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August 2014

MY SAY: THE VERY PRESCIENT WORDS OF AMBASSADOR WILLIAM BULLIT IN 1936

Thanks to my friend Dr. Andrew Bostom- whose first and second opinions both in medicine and on every aspect of Islam are right on target…..rsk

William Christian Bullitt, Jr. ( 1891-1967)was an American diplomat, journalist, and novelist. Although in his youth he was considered something of a radical, he later became an outspoken anti-communist.

William Bullitt, April 20, 1936 to Sec State Hull:

“[T]he loyalty of a believing communist is not to the nation of which he is technically a citizen but to his faith and the Caliph of his faith. To such men the most traitorous betrayals are the highest virtues”

VICTOR SHARPE: THE CONTINUING BLUNDER OF RETREAT

In 2006, when I first published Volume One of my trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state, I wrote the following in the foreword:

“The Israeli government of Ariel Sharon from 2004 onwards is increasingly criticized, especially over what became known as the “disengagement plan,” a euphemism for unilateral retreat from Gaza and a course of action, which already has had profound and dire implications for Israel’s survival.

“With Ariel Sharon in a coma after suffering a massive stroke, his successor, Ehud Olmert, is still considering a suicidal policy of retreat from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) under a new euphemism – the ‘convergence plan.’

“If this policy is not reconsidered, in the face of continuing and relentless Arab and Islamist aggression, it will force hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children from their homes and land in what is their Biblical and ancestral Jewish homeland.

“The territory will inevitably fall into the hands of a Hamas regime controlling the so-called Palestinian Authority and backed by the totalitarian Islamic nightmare that is Iran. It will also become a new base for anti-Israel terror on a massive scale just as has happened in Gaza. Since the retreat from Gaza, southern Israeli towns and villages are daily bombarded with rockets by Palestinian terrorists.

“Yet if the Olmert government decides to forge ahead with its “convergence plan,” it will result in Arab missile bombardments of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and the rest of central and northern Israel from the West Bank (Biblical Judea and Samaria).”

Well that was written eight years ago. Ariel Sharon passed away and Ehud Olmert left office in disgrace. But Israel has been suffering in all that time from growing aggression by a barbaric Hamas regime with non-stop missile bombardments from the Gaza Strip.

Tragically, my words back in 2006 have come true. Indeed, as I wrote, “unilateral retreat from Gaza …has had profound and dire implications for Israel’s survival.”

AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION OF EBOLA:RONALD R. CHERRY, MD

The American public has been misinformed regarding human-to-human transmission of Ebola. Assurances that Ebola can be transmitted only through direct contact with the body or body fluids of victims needs to be seriously scrutinized in the wake of the current West African outbreak. The Canadian Health Dept. states that airborne transmission of Ebola is strongly suspected and the CDC admits that Ebola can be transmitted in situations where there is no physical contact between people, i.e.: via direct airborne inhalation into the lungs or into the eyes, or via contact with airborne fomites which adhere to nearby surfaces, where individuals are separated by 3 feet. That helps explain why 81 doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have died in West Africa to date. These courageous health care providers use careful CDC level barrier precautions such as gowns, gloves and head cover, but it appears they have inadequate respiratory and eye protection. Dr. Michael V. Callahan, an infectious disease specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has worked in Africa during Ebola outbreaks said that minimum CDC level precautions

“led to the infection of my nurses and physician co-workers who came in contact with body fluids.”

Currently the CDC advises health care workers to use goggles and simple face masks for respiratory and eye protection, and a fitted N-95 mask during aerosol-generating medical procedures. Since so many doctors and nurses are dying in West Africa, it is clear that this level of protection is inadequate. Full face respirators with P-100 (HEPA) replacement filters would provide greater airway and eye protection, and I believe this would save the lives of many doctors, nurses and others who come into close contact with, or in proximity to, Ebola victims.

