RUTHFULLY YOURS

Surrounded by fans and protected from criticism, it’s no wonder Brian Williams became a serial fabulist.

By now everyone knows about his transgressions. If even only some of the reports are true, Brian Williams is a serial embellisher, a self-aggrandizing fabulist.

No doubt everyone knows somebody like this, and if you don’t it’s probably because you’re that guy. But Williams’ case is special. This isn’t some sad Willy Loman at the end of the bar who needs to invent impressive stories about himself. If anything, he needed to not tell such stories, given that he reportedly makes more than $10 million a year to be a trusted name in news.

Yet he couldn’t stop himself.

“To walk down a street with an anchor is to be stunned both by how many people recognize them and how many viewers call out to them about specific stories,” writes Ken Auletta, The New Yorker’s media critic. “There’s a respectful familiarity different from the awe displayed to Hollywood celebrities. The anchor is treated as the citizen’s trusted guide to the news. As a result, they can feel expected to dominate discussions, to tell war stories, to play God.”

A sharia court in Texas? What could possibly go wrong? Well, I can think of a few things…

In this segment of Glenn’s interview with the imams, Taher El-Badawi claims that cutting off heads is not just something they do in Islam, but it’s practiced everywhere, including the U.S. (!!!), and that cutting off hands for theft in America would be economical:

Taher : We are ready for any point to discuss with, but the main point here, the reason we are here to discuss this issue what kind of cases Islamic tribunal handle, and you start with the sharia. Why the people afraid from sharia? I’m sorry to say it, one point related to this, cut head is not just in sharia law, just in Islamic law. It’s everywhere. Who said that just in Islamic law? That’s even another sharia, in Jewish sharia, in Christian sharia, in American here, we cut we cut head for some reason.

Thought experiment: What if a white racist with a submachine gun broke into a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles, grabbed seven or eight African Americans who were shopping (maybe there was one Korean) as hostages for the release of some other white racists and then, when attacked, started spewing the N-word while shooting up the place, killing three or four of the African Americans and wounding three or four others, one or two critically.

How would President Obama react?

Do you think he would say there was something racial about the obscene incident? Damn right he would — and he should. In fact, he would do it forcefully and immediately. After all, when Trayvon Martin died in far more ambiguous circumstances, he was quick to jump in, identifying with the 17 year old who would resemble, Obama said, his own son if he had one.

Now consider what our president said about the events at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris on January 9 in a new interview with Vox.com: [1] “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

NBC suspended “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay for telling a false war story repeatedly, putting a major blemish on the career of one of America’s star newscasters.

The network made the decision after an investigation into Mr. Williams, including a now-debunked story he told about being on a helicopter that was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade while he was covering the war in Iraq in 2003.

“By his actions, Brian has jeopardized the trust millions of Americans place in NBC News,” said NBCUniversal Chief Executive Steve Burke, in a memo to employees. He called what Mr. Williams did “inexcusable.”

Mr. Burke, who has a close relationship with Mr. Williams, broke the news of the suspension to the NBC anchor personally Tuesday morning in a meeting at Mr. Burke’s Central Park West residence in Manhattan. In his memo, he said that Mr. Williams “deserves a second chance and we are rooting for him.”

The warnings that Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded 50 years ago have come true. Will liberals ever forgive him?

Will liberals ever forgive Daniel Patrick Moynihan for being right?

Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the future senator’s report on the black family, the controversial document issued while he served as an assistant secretary in President Lyndon Johnson’s Labor Department. Moynihan highlighted troubling cultural trends among inner-city blacks, with a special focus on the increasing number of fatherless homes.

“The fundamental problem is that of family structure,” wrote Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology. “The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.”

The public-health benefits outweigh the costs, both real and imagined.

There has been much debate recently over vaccination mandates, particularly in response to the measles outbreak currently taking place throughout the country.

