RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some 40,000 Christians live in Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, Iraq. Residents have been gathering daily in 12 local churches as ISIS jihadists advance towards the community. Their existence is a precarious one.

Some 40,000 Christians live in Qaraqosh, a town near Mosul, Iraq. Residents have been gathering daily in 12 local churches as ISIS jihadists advance towards the community. Their existence is a precarious one.

It was the evening of Tuesday, June 10 when Salam Kihkhwa walked into a mobile phone shop in the Qaraqosh city center to purchase more minutes for his phone. Kihkhwa surfs the Internet for several hours each day and was carrying an iPhone 5s in his hand as he navigated his way past brackish puddles on the edge of the road. He set a few wrinkled dinar notes down on the counter to pay for a pack of Winchesters. Just at that moment, he recalls, he heard the scream: “The jihadists are in the city!”

Salam no longer remembers where the scream came from or whether it was a man or a woman. But he knows he left his cigarettes and money on the counter, grabbed his phone and made a run for it. Hundreds of others joined him, and the crowd kept swelling as it dashed through the streets of Qaraqosh.

“They’re coming,” the people fleeing yelled, warning others along the way. They ran into their houses — and the bells of Qaraqosh’s 12 churches began to ring.

Yet the day that the residents of Qaraqosh thought that the radical Islamist militia of terrorist Abu Bakr a-Baghdadi had entered the city turned out to be just one fear-filled day among many. And the situation this week appears to be worsening.

A week after his trip to the shop, Salam is sitting on a sofa in his small home, a wooden cross hanging on the wall behind him. His mother Sabria has set a meal of chicken and couscous on the table while his father Samir brings glasses of ice water. “God, we thank you for this meal,” they say. “Please stand by us.”

On my weekly visit to The Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday, Hugh and I discussed the Clintons and their money – Bill can’t stop talking about how much they have, Hillary can’t stop talking about how poor they are, and poor Chelsea has declared, from her $10.5 million apartment, that she’s just too, too bored by money. On Hugh’s show, I put it this way:

“The problem here is it’s a Mitt Romney problem. When Mitt ran, people talked about Bain Capital, and a lot of people couldn’t understand what Bain Capital did. You know, he would talk about Staples, but everyone understood he wasn’t the guy who invented Staples, he wasn’t the guy who worked in stationery and office equipment and built up a chain of stores. Somehow Staples had fallen his way, and he turned it around. And people couldn’t quite equate that as work. And I think it’s actually even worse for Hillary Clinton, because she and Bill Clinton are stinkingly rich just from giving $200,000 speeches to rather shady and shifty figures from the United Arab Emirates. That’s basically how they’ve got rich… People don’t mind money, and people don’t mind Bill Gates having a ton of money, people don’t mind Steve Jobs making a ton a money. But this is hard-to-explain kind of money.”

Her latest book is part of that phenomenon. Her publisher paid an advance of $14 million. It will never earn that back. So what exactly are Simon & Schuster paying for? What exactly are all those Saudi sheikhs paying for, other than dull speeches on the need for education? No other “First Family” has leveraged their “public service” into a grip’n’greet cash-cow on the scale the Clintons have. That’s not like getting rich from “adding value” – from starting and building a business – or even from being a genuine bestselling author, like J K Rowling. I’m not sure how appealing this will be to the electorate at large.

Advocates for the family think the State Department is covering up potential mistakes.

State Department officials, under pressure since Sudanese woman Meriam Ibrahim and her American family were prevented from leaving the country for the United States, have discouraged congressional leaders from speaking out publicly on behalf of them, advocates for the family say.

Ibrahim, a Sudanese woman sentenced to death for apostasy before the government ultimately overturned her conviction, was arrested for a second time on her way out of the country. Her husband, American citizen Daniel Wani, was also arrested.

The State Department said this week that Ibrahim’s family wanted members of Congress to “keep quiet” about her case, according to a religious-liberty advocate whose organization works with the Ibrahim family’s lawyers in Sudan.

“And that’s simply not true,” says Tina Ramirez, founder of Hardwired, which provides legal training in Sudan on religious liberty, told National Review Online. State was “lying” about the wishes of the Ibrahim family, she says. “I don’t know why they would say such a thing.”

