RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anyone who doubts the power of prayer should consider the power of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, the Jerusalem hill where the First and Second Temples of ancient Israel once stood. It’s still a Jewish world, at least from the Indus to the Atlantic; everyone else just lives in it. That in what an extraterrestrial observer would conclude from the hysteria over a modest Jewish presence on the site.

A Palestinian law student last week murdered a young Israeli father and a local rabbi in Jerusalem’s Old City last week, the killer’s father declared: “He defended the honor of 1.5 billion Muslims all over the world,” according to the Washington Post. The murderer, Mohannad Halabi, also wounded the man’s wife and infant daughter, and killed a local rabbi who came to the family’s aid.

Halabi had written on his Facebook page, “What’s happening to our holy places, what’s happening to our mothers and sisters in al-Aqsa mosque? We are not the people who accept humiliation. Our people will revolt.” The killer’s father, Shafeek Halabi, declared “I am so proud of him” for having defended Muslim honor. Self-styled “guardians” of the Temple Mount have stockpiled stones and firecrackers in the al-Aqsa Mosque itself to throw at Jewish visitors as well as Israeli police, who have arrested violent protesters on several occasions in recent months.

No-one wants to talk about anything except the US elections, and there is nothing sensible to say about them. The Republican Party of better days, of entrepreneurship and energetic defense, seems to have been kidnapped by space aliens and replaced by Pod People. The aliens have kidnapped not just the party apparatus, but the party base as well. What do the Republicans want? The operative answer is “none of the above,” namely a candidate without a verifiable track record–a Donald Trump, a Ben Carson, a Carly Fiorina.

According to the Pew Institute, 65% of Republicans in September preferred “new ideas and a different approach” to “experience and a proven record.”

President Obama’s “Uncle Omar” lived in the US illegally for years and was arrested for DUI, but avoided punishment and received a legal driver’s license.

What has been traditionally used to identify American motorists has now become about as useful to police as an empty holster. For example, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) surge in giving driver’s licenses to more than 1.5 million illegal immigrants — a/k/a undocumented immigrants in current Golden State “newspeak” — is disturbing to many law enforcement officers. Police officials are very concerned with this policy, so much so that a homeland security newsletter began covering what many believe is just one more magnet for drawing illegal immigrants to the United States from terrorist havens throughout the world.

In January 2015, California began allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain the same driver’s licenses as legal immigrants and citizens. Police officers claim that there are tens of thousands of immigrants who stand on long lines at DMV centers throughout the state and their licenses not only allow them to drive vehicles but also double as identification for conducting many personal and business transactions.

Memo to the State Department: It’s time to think twice about knee-jerk criticism of Israel. You never know when it might turn around and bite you.

Just that happened when Associated Press reporter Matt Lee caught deputy State spokesman Mark Toner by surprise at a briefing this week. Lee asked about Saturday’s US bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that left 22 patients and staff dead.

The administration has called the attack a tragic mistake. But Lee recalled Israel’s August 2014 shelling of a UN school in Gaza — which State immediately labeled “disgraceful,” adding: “The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”

Jerusalem’s Jewish connection dates back more than 3,000 years. Even after Jews lost control of the city in 70 CE, a Jewish spiritual and physical bond with Jerusalem remained unbroken, despite 2,000 years of dispersion.

Although Islamic dynasties controlled Jerusalem for some 1,300 years, they never once made it the capital of an Arab state. Even Jordan, which controlled part of the city for 19 years, until 1967, refrained from making it its capital. Furthermore, Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran, Islam’s most holy book.

Following in Yasser Arafat’s footsteps, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas used an international stage to unleash yet another round of terror attacks against Israel.

As international criticism against his personal corruption mounted, Arafat used the conclusion of the Camp David meeting on July 25, 2000, to launch the Second Intifada. Earlier that month, Imad Faluji the Palestinian Authority’s communications minister

told a PLO rally in the Ein Hilwe refugee camp in South Lebanon, that as part of that plan all the PLO “military action groups of the 1960s 1970s and 1980s are returning to work to escalate the fighting against Israel.”

