RUTHFULLY YOURS

“God is not fanatic; the ulema [religious scholars]… are.” — Mohammed Charfi, Muslim intellectual.

Saudi Arabia’s behavior comes with the bought consent of the West, which would rather constantly reprimand and punish Israel than address the Arab and Muslim world’s floggings, stonings, beheadings and amputations — not to mention executing homosexuals, gender apartheid and the often merciless treatment of foreign workers. Such a double standard exposes that many Europeans who consider themselves moral and speak about “ethical investing” are, in fact, accessories to these Saudi crimes, and therefore themselves guilty of crimes against humanity.

“He does not see this court as legitimate.” — Samar Badawi, wife of human rights lawyer Walid Abu al-Khayr, who was sentenced by a Saudi court to 15 years in prison.

Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger, has been sentenced to 1000 lashes, ten years in jail and a fine of $270,000 for a blog regarded by Saudi Arabia’s regime as insulting Islam.

“My commitment is…to reject any repression in the name of religion…a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” — Raif Badawi

Terrorism only exists, therefore, if and when it is directed at the Saudi regime, and may well mean just defeating Shiites.

Saudi human rights lawyer Walid Abu al-Khayr, who defended blogger Raif Badawi, was sentenced yesterday, July 6, to 15 years in prison He was arrested on April 15, accused of: “inciting public opinion,” “disobedience in matters of the sovereign,” “lack of respect in dealings with the authorities,” “offense of the judicial system,” “inciting international organizations against the Saudi kingdom” and, finally, for having founded illegally, or without authorization, his association “Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.” He was also forbidden to travel for fifteen years after his release, and fined 200,000 riyals ($53,000) according to Abdullah al-Shihri of the Associated Press. His wife, Samar Badawi, said that he refused to sign the verdict and would not appeal the case, since “he does not see this court as legitimate,” she said.

A lot of people are commenting that there is nothing to watch on CNN. Instead of news, CNN is daily airing hours of Anthony Bourdain travelling to experiment with food and hours of crime shows, such as “Forensic Files,” which is probably the most interesting thing to watch these days on CNN.

The current administration scandals and other important topics are ignored by CNN, unless they are in the context of criticism of Republicans. CNN seems to be trying to force a reality on the American public that does not exist. The majority of the American people are concerned about the economy, the scandals and the radical change the administration is forcing on the American people. Like it or not, all of the media, right and left, should be reporting on Obama’s push for such radical changes. If the leftist media supports the change, then fine, but they should go ahead and talk about why they support it, instead of pretending that nothing is happening in America.

The role of the media is supposed to be to keep citizens informed and educated about what is going on inside their government, in society and in the world. America under Obama has been undergoing a major change that is very alarming to many American citizens, but the mainstream media seems not to notice.

We now have a situation where instead of reporting on government, CNN thinks and acts as though they are the government. Instead of naming their shows with titles that reflect what the media’s job should be — to be a watch-dog — they have chosen to impersonate government. We thus have a show on CNN entitled, “The Situation Room” in which Wolf Blitzer reports as though CNN and the White House situation rooms are the same.

Another CNN show is “State of the Union.” Again here CNN is playing the role of president of the United States, reporting on the state of the union. Another unsuccessful daytime show that was canceled soon after it started was Kyra Phillips’ “Raising America.” Here we see yet another maternalistic title attempting to control and teach America how to raise its kids.

The mainstream media have extended the separation of “Church and State” to their own reporting. In so doing, they have confused themselves with the government yet again. America has left untapped the great talent of many outstanding male and female pastors and religious leaders who would be wonderful guest and hosts of many non-religious shows. Just look at the success of Mike Huckabee on FOX. It is a shame to see disclaimers by some TV channels stating that “they are not responsible for the content” of religious shows such as the 700 Club, but the disclaimer is never made on other shows.