STEPHEN GREEN: MEET ISRAEL’S DOOMSDAY BOATS……

Don’t ƒ¨¢% with the Jews.by Stephen Green

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Via Real Clear Defense:

Right now, three Dolphin II-class submarines are under construction at Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems shipyards in Kiel. Once the submarines complete their trials and head towards the Mediterranean, they will become the most powerful Israeli submarines ever.

More than 225 feet long, the diesel-electric Dolphin II class is part attack submarine, part nuclear strike ship and part commando taxi.

They’re also painted in an unusual combination of black, blue and green colors. That’s “meant to make the ship less visible, and thought to be especially effective in Mediterranean waters,” Defense News noted after recently publishing new photographs of the fat, oddly-shaped boats in dry dock and on sea trials.

The most serious part comes further down in the story:

Although not admitted by the Israeli government, the Dolphin II is widely believed to soon possess nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles. The submarine’s armament includes non-nuclear anti-ship Harpoon and anti-helicopter Triton missiles.

That’s a lot of hurt for the bad guys packed into one boat — and Israel is buying three of them.

******

Cross-posted from Vodkapundit

BILL PEACOCK: THE EPA’S POWER GRAB

The Clean Power Plan represents a federal takeover of the electricity market.

he Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) mandates sweeping reductions of CO2 emissions from existing electrical-generation plants. The rule will dramatically increase federal regulation of the nation’s electric industry. It will impose devastating costs on working families across America — with hugely disparate impacts from one state to another. And if states comply with the CPP, the result will be a massive federal takeover of the state governments.

The assault on the dual sovereignty of the states — the federalism enshrined in our Tenth Amendment — is nothing new. Much of the battle over Obamacare turned on the attempt to force Medicaid expansion on the states, which the Supreme Court deemed a violation of the Tenth Amendment. However, with the CPP, the EPA is attempting to take federal control of states to a whole new level — perhaps hoping that the states will meekly comply rather than calling its bluff by challenging a rule based on very questionable statutory authority.

Writing in The Atlantic, Mario Loyola and Richard Epstein describe the federal takeover of the states through “cooperative federalism” programs as an effort to “turn states into mere field offices of the federal government.” Already today, they point out,

federal officials exert enormous influence over state budgets and state regulators, often behind the scenes. The new federalism replaces the “laboratories of democracy” with heavy-handed, once-size-fits-all solutions. Uniformity wins but diversity loses, along with innovation, local choice, and the Constitution’s necessary limits on government power.

One such scheme is the Clean Air Act, which “allows the states to issue federal permits — but only under federally approved state implementation plans.” The states can’t be forced to take on this role, but Loyola and Epstein note that the EPA coerces states to do so by telling them, “Implement our regulations for us, or we’ll do it ourselves, and your constituents will be sorry.” This is the hammer behind the CPP.

OBAMA’S ISIS SANCTIONS: ROBERT ZUBRIN….SEE NOTE PLEASE

SANCTION IS A CONTRANYM- A WORD WITH TWO OPPOSITE MEANINGS:

1.official permission or approval for an action- The Obama definition

2.penalty, punishment, deterrent; punitive action, discipline, restriction;……..RSK

No Disneyland visits for deputy commanders; Happy Meals for the Peshmerga.

Washington, August 25. Briefly interrupting his latest vacation, President Obama made a surprise visit to the nation’s capital today to announce that his administration is taking forceful action to stop the advance of the violent extremist movement calling itself the Islamic State, and otherwise known as ISIS.

“The Islamic State is a cancer on the region, and represents a horrendous threat to civilized humanity worldwide,” the president said. “Therefore I am announcing today a series of powerful actions to halt, and ultimately destroy, this menace. The brutal murderers of James Foley will soon see exactly what it means to incur the righteous wrath of the United States of America.”

Following the president’s announcement, White House spokesperson Benjamin Rhodes stepped up to the podium to detail the measures to be taken. “Our strategy consists of two components,” Mr. Rhodes said. “We will punish ISIS directly, and will provide strong assistance to those forces in the region willing and able to fight it.”

“In line with this, as a direct punitive measure to be taken as soon as possible, the State Department will shortly release a list of six regional ISIS deputy commanders who will be denied entrance visas to the United States for the foreseeable future. This will send a powerful message to all ISIS officers: You can cut off the heads of American citizens, or you can visit Disneyland. You can’t do both.”

