RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was headlining AOL on Friday: a story about a woman stabbing a schoolteacher to death in front of a class of five and six-year-olds. The gruesome and bloody crime occurred in the southern French town of Albi; the victim was a 34-year-old mother of two.

But a certain bit of information is conspicuously missing from virtually all the reportage. We’re told the killer was under the impression that the teacher had accused her five-year-old daughter of theft. We’re told she had a history of child abuse and “severe psychiatric problems.” We’re told she’s 47. And we’re told she’s a she. But her name is nowhere to be found, and information about her background is…well, you’ll see.

This isn’t true of the victim. Every news source I checked provided her name. The International Business Times (IBD) even led with it in the title: “Deranged Mother Kills Teacher Fabienne Terral-Calmès in Front of Class.” The killer, however, is almost universally identified as “the mother.” But I was sure I knew what the big secret was. Those tow-headed Norwegians are at it again.

The AOL piece, from the AP, did the “The Mother” thing exclusively. Other sources, such as IBD, reported that the police have not released the attacker’s name but that she’s of Spanish origins. Ah, okay, a Franco supporter, no doubt. But I still thought I knew the truth.

So I dug further. New York’s Daily News reported that “[a]uthorities would not comment on what spurred the horrific stabbing.” The BBC said that The Mother used a “long knife.” The Telegraph identified The Mother as a “Spanish national” (emphasis added). We’re getting closer…

I even checked the French publication L’Expresse, which, after being spit out the other end of Google Translate, told us about The Mother, “[I]t would be of Spanish nationality” (obfuscation is always a bit more interesting when processed through artificial unintelligence). The paper also tells us that the school “is located in the district Lapanouse in sensitive urban areas.”

“Sensitive urban areas.”

My, that could be the electronic translation of “scary ghettos where angry, unassimilable North African immigrants will rob you blind and beat you within an inch of your life while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and where, when you call the gendarmes, they say, ‘Are you crazy, Monsieur? We’re not setting foot in there!”

Or it could be that we’ve got nothing on the French when it comes to euphemizing.

The Obama Administration has targeted for-profit colleges as if they are enemy combatants. And now it has succeeded in putting out of business Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges for a dilatory response to document requests. Does the White House plan to liquidate the IRS too?

A month ago the Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 U.S. campuses.

Like the for-profit college industry, Corinthian draws roughly 80% of its revenues from federal student aid. Yet this is a function of its demographics. For-profit schools educate a larger share of low-income, minorities, veterans and single mothers than do nonprofit and public colleges. Eighty percent of their students lack parental financial support.

The Obama Administration’s five-year lashing of “predatory” for-profits has deterred many new students from enrolling in these schools. Corinthian’s system-wide student body has shrunk to 72,000 from 112,000 in 2010, and the company had laid off 1,350 employees in the last year. Then there are investigations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and more than a dozen state Attorneys General over sundry alleged violations, which have added regulatory uncertainty and legal costs. Keep in mind that Corinthian has been found guilty of nothing.

Most of the investigations involve trumped-up charges of misleading job placement rates, which federal law requires for-profits—but not public and nonprofit colleges—to document and disclose. But here’s the rub: There’s no standard definition of “job placement.”

Now will come assertions of equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian societies. But are the situations comparable?

As America approached its national holiday this year, Israel and world Jewry were plunged into mourning for three students who were abducted and murdered by members of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Thirty-eight years ago, on July 4, 1976, jubilation greeted the news that an Israeli commando raid had freed 102 fellow citizens held hostage by Palestinian terrorists at an airport in Entebbe, Uganda. These different outcomes for the same kind of villainy directed at Jewish targets prompts us to ask which side is winning this unilateral war.

Some would say that Arab violence against Jews is no villainy at all, but merely an alternate form of national politics. Representatives of the American government seeking peace in the Middle East have been shuttling between Israeli and Palestinian leaders as though dealing with equivalent societies with an equal investment in territorial compromise. In the arts, the Metropolitan Opera in New York this season plans to present a work that gives sympathetic voice to Palestinian terrorists who in 1985 shoved a disabled American off a cruise ship and into the ocean because he was a Jew. Reflecting the abjuration of evil, the opera is called “The Death of Klinghoffer” instead of “The Murder of Klinghoffer.”

