RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375026/print

President Obama was doing his favorite thing this week: talking to crowds of adoring young people who already agree with him while acting like he persuaded them about something.

They also seemed to give Obama the impression that he’s a really funny guy. On Wednesday, he told a crowd of 1,400 at the University of Michigan that he visited a local deli, Zingerman’s. He proceeded to tell a long story about ordering the small Reuben sandwich, which he said was “killer.” That description got a good laugh. Then he explained how he thought the sandwich was too big, so he shared it with his adviser, Valerie Jarrett.

“After I finished [my] half, I wanted [her] half back,” Obama said. “But it was too late, all she had was the pickle – so I took the pickle.”

“Took the pickle” was a huge laugh line.

Pickle is a funny word, but still; when an audience thinks this is a knee-slapper, you know it’s not a rough crowd.

But Obama had a serious point to make as well. Zingerman’s “is a business that treats its workers well and rewards honest work with honest wages. And that’s what I’m here to talk about today.” He then segued into a pitch for raising the minimum wage.

National Review’s Andrew Johnson noted that Zingerman’s is pretty expensive. That small Reuben cost $13.99 – pickle included! (Thank you! I’m here all week. Please tip your servers.) The large goes for nearly $17. The irony might have been lost on the president that Zingerman’s “honest wages” also lead to high prices.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

A “small group of angry white liberals” are attempting to ban Condoleezza Rice, the first African-American woman to be Secretary of State, from speaking at the University of Minnesota on April 17 – this, according to an article in the Daily Caller on March 29th. The group is led by a math teacher named William Messing and a graduate student named Nick Theis who is a member of the ill-named Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), with assistance from the University of Minnesota’s chapter of the SDS. Messing introduced a resolution in the school’s University Senate that calls on the administration to rescind the invitation. In an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Mr. Theis wrote that his objection had nothing to do with party politics or freedom of speech, but was “simply an issue of human rights.” Yeah! Right!

Unfortunately this attempt to muzzle conservatives is not unique to Minnesota. The faculty at Rutgers University has opposed Ms. Rice as this spring’s commencement speaker. She “lacks moral authority” and fails to meet the standards of “exemplary citizenship,” according to the faculty’s statement. The attempt to silence the Right is not unique to Ms. Rice. Neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson, who spent 30 years at Johns Hopkins Hospital and was emeritus fellow of the Yale Corporation, was banned from speaking at last year’s Hopkins’ graduation ceremony by an on-line petition from “liberal” students.

Black pastor Reverend Kevin Johnson of the Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia was supposed to be the commencement speaker at his alma mater, Morehouse College. But when he wrote an op-ed criticizing President Obama for “failing the Black community” he was disinvited. Sandor Farkas is one of two students at Dartmouth (both registered Independents) who were banned from a campus activists’ strategy meeting as to how the college should honor Martin Luther King Day. Mr. Farkas’ comment: “What I am really frustrated at is that we can’t have reasonable discussions about these issues.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375045/print

Qanta Ahmed, M.D., is a member of the board of directors of Women’s Voices Now and the author of In the Land of Invisible Women, an account of her experiences as a physician in Saudi Arabia.

Victims of honor crimes are silenced. Victims of honor crimes are shamed. Victims of honor crimes are made pariahs. And, often, victims of honor crimes are extinguished. This week, Honor Diaries, a documentary focusing on the global manifestations of honor violence, was itself silenced, when two American universities — the University of Michigan at Dearborn and the University of Illinois in Chicago — canceled planned screenings. With this act of censorship, the movie has become a metaphor for its message. Just like the women and girls it portrays, the movie has been silenced and its progenitors shamed.

While honor crimes take place in many cultures, they are most prevalent today in the Muslim-majority world and increasingly in Muslim diaspora communities settled in the West. Our movie examines the work of nine women activists, many of them Muslim, in defending and rescuing these victims.

As an observant Muslim who has lived in Saudi Arabia, the center of the Muslim-majority world, as a woman of Pakistani heritage, and as a female physician who has identified and reported both adult and child victims of abuse, I contributed to the expert commentary in Honor Diaries, and did so willingly without compensation of any form. I did so in accordance with my values as a Muslim: We are mandated by Islam to expose any injustice, including among our own.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375041/print

Russian president Vladimir Putin has completed his Anschluss of Crimea to the sound of muted global grumbling. He now is watching America and the West for signals on what he can get away with next. Putin surely is calculating whether to keep 80,000 Red Army troops on Russia’s side of its border with Ukraine or deploy them across that red line — to the greater glory of Mother Russia.

In that context, Obama exhibited breathtaking weakness on March 28 when he ordered the EPA to study the methane generated by oil and gas production. This research, part of Obama’s obsession with so-called “global warming,” is scheduled to continue through late 2014. After that, the EPA will decide whether or not to regulate oil and gas development even further. This paralysis of analysis most likely will push decisions on the Keystone XL pipeline and new federal fracking permits well past November’s midterm elections.

