RUTHFULLY YOURS

Apparently truth is not a valued commodity in Washington. By now, most people have read the profile of Ben Rhodes in the New York Times by David Samuels in which Mr. Rhodes, who is described as Obama’s “foreign policy guru” created an echo chamber—a fictitious reality of under-educated, newly minted journalists — to make the Islamic Republic of Iran appear much more benign than it actually is in order to sell the Iranian nuclear agreement to a skeptical American Congress and public.

I had expected heads to roll over this. Yet, not a single person has been fired. In fact, those who are most culpable have only been promoted up the ladder in the Obama administration where total fictions are peddled as truths, and where empty bromides are offered about how they would like ISIS and other radical Islamist terrorists to be treated.

For example, yesterday, while visiting grieving families of the 49 loved ones who were murdered by Omar Mateen in Pulse, a gay bar in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch prescribed how we should respond to this tragedy. “Our most effective weapon is compassion, unity and love … We need to find our common humanity,” remarked the Attorney General.

Love? Tell that to someone whose son’s head has been savagely cut off by ISIS or whose daughter has been kidnapped and raped and then sold into slavery.

There is currently a rigid dogma among some inside the beltway now, not to acknowledge that ISIS hates Yazidis, Christians, Shiites-or any Muslim who does not practice their precise brand of Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Rastafarians and (of course) Jews, as well as gays.

Recently, members of my staff were in a Democratic congressional office, and the staffer refused to acknowledge that simple fact. He insisted that this was simply an LGBT issue. (Period. End of story.)

This administration has substituted wishful thinking for realistic sound policy, and it has become contagious. And one of the cornerstones of this wishful thinking is that Islam, in all its many varieties, is a religion of peace.

And when the facts do not fit their paradigm, then just edit out the facts. This is what occurred last Sunday, June 19th on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd when the Attorney General had announced that they were to “release the partial transcripts of the killer’s calls with law enforcement” that night when Omar Mateen killed 49 people on Saturday, June 11th.

Each generation looks back at the generation behind it and weeps. Surely these children will be the death of our society, they think. Well, people looking at the current crop of American college students — and the administrators who enable them — while thinking such things may very well be right.

On top of the myriad other nonsense on college campuses, it now seems that some professors are being investigated for admitting that the Official Line ™ isn’t the only opinion out there:

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

In at least one of the cases, a transgendered student was offended merely because the professor acknowledged the opinion that some believe transgender isn’t a real thing.

He’s not accused of arguing that position, even for the sake of argument. Nope. Just admitting that it exists was too offensive.

Whether transgender is a real thing, a psychological condition, or the result of a science fiction experiment brought to life by a howler monkey on meth is irrelevant. Honestly, the professor not having expressed his personal opinions on the matter is irrelevant. What is relevant is that American college students just can’t handle opinions different from their own.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lies about Israel not only as a matter of course but as one of policy. It was no surprise, then, when he stood up at the European Parliament on Thursday and regurgitated a claim made this week that rabbinical figures in the Jewish state had urged the government to poison Palestinian wells.

Abbas knew that this classically anti-Semitic blood libel was as false as a similar one, spread last week, that claimed Israel forced Palestinians from a certain village to flee by drying up their water supply during Ramadan. In fact, a pipe had burst, and it was immediately repaired. But not — as media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out — before the “water apartheid” lie, first “reported” by Al Jazeera, was picked up by The Independent, the International Business Times, Radio New Zealand and The Times of London.

In keeping with the tradition of his predecessor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas encourages the invention of all kinds of blood libels, which he then states as fact, both to his own people and to the international community. Each libel is more ludicrous than the previous one, and they would be funny if they weren’t reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and didn’t serve the same purpose: to foster the kind of Jew-loathing that enables genocide.

But annihilating Israel and the Jews is not the real reason that Abbas perpetuates utterly insane accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. More immediate personal concerns preoccupy the PA leader, who knows his days are numbered, literally and figuratively, if he does not remain relevant at home and abroad.

Indeed, Abbas constantly faces the possibility of being ousted by members of his own faction, Fatah, and by Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza. He manages to survive by enlisting financial and political support from the United States, Europe and the United Nations.

A professor at the University of Northern Colorado assigned Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” to his students — and watched as they proved the essay’s point.