The leftist media is starting to feel the negative effects of its insincerity and bias. Instead of self-discipline and sticking to their duty to the public, they have allowed themselves to be seduced into competing with the goals and role of the government. Instead of objectively examining the causes of their shrinking viewership, they continue to impose their agenda to educate the public about what their of hope and change should be. Instead of reflecting what is going on in society so that the public can make informed decisions, they continue with their obsession of steering the public into their leftist agenda.

ISIS marching through Iraq has smashed the media’s taboo against criticizing Obama’s foreign policy. Substantive discussions are taking place about why his foreign policy is such a miserable failure.

And they mostly miss the point.

Liberal journalists still proceed from the fallacy that there was a foreign policy debate between neo-conservative interventionists and liberal non-interventionists. These are a series of digested Bush era talking points that have no relationship to reality since Bush’s foreign policy on Iraq carried over from Bill Clinton. It’s why Hillary gets so uncomfortable when she has to discuss her vote on Iraq.

The liberals weren’t non-interventionists who insisted on multilateralism and UN approval before acting. Obama, like virtually every other Democrat, disproved that myth as fast as he could. Nor were they even opponents of the Iraq War until opposing the war became politically convenient.

Obama however isn’t on this map at all. It’s not that he is an opponent of intervention. The Libyans can tell you that. It’s that his reasons for intervening fall completely outside the grid of national interests.

The anti-war activist as pacifist is largely a myth. There are a few anti-war activists who oppose all wars, but mostly they just oppose America. Obama, who got his foot up the political ladder by flirting with the anti-war movement, falls into that category. Obama isn’t opposed to wars. He’s opposed to America.

Obama is an ideological interventionist, not a nationalist interventionist. And despite his multilateralist rhetoric, he isn’t your usual globalist either. Instead he uses national and international power as platforms for pursuing ideological goals without any regard to national or international interests.

That is true of both his foreign and domestic policy.

Obama’s foreign policy is issue oriented, just like his domestic policy is. There is no national agenda, only a leftist agenda. America is just a power platform for pursuing policy goals.

Domestically, Obama does not care about fixing the economy. The economy is a vehicle for pursuing social justice, environmental justice and all the many unjust justices of the left. It has no innate value. Likewise national security and power have no value except as tools for promoting leftist policies.

Obama thinks of the ideological issue first. Then he packages it as a national interest for popular consumption. It’s a Wilsonian approach that is not only far more extreme than the policies of most White House occupants have been, but also more detached.

Scenes all too familiar from the Arab conflict with Israel have followed the murder last Wednesday of a 16-year-old Palestinian, Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Mourners at his funeral chanting the Muslim war-cry “Allahu Akbar” as they carry the boy’s open coffin, the crowd shouting slogans like “Intifada rise up” and “America and Israel are the terrorists,” banners representing terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad waving above the crowd, gangs of “youths” attacking Israeli police throughout East Jerusalem, barrages of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, and the usual condemnations of Israel and calls for “restraint” from the “international community” – all sadly are business as usual. And the “business” is the demonization of Israel and the obscene double standards indulged by too many in the West.

The Israeli authorities have quickly tracked down and arrested 6 Israeli minors as suspects in the killing, even as the killers of the Israelis are still at large. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu said, “We do not differentiate between terrorists, and we will respond to all of them.” The speed of the arrest, and Netanyahu’s unequivocal identification of the crime as an act of terrorism, should underline the differences between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which seemingly is making little effort to hunt down the main killers of the 3 Israelis, and the Authority’s political partner Hamas, which praised the killings. As Netanyahu pointed out, “The murderers [of the Israelis] came from the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority; they returned to territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority is obliged to do everything in its power to find them, just as we did, just as our security forces located the suspects in the murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir within a matter of days.”

But Israel’s enemies are unlikely to draw the proper conclusion from this contrast, or even take time to note how comparatively rare such violence on the part of Israelis is compared to the thousands of Israelis murdered by Palestinian Arabs over the decades. Rather, the moral and intellectual idiocy of the “cycle of violence” meme will determine reactions to this murder on the part of those too lazy or timid to choose a side, even as they hold Israel up to standards of behavior and forbearance no other country would accept. But there are good and bad sides in this conflict, and which side has the moral high ground can be seen by comparing further the reactions of each to the recent murders.

