RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama delivered on upbeat progress report Monday on the fight against Islamic State, and we can only hope that this time he’s right. A reason for skepticism is that Mr. Obama has offered similarly confident predictions of eventual victory before.

Speaking at the Pentagon, the President noted that Islamic State had been hit by more than 5,000 air strikes, “lost more than a quarter of the populated areas that it had seized in Iraq,” failed in key battles at Kobani, Mosul Dam and Tikrit, “alienated those under its rule” and united the world against it. He also promised an intensified air campaign against its leadership in Syria and its oil facilities in Iraq, along with an intensified effort to train and equip friendly local forces.

It started with a course boycott and ended with a Nazi cartoon.

In the spring of 2014, a series of ugly incidents rocked the campus of Vassar College, a small liberal arts college just north of New York City.

It started with a boycott protest against a course that involved travel to Israel and the West Bank, including forcing a professor and students to walk a gauntlet of people ululating (audio example here). It culminated in the posting on social media of a Nazi cartoon portraying Jewish control of the U.S.

The group mounting the protest and posting the plainly anti-Semitic cartoon was Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Obama Administration dismisses a bias complaint by Asian-Americans.

Harvard University is looking for legal cover to justify discriminating against Asian-Americans, and it has an ally in Washington. The Education Department on Tuesday said it had dismissed a complaint from 64 organizations alleging that Harvard uses de facto quotas to limit Asian-Americans on campus.

The percentage of Asian-American students at Harvard and other elite universities has held suspiciously steady for two decades at about 18%, while the number of college-age Asian-Americans has increased rapidly. In May the coalition asked the civil-rights arms of the Education and Justice Departments to investigate why Asian-Americans, who make up about 5% of the population but earn an estimated 30% of National Merit semifinalist honors, aren’t accepted to Harvard in numbers that reflect these qualifications.

White House expected to announce millions of Office of Personnel Management records stolen; intelligence chief suspects Chinese hackers
WASHINGTON—Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey said Wednesday the White House soon will announce that “millions and millions” of government background investigation records—dating back 20 years—were stolen by hackers who broke into the Office of Personnel Management’s network.

Mr. Comey, describing the theft as an “enormous breach” during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his own personal information was stolen as part of the intrusion, which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said likely was carried out by Chinese hackers. Chinese officials have said they weren’t involved.

Some native Swedes feel that Sweden’s immigration policy is a sociological version of creative destruction: “Out with the old, in with the new.” Various ethnic and religious identities have been formed, but Swedish national identity is being lost. If this trend continues, in a few years Malmö will become a city where ethnic Swedes are in the minority.

Sweden has become a shattered society. Optimists say that some day a new common historical and cultural context, based on Swedish multiculturalism, will grow. But immigrant riots in Husby, and the jihadist elements growing in major Swedish cities, tell a different story.

Officials in Sweden’s government say they want immigrants to integrate into the society, but in areas where the majority are immigrants, there is not much society for them to integrate into. There are buildings and traces of a society, but the people who built that society are not around. In many areas where the majority of residents are immigrants and their children, the only identity the community manages to forge is that the area has many social problems.

Most boycotters have no commitment to fairness and regard the idea with derision. Against them, one has to use tactics that fall under the rubric “this is going to hurt you more than us.” Anti-boycott operations have used this approach sporadically with remarkable success. But the approach needs to be conceived more systematically and implemented far more widely.

Such strategies can be summarized under at least four headings: lawfare, counter-boycotts, digging up dirt and self-harming. On the other hand, some Israeli ministerial decisions inadvertently facilitate boycotts; this area, too, needs to be considered.

Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield unveils the temptations of evil.

There’s a lot of overlap with the UK sex grooming crisis here. The tactics are much the same as you see in cults.

The Jihadists targeted isolated and inexperienced young people, love bombed them, threatened with the withdrawal of affection, and brainwashed them with materials they didn’t understand. They led with non-Jihad materials and the softer side of the Islamic State.

And yes they can get to your kids even if they don’t know Allah from a hole in the wall.

Adopting the dubious theory that compromise on the part of the stronger power and appeasement can change the behavior of tyrants, can make them behave more like us, has been at the core of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Obama declared his intentions in his first inaugural address suggesting negotiations with adversaries through “mutual interests” that would lead to “mutual respect.”

The Obama administration’s internationalist ideology has in fact succeeded in what late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called, in 1993, “Defining Deviancy Down” in the international arena.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer expanded Moynihan’s point by proposing that not only were we “normalizing what was once considered deviant,” but we were also “finding deviant what was once considered normal.”

Effectively, there seems to be no tyrant who is “as bad as all that,” who doesn’t deserve gestures of kindness, and a bonus now and then. On May 6, at the Pentagon, the president reinforced everything he has said in the past about America’s avowed adversaries.

Lately I’ve been looking at Organic Opposition instead of Organizational Opposition. The latter is still important, but people are rightly disappointed and angry with everything from the GOP to assorted national groups and bewildered by a wide array of candidates.

Organic Opposition doesn’t require organizations or a movement. It’s about living in ways that naturally oppose the left.

Most of the people here already live in ways that the left resents without even thinking about it. Organic Opposition is about finding new ways to oppose the power of the left in your life.

This is not a complete checklist. It’s a set of general ideas and people are welcome to add to them in the comments.

5. Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You

The latest word from Vienna is that the July 7 deadline has come and gone, and ‎now the P5+1 and Iran hope to wrap things up by Friday, July 10.

The three-day ‎slippage may not appear to be a big deal, but it is a delay the administration ‎hoped to avoid, since the Corker-Menendez bill provides for 60 days for congressional review of an Iran agreement if the terms are submitted to Congress ‎after July 9, but only 30 days if submitted by that date. Given summer vacations ‎and the general undesirability (heat, humidity) of being in the nation’s capital ‎during the summer months, the extra 30 days allows for both houses of Congress, ‎controlled by Republicans in each case, to set up less compressed schedules for ‎reviewing the agreement, calling in witnesses and taking the votes. And of course, it ‎provides more time for skeptical lawmakers and their staffs to read the details of ‎what has been conceded and given away and to try to determine what our side got ‎in exchange for removing most sanctions — American and ‎international — almost immediately, and providing about $150 billion to Iran.