RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rob Portman Didn’t Know His PAC Paid for Race-Baiting Anti-McDaniel Ads

Ohio Senator Rob Portman told The Plain Dealer he didn’t know that money his PAC donated to Mississippi Conservatives PAC would be used for ads that portrayed the Tea Party and Senate candidate Chris McDaniel as racists. Portman said he had “absolutely no discretion” over how his donation would ultimately be used. “I believe using race as a political issue, as these ads apparently did, was wrong.”

“United States senators contributed money for ads to call Chris McDaniel a racist and to motivate black Democrats through hatred to come out and to vote for Thad Cochran,” Mitch Tyner, an attorney for McDaniel, told reporters this week. McDaniel ran against incumbent Senator Thad Cochran in the Mississippi primary, losing by just over 7000 votes in the runoff election.

Portman’s PAC, Promoting Our Republican Team, gave $25,000 to Mississippi Conservatives, a group associated with Haley Barbour that not only paid for racially charged anti-McDaniel ads, but also funded another group, All Citizens for Mississippi, that ran ads in the black community saying that McDaniel wanted to suppress the black vote and cut food stamps. A radio ad from All Citizens for Mississippi warned voters that, among other things, “A victory for Chris McDaniel is a loss for the reputation of this state, for race relations between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.”

“As NRSC finance chair, I am working to secure a Republican majority in the fall, and I support Sen. Cochran’s re-election,” Portman said in a statement to The Plain Dealer. “My PAC donated money to a Mississippi PAC also supporting his election, but I had absolutely no discretion over how that money would ultimately be spent. In fact, I believe using race as a political issue, as these ads apparently did, was wrong. All who believe our country is heading in the wrong direction under the failed policies of the Obama Administration — including Tea Party activists and more moderate Republicans — must come together to take back the Senate and put our country back on the right track.”

Tom Zawistowski, executive director of the Portage County TEA Party and recent past president of the statewide Ohio Liberty Coalition, reacted angrily to Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s claims that he had no idea that the $25,000 from his PAC would be used by the Thad Cochran campaign to air racially charged attacks on the Tea Party.

If you’re looking for a reason for the supposed impoverishment of Gaza, look no further than the maze of tunnels [1]– some of them miles long — Hamas has built under their territory and beyond their borders into Israel. It’s the jihadist version of Boston’s “Big Dig.” The construction is so extensive that nearly every able-bodied man must have been employed in the occupation of tunnel-building, not to mention the huge diversion of funds, much of it donated by the West, for material like concrete originally trucked into Gaza by the Israelis and others for “humanitarian purposes.”

A huge complex is reported to have been built under Gaza City that houses the wealthy Hamas leadership, including Ismail Haniyeh, who is said to be a multi-millionaire [2]. He is undoubtedly a “strong” critic of “income inequality,” along with the Hamas capo di tutti cappi Khaled Meshal, said to be a billionaire and currently residing in a luxury hotel in Qatar safely out of harm’s way.

(For those, like most members of the MSM, who are unaware, Gaza before Hamas was considered one of the more opulent areas of the Arab world and was frequently used by Egyptians as a honeymoon spot.)

Although the tunnels have been employed for smuggling of some consumer goods, their main purpose, of course, was and is transporting and storing arms and killing or kidnapping Israelis. (I was going to be blunt and say “killing Jews,” but Hamas appears not to be quite so discriminating, as they lob missiles over Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron, areas filled with Muslims. What would happen if one of their missiles hit the Dome of the Rock? I don’t even want to go there.)

This obsession with tunnel-building, driven as it is by a rancid cocktail of hate and envy leavened with religious fanaticism and the psychotic lust of a death cult, is clearly not commercially productive. It is also only one aspect of a rapidly metastasizing global phenomenon, replete with beheadings and crucifixions, that is unlikely to end and may only be at its beginning unless someone puts a genuine stop to it.

Obama, Kerry and the rest of the flaccid moral narcissists who govern our country or the creepy disingenuous bureaucrats who represent “the international community” obviously don’t have the gumption to do it — or even the inclination.

Perhaps because it is already a life or death matter for them, the only people with the will or the ability literally to save the precarious civilization we all take for granted are the Israelis. Israel alone is defending the West.

It’s probably not true that a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if only the heat is raised slowly enough, but it’s an irresistible image nonetheless.

