RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_catastrophic_death_of_fairness.html

Some social psychologists believe that humans are biologically wired to seek “fair” relationships with others.  Some theologians believe that the soul’s capacity for distinguishing right from wrong leads a moral person toward the same result.  Whether genetically or spiritually inclined to prefer fair outcomes, we humans are not comfortable around those who cheat and prosper from duplicity.  Cheating is ugly and therefore despised.

Systemic cheating, however, now dominates Western life.  Elevating “diversity for diversity’s sake” over all other metrics for gauging achievement has reduced merit and hard work to second-class virtues.  Rewarding illegal aliens with amnesty has cheapened the sacrifices of those lawful immigrants who have struggled to integrate into their new home countries.  Allowing delusional men to dominate women’s sports has cheated female athletes of a fair playing field for pursuing excellence.  In ways big and small, “woke” governments, corporations, and academic institutions cheat Western citizens of the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their own labors.

Of course, systemic cheating is disguised in language that sounds noble.  “Woke” Marxists use “fairness” jiujitsu to force disingenuous and unprincipled change. 

Unfairly promoting a less talented person over a more talented person because of his respective skin colors is celebrated as a victory for “diversity” — a reminder that in the twenty-first century, racists are still obsessed with how a person looks at the expense of what thoughts occupy his mind.  Without any public debates or votes, governments have replaced “equal treatment under the law” with “equitable” redistribution — or, in layman’s terms, “special treatment under the law” — so that certain classes of people can benefit at the expense of others.  

In an amazing instance of Orwellian “doublespeak,” the State categorizes those classes that are unfairly rewarded as “underprivileged” and the people against whom it discriminates as “privileged.”  Never in human history have people with “privilege” felt so marginalized.  All this cheating is done for the stated purpose of “including” many different kinds of people, but it depends entirely on “excluding” people to obtain fraudulently manufactured and prejudiced results.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/still-delusional-after-all-these-years/

Recently Barack Obama opined on Israel’s war with Hamas, and predictably reprised all the received wisdom that our politicians on both sides of the aisles have indulged since 9/11. One comment in particular evoked one of the more dangerous takes on the conflict with modern jihadism––that this venerable doctrine of Islam is some sort of heresy or extremism that doesn’t represent Muslims worldwide.

In the context of the current war with Hamas, according to ABC news, Obama said of Israel’s campaign,  “‘There are people right now who are dying who have nothing to do with what Hamas did,’ Obama said, making the distinction between Palestinians who live in Gaza and the militant group Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.”

We’ll pass over the mendacious euphemism “the militant group Hamas,” and the implication that the accurate description “terrorist organization” is merely a prejudiced slur by U.S. security agencies. More important is Obama’s variation on the cringing and dishonest phrase “nothing to do with what Islam,” an echo of the Western apologists after 9/11 who regularly chanted this lie.

The use of this duplicitous formula transcends political party. After 9/11, the Bush administration no doubt thought that such rhetorical distortions would pacify Muslims and show them that we’re “not at war with Islam.”  Verbal preemptive cringes abounded in Bush’s speeches, such as the following: “Our enemy [al Qaeda] doesn’t follow the great traditions of Islam. They’ve hijacked a great religion . . . All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true face of Islam . . . It’s a faith based upon love not hate.”

Anybody even vaguely familiar with traditional Islamic doctrine and history knows that this flabby ecumenicalism is at best well-meaning wishful thinking, at worst a talking-point for malignant apologists. Listen to Ibn Khaldun (d.1406), one of Islam’s most significant and revered historians and philosophers: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” So too, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), another important Muslim theorist of jihad: “Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.” Are these titans of Islamic thought “hijackers” or “heretics”?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-executive-branch-anonymous-letter-joe-biden-israel-ceasefire-gaza-hamas-f22374d0?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden has been learning lately what life is like for Republican Presidents. Parts of the deep state, to borrow a phrase, are revolting in opposition to his support for Israel against the Hamas terrorists responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre.

News reports say that no fewer than 500 appointees and staff from 40 agencies, including the National Security Council and the Justice Department, have sent Mr. Biden a letter demanding that he call for a cease-fire and “de-escalation” between Israel and Hamas: “Americans do not want the U.S. military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle East.” The signatories are bravely anonymous.

The same is true of more than 1,000 employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development, who have reportedly signed a similar letter. “We believe,” it says, “that further catastrophic loss of human life can only be avoided if the United States Government calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.” The letter adds that its backers are withholding their names out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.”

https://dianebederman.com/if-trump-had-been-president-october-7-2023/

If Trump had been President of the USA on October 7, 2023, there would never have been the October 7 Massacre of 1200 Jews in Israel, and the taking of more than 220 hostages: Israelis and from many other countries. And there would be no talk today about a possible Middle East war or God forbid WWIII. Then again, the elites across America love war. Trump didn’t.

