RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamic terrorism threatens our lives in ways both visual and dramatic. Primordial screams, the stench of death, and blood-streaked streets where bodies so mutilated they are virtually unrecognizable capture our senses of hearing and sight. It is horrific, real and frightening. It is meant to scare. It does.

The danger from political correctness is different, but no less treacherous. It arrives like the morning fog that, as Carl Sandberg wrote, “comes on little cat feet.” It settles imperceptibly and enshrouds us. Political correctness makes one feel noble and caring, because it is said to be inclusive and sensitive to the feelings of others, especially those who are racially and culturally different. But it is exclusive; it impugns those whose thinking is at odds with convention. It is based on “group think.” It is dependent on minds closed to ideas outside what is deemed correct. It was the basis of fascism and underlies communism. Its consequence can be deadly to those who value freedom and democracy.

We see it on college campuses when students and faculty prevent conservatives from speaking, and in the willingness of administrations to provide “safe places” for those who feel threatened by opinions and expressions that do not match what they have been taught to believe. Political correctness ill prepares students for a world that does not march to a single drummer and puts them at a disadvantage when they enter the workforce where diversity of ideas is as commonplace as cultural diversity. Diversity is a powerful force for good, but only when it extends beyond genetic traits and delves into the realm of ideas. Its adherents claim idealism, but that is not true, as it denigrates those who think differently. It is, in fact, anti-intellectual and anti-liberal. It suffocates curiosity, accountability and individualism, characteristics critical to a liberal education and necessary for life after college.

Tariq Ramadan was barred from the US under Bush, but Obama threw open the doors for him. Ramadan was billed as a moderate reformer. And here is the “moderate reformer” on the Brussels attacks. After the formality of condemning the attacks, mumbling that terrorism is wrong, Ramadan pivots to the same old song and dance.

We cannot, today, afford to disconnect these events with the violence, terror and death that have long been commonplace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and in Africa and Asia more widely. European and American foreign policy does not happen in a vacuum, as those who target us have repeated in countless videos: You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.

Now the “war and death” that ISIS terrorists are talking about is the US and the rest of NATO pushing back against its genocide of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities. Or to put it another way, American intervention against Islamic terror doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. “You have caused war and death in our countries, now you will suffer the consequences.”

But what is Tariq Ramadan really suggesting? That bombing ISIS is wrong?

We must hear those who criticize the incoherence of our allegiances and our support of dictatorships.

What dictatorships? Obama threw them overboard. And the Islamist alternative is itself a dictatorship. That’s what ISIS is.

Does the condemnable violence of their reaction mean we can ignore their arguments?

Any fair reading of State Department and general federal government laws regarding the use of classified information by federal employees makes it is clear that Hillary Clinton violated the law—both by improperly setting up her own private server, and then by sending information through it that was classified. And it is evident that Clinton went to such extraordinary lengths in order to mask her communications and shield them from the sort of Freedom of Information Act suits that now are plaguing her—and that she arbitrarily decided which of her private server emails were public and which private, and then simply destroyed thousands of them without audit.

If she is not indicted by the Obama administration for violations of federal laws or conspiracy to obstruct justice, in the future it will be almost impossible to prosecute successfully any federal employee for violating government protocols about the handling of classified information. If Clinton avoids indictment, it will make a mockery of the Obama Justice Department that sought to prosecute Gen. David Petraeus for showing his personal journals, which contained classified information, to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. The government leveraged Petraeus on the basis that he knew his notebooks contained classified information though they were not formally identified as such; Hillary Clinton knew the same about her own communications, but unlike Petraeus was sneaky enough not to admit to that fact on tape or to associates.

In 2007, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted and then won a conviction against Scooter Libby, in an investigation that ostensibly began over accusations that Libby had leaked the “covert” status of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the spouse of flamboyant loudmouth Joseph Wilson, who was making wild (and later to be proven unfounded) charges against the Bush administration. Yet in a bout of prosecutorial (and politicized) overreach, Fitzgerald had known all along—but kept quiet—about Secretary of State Colin Powell’s aide Richard Armitage being the self-admitted leaker of information concerning Plame’s employment with the CIA. And Fitzgerald also either knew or should have known that Plame was not really a covert operative but instead was widely recognized to have worked at the CIA. Given such precedents, how can the Obama administration possibly determine the degree of wrongdoing of its own former secretary of State and the likely Democratic presidential nominee? The answer is that this is now a country, after all, that jails a video-maker on a trumped-up probation charge to cover up false talking points about a supposed riot of aggrieved Muslims who ad hoc showed up to kill four Americans. And it jailed Dinesh D’Souza, another video-maker, on a rather minor campaign money-raising infraction.