Ramirez explained that the State Department told members of Congress that Meriam Ibrahim’s husband and her brother-in-law, Gabriel (who lives in New Hampshire), had asked that Congress stand down.

“State was advising Congress to back off,” Ramirez said.

A State Department spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the specific question of whether the department had discouraged members of Congress from speaking out publicly on this case.

“The State Department is in close contact with members who are interested in this case,” Pooja Jhunjhunwala told NRO. “We don’t discuss the details of those conversations but we greatly appreciate the support Congress has given the family, our embassy staff, and the interagency personnel in D.C. working towards a positive resolution of this case.”

A Hill staffer following Ibrahim case corroborated Ramirez’s account. “During this week’s fiasco, State has urged multiple congressional offices to maintain a ‘low profile’ on the Meriam case,” one Hill staffer told NRO, saying that the directive had gone primarily to Democratic offices inclined to follow State Department instructions.

A congressional lawsuit is precisely the wrong weapon to combat Obama’s lawlessness.

You wish you could call the police. But the neighbor who is robbing your house at gunpoint is the police. You are stupefied, so inconceivable does it seem to you that the man sworn to uphold the law could be an outlaw.

Yet, the architects who designed your house not only conceived of that danger, they took precautions. As a result, you not only have your own arsenal of emergency firepower; you’re also in charge of all the ammunition. See, the architects hoped we’d always have good, honorable police, but they didn’t make your life depend on it. They knew the police had to be strong to protect us, but that this very strength could potentially destroy the whole community if the guns and badges ever ended up in corrupt hands. So while hoping for the best, they planned for the worst: The police have to come to you for the bullets if their guns are to be of much use; and you ultimately determine whether they get to keep their badges.

So as the police rob John Boehner’s House, just like they’re robbing every house in the neighborhood, what does he do? Does he grab his gun in self-defense? Does he lock the ammo vault? Does he start yanking the badges of the lawless beat cops and warn police headquarters that the commissioner could be out of a job, too, if things don’t change?

No. Boehner instead decides to call his neighbor, the referee at the town gym. The whole community respects the ref. When we come to his court, he makes all the calls and, win or lose, the players know the game was fair and square. But the ref cannot force the police to follow the rules. And he doesn’t have a gun, just a whistle.

This, in a nutshell, is the theatrical exercise in futility that is House Speaker Boehner’s proposed lawsuit against our rampantly lawless president. Boehner and the Congress hold the tools that could end, or at least dramatically reduce, the administration’s onslaught. Instead, the speaker prefers to bring a whistle to a gunfight. Paralyzed by fear of catcalls from Obama’s slavish media, Boehner eschews the use of his own armaments in favor of turning to the courts — apparently, in hope that a judge will pronounce with stentorian flourish that which is already abundantly obvious to all with eyes to see: The president of the United States is in gross violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully, usurping congressional power in a systematic assault on the separation of powers that safeguards our liberties.

The speaker will persevere in the lawsuit gambit because his flanks are covered. On his left, Jonathan Turley thinks the suit has a fighting chance to, er . . . well, Professor Turley is not exactly clear on what exactly it would accomplish. But as a devotee of the Left’s preference of a tutelary judiciary over republican self-governance, he’s all for it. And on the speaker’s right, there is George Will.

On Thursday, when Israeli military sources revealed the names of two key suspects in the June 12 abduction of Israeli teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gil-ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach, outgoing President Shimon Peres was in Washington receiving the Congressional Gold Medal.

It turns out that Israel’s Shin Bet security agency has been investigating the disappearance of Hamas terrorists Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisheh from their homes near Hebron since the night of the kidnapping, and interrogating many other Palestinians believed to be involved in the abduction plot. It has also emerged that the parents of the captives have been kept in the loop all along.

This puts in context Tuesday’s cabinet decision to scale back the search for the boys — a move that initially aroused outrage among those of us who feared it indicated the government’s weakening resolve in the face of international condemnations over mass arrests of Palestinians. The reason for the curtailing of activity, in fact, was that the large net cast over the West Bank hotbeds of terrorism could now be narrowed down and given focus where it would be most effective.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his appeal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to rescind his recently forged treaty with Hamas, the organization behind the kidnapping. Though the PA also promotes violence against Jews and Israel — and its press has been lauding the abductions through mockery — Netanyahu must figure that he has a better chance of being heard when fingering Hamas, which is more widely recognized as a full-fledged terrorist group.