Now that Jewish suspects have been apprehended in the Jerusalem murder of 16-year-old Arab Mohammed Abu Khudair, there are those who would cite the parallel between this heinous crime and the recent murders of Gilad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Frenkel as proof of moral and political equivalence between the two societies. One anticipates that in the coming days the standard outlets for such views will offer standard justifications for Arab rioting and condemnations of Jewish extremism as part of the same alleged cycle of violence.

But are the situations comparable?

Arab rioters did not wait for the identification or apprehension of suspects in the killing of Mohammed Abu Khudair to begin destroying Jewish life and property. One of their first targets was Jerusalem’s new light-rail system that connects Jewish and Arab sectors of the city. In their own communities, murderers of Israelis enjoy support, encouragement, adulation. News of the abduction of three Israeli boys had no sooner hit the Internet on June 13 than Arab celebrants were handing out candies and posting three-fingered salutes, called Gilad Shalits, for the Israeli soldier seized by Hamas and held for five years until “swapped” in 2011 for 1,027 Arab prisoners whose crimes had included the killing of 569 Israelis. The celebrants of mid-June were mocking the value that Jews place on individual life, one that contrasts so sharply with the value they place on taking Jewish life. Three Shalits would have given them three times the bargaining power had the abduction not ended with the boys being shot instead. Almost a month after the murder of the Jewish boys, the Arab perpetrators are still on the loose.

Written for Arutz Sheva. An expert in international law weighs in on the proposal to achieve a ceasefire with Hamas.

Any time there is an announced “cease fire” between Israel and Hamas, it wrongly and foolishly bestows upon that terror organization

(1) an expressly legitimate status under international law; and

(2) a clear and newly incontestable condition of legal symmetry between the parties.

This is never a tolerable jurisprudential arrangement for Israel.

Moreover, no proper system of law can ever permit any sort of compromise or accommodation by a government with criminal organizations, even, in the case of Israel and Hamas, one that might involve a somewhat less formal arrangement than the currently proposed cease fire.

It follows that Israel ought never to unwittingly prop up its criminal adversary in Gaza by agreeing to a cease fire or similar “armistice”; instead, it should proceed immediately to do whatever is needed operationally, while simultaneously reminding the world that the pertinent conflict is between a fully legitimate sovereign state (one that meets all criteria of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, 1934) and an inherently illegal insurgent organization that meets none of these criteria, and that routinely violates all vital precepts of the law of armed conflict.

Hamas’ inherent illegality is readily deducible from the far-reaching codified and customary criminalization of terrorism under authoritative international law, and can never be challenged by even well-intentioned third parties (e.g., the United States) in the presumably overriding interests of “peace.” This is true even if Hamas were somehow mistakenly acknowledged to have “just cause” for its insurgency

Since the Hebrew Bible, there have always been clear and determinable rules of warfare. Now, moreover, especially since prominent codified changes enacted in 1949 and 1977, these rules bind all insurgent forces, not only uniformed national armies. In modern usage, they derive most plainly from the St. Petersburg Declaration (1868), which, in turn, followed upon earlier limitations expressed at the First Geneva Convention of 1864.

In any conflict, the means that can be used to injure an enemy are not unlimited. It follows that no matter how hard they may try to institute certain self-serving manipulations of language, those who would identify the willful maiming and execution of noncombatants in the name of some abstract ideal – any ideal – are always misrepresenting international law.

Whenever Palestinian insurgents (Hamas; Fatah; Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Islamic Jihad, it makes no difference) claim a legal right to use “any means necessary,” they are attempting to deceive. Even if their corollary claims for “national self-determination” were in some fashion legally supportable, there would remain fully authoritative limits on permissible targets and weapons.

Under binding humanitarian international law, the ends can never justify the means.

Events are drawing Israel into a major war with neighboring Arab terrorist organizations to result in another total reordering of Mideast relationships.

Comparison of the current scene with the eve of the Six Day War in 1965 is almost unavoidable. Then, too, a reluctant Israel waged a preemptive action because of what it saw as an existential threat from an alliance of Arab neighbors.

As great as the possibility for another complete regional redispositioning is, the outcome of events is even more unpredictable than it was in 1965. Today’s situation is vastly different:

First, Egypt, the largest and traditionally the leading Arab state, will not be the tripwire which brought on Israel’s preemptive strike then. This time Cairo could well be a benevolent neutral if not an ally in any new encounter between Israel and its principle enemy, the radical Arab Islamicists. Cairo’s military junta is waging a ruthless campaign against the jihadists, voted into power but which it dislodged with considerable popular support.