If Trump had been President, Iran would have been a mere shell of itself. A country living in poverty where the women freedom fighters would have encouraged the men to fight back and get rid of the evil Khamenei. Iran would have been poor because Trump placed sanctions on her and stopped the sale of oil; the source of billions of dollars in income; particularly to China. China is principally responsible for keeping the Iranian regime in business through oil purchases that have totaled more than $80 billion since President Biden assumed office in January 2021 to September 2023. Iran exported nearly 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in October, sustaining its average for 2023. This is up 80% from the 775,000 barrels per day Iran averaged under the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy, according to United Against Nuclear Iran, the group of former U.S. Ambassador Mark Wallace and Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose Tanker Tracker generates the best public data we have.

Iran would have been on her knees with Trump as President. There would never have been money to buy armaments for Hamas or Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And now the Biden administration is considering a sanctions waiver on Iran that would free up 10 billion dollars.

“Why should Iran have any access to more than $10 billion after sponsoring one of the worst terrorist attacks against American citizens and the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? It would make more sense to freeze all of these accounts and keep every penny out of Tehran’s hands.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-food-insecurity-lie/

President Joe Biden says 24 million Americans “suffer from food insecurity!”

News anchors were shocked that there is “food insecurity in the richest country in the world!” ABC hosts turned “insecurity” into “hunger.”

But in my new video, Rachel Sheffield, who researches welfare policy at the Heritage Foundation, explains, “Food insecurity is not the same thing as hunger. It just means that they had to rely on cheaper foods, store-brand alternatives … or reduce variety.”

Really? The alarm about “food insecurity” is based on that? Well, yes. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its fine print, admits that “for most food-insecure households, the inadequacies were in the form of reduced quality and variety of food rather than insufficient quantity.”

“They always want to create a crisis,” I say to Sheffield.

“Government programs want to keep themselves going,” she replies.

She’s talking about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; the Women, Infants and Children program; the National School Lunch Program and the other constantly growing handouts that make up America’s welfare system.

The biggest effect of these handouts is to harm the people they want to help. They harm people by making them dependent on government.

Before government’s War on Poverty began, Americans were steadily lifting themselves out of poverty. Year after year, the number of people living below the poverty line dropped.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tell-the-truth-about-law-enforcement-and-crime

Public safety has been destroyed in many American cities because of an idea. That idea holds that any law-enforcement activity that has a disparate impact on black criminals is racist. Disparate impact is why many police departments have dismantled gang databases and antigun task forces, why they have given up on public-order enforcement, and why they have all but eliminated car stops. It is why “progressive” district attorneys have stopped prosecuting trespassing, shoplifting, fare evasion, and resisting arrest, why bail is being eliminated, and why judges let repeat offenders back on the street. Disparate impact is the reason that chain stores like Starbucks and Walgreens would rather close high-loss outlets than accost thieves.

Until the disparate-impact conceit is demolished, permanently restoring law and order will be impossible. Any short-term gains from renewed enforcement will remain vulnerable to the charge that they have come at the expense of racial equity. Conservatives can call for re-policing all they want. Unless they explicitly discredit the idea that incarcerating black criminals is racist, however, Democratic politicians and policymakers will be able to use disparate rates of stops and arrests to roll back constitutional crime control whenever they have the power to do so.

Only a president has the national reach to engage this most difficult of all “conversations about race.” If the next president does not have the fortitude to do so personally, his attorney general should assume the responsibility. The next AG should lay out in a national speech the dilemma facing law enforcement: in order to save black lives, police officers will have to stop and arrest black criminals in numbers greatly disproportionate to the black share of the population. He should give the victimization facts: black juveniles were shot at 100 times the rate of white juveniles since the George Floyd race riots; blacks between the ages of ten and 24 were killed in gun homicide at 24 times the rate of whites in that age cohort. Those black victims are not being gunned down by America’s alleged white supremacists or by the police; they are being gunned down by other blacks, at rates equally disproportionate to the black population share. Providing justice to those black victims will require putting more black criminals in prison.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Critics of “moral clarity” claim the world cannot be divided into good and evil, that there are too many nuances. As well, these critics tell us that the words “moral clarity” suggest exclusionary views, such as that expressed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

In my opinion they misunderstand the words, as they assign a moral equivalence based on claimed beliefs. The fact that Nazis justified the extermination of the Jewish people as a means to achieve a pure, Aryan race was an act of pure evil, as was their concept of lebensraum. It was evil that drove Hamas terrorists to parachute in and slaughter Jewish civilians, including children, in the most horrific manner. None of what they did could be compared to Israelis giving Palestinians two weeks to leave northern Gaza before sending in armed forces to ferret out terrorists in tunnels beneath Gaza City’s civilian population. Moral clarity is the ability to think clearly about good and evil, of what is right and what is wrong. There are times when wars are fought for good causes. Moral clarity implies the existence and ubiquity of evil.

