RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-GinsburgWriting Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.

A slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is “Islam is the solution”. Dean Philip Jensen recently stated in regard to the Islamic State (ISIS) that “It is time to face the truth that Islam itself is part of the problem.” Solution or problem: what is the truth about Islam?

The world has been shocked by ISIS, which has committed beheadings, crucifixions, stonings, enslaving and selling captives, and imposing the notorious ‘three choices’ upon Syrian and Iraqi Christians. More than this, it has showed itself proud to do such things. The fact that thousands of Muslims from around the world have been traveling to the Levant to join ISIS suggests that these people also consider the acts of ISIS to be in accordance with Islam.

The publicly stated position of ISIS is that it is motivated by religious devotion. The English language version of the ISIS magazine Dabiq recently praised the enslavement of the Yazidis, a non-Muslim group in northern Iraq. The article ‘The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour’, defended the practice from Islamic legal history, the example of the first Muslims, and Muhammad himself: “The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers as the mushrikīn [idolators] were sold by the Companions [of Muhammad] … before them. … enslaving the families of the kuffār [non-Muslims] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharī’ah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur’ān and the narratives of the Prophet [Muhammad] … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.” ISIS is a product of Islamic revivalism. After enduring several centuries of Islamic decline, a view developed across the Muslim world that if only Muslims were more religiously observant, Allah would make them ascendant again. This conviction has driven the Islamic revival, which seeks to renew Islam by going back to original sources, including the life of Muhammad.

The de Blasio Democrats For a party that trumpets its populism and democratic heritage, their brazen apathy toward public sentiment is astounding. By Matthew Continetti

Bill de Blasio, the New York mayor, says he knows why Democrats lost the 2014 election. Income inequality defines our times, he said during a visit to Washington this week, and his party did not talk about the issue enough. De Blasio needs a hearing aid: Democrats speak of little else.

Dodging questions about Hillary Clinton, de Blasio praised Elizabeth Warren. He called the liberal heroine “one of the indispensable voices” among Democrats, and appeared with her at a Center for American Progress event later that day. The policy conference featured other darlings of the Left: Julian Castro, Tammy Baldwin, Kamala Harris, Bishop Gene Robinson, Gina McCarthy, and John Podesta. Listening to the speakers, you would not have known that two weeks earlier liberalism had encountered its worst setback in decades.

Indeed, President Obama and congressional Democrats have shown no signs of rethinking their political and policy strategies following the 2014 election. The president has veered left, calling for government regulation of the Internet, agreeing to a burdensome climate deal with China, and ordering an amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants. Harry Reid elevated Warren to a leadership position and voted to kill the Keystone pipeline — as well as Mary Landrieu’s Senate career. Nancy Pelosi, the most unpopular congressional leader in the country, is going nowhere.

The gap between Democratic performance and liberal behavior is stunning. President Obama is responsible for two of four postwar GOP landslides, polls show Americans dissatisfied with Washington and eager to have congressional Republicans set the agenda, and there is growing fear among Democratic consultants and journalists that the party is headed toward more defeats. How have liberals responded? By blowing a raspberry in all of our faces.

If Congress remains silent, it acquiesces in the president’s constitutional excesses.

In reacting to President Obama’s extraordinary abuse of his power on immigration, Republican officeholders are wisely steering clear of talk of impeachment. “I don’t want to do the ‘I-word,’ nobody wants to throw the nation into that kind of turmoil,” Representative Steve King, an anti-illegal-immigration firebrand, told CNN.

But King and others are pointing out that there is another way for Congress to move against a president who has put himself above the law. And it’s one that Democrats once favored as a means of dealing with Bill Clinton’s perjury under oath and subsequent cover-up of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. None other than Nancy Pelosi proposed that the House censure Bill Clinton, rather than impeach him. She and other House Democrats backed a resolution declaring that President Clinton “fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress.”

Certainly some action beyond Congress suing the president and trying to withhold money from his efforts to implement his executive orders is needed. A failure to resist President Obama’s repeated, serious offenses against his oath of office not only endangers the Constitution today, but provides a blueprint for future generations to suffer similar assaults from another president.

But what can Congress and the American people do?

The impeachment of a president is a very grave step, a sort of “nuclear option” to be avoided unless absolutely required. Not only is its explicit purpose to legislatively overturn the sovereign judgment of the people at the ballot box, its impact on the work of the government and national life is deeply corrosive.

