RUTHFULLY YOURS

The US military gets a bad rap from time to time, accused by the likes of Edward Luttwak of preparing for the last war while forever being caught on the hop by the present one, lambasted by congressmen for buying $600 toilet seats and, of current interest to Australian taxpayers, for pumping billions of dollars into gold-plated hangar queens. One thing on which the US military cannot be faulted, however, is the good manners of its military colleges’ students. President Obama’s visit this week to the Coast Guard Academy, where he welcomed graduates to their country’s service, makes the case.

In the Middle East, evidence of US impotence is rampant. How ever did ISIS manage to stage a full-fledged victory parade, in broad daylight no less, without seeing its festivities dispersed by loads of laser-guided bombs? Obama may know the answer to that; then again, maybe not. With this President, any cause that demands more than a bombardment of TelePromptered cliches probably isn’t going to get off the ground. So Obama dodged mentioning that situation, and the mess in Libya, plus the likelihood of a nuclear-armed Iran, and a good many other of his ongoing debacles.

Instead, he identified the real enemy: catastrophic climate change.

To their immense credit, not one of the Coast Guard graduates laughed out loud.

Denmark’s Foreign Minister, Martin Lidegaard, did not of course address the question: If your neighbor is trying to import weapons while threatening to kill you, what are you supposed to do about that? He also did not address the similar blockade of Gaza by Egypt, which faces the same problem. The more terror tunnels Hamas members build, the more respect they get from the West.

As someone born and raised a Muslim in the Middle East, and still living there, I can assure Europeans officials that if they think the recognition of Hamas and Palestinian statehood would encourage Hamas to change its charter and abandon its terrorists attacks, they could not be more wrong. Why then should Hamas change its charter or tactics, or commit itself to a peaceful resolution, when its current terror tactics seem to be working so magnificently?

“We do not distinguish between what was occupied in the 1940s and what was occupied in the 1960s… We will continue until the very last usurper is driven out of our land.” – Sheik Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader, Gaza, 2005.

The EU authorities speak about “peace talks,” and a “two-state solution;” Hamas does not. Hamas openly rejects them. If one compares the language these governments use with the language Hamas officials use, they would appear to live on different galaxies. To Hamas, and apparently to many countries in Europe, Israel as no right to defend itself and no right to exist. But Europe is ready to prop up, with unconditional support, racist, anti-humanitarian organizations such as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. Is this really the spirit of pluralism, humanism and tolerance these “good,” “moral” European governments and the Vatican support?

This month, the Vatican signed the first treaty with “the state of Palestine,” which it had already recognized in 2012.

Dear Reader (including Josh Duggar who foolishly got a job at the Family Research Council rather than as a party planner on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane),

Bill Clinton is the greatest gaslighter in modern American politics.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on “Gaslighting”:

Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.

Some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners by flatly denying that they have been violent.

Gaslighting describes a dynamic observed in some cases of marital infidelity: “Therapists may contribute to the victim’s distress through mislabeling the woman’s reactions. . . . The gaslighting behaviors of the husband provide a recipe for the so-called ’nervous breakdown’ for some women [and] suicide in some of the worst situations.”

A truly sociopathic liar (though his sociopathologies hardly end there), Clinton has a gift for making other people feel like there is something wrong with them for objecting to his deceptions.

At the outset of the 1990s, liberals had worked themselves into a moral panic about sexual harassment. If anything, it was a bigger obsession than the campus-rape panic we’ve been witnessing over the last few years (no doubt in part because there was more factual basis to the problem). Male politicians — Bob Packwood, John Tower, et al. — had their careers summarily ended because of their “womanizing” — a term popularized by Tower’s predations. (Ironically, the original meaning of the word was to “make effeminate,” i.e., to turn into a woman. Given the mainstreaming of sex-change surgery, maybe it’s time to rehabilitate the older definition?)

Then, the country was presented with proof, incremental and suggestive at first, overwhelming and indisputable by the end of the decade, that Bill Clinton was an irrepressible and irresponsible sexual predator, at least by the moral and evidentiary standards established by feminist activists and the press corps that loves them. And, rather than face the consequences of applying their own principles consistently, they prostrated themselves to the Oval Office. Gloria Steinem raced to the pages of the New York Times to advance the “one free grope” rule. Susan Estrich, Susan Faludi, and countless other professional feminists defenestrated their principles in a desperate attempt to defend Clinton.

There it was — the classic Hillary charm. Close to a month had passed since the Democratic frontrunner answered questions from the press. So this week, when reporters were invited to gawk at the spectacle of Clinton sitting with “everyday Iowans,” Ed Henry of Fox wanted to know: Would the former secretary of state take a moment to respond to inquiries from non-stage-managed reporters?

Before Henry was able even to finish his sentence, however, Clinton interrupted him, tut-tutting his impertinent shouting and raising her hand, empress-like, to quell her subject. After a few seconds of talking over each other Clinton must have realized that she had to give Henry an answer. Whereupon she said, slowly and sarcastically: “I might. I’ll have to ponder it.” What a kidder.

