RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pope could have used his forum in Congress to call attention to the plight of Christians

Unlike Communist Cuba, America hasn’t seized and nationalized Catholic churches and schools. It hasn’t locked up Catholic clergy or installed surveillance equipment in their homes. It hasn’t denounced the Catholic church as “exploiters” and “fascists”. And yet Pope Francis, who had few criticisms of Cuba, came to Congress to denounce the collision between Americans and Indians, and to urge the United States to take in illegal aliens without regard for the law.

There’s a condemnation of the death penalty. Never mind that in the US, the death penalty is used after extensive appeals against some of the worst monsters imaginable, unlike Cuba, where it was used to massacre political opponents of the Castro crime family. And condemnations of selling weapons. Much of this is couched in vague language, but it’s still a sharp contrast from the visit to Cuba.

The Pope even threw in a backhanded defense of Islam…

Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism. This means that we must be especially attentive to every type of fundamentalism, whether religious or of any other kind…

But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.

Of all the points presidential candidate Ben Carson made in defense of his position that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” most poignant is his reference to taqiyya, one of Islam’s doctrines of deception.

According to Carson, whoever becomes president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Koran”:

“I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing the Islamic law derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”

Carson said that the only exception he’d make would be if the Muslim running for office “publicly rejected all the tenants of Sharia and lived a life consistent with that.”

“Then I wouldn’t have any problem,” he said.

Carson is now close to getting 1 in 5 black voters

These numbers are interesting mainly because there’s been a lot of effort put into trying to nail down Carson’s base of support.

Currently, in a national election, Bush beats Hillary by 2 percent, Carson is ahead by 7 percent. The difference doesn’t so much come from black voters, though Carson is now close to getting 1 in 5 black voters.

Carson does much better among white women, beating Hillary by 54 to 40 percent. (Every one of those “Republicans have a woman problem” articles are misrepresenting a racial gender voter turnout gap as a gender issue)

Jeb Bush does better with Latinos than Carson by 10 percent. But Carson picks up enough white and black votes that it doesn’t matter.

Pope Francis scolds America for the ingredients that made it great.

Pope Francis chided Americans yesterday for their supposed intolerance and xenophobia, the same thing President Obama does every day, in his historic address to the U.S. Congress.

Although Francis toned down his sometimes in-your-face rhetoric for his congressional speech, it was still a politically tone-deaf lecture on America’s failings, past and present.

It bore more than a passing resemblance to the many speeches President Obama has given around the globe apologizing for America’s history and greatness. The pope delivered this address standing on the dais in front of Vice President Joe Biden (D) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). Both are Catholics. Boehner made this major debacle, which amounts to a propaganda boost for the Obama agenda, possible by inviting the pope to address Congress. (A full transcript of the pope’s address is available here.)

It may be significant that only four members of the nine-member Roman Catholic-dominated Supreme Court showed up for the Holy Father’s address. The attendees were Chief John Roberts (Catholic), Anthony Kennedy (Catholic), Sonia Sotomayor (Catholic), and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jewish). Absent were Samuel Alito (Catholic), Antonin Scalia (Catholic), Clarence Thomas (Catholic), Stephen Breyer (Jewish), and Elena Kagan (Jewish).

The Left loves the pope’s message. Although the Left vindictively led the charge against the Catholic church during the various sexual abuse scandals, it now has the current pope’s back because, except for abortion, he agrees with leftists. For example, in recent days the Salon website, a hotbed of hostility to organized religion (except Islam), has switched sides. Salon has been running stories sympathetic to the pope with titles like “The transcendent compassion of Pope Francis” (by leftist mud-hurler Joan Walsh, no less), “Twitter tells the tale: Pope Francis’ speech does not sit well with the conservative ‘intelligentsia,'” “Conservatives who hate the pope rush to his defense,” “5 new ways Pope Francis is sticking it to the Christian right,” and “The GOP’s venomous Pope tirades are the ultimate example of hypocritical rage.”

Advocacy organization that booed Ted Cruz remains uncertain about jihad.

Last year’s inaugural In Defense of Christians (IDC) conference indicated to this author a “strategic confusion among beleaguered Middle Eastern Christian minorities,” a situation that lamentably remained unchanged this year. The recently completed September 9-11, 2015, IDC conference exhibited strange ideological crosscurrents, as panelists often sharply differed over the connection between Islam and religious persecution of Christians and others.
A moment of controversy at IDC’s initial panel, “ISIS, Genocide, and the International Response” at Washington, DC’s National Press Club (video excerpts here), set an ambiguous tone for the conference. Panelists like United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Commissioner Katrina Lantos-Swett focused on the “intrinsically evil” atrocities of groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Beyond politico-military responses, “ultimately, ISIS and like-minded groups must be defeated in the realm of ideas.”

Why are Christian minorities, who are the most to suffer from the chaos engulfing the Middle East, the least wanted in the United States?

To the Obama administration, the only “real” refugees are those made so due to the actions of Bashar Assad. As for those who are being raped, slaughtered, and enslaved based on their religious identity by so-called “rebel” forces fighting Assad — including the Islamic State — their status as refugees is evidently considered dubious at best.

