RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like a warped Islamic version of Santa Claus, Obama had a secret Muslim list. And his people checked it at least twice. The list was of Muslims who were prospects for important jobs and appointments.

It included a Muslim who had described Israel as an “Apartheid State,” Iran’s “go-to guy in New York financial circles” and a number of figures linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

It was the ultimate religious test from an administration that had vocally rejected them.

Obama had claimed that having religious tests for migration was “shameful” and “not American.”

“When I hear folks say that, well maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims,” he huffed from Turkey. His Muslim host country was run by a bigoted sponsor of Islamic terror.

“We don’t have religious tests,” he insisted.

Except we did and we do. Obama also had religious tests. His religious tests excluded Christians and favored Muslims. That is why his Syrian refugees were between 98% and 99% Muslim with only 68 Christians and 24 Yazidis, even though both groups are real victims of the Muslim religious war.

Syria is 10% Christian and hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Yet only 68 have made it past Obama’s iron curtain. That’s either an Islamic religious test or the world’s greatest coincidence.

But would the man who piously lectured us on the evils of religious tests really have a religious test?

Of course he would.

The hacked emails include a list of “Muslim American candidates for top Administration jobs, sub-cabinet jobs, and outside boards/agencies/policy committees.”

The list was sent to John Podesta who headed the Obama-Biden Transition Project. It had been put together by a woman who had sat on the Commission on International Religious Freedom, but boasted that she had, “Excluded those with some Arab American background but who are not Muslim (e.g., George Mitchell). Many Lebanese Americans, for example, are Christian.”

How “shameful.” How “not American” of Barack Hussein Obama.

“Most who are listed appear to be Muslim-American, except that a handful (where noted) may be Arab American but of uncertain religion (esp. Christian),” she assured Podesta.

Religious tests are only out of line when they exclude Muslims. Not when they exclude Christians.

A generation ago the Communist tyranny in Cuba demanded that the United Nations condemn America for the embargo. The brutal Castro regime’s rant accused the United States of threatening “nuclear annihilation,” “countless acts of sabotage and plans to assassinate Cuban leaders.”

On a cold day in October, the European left-wing activist serving as UN Ambassador announced to applause that her administration would no longer be voting to defend the US at the UN.

“UN Member States have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly resolution that condemns the U.S. embargo and calls for it to be ended. The United States has always voted against this resolution. Today the United States will abstain,” Samantha Power said.

“Thank you,” she added, acknowledging the applause.

Under Obama, the United States would no longer defend the United States. A generation ago the Communists had been in Cuba. Now they were in Washington D.C.

Instead of defending America, Obama’s chosen representative agreed that our Communist enemies had a point about our lack of human rights and our imperialist foreign policy.

“Let me be among the first to acknowledge – as our Cuban counterparts often point out – that the United States has work to do in fulfilling these rights for our own citizens. And we know that at times in our history, U.S. leaders and citizens used the pretext of promoting democracy and human rights in the region to justify actions that have left a deep legacy of mistrust,” she said.

If the Cuban representative had been in her place, he could not have done much better. Communist Cuban propaganda was now being parroted by Ambassador Power. If the Castro dictatorship wanted to save money, it could shut down its propaganda department and outsource the labor to Washington D.C.

The Cuban ambassador boasted that Cuban Communists had “rid ourselves of US imperialism” and proclaimed that, “We will never go back to capitalism.” He declared that the resolution was a powerful message to “the peoples of the world.” The message is indeed unmistakable.

Ben Rhodes, the close Obama adviser who sold the media on the Iran sellout, curtly tweeted his justification, “No reason to vote to defend a failed policy we oppose.”

Who is this “we”?

On the morning of January 17, 2016, President Obama declared that this was “a good day, because, once again, we’re seeing what’s possible with strong American diplomacy.”http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/11/the-story-of-obamas-ransom-payment-to-iran-gets-worse/America paid Iran $1.7 billion in cash—funds that by law were not to be released unless and until Iran paid what it owed to American victims of its terrorism.

The Iran nuclear deal had been implemented the day before—an example, the President said, of his “smart, patient, and disciplined approach to the world.” Now Iran was releasing five American hostages, the result of the administration’s “tireless” efforts. “On the sidelines of the nuclear negotiations,” the president explained, “our diplomats at the highest level, including Secretary [of State John] Kerry, used every meeting to push Iran to release our Americans.” In return for that gesture, the president continued, he was making a “reciprocal humanitarian gesture”: namely, clemency for seven Iranians imprisoned or awaiting trial for criminal violations of American sanctions. Later it was announced that the U.S. had also dropped outstanding warrants against another fourteen Iranians.

