RUTHFULLY YOURS

“[Education] is now being used to raise an obedient generation that will serve the government.” — Sakine Esen Yilmaz, Secretary General of a secular teachers’ union.

Christian Pastor Ahmet Guvener managed to get his daughter, also a Christian, an exemption from mandatory Islamic religious classes in her Turkish school, but he soon found out this was not an easy task. Schoolteachers offered the girl three options: take as an elective course, “the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran,” or basic religious knowledge — or fail the year. After the father spoke to the press, the school offered his daughter an alternative: an elective course in “astronomy.”

For the Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a pious Sunni man is, by definition, a more decent man than any other. Therefore, he reasons, a pious Sunni youth is better than any other youth.

While the president’s amnesty gets all the ink, his plan to flood the U.S. with cheap foreign workers proceeds apace.
When President Obama issued a series of executive orders on immigration last November, he unleashed a fierce torrent of criticism for granting millions of undocumented immigrants a de-facto amnesty. Lost in all the attention paid to that fight, however, was a lesser known executive action taken at the same time, one which the administration claimed would “modernize, improve and clarify immigrant and nonimmigrant visa programs to grow our economy and create jobs.” Now, the Obama administration has issued guidance clarifying what exactly their modernized, improved visa system will look like, and it’s not pretty: It appears that the president aims to unilaterally overhaul a critical visa program to usher in a flood of cheap foreign labor, crowding thousands of American workers out of their jobs and potentially discouraging many more from reentering the workplace.

A deadline passes with no agreement in sight. The third deadline has expired. There is no agreed framework. While the negotiators in Lausanne are continuing to talk, their language is telling. By yesterday there was supposed to be an agreed framework outlining the contours of a nuclear deal. Instead, negotiators said they would release a statement explaining which issues are agreed and which are not yet resolved. The truth is clear: For all the hard work of American and European diplomats, this endeavor has failed.

Why?

Because, as it has for over twelve years now, Iran is playing games. Ayatollah Khamenei has decided to roll the dice and pursue endless concessions. In doing so, he’s rolled out four obstacles to prevent a deal from taking shape. First, as the New York Times notes, Iran is now intransigent about the future of its existing nuclear-fuel stockpiles. Before, Iran had agreed to ship its stockpiles to Russia to be transformed into fuel rods for its civilian nuclear-power program. Second, Iran is demanding that advanced centrifuges — and future centrifuge research and development — be included in its post-deal nuclear portfolio.

Are we prepared to handcuff a feminist photographer who won’t take pictures at a strip club? The only identifiable victim of Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act is the First Amendment’s Freedom of Association clause. Like Joan of Arc, it has been burned at the stake. In the name of nondiscrimination, Republican governor Mike Pence has surrendered to the angry mobs that erupted like the Sandinistas’ turbinas divinas. Despite RFRA’s similarity to a 22-year-old federal statute and laws in 18 other states, liberal activists and journalists have distorted Indiana’s measure into an alleged anti-gay hit list.

It never helps that laws like this one focus solely on the rights of religious people. As vital as religious liberty is, what about the rights of the 25 percent of Americans who have no faith? The safe harbors that these laws attempt to dredge should not, themselves, discriminate against nonbelievers. The sorts of freedoms shielded by Indiana’s new law — and nearly identical pieces of legislation heralded by the ACLU, signed by President Clinton, and supported by Obama in the Illinois state senate — should be protected for all Americans, be they religious, agnostic, atheist, confused, or otherwise.

While the latter compelled discrimination, the former does nothing of the sort. ‘I could have handled that better.” I don’t know if the captain of the Titanic ever said that. But Mike Pence did on Tuesday. The Indiana governor has managed to step on an impressive number of parts of his own anatomy recently and in the process gravely injured what was already a long-shot ambition to run for president in 2016. Earlier this month he signed the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act in a private ceremony. In attendance were prominent opponents of gay marriage.
In response, great algae plumes of righteous outrage erupted across the Internet. Gay-rights groups, the Democratic party, and the mainstream media, in unison, lost their collective marbles and raised unshirted hell. Know-nothings of every stripe cried out that Jim Crow had returned to the land. Shouts of “boycott!” went forth, including perhaps of the NCAA’s Final Four, which for Hoosiers is like threatening a boycott of Easter Mass at the Vatican. The Indiana Chamber of Commerce hied to its corporate fainting couch and begged to be rescued. Pence, desperate to put out the political fire, raced to a TV studio last Sunday to quench the flames on ABC’s This Week.

