Displaying posts published in

November 2014

Ksenia Svetlova:Enslaved and exploited for Allah-

A virgin is worth $100 on the slave market; a mother only $10 • Women are forced to convert to Islam and then turned into sex slaves • Thousands of Kurdish and Yazidi women held by Islamic State are learning that modern slavery is alive and kicking.Every evening, silence reigns in the Khanke refugee camp, close to the Kurdish city of Dohuk in northern Iraq. Winter has already arrived, bringing with it rain, mud and cold.

Although a fire has been lit for warmth, it is potentially dangerous. A Yazidi family — men, women, elderly people and children — is crowded into each tent. The tents afford no protection from the rain, and if any should catch fire, they would immediately turn into death traps. About 60,000 Yazidis — adherents of an ancient faith that contains elements of Sufism, Kharijism and Zoroastrianism and Kurdish by culture and language — live in this camp. Last summer they managed to survive and escape from Mount Sinjar, which had been taken over by the Islamic State group. Every person at the camp knows someone who has been killed or wounded or is missing. Every person has a sister, wife or daughter who was kidnapped and raped.

Some of them have already seen the video footage on YouTube showing the modern slave markets in Syria and Iraq and the women who have fallen into bondage. According to these video clips and the accounts that are trickling out of Raqqah, the caliphate’s capital in Syria, and from Mosul, its stronghold in Iraq, the women are sold at auction to the highest bidder. Prices vary — virgins are worth $100, while women who have borne children fetch roughly $10. The members of Islamic State, fanatical jihadists who base themselves on texts from the Koran, regard the Yazidis as idol-worshippers who may be bought and sold like sheep.

Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in the American Heartland — on The Glazov Gang

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/confronting-the-muslim-brotherhood-in-the-american-heartland-on-the-glazov-gang-2-1/

The Muslim Brotherhood is now gaining a strong foothold in Omaha, Nebraska, having infiltrated “The Tri-Faith Initiative” through its Islamist front groups that pose as Muslim “civil rights” organizations.

In response to this Muslim Brotherhood invasion of the American Heartland, Frontpage is running the Glazov Gang‘s feature interview with Dr. Mark Christian, the President and Executive Director of the Global Faith Institute. He is the son and nephew of high ranking leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in his home country of Egypt. After his conversion from Islam to Christianity, Dr. Christian dedicated his life and work to the proposition that “the first victims of Islam are the Muslim themselves.”

3 Myths About the Rioters and Looters of Ferguson : Daniel Greenfield

The angry rioter is a sacred figure in the progressive pantheon of social justice. The shirtless men in bandanas carting away cell phones are so outraged by injustice that they are willing to take to the streets and do what progressive hipsters taking social justice selfies of themselves in souvenir t-shirts plastered with the face of the latest victim of “white supremacism” can only dream about.

But the saint of the looted convenience store is as mythical a figure as the selfless community organizer. The race riot isn’t a bubbling stew of outrage out of which wounded souls emerge to cry out for justice. It’s a complicated criminal conspiracy in which the perpetrators rarely suffer any consequences.

Here’s how a race riot is actually put together.

3. Riots aren’t fed by outrage, but by opportunism.

The rioters aren’t outraged, they’re usually bored young men, frustrated and lacking in empathy. Many of them have gang ties or a criminal record stretching back to kindergarten.

They’re the same people who commit crimes in any other non-outraged context.

The rest are there to get some attention while providing them with protective colorati

For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law By Victor Davis Hanson

The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.

There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.

Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls.

Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances.

Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014 midterms explain his inaction from 2012 until now. He certainly wouldn’t have waited until 2015 to act, because Republicans will then control Congress.

Given that he has no more elections and can claim no lasting achievements, Obama now sees amnesty as his last desperate chance at establishing some sort of legacy.

Obama cited empathy for undocumented immigrants. But he expressed no such worry about the hundreds of thousands of applicants who wait for years in line rather than simply illegally cross the border.

Any would-be immigrant would have been far wiser to have broken rather than abided by federal laws. Citizens who knowingly offer false information on federal affidavits or provide false Social Security numbers would not receive the sort of amnesties likely to be given to undocumented immigrants.

Obama has downplayed Americans’ worries about social costs and competition for jobs, but studies show illegal immigration has depressed the wages of entry-level American workers while making social services costly for states and burdensome for U.S. citizens.

The Silence around Ferguson Sometimes, it Seems, Black Lives Don’t Matter. By Deroy Murdock ****

Millions of moms and dads will celebrate this Thanksgiving break with their kids. Alas, Michael Brown’s parents will mark this holiday without their late, world-famous son. That is a sad fact, whatever one thinks about the blazing controversy that has engulfed Ferguson, Mo.

