RUTHFULLY YOURS

The only limit on the president’s power that he recognizes is political expediency.

President Obama is an Alinskyite.​

That assertion is not an epithet — well, not primarily. True, I would not describe someone I admired as an “Alinskyite.” Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics. But in tying the president to the seminal community organizer whose theories and tactics so influenced him, my purpose is more to decode than to insult him.

Of course, calling Obama an “Alinskyite” draws cataracts of condemnation from the Democrat-media complex — for the same reason that Muslim Brotherhood shrieks of “Islamophobe!” inevitably follow any reasoned, scripturally based discussion of Islamic supremacism. People who advance their agendas in dishonesty and stealth can’t afford to have critics shine a light on them. The best diversion is to smear the critic as racist and phobic — or as Alinsky, a master of the game, put it, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Well, this week Alinsky did amnesty, so let’s not be diverted.

It was remarkable. We’ve endured six years of “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” “How dare you call Obamacare a tax,” “The video did it in Benghazi,” “Of course we’d never let guns walk to Mexican gangs,” “Workplace violence,” “Kinetic military action,” “The IRS harassment is outrageous and intolerable,” and “not a smidgeon of corruption” from “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet what so astonished the commentariat about Obama’s decree of amnesty for illegal aliens was the sheer audacity of hoax.

“I’m the president of the United States, not the emperor of the United States,” our would-be emperor repeatedly explained in the months and years before Thursday’s edict. Again and again, in more than two dozen recorded public statements, the president emphatically denied that he had the power to pronounce law unilaterally. “My job,” he huffed, “is to execute the laws that are passed.” His mere say-so could not suspend deportations or grant illegal aliens lawful status, he explained, because that would transgress “laws on the books that Congress has passed.”

In a few hours’ time, the President of the United States will apparently do to his oath of office what the Islamic State does to its captives. As I said to Hugh Hewitt the other day, even a constitution of meticulously constructed checks and balances requires a certain seemliness of its political class. This chief executive is brazen in his lawlessness, and ever more so. And he has calculated that those who object lack the stomach to do anything about it. We shall see.

However, I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week – Barack Obama’s reaction to the latest beheading of a US citizen by the head hackers of the Islamic State. Peter Kassig’s death video was not as the others:

David Haines and Alan Henning – both from Britain – and Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff each made statements before their deaths in earlier videos. Each held Barack Obama or David Cameron to blame for their deaths, because of American and British military action against Isil in Iraq and Syria.

There was no such statement from Peter Kassig. Instead, “Jihadi John” appears with Mr Kassig’s severed head, and sneers, “He doesn’t have much to say.”

Indeed. But I wonder what he had to say in the last moments of his life. Evidently not a statement blaming Obama for his predicament. Perhaps he even pushed back against his executioner in a more forceful way. In Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade, in an essay on another westerner beheaded by the jihadists, I salute someone who declined to go gentle into that good night:

Consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book, ‘Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, 2012). His articles and blogs are published in several foreign journals and his new work, ‘Bilaam’s Curse: The enemies of Zion’ will be published by Hamilton Books this year
Think of the worst crimes a state can be guilty of. Then dishonestly make them peculiar Israeli crimes. Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, war crimes of every description. But it’s all been seen before

Plots and characters in the bible are said to portend what history will have in store for the Jewish people. That being so, the Balaam narrative foretold the plot against modern Israel: if war could not bring down the nation then cursing would. Delving into the intrigue described so compellingly in the Book of Numbers we bump into far-sighted prophecy at every twist and turn.

The plot is familiar enough. It begins with the desire of Moabite king, Balak to stop the Jewish people in their tracks after a series of victories over more powerful armies. Military might was not behind the juggernaut Jews, so Balak understood.

The power of the start-up nation, he learns, resided in their leader’s power of speech. Moses was the secret weapon. And this gave Balak an idea. If, by speaking with God, Moses could empower the Jews, then surely they could be disempowered by speech.

So the king hires a curser-in-chief named Balaam. His goal is not necessarily to wipe a wandering multitude off the face of the desert, but to keep it from going into Israel.

“Let us drive them out of the Land” he tells the Elders of Moab. What he meant was that the Jews must at all costs not establish a sovereign nation. As long as they were homeless and stateless, as far as Moab’s leaders were concerned they could keep their spirituality and myriad laws and God-given strength.

