RUTHFULLY YOURS

The public-health benefits outweigh the costs, both real and imagined.

There has been much debate recently over vaccination mandates, particularly in response to the measles outbreak currently taking place throughout the country.

At this juncture, there have been 102 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. during 2015, with 59 of them linked to a December 2014 visit to the Disneyland theme park in Southern California. (It is important to note that eleven of the cases associated with Disneyland were detected last year and, consequently, fall within the 2014 measles count.) This large outbreak has spread to at least a half-dozen other states, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently requesting that all health-care professionals “consider measles when evaluating patients with febrile rash and ask about a patient’s vaccine status, recent travel history and contact with individuals who have febrile rash illness.”

When thousands of Central American children began arriving on the border between Texas and Mexico last year, President Obama’s team denied that the sudden influx was driven by his decision to grant the practical equivalent of amnesty to illegal immigrants who came to the country during childhood. On Monday, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services decided to avoid a repeat of that summer spectacle at the border by announcing a legal path for those children to enter the country.

“There are literally hundreds of millions, if not a billion or more people who would like to be in America; we can’t accept them all,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) tells National Review Online. “We just continue to create that incentive. We should have an asylum process. We should have a legalized-refugee status [program]. We’re a very compassionate nation, but, again, it’s got to be controlled.”

During a National Prayer Breakfast address that was otherwise troubling to American Christians, President Obama managed to strike one encouraging note:

Last year, we prayed together for Pastor Saeed Abedini, detained in Iran since 2012. And I was recently in Boise, Idaho, and had the opportunity to meet with Pastor Abedini’s beautiful wife and wonderful children and to convey to them that our country has not forgotten brother Saeed and that we’re doing everything we can to bring him home.

It is a remark that has not gone unnoticed in the land of the ayatollahs. Nor has the president’s January meeting with Naghmeh Abedini, and his subsequent invitation to her to travel to Washington, D.C., which she will do later this month, to meet with David N. Saperstein, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Saeed Abedini, an Iranian-born pastor and convert from Islam, moved with his wife to the United States in 2005, when a government newly led by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intensified persecution of Iranian Christians. On a visit to his native country in 2009, Abedini was arrested; authorities reportedly threatened him with death for his apostasy from Islam. He was released after pledging to stop organizing house churches in the country.

I don’t understand why folks are giving President Obama and his spokes-minions such a hard time over his insistence that Ahmedy Coulibaly, the terrorist who just happened to be Muslim committing terrorism that had nothing to do with Islam, was just “randomly” picking out folks in Paris to kill when he randomly came upon a grocery that just happened to be Jewish and, coincidentally, to have Jews in it, whom he randomly killed.

Sure, we know Coulibaly called a French TV station during the siege, said he was loyal to the Islamic State that has nothing to do with Islam, and that he picked this kosher market because he was targeting Jews. But you can’t believe everything you hear on TV — just ask Brian Williams.

Come to think of it, the Paris attack seems an awful lot like another random one in 2008. Back then, another group of Pakistani terrorists who just happened to be Muslim, and who belonged to the Lashkar-e-Taiba Islamic terrorist organization that has nothing to do with Islam, went looking for random folks to kill and just happened to stumble on the Nariman House, a Chabad Lubavitch Jewish center which, coincidentally, had Jews in it — Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, then six months pregnant.

Swedes now tend to view all immigrants as victims of totalitarianism and refuse to acknowledge that not all immigrants think like Swedes. They cannot comprehend that people would flee if they were not hated and threatened. Most Swedes have never realized that one minority group may expose another minority group to violence and intimidation.

Unfortunately, one of the worst offenders trying to hide the truth is the Jewish organization SKMA, the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism. What seems to have upset the supporters of the SKMA was that Carlqvist compared them to the Organization of German Nationalist Jews, who, in the 1930s, supported Hitler and claimed that Jews were treated fairly in Nazi Germany.

Instead of breaking up the pro-Arab demonstrations, which took place without police permission, the police chose to revoke the Jews’ right to assemble. Malmö’s former mayor, Ilamar Reepalu, surely must have been aware that the perpetrators of anti-Semitic excesses were his own voters. Not one of the many complaints to the police by the city’s Jews has led to indictments, not to speak of convictions.

Ruthie Blum is the Web editor of Voice of Israel radio (voiceofisrael.com).

