RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Eid, who often uses a pseudonym, Qusai Zakarya, that he adopted while opposing the regime in Syria, now lives in Washington, D.C.

I kept asking why the administration wasn’t doing more to help my people. Then the Iran deal came through, and I knew.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was meeting with high-level Obama administration officials in Washington, D.C., two months after escaping Syria in February 2014, and I had just described to them all the horrors I had seen: the torture of protesters, the rape of women, the bombardment of civilians, the barrel bombs, the massacres, the sieges, the starvation, and the gassing of hundreds of innocents with sarin in August 2013. I had recounted how I barely survived those sarin attacks and the siege of my hometown, Moadamiya, near Damascus; and how, by some miracle, I managed to trick the regime into letting me leave Syria.

Now, I was asking the officials to take simple steps, to do something, anything, that would protect the millions of civilians I had left behind from further starvation and slaughter. But as I pressed these officials for answers, their replies grew increasingly divorced from the Syrian conflict:

Why couldn’t there be military action to protect civilians? The reply: The U.S. is helping Syrians through humanitarian and nonlethal means. Me: Thanks for your generosity, but can Band-Aids take down a fighter jet as it bombs civilians? Them: President Bashar Assad’s air-defense systems are too strong for a no-fly zone. Me: Then how does Israel keep bombing the regime? Them: The U.S. wants to avoid a military solution. We also need to stabilize the whole region. Me: Assad’s barrel bombs and starvation sieges are driving extremism, I’ve seen it with my own eyes—you call that stabilizing the region?

Ahmed Mohamed appears to have been treated outrageously. After all, all he did was build a clock. But now the Left’s false-moralist brigades are using Ahmed as a pivot to portray America as an inherently racist, ignorant nation.

Take Sally Kohn. Learning of Ahmed’s situation, the CNN commentator launched a Twitter diatribe against conservatives. “I get it, conservatives don’t believe anyone in America treated differently because of race or religion — except for white Christians.” Many other liberals are joining this latest chapter of Kohn’s never-ending purity war against conservatives. But their reaction is tragic. While I’d be the first to highlight true examples of injustice against American Muslims, the available facts suggest that Ahmed’s treatment was a consequence not of racism but rather of one teacher’s ignorance and overreaction.

Ahmed Mohamed is a human Rorschach test. Look at that face and tell me what you see: Muslim-American? African-American? I myself see something very familiar: Nerd-American.

Mohamed, a 14-year-old high-school freshman in Texas and the son of an immigrant family from Sudan, is a cause célèbre just at the moment because he was handcuffed, frog-marched out of a classroom, and arrested for the crime of showing off his technological chops by building an electronic clock and bringing it to school to show his engineering teacher. (Let us now praise MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, for the fact that 14-year-olds there have engineering teachers.) Apparently, an English teacher — it had to be an English teacher — thought the device looked like a bomb.

It didn’t. But it looked a hell of a lot more like a bomb than that half-eaten Pop-Tart in the possession of that seven-year-old in Maryland looked like a gun, yet the child was suspended; it was surely more reasonable to think that those circuit boards constituted a bomb than to think that the bang-bang! hand gesture of a ten-year-old in Milford, Mass., constituted a serious threat to shoot somebody; taking a high-school kid into custody after a teacher reports a possible bomb threat is surely no more irrational than arresting an eighth-grader over an NRA T-shirt.

Senator Cotton is one of the brightest, most principled and outspoken legislators in America. His resume is golden with academic and military records that are outstanding….stay tuned to his career…rsk

Congressional Democrats who backed President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran are “soft and gullible,” according to Senator Tom Cotton.

The Arkansas Republican suggested that Obama’s executive agreement with Iran would fail to bar the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon, just as Bill Clinton’s executive agreement with North Korea proved unsuccessful.

“I think many of these Democrats are simply soft and gullible about the role of power in the world,” he said Tuesday evening. “Too many Democrats in the Senate and the House are soft in the sense that they don’t want to confront evil forces with force when necessary. . . . And they’re gullible to believe that the ayatollahs will follow this agreement.”

“Sen. Rubio is probably the most gifted candidate in the race. His command of the issues has already been observed by my fellow Corner denizens, but what is most attractive to me is his sense of himself. He does not feel the need to tell you he is young, bright, attractive, and likable – he just is. I do not envy shopworn Hillary Clinton or goofy Joe Biden the thought of a one-on-one against him. Rubio also showed some refreshing humility last night, confessing that it was a misjudgment to address illegal immigration in one massive piece of legislation, and suggesting that the enforcement components have to take priority. Conservatives are already favorably disposed toward Rubio but are suspicious when it comes to his instincts on immigration; he’s obviously working to allay those concerns and it’s effective – at least it’s effective on me. I still have questions about where he may be on radical Islam – not on terrorists but on the “moderate Islamists” that Washington is convinced are out there just waiting to align with us. But Rubio has obviously done his homework on more complicated issues, so there’s good reason to think he’ll get that one right, too.”