Asked by reporters why the administration was only targeting deputy regional ISIS commanders, rather than higher-level officials, Mr. Rhodes explained that the U.S. actions “are being carefully calibrated to represent a proportionate response,” but that “should ISIS continue to escalate its violence beyond the current level, all options, including visa denials to actual regional commanders, are on the table, and will be considered in due course.” Mr. Rhodes added that even ISIS government ministers could eventually be held accountable and denied U.S. entrance visas themselves, “provided, of course, that direct culpability of such senior officials in specific atrocities is first proven by a thorough forensic investigation and confirmed in accord with proper standards of evidence and due process in a court of law.”

The Rockets’ Red Glare – Thanks to a Fence and the Iron Dome, Israel Enjoys Relative Safety. By Quin Hillyer

Despite enduring thousands of Hamas rockets in the past ten weeks, the whole of Israel is far safer now than it was a decade ago, and safer than many American cities. Indeed, two initiatives long favored by American conservatives, namely missile defense and a border fence, have made the current unpleasantness with Hamas little more than an unfortunate distraction from the true existential threat, which is Iranian nukes.

Since the Hamas attacks began June 13, the rockets from Gaza have killed seven people in all of Israel while wounding only a few dozen more. An August 19–20 tour of both the fence and of an Iron Dome missile-defense installment, guided by top retired Israeli military officials, amply demonstrated why Israeli civilians and tourists feel comparatively safe amid so many terrorist attacks.

One of those rockets set off sirens in Jerusalem just before midnight on Tuesday, August 19, while I was there. Everybody in my hotel seemed to take the attack seriously, by dutifully gathering in the designated safe zone — but, remarkably, the only person who showed fear rather than mere annoyance was a three-year-old scared by the noise. Perhaps the confidence can be attributed to some compelling numbers.

The statistics were supplied by retired Israeli Colonel Danny Tirzia, a member of the 16-member Israeli delegation at President Clinton’s failed Camp David meeting in the year 2000 who later was tasked with designing and overseeing construction of Israel’s 451-mile-long security barrier. From 2000 through 2006, he said, Israel suffered more than 3,000 terrorist attacks (apart from rockets) within its borders, with 1,629 fatalities. Post-fence, from 2007 until today, only 25 such attacks (not counting Gazan rockets) have occurred, with only 18 deaths.

The big difference is the fence, which snakes in a bewilderingly complicated route along Israel’s border with the Palestinian Authority–controlled West Bank. Its precise route and design was determined, Tirzia said, by the oft-competing demands of topography, the political allegiances of affected communities, the desire to provide for cross-border employment in some areas, and the location of sites of religious or other historic significance. (The employment numbers might surprise Americans: Each day, some 70,000 Palestinians are allowed to cross into Israeli territory for their jobs, through security checkpoints that take just 20 minutes to traverse.)

Jonathan Bronitsky: The British Connection – British Muslims Have Been Waging Religious War Abroad for at Least Two Decades.

For many, the British accent of the Islamist who executed American journalist James Foley was almost as shocking as the barbaric murder itself. In the days that follow, critics of American foreign policy will assert that the Islamic State’s audacious act was merely a symptom of “blowback,” the unintended consequence of Western military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. But above all, they will relentlessly stress that the participation of a European Muslim in foreign jihad marks a new development in domestic radicalization. And they will be deeply mistaken.

It is easy to write off the Islamization of European Muslims as an inadvertent and unprecedented outcome of the War on Terror. Alas, the savage exploit performed on the barren dunes of Mesopotamia and broadcast via social media represents the continuation of a relatively longstanding trend. European domestic radicalization and, specifically, the willingness of British Muslims to wage jihad abroad, began in earnest at least 20 years ago.

