RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secularism didn’t save the West from religious excesses, and it won’t save us from jihadists.In an attempt to find a peaceful alternative for those in the Islamic world who advocate violence for political and religious goals, Christians in the West shouldn’t distort the history of Christianity, or stand idly by while others do so. Letting this version of events shape perceptions of Christian history invariably means a portrait of religion as a force of darkness, while science and technology will always be beacons of sanity and light.

The narrative portraying religious conviction as antithetical to reasoned comity among people and nations is easy enough to fall into. At the national prayer breakfast last week, for instance, President Obama compared the excesses of the Crusades and the Inquisition to the terrorism of today’s radical Islam. The president went on to condemn (rightly) those who advance their religious convictions with violence.

The last time the Kremlin signed an agreement to end the war in Ukraine—as recently as September—it promised to withdraw “military equipment as well as fighters and mercenaries” from the war zone, ban offensive operations and abide by an immediate cease-fire. In exchange the Ukrainian government granted unprecedented political autonomy to its rebellious eastern regions.

Moscow and its proxy militias in Ukraine have been violating the so-called Minsk Protocol ever since. Russian troops and equipment have poured across the Ukrainian border to support the separatists. Together they have seized an additional 200 square miles of territory, rained deadly rocket fire on the port city of Mariupol and encircled thousands of Ukrainian troops defending a strategic railway link in the village of Debaltseve.

Muslims need to change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.” Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2015

President Obama’s requested Congressional authorization to indefinitely use U.S. military forces in “systematic campaign of airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria” to “degrade and defeat” it. While ISIL may be degraded in that limited area, it will not be defeated in the rear-end-war fought by the United States in the Middle East, because the organization’s core jihadist ideology cannot be defeated by non-Muslims.

The Arab Sunni states in the Middle East fear ISIL and, like Obama, condemn its jihadist barbarism as “not-Islamic”. But of all the Arab leaders, only Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi recognizes that unless Islam is reformed, groups like ISIL cannot not be defeated. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, el-Sisi repeated his call to Muslims “to modify this religious discourse…and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.” On January 1, 2015, speaking at al Azhar University in Cairo, el Sisi, a devout Muslim, called on “religious clerics” to lead the “religious revolution” “The entire world is waiting for your next move,” he said.

The presumed Islamic State murder victim Kayla Mueller isn’t quite the saintly martyr that President Obama and the media are trying to make Americans believe.

Family and friends told reporters Mueller was “a deeply idealistic young woman eager to help those less fortunate.” A neighbor of hers, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran, said Mueller “represented everything good about being an American. In the outgoing battle between good and evil, she represented the best of the good. She took great risks to help other people.”

Fresh from the golf course, President Obama praised Mueller effusively, saying she was “the best of America,” and adding that she “worked with humanitarian organizations in India, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, compelled by her desire to serve others.” Kayla’s “compassion and dedication to assisting those in need shows us that even amongst unconscionable evil, the essential decency of humanity can live on.”

Only someone with Obama’s twisted, pro-Islamist perspective could lie so passionately on Mueller’s behalf.

[Editor’s note: This article is reprinted from our Valentine’s issue of Feb. 15, 2014. It has been updated and edited to fit this year’s Day of Love.]

This Saturday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo jihadists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the radical Left and Islamic fanaticism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year — and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist states.

This year, for example, Islamic religious leaders and officials in Malaysia have warned Muslims against celebrating Valentine’s Day. In Saudi Arabia, the morality police have, as always, outlawed the sale of all Valentine’s Day items, forcing shopkeepers to remove any red items, because the day is considered a Christian holiday.

Jeremy (“J Street”) Ben-Ami, son of Irgun hero, Yitshaq, refers to it as “a big deal’ that is “not going away”, well, as long he has enough money to advertise it. As he writes to his supporters:

“Defying calls to postpone or cancel his upcoming political speech to Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down. Not only is he still coming, he says, but he’s coming as the representative of all Jews, everywhere.”

For Jeremy, “That’s outrageous. It flies in the face of decades of custom and practice…Suddenly, he speaks for all of us?”

Who knows what drove Brian Williams to embellish his resume with outright prevarication. He is now a laughing stock. I save my rancor for those who have done much more harm.

The New York Times outpaces Williams in bending truth. They bash Israel with misleading news, headlines and information and made-up history. And chief among their “calumnists” is Thomas Friedman whose lies and innuendos contribute mightily to the BDS movement.

And what of those phony climateers whose poster boy is Al Gore? They alter data, air-brush climate charts, and obfuscate scientific evidence to promote their lies as “settled science” ???

What of those spurious warnings that one of every five women has been raped?

What has been raped in America is our national culture, our language, our morality, our economy and our future. And the media and academics must share the blame. Brian Williams is a footnote.

A new human-rights report exposes the group’s horrific crimes.

Former congressman Frank Wolf released yesterday an important new human-rights report on Iraq’s religious minorities, aptly entitled “Edge of Extinction.” Detailing some of the Islamic terrorists’ cruelest practices, particularly with respect to women and children, this documentation should serve as the opening salvo in the long-neglected battle of ideas over Islamic extremism.

Mr. Wolf, who stepped down from his congressional seat last month, just returned from Iraq with the new Christian human-rights group, the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, where he is a distinguished senior fellow. In Kurdistan, less than two miles from the front line, he and his team interviewed Christians and Yazidis persecuted by the Islamic State, banished from their homes, and now huddled with hundreds of thousands like them in abject misery in Iraq’s northernmost province.

On no credible public evidence, the Army and the CIA subjected a Green Beret to a three-year witch hunt.

Recent news articles have described the disquieting case of Green Beret major Matt Golsteyn. After commanding Special Forces teams in two combat tours, his Distinguished Service Cross — the nation’s second-highest award for valor — has been revoked and he is being forced out of the Army with no pension.

Why?

In 2010, Golsteyn and his nine-man team were advising an Afghan battalion charged with seizing a portion of Marjah district in southern Afghanistan. The Marine colonel in overall command placed a Marine platoon under Golsteyn’s control; the Afghan battalion held its sector, thanks to Golsteyn’s team. Near the end of the campaign, however, two Marines were killed, blown up by an IED. Amid incoming fire, screaming, and carnage, the Green Berets cared for the wounded and the dying.

The NBC anchor’s lies are symptomatic of a culture in which truth has become relativized.

NBC Nightly News anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.

Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news.

Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National Guard record.

CNN news host Fareed Zakaria, who recently interviewed President Obama, was caught using the written work of others as if it were his own. He joins a distinguished array of accused plagiarists, from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to columnist Maureen Dowd.