RUTHFULLY YOURS

Notable & Quotable: The Russian Threat to Nato Lithuania and Poland ask for permanent U.S. military bases to fend off an aggressive Putin.
Reporter Niels Lesniewski writing online for Roll Call, May 29:

Officials in Lithuania and Poland told Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin they’re concerned enough about the threat posed by Russia that they want to host U.S. military bases.

The Illinois Democrat traveled to the two NATO member states, as well as to Ukraine, during the Memorial Day break, meeting with officials in the three countries. Durbin told reporters Friday he met in Lithuania with the country’s president and prime minister, as well as members of Parliament.
“They went so far to say they want the United States, if they will consider it, to put in a permanent military base in Lithuania, which I thought was an interesting request,” Durbin said.

At a subsequent stop in Poland, Durbin said he heard similar sentiments from officials there, including from representatives for Polish President-elect Andrzej Duda.

Fabius talks tough about inspections, but he’s fallen in line before.

The Iranian nuclear talks are resuming with the June 30 deadline approaching, and right on time here come the French talking tough. If history repeats, however, our Gallic allies will take a hard line right up until they agree to whatever President Obama wants.

“The best agreement, if you cannot verify it, it’s useless,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told our Journal colleagues in an interview on Monday from Nigeria. “Several countries in the region would say, OK, a paper [has been signed] but we think it is not strong enough and therefore we ourselves have to become nuclear.” He no doubt means Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and perhaps Egypt and the Gulf Sunni Arabs.

Ubiquitous but opaque. Powerful but unaccountable. Ostensibly public spirited but relentlessly mercenary. Often shamed but unshakably shameless. Let us count the ways in which the Clinton Foundation resembles the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA.

Last week we learned that FIFA had made a donation to the Foundation in the range of $50,000 to $100,000. But for the Clintons that kind of money is hardly worth mentioning, so the suggestion of some sort of unseemly financial linkage between the two organizations is doubtful. You don’t get to roll with Bill, Hill or Chelsea for less than seven figures.

We also learned that the “Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee,” tasked with organizing the forthcoming World Cup in the Arab kingdom, gave the foundation as much as $500,000, while the Qatari state itself gave up to $5 million.

Social welfare fraud of the kind perpetrated in Denmark is being repeated throughout Europe.

Because Anjem Choudary’s welfare payments are not taxed, his income is equivalent to a £32,500 ($50,000) salary. By comparison, the average annual earnings of full-time workers in Britain was £26,936 ($41,000) in 2014.

A Swedish soldier deployed in Afghanistan said that he was likely to get less help when he came back to Sweden than returning jihadists were.

More than 30 Danish jihadists have collected unemployment benefits totaling 379,000 Danish krone (€51,000; $55,000) while fighting with the Islamic State in Syria, according to leaked intelligence documents.

The fraud, which was reported by Television 2 Danmark on May 18, comes less than six months after the Danish newspaper BT revealed that Denmark had paid unemployment benefits to 28 other jihadists while they were waging war in Syria.

The disclosures show that Islamists continue to exploit European social welfare systems to finance their activities both at home and abroad — costing European taxpayers potentially millions of euros each year.

According to Television 2 Danmark, the welfare fraud was discovered after the Danish intelligence agency PET began sharing data about known Danish jihadists with the Ministry of Employment to determine if any of these individuals were receiving unemployment benefits.

As a percentage of the overall population, Denmark is the second-largest European source of foreign fighters in Syria after Belgium. At least 115 Danes have become foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq since Syria’s civil war broke out in March 2011, according to a recent report by the Center for Terrorism Analysis, an agency of PET. The report states:

“CTA assesses that approximately half of those who have gone abroad are now back in Denmark, while a quarter of them remain in the conflict zone. CTA assesses that two thirds of these individuals have been in the conflict zone for more than a year. The remaining travelers are located elsewhere abroad. CTA assesses that at least 19 travelers from Denmark have been killed in Syria and Iraq.”

The CTA admits that, “the number may be higher” than 115. The comment is a tacit recognition that it does not know exactly how many Danes have become jihadists abroad.

