RUTHFULLY YOURS

For seven months in 2011, the United States carried much of the weight in NATO’s extensive Libya campaign. Now, an American-led coalition is pummeling targets in Iraq and Syria. Neither of these extensive military actions was ever voted on by Congress. And just in the last few weeks, word has spread that the president will “do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote” on a settlement with Iran. Together, these episodes paint a picture of unbridled presidential power over foreign policy. Next Monday, in Zivotofsky v. Kerry, the Supreme Court will have its best opportunity in decades to check this rapid expansion of executive authority.

On its face, Zivotofsky is about passports and Mideast politics. For decades, presidential policy has held that the sovereignty of Jerusalem is a “final status” issue, only resolvable through a regional peace agreement. As a result, American citizens born in Jerusalem have no country of birth listed on their passports. (Their passports read “Jerusalem” rather than “Jerusalem, Israel.”) But in 2002, Congress tucked language into a larger bill insisting that the State Department “shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.” President Bush signed the law, but issued a “signing statement” explaining that the directive was unconstitutional and that he had no intention of obeying. Enter Menachem Zivotofsky, a 12-year-old Jerusalem-born American citizen. Since his birth, his parents have waged a legal battle demanding that the State Department comply with the Congressional mandate. On Monday, the case goes before the U.S. Supreme Court.

As a matter of policy, the law is a foolish stunt. An eventual recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over much of Jerusalem—like the eventual recognition of a sovereign Palestine—is a moral necessity. But not all moral rights must be vindicated immediately. And it would be diplomatic malpractice not to use recognition as a tool for advancing American interests—for instance coaxing the parties to make concessions and reach a comprehensive settlement.

But constitutionality, not wisdom, is the question before the Court. And the constitutional question is more complicated: Can Congress force the president to issue passports in a manner that conflicts with his diplomatic objectives? Yes, argue the Zivotofskys, and for two main reasons: First, passports and diplomacy can be easily separated. After all, Congress invented passports (in 1856) and has passed all manner of related regulations and restrictions ever since. A 1994 law even allowed Taiwanese-born Americans to record “Taiwan” as their place of birth—over the objections of the State Department and despite the president’s official “one-China” policy.

One of the last acts Congress undertook before leaving Washington, D.C., in September for the midterm election break was to add $500 million in new funding to arm and train the so-called “vetted moderate” Syrian rebels. The $500 million in funding had been an agenda item for Obama since June, when ISIS began making quick gains in an offensive push back into Iraq.

But the political net effect of this vote was to get the GOP leadership in Congress to publicly buy into Obama’s rapidly crumbling Syria policy. Led by Boehner in the House and McConnell in the Senate, the congressional GOP leadership allowed Obama to walk them off the Syrian rebel cliff.

As I reported here at PJ Media yesterday, the most important “vetted moderate” rebel groups are in retreat, having surrendered or defected to Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria.

This development should come as no surprise to any member of the congressional GOP. In the week before the rebel amendment funding vote, I was asked to brief a number of GOP members and prepared a presentation on the collapse of the U.S.-backed Syria rebels that was widely circulated amongst both the House and Senate GOP conferences.

Among the chief trends I noted in these briefings — and that I was concurrently reporting on here — was that large groups of Free Syrian Army (FSA) units were defecting to al-Qaeda and ISIS, surrendering their U.S.-provided weapons along the way, and that other FSA units were forging peace deals and fighting alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS in some areas.

Even before the votes on the rebel funding, there was growing evidence that these “vetted moderate” forces were not moderate at all, and certainly would provide little assistance in fighting against ISIS.

Obama was hinting at where his policy was headed, too. Just a month before those congressional votes, in an interview with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Obama said that the belief that arming the Syrian rebels would have changed the situation had “always been a fantasy”:

With “respect to Syria,” said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

We’ve come a long way since 2009. Back then, Barack Obama was crowing, “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.” [1]

Now, a day before the 2014 midterms, there’s no crowing from the Dems, only a sullen susurration of rage. It’s no longer possible to blame George W. Bush for the party’s impending dégringolade (though there continue to be pathetic efforts [2] to do just that).

Someone is to blame, you can be sure that point will eventually be established. But in the meantime the Democratic grievance machine has shifted gears. Everyone’s still affronted. There’s still a “war on women” — at least on women who stay at home and take care of their children: quoth Obama, “That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.” [3] (Wow. Just wow.)

And there’s still “climate change” — or is there? The award-winning meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, just sent an open letter to UCLA [4] that begins:

There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future. Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant “greenhouse” gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed. There has been no warming over 18 years.

Uh oh. The great thing about the Green Philosophy, of course, is that you can never be green enough. As a strategy to promote moral smugness among liberals and scapegoating of the productive segments of the economy, the whole green apparatus is a godsend. It has the additional advantage of being international in scope. Not only can you employ it against domestic entities, but it can also be used to justify redistribution on an international scale. So people like Colemen, along with the 9,000 other scientists who endorse his contentions, must be ignored — demonized first as tools of the evil Koch brothers, then ignored.

But that’s not going to happen. Environmentalism, as the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed a couple of decades ago, may be “school prayer for liberals.” But reality still counts for something, and in the clash between possible prosperity and certain immiseration, the former will always win out — unless, nota bene, it is prevented by the coercive power of the state.

WASHINGTON — Scott Brown did an unusual thing for a midterm congressional candidate in his quest to unseat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), something more characteristic of senators feeling out support for a presidential run: On Sept. 24, before the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in Manchester, Brown delivered a major foreign policy address.

It wouldn’t be the only time that the former Massachusetts senator spotlighted foreign policy during this aggressive campaign, including a townhall on the topic with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

“A record of near-complete conformity with the president covers just about every issue of national security and defense. So if we’ve seen some bad calls at the White House, it’s a very safe bet that our senior senator has been right in line with that failed program,” Brown said.

“It’s been nearly six years of confusion, uncertainty, and withdrawal in American foreign policy. For Senator Shaheen, it’s been nearly six years of just going along, with no questions for the president about his decisions – at least none that anybody remembers … no expressions of disagreement … not a single sign of independent thinking.”

Brown has had plenty of current events fodder to satisfy his strategy of making this state race national, including ISIS, Ebola, Ukraine, the Middle East and terrorism in North Africa.

“[Shaheen] has insisted that the group, Boko Haram, operating in and around Nigeria, is not really an Islamic terrorist group. But let’s not be confused on this: These are the jihadist killers who kidnapped over 200 girls last spring,” Brown said. “They’ve been at it a while, and back in 2012 I introduced a bill instructing then Secretary of State Clinton to designate Boko Haram as the terrorist organization that it is. The bill went to Senator Shaheen’s committee, the Foreign Relations Committee – where, once again, they did exactly nothing.”

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like By Daniel Greenfield

In Nigeria and Iraq, Muslim armies are selling women as slaves. Iran hanged a woman for fighting off a rapist. ISIS was more direct about it and beheaded a woman who resisted one of its fighters.

But we don’t have to travel to the Middle East to see real horrors. The sex grooming scandal in the UK involved the rape of thousands of girls. The rapists were Muslim men so instead of talking about it, the UK’s feminists bought $75 shirts reading, “This is what a feminist looks like” which were actually being made by Third World women living sixteen to a room.

This was what a feminist looked like and it wasn’t a pretty picture.

The same willful unseriousness saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a survivor of genital mutilation and an informed critic of Muslim misogyny, booted from Brandeis by self-proclaimed feminists. Meanwhile the major feminist cause at the moment is Gamergate, a controversy over video games which can be traced back to a female game developer who slept with a video game reviewer.

Professional feminists have spent more time and energy denouncing video games than the sale and rape of girls in Nigeria and Iraq.

That is what feminism looks like and there is something seriously wrong with that.

Women Against Feminism touched a nerve because professional feminists know that few women want to identify as feminists. Polls have found that the majority of women view feminism negatively. Even among young women, the feminist label doesn’t come close to breaking the halfway mark.

Professional feminists respond to the negative feedback by claiming that feminism is simply equality. But if feminism were equality, women, and for that matter men, wouldn’t dislike it so much.

A feminist looks like a professional activist wearing a $75 t-shirt made by slave labor while proclaiming that she is a feminist. It isn’t fighting for the rights of women that makes her a feminist. It’s the pricey fashion statement of someone who toots their own horn while exploiting less fortunate women.

Israel was very late in understanding the Islamic nature of the wars (Jihads) against the state. Moshe Sharon warned of this early on but even Israel’s tougher leaders including Begin and Shamir never fully grasped the Koranic, faith driven hatred for Jews by Arab/Moslems….rsk

In his speech on September 11 announcing that the US would commence limited operations against Islamic State, US President Barack Obama insisted, “ISIL, [i.e. Islamic State] is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”

To be sure, it is hard to see how any human faith can countenance IS’s actions. For the past several months, on a daily basis, new videos appear of IS fighters proudly, openly and wantonly committing crimes against humanity. This week for instance, a video emerged of an IS slave market in Raqqah, Syria, where women and girls are sold as sex slaves to IS fighters.

Despite the glaring contradiction between divinity and monstrosity, the fact is that IS justifies every single one of its atrocities with verses from the Koran.

IS referred to its sex slave market in Raqqah for instance as the “Booty Market… for what your right hands possess.”

The phrase “what your right hands possess” is a Koranic verse (4:3) that permits the sexual enslavement of women and girls by Muslim men.

Whether it is mainstream Islamic jurisprudence or not to embrace the enslavement of women and girls as concubines is not a question that Obama – or any US leader for that matter – is equipped to answer. And yet, Obama spoke with absolute certainty when he claimed that IS is not Islamic.

