RUTHFULLY YOURS

Meryl Streep made some pretty divisive remarks at the Golden Globes last weekend. While accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she decided to dedicate much of her speech to demeaning the next president of the United States, Donald Trump. Her comments were met with much applause and nodding heads at the awards show (except for these guys.)

It’s clear Streep did not speak for all of Hollywood. Nicole Kidman, an A-list actress in her own right, said it’s time we leave partisanship behind and get behind our new president.

“I would just say he’s now elected,” Kidman said in an interview this week with BBC News when asked her opinion of the president-elect, “and we as a country need to support whosever the president because that’s what the country’s based on.”

Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington are of the same mind. Last month, Wahlberg chided his fellow actors for living in a bubble and not being able to understand the everyday challenges of everyday people. As for Washington, he has suggested Hollywood think twice before they dive into political rhetoric because acting in front of a camera is nowhere near as challenging as fighting for our country.

To paraphrase these talented actors: Hollywood should stick to their day jobs.

As the president-elect has repeatedly made clear, his first full day in office will be a busy one. He has promised to effect a wide array of changes. But what about his second day? If he has some free time, we have some suggestions.

As the threat from international terror groups and homegrown radicalization increases, clamping down on domestic Islamist networks should be a priority. In particular: terror financing.

Under the Obama administration, the federal government appeared to ease up on prosecutions of American Islamist charities linked to terror. This was a marked change from the years after 9/11, when scores of charities were shut down after prosecutors found financial and logistical links to terrorist groups across the globe. This effort culminated in 2008, when the Holy Land Foundation was tried in court on charges of financing terrorism. Federal prosecutors listed a considerable number of prominent American Muslim organizations as “unindicted co-conspirators.”

Eight years of a more permissive attitude has afforded Islamist groups the chance for a resurgence. Islamist charities do not just provide a means to move money; they also offer legitimacy to American Islamist organizations struggling to free themselves from decades of allegations of extremism. Islamist charitable endeavors abroad serves to sanitize the Islamist agenda at home.

The most common terrorism link for American Islamist charities involves, unsurprisingly, the Palestinian territories. Where do charitable donations for the Palestinian territories end up? In the Gaza Strip, Hamas, which is designated a foreign terrorist organization, oversees every facet of society, especially the social services in which Western charities work. From the distribution of medicine to the running of schools, orphanages, and kids’ summer camps, Hamas rules the roost.

One example worth investigating is the Gaza-based Unlimited Friends Association for Social Development (UFA). At least eight prominent U.S. charities and, apparently, the taxpayer-funded United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are supporting this Palestinian group. A close examination of UFA shows that it is closely aligned with senior Hamas leaders, provides cash to the families of so-called martyrs in the Gaza strip, and promotes virulent anti-Semitic rhetoric.

UFA claims to “provide relief, emergency and developmental services to marginalized areas and people in need.” And it probably does. Its social-media pages show happy children playing in the sun, buildings constructed, and food packs distributed. But UFA operates with the political support of senior Hamas figures. And the support of Hamas means the support of a genocidal terror group that has pledged to eradicate Jews across the globe, that throws its political opponents off rooftops, oppresses women and homosexuals, fires rockets at Israeli schools and homes, and uses Palestinian children as human shields to advance its murderous cause.

UFA regularly collaborates with Hamas officials. In 2014, envisioning the “right of return” for Palestinians, it organized a ceremony at which the guest of honor was Mustafa Sawwaf, a prominent Hamas minister. Sawwaf had argued in the Hamas newspaper Al-Risala that “Israel’s disappearance is a necessity [according to] the Koran — that is a truth that we have learned and that we have been teaching since the first intifada, which was the Palestinian people’s first step toward ending the usurpation of Palestine by the Jewish gangs.”

