RUTHFULLY YOURS

Paul Hollrah is a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black high school student from Miami, was shot to death during an unprovoked attack on neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed-race Hispanic. The incident occurred when Martin became concerned that his movements were being observed by a person or persons unknown. When attacked, Zimmerman was awaiting the arrival of local police after having reported the presence of a suspicious-looking person passing through his neighborhood.

In the afternoon of July 17, 2014, on a sidewalk in Staten Island, New York, 43-year-old Eric Garner, a black man, was approached by police officers when he was observed selling individual cigarettes from packs without tax stamps, a violation of New York state law. Garner complained about being “harassed,” and when an officer attempted to place handcuffs on him he slapped the officer’s hands away. Garner, a very large man who suffered from asthma, struggled with five officers, during which time he was allegedly held in a chokehold for approximately 15 seconds. Officers called for medical assistance but Garner expired an hour later of cardiac arrest.

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name.” — Salman Rushdie, former President of PEN.

Today, a genuine fear of retribution for a “blasphemous” statement has subdued the will to stand up for one’s own beliefs, values and the right to speak out. This fear has made most of the West submissive, just as Islam — in both its name [Islam means “submission”] and declarations — openly wants.

This time, the condemnation had not come in a fatwa from Iran’s Supreme leader, but from a Western academic. If we do not reverse this trend, censorship, blasphemy laws, and all the other encumbrances of totalitarians, will return to our lives. The bullies will win.

If Geert Wilders and others are being accused of hate speech, then why isn’t the Koran — with its calls for smiting necks and killing infidels — also being accused of hate speech?

The mere criticism of a religious belief shared by many people mainly in the Third World has been linked, with no justification, to their genuine prejudice against the inhabitants of the developed world.

Anyone who has had much to do with publishing, or anyone who cares about books and free speech, will be familiar with the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, an enduring champion of the First Amendment and the public’s right to read whatever they please — without the interference and censorship of self-appointed guardians of inoffensiveness and sexual purity.

“Yet religion should not pass itself off as science. Conversely, (post-modern climate) science should resist the temptation to proselytise, to politicise and to encourage “a religious comet to trail off into the darkness, making suspicious everything about itself that it presents as science”, especially where its arguments – and ‘expert scholarship’ – lack precision, clarity and evidence.”

They tinker with their computer models and hand down oracular pronouncements on atmospheric events 100 years hence, never troubled by self-doubt nor annoying queries from congregants in the media choir. Like Islam, if science is to be reformed, look to the heretics.

Further evidence that our national broadcaster is on a climate-change jihad emerged this week as ABC RN Breakfast’s Ellen Fanning chatted with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about her new book, Heretic: Why Islam needs a Reformation now. What folows are some snatches from that broadcast (emphasis added):

Thug Strife I don’t get it. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big when all the executives are excited about the toy buildings that turn into robots. Hanks just doesn’t get it. He asks, “What’s fun about that?” Except I’m asking, “What’s racist about that?”

The mayor of Baltimore, who will spend the rest of her days living light-years from the word “Churchillian,” recently apologized for two gaffes. First, she walked back her statement that she gave rioters space to “destroy.” That’s not what she meant, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

It sure sounded like it to me, and the facts on the ground seemed to line up with the rhetoric (this new video of Baltimore cops fleeing rioters is pretty compelling). But fair enough. People often say things clumsily in stressful situations. But then the mayor apologized for calling the destroyers “thugs.” “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” she added. “Sometimes my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”

Really, there are no thugs in Baltimore? It’s a thug-free zone?

Dear Reader (including foreign donors who’d like to hide their direct support of this “news”letter by giving money to the Goldberg Global Initiative), I was going to write about the latest Clinton stuff but, frankly, I can’t muster the energy. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. The Clintons are to sleazy behavior what Joe Biden is to craziness and inappropriate backrubs. Sure, they get criticized or mocked, but ultimately it gets discounted because that’s just the way they are. Biden could divulge his sacrofricosis addiction on national television while explaining how the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor and within a week it would be “old news.” “Oh, that’s just Joe!”

But at least Biden’s behavior is contained to himself and perhaps whoever is foolish enough to get in his bitch’n TransAm. The Clintons run a vast enterprise which at this moment is in the finishing stages of taking over the Democratic party and, if it has its way, the United States government. No serious person of any ideological stripe denies — privately, at least — that what the Clintons have been doing over the last 15 years has been unseemly. Legitimate debates can be had as to whether it was criminal. But if the standard is the appearance of corruption, tax-status abuse, influence-peddling, access-selling, money laundering, greed, self-aggrandizement, arrogance, non-transparency, or simply flat-out lying, then no serious person can deny the Clintons have fallen short of that standard.