Netanyahu’s tactics are understandable. The media and education system that Abbas controls may be filled with anti-Semitic vitriol, but the PA president himself is still viewed by Western liberals as a potential partner for peace with Israel.

Nevertheless, it is a grave mistake for Netanyahu to assist in the perpetuation of this myth. Nor has his willingness to play along with the charade of a hostile U.S. administration ever gained him any brownie points, not even in the joint interest of staving off a nuclear Iran.

These are our neighbors who’ve gone over to the “banality of evil.”

Even as we’re hurting over the three kidnapped Yeshiva kids in Israel, along comes the Presbyterian Church USA to pour it on, as if to say, here’s more.

The Elders of that Church do not speak for the vast majority of Presbyterians across the USA – I am sure of this – but a sizeable minority within its hierarchy can’t seem to shake loose from the wildfire of European anti-Semitism.

So last week they joined the BDS movement. They voted to oust three companies that do business in Israel: Motorola, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar.

The vote was 310 in favor of divestment, 303 against, so it was close, but the Jew-haters still won. They do keep on winning.

Imagine being left to the tender mercies of these people…as once we were.

Proof that malice motivated the Elders comes by way of a move among the delegates to delete all references to Israel in the Book of Common Worship.

Plainly, they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. The motion failed, this time around, as otherwise the Book of Psalms, written mostly by King David in Hebrew from Jerusalem, would have to be scrapped. But even translated into English the line from their Liturgy still reads, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”

I was listening to the CNN exchange between a man who represents the Church, Dr. Heath Rada, and for our side we had Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who did me no favors. Rada said that he did not vote for the resolution but he did support the Church’s position.

In other words, he spoke from both sides of his mouth, as when he said that despite everything the Jews are his “brothers and sisters.”

No sir, you are not my brother.

Israeli soldiers have discovered “dozens of suspected terror tunnels.” Oslo, anyone?

One of the most important, but least-reported stories connected to the recent kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Palestinian terrorists is the discovery of numerous terrorist tunnels and weapons depots in areas ruled by the “peace-seeking” Palestinian Authority.

The conventional wisdom is that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas is a “moderate” who opposes terrorism and wants to make peace with Israel. PA spokesmen have assured Western reporters that they oppose the Hamas terrorists and are “cooperating” with Israel in the search for the abducted teens.

But what Israeli soldiers have found in their search missions tells a very different story.

As they have gone house to house in the PA-controlled Hevron region, Israeli soldiers have discovered “dozens of suspected terror tunnels,” according to a June 22 report on Israeli news sites.

“Some of the tunnels were found by soldiers inside the homes of Palestinians, under large pieces of furniture and laundry machines,” they reported. The Israelis also found numerous “caches of weapons and explosives” in private homes — and “close to 20 laboratories for manufacturing improvised explosives devices.”

“We would arrive at a suspicious home and find a family living on the first floor and a laboratory with explosives on the third floor,” said a senior officer in the special Israeli Army engineering unit, called Yahalom, which is carrying out the search.

Where, then, do they [the PA police] operate, exactly? Only in areas where foreign television crews are stationed, so they can put on a good show for audiences abroad?
very once in a while, one can find a little hint in the American press about the failure of the Palestinian Authority security forces to combat terrorism. For example, on March 23 of this year, a New York Times report mentioned, in passing, that Israeli troops entered the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.”

The State Department’s demand that Israel “exercise restraint” in its search for the Hamas kidnappers makes a mockery of President Obama’s pledge two years ago that he “will always have Israel’s back.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declared on June 20 that the Obama Administration is “urging all parties to exercise restraint and avoid steps that could destabilize the situation.”

That phrase “all parties” was a thin veneer of even-handedness. Everyone knows the call for “restraint” was aimed at Israel. In fact, Psaki made her slant clear in her very next words, expressing “concern” that two Palestinian Arabs were shot dead by Israeli troops. Psaki did not exhibit any “concern” for the Israeli soldiers at whom those Arabs were throwing rocks and firebombs.