In 2015, UFA hosted a public meeting with Mohamed Abu-Shkian, a senior Hamas official and the mayor of Nuseirat. They discussed “joint cooperation to implement projects that serve the various categories of the Palestinian community.” Abu-Shkian, whom Hamas media has nicknamed “Mohammed the Conqueror,” is a vocal supporter of the “mujahedeen” against Israel, has spoken at the graduation ceremony of a Hamas terror-training program, and has addressed crowds at a ceremony commemorating Hamas terrorists.

Last week in Chicago, a white special-needs teenager was held captive by four black youths. The victim was bound, gagged, tortured, forced to drink toilet water, partially scalped, and subject to racially and politically motivated verbal abuse. The perpetrators streamed portions of their violent savagery on Facebook.

After the victim escaped from his assailants and was found on the streets by a police officer, a Chicago police commander initially said he was unsure whether the attack constituted a hate crime — as if that distinction might calibrate the crime’s viciousness.

President Obama was likewise initially hesitant to label this cruelty as a racially motivated hate crime — which was odd given the president’s prior readiness to jump into and editorialize about racially charged cases such as those of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and Trayvon Martin.

Yet it is hard to imagine what additional outrages the Chicago youths might have had to commit to warrant hate-crime status. After public outcry, Chicago prosecutors — along with Obama — confirmed that the attack did indeed, in their opinion, qualify as a “hate crime.”

Many in the media still sought to downplay that classification.

“I don’t think it’s evil,” editorialized CNN anchor Don Lemon, who instead attributed the violence to the offenders’ problematic upbringing.

What are the lessons from all the verbal gymnastics concerning “hate crimes”?

Sadly, we are learning that the labeling of hate crimes has become so politicized and ill-defined that the entire concept is unworkable.

The idea of identifying hate crimes gained currency in the 1980s, when reformers wanted lighter penalties for most criminal offenses but also wished to increase punishment for criminal acts that were deemed racist, sexist, or homophobic. So hate crimes emerged as new enhancements to criminal punishment, as a way to tack on stiffer penalties for affronts to liberal society at large.

The rationale for designating hate crimes relied on force multipliers in criminal sentencing — such as premeditation that can make murder a first-degree offense. But after years of confusion, how do we consistently and fairly define perceptions of bias or hate as a catalyst for criminal violence?

After all, crimes such as murder and rape are already savage and brutal by nature. Is the killer who shouts bigoted epithets more dangerous to society than the quiet sadist who first tortures his murder victim without comment?

BOZO as he is aptly named here lied about military service during his campaign ” Blumenthal’s Words Differ From His History – NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18blumenthal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.” There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.” He won and serves the NUTmeg state in the Senate…..rsk

…….There was quite a stir during the Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions this week, when, to the delight of so many observers, the famous Bozo the Clown showed up to question Senator Sessions on Tuesday. Bozo didn’t bring along his big red nose, or his face paint, or his large shock of red hair, so we all got to see that his real identity is that of U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D–Connecticut). But even without the costume, there was no mistaking that we were witnessing the well-practiced performance of a bona-fide, veteran clown, as Bozo Blumenthal stammered his way—with proper clownish awkwardness—through the notes that had been prepared for him by whoever is in charge of prepping buffoonish Democrat clowns for Senate hearings. And we can’t really blame poor Bozo for the vacuousness of his “charges” against Sessions, given that the job description for clowns does not—so far as anyone can tell—require one to actually know what he’s talking about. Making strange sounds and goofy faces is enough.

Bozo Blumenthal played his part to perfection when he confronted Sessions with the fact that the senator had previously expressed great admiration for David Horowitz, even though the latter has said, as Bozo noted, that “all the major Muslim organizations in America are connected to the Muslim Brotherhood”; that “80 percent of the mosques are filled with hate against Jews and Americans”; and that “too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes.”