During the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, British Muslims traveled to Bosnia to assist their co-religionists in the face of Serbia and Croatia’s genocidal campaign. Some assisted relief organizations, which collected and distributed food, water, medicine, and blankets. Some smuggled weapons and ammunition. Others, however, fought on the frontlines. What started as a largely protective mission transformed into an international offensive to secure the future safety of Muslims through the reestablishment of the caliphate.

A cohort of London-based Islamists, primarily funded by Wahhabi sources, orchestrated a grassroots campaign that seized the hearts of countless young British Muslims. It created and propagated the conspiracy theory that Europe’s unwillingness to intercede in the Balkans was proof of a Christian plot to extinguish Islam. Unfortunately, in retrospect, the Islamist yarn does not seem so far-fetched. A flight from Rome to Sarajevo is only a few hours, meaning that the killing fields were virtually in Europe’s backyard. Three years passed before the West intervened. It was only after the massacre at Srebrenica that NATO air strikes were carried out against Ratko Mladić’s forces. And even then, the response was essentially led by the United States, not Europe.

Caliphate of Fear: The Curse of the Islamic State…..see note please

IS ISIS THE MUSLIM TERRORIST GROUP DUJOUR? WHERE HAVE ALL THESE COMMENTATORS BEEN? AL QAEDA, TALIBAN, ABU SAYAAF, AL SHABAAB, HEZBOLLAH, HAMAS, FATAH, BOKO HARAM…..THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME JIHADIST IDEOLOGY…EMANATING FROM THE KORAN….RSK

In Raqqa, Syria, the Islamic State’s “caliphate” has already become a reality. All women in the city are required to wear the niqab veil and pants are banned. Thieves have their hands hacked off and opponents are publicly crucified or beheaded, with the images of these horrific acts then posted on social networks.

The few hair salons that are still open are required to black out the pictures of women on the packaging for hair dye solutions. Weddings are only permitted to take place without music. And at livestock markets, the hindquarters of goats and sheep must be covered in order to prevent men from viewing their genitalia and having uncomely thoughts.

Any person caught out on the street during the five daily prayer times is risking his or her life.

The jihadists with the Islamic State, or IS, are acting out their fantasies of omnipotence in the name of God. They’re murdering, torturing and forcing families to give their daughters away for marriage to Islamist fighters coming in from abroad. One girl whose family agreed to marry her off took her own life.

In Syria, IS militants and their predecessors have killed countless people in recent years, and over 160,000 in total have died during the Syrian civil war. Yet it is only now that the world is waking up, now that the conflict has spilled into Iraq, where the Islamic State also appears to be spreading its tentacles without much resistance.

Pictures were needed in order for the international community to understand the scale of the horror unfolding in Iraq and just how inhumanely the Islamic State terrorist militia is acting. Images allowed the global community to become witnesses to the plight of the Yazidis, followers of one of the world’s most obscure religions, as they were forced to flee into the mountains, begging for help as they died of thirst. In the eyes of the IS fanatics, the Yazidis are “devil worshippers,” people who deserve to die.

MARK STEYN: THE FACE OF THE TIGER

A few days ago, James Foley was beheaded by an ISIS jihadist, apparently British by upbringing and passport, if not in his primary identity. The decapitation of an American by an outfit he’d previously dismissed as the “jayvees” of jihad was sufficiently serious for President Obama to postpone his tee time, although not to any useful effect. Aside from the fake, tinny chumminess (all “Jim” this, “Jim that, just as for Ambassador Stevens it was all “Chris” this, “Chris that”) the commander-in-chief reserves for the victims of an enemy he assured us was on the run, Obama’s remarks were fatuous even by his own recent standards, and did not long delay his arrival at the links. As his courtiers at The New York Times assured us with touching if unwitting accuracy:

Obama, Outraged Over Beheading, Vows to Stay on Course

While he stays on the course at the Vineyard Golf Club, the rest of us have to make do with the pabulum of his prompter:

“One thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.”

As I was driving back from Quebec to New Hampshire today, I heard a host on CJAD express agreement with the President on this. And why not? It demands nothing of one. It makes ISIS sound like a social faux pas: one thing we can all agree on is that no one wears white after Labor Day or saws your head off after the year 2000.