Congress’ placating the president on immigration would establish a precedent for lawless executive action.

Dear Reader (including those of you in the shadows),

Like a cannibal in a coma ward, I have no idea where to begin. It is always remarkable to me — which is why I am remarking upon it — how the only way this president can be rescued from a bad news cycle is if an even worse one comes along. This is a source of frustration for many on the right who get outraged by the fact that “we” don’t talk enough about Fast & Furious or Benghazi or the IRS scandal or the VA scandal or Ukraine/Syria/Islamic State/China/Libya/Gitmo . . . . etc. The reason some of these topics get pushed to the backburner, even on the right, is that another controversy or scandal suddenly eclipses the previous one. If I ask you to hold a bowling ball and then, five minutes later, I surprise you by throwing a second bowling ball at you and shouting “Catch!” it’s sort of unfair for me to expect you not to drop the ball. (“That may be the worst thing you’ve ever written” — The Couch.)

Phase One of Grubergate came to an end not because the White House or Jonathan Gruber or his legions of activist-journalist homunculi offered the necessary answers or contrition, but because a bigger mess came along. The current fight over Obama’s immigration diktat will probably end when the White House throws Israel under the Mother of All Buses by striking a deal with Iran (already Bibi Netanyahu must feel like Joe Pesci as he walked into the room with plastic sheets on the floor in Goodfellas). The subsequent controversy over that will likely subside when the administration reveals it has been running an illegal dogfighting ring in the White House basement. That brouhaha will conclude when Biden lets it slip that he routinely hunts human beings for sport on the grounds of the Vice President’s residence.

It’s My Way or My Way

So let me bow to the power of this fully operational news cycle and talk about the immigration thing first.

For the last several weeks, the White House’s court spinners have been arguing that Republican inaction is forcing the president to act. Here’s Eugene Robinson in a column titled “Boehner’s immigration inertia forces Obama to act”:

Oh, please. All the melodramatic Republican outrage isn’t fooling anybody. The only reason President Obama has to act on immigration reform is that House Speaker John Boehner won’t.

I repeat: That’s the only reason. The issue could have been settled a year ago. It could be settled in an afternoon. The problem is that Boehner refuses to do his job, preferring instead to spend his time huffing and puffing in simulated indignation.

SLAVE
Peter Kassig was a ex-Ranger who, like so many of the other hostages, was betrayed by Muslims he trusted into ISIS custody. He converted to Islam as a hostage and his parents have continued the farce of calling him Abdul Rahman.
Now one of America’s enemies has been invited to pray over his funeral.
The sermon built to an impassioned, rapid-fire crescendo, in which, almost shouting, al-Yaqoubi seemed to divide jihad into foreign and domestic spheres, with appropriate action for each. “Wherever the American troops are — wherever they are, they are going to be defeated,” he yelped.

Sheikh Who Cheered Killing US Soldiers to Pray Over Ex-Soldier Beheaded by ISIS

“Palestinian” Terrorists Killed More Americans in 2014 Than ISIS

A NATION OF OBAMAS

2. We are a nation of laws

“Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws. Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable… “

The least appropriate time to namecheck America as a nation of laws is when you have to decided to…

A. Illegally usurp Congress

B. Provide sanction to lawbreakers

C. Disregard the very immigration laws you’re mentioning

The 5 Dumbest Lies in Obama’s Amnesty Speech

OBAMNESTY

Obama Whines TV Won’t Preempt “The Biggest Loser” for his Sore Loser Speech

Illegal Alien: Obama’s Amnesty Inspired Us to Cross Border – Who says Obama doesn’t inspire anyone anymore?

IF ONLY MOHAMMED KNEW

The only limit on the president’s power that he recognizes is political expediency.

President Obama is an Alinskyite.​

That assertion is not an epithet — well, not primarily. True, I would not describe someone I admired as an “Alinskyite.” Saul Alinsky was a loathsome figure — a radical statist who whose toxic brew of thoroughgoing deceit and brass-knuckles extortion (“direct action”) has become a part of mainstream politics. But in tying the president to the seminal community organizer whose theories and tactics so influenced him, my purpose is more to decode than to insult him.