However, the anti-borders forces — on the left and the right — have counted on such passivity among the public to incrementally erode the American people’s ability to decide who gets to move here from abroad. They have devised endless opportunities to appeal deportation decisions, prevented the implementation of needed control measures, pushed relentlessly to pierce numerical caps, and created strong incentives against government functionaries saying “no” to those who want to come. The motto over the doorway of the immigration office might as well be “It ain’t over til the alien wins.”

President Obama has turned up the heat over the past five years. Using “prosecutorial discretion” as a pretext, he has exempted the vast majority of illegal aliens from the consequences of their actions. He has formally amnestied — without legislative authorization — more than a half-million illegal immigrants who claim to have come here before age 16. He is signaling that sometime this year he will unilaterally, and illegally, amnesty half or more of the roughly 12 million illegal aliens now living in the United States.

All this generated some pushback, of course, but not enough to get the frog to jump out of the pot.

The border crisis seems to be changing that.

Tens of thousands of teenagers and families from Central America have poured into Texas, drawn by the Obama administration’s lax enforcement policies. There should be an emergency response to this unprecedented crisis, featuring military backup, tent cities, expedited processing and uncompromising rhetoric. Instead, the illegal immigrants are simply being released into the United States with a summons to appear in immigration court. The majority will ignore the summons with impunity, but it allows them to reside and travel here legally until the court date, leading to its being nicknamed a “permiso,” or permit.

The administration’s frivolous approach to the deluge is clear from a recent request for an extra $3.7 billion to address it. The majority of funds would go not to enforcement but to efforts at resettling the illegal aliens in the United States.

The former Governor and one time presidential hopeful is straight from central casting in dirty good old boy Southern politics…rsk
The Barbour Machine’s Mississippi Ad War :Thad Cochran’s supporters bankrolled race-based attacks on Chris McDaniel. By Eliana Johnson

Even in the bitterly fought primary battle between Mississippi senator Thad Cochran and his challenger, state senator Chris McDaniel, some of the radio ads that aired against McDaniel were considered especially incendiary. One charged that a McDaniel victory would set back “race relationships between blacks and whites and other ethnic groups.” Another warned that his campaign was part of an attempt to “roll back the hand of time.”

The political-action committee that aired the ads raised eyebrows from the outset.

For one thing, it had the same address, phone number, e-mail domain, and leader — the bishop Ronnie Crudup — as the Jackson-based New Horizon Church International. Crudup told Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger earlier this month that he founded the PAC and raised $200,000: “Some money from the Republicans,” some from African Americans. “I raised money from a number of sources,” he said.

As it turns out, Crudup raised all of the $144,685 his PAC took in from exactly one source: Haley Barbour’s political machine. A report filed with the Federal Election Commission reveals that Mississippi Conservatives, the political-action committee founded by the former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman and run by his nephew, Henry, provided that money to Crudup’s group in four installments. The first, in the amount of $62,685, came on June 10, a week after the race was thrown into a runoff. Cochran and his allies were looking to increase voter turnout across the state, particularly among African Americans and Democrats who had not voted in the June 3 primary.

Particularly in an intra-Republican fight, in a party that has for years decried Democrats for playing racial politics, the ads are enraging the McDaniel camp and its tea-party supporters. Some national Republicans are starting to voice their concerns, too.

Crudup did not return phone calls to his church seeking comment about the discrepancy between what he told the Clarion-Ledger and the FEC report. The group’s treasurer, Jacqueline Vann, who is also the treasurer of New Horizons Church, did not return an e-mail seeking comment.

Henry Barbour says Crudup has told him the report contains a “mistake” but that, regardless, Barbour’s committee was “clearly the material donor.” And he is not distancing himself from the inflammatory ads. In fact, he says they were deserved because McDaniel and his tea-party supporters criticized Cochran’s outreach to black voters and “tried to intimidate African Americans from voting.”

‘The bear is loose!” President Obama has been saying, whenever he leaves the White House to visit Starbucks, or sandwich shops, or burger joints, or BBQ shacks, or neighborhood diners, in his increasingly rote and pathetic attempts to “connect” with “real people.” Obama, we have been told, is frustrated, “restless,” bored with the responsibilities and chores of office. He thinks of himself as the bear — intimidating, wild, untamed, roving — escaping his den. But he is flattering himself. Obama is not the bear. He is the cub: aimless, naïve, self-interested, self-indulgent, irresponsible, irresolute. The bear is in Moscow.