According to a report obtained by Heat Street, students filed a complaint with the school’s “Bias Response Team” based on the professor’s lesson. The professor, whose name has been redacted, seems to have assigned the essay as part of a broader lesson about the value of debate: After reading “The Coddling of the American Mind,” students were instructed to chart out competing arguments on topics such as transgenderism, abortion, and global warming.

Doubtless, the professor intended to use those first-order issues as a bridge to the more challenging second-order question: Why does debating controversial subjects provoke so much controversy itself? Instead, he unwittingly gave the world more proof that American higher education has gone off the rails: The mere notion that people disagreed about such issues was, apparently, cause for an investigation. The Bias Response Team was put on the case.

What, precisely, is a Bias Response Team? Around the country, universities are increasingly using them as part of an effort to do . . . something. The University of Northern Colorado describes that something as follows in response to an inquiry: “The intent of the bias-response team is to facilitate discussions between members of the campus community when non-legal concerns of offensive behavior are reported.” UNC offers further assurance that “there’s nothing punitive about” Bias Response hearings, and that “this is about understanding, not punishment.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-fleeing-the-nazis-a-legacy-that-wont-run-dry-1466722996 How does one overcome almost unimaginable horror and trauma? For Holocaust survivors Howard and Lottie Marcus, the healing came, in part, from the hope that they could help to provide refuge for other Jews who might find themselves at risk. But after restarting their broken lives in America, this modest couple could never have […]

When one contemplates the radical anti-Israel Left in Israeli academia, Bar-Ilan University (BIU) is not ordinarily the school that jumps to mind. Bar-Ilan is nominally an Orthodox religious school, although lots of secularists and non-Jews study and teach there. Bar-Ilan has fewer tenured anti-Israel leftists than do other institutions, but nevertheless it does have a few. Probably the worst is Menachem Klein from the BIU political science department.

Klein is one the leading Bash-Israel academics who has a special passion for the idea of dividing Jerusalem and removing Israel from its sacred shrines. The 64-year-old was the academic fig leaf for the anti-Israel “Geneva Initiative” of Yossi Beilin and the Far Left. When he was denied an academic promotion a while back, he publicly denounced Bar Ilan University as a thuggish institution.

A member of the board of B’tselem, Klein seems to have never met an anti-Semite he does not like. He favors Israeli leftists negotiating peace with Palestinians, by surrendering to their demands.

In recent years, Klein has devoted his energies to resuscitating the old Stalinist myth about Arab-Jewish euphoria before the rise of Zionism and especially the silly pseudo-history around the notion of the “Arab Jew.” Invented by a small group of Israeli Stalinists led by Tel Aviv University sociologist Yehouda Shenhav, these people claim that Oriental Jews are actually Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion. Never mind the proportion who would slap you silly if they hear you calling them Arabs of any sort. Shenhav has promoted his view that Asian Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and his book, The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity, won rave reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups.

Congress has passed a $576 billion Defense Appropriations bill for 2016 with a wide and bipartisan majority: 282-138, according to Defense News. The Obama administration takes issue with various parts of the bill, including presenting a six-page memo specifically calling for the elimination of Congress’s allocation of $635 million for Israel.

The money for Israel includes $268.7 million in R&D for U.S.-Israel cooperative missile defense programs; $72 million for the procurement of Iron Dome; $150 million for the procurement of David’s Sling; $120 million for procurement of Arrow III; and $42.7 million for U.S.-Israel anti-tunnel cooperation.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the administration opposed the funding increase for Israel because it “would consume a growing share of a shrinking U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s budget… Additional support for Israel means fewer resources that are available for critical U.S. programs at a time when the missile threat from North Korea, in particular, is increasing.”

Here’s a thought for Adm. Kirby and the administration: Man up.

Fund U.S. missile defense programs – and the rest of the U.S. defense budget — at levels appropriate to the threat America faces without shortchanging an ally facing broad, increasing and unremitting threats.

How did we get here?

