RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Oren reminds us that upon taking office, the newly elected president removed the statue of Winston Churchill from the White House. Oren does not need to explain the act. Churchill saved the West precisely because he was committed, as he said so famously, to defending “our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.That commitment to protecting the West and its values at all cost, Obama implied by removing the statue, would be anathema to his administration.”

The coming weeks will reveal whether the American Jewish community still has a sense of historic responsibility.

Some dramatic historic events have the capacity to remain stunning even if they are not surprising. This week’s accord between Iran and the P5+1 is a case in point. It is a stunning error, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has correctly noted, but it is not a surprising one.

The agreement was unsurprising not only because the parties were so close to a deal for so long, but because the United States was hell-bent on reaching a deal. President Barack Obama wanted a deal no matter what compromises he had to make, no matter how much danger the deal represented for Israel, ostensibly the US’s ally.

A police officer in Birmingham, Ala., was beaten unconscious by a suspect during a traffic stop last week because the officer did not want to be pilloried in the media as a racist for using force against a black man.

Last Friday, a Birmingham plainclothes detective pulled over a car being driven erratically. The officer, who has chosen to remain anonymous to protect his family, told the driver to stay in the car while he called for backup. Instead, according to CNN, the driver got out and became belligerent, angrily and repeatedly asking why he’d been stopped. The driver, a 34-year-old convicted felon, allegedly grabbed the detective’s gun and pistol-whipped him with it until the detective lost consciousness. The felon, Janard Cunningham, reportedly fled the scene but was later apprehended. His record includes convictions for robbery and assault, among other crimes, and an attempted-murder charge, according to ABC 3340 and WVTM 13.

Several witnesses to the beating posted photos of the bloodied, inert, and prostrate detective on social media, accompanied by celebratory gloating similar to the social-media triumphalism after two New York City police officers were assassinated last December. A typical post read: “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” under the hashtag #FckDaPolice.

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

They got Al Capone for tax evasion, and they may get Huma Abedin for “violating rules regarding vacation and sick leave” and for the “possible exchange of unsecured, classified data.” To be sure, these are serious charges, and the available evidence makes it abundantly clear that there is ample warrant to investigate and perhaps even charge Abedin. However, it is a sign of a serious problem with today’s political culture that even more serious allegations regarding Abedin have never been investigated, and almost certainly never will be.

Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections have been fully exposed by Andrew McCarthy and bruited about for years. The facts are quite public, albeit largely ignored: Abedin’s parents are both members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but her links to the organization are not just familial. Abedin was for twelve years the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), which was founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood operative and al-Qaeda financier. Naseef and Abedin both appeared on the JMMA’s masthead from 1996 to 2003.

Consider that Abedin worked closely for seven years with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who financed al-Qaeda in light of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy during the years that Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State. Everyone acknowledges that Abedin and Clinton are extremely close, and that Abedin controls access to Clinton and has tremendous influence over her.

Open Letter to Linda Sarsour

Director of the Arab American Association of New York
Honoree, New York City Council’s Shirley Chisholm Women of Distinction Award
Senior Strategist for the Campaign to Take on Hate
2009 Fellow with the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, housed at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, in partnership with the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University
Obama White House honoree as a “Champion of Change”
Feminist: “I am a feminist and the reason I am a feminist is because I am a Muslim.”

Dear Linda Sarsour,

The news broke on Friday, August 14, 2015. That day would have been Kayla Mueller’s twenty-seventh birthday.

The breaking – and heartbreaking – news: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the Islamic Studies PhD who heads ISIS, had repeatedly raped Kayla Mueller. “He owned her,” news accounts report. Kayla was al-Baghdadi’s “sexual slave.” She was tortured. Kayla had been 24 years old when ISIS first took her captive in 2013.

Kayla Mueller was from Prescott, Arizona. She was an idealist. She had worked for many causes, including Tibetan refugees, Amnesty International, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Save Darfur Coalition. Kayla was taken captive by ISIS in 2013 while leaving a Doctors without Borders hospital in Syria. She was there helping war refugees. Kayla died in captivity in February, 2015. Kayla’s fellow hostages report how kind and self-sacrificing she was.

Why did Kayla put her life at risk to help others? “Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love. I found God in suffering. I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is. Using my hands as tools to relive suffering,” she wrote.

Editor’s note: Below is the third article in the Frontpage series, “Obama’s Betrayals.” Click the following to read Part I and Part II.

President Barack Obama is guilty of multiple counts of illegality and malfeasance in office. He has both willfully abused his executive powers and willfully neglected to perform his executive duties under the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

More than any president in the history of the United States, Obama’s motive for his shredding of the Constitution is the pursuit of absolute power for the purpose of, in his words, “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Richard Nixon is often mentioned when one talks about abuse of presidential power. From his enemies list to Watergate and its cover-up, Nixon set the bar in his time for illegality and malfeasance in office. But he was an amateur compared to Obama, who has taken illegality and malfeasance in office to a whole new level.

