RUTHFULLY YOURS

How much should we worry about Islamic terrorism? How much should we worry about other kinds?

There’s no exact right answer to this question. Who is out there in dark places plotting murder most foul? We can only guess, using imperfect information. Of course, there’s “imperfect” and then there’s downright distorted.

The New York Times highlighted one data set recently, in an article headlined “Homegrown Extremists Tied to Deadlier Toll Than Jihadists in U.S. Since 9/11.” “Since Sept. 11, 2001,” the article says, “nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.” The article goes on to cite a nationwide survey of police and sheriffs departments, noting that “74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed ‘Al Qaeda-inspired’ violence, according to the researchers.” Well, I guess that settles that, then.

Ah, no. You’ve been reading this column too long to believe that. Statistics are useful, but fragile. How you handle them makes a big difference.

The return of the Confederacy was averted in the summer of 2015 when major retailers frantically scoured through their vast offerings to purge any images of a car from the Dukes of Hazzard. If not for their quick thinking, armies of men in gray might have come marching down the streets of New York and San Francisco to stop off for an Iced Mocha Frappucino ™ at a local Starbucks before restoring slavery.

History will little note nor long remember the tired wage slaves making $7.25 an hour while checking Amazon and eBay databases for tin models of an orange car with a Confederate flag on top. During this courageous defense of the homeland from the scourge of a mildly politically incorrect 80s show, Hillary Clinton committed her own unpardonable racist hate crime by saying, “All lives matter”.

The politically correct term is, “Black lives matter.”

Within the space of just 48 hours, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the president is above the law; that straightforward statutory words may be twisted to mean the opposite of what they say; that discrimination — heretofore, the textbook example of a willful act — can be committed unconsciously, thereby supplanting our constitutional foundation of equal opportunity for all with the totalitarian’s dream of guaranteed outcomes for favored factions; and that five politically unaccountable lawyers, by dint of being issued robes, may impose their vision of the good society on 320 million Americans, reimagining our most basic institutions, our founding law, centuries of jurisprudence, and millennia of civilization.

Like millions of Americans, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) thought this was a disastrous couple of days for the country. So did the rest of the Trumped-up cavalcade of GOP presidential hopefuls — or, at least, they said they did. Cruz, however, undertook to do something about it. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would subject the justices to retention elections.

Urges Others to Rebel Against Democracy ‘Forced Down Our Throat’ Posted

A missing family of 12 has turned up in the Islamic State — and confirmed their move with a statement urging others to pack up and make the same family vacation.

The family ranges in ages from a 1-year-old baby to a 75-year-old patriarch.

The Mannan family were reported missing to British authorities after they failed to return to their home in Luton following a May trip to their native country, Bangladesh. Their flight stopped over in Turkey.

Bedfordshire Police released photos of the missing family members and has been investigating the disappearance. Remaining family members in the UK released a statement calling the move “completely out of character” for the family. “We can only think they have been tricked into going there, it is no place for elderly or young people.”

So she doesn’t know how to use a fax machine. Big whoop. If there is a “smoking gun” in the 3,000 pages of Hillary Clinton e-mails released by the State Department this week, it’s not in her technological ineptitude, or her calling her hairdresser “Santa,” or her continuing to encourage Sid Blumenthal to offer bad advice, or her fetish for ice tea, or her bizarre demand that John Podesta wear socks to bed. The most revealing dispatch, the one dripping with unintended irony and status detail and sanctimony dressed as social conscience, is the e-mail Lynn Forester de Rothschild, centimillionaire, addressed to Clinton on the morning of August 26, 2009. It is 122 preening and obsequious words long. I reprint it here:

H,

I spent yesterday with Les Gelb on Nantucket. He had lots to say which might be of interest, but I thought the most important thing to tell you is to make sure are aware of the Parade magazine piece he wants to do about you. He would like to do a day in your life, when you meet with members of Congress and international figures. He wants to show the impact you are having domestically and internationally. He said he would give you a veto over content and looked me in the eye and said, ‘she will like it.’ Maybe you know this, but did not want it to fall between the cracks. Enjoy your vacation and love to all of you.

Xoxo

L

Ah Nantucket! The island redoubt of the well heeled and au courant, where the billionaires go to escape the proles of the Vineyard, where you watch John Kerry windsurf from the starboard window of your private jet. Only a matter of time before this exclusive hideaway made an appearance in the correspondence of Hillary Clinton. And how perfect that it was during a summer in Nantucket, with the breeze coming off the sound and a Waterford pitcher of Cape Codders sitting on the patio table, that Lady Lynn communed with Dr. Gelb, who has worked in the Senate, at the New York Times, at the Brookings Institution, and is now president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. Difficult to find such established and credentialed personages. In Nantucket they’re everywhere.

“To learn who rules over you, find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.”
— Voltaire

If you’re wondering what Americans can do as our ruling class sets about enforcing its redefinition of marriage, start by looking back at what it did to the citizens of Indiana when their legislature raised the possibility that someone might object to joining in celebrations of homosexual marriage.