At this juncture, there have been 102 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. during 2015, with 59 of them linked to a December 2014 visit to the Disneyland theme park in Southern California. (It is important to note that eleven of the cases associated with Disneyland were detected last year and, consequently, fall within the 2014 measles count.) This large outbreak has spread to at least a half-dozen other states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently requesting that all health-care professionals “consider measles when evaluating patients with febrile rash and ask about a patient’s vaccine status, recent travel history and contact with individuals who have febrile rash illness.”

When thousands of Central American children began arriving on the border between Texas and Mexico last year, President Obama’s team denied that the sudden influx was driven by his decision to grant the practical equivalent of amnesty to illegal immigrants who came to the country during childhood. On Monday, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services decided to avoid a repeat of that summer spectacle at the border by announcing a legal path for those children to enter the country.

“There are literally hundreds of millions, if not a billion or more people who would like to be in America; we can’t accept them all,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) tells National Review Online. “We just continue to create that incentive. We should have an asylum process. We should have a legalized-refugee status [program]. We’re a very compassionate nation, but, again, it’s got to be controlled.”

During a National Prayer Breakfast address that was otherwise troubling to American Christians, President Obama managed to strike one encouraging note:

Last year, we prayed together for Pastor Saeed Abedini, detained in Iran since 2012. And I was recently in Boise, Idaho, and had the opportunity to meet with Pastor Abedini’s beautiful wife and wonderful children and to convey to them that our country has not forgotten brother Saeed and that we’re doing everything we can to bring him home.

It is a remark that has not gone unnoticed in the land of the ayatollahs. Nor has the president’s January meeting with Naghmeh Abedini, and his subsequent invitation to her to travel to Washington, D.C., which she will do later this month, to meet with David N. Saperstein, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-born pastor and convert from Islam, moved with his wife to the United States in 2005, when a government newly led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensified persecution of Iranian Christians. On a visit to his native country in 2009, Abedini was arrested; authorities reportedly threatened him with death for his apostasy from Islam. He was released after pledging to stop organizing house churches in the country.

I don’t understand why folks are giving President Obama and his spokes-minions such a hard time over his insistence that Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who just happened to be Muslim committing terrorism that had nothing to do with Islam, was just “randomly” picking out folks in Paris to kill when he randomly came upon a grocery that just happened to be Jewish and, coincidentally, to have Jews in it, whom he randomly killed.

Sure, we know Coulibaly called a French TV station during the siege, said he was loyal to the Islamic State that has nothing to do with Islam, and that he picked this kosher market because he was targeting Jews. But you can’t believe everything you hear on TV — just ask Brian Williams.

Come to think of it, the Paris attack seems an awful lot like another random one in 2008. Back then, another group of Pakistani terrorists who just happened to be Muslim, and who belonged to the Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic terrorist organization that has nothing to do with Islam, went looking for random folks to kill and just happened to stumble on the Nariman House, a Chabad Lubavitch Jewish center which, coincidentally, had Jews in it — Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, then six months pregnant.

Swedes now tend to view all immigrants as victims of totalitarianism and refuse to acknowledge that not all immigrants think like Swedes. They cannot comprehend that people would flee if they were not hated and threatened. Most Swedes have never realized that one minority group may expose another minority group to violence and intimidation.

Unfortunately, one of the worst offenders trying to hide the truth is the Jewish organization SKMA, the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism. What seems to have upset the supporters of the SKMA was that Carlqvist compared them to the Organization of German Nationalist Jews, who, in the 1930s, supported Hitler and claimed that Jews were treated fairly in Nazi Germany.

Instead of breaking up the pro-Arab demonstrations, which took place without police permission, the police chose to revoke the Jews’ right to assemble. Malmö’s former mayor, Ilamar Reepalu, surely must have been aware that the perpetrators of anti-Semitic excesses were his own voters. Not one of the many complaints to the police by the city’s Jews has led to indictments, not to speak of convictions.