RUTHFULLY YOURS

The document warns that increasing numbers of students in Hamburg are being influenced by Islamist propaganda and are embracing radical Islam and idolizing jihadist fighters in Syria.

The problems in Hamburg are drawing renewed attention to the alarming growth of Salafism in Germany. Salafists openly state that they want to replace democracy in Germany (and the rest of the world) with a Sunni Islamic government based on sharia law.

Muslim radicals are imposing Islamic norms and values in primary and secondary public schools in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, say school officials, who are asking for stepped-up monitoring of the Salafist groups thought to be behind the Islamization efforts.

At least 25 schools across Hamburg are believed to have been infiltrated by Salafists and other fundamentalist Muslim groups, according to German media reports. But local politicians from the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD)—a party committed to enforcing multiculturalism in Hamburg—have refused to disclose precisely which schools are affected.

Now, for the first time, a confidential report leaked to the German newspaper Bild identifies seven of the problem schools by name. The schools where Islamist fanatics are “waging a religious war” against non-Muslim teachers and classmates are located in districts across the city, the document says, but the situation in Mümmelmannsberg in eastern Hamburg is “particularly appalling” and “the focus of an organized strategy” by Islamists to recruit new followers.

Teachers and school administrators say that efforts by Muslim fundamentalists to run the schools “according to their own rules” have increased in recent months, and speculation is rife that the document was leaked by someone seeking to force city officials into taking more forceful action.

School principals are being pressured, among other demands, into setting up special prayer rooms for Muslim children, who are increasingly gathering for prayers and shouting Islamist slogans on school playgrounds. Girls are requesting exemptions from gym classes and swimming lessons, and are being harassed if they fail to dress according to Islamic norms.

All of a sudden, Hillary’s not feeling the love from Democrats
It’s almost as if Democrats are starting to realize that Benghazi is going to take down their formerly presumptive 2016 nominee.

Ben Wolfgang, Washington Times:

Progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren repeated her Shermanesque pledge Sunday and vowed not to run for president in 2016, but she declined to endorse her party’s clear frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

Rick Moran, AT:

It looks like Vice President Joe Biden is dead serious about running for president in 2016. During a closed door speech before wealthy Democrats in South Carolina, Biden took a shot at the Clinton administration’s economic policies in what was described as an “Elizabeth Warren-type” address. (snip)

Biden, a potential 2016 candidate, said the unraveling of middle-class financial security began in “the later years of the Clinton administration,” not under George W. Bush, CNN reported Saturday.

On CNN panel yesterday, there was this interesting comparison on Biden’s remarks (via Noah Rothman, Mediaite):

“This is sort of the case that then Senator Barack Obama made against Hillary Clinton back in ’08,”The Atlantic’s Molly Ball said.

We all remember how that worked out.

While I do not discount Hillary’s lust for power, the plain fact is that she is not an attractive candidate. She has none of the charm of her husband, and has accomplished nothing positive in her Senatorial or State Department careers. Benghazi is an open sore, and it could well get badly infected.

John Kerry began the year trying to bring representatives of the Assad regime together with rebel leaders in Geneva to end the civil war in Syria.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike one.

Next, the secretary of state worked tirelessly to create a framework agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, with a view to settling their differences once and for all.

It was bound to fail. It failed. Strike two.

This week, U.S. negotiators and their counterparts from the P5+1—the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany—will meet in Vienna with Iranian negotiators to work out the details of a final nuclear agreement.

You know where this is going.

There’s been a buzz about these negotiations, with Western diplomats extolling the unfussy way their Iranian counterparts have approached the talks. Positions are said to be converging; technical solutions on subjects like the plutonium reactor in Arak are being discussed. Last month Iranian Foreign Minister Mohamad Javad Zarif said there was “50 to 60 percent agreement.”

All this is supposed to bode well for a deal to be concluded by the July deadline. If the Iranians are wise, they’ll take whatever is on the table and give Mr. Kerry the diplomatic win he so desperately wants. Time is on Tehran’s side. It can sweeten the terms of the agreement later on—including the further lifting of sanctions—through the usual two-step of provocation and negotiation.

The Obama crowd too often responds to critics and to world affairs like self-absorbed adolescents.

As American foreign policy continues its long string of failures—not a series of singles and doubles, as President Obama asserted in a recent news conference, but rather season upon season of fouls and strikes—the question becomes: Why?

Why does the Economist magazine put a tethered eagle on its cover, with the plaintive question, “What would America fight for?” Why do Washington Post columnists sympathetic to the administration write pieces like one last week headlined, “Obama tends to create his own foreign policy headaches”?

The administration would respond with complaints, some legitimate, about the difficulties of an intractable world. Then there are claims, more difficult to support, of steadily accumulating of minor successes; and whinges about the legacy of the Bush administration, gone but never forgotten in the collective memory of the National Security Council staff.

More dispassionate observers might pick out misjudgments about opportunities (the bewitching chimera of an Israeli-Palestinian peace, or the risible Russian reset), excessively hopeful misunderstandings of threats (al Qaeda, we were once told, is on the verge of strategic defeat), and a constipated decision-making apparatus centered in a White House often at war with the State and Defense departments.

There is a further explanation. Clues may be found in the president’s selfie with the attractive Danish prime minister at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December; in State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki in March cheerily holding up a sign with the Twitter TWTR +5.90% hashtag #UnitedForUkraine while giving a thumbs up; or Michelle Obama looking glum last week, holding up another Twitter sign: #BringBackOurGirls. It can be found in the president’s petulance in recently saying that if you do not support his (in)action in Ukraine you must want to go to war with Russia—when there are plenty of potentially effective steps available that stop well short of violence. It can be heard in the former NSC spokesman, Thomas Vietor, responding on May 1 to a question on Fox News about the deaths of an American ambassador and three other Americans with the line, “Dude, this was like two years ago.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579491643733173318?mg=reno64-wsj

Documents reveal a lawless attempt to block an Alaska mine project.

A basic precept of American democracy is that petitioners before their government receive a full and fair hearing. The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is in urgent need of that remedial civics lesson.

The EPA inspector general’s office last week announced it will investigate the agency’s February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America’s largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn’t worry other developers because Pebble is a “unique” threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.

The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we’ve also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA’s main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.

This story goes back to the debate over the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to evaluate projects and issue permits. Congress gave EPA only a secondary role of reviewing and potentially vetoing projects (with cause) under Section 404c. EPA has long chafed at this secondary role, which has made it harder to nix projects approved by the Corps.

EPA’s decision to initiate a veto process before Pebble had even received an Army Corps review is a disturbing first—and a flouting of the law. The internal documents refute EPA’s repeated claims that it began this process only in “response to petitions” from local Native American tribes in May 2010, and that peer-reviewed science drove its veto.

Emails show that EPA biologist Phillip North, based in Alaska and working on Pebble, was in 2008 advocating that his agency bring down the 404c hammer. “The 404 program has a major role” with Pebble, wrote Mr. North to Patricia McGrath, EPA’s regional mining coordinator for Alaska, in August 2008. By August 2009, Mr. North was pushing for EPA’s annual mining retreat to include a discussion about vetoing the project: “As you know, I feel that [Pebble] merit[s] consideration of a 404C veto.” The retreat included that discussion, though Pebble’s developer hadn’t yet applied for a permit.