RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, before embarking on a three-day visit to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel, Pope Francis stated that his trip would be “strictly religious.” A key reason for his short sojourn, he said, was to “pray for peace in this land that has suffered greatly.”

After arriving, however, he spent less time engaged in prayer than in politics.

This would have been completely appropriate had the bishop of Rome and the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church addressed the religious nature of the Islamist war being waged against Christians and Jews. It would have befitted the head of the Holy See to stand at the believed-to-be sites of Jesus’ birth and baptism and bemoan the fate of his flock at the hands of Muslim fanatics bent on subjugating all “infidels.” It would have been in keeping with his mission to reassure the world’s Christians that good will prevail over evil.

Sadly, this is not how the pope’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land panned out. Though he did mention the plight of his people when in Amman last Saturday, it was to praise Jordan’s “climate of serene coexistence” between Muslims and Christians.

“I thank the authorities of the kingdom for all they are doing,” he said, while meeting with King Abdullah II and Queen Rania at their palace. “And I encourage them to persevere in their efforts to seek lasting peace for the entire region. This goal urgently requires that a peaceful solution be found to the crisis in Syria, as well as a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

On Sunday, the pontiff went to Bethlehem. There he met with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he called “a man of peace.”

As always, Abbas and his cronies put their best lies forward, undoubtedly denying Christian flight in droves from Palestinian-controlled areas on the one hand, while blaming Israel for the phenomenon on the other.

The remaining tiny Christian minority in Bethlehem was then treated to a mass delivered by the pope at Manger Square. But his words were drowned out by the muezzin of the Omar Mosque calling Muslims to prayer and blasting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) into a loudspeaker.

The cult of Obama has entered laughingstock territory. The West Point graduates who stayed seated when a standing ovation was attempted were far too polite to openly laugh at the president, but the behavior yesterday of reporters at the State Department indicated their scorn with less restraint.

During a press conference, Jen Psaki, the State Department’s official spokeswoman, claimed at a news conference yesterday, “I would argue the president doesn’t give himself enough credit for what he’s done around the world, and that’s how the secretary feels too.”

The response from the reporters gathered there was laughter.

Keep in mind that these are mostly reporters assigned to the State Department beat, who are knowledgeable about foreign affairs, and who are well used to diplomatic language being used for evasion and puffery.

The follow-on questions were sarcastic:

Q: But isn’t this a potential mission accomplished situation?

PSAKI: Absolutely not.

Q: Jen, you would argue the president doesn’t give himself enough credit? How much credit would you give him?

PSAKI: Well, I think what I’m — I would give him more than he has given himself. That’s what I just said.

Q: What, like, 200 percent credit?

PSAKI: So would the secretary.

Q: So — and for — and for –

Its climate-change policies set up the administration for a fall on Election Day.

On June 2, the Environmental Protection Agency is going to announce new rules for existing coal-fired power plants, most likely a 20 percent reduction in allowable carbon dioxide emissions. The only way this will be possible will be by upgrading almost all combustion units, and the ultimate cost of the upgrades will make coal noncompetitive with much-less-expensive natural gas–fired facilities.

EPA’s proposed new greenhouse-gas regulations are a campaign promise come true. In 2008, Senator Barack Obama announced that, if elected, his climate policies would “necessarily bankrupt” anyone who wanted to build a new coal-fired power plant.

Public comments on EPA’s proposal to do just that closed on May 9, and there is no chance that the president will renege — or that this policy will have any detectable effect on global temperature.

The EPA’s own model, ironically acronymed MAGICC, estimates that its new policies will prevent a grand total of 0.018ºC in warming by 2100. Obviously, that’s not enough to satisfy the steadily shrinking percentage of Americans who think global warming is a serious problem.

MAGICC tells us that the futility of whatever Obama proposes for existing plants will be statistically indistinguishable from making sure that there are no new coal-fired ones. In fact, dropping the carbon dioxide emissions from all sources of electrical generation to zero would reduce warming by a grand total of 0.04ºC by 2100.

This is hardly going to stop the crescendo of global-warming horror stories, perhaps best summarized by the government’s recently released “National Assessment” of the effects of climate change on our country.

For example, the assessment tells us that global warming will increase mental illness in our nation’s cities. The obvious implication is that people in Richmond are crazier than they are in Washington, 100 miles to the north. Or that people must really be loony in Miami.

Should we really police all discourse for fear of the reaction of a microscopic minority?
Can we please stop holding the country hostage to crazy people?

Every year a tiny number of mentally ill people go on horrific killing sprees. It just happened in California. I won’t name the person, because I think the media attention lavished on these horror shows encourages some of these young men — and they are almost all young men — to seek fame or validation through bloodshed.

