RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam,” Obama said.

Pelosi assured worried Americans on MSNBC that we were winning the war against ISIS on social media.

John Kerry took to calling ISIS by the derogatory Daesh epithet to prove it has nothing to do with Islam.

But winning the war of word games wasn’t enough to stop the bombings and beheadings. So American troops are back on the ground in Iraq and Syria to try and win the real non-Twitter war.

But we just can’t call it that.

While raids on ISIS targets are the core of the new strategy, they are referred to as “direct action on the ground” instead of “combat”. American soldiers aren’t “boots on the ground”, they’re just there providing “enhanced support”. The kind of enhanced support that only bullets can offer.

They’re fighting and dying as part of an “advise and assist” mission which is not to be confused with the traditional kind of “fighting and dying” mission.

In the Middle East, ships on the sea can be as important boots on the ground.
Whatever else was accomplished, the congressional hearings on Benghazi last month were a reminder that the Obama administration’s Libyan expedition failed. Libya has been in turmoil since the beginning of the Libyan civil war in 2011. American airstrikes and a no-fly zone helped a mix of moderate and Islamist groups topple Moammar Qaddafi’s brutal regime in 2011, but the country is no more stable. Libya descended into civil war again in 2014, with the internationally recognized government fighting for control of the country against Ansar al-Sharia and the Islamist New General National Congress.

The situation is much worse today. As of October 2015, the Islamic State (IS) has taken military control of the area around Sirte, Qaddafi’s birthplace. Sirte lies along the Libyan coastline, positioned between the major ports of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Islamic State now has full control of a strategically positioned coastal area in an unstable country that has become a proxy battlefield for Middle Eastern powers, and through which millions of refugees from Africa might be allowed to pass on their way to Europe.

Over the past five years of Syria’s civil war, the United States has admitted a grand total of 53 Syrian Christian refugees, a lone Yazidi, and fewer than ten Druze, Bahá’ís, and Zoroastrians combined. That so few of the Syrian refugees coming here are non-Muslim minorities is due to American reliance on a United Nations refugee-resettlement program that disproportionately excludes them. Past absolute totals of Syrian refugees to the U.S. under this program were small, but as the Obama administration now ramps up refugee quotas by tens of thousands, it would be unconscionable to continue with a process that has consistently forsaken some of the most defenseless and egregiously persecuted of those fleeing Syria.

The gross underrepresentation of the non-Muslim communities in the numbers of Syrian refugees into the U.S. is reflected year after year in the State Department’s public records. They show, for example, that while Syria’s largest non-Muslim group — Christians of the various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions — constituted 10 percent of Syria’s population before the war, they are only 2.6 percent of the 2,003 Syrian refugees that the United States has accepted since then.

The modern art of a community organizer seems fairly simple.

The proverbial agitator identifies a particular aggrieved racial, ethnic, gender, or class group that believes equality of opportunity must guarantee equality of result.

Then he “organizes” the victims by claiming that their ostensible failure to obtain parity can only be due to systematic racism, sexism, and bias by the supposed callous establishment majority (usually emblemized as callous white, male, heterosexual Christians). Myth is useful (e.g., “hands up, don’t shoot” or “one in four women on campus suffer sexual assault”).

Next he mounts a shrill campaign to demand “fairness” and “equality” (demonstrations, demonization of public figures, boycotts, media campaigns, showing up outside the homes of supposed enemies of the people, getting “in their faces,” and metaphorically “taking a gun to a knife fight,” etc.).

Overdriveonline, a trucking industry news site, blares the headline:

“EEOC awards Muslim truckers $240k after being fired for refusing to haul alcohol.” The Obama administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued a trucking company, at taxpayer expense, when two Somali Muslim truck drivers were fired for refusing to haul alcohol. Doing so, the Islamists claimed, would infringe on their religious beliefs under “Islamic law.”

From the story: “EEOC also alleged that Star Transport could have but failed to accommodate their religious beliefs.” Stunning.

