RUTHFULLY YOURS

The phrase, “change the laws on my own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution.

History will ill-serve Eric Holder if it does no more than echo the view common in the wake of his resignation that his tenure as Attorney General was “controversial.” Mr. Holder’s more than five years as the nation’s chief legal officer were consequential.

In tandem with Barack Obama ‘s White House, Mr. Holder pushed the authority of the federal government and its administrative agencies beyond the edge of the Constitution and law. They did so not in one or several controversial instances, as with past presidencies, but repeatedly and across the breadth of the federal government.

Universities, public schools, fire and police departments, the financial industry, utilities, state legislatures, orders of nuns, black parents, small-business owners, the electrons inside the Internet, random sections of the U.S. Constitution—all have learned that what they took to be the clear meaning of existing law was wrong.

Messrs. Obama and Holder have attempted to make federal legal authority limitless. The Obama-Holder theory of law—that the needs of justice, as they define it, supersede the law’s boundaries—deserves to be repudiated. It has no precedent outside progressive law journals or various periods in South American history.

Mr. Obama made his intentions clear. In July 2011, the president said in public he’d like to “bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.” The phrase, “change the laws on his own,” is not in the U.S. Constitution. The next year, Mr. Obama made his now-famous and unconstitutional recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board. The recess appointments were the tip of the iceberg.

For the firm of Obama & Holder, shocking the conscience of sitting federal judges with legal overstepping is just another day in court. The Obama lawyers’ legal justification for their actions has often been, in effect, what difference does it make? That isn’t a legal argument. Yet.

Socked by new taxes, U.S. health-care technology companies are moving R&D centers and jobs overseas.

Of the many unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the least noticed is its threat to innovation. Although most discussions center on the law’s more immediate effects on hiring, insurance rates and access to doctors and care, attention should also be paid to its impact on U.S. research and development and health-care technology.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s health-care innovation occurs in the U.S. This includes ground-breaking drug treatments, surgical procedures, medical devices, patents, diagnostics and much more. Most of the funding for that innovation—about 71% of U.S. R&D investment—comes from private industry. A recent R&D Magazine survey of industry leaders in 63 countries ranked the U.S. No. 1 in the world for health-care innovation.

But that environment is changing. According to R&D Magazine and the research firm Battelle, growth of R&D spending in the U.S. from 2012 to 2014 averaged just 2.1%, down from an average of 6% over the previous 15 years. In that same 15-year period, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, India and the European Union saw faster R&D spending growth than the U.S. China’s grew on average 22% per year.

The recent slowdown in R&D spending in the U.S. is in part caused by weak economic growth since the 2008 financial crisis. But the economy’s weakness itself has been exacerbated by the negative impact of new taxes and regulations under ObamaCare. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the new health-care law will levy more than $500 billion in new taxes over its first 10 years to help pay for insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion. These new taxes include significant levies on key health-care industries, such as manufacturers of medical devices and drugs, and their investors.

Originally, I thought that President Obama’s refusal to invite Prime Minister Netanyahu to a White House dinner was merely because of our president’s animus toward Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular. It turns out, however, that Obama was saving dinner delicacies for a gala meal to honor Prime Minister Modi of India. At the White House dinner, P.M. Modi only had warm water. As a religious Hindu, he was observing Navrati, a Hindu festival, and was fasting.

The White House had been informed that Modi was fasting, but they assumed that meant that he was eating fast food dishes. I’m guessing that Modi’s uneaten food will be saved for Netanyahu, whom the White House will invite for a barbecue on Yom Kippur.

President Obama might not have known about Navrati. But perhaps he considered Modi to not be a real Hindu. Our President has proven to be somewhat of an expert on theology. At the UN, he explained that ISIS was not truly Muslim and he reiterated his assertion that no religion tolerates the killing of innocents. I’m guessing that part of our President’s expertise must have come from attending twenty years of sermons by the Reverend Wright who perhaps had suggested that the Crusades and Inquisition were part of a Jewish conspiracy.

On the other hand, perhaps it is not really a matter of theology. After all, the State Department has adopted the new dictum that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and even flies like a duck, then it is probably a kangaroo. They are constantly providing us with new names for Al Quaida terrorists . In part this is in order to disguise the fact that the requiem for Al Quaida pronounced by President Obama was a bit premature.

Also this is because our administration is so enamored with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, that it would much prefer that the perpetrators of these atrocities turned out to be 7th Day Adventists.

“We awoke one morning in September and the world lurched on its axis.”Jeb Bush

The world may not have “lurched on its axis” this month, but President Obama did. This was the man who scored a Nobel Peace Prize, not for what he had done, but for what it was hoped he would do. He said he would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unilaterally, he pulled all troops from Iraq two years ago, leaving a vacuum rapidly filled by al Qaeda and its affiliates. He plans to do the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2016. This month he added airstrikes against ISIS in Syria to those he began flying in Iraq last month. The “Peace” President has gone to war.

Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry gathered an impressive list of Arab allies – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Qatar and Bahrain – to aid in the destruction of ISIS through air strikes. Additionally, the plan is to arm about 5,000 Syrian insurgents who are fighting Bashar al-Assad to take up arms against more than 30,000 ISIS troops in Syria. And, Mr. Obama did this without having crossed any red lines. In contradiction to previous promises, in August he did put a few thousand “boots on the ground” in Iraq (military advisors, as President Kennedy quaintly called them, when he sent 400 of them to Vietnam in May 1961). Whether he does the same in Syria is yet to be known, but it is likely that some special forces are already there.

However, keeping true to form, when asked last Sunday by Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes” if he had been surprised by the rapid rise of ISIS, he said he was, but deflected the blame. Mr. Obama said “they underestimated them,” naming James Clapper and the intelligence community. He did not say “we;” he said “they.” However, three weeks after Fallujah fell to ISIS early last January it was Mr. Obama who referred to ISIS as the jayvee, not Mr. Clapper. The most salient characteristic of Mr. Obama: never take blame!

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Sir Walter Scott’s lines apply to the Middle East. Mr. Obama has quoted the proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”, or maybe the first enemy is still my enemy? Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with allies you have, not the ones you wish for.” Maybe, but are they real allies? Any deal we make with Arab allies risks being Faustian. It was the lesson learned by Jabez Stone in Stephen Vincent Benét’s novel, The Devil and Daniel Webster. Our most visible Islamic terrorist enemies are Sunni, but so are the Saudis, an ally. The greatest longer term threat we face is a nuclear Iran who are Shias. Iran’s centrifuges continue to spin. The Country is also Syria’s patron. In attacking ISIS in Syria, we are doing Bashar al-Assad’s work, but Assad has now killed an estimated 190,000 of his own people. What sort of deal will we strike with Iran?

Over the weekend, I argued that the terrorist organization the Obama administration chooses to call the ‘Khorasan Group’ does not actually exist – at least not as a standalone terrorist organization. As I elaborated in the column:

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria.

FDD’s Tom Joscelyn, who is as good as it can get when it comes to analyzing jihadist organizations, has also argued that the “so-called Khorasan Group” is “to put it simply, al Qaeda.” It is not a standalone terrorist organization. It is, at most, a group of trusted advisers within al Qaeda (the Islamic concept is a “shura”) who were dispatched by al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri to the jihad in Syria. Syria has been an optimal location for plotting attacks against the West because Qaeda has had safe-haven there akin to what it enjoyed in Afghanistan in the years before September 11, 2001. Most analysts and even jihadists themselves have never heard of the “Khorasan Group” because the shura it refers to is an internal organizational arrangement – not a combat unit, much less a terrorist organization. The members sent to Syria were simply al-Nusra, just like other al-Qaeda operatives in Syria.

President Obama and his subordinates take pains not to mention al Qaeda, particularly in the context of continuing plots to mass-murder Americans, because the president repeatedly and falsely claimed during the 2012 campaign to have “decimated” the terror network and put it “on the path to defeat.” The administration miniaturizes the continuing threat by breaking al Qaeda down into its components and speaking about them as if they were independent actors rather than a global jihadist movement unified by virulently anti-American Islamic-supremacist ideology.

Some of the names Obama officials use for these purposes are simply made up – like “core al Qaeda.” (See, e.g., Tom Joscelyn’s Weekly Standard report, “Misunderstanding al Qaeda”, quoting Susan Rice’s rationalization of “what we call al Qaeda core” [my italics] – what are actually just the network tentacles in Afghanistan and Pakistan). Other names may be appropriated from al-Qaeda’s organizational divisions (internal ones like “Khorasan” or external ones like “al-Nusra” or “Ansar al-Sharia”) and then disingenuously used in a similar fashion to make the global terror network seem like a disconnected and trifling gaggle of “jayvee teams.”

Political correctness in speech is the severed hamstring of the strongest assertion of moral integrity.

The politically correct fear of affronting Muslims is so infectious and poisonous it will lead a man who takes an otherwise commendable and irrefutable position on Islam to make a fallacious distinction between Islam and its allegedly “militant” adherents and practitioners.

In one sentence, apparently calculated to mollify Muslims and Islamic states of all stripes, including ISIS, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated:

“It’s not militants. It’s not Islam. It’s militant Islam.”

It occurs in the fourth paragraph of Netanyahu’s speech to the UN on September 29th, 2014.