While the brouhaha in the United States and Israel over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled address before Congress on March 3 continues to gain momentum, the mullahs in Iran are having a field day.

There is nothing that Islamists cherish more than watching the West implode. They especially enjoy seeing sparks fly between Washington and Jerusalem, the power centers of the “Great Satan” America and the “Small Satan” Israel. Their joy knows no bounds when the animosity of U.S. President Barack Obama toward Netanyahu flares up with the spin of each new centrifuge.

The deadline for a deal on their nuclear program — extended each time the P5+1 countries (the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K., France and Germany) hit an impasse with representatives of the Islamic republic — is currently slated for July. But, like Obama and his European partners in the negotiation charade, the regime in Tehran is anxious to get the documents on a treaty signed before then.

This is because the parties are nearing an agreement that would allow for the mass production of atom bombs on the one hand, and enable all concerned to perpetuate the myth that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes on the other.

Media manipulation is often direct, but more often it is subtle enough to get to everyone.
He lied? Yes he lied. Wait a minute. Maybe Brian Williams simply embellished. Guys do that all the time. We all want to be heroes.

We enhance the truth particularly as we behaved in war.

That’s where Brian Williams met his disgrace. “That’s the way it is,” Walter Cronkite used to say. Well, no. Not quite, these days.

There too, in Israel, some are catching on to the deceptions from “news you can trust.” Leading journalist Kalman Liebeskind on Arutz Sheva upbraids (leftist) Big Media for their volley of lies and half-truths especially as they go gunning for Benjamin Netanyahu through torrents of abuse.

Onto our own Brian Williams, did his Army helicopter really come under enemy fire 2003 in Iraq? No. He’s come clean, partly. But he was there in Iraq. Did he really suffer terribly during his coverage of Katrina? Apparently not. But he was there in New Orleans during that terrible hurricane.

Get the point? To sell a lie successfully, it must be based on some truth. Moreover, he is no coward.

To believe and accept any part of President Obama’s new national security strategy requires the willing suspension of disbelief. It’s a statement of bold leadership, in almost Churchillian terms, but it bears no relationship to the president’s actions or the current state of the world.

The “strategy” blueprint, released by the White House on Friday and outlined by national security adviser Susan Rice during a speech at the Brookings Institution, promises we will “lead with strength,” “lead by example,” and “lead with capable partners.” That sort of leadership is nowhere in evidence, and has not been in Mr. Obama’s entire presidency. Allies such as Saudi Arabia have renounced American foreign policy and have gone their own way. Ukraine, which the strategy promises to defend not with arms shipments but with more sanctions, is being gradually conquered by Russian “little green men,” soldiers disguised as insurgents and supported by identified Russian troops.

A bad deal on Iranian nukes would be so catastrophic to global security that presidential resistance to a related speech – by the leader of an allied democracy, who may be the greatest expert on the issue – should leave everyone speechless.

The Obama Administration’s outraged accusation that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu violated protocol by accepting House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress is preposterous: Bibi’s speech before Congress in 2011 came about in the exact same way with no similar Obama outrage (predictably, given the upcoming 2012 election). And the New York Times advanced this “violated protocol” narrative all too willingly, only to correct itself as inconspicuously as possible, revealing yet again its own anti-Israel agenda. Ironically, Obama’s main, if not only, motivation for visiting Israel in 2008 (and promising policies far from those he eventually adopted) was to gain the support of Jewish voters, back when he needed them to win the presidency.

The situation in Ukraine is complicated. A large part of the country to the east, is Russian-speaking, Russian culture, and sees itself as closer to Russia. Another part of the country to the west, is Ukrainian-and perceives nearest the Western world.

At the time when the Soviet Union existed, the two parts of the country were governed by the same totalitarian dictatorship. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country has gradually emancipated and took slowly distanced Russian domination. Putin did not accept this desire for emancipation, Russian-speaking populations have been reluctant in relation to it. The Orange Revolution in 2004 led to the emancipation of the advanced camp. The uprising Nejalejnosti Maidan in November 2013 led to a further advanced. Putin responded as might be expected to react by annexing the Crimea, and leading a creeping annexation of the Russian-speaking part of the country. This creeping annexation continues.

What is serious in the case is that the US Obama administration did not anticipate the reaction of Putin, and the countries of the European Union did not advance: Russia n ‘ argued that because the United States and the European Union have given him the opportunity to move forward.