Displaying posts published in

June 2012

DEBORAH WEISS: ISLAMICALLY CORRECT COUNTER-TERRORISM

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jun/13/islamically-correct-counterterrorism/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS CAIR pressure tactics at work throughout government The Department of Justice and the FBI are revising their counterterrorism training material to remove “inaccurate and biased information” at the direction of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. The Department of Homeland Security, which uses the most funding for counterterrorism […]

NEWS AND BUZZ 24/7

http://times247.com/
German police launch raid on Islamic Salafists
BBC
Thursday, June 14, 2012
News
German police have launched nationwide raids targeting ultra-conservative Islamic Salafists, suspected of posing a threat to public order. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1xlNLfKTG
Panetta denies leak to makers of bin Laden film
Associated Press
Thursday, June 14, 2012
News
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says no unauthorized information was provided to filmmakers producing a movie on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1xlNWrxzG

German police launch raid on Islamic Salafists
BBC
Thursday, June 14, 2012
News
German police have launched nationwide raids targeting ultra-conservative Islamic Salafists, suspected of posing a threat to public order. Read more…
Panetta denies leak to makers of bin Laden film
Associated Press
Thursday, June 14, 2012
News
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says no unauthorized information was provided to filmmakers producing a movie on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Read more…

Kennedy pivotal in court’s Obamacare decision
Bloomberg
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
News
Anthony Kennedy has cast pivotal votes at the U.S. Supreme Court on terrorism, school integration, clean water, the death penalty, gun rights, abortion and campaign finance. Health care may be next. Read more…

U.S. energy boom casts shadow on OPEC meeting
Financial Times
Thursday, June 14, 2012
News
The rise of U.S. shale oil, along with other sources such as Canada’s tar sands, is raising the prospect that OPEC’s share of the global market for crude, and hence its influence over the price, could be undermined. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1xlNjeMQm

DANIEL GREENFIELD: EVERYTHING IS COMING UP JIHAD

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“There are police forces in the Muslim world, but they’re tasked with arresting blasphemers, jailing runaway brides and conducting virginity tests on women found alone in the same room with a man. And occasionally hanging the homosexuals, who as Messr Ahmadinejad assured us don’t exist, because as soon as they exist, they are killed, resolving the paradoxes of Islamic morality and Schrodinger’s cat in one instant.”

June has been a banner month for Muslim lawsuits against the NYPD. First “Muslim Advocates” filed a lawsuit against the NYPD on behalf of some New Jersey Muslims attending mosques that the NYPD had assessed as a potential terrorism risk. The “Muslim Advocates”, like every other Muslim “civil rights” group, has a history of covering up and defending terrorism.

The media is full of sympathetic interviews with Muslims, who are baffled as to why the NYPD might be surveiling mosques and Imams. Farhoud Khera, the head of Muslim Advocates, complains, “There was explicit reference to the fact that they weren’t targeting Syrian Jews or Iranian Jews or Egyptian Christians, but really, the focus was on Muslims.”

The extensive Coptic Christian and Persian Jewish terrorism sprees aside, the goal here is to get the NYPD to play the same “Three Blind Monkeys” game that Federal law enforcement has taken up. And the only answer is the TSAization of the NYPD, as the last remaining counterterrorism force will prove that it isn’t singling out Muslims, by surveiling Methodist churches and Chassidic synagogues for signs of terrorist sympathies.

SAUDI ARABIA TO LEAD UN COUNTER TERRORISM INITIATIVE (???!!!) Brooke Goldstein and Zack Kousnetz

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/saudi_arabia_to_lead_un_counter_terrorism_initiative.html

If the UN were to form an anti-terrorism group dedicated to attacking the menace on a global scale, who do you think would be asked to lead it? A nation with a proven track record of anti-terror initiatives? A nation that esteems human rights and freedoms above all else? Unfortunately, in the case of the UN Centre for Counter Terrorism (UNCCT), the answer is emphatically neither.

The UNCCT was formed in September 2010 with the purpose of executing the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, adopted by the General Assembly in 2006. In a move more befitting Alice in Wonderland than the United Nations, Saudi Arabia was named chair of the organization.

The Resolution that created the UNCCT highlighted four key “pillars” in the fight against terrorism. The first of these pillars, “tackling the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism,” was undermined almost immediately upon the organization’s establishment. Three months after the UNCCT’s formation, WikiLeaks exposed a trove of diplomatic cables in which Secretary of State Hilary Clinton wrote “Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas.” Clinton’s US embassy cables also revealed Saudi resistance to prioritizing the issue in terms of its own domestic policy.

These revelations are perhaps not so surprising in light of the Saudi kingdom’s lukewarm response to terrorism funding and recruitment within its borders. Remember when, in the months following the 9/11 attacks, Saudi Arabia denied the fact that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, before eventually confirming the undeniable truth in 2002? Even worse, this past February two former US senators involved in the 9/11 inquiries suggested in separate affidavits that the Saudi government may have played a direct role in the attacks themselves.

