RUTHFULLY YOURS

Here’s another Arabic word that both you and I would prefer not to have to know but probably should: mutaween. It means “religious police” or “morality police.” In Saudi Arabia it’s an officially constituted entity whose officers are fully empowered to arrest and punish anyone who violates sharia law – which, of course, can mean anything from committing various sexual acts to being caught taking a sip of water during Ramadan. The Saudi morality police made international headlines in March 2002 when they physically prevented dozens of girls from escaping a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t properly covered.

After that horrific incident, which resulted in fifteen deaths, people around the world congratulated themselves on not living in such a backward culture. And yet the Islamic morality police, far from being confined to Saudi Arabia – or even to the Muslim world – are an increasing presence in Europe and elsewhere.

To be sure, Islam’s moral cops in the Western world aren’t officially sanctioned. They aren’t even necessarily an organized force; many, if not most, of them are self-appointed monitors of public morality. And compared to their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and the Gaza Strip, they’re amateurs. But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. Given time, and given enough leash by the real police and others in positions of public trust who prefer to look away from this deplorable state of affairs, these amateurs will increasingly resemble their Saudi models. In the meantime, they already wield real power. Authentic refugees from the Muslim world – non-Muslims or secular Muslims who fled to the West precisely to avoid such surveillance and control – are very aware of that power. So are an increasing number of natives of Western countries who live in largely Muslim neighborhoods – and who are increasingly being reminded that their ways of life conspicuously violate sharia strictures.

Consider the situation in Oslo, where things are bad, though not quite as severe (yet) as in many other European cities. Zahid Ali, an actor and stand-up comic, recalled in a 2010 interview that he’d been living with Oslo’s morality police for twenty years, ever since his early teens. “If he smoked on the street in Oslo,” reported NRK, “his mother, father, uncles, and aunts know about it before he got home” – because the news had been passed to them via Pakistani cab, bus, and tram drivers, a class of people whom Ali described as the “largest intelligence service” in Norway. Ali, now a familiar face on Norwegian television, said that members of the morality police in the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Grønland now routinely stopped him on the street to tell him: “I don’t like what you’re doing! I hate you! I’m going to kill you!” The threats, which he said had grown steadily worse over the previous five or six years, were usually delivered in Punjabi, and when Ali replied in Norwegian, his tormentors grew even angrier. (“If I answer in their language,” he explained, it means that “I’ve accepted their culture, accepted that they’re right.”) Ali said he took the threats seriously enough to avoid Grønland whenever possible.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is apparently ready to pick up where he left off last year and continue his investigation into whether Trayvon Martin’s civil rights were violated by the recently acquitted George Zimmerman. Holder had stepped aside to let the Florida trial of Zimmerman proceed, but it would appear that the verdict rendered Saturday night is too irresistible for the man who oversees one of the most racially-polarized Justice Departments (DOJ) in the history of the nation. “Experienced federal prosecutors will determine whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation of any of the limited federal criminal civil rights statutes within our jurisdiction, and whether federal prosecution is appropriate,” the DOJ announced.

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous was thrilled with the news. Regarding the conclusion of the trial, he said in a statement, “We are outraged and heartbroken over today’s verdict. We will pursue civil rights charges with the Department of Justice, we will continue to fight for the removal of Stand Your Ground laws in every state and we will not rest until racial profiling in all its forms is outlawed.”

Such “coordination” between the NAACP and the DOJ has already occurred. As a 2012 article in the Orlando Sentinel reveals, the DOJ’s Community Relations Service (CRS) “helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials” leading to the temporary resignation of Sanford police Chief Bill Lee, who was subsequently fired for failing to file charges against Zimmerman. The article further notes that the CRS, which the DOJ claims ”does not take sides” in their role as “peacemakers” in community racial conflicts, also “arranged a police escort for college students to ensure safe passage for their 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to Sanford to demand justice.”

DOJ coordination with the NAACP was not limited to Sanford. In 2010, following a year of stonewalling by the Department, two former DOJ officials testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. They revealed that the NAACP pressured the DOJ to drop its already won voter intimidation case against New Black Panther members videotaped at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008. Two men were shown dressed in military-style uniforms with one holding a night stick.

WHEN WILL GOP “REID HIM THE RIOT ACT” BY REMOVING THIS BUFOON FROM CONGRESS?….RSK

“The sensible answer today is the same sensible answer that held in 2005: Don’t do it. These rules exist and have existed because they’ve made the Senate function better than it would have had they never been promulgated. Change them when it’s expedient for you, and you open Pandora’s box.”

Here’s what you should remember when you read about the battle over fundamentally changing the rules of the US Senate, a battle that will go on despite a deal struck yesterday to avoid a major partisan conflagration this week.

Superficially, the arguments made for change sound as if they’re more democratic than the current system — in which it takes a three-fifths vote rather than a simple majority to move legislation through the Senate, and in which a single senator can block action on a variety of fronts for any reason he chooses.

Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, sounds reasonable when he says “the Founding Fathers wanted an up or down vote” on Senate matters save overriding a presidential veto, approving a treaty or impeaching a president. (For those, the Constitution requires a “supermajority” vote.)
Hypocrite: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was fine with the filibuster when he was the minority leader.

But Reid’s remarks are a historical absurdity. In the first place, the Constitution gives the Senate and the House complete authority over how it works on a day-to-day basis. The language is plain: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”

This means, in effect, that the Senate could decide everything would have to be approved unanimously to pass — and that would be entirely constitutional.

Attorney General Eric Holder sounded a familiar theme in his first public comments after George Zimmerman’s acquittal. “I believe that this tragedy provides yet another opportunity for our nation to speak honestly about the complicated and emotionally charged issues that this case has raised,” Holder told the annual Social Action Luncheon of Delta Sigma Theta, a historically black sorority. “We must not–as we have too often in the past–let this opportunity pass.”

The comment echoes, albeit softly, Holder’s famous 2009 declaration that “in things racial,” America is “a nation of cowards.”

As if prompted by Holder’s exhortation, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post weighs in with a column on the Zimmerman case:

I don’t like what George Zimmerman did, and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know whether Zimmerman is a racist. But I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

Cohen goes on to say that “the problems of the black underclass are hardly new” and that while their origins can be attributed to slavery and Jim Crow, “for want of a better word, the problem is cultural, and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.”

One may agree or disagree with Cohen’s point of view, but one cannot accuse him of dishonesty or diffidence. He is, just as Holder urged, expressing himself honestly about complicated and emotionally charged questions.

Michael Calderone of the Puffington Host reports on the reaction:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324348504578609800448677208.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop ‘I am not in the habit of saying what we did or we didn’t do,” Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, when he was asked if Israel had carried out a July 5 attack in Syria against a cache of Russian-made anti-ship missiles. “My policy,” the Prime Minister added, “is to prevent […]

http://www.steynonline.com/5676/doing-the-decent-thing Fifty years ago, it was the Summer of Profumo in London, commencing with a ministerial resignation that brought down a Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, and eventually his successor, Lord Home, too. Half-a-century on, it remains Britain’s most famous sex scandal, and sufficiently potent that later this year Andrew Lloyd Webber, Don Black and […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/aiding_islamist_propaganda.html In the latest clashes between the Egyptian Army and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, at least 51 mostly Muslim Brothers were killed near a Cairo military building, prompting Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Badie to vilify — you guessed it — Jewish people. “Even the Jews have never done to Egypt what the army did,” Badie stated. […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/fake_outrage_in_the_martinzimmerman_case.html Having lived half my life in the Middle East, I am especially sensitive to recognizing fake outrage and shaming forced upon ordinary people by the social system. Every society uses shaming to define its morality, but some societies go too far in using and abusing shaming words that make people cringe and shrink whenever […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/daddyless-daughters-promiscuity-self-mutilation_n_3600946.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl20%7Csec1_lnk3%26pLid%3D344651

THERE ARE NOW FOUR GENERATIONS OF CHILDREN BORN TO TEENAGE MOTHERS REPEATING THE MISTAKES OF THEIR GRANDMOTHERS AND TRYING TO REAR CHILDREN WITHOUT FAMILY STRUCTURE, FATHERS OR A MEANS TO SUPPORTS THEM. THE “WOMEN’S RIGHTS” GROUPIES AND BLACK LEADERS FAIL TO CONFRONT THIS PERNICIOUS TREND….RSK

For girls who grow up without fathers, it’s not unusual to act out sexually and look for validation in all the wrong places. Promiscuity is often observed as a common practice among “daddyless daughters” and is just one possible effect of not having a father figure. It’s also something Dr. Steve Perry, founder of Capital Preparatory Magnet School, has seen in his work with fatherless girls, leading him to a startling definition of promiscuity as a whole.

“Promiscuity is the main thing,” Dr. Perry says in the above video from “Oprah’s Lifeclass,” on the topic of daddyless daughters. “It’s rarely seen as self-mutilation, but that’s exactly what it is.”

Iyanla Vanzant, a prominent voice in the discussion on both daddyless daughters and fatherless sons, agrees. “Absolutely. It’s violence against the self,” she says.

Dr. Perry continues, “Often when we look at young girls who are dealing with pain, we think of self-mutilation as the cutting. That, too, but [promiscuity is] the self-mutilation of allowing someone to physically enter you.”

“Wow, that’s a big one,” Oprah says. “Self-mutilation comes in the form of promiscuity and it’s violence against the self. I never thought of it that way before.”

For Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada, there’s something even more troublesome about promiscuous girls. “The thing that shocks me with these young girls is that… they don’t necessarily even like the guys that much,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Why did you do that? You don’t even like the guy?’… They don’t know.”

Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published 130 scientific papers, six books and edited the Encyclopedia of Geology.