Of course, calling Obama an “Alinskyite” draws cataracts of condemnation from the Democrat-media complex — for the same reason that Muslim Brotherhood shrieks of “Islamophobe!” inevitably follow any reasoned, scripturally based discussion of Islamic supremacism. People who advance their agendas in dishonesty and stealth can’t afford to have critics shine a light on them. The best diversion is to smear the critic as racist and phobic — or as Alinsky, a master of the game, put it, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Well, this week Alinsky did amnesty, so let’s not be diverted.

It was remarkable. We’ve endured six years of “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan,” “How dare you call Obamacare a tax,” “The video did it in Benghazi,” “Of course we’d never let guns walk to Mexican gangs,” “Workplace violence,” “Kinetic military action,” “The IRS harassment is outrageous and intolerable,” and “not a smidgeon of corruption” from “the most transparent administration in history.” Yet what so astonished the commentariat about Obama’s decree of amnesty for illegal aliens was the sheer audacity of hoax.

“I’m the president of the United States, not the emperor of the United States,” our would-be emperor repeatedly explained in the months and years before Thursday’s edict. Again and again, in more than two dozen recorded public statements, the president emphatically denied that he had the power to pronounce law unilaterally. “My job,” he huffed, “is to execute the laws that are passed.” His mere say-so could not suspend deportations or grant illegal aliens lawful status, he explained, because that would transgress “laws on the books that Congress has passed.”

In a few hours’ time, the President of the United States will apparently do to his oath of office what the Islamic State does to its captives. As I said to Hugh Hewitt the other day, even a constitution of meticulously constructed checks and balances requires a certain seemliness of its political class. This chief executive is brazen in his lawlessness, and ever more so. And he has calculated that those who object lack the stomach to do anything about it. We shall see.

However, I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week – Barack Obama’s reaction to the latest beheading of a US citizen by the head hackers of the Islamic State. Peter Kassig’s death video was not as the others:

David Haines and Alan Henning – both from Britain – and Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff each made statements before their deaths in earlier videos. Each held Barack Obama or David Cameron to blame for their deaths, because of American and British military action against Isil in Iraq and Syria.

There was no such statement from Peter Kassig. Instead, “Jihadi John” appears with Mr Kassig’s severed head, and sneers, “He doesn’t have much to say.”

Indeed. But I wonder what he had to say in the last moments of his life. Evidently not a statement blaming Obama for his predicament. Perhaps he even pushed back against his executioner in a more forceful way. In Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade, in an essay on another westerner beheaded by the jihadists, I salute someone who declined to go gentle into that good night:

Consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

Steve Apfel is director of the School of Management Accounting, Johannesburg. He is the author of the book, ‘Hadrian’s Echo: The whys and wherefores of Israel’s critics’ (2012) and a contributor to, “War by other means.” (Israel Affairs, 2012). His articles and blogs are published in several foreign journals and his new work, ‘Bilaam’s Curse: The enemies of Zion’ will be published by Hamilton Books this year
Think of the worst crimes a state can be guilty of. Then dishonestly make them peculiar Israeli crimes. Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, occupation, war crimes of every description. But it’s all been seen before

Plots and characters in the bible are said to portend what history will have in store for the Jewish people. That being so, the Balaam narrative foretold the plot against modern Israel: if war could not bring down the nation then cursing would. Delving into the intrigue described so compellingly in the Book of Numbers we bump into far-sighted prophecy at every twist and turn.

The plot is familiar enough. It begins with the desire of Moabite king, Balak to stop the Jewish people in their tracks after a series of victories over more powerful armies. Military might was not behind the juggernaut Jews, so Balak understood.

The power of the start-up nation, he learns, resided in their leader’s power of speech. Moses was the secret weapon. And this gave Balak an idea. If, by speaking with God, Moses could empower the Jews, then surely they could be disempowered by speech.

So the king hires a curser-in-chief named Balaam. His goal is not necessarily to wipe a wandering multitude off the face of the desert, but to keep it from going into Israel.

“Let us drive them out of the Land” he tells the Elders of Moab. What he meant was that the Jews must at all costs not establish a sovereign nation. As long as they were homeless and stateless, as far as Moab’s leaders were concerned they could keep their spirituality and myriad laws and God-given strength.

