RUTHFULLY YOURS

Offering a helping hand to America’s enemies in Iran, Russia and Cuba will ruin lives and many more will die.
A quick glance at the latest headlines suggests a jarring disconnect from the stream of foreign-policy successes touted by the Obama White House and its allies. President Obama has been hailed by many as a peacemaker for eschewing the use of military force and for signing accords with several of America’s worst enemies. The idea that things will work out better if the U.S. declines to act in the world also obeys Mr. Obama’s keen political instincts. A perpetual campaigner in office, he realizes that it is much harder to criticize an act not taken.

But what is good for Mr. Obama’s media coverage is not necessarily good for America or the world. From the unceasing violence in eastern Ukraine to the thousands of Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, it is clear that inaction can also have terrible consequences. The nuclear agreement with Iran is also likely to have disastrous and far-reaching effects. But in every case of Mr. Obama’s timidity and procrastination, the response to criticism amounts to this: It could have been worse.

Tax reform that would cut rates and unleash business investment.

“Mr. Bush will have to sell his plan in the crowded GOP field, but perhaps his policy seriousness will steer Republicans away from this summer’s sloganeering and toward a debate about what really would make America great again.”

Conventional politics says presidential candidates should keep their tax reform plans gauzy and nonspecific. So much for that. Jeb Bush on Wednesday rolled out a tax plan that is remarkably detailed, including the tax deductions he’d eliminate in return for cutting rates to spur faster economic growth.

The former Florida Governor has made reviving growth and raising wages his main policy goals, and the tax plan is his first down payment on getting there. These are the right goals given six years of tepid growth and median household income that is still lower than when the expansion began in 2009. Faster growth than 2% a year is crucial to solving every other problem—from drawing more Americans back into the workforce, to reducing poverty, to financing U.S. defenses against growing global threats.

The administration couldn’t give Congress documentation of the Nuclear Iran secret side deals – it doesn’t have them and never did.

In an exclusive interview with the JewishPress.com, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) disclosed that not only has every member of Congress who voted for the Nuclear Iran Deal never seen any of the documents containing key elements of the deal, but also that not a single document from or about those side deals is anywhere in the possession of any Americans.

This means that neither the President of the United States, nor the Secretary of State, nor any member of the U.S. negotiating team has the capacity to read any of these documents and know what they say.

The treatment meted out to Jewish-American reggae icon Matisyahu by the organizers of Spain’s Rototom Sunsplash music festival, held annually near Valencia, is by now common knowledge. Refusing to sign on to the pro-Palestinian BDS movement making the global rounds, he was disinvited from participating in the event. As Matisyahu posted [1] on his Facebook page:

The festival kept insisting that I clarify my personal views; which felt like clear pressure to agree with the BDS political agenda. Honestly it was appalling and offensive, that as the one publicly Jewish-American artist scheduled for the festival they were trying to coerce me into political statements. Were any of the other artists scheduled to perform asked to make political statements in order to perform? No artist deserves to be put in such a situation simply to perform his or her art. Regardless of race, creed, country, cultural background, etc, my goal is to play music for all people. As musicians that is what we seek. – Blessed Love, Matis

It was only after the Spanish government and various prominent Jewish agencies intervened that Matisyahu was re-invited.

On the micro-level of public opprobrium, I recently experienced something similar. Having been invited, pro forma, with my pianist wife Janice to play a selection of my original songs at the farmers’ market held in the small southeastern Ontario town where we make our home (let’s call it Cataraqui), I lingered six weeks to learn the date of our performance. Finally, I inquired by email. After a few days, I received the following message from the event organizer:

Hi David
I’m sorry, I’ve been somewhat out of the loop and had to step back a bit from market organising, but I thought someone had been in touch. My understanding was that there was some concern that your musical style might not be the best fit for the market but I believe moreso [sic] that the strong political content of your website was not something we were prepared to appear to be endorsing.

How could any member of Congress in good conscience support a deal that so blatantly empowers a brazen enemy of the United States — a regime that has killed thousands of Americans, a regime that daily continues to call for death to America and the annihilation of Israel — to the degree that even the Obama administration openly concedes that the deal materially supports terrorism?

No sooner did Obama lock up the Democratic support he needed in the Senate to ensure his deal cannot be defeated under the farcical Corker review process than did his Iran point-man, Secretary of State John Kerry, send a letter to members of Congress promising that more military aid would be given to Iran’s enemies, Israel and the Sunni Gulf states. Let’s put aside the absurdity of vowing, as Kerry does in the letter, that Obama’s deal will promote regional peace while simultaneously acknowledging that Iran’s enemies will need “increase[d] security assistance.” If the Obama administration were charged with committing material support to terrorism, a serious felony violation of federal law, Kerry’s letter would suffice as a “Guilty” plea.

