RUTHFULLY YOURS

Don’t Worry, Be Happy By Victor Davis Hanson
In his 1988 presidential race, George H.W. Bush was trashed by the left for selecting the Bobby McFerrin hit “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as his campaign song. Maybe Bush thought he needed a lighthearted optimistic echo of Reagan’s 1984 mantra, “It’s morning in America.” [1] But the Left thought the ditty confirmed the image of a callous and vacuous Bush who didn’t “worry” enough about the poor and minorities. The liberal McFerrin was outraged that Bush sought to play his own song at rallies. Shortly afterwards, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” was quietly dropped by the Bush team.

Perhaps no other slogan better characterizes the Obama tenure.

America is relieved that things at least appear calm, as war and death rage abroad. At almost every critical juncture, the administration chose short-term happy talk in lieu of worries over long-term consequences. No matter how frequent the disasters abroad, Obama can proclaim the world is at peace in an unprecedented age of stability and security.

An Ohio man indicted by a federal grand jury on terrorism support charges last week, Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, was questioned by the FBI two days after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.

During that questioning, he was caught lying about his identity.

Several days later, Mohamud applied for a U.S. passport and was allowed to travel to Syria. There, he fought and trained with Jabhat al-Nusra — an official al-Qaeda affiliate — and then was allowed to return to the U.S. where he planned to launch terror attacks inside the U.S.

These remarkable revelations of FBI failure emerged from documents unsealed by the federal court and from last week’s indictment.

According to the indictment (p.2), Mohamud became a naturalized U.S. citizen on February 18 last year, and applied for a U.S. passport a week later:

For those interested in where the Islamic State (IS) gets its money, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has produced a report detailing the financial pathways behind this entity.

As the report notes:

While IS funding streams remain fluid, the group’s largest revenue sources appear (based on open-source information) to include oil sales, taxation and extortion, and the sale of looted antiquities. Oil sales initially provided the majority of the group’s revenue, but gradually declined as a percentage of overall IS profits due to an extensive campaign of airstrikes by the United States and coalition partners against oil and gas facilities used by the group.

The money flowing into IS is substantial, ranging into the millions of dollars per day. Consequently, senior U.S. officials view IS as one of the best-funded terrorist organizations – allowing it to administratively control and govern the territory it seizes.

[1]Just when you think the left’s passionate idolatry of Barack Obama might be waning a bit after six years in office, along comes a photo posted recently on the White House official Twitter account to remind you of the President’s divinity. The image appears to show the Messiah-in-Chief shooting a rainbow out of his palm, as only God or perhaps an LGBT Spiderman can do.

After clinching the “framework” of a nuclear deal with our enemy the Iranian regime in which the President made doormat Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill, Obama traveled to Kingston, Jamaica recently to speak [2] to impressionable young fans, lecture the leaders of Caribbean countries about fighting global warming global cooling climate change bad weather, and tour a museum dedicated to fellow marijuana enthusiast Bob Marley.

At his departure at the end of the week, a gorgeous rainbow happened to be arcing overhead as Obama climbed the stairway to Air Force One. White House official photographer Paul Souza captured, or manipulated, a shot of the rainbow seemingly emanating from the President’s hand as he waved goodbye at the plane’s door. Souza posted the pic on Twitter with this accompanying affirmation from Obama: “With hard work and hope, change is always within our reach.” But the subtext was, “And as a sign of my power, mortals, behold as I call forth rainbows.”

James Comey, former US Attorney and current head of the FBI, gave a speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington last week commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day. He stated: “In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, Poland and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.” (NYTimes, 4/21/15) Immediately, the Polish president took umbrage at this, reminding us that Poland was a victim, not an aggressor during the war and that Mr. Comey’s comments were the result of “ignorance, lack of historical knowledge and possibly large personal aversion” towards Poles. Rick Lyman, the Times reporter offered the following clarification: “And while there were certainly episodes in which Poles were responsible for the deaths of Jews, there was no widespread complicity with the Nazi policy of extermination.” Let’s be grateful for small favors.

[1]Incitement and indoctrination are at the heart of the Jew-hatred raging through the Arab and broader Muslim world and now infecting much of Europe.