The Moabites, who after all descended from a son of Lot by his elder daughter, were prepared to live and let live. But a Jewish people connected to a national homeland – that would be a different kettle of fish. The Moabites, true blue descendants of lifestyle-loving Lot, felt that such a prospect posed an existential threat to their free and easy ways. In fact, Jews occupying the Land of Israel, they felt, would ramify the entire world.

Listen, myriad voices urge at a far-ahead point in history, at which time the people of Israel are living, and thriving, in the Promised Land, and “Human Rights” delegates by the thousands meet on the side of a game-changing conference at the Indian Ocean city of Durban in 2001; listen, say the plotters; war after war has left Israel not just intact but invulnerable.

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nick, who is a regular contributor to The Commentator, blogs at cmewonline.com
Israel supporters fight back against the boycotters. It’s a standing joke among supporters of decency that the anti-Israel boycott crowd is going to end up boycotting itself since Israeli technology is so essential to modern life. Now there’s an app to really ram it home to the bigots

The supposedly pro-Palestinian Boycott Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement frequently makes the news with its aggressive and counter-productive antics in stores and on the streets. But supporters of Israel, both Jewish and Christian, are fighting back.

It’s a common joke in the pro-Israel community that there are fewer and fewer things that BDS supporters can eat, use or be treated with without infringing their own “never buy Israel” mantras.

BDS purists have (or should have!) banned themselves from using mobile ‘phones, receiving the best heart treatments in hospital or enjoying the delights of cherry tomatoes or Medjool dates (both of them yummy as well as healthy and produced in Israel).

Just so BDS supporters can check themselves on their way to go shopping, there’s now an app for that. “Am Israel Buy” (a play on the Hebrew phrase “the people of Israel live”) is a compendium of Israeli-sourced foods, cosmetics, clothing and even books about Israel; most of which can be ordered online from your ‘phone (oops, sorry Mr BDS, you shouldn’t be using your Smart Phone with its Isaeli-invented voicemail and SMS).

The Am Yisrael Buy app is available on most mobile platforms, so go buy.

While we’re talking apps, canny supporters of Israeli products can use the software boycotters themselves use as they avoid the same items! www.buycott.com is the home of the “Buycott”, app, which allows you to scan barcodes with your phone to detect products you want or don’t want to buy.

The rent-seekers, opportunists, third-rate academics, carbon-market scam artists and peddlers of catastrophic prophecy can see the alarmist bubble deflating, so they’re trying harder than ever to sustain the scare. Problem is, Mother Nature isn’t cooperating

This doesn’t mean the climate change “debate” will stop, the news media will cease reporting weather as a dire threat, or that the true believers will no longer be obsessed by it. However, the ultimate arbiter, climate itself, has made clear its decision by ceasing to warm for over 18 years. Despite the ongoing use of fossil fuels, a proclaimed 95% certainty of 97% of scientists and the high-powered projections of the world’s most advanced climate models, the climate has refused to pay the slightest heed.

Contrary to all the confidence and predictions of alleged experts, storms are no more intense nor frequent, while droughts, floods and sea levels have declined to confirm alarmists’ barely concealed hopes of disasters. The simple fact is that the alleged experts and their high-powered models were wrong. The climate has ceased to warm and, with little or no greenhouse warming, the entire theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), aka Climate Change (CC), aka Global Warming, aka Extreme Weather, is left with no basis.

The debate over CC has been unique in the history of science in that its proponents have largely abandoned the primacy of evidence and openly declared methodology in favour of self-proclaimed authority backed by their own confidential methods and models. It is also unique in that the alarmists refuse to directly address their arguments, prefering to ignore, censor and personally denigrate them. In a few instances in the early part of the public debate, the proponents attempted direct debate with their critics but came away looking decidedly second-best and they soon refused any further direct discussion. With no convincing answers to the uncertainties and conflicting evidence raised by their opponents they simply chose to ignore them, declare the science “settled” and anoint themselves as the only experts. All who disagreed agree were deemed to be fools, knaves and/or in the pay and pocket of Big Energy.

With a naive and compliant news media steeped in the same politically correct, left wing academic indoctrination as the researchers, the latter enjoyed a near monopoly on favourable news coverage. Self-serving publicity releases were regurgitated undigested beneath the by-lines of environmental “reporters”, who eagerly reduced themselves to unquestioning stenographers.