One can trace a line from any global hotspot to Russia and its authoritarian ruler. Iran? Russia has assisted its nuclear program for decades. Syria? Russia is Bashar Assad’s arms dealer. Iraq? Russia is sending men and materiel to the central government. Afghanistan? Putin muscled nearby Kyrgyzstan into closing our air base there, crucial for transport, resupply, and reconnaissance in the war against the Taliban. The contretemps between the United States and Germany is the result of Edward Snowden’s breach of national security. Where is Snowden? In Russia, where he has just asked to have his visa renewed. I wonder if Vladimir Putin will say yes.

Then there is Ukraine, where Putin has been driving events since March, when he illegally annexed Crimea. The West thought sanctions would intimidate Putin, would force him into retreat. For a time, he drew down his troops on the Ukrainian border, leaving the fighting in eastern Ukraine to separatists trained, armed, and led by Russian special forces. The West thought it could ignore the situation. A guerrilla war in the east, it was assumed, does not threaten democracy in Kiev. The Ukrainian economy returned to its lethargic equilibrium. The Ukrainians elected a president. President Obama, in his speech at West Point, trumpeted his Ukraine policy as an example of “our ability to shape world opinion” and “isolate Russia.”

Some isolation. Even as Western attention turned to the Middle East, Russia continued to act unimpeded, and the Ukrainian war went on. Recently, when Petro Poroshenko, the new Ukrainian president, retook the city of Sloviansk, Putin’s hand was forced. Russian soldiers reappeared along the border — more than 10,000 at last count. The weapons systems supplied by Russia to the insurgents became more sophisticated. Earlier this week, a rocket brought down a Ukrainian cargo plane. The rocket was fired from Russia. Thursday brought us only the latest unintended consequence of Russia’s war on Ukrainian independence: the destruction of a Malaysian airlines flight carrying 295 souls. The attack is revolting, the loss of life infuriating, but the downing of Flight MH17 is not the first unanticipated outcome of the war Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine. Nor will it be the last.

Make no mistake, the president has instigated the present influx of illegal aliens.
It is a grave error to view the swarming of illegal aliens across our southern border as anything other than a challenge to our sovereignty — a challenge abetted, rather than repulsed, by a president who vows to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” The challenge brings into sharp relief a question I’ve repeatedly pressed (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here): If the states cannot or will not defend themselves, are they still, in any real sense, sovereign?

As expected, the president’s mainstream-media allies portray Obama as a man struggling to manage a crisis beyond his control, a crisis their thin and exhausted playbook instructs them to blame on George W. Bush. Nonsense.

In Faithless Execution, I detail Obama’s immigration lawlessness — at least the very extensive record compiled as of mid-spring 2014, when I had to stop writing in order to make an early June publication date. If you’re keeping track, mid-spring was before the ramping up of the ongoing invasion, which already involves close to 300,000 illegal aliens (less than 20 percent of whom are, according to the New York Times, “unaccompanied minors”). It was, however, months after what we now know was the Obama “Homeland Security” Department’s solicitation of escort services to help handle an anticipated arrival of 65,000 illegal-alien minors.

As one would expect, the usual Obama apologists claim that the administration was not conspiring in the invasion. Rather, it was preparing for a humanitarian crisis it had heard alarms about but was somehow powerless to avert. On its face, this is laughable: The executive branch has many ways of discouraging and stopping attempts by foreigners — whether as an armed force or in overwhelming numbers — to enter our country. More significantly, the facts here point unmistakably to willful administration collusion.

The January 2014 solicitation published by DHS’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement foretells (a) the arrival of 65,000 “unaccompanied alien children,” and, tellingly, (b) the administration’s intention to transfer them to “Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.” Weasel Zipperspoints out the glaring fact, largely ignored by the press, that by planning to dispatch the new arrivals to ORR, the administration implicitly presumed that they should be deemed refugees, not excludable or deportable illegal aliens.

The mission of the ORR is to settle “new populations” within the United States, not to detain them pending expulsion. Clearly, the plan was — is — to seed thousands of illegal aliens in cities and towns throughout the country. That is perfectly consistent with other aspects of the administration’s radical agenda, such as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” Obama’s plan to have the executive branch engineer the racial and ethnic composition of American neighborhoods.

The confirmed death toll now approaches 300 from the missile attack by Russia-backed Ukrainian rebels against a Malaysian Airlines jet. We can stipulate that the foreign policy of President Barack Obama, who works against American interests in both the domestic and the international sphere, is a catastrophe – a frighteningly real study in what happens when America empowers her enemies.

Still, the failure to recognize Putin’s Russia as a hostile power; the delusion that we are part of an “international community” that functions like a global body politic with universal values and common interests under a recognized “rule of law”; and the consequent conceit that figuring out what our strategy should be hinges, like a prosecutor’s case, on proving the rogue’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt – these are not merely Obama fantasies. They are the gospel according to the bipartisan ruling class. With some honorable exceptions like John Bolton, the GOP’s transnational progressives have been nearly as infatuated with Vladimir Putin’s regime as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry.