Within the Palestinian realm, both Palestinian governments – the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza – regularly call for annihilation of the Jews. Hamas’s charter cites the oft-quoted Hadith (a statement attributed to Muhammed but not found in the Koran) declaring that Judgement Day will not come until all Jews are killed. It pledges the organization’s dedication to that goal. The necessity of exterminating the Jews has likewise been declared by PA-appointed religious leaders, and genocidal Jew-hatred is routinely promoted in PA mosques, media and schools.

Similar genocidal rhetoric is a fixture of media, mosques and schools throughout most of the Arab world and, largely through Arab financing and disseminating, has become a constant theme in much of the wider Muslim world and within Muslim communities elsewhere, not least in Europe.

Beyond explicit calls for genocide, anti-Jewish indoctrination entails labeling Jews as sub-human, blaming them for virtually all the world’s ills, characterizing them as a disease within the body of humanity, and attributing to them the most reprehensible qualities and the most vile crimes. This demonization of Jews routinely draws upon both old anti-Jewish Islamic texts and classic European anti-Semitic materials including medieval European blood libels, the czarist-generated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and caricatures.

Hillary Clinton has formally announced she is running for president. Thus begins one of the most interesting and consequential political experiments in American history, one that will unfold over the next year and a half. We are going to see if a candidate for president with no real-world experience, no notable achievements, and no charisma or likability can fool 62 million voters into making her president.

Some may argue that we already conducted that experiment with Barack Obama, but there are several important differences. As a candidate, Obama could at least pretend to be likable. He made all the right noises about “no blue state America, no red state America,” promised “hope and change” for an electorate reeling from two wars and the Great Recession, and sold voters the notion that he would transcend the old politics of government gridlock and zero-sum partisanship. Also, he had a nice smile and could read a teleprompter well.

When, exactly, does it matter? Who decides? Apparently not Israel.

Ambassador Samantha Power’s testimony may have completed the transition of the United States from Israel’s ally… to an arbiter between Israel and those who seek to erase it.

The “peace process,” first codified in the Oslo accords, commits Israel and the Palestinians to resolve differences bilaterally, not through the dictates of a third party or organization.

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, says the U.S. will no longer automatically exercise its veto in the UN Security Council to protect Israel.

In testimony before the Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, Power specifically declined to rule out support for resolutions on Palestinian statehood or the “peace process.” “We will look to see what will advance Israel’s security and what will advance peace in the region… Our objective as an administration is what can we do to defuse tensions, what will it take to get those negotiations back on track.”

“There is global unanimity that jihad is an obligation.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“My convictions emanate from what Allah said: You must kill the non-believers, regardless of whether they are Muslims or atheists.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“Beheading is permitted in Islam. I recommend you read the Suras [chapters] of Al-Anfal (8), At-Tawbah (9) and Mohammed (47).” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

“I swear by the name of Allah, this is not violence. We are defending our religion.” — Mohamed Hamdouch.

A Spanish woman married to a Moroccan jihadist has given birth to the first Spanish citizen born in the Islamic State.

The child’s father, 28-year-old Mohamed Hamdouch, is notorious for his exceptional brutality and cruelty both on and off the battlefield. He is known in Spain as the “Beheader of Castillejas,” in recognition of his penchant for posting photographs of himself smiling while holding the decapitated heads of Syrian soldiers.

The child’s mother is Asia Ahmed Mohamed, a native of the North African Spanish exclave of Ceuta. She married Hamdouch after he gave her a suicide vest as a dowry.

This information was part of the University of Pittsburgh’s “Gender-Inclusive/Non-Sexist Language Guidelines and Resources” document. The University of Pittsburgh has released a set of “Gender-Inclusive/Non-Sexist Language Guidelines and Resources” informing instructors how they should be talking in their classrooms in order to not offend anyone.

One suggestion is to ask “students to write down preferred names and pronouns” on the first day while also keeping in mind that just because a student wanted a particular pronoun on the first day doesn’t mean that he/she/they/zi/zie will always want that pronoun because “a person’s gender identity may change over time.” “Zi” and “zie” are provided as examples of gender-neutral pronouns in the document, as well as the singular use of the pronoun “they.”