RUTHFULLY YOURS

Given President Obama’s most recent action in the “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians, it’s reasonable to ask if the president believes that Israel has the right to exist.

That’s not a question to be posed casually. From the time it became a nation, Israel – the only democracy in the Middle East – has always been able to count on America to come to its defense. Until now.

The State Department has announced that it will not only work with but will also continue to fund the Palestinian “reconciliation government” sworn in last week. The “reconciliation” was between Fatah – the political party of Palestinian president Mahmood Abbas – and the Hamas terrorist group which has, as its primary raison d’etre, the destruction of Israel.

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The Hamas charter declares, “The purpose of Hamas is to create an Islamic Palestinian state throughout Israel by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.” If Hamas had changed its charter to renounce jihad and accept Israel’s existence then and only then could Abbas’ Palestinian Authority have reconciled with it without endorsing its goal of destroying Israel.

But Hamas never made any change to its charter, its beliefs or its dedication to the violent destruction of Israel. The only conclusion that can be reached is that Abbas and his group have accepted Hamas’ goals and methods and modified their own to suit them.

That point compels another conclusion: that the State Department’s announced intent to accept the Hamas-Fatah government into the peace process – and to continue funding it – is that the president and Secretary of State John Kerry have also accepted the legitimacy of Hamas, its goal and its chosen method of reaching them. They have legitimized Hamas just as they have legitimized the Taliban by negotiating with it and releasing five of their top commanders.

Obama’s disdain for Israel has been no secret. In March 2010, Obama treated Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the sort of rudeness presidents had previously reserved for America’s enemies. As detailed in my new book, The BDS War Against Israel, Obama’s anti-Israel attitude must have been formed when, as a college student, he studied under the late Edward Said, a Palestinian activist with whom Obama maintained a relationship for two decades.

After presiding for six years over a war in which over 1,600 Americans were killed fighting the Taliban, Obama did not mention the enemy during his West Point Commencement Address.

That wasn’t unusual. Obama has a curious habit of avoiding the “T-word” in his official speeches.
Even when delivering his Rose Garden speech about Bergdahl’s return, the Taliban were never mentioned.

Obama’s mentions of the Taliban vary by context. When speaking to the military he will sometimes say that the United States is at war with the Taliban. In international diplomatic settings however there is a subtle shift in his language that emphasizes that the conflict is really a civil war between the Taliban and the Afghan government with the United States there to act as a stabilizing force.

When discussing the Qatar process, his language suggested that the United States was only there to facilitate an understanding between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

The President of Afghanistan claimed that Obama had told him, “The Taliban are not our enemies and we don’t want to fight them.”

Vice President Joe Biden had expressed similar thoughts, stating, “The Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical.” White House spokesman Jay Carney awkwardly defended Biden by arguing that the United States was fighting the Taliban, but was there to defeat Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda in Afghanistan however had already been defeated by Bush.

During the campaign and once in office, Obama had proposed outreach to the “moderate” Taliban. Biden estimated that only 5% of the Taliban were incorrigible while 70% and then another 25% could be reasoned with.

According to Biden, these Taliban were expected to end all ties with Al Qaeda, accept the Afghan constitution and offer equal treatment to women. Obama issued the same demand last year. The Taliban who hold strict religious beliefs about the evils of democracy and the inferiority of women did not rush to take Obama and Biden up on their offer.

Obama’s dual views of the Taliban made for an incompatible policy. When playing the role of commander, he delivers applause lines about “pushing the Taliban back” and large numbers of American soldiers were sent to Afghanistan. But the rest of the time he views the Taliban not as an enemy, but like Boko Haram or Hamas, as a group that is acting violently only because their legitimate political needs are not being met.

Some might say that it was as a commander that Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan, but that it was as an appeaser that he brought him back. And yet both Obamas are the same man. Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan for the same reason that he brought him back.

This is the discontinuity that bedevils modern liberal foreign policy which fights wars it does not believe in, rejecting war, while still attempting to use force as an instrument of diplomacy.

When Bush sent American soldiers off to war, it was because he believed that there was a real enemy to fight. Obama, as we have seen, never believed that the Taliban were our enemy and his own intelligence people had told him that Al Qaeda had a handful of fighters in Afghanistan.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacore-emerges-as-a-major-issue-as-education-takes-an-orwellian-turn?f=puball

In the past week, Governors Haley of South Carolina and Fallin of Oklahoma evicted Common Core from public schools, even at the risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars promised to states adopting it. Mmes. Haley and Fallin initially supported Common Core. But public outrage is forcing them to reverse course, and more states will follow. In New York, the Republican-Conservative challenger to Governor Andrew Cuomo, Robert Astorino, vows to topple Common Core if he wins in November.

