RUTHFULLY YOURS

Maybe the separation of powers isn’t a dead letter after all. The U.S. Constitution’s core protection against tyranny got a reprieve late Monday when an appeals court upheld a federal judge’s injunction against President Obama’s unilateral immigration order.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2 to 1 that a legal challenge by 26 states has a high probability of success and thus the regulation should not be enforced until the case is decided on the merits. On Tuesday the Administration said it will appeal to the Supreme Court, which means this could be a landmark ruling before Mr. Obama leaves office.

The careful, 70-page opinion by Judge Jerry Smith eviscerates the Administration’s unprecedented claims of executive authority. The Homeland Security Department says it has executive discretion to decide whom to deport, but its detailed marching orders to immigration agents provide for almost no discretion in handling individual cases.

By bonfire of the academy we mean a conflict of values about the idea of a university that now threatens to undermine or destroy universities as a place of learning. Exhibit A is the ruin called the University of Missouri.

In the 1960s—at Cornell, Columbia, Berkeley and elsewhere—the self-described Student Left occupied buildings with what they often called “non-negotiable” demands. In the decades since, the academy—its leaders and faculties—by and large has accommodated many of those demands regarding appropriate academic subjects, admissions policies and what has become the aggressive and non-tolerant politics of identity and grievance.

This political trajectory arrived at its logical end this week at Missouri with the abrupt resignation of the school’s president, quickly followed by its number two official. The kids deposed them, as their liberal elders applauded either out of solidarity or cowardice.

This was an interesting presentation of often stark views.

“We witness our Christian faith and proclaim the word of God in the land where Islamic fundamentalists and extremists are in power,” stated recently a Pakistani Christian to a Washington, DC, area Christian gathering. Speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals back home, “Thomas” expressed with somewhat rudimentary English stark views about Islam during a church reception for about 30 and subsequent interview.

“You are very much free and blessed people,” Thomas noted for his American audience who “do not need guards while you worship.” By contrast, reception displays on Pakistani Christians included a photo of an adolescent pastor’s son standing guard with an assault rifle before a church. This “son is protecting the worshippers by putting his life in danger and father is preaching the gospel to save the life of the worshippers,” he stated.

An interviewed Thomas noted how guards averted massive casualties during a March 2015 attack on Lahore, Pakistan’s Catholic Church by preventing suicide bombers from entering, yet he distrusted Muslims in Pakistani security forces. While he perceived a lax official response to attacks upon Christian institutions or mosques of Pakistan’s Shiite minority, the army responded vigorously to a 2014 terrorist massacre at a Peshawar army children’s school. Christians often insist upon having private Christian guards for whom “their brothers and sisters are inside” church.

The Bible Believers benefited from living in nation governed by the rule of law. Under Sharia law, they would be condemned to death.

Daniel Greenfield ran an interesting story on November 9th, “The Atlantic: Freedom of Speech Victimizes Muslims,” about the Bible Believers case, in which an en banc court reversed the group’s responsibility for basically “disturbing the peace” of an Arab American festival in 2012.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday found that Wayne County violated the constitutional rights of a group of religious proselytizers who were kicked out of an Arab-American cultural festival in 2012.

In a rare reversal of a previous decision from three-judge appeals court panel, an en banc review by 15 judges yielded a majority ruling that Wayne County is civilly liable to the group of evangelical Christians who sued after being ordered to leave the festival by sheriff’s deputies.

A recent study published by the National Academy of Sciences, co-authored by a Nobel laureate, revealed a spiraling death rate since 1999 of Americans described as middle-aged (45 to 54), middle/working-class (without a college degree) whites (apparently self-identified as such).

That is not supposed to happen to sizable demographic groups in our postmodern societies. The regression to shortened lifespans is more akin to the trend in the old Soviet Union than in the United States. The supposed culprits are inordinate use of alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal), psycho-social maladies leading to increased suicide, and legal and financial problems. In search of root causes, are we to think that the white working class eats less healthy foods than, say, blacks and Hispanics of the same class? Do whites visit the doctor less? Or are they more prone by nature to disease and culturally induced illnesses? The answer seems probably not.

The study’s findings belie conventional wisdom, which has focused almost exclusively on the plight of minorities, who in many areas have proven unable to achieve parity, ostensibly because of endemic and lethal white racism.

“He was one man, in one moment, changing the course of an action during one of the toughest battles of the war.”
Remember that quaint old notion called “responsibility”? It’s hit a patch of rough times. As problems and costs and scandals pile up in the shadow of the expanding American nanny state, as horrors mount in a world bereft of American strategic vision and leadership, it happens far too often that the buck stops nowhere. Instead, as far as our political elite are inclined to offer anything even resembling accountability, what we hear far too often these days is a phrase that has been hijacked as the ultimate non-apology: “I take responsibility.”

How many times in recent years have you heard that phrase on the news, uttered from some pinnacle of power – “I take responsibility” — and wondered what on earth it really means? What are the consequences of taking this ever more amorphous thing called responsibility?

Not that this vacuity of word and deed is confined to American politics. If anything, Washington has increasingly imbibed techniques perfected years ago by the likes of the United Nations, an outfit devoted to seeking control over everything in its path while taking genuine responsibility for almost nothing.

A 64-page terrorist operations manual recently released by an Islamic State supporter on Twitter underscores concerns that the U.S. homeland remains firmly in the group’s crosshairs. FBI Director James Comey told U.S. intelligence officials last month that the Bureau has approximately 900 ongoing Islamic State-related inquiries, most of which involve homegrown suspects.

The manual, “Safety and Security guidelines for Lone Wolf Mujahideen,” provides detailed instructions on successfully carrying out terror attacks.

“I think the manual format gives them sort of a how-to process and therefore it’s another indication of the danger we face in dealing with these self-motivated jihadists,” said former FBI Associate Deputy Director Oliver “Buck” Revell. “I think it shows a great deal of critical analysis at the heart of the movement and that they are certainly knowledgeable, and they are not ignorant of our methodologies and even our technical capabilities, and we would be wise not to underestimate their capabilities.”

Hamtramck, Mich., has elected what is believed to be the first U.S. city council with a majority of Muslims, as a recent wave of immigrants put its stamp on the longtime Polish enclave.

“I’m proud to be an American Muslim, but we were elected by everyone in Hamtramck and we’re going to serve everyone,” said Saad Almasmari, a 28-year-old Yemeni-American who was elected to the council by receiving the most votes of the six candidates on the ballot. Mr. Almasmari, who moved to the U.S. in 2009 and became a citizen in 2011, expects to take office in early January.

After last week’s election, four of the city council’s six seats will be filled by Muslims, including three who are from Bangladesh. One of those council members was an incumbent not up for re-election.
Saad Almasmari, 28, was elected to the city council by garnering the most votes of the six candidates running.
Saad Almasmari, 28, was elected to the city council by garnering the most votes of the six candidates running. Photo: Saad Almasmari

A city of 22,000 that is surrounded on all sides by Detroit, Hamtramck was once a haven for immigrants who were mainly Polish and Catholic. But more recently, churches have given way to mosques. The Polish population has dropped to about 11% today from 90% in 1970s. Since 2004, the Muslim call to prayer has been broadcast to the city’s streets.

Arab immigrants, mostly from Yemen, now make up 24% of Hamtramck’s population, according to the Census Bureau. Other Muslim immigrants have come from Eastern Europe and Asia. By some estimates, the city’s Muslim population has surpassed 50%.

“They’re the new majority, and those numbers are being reflected at the ballot box,” said Sally Howell, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who published a history of the Muslim communities in Detroit last year.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/10/stephen-coughlin-on-muslim-brotherhood-above-the-law-in-america-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss Muslim Brotherhood: Above the Law in America, unveiling how stealth Jihadists are now out of reach of investigators, national security analysts and members of Congress. [See also Stephen on the special Glazov Gang: How American Leadership is Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.]

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