Listen, for example, to the response of Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas to the kidnapping of the Israeli teens, delivered at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Saudi Arabia: “Those who kidnapped the three Israeli teenagers want to destroy us. First and foremost [these teenagers] are human beings like us. It is our responsibility to search for them and to return them to their families. We will hold their kidnappers accountable, whoever they are.”

For those impressed by these comments, notice that the first sentence condemns the kidnapping not as a moral evil or a terrorist act, but as a tactical blunder damaging the Palestinian Arab program of destroying Israel by “stages.” Bad p.r. is the problem, not the evil of terrorism or the deaths of 3 innocent teenagers. This sort of comment is consistent with Abbas’s past habit of joining general condemnations of terrorist acts to complaints about their bad timing or damage to Palestinian interests. Speaking of the Second Intifada and its brutal terrorism, Abbas commented, “If we do a calculation we will see that without any doubt what we lost was big and what we gained was small.” Later, speaking out against a rocket attack from Gaza, he said, “This is not the time for this kind of attack,” which suggests there is a time for shooting rockets at women and children. That is, blowing up innocents is not wrong, just inefficient at that particular time for achieving the long-term goal of a Palestinian state that eventually will include the territory of Israel.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/video-jamie-glazov-on-the-lefts-jihad-denial-2/

In this special episode of The Glazov Gang, Ann-Marie Murrell interviews Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov about the Left’s Jihad Denial and progressives’ willful blindness in the face of the Islamic threat. The dialogue occurred within the context of Jamie’s discussion about his battle on Hannity against the Unholy Alliance:

When you consider how many ways an alien may enter the United States it is absurd to focus all attention on just the Southwest Border of the United States that involves just four of America’s 50 states.

In point of fact, it has been estimated that 40% of the illegal aliens who are present in the United States did not run our border and evade the inspections process that is supposed to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence would be harmful to America or Americans but entered the United States through ports of entry and went on, in various ways, to violate the terms of their admission into the United States.

Furthermore, some illegal aliens gain entry into the United States by stowing away on ships, illegal disembark from ships on which they work and are referred to as “ship-jumpers” or enter without inspection from Canada.

Yet the immigration debate has disingenuously focused nearly exclusively, on the need to secure America’s Southwest Border that is supposed to separate the United States from Mexico.

Of course, given the ongoing crisis involving tens of thousands of unaccompanied minor illegal aliens, primarily from Central America, who are showing up along the Southwest Border of the United States having illegally entered the United States, it is clear that this border must be made secure. However, it is foolhardy to not pay attention to all of the other entry points and methods of entry employed by illegal aliens. It is no less foolish to ignore the other failings of the immigration system that enable criminals and terrorists to game the process by which visas are issued and immigration benefits are conferred upon aliens.

The easiest way to visualize the immigration system is to consider the configuration of a colander.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a colander thusly:

col·an·der noun \ˈkä-lən-dər, ˈkə-\

: a bowl that has many small holes and that is used for washing or draining food

Consider that each of the holes in the colander is comparable to a hole in the immigration system. Politicians who attempt to convince us that all that is necessary as a pre-requisite for implementing Comprehensive Immigration Reform is to secure the US/Mexican border are, in essence, claiming that if you plug one hole in the bottom of a colander it could then be used as a bucket to carry water.

The president is behind on the immigration crisis, but so is Congress.