Thirty years ago, Israel was invited to join President Reagan’s missile defense program by LTG James Abrahamson, the first director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). It was a serious philosophical leap for the IDF, which had until that time understood the only response to rockets and missiles to be offensive — hence escalatory. If Hizb’allah fired one at Israel; Israel fired two in return until the “international community” sought a ceasefire. Uzi Rubin, former director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization (IMDO), explained in inFOCUS Quarterly:

The IDF high command was generally skeptical about the strategic value of active defense, and doubted Israel’s defense industries’ ability to master the required technologies. This skepticism was mirrored by the media and elaborated on by civilian military analysts. Only shock and dismay from missiles and rockets hitting Israel’s undefended population centers in 1991 (the Gulf War) and 2006 (the Second Lebanon War), coupled with Iron Dome’s successful defense on the Gaza front brought a change of heart…

“Unfortunately Obama is not alone. The European big three — Cameron, Hollande and Merkel — all parrot the ‘religion of peace’ hoax. Mind you, let’s put it in perspective, they don’t have the same aversion to referring to radical Islamic terrorism; and, so far as I know, have not gone so far as Obama in purging all references to the religion that dare not speak its name from the lexicon of their military and security agencies. The words Islam, sharia law, and jihad are verboten apparently. The words extremism and terrorism, and now presumably ‘thuggism’, are allowed provided they are devoid of any link to Islam. We are in serious trouble. Islamists are beheading infidels and the Commander-in-Chief is parsing his language to cloud the threat. In these circumstances, whether he offends tender sensibilities or not, Trump is what the Western world needs now. Love sweet love will have to wait for a different time.”

The only thing more certain than the next Islamist assault is the parade of world leaders who can be counted to mouth their kumbaya pieties, even as the blood is wiped off the walls. In this, if nothing else, President Obama is the undisputed world leader.
Though the roots of ISIS go back a fair way it did not begin coming to prominence until President Obama withdrew remaining US troops from Iraq in December, 2011, leaving behind, as he put it, “a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” And it was after that, in April, 2013, that al-Baghdadi announced its formation. Yet, wall-to-wall conservative commentators apparently believe that defeating ISIS is the key to preventing the recent atrocities in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Brussels, and in Paris.

Talk about memory loss. The London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai bombings and countless other Islamist attacks occurred before ISIS was a glint in al-Baghdadi’s eye. Thomas Jefferson was fighting Muslim Tripoli pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is the religion stupid! And if and when ISIS is defeated, whatever that looks like, the religion, and its integral supremacist ideology, will persist. The only permanent solution is to degrade and marginalize Islam itself so that its remaining fundamentalist adherents resemble a small group of whacko religious snake dancers.

The religion cannot be saved. It cannot be saved because its very scripture is immutable and corrupting. That’s it, full stop, no argument. Where it holds sway warped views bloom: e.g., support for sharia law, religious intolerance, the inferiority of women, death for apostasy, and for blasphemy, heresy, homosexuality and adultery. Does anyone think that is a coincidence?

Sure, external and home-grown terrorists have to be killed. But the creed of Islam has to be confronted. The made-up hateful words of Allah and the hateful sayings and doings of his earthly amanuensis Mohammed cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged and infect hundreds of millions of people, here now and still to be born. It is a plague on humanity and must be confronted as resolutely as Reagan confronted ‘the evil empire’ and all that it stood for.

To quote the old proverb: “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck.” So it is with Islam. There is no radical Islam, no hijacked Islam, no corrupted Islam, no extreme Islam and no moderate Islam: There is simply Islam.

I remember listening as far back as in 2010 to then White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, answering questions from reporters about the planned 15 story high mosque mere yards from ground zero. It was revealing as he said:

“I think you’ve heard this administration and the last administration talk about the fact that we are not at war with a religion but with an idea that has corrupted a religion.”

There again was that oft repeated phrase that the religion of Islam has been corrupted. But did Gibbs and his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, truly believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and not without a major pillar called jihad with its dire implications for all non-Moslems or, as the Muslim world impudently describes them: infidels.

We hear the phrase by well-meaning but misguided individuals that Islam means peace. No. Islam means submission; not submission to the will of the people, as in a democracy, but solely to the will of Allah. And Moslems may not question the teachings of their prophet, Mohammed.

Islam also teaches that it is superior to all other religions. It is Islam über alles. The Moslem is taught that Judaism and Christianity perverted the will of Allah, and that Islam received the superior revelation requiring, therefore, that Jews and Christians ultimately submit to Islam.

Islam bases its ideology on five pillars – Witness to Allah and his prophet Mohammed; Prayer five times daily facing Mecca and the Ka’ba; Alms giving to the poor and to the mosque; Fasting during the month of Ramadan and Pilgrimage to Mecca.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie focuses on Why Moderate Muslims Can’t Destroy ISIS, explaining how it is connected to why Obama acts like a defense attorney for Islam.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Nonie discuss: Why is Obama Defending Islam at Any Cost?, revealing the true reason the Radical-in-Chief positions Muslims as victims in every speech on terror: