RUTHFULLY YOURS

Say good-night, Gracie:

The United States will increase its cap on the number of refugees it admits and resettles to 85,000 in the coming year and 100,000 in the following year, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday. The additional refugees, up from 70,000 in the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, will come from countries around the world. But the increase largely reflects the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the White House has promised to resettle over the next 12 months.

Naturally, this is being couched in Alinskyite terms: making the enemy (us) live up to their own book of rules.

“This step is in keeping with America’s best tradition as a land of second chances and a beacon of hope,” Kerry said in announcing the increase during a visit to Berlin to discuss the Syrian refugee crisis with his German counterpart, Frank Walter Steinmeier. Even before Syrian refugees began streaming into Europe in recent weeks, the State Department had been considering a modest increase of about 5,000 refugees, including more from Congo, where human rights abuses are rampant. At the end of every fiscal year, the State Department announces the new target number for refugees.

Administration also advocating “for our African LGBT brothers and sisters and their right to equal treatment.” Huh?????rsk

National Security Advisor Susan Rice said the U.S. is working with its partners to fight a “growing terrorist threat” in Africa.

“With our partners, we’re facing down a growing terrorist threat. In Somalia, we continue to provide training, equipment, and funding to support the African Union’s Mission to root out al-Shabaab and strengthen Somalia’s security institutions. In the fight against Boko Haram, we are increasingly providing specialized advisers, training and equipment, and intelligence support to Nigeria and its regional neighbors,” Rice said at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference.

According to the Washington Post, Kenya has received $100 million in U.S. counterterrorism assistance this year.

Rice also said the U.S. is working to combat wildlife trafficking in Africa to preserve Africa’s ecology and to shut down the “illicit” transfer of funds to terrorist networks.

“Critically, we’re working with governments and community leaders to counter violent extremism before radicalization to violence can occur. In Nigeria, Niger and Chad, we’re increasing civilian security and building communities targeted by Boko Haram,” Rice said.

“We’re supporting efforts in Northern Mali to promote reconciliation and mitigate conflict, particularly in isolated communities and we’re working with governments to responsibly address legitimate grievances that terrorists might exploit, as in Ethiopia, where American legal advisers are training police and lawyers to better uphold the rule of law,” she added.

The Islamic State has managed to destroy two thousand years of Christian civilization in the Middle East in just a couple of years, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted on The O’Reilly Factor last week. And he placed the blame squarely on President Obama’s cowardly, feckless, incompetent foreign policy.

ISIS has been spreading across the Middle East like a plague of locusts, and as they have spread, they have targeted religious minorities, particularly Christians, for destruction. In Syria, tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians have been attacked and displaced.

They are the forgotten refugees.

A Catholic priest who visited Kurdish Iraq last fall described the wounded souls of the Christians who had taken refuge there. They had been forced from their homes in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.

We don’t know yet what issue will end up driving the autumn phase of the 2016 election. In 2008 a hectoring Obama thought it would always be Iraq — an issue that he had scrubbed from his website by mid-2008 when the surge had rendered his anti-war traction irrelevant.

Instead, the key moment was not the war, but the sudden Lehman Brothers meltdown — and the herky-jerky McCain reaction to it, coupled with Obama’s monotonous “Bush did it” blame-gaming of the crashing stock market. Before September 14, 2008, John McCain and Sarah Palin were consistently up over the supposedly transformational first African-American president by anywhere from 2 to 4 points; afterwards it was steadily downhill.

No one knows what will happen to the economy in the fall of 2016, much less what North Korea, Iran, Putin or ISIS will be doing. If nothing, Democrats benefit; if something, not so much. Obama last week reminded us of the rules of media and progressive politics for 2016: he announced that critics of his presidency were de facto unpatriotic — apparently in the same manner that as a presidential candidate in 2008 he slurred a sitting president as unpatriotic. No one even noticed.

Some central and eastern European countries are being criticized by more “progressive” Western nations for not wanting to take in Muslim refugees.

Chief among them is Hungary, specifically in the person of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Western media are characterizing him as “xenophobic,” “full of hate speech,” and Europe’s “creeping dictator.” Sounding like the mafia boss of the Left, the Guardian simply refers to him as a “problem” that needs to be “solved.”

Orbán’s crime is that he wants to secure his nation against Muslims and preserve its Christian identity. According to Hungary’s prime minister:

Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity…. We don’t want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don’t want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see….

Should AIPAC temper its opposition to Obama’s Iran deal in the name of “bipartisanship”?