Obama speaks with similar conviction whenever he refers to Iran as “The Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Another young American man has given his life while fighting in the ranks of Islamist terrorists abroad. But this time, instead of being met with universal condemnations and scorn, the young terrorist is being greeted with sympathetic news accounts and “even-handed” statements from the State Department — all because he joined the politically correct terrorists, that is, the Palestinians.

Just think. When Eric Harroun of Arizona joined an Al Qaeda group fighting in Syria last year, he was arrested as soon as he tried to re-enter the United States.

When Douglas McCain of Minnesota was killed in August while taking part in an ISIS attack in Syria, a senior Obama administration official told NBC that “the threat we are most concerned about to the homeland is that of fighters like this returning to the U.S. and committing acts of terrorism.”

When three young Muslim women from Colorado were caught on their way to try to join ISIS, the Obama administration strongly condemned them.

But when U.S. citizen Orwa Abdel Hammad, a former resident of New Orleans, took part in an Islamist terrorist attack in the Middle East in October, the response from the Obama administration was oh so different.

Hammad was a Palestinian Arab with American citizenship. On Friday, October 24, decided to take part in the wave of Islamist violence against Jews that has been engulfing Israel in recent weeks.

Hammad positioned himself alongside Highway 60, north of Jerusalem, and prepared a Molotov cocktail. Spotting an approaching Israeli motorist, Hammad rose to hurl the flaming bottle of gasoline. The goal was to set the Israeli car on fire, so that its drivers and passengers would be burned alive.

Because they were Jews.

Fortunately, Israeli soldiers on a stakeout shot Hammad dead.

The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.

Over the past six years Obama and progressives partially achieved some of these progressive goals. Through legislation, executive orders, like-minded judges, and the interpretations of law by anonymous, unelected federal functionaries, Obama’s government has intervened in the automobile, finance, health care, and housing industries; hampered the explosive growth of the energy industry by reducing development on federal lands and waging a war on carbon; encroached on the states’ sovereignty through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the renegade Department Of Justice; and intruded into civil society and individual rights on issues such as contraception, traditional marriage, freedom of speech, and religious freedom.

Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending has exploded, increasing along the way the wider regulatory scope and intrusiveness of the federal agencies created to manage this transfer of wealth. Social welfare spending now approaches a trillion dollars a year, people claiming Social Security Disability insurance have increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11 million today, and the number of people getting food stamps has doubled to 46 million just over the last decade. These trillions in transfer payments represent a massive redistribution of property. According to the Tax Foundation, America’s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.

Judging by their actions, most Arab leaders do not want to create yet another terrorist Islamist state, dedicated to the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and to toppling their regimes. We do want a Palestinian state, but please, only one that will provide responsible governance.

According to the “Arab street”, it is the Americans and Europeans who are cowards, afraid to take significant steps against Iran, and terrified of the Islamic ghettoes in their cities, which have been exporting terrorists to fight for the Islamic State, and providing housing to the seasoned fighters who return.

To Arabs, the ultimate irony is that America is paying Qatar to have its airbase there, while Qatar is paying terrorists to kill Americans.

When John Kerry claimed it was the unresolved Palestinian issue that caused a ripple effect that crated ISIS, he simply inspired the Palestinians to use Al-Aqsa mosque as a religious trigger for future bloodshed.

There is a civil war currently under way between radical Islam — motivated by imperialist fantasies of restoring the Islamic Caliphate — and the more moderate secular Muslim regimes which are seeking the path to modernization and progress.

At the same time, Sunni Islam is in the midst of an increasingly violent crisis in its dealings with Shi’ite Iran, which looks as if it is about to be granted nuclear weapons capability, and which for decades quietly has been eyeing neighboring Arab oil fields.

To reduce their own fear, the clerics try to raise the fear levels among the public.

Rare as they are, media accounts of attacks are minimized; victims are blamed; women’s voices are omitted, and the attackers are regarded sympathetically.

A young woman with two inches of hair showing is the small “hole in the dyke” that can with time, break the dam and flood the country with all the things the revolution was carried out to prevent: liberalism, individual freedoms, religious and political tolerance, democracy, free speech, equal rights for women and on and on.

One curly lock in the open air convulses the totalitarian with fear, the fear that he may be shown to be, in the last analysis, irrelevant.

News reports are coming in of massive demonstrations in Iran on October 25, throughout the northern half of the country — Saqqez, Tehran, Mashhad, Rasht, Shahr-e Kord, and Isfahan. The protests all focused on the issue of acid-throwing. At each event, the regime’s Revolutionary Guards, the police and their supporters moved in hard with tear gas and pepper spray. They were shooting in the air, and battering women.

In the days of Shah Abbas the Great, his capital city, the beautiful Isfahan, was celebrated in the rhyming couplet “Isfahan, nesf-e jehan”: “Isfahan is half the world.” Today, however, in Shah Abbas’s Isfahan, acid attacks on “badly veiled” girls have grown frequent. In early October 2014 alone, there were as many as 14 acid attacks on young women in Isfahan.[1]