RUTHFULLY YOURS

Listening to Laura Ingraham’s interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller’s right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not “helpful.”

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham’s earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we will enforce it again and again and again.

Ingraham replies with a list of her own bona fides regarding freedom of religion, persecuted Christians, the war in Iraq, also professing her own Roman Catholic faith. She then says she doesn’t think the US effort to combat the Islamization of the globe is “necessarily helped” by putting on Mohammed art contests, although she supports PG’s right to do so. She then intimates that PG was merely grandstanding, which PG takes exception to. (PG: Where did I say I was “brave,” LI: I didn’t say you said that — although LI did imply exactly that.)

Constant blame being thrown at US president for many difficulties Israel is currently facing is in reality a distraction from fact that Israel itself is not functioning like a full-fledged sovereign state.

Similarly, after more than 20 years of the disastrous Oslo “peace process” and all the carnage and suffering that it brought, as well as in the face of a strengthening international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel, many Israelis are perturbed by Obama’s continued insistence that Israel must work towards the fulfillment of the two-state solution.

Together these point to Obama’s unwavering belief that the source of all the instability in the region is not Arab/Islamic terror or Arab/Islamic hatred of Israel and the West, but rather previous western injustices that need to be rectified. In the case of Iran, this means the fostering of positive relations after years of America treating Iran like a pariah state while in the case of Israel this means the ending of its supposed unlawful occupation of Judea and Samaria in order to help bring to fruition the creation of yet another Arab state in the region.

An article by Christopher Carson in the April 27 edition of Daily Mailer.FrontPage, titled, A Mad Max Nation with No Electrical Grid, is enough to scare the bejabbers out of anyone.
In predicting what America would be like during a major outage of our electrical grid, Carson tells us: “It’s been one year since a white-hot study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The government study concluded that coordinated attacks on only nine electrical transmission substations in the United States could bring down the entire trinity of grids (called interconnections) that supply electricity to America. Terrorists would have to physically destroy only four in the East, three in the West, and two in Texas, plus one large transformer production plant, and ‘the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.’

WASHINGTON – Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce-Justice-Science on Thursday to discuss the Justice Department’s funding request, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told lawmakers that Baltimore police had made some progress in dealing with the public but acknowledged that “more may need to be done.”

“We’re currently in the process of considering the request from city officials and community and police leaders for an investigation into whether the Baltimore City Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations,” she said. “And I intend to have a decision in the coming days.”

That decision came quickly. She announced [1] Friday that the Justice Department should commence an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department amid claims that the agency has employed excessive force and violated individuals’ civil rights in carrying out its duties.

As I have reported extensively here at PJ Media over the past year, a growing mountain of evidence confirms that the “vetted moderate” Sunni groups that the U.S. has backed in Syria — backing which includes CIA-provided heavy weaponry – have always been working with the very same jihadist groups that the Obama administration and the Washington, D.C. foreign policy “smart set” have consistently claimed they would counter.

Now, a new report establishes that even more CIA-backed “vetted moderate” groups are collaborating with groups designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. Specifically, they are collaborating with al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, though at times they have also operated jointly with the Islamic State.

Reuters reported last Thursday that two Free Syrian Army (FSA) units — Division 13 and Fursan al-Haq — are fighting side-by-side with the Nusra Front in northern Syria:

Despite the fact that we’re clearly pretty far from colonizing Mars, the social-justice crowd is already freaking out that it’s going to be an oppressive, white-male dominated society and that we must act now to stop it.

“The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of #gamergate nobheads are running Mars,” Martin Robbins writes in a piece for the Guardian titled, “How Can Our Future Mars Colonies Be Free of Racism and Sexism?”

Robbins explains that part of his concern comes from the fact that humans’ colonization of new lands has traditionally been oppressive.

“Destiny is rarely great for the people already at the destination,” Robbins explains.

Um, just one thing about that: As far as we know, there are no people on Mars.

Robins acknowledges that “the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers,” but explains that his freakout is still totally justified because “no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery and oppression. It’s just what we do.”

The dedication of New York City’s new Whitney Museum — a $420 million, nine-story behemoth, under construction in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for the past five years — was an occasion for celebration. Leave it to an Obama to employ the occasion for racial scolding.

The Obama in this case was Michelle, who has long shared her husband’s constitutional inability to refrain from racializing a public occasion: “You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood,” she said at the dedication ceremony. “In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”

A Canadian judge ruled this week that Omar Khadr poses no public-safety threat. Tell that to the children of Sergeant First Class Christopher J. Speer and the surviving American soldiers who valiantly fought Khadr on the battlefield.

In 2012, Khadr pleaded guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, and guilty to five charges related to the killing of Speer, a 28-year-old medic with the U.S. Special Forces. This young American hero died in Afghanistan in 2002 during an ambush by al-Qaeda operatives. Just days before he gave his life, Speer had fearlessly walked onto a minefield to rescue two wounded Afghan children. It was Khadr, born and bred an Islamic jihadist by his terrorist father, who lobbed the fatal grenade in the war zone. Another American soldier, SFC Layne Morris, survived the attack but was blinded in one eye for life.

This so-called “child soldier” and “good kid” was a full-blown Muslim soldier of jihad; he trained one-on-one in weaponry, explosives, and Jew hatred.

Bowdoin College in Maine recently held a student-body referendum for a full academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Unlike more common student-government resolutions seeking “divestment” from a handful of companies, the Bowdoin referendum sought an unprecedented cutoff of all academic and cultural ties. The referendum was initiated by Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), part of a growing national SJP movement on campuses.

I have covered SJP antics at Vassar (the picketing of a classroom because a course involved a trip to Israel, and later posting of a Nazi cartoon), Cornell (a protest leads to physical and verbal harassment of pro-Israel students — and me!), Northeastern University (a protest over suspension included chants of “Long live the intifada,” the bloody suicide-bombing and terrorist campaign), and New York University (the posting of mock eviction notices), and elsewhere.

Wherever I see SJP, I see a messianic absolutism directed at the deligitimization and demonization of every aspect of Israeli society. It is a view that presents Israel as uniquely evil, and Palestinians as uniquely pure victims.

The most messianic of all are some (not all, by any means) left-wing Jews who lead SJP chapters or are fellow travelers like the members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). For that sub-group of left-wing Jews, demonizing Israel has become a religion.

Wherever I see the Students for Justice in Palestine organization, I see a messianic absolutism directed at demonization of every aspect of Israeli society.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

When Republican leaders rationalized confirming Loretta Lynch as attorney general — notwithstanding her stated commitment to facilitating President Obama’s lawlessness – they mumbled about how the country needed to end the tenure of Eric Holder. You may remember him as the original Obama attorney general whose confirmation Republicans strongly supported despite extensive evidence of his unfitness.

As a number of us countered, and as anyone with a shred of common sense knows, major Justice Department policy is and has always been set by President Obama. While Ms. Lynch is temperamentally different from Mr. Holder, her confirmation portended no change of direction.

And so . . . no sooner has Attorney General Lynch been sworn in than she has continued Mr. Holder’s crusade against state and local police departments. She announced on Friday that the Justice Department has opened a “pattern or practice” investigation of the Baltimore Police Department to determine whether — actually, to pave the way for the preordained conclusion that — the BPD systematically violates civil rights. The pretext for the investigation is the death of Freddie Gray in police custody on April 12.