RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the immediate aftermath of Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez’s killing of four Marines and wounding of at least three other people, there was a noticeable effort to portray the jihadist as an all-American boy from small-town Tennessee. With just a bit of digging, however, a different picture is emerging. The New York Times reported Friday morning that Abdulazeez had spent about seven months in Jordan last year.

As is their wont in cases where Muslims kill Americans, investigators hastened to point out that overseas stays in a region rife with Islamic radicalism are not necessarily suggestive of terror ties . . . even if the traveler, on his stateside return, promptly shoots up military installations while the Islamic State and al-Qaeda urge Muslims to shoot up military installations.

Abdulazeez was technically a Jordanian national when his parents brought him to the United States from Kuwait as an infant in 1990. Sometime during his childhood, he became a naturalized American citizen. Yet the family appears to self-identify as Palestinian, a conclusion I’ll explain in due course.

Rick Perry is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He served as governor of Texas from December 2000 to January 2015. He is currently running for president.

Being president of the United States is serious business, not a reality TV show.

This is especially true for the next president, who will have a big job ahead after the failures of the Obama administration. Our challenges are too complex — and the future of our country too important — to let egos, inflated rhetoric, and emotion take the place of thoughtful discussion.

I made the case recently for why GOP policies are the best to create opportunity across the country for families of all backgrounds. I’ve held up my home state’s reforms in economic, education, and sentencing policies as examples of conservative governance that have made life better for minorities in Texas compared with other places around the country. And I’ve been honest about our party’s shortcomings — including my own — in engaging all Americans in our conversations about the future of this nation.

About 2.5 million people have immigrated to the United States illegally since President Obama took office, 790,000 of them in the last two-and-a-half years, according to a new analysis of immigration and census data.

The data marks an improvement over illegal immigration rates from 2000 to 2006, when 500,000 to 600,000 people entered the country illegally each year. But it nevertheless shows just how far the country still is from stemming the tide of illegal immigrants, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which conducted the new analysis.

“While the level of new illegal immigration is lower than a decade ago, the enormous ongoing scale of illegal immigration is a clear indication that the United States has not come close to controlling it,” CIS says. “The evidence indicates that, in the last few years, about 400,000 new illegal immigrants snuck into the country or overstayed a temporary visa each year.”

A generous person might say that this is unimportant — that in Iran, chanting “Death to America” is like throat-clearing.

Surely only an uncharitable person would wonder why Iran’s rulers are buying the technology they would need to repel any attack on their nuclear project at the same time as they are promising the Americans that they are not developing nuclear weaponry.

What exactly is it that the Obama administration thinks has changed about the leadership of Iran? Of all the questions which remain unanswered in the wake of the P5+1 deal with Iran, this one is perhaps the most unanswered of all.

There must, after all, be something that a Western leader sees when an attempt is made to “normalize” relations with a rogue regime — what Richard Nixon saw in the Chinese Communist Party that persuaded him that an unfreezing of relations was possible, or what Margaret Thatcher saw in the eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev, which persuaded her that here was a counterpart who could finally be trusted.

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith polled 10,000 Greeks this June, and was shocked to learn that Greeks hate Jews. Greece, wrote Alana Goodman in the Washington Free Beacon,

…surpasses Iran and trails just slightly behind Turkey in the percentage of its residents who hold anti-Semitic views. In total, 67 percent of Greek respondents agreed with the majority of a list of anti-Semitic statements included in the survey. Other European countries, particularly France and Germany, have experienced a decrease in overall anti-Semitic attitudes in the wake of recent attacks on Jews. According to the ADL poll, 90 percent of Greeks agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power in the business world” and 85 percent agreed “Jews have too much power in international finance markets.” In addition, 70 percent said that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust” and 51 percent said “Jews don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.”

Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad, said the Greeks of antiquity. Whom YHWH wishes to destroy, he first makes an anti-Semite. Greeks are among the world’s cleverest peoples—their diaspora overflows with accomplishment in every field of intellectual endeavor—and it is disconcerting to hear them expectorate the sort of vulgar prejudice that one might expect from a semi-literate Anatolian peasant. Then again, the Germans of 1933 were the world’s most cultured nation. Endemic Jew-hated in Greece reminds us that ignorance is an implausible explanation for anti-Semitism.

