RUTHFULLY YOURS

Leftist policy is the search for the root cause of evil. Everything from a street mugging to planes flying into the World Trade Center is reduced to a root cause of social injustice. Throw poverty, oppression and a bunch of NGO buzzwords into a pot and out come the suicide bombings, drug dealing and mass rapes.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Boko Haram, the Islamic terrorist group that kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls, or a drug dealer with a record as long as his tattooed arm.

Obama and Hillary resisted doing anything about Boko Haram because they believed that its root cause was the oppression of Muslims by the Nigerian government. Across the bloody years of Boko Haram terror, the State Department matched empty condemnations of Boko Haram’s killing sprees with condemnations of the Nigerian authorities for violating Muslim rights.

Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton haven’t championed #BringBackOurGirls because it’s a hashtag in support of the kidnapped girls, but because it undermines the Nigerian government. They aren’t trying to help the kidnapped girls. They’re trying to bring down a government that hasn’t gone along with their agenda for appeasing Boko Haram and Nigerian Muslims.

The hashtag politics aren’t aimed at the terrorists. They’re aimed at helping the terrorists.

There’s a reason why the media and so many leftists have embraced the hashtag. #BringBackOurGirls isn’t a rescue. It denounces the Nigerian government for not having already gotten the job done even as the State Department stands ready to denounce any human rights violations during a rescue attempt.

Obama and Boko Haram want to bring down the Nigerian government and replace it with a leadership that is more amenable to appeasement. It’s the same thing that is happening in Israel and Egypt.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that now that gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military, the Defense Department needs to look at how it can accommodate transgender individuals.

Hagel told ABC’s This Week that “the issue of transgender is a bit more complicated, because it has a — a medical component to it.”

The American Psychological Association defines transgender as “an umbrella term for persons whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.” Pfc. Bradley Manning, the day after being sentenced in the Wikileaks scandal, changed his name to Chelsea and has requested hormone therapy in prison. Army records continue to identify him as a male even though he has requested to only be called female.

“These issues require medical attention,” Hagel said of the general issue of transgenders, who are barred from military service under current policy. “Austere locations where we — we put our men and women in — in many cases, don’t always provide that kind of opportunity. I do think it — it continually should be reviewed.”

“I’m open to that, by the way. I’m open to those assessments, because, again, I go back to the bottom line. Every qualified American who wants to serve our country should have an opportunity if they fit the qualifications and can do it,” he added. “This is an area that we — we’ve — we’ve not defined enough.”

The National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement after Hagel’s remarks that it looks “forward to working with the Pentagon to end these outdated rules that harm our military.”

“This willingness to evaluating changes to the medical regulations is overdue but very welcome,” said NCTE Executive Director Mara Keisling. “If the Secretary were able to meet and talk with the trans service members I’ve met, he’d understand the answer is self-evident. These are amazing people who serve even though they must hide a basic part of who they are.”

The group cited its National Transgender Discrimination Survey that showed “about one-fifth of all transgender adults are veterans, making transgender people approximately twice as likely as others to serve in the military.”

Dr. Andrew Bostom closes the preface to his new volume, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Islamic Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran [1], with several rhetorical questions, answered encyclopedically in the chapters that follow.

At first glance, someone unfamiliar with the nature of the subject might recognize in them a resemblance to Jeopardy!, now in its 30th year. Jeopardy contestants must correctly identify the historical event, leader or trivia — in the form of a question. To a description, for example, of “totalitarian religious law dictating behavior in all aspects of life for persons of said faith,” a well-tutored college student might ask: “What is sharia?” Of a treaty signed in March 628 between a famous charismatic figure and military commander and a competing Arabian tribe, a brainy homemaker might respond: “What is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah?”

However, few Westerners can actually provide these correct responses, a issue that puts Western society in grave jeopardy.

Only the near-universal ignorance on Islam could explain why the Western press corps and leaders of the so-called “P5 +1” nations — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Iran — all naïvely lauded the late November 2013 news of an interim agreement to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, and blindly accepted the notion that the deal would halt Iran’s future military goals.

Actually, the opposite happened. The P5 leaders, hopeful that a written agreement could put Iran’s nuclear ambitions to rest, were all-too-easily duped by Iran.

This reality marched to the fore on February 11, 2014, when Iranians massed in the streets of Tehran shouting “down with the U.S.” and “death to Israel” to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, during which Ayatollah Rehollah Khomeini reestablished the Iranian Shiite theocracy that the 20th century Pahlavi shahs had forestalled for an all-too-brief 54-year juncture (1925-1979).

As if to punctuate the madness of any attempt to reach agreement, current Iranian president Hassan Rouhani that day stated that the country’s nuclear program would continue “forever,” and that all Western sanctions to stop it had been “brutal, illegal, and wrong.”

