RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel.” Numbers 23:10

The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills, the traffic stops, the people stop, and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country.

Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country’s own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror– Israel’s Memorial Day.

What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year’s dead and wounded to the scales of history. A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To stand watch or run away. It is not so much the past that is remembered on this day, but the present and the future. The stillness, a breath in the warm air, before setting out to climb the slopes of tomorrow.

Who can count the dust of Jacob. And yet each memorial day we count the dust. The dust that is a fraction of those who have fallen defending the land for thousands of years. Flesh wears out, blood falls to the earth where the red daisies grow, and bone turns to dust. The dust blows across the graves of soldiers and prophets, the tombs of priests hidden behind brush, the caverns where forefathers rest in sacred silence, laid to rest by their sons, who were laid to rest by their own sons, generations burying the past, standing guard over it, being driven away and returning each time.

[1]In a move destined to leave a bitter taste in the mouths of many Americans, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed [2] Loretta Lynch, currently U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, as United States Attorney General. The 56-43 vote occurred after a delay of more than five months, and Lynch was put over the top when 10 Republicans broke ranks with their colleagues to confirm Eric Holder’s successor. Those Republicans are Kelly Ayotte (NH), Orrin Hatch (UT), Lindsey Graham (SC), Susan Collins (ME), Jeff Flake (AZ), Mark Kirk (IL), Rob Portman (OH), Thad Cochran (MS), Ron Johnson (WI) and Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (KY). “Today, the Senate finally confirmed Loretta Lynch to be America’s next Attorney General — and America will be better off for it,” said [3] President Obama in a statement.

Hardly. As Lynch made painfully clear during her pre-confirmation hearings, she is more than prepared to kick the Constitution to the curb in pursuit of Obama’s agenda, especially with regard to illegal immigration.

In his column in Haaretz on Wednesday, titled “Why I won’t be celebrating Israel’s Independence Day this year,” Asher Schechter lists many reasons for his dejection by the Jewish state and his absence from the holiday festivities for the first time in 29 years. On a trip to New York, he had decided in advance that he wouldn’t even join the event in spirit, avoiding “anything and everything Israeli” for the day.

His description of the state of the nation is as bleak as it is detailed. He writes: “The past 12 months in Israel have been rife with internal and external conflicts, international isolation and political corruption. It saw an operation in Gaza last summer that claimed the lives of more than 2,000 Palestinians and 70-plus Israelis, and then was almost instantly forgotten. It saw an ugly election campaign that pitted Israelis against each other: Right against Left; Jews against Arabs; Ashkenazim against Sephardim; secular against religious — and the reelection of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

He then asks: “Should we raise a glass to Israel’s rapid descent into a moral and political abyss? Should we congratulate the young nation on its narrowing democracy, on the growing reliance of its leaders on nationalism and bigotry, on the emotional numbness that seems to have overtaken it in recent years? Should we cheer for the untimely death of the two-state solution, or maybe Israel’s dangerous steps toward apartheid?”

The answer to his rhetorical questions, of course, is no.

I was with my wife and daughter in the kitchen dishing out dinner Thursday evening, discussing the news of the day, when my cell phone rang. I glanced at it — unknown number from Orange County — and, even though I feared a salesman, took the plunge and said hello.

“Am I speaking with Roger Simon?” came a hoarse male voice. Now I was sure it was a salesman.“Yes,” I said in growing trepidation. ”Who’s calling?”“This is ‘Voters for Hillary’.”“What?!” I immediately thought it was a prank.

“‘Voters for Hillary.’ We’re —”

“‘Voters for Hillary.’ Are you kidding me? Didn’t you read the New York Times [1] today?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Uranium One. The Clinton Foundation. ”

“Yes. That’s right. The Clinton Foundation. We’d like your support. We—”

“Are you crazy?” I was starting to shout. ”Don’t you know what’s going on? Because of the Clintons, Putin got twenty percent of America’s uranium!”