“We’re studying it,” Team Obama can say when asked about Keystone and fracking. “We’ll make up our minds later.”

Kicking this gas canister down the road keeps the Left hoping that Obama will kill Keystone and new fracking plans come 2015. Meanwhile, since Obama now can scrutinize projects rather than block them, the Right will be unable to pound him as hard as they would if he actually had nixed Keystone and fracking initiatives. Obama also can assuage the pro-energy labor unions with assurances that “we’ll take a look after November.” That should keep them calm, and their coffers open.

So Obama likely will get what he wants, all the way through the November 4 vote, as Capitol Hill dangles in the balance.

At the same time, Obama has shown Putin that he need not worry about the one weapon that Moscow fears most: America’s ability to drive oil and gas prices into the floor.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/syria-is-what-happens-when-islam-wins/print/

Saudi Arabia and Qatar aren’t talking to each other. Syria and Turkey are shooting at each other. Not only are the Shiites and Sunnis killing each other in Syria, but the Sunni groups have been killing each other for some time now. There are even two or three Al Qaedas fighting each other over which of them is the real Al Qaeda.

There’s something about Syria that splits down everything and everyone. Even Hamas had to split between its political and military wings when choosing between Iran’s weapons and Qatar’s money. Doing the logical thing, the military wing took the weapons and the political wing took the money so that the military wing of Hamas supported Assad and its political wing supported the Sunni opposition.

It’s not however money and weapons that splits Muslims over Syria. Money and weapons are only the symbols. What they represent is Islam. And what Islam represents is the intersection between identity and power.

A modern state derives its power from its identity. The Japanese and the Russians were willing to die in large numbers for their homeland during WW2. Both countries had undergone rapid de-feudalization turning peasants into citizens. Japan and Russia however had historic identities to draw on. The rapid de-feudalization in the Arab world had messier results because countries such as Jordan and Syria were Frankenstein’s monsters made out of bits and pieces of assembled parts of history stuck together with crazy glue.

The Middle East is full of flags, but most are minor variations on the same red, green, black and white theme. The difference between the Palestinian flag and the Jordanian flag is a tiny asterisk on the chevron representing the unity of the Arab peoples. The Iraqi flag was originally the same as the Jordanian and Palestinian flags. So are most of the flags in the region which are based on the Arab Revolt flag which was in turn based on the colors of the Caliphates.

Every time you see the Al Qaeda “black flag” of Jihad, it’s already represented in the black stripes on the flags of every Arab nation. What Al Qaeda has done is strip out the other colors representing the various succeeding caliphates and gone back all the way to the black of Mohammed’s war flag.

What is Syria? The civil war answered that question. Like the USSR, it’s a prison of nations. It exists only by virtue of men pointing guns at other men. As long as all the men with the guns agreed on what Syria was, the country existed. Once they no longer did, there was no longer a Syria. The same is true of much of the Middle East.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/obama-epas-monstrous-human-experiments/print/

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has been subjecting unknowing human guinea pigs to high levels of carcinogens and potentially lethal pollutants in order to justify tough new air quality standards.

To make matters worse, EPA has been carrying out these egregiously immoral and unethical human experiments in which subjects are made to inhale freshly pumped-in diesel truck exhaust fumes without advising them of the risk to their health.

Such EPA-funded studies have reportedly been carried out at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Rochester (N.Y.), University of Southern California, University of Michigan, and elsewhere.

It is social engineering of the worst sort carried out by left-wing bureaucrats who view people as objects or playthings, not as individuals. It is also consistent with the profoundly misanthropic ethos of environmentalism, a movement that was already radical 25 years ago but has become outright totalitarian in its goals since it was taken over by neo-Marxists around the world following the collapse of their ideal state, the Soviet Union.

The news, which has largely been ignored by the mainstream media, comes amidst the EPA’s draconian crackdown on wood-burning stoves (that will probably lead to a crackdown on fireplaces too eventually).

The disturbing finding that Americans have been subjected to dangerous toxins for political gain is contained in a new investigative report by The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch.

The article comes on the heels of a new report by the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) that says the EPA’s experiments exposed individuals, including those with asthma and cardiac problems, to pollutants such as diesel fumes in quantities up to 50 times greater than the levels the agency deems safe for humans.

None of the $12-an-hour test subjects has died (yet) but some of them have experienced significant health problems.

After being exposed to “ambient air pollution particles” in 2010, an obese 58-year-old woman with medical problems and a family history of heart disease had to go to the hospital. One volunteer patient was exposed to ozone for 15 minutes and developed a nasty cough while two other experienced “cardiac arrhythmias” during testing.

