RUTHFULLY YOURS

That Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker never graduated from college renders him ineligible for the office of the presidency. Or so says such critics as Howard Dean when they suggest that Walker is insufficiently educated for the position.

I have multiple degrees, including a doctorate degree. For the last 16 years, I have taught philosophy at an array of universities and colleges—four-year and two-year, research-oriented and teaching-oriented, public and private, big and small—from Texas to New Jersey.

And I can assure you, the mere possession of a college degree most definitely does not certify that its holder is “educated.”

Though there are always exceptions, the painful truth of the matter is that the contemporary academic world has long since decided against supplying students with an education into the traditions of Western civilization. Instead, it has made up its mind to provide them with training in an ideology, namely, the prevailing leftist ideology better known as “Political Correctness” (PC).

President Obama is appointing an openly terrorist-sympathizing Muslim to head a government office dedicated to countering Islamic State propaganda.

In April, Rashad Hussain will take over as director of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a small office within the U.S. Department of State that Obama plans to make bigger. A new component called the Information Coordination Cell will be added to the expanded center and will reportedly be staffed by intelligence analysts. It will have a staff of around 80 people and will coordinate with other government agencies.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told the New York Times.

The head-chopping barbarians of the Islamic State will no doubt cower in fear because the U.S. government has, as the newspaper notes, “more than 350 State Department Twitter accounts, combining embassies, consulates, media hubs, bureaus and individuals, as well as similar accounts operated by the Pentagon, the Homeland Security Department and foreign allies.”

Obama says that we are not fighting a war on Islam. What he leaves out is that under his administration the United States is fighting in a civil war that is taking place within Islam.

It’s not a conflict between the proverbial moderate Muslim and the raging fanatic. That was an outdated Bush era notion. Instead Obama has brought us into a fight between Muslim governments and Muslim terrorists, not on the side of the governments we were allied with, but on the side of the terrorists.

It’s why Egypt is shopping for French planes and Russian nukes. Yemen’s government was run out of town by Obama’s new Iranian friends in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are dumping oil.

Iran and Qatar are the regional powers Obama is closest to. What these two countries have in common, is that despite their mutual hostility, they are both international state sponsors of Islamic terrorism.

The first question the Danish Prime Minister got from one of the journalists, was, “How do you think this is going to affect the Muslims in Denmark? None of the journalists asked, “What are you going to do to protect us from this Islamist savagery?”

Imam Hajj Saeed of the Al-Faruq Mosque in Copenhagen, the day before the terror attack, rejected any thought of interfaith dialogue, and noted that the Prophet Muhammad waged war against his Jewish neighbors rather than engage in dialogue.

The day after the shootings, the political spokesperson of the main liberal opposition party went on television and said, “We are dealing with a small group that is abusing the Koran.” In other words, once again we are faced with one or more Muslims who have completely misunderstood their own religion. The implication, of course is that Danes have nothing to fear from the fast growing number of Muslims or the spread of Islam.

Despite a European-brokered “ceasefire,” the war in eastern Ukraine rages on. Russian separatists continue their assault on the city of Debaltseve, forcing the Ukrainian army to withdraw its troops. And yet, the U.S. State Department continues to hold out hope that the ceasefire will work. “We don’t consider it dead,” said spokeswoman Jen Psaki. “We still need time for the agreement to work through.”

But that’s not even the most outrageous aspect of the Obama administration’s position on Ukraine. This is:

State Dept on Ukraine surrender of Debaltseve: “Sovereign govt has right to make decisions about how to protect their people.”

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) February 18, 2015

That was Psaki’s response on Wednesday when asked whether the Russian assault on Debaltseve would be considered cause for further sanctions. In other words, the United States respects the right of a sovereign government to surrender territory when its sovereignty is violated.

I’m sure the Ukrainians (and other eastern Europeans) will take comfort in the Obama administration’s recognition of their sovereign right to cede territory to a foreign aggressor.

“Several hundred students, professors and community activists converged at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Saturday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed budget cuts, a demonstration during which participants cheered for the end of democracy,” reports David Hookstead, a student stringer for TheCollegeFix.com.

“Several in the crowd also poked fun at the fact Walker never graduated from college. Signs stating ‘too cool for school’ dotted the protest”—apparently not a reference to the “subzero temperatures and a windchill of -17 degrees” (global warming strikes again).

Thanks to Snowden and other self-imposed harm, we know less about the enemy than at any time since 9/11.

It is alarming enough to see the rapid advance, almost unhindered, of radical Islamist armed groups and terror across the globe, but the paralysis in Washington—exemplified by the Department of Homeland Security budget deadlock—compounds the crisis. Moreover, such political failure masks another unsettling problem. As al Qaeda and Islamic State gain strength, U.S. intelligence is relatively weaker and more challenged than at any time since the 9/11 attacks. Most of this weakness is of our own making.

The intelligence challenges couldn’t be clearer. Every day seems to bring news of more horror from the Middle East, Nigeria and the heart of Europe. Yet the terrorists appear to operate with near impunity, exploiting the world’s information connectivity for their social-media campaigns. Their sophisticated propaganda helps inspire and recruit. According to the National Counterterrorism Center, enemy combatants in Syria and Iraq include 20,000 foreigners from 90 countries. More than 3,400 of these recruits are Western passport holders who may return to the West, including the U.S., to continue their war.

Republican presidential aspirants are already launching political-action committees, gearing up for the expensive elections to come. They’ll be hard-pressed to compete with the campaign vehicle Hillary Clinton has been erecting these past 14 years. You know, the Clinton Foundation.

With the news this week that Mrs. Clinton—the would-be occupant of the White House—is landing tens of millions from foreign governments for her shop, it’s long past time to drop the fiction that the Clinton Foundation has ever been a charity. It’s a political shop. Bill and Hillary have simply done with the foundation what they did with cattle futures and Whitewater and the Lincoln Bedroom and Johnny Chung—they’ve exploited the system.

Most family charities exist to allow self-made Americans to disperse their good fortune to philanthropic causes. The Clinton Foundation exists to allow the nation’s most powerful couple to use their not-so-subtle persuasion to exact global tribute for a fund that promotes the Clintons.

You may understandably think of it as an ISIS jobs fair, but the ongoing confab in Washington is officially known as President Obama’s “summit” on “Countering Violent Extremism.” That being the case, many Americans seem surprised at the appearance of Salam al-Marayati, leader of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). After all, the White House is having a public hissy fit over the upcoming speech to Congress by Obama’s bête noire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
An odd time, one might think, for the POTUS to be so chummy with a Muslim activist best know for theorizing, right after the 9/11 attacks, that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.” But National Review readers will not be surprised.

While the world obsesses over its distorted perception of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, it does not focus on where the real injustice – and mass murder – is taking place.
President Barack Obama’s “random folk in a deli” comment sounded stupid when he said it last week, referring to the victims, all four of them Jewish, in the January attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris.
We should be thankful for small mercies.

When a similar pattern of attack on a meeting of caricaturists in Copenhagen was followed a few hours later by a deadly assault on a bat-mitzva party at a synagogue in the Danish capital on February 14, the American president who has such trouble enunciating the words “Islamist terror” did not, at least in public, pretend that death of a Danish Jewish guard was just a matter of bad karma.