It’s an ironic twist that the UN appointed Saudi Arabia, a country historically labeled by groups like the CATO Institute as a state sponsor of terrorism, to chair the flagship effort to end such practices. The UN’s actions speak to a certain cluelessness it exhibits as a governing body: the organization bows to diplomatic and political courtesies while ignoring what’s happening on the ground.

The designation is also farcical in another sense. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record blatantly contradicts the UNCCT’s fourth pillar, “ensuring respect for human rights against the backdrop of the fight against terrorism,” as evidenced by the nation’s treatment of its own citizens. Amnesty International’s 2012 Report details the state’s numerous abuses: public demonstration is forbidden, females face harshly oppressive discrimination in both the law and society, citizens are subject to torture and confinement for excessive periods of time without due process of law, etc. And the Amnesty International report is not even comprehensive. For example: it fails to mention LGBT rights or the fact that homosexuality in the Saudi kingdom is a capital offense.

Moreover, Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored curriculum continues to foster a learning environment of intolerance and discrimination. As detailed in the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom’s recently published report, the Saudi Kingdom’s academic curriculum for grades 1-12 contains textbooks that disparage Christianity and Judaism and tutors on the subject of jihad and war against nonbelievers. In 2010, a special investigation by the BBC’s Panorama discovered that part-time schools “teaching the official Saudi national curriculum” in the United Kingdom were imparting messages of anti-Semitism and homophobia to young Muslim students, as well as illustrating how to punish thieves by cutting off the criminal’s hand or foot.

It is no secret that Saudi Arabia holds a strong anti-democracy stance, as exemplified in March 2011 when the kingdom sent troops into Bahrain to help repress protests during a government crackdown. Freedom of expression is nearly non-existent; a draft of the nation’s own anti-terror law leaked in July 2011 would suppress free speech and could punish blasphemy with death.

The greatest irony of all is the UN’s failure to come up with a legal definition for the act of terrorism while purporting to fight it with projects like the UNCCT. While the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism has been in the works since 2000, the UN General Assembly Sixth Committee (Legal) has reached an impasse in negotiations. The result is that the UNCCT exists without any clear international definition the word “terrorism.”

BRUCE BAWER: JEW-HATRED IN NORWAY

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/14/jew-hatred-in-norway/

On Wednesday, June 13, during an Internet search, I ran across a left-wing Norwegian blog with which I was previously unfamiliar. The posting I stumbled upon dated back to February and was concerned with what it described as my many lies about Norway. Chief among these lies, apparently, is my claim that “there is strong antisemitism in Norway’s ‘elite.’” The blogger claimed to find this claim outrageous. “Does he not know the labour party [sic] has historical strong ties with Israel? That a recent prime minister was a devoted friend of Israel?”

Less than an hour later, I followed a link in my inbox to a just-posted Jerusalem Post article by Benjamin Weinthal headlined “Norwegian student in Oslo burns Jewish pupil.” The story, which was originally reported on June 12 by a Norwegian Jewish blog, Med Israel for Fred (With Israel for Peace) – MIFF for short – was straightforward enough: on June 11, at an Oslo secondary school barbecue, an ethnic Norwegian student had burned a Jewish classmate with a red-hot coin, leaving “a very visible burn on the boy’s neck.” In a letter to Norway’s Minister of Justice, Grete Faremo, the Simon Wiesenthal Center complained that “this child has been the subject of anti-Semitic bullying and violence for the past two years, reportedly, because his father is Israeli,” but that “there has been no reaction by the school, the police or governmental authorities.” The Wiesenthal Center complained that “the silence of the school, the police and your government is too reminiscent of another Norway, under the WWII Nazi collaborator, Quisling.”

Vebjørn Dysvik, Norway’s chargé d’affaires in Tel Aviv, told the Post in an e-mail that he knew nothing more about the case than what had already been reported and insisted that “the Norwegian government has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to bullying in schools.” But Dysvik didn’t leave it at that. He also took the occasion to complain that the letter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center “contains several extreme statements that lack any foundation in reality. We take exception to the attempt of painting a picture of Norway and Norwegian society as being anti-Semitic. This is a gross distortion of facts for which the Center must bear responsibility.”

BRUCE THORNTON: THE PRESIDENCY AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF PROGRESSIVISM

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/14/obama%e2%80%99s-presidency-and-the-pathologies-of-progressivism/print/

Obama’s presidency has failed miserably, but it has accomplished one thing: it has revealed for all to see the lethal pathologies of progressive ideology. This doesn’t mean progressivism will go away. We thought the New Democrat Bill Clinton had put progressive ideas to rest when he said that the era of big government was over, and then reformed welfare and cut government spending from 23.5% of GDP to 19.5%. Yet despite the success that followed his rejection of failed liberal policies, here we are in the fourth year of Obama’s term, saddled with $5 trillion in new debt, a stalled economy, a National Labor Relations Board carrying water for the unions, a blatantly politicized Department of Justice, and rapidly metastasizing entitlement programs. Meanwhile the president indulges in class-warfare rhetoric young a century ago, and calls for even more redistributionist deficit spending to benefit his political cronies and clients.