Hillary Clinton Offers Her Own Condescending Hispanic Stereotype :Stephen Kruiser

Remember, this is an MSNBC guy reporting this, so it’s probably accurate. He also probably didn’t notice how cringe-inducing the statement was.

Again, she is an extraordinarily awful candidate. All she has to do is speak extemporaneously and she does more damage to herself than any opponent ever could. As I wrote on Wednesday, the press has a herculean task ahead of them to make this woman likable.

Hillary Clinton now on immigration order: “This is about people’s lives, people, I would venture to guess, who served us tonight.”

The 1940s and ’50s saw huge forced moves of population groups—people who put down roots and started over.

On Tuesday, as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the murder in a Jerusalem synagogue of five Israelis, the Spanish Parliament happened to be passing a nonbinding motion urging its government to “encourage the recognition of Palestine as a state.” Last month, Sweden became the first European Union member to officially recognize Palestine as a state, and parliamentarians in England and France have similar legislation in the works.

As anti-Israel sentiment grows in Europe—and in the U.S., where the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement has taken hold on many college campuses—calls for an immediate resolution to the Palestinian “refugee” problem abound. To hear some in the anti-Israel movement today, one might imagine that the Palestinian exodus was a unique occurrence in modern history, that no other people have ever been moved off what they considered to be their ancestral lands.

The truth is that such movements—including that of the Palestinians—happened so often in the mid-1940s to early 1950s that it is surprising that the plural of the word exodus—exodi?—is not used in reference to this period.

For all sorts of reasons, ethnic groups were either forcibly or voluntarily moved during that troubled period, and usually in far worse circumstances and for far longer distances than the Palestinians. There were no fewer than 20 different groups—including the Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus of the Punjab, the Crimean Tatars, the Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin Islanders, the Soviet Chechens, Ingush and Balkars—many in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who were displaced and taken to different regions.

Yet all of these refugee groups, except one, chose to try to make the best of their new environments. Most have succeeded, and some, such as the refugees who reached America in that decade, have done so triumphantly. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, who made the choice to embrace fanatical irredentism and launch two intifadas—and perhaps now a third—resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis.

After Germany lost World War II in 1945, more than three million of its people were forced to leave their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia and regions east of the Oder and Neisse rivers—lands that their forefathers had tilled for centuries. These refugees embarked on a 300-mile journey westward under conditions of extreme deprivation and danger with only what they could carry in suitcases.

Prosecutors have taken a yen to civil forfeiture laws, which they’ve used to shore up state and municipal budgets with sums from confiscated private property. One happy joiner is Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch, whose U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York has been an enthusiastic grabber of private assets.

Prosecutors love the practice because it allows them to seize cash and property before the target is charged with a crime. Intended to be used against drug dealers and their ill-gotten gains, the law has become an all-purpose cash machine for police departments and prosecutors who often make forfeiture calls based not on the suspected crime or the perpetrator but on the desirability of the available goods to be seized.

For Jeffrey, Richard and Mitch Hirsch, three brothers in Long Island, the law allowed the federal government to drain their bank account while never charging them with a crime. In May 2012 the feds confiscated $446,651.11 from the account the brothers use for deposits from their 27-year-old Bi-County Distributors, which stocks convenience stores in the region with candy and snack food.

According to the federal government, the brothers came under suspicion because of the frequent small deposits they made in the bank. Under federal law, banks are required to report cash deposits of more than $10,000 at a time to the Internal Revenue Service. Frequent deposits beneath the $10,000 threshold can also trigger federal scrutiny on suspicion the depositors are seeking to evade federal oversight for crimes like money laundering or drug trafficking.

The Hirsch brothers run a small business that deals in small amounts of cash, a fact that the government surely noticed, since they were never charged with a crime. But more than two years after the government grabbed the hundreds of thousands of dollars, none of it has been returned. According to the Institute for Justice, which is representing the family in a lawsuit, the government has also denied the Hirsches a prompt hearing on the forfeiture, putting it in violation of the 2000 Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act.