The Obama administration never seems to miss an opportunity to display its bias for Muslims against Christians. The State Dept. is in the habit of inviting scores of Muslim representatives but denying visas to solitary Christian representatives. While habitually ignoring the slaughter of Christians at hands of Boko Haram, the administration called for the “human rights” of the jihadi murderers.

In Islamic usage, the “cause of Allah” is synonymous with jihad to empower and enforce Allah’s laws on earth, or Sharia. In this context, immigrating into Western lands is a win-win for Muslims: if they die in the process somehow, paradise is theirs; if they do not, the “locations and abundance” of the West are theirs.

Muslims all around the U.S. are supporting the Islamic State and Muslim clerics are relying on the refugee influx to conquer Western nations, in the Islamic tradition of Hijrah, or jihad by emigration.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/424479/print

There’s only one time when you can depend on the chronically backlogged, recklessly inefficient Department of Homeland Security to perform smoothly: election season.

While hundreds of thousands of visa overstayers and deportation fugitives remain on the loose, federal bureaucrats at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) are hastily recruiting tens of thousands of foreigners for the Obama administration’s new “U.S. citizenship and immigrant civic integration” campaign.

For the past week, the agency has staged more than 200 naturalization ceremonies for more than 36,000 new citizens. In partnership with the Interior Department (the same one that blocked American veterans from visiting war memorials during the 2013 federal-government standoff over spending), the feds hosted camera-ready events at national parks — and encouraged their new political pawns to post propaganda photos across social media.

The CBS affiliate in Miami reports that Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate & resort in Palm Beach has requested hundreds of foreign worker visas for jobs such as cooks, waitresses, and housekeepers. This would appear to conflict with his boast that “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” and with the assertion in his immigration policy paper that “we need companies to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed.”

I’d guess that Trump’s reply (his people didn’t respond to the TV reporter) would be a version of what he said about bankruptcy laws in the first debate: “I’ve used immigration laws to do a great job for my companies.” The reporter notes that since airing the story, Mar-A-Lago has reached out to a local job-placement service.

Now that we’ve all got that thrill up our leg about Trump’s hypocrisy, it might be worth asking which of his rivals is in a position to call him on it? Cruz? He favors quintupling H-1B visas, which are the same kind of indentured-servitude visas Trump used, but for run-of-the-mill tech workers (not the best-and-brightest workers lobbyists claim) rather than waitresses.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424544/europe-refugee-crisis-germany-peace
The Three Crucial Factors to Maintaining the Peace in Europe
By Victor Davis Hanson —

The bailed-out Greeks are still broke. Now their islands are flooded with a horde of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

Spain, Portugal, and Italy are almost in the same boat. Their shared Mediterranean traditions — and vulnerabilities — are far different from those of northern Europe’s more affluent nations.

Given the triad of history, geography and culture, it is no accident that Europe on the Mediterranean is being hit first by Third World immigration heading northward. Southern Europe always seems to owe money to the north.

Eastern Europeans are angry that the EU tries to override their own individual immigration laws. Nearly a million immigrants, most of them young male Muslims, now flock to the borders of Eastern European countries. From the Baltic states to the former Yugoslavia, these nations for 500 years were caught in the meat grinder when East fought West in Eastern Europe, the battered sea wall against which the tsunami of the Islamic Ottoman Empire finally crashed and receded.

Criminologists at the University of California beware: disseminating crime data could put you afoul of university governance. The politically appointed regents of the ten-campus UC system are devising “principles against intolerance” that would regulate university speech and behavior and could threaten a large range of academic inquiry, including crime research. The effort shows how a therapeutic agenda has taken over the traditional educational and research functions of American colleges.

The impetus for the “intolerance” initiative was an alleged rise in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incidents on UC campuses. In February 2015, some UCLA students questioned whether another student with ties to Jewish organizations could serve impartially on a campus judicial board. In response, the regents asked the UC administration to compose a “statement of principles against intolerance”; the UC provost presented a draft at a regents’ meeting last week at UC Irvine. The regents criticized the principles for not explicitly mentioning anti-Semitism but didn’t object to their substance. Indeed, one regent called them a “nice statement.” While the next version will undoubtedly incorporate a reference to anti-Semitism—which had been omitted out of a desire to be “inclusive,” according to provost Aimee Dorr—the draft’s main ideas and language will almost certainly remain the same.

The current “intolerance” draft opens by announcing the regents’ commitment to protecting UC’s core principles of “respect, inclusion, and academic freedom.” Only recently would “inclusion” have been considered a core academic principle. Universities exist to preserve culture and generate knowledge. Any university run as a meritocracy will be naturally inclusive of anyone who brings intellectual talent and rigor to the institution. To make “inclusion” an end in itself goes beyond traditional academic values into social-justice territory. Even “respect,” however salutary a virtue, is a recent arrival in the pantheon of affirmative academic principles. Respect is ordinarily earned by intellectually solid research. The UC intolerance principles, by contrast, mean “respect” as validation of self-worth: “University of California students, faculty, and staff must respect the dignity of each person within the UC community.” Such an injunction might seem anodyne. But to state it as an affirmative mandate implies that the university is otherwise at risk of systematically “disrespecting” or “excluding” certain persons “within the UC community.” This belief, focused on a favored list of alleged victims, is the foundation of the “diversity” takeover of the academy.