The Algemeiner recently reported that “After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the ‘special’ relationship between the US and the Jewish state. In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she ‘thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.’”

The Pineapple Revolt is from Jack Engelhard’s memoir Escape from Mount Moriah.
“There was only fear on this ship, and pineapples, several hundred passengers, a million pineapples.

We were on the Serpa Pinto, on the high seas destined from Hitler to FDR, or whoever would take us in. FDR refused.

So we were headed for Philadelphia, and after that, who knew?

But along with the rest of the huddled men, women and children on board, we were the few who had managed to escape.

Mischief at the U.N.
Obama toys with cutting Israel adrift in the Security Council.

Immediately after Israel’s March 17 election, Obama administration officials threatened to allow (or even encourage) the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state and confine Israel to its pre-1967 borders. Within days, the president himself joined in, publicly criticizing not just Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Obama has had notoriously bad relations, but sectors of Israeli opinion and even Israel itself.

The administration leaks suggesting that Israel be cut adrift in the Security Council in effect threatened “collective punishment” as a weapon in U.S.-Israel relations. This is especially ironic coming from “progressives” who have repeatedly accused Israel of “collective punishment” by forcefully retaliating against terrorist attacks. But more important, exposing Israel to the tender mercies of its Security Council opponents harms not only Israel’s interests, but America’s in equal measure. Roughly half of Washington’s Security Council vetoes have been cast against draft resolutions contrary to our Middle East interest

“But it’s Israel, a land populated by the eternally persecuted, that according to the U.N. eclipses all others in a world of egregious atrocity. Israel has turned the other cheek to violence, oppression, and subjugation throughout history. To rank Israel atop countries with well-known and well-documented histories of civil rights and human rights violations is an inexcusable insult and quite indicative of the sorry state of affairs within the U.N. and within our own diplomatic circles.”

The U.N. wants the world to believe that Israel is leading the globe in human rights violations, partly as a result of the shameless propaganda war perpetrated by Hamas during and since the war in the Gaza Strip last summer. The war was precipitated by numerous Hamas and Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, the last straw being the bloody massacre of an entire Israeli family, including their newborn baby.

Only the uninformed could pass judgement on Israel for the unavoidable collateral damage on civilians which any warring state has been guilty of ranging from minimal to egregious. The United States is no stranger to civilian collateral damage. We routinely kill civilians as a result of our drone executions which take place near daily all over the Middle East. How does the U.S. handle the repercussions of killing civilians in order to execute high-value targets? We pay them cash money. In the Mideast, it’s referred to as “blood money”, and in Islam, paying that debt brings balance to the scales of justice.

Barack Obama wants to fundamentally transform something besides America.

As most informed Americans know by now, Barack Obama is a man with grandiose visions of himself.

According to Barack Obama, President Obama’s accomplishments have vaulted him into the pantheon of the greats: Lincoln, Roosevelt and Johnson. His nomination victory speech marked the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal” according to, once again, Barack Obama. He was a better political director than his political director and a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, reported…Barack Obama. The sense of grandiosity is dangerous in any president as is the view that a president can do whatever he wants — the conception of the presidency as held by …you guessed it…Barack Obama. When Barack Obama declared he yearned to go full Bulworth in his second term when he would no longer be on the ballot, pundits pondered how he would wield his power.

One primary goal has become increasingly apparent. He wants to fundamentally transform America’s feelings towards and support of Israel, one of our most reliable and key allies. He has been doing so in ways that should offend every America, because the methods he has used are contrary to our best and most honored traditions.