RUTHFULLY YOURS

Open borders, by any means necessary:

Nearly 100 Mexicans have sought to return to the U.S. by Wednesday’s deadline under the settlement of a class-action lawsuit that accused federal immigration officials in Southern California of failing to advise people of their rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Homeland Security in 2013 over the use of a procedure to expel people from the country known as a voluntary return. Under the procedure, people surrender rights to appear before an immigration judge and can’t legally return to the U.S. for up to 10 years. The lawsuit claimed authorities threatened people into accepting the terms.

The government didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing but agreed to changes in California that include a revised form that spells out the consequences and options of a voluntary return, new training and procedures and an information hotline for detainees seeking legal aid. The government also agreed to let some Mexicans return to the U.S. to resume efforts to stay legally.

Of course it did. Because, in the progressives’ view of the Constitution they despise, constitutional protections apply to everybody in the world — except, of course, real Americans.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-mark-twain-1450913993

A letter from Mark Twain, Dec. 23, 1890, to the editor of the New York World newspaper:

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us—the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage—may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss—except the inventor of the telephone.

It seems like a new development, but of course it has been under way for some time: a wave of extreme assimilationism, much in the form of anti-Israel agitation, in non-Orthodox American synagogues. I am writing from Brownstone Brooklyn where this neo-Hellenism seems particularly rampant.

First, there is the extreme form, (still) relatively rare: “brit shalom.”

Here is a frequently-heard witticism at a brit (or bris), a circumcision ceremony: iz shver tsu zeyn a yid, it’s hard to be a Jew. But now there are people who have found a way around the problem: let’s not do it, the circumcision, let’s just say we did. This “non-cutting naming ceremony for Jewish boys” is disingenuously called Brit Shalom, provided by the “Jews Against Circumcision.“ We are told that there are 216 “celebrants” who will (for a fee) perform the service, among them 132 rabbis, or at least people who say they are.

As it happens, two of these “celebrants” — David Mivasair of Vancouver and Brat Rosen of Chicago — enjoy considerable public attention because of their leadership positions in the radical anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace. Both men hold ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, home of the bulk of anti-Israel rabbis. But despite each man’s vigorous protestation, there is doubt about the extent to which either can be called Jewish at all. While Mivasair had his nominally Jewish congregation in Vancouver, he also, at the same time, held the title of Chaplain at the United Church of Canada. Rosen, while Rabbi of Tzedek Chicago, is also, simultaneously, the Midwest Regional Director of the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee,

An explicit embrace of non-Jewish religion, though rare among self-described Jews, is not confined to men like Mivasair and Rosen who affiliate with Christian groups. The late Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the fathers of the Jewish Renewal movement, was also a practitioner of both Buddhism and Sufism. At the time of his death he held the (modestly named) World Wisdom Chair at the (Buddhist) Naropa Institute of Colorado, and, if that weren’t enough, he was also described as a Sufi shaikh, whatever that means.

www.HumanRightsVoices.org.

Over at the United Nations, they are laying the groundwork for the 2016 American presidential election — on behalf of the Democratic party. The perceived golden ticket? Playing the victim card. Wild and repeated accusations are being hurled against the GOP of systematic racism, xenophobia, and, in particular, “Islamophobia.”

On December 18, 2015, the U.N. hosted two panels under the title “The Changing Dynamics of Islamophobia and Its Implications on Peaceful and Inclusive Societies.”

The predominant theme was victimhood. There were frequent mentions of 9/11, but not of the 2,977 who died, or their families. The alleged victims of 9/11 of interest to the U.N. gathering were the entirety of American Muslims. MuslimGirl.net editor Amani Al-Khatahtbeh told the U.N. audience: “I was in fourth grade when 9/11 happened. So I had to endure the height of Islamophobia during my formative years.” Wajahat Ali of Al Jazeera America said that 9/11 was “a baptism by fire. . . . As a result of that pain and trauma of 9/11, for my generation there is always a pre- and post-9/11.”

Each instance of radical Islamist terror was flipped the same way. Co-host Ufuk Gokcen, the U.N. representative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, had a long list of incidents bracketed by events in America: “9/11 terrorist attacks . . . and San Bernardino terrorist attacks. The level that Islamophobia has reached, and its mainstreaming into media and political discourse, is terrifying us.”

As we approach the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, there isn’t much that the president can do to change people’s opinion of him, for better or worse. His legacy, barring some extraordinary occurrence — including an extraterrestrial one, as the holiday advertising blitz for the new Independence Day movie reminds us — is baked into history.

Setting aside legislation and executive action (on which more imminently), we note that one of President Obama’s chief accomplishments has been to return the Constitution to a central place in our public discourse.

Unfortunately, the president fomented this upswing in civic interest not by talking up federalism or the separation of powers but by blatantly violating the strictures of our founding document. With his pen and his phone, and hearkening to Woodrow Wilson’s progressive view of government, he’s been taking out his frustrations with the checks and balances that inhibit his ability to “fundamentally transform” the country.

The president says, “Muslims are our neighbors,” which, in fact, they are. Newspapers, including the influential Washington Post, have run stories extoling the virtues of Muslim refugees, Muslim soldiers, and Muslims as just-about-everyone, which, in fact, they are.

And because of that, perhaps, Americans have not exactly been on an “anti-Muslim” rampage since the San Bernardino jihadist attack that killed 14 people, despite the fear-mongering of CAIR. Americans don’t need condescending lectures by the president or threats by the attorney general. There are more than 318 million people living in the United States. In 2014, law enforcement totaled 1,014 religion-based hate crimes including 609 against Jews (60%) and 154 (15%) against Muslims. The FBI totals are slightly different: 1,140 crimes, of which 648 (56.8%) were against Jews and 184 (16%) against Muslims.

Using the law enforcement totals, there was a spike in crimes against Muslims 2001 to 481 (26%), and then a decline to 155 (11%) in 2002. The numbers until 2014 ran between 105 (11%) in 2008 and 160 (12%) in 2010.

Both the patriotism and the fear in the Muslim community are real, and a spike in 2015 is likely, so caution is in order. But Americans in general aren’t viscerally — or even notably — antagonistic toward their Muslim neighbors.

On the other hand, Americans have reacted very strongly against the possibility of bringing large numbers of Syrian refugees into the country, and strongly in favor of efforts to enhance the vetting of potential immigrants — even including calls to halt Muslim immigration for a time while the process is reviewed.

President Obama continued to use executive agencies to exceed his constitutional power in 2015, none more so than the Environmental Protection Agency. The courts have pushed back on occasion, and now Congress is beginning to use its powers to do the same.

Though it didn’t get much media attention, Congress used the Congressional Review Act to put two bills blocking EPA rules on Mr. Obama’s desk the past two months. One would have nullified the EPA’s draconian new Clean Power Plan that will force lower emissions from existing power plants. A second measure is designed to block new coal-fired plants.

The Congressional Review Act allows a bill to pass without 60 votes in the Senate, and the GOP put together a bipartisan majority in both houses. Mr. Obama rejected both measures with rare pocket vetoes that let a President refuse to sign a bill when Congress is out of session, as it has been since Friday.

Someone, please, tell me that H.Res.569 is not in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Stephen Coughlin alerted me to a House Resolution introduced on December 17th, H.Res.569, “Condemning violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.114th Congress (2015-2016).” As of this writing, the country remains clueless about this development.

The resolution was introduced by Virginia Democrat Donald S. Beyer, and sponsored by Frank Pallone, a New Jersey Democrat, and endorsed by seventy-one other Representatives, most of them Democrats, and possibly a sprinkling of Republicans. The resolution has gone into committee, but one can predict with confidence that it will emerge virtually unscathed and unaltered. After all, the “victims” are Muslims, and the House wishes to put it in the record that certain of its members are against hurting anyone’s feelings.

Many of the usual suspects have endorsed the resolution: Keith Ellison, a Democrat and Muslim from Minnesota; Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Democratic National Committee; Charles Rangel, New York Democrat; and Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida. Most of the other endorsers’ names I do not recognize. They are all termites who have made careers of eating away at the rule of law and “transforming” America from a Western nation into a multicultural, welfare-statist, politically correct stewpot of no particular character.

Resolutions of this nature have a tendency to be reintroduced later as binding legislation to be forwarded to the Senate. The introduction of this resolution is not yet newsworthy, but it will be if it emerges intact from committee to be voted on by the whole House. One suspects that H.Res.569 was inspired by U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s promise to an audience of Muslim Advocates on December 3rd that she would spend efforts to combat and prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. I do not think the two-week gap between Lynch’s pronouncements and the introduction of the resolution is coincidental. It probably took two weeks to compose and fine-tune its wording.