RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is no more important book to read right now than Heather Mac Donald’s clear-eyed, riveting new work The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. You cannot fully get to the core of the truth about the current anti-cop sentiment in the country, or be armed with the facts to shoot down Black Lives Matter lies without reading it. If you can get a copy, that is – demand is so great that there is currently a one-to-two month wait for it on Amazon.com. Don’t wait – get the ebook.

In case you haven’t already been following everything Mac Donald writes, she is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Her writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Criterion, and elsewhere.

She is the recipient of the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association’s 2004 Civilian Valor Award, the 2008 Integrity in Journalism award from the New York State Shields, the 2008 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration from the Center for Immigration Studies, and the 2012 Quill & Badge Award for Excellence in Communication from the International Union of Police Associations. In other words, unlike the legion of talking heads in the news media pontificating about the racism in American law enforcement, Heather Mac Donald has actually done the journalistic legwork, is qualified to discuss the subject, and is bold enough to speak the truth about it.

The War on Cops begins by noting that crime is skyrocketing in cities across the United States as “the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close.” This isn’t, however, “the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimization of law and order itself.” If we don’t begin to counter the present lies about law enforcement propagated by the Black Lives Matter movement and facilitated by a complicit media and by the “academic victimology industry,” Mac Donald concludes, civilized urban life will break down – which we are already beginning to witness.

Ms. Mac Donald took time out to answer a few questions about crime, terrorism, and the recent Dallas cop shooting for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: More than a dozen years ago you wrote Are Cops Racist? in which you pushed back against the anti-profiling crusade and warned that it was undermining the law enforcement progress of the previous decade. What, if anything, has changed between that book and your newest one?

Heather Mac Donald: We are now living in the most anti-law enforcement administration in recent memory and most likely in American history. The specious “driving while black” crusade of the 1990s and early 2000s was mostly promulgated by left-wing activists, albeit with help from the mainstream media.

Today, we have a president who regularly spreads the poisonous lie that the criminal justice system is racist. The academic victimology industry, presciently identified by David Horowitz’s pioneering work, has only become more entrenched and powerful over the last decade. It, too, is the essential helpmate of the Black Lives Matter movement, propelling the anti-cop narrative to powerful mainstream status.

MT: What were your thoughts upon hearing of last week’s Dallas shooting in progress, when police were dying and being wounded even as they tried to protect the demonstrators who had gathered there to protest their supposed racial bias?

WASHINGTON — President Obama hailed the Iran nuclear deal as “avoiding further conflict and making us safer” on the one-year anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Within that year, Iran has conducted ballistic missile tests in violation of a UN Security Council resolution that the administration says are outside the scope of the nuclear agreement but UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said are “not consistent with the constructive spirit” of the agreement in a confidential report cited by Bloomberg.

Iran has also captured U.S. sailors and humiliated them on-camera before releasing them, indicted an American businessman and a U.S. permanent resident who had done work for the U.S. government, and shipped arms to Yemen. Iran has warned that if the U.S. gives them any grief about their activities, they’ll consider the nuclear deal null and void.

German intelligence reported at the end of June that Iran has continued its “illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities” at a “quantitatively high level” — which “holds true in particular with regard to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.” The State Department has denied the report.

“The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution also registered a further increase in the already considerable procurement efforts in connection with Iran’s ambitious missile technology program which could among other things potentially serve to deliver nuclear weapons,” states the German report. “Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

“All of Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon remain closed, and Iran’s breakout time has been extended from two to three months to about a year,” Obama declared in a statement released by the White House today. “The United States and our negotiating partners have also fully implemented our commitments to lift nuclear-related sanctions, and we will continue to uphold our commitments as long as Iran continues to abide by the deal.”

“The JCPOA demonstrates what can be achieved by principled diplomacy and a sustained commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” the president added. “America’s willingness to engage directly with Iran opened the door to talks, which led to the international unity and sustained engagement that culminated in the JCPOA. We still have serious differences with Iran, but the United States, our partners, and the world are more secure because of the JCPOA.”

Secretary of State John Kerry did his own victory lap, emerging before the media at the Westin Hotel in Paris to declare that “a program that so many people said will not work, a program that people said is absolutely doomed to see cheating and be broken and will make the more dangerous, has, in fact, made the world safer, lived up to its expectations, and thus far produced an ability to be able to create a peaceful nuclear program with Iran living up to its part of this bargain and obligation.”

“The world is safer today because conflict in the region is not calculated on the basis of the potential of a nuclear confrontation or nuclear explosion, and because we have the ability to be able to work through some issues which we’ve seen, for instance with our sailors who stumbled into Iranian waters and within 24 hours we were able to get them out,” Kerry said. “That could not have happened prior to this agreement having taken place.”