Move over Obamacare. Mid-term elections will also be referendums on ObamaCore.

Contrary to what the public is told, Common Core is not about standards. It’s about content – what pupils are taught. In the Social Studies Framework approved on April 29th by New York State’s education authorities (but not parents), American history is presented as four centuries of racism, economic oppression, and gender discrimination. Teachers are encouraged to help students identify their differences instead of their common American identity. Gone are heroes, ideals, and American exceptionalism.

Eleventh grade American history begins with the colonial period, but Puritans and their churches, standing on virtually every New England town green to this day, are erased. Amazingly, Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” vision, an enduring symbol of American exceptionalism cited by politicians from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and Michael Dukakis, is gone. Religion is expunged from New York State’s account of how this nation began.

Instead, the focus is on “Native Americans who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict.” The other focus is on slavery and indentured servitude. True, the curriculum includes political developments and democratic principles. But overall, it’s so slanted as to be untrue.

The indoctrination begins early. In grade three, “students are introduced to the concepts of prejudice, discrimination and human rights, as well as social action.” Grade four suggested reading includes “The Kid’s Guide to Social Action.”

NORTON MEZVINSKY MENTIONED HERE IS THE UNCLE DEAREST OF CHELSEA CLINTON’S HUSBAND…AND A VICIOUS AND SELF PROFESSED “ANTI ZIONIST”….RSK
Only ten people, including two imams and a reporter, showed up to hear University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, professor of religious studies Carl W. Ernst deliver the “First Annual Ibrahim Abu-Rabi Lecture” on May 7 at the International Council for Middle East Studies (ICMES) in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Ernst was introduced by ICMES founder and president Norton Mezvinsky, who came to ICMES after a 42-year career teaching Middle East history at Connecticut State University.

A self-professed “anti-Zionist,” Mezvinsky endorsed the infamous 1975 Zionism-is-racism U.N. resolution and developed amiable relations with the deranged anti-Semitic Lyndon LaRouche movement and once spoke at the LaRouchite Schiller Institute in Germany. He also co-authored Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel with the late Israel Shahak, whose work, MEF Fellow Asaf Romirowsky wrote, “rests on his conviction that Judaism is the font of all evil and that most global issues can ultimately be traced back to Judaism via a world-wide Jewish conspiracy.”

In dedicating its inaugural lecture series to the memory of former ICMES director Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, ICMES signals its support of his radical ideology. Mezvinsky tearfully recalled his late “very good friend” and “distinguished scholar,” about whose book on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb Daniel Pipes wrote, “author and subject meld into a nearly seamless whole” so that, for Qutb and likeminded individuals, Abu-Rabi was “their apostle to an English-speaking audience.”

Appreciatively hearing Mezvinsky were Imams Mohammad Magid and Johari Abdul-Malik. The Sudanese-born Magid heads two groups with disturbing Islamist connections, the Muslim Brotherhood-founded, terrorism unindicted co-conspirator Islamic Society of North America and the All Dulles Area Muslim Society mosque in northern Virginia. The American convert Abdul-Malik, meanwhile, who called Magid “my teacher” at a press conference the day after the ICMES lecture, is outreach director at northern Virginia’s Dar al-Hijrah mosque, known for many years of attracting violent individuals, some personally defended by Abdul-Malik.

On June 12, 1987, the President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, speaking in Berlin, said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” It fell in 1989 and, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. From the end of World War Two in 1945, the United States had stood strong against the Communist empire’s effort to extend its power and influence around the world.

Today, however, we have a President who not only swapped five Taliban generals, men whom the United Nations regards as war criminals, but likely also paid a yet unreported ransom as well. We have a President who made it clear that he intended to close Guantanamo where jihadist enemies have been detained because he thinks the United States is provoking the Islamic fanatics by maintaining it.

President Obama’s mindset is so favorable to Islam that he seemingly cannot grasp that jihad is a sacred duty for Muslims and nothing the U.S. or any other nation does will cause their holy war to end. Or maybe he does understand that and his true sympathies are with the growing army of Islamists?

The Rand Corporation, a think tank, recently released a report noting the accelerating rate of jihadist groups worldwide and the number of jihadist fighters which it estimates at 100,000. The number of attacks by al Qaeda affiliates between 2010 to 2013 rose to approximately one thousand from an initial 392.

The five Taliban generals were sent to Qutar, a small Arab state that borders Saudi Arabia, with the understanding they would remain there for a year. That is unlikely. Muslims are permitted to lie to infidels to advance Islam and jihad. The practice is call taqqiya. I have little doubt we will see them return to Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which are still home to al Qaeda and allied groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Taliban.