The NSA Is Not Spying on You The NSA doesn’t even know your name.

But you probably don’t know that. It is amazing how little the public has learned from the debate the national-security Right has lost — not is losing but has lost — over the National Security Agency’s “metadata” program.

The information the NSA has collected in bulk from telecommunication-service providers does not include the names of telephone subscribers. They don’t know who you are. It does not include addresses. They don’t know where you are.

Most people still do not know this, which reflects the power of the “domestic spying” canard peddled by Rand Paul’s anti-government extremists and Baby-Boom lefties who apparently still think it’s 1974. The latter camp includes a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit federal appeals court in New York, whose ruling that the NSA program is illegal begins with this astonishing claim: “In the early 1970s, in a climate not altogether unlike today’s, the intelligence-gathering and surveillance activities of the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA came under public scrutiny.”

Well, you heard it here first.

Today, the State Department released Benghazi-related email from the private server and one of the (at least) two private email accounts on which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conducted official business – recklessly and in violation of laws and guidelines relating to the exchanging and preservation of electronic communications. Within hours, the Obama administration was forced to concede that at least one of the emails contained classified information.

Mrs. Clinton has previously and dubiously claimed that she did not discuss classified information on her private email account(s). Despite today’s disclosure, she is standing by that claim as, apparently, is the State Department. Her rationale is that the information in question – which relates to suspects in the Benghazi attack and remains highly sensitive ­– was not classified “secret” at the time of the email exchange. Instead, it was upgraded to “secret” status just today by the FBI, which was plainly alarmed at the prospect of its disclosure.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: This Friday, hours before Shabbat is set to begin and one day before the holiday of Shavuot starts, President Obama walked into a D.C. synagogue and proceeded to tell Jews that their religious texts and traditions compel them to give away Israeli land for the creation of a Palestinian state.

That’s some big, clanging brass you-know-whats on display right there. It’s one thing to use a prayer breakfast to rip Christians a new one. Would he have the guts to walk into a church and do the same thing, hours before a holy day, one day before a holiday no less? Are we Jews that nice? That pathetic? Do we give the impression of being such pushovers that we turn our pulpits over to world leaders who crap on our identity and manipulate our covenant with God to suit their own personal political agendas?

The migratory invasion of Europe, uncannily but presciently foreseen in Jean Raspail’s much derided [1] 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, [2] is now taking place with near-irresistible force on the shores of that beleaguered continent. As National Post columnist Matthew Fisher reports [3], “Europe is in a deep quandary over how to respond to a huge and growing influx of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa.” Fisher writes as a compassionate liberal whose sympathies go out to these poor wretches, victims of human traffickers, trusting their lives to rickety boats that frequently capsize. It is hard not to feel sympathy for these hapless multitudes.

At the same time, one must also remember that the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers form part of a vast transfer of Muslim populations to Europe, and that Christians in their midst have been thrown overboard [4]. Equally distressing is the likelihood that as many as one million “would-be migrants [are] gathering on the Med’s southern shores” to make the crossing. At this rate it will not take long before Europe, already burdened by large, clamorous and disruptive Muslim enclaves, becomes the island of Lampedusa [5] writ majuscule.

Seventy years after World War II’s end, this Memorial Day would be a fitting time to visit a local monument.

World War II memorials—who notices them anymore? They blend into the background like telephone poles.

Chances are your community has a tribute to local men and women who served, but it’s likely you’ve never stopped to visit. Those who fought the Axis powers are out of mind now. “In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life,” said Robert Frost. “It goes on.”

Still, it’s unbefitting that as we pass their chiseled names we fail to acknowledge these patriots for even an instant—especially on Memorial Day 2015, the 70th year after the end of World War II. From high-school history, we’re all familiar with the vast numbers. More than 400,000 Americans were killed during the war. Another 670,000 were maimed or wounded. They came from nearly every city and town. And they fell by the tens of thousands at Luzon, Normandy, Anzio, Guadalcanal and Okinawa.

This Army vet is trying to save their lives.

His Maryland driver’s license lists his name as “FNU Ajmal.” The FNU stands for “first name unknown.” It’s the way all his legal and identification documents appear, because this is what some bureaucrat slapped on the green card he received from Uncle Sam when he came to America.

His real name is Ajmal Faqiri. But the FNU that has become his legal name in America is a metaphor for the bungling that characterizes one of the noblest efforts to come out of our long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: a 2008 decision by Congress to grant special visas to the Afghan and Iraqi interpreters and translators who put their own lives at risk to serve American troops.

“There are hundreds just like Ajmal who now go by F-N-U,” says Matt Zeller, a 33-year-old Army veteran of Afghanistan who now runs a nonprofit—No One Left Behind—founded to hold America to its promise to resettle interpreters such as Mr. Faqiri here in the U.S.