RUTHFULLY YOURS

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina.

Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines?

When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more popular.

That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence.

The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

A review of: Charles Murray in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission,

The constitutional government of these United States of America is sick beyond the curative, or even palliative, powers of the ordinary process of legislation, elections, and the appointing of constitutional judges. Perhaps the only solution left to us is civil disobedience, to throw sand in the gears of the regulatory state. [See related episode of PJTV’s Trifecta in video below.]

So says Charles Murray in his new book By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, scheduled for release May 12. His remedy: create a “Madison Fund,” from private donations, to vigorously defend small businesses and individuals against the unconstitutional regulations that strangle our economy and our liberty. By flooding the zone, Murray hopes to cripple the ability of the regulatory state to fight a multi-front war against we, the people.

As we move through this period of Islamic assault on Western civilization in general and on the USA in particular , we can more and more appreciate the stamina and fortitude of Winston Churchill as he warned the British public and government over and over of the gathering storm of Nazi aggression. To those who study history, it has always been bewildering that the British Establishment was so oblivious to the building threat, which was supported by legions of facts.

We find ourselves in a similar situation. Few in public life are willing to address the growing threat to our way of life, to the Constitution from militant Islam. We see the destruction of countries in North Africa by militant Islam. The Middle East is being turned into a charnel house by ISIS while our president and secretary of state can see only infractions of international law by Israel.

Garland, Texas: The Sixth Time Since 9/11 that Terrorists Have Slipped Through the Feds’ Grasp
The Garland, Texas, terror attack now represents the sixth instance since 9/11 that terror suspects have been questioned by the federal government and gone on to participate in terror attacks. Let’s not forget Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s op-ed after the Boston Marathon Bombings:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is the fifth person since 9/11 who has participated in terror attacks after questioning by the FBI. He was preceded by Nidal Hasan; drone casualty Anwar al Awlaki; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (born Carlos Leon Bledsoe), who murdered an Army recruit in Little Rock in June 2009; and David Coleman Headley, who provided intelligence to the perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre in 2008. That doesn’t count [underwear bomber Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab, who was the subject of warnings to the CIA that he was a potential terrorist.

Now we can add Garland shooter Elton Simpson to the list. It turns out that we’re pretty effective at identifying potential terrorists, just not so effective at doing anything about it. It’s almost as if there’s an actual policy or philosophy at work here — one designed to minimize threats and rationalize extremism rather than deal with the harsh reality of jihad.

Terrorists assaulted a “Mohammed cartoon” event in Texas sponsored by activist Pamela Geller, and the response has been, in part, soul-searching over what’s wrong with Pamela Geller.

Geller is an attention-hungry provocateur who will never be mistaken for Bernard Lewis, the venerable scholar of Islam. Her Texas gathering to award a cash prize for the best cartoon of Mohammed — depictions of whom are considered offensive by many Muslims — was deliberately offensive, but so what?

Two armed Muslim men showed up intending to kill the participants, and were only thwarted when they were shot dead by a police officer who was part of the elaborate security arrangements.

Absent the security, we might have had a Charlie Hebdo–style massacre on these shores, in Garland, Texas, no less, a suburb of Dallas. (The world would be a safer and better place if the forces of civilization everywhere were as well-prepared and well-armed as they are in Texas.)

What accounts for hatred of the West by people who voluntarily spent years here?
One of the stranger things about East–West relations these days is the schizophrenic attraction to, and hatred of, Western culture that characterizes many foreign leaders and celebrities.

Did these mixed-up folk idealistically flock to the West, and then end up bitterly disappointed that their experience did not match their dreams, in the infamous manner of Sayyid Qutb (“The America That I Have Seen”)? The Egyptian intellectual Qutb leveraged his subsidized residence in Colorado into an unhinged and racist screed against Western popular culture; among his targets were provocative women, “primitive Negroes,” rampant divorce, and heartless capitalism. Qutb’s two years in the U.S. were the font of his anti-Western and Islamist thought, which he developed as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. His work in turn inspired much of the anti-Americanism of al-Qaeda specifically and current radical Islam in general.

Mohamed Morsi was briefly president of Egypt and is the currently jailed head of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose attempt to create an Islamic theocracy (in one-election, one-time fashion) was thwarted by a military coup. In his year-long tenure, Morsi sought to institute Islamic law and to bargain for the freedom of the terrorist killer responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Omar Abdel-Rahman, serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Morsi labeled Israelis “bloodsuckers” and the “descendants of apes and pigs,” as well as claiming that Israel had no right to the territory it has occupied since 1948.

Bill Clinton recently defended his high-priced speeches by explaining that he’s “gotta pay our bills,” but Peter Schweizer’s much-discussed forthcoming book Clinton Cash suggests that there’s a sense in which Hillary Clinton has been the real family breadwinner of late.

“The really troubling thing about Bill’s speeches is the apparent correlation between his fees and Hillary’s decisions during her tenure as secretary of state,” Schweizer writes in the book, which comes out tomorrow. “The timing of the payments, the much higher than average size of some of them, and the subsequent actions taken by Hillary raise serious questions about just what those who underwrote these exorbitant fees were actually paying for.”

France is selling out Israel – just like it abandoned Czechs in 1938

Just as France betrayed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, it wants Israel to abandon territory and buoy Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic State.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius intends to propose a UN Security Council resolution that would present a framework for negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That framework will include the 1967 lines as a basis for negotiations on the border between Israel and the future Palestinian state.

In other words, Fabius, and his superior, President Francois Hollande, want Israel to abandon the territory of Judea and Samaria and turn it over to the Palestinians. The fact that control of this territory is considered of great importance to Israel’s security by the democratically elected Israeli government seems to be of little concern to them.

Je suis Charlie. French for “I am Charlie,” the phrase became a global expression of solidarity and resolve after Islamist gunmen murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo.

In a terrifying copycat attack Sunday in Garland, Texas, two men with assault rifles attempted to gun down people attending an event satirizing Muhammad with cartoons. A single police officer managed to shoot and kill both gunmen before they got inside the event. With some 200 people in the building, the potential for another politicized mass murder was great.

On Monday authorities said one of the gunman, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, had been under surveillance for years because of interest he’d shown in joining jihadist groups overseas. He was found guilty of making false statements to the FBI, but a federal judge ruled there wasn’t enough evidence that Mr. Simpson’s activities were “sufficiently ‘related’ to international terrorism.”
Against this backdrop we have the extraordinary—almost comical—irony of some of America’s bien pensant intellectuals boycotting a ceremony Tuesday by the PEN American Center to confer its annual courage award for freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo. PEN is an association of writers, and six prominent novelists—Peter Carey,Michael Ondaatje,Francine Prose,Teju Cole,Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi—have been trying to repeal the award for Charlie Hebdo.

In the early spring of 1944 a political prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp penned a letter to his wife, Käthe, in Hamburg.

“It looks like we have to count on a long separation, but we must hope strongly for a reunion,” wrote the prisoner, a doctor named Hermann da Fonseca-Wollheim. “Today is Palm Sunday, a sunny, wintry day on our mountain. Tonight at six I will listen to Furtwängler’s concert on the radio. Why don’t you, too, tune in to the radio on Sundays and then we can think about each other fervently.”

It was the last letter Käthe would receive from Hermann. Six weeks later, on May 13, she was notified of his death, supposedly of disease.

Hermann had been arrested by the Gestapo the previous August and held on charges of Ausländerfreundlichkeit, or xenophilia. He was suspected of being friendly to foreign workers, mostly forced laborers from Ukraine, whom he treated in his practice. He had also been overheard saying that sooner or later everybody would have to learn Russian, and was learning some Russian himself. It smacked of defeatism. After the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, the Gestapo were keen to make examples of would-be dissenters.