One of the most diehard Obama loyalists in Chicago, Steve Sheffey, is unhappy that AIPAC chose to oppose the president’s Iran deal. Sheffey argues that since Democrats were on one side of this issue and Republicans on the other, AIPAC should have been neutral, and not come down for one side, especially of course the Republican side. We don’t know what Sheffey thought about AIPAC opposing President Reagan’s sale of AWACs to Saudi Arabia in the early 80s. Maybe he was too young to be writing partisan screeds back then. My guess is that for Sheffey, bipartisanship is good if it helps neuter opposition to anything Obama wants. When a Republican is in the White House, all bets are off.

Most telling in the article is Sheffey’s apparent need for a safe space at AIPAC conferences and probably a few trigger warnings from AIPAC leadership as well:

“In the past few years, the atmosphere at AIPAC meetings has become increasingly partisan. Democratic speakers get polite applause, if any, while Republican speakers get thunderous applause. Speakers whose views diverge from mine on other issues, such as Pastor John Hagee, and whose rationale for supporting Israel is troubling, seem too popular among too many AIPAC members. But I can live with that as long as their support for Israel does not require me to support the rest of their agenda.”

Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem to share President Obama’s definition of “smarter.” Ten days ago Mr. Obama declared that the Russian President’s military deployments in Syria were “doomed to fail” and the Kremlin was “going to have to start getting a little smarter.” Mr. Putin then began sending fighter jets, and now it looks like Mr. Obama is the one who has been taken to school.

That’s the only way to read Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s call on Friday to Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu to explore what a Pentagon spokesman called “mechanisms for deconfliction” in Syria. In addition to the jets, Russia is sending T-90 tanks, howitzers, troop-transport and attack helicopters, a company of armed Marines, and further equipment to establish an air base near the coastal Syrian city of Latakia. Mr. Shoigu describes the build-up as “defensive in nature.”

Sure, as in Ukraine. Along with Iran, Russia is the Bashar Assad regime’s principal sponsor, providing weapons, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and now direct military support. Mr. Putin sees an opportunity to rescue his client in Damascus, strengthen ties with Iran, establish a large military footprint along the eastern Mediterranean, further reduce U.S. influence, and create diplomatic leverage that he can use to ease Western sanctions imposed in response to his invasion of Ukraine. On present course he’ll accomplish all of the above.

U.S. to admit 85,000 in fiscal 2016 and 100,000 in fiscal 2017, says Secretary of State John Kerry

The U.S. will boost the number of refugees it accepts from around the world to 100,000 annually, up from 70,000 now, as part of an effort to help Europe cope with a migration crisis, Secretary of State John Kerry said.

The increase would include at least 10,000 Syrian refugees that the White House has proposed admitting to the U.S. next year, Mr. Kerry said. Beyond that, however, details were scarce.

Since 2011, the U.S. has taken in about 1,600 Syrians.

Some Republicans say the U.S. should concentrate its efforts on helping Syrians resettle in the region, rather than transport them far from home. Other critics have raised concerns about Islamic State or other militants outwitting the lengthy background checks each applicant undergoes to infiltrate the U.S. posing as refugees.

But Mr. Kerry said the U.S. move would be “in keeping with America’s best tradition as a land of second chances and a beacon of hope.”

Normalization of relations with Israel could bolster efforts to balance Iran’s growing regional clout.

“In the Middle East, everyone at some point realizes that there is a bigger enemy than the big enemy.” – Israeli official.

But in the Middle East, reason does not always overcome holiness.

Israel-bashing and the systematic fueling of anti-Semitic behavior have become a Turkish political pastime since Turkey downgraded its diplomatic ties with Israel in 2010. There has been, though, relative tranquility and reports of a potential thaw since June 7, when Turkey’s Islamist government lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since it rose to power in 2002.

In August, a senior Hamas official, apparently hosted for some time by an all-too affectionate Turkish government, vanished into thin air. Saleh al-Arouri, a veteran Hamas official and one of the founders of its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was forced to leave Israel in 2010, after serving more than 15 years in prison. After his release, he was believed to be living in Istanbul. In August 2014, at a meeting of the International Union of Islamic Scholars in Istanbul, al-Arouri said that Hamas was behind the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, an incident that triggered a spiral of violence in Gaza and Israel that summer.

Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, sentenced to be crucified, was accused of participating in banned protests and firearms offenses — despite a complete lack of evidence on the latter charge, and he was denied access to lawyers. Al-Nimr is also alleged by human rights groups to have been tortured and then forced into signing a confession while in custody.

Not only are the Saudi authorities preparing to crucify someone — in 2015 — whom they tortured into making a confession; they are preparing to crucify someone who was a minor at the time of arrest.

Alas not a week goes by without Saudi Arabia demonstrating to the world why they retain their reputation as one of the world’s foremost human rights sewers.

Crucifixion is a punishment which, it would appear, is not only Sharia-compliant but also — we must assume — Geneva-compliant.