RUTHFULLY YOURS

2016 may well be remembered as the year that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel finally died its death—in a clinical sense, at least.

Across the U.S., state legislatures are passing bills that will outlaw state authorities from investing public funds in, and entering into contracts with, companies and other entities that engage in a boycott of Israel. This doesn’t mean that engaging in a boycott of Israel is illegal, but for anyone who cares about their bottom line, the legislation should provide a powerful incentive against its adoption.

These anti-boycott bills should properly be seen as anti-discrimination measures, and welcomed on those grounds. No U.S. state should contract with entities that enforce discriminatory policies—and boycotting Israel in the expectation that doing so will contribute to the Jewish state’s demise is, by definition, an act of discrimination. Why should taxpayer funds subsidize such bigotry? Why should jobs and revenues be sacrificed in the promotion of hatred towards an entire nation?

As we’ve learned over several years, however, in the inverted world of the boycotters, this same hatred is regarded as love and this same discrimination is regarded as justified resistance. Hence the BDS movement’s depiction of the anti-boycott bills as a conspiracy of “special interests” aimed at crushing free speech for Palestinian advocates.

This is, of course, the sort of distortion that we have come to expect from the boycotters. The truth is that, unlike France, which in October 2015 determined that BDS, as a form of discrimination, is outlawed in speech and in action, in America the advocacy of a boycott of Israel remains protected speech. As the Lawfare Project pointed out in an incisive analysis of current objections to the anti-boycott bills, “Individual consumers, acting in their own individual capacities, cannot be punished for refusing to purchase Israeli products, regardless of motivation. Supporters of BDS are also free to stage protests, circulate petitions, and otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights to advocate for boycotts of Israel, Israeli goods, and Israeli persons.” Further, with regard to the specific allegation that the anti-boycott bills violate the First Amendment, the Lawfare Project counters that the statutory prohibitions apply only to business conduct that is discriminatory, and not “advocacy, picketing, or other forms of speech in furtherance of boycotting.”

Nade Conrad’s long black hair disappeared under the cover of a lilac hijab.

“I feel different,” she said.

Conrad, who is not Muslim, had donned the scarf to show support for a Muslim friend at Normandale Community College in Bloomington.

Such acts of “hijab solidarity” are on the rise.

World Hijab Day, a global event inviting people of all faiths to post pictures of themselves in a hijab on social media, is gathering steam. It was at a World Hijab Day event at Normandale — one of several such events held at Minnesota colleges in early February — that Conrad first tried on a hijab.

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges has worn a head scarf when meeting with leaders of the city’s Somali-American community. And a professor at a Christian college in Illinois just resigned after a backlash over her choice to wear the scarf.

You can’t accuse us of conspiracy to commit murder, because we were actually solders engaged in war. That’s the argument offered by a group of five Muslim men from Minnesota who were caught last year attempting to flee the country to become ISIS fighters. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

[The defendants] are asking a federal judge to drop murder conspiracy charges on grounds that they have “combatant immunity” under both common and international law.

They say combatants are immune from criminal prosecutions for acts of war, including murder, against military targets.

…

“ISIL has engaged in atrocious acts,” attorneys for the five said in one motion. “But however one might describe it as an entity, it has an organized professional army engaged in traditional military warfare — an army with which the defendants are alleged to have intended to join in ‘combat.’ ”

Federal prosecutors who brought the case argued in a court filing last month that the men were “grossly mistaken” in claiming ISIL fighters are combatants as part of a regularly constituted military force.

Regardless of how the case pans out, do we need any further evidence that ISIS is a declared enemy of the United States? They’re literally asking to be treated as such.

It’s ironic. On the one hand, you have folks advocating that terror suspects be treated like civilians and given criminal trials with full constitutional rights. On the other hand, you have these guys trying to dodge criminal prosecution by claiming to be non-civilian combatants. Which is it? It can’t be both.

It was strange to see Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng in chains, but there she was: shackled, in purplish county-jail scrubs, heavy chains swinging across her belly. She doesn’t look like much of a menace to society; in fact, she looks exactly like what she is: an unimposing, middle-aged, female doctor in Rowland Heights, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb that is home to a large and largely well-off Asian-American community, mainly of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean background.

She is going away, for 30 years to life, sentenced late last week on three second-degree murder convictions related to deaths in which she did not have a direct hand, at murder scenes she was nowhere near. It’s the rest of the charges that tell the story: 19 counts of unlawful prescription of a controlled substance, one count of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.