The response of “non-violent” Islamists to counter-extremism programs displays a master class in deception. The greatest mistake made by the Obama administration is to treat groups such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) as genuine representatives of the Muslim community.

Very few American Muslims believe that CAIR is a legitimate voice of American Islam. A 2011 Gallup poll revealed that around 88% of American Muslims said CAIR does not represent them.

It is little wonder that groups such as CAIR disparage genuine moderates. They perceive moderates as a threat to their self-styled reputations as representatives of American Islam. Many in them have learned to speak the language of liberalism and democracy in their pursuit of an ultimately illiberal and anti-democratic ideal.

Counter-extremism work is best achieved by marginalizing such groups — by freeing American Muslims from their self-appointed Islamist spokesmen, and by working instead with the genuine moderates.

A number of Massachusetts Muslim groups, led by Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, are currently spearheading a campaign against the Obama administration’s program, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), which has designated Boston as one of its pilot cities.

From the government’s perspective, Boston was an obvious choice. The city has a long, unfortunate history of producing internationally-recognized terrorists, including the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon; Aafia Siddiqui, whom FBI Director Robert S. Mueller describes as “an al-Qaeda operative and facilitator;” Abdulrahman Alamoudi, the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston, and named by the federal government as an Al Qaeda fundraiser, and Ahmad Abousamra, a key official within Islamic State, whose father is vice-president of the Muslim American Society’s Boston branch.

During the past decade, in fact, twelve congregants, supporters, officials and donors of the Islamic Society of Boston alone have been imprisoned, deported, killed or are on the run in connection with terrorism offenses.

Despite these alumnae, a number of extremist Islamic organizations, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have claimed that the government’s attempt to combat radicalization “targets American Muslims” and “undermines our national ideals.”

Cambridge city councilor Nadeem Mazen, who is also a director of CAIR’s Massachusetts branch, has spoken at a number of anti-CVE rallies, condemning the government’s approach as “authoritarian” because it included “violent practices like surveillance and racial profiling.”

In response, Robert Trestan, the Massachusetts director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), points out that the CVE program “is relatively new in this country. It’s not fair to judge it yet and be overly critical.” He added: “Nothing I’ve seen or participated in has gone anywhere near proposing or suggesting anything close to surveillance, crossing the line of people’s civil rights or profiling.”

What, then, is the basis for this opposition?

NYC gives $500K to an organization serving few and run by a Zionist-hating anti-Israel violence promoter. The First Lady of New York City, Chirlane McCray, on behalf of a City non-profit, is handing over $500K to an Arab American activist who is supported by a Hamas-affiliate organization and who herself proudly supports rock attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israelis. And the money is earmarked to support a tiny population. Why?

The Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City is a tax-exempt, non-profit organization that promotes public-private partnerships to meet the needs of the City’s underserved. To apply for participation, community groups fill out a request for proposals and, if approved, are matched with a private entity to collaboratively meet the needs of a given needy community.

On March 11, the Mayor’s Fund announced that 14 community groups would be receiving grants to partner with mental health providers to improve access to mental health care providers in their communities, as part of the $30 million program “ThriveNYC.”

The Fund’s website proclaims that its current areas of focus include youth workforce, mental health, and immigration.

WHO IS AAANY’s DIRECTOR?

Despite that claim, the 14 groups just awarded by the Mayor’s Fund, which together will receive at least $10 million over the next five years, includes at least one, the Arab-American Association of New York, whose mission is to “support and empower the Arab Immigrant and Arab American community by providing services to help them adjust to their new home and become active members of society.”

Instead of “active,” they may mean “activist.” One might think that because the director of the AAANY is Linda Sarsour who describes herself as a “Palestinian-American-Muslim, racial justice & civil rights activist.”

Welcome to our special 2-Part Glazov Gang video series withTommy Robinson, the founder and ex-leader of the EDL, the coordinator of Pegida UK and the author of his new memoir, Enemy of the State. http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/02/tommy-robinson-vs-islamic-supremacism-special-2-part-video-series/

In Part I, Tommy discusses his new memoir and his continuing fight against the Islamization of his country. He talked about his opposition to all forms of racism and the slanders against him, the British authorities’ persecution of him for being a British patriot, the vicious Islamic assault on his nation and the mass denial about it, and much more.