The dangerous taxpayer-funded experiments were unearthed in 2012 by pseudoscience debunker Steve Milloy. Using the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA), his website, JunkScience.com, got its hands on the results of tests EPA quacks conducted on people who were exposed to high levels of airborne fine particulate matter – soot and dust that scientists refer to PM2.5.

In congressional testimony in late 2011, then-EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson told a congressional committee in effect that her agency was putting at risk the lives of study subjects.

“Particulate matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It’s directly causal to dying sooner than you should,” said Jackson who is infamous for using secret pseudonymous email accounts in to conceal her official activities from FoIA inquiries and Congress. EPA claims that PM2.5 can kill those who inhale it within two days of exposure.

“If we could reduce particulate matter to healthy levels it would have the same impact as finding a cure for cancer in our country,” Jackson added.

“Got that?” Milloy wrote. “Airborne dust and soot don’t make you sick, they just kill you – virtually upon exposure.”

So is it true? Is particulate matter dangerous or not?

http://www.jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain/item/the_quaker_exchange_part_1_on_the_early_beginnings_of_palestine_refugee_rel

Asaf Romirowsky is a Middle East historian. He holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King’s College London, UK and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. He lives in Philadelphia.

Alexander H. Joffe is an archaeologist and historian. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona, USA and has published widely on topics in archaeology, ancient and modern history, and contemporary politics. He lives in New York.

The following exchange will focus on their new book, ‘Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief’.

Dear Dr. Romirowsky and Dr. Joffe,

Your interesting book examines in detail the role played by one NGO, the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), in the very first days (1948-50) of the UN’s Palestinian refugee relief program. The first question in this case almost writes itself: so much water has gone under the bridge since then, and there are so many aspects (both current and historic) to the Palestinian refugee question. Why the Quakers? What can this seemingly esoteric episode about the formation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) teach us about the conflict in 2014?

http://www.renewamerica.com/analysis/swirsky/140403

Just last week, on March 24, 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) released its latest data on autism. After surveying medical and school records from 11 states, the CDC found that autism has more than doubled since the new century began only 14 years ago. Today the condition affects one out of 68 children – five times as many boys as girls. Alarmingly, there was a 30 percent climb in its incidence between 2008 and 2010.

Maybe you missed the story, since the day it broke, and the following day, the media – TV, radio, print – devoted about 30 seconds and just a few articles to this horrific report, significantly less time than is still spent endlessly speculating on Flight 370 or debating the use of the word “bossy,” both of which pale in comparison to the marathon of unendurable daily ads for Cialis and Viagra! Exhibit Number One in America’s priority system!

The powers-that-be at the CDC once again trotted out the age-old rationales to explain this bizarre finding:

Greater awareness and therefore earlier and more accurate diagnoses

The role that being an older parent plays not only in the incidence of autism but also Down syndrome and other developmental disabilities

Genes

“Something” in the environment

The study found that the incidence of autism in blacks “continues to lag behind whites and Hispanics,” which some experts attributed to racial bias (i.e., blacks lack equal access to medical care), but other experts said that blacks may simply be less vulnerable to autism for some unknown reason.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/04/02/twelve-questions-about-the-peace-process/

In today’s New York Times, a letter from Dov Bruce Krulwich in Beit Shemesh, Israel, asks two questions about the possible release of Jonathan Pollard to encourage Israel to release Palestinian murderers to convince the Palestinians to discuss a Palestinian state, even though the Palestinians “refuse even to agree that the end game involves two states for two peoples”:

Shouldn’t a people who have never had a state be the ones making goodwill gestures to continue a process that will benefit them the most?

Why weren’t the previous good-will gestures, not to mention all the good-will gestures in the past 20 years, enough to expect the Palestinians to take a step themselves?

Those questions lead to some of my own:

Why do people have to be paid–in the form of cash, prisoners, freezes, etc.–to convince them to show up to negotiate a state for themselves?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/dartmouths-chickens-come-home-to-roost-in-the-presidents-office.php

The Dartmouth students known as “Concerned Asian, Black, Latin@, Native, Undocumented, Queer, and Differently-Abled students” have followed through on their threat to take “physical action” if the College’s administrators don’t reply to their demands. Their physical action consists of occupying the office of Phil Hanlon, Dartmouth’s president.

The demands of these activists are so absurd that when I first reported on them some very intelligent people told me that this was a hoax. Here are some of the demands:

Incorporate into each department at least one queer studies class.

Commit multi-millions of dollars to increase faculty and staff of color in all departments, and create a “professor of color” lecture series.

Require ALL professors to be trained in “cultural competency” and the “importance of social justice in their day to day work.”

Ask faculty to use preferred gender pronouns. Allow body and gender self-determination.