His predecessor Abbas, used his speech at U.N. General Assembly on September 30, 2015, in which he declared his intention to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state, thus abandoning the Oslo Accord, to instigate escalation in the deadly attacks against Jews in the West Bank, Jerusalem and even among Israeli Arabs. Abbas probably hopes that the violence and political chaos would mask Hamas harsh criticism against him and his government.

Saudi Arabia recently invited the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood to an event sponsored by the Kingdom in Riyadh, in a signal that the country’s government may be trying to bury the hatchet with the Islamist group. Reuters reports:

Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, a Qatar-based cleric whose fiery sermons have strained ties with Gulf neighbors, appeared alongside the Qatari prime minister and the Saudi ambassador at an event in Doha to celebrate Saudi Arabia’s national day.

The accession to the Saudi throne in January of King Salman, who is more sympathetic to religious conservatives than his predecessor King Abdullah, caused glimmers of hope among Muslim Brotherhood exiles in Qatar that the Middle East’s political winds had started to shift in their favor, potentially giving the Islamist group more space to act.
Salman, while stopping short of befriending the Brotherhood, has worked to reduce tensions with the movement’s own allies, strengthening Riyadh’s ties with Turkey and Qatar and reaching out to Islah, the Islamist group’s offshoot in Yemen.

Note: Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra is the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Shillman senior fellow. This article originally appeared at Newsmax.

NBC’s “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd in a recent exchange with a presidential candidate raised an issue that should be discussed not only by all of the candidates, but debated and analyzed by the American people.

Is Islamic law (Shariah) compatible with the U.S. Constitution?

The question has no simple answer, but we have three recent examples of where regime change forced national leaders to determine Shariah’s role in their governance, all failing to reach a definitive conclusion.

The first two followed interventions by the Obama administration, in one case actively and in the other passively, that facilitated the overthrow of stable authorities.

In Libya, NATO precipitated the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi’s 42-year dictatorship. In Egypt, the U.S. sent clear and unambiguous indications that replacing President Hosni Mubarak with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood would be acceptable, if not desirable.

On Sunday night, the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem was nearly empty. Though it was the eve of Simchat Torah, when thousands of Jew normally congregate at the holy site to celebrate the holiday by dancing with Torah scrolls, the Palestinian terrorist attack that took place in the area 24 hours earlier served to scare off even those people who believe that everything is in God’s hands.

No one could possibly be blamed for such fear.

The stabbing of an Israeli family by a 19-year-old Ramallah resident and Jerusalem law student — culminating in the death of 22-year-old Aharon Bennett and 41-year-old Rabbi Nehemia Lavi, who came to the rescue; the critical wounding of 21-year-old Adele Bennett; the injury to the couple’s two-year-old boy and trauma to their physically unscathed baby daughter — was not merely brutal. It was documented on the cellphones of Arab onlookers, who laughed and spit at the young mother covered in blood, begging for help as she tried to flee the scene with a knife wedged in her shoulder.

“You should die, too,” they chanted, while she stumbled ahead in the direction of Israeli Border Police.

Hillary Clinton has a new gun agenda that is the same as the old gun agenda.

We all are appalled and heartsick over the country’s mass shootings, which aren’t any less shocking for their routine occurrence. But that doesn’t mean we know how to stop them. The Pavlovian Democratic reaction is to offer a raft of familiar gun-control proposals, whether or not they have any bearing on mass shootings.

Hillary’s ideas are a testament to the essential sterility of the gun debate, no matter how much heat it generates. There is no way around the fact that marginal changes will do little or nothing to stop mass killers, while more sweeping changes — even if they were practicable or wise — run afoul of the Second Amendment.

Among other things, Clinton wants to renew the assault-weapons ban, which we had for 10 years before it lapsed in 2004. The ban never made any sense, and a push to revive it is nostalgia for a meaningless gesture. To review: A so-called assault weapon is a semi-automatic rifle tricked out with frightening-looking cosmetic features. It is functionally indistinguishable from any other semi-automatic rifle.