In Part II, Tommy focuses on Rotting in Solitary, sharing the excruciating ordeal he has endured in the UK prison system.

Don’t miss this 2-part Blockbuster series!

Nobody knows how to game the system for personal gain like an Illinois lawmaker. The political class voted themselves tens of millions of dollars in lifetime pension payouts. It’s time end their ‘pension palace.’

Illinois lawmakers have one of the sweetest retirement deals on planet earth. It’s supposed to be a ‘part-time’ job in the general assembly, but now taxpayer funded legislator pension costs exceed most base salaries. Last year, taxpayers paid a whopping $71,818 per legislator ($15.8 million in FY2015) to fund their ‘golden parachute’ retirement plans. See the top all-time General Assembly Retirement System pensions here.
At OpenTheBooks.com, we looked at who’s receiving what, when and for how long. The results would make Public Enemy #1, the 1930s bank robber John Dillinger, blush. For example, the #1 all-time pension goes to a 31-year long-forgotten state senator. Retiring from Springfield in 2000, with a pension spiking stop at the Chicago schools, Arthur Berman (D) now takes $19,652 a month ($235,824) in annual pension – nearly four times more than he ever made as a Springfield lawmaker.
Here are just some of the Illinois lawmaker ‘big-dogs’ from both parties:

Retired Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (D) makes $132,384 a year in state lawmaker pension – from a short eight-year ‘career’ as a state senator (plus some pension spiking tricks).
Former Governor Jim Edgar (R) costs taxpayers $337,816 per year: a $156,324 pension, plus an $181,492 salary (FY2013) at our flagship University of Illinois at Champaign.
In 2010, former Governor George Ryan (R) had a $197,028 annual pension ($16,419/month), but it was stripped away by the successful public corruption prosecution conviction.

Even former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (R) cashed in for a $28,020 ($2,335/month) legislative state pension before heading off to his congressional career.

Both Democrats and Republicans have engineered a system of compliance and largesse – give no pain to party leadership and the lawmaker gets all the gain. As soon as lawmakers ‘retire,’ they move into a pension palace.

Of course, even the losers get into pension palace. Consider the ‘casualties’ of the 2014 elections:

To Turkish President Recip Erdogan’s dismay, Obama did NOT attend today’s opening of the Lanham, Maryland mega-mosque as expected. At the mosque inauguration, the stealth ISIS supporter and arch enemy of the Kurds lambasted “those who are defaming our faith” and singled out U.S. presidential candidates who are exposing the Islamic threat to America as “targeting Muslims.”

Erdogan defended Turkey’s efforts to fight terrorism and pledged to send the “true message of Islam across the globe.” Ironically, the Turkish leader has described his Islamic-supremacist government’s efforts to deliver weapons to Palestinian jihadists and thwart Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza as a “peace flotilla” and had the hubris to demand an apology from Israel for its “aggressive” interception of the operation. Under pressure from Obama, Israel was forced to oblige.

The Lanham, Maryland mosque is reputed to be the largest Islamic campus in the Western Hemisphere. Turkey has been busily building mega-mosques on five continents with planned mosque construction projects in Havana, Cambridge, Budapest, Bucharest, Haiti, and several other cities around the world. It appears that Erdogan, an aspiring Caliph, may be close to attaining his goal of reviving and leading the Neo-Ottoman Empire by 2023.

The Lanham mega-mosque, a $110 million project, housed on 15 acres, comprises a 20,000+ square foot mosque, a cultural center, guest houses, and an underground sports complex. (This begs the question, “Why underground?”)

The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area is reported to have the second largest Muslim population in the U.S. (conveniently located at the heartbeat of the country) with at least 25 mosques a.k.a. potential jihad training centers and weapons depots. With estimates from several studies (including the 2005 expose by Freedom House) claiming that over 80% of U.S. mosques are radicalized, doing the math indicates that 20 such facilities potentially threaten the seat of our government and beyond.