Secondly, the prospect of a Soviet Union intervention is missing – and a clash of the then two superpowers – which hung over the earlier events. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal notwithstanding, his ability to influence events in the region with conventional military forces and aid is marginal. In part, that is because his imbroglio in Ukraine having produced early victories is now turning into a Russian disaster.

Thirdly, the ambivalent position of the Obama Administration despite all its public protestations of loyalty to a U.S. ally, is a sharp contrast to Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s profound pro-Israel sympathies at a time when the U.S. Left had not made a bogus Palestinian crusade a central issue.

And, fourthly, there is a new aggressive and potentially nuclear-armed Iran, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, mobilizing long suppressed Shia minorities throughout the region in a Muslim sectarian conflict. Tehran’s mullahs have been able to bridge the historic Arab-Persian divide to bolster Arab Shia and even non-Shia allies.

Uthman Badar and his “moral defence” of murdering difficult women:

“For most of recorded history parents have reluctantly sacrificed their children—sending them to kill or be killed for the honour of their nation, their flag, their king, their religion. But what about killing for the honour of one’s family? Overwhelmingly, those who condemn ‘honour killings’ are based in the liberal democracies of the West. The accuser and moral judge is the secular (white) westerner and the accused is the oriental other; the powerful condemn the powerless. By taking a particular cultural view of honour, some killings are condemned whilst others are celebrated. In turn, the act becomes a symbol of everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture.”

One doesn’t need the gift of clairvoyance to know that somewhere in Canberra, in that tricky terrain between principle and practicality, Attorney-General George Brandis is contemplating what to do with the infamous Section 18C. Should he move to have the provision scrapped altogether, as was promised before last year’s election, or might it be safer to tinker merely at the edges — scratch a word here, amend a phrase there — and leave the cudgel wielded against Andrew Bolt largely intact and ready to silence others who dare to ruffle the aggrieved and well-lawyered?

If press reports are to be believed, Brandis is copping grief even from some in his own party, who really should know better. Professional politicians with a professional interest in being professionally re-elected know that placating those noisy and ultra-quotable “community leaders” is a vocational imperative. It would be a brave politician who told the leaders of, say, his local Calathumpian ghetto that while barbarous traditions are revered in their ancestors’ homeland, they themselves have chosen to live at a remove of many thousands of miles and quite a few centuries. If they opt not to embrace the rich legacy of the Enlightenment, which Australia mostly embodies, the international departure terminal is but a short drive down Anzac Parade and, oh, just by the way, would you like a little help to get those bags into the taxi?

So it must be a tough call for poor Senator Brandis, who learnt just a few weeks ago that endorsing free speech can bring down an avalanche of criticism. Even bigots and fools have the right to be heard, he noted, it being the duty of those who detest their words and views to point out why they are so wrong, so wicked, so stupid or, as is very often the case, all three at once. It is not a difficult concept to grasp, this notion that the counter to dangerous ideas is more speech, rather than the legislated gag or ruinous cost of the many learned friends needed to conduct an adequate defence.

But for a professional politician it is a very dangerous one, as a sidelight to this week’s furor over the Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ invitation to Uthman Badar illustrates. If you have been napping under a horse trough, know that Badar’s topic was to be “a moral defence” of honour killings. That’s no infelicitous paraphrasing of his intended speech, for the subject was laid out with exquisite precision in the festival’s programme:

“Only if we remain quiet do we let this dangerous farce continue. And continue it does. This weekend a Global Dawah Day is taking place — a day on which purpose-trained, purple-T-shirted Muslims are going to be out in force trying to persuade you — or more likely, your children — to convert. There need be no doubt that the “need-to-know” principle will be applied. Expect not Korans but glossy pamphlets handed out along with “polite” invitations from “God” (which is the name Muslim missionaries usually give to Allah when they are on the prowl for recruits). They will assure anyone who is interested that Islam respects women, that Jesus is a prophet of Islam, that Islam is not an extremist religion, and so on……Perhaps they have calculated that non-Muslims are desperate for purpose in their miserable, godless lives, and perhaps this perception might have enough truth in it to persuade some of our young to embark on the one-way journey to Allah and His Messenger’s Sharia rules for life — to expand the generational growth of Islamic totalitarianism. Beware!”

“Sweet reason, love, peace and universal tolerance will be the message as the Religion of Peace launches its global push, Dawah Day, to spread the word and attract fresh converts. Those inclined to be swayed should consider the long history of Islamic missionaries promising one thing and delivering quite another

Recently, a Sudanese Muslim man took issue with me about the historical Islamisation of his country. He had told me that the Sudan adopted Islam peacefully, through the teachings of migrating Sufis. I mentioned the Sudanese Mahdi, who was definitely not peaceful, despite being a Sammaniya Sufi. My adversary, or so he soon became, angrily denied historical facts I brought up, including that the Mahdi was a Sufi, and refused to continue the conversation.

The problem with our argument, it seemed to me, was that Muslims seem to be entirely capable of believing contradictory things at the same time, and presumably amongFunst themselves there is no problem; but an outsider is not supposed to interfere with that alogical comfort zone. Perhaps, also, Muslims are as confused about the role of Sufis in their history as are non-Muslims. What is important for us is that the current Western perception of Sufism is of a kind of accessible mysticism, linked to Islam only loosely if at all, and most definitely “peaceful”.

Years ago, a Sudanese Sufi, when his sect was attacked by fanatics who deem Sufism heretical, told me that they “had no right to attack, as only God can know what is in our hearts”, which sounded terrific. But on a later occasion he affirmed that apostates from Islam should be killed. Contradictory sentiments? The dualism of Islam existing in one Muslim heart?

The problem with the image of Sufis lies in the fine print, as it were, the Koranic texts which no Sufi or any other Islamic sub-sect can ignore, even if they diverge a little from accepted tradition.For instance, celebrating the birthday of the Prophet, which renders them “as bad as Christians” in the eyes of their more fine-print-observing Muslim enemies.

You’ll have a hard time finding any mention of it in the left-wing mainstream media, but last Saturday former U.S. President James Earl Carter flew into the northern Russian city of Murmansk on a Gulfstream private jet for a little luxury fishing expedition (Russian-language link). It seems Mr. Carter would like to do all he can to legitimize Russian aggression in Ukraine, and if he can combine doing so with a gold-plated vacay, so much the better.

At almost the same moment, Ukrainian government troops were triumphantly raising the national flag over City Hall in the Eastern Ukraine city of Slaviansk, ejecting pro-Russian rebels from their main stronghold. An even more furious battle lies ahead in Donetsk, where the rebel cadre fled following their ouster. Throughout this struggle, human rights atrocities by the pro-Russian forces have been as relentless as they have been legion.

Even as the battle raged, the Putin regime was enacting tough new laws to ban separatist activity (Russian-language link) within Russia, one of the more amazing acts of suicidal political hypocrisy so far this century. And a famous Czech leader of the anti-Soviet struggle in his country was branding Vladimir Putin a war criminal for his frenzied acts of aggression against his smaller neighbors.

But none of that mattered to former President Carter. Nor did he care about Russia’s systematic efforts to “divide and conquer” the U.S. and her allies in Europe, or about Putin’s increasingly brutal crackdown on civil society, with special emphasis on the Internet. He blithely allowed his visit to be used by the Putin regime as clear proof that America doesn’t really oppose Putin’s naked imperialism in post-Soviet space, and in so doing encouraged even more such aggression from Russia.

One can’t help but recall Carter’s limp-wristed response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during his presidency, when all the gumption he could muster was an Olympic boycott. Combined with his gross mismanagement of the economy and his humiliatingly failed policies in Iran, it’s easy to understand how desperate Carter is to somehow remain relevant.

Russian journalist Dmitry Shipilov believes that Putin’s actions in Ukraine are designed for one purpose: to frustrate any attempt to establish a democratic, freedom-focused government in post-Soviet space out of fear that such a contagion could spread to Russia itself. It’s clear that Russia’s policy towards Ukraine is that it must be poor and energy starved, permanently servile and dependant upon Russian mercy for its existence.

But Carter isn’t paying any attention to Russian journalists or human rights activists these days, nor any attention to Putin’s terrifying utterances. Just days before Carter arrived, for instance, Putin let it be known that he feels he has the right to intervene anywhere around the world where “people who consider themselves Russian” desire it, even if they don’t speak Russian. Indeed, Putin’s own henchmen are openly and proudly comparing him to Stalin. With the simple gesture of a fishing trip, Carter is telling the world all of that’s just fine with him.

Leftists can’t stop repeating blatant untruths about the case.