U.S. President Barack Obama might be right about not allowing a nuclear Iran “on his watch,” but after he leaves the White House — and because of him — the nuclear landscape of the Middle East might be “radiating” like a pinball machine.

Western powers negotiating the Iran deal have demonstrated that they lack the conviction and resolve to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — or prevent Arab countries from acquiring nuclear weapons of their own.

And with President Obama shrinking America’s “footprint” in the world, this time the cavalry might not be coming.

India’s Foreign Ministry and media welcomed the Iran deal, much as their counterparts in Western capitals did. But country’s defence establishment and business community are raising their concerns about the newly negotiated deal with Iran.

“I’ll see you guys in New York.” — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self-declared “Caliph” of ISIS.

On May 23, 2013, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that the “war on terror” was over.

In a public opinion survey conducted in 2006, in Egypt, Pakistan, Morocco and Indonesia, two third of respondents supported the idea of ​​”uniting all Muslim countries in a new caliphate.”

On June 8, 2015, President Obama said his administration had “no strategy yet” for dealing with the Islamic State. The Islamic State does have a strategy.

For now, Western countries are, at best, on the defensive. They dare not even identify the enemy. Rather than cautionary vigilance in the face of danger, today’s Western leaders are choosing willful blindness and appeasement.

Places of sanctuary date to Biblical times. When the twelve tribes of Israel were sent to the Promised Land, the Levites were the one tribe not given a specific area. Instead their people were distributed throughout the land, in forty-eight cities that would become part of their heritage. Six of those cities were designated as places of refuge – principally for those who had committed murder unintentionally. That concept of forgiveness and protection in the Jewish faith descended to Christianity, where sinners are told they can find refuge in Christ. Consequently, churches and synagogues have long provided sanctuary.

In the United States, sanctuary cities (formed in the 1980s) were to shelter illegal immigrants from federal immigration laws. Like so many ideas coming from the Left, this one, while well intentioned, has in practice served to protect criminals as well as hapless illegal immigrants who are otherwise innocent.

Readers following the way that Israel is discussed abroad these days might be aware of two intertwined and mutually reinforcing tropes. According to the first trope, the story of Israel is not about complicated events with multiple players but about the moral character of Israel alone. Israel’s opponents generally appear as bystanders or corpses. Arabs don’t make decisions: they are merely part of the set upon which the Jews perform.

According to the second trope, Israel has dirty secrets that it is trying hard to keep under wraps. Thus, the claim that Israel “crushes dissent” has become common among the country’s critics, leading to expressions of the need to “tear off the mask,” “end the charade,” or “break the silence.”

Both tropes are on display in the new movie Censored Voices, to which Martin Kramer, in “Who Censored the Six-Day War?,”has skillfully applied his historian’s toolkit. (Kramer did the same last year in his detailed deconstruction of Ari Shavit’s account in My Promised Land of the Lod battle of 1948, which played to the same tropes.) The movie is about 1967, but it’s a product of the present moment. Like the work of the NGO Breaking the Silence, whose recent report on the 2014 Gaza war dominated international press coverage a few months ago, it is of the popular genre we might call the “moral striptease.” In this genre, introspective Israeli veterans—of whom Israel has many, a fact of which it can be proud—publicly undress, confessing their failings and those of their countrymen. These accounts are taken at face value and presented as disembodied truths, without details of the environment in which they occurred or the assumptions under which the soldiers operated, and without information that would allow corroboration.

Remote village now an ISIS base in Europe.

Anybody who knew anything about the Balkans knew that Bill Clinton’s extra-legal intervention on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Christian Serbs was a terrible idea; the area’s ancient, tripartite (the western Christian Croats are also part of the mix) religious divisions date back to the schism within Christianity and the invasion of large swaths of eastern and central Europe by Muslim Turks. The Turks were eventually thrown back and out of almost everywhere in Europe, with the exception of what became Albania and in Kosovo. To this day, Bulgarians, Romanians and Hungarians celebrate their deliverance from Islam — and know exactly why it must be resisited, tooth and nail. Allowing the Serbs to crush the Muslims of Yugoslavia — especially Muslims occupying one of Orthodox Christianity’s holiest sites — would have been merely the final touches on a long war against darkness and brutality. So, thanks, Bill Clinton, for leaving this dagger in the heart of Europe: