RUTHFULLY YOURS

In his blog, theologian and scholar of Islam Dr. Mark Durie states:

It is remarkable that the daily prayers of every Muslim, part of the core of Islam, include a rejection of Christians and Jews as misguided and objects of Allah’s wrath.

Devout Muslims repeat this Surat al Fatiha (Qur’an, 1:7) at least seventeen times daily during the five calls to prayer – over 5,000 times a year.

On Friday, August 4, 2017, I attended the weekly Jummah prayers at the Chautauqua Institution Hall of Christ. The Abrahamic Program for Young Adults (APYA) leads the service each Friday with full support from the Institution’s department of religion. Each summer, the department selects four college-age students to serve for the season as the “face” of interfaith dialogues at Chautauqua: one liberal Jew, one liberal Christian, and two Muslims – one Sunni (male) and one Shia (female).

At the Hall of Philosophy, prior to introducing the various speakers, the department of religion director proudly invites a large audience (anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000) and residents to join the Friday Jummah, ostensibly to show how people of all religions can celebrate together through this Islamic service.

In this instance, some 50 people attended. About 20 actually participated in the prayers – about half of the them non-Muslims. All willingly bowed and prostrated themselves according to Islamic tenets. Roughly 30 spectators sat, listened, and watched the ritual unfold. Texts of the prayers were handed to the entire audience.

The Shia female asked participants to remove their shoes in that “sacred” space, which she called the Hall of the “Prophet,” despite its actual name, Hall of Christ. She didn’t elucidate which prophet she meant.

The APYA Sunni Muslim, Omar, led the prayers. He completed his undergrad at the Zaytuna College, Calif. – the first Muslim university in the U.S. – and plans to attend the Hartford Institute before enrolling in the U.S. military as a Muslim chaplain.

During prayers, Omar and few other Muslims recited the phrase “Allahu akbar” a few times. It was explained that god is greater than any of us. The event included Quranic chants in Arabic between prostrations. Participants followed Omar’s lead, bowing to the floor, then kneeling. They repeated this ritual a few times.

Omar served as the imam, preaching a long sermon. Since nothing in the world is going in the right direction, he stressed, “we need to look into a different direction,” be kind to others, to our neighbors, and look inside ourselves and be connected to our spirituality. Until 2010, he told the audience, he was a confused person, but now he feels good. He suggested we can all also turn around our lives.

Omar displayed Da’wa activity in full. His sermon effectively served as an invitation to Islam, albeit indirect. For now, the Chautauqua Institution prohibits official invitations to Islam (or other religions) and requires all denominational leaders to sign statements that they may not proselytize. Yet I wonder how long these APYA Muslims will restrain themselves about their real intention, since Islam requires Muslims to invite all “infidels” to join them and “revert.”

Then the female Shia Muslim young adult explained that during the Jummah prayer, she would stand behind Omar; she claimed that in her Shia tradition, she wouldn’t have done so, and this was “just” a simple cultural difference. She then explained that this tradition prevents the men from getting looks at the “women’s booty.” The spectators approvingly laughed. If there were feminists among the audience, they were silent.

Imagine if a conservative Christian said something similar about his religion. All hell would break loose. Muslims, however, get a free ride on most anything they say or do.

The young Shia woman sang a melodic chant in Farsi. Then came the Q and A segment. The Sunni, Omar, said we had only six minutes. I raised my hand, received the microphone from the male Jewish APYA young adult, and calmly stated:

“I am a student of Islam [at which Omar smiled with pleasure] – not the Islam that you are teaching here at Chautauqua, but the real Islam. [All smiles faded.] As such, I learned that Surat al Fatiha verse 1:7 in effect vilifies the Jews and Christians. Those who go astray are the Christians, and those who earned Allah’s wrath are the Jews.”

In May 2014, a broad collection of thinkers and politicians gathered in Washington to celebrate a new conservative “manifesto.” The document called for replacing stodgy old Reaganite economics with warmer, fuzzier handouts to the middle class. Donald Trump must have missed the memo.

The president formally opened the tax wars on Wednesday with his speech in Missouri challenging Congress to meet his principles for reform. The media almost uniformly applied to the speech its favorite (though misused) descriptor: “populist.” But the real news was that Mr. Trump wants to make Reagan-style tax reform great again.

The left saw this clearly, which explains its furious and frustrated reaction to the speech. “Trump’s New Tax Scam: Selling Plutocracy as Populism,” ran a headline in Vanity Fair, bemoaning that “Trickle-down is back, baby.” Democratic strategist Robert Shrum railed in a Politico piece that the “plutocrat” Mr. Trump was pitching a tax cut for “corporations and the top 1 percent” yet was getting away with a “perverted populism.” Trump voters had been “tricked into voting against themselves,” and now Mr. Trump was pulling a similar con with taxes.

Nonsense. Mr. Trump is selling pro-growth policies—something his party has forgotten how to do. And there’s nothing very “populist” about it, at least not by today’s political standards. The left has defined the tax debate for decades in terms of pure class warfare. Republicans have so often been cast as stooges for the rich that the GOP is scared to make the full-throated case for a freer and fairer tax system. It was precisely the right’s desire for a more “populist” tax policy that gave us the Reformicons and their manifesto for buying off the middle class.