The worst economic recovery since World War II that Obama and the Democrats midwifed has exposed the failure of the notion that the government can create economic growth and wealth rather than merely expropriating it from the creative and productive, and that centralized planning and regulating by “experts” can more efficiently allocate resources than the free market does. But more important is the underlying idea of progressivism that Obama’s policies is predicated on: Perfect justice, prosperity, and equality are possible if enlightened elites are given the power to organize and run society according to “scientific” knowledge about human nature and behavior. For two centuries this hubristic idea has led to failure, misery, and murder on a vast scale, yet progressives continue to increase government power in order to create this impossible utopia. Obamacare is just the latest iteration of this frequently demonstrated fallacy that complex human behavior, which reflects the unpredictable free will of millions of unique individuals, can be organized, controlled and regimented in order to achieve some dream-world utopia. That progressives still cling to this exploded idea despite the evidence of history and a disintegrating E.U. shows just how reactionary and blinkered they are.

ANDREW McCARTHY: OBAMA’S LEAKS ARE PROBABLY NOT PROSECUTABLE

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/ In my post over the weekend about the folly of pushing for a special prosecutor on the Obama administration’s intelligence leaks to the New York Times, I argued that holding the president politically accountable is far more important than indicting the leakers; therefore, Congress should do its job and shine intense light on this […]

Homeland Security-Funded Study Pushing Tea Party Terrorism Narrative: Patrick Poole

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/06/11/homeland-security-funded-study-on-the-hunt-for-tea-party-terrorism/?singlepage=true

In an era of agenda-driven academic research, who watches the watchers? Or more accurately, who gets to designate and categorize the “objective” data? This is the question raised after examining a study and related dataset recently published by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland.

START was launched in 2005 with a $12 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security, and is recognized by DHS as one of its “Centers for Excellence.” In December, DHS announced it had renewed START’s funding to the tune of $3.6 million.

A recent START study titled “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008” puts the “excellence” description in question. A press release announcing the report states the study concluded that nearly a third of all terrorist attacks between 1970 and 2008 occurred in just five major metropolitan areas. The study was based on a START database called “Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism in the United States,” and both the report and database are supported by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division.

Reading through the study, some baffling issues arose. In Table 4 (p. 22), titled “Hot Spots of Religious Terrorism by Decade”, three “hot spot” areas — Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Wasco, Oregon (former home of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) — are identified: But there seems to be some data missing when it comes to known Islamic terrorist incidents in New York City and Los Angeles. The study shows no religious terrorism in Manhattan during the 1990s. How about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Or the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge Jewish student van shooting by Rashid Baz that killed 16-year-old Ari Halberstam after Baz heard a fiery anti-Jewish sermon at his local mosque? Or the 1997 Empire State Building observation deck shooting by Ali Abu Kamal that killed one tourist and injured six others before Kamal took his own life?

JOE HICKS: ERIC WITHHOLDER OF JUSTICE SLIDES INTO RACE POLITICS

http://pjmedia.com/blog/eric-holder-slides-into-the-depths-of-race-politics/?print=1 The nation has seen more than a few odd attorneys general over the years. Among them have been the eccentric John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s man at the Justice Department; Bill Clinton’s peculiar Janet Reno; and the personality-challenged John Ashcroft, who served under George W. Bush. Personal oddness or political partisanship is one thing, but […]

Obama Trade Document Leaked, Revealing New Corporate Powers And Broken Campaign Promises

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/obama-trade-document-leak_n_1592593.html

WASHINGTON — A critical document from President Barack Obama’s free trade negotiations with eight Pacific nations was leaked online early Wednesday morning, revealing that the administration intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations, contradicting prior promises.The leaked document has been posted on the website of Public Citizen, a long-time critic of the administration’s trade objectives. The new leak follows substantial controversy surrounding the secrecy of the talks, in which some members of Congress have complained they are not being given the same access to trade documents that corporate officials receive.

“The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of [trade] negotiations,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch in a written statement.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has been so incensed by the lack of access as to introduce legislation requiring further disclosure. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has gone so far as to leak a separate document from the talks on his website. Other Senators are considering writing a letter to Ron Kirk, the top trade negotiator under Obama, demanding more disclosure.

The newly leaked document is one of the most controversial of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. It addresses a broad sweep of regulations governing international investment and reveals the Obama administration’s advocacy for policies that environmental activists, financial reform advocates and labor unions have long rejected for eroding key protections currently in domestic laws.