This attempt by the Administration to tie Israel’s hands in its search for the kidnappers is just the latest in a series of indications that President Obama is trying to avoid siding with Israel against Hamas.

1. The Obama Administration website, www.rewardsforjustice.com, which offers monetary rewards for tips leading to the capture of terrorists who harm Americans, is not offering any reward in connection with the kidnapping – even though one of the victims, 16 year-old Naftali Frankel, is an American citizen.

2. While spokespeople for the Administration have made the usual general remarks of sympathy for Israel in the current crisis, President Obama himself has not said a word about the kidnapping. A President who is so well known for his rhetorical gifts has suddenly fallen silent.

3. The Obama Administration has refused to withdraw its recognition of the Hamas-Palestinian Authority regime.

4. The U.S. continues to send $500 million annually to the PA, even though Hamas is now a full partner in its government. That’s a total of more than $20-billion since 1993 – yet all the Administration could get out of PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas was a vague statement about how he is against kidnapping because Israelis “are human beings, too.” That’s not exactly an earth-shaking concession.

President Obama’s March 2012 vow to “always have Israel’s back” evoked some private skepticism in the American Jewish community, since it was made when he was running for re-election. But now the Obama Administration’s failure to unequivocally side with Israel in the current kidnapping crisis exposes his pledge of support as painfully hollow.

Hillary called Obama ‘incompetent and feckless’ in boozy rant

Hillary Clinton called President Obama “incompetent and feckless” and charged that he had “no hand on the tiller half the time” during a boozy reunion with college pals, a new book claims.

The scathing attacks came as the wine was flowing at a May 2013 dinner at Le Jardin Du Roi, a cozy French bistro near the Clinton family home in Westchester, according to “Blood Feud,” by best-selling author Edward Klein.

The former first lady, months removed from being Obama’s secretary of state, unleashed the verbal assault between sips of vino, sources told the author.

“When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,” Klein wrote.

Clinton ranted, “The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time. That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f–king tiller,” according to the book, which was excerpted exclusively in Sunday’s Post.

“Obama has turned into a joke,” she went on, according to Klein.

“The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and [Fox reporter] James Rosen’s e-mails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,” she raged, the book says, adding that she called the president “incompetent and feckless.”

‘Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did.’

The musical Atomic puts a wild slant on the Manhattan Project

—Imagine what it felt like to create the atomic bomb. Imagine the manic pulse in the various labs and hallways of the Manhattan Project, where everyone was working so hard to create something they weren’t even sure was going to work. Something they weren’t even sure they wanted to work.

In 2014, when we’ve had decades to comprehend the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that fraught sense of urgency can seem as remote as a black-and-white newsreel, and so can the moral paradox of ending a terrible war with an earth-scorching weapon.

But Atomic—a new rock musical by Danny Ginges, Gregory Bonsignore, and Philip Foxman that began performances yesterday at Theatre Row—wants to revive those frantic feelings. With a cracked sense of reality that includes gyrating lab technicians, rocking government officials, and even Robert Oppenheimer belting a vampy number to the commission putting him on trial, the show drops the creators of the bomb into a fever dream. As they grapple with what they’re about to do to the world, the scientists and officials are surrounded by smoke machines, strobe lights, and shredding guitars.

For cast member David Abeles, who plays conflicted physicist Arthur Compton, that’s the perfect context for this story. “The life and energy that come through our production in the light and sound and action all have a wild energy,” he says. “And that’s what we’re trying to translate. This is a project where the scientists were under a high amount of pressure to perform. It was absolutely a race to build this bomb, and there was an energy that was created from that that I think suits rock music really well. There’s a drive to it, a build, and that’s where the grandiosity of all these effects and this approach helps the storytelling. It gives a frenetic rush to the whole evening.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Abeles can just act like a crazy person for two hours and call it a day.

David Abeles & Jeremy Kushnier

His character is almost always rooted in grim reality, trying to navigate his sense of duty to the American government and his deep fear that the bomb will ruin society. (The real-life Compton, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927, was eventually awarded a Medal of Merit for his work on the Manhattan Project.) The character doesn’t become heightened until the second act, when he sings a song called “Method to Madness” about how this conflict is tearing him apart.