RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s sanitized history for Iftar dinner

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President Obama showed off Jefferson’s Koran at a recent White House Iftar Dinner, but ignored the book in its historical context.

According to a press release from the White House dated August 10, 2012, the President told those gathered at the Iftar dinner, where Muslims break the fast of Ramadan, that,

“As I’ve noted before, Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia — perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago. And some of you, as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy of our friends at the Library of Congress — the Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that’s a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam — like so many faiths — is part of our national story.”

The President ignored the context for that “first Iftar at the White House.” To mention it would have been politically incorrect. Here, thought, is the rest of the “first Iftar” dinner at the White House.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/paul-ryan-the-muslim-brotherhood?f=must_reads

I’m glad Mitt picked Paul Ryan. Of the finalists who’ve been floated in the last few weeks, he is the best choice. I like him, although as I’ve said before, he’s not quite the Captain Courageous some on our side portray him to be. But he is more serious about dealing with our financial catastrophe than most of the Beltway GOP. As Mark’s never-to-be-missed weekend column illustrates today, that’s not exactly not a high bar, but hey, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Bottom line: I feel better about Romney because he made this choice, and I imagine most other conservatives will, too.

The pick also made me chuckle a bit because of the week I’ve had speechifying over the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on our government. A little over a year ago, I wrote a column about President Obama’s speechifying. In particular, I was contrasting the difference between the way he treated the guests he famously took pains to invite to two of his speeches: Paul Ryan and the Muslim Brotherhood. It started out something like this:

There is always great intrigue in Barack Obama’s speeches. Not much heft, mind you, but substance is not the point. In this Chicago-style presidency, what is said is often less telling than who is invited to hear what is said. That’s where you find out who is in and who is out.

Count Rep. Paul Ryan among the outs. The GOP budget guru got a coveted invitation to hear the president outline his new vision for escaping the economic catastrophe wrought by his current vision. The speech was much anticipated, because it was Ryan’s own ambitious plan to slash trillions in spending that roused Obama from his customary crouch in the tall grass.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313674/milquetoast-mitt-mark-steyn
Romney needs to get serious about the crisis we face.

The other day, I passed a Republican-party county office here in my home state, its window attractively emblazoned with placards declaring “Believe in America. Romney 2012” and “New Hampshire Believes. Romney 2012.” There’s not a lot of evidence for the latter proposition, but I’m certainly willing to believe that Romney believes that New Hampshire believes. An hour or two later, I chanced to be passing a television set just as the station went to break. The words “WE BELIEVE” appeared on the screen, followed by youthful hands raised to a clear blue sky at the dawn of a new day, shafts of sunlight gleaming through ears of corn, a puppy gamboling across a meadow, a kitten playfully pawing, happy green-T-shirted volunteers of many races unloading a recycling carton . . . and I thought, despite myself, “Well, say what you like, but the reassuring vapidity of the Romney campaign is at least getting more professional.” At the end, in the spot where the off-screen voice is supposed to say “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message,” it instead said: “Introducing Purina One Beyond: a new food for your cat or dog.”

Well, what do I know? By contrast, the Obama campaign’s theme is “Forward” — which, in the context of a second term for Mister You-Didn’t-Build-That, I’d carelessly assumed was a poignant allusion to “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/313882

The election of the biracial Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. Instead, that dream is becoming a tribally polarized nightmare –by design, and intended to assist in the reelection of Barack Obama.

Consider the increasing obsession with the term “white” (as in versus “black”), along with the old standby charge of “racism” — nearly all of it emanating from the president’s surrogates and celebrity supporters. Upon the announcement of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick, almost immediately Donna Christensen, the non-voting congressional delegate from the Virgin Islands, tweeted: “Wait a minute! Are there black people in Va? Guess just not w Romney Ryan! At least not seeing us. We know who’s got our back & we have his.”

“Got our back” — compare the Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith’s video appealing to African-Americans to cover the president’s back — of course implies that Paul Ryan is a veritable racist who by virtue of his skin color and conservative politics will stab blacks in the back. In that vein, Mia Farrow, viewing the initial Romney/Ryan rally, offers, “Camera pans crowd: whole bunch of white people.”

Here is what Melissa Harris-Perry, the weekend host of MSNBC’s Hardball, said of Paul Ryan’s referring to the Declaration of Independence: “The thing I really have against him is actually how he and Gov. Romney have misused the Declaration of Independence. I’m deeply irritated by their notion that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ means money for the richest and that we extricate the capacity of ordinary people to pursue happiness. When they say ‘God and nature give us our rights, not government,’ that is a lovely thing to say as a wealthy white man.” In the postmodern world of Ms. Harris-Perry, which is the world of Barack Obama, what we say has no innate meaning apart from our class, race, and gender.

Expect the Ryan selection in the next few days to spawn a new flurry of “wealthy white man” invective in a manner that two Clinton-Gore tickets, a Gore-Lieberman ticket, and a Kerry-Edwards ticket never did.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313904/ryanism-big-picture-william-voegeli By choosing Paul Ryan to be his running mate, Mitt Romney has ensured that a “far-reaching debate about the broader role of government and the entitlement state,” in the words of Politico’s instant analysis, will dominate the final, decisive twelve weeks of the presidential campaign. The long-term budget plans that Representative Ryan has advanced […]

JINSA Vice Chairman
MORRIS AMITAY
The specter of the January 2, 2013 sequestration has created rare unanimity here in Washington. Just about everyone both in the defense establishment and Congress maintains it would have disastrous consequences if implemented.

This new round of budget cuts was mandated by the U.S. Budget Control Act after the failure of a super committee – the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – to reach an agreement on a balance between taxes and spending. The Act was part of a compromise between Democrats and Republicans to permit raising the Federal debt ceiling. This translates into a $55 billion cut in fiscal year 2013 from the roughly $511 billion base defense budget, $93 billion from the war budget and $82 billion from unobligated funding.

These cuts, mandated by the sequester, would be on top of the $487 billion in budget reductions already scheduled over the next decade, because Congress could not find another $1.2 trillion in Federal savings over the same period. With the Administration’s decision to exempt military personnel from the cuts, the rest of the defense budget would be looking at an 11.2 percent reduction and could mean an estimated 89,000 job cuts at the Department of Defense and a hiring freeze. Non-defense spending would also be sequestered, but at a lower rate.

Unfortunately, given continuing partisan rancor over this issue, Congress has been unable to agree on a solution to the growing financial crisis facing our country. With the politics of this election year preventing agreement on a decisive course of action on the economy, we can expect Congress to “kick the can down the road.” When it returns to work in September, it is expected to pass a stopgap spending measure to provide federal funding for the first half of fiscal year 2013. This would permit Congress in the “lame duck” post-election session to focus on the looming automatic sequestration cuts before the January 2 deadline.

But, at some point soon, crucial decisions will have to be made as to our nation’s overall defense posture, and by definition, our leadership role in an increasingly dangerous world. In a bipartisan vote, Congress recently tasked the Obama administration to lay out precisely what these cuts to defense and domestic programs would mean. The Administration has maintained that it had not provided details because sequestration was designed to be so draconian that implementation was unthinkable. Even with many of the details missing, there is almost unanimous agreement as to the catastrophic effects of sequestration on our national security.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has described the cuts as “devastating,” with the prospect of “the smallest ground force since 1940,” “a fleet of fewer than 230 ships, the smallest level since 1915,” and the “smallest tactical fighter force in the history of the Air Force.” In this regard, it is worth noting the average age of the Air Force’s B-52 bombers is nearly 50 years. On average, American long-range bombers are 35 years old, mid-air refueling tankers are 49 years old, and fighter aircraft are 22 years old.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/index.xml

A magician typically succeeds when the attention of the audience is diverted from his main activity onto some distraction. President Obama has raised this sort of deflection into a political art form.

Take, for example, the matter of revelations by five Members of Congress and the Center for Security Policy that there appear to be a number individuals working for or with the Obama administration with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The possibility that their influence may be helping to shape U.S. policy in ways that increasingly align it with the demands, ambitions and goals of the Brotherhood and other Islamists is a national security problem of the first order. That is especially true at a moment when Muslim Brothers are consolidating their hold on power in Egypt with the cashiering of two top generals at the hands of the Brotherhood’s newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Yet, Team Obama and its allies in the elite media have aggressively worked to deflect the focus away from these realities. At first, they did so by viciously attacking Congresswoman Michele Bachmann – even though she was just one of five legislators who asked for investigations into these seeming influence operations by inspectors general of five federal agencies.

Then, they sought to portray as a victim of racism and bigotry just one of those about whom the Members of Congress raised legitimate questions: Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Journalists like CNN’s Anderson Cooper repeated uncritically – and unprofessionally – assurances that there was no factual basis for linking Ms. Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood. Where compelled to acknowledge that members of her family do have ties to Brotherhood-connected organizations, the administration and its allies denounced such concerns as “guilt by association” and “McCarthyism.”

Then, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, former Muslim Brother Walid Shoebat and other researchers established a direct tie between Huma Abedin and a Muslim Brotherhood front, the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA). IMMA was established essentially as an Abedin family business by Abdullah Omar Naseef, an officially designated al Qaeda financier.

Shortly after IMMA was founded under his chairmanship, Naseef became the secretary general of the Muslim World League (MWL) which Mr. McCarthy described in an August 8th speech in Washington sponsored by the Center for Security Policy as: “the Saudi-financed global propagation enterprise by which the Muslim Brotherhood’s virulently anti-Western brand of Islamist ideology is seeded throughout the world, very much including in the United States.”

It happens that Huma Abedin was listed for twelve years on the masthead of the IMMA’s journal as an associate editor. For at least seven of those years, Omar Naseef was also listed as a member of the editorial advisory board.

In his remarks last week, former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney McCarthy directly spoke to charges that Huma Abedin was being unfairly challenged by virtue of these various ties to the Muslim Brotherhood: “‘Guilt by association’ has nothing to do with fitness for high public office. High public office is a privilege, not a right. Access to classified information is a privilege, not a right. You need not have done anything wrong to be deemed unfit for these privileges.”

