RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/bill-barr-on-the-forces-of-division-in-america/

EXCERPTS:

Now back in private life, Barr has lost none of his critical acumen. His speech on May 20 for the Alliance Defending Freedom is a case in point. “[T]he greatest threat to religious liberty in America today,” he said, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system.” Barr is right: 

We are rapidly approaching the point—if we have not already reached the point—at which the heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country.

Barr traced the evolution of the dominant attitude about the relationship between religion and government-financed public schools through three phases. In the first phase, which ran from the educational reform movement of the early 19th century through the mid-20th century, public education was seen as inculcating the values of good citizenship and, beyond that, a moral outlook that was grounded explicitly in Protestant Christianity. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington spoke in this context of “Anglo-Protestant values,” a phrase that drew instant obloquy from secularists and other radicals who fell over themselves trying to decide which was worse, the “Anglo” part or the “Protestant” part. 

“The key point,” Barr noted, was that until the 1970s, this “anodyne form of Christianity” offered a “generally acceptable ‘pan-Protestantism’” that was taught in public schools throughout the country. Accommodations were easily made for Catholics, Jews, and members of other religions, but the dominant note were those “Anglo-Protestant” values that Huntington extolled. “Throughout American his- tory,” Huntington noted, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.” 

But things took an ominous turn in the 1960s and 1970s. It was then that the ACLU nuts and other members of the Left “embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground.” School prayer? Out. A crèche at Christmas? Absolutely not. This was phase two: the effort to purge the public square, beginning with public educational institutions of all remnants of religious identity. This is what Barr called “secularization by subtraction.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

“The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.”
— Daniel 2:33

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be “enlightened” by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists. The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia. It wasn’t just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product—educating students—was defective. No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge. More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt. 

But until recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.

All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.

Protect or Proselytize?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/congressional-enablers-genocidal-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin/

Hamas is explicit in wanting to kill not only all Israelis but all Jews. The organization states as much in its charter and declares that goal a religious duty. Hamas has sought to translate the genocidal intent into action, including through innumerable missile attacks targeting Israel’s civilian population since the terror group gained control of Gaza in 2007. 

Yet Hamas has a coterie of apologists, supporters, cheerleaders and other enablers in Congress, including those who criticize Israel and are silent about Hamas’s actions and objective.

Hamas missile barrages doubly fit the internationally recognized definitions of war crimes, by virtue of their objective of killing civilians and by virtue of their use of Gazan civilian areas as launching sites for their attacks, thus endangering Palestinians in Gaza. Yet this too has not dissuaded Hamas’s Congressional enablers.

In initiating its latest missile war against Israel, Hamas justified doing so by claiming Israel was seeking to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem and also that Israel was attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple Mount.

The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. But the tenants have refused to pay and it is in response to this that the courts have for some years ordered the vacating of the property. This is one of Hamas’  justifications for firing over 4,000 missiles at Israeli civilians, a justification parroted by members of Congress.

The other justification, that Israel was threatening Al Aqsa, has been a rallying cry for virtually a century by Palestinian leaders seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews. In 1929, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the most prominent figure among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to choreograph assaults on Jews that took some 130 lives. According to reports at the time, such as those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen, Husseini also produced and distributed bogus photographs of a supposedly demolished Jerusalem mosque in hopes of instigating the murder of Jews in the Mandate territory and beyond.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/biden-brings-islamic-activists-investigate-us-daniel-greenfield/

A decade ago, Hina Shamsi was fighting on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation whose leaders had been convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

As the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Shamsi, a Pakistani citizen, had fought fiercely for the Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “We all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names,” she recently declared.

But now the Pakistani advocate for Islamic terrorists has a new job: going after our soldiers.

Shamsi (pictured above left) is one of the terror lawyers who appears on a list of partners for the Biden administration’s crackdown on “extremism” in the military. The only kind of extremism that Shamsi appears to be an expert on is the Islamic kind and her expertise has been in denying it.

Furthermore, at least as of 2017, Shamsi had described herself as a Pakistan citizen with permanent legal residency in America.

She’s not the only apparent Pakistani citizen tasked by Biden to go after our troops.

Take Faiza Patel, another Pakistani immigrant, who co-wrote an article arguing against designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The article claimed that “the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization, a political party, and a social service provider” and that it had “disavowed violence decades ago.”

That would come as news to Hamas and its other active Jihadist network members.

In another co-written article, Faiza Patel claimed that laws against Sharia were Islamophobic.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/24/the-population-dud-paul-ehrlich-call-your-office/

There’s an old saying among economists, demographers, actuaries and sociologists: “Demographics is destiny.” If that’s true, and it certainly appears to be, America could be in very big trouble.

Back in 1970, leftist Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned in his sensationalist book, “The Population Bomb,” that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and the depletion of our natural resources. As we all know, it didn’t happen.

Indeed, natural resources have never been more abundant, based on prices we pay, as the late economist Julian Simon predicted in making a very public1980 wager with Ehrlich about the future. Virtually every measurable form of pollution has fallen sharply in the intervening years. And billions of people were pulled out of poverty, all during a time of strong population growth.