San Diego — President Obama will visit Texas this week for three political fundraisers. One place he will not visit while in Texas: the Mexican border. A border visit is apparently not necessary, in Obama’s view, to monitor the crisis that has seen thousands of migrants — including unaccompanied children — flood into the United States.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest bizarrely says that people criticizing Obama’s failure to visit the border would “rather play politics than actually try to address some of these challenges.” The president, it seems, will “lead from behind” once again. All this has been too much for Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the border city of Laredo. “They should have seen this coming a long time ago . . . because we saw those numbers increasing,” he said today on CNN’s State of the Union. Cuellar admitted that our current system creates perverse incentives. “There is an incentive that if you bring your child over here, or you’re a child by yourself, you’re going to be let go. And that’s exactly what’s happening,” he said. “Our immigration courts are so backlogged. There’s not enough detention spaces. . . . This is the incentive we have to take away.” As for Obama’s pledge to send more personnel to the border, Cuellar didn’t sound confident: “I think he’s still one step behind. They knew this was happening a year ago. . . . and they are not reacting fast enough at this time.”

The crisis at the border should serve as a slap in the face to people in both parties who have been unable to come up with a border solution for the last decade. On the one hand, Democrats’ insistence that any reform must be “comprehensive” and include a path to citizenship ignores the fact that for most migrants, becoming a citizen is not a first-tier priority. The Pew Research Center found last year that of the 5.4 million Mexican immigrants who reside legally in the U.S. today, only 36 percent have chosen to become citizens. Safety, the ability to visit family and friends in Mexico and return, and being able to live openly in society are far more important to immigrants. For their part, many Republicans who insist on an enforcement-only approach ignore the evidence that the 45-year-old “War on Drugs” has done little to stem drug trafficking on the border despite an increase of more than 50 percent in Border Patrol funding over the last six years.

Border Patrol agents I spoke with were reluctant to be quoted on the record, but all agreed that a comprehensive solution that combines better border enforcement (which entails less-political enforcement) with a well-designed guest-worker program is necessary if we wish to make real progress. “We need to enforce employer sanctions at the same time we give employers a legal path to fill the jobs they must have workers for,” one agent told me. A retired agent points to the bracero (“one who works using his arms” in Spanish) guest-worker visa program, which until 1964 brought Mexican manual laborers north to work in agriculture, construction, and service industries.

The bracero program began during a labor shortage in World War II and expanded in response to an immigration crisis that peaked in 1954, when arrests of illegal aliens topped the 1 million mark. Under the bracero program, some 300,000 Mexican workers entered the U.S. legally every year. The results were dramatic. By 1959, arrests of illegal aliens had fallen to 45,000 a year; they remained under 100,000 annually until 1964.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered the eternal conundrum of competing choices. His “Aye, there’s the rub” nicely summarizes the conflicts inherent in the present socio/political/scientific arena of climate discussions.

Years of relentless doomsday prognostications by a variety of public voices spanning the political-scientific spectrum have found their mark in a gullible and guilt-prone public. There is a Medusa-like quality in the serpentine web of doomsday prophets, including members of the Club of Rome, Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb,” and the current White House science advisor, John Holdren. In the U.S., Rachel Carson proclaimed DDT to be environmental enemy number one, and inspired Al Gore to discover “Inconvenient Truths,” later found to be not so truthful. Al Gore’s contribution to making climate change a co-equal amongst the four horsemen of the apocalypse is matched by M. Mann’s reinterpretation of global temperature history. Repeated refutations of “faulty” science and failed predictions of climate calamities have not deterred these marketers of doom. Cut the head off, yet it lives on.

Sustainability, population control, and redistributive-based social justice were offered as moral justifications for the one-world governance needed to solve one-world problems, as posited by the UK’s Barbara Ward. Answering this “cri de coeur,” the U.N. global bureaucrats crafted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the instrument by which life-sustaining carbon dioxide would be reinvented as the most dangerous threat to the world. Our current Federal government is more certain than ever that “the science is settled,” and that the global climate bears the human stain of excessive consumption of fossil fuels. An unelected Federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has assumed the role of guardian of public health via arbitrary edicts regulating all things atmospheric, in addition to all surface waters. Those wishing to pursue independent traditional scientific inquiry and reproducibility of EPA claimed findings have noted an adamant shyness by the EPA in producing the requested original data.

“Fear and loathing” is no longer confined to Las Vegas, but has been turned into a self-hate/guilt propaganda tool by doomsday prophets and fear profiteers. Humans are carbon — based life forms intertwined in the biological interdependence upon green plant production of oxygen and consumption of carbon dioxide. Thus the guilt stage is set for humans to be declared a living source of this newly-defined carbon pollution, and therefore enemies of mother Earth. According to the Club of Rome: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” Population control is the implied remedy.

It was headlining AOL on Friday: a story about a woman stabbing a schoolteacher to death in front of a class of five and six-year-olds. The gruesome and bloody crime occurred in the southern French town of Albi; the victim was a 34-year-old mother of two.

But a certain bit of information is conspicuously missing from virtually all the reportage. We’re told the killer was under the impression that the teacher had accused her five-year-old daughter of theft. We’re told she had a history of child abuse and “severe psychiatric problems.” We’re told she’s 47. And we’re told she’s a she. But her name is nowhere to be found, and information about her background is…well, you’ll see.

This isn’t true of the victim. Every news source I checked provided her name. The International Business Times (IBD) even led with it in the title: “Deranged Mother Kills Teacher Fabienne Terral-Calmès in Front of Class.” The killer, however, is almost universally identified as “the mother.” But I was sure I knew what the big secret was. Those tow-headed Norwegians are at it again.

The AOL piece, from the AP, did the “The Mother” thing exclusively. Other sources, such as IBD, reported that the police have not released the attacker’s name but that she’s of Spanish origins. Ah, okay, a Franco supporter, no doubt. But I still thought I knew the truth.

So I dug further. New York’s Daily News reported that “[a]uthorities would not comment on what spurred the horrific stabbing.” The BBC said that The Mother used a “long knife.” The Telegraph identified The Mother as a “Spanish national” (emphasis added). We’re getting closer…

I even checked the French publication L’Expresse, which, after being spit out the other end of Google Translate, told us about The Mother, “[I]t would be of Spanish nationality” (obfuscation is always a bit more interesting when processed through artificial unintelligence). The paper also tells us that the school “is located in the district Lapanouse in sensitive urban areas.”

“Sensitive urban areas.”

My, that could be the electronic translation of “scary ghettos where angry, unassimilable North African immigrants will rob you blind and beat you within an inch of your life while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and where, when you call the gendarmes, they say, ‘Are you crazy, Monsieur? We’re not setting foot in there!”

Or it could be that we’ve got nothing on the French when it comes to euphemizing.

The Obama Administration has targeted for-profit colleges as if they are enemy combatants. And now it has succeeded in putting out of business Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges for a dilatory response to document requests. Does the White House plan to liquidate the IRS too?

A month ago the Department of Education imposed a 21-day hold on Corinthian’s access to federal student aid because it “failed to address concerns about its practices, including falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students.” The funding freeze triggered a liquidity crisis, which has culminated in Corinthian’s decision to wind down or sell its 97 U.S. campuses.

Like the for-profit college industry, Corinthian draws roughly 80% of its revenues from federal student aid. Yet this is a function of its demographics. For-profit schools educate a larger share of low-income, minorities, veterans and single mothers than do nonprofit and public colleges. Eighty percent of their students lack parental financial support.

The Obama Administration’s five-year lashing of “predatory” for-profits has deterred many new students from enrolling in these schools. Corinthian’s system-wide student body has shrunk to 72,000 from 112,000 in 2010, and the company had laid off 1,350 employees in the last year. Then there are investigations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and more than a dozen state Attorneys General over sundry alleged violations, which have added regulatory uncertainty and legal costs. Keep in mind that Corinthian has been found guilty of nothing.

Most of the investigations involve trumped-up charges of misleading job placement rates, which federal law requires for-profits—but not public and nonprofit colleges—to document and disclose. But here’s the rub: There’s no standard definition of “job placement.”