Kerry added that “nobody pretends that some of the challenges we have with Iran have somehow been wiped away.”

Would Kerry, who sits on his brains, explain…if Syria is a hotbed for terror, then why is Obama escalating the admission of Syrians to the United States.???

MOSCOW—At the start of a second day of discussions on a U.S. proposal for closer military cooperation with Russia in Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry invoked the attack in Nice to emphasize the urgency of bringing about an end to the crisis in Syria.

“Nowhere is there a greater hotbed or incubator for these terrorists than in Syria,” Mr. Kerry said Friday, at the top of a meeting with his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “People all over the world are looking to us and waiting for us to find a faster and more tangible way of them feeling that everything that is possible is being done to end this terrorist scourge.”

Mr. Lavrov began the meeting with a moment of silence for the victims of the attack in Nice that killed dozens late Thursday.

He said the attacks in Nice made the dialogue with the U.S. “even more urgent and relevant” and said the discussions Thursday night with Russian President Vladimir Putin would allow for “an intensification of efforts to find a solution to the crisis and boosting efforts for more effective work,” according to Interfax news agency.

At the start of the meetings Friday it was unclear if the U.S. and Russia would agree on a deal to increase military cooperation in Syria in exchange for Russia using its influence to ground Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s air force.

Mr. Kerry described three hours of meetings with Mr. Putin on Thursday evening as “extremely frank and serious.”

There’s plausible deniability here, but it’s not very plausible as the only real purpose for the organization being funded was to undermine Netanyahu. And when the media complains about Israel’s suspicion toward NGO’s, this is a prime example of why they have become such a problem. Foreign governments keep using them to try and control Israeli politics.

The campaign’s explicit goal was to elect “anybody but Bibi [Netanyahu]” by mobilizing center-left voters. . . .

The State Department permitted One Voice to use a taxpayer-funded grant to build valuable political infrastructure—large voter contact lists, a professionally trained network of grassroots organizers/activists, and an impressive social media platform—for the putative purpose of supporting peace negotiations. But during the federal grant period, OneVoice devised a plan to target Prime Minister Netanyahu; immediately after the grant period ended, OneVoice deployed its taxpayer-funded campaign resources to launch the largest anti-Netanyahu grassroots organizing campaign in Israel in 2015. Despite OneVoice’s known history of political activism in Israel, the State Department did nothing to guard against the clear risk that OneVoice could engage in electioneering activities using a taxpayer-funded grassroots campaign infrastructure after the grant period. Remarkably, according to the State Department, OneVoice’s conduct was fully compliant with Department regulations and guidelines.

Among the report’s most damning findings, evidence was found that the “durable campaign resources” built during the grant with taxpayer dollars included “a larger voter contact database, a professionally trained network of grassroots activists across the country, and an enhanced social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. OneVoice was even permitted to use State Department funds to hire an American political consulting firm called 270 Strategies — run by Obama 2008 campaign veterans — to train its activists in how to execute a ‘grassroots mobilization’ campaign.”

If you’re not familiar with the name Phelim McAleer, then you’re unaware of one the most fearless independent filmmakers working today. The producer and director of films such as Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism (2006), Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria (2009), and FrackNation (2013), all of which proved to be very inconvenient truths to the left, McAleer also crowdfunded his way to producing a film about abortion monster Gosnell: America’s Biggest Serial Killer, directed by actor and conservative gadfly Nick Searcy and written by novelist/political humorist Andrew Klavan.

Somewhere amid all that, McAleer also produced a play called Ferguson about the controversial killing of Black Lives Matter martyr Michael Brown by white officer Darren Wilson, reenacted onstage using only unaltered Grand Jury testimony. McAleer is not afraid to use film and theater works to force the left to face the truth about such issues.

For his latest project, McAleer has turned to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s illegal private email server. Her staff are currently giving depositions about it under oath and on film, but Hillary’s lawyers have persuaded the judge to block the release of the tapes because they could damage her chances in the election.

McAleer finds this unconscionable and “unacceptable – that films showing the truth are being blocked from the American people. George Orwell described journalism as ‘something somebody somewhere doesn’t want published.’ So we are going to commit a series of acts of journalism.” What that means is, McAleer is creating a series of short film re-enactments of highlights from the depositions, scripted from the transcripts themselves.

Here, for example, is a video of Cheryl Mills’ deposition highlights, in her own words from the transcript. Mills worked for the Clintons for almost 30 years. She was Hillary’s Chief of Staff at the State Department. Her testimony is “amazing,” writes McAleer, “full of classic Clintonian evasions. She used the phrase ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘don’t recall’ 189 times. This deserves to be brought to a wider audience, not censored and hidden away. And we now have it on film.”