“What’re you talking about?” The man sounded genuinely puzzled. This was news to him.

“What’m I…?” By this time I was shrieking into the phone. My wife and daughter were looking at me, half amazed, half hysterical. We had just been discussing that latest putrid evolution of the Clinton scandal [2], but getting into the weeds with this nitwit was more than I could handle. “Oh, forget it,” I clicked off.

As I’ve been saying for months now, she’s toast:

The headline in Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when the newspaper served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.” The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

A century after the Armenian Genocide, Muslims continue cleansing their countries of Christian minorities.
Today, April 24, we remember how exactly 100 years ago the last historic Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, tried to cleanse its empire of Christian minorities — Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks — even as we stand by watching as the new caliphate, the Islamic State, resumes the genocide.

And in both cases, the atrocities were and are being committed in the name of Islam.

In November, 1914 [1], during WWI, the Ottoman caliphate issued a fatwa, or Islamic decree, proclaiming it a “sacred duty” for all Muslims to “massacre” infidels — specifically naming the “Christian men” of the Triple Entente, “the enemies of Islam” — with promises of great rewards in the afterlife.

The same Koran verses that the Islamic State and other jihadi outfits regularly quote permeated the Ottoman fatwa, including: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them — seize them, besiege them, and be ready to ambush them” (9:5) and “O you who have believed! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are but friends of each other; and whoever among you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them” (5:51) — and several other verses that form the Islamic doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity [2].

Homeland Security Working Overtime to Add ‘New Americans’ by 2016 ElectionSources at the Department of Homeland Security report to PJ Media that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is reallocating significant resources to sending letters to all 9,000,000 green card holders urging them to naturalize prior to the 2016 election.

President Obama’s amnesty by edict has always been about adding new Democrats to the voter rolls, and recent action by the Department of Homeland Security provides further proof. Sources at the Department of Homeland Security report to PJ Media that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is reallocating significant resources away from a computer system — the “Electronic Immigration System” — to sending letters to all 9,000,000 green card holders urging them to naturalize prior to the 2016 election.

Yesterday the FBI in San Diego arrested Mohamad Saeed Kodaimati, a naturalized U.S. citizen since September 2008, for making false statements to U.S. Embassy officials, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI related to his time in Syria and Turkey over the past two years. Kodaimati left the U.S. in late December 2012 and returned on March 23.

According to the FBI affidavit in support of the criminal complaint filed today in the case against Kodaimati, the 24-year-old man was caught in a series of lies related to his work on behalf of a sharia court operated by Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria and a U.S. designated terrorist organization, and also his role mediating between Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS.

Is this the beginning … of RICO?

Okay, so that’s not quite as catchy as Edward G. Robinson’s immortal line. But it is what a good prosecutor would be asking while pondering the growing cloud around the Clinton Foundation.

Among Little Ceasar’s imprints on popular culture is that Robinson’s mobster character, Cesare Enrico Bandello, inspired Congress to name its seminal anti-organized crime legislation “RICO” — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971. The mafia was its most infamous target, but far from its only target.

RICO makes it a crime to run an organization through what’s called a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The term racketeering is extensively defined in the statute. It includes acts involving bribery, fraud, and obstruction of justice, to name just a few.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks, the world should listen. He has a much keener sense of the direction of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program than the president of the United States, and is evidently much more forthright about it.

When the Iranians and the United States cut what was portrayed as a tentative deal on the Iranian nuclear program, they described it differently. The U.S. emphasized that sanctions would only be phased out gradually and that inspections would ensure complete transparency. Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that there wasn’t really a deal, and oh yeah, sanctions would be lifted immediately and inspections wouldn’t be allowed to impinge on Iran’s security — in other words, would not include military sites. In a similar vein, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif attacked a U.S. fact sheet on the alleged deal as inaccurate. “There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on,” Zarif lectured on Twitter. Zarif was right to put sneer quotes around “fact sheets,” but his political analysis was off.