The intervention by EEOC was hypocritical, discriminatory and insanely out of equilibrium when the plight of Christians in the matrimonial business who object to providing goods and services for gay weddings is contrasted. Christian businesses are being fined; forced to take “diversity” propaganda courses or closed down for refusing to “accommodate” gay weddings. Are not their religious beliefs, duly protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment and 42 U.S. Code Chapter 21B – Religious Freedom Restoration equal to the beliefs of Muslims?

Since when does Islamic law trump the U.S. Constitution and U.S. federal law? For Obama, such violations of his oath began with the first breath he took after he took his inaugural oath. In fact, the scofflaw-in-chief gave us a glimpse of his personal religious preferences when, during his “Apology Tour,” he proclaimed to the world that, “The United States is no longer a Christian nation.” Had he taken the time to apply his finger to the nation’s pulse, he would have learned that an ABCNEWS/Beliefnet poll found that, “Eighty-three percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.” Granted, that number has diminished some since he first sat in the big chair, but it’s still north of 70%.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced recently that she expects 10 million people to be enrolled in health-care coverage through ObamaCare’s exchanges by the end of next year. What she didn’t mention was that in March of last year the Congressional Budget Office predicted that 21 million people would be enrolled in 2016—more than double the new estimate.

The administration says the difference can be explained away: For instance, fewer companies dropped coverage than expected, thus fewer employees are migrating from employer-sponsored plans to the exchanges. “We haven’t seen much of a shift at all,” Richard Frank, a health and human services assistant secretary, told USA Today.

But the question isn’t where Americans are getting health insurance. It is whether ObamaCare will provide more Americans with affordable insurance for decades to come.

Supporters credit ObamaCare with helping nine million uninsured Americans find coverage in 2014. But a new paper from the Heritage Foundation, however, suggests that nearly all of the increase came from adding nearly nine million people to the Medicaid rolls.

The Justice Department has permitted Denny Hastert to plead guilty to a felony money-laundering violation. Under the plea agreement, the 73-year-old former House speaker may face no more than six months’ imprisonment and, quite likely, no jail time at all.

This has some legal experts grumbling. One, according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, insists Hastert got a “sweet deal.” The critique is worth exploring. In a recent weekend column, I visited “sentencing reform,” Washington’s latest fetish. Hastert’s case is a good example of how badly the bipartisan project misses the mark: failing to address the real problem, which is over-criminalization, not over-incarceration; and encouraging judges to avoid imprisoning offenders by fictional “fact” pleading.

An FBI investigation uncovered that Hastert paid nearly $1 million in “hush money” to conceal “misconduct” that occurred decades ago. The nature of the misconduct is not specified in the indictment and has not been publicly confirmed, so ordinarily I would not describe it. In this case, however, the misconduct is key to understanding why a prominent figure has been induced to plead guilty to a serious charge, and why the “slap on the wrist” Hastert is getting has some people grousing. We thus take note of Mr. Gerstein’s explanation that “sources have alleged the behavior involved sexual contact with a male student while Hastert was a coach and high school teacher several decades ago.”

In a tight spot and need some cash? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is here to help. All you need to do is convert to Islam then refuse to do your job on religious grounds, and significant financial rewards await you.

Last Thursday [1], the EEOC won $240,000 for two Muslim truck drivers who had been fired for refusing to transport beer. The lucky winners, Somali Muslims Mahad Abass Mohamed and Abdkiarim Hassan Bulshale, had been fired by trucking company Star Transport. Their refusal was based on Islamic law.

One hadith describes Aisha, Muhammad’s beloved child bride, recounting:

When the last verses of Surat-al-Baqara [chapter two of the Qur’an] were revealed, the Prophet went out (of his house to the Mosque) and said, “The trade of alcohol has become illegal.” (Bukhari 3.34.429)

Due to this passage, Muslims not only cannot drink alcohol, but they cannot traffic in it, including driving it from one place to another. However, this rule is not hard and fast: Muslims who sell alcohol in convenience stores or do the job Mahad Abass Mohamed and Abdkiarim Hassan Bulshale were told to do can justify it by pointing to the Islamic principles of taysir, meaning “facilitation” or making things easier, and darura, the permission to do something that is normally illegal out of some necessity.