At the turn of the twentieth century, two of the wealthiest and most famous men in America were a pair of Jewish brothers named Nathan and Isidor Straus. Owners of R.H. Macy’s Department Store and founders of the A&S(Abraham & Straus) chain, the brothers were multimillionaires, renowned for their philanthropy and social activism.

In 1912, the brothers and their wives were touring Europe, when Nathan, the more ardent Zionist of the two, impulsively said one day: “Hey, why don’t we hop over to Palestine?”
Israel wasn’t the tourist hotspot then that it is today. Its population was ravaged by disease, famine, and poverty; but the two had a strong sense of solidarity with their less fortunate brethren, and they also wanted to see the health and welfare centers they had endowed with their millions.

However, after a week spent touring, Isidor Straus had had enough. “How many camels, hovels, and yeshivas can you see? It’s time to go,” Isidor decreed with edgy impatience in his voice. But Nathan refused to heed his brother’s imperious command. It wasn’t that he was oblivious to the hardships around him; it was precisely because of them that he wanted to stay.

There never was any need for pushing….Abbas and Hamas have exactly the same murderous ideology…just a difference in tactics….What Indyk and Kerry have done is show their bias against Israel coming straight from the White House…..rsk

Abbas correctly calculated that so long as he continued to negotiate with Israel, the U.S. and the Europeans would continue to prop him up with political backing and financial support in the mistaken belief that a peace deal could be reached.

Thus Kerry and Indyk have been pushing Abbas into a corner by trying to tempt him to commit suicide in the name of permanently solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

While Israeli leaders seek peace, Palestinian leaders seek an endless peace process.

Palestinians say that for Muslims, Palestinian land reaches “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea” — that is, over all of what is now Israel. In their view, Tel Aviv is illegally occupied territory just as much as any of the settlements in the West Bank. This view is based on the Muslim doctrine, deeply rooted in Islamic jurisprudence, called “waqf” (religious endowment). Any territory once under the control of Muslims, must forever be controlled by Muslims.[1] According to Islamic law, “If a person makes something waqf, it ceases to be his property and neither he nor anybody else can gift or sell it to any other person.[2]

Unfortunately, the premises on which American negotiations — led by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Martin Indyk[3] — are based are completely at odds with the premises on which Middle Eastern negotiations are based.

Americans seem to believe that all problems are solvable; if there is no solution, it simply means one has not tried hard enough. Americans generally are prepared to compromise on particular points to attain other points that are more important to them. When both sides reach an agreement, Americans usually are prepared to put past disagreements to bed. By making concessions, neither side has compromised its personal honor. Americans focus on the goal, which is to attain an agreement both sides can live with. We negotiate, arrive at an agreement and let bygones be bygones.

The document warns that increasing numbers of students in Hamburg are being influenced by Islamist propaganda and are embracing radical Islam and idolizing jihadist fighters in Syria.

The problems in Hamburg are drawing renewed attention to the alarming growth of Salafism in Germany. Salafists openly state that they want to replace democracy in Germany (and the rest of the world) with a Sunni Islamic government based on sharia law.

Muslim radicals are imposing Islamic norms and values in primary and secondary public schools in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, say school officials, who are asking for stepped-up monitoring of the Salafist groups thought to be behind the Islamization efforts.

At least 25 schools across Hamburg are believed to have been infiltrated by Salafists and other fundamentalist Muslim groups, according to German media reports. But local politicians from the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD)—a party committed to enforcing multiculturalism in Hamburg—have refused to disclose precisely which schools are affected.

Now, for the first time, a confidential report leaked to the German newspaper Bild identifies seven of the problem schools by name. The schools where Islamist fanatics are “waging a religious war” against non-Muslim teachers and classmates are located in districts across the city, the document says, but the situation in Mümmelmannsberg in eastern Hamburg is “particularly appalling” and “the focus of an organized strategy” by Islamists to recruit new followers.

Teachers and school administrators say that efforts by Muslim fundamentalists to run the schools “according to their own rules” have increased in recent months, and speculation is rife that the document was leaked by someone seeking to force city officials into taking more forceful action.

School principals are being pressured, among other demands, into setting up special prayer rooms for Muslim children, who are increasingly gathering for prayers and shouting Islamist slogans on school playgrounds. Girls are requesting exemptions from gym classes and swimming lessons, and are being harassed if they fail to dress according to Islamic norms.

All of a sudden, Hillary’s not feeling the love from Democrats
It’s almost as if Democrats are starting to realize that Benghazi is going to take down their formerly presumptive 2016 nominee.

Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times:

Progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeated her Shermanesque pledge Sunday and vowed not to run for president in 2016, but she declined to endorse her party’s clear frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

Rick Moran, AT:

It looks like Vice President Joe Biden is dead serious about running for president in 2016. During a closed door speech before wealthy Democrats in South Carolina, Biden took a shot at the Clinton administration’s economic policies in what was described as an “Elizabeth Warren-type” address. (snip)

Biden, a potential 2016 candidate, said the unraveling of middle-class financial security began in “the later years of the Clinton administration,” not under George W. Bush, CNN reported Saturday.

