RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just when you think the Islamic State can’t do anything that would outrage civilized humanity any more than we already are, along comes this story in the New York Times that goes into excruciating detail about how rape is being used to recruit ISIS members and the twisted justification for it that ISIS says comes directly from the Koran.

The report also details how the sex-slave market works — its bureaucracy, its logistics, and its organization.

The article starts with a horrific description of an ISIS fighter raping a 12-year-old girl:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

They say it’s not the crime, but the coverup. But sometimes it’s the crime and the coverup. Hillary Clinton’s metastasizing email scandal is beginning to look more and more like a case of both.

Back in the seventies, Charles Colson of Watergate fame boasted he would “walk over my own grandmother” to assure the election of Richard Nixon. Hillary Clinton — who cut her teeth on the very Watergate investigation before she was “let go” by the House Judiciary Committee under disputed circumstances — now may have to demand the same kind of loyalty from longtime “girl Friday” Huma Abedin. From Politico:

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s most trusted confidante, is increasingly becoming a central figure in the email scandal that’s haunting her boss on the campaign trail, as Republicans and federal judges seek information about Clinton’s communications while she was running the State Department.

Secretary Kerry is going to Havana this week. The island’s chief dissidents will be kept away from the celebration at the new U.S. embassy.

President Obama made his Cuba announcement in mid-December. U.S.-Cuba talks are down to this: Fidel Castro is now asking for money on his birthday:

“Castro wrote: “Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total many millions of dollars, as our country has stated with irrefutable arguments and data in all of its speeches at the United Nations.”

He did not go into detail on precisely how much money he reckons Washington owes Havana.

The Americans are also claiming compensation for US-owned property, such as real estate, that was confiscated when Castro took power.”

Ah ha ha, I’m chortling. Or maybe it’s better to imagine airy bell-like laughter, something silky and lacy. Ah ha ha, I’m laughing. The Big Bad Wolf said I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll… give an interview to a journalist. That was Gaza Beach today, a silly little flop. More journalists than BDSniks in their green Boycott Israel t-shirts. More riot policemen than petulant self-satisfied protestors in keffieh. The caliphators were not out in force.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Shortly before noon a parade of police cars passed by, sirens singing. That always electrifies the atmosphere. The cars took up positions around the Hôtel de Ville [city hall]. Dozens of CRS [riot police] were already in place, manning their stations. A long line of people waited patiently on the high road to go through the checkpoint and down the ramp to Tel Aviv on the Seine. Silent hecklers waited off to the side, making a fashion statement with their keffiehs and Gaza Beach Soccer t-shirts as if their presence were the eloquent expression of “international opinion.” Euro-Palestine in person [http://www.europalestine.com/] had informed loyal followers that permission to demonstrate had been granted on the grounds that they not try to mingle with the Tel Aviv beachgoers. So of course that’s why a dozen of them had to stand there like “do me something.”

As U.S. lawmakers debate the Iran nuclear deal, they are rightly concerned about Iran’s refusal to disclose its past work on nuclear weapons. Not only does this refusal deprive inspectors of a baseline for monitoring Iran’s compliance; it also deprives Congress of information about the networks that Iran’s regime might most readily employ should it choose to secretly continue its quest for the nuclear bomb.

On that note, it should also concern Congress that Tehran is not alone in hiding information on Iran’s history of developing nuclear weapons. Whatever President Obama and his negotiating team might know about such matters, they have been — to put it mildly — less than diligent about informing the American public.

An honest accounting would quite likely reveal something that many press reports have alleged, but U.S. administration officials have never publicly confirmed: A history of nuclear weapons collaboration between Iran and nuclear-proliferating North Korea.

Don’t take my word for it. Let us turn instead to an in-depth article published on August 4, 2003 by a staff writer of the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb.” The reporter was no junior correspondent. The article was the product of a three-month international investigation by a veteran investigative reporter, previously a member of a Pulitzer-Prize winning team at the New York Times, Douglas Frantz.

•Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the author of Unlearning Liberty.
• Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

The Clinton email cover up keeps unraveling, thanks to the courts.

Hillary Clinton has made a career of stiff-arming Congress, inspectors general and the press. So it looks like it’s up to the courts and law enforcement to get to the bottom of her email scandal.

That’s the real meaning of this week’s news in the email case, as the Clinton stonewall becomes harder to sustain. Mrs. Clinton is turning over to the FBI the private server she used to conduct government business while Secretary of State, as well as three thumb drives containing her government-related email. The Clinton campaign won’t say she did this voluntarily, or in response to an FBI demand. And the FBI won’t say why it sought the server. But the handover follows news that top-secret information traveled across her private system, despite her previous denials.

Meanwhile, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has now verified that Mrs. Clinton will not certify that she has handed over to the State Department all of her work-related records. Two of her closest aides are also dodging Judge Sullivan’s request to hand over their work-related documents to State, and we now know that one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides was using the unsecured Clinton system for government work.

Gen. Odierno, the U.S. Army chief of staff, is retiring Aug. 14.

We need a force of 490,000 as global dangers rise. It’s at 450,000 and heading down.
For almost 40 years, I have had the honor to serve alongside the great men and women of the United States Army. I have been inspired by their professionalism and unwavering commitment to the mission, to the Army, and to the nation. Our leaders at every level have displayed unparalleled ingenuity, flexibility and adaptability. Our soldiers have displayed mental and physical toughness and courage under fire. They have transformed the Army into the most agile, adaptive and expeditionary strategic land force the world has ever known.

Today, the Army is engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan; in Kosovo, the Korean Peninsula and across the African continent. We have rotational forces in Europe, Kuwait and the Pacific. And our missions are both wide-ranging and essential. The missions include humanitarian assistance, training and advising forces in combat, and reassuring allies with a dedicated U.S. military presence.

As the velocity of world-wide instability rises, the demand for the U.S. Army escalates around the globe, with American soldiers responding where others either won’t or can’t. The threats they face are more complex and diverse than at any other point in recent memory. The nation’s enemies are determined, and they increasingly have the capability to threaten regional and world order, as well as America’s physical security and economic stability.

Mr. Ridley is the author of “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords. His family leases land for coal mining in northern England.

Raising constant alarms—about fracking, pesticides, GMO food—in the name of safety is a dangerous game.

‘We’ve heard these same stale arguments before,” said President Obama in his speech on climate change last week, referring to those who worry that the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon-reduction plan may do more harm than good. The trouble is, we’ve heard his stale argument before, too: that we’re doomed if we don’t do what the environmental pressure groups tell us, and saved if we do. And it has frequently turned out to be really bad advice.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate. Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her 1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s. Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was done.

Foreign-policy failures have a way of compounding, and that’s what seems to have happened as U.S. officials said Thursday they believe that Islamic State militants used mustard gas this week against Kurdish forces in Iraq.

The sources told Journal reporter Adam Entous that the mustard gas was probably obtained in Syria. Bashar Assad’s government admitted in 2013 to having stockpiles of mustard gas and other banned poisons. President Obama has since claimed often that his deal that year with Vladimir Putin removed those weapons from Syria. But recently U.S. intelligence has said it believes the government hid some caches from international inspectors. That’s the first U.S. failure.

The second is Mr. Obama’s refusal to act with enough dispatch and force against Islamic State. He promised a year ago to degrade and destroy ISIS. But the jihadists have since been able to expand their writ in Iraq, taking the city of Ramadi in May. It’s hardly surprising that jihadists who drown men in cages would resort to using chemical weapons. They will use whatever they can to hold and expand their caliphate.