RUTHFULLY YOURS

The State Department said Secretary of State John Kerry finally called the Massachusetts family of a teen killed last week in a West Bank terror attack.

But that was just a couple of days after a State Department official, previewing Kerry’s visit this week to the Middle East, said the administration was just “a bit concerned” about attacks on Americans by Palestinians.

President Obama and Kerry have been mum on the attack in which Ezra Schwartz, 18, of Sharon, Mass., was killed Thursday.

Schwartz was a gap-year student attending Yeshivat Ashreinu in Beit Shemesh. He was in a van with five other friends taking food to IDF soldiers Thursday near the Gush Etzion junction when a Palestinian terrorist opened fire on cars stuck in traffic. The terrorist then rammed his car into another vehicle and was arrested.

Over the years since President Obama first took office, he has lectured Americans about the receding tide of war, al Qaeda on the run, and, more recently, ISIS (or, as the administration has it, ISIL) being degraded, slated for ultimate destruction, and, even more recently, “contained.” Meanwhile, the world is getting ever more dangerous. Over the past six months alone, the State Department in its efforts to keep up with the turmoil and threats has issued more than three dozen travel warnings for Americans thinking of visiting places from Eritrea to Mali, Lebanon, Colombia, Sudan, El Salvador, Nigeria, Tanzania, Cameroon, Burma, Nepal, Mali, the Philippines, Kenya, Turkey… and of course Syria, Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Now, in the aftermath of the ISIS terrorist attacks on Paris, with ISIS threatening strikes on America, and Brussels heading into its fourth day on lockdown, the State Department is taking a more wholesale approach. Today, as PJ Media’s Bridget Johnson reports, the State Department issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert,” warning U.S. citizens of “possible risks of travel due to increased terrorist threats.”

Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens remarked that terrorism in Europe
was no longer limited to Jews and law enforcement officials, but now
affects targets of a different profile, including the general public,
The Guardian reported on Sunday.

Geens, the justice minister, said that the Paris attacks had shown
that the profile of potential targets had changed. “It’s no longer
synagogues or the Jewish museums or police stations, it’s mass
gatherings and public places,” he said.

By the calculations of the social scientists at the World Economic Forum, the United States’ gender-equality ranking has slipped from 20th place to 28th since 2014. WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index 2015 found that the U.S. is outranked not only by such leftist Valhallas as Iceland (first) and Sweden (fourth), but also, among others, by Mozambique (27th), Namibia (16th), Rwanda (sixth), and Burundi (23rd).

Yes, according to this report, American women who want to enjoy greater gender equality should move to Burundi — a small East African country whose president held a sham election to garner an unconstitutional third term and who is currently threatening to commit genocide against his own people in order to keep power. Burundi also has a continuing history of widespread rape committed by both private citizens and government officials.

Or there’s Burundi’s neighbor Rwanda, whose government recently recruited Burundian refugees, apparently to wage an armed insurgency within Burundi.

Also outranking the U.S. are the Philippines (seventh), where human-rights abuses such as extrajudicial killing are normal; Bolivia (22nd), where corruption and gender-based violence prevail; and Nicaragua (twelfth), where property rights are tenuous and the press faces judicial and legal harassment from the Ortega administration.