In an entirely human response, we get spun up into a frenzy of finger-pointing. In the aftermath of the Gabby Giffords shooting, many of the country’s leading journalists and politicians suggested the former congresswoman was shot because of the “violent” political rhetoric of Sarah Palin, Representative Michele Bachmann, and other tea-party-affiliated politicians. It was beyond stupid and slanderous. It was also utterly devoid of evidence. (The culprit was a severe paranoid schizophrenic who abused drugs.)

In 2012, at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo., another mentally ill young man allegedly murdered twelve people. Because he had dyed his hair orange and booby-trapped his home the way the comic-book villain the Joker might have, many speculated that he was motivated by the Batman movies to kill.

After the particularly horrifying mass murder in Newtown, Conn., many speculated that the mentally ill killer was at least partially driven to kill by violent video games.

In the wake of the recent murder spree in California, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday tried to lay some of the blame on romantic comedies:

“I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: ‘This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up.'” — Timothy Garten Ash, The Guardian.

Anti-establishment parties from both the left and the right won big in the 28-nation European Parliament elections that ended on May 25.

Riding a wave of voter discontent over the existing political order in Europe, the electoral victories—especially those by euro-skeptic politicians in major EU countries such as Britain, France and Germany—mark a clear turning point in the debate over the future of the European Union.

The surge of anti-EU parties represents an important blow to the legitimacy of plans by the European establishment to transform the continent into a United States of Europe.

Europe-wide, nearly 150 representatives from anti-establishment parties won seats in the European Parliament. This is up from around 60 seats in the 2009 election. Established pro-EU parties will remain in control of roughly 70% of the 751-seat parliament, which manages the EU’s €143 billion ($200 billion) annual budget and passes EU-wide laws that affect more than 500 million citizens.

Moreover, Europe’s ruling elites are unlikely to allow these or any other election results to derail their quest to build a European superstate. Although European voters have sent an unmistakable message, efforts are already underway to discredit euro-skeptics by branding them as extremists.

Anti-establishment parties are also divided among themselves on many issues, a weakness that, if not overcome, will blunt their effectiveness in the European Parliament.

In summary, the euro-skeptics face a daunting set of long-term challenges to stop the seemingly relentless march toward European federalism. In the near term, however, the greatest impact of their electoral victories will be felt at the local and national levels.

Coming off a week where President Obama laid out an Afghanistan withdrawal timetable and put forth his foreign policy vision, Secretary of State John Kerry declared Thursday that this administration is “more engaged” with the world “than at any time in American history.”

“I don’t think the president, frankly, takes enough credit for the successes that are on the table right now,” Kerry told PBS. “I mean, if you look at what has happened in Ukraine, the president led an effort to try to keep Europe unified with the United States, to put difficult sanctions on the table. Europe wasn’t thrilled with that. But they came along. That was leadership. And the president succeeded in having an impact ultimately, together with the Europeans, on the choices that face President Putin.”

“In Syria, the president obviously made his decision to strike Syria, and appropriately sent that decision to Congress. Congress didn’t want to move. But we came up with another solution, which was get all of those chemical weapons out, rather than just have one or two days of strikes,” he added.

Kerry then claimed “the president has now succeeded in getting 92 percent of those weapons out of Syria.”

“There is one last transfer that has to take place to get to 100 percent,” he said. “I believe it will take place.”

A May 23 letter to the UN Security Council from Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon obtained by the New York Times paints a bleaker picture, noting that only five of 18 known chemical weapons production facilities had been closed in Syria. The deadline to clear the program is supposed to be June 30.

The Assad regime has also been using chlorine gas as its new chemical weapon of choice, a substance prohibited for weapons use under the Chemical Weapons Convention that Assad joined last year to avoid strikes.

Big Gulp banning Mayor Mike Bloomberg delivered an extraordinary speech at Harvard University. With conservative speakers getting banned and/or uninvited from university commencement ceremonies, Bloomberg took the opportunity at Harvard to, basically, tell the banners and uninviters to knock it off. He likened them to McCarthyism, which is unfair as McCarthy was actually fighting a totalitarian idea that was being pushed into the US by a hostile foreign power for the express purpose of weakening us and overthrowing capitalism. But that bit of moral confusion aside, and his support for the Ground Zero mosque aside along with it, Bloomberg delivers a strong defense of free speech. Stirring, even.

I’m as stunned to write that as you surely are reading it.

The important part starts after the six minute mark.

Bloomberg’s defenses of freedom of thought and speech are not a mere sidebar in the speech. They are the speech. Bloomberg strongly defends all dissent from the current leftist orthodoxy, even on gay marriage, and calls out universities for going so far left that they have become the very forces of intolerance they claim to oppose. And earns applause. No one even threw a pie at him.

Via Allahpundit, a few quotes.

“It is just a modern form of McCarthyism,” Bloomberg said of university “censorship” of conservatives. “Think about the irony: In the 1950s, the right wing was attempting to repress left wing ideas. Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species.”

“And that is probably nowhere more true than it is here in the Ivy League,” declared Bloomberg…

More than 60,000 illegal children below the age of 18 will cross the border this year unaccompanied by an adult, and the government thinks that number is likely to double next year.

The flood of children from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and other Central American nations is putting a tremendous strain on government resources. Reuters reports that not only is there simply no room to house the children, but the budget problem makes it difficult to adequately care for them. It costs the U.S. $252 a day to care for each child and the total cost this year could reach $868 million. That number is expected to climb to $2 billion next year.

The tenfold increase in illegal minors crossing the border alone since 2011 is partly the result of relaxed deportation policies of the Obama administration. But it is also true that many of these children are escaping poverty, abuse, and rampant violence in their home countries.

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.

The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.

“This is a humanitarian crisis and it requires a humanitarian response,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski said in an interview. The Maryland Democrat, a former social worker, has likened the flood of unaccompanied children to the “boat people” of past exodus movements.

Emerge USA is a Florida-based organization whose unstated goal is to give radical Muslims a political voice in America. One way they do this is by getting their leaders placed in key positions of power. Another way is by making friends with those already in power. United States Representative from Florida, Joe Garcia, is one of those friends. He has accepted thousands of dollars from Emerge for his 2014 reelection bid, and he has returned the favor by helping the group raise more money.

Earlier this month, Emerge held its annual fundraising dinner in Miami, at the DoubleTree Hotel and Airport Convention Center. Featured at the event was Sayed Ammar Nakshawani, an Islamic lecturer from England who is a devotee of Iran’s deceased terrorist leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and who has called for the destruction of Israel.

In a speech found on YouTube and the lecture section of his website, titled ‘Sayed Khomeini’s Quds Day,’ Nakshawani states, “The shame in this world is that, if we put ourselves down to a two-state solution, we would allow a country which has broken 60 UN resolutions to have their own freedom of peace. It is barbaric that this Zionist state is allowed to continue.”

Emerge advertised Nakshawani in an event flyer as well as an Emerge-produced video of Nakshawani telling people to attend.

Given Emerge’s past, having this man speak was no surprise. What was a surprise, though, was that a sitting U.S. Congressman, Joe Garcia, would also be speaking at the event, even after the leader of his political party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, cancelled her keynote address in front of the same group just two years prior.

One of the two co-chairmen of Emerge is South Florida attorney Khurrum Basir Wahid. According to his bio, Wahid specializes in defending “individuals charged with allegedly committing or conspiring to commit acts of terrorism.”

Wahid’s clients include: Rafiq Abdus Sabir, who received a 25 year prison sentence for conspiring to provide material support to al-Qaeda; al-Qaeda member Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was given a life sentence for plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush; Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, who is presently under house arrest in Virginia; and Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, a Miami, Florida imam who was convicted of funneling tens of thousands of dollars to the Taliban for the express purpose of murdering American troops.

Prior to helping found Emerge, Wahid was a legal advisor for the national office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and a director of CAIR’s Florida chapter. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named by the U.S. Justice Department as a co-conspirator to the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas.

In 2011, Wahid himself was placed on a U.S. government terrorist watch list.

I agree with much in this column….but Greenfield is a tad too harsh here….AIPAC , like all the other major Jewish/Israel support groups has strayed from its founding mandate, namely, to represent the needs and goals of Israel. On the other hand, unlike others, who have waded into mainly liberal issues- abortion rights, climatology, etc., AIPAC has had a very beneficial outreach to conservative, Republican legislators who had no history of support for, or, interest in Israel….rsk

Like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, the Israel Lobby is a myth. AIPAC, like jolly bearded men sitting in shopping malls, exists. And like the men with fake beards and pillows under their red coats, it goes through the motions. Its activists lobby, its events attract politicians and the one thing that it and its enemies agree on is its vast sphere of political influence that, like Santa, is absolutely everywhere.

If you believe AIPAC, it’s an incredibly effective organization. If you believe its enemies, AIPAC runs America and parts of Canada. It’s not an accusation that AIPAC denies too hard. Mall Santas don’t deny that they have flying reindeer waiting for them on the roof. AIPAC is a fat man in a rented red suit and fake beard trying to pretend that it can do anything. But AIPAC would have better luck making reindeer fly than countering the dominant power of the anti-Israel left and the Saudi lobby in Washington D.C.

And that’s because it doesn’t even try.

When the Democratic Party’s platform deleted the usual mention of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, removed a call to boycott Hamas and opposition to the “Right of Return” vocal protests came from Jewish organizations.

AIPAC was not one of them.

DNC aides claimed that AIPAC had reviewed and approved the new party platform, a claim that it denied. AIPAC’s submission contained a reference to Jerusalem, but the organization, often wrongly described as “hard-line” or “right-wing” by the media, made no objection to its omission.