The president then added something else: with the nuclear deal implemented, and the hostages released, “the time was right” for “resolving a financial dispute that dated back more than three decades.” That dispute involved an Iranian claim regarding money advanced by the government of the Shah for military equipment that Washington did not deliver after the 1979 revolution. Now, the president asserted, we were returning Iran’s “own funds,” including “appropriate interest,” but “much less than the amount Iran sought.” The savings, he said, came potentially to “billions”—a figure quantified by his press secretary as “up to $6 billion or $7 billion” in a “very good deal for taxpayers.” In other words, now that the larger issues had been resolved, the U.S. was simply issuing a long-delayed refund to Iran, and in the process saving Americans a significant amount of money.

The president’s statement, however, omitted a great deal of relevant information. The president was returning $400 million in Iran’s “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) account with the Pentagon, plus $1.3 billion in interest, but he failed to mention that in 1981, when Iran filed its claim before the Claims Tribunal at The Hague, the U.S. had responded with a counterclaim for $817 million for Iran’s violations of its obligations under the FMS program. In 2016, with both the claim and the counterclaim still pending, it was possible that Iranowed billions of dollars to the U.S., not the reverse.

Nor did the president mention the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and stipulating that Iran’s FMS account could not be refunded until court judgments held by the U.S. government against Iran for damages from terrorist acts against American citizens were resolved to America’s satisfaction. Those judgments, including interest accumulated between 2001 and 2016, totaled about $1 billion. The president did not explain how, under the 2000 law, with those judgments still outstanding, he could pay Iran anything at all.

Nor did the president mention that his “refund” to Iran was being paid in untraceable European cash, a fact discovered by reporters seven months later. He would then contend that, in light of the sanctions on banking transactions with Iran, “we had to give them cash.” But the sanction regulations expressly authorize bank payments to settle Iran’s claims at The Hague, as Michael Mukasey, the former U.S. attorney general, later testified to Congress, adding that there was “no legitimate reason why [Iran] should want cash other than to pursue terrorism.” Indeed, the Hizballah International Financing Prevention Act, passed by Congress in December 2015, had resulted in Tehran’s needing significantly more cash to continue funding its terrorist organization in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere.

In a February 3 letter, Ed Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked the administration to provide the legal basis for paying Iran’s claim, as well as a specific computation of the interest paid. He repeated the request in a June 1 letter, adding that according to information provided to him by the Congressional Research Service, the Hague tribunal paid 10-percent simple interest on such claims. Computed at that rate, and before considering the U.S. counterclaim under the FMS and the terror judgments still outstanding, Iran’s total claim on the FMS account was virtually identical to the $1.7 billion the administration paid, with no “billions” in savings.

To date, the administration has released no legal analysis to support its payment, no evaluation of the U.S. counterclaim, no text of the settlement agreement, no computation of the interest, no credible explanation for issuing the payment in cash, and no document showing the approval of the attorney general as required for issuing such a payment. For months, the administration hid important facts—including how the settlement was paid—even in response to direct congressional inquiries.

The words “Obama” and “disaster” go together all too well these days. To name just a few, there’s Obama’s Middle East disaster, the Obamacare disaster, Obama’s economic disaster, and Obama’s Europe disaster, including Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the refugee crisis sweeping the continent — a crisis triggered by Obama’s Middle East disaster.

And now we have Obama’s Pacific disaster, which may have cost us America’s oldest ally in the region, the Philippines. Its president, Rodrigo Duterte, has been on an anti-American tirade since the G20 summit in early September. He’s denounced Obama to his face as a “son of a bitch” and canceled any future joint military exercises with the U.S. “America has lost,” he’s been quoted as saying, meaning we’ve lost out to the other great power in the Pacific, China. Duterte has just finished up trips to Beijing, to court Chinese president Xi Jinping, and to Japan, where Duterte said it was time for all foreign troops to leave his island nation — including the handful of planes and 200 personnel we sent to our former air base at Clark Field to monitor Chinese moves in the Pacific’s hottest hot spot, the South China Sea.

Granted, Duterte is an acknowledged nut case. Granted, too, U.S.–Philippine relations have had their ups and downs, with previous low spots including the Fernando Marcos years and President Corazon Aquino’s closure of our bases at Clark and Subic Bay in 1991. Still, Douglas MacArthur must be somersaulting in his grave. The idea that the country for whose protection and then liberation he dedicated so much of his life; the country whose soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder with ours to fight the Japanese army to a standstill on Bataan in 1942, and then hailed MacArthur as their savior when he kept his promise, “I shall return,” in 1944; the country that U.S. Special Ops troops have helped to save from al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents since 9/11 — the idea that the Philippines would abandon its treaty alliance with the United States to join up with China, a nation with which Manila has been feuding for years, would seem outrageous, even contrary to nature.