It still is stunning to watch someone prominent and powerful flat-out lie on TV. Like an Olympic gymnast’s perfect dismount from the parallel bars, it leaves you breathless.

Responding to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision on Monday, Hillary Clinton told the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson: “It’s very troubling that a sales clerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health-care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.”

Clinton did not daintily spin, dissemble, or mislead. She told a big, fat, shining lie.

It is holistically false for Clinton to claim that Hobby Lobby “doesn’t think she [the sales clerk] should be using contraception.”

As I documented Monday, Hobby Lobby’s health plan includes 16 different categories of birth control. They are available on a non-co-pay basis, so employees get them at no out-of-pocket cost. The Food and Drug Administration’s official list of approved contraceptives includes small drawings for each of 20 types of birth control. I assembled these sketches into two graphic illustrations. The first shows the contraceptive cornucopia available to Hobby Lobby’s workers, courtesy of the alleged barbarians who own that company.

Hobby Lobby offers its health-insured employees these 16 different forms of FDA-approved birth-control, for free. Graphic illustrations compiled by Deroy Murdock.

These products are, from left to right and top to bottom:

1. Male condoms

2. Female condoms

3. Diaphragms with spermicide

4. Sponges with spermicide

5. Cervical caps with spermicide

6. Spermicide alone

7. Birth-control pills with estrogen and progestin (“Combined Pill”)

8. Birth-control pills with progestin alone (“the Mini Pill”)

9. Birth-control pills (extended/continuous use)

10. Contraceptive patches

11. Contraceptive rings

12. Progestin injections

13. Implantable rods

14. Vasectomies

15. Female sterilization surgeries

16. Female sterilization implants

Hobby Lobby does not cover four drugs and devices that it considers abortifacients. If staffers want those items, they are free to purchase them with their own money. In the second graphic, these are, left to right:

Considering the sundry enthusiasms upon which government at all level spends our money — Harry Reid’s bovine literary interests, helping out those poor struggling people who own Boeing — it is remarkable that the job of apprehending a known felon, once deported from the United States and illegally present in Texas, fell to volunteers in Brooks County, near the Mexican border. Brooks County, like many other border areas, is overrun with illegal immigrants, and the cost of burying those illegals who die in transit, which can run into the six figures annually, has forced the county to cut back on regular law enforcement. And thus we have the volunteer deputies who brought in the felon, who after he injured his ankle had been been abandoned by the coyotes — professional human traffickers — who had brought him across the border. The volunteers were in the process of working a 26-hour shift — that’s 26 hours, not a typo. Consider for a moment that the cost of illegals’ breaking the law is so high that enforcing the law has been handed over to unpaid volunteers.

Similar scenes are playing out across the border. Nearby Duval County, Texas, was the scene of a dramatic car chase when a truckload of illegals was spotted by police, who determined that the vehicle was outfitted with a fraudulent license plate. Two were killed and a dozen injured in the pursuit. (Many years ago, Duval County enjoyed the services of an elected Democratic sheriff whose grandson is a familiar figure here at National Review.) Nearly 200,000 illegals have crossed into Texas’s Rio Grande Valley this year, and the cartels that oversee the coyote operations have the local landowners terrorized into compliance. This includes the trafficking of minors and others destined for the sex trade; perversely, the Department of Homeland Security has been known to send minors trafficked across the border on to their final destinations, thus “completing the criminal mission” of the traffickers, in the words of one federal judge.

Far from the Mexican border, in the South Carolina town of Lexington, Sheriff James Metts is a crusader against illegal immigration, one who successfully persuaded the federal government to allow his deputies to question those they believe to be illegally present in the country and, when warranted, to begin deportation proceedings on the feds’ behalf. In June, Sheriff Metts was indicted by a grand jury on charges of taking bribes from a local restaurateur to release illegals in his employ. According to the indictment, the bribes came from Gregorio M. Leon, owner of the San Jose Mexican restaurant. Both men are well known and, until recently, were admired for their community spirit. One wonders why Mr. Leon would bother with a bribe; if he were hiring illegals, he’d likely receive gentle treatment from the Obama administration. While talking tough about cracking down on those who employ illegals, the administration has in fact been systematically reducing penalties handed down for that felony, according to an inspector general’s report. Fines have been reduced by as much as two-thirds or even four-fifths; there are millions of illegals working in the United States, but there is nothing even approaching a proportional number — or a rounding error on it — of businessmen serving time for employing them.