RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Scandal of Free Speech
A year from now none but the unfeint of heart will still be with Charlie.

Last May, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics in which he used a term so infamous that it caused members of the audience to walk out “in a state of distress.” Later, a petition was put forward to demand that the institute apologize “for failing to stop” Mr. Savage from using the term, and to “assert a commitment to preventing the use of slurs and hate speech in the future.”

The word in question? To adapt the old joke: I could tell you but they’re going to kill me.

Well, OK, here goes. The word is “tranny,” meaning a transgender, or transsexual, or transvestite person. So hideously offensive is this word nowadays that, when I arrived at an Institute of Politics event a few weeks later, a group called Queers United in Power—or QUIP, minus the humor—held a protest outside and handed out fliers denouncing (without spelling out) the use of the “T word.” I had to ask around to find out just what the word was; I got the answer in a whisper.

Attention all of you logicians of Hyde Park: If words are to be forbidden, must they not first be known?

Scott Walker and Right to Work
Wisconsin’s Governor bobs and weaves on another labor reform.

Scott Walker is heading to Iowa this month as part of his consideration of a run for the White House, but in the meantime he’s starting a second term as Governor in which he presumably wants to accomplish something. So it’s unfortunate that he’s ducking a chance to make Wisconsin the country’s 25th right-to-work state.

At his second inauguration last week, Mr. Walker told voters that prosperity comes “from empowering people to control their own lives and their own destinies through the dignity born from work.” In the Badger State, he added, “we understand people create jobs, not the government.”

He’s right, which makes it that much stranger to watch Mr. Walker dodging the right-to-work challenge. In December, after Wisconsin Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald said he was interested in taking up a right-to-work bill, the Governor called it a “distraction.” Then he told WKOW-TV “Capitol City Sunday” that despite the chatter about right-to-work momentum, “there’s a lot of things that are going to keep the legislature preoccupied for a while,” like taxes and education.

That may be, but Wisconsin needs an economic lift and right to work can help. Big Labor spins right to work as radical, but it merely gives workers a choice to join a union. Many workers decide to drop their union affiliation once government coercion is repealed, and union political clout tends to fall.

The liquidation of the jihadists guilty of the Charlie Hebdo massacre has closed the first act of yet another European drama. It was not the first and will not be the last in the war of radical Islam against civilization. The lessons to be drawn have been in front of us for years, yet many in the politically correct France and the West are seemingly afraid to see the reality for what it is and draw the logical conclusions. If they continue to do that, European civilization is facing an existential danger.
So let’s see what transpired in Paris. Innocent people were murdered in cold blood as a revenge for an ostensible insult of the prophet Muhammad the cartoonists were said to have committed. And while common people with common sense reacted to this barbarism with a resounding “Je suis Charlie,” assorted western media like CNN tried to absolve the terrorists by intoning that Charlie Hebdo ‘had provoked the Muslims.’ Nor is this unconsionable attitude atypical of the leftist establishment that rules the roost in the West. Two years ago president Obama himself declared in a speech to the UN (Sept. 25, 2012) that “The future should not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” thereby expressing his solidarity with the Islamists. Many other media refuse to publish the cartoons to this day, demonstrating with their behavior that maybe the jihadists are right. No one, mentioned even once that there is no prohibition against drawing Muhammad in the Koran.

Jimmy Carter ties Paris terror to ‘Palestinian problem’
Former US president Jimmy Carter said on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” that “the Palestinian problem” is one of the causes of the violent terror attack during which four Jews were murdered in a Paris supermarket.
Carter was answering a question by Stewart on whether the violence stems from anything other than Islamic extremism.
“This aggravates people who are affiliated in any way with the Arab people who live in the West Bank and Gaza, what they are doing now — what’s being done to them. So I think that’s part of it,” Carter said.
http://cdn.timesofisrael.com/uploads/2013/05/F121022YA04-e1368360903729.jpgFile photo: Jimmy Carter seen during a press conference in Jerusalem on October 22, 2012. (photo credit: Yoav Ari Dudkevitch/Flash90)

Blaming “Islamophobes in America” for the bad rap that comes around whenever a group of Islamists worldwide commits some new blood-soaked atrocity, American Muslim leaders are gathering in Texas this weekend for a “Stand with the Prophet” conference.
Since the headlines will just be fading on the Islamist massacre in Paris on Wednesday – and who knows what stomach-turning activities might crop up before Saturday – it might be a tough sell to the uninitiated.
According to a Washington Free Beacon article by staff writer Adam Kredo, organizers of the “Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect” conference, planned for Saturday evening Saturday evening at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, say the media and “Islamophobes” are to blame for Islam’s reputation in the Western world.
The conference is apparently meant to change that.

Unfortunately for Harf, the issue she tried to distract reporters with was the activities of the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist group in Nigeria. That would be the Boko Haram group that’s kidnapped hundreds of girls to be forced into “marriage” with Islamist fighters. So far, the Obama White House’s most memorable contribution has been a selfie of Michelle Obama pouting over the girls’ sexual slavery.
If that sounded like an odd thing for the State Department spokeswoman to want to talk about, her performance during the rest of the briefing — vainly trying to explain away the U.S. failure to appear at the Paris gathering — explained it.
“We make decisions like these based on a variety of factors,” Harf said, in a classically obtuse Harf formulation. “There are just a variety of factors we take into account …
“I’m not going to get into what our internal conversations look like.”
Besides, she noted, the whole thing was getting more attention in the United States than it was in France. So to paraphrase another great American diplomat, at this point, what difference does it make?

Read more: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/01/13/dumbest-deflection-of-the-century-state-dept-marie-harf-tops-her-past-breathtaking-ignorant-moments-172224#ixzz3Oi7Lj5E5

THE COIN DOCTRINE-RULES OF ENGAGEMENT ENDORSED BY THE GENERAL SHOWED SUCH OVERWEENING SENSITIVITY TO THE BARBARIAN MOSLEM MORES THAT IT PUT OUR OWN BRAVE WARRIOR’S IN HARM’S WAY…..FIVE STAR BLOWHARD….RSK
One Cheer for Gen. Petraeus David P. Goldman

The Obama administration is still deciding whether to bring felony charges against former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, according to Attorney General Eric Holder. As a senior DOJ official in the Clinton administration, Holder arranged a presidential pardon for fugitive tax cheat Marc Rich. As attorney general, he ignored the unconscionable use of the IRS against conservative-leaning organizations seeking tax-exempt status.

This is a political prosecution. Petraeus’ supposed crime, leaking classified information to a girlfriend, is the sort of victimless infraction that never has been brought to the point of criminal prosecution at any time in the past. Petraeus’ offense, rather, is political: He is credited with the 2006-2007 surge that in Republican mythology won the Iraq War before President Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. One risks being run out of the Republican Party on a rail for questioning this mythology, but someone has to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Petraeus improved the optics of the Iraq mess at the end of the second Bush administration, to be sure, but he also helped set in motion the catastrophe that has now engulfed the Levant.

The story already has been told in depth by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel Bolger, whose memoir Why We Lost appeared last year. I reviewed it in Asia Times Online after observing that not one of the mainstream media reviews mentioned the most important assertions in Gen. Bolger’s excellent book: First, that American success in imposing majority rule on Iraq in 2006 set in motion the Sunni insurgency, and second, that America’s sponsorship of the Sunnis in 2007-2008 (the “Sunni Awakening” built with American funds as part of the “surge”) made the insurgency intractable.

Last week’s terror attack targeting French magazine Charlie Hebdo‘s office in Paris has sparked a global conversation about the nature of free speech, with the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag in support of the murdered Charlie Hebdo staff going viral and becoming the most used hashtag in the history of Twitter.

But this afternoon, the UN representative for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Ufuk Gokcen, was expressing another view with respect to free speech.

The OIC is comprised of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and the Palestinian Authority. They are the largest bloc at the UN, and when they meet on the head-of-state level, they literally speak for the Muslim world.

So it is noteworthy that after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Gokcen is now calling for more implementation of the OIC-sponsored UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 and the follow-up Rabat Plan of Action that would criminalize the very type of speech that Charlie Hebdo engaged in:

The timing of Gokcen’s call couldn’t be more perfect.

Editor’s Note: This past Saturday, renowned Lincoln scholar and conservative academic Harry Jaffa passed away at the age of 96. The following article is adapted from John J. Miller’s profile of Jaffa that ran in the July 1, 2013 issue of NR.

When Harry V. Jaffa learned of the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, he phoned a 36-year-old high-school teacher in Ashland, Ohio, named Sara Whitis. “I just want to be sure you’re okay,” he said in a voice mail. Whitis listened to the message when she arrived home from work. “It stirred me to tears,” she says. Two years earlier, Whitis had completed a master’s thesis about Jaffa’s scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and the politics of freedom. The paper had come to the attention of the 94-year-old professor, who liked it so much that he reached out to Whitis and took a grandfatherly interest in her career. He also knew that Whitis was a marathoner who had raced in Boston seven times — and was relieved to learn, when Whitis called back, that she was safely at home.

Preventing a Paris-style attack is, in part, a numbers game. Americans don’t seem to be paying attention.

A major Islamist terror attack in France was only a matter of time. For several decades, the country has invited immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa en masse – first to bolster the labor force in the rebuilding years that followed World War II, then out of multicultural impulses that prevailed over prudential considerations. That radical Islam was transplanted to France, grew in strength and extent, and bore this week’s hideous fruit was not difficult to predict. The same is not unlikely in Sweden, Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere.

Demographics may not be the whole of destiny, but they are certainly a good part, and across the Atlantic, the United States seems increasingly to be turning toward Western Europe’s most undesirable demographic trends.