Dr. Tseng is the first physician to be convicted of murder for contributing to the current epidemic of prescription-opiate addiction — the motive force behind the national heroin epidemic — through her criminally wanton over-prescription of pharmaceutical painkillers. She probably won’t be the last: Dr. Gerald Klein of Palm Beach, Fla., was charged with first-degree murder under similar circumstances last year, though in the end he was acquitted of all but one relatively minor drug charge. Other cases are in the works.

Dr. John K. Sturman Jr. had his admitting privileges revoked in the state of Indiana in 2012, and he had earlier been disciplined by state authorities in California for his irresponsible handling of opiate prescriptions. Naturally — inevitably, really — he was hired by our corrupt and incompetent Department of Veterans Affairs, to work at a VA hospital in Danville, Ill., where his responsibilities included — can you guess? — implementing an “opioid safety initiative.” Last summer, he was charged with three homicides and 16 felony counts related to improper prescriptions.

He was arrested at a VA hospital management meeting.

The VA inspector general has issued a scathing report accusing a Colorado VA clinic of manufacturing wait time data and delaying treatment for hundreds of veterans.

Washington Times:

Employees at a Colorado Springs VA clinic incorrectly reported wait times for veterans, making it appear that they got their appointments sooner than they actually did, while at least 288 veterans had to wait longer than the government’s 30-day target for an appointment, a federal watchdog said Thursday.

The VA inspector general found that 64 percent of veterans faced excessive wait times at the PFC Floyd K. Lindstrom Outpatient Clinic.

Excessive wait times ranged from 31 days to 200 days.

Staffers are also required to put veterans facing long wait times for appointments on the Veterans Choice List, which allows patients to receive outside care. However, investigators found that, for 288 veterans with excessive wait times, staffers either did not add them to the list in a timely manner or did not add them to the list at all.

One hundred veterans were denied care because they were not added to the list.

It was not made clear in the report whether staffers deliberately falsified records to make wait times appear shorter.

Amid the chaos of the 2009 holiday travel season, jihadists planned to slaughter 290 innocent travelers on a Christmas Day flight from the Netherlands to Detroit, Michigan. Twenty-three-year old Nigerian Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab intended to detonate Northwest Airlines Flight 253, but the explosives in his underwear malfunctioned and brave passengers subdued him until he could be arrested. The graphic and traumatic defeat they planned for the United States failed, that time.

Following the attempted attack, President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to “connect the dots.” He said, “this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.”
Most Americans were unaware of the enormous damage to morale at the Department of Homeland Security, where I worked, his condemnation caused. His words infuriated many of us because we knew his administration had been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to destroy the raw material—the actual intelligence we had collected for years, and erase those dots. The dots constitute the intelligence needed to keep Americans safe, and the Obama administration was ordering they be wiped away.

President Obama has forbidden immigration authorities to enforce the law at the border, bringing back the Bush-era “catch and release” policy that allows illegals to go their merry way after they’ve been caught entering the country illegally.

It led one border agent to remark, “We might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether.”

Washington Times:

The Obama administration has revived the maligned illegal immigrant “catch-and-release” policy of the Bush years, ordering Border Patrol agents not to bother arresting and deporting many new illegal immigrants, the head of the agents’ labor union revealed Thursday.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Congress that Homeland Security was embarrassed by the number of illegal immigrants not showing up for their deportation hearings, but instead of cracking down on the immigrants, the department ordered agents not to arrest them in the first place — meaning they no longer need to show up for court.

Mr. Judd said the releases are part of President Obama’s “priorities” program, which orders agents to worry chiefly about criminals, national security risks and illegal immigrants who came into the U.S. after Jan. 1, 2014. Mr. Judd said illegal immigrants without serious criminal convictions have learned that by claiming they came before 2014 — without even needing to show proof — they can be released immediately rather than being arrested.

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preaching radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny.
OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country—we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths . . . We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”

FACTS: The implication is that Islam (with over 3,000 active mosques) is under attack in America, and that Obama’s “fellow Christians” are the culprits who need to listen. Since 9/11 89 Americans have been killed in 48 separate attacks of deadly Islamic terror in the U.S. while one Muslim was killed in an apparent “revenge” attack during the same period. Only Muslims routinely target members of other faiths on American soil. The number of Muslims involved in terrorism in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2015: it more than doubled over 2014. Two-thirds of them were born in America. The resulting public perceptions are not based on prejudice or bias, but on reason and empirical evidence.