The night belonged to Carly Fiorina. It was too crowded, unwieldy and tediously Trump-focused a forum for there to have been more than a few memorable moments; in retrospect, she got all of them. Mrs. F has a razor sharp mind and a crisp delivery, especially when giving reactive answers rather than scripted ones. She combines these with an attractive dignity –she knew there was no need to lay it on thick in laying out Trump. Her skill set is tailor-made for debate forums. Now that she’s shown she belongs, she is going to get a different kind of scrutiny than she’s had before. It will be interesting to see how she handles it, but you can tell no one will be better prepared – she’s not going to be outworked.

I’ve never taken Trump seriously and last night his lack of seriousness was on display. I know what the polls say, but it’s mid-September. To my mind, what is notable about his candidacy has never had much to do with him. He is an exhibit that shows how angry the Republican base is at the Republican party, particularly over illegal immigration and, overall, the GOP’s fear of taking it to Obama. He is also a major celebrity in a culture sadly fixated on celebrity. But he’s not a conservative, he hasn’t really thought deeply about public issues (which is fine, unless you want to be president), and I just don’t think he has staying power. Maybe I’ll end up being wrong (wouldn’t be the first time) but I can’t get whipped up about him. It would have been a more interesting debate if CNN weren’t so whipped up about him (ditto Fox).

Few people understand how President Barack Obama has succeeded in pushing through initiatives, programs and legislation that are distinctly unpopular with the total of the American population. To that end, few people understand how such a divisive incumbent president achieved re-election. Common sense would have that if a majority of people stood against a program, initiative or legislation – or a candidate for that matter – that success in achieving a positive result would be scant, if not impossible. But, as we have come to understand – almost seven years after the fact, Barack Obama and the Progressive machine do not play by a traditional set of rules. Instead, they play by a set of rules that are foreign and unintelligible to mainstream America and, especially, the tone-deaf Republican establishment.

Senate Democrats on Thursday secured a final victory for President Obama and his Iran nuclear agreement, by blocking two last-ditch efforts from Republicans to either disapprove of the deal or gum it up.

Over the last week, Democrats have prevented Republicans from even considering a resolution disapproving of the deal. In an effort to get around that opposition, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., tried to take up a new measure to prevent the Obama administration from lifting sanctions against Iran until that country frees four jailed Americans and recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

Thursday morning, McConnell tried to coax Democrats into supporting his plan, which is aimed at stopping a deal all Republicans oppose.

A Muslim “comes quietly, peaceably” into a society “until he can put knife under things that hold you together,” warned a Nigerian Anglican priest at Washington, DC’s Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) on August 10. He and a colleague briefed about ten audience members of IRD staff and others over ominous implications of growing Islamic influence in their northern Nigerian home state wracked by Boko Haram jihadist terror.
The quotation from Nigerian author Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart originally described Africa’s European colonizers, but fit Muslims as well for Reverend “Peter.” (“We are on the front line,” stated this past victim of Muslim attacks in asking that the priests’ real names not be used.) “When a Muslim is in the minority in any community, he becomes friendly. He is not a fanatic at the point,” explained Reverend “Matthew” in deadly earnest what some might otherwise dismiss as conspiracy-mongering. “As a strategy, it is advisable for him to be peaceful” and “to buy time until he is able to gather his momentum” in numbers and influence.

A teenage boy brings a ticking mechanical object with wires, screws and electrical components hanging from it to his high school. He shows it to his engineering teacher and explains that it’s a homemade alarm clock; that teacher calls it “nice” but advises the boy not to show it to other teachers. Ignoring this advice, the boy brings his invention to his English class where it beeps, is revealed to the English teacher who wisely notifies school authorities who immediately call police. So far, this sounds like exactly the type of reaction you would want from any school or public facility in a country that has already lost too many people to the unsuspected acts of terrorists, malicious students and mentally ill individuals. The clock is confiscated and the boy is suspended from school for 3 days.

But then the spin begins. Instead of heralding the quick thinking and actions of the school and police, Texas democrats call this an example of anti-Muslim sentiments. Immediately, this goes to social media eliciting comments from Mark Zuckerberg, Hillary Clinton and, mirabile dictu, President Obama himself who has enough time to tweet, “Cool clock Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.” Actually, America doesn’t need any new ticking “nice” clocks – what it does need is kids with enough common sense by the age of 14 to not bring unidentifiable objects resembling bombs to school.

In this post, I will discuss how the legislative history of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 adds significant support to arguments that the President has not complied with its terms, and that sanctions on Iran cannot be suspended until he does. I will also show how a provision of the statute previously not discussed in this context adds further support to the view that the so called “side deal” with the IAEA is part of the “deal.”

Does failure to transmit prevent sanctions relief?

As Jack Goldsmith acknowledges in a recent post, this is a very plausible reading of the statute. I also agree with him that it is not mandated by the text. However, the legislative history tilts the scales in this direction. The Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee clearly explained: “Sanctions relief is frozen until Congress receives the agreement and then holds a referendum on its merits.” (emphasis added)