The international realm in which we actually live is a jungle, not a community. Order is imposed by power, not law. A body politic operating under agreed upon principles that promote freedom and punish crime can afford to take the position that an accused is innocent until proven guilty. This is not so in the international arena, where there are few if any universal animating principles, where freedom is widely denied, and where the criminals are often the rulers. In the international realm, the United States is better off remaining strong and acting in accordance with the wisdom of U.S. Marine General James Mattis: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” To the extent the global order has been reasonably orderly for much of the past half-century, it is because American power—when exercised in furtherance of American interests—is a force for good. It is not because we’ve strengthened international institutions, which serve the interests of authoritarians and are designed to allow rogue nations to even the playing field against American power.

There are now at least twice as many young British Muslims who have gone to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and other such groups than there are fighting for Queen and country here in the British armed forces.

The Israel-haters are no real problem for Israel, but they are the greatest possible problem for Europe.

The barricades are up again outside the Israeli Embassy in London, as they are across many capitals of Europe. Given that even more rockets than “normal” have been raining down on Israel in recent days, any sane country would need further barricades outside the Israeli embassy in order to contain yet another demonstration of support for Israel. But no, another day in London and another Palestinian-ist and Socialist Worker party protest is going on against the Israeli state.

The protestors are not, of course, demonstrating because they especially care about the lives of the people of Gaza. If they cared about the lives of Palestinians — or the people of the region in general — they would have spent night after night outside the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Turkish, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian embassies, among others. They would be sore from sleeping outside Belgravia townhouses. But they are not. They are fresh and raring for the fight.

I have watched them a bit in recent days, watched the contorted hatred on their faces as they scream at the embassy and then watched their friendly sociability as the headscarfed women are driven away by their menfolk, often with their children in tow — a family day outing in “diverse” modern London. Behind their smiles and the increasingly competent public relations that the pro-Hamas faction is managing in Britain, it is possible for some people to forget that what brings these people out is one simple thing: a hatred of the Jewish state and a desire to see it annihilated by the terrorists of Hamas or anyone else at hand.

There are those who will say this is not a not-sufficiently-nuanced observation, that the motives of those protesting Israeli action are motivated by something other than a great hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. But if this were true, why would their posters say, “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza?” There is no “Holocaust” in Gaza. Anybody can see there is no similarity between the organized and systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the precision targeting of some Hamas rocket sites, some of which are deliberately hidden under hospitals, in the Gaza strip. Why do the protestors say “Holocaust” then? They know that this way they will hurt Jews as deeply as possible. By using the term “Holocaust” for this, they will either give the impression that the Holocaust was a small and minimal thing in the history of war – such as the confrontation between Hamas and Israel currently is – or else that the Israelis are, in their view, currently carrying out precisely the same barbarism which made the creation of the state of Israel such an added necessity for Jews in the 1940s, and that by supposedly becoming the Nazis they are meant to abhor, the Jews have forfeited any right to be regarded as part of acceptable humankind.

There is no URL here. This was sent directly by Professor Harari who is currently the Chair of the Board of the Davidson Institute of Science Education at the Weizmann Institute and Chair of the Management Committee of the Weizmann Global Endowment Management Trust in New York. He was the President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science. During his presidency, the Weizmann Institute, entirely dedicated to basic research, became one of the leading academic and scientific organizations in the world. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. rsk

These lines are written ten days after the beginning of the latest Gaza conflict and thirteen years since the Hamas started launching thousands of rockets from Gaza exclusively into Israeli civilian targets. It has also been nine years since Israel completely left the Gaza strip, and a few hours since the Hamas rejected two Egyptian cease fire proposals, and Israel launched a ground operation aimed at destroying Hamas offensive facilities.
In Israeli towns, near the Gaza border, 13 year old children celebrated their Bar Mitzvah without experiencing, since their birth, even one day free of fear of rockets, always having 15 seconds to reach for an improvised cover. High school graduates, the class of 2014, never went to school or returned from school, since kindergarten, without a real threat of a Hamas rocket hitting them on the way. It is debatable whether the children’s stress or their parents’ anxiety has more damaging long term effects. It is a hard competition.