It’s not militants. It’s not Islam. It’s militant Islam. Typically, its first victims are other Muslims, but it spares no one. Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Kurds – no creed, no faith, no ethnic group is beyond its sights. And it’s rapidly spreading in every part of the world. You know the famous American saying: “All politics is local”? For the militant Islamists, “All politics is global.” Because their ultimate goal is to dominate the world….

Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch called the Prime Minister’s speech “brilliant.” Indeed, it is that in many respects. But that one sentence has dimmed its brilliance with that single corrosive politically correct statement.

That single sentence undercuts the clarity and force of the rest of his speech. I won’t be the only one to have noticed it and measured its import on the balance of the speech and Netanyahu’s position on the threat of ISIS, Hamas, and all the other terrorist gangs he names. Our enemies will have noticed it and evaluated it and reached the same conclusion: He has pulled back from a blanket condemning of Islam root, trunk, branch and twig.

So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.
And what they share in common, all militant Islamists share in common: • Boko Haram in Nigeria; • Ash-Shabab in Somalia; • Hezbollah in Lebanon; • An-Nusrah in Syria; • The Mahdi Army in Iraq; • And the Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere.

This is a follow-up response to John Azumah’s critique of my views on the Islamic State. Two key points are that core doctrines of jihadi movements are held in common by all Sunni schools of Islamic law – and not just ‘Wahhabi’ Islam – and jihadi groups have often justified their militancy campaigns on the basis that Muslim lands are ‘occupied’ by unbelievers.

John Azumah has taken yet another bite of the apple by releasing a third response to my Lapido Media article “‘Three Choices’ and the bitter harvest of denial”. This is an earlier response, now re-issued, in edited form, with Fulcrum (for his previous comments, both reported on Lapido Media, see here and here).

I can refer readers to my previous rejoinder to Azumah: “Complexity, Truth and the Islamic State: a response to John Azumah and Colin Chapman.” In respect of Azumah’s new material for Fulcrum I make the following observations:

I did not say that the conditions of the dhimma “always” applied to Christians living under Islamic rule. My point was subtly different, namely that coexistence after Islamic conquest was “always regulated by the conditions of the dhimma”. By this I did not mean to imply that dhimma laws were consistently or uniformly applied to Christians at all times and in all places: my point was that the dhimma conditions and worldview profoundly framed and shaped the patterns of coexistence of Muslims and their conquered subjects.

John Azumah emphasizes that groups like the Islamic State, Al-Qa’ida and Boko Haram trace their theology to the Hanbali madhab (Sunni school of law), which, he points out, is followed by only a minority of Muslims today. He insinuates that other schools – representing the majority of Muslims – have different rules concerning jihad and the treatment of conquered non-Muslim subjects.

This is misleading on several counts. Although it is true that Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya has been influential among Salafi groups, his student Ibn Kathir, who has been almost as influential, was Shafa’i. Terrorists today follow all four of the main madhabs: Al-Shabab are Shafa’i, the Afghan Taliban were Hanafi, and Gadhafi, a long-term sponsor of terrorism, governed according to Maliki jurisprudence. In any case the rules for the treatment of non-Muslims during and after conquest are essentially the same in all four schools: for example it is permissible to kill male captives of war in all the schools of Sunni jurisprudence.

Abdirizak Bihi strolls through neighborhood parks where young Somalis shoot hoops and play soccer. He tells jokes, urges them to clean up their trash and even grabs the basketball to take a few shots.
It may seem like fun, but Bihi’s eyes are scanning the playgrounds and ball courts of Minneapolis for something sinister – anyone who might try to recruit these kids to join a jihad overseas.

If Bihi doesn’t show up for his personal patrol for five, six or seven days, “somehow the word gets out, and they’re back,” he said.
Community members and law enforcement officials are on a mission to stamp out terror recruiting in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali population in the United States. A handful of people from the community have left to join militant groups in Syria within the last year, according to authorities.

The anti-jihad work is not unlike longstanding efforts to keep young people out of gangs in any number of other U.S. cities. And just like street gangs, militant groups tend to prey on the vulnerable via the Internet or to strike up relationships through small group meetings or one-on-one conversation in parks, mosques or even hospitals.
Bihi’s mission is also personal. His own nephew was recruited to fight for the al-Qaida-linked group al-Shabab in 2008 and died in Somalia.

He said he sees unfamiliar men with “hostile” eyes approach teens in parks. The kids describe how the men talk about the Quran – never about jihad at first – and scold them for wearing shorts or associating with infidels.
“It’s about scaring the hell out of them first, telling them that they are bad people and that they can make them good,” Bihi said. They leave when he approaches.
Terror recruiting is not new here: More than 22 young Minnesotans have traveled to Somalia since 2007 to take up arms with al-Shabab. Back then, authorities found a handful of people were holding secret meetings to promote the cause. Now social media are playing a prevalent role, according to FBI spokesman Kyle Loven.