RUTHFULLY YOURS

The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.

We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.

Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.

Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning.

Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.

The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.

Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.

In November 2014, Congress voted to ban the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States. It was not a close vote. The final margin was 91 to 3 in the Senate and 370 to 58 in the House. Those are bipartisan, veto-proof majorities. And since those votes happened, Republicans have gained control of the Senate and increased their House majority.

Yet today President Obama unveiled a plan that directly contradicts the law. He wants to release 35 detainees and move the other 56 to a prison that would be built somewhere in the United States to house them.

In making his case, President Obama repeated the same tired talking points about how Gitmo has been a terrorist recruiting tool, even though there is scant evidence to support this proposition. Even two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady, dispute Obama’s contention. They write:

**Indeed, other issues and grievances seemingly receive much more airtime and emphasis than the detention camp does; and Guantanamo, when mentioned, is often lumped in with other controversial facilities—like Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Detention and abuse of suspected terrorists by the United States, in other words, is a readily discernable motif. But the contemporary propaganda narrative seems to treat that motif as but one category of offenses in a long chain of western transgressions against the Muslim world.

Accordingly, it is hardly clear that Guantanamo’s closure would matter much, so far as concerns the contents of jihadist propaganda. U.S. detention operations at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, after all, are now in the past—but that hasn’t persuaded jihadis to drop their invocations of both prisons in their online literature.**

Poplin and Brady note that Gitmo is especially unimportant in the ISIS narrative. What has really been a terrorist recruiting tool has been the administration’s weakness in the face of the Islamic State. But rather than announce a serious plan to destroy ISIS, Obama finds it much easier to score rhetorical points by announcing a plan to close Gitmo.

His timing is especially bad because, as I argued in the Washington Post, the U.S. needs a detention facility to hold captured ISIS leaders, assuming that we actually capture and interrogate some (as we should). If not Gitmo, then where?

A House bill introduced last year by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity cleared the House Judiciary Committee today.

The bill details many links of the Brotherhood to terrorism, including the endorsement of violence in Egypt last year in response to a “war against Islam’s principles.” It notes that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain have banned the Brotherhood.

Not more than 60 days after enactment of the bill, the State Department would have to submit a report to Congress on whether the Muslims Brotherhood meets the criteria to be designated a foreign terrorist organization — and if not, explain why not.

The legislation has 28 bipartisan co-sponsors. A companion bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sits in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At today’s Judiciary Committee markup, in which the vote was 17-10 to move the bill to the House floor, Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said he was “troubled” to learn that the State Department never considered the Muslim Brotherhood an FTO.

Since its founding in 1928, Goodlatte noted, “the Brotherhood’s strategic goal ‘in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.'”

The chairman stressed that under the designation “this administration would actually have to deny admittance to aliens tied to the Muslim Brotherhood rather than continue to proclaim to the world that the Brotherhood is a moderate and secular organization.”

We often hear the line from a Robert Burns poem, “The best laid schemes of mice and men, often go askew,” invoked when someone’s grandiose plans blow up in one’s face.

That may be what we’re in store for if President Obama’s recently announced plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and place terrorists on U.S. soil is able to proceed unilaterally without congressional approval. This time, the danger in the plan is to the American people.

Slowly over the years he has been in office, Obama has released numerous terrorists to other countries without adequate provisions to prevent them from returning to the battlefield against U.S. soldiers and civilians.

One recent case is that of Ibrahim al Qosi. He was a member of al-Qaida and a personal aide to Osama bin Laden who was released from Guantanamo in 2012 and sent to Sudan. He recently appeared in a video as a spokesperson for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

In the video, “Guardians of Sharia,” he calls on people to commit acts of jihad. Clearly his time in Guantanamo did nothing to rehabilitate him. He is the classic recidivist.

The fact that ex-cons often get released from prison neither rehabilitated nor transformed is nothing new. Recidivism rates for common criminals continue to be an issue for sociologists and criminologists to explore.

The Obama administration is prohibited by law from moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States, but President Obama on Tuesday sent Congress his plan for doing just that.

Even before Obama spoke, members of Congress reacted negatively.

“The fact is, it is very hard to stop a president from doing something if he is willing to ignore the law and his oath,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Fox News Tuesday morning.

Issa said Obama’s plan to close the military prison in Cuba is not a surprise — he talked about doing it even before he became president.

“But the fact that he’s willing to do it in violation of specific law…(shows that) he has very little to lose, in his opinion. He doesn’t believe that the American people will impeach him, and with the death of Justice Scalia, he probably views that the Supreme Court might back him with a 4-4 decision.”