Nixon, for example, tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies, but did not have enough loyalists in the IRS to do his full bidding. Obama created a climate that encouraged IRS targeting of nonprofit tea party organizations. The purpose was to keep them from raising enough tax-deductible funds to play any significant role in connection with issues relevant to the 2012 presidential election. When the IRS scandal first broke, Obama feigned surprise and dismay. But after months of stonewalling by members of his administration of congressional investigations, Obama said during a 2014 interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption.”

ByAndrew R. Finlayson

“This is a gem of a book by one of the truly distinguished “Old Asian Hands” in the fields of journalism and scholarship. What is so appealing in this book and what sets it apart from so many other memoirs is the delightful prose style employed by Mr. Sanders and the wide range of very interesting people he has known during his long life. As someone who has spent a great deal of his adult life studying China and the other nations in Asia, I found his personal insights into the personalities that contributed to 20th Century Asia, both well known and unknown, absolutely fascinating. As a young China scholar, I often relied on the very accurate intelligence gained by a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest named Father Ladany. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Father Ladany produced what I consider to be the most accurate information on events then transpiring inside the People’s Republic of China. Sol Sanders was a personal friend of Father Ladany his book is full of little vignettes about him that I had never heard before. His short, highly entertaining chapters, each devoted to one or two of the very interesting people he was know, are a pleasure to read and provide tidbits of information about these individuals you will not find anywhere else. I recommend this book highly.”

If you had thought that the only qualification needed is to excel at your chosen art form and then see if you can gather audiences, you were wrong. That is not enough anymore — certainly not if you are Jewish.

The treatment of the reggae star Matisyahu is something new. For Matisyahu is not an Israeli — he is an American. For a while, only Israeli Jews were made pariahs among the nations because of an unresolved border dispute involving their country. Now it is Jews born anywhere else in the world who can be targeted in the same way. They are singling out Jews — Jews and only Jews.

Habima performers were insulted and vilified while on stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, trying to perform “The Merchant of Venice.” None of the protesters seemed to see the irony of vilifying Jews on stage during that of all plays.

Spain has its own border issues. Perhaps Spanish performers should henceforth be quizzed about their political attitudes before they are allowed to perform abroad? Maybe the rest of the world should demand that all artists from Spain sign a statement or make a video supporting Catalan independence if they are to be allowed to perform in public?

The U.S. has provided approximately $5 billion to the Palestinians in bilateral aid since the mid-1990s and about $540 million this year. The EU added more than €500 million ($558 million), making it the largest single-year donor. Why should Palestinian Authority (PA) not have to pay the bill for its own savage behavior? And why is the U.S. so determined to protect it?

According to the deputy head of UNRWA, the organization needs $101 million in order to open schools on time. Why does the Hamas government not pay for its own children to go to school? And why does the Hamas government not pay for the repair of its own people’s houses? UNRWA and the U.S. government seem to believe that the PA and Hamas cannot be expected to spend their own funds — or donated funds — on the needs of their own people. Hamas can therefore use all its funds to make war.

As long as Hamas and the PA are permitted both to spend sponsors’ money on terrorism and warfare while escaping responsibility for the needs of their people, and as long as Iran is a key donor — with all the temptations, means and opportunity to “wipe Israel,” as it repeatedly threatens to do — the idea of a U.S.-led “peace process” is fantasy.

The world is poorer for his passing, but his searing and accurate appraisals of Soviet evil will stand as enduring indictments of those calculating apologists and useful idiots who persist, even now, in making their excuses for Stalin and his murderous tyranny.
How important are obituaries? And do they serve any significant purposes other than informing us that someone important has died and comforting the bereaved that the worth of his life has been widely recognized? I’ve had cause to ponder that in the days since my friend Robert Conquest died and obituaries, tributes, and reflections on his work and life have flooded the internet. Among these are the obituary on Quadrant Online to which John Whitworth contributed here and an earlier piece by John on Conquest’s poetry and literary criticism. And there are more to come. Quadrant on paper will be publishing assessments by Clive James and Peter Coleman in our next issue.

From the most detached viewpoint this attention is richly deserved. Conquest was the single most important historian of the Soviet Union and its crimes while also being eminent in other fields, notably literature and criticism, and not least an influential advisor to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at a key turning-point in the Cold War. One can hardly sum up such a life in a single article, especially when the task has to be completed by journalism’s arbitrary deadlines. No single obituarist can mention everything. So one or two achievements may fail to be mentioned anywhere. I may be mistaken but I don’t believe that any obituary has yet mentioned Bob’s highly readable but also profound 1980 book, We and They, which examines the differences between civic and despotic cultures and the importance of which, alas, did not vanish with the end of the Cold War.