The land for the Lanham mega-mosque was originally purchased by Fetullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric, who with over 150 schools, operates the largest charter school network in the United States. It was recently reported that Gulen is infiltrating the U.S. military by establishing publicly-funded schools to target the children of American service personnel. The radical cleric is currently negotiating with the U.S. Air Force to locate a charter school at Nellis Air Force Base with classes to begin in the 2016-2017 school year. As one of the largest national users of H1B* visas, Gulen is able to recruit Turkish Muslim teachers to staff his many schools. He retains a skilled stable of immigration lawyers to insure favorable visa decisions – 684 H1B visas in 2009 alone.

While Americans are busy focusing on other things – March Madness and Kim Kardashian to name a couple, the stealth jihad of over 60 years duration continues apace. In a relatively short time, the civilizational jihad has advanced to an unfathomable degree. Truly, the enemy within has cleverly achieved enormous success raising minimal awareness and relatively contained violence.

*(Beware: Several presidential candidates have called for increasing the number of H1B visas).

Chuck Brooks, vice president for government relations and marketing at Sutherland Global Services, believes the U.S. should exercise vigilance, adopt intelligence and surveillance technologies and deploy trained security personnel to prevent attacks on soft targets.http://www.executivegov.com/2016/03/sutherlands-chuck-brooks-vigilance-shared-intell-tech-key-to-protect-soft-targets/

He wrote in a guest piece published Monday on Federal Times the recent terror attacks in Brussels have brought a new focus to the U.S. government’s national security efforts.

“While no plots have been recently uncovered directed at our soft targets, it does not mean that such plots do not exist,” he noted.

“Increased vigilance, shared intelligence, continued specialized training, and more investments in security technologies, canine detection capabilities, and dedicated security personnel to patrol common spaces will all serve to make us safer.”

The Department of Homeland Security is eyeing a potential integration of physiological and behavioral sensor systems into checkpoints, according to Brooks.

He recommended that DHS checkpoints adopt facial recognition software designed to feed real-time data into a database of suspected terrorists as well as three-dimensional imaging tools that can work to detect bombs.

You know you live in New England when you awake on the morning of the vernal equinox and the ground is covered with snow! But as Mark Twain (who lived in Hartford, Connecticut for seventeen years) once said: “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”

It wasn’t only the weather that was out of sorts in March: The Republican race for President took a nastier tone, as the wives of Trump and Cruz were invoked in petty and mean ways. Not to suggest that wives have ever been immune from the scurrilous behavior of their husband’s opponents. Rachel Jackson was called an adulteress and a bigamist. She died of a heart attack, after her husband was elected but before he was inaugurated. Florence Harding was accused by the press of poisoning her husband. Eleanor Roosevelt was reamed by southern newspapers for associating with Blacks. Life magazine referred to Mrs. Truman as “payroll Bess.” It was widely believed that Mamie Eisenhower had a drinking problem. Nonetheless, one hopes for civility; unfortunately, rudeness sells better than decency.

But it was the persistence of Islamic terrorism – seen most vividly in the horrific bombings in Brussels, where the dead were so mutilated that identification was difficult – that defined the month. Brussels received the most attention in our West-centric world, but Islamic attacks in the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa occurred, literally, daily – including the killing of 70 on Easter, near a children’s swing in Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore, Pakistan. Slipping in bathtubs may kill more Americans than terrorists, but that is effectively a tautological argument used by an Administration that refuses to put the qualifier “Islamic” before the noun “terrorist.” According to a report recently out from the nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism, the number of people killed annually by terrorists has increased eight-fold since 2010. While Mr. Obama took pride in the killing of ISIS financial chief Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli (and I would rather him dead than alive and free), one cannot help but think how much better it would have been had he been captured, made to talk and then executed. Collateral damage would have been less and we might have learned something that could help prevent future attacks.

In an attempt to divide further an already fractured Republican Party, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. Judge Garland would seem qualified for the position, but he is no Antonin Scalia. He is a moderate. He is a man who interprets the Constitution more liberally than did Justice Scalia. It would be like replacing a Mastiff with a Golden Retriever. It is not that Mr. Obama prefers moderates like Judge Garland – Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are better examples of his leftist leanings – but he would prefer to trap Republicans in the quagmire he has concocted. In a closely watched case concerning First Amendment rights (a re-hearing of Abood v. Detroit Board of Education), the Court split evenly 4-4. They therefore left in place a decision by a lower court that stated public sector workers had to pay union fees for collective bargaining and political support, even if they chose not to join the union and/or disagreed how their dues would be spent. It was a win for unions and a loss for First Amendment advocates. The decision would have been 5-4 in favor of the appellants had Antonin Scalia been alive.