Mr. Trump isn’t playing this game—and that’s why the left is unhappy. The president wants to reduce business tax rates significantly and encourage American companies to repatriate billions of profits held overseas. He wants to simplify the tax code in a way that will eliminate many cherished carve-outs. He wants tax relief for “middle income Americans,” though he also praised to the sky the 1986 Reagan reform that reduced the number of tax brackets and significantly lowered top marginal rates.

Mr. Trump did sneak a nod to Ivanka into the speech by including her proposal to hand out taxpayer money for child care. But his address was largely a hymn to supply-side economics, stunning Democrats who believed they’d forever dispelled such voodoo.

What made the left even more apoplectic was the president’s manner of sales pitch. What journalists always fail to note is the difference between “populist” policies and a “populist” delivery (of which Reagan was a master). Mr. Trump has defined himself as the protector of America’s forgotten man, an outsider to the swamp, an America Firster. The result is that he is uniquely qualified to sell a tax plan decried as “elitist” to average Americans. CONTINUE AT SITE

Amid so much bad news out of Texas, our vote for hopeful story of the week goes to Gilead Sciences ’ bid to buy Kite Pharma Inc. for about $11 billion. That’s a big bet on a new type of cancer therapy based on genetically modifying a kind of immune cell known as T-cells.

Our Allysia Finley recently wrote about the so-called CAR-T treatment in an interview with Carl June, one of the cancer researchers behind the discovery. The treatment shows remarkable results in many patients, and the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Gilead, a leading biotech firm, is paying a steep price for Kite’s CAR-T technology. But Gilead has the means to do so thanks to the success of its Sovaldi drug in curing hepatitis C in thousands of patients. But other companies are also moving fast to exploit CAR-T treatments, including Novartis AG , and there’s no guarantee that Gilead-Kite will be first to market. That’s a risk for Gilead shareholders.

The exciting news for the rest of us, especially the many who will get cancer over our lifetimes, is the vote of confidence the merger signals for improving survival rates. Not too long ago academic and media scolds were dismissing U.S. drug research as providing little more than marginal gains. And major newspapers were claiming little or no progress against cancer. Now they’re fretting about the costs of breakthrough drugs that have the potential to cure deadly diseases.

Whether or not Kite works for Gilead as a business, it’s good to be reminded that drug research means taking risks in the hope of saving lives and making money in the process.

It is time for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) performance review. How have Candidate Trump’s campaign promises fared in President Trump’s White House?

When ex-president Obama promised President Trump the customary peaceful transition of power President Trump believed him – it was a devastating mistake and catastrophic for MAGA. Our new President is a savvy businessman and America needs his business expertise – but government business is even dirtier and more corrupt than the New York real estate business.

In real estate it is far easier to identify your enemies – in government the swamp creatures are camouflaged by their ever-changing colors, deceitful smiles, and ability to adapt. Swamp creatures are entirely self-serving – there are no teams or loyalties in the swamp – just survival.

For eight years ex-president liar-in-chief Obama staffed the United States government with Globalists, Islamists, and Leftist activists. His hope and change agenda was designed to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to create the social chaos required for seismic social change. Obama weaponized his pro-Muslim agenda and used it in his information war to destabilize America and create social chaos. He staffed the government with Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR members. Obama weakened the military and national security apparatus with training manuals rewritten to satisfy his MB/CAIR advisers that deliberately deleted any mention of Islam as the ideological inspiration for jihad terror. He used Common Core to re-educated our youth with a revisionist curriculum that rejects Judeo-Christian traditions and exalts Islam as a religion of peace. Obama was the media’s globalist darling and they covered up his crimes against America to advance the globalist agenda of their owners.

Make America Great Again advances Americanism. MAGA is the new program that President Trump brought to Washington to oppose globalism. So, after seven months what does the MAGA performance review reveal? A shocking reorganization from MAGA to GAMA – Globalists are Management Again.

In a stunning reversal of staffing all the President’s men are OUT and all the ex-president’s men are IN. This is a catastrophic management upheaval. It is simply impossible for President Trump to fulfill his campaign promises to MAGA with an oppositional staff that rejects Americanism, a Washington swamp that embraces globalism, a biased mainstream media that protects the globalists, a pro-Muslim educational system that idealizes globalism, and a national security apparatus that denies Islamic ideology is the inspiration for jihadi terrorism.

How did this happen? How does a dream become a nightmare? How does unlikely Candidate Trump become President Trump and then lose his way?

Thought precedes behavior. Businessman Trump built an empire by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

Candidate Trump became President Trump by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision MAGA, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

President Trump brought his MAGA vision to Washington but the globalist traps were already set. There was no peaceful transition of power as promised. Instead, the swamp offensive began. The first attack was on General Michael Flynn, a true America-first patriot who understood the clear and present danger of radical Islam. General Flynn had the information to expose Obama’s insidious master plan to destabilize and destroy America from within. The globalist swamp needed to destroy General Flynn’s credibility to survive and so they did. But the creatures were not satisfied and the swamp attacks continued.

President Trump’s America-first MAGA team that was designed to oppose and dismantle the existing globalist swamp in Washington was attacked relentlessly and has itself been devoured by the swamp creatures instead. Team members Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka – all disappeared. Obama loyalists H.R.. McMaster, Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson – all reappeared. Why?