Support for homosexual unions was incidental to the insistence of the likeminded folks atop society’s commanding heights on punishing Indiana. What incurs their ire has less to do with any substantive matter than with the American people’s resistance to honoring their fantasies. These fantasies can be reversed without notice. (Obama opposed homosexual marriage until 2013.) But dissenting from any of them — whether about race, or sex, or science, or anything else — risks ostracism and disqualification from earning a living.

Indiana’s Republicans, its churches, and conservatives in general pled for the liberty to speak and act according to religious faith. They did not and do not argue the worth of the Judeo-Christian religious beliefs that the ruling class deems odious. This has proved to be self-defeating. Appeals for tolerance of all beliefs in the name of America’s traditional freedoms fail because they concede the ruling class’s assertion of its own moral-intellectual superiority, as well as its underlying assumption that good and evil, better and worse, are just other words for its own likes and dislikes.

My fellow Americans:

In a few moments the celebration will begin here in New York Harbor. It’s going to be quite a show. I was just looking over the preparations and thinking about a saying that we had back in Hollywood about never doing a scene with kids or animals because they’d steal the scene every time. So, you can rest assured I wouldn’t even think about trying to compete with a fireworks display, especially on the Fourth of July.

My remarks tonight will be brief, but it’s worth remembering that all the celebration of this day is rooted in history. It’s recorded that shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia celebrations took place throughout the land, and many of the former Colonists — they were just starting to call themselves Americans — set off cannons and marched in fife and drum parades.

What a contrast with the sober scene that had taken place a short time earlier in Independence Hall. Fifty-six men came forward to sign the parchment. It was noted at the time that they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors. And that was more than rhetoric; each of those men knew the penalty for high treason to the Crown. “We must all hang together,” Benjamin Franklin said, “or, assuredly, we will all hang separately.” And John Hancock, it is said, wrote his signature in large script so King George could see it without his spectacles. They were brave. They stayed brave through all the bloodshed of the coming years. Their courage created a nation built on a universal claim to human dignity, on the proposition that every man, woman, and child had a right to a future of freedom.

Again this year we celebrate July 4 as the anniversary of the day one hundred and sixty-nine years ago on which we declared our independence as a sovereign people.
In this year of 1945, we have pride in the combined might of this nation which has contributed signally to the defeat of the enemy in Europe. We have confidence that, under Providence, we soon may crush the enemy in the Pacific. We have humility for the guidance that has been given us of God in serving His will as a leader of freedom for the world.

This year, the men and women of our armed forces, and many civilians as well, are celebrating the anniversary of American Independence in other countries throughout the world. Citizens of these other lands will understand what we celebrate and why, for freedom is dear to the hearts of all men everywhere. In other lands, others will join us in honoring our declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights–life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Here at home, on this July 4, 1945, let us honor our Nation’s creed of liberty, and the men and women of our armed forces who are carrying this creed with them throughout the world.

“The fathers of our country were young men when they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence—it was a young man’s document and it expressed the faith and hope and ideals of youth. Ex-President Hoover, in his speech the other night, said that the Republican Party recognized that this was a time when youth would take over. Comparatively few states have made it really easy to be in the armed services, still assurance was given to both the men and the women in the services that they would be consulted and have a voice in our policies for the future. This is in line with our tradition—good, sound, old American doctrine.

People in the older nations of Europe must have laughed at the young upstarts who thought they could put into words anything which would so inspire a people that a new country would be founded and shape its policies in accord with their declaration. The amusement did them no harm, and neither will it hurt the young people of today if they speak out their convictions and write from their hearts.

Many of the things which were said in the original declaration I think the youth of today will reaffirm. It would be hard to improve on: “We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These are brave words, and the men who wrote them meant them, for they ended thus; “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” That is what the youth of today is carrying out. God grant their elders help them.”

On the British front in the West and the North of Caen, the strategy set by general Montgomery finally starts to pay: since the English run up against the North of the city to the German defenders , the Canadians are sent to sail round Caen by the West and to capture the airport located near the locality of Carpiquet. This offensive lies within the scope of the Windsor Operation, planned by general Dempsey, which begins on July 4.

Carpiquet, located at 1 kilometer in the West of Caen, is attacked by the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, Royal Winnipeg Rifles Regiment, North Shore Regiment, Queen’s Own Rifles Regiment and the Canadien French Regiment la Chaudiere, which run up against the German defenders of the 12nd SS Panzer Division, largely bombarded by the allied artillery and the British Typhoon fighters.

At the end of the day, the Canadians control Carpiquet as well as Northern part of the airport and push back a great number of German counter-attacks.

In the South of Carentan in the Cotentin peninsula, the Americans continue the siege of the La Haye-du-Puits. Many units are gathered in the North of this village which have to be thrown in the battle the next day.

In the North of Saint-Lo, the 7th Corps of general Collins continues its offensive which begun the day before, and the 83rd and 90th American Infantry divisions must deal with German soldiers belonging to the 7th Army. The combat are extremely violent. The soldiers of the 90th Infantry Division reach the village of Sainteny, defended by SS Pomegranates of division Götz von Berlichingen and by elements belonging to the 6th German Parachutist Regiment. The American losses are terrifying and reach thousand of men out of fight, for a very limited Allied progression in this sector: only 200 meters.