Issa noted that Obama himself signed the bill that included the provision barring transfers of Gitmo detainees to the United States. “But this is a president that doesn’t respect the law and the Constitution.”

Issa said there isn’t much Congress can do “in a timely fashion” if Obama ignores the law and orders the military prison closed. Congress’s recourse would be to go to court, and the courts are not likely to rule quickly.

Issa said that voiding the Guantanamo lease, which the United States holds in perpetuity, would be more complicated for the president to do. He could order the military to leave Guantanamo, but that places the burden on military leaders.

“I have to be quite candid,” Issa said. “It is the decision that U.S. military leaders have to make. Are they going to obey an unlawful order…to move people from Guantanamo? An unlawful order to close the base?”

Issa said he believes the military may push back on the president. “I can see flag officers resigning rather than obeying unlawful orders.”

Western states should legally permit immigrant communities to surgically “nick” young girls’ vaginas as an alternative to genital mutilation, a pair of US gynaecologists argued in a hotly-challenged paper Tuesday.
Such a “compromise” could allow groups to honour cultural or religious prescripts while saving millions of girls from invasive and disfiguring genital slashing practised in some African and Middle Eastern cultures, the two doctors stated in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“We are not arguing that any procedure on the female genitalia is desirable,” said Kavita Arora of the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Allan Jacobs of Stony Brook University in New York state.
“Rather, we only argue that certain procedures ought to be tolerated by liberal societies”, which have outlawed such practices but host immigrants for whom it is part of their culture.
Efforts to enforce an outright ban on female genital mutilation (FGM) have often had the opposite effect — driving the practice underground and putting women at even greater risk, said the duo.
But many peers immediately dismissed the idea.

History and recent trends are on their side without question.

There has been a large volume of contradictory statements by Democrats and Republicans on nominating a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

President Barack Obama has claimed that he is duty-bound to nominate a judge for the highest judicial court in the land, and that his nominee is entitled to an up-and down vote. Conversely, several Republicans have been arguing that tradition dictates that a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court nominee do not take place in an election year.

As it happens, none of these claims hold water.

Election year Supreme Court vacancies have been filled by Senate-approved nominees in all six occurrences since 1900. The President certainly has the right to put forward a Supreme Court nominee in his final year, but he has no obligation to do so. And the Senate is not duty-bound to confirm, or even vote upon, his nominee, election year or not.

President Obama’s push to obtain a vote on his eventual nominee also puts him at odds with a Democratic tradition of thwarting Republican judicial nominees.

In asserting that Republicans need to vote on his eventual nominee, President Obama has been compelled to publicly “regret” via his spokesman his own efforts, as senator from Illinois, to filibuster Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s nomination in 2005.

Similarly, Vice President Joe Biden must be regretting his public assertion in the 1992 election year (which can be seen here) that the then-Democratic-controlled Senate should refuse consideration, let alone a vote, on a hypothetical George H.W. Bush Supreme Court nominee before that year’s presidential elections. The fact that Mr. Biden was then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman makes it all the more difficult for Democrats to shrug off.

So what is the history regarding Supreme Court nominees?

A Marine veteran has filed a lawsuit after being banned from his daughter’s school for more than a year after he raised objections to the school’s pro-Islam curriculum.

John Kevin Wood is asking a judge to remove the ban so he can watch his daughter graduate from La Plata High School in Charles County, Maryland.

“She’s in the final semester of her senior year, and as it stands right now, she’s going to have to go through that life experience without her dad there,” said Kate Oliveri, a lawyer from the Michigan-based Thomas More Law Center who is representing the Wood family.

In October 2014, Wood’s daughter showed him several assignments for her 11th grade World History class in which she was required to memorize the Five Pillars of Islam and to write and recite the shahada, the Muslim statement of faith that says “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

According to school papers submitted to federal court, the curriculum said that most Muslims’ faith is “stronger than the average Christian.”

Wood, who lost two friends in combat during Operation Desert Storm, said the school wasn’t just teaching Islam but was promoting it in a way that amounted to an assault on his family’s Christian faith.

Less than a week ago, French lawmakers voted to extend the state of emergency initiated in November after the Paris jihadist attacks that left 130 dead and 367 wounded. By law, the emergency status vests police with expanded powers to conduct raids, seize property, and detain persons without judicial oversight, much less trial.

It was impossible not to think of France this morning as President Obama once again agitated for the closing of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. It is an unkept promise to the hard Left from his 2008 campaign that the president has been working on since his first full day in office seven years ago.