There will be a total of five short films, ending with the deposition of Hillary aide Huma Abedin, who was talkative and very casual about emailing government business with Hillary when both of them were using the server in Hillary’s basement:

If your heroes are Noam Chomsky and Jesse Jackson, or if you’re a fan of parenting by dictatorial narcissists who retreat to the wilderness and isolate their children from society – you may enjoy Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortenson. The normally swoon-worthy and photogenic actor is buried below a massive beard so you’ll have to wait till the end to see his adorable chin but in the meantime, you can count the many ways that this movie, which should have been titled Captain Fanatic, fails to deliver.

A safe bet is that 90% of the audience does not know who Noam Chomsky is and since his birthday is celebrated instead of Christmas, it’s just plain silly that he’ d be considered a superior reformer to Jesus – son of God, for God’s sake! You may also wonder throughout the course of the film where Viggo – here known as Ben Cash – actually got the cash to buy the various knives and other weapons intrinsic to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle he has imposed on his clan. Likewise for the clothing, food, camping and climbing paraphernalia that comprise a Hollywood minimal lifestyle. As the film progresses and you discover that the missing mother has been hospitalized for mental problems, you continue to wonder who decided it was a good idea to have a hallucinatory bi-polar woman undergo post-partum episodes SIX times. Never fear, for more than half the movie, the children are as upbeat as the von Trapp family and as skillful as the Flying Wallendas. As for precocity, I can only hint that one of them will get into ALL of the top colleges in your lexicon and, in a tasteless shaming of the poorly educated schoolchildren, these kids rival the Bronte and James families combined.

Eventually, the children are brought into the real world where they encounter their ‘civilized” relatives who hardly measure up to the lofty far-left standards of the screenwriter and his creations. Since every movie requires an arc, there comes a confrontation, some meltdowns, some accusations of “I hate you,” along with a generally unbelievable happy ending to rival Mama Mia. The moral of this movie is that even leftover hippies and their progeny look better with haircuts and no one with a chin like Viggo should ever consider a beard.

If you want to test yourself on the credibility factor in this film, try substituting L. Ron Hubbard for Noam Chomsky and ask yourself whether cult tactics of indoctrination are ever appealing coming from the right. How strange that the very same methods are made to look so cute with lefties as inspiration…………..

The events in Dallas and the advent of #Black Lives Matter and renewed activism of the New Black Panthers is not the fault of President Obama. There is enough wrong in our domestic and foreign policis which is attributable to him. I know many young black jazz musicians that have been pulled over by police for no infractions or suspicious behavior. The President is Black ( I don’t use hyphenations)….and he feels the pain of the sorry predicament of many American Black people. I am Jewish and I dwell on Anti-Semitism and the unfair and immoral bashing of Israel.

There is a large and growing number of Black Americans that have entered into and participated in every institution in our nation, thanks to programs that are anti-discriminatory and the reparations of affirmative action. Why are they mostly silent on the illegitimacy, fourth generation of unwed teen age mothers, rampant drug use and sales, and criminal behavior that plague Black youth and render them unemployable? Why do they accept the false and destructive narrative of the left?

There are exceptions…. Tom Sowell, Jason Riley, Ben Carson, Deroy Murdock, to name a handful, but only Juan Williams honestly confronts these issues on the left? Where are the others?

Blame them and their leaders and their pastors as well as posturing White limousine liberals. But don’t blame the President for this crisis. Rsk

Surprise, surprise; one of the suspects arrested in connection with last week’s terrorist attacks in Turkey spent time at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. released him to his native Russia along with six other detainees who subsequently became known as the “Russian Taliban,” according to an alarming report published by a Washington D.C. think-tank that studies totalitarian societies of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

One of the members of the so-called Russian Taliban, Airat Vakhitov, is among 30 people arrested by Turkish authorities in connection with the attack at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport that killed dozens and injured more than 100, a U.S. government-funded news service reports. Vakhitov spent two years at Gitmo after being captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2001, the news report says, and he’s one of 11 Russian citizens arrested in the last few days in connection with the Turkey attack, which was carried out by ISIS. “Russia’s security services have accused Vakhitov of fighting in Syria and Iraq alongside terrorist groups, as well as recruiting foreign fighters for IS and other groups, and raising funds for terrorists,” the news story says.

Judicial Watch tracked down Vakhitov’s Department of Defense (DOD) Gitmo file and it says he was born in Naberyozhnyj and traveled by train to Afghanistan where he was eventually arrested by the Taliban on suspicion of espionage. He was taken to Gitmo in mid-June, 2002 and was “cooperative” during his two-year stay. “Because of the Russian government’s agreement to incarcerate this detainee upon his transfer, and provided that he remains incarcerated under the control of the Russian government, the detainee poses no future threat to the U.S. or its allies,” the DOD file states. “In addition, the Russian government has agreed to share with the United States all intelligence derived from this detainee in the future.” It’s not clear when Russia freed Vakhitov or if he was ever really incarcerated there after leaving Gitmo. An international human rights organizations claims Vakhitov and his fellow countrymen were tortured in Russia after leaving Gitmo in 2004. “Access to the ex-detainees is limited because three of them are in prison and the rest have either managed to leave the country or are in hiding,” the group writes in an announcement promoting a report blasting the U.S. for relying on Russia’s “diplomatic assurances” of fair treatment to justify sending Gitmo captives.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. transferred two prisoners from the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay to Serbia, the Pentagon said Monday.