The Hamas, which is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, is openly committed to the annihilation of the State of Israel and to the extermination of all Jews, wherever they are. The United States, The European Union, Egypt and Israel consider the Hamas a terrorist organization. The Palestinian authority and most Arab countries treat the Hamas with suspicion, if not with animosity. They would be delighted if Hamas were destroyed, although they would not say so publicly. The amazing fact is that the only solid support of the Hamas comes, in recent years, from two countries: Qatar, an alleged staunch ally of the United States, home of the American Forces in the Gulf, and Turkey, a member of NATO, whose mask of moderation was lifted when the hot-headed Mr. Erdogan recently started making openly anti-Semitic statements, in the best traditions of Nazi Germany and the Muslim Brothers. The most disturbing factor of this unusual alliance is the mind boggling attitude of the United States and its President Barack Obama. The United States, “leading from behind”, as its current policy dictates, has consistently avoided helping the Egyptian negotiators, who tried to broker a cease fire between Israel and the terrorists. The Egyptians openly stated that President Obama has joined forces, in an unholy partnership, with Qatar and Turkey, supporting the Muslim Brothers, under the faint excuse of “they won the democratic election in Egypt”. They won? So did Hitler, after all.

Life in much of Israel is progressing on the basis of an unusual oxymoron: The Emergency Routine. This means going about your normal business, and getting, from time to time, into a barely protected area, not a real shelter, within 15 or 60 or 90 seconds, depending on the distance the rocket has to travel from Gaza in order to reach your area. Parents bring their children to their place of work, if possible; grandparents are drafted as babysitters; little children are taught to lie face down on the floor when an alarm catches them outdoors, and they are more than a few seconds away from cover. A few minutes later, explosions are heard. Perhaps a rocket falling in an empty area; Often the protective “Iron Dome” defensive missile intercepts the intruder from the sky; sometimes a rocket falling in a built area, causing damage and bodily harm. And then life goes on till the next siren sounds.

In the New York Times last week, columnist Nicholas Kristof officially became an Islamophobe. More precisely, he finally adopted somewhat the same stance toward Islam as the Cassandras whom Kristof and his ilk relentlessly demonize as Islamophobes – all the while trying to distance himself from them.

“In country after country,” a concerned Kristof begins, “Islamic fundamentalists are measuring their own religious devotion by the degree to which they suppress or assault those they see as heretics, creating a human rights catastrophe as people are punished or murdered for their religious beliefs.” No, really? Surely it is no surprise to him that writers such as those of us at FrontPage have been expressing our concern about Islamic fundamentalists for many years. We’ve noted repeatedly that the most numerous victims of Muslims are other Muslims, many of whom are ostracized (at best) or killed (at worst) precisely because they aren’t sufficiently hardcore believers.

But Kristof dismisses such writers as “Islam-haters in America and the West,” who “denounce Islam as a malignant religion of violence, while politically correct liberals are reluctant to say anything for fear of feeding bigotry.” It’s not bigotry or hate to point out that orthodox Muslims themselves demonstrate its malignance and violence every day around the world. Moreover, “politically correct liberals” aren’t silent only because they don’t want to feed bigotry; the most radical are silent because they see Islam as an ally in their multiculturalist siege of the West.

“Yet there is a real issue here of religious tolerance,” Kristof continues, “affecting millions of people, and we should be able to discuss it.” No kidding. As I mentioned above, the freedom fighters that the left dismisses as Islam-haters have been trying to discuss the Islam problem for decades, but have been relentlessly attacked and delegitimized for it. Now however, Kristof decides we need to have an open discussion, as if it’s his idea.

He was apparently prompted to address this topic by the murder of a Muslim friend at the hands of his friend’s co-religionists. “Such extremists,” he posits, “do far more damage to the global reputation of Islam than all the world’s Islamophobes put together.” This is his grudging way of admitting that orthodox Muslims themselves are the ones responsible for Islam’s dismal reputation. Now if only he would connect the dots and acknowledge that perhaps the world’s “Islamophobes” have legitimate concerns.

But Kristof hedges his newfound realistic perspective on Islam with an historical aside: “The paradox is that Islam historically was relatively tolerant… Anti-Semitism runs deep in some Muslim countries today, but, for most of history, Muslims were more tolerant of Jews than Christians were.” He cites the Holocaust and “the killing of Muslims by Christians at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina” as evidence for this. First, anti-Semitism has always run deep in Muslim lands, not just today, because Jew-hatred is endemic to Islam itself. Secondly, Islam has not been “tolerant” for most of its history, and whatever its historical sins, Christianity has evolved and Islam has not; the pressing issue is that Islam remains violently intolerant today.