“Islam has no family resemblance with Christianity and Judaism. The similarities are appropriated, not inherited,” the Anglican priest and theologian Mark Durie starkly stated in his book “ Which God? Jesus, Holy Spirit, God in Christianity & Islam.” This volume is essential reading for Christians who wish to counter the “Abrahamic fallacy” of Islamic kinship with Judeo-Christian faith.
In his book, Durie noted the oft-touted idea of Western Abrahamic civilization in a world that once esteemed its Judeo-Christian civilization. Many assume that Islam joins Judaism and Christianity in possessing a theological lineage from the Old Testament’s Father Abraham. “This is new thinking which reflects the growing influence of Islam,” Durie said, adding that “one expression of the Islamicization of Christian thought serves the supersessionist program of Islam.”

In the chapter entitled “The Arts of Selling” from 1958’s Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote that “[t]he survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. A dictatorship, on the other hand, maintains itself by censoring or distorting the facts, and by appealing, not to reason, not to enlightened self-interest, but to passion and prejudice [.]” Which is why under the soft dictatorship of Barack Hussein Obama, the American people may be hard pressed to make realistic choices since they are far too susceptible to the distortions of language.

Logical fallacies are really “weaponized irrationality” gussied up to catch people unaware. Ad hominem attacks against an individual instead of the merit of an idea have been a hallmark of this administration. In 2014 when attempting to persuade the country on his immigration policy, Obama utilized the ergo decedo fallacy by attacking Republicans for their party position rather than for their argument.

Logical fallacies have long been the lifeblood of dishonest politicians and in Obama, we find an abundance of them. A favorite fallacy is the strawman, which is an attack on a position that is not even held by the other side. Obama’s strawmen have been those never-named naysayers Obama claims are “urging him to sit on his hands at the White House and do nothing to address any of the economic or national security problems facing the country.” Some telltale indicators that the straw man tactic is being used are the words “there are those who say” or “some say” as in Obama’s “[s]ome people say that maybe I’m being too idealistic.” Then there is the false choice embedded inside another straw man as in his “You can’t have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience”– yet no one ever asked for 100 percent of these things in the first place.

In Germany, posters saying “Refugees welcome” and “Nobody is illegal” have been appearing at bus stops and demonstrations. At a rally in Oxford last weekend, demonstrators held up home-made placards saying “We welcome refugees (given the chance)” and “We are all human”.

These people are merely telling us about themselves. Public expressions of compassion signify that a person is good. Their absence demonstrates heartlessness. This has been called “virtue signalling”, or mandatory emoting, and it has now reached its crazy apotheosis in the great migration crisis.

What remains unknown is why President Obama and most of his party want a nuclear Iran.

The goals of the diplomatic process have changed tremendously from the beginning, when President Obama regularly claimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon is “unacceptable,” and that only his unique brand of personal diplomacy could prevent it. Rather than “prevent” or “block” Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, as the president and Secretary of State Kerry falsely claim, the deal assures Iran of legally acquiring one.

By weaponizing its nuclear program, Iran has violated every agreement it has signed. Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program is being cleansed and validated at the behest of the Obama administration. These terms make the JCPOA deal unknowable. Signing it is not an act of diplomacy; it is surrender.

There is only one flaw in the JCPOA laundering scheme. In a true money-laundering scheme that involves an outlaw and a legitimate party, the money launderer receives a fee for the service provided; in this trade, the U.S. gets nothing from the JCPOA. The U.S. does not even get back one of the Americans held hostage by Iran.

Let’s come clean. Let’s finally recognize the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for what it is — a laundering project designed to legitimize Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

One migrant was asked why he doesn’t want to stay in Hungary. He replied: “[Hungary is] not giving us like in Germany… a house, money…”

“It’s not 150,000 migrants coming that some want to divide according to quotas, it’s not 500,000, a figure that I heard in Brussels, it’s millions, then tens of millions, because the supply of immigrants is endless.” — Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary.

Only 20 of the 12,000 people who crossed the border during the weekend of September 5-6 applied for asylum in Austria. The rest have already moved on to the more generous Germany.

In Germany, the number of asylum seekers entering the country in a single month surpassed the 100,000 mark for the first time ever. Germany expects to receive a total of 800,000 refugees and migrants this year, a four-fold increase over 2014.

Germany and Sweden are the final destinations of choice for most migrants, lured by the generous benefits they can claim, and the governments’ message that refugees are welcome in unlimited numbers. The open-door immigration policies could draw millions of Muslims into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.

Hundreds of Muslim refugees are converting to Christianity, apparently in an effort to improve their chances of having their asylum applications approved. Under Islam, Muslims who convert to Christianity are guilty of apostasy, a crime punishable by death. The “converts” apparently believe that German officials will allow them to stay if they can be persuaded that they will be killed if they are sent back to their countries of origin.