RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillel CEO tries to speak about common position against BDS, J Street U students want him to say “occupation” is the reason for BDS.

Lots of campus organizations have their retreats in the summer. It’s a time for energizing the members before they return to campus in the fall.

J Street U, the campus arm of J Street, is having its Summer Leadership Institute this week, just outside of Washington, D.C.

On Monday, Aug. 17, Hillel International’s CEO Eric Fingerhut addressed the organization that claims to be pro-Israel. Fingerhut was looking to stake out common ground. The only issue the J Street U students wanted Fingerhut to discuss, however, was the Israeli “occupation” of the Palestinian Arabs.

Fingerhut was invited to address J Street’s SLI back in June, when he met with J Street’s leadership to discuss ways the two organizations could work together. The June meeting took place after Fingerhut, who originally agreed to speak at J Street’s annual conference, pulled out of that commitment.

The only way a Democrat can defeat Mrs. Clinton is by making an issue of her Nixon-like character.

At least since 1968, Democratic campaigns for the party’s presidential nomination have been loud and raucous affairs. This is in marked contrast to the Republicans, who have traditionally operated more like the Elks, bestowing their nomination on some distinguished elder whose “turn” it is to run—whether Bob Dole in 1996 or John McCain in 2008.

Today the parties appear to have switched. Now it is Democrats who look set to nominate their elder, Hillary Clinton, in what has so far been the wimpiest nomination fight in history.

The switch is particularly baffling given that each new day brings new headlines quoting Democratic insiders panicked by what the growing scandal over Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information means for the party. Thus the whispering campaign, here floating Joe Biden or Al Gore or John Kerry as an alternative; there noting the turnout for Bernie Sanders; here again watching the FBI seize Mrs. Clinton’s email server and fretting about a nightmare scenario where she enters the 2016 election under federal indictment or investigation by a special prosecutor.

An an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer said Prime Minister Netanyahu has more support from Israelis in opposition to the Iran deal than Moses had from Israelites during the Exodus.\Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, said on Sunday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has more support in the Jewish state for his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal than Moses had when he led the Israelites out of Egypt.

Dermer’s comment was made in an interview with CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria in response to a question on whether it was prudent policy for Israel to oppose the Obama Administration on the Iran deal, given the importance of Washington’s support for Israel’s security.

Among the lamentably small coterie of Jewish intellectuals and academics who defend Israel against the anti-Zionist tirades of its legions of liberal and leftist Jewish critics Edward Alexander ranks high. His new collection of essays, Jews Against Themselves (Transaction Publishers), displays sweeping intellectual range and abiding Jewish passion as he hones in on the targets of his analytical scrutiny. A proud and committed Jew who spent years teaching in Israel, Alexander writes with insight, precision and, at time, scathing scorn.

Amid the rising waves of anti-Semitism that course through Europe and surge in the Middle East, Alexander focuses on “the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Nazi war against the Jews.” Comprising those who hate Israel, defame other Jews for supporting the Jewish state, and “Israelis against themselves,” they join the roster of Jews, stretching back into the Middle Ages, who have “defamed, abandoned, and harmed their own people.” He exposes and eviscerates Jewish self-hatred, the liberal betrayal of Zionism, the “moral failure of American Jewish intellectuals,” and – as only an academic could – the rampant anti-Semitism that infests American universities and how it came to lodge there.

“Oren reminds us that upon taking office, the newly elected president removed the statue of Winston Churchill from the White House. Oren does not need to explain the act. Churchill saved the West precisely because he was committed, as he said so famously, to defending “our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.That commitment to protecting the West and its values at all cost, Obama implied by removing the statue, would be anathema to his administration.”

The coming weeks will reveal whether the American Jewish community still has a sense of historic responsibility.

Some dramatic historic events have the capacity to remain stunning even if they are not surprising. This week’s accord between Iran and the P5+1 is a case in point. It is a stunning error, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has correctly noted, but it is not a surprising one.

The agreement was unsurprising not only because the parties were so close to a deal for so long, but because the United States was hell-bent on reaching a deal. President Barack Obama wanted a deal no matter what compromises he had to make, no matter how much danger the deal represented for Israel, ostensibly the US’s ally.

A police officer in Birmingham, Ala., was beaten unconscious by a suspect during a traffic stop last week because the officer did not want to be pilloried in the media as a racist for using force against a black man.