The Moabites, who after all descended from a son of Lot by his elder daughter, were prepared to live and let live. But a Jewish people connected to a national homeland – that would be a different kettle of fish. The Moabites, true blue descendants of lifestyle-loving Lot, felt that such a prospect posed an existential threat to their free and easy ways. In fact, Jews occupying the Land of Israel, they felt, would ramify the entire world.

Listen, myriad voices urge at a far-ahead point in history, at which time the people of Israel are living, and thriving, in the Promised Land, and “Human Rights” delegates by the thousands meet on the side of a game-changing conference at the Indian Ocean city of Durban in 2001; listen, say the plotters; war after war has left Israel not just intact but invulnerable.

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nick, who is a regular contributor to The Commentator, blogs at cmewonline.com
Israel supporters fight back against the boycotters. It’s a standing joke among supporters of decency that the anti-Israel boycott crowd is going to end up boycotting itself since Israeli technology is so essential to modern life. Now there’s an app to really ram it home to the bigots

The supposedly pro-Palestinian Boycott Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement frequently makes the news with its aggressive and counter-productive antics in stores and on the streets. But supporters of Israel, both Jewish and Christian, are fighting back.

It’s a common joke in the pro-Israel community that there are fewer and fewer things that BDS supporters can eat, use or be treated with without infringing their own “never buy Israel” mantras.

BDS purists have (or should have!) banned themselves from using mobile ‘phones, receiving the best heart treatments in hospital or enjoying the delights of cherry tomatoes or Medjool dates (both of them yummy as well as healthy and produced in Israel).

Just so BDS supporters can check themselves on their way to go shopping, there’s now an app for that. “Am Israel Buy” (a play on the Hebrew phrase “the people of Israel live”) is a compendium of Israeli-sourced foods, cosmetics, clothing and even books about Israel; most of which can be ordered online from your ‘phone (oops, sorry Mr BDS, you shouldn’t be using your Smart Phone with its Isaeli-invented voicemail and SMS).

The Am Yisrael Buy app is available on most mobile platforms, so go buy.

While we’re talking apps, canny supporters of Israeli products can use the software boycotters themselves use as they avoid the same items! www.buycott.com is the home of the “Buycott”, app, which allows you to scan barcodes with your phone to detect products you want or don’t want to buy.

The rent-seekers, opportunists, third-rate academics, carbon-market scam artists and peddlers of catastrophic prophecy can see the alarmist bubble deflating, so they’re trying harder than ever to sustain the scare. Problem is, Mother Nature isn’t cooperating

This doesn’t mean the climate change “debate” will stop, the news media will cease reporting weather as a dire threat, or that the true believers will no longer be obsessed by it. However, the ultimate arbiter, climate itself, has made clear its decision by ceasing to warm for over 18 years. Despite the ongoing use of fossil fuels, a proclaimed 95% certainty of 97% of scientists and the high-powered projections of the world’s most advanced climate models, the climate has refused to pay the slightest heed.

Contrary to all the confidence and predictions of alleged experts, storms are no more intense nor frequent, while droughts, floods and sea levels have declined to confirm alarmists’ barely concealed hopes of disasters. The simple fact is that the alleged experts and their high-powered models were wrong. The climate has ceased to warm and, with little or no greenhouse warming, the entire theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW), aka Climate Change (CC), aka Global Warming, aka Extreme Weather, is left with no basis.

The debate over CC has been unique in the history of science in that its proponents have largely abandoned the primacy of evidence and openly declared methodology in favour of self-proclaimed authority backed by their own confidential methods and models. It is also unique in that the alarmists refuse to directly address their arguments, prefering to ignore, censor and personally denigrate them. In a few instances in the early part of the public debate, the proponents attempted direct debate with their critics but came away looking decidedly second-best and they soon refused any further direct discussion. With no convincing answers to the uncertainties and conflicting evidence raised by their opponents they simply chose to ignore them, declare the science “settled” and anoint themselves as the only experts. All who disagreed agree were deemed to be fools, knaves and/or in the pay and pocket of Big Energy.

With a naive and compliant news media steeped in the same politically correct, left wing academic indoctrination as the researchers, the latter enjoyed a near monopoly on favourable news coverage. Self-serving publicity releases were regurgitated undigested beneath the by-lines of environmental “reporters”, who eagerly reduced themselves to unquestioning stenographers.