Jermaine Jones’s family, too, will not share turkey and gravy with their son. On October 18, Jones, 29, stood with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, Mo., adjacent to Ferguson. Police say an unknown black male opened fire, killing Jones and wounding three other black men near him. (Strangely, Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was shot fatally a half-mile away, just three hours earlier. In her case, too, police suspect yet another unidentified black man.)

“There’s too much violence going on,” Nicole Rice, Jones’s sister, told KTVI. “I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I can’t work. I can’t do anything wondering if my son will be a victim to the streets.”

Why has Jones’s death not unleashed riots and looting? Simple: Jones was killed by a fellow black man. Therefore, his death and his loved ones’ agony generate silence.

As a St. Louis County grand jury ruled Monday, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, 28, lawfully shot Brown, 18, in self-defense last August 9. This decision has fueled widespread chaos, including arson in several cities and infernos in Ferguson that cremated 25 local businesses. The national outrage still is at full boil over this white cop shooting an unarmed black man who acted very aggressively after stealing cigars from a convenience store.

But one can hear birds chirp while listening for public outcry over the deaths of black citizens killed by black perpetrators. Somehow, these black lives don’t seem to matter.

Ferguson is within the St. Louis metropolitan area. The FBI’s latest homicide-rate data ranked St. Louis as America’s fourth deadliest city. Its 38 killings per 100,000 residents in 2013 put it behind only Nos. 1 to 3, Detroit, New Orleans, and Newark.

MORE MISCHIEF FROM THE EPA- FIRST TARGET COAL, THEN ALL FOSSIL FUELS SEE NOTE PLEASE

RAEL ISAAC EXPOSES THE REAL AGENDA OF THE CLIMATEERS AND PSEUDO ENVIRONMENTALISTS IN A SHORT, CONCISE BOOK…READ IT!
Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World (new, revised…Oct 15, 2013
Highway to the Danger Ozone As Obama rewrites the law, Congress and the courts begin to push back.

The afterparty of President Obama ’s immigration rewrite is a year-end blowout of anticarbon regulation that is also contemptuous of the rule of law and democratic consent. The better development is that the two other branches of government aren’t amused by the festivities and may impose some accountability for the damage.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the Environmental Protection Agency released a 626-page proposal (plus a 575-page appendix) to regulate ozone. Like so many other such rules, this one twists decades-old air pollution laws to restructure the U.S. energy industry and gradually ban fossil-fuel-fired power. Coal is the first target but natural gas is next.

The ozone rule requires power plants, heavy manufacturers and agriculture operations to limit smog in ground-level ambient air. About a third of the country is out of compliance with the current standard of 75 parts-per-billion, and the EPA wants to take it to 65 ppb. The agency is also taking comments on a 60 ppb standard that would leave 95% of the country out of compliance.

This entirely discretionary rule could cost as much as $17 billion a year in return for ever-more-minuscule gains in public health—by the agency’s own calculation. Footnote: EPA estimates are always wrong by at least an order of magnitude.

This ozone ploy is especially notable because the EPA first attempted to impose it in 2011. Mr. Obama’s former regulatory chaperone Cass Sunstein prevailed on his boss ahead of the election to yank the rule, in the name of jobs and business investment. With his re-election behind him, Mr. Obama has reverted to go-for-broke green politics.

If the White House climateers are making up for lost time, and then some, they are ignoring warnings from the Supreme Court to, well, obey the law. On Tuesday the Justices agreed to hear a challenge to a separate EPA rule, which nominally limits mercury emissions but is intended as another cartridge in the anticarbon chamber.

C.S. Lewis and the Crises of Belief Despite Tragedies, the Scholar and ‘Chronicles of Narnia’ Author Came Down on the Side of Faith. By Gregory Cootsona

I am an admirer of C. S. Lewis- for his writing, but, above all for his defense of faith. In an era when coercive atheists deride and ridicule religion, and there is almost contempt for orthodoxy, whereas cults and trends are praised, C.S. Lewis defended faith….what would he say today of the assaults on Christianity throughout the Moslem world?…rsk

This is a notable month for fans of C.S. Lewis : He was born on Nov. 29, 1898, and left the world on the 22nd of the same month in 1963. The passing of this major figure in Christian thinking thus became a footnote to the day of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Lewis deserves to be remembered as one of the great lights of English academics for his scholarship on Medieval and Renaissance literature. But he is deservedly best known as a spokesman for Christianity. If anything, Lewis’s work is more widely read now than during his lifetime, thanks in part to the Hollywood films based on his landmark fantasy series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.” A fourth movie, based on “The Silver Chair” in Lewis’s Narnia series, is poised for production and scheduled for a 2016 release.

His nonfiction books—such as “The Screwtape Letters,” in which devils discuss how to corrupt a well-meaning human—have broad appeal because they defend Christian belief by answering questions that a doubting public might be struggling with. Author Anthony Burgess once wrote that “Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way.”
Lewis grappled with crisis and struggle, and he came down on the side of faith. It was his honesty and intellectual rigor in describing his trials that help make him so compelling.