Andrew McCarthy added pointedly: “It is not a question of your patriotism or your trustworthiness. It is about whether you would be burdened by such obvious conflicts of interest that you would be tempted to act on those interests, rather than in the best interests of the United States.”

Nonetheless, two days later, the Deflector-in-Chief used the occasion of remarks at his fourth annual White House Iftar dinner – a ceremony marking the breaking of the Ramadan fast – to provide a shout-out to one of his guests, Huma Abedin. Mr. Obama pronounced: “Huma is an American patriot, and an example of what we need in this country – more public servants with her sense of decency, her grace and her generosity of spirit. So, on behalf of all Americans, we thank you so much.” Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Not only does Ms. Abedin’s relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood and involvement in policies favorable to its interests warrant close official scrutiny. There are at least six other individuals with Brotherhood ties whose involvement in Obama administration “Muslim outreach” and/or related policy-making also deserve investigation by the IGs and the Congress:

* Rashad Hussain, Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation;
* Dalia Mogahed, an advisor to President Obama;
* Mohamed Elibiary, a member of Homeland Security Department’s Advisory Council;
* Mohamed Magid, a member of the Homeland Security Department’s Countering-Violent Extremism Working Group;
* Louay Safi, until recently the credentialing authority for Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military and now a leader of the Brotherhood-dominated Syrian National Council; and
* Kifah Mustapha, a Hamas-fundraiser and graduate of the FBI’s ‘Citizens Academy’

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=281113

In the wake of an Israeli government- initiated report presenting Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria, opponents of settlements argue that the issue is not about Israel’s legal and historic rights, but about “morality.” I assume that means supporting “Palestinian self-determination,” “ending the occupation” and establishing a second Arab Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.
Anything which inhibits this goal, therefore, is considered “immoral,” including Jews living in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, aka “occupied Palestinian territories (OPT).” “Justice for Palestinians,” aka “the Palestinian right of return” is also hyped as a moral obligation.

The accusation is that Israel/Jews have stolen land and occupy Palestinian territory. Theft is a criminal and hence immoral act. If that is true, however, due to Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in 1967 this would also apply to areas Israel acquired in the 1948-49 war.

While this involves legal disputes, moral arguments focus on Israel’s denial and abuse of human and civil rights. Even if Israel’s legal claims were justified, it is charged with violating “international humanitarian law” and stepped over a moral line, according to organizations like the ICRC.

As TAU Prof. Chaim Gans wrote in A Just Zionism; on the morality of the Jewish state, (OU P, 2008), it is a “moral duty… not to undermine the partition plan of 1947,” “there were significant justifications for the Arabs’ opposition to Jews’ return to the Land of Israel,” “Jews have a special moral obligation to understand [it],” and Jews caused “considerable injustice to the Arabs.”

Mitt Romney has done this country a great service by selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate. He has changed the nature of the election from one that is about who is the best candidate to lead us out of the aftermath of the Great Recession to one that concerns fundamental party policies and philosophy. He has turned the election into what we had in 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson was finishing the term of our martyred President Jack Kennedy and running for his own first term against Senator Barry Goldwater, Republican from Arizona. Goldwater was the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party and ultimately the leader of the entire party in that election.

The 1964 race became a referendum on whether the United States should jettison the principles of the party of hope – the Democratic party — created by FDR that united the aspirations of the middle class and addressed the needs of the poor and the concerns of women, blacks, Jews, other minorities, and farmers. FDR, a wealthy man, was denounced by many of his peers as a traitor to his class.

What FDR gave to our country was the promise of greater fairness for all of its people. One of his greatest contributions, many would say, was the Social Security program that was intended to assist these who had worked all their lives to retire at 65 with dignity. That concept was extended by President Johnson in 1965 with the creation of both Medicare and Medicaid. The former is basically for the elderly and the latter is for the impoverished of all ages.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the very programs that the Republicans and Conservatives beginning with Goldwater have been seeking to chip away at and ultimately eliminate. For example, President George W. Bush rightly recognized that Social Security needs to be changed to make it solvent. However, his proposal to privatize the program, making payments dependent on stock market performance, makes no sense, particularly in view of the affects of the Great Recession on the stock market. A better approach would have been and still would be to gradually increase the eligibility age (we fortunately live much longer today than we did in 1935), and apply the current Social Security tax to our entire personal income – it stops now at $110,100 — with such additional fiscal measures as are necessary to bring in more revenue. The program eligibility could also be made subject to a needs basis. Those who are wealthy don’t need the employer subsidies which could be added to and used for those who do.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187072/Saudi-Arabia-Women-city-planned-allow-more-females-pursue-career.html#ixzz23VzlYVrP

No man’s land: Women-only city planned for Saudi Arabia to allow more and more females to pursue a career

Saudi Arabia is planning to build a new city exclusively for women as it bids to combine strict Sharia law and career minded females, pursuing work.

It is thought the Saudi Industrial Property Authority (Modon) has been asked to bring the country up to date with the rest of the modern world with the controversial city, which is now being designed with construction to begin next year.

It is hoped it will allow women’s desire to work without defying the country’s Islamic laws.