Last Friday, a Birmingham plainclothes detective pulled over a car being driven erratically. The officer, who has chosen to remain anonymous to protect his family, told the driver to stay in the car while he called for backup. Instead, according to CNN, the driver got out and became belligerent, angrily and repeatedly asking why he’d been stopped. The driver, a 34-year-old convicted felon, allegedly grabbed the detective’s gun and pistol-whipped him with it until the detective lost consciousness. The felon, Janard Cunningham, reportedly fled the scene but was later apprehended. His record includes convictions for robbery and assault, among other crimes, and an attempted-murder charge, according to ABC 3340 and WVTM 13.

Several witnesses to the beating posted photos of the bloodied, inert, and prostrate detective on social media, accompanied by celebratory gloating similar to the social-media triumphalism after two New York City police officers were assassinated last December. A typical post read: “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” under the hashtag #FckDaPolice.

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

They got Al Capone for tax evasion, and they may get Huma Abedin for “violating rules regarding vacation and sick leave” and for the “possible exchange of unsecured, classified data.” To be sure, these are serious charges, and the available evidence makes it abundantly clear that there is ample warrant to investigate and perhaps even charge Abedin. However, it is a sign of a serious problem with today’s political culture that even more serious allegations regarding Abedin have never been investigated, and almost certainly never will be.

Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections have been fully exposed by Andrew McCarthy and bruited about for years. The facts are quite public, albeit largely ignored: Abedin’s parents are both members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but her links to the organization are not just familial. Abedin was for twelve years the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), which was founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, a Muslim Brotherhood operative and al-Qaeda financier. Naseef and Abedin both appeared on the JMMA’s masthead from 1996 to 2003.

Consider that Abedin worked closely for seven years with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who financed al-Qaeda in light of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy during the years that Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State. Everyone acknowledges that Abedin and Clinton are extremely close, and that Abedin controls access to Clinton and has tremendous influence over her.

Open Letter to Linda Sarsour

Director of the Arab American Association of New York
Honoree, New York City Council’s Shirley Chisholm Women of Distinction Award
Senior Strategist for the Campaign to Take on Hate
2009 Fellow with the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, housed at the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, in partnership with the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University
Obama White House honoree as a “Champion of Change”
Feminist: “I am a feminist and the reason I am a feminist is because I am a Muslim.”

Dear Linda Sarsour,

The news broke on Friday, August 14, 2015. That day would have been Kayla Mueller’s twenty-seventh birthday.

The breaking – and heartbreaking – news: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the Islamic Studies PhD who heads ISIS, had repeatedly raped Kayla Mueller. “He owned her,” news accounts report. Kayla was al-Baghdadi’s “sexual slave.” She was tortured. Kayla had been 24 years old when ISIS first took her captive in 2013.

Kayla Mueller was from Prescott, Arizona. She was an idealist. She had worked for many causes, including Tibetan refugees, Amnesty International, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Save Darfur Coalition. Kayla was taken captive by ISIS in 2013 while leaving a Doctors without Borders hospital in Syria. She was there helping war refugees. Kayla died in captivity in February, 2015. Kayla’s fellow hostages report how kind and self-sacrificing she was.

Why did Kayla put her life at risk to help others? “Some people find God in church. Some people find God in nature. Some people find God in love. I found God in suffering. I’ve known for some time what my life’s work is. Using my hands as tools to relive suffering,” she wrote.

Editor’s note: Below is the third article in the Frontpage series, “Obama’s Betrayals.” Click the following to read Part I and Part II.

President Barack Obama is guilty of multiple counts of illegality and malfeasance in office. He has both willfully abused his executive powers and willfully neglected to perform his executive duties under the Constitution to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

More than any president in the history of the United States, Obama’s motive for his shredding of the Constitution is the pursuit of absolute power for the purpose of, in his words, “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Richard Nixon is often mentioned when one talks about abuse of presidential power. From his enemies list to Watergate and its cover-up, Nixon set the bar in his time for illegality and malfeasance in office. But he was an amateur compared to Obama, who has taken illegality and malfeasance in office to a whole new level.

Nixon, for example, tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies, but did not have enough loyalists in the IRS to do his full bidding. Obama created a climate that encouraged IRS targeting of nonprofit tea party organizations. The purpose was to keep them from raising enough tax-deductible funds to play any significant role in connection with issues relevant to the 2012 presidential election. When the IRS scandal first broke, Obama feigned surprise and dismay. But after months of stonewalling by members of his administration of congressional investigations, Obama said during a 2014 interview with Bill O’Reilly of Fox News that there was “not even a smidgeon of corruption.”