The crises that Lewis faced were substantial—his mother’s death when he was 9; being sent to a series of boarding schools that he detested; fighting and being wounded in World War I; living through the Great Depression and World War II; caring for his alcoholic brother; and, finally, the death of his wife, Joy.

How did he work through those crises? His son-in-law, Douglas Gresham, comments on Lewis’s response to Joy’s death, “He did what he always did under extreme stress. He sat down at his desk, and looking into himself and carefully observing what was happening deep in his mind where we keep our inmost secrets, he picked up his pen and an old exercise book and began to write.”

‘Lost’ IRS Emails Found : An Investigator Locates What the Tax Agency Claimed had Vanished.

The Democrats’ midterm shellacking was in part a referendum on competence, which leads, naturally, to the all but unreported news that the IRS never “lost” emails after all. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen is pulling off the impossible task of destroying what little credibility that bureaucracy has left.

Treasury Department Inspector General Russell George recently informed Congress that his forensic investigation has turned up as many as 30,000 emails from the account of former IRS Exempt Organizations Director Lois Lerner—emails the IRS has insisted were destroyed. The emails cover the crucial period from January 2009 through June 2011 when the IRS was ramping up its targeting of conservative nonprofits.

Mr. Koskinen—hired nearly a year ago to clean up the IRS—has been at the center of that delay. In June the IRS buried in a letter to the Senate Finance Committee the bombshell news that nearly two years of Lerner emails were missing because her hard drive had crashed. This malfunction conveniently happened about 10 days after Congress alerted the IRS that it was looking into claims the agency was harassing conservative groups.

It later emerged that Mr. Koskinen had known about these missing emails in April—but hadn’t told Congress. He informed Congress only after a court case revealed the Lerner email record was incomplete.

Mr. Koskinen claimed in June that his agency had done everything humanly possible to recover the pesky documents: “We retraced the collection process for her emails. We located, processed and included email from an unrelated 2011 data collection for Ms. Lerner. We confirmed that backup tapes from 2011 no longer existed because they have been recycled, pursuant to the IRS normal policy. We searched email from other custodians for material on which Ms. Lerner appears as author or recipient.” (Our italics).

We can only imagine Mr. Koskinen’s shock in September when the Treasury IG said it had found 760 tapes that might hold Lerner emails. Or his further surprise when it took only a few weeks to identify and extract the specific Lerner documents—out of 250 million backup emails.

Democratic Rifts Surface in Wake of Midterm Election Defeat Leaders Dispute Wisdom of Health-Care Overhaul, Delaying Move on Immigration-By Peter Nicholas, Siobhan Hughes and Byron Tau

Long-muted tensions within the Democratic Party over policy and strategy are beginning to surface publicly, a sign of leaders looking beyond President Barack Obama ’s tenure in the aftermath of the party’s midterm election defeat.

A prominent example came this week, when Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), a member of the Senate leadership, gave a rare public rebuke to Mr. Obama over the centerpiece of his presidency: the health-care overhaul of 2010. Mr. Schumer said the party should have focused on helping a broader swath of the middle class than the uninsured, whom he called “a small percentage of the electorate.’’

On the same day, the White House surprised Democratic leaders in the Senate by threatening to veto a tax package negotiated by both parties. The White House said the deal would help “well-connected corporations while neglecting working families.’’

The twin developments were among fissures within the party that, at their broadest level, show Democrats at odds over what economic message to present to voters ahead of the 2016 presidential race. Worried that they lacked a compelling position in the midterms, Democrats are split over whether to advance a centrist message or a more populist economic argument that casts everyday families as victims of overly powerful corporations and benighted government policies.

“You’re going to get a fight within the Democratic Party,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), as the progressive wing of the party splits from centrists, who fear that liberal economic policy proposals are unpalatable to most voters. “There is a substantial disagreement coming up.”

Democratic infighting has largely been out of public view for the last half-dozen years. Since Mr. Obama took office, Republicans have been the ones dealing with rifts. A conservative Tea Party wing clashed with mainstream Republicans in primary contests this year, jockeying for sway over the party’s ideological compass. That debate remains unsettled and is likely to play out in the 2016 Republican primaries.

Turkey and the Kurds by Uzay Bulut

For decades Turkey’s official policy was: There are no Kurds — so there is no problem.

“They wanted to send us a message through a beheading, a throat-cutting. This was an organized attack against our party. The [Turkish] state wanted to behead our party administrator in our party building. Behind this attack was the state itself.” — Selahattin Demirtas, co-Chairman of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP).

Turkey: A Laboratory of Various Methods of Oppressing the Kurds

In Turkey, the approximately 20 million Kurds do not have any national rights, autonomy, or even primary schools where they can be educated in the Kurdish language.

The real population of Kurds in Turkey is not known; the Turkish state has not carried out a census of Kurds.

That policy may be deliberate: the Turkish regime seems to prefer to deny everