RUTHFULLY YOURS

The conservative media who applaud him are hurting the cause.

It came slightly ahead of schedule, but Donald Trump’s inevitable self-immolation arrived on the weekend when he assailed John McCain’s war record. The question now is how long his political and media apologists on the right will keep pretending he’s a serious candidate.

Speaking at a forum in Iowa, Mr. Trump declared that Senator McCain was “not a war hero,” adding that “he’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

Mr. McCain spent more than five years in a Vietnamese prison camp, was tortured to the point of lifelong disability, and yet refused an offer to be released before all of his fellow prisoners. Mr. Trump had a more relaxed war due to military deferments. The Trump dump drew immediate condemnations from most GOP candidates and others, but the political apprentice refused to apologize.

One of history’s most important dividing lines was etched in a remote and desolate part of New Mexico exactly 70 years ago today, and the world knew nothing about it at the time.

Ask most people when the nuclear age began and they will probably answer Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945. It did not. Three weeks earlier, on July 16, the world’s leading scientists, including Lawrence, Fermi, Teller, and, of course, Oppenheimer, assembled in the middle of the night at an abandoned ranch near Alamogordo. Along with hundreds of engineers and soldiers, they huddled in anticipation, wondering what, if anything, their long labor to create a nuclear bomb would produce.

Years later, Norris Bradbury, the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1945 to 1970, put the entire event in context: “Most experiences in life can be comprehended by previous experiences. But the [first] atom bomb did not fit into any preconception possessed by anybody.”

Today in the Islamic Middle East, Christians like the Abada family in Iraq suffer real persecution the likes of which most of us can scarcely imagine.

It has been nearly a year now since Ayda and Khader Abada have laid eyes upon their three-year-old daughter.

On August 22 of last year, ISIS militants snatched little Christine from the arms of her mother, Ayda. To this day, her parents haven’t a clue as to her fate.

Ayda and Khader Abada are the parents of five children. On August 6, 2014, a little less than three weeks before their daughter was snatched from them, Islamic State zealots took command of their home city of Qaraqosh. But because Christine’s father, Khader, is blind, he and his family, not unlike many of their neighbors with comparable disabilities, were left with little option but to stay put.

Typical of the delusions being peddled about the Iran nuclear deal is this rundown by Charlotte Alfred, World News Fellow at The Huffington Post. She calls it a “historic accord” that “will roll back Iran’s nuclear work in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions.”

In other words, a triumph, a win-win endeavor. If only there were any truth to that.

Beginning with “Restrictions on [Iran’s] Nuclear Work,” Alfred notes that Iran is supposed to reduce its working centrifuges from 19,000 to 5,060, cut back its stockpile of 3%-enriched uranium by 98 percent, and defang its Fordo enrichment site and Arak heavy-water reactor.Sounds nice until you look into the details. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani tweeted (crowed is more like it) in reaction to the deal (quoted here):

Our objective was to have the nuclear program and have sanctions lifted. At first they wanted us to have 100 centrifuges now we will have 6,000. They wanted restrictions of 25 years now its 8. First they said we could only have IR1 centrifuges, now we can have IR6, 7, and 8, advanced centrifuges. Heavy water plant at Arak had to be dismantled but now it will remain with heavy water under conditions. Fordo had to be closed now we will have 1000 centrifuges there.

“The war keeps coming home because we have filled our home with the enemy. It’s time we clean house.”

If we really want to stop terrorism, the place to start is the airport.

Tennessee is to Muslim refugees as New York is to Muslim hijacked planes. Chattanooga, the site of the latest Muslim terror attack against America, is a “preferred community” for resettlement along with Knoxville and Nashville.

Nashville was designated a “Gateway City” for Iraqis. Hundreds of Somali Muslims were dumped in Shelbyville and the Murfreesboro Mega-Mosque became national news because of its terror ties.

Over the last decade, middle Tennessee’s Muslim population tripled. The rise of Islam in Tennessee as Muslims from terror zones like Iraq and Somalia flooded its towns and cities brought hate and violence.

In Memphis, Imam Yasir Qadhi was caught on tape calling Jews and Christians filthy and declaring that Muslims can take their lives and property. Last year the FBI warned of an ISIS threat in Memphis.

This year it was Chattanooga’s turn.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the son of a Palestinian man and a Kuwaiti woman living in the United States, killed four marines. One of his targets, a recruiting center, was a gun-free zone. Those inside had no way to defend themselves. Their government had welcomed in the enemy and left them unarmed and helpless against his Jihad.

At the very moment that Pope Francis is warning the world that “doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain,” doomsday is an imminent reality for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East, most urgently in Syria and Iraq. “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us?” the pope asks in his encyclical Laudato Si’.

“No world at all” is the answer for the 70,000 Christians still left in Aleppo, Syria. ISIS surrounds them on three sides. Aleppo may fall to the Islamic terrorists within weeks, with Damascus following. The slaughter of Christian men and other religious minorities will be immense. The women and girls face abduction and sex slavery. Similarly, although the 120,000 Christians living in the refugee camps around Erbil in Kurdistan, which I recently visited, are comparatively safe at the moment, an ISIS victory in Syria would leave them exposed to great danger: They would have nowhere left to seek refuge. For the Christians of Aleppo, it may be too late to flee. Part of the problem for the Christians across the region has been that these “doomsday predictions” have been wilfully ignored in the West, just as disingenuous dismissals of ISIS as the “JV team” allowed that deadly force to gain large sections of Iraq and Syria.

Four U.S. Marines, barred from carrying weapons at naval training facilities despite explicit ISIS threats against our military, are dead in Tennessee. Another service member and a Chattanooga police officer survived gunshots after Thursday’s two-stage massacre allegedly at the hands of 24-year-old jihadist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

Navy secretary Ray Mabus called the terrorist’s spree “insidious and unfathomable.” President Obama bemoaned the “heartbreaking circumstance” in which the murdered Marines found themselves.

“Unfathomable”? Not if you’ve been paying attention. Islam-inspired hate crimes against our troops have continued unabated since the Obama White House first dismissed the 2009 Fort Hood massacre as “workplace violence.”

The World Requires Voter ID, but George Soros and Hillary Clinton Are Determined the U.S. Won’t What the rest of the world calls an anti-fraud measure, Democrats call racist.
It’s been over seven years since the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision that was written by liberal favorite John Paul Stevens, declared that voter-ID laws don’t constitute an undue burden on people attempting to vote. But that hasn’t stopped liberals from fighting in legislatures and courts against those laws and other efforts to promote voter integrity. The lawsuits are often brought by Marc Elias, who doubles as the attorney for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And their efforts have paid off: Only about 18 states currently require a photo ID to vote.

Where do we draw a line against the intolerance of bad ‘religions’, of which the philosopher regarded Nazism as a secular variant? Today, militant Islam fits that same mould — as do its left-liberal apologists, whose reverence for relativism is the offering laid before the altar of totalitarian militancy.

“I have insisted that we must be tolerant. But I also believe that this tolerance has its limits. We must not trust those anti-humanitarian religions which not only preach destruction but act accordingly. For if we tolerate them, then we become ourselves responsible for their deeds.” — Karl Popper

That comes from a lecture on science and religion, delivered in 1940 in New Zealand in a university extension course, Religion: Some Modern Problems and Developments. The lecture has been published in After the Open Society, edited by the ANU’s Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A summary of the main ideas in the book can be found here.

Popper wanted to bring together people of good will, despite their differences. That was Hayek’s aim in The Road to Serfdom, which he addressed to the socialists of the world This does not mean glossing over differences or holding back from criticism of mistakes, but it does mean taking a stand on common ground when it exists. I think that Popper would be surprised and disappointed by the militant atheists. He was a secular humanist, however he argued that the dispute between religion and science in the 19th century was a thing of the past because it was based on each side intruding on the territory of the other. Science is concerned with the way the world works and it does not presume to answer questions about morality or the purpose of life. Religion is a rival for science when it tries to trespass on the territory of science to describe how the world works. The antagonism is intensified when each side thinks that it alone holds of the criteria to decide the issue with certainty.