Ms. Lynch’s office is a major forfeiture operation, bringing in more than $113 million in civil actions from 123 cases between 2011 and 2013, according to the Justice Department. This is a trend across the country. Under a program known as equitable sharing, state and local law enforcement also get a piece of federal civil forfeiture actions. Between 2003 and 2011, annual payments from that program rose to $450 million from $218 million, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The Supreme Court declined to draw a clear line on racial discrimination in university admissions in last year’s Fisher v. University of Texas decision. Now new lawsuits are moving to challenge how far colleges can go in using racial preferences.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions filed lawsuits Monday against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in federal court. The suits argue that the schools use race preferences to reach a specific racial balance on campus and have failed to abide by the strict scrutiny of racial preferences required by the Supreme Court.

The Harvard challenge concerns what the lawsuit calls a de facto quota on the number of Asian students the school admits. The suit compares its current racial admissions to Harvard’s quotas limiting Jewish students in an earlier era. In both cases, Harvard kept out minorities who would have been admitted based on academic merit.
Over the last eight years Asian students have comprised between 17.6% and 20.7% of students admitted to Harvard. Though the number of Asians applying for admission has increased, the percentage of offers has barely budged. In 1992, 19.1% of Harvard’s admissions offers went to Asian applicants, compared to 25.2% who were admitted to the California Institute of Technology, a school that doesn’t use racial preferences. In 2013 Harvard made 18% of its offers to Asians, while CalTech admitted 42.5% Asian students.

Similar admissions percentages at Harvard have held steady for other racial groups with remarkably little variance. In other words, while schools like Harvard say the goal of racial preferences is to achieve a “critical mass” of minority students, the admissions evidence suggests that the school is reserving pre-rationed pie slices for racial groups.

The other lawsuit argues that UNC at Chapel Hill is evading Fisher’s strict-scrutiny requirement that a school cannot use race preferences to achieve diversity if it can get the same result using race-neutral methods. The lawsuit says UNC hasn’t adjusted admissions policies since the Fisher decision. The university itself did a study showing that it could increase diversity on campus by admitting the top 10% of the state’s high school classes more than with racial preferences. UNC rejected that alternative because it would have slightly lowered the school’s average SAT scores.

In a recent appalling surge of innovative terrorist violence, Palestinians have driven cars into Jewish civilians whose only crime was walking or waiting near the light rail that runs through Jerusalem. In late October a Hamas fanatic murdered a three-month-old Israeli-American baby whose parents were returning from her first visit to the Western Wall. In a similar attack two weeks later, another Hamas zealot killed two pedestrians.

Palestinians were ecstatic. An animated cartoon showed three religious Jews with a Star of David on their hats frantically fleeing a pursuing car painted with the colors of the Palestinian flag. Another, labeled the “Run Over Organization,” called on followers to “hit the gas . . . for Al-Aqsa,” the Temple Mount mosque. Palestinians were urged to “Run over, friend, run over the foreign settler!”

Climaxing the current wave of Palestinian atrocities was the brutal slaughter earlier this week of four rabbis (three of whom were Americans) at prayer in their Jerusalem synagogue. Palestinian cousins armed with meat cleavers and a gun left ghastly images of murdered Jews wrapped in blood-smeared prayer shawls lying on the blood-splattered floor. These barbaric images will endure forever as testimony to the demented insanity of Palestinian terrorists.

Responses from Arab political leaders were predictable. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas complied with Secretary of State Kerry’s firm request that he condemn the attack, adding his universal denunciation of “the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it.” A senior Hamas official more precisely proclaimed his support for “any military action against the occupation anywhere it can be carried out.”

As political leaders worldwide condemned the brutal assault, President Barack Obama, the obtuse master craftsman of moral equivalency, chimed in. “We condemn in the strongest terms these attacks,” which he properly labeled “outrageous acts.” That would have been the perfect place to stop. But the preening universal moralist who resides in the White House could not resist the opportunity to generalize and equivocate, seizing upon the pitiless slaughter of innocent Jews to bracket Palestinian murderers and Israeli victims.

“Too many Israelis have died, too many Palestinians have died,” Obama continued, as though the synagogue slaughter was an equal-opportunity participatory event. He stressed the importance of collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians “to lower tensions and reject violence.” In conclusion, the President offered his familiar trope, for which there is not a shred of supporting evidence: “We have to remind ourselves that the majority of Palestinians and Israelis overwhelmingly want peace.”