On CNN panel yesterday, there was this interesting comparison on Biden’s remarks (via Noah Rothman, Mediaite):

“This is sort of the case that then Senator Barack Obama made against Hillary Clinton back in ’08,”The Atlantic’s Molly Ball said.

We all remember how that worked out.

While I do not discount Hillary’s lust for power, the plain fact is that she is not an attractive candidate. She has none of the charm of her husband, and has accomplished nothing positive in her Senatorial or State Department careers. Benghazi is an open sore, and it could well get badly infected.

John Kerry began the year trying to bring representatives of the Assad regime together with rebel leaders in Geneva to end the civil war in Syria.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike one.

Next, the secretary of state worked tirelessly to create a framework agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, with a view to settling their differences once and for all.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike two.

This week, U.S. negotiators and their counterparts from the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany—will meet in Vienna with Iranian negotiators to work out the details of a final nuclear agreement.

You know where this is going.

There’s been a buzz about these negotiations, with Western diplomats extolling the unfussy way their Iranian counterparts have approached the talks. Positions are said to be converging; technical solutions on subjects like the plutonium reactor in Arak are being discussed. Last month Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Javad Zarif said there was “50 to 60 percent agreement.”

All this is supposed to bode well for a deal to be concluded by the July deadline. If the Iranians are wise, they’ll take whatever is on the table and give Mr. Kerry the diplomatic win he so desperately wants. Time is on Tehran’s side. It can sweeten the terms of the agreement later on—including the further lifting of sanctions—through the usual two-step of provocation and negotiation.

The Obama crowd too often responds to critics and to world affairs like self-absorbed adolescents.

As American foreign policy continues its long string of failures—not a series of singles and doubles, as President Obama asserted in a recent news conference, but rather season upon season of fouls and strikes—the question becomes: Why?

Why does the Economist magazine put a tethered eagle on its cover, with the plaintive question, “What would America fight for?” Why do Washington Post columnists sympathetic to the administration write pieces like one last week headlined, “Obama tends to create his own foreign policy headaches”?

The administration would respond with complaints, some legitimate, about the difficulties of an intractable world. Then there are claims, more difficult to support, of steadily accumulating of minor successes; and whinges about the legacy of the Bush administration, gone but never forgotten in the collective memory of the National Security Council staff.

More dispassionate observers might pick out misjudgments about opportunities (the bewitching chimera of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, or the risible Russian reset), excessively hopeful misunderstandings of threats (al Qaeda, we were once told, is on the verge of strategic defeat), and a constipated decision-making apparatus centered in a White House often at war with the State and Defense departments.

There is a further explanation. Clues may be found in the president’s selfie with the attractive Danish prime minister at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December; in State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in March cheerily holding up a sign with the Twitter TWTR +5.90% hashtag #UnitedForUkraine while giving a thumbs up; or Michelle Obama looking glum last week, holding up another Twitter sign: #BringBackOurGirls. It can be found in the president’s petulance in recently saying that if you do not support his (in)action in Ukraine you must want to go to war with Russia—when there are plenty of potentially effective steps available that stop well short of violence. It can be heard in the former NSC spokesman, Thomas Vietor, responding on May 1 to a question on Fox News about the deaths of an American ambassador and three other Americans with the line, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579491643733173318?mg=reno64-wsj

Documents reveal a lawless attempt to block an Alaska mine project.

A basic precept of American democracy is that petitioners before their government receive a full and fair hearing. The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is in urgent need of that remedial civics lesson.

The EPA inspector general’s office last week announced it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America’s largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn’t worry other developers because Pebble is a “unique” threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.

The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we’ve also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA’s main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.

This story goes back to the debate over the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to evaluate projects and issue permits. Congress gave EPA only a secondary role of reviewing and potentially vetoing projects (with cause) under Section 404c. EPA has long chafed at this secondary role, which has made it harder to nix projects approved by the Corps.

EPA’s decision to initiate a veto process before Pebble had even received an Army Corps review is a disturbing first—and a flouting of the law. The internal documents refute EPA’s repeated claims that it began this process only in “response to petitions” from local Native American tribes in May 2010, and that peer-reviewed science drove its veto.

Emails show that EPA biologist Phillip North, based in Alaska and working on Pebble, was in 2008 advocating that his agency bring down the 404c hammer. “The 404 program has a major role” with Pebble, wrote Mr. North to Patricia McGrath, EPA’s regional mining coordinator for Alaska, in August 2008. By August 2009, Mr. North was pushing for EPA’s annual mining retreat to include a discussion about vetoing the project: “As you know, I feel that [Pebble] merit[s] consideration of a 404C veto.” The retreat included that discussion, though Pebble’s developer hadn’t yet applied for a permit.