At the heart of the deal struck to get the return of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter from his unit in Afghanistan, bespeaks the utter weakness of American foreign policy that has been the hallmark of the Obama administration. In a recent commentary, “Meet Obama’s Kissingers”, Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly A. Strassel, spelled out the alarming fact that Obama’s key national security and foreign affairs advisors are all politicians as opposed to experts in those respective fields.

In May 2011, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria wrote a column headlined “Al Qaeda Is Over”:

The truth is this is a huge, devastating blow to al Qaeda, which had already been crippled by the Arab Spring. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is the end of al Qaeda in any meaningful sense of the word.

Al Qaeda is not an organization that commands massive resources. It doesn’t have a big army. It doesn’t have vast reservoirs of funds that it can direct easily across the world.

Zakaria is famously a confidant of Obama’s, but there are limits to the horse manure even devoted courtiers swallow. Three years on, just one malign al-Qaeda progeny, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, now commands more territory than ever – from Aleppo in western Syria to the gates of Baghdad. It has all the tanks and weaponry abandoned by the Iraqi “army” we trained. It has the cash reserves of the second largest city in Iraq, and control of the northern oil fields.

Meanwhile, the White House has apparently canceled its cable subscription and daily newspaper. On Tuesday, as half-a-million Iraqis were fleeing Mosul, Administration flacks were talking up Hillary’s Greatest Hits:

Earnest was asked by a reporter at the daily press conference to describe Clinton’s accomplishments while she was Secretary of State.

“Ending the war in Iraq and winding down in a responsible fashion the war in Afghanistan, and doing that after the success of our our efforts to dismantle and destroyed Al-Qaida core that had established a base of operations in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Earnest answered.

Obama and Clinton ended the war in Iraq by losing it. They “pivoted” from Iraq to Afghanistan, and wound up losing both. Hillary crowed over Gaddafi’s corpse – “We came, we saw, he died” – and then sat by as her ambassador and best friend “Chris” was devoured by the mob: He died, she sat by, we’re gone. The Arab Spring that Zakaria claims “crippled” al-Qaeda delivered Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood and a military coup, Tunisia to soft Islamists, Libya to ever harder Islamists, and much of Syria and Iraq to jihadists too hardcore for “mainstream” al-Qaeda.

Last night, I talked to Dana Perino on Fox News about the supposedly inevitable next President. Barely had I left the studio when news broke of the defeat in a primary of the supposedly inevitable next Speaker of the House. The magnitude of what happened to the House Majority Leader at the hands of some wossname who wasn’t supposed to break 40 per cent is nicely summed up in this headline:

Eric Cantor Blew $168K at Steak Houses; Brat Spent $122K Overall

“Brat” is the name of the obscure economics professor who whupped him, not the Cantor campaign’s characterization thereof. Nevertheless, they made the mistake of condescending to the prof. Like so many other ingrate rubes in the despised “base”, he didn’t get it. The Chamber of Commerce wants an endless supply of cheap unskilled foreign labor, so the job of “mainstream” Republicans is to find a way of facilitating this without using provocative words like “amnesty”. Eric Cantor was the master of this, talking up coy cotton-candy maneuvers like the “ENLIST” Act.

Here’s what he said in his famous let’s-do-it-for-the-kids speech:

A good place to start is with the kids. One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents. It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.

It’s news to me that not punishing children for their parents’ mistakes is a “founding principle” of America. But no matter. Washington bigwigs have many attentive readers in the human-shipping industry south of the border, and so Cantor’s primary campaign coincided with the bizarre Bugsy Malone’s Camp of the Saints scenario currently playing out on America’s southern border.

Reading, Writing, Rubbers Schools give out condoms to 11-year-olds
This month a rural Oregon school district announced its decision to offer condoms to children as young as 11. The new policy was adopted in part because, according to a memo from the superintendent, “every few years, a middle school student either becomes pregnant or is associated with a pregnancy.” The rationale is flimsy, but it speaks to the wider trend of pushing the envelope when it comes to giving kids contraception in school.

Statistics on the availability of condoms nationally in secondary education, particularly in middle schools, are hard to come by. In 1998, Advocates for Youth reported that 418 schools gave out condoms. More recently, in 2006, the CDC said it was 5 percent of high schools. But city-wide programs in places like Chicago are growing and anecdotal evidence suggests that schools serving as free condom dispensatories is becoming old hat by now.