The case has not gotten better with time, unless we factor in the extortionate tactics of the community organizer. Obama has released so many jihadists to other countries that the Gitmo prisoner population is down to 91 (according to the New York Times). Obama, in his brass knuckles way, is telling Congress, “Either shutter this place or I’ll spring even more committed terrorists to return to the jihad.” The threat is his most persuasive argument.

The rest of his case is as preposterous as it ever was. Or worse, actually. The president claims that our allies in the fight against “violent extremism” are dismayed by Gitmo’s continuing operation. Really? Does anyone really believe that the French are worried about Guantanamo Bay when they have suspended their own civil-liberties protections to deal with the prospect of more mass-murder attacks? How about other European countries grappling with the fallout of “migrants” overrunning their territories? Think Gitmo is at the top of their list?

RELATED: Closing Guantanamo Bay Will Only Empower Our Enemies

The most laughable claim Obama makes is that Gitmo drives terrorist recruitment. This has always been a specious assertion, made all the more remarkable now by Obama’s campaign to bring thousands of unvettable Syrian “migrants” into our country — on top of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners from Islamic countries who have come to the United States during Obama’s presidency. For the guy who is bringing the recruits here in droves to fret about recruitment is even more precious than is the urging of Gitmo’s closing as a cost-saving measure by the guy who has added $10 trillion to the national debt in just over seven years.

In any event, I’ve responded to the recruitment point several times, most recently after the San Bernardino attack in December:

[T]here are two things that drive terrorist recruitment. The first is Islamic supremacism. In a West ever more indifferent to religion and entranced by the smug assumption that our “values” are universal, the power of a conquest ideology cloaked in religion eludes us. But it seizes our enemies and burns like a fire inside them. While Obama sees America as something to apologize for, Islamists portray their jihad as the road to esteem in this life and bounty in the next. It is a heinous belief system, but belief in something always beats belief in nothing.

The second driver of terrorist recruitment is the perception that the jihadists are winning, the conviction that they will ultimately prevail. Osama bin Laden wooed young Muslims with the wisdom that people are always drawn to the strong horse and shun the weak one. While Islamic State “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi follows up each jihadist atrocity by seizing more territory and enslaving more subjects, the president of the United States follows each jihadist atrocity — Benghazi, Paris, and now San Bernardino — by releasing more jihadists from Gitmo.

It’s not Gitmo driving recruitment. It’s our president.

If you want a monument to the failure of American schools, just look around a Bernie Sanders rally. It will be full of millennials, the 83 million people born between the early 1980s and 2000s. Most of them have been educated in schools that abandoned basic skills and knowledge, and put in their place curricula designed to “improve” human nature in order to conform to progressive utopian ideals. So instead of informed citizens, we have today’s “tolerant,” “sensitive,” and “diverse” narcissists whose heads are uniformly filled with intolerant leftwing dogma and unexamined political orthodoxy.

Exhibit one is the enthusiasm for socialism on the part of many millennials. This affection for a failed ideology in turn explains their attraction to an antique hippie and self-proclaimed socialist whose only jobs his whole life have been on the public payroll in a state with fewer people than Fresno County. So no surprise that in New Hampshire 83% of the under-30 vote went for Sanders, in Iowa 84%, and in Nevada 82%. That electoral approval, of course, is predicated on massive ignorance of socialism’s historical reality. In a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, only 16% of millennials knew that socialism means some degree of government ownership of the economy. But it’s not just millennials: 43% of Democrats––and 56% of Democratic primary voters–– also view socialism favorably. That’s why Hillary Clinton is furiously tacking left in the primaries.

Nor do millennials know that Bernie’s advice to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” ignores the fact that those countries have long been reforming their welfare states and liberalizing their economies, backing away from the failed dirigiste policies that excite the Berniacs. Denmark does have a generous welfare state, but high taxes on the middle class and a regressive Value Added Tax fund these benefits. This inconvenient truth contradicts Bernie’s claim that all his promised goodies can be paid for by punitively taxing “billionaires,” whose combined total wealth couldn’t pay for one year of the federal budget, let alone the trillions of dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.

But the flip side of this love of socialism is a strange hatred of capitalism, another consequence of the degeneration of our schools, which teach very little about the history and true nature of capitalism. So all that students know are what popular culture, movie actors, and progressives teach them with caricatures of capitalism as silly as Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of currency or pin-striped Mr. Moneybags lounging at Park Place.