In April, it emerged that the parents of Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein — a Danish-Jordanian jihadist responsible for the terror attacks in Copenhagen in February 2015 in which two people died — have been welfare recipients in Denmark for more than 20 years. Omar’s parents received a total of 3.8 million krone between 1994 and 2014, amounting to roughly 500,000 euros or $560,000.

Social welfare fraud of the kind perpetrated in Denmark is being repeated throughout Europe.

One’s first inclination is to laugh – laugh heartily or perhaps in despair – at the idea that college students, or students of any kind, require “trigger warnings” that they will encounter “upsetting” material in the books they are reading. I nearly laughed out loud when I read an article, which is linked in a Daniel Greenfield book review of a title produced by an especially repulsive writer, David K. Shipler. Greenfield wrote in “Shameless Liar: The Strange Dishonest World of David K. Shipler”:

Freedom of Speech [Shipler’s book] instead sets out an imaginary struggle in which the conservatives are censors while those on the left are defenders of free speech. There are bad parents who think their children shouldn’t be assigned novels filled with graphic sexual acts and good leftist teachers who teach children that free enterprise is evil. It’s a comfortable lefty talking point from a few generations ago.

Sadly, the UCC delegates’ choices regarding Israel will be based on documents, “proofs,” and appeals built upon a foundation of lies, false choices and political fantasies that accuse Israel of being an “Apartheid State,” and an “illegal occupier of Palestinian land.”

“The Palestinian people [do] not exist… In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” — PLO Executive Committee member Zahir Muhse’in, quoted in the Dutch newspaper Trouw.

Adam Andrzejewski is the Chairman of American Transparency, founder of OpenTheBooks.com and the author of the Federal Transfer Report – Export – Import Bank.

How is bankrolling of dictators, subsidizing authoritarian regimes,propping up green energy and destabilizing entire industries good for growth?

By the end of June Congress will have to resolve whether the Export – Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im) should be re-authorized. If Congress does nothing the authorization will expire but a vote could save the bank. The fate of the bank is important test that will show whether Congress is on the side of taxpayers, and basic market principles, or special interests that are capable of bending markets in their direction.

Presidential candidate Hilary Clinton is advocating re-authorization while most Republican presidential candidates are opposed. The Ex-Im Bank claims that it “fills the lending gaps for small businesses in international trade” and therefore “grows American jobs.” But critics hammer Ex-Im for cronyism, waste and outright corruption.

Today’s Left lies, and does so on an industrial scale. Is diversity really our strength? Is race just a social construct? Sadly, at least for those who appreciate the truth, the Right is often just as guilty. Perhaps ideologues just cannot help it.
I seldom get overwrought about rampant falsehoods but the stench of dishonesty can be so over-powering that silence is not an option, and this urge is all the more compelling when the odor emanates from “our side.”
Consider the frequent conservative allegation linking liberalism and Democratic governance to the rioting in places like Ferguson, MO., or Baltimore, MD. According to these pundits, the root of these calamities are public schools run by teachers’ unions, an over-regulated, over-taxed marketplace, excessive bureaucratically directed work-ethic killing social welfare spending, and a moral relativism that undermines strong families among sundry other Great Society-style pathologies.

Today I will focus on the newest of the announced Democratic candidates for the Presidency, Maryland’s former governor, Martin O’Malley who announced his candidacy for the Presidency on Saturday, May 30th and began his speech by taking on big banks and the de facto oligarchs of the United States – those whose wealth is so off the charts that they wield incredible political power.

Because immigration was an integral component of his speech, I will divide my analysis of his position into two parts. Because Mr. O’Malley began by focusing on the American Dream and economics – indeed his podium was festooned with a poster that in addition to his name bore the phrase “Rebuild the American Dream,” we will begin by considering the national security implications of Mr. O’Malley’s stance on immigration.

In denying the average college student the opportunity to hear, think, question and learn, these minority organizations violated the basic principles of a liberal arts education and what higher learning should presumably be about: challenging assumptions and talking openly about issues that might cause discomfort.

Both micro-sensitivity and political correctness require at best, obfuscating information, and at worst, silencing it.

On college campuses, teachers, students and sometimes even administrators seem to have become ever more eager to block any idea with which they disagree.