Sure, the foundation spends a few pennies on the dollar for latrines and textbooks. But its real purpose is to serve as a super–super PAC with better branding. But what really rankles is that the Clintons began their post-presidency in reputational shambles. Bill Clinton sold pardons, or at the very least didn’t care that it seemed like he did. That’s not my characterization; it’s Barney Frank’s, E.J. Dionne’s, Jimmy Carter’s and Patrick Leahy’s, just to name a few. Oh and Hillary’s brother was in on it as well. Hugh Rodham, a Haitian gold-mining expert of late, took $400,000 dollars to shop for pardons, too.

Not since Baryshnikov has a foreigner so captivated a New York audience. “A Conversation with H.E. DR. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran” played the other day at NYU. The show ran for just 90 minutes, but reviews were spectacular. Give this man a Tony: Zarif slayed ’em.

“Demonstrating suave fluency in English and a familiarity with American history and law,” wrote the New York Times, “Iran’s foreign minister said Wednesday that the United States would risk global ostracism if it were to scrap a signed international pact that resolves the Iranian nuclear dispute.” Zarif, the Times went on, “was easygoing and smiling, living up to his image as a diplomatic charmer to an audience that was polite and respectful.” Not to mention sycophantic.

Zarif, adds Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “comes off as practically American.” Why? Well, “He went to college in the United States, at San Francisco State University, and to graduate school at the University of Denver. As Ambassador to the United Nations, he lived in New York for five years. His English is perfect.”

“Let Democrats try to explain to Jewish supporters why they oppose telling jihadist Iran that it must accept Israel; let Democrats try to explain to the country why they want to accommodate — on nuclear weapons, of all things — a totalitarian theocracy that remains a lifeline for anti-American terrorism.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417808/corker-bill-will-not-block-obamas-iran-deal-andrew-c-mccarthy

Republicans’ effort to do something is born of frustration.

I’m in Gomorrah by the Potomac this weekend at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit. As you’d expect, one of the ideas coming in for a good deal of scrutiny is the Corker bill — the legislation proposed by Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) that purports to give Congress an opportunity to review President Obama’s imminent, disastrous nuclear deal with Iraq.

As a New Yorker, I have as my default setting: stay out of Washington. But defaults are made to be broken. From a comfortable remote, it is too easy a thing to dismiss this place as a lost cause for conservatives. From up close, though, it is plain to see that many of the bad ideas that come out of Washington — which often seems like a bad-idea assembly line — result from the frustration of doing battle, day in and day out, with both a destructive presidential administration and a Democratic party that has been commandeered by the hard Left. The Corker bill is one of those bad ideas.

As I recount in Faithless Execution, the framers had a prescient fear of ideological factions. They understood that factions would be more intent on acquiring power and imposing their pieties than on preserving the Constitution’s meticulous separation of powers, the design that guards against accumulation of tyrannical power by any single governmental component. To function properly, the officials in each separate branch must defend their powers from encroachments by the other branches — a legislator, for example, must be incentivized to defend the institution of Congress from executive usurpations. The movement Left, however, is most interested in imposing its agenda; it thus shifts power to whatever branch has the best potential to do that — which is the presidency when it is held by a leftist.

While the Obama Administration continues their pressure on Israel [2], for at least Joe Biden, it is not the first time that there has been animosity with an Israeli leader. The reality is that while some of the names change, this conflict is about Israel’s refusal to surrender to a Palestinian Arab enemy who seeks to destroy the Jewish nation.

The United States is wrong to pressure Israel – yet, this too shall pass.

History often repeats itself.

“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

How can any Israeli just not be charmed by good ole’ Joe Biden? Time and again, especially when courting Jewish voters or when appearing on behalf of his boss Barack Obama before Jewish audiences, America’s Vice President has ebulliently let us know that some of his best friends are Zionists.

He has even famously stated: “I am a Zionist.” He instantly then added straight-faced: “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” We might never have grasped this elusive truth, had he not enlightened us.

Bernie Sanders’s wife involved in real estate scam?March 27th, 2015

Socialism, as they say, works until you run out of other people’s money. That appears to have happened to Jane Sanders, the wife of Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders.

The story is banal. A woman who has her job because of her husband’s clout finagles a credulous state agency into accepting bogus financial documents. Real estate is purchased. The fraud is discovered. The wife of the powerful man is paid a lot of money to leave. Everyone else is ruined.