In Boston this spring there was a controversy over condom distribution in the school system. Not over the fact that condoms were being given out to students, but over the design of the wrapper. City schools received condoms from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to hand out to high schoolers that were emblazoned with provocative phrases like “one lucky lady,” “hump one,” and “tasty one.”

Somehow this scandalized parents who were otherwise supportive of their kids’ collecting condoms on the way to class. One mother told the Boston Globe, “I was horrified. As a mother of three teenagers, there was no way I wanted my kids to be given condoms with those wrappers.” Try to wrap your head around that logic.

Speaking of interesting wrappers, New York Daily News reported that city students were welcomed back to school last fall with a vast assortment of condoms from which to choose. Not content to provide condoms for simple utilitarian use, fun features such as “Rough Rider Studded,” “King XL,” “Extra Strength,” “Ultra Sensitive,” “Ultra Thin,” “Ribbed” and even “Assorted Flavors,” were on offer to minors. Far from the professed purpose of safety, these types of condoms sure seem to cross the line into encouraging more sex and experimentation. Homework assignment, kids: figure out the difference between “Ultra Sensitive” and “Ultra Thin!”

Disability judge Harry Taylor has long been accused of misconduct. The allegations have included repeatedly sexually harassing female colleagues and employees, frequently dozing off and audibly snoring during hearings, and making an inappropriate call to a legal expert representing clients. But even as he avoided significant reprimand, he continued to award disability benefits to thousands of claimants, often without even holding a hearing, at a taxpayer cost of around $2.5 billion. The kicker: Though the Social Security Administration knew of Taylor’s shortcomings, it allows him — to this day — to continue judging its disability cases.

That’s just one shocking finding among dozens in a report aptly titled “Systemic Waste and Abuse at the Social Security Administration,” released this week by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It finds that 191 of the SSA’s judges rubber-stamped cases, awarding disability benefits in more than 85 percent of the cases they decided, including to claimants who almost certainly weren’t entitled to them.

In addition to crunching these appalling numbers, the report pays much attention to three judges, including Taylor, whose abuses of the system were particularly outrageous.

Charles Bridges, who served as the chief administrative-law judge in the SSA’s Harrisburg, Pa., hearing office between 2004 and 2010, was so notorious for prodigally awarding benefits that one disability law firm enacted a so-called Bridges Policy: to accept “any individual as a client if their case was assigned to [Bridges], regardless of the evidence.” Between 2005 and 2013, Bridges singlehandedly awarded an estimated $4.5 billion in benefits.

The report also heavily features David Daugherty, a disability judge who awarded benefits in all but roughly 1 percent of the cases he heard. Previous reports, including ones from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, have detailed how Daugherty worked with a greedy disability attorney who was shamelessly gaming the system.

All three judges are deserving of opprobrium. Instead, as the report notes, they kept their jobs and were even periodically rewarded for their bad behavior. That’s because the SSA has adopted a warped set of benchmarks for just what counts as good performance from a disability judge.

Bringing Bergdahl home was useful for closing Gitmo and winding down the war.
Soon we shall get to the bottom of the swap of five Taliban kingpins from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility for one Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl.

In time we will learn whether Bergdahl really served with “honor and distinction” and was “captured on the battlefield,” as National Security Adviser Susan Rice has stated. Or whether, as fellow soldiers of his platoon insist, he was a deserter who left his comrades to seek out the Taliban.

We will soon discover whether Bergdahl’s serious health problems or imminent danger prompted President Obama to make the sudden swap. Or whether, as administration skeptics insist, the deal was a rushed political gambit to divert attention from the Veterans’ Affairs scandal — and a way to whittle down the Guantanamo population and erode laws demanding congressional approval before such detainees are released.

Amidst the swap conundrum, the president has defended the trade by referencing history and the American experience in past wars. But here, too, what the president states is not always accurate.

Obama insisted that “we have a rule, a principle, that when somebody wears our country’s uniform and they’re in a war theater and they’re captured . . . we’re going to do everything we can to bring ’em home . . . and regardless of whatever circumstances there are, it is our obligation to bring them home.”

Yet the United States has not routinely sought to bring captives home, “regardless of whatever circumstances there are.” During the Korean War, and for decades afterwards while on patrol in Korea, some American soldiers simply walked across the DMZ and turned themselves over to the North Koreans.

Both in war and peace, the United States often did little to bring them back, even when the deserters had second thoughts and wanted to return. Charles Robert Jenkins stayed in North Korea for nearly 40 years after deserting in 1965. Japan sought to pressure the U.S. government to pardon him and helped obtain his release. On his return, Jenkins pled guilty to charges of desertion and aiding the enemy and was given a dishonorable discharge.