The resettlement of the prisoners, Muhammadi Davlatov of Tajikistan and Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi of Yemen, brings the prison’s population down to 76. Of those, 27 have been approved for transfer to another country.

Monday’s announcement followed a transfer on Sunday of a Yemeni detainee to Italy and comes as U.S. and Latin American officials are trying to locate a former Syrian prisoner who was resettled to Uruguay in 2014 but who has recently disappeared.

“The United States appreciates the generous assistance of Serbia as the United States continues its efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” Secretary of State John Kerry said.
Officials have said the Obama administration hopes to whittle the prison’s population down by the end of the summer by moving all of those prisoners who have been cleared for transfer. That number has grown as the administration has sped up the periodic review process that determines whether those who have been detained without charge can be sent to another country and resettled. Therefore, moving all of those cleared for transfer could take longer.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to close the prison but has struggled to do so as he faces opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. He presented a plan to lawmakers in February that would involve moving those who can’t be released, including those who are facing military commissions or are deemed too dangerous for transfer, from the facility to the U.S., which is now barred by law. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bret Stephens has endorsed Hillary, calling her the “Conservatives Hope”…..( http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-the-conservative-hope-1462833870)she supports the Iran Deal …..” rsk
What diplomats call the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—known to the rest of us as the Disastrous Iran Deal—was agreed in Vienna a year ago this week. Now comes a status update, courtesy of our friends at the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV.

In its fascinating 2015 annual report, published late last month, the German domestic intelligence service reports a “particularly strong increase” in the number of Salafists, describes the reach of Russian and Chinese espionage efforts in Germany, and notes a growing number of right-wing extremists.

Then there’s this:

“The illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities [by Iran] in Germany registered by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution persisted in 2015 at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level. This holds true in particular with regard to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.”

The report also notes “a further increase in the already considerable procurement efforts in connection with Iran’s ambitious missile technology program which could among other things potentially serve to deliver nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

The BfV report arrived days before Germany arrested a Pakistani national, identified as Syed Mustufa H., accused of spying for Iran. It also corroborates another German intelligence report, this one from the intelligence service of North Rhine-Westphalia, that Iran’s nuclear procurement efforts have increased dramatically in recent years, from 48 known attempts in 2010 to 141 in 2015. Seven other German states have reported similar Iranian procurement efforts. This violates Iran’s explicit commitment to go through an official “procurement channel” to purchase nuclear- and missile-related materials.

All this was enough to prompt Angela Merkel to warn the Bundestag last week that Iran “continued to develop its rocket program in conflict with relevant provisions of the U.N. Security Council.” Don’t expect German sanctions, but at least the chancellor is living in the reality zone.

As for the Obama administration, not so much. For the past year it has developed a narrative—spoon-fed to the reporters and editorial writers Ben Rhodes publicly mocks as dopes and dupes—that Iran has met all its obligations under the deal, and now deserves extra cookies in the form of access to U.S. dollars, Boeing jets, U.S. purchases of Iranian heavy water (thereby subsidizing its nuclear program), and other concessions the administration last year promised Congress it would never grant.

“We still have sanctions on Iran for its violations of human rights, for its support for terrorism, and for its ballistic-missile program, and we will continue to enforce those sanctions vigorously,” Mr. Obama said in January. Whatever.

The administration is now weighing whether to support Iran’s membership in the World Trade Organization. That would neutralize a future president’s ability to impose sanctions on Iran, since WTO rules would allow Tehran to sue Washington for interfering with trade. The administration has also pushed the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that enforces anti-money-laundering standards, to ease pressure on Iran, which FATF did last month by suspending some restrictions for the next year.

And then there’s the Boeing deal to sell $17.6 billion worth of jets to Iran, which congressional Republicans led by Illinois’s Pete Roskam are trying to stop. Iran uses its civilian fleet to ferry weapons and fighters to its terrorist clients in Syria and Lebanon.

“The administration is trying to lock in the Iran deal and prevent a future president from doing anything, including pushing back on Iran’s malign behavior,” says the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz, who knows more about Iran sanctions than anyone in Washington. “Instead of curbing Iran’s worst behavior, the administration effectively facilitates it.” CONTINUE AT SITE