With regard to the first quote, poor Bozo apparently has no idea that in May 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood itself produced a highly revealing “Explanatory Memorandum” outlining its “General Strategic Goal” in North America. This document was written by Mohamed Akram Adlouni—a member not only of the Brotherhood’s governing Shura Council, but also of its Planning Committee, its Special Committee, its Curriculum Committee, and its Palestine Committee (which provided funds and manpower for Hamas). Asserting that the Brotherhood’s mission was to carry out “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying … Western civilization from within,” the Memorandum advocated the use of stealth measures to impose Islamic values and customs on the West in a piecemeal, incremental fashion. Moreover, it listed some 29 likeminded “organizations of our friends” which sought to realize that same Muslim Brotherhood objective. Among those 29 organizations were groups that remain, to this day, among the most influential Islamic entities in America today. They include:

All these years later, it can be hard to remember quite what it was like. For the very youngest members of today’s electorate, it’s something that happened when they were just children. Even those of us who have been casting presidential ballots for decades may have trouble recollecting exactly how it felt. Because in the entire history of the Republic, there’s never been anything quite like it.

Around a decade ago, during a brief visit to New York, I had dinner with an old friend of mine who is highly intelligent and supremely level-headed and certainly not the type to give in to sudden and rhapsodic enthusiasms. As it happened, she had come straight to the restaurant from what I assume must have been a fundraiser. At it, she’d heard a talk by a certain individual who at that point, I guess, was at the exploratory stage of a presidential candidacy. Her eyes were aglow. He was all she could talk about. She’d been floored by his eloquence, his charm, his palpable earnestness, his passionately articulated vision of a post-racial America. I had been aware of this fellow, but had not thought seriously about him as a candidate for the White House: all else aside, he was simply too inexperienced, with no national record to speak of. But my friend’s excitement challenged my perceptions. If she, of all people, could get this worked up over Barack Obama, maybe I should pay him a bit more attention.

So I read his book, Dreams from My Father. It disturbed me. This was supposed to be the post-racial hero who’d finally heal America’s most ancient wound? Take his family. The middle-class white grandparents who’d raised him had, apparently, been invariably loving – in his narrative, they came across as veritable saints – but he called them racists; by contrast, his accounts of his privileged, polygamous Kenyan father made it clear that the old man had been a world-class jerk and egomaniac, utterly indifferent to his wives and children, but in Obama’s eyes every one of the man’s failings was, somehow, the product of white racism.

As I wrote in December 2007: “Forget the content of our character; this is a work preoccupied with skin color.” It was, moreover, a book by a man more in love with Kenya and Indonesia than with America; a man who, at least in his boyhood, had had a close attachment to Islam, the religion of his father and stepfather; a man who’d enjoyed immense good fortune and experienced very little real hardship but who seemed to feel he’d had a rough ride and hadn’t gotten his due.

Months later, when the news came out about Obama’s virulently racist pastor and longtime mentor, Jeremiah Wright, it just confirmed – and then some – my worst suspicions about the junior senator from Illinois. “Millions have been drawn to Obama,” I blogged in March 2008, “because he has seemed to them to be something more than a politician. Alas, it seems increasingly clear that in fact he’s the best, the slickest, politician of them all.” Seeking to put the Wright debacle behind him, Obama delivered his now-famous speech on race. For me, it only underscored “the absurdity of the fact that a man capable of such an eloquent affirmation of America’s founding principles could have spent twenty years’ worth of Sunday mornings listening to the vile ravings of a boorish jackass.”

Yet for Obama’s true believers, his sermon on race was only further proof that he was The One. Instead of holding him up to any standards, they felt it was their job – our job – to live up to him. “We have been asked to reflect in the most serious of ways about the role that race plays in the life of our country,” wrote the political scientist Alan Wolfe. “I cannot recall any leader or potential leader in the last two or three decades asking us to do that. I hope we are up to the challenge.” As I commented at the time: “This is not how America is supposed to work, people. We’re not here to prove anything to our leaders….But Obama has already got so many people thinking otherwise.”