” and deplored opposition to these exclusionary moves as an assault on the freedom of speech, but “strongly urge[d] MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”

MESA has crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew-baiting.

A new batch of e-mails sent and received by top Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin during her time at the State Department were released by Judicial Watch on Monday.

Clinton’s team likely will point to one message, at least, as evidence that they secured classified information even while conducting government business on a private e-mail server. Judicial Watch, the conservative group embroiled in a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain Clinton’s correspondence, says that the e-mails show a lack of caution about sensitive information.

“These e-mails Judicial Watch forced out through a federal lawsuit show that Huma Abedin used her separate clintonemail.com account to conduct the most sensitive government business, endangering not only her safety but the safety of Hillary Clinton and countless others,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a Monday statement.

In one message, a State Department official e-mailed Abedin to suggest an earlier-than-planned arrival in Geneva, Switzerland following a visit to Russia, in part because they couldn’t access a classified network in St. Petersburg. “It would be a lot better for us to work through the night there (with access to classified) than be stuck in St. Pete with no classified at all,” the official wrote.

Abedin, who had “no idea about comms,” agreed that Clinton would need a secure workspace. “Makes total sense,” she replied.

The Obama administration maintains that its principal strategic response to the conflict in Syria is humanitarian, not military, and focused on human rights. In Syria as well as Iraq, the consequences of this policy have been shockingly deficient. The West is only now beginning to wake up to its catastrophic results, as Europe struggles with a mass migration of a magnitude the continent has not experienced since the 1940s.

In April, Assad began intensifying the barrel bombing of Aleppo and Damascus’s Sunni neighborhoods while streamlining the passport process. In June, the U.N. was forced, unconscionably, to slash Syrian refugee food rations for lack of funding. Whether it was then, or when human traffickers began operating rickety craft from the port of Izmir, Turkey — leading to some 3,000 drownings — at every juncture, the administration failed to lead a serious effort to mitigate the suffering. This explosion has been building for years. The administration slumbered instead of coordinating an effective allied effort to head off a dangerous and chaotic westward surge of hundreds of thousands, potentially tens of millions, of oppressed and poor migrants, with some terrorists among them.

And that’s not the half of it. In Syria and Iraq, there continues to develop a horrific human-rights crisis that evokes the darkest episodes of World War II. ISIS and other Islamist extremists are waging genocide, the most egregious of all human-rights atrocities, against Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, and other defenseless religious minorities, whom the administration, apart from last year’s airstrikes to help the Yazidis, has failed.