In short, Ehrlich and his legions of doomsday followers couldn’t have been more wrong.

In fact, the real problem we face today is exactly the opposite: People in the U.S. are no longer having enough babies. That fertility decline shows in a dramatic slowdown in population growth. And no, don’t blame COVID-19 for that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/forgetting-justice-marshall-11621806240?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The University of Illinois board of trustees last week entered a no-confidence vote against America’s greatest Supreme Court Chief Justice. Starting in July, the John Marshall Law School in Chicago will be known simply as the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. The press release cites Marshall’s “role as a slave trader, slave owner of hundreds of slaves, pro-slavery jurisprudence, and racist views.”

This is the go-to progressive indictment of American historical figures. Never mind that Marshall’s muscular jurisprudence as Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835 forged a national government and economy powerful enough to finally smash slavery a generation after his death.

The U.S. is awash in iconoclasm, from Washington, D.C.’s bid to erase Benjamin Franklin from a city building, to the San Francisco school board’s vote to rename Abraham Lincoln High School. But the astonishing progressive turn on Marshall—law blogger Josh Blackman notes another law school may also cut ties—carries its own significance, intended or not.

Marshall’s legacy is at the heart of current Supreme Court debates. In a speech last month cautioning against Court-packing, Justice Stephen Breyer appealed to Marshall’s legal authority. He explained how Marshall deftly “strengthened the norm of judicial review” despite resistance from Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-jews-vs-the-world/

As a weak and sclerotic Democratic leadership cowers before the anti-Israel zealotry of the Squad and its acolytes in the House of Representatives, American Jews are getting a glimpse of what the future may hold: a return to a not-so-distant past in which Jews stood alone to face either slaughter or survival.

There are differences between now and then, of course. The Jews now have a state and an army, facts that provide the fig leaf for the new anti-Semitism now exhibited by left-wing Democrats, academics, and Jewish radicals. The old hatred has found new life in characterizing Jews as oppressors and the genocidal Hamas as victim.

In a kind of provincial stupidity the left would abhor in almost any other context, the liberal elite has conflated caricatures of the Palestinian experience with that of the minority experience in the United States.

The left-wing congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), his anti-Semitism cloaked in the argot of the social justice warrior, has called on Israel to stop brutalizing and murdering “Black and brown bodies.”

Members of the Princeton University faculty on Tuesday released a similar statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that rejects what they call “Jewish supremacy”—an inartful attempt to liken Jews to their tormentors in the Ku Klux Klan.

The faculty statement will have no impact on world events, but it sends a clear message to Jewish students at the university. It will be familiar to any Jew who managed to sneak into Princeton between its founding in 1746 and the infamous “dirty bicker” of 1958, in which Jews were systematically excluded from the school’s social clubs. University-sanctioned anti-Semitism has been the rule, not the exception, at Princeton.

Finally, there are the Jews who will give cover for this Jew-hatred. Many signed the Princeton letter. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who made a name for herself arguing that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” has a Jewish spokesman. Hamas has retained a Jewish lawyer, too.

We don’t despair for two reasons.

First, the enmity of the world around us is the strand that connects the Jews of today to their ancient ancestors.

The brief moment in which the majority of the world’s remaining Jews found safety in Israel and the United States is a historical aberration, but Jewish culture has well preserved the outsider mentality that will be necessary as we brace for the return to normalcy.

Second, Zionism was incubated and refined for moments just like this. The good will of the United States was a blessing for Israel; it was not, however, a prerequisite for Zionism’s success. The very premise of the movement was that the Jews could rely on no one but themselves for their own survival.

And for American Jews who can imagine no other home and no other life, we still have righteous and stalwart allies, from our Evangelical Christian friends to Republicans in Congress (with the notable and ignoble exception of Indiana senator Todd Young) to the vast majority of the American people.

Despite a steady diet of anti-Israel invective by the media, Americans seem largely immune to the prejudices and fads of the country’s elite: The latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that 63 percent of Americans have the decency and common sense to say that protecting Israel should be either “very important” or “somewhat important” to the United States.

The future may yet be as dark as the past, but not yet. Hamas and its many sympathizers here and around the world will have to endure at least another day of unrepentant Jewish survival.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/social_justice_rabbinic_students_betray_the_jewish_people_in_time_of_war.html

While the young men and women of Israel are putting their lives on the line defending their homes and family, here in America we have a comfortable and self-indulgent group of rabbinical students verbally attacking Israel and giving moral support to the Hamas and Palestinian Arabs trying to destroy Israeli families. Most are from the Boston Hebrew College, the Reconstructionist Jewish Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, and they are trying to influence world opinion against Israel, which enhances the ability of the terrorists to murder more Jews.

It is a despicable act of betrayal and cowardice and should not be construed as coming from people with a higher moral standard. Sitting in their protected ivory towers – never being forced into a draft for either the American or Israeli army – they announce with detached pontification how much better they are than those “warmongering” Israelis who man their tanks, pilot fighter bombers, and raise their rifles while soldiering forward into danger.

By now, it is obvious that Hamas and other jihadists, unlike Israel, are not interested in peace and, instead, represent the most barbaric actions and attitudes, even to their own people – in contrast to Israel which tries exceedingly hard to defend itself in the least harmful and most humane way possible. Whereas, for example, Israel protects its civilians by placing women and children behind soldiers, the jihadists put their women and children in front of their men to protect the men and disarm their opponents. Whereas Israel has forfeited vast segments of its land and made other sacrificial peace offers, no P.L.O or Hamas leader has ever agreed to any formula for peace except to brazenly announce his intention that a Muslim Palestine will replace all of Israel.

But these rabbinical students seem so immersed in self-righteousness and virtue signaling, so intoxicated by a feeling that they know better than those “morally inferior” to them, they do not seem able to see the obvious Jewish side of the conflict. Rather, they identify totally with those who would gleefully murder their brothers and sisters, not because they are Israelis but precisely because they are Jews.

What they think is social justice is actually injustice and ignorance. Worse, it is an indifference to the plight of the Jewish people they hope one day to lead. They are not to be admired for “idealism;” instead, they should be scorned for taking the easy way out and masking their cowardice in lofty sounding principles of “social justice.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/violent-attacks-on-american-jews-prove-anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism/?utm_source

Tell me it’s not about Jews.

T his week, a wave of Jew-hatred broke out across the United States. You may not have heard much about it, since the media — so skilled at detecting every racist dog whistle and secret Nazi handshake — have been largely AWOL on the issue.

In West Los Angeles, men waving Palestinian flags drove in a caravan through a Jewish neighborhood, shouting slogans like “Israel kills children” through a megaphone and getting out of their cars to attack Jewish diners at tables on the sidewalk. In Manhattan, another caravan of men with Palestinian flags drove to the Diamond District, burning one person and attacking others whom they believed to be Jewish. Also in New York City, a gang of men chanting anti-Israel slogans harassed and spat at people eating outside. If there were such attacks against Muslims, the media would rightly speak of nothing else right now.

Note, these weren’t clashes between pro-Israel demonstrators and pro-Palestinian demonstrators. These were attacks by the latter on whatever Jews they could find. And they should prove the falsehood of the narrative that “anti-Zionism” is distinct from anti-Semitism.

What is consequential in the long term is the normalization of the sentiments that drive this hatred. If it’s not the Washington Post running op-eds arguing that “justice” and a Jewish homeland can’t co-exist, it’s the Obama Bros, who helped to transform the Democratic Party on the Israel issue, asking their millions of followers to donate to the Islamic Relief charity even after the Biden State Department cut ties to that organization for promoting anti-Semitism (the tweet making this appeal has since been deleted). The union at The New Yorker — once the most prestigious magazine of culture in America, with central importance to many American Jews — tweeted out “solidarity with Palestinians from the river to the sea,” the latter phrase a Hamas-inspired genocidal slogan the plain meaning of which is the elimination of Israel. (That tweet, too, was deleted and replaced with a revised one still expressing “solidarity” but, you know, sorry about that Hamas language.)

Perhaps The New Yorker union was inspired by Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), a member of the “Squad” and one of a contingent of Hamas supporters now vocally present in one of the major American political parties. One wishes the media gave the Squad’s recent House floor statements slandering the Jewish State a fraction of the attention they give the rantings of largely powerless white supremacists. The Squad gins up anti-Jewish anger by lying about U.S. aid to Israel, falsely (and ludicrously) alleging that Israel practices apartheid, lying about Israel’s counterterrorism efforts and the causes of the present conflict, and comparing Hamas’s openly anti-Semitic mission to the struggle of black Americans against police brutality. All this is going on as craven Democrats cower.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-york-man-arrested-for-setting-fire-to-jewish-school-synagogue-doj_3824932.html

A New York man was been arrested and charged for setting fire to a Jewish school and synagogue in Brooklyn, the Justice Department said.

The man, Ali Alaheri, 29, from Brooklyn is accused of piling garbage bags against the side of a yeshiva, or a Jewish school, and synagogue on 36th Street in Brooklyn, and setting the bags on fire in the early hours of May 19, according to a criminal complaint (pdf).

Alaheri was captured on surveillance footage allegedly committing the act as well as punching a man wearing traditional Hasidic garb several hours later without provocation. Federal prosecutors said Alaheri and the victim had no prior interactions before the alleged assault.

The task force officer responsible for Alaheri’s investigation said he identified the 29-year-old from photographs available in the New York Police Department database. Alaheri was arrested allegedly wearing the same clothing as was seen on the suspect in the video footage of the assault.

The criminal complaint also alleges that Alaheri was in possession of a stolen bicycle during the course of the incident.

“As alleged in the complaint and detention letter, Alaheri deliberately set fire to the sacred home of a yeshiva and synagogue, and viciously attacked a man wearing traditional Hasidic garb, demonstrating a violent hatred that cannot be tolerated,” Acting U.S. Attorney Mark J. Lesko said in a statement. “This Office strongly condemns these sorts of intentional acts of violence and we will go to every length possible to prosecute this type of conduct to the fullest extent possible.”