However, among the extreme Left, the words have become pejorative, as they associate them with American conservatives. They link them to Ronald Reagan, whose popularity has never sat well with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party, and they were popularized by William Bennett in Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, a book that highlighted the tension between good and evil. Moral clarity demands the United States has a strong defense, the ability to confront enemies and support allies. 

As Natan Sharansky wrote in the rubric above, the challenge for western democracies is to acknowledge that evil exists. Those living under dictatorships, victims of Ku Klux Klan marauders in the early part of the 20th Century, and Jews subject to anti-Semitism today understand how evil infests individuals. In his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through the human heart.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-lesson-for-rashida-tlaib-hamas-israel-moral-equivalence-778f2cbb?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

“When Rashida Tlaib makes the case for moral equivalence, she is outrageous and extreme. But when Barack Obama does, his argument is smooth and sophisticated. That’s what makes it all the more pernicious.”

Poor Rashida Tlaib. If only she had Barack Obama’s ability to couch the argument for moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas in terms acceptable to polite society.

Because she doesn’t, the Michigan Democrat was censured last Tuesday by the House for her comments following the Hamas barbarities of Oct. 7. In the end, 22 of her fellow Democrats voted alongside most Republicans for censure. But in her statement in response, Ms. Tlaib—the sole Palestinian-American in Congress—remained unapologetic.

“Many of them,” she said of her colleagues, “have shown me that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them, but I still do not police their rhetoric or actions.” This from a congresswoman who posted a video on social media accusing Joe Biden of supporting the “genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Then there’s the Obama approach. At about the same time Ms. Tlaib was drawing condemnation even from Democrats, the “Pod Save America” podcast released a clip from an interview. In it Mr. Obama also made a case for moral equivalence. But he went about it in an underhanded manner that is more damaging to Democratic unity and support for Mr. Biden’s policy than anything Ms. Tlaib could do.

It’s all wrapped in his call for an admission of “complexity.” The 44th president did declare that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was “horrific” and unjustified. But complexity means it’s also true the “occupation” was “unbearable” for Palestinians and that “nobody’s hands are clean.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/13/the-damage-of-the-white-privilege-smear/

One of the many satanic paradoxes of the Third Reich’s architecture of the Final Solution was the requirement—mandated after the 1939 outbreak of the war—that Jews anywhere under German rule or occupation had to wear a yellow badge or armband with the Star or David.

Yet was not all this elaborate bureaucratic need for identification embarrassing to the Nazi apparat?

After all, if Nazi doctrine about supposedly manifest Aryan “racial” superiority—Nordic looks and build, superior intelligence, stable disposition—were so persuasive, then why the need for Jews to identify themselves?

In contrast, the Star-of David IDs were prima facie proof that the entire bankrupt Nazi project was based on the unspoken fear that millions of Jews were indistinguishable in all respects from other Europeans.

In other words, on the fascist right, anti-Semitism was predicated on the pseudo-science that Jews were not European and thus somehow racially inferior. Yet currently, the entire industry of anti-Semitic hatred has flipped, from Jews as toxic non-whites to Jews as toxic whites. The two common denominators of racial obsession and hating Jews remain the same.

One of the key reasons leftwing anti-Semites have been so effective at galvanizing campus hatred of Israel, and by association of Jews in general, is their careful effort to brand themselves DEI victims why tarring Jews with the empty white supremacy slur.

Accordingly, Jews and Israel now supposedly enjoy toxic white privilege. They are libeled as veritable white supremacists illegitimately in the Middle East to colonize “Palestine,” and as European imperialists picking up the mantle of the earlier 19th century British and French—as if a prior 400 years of Ottoman imperialism in the Middle East never occurred.

As now-privileged white victimizers, contemporary Jews are not seen as victims of the Holocaust, explaining the comfortable alliance between Islamist Holocaust deniers and the DEI crowd.

It was no accident that a racist BLM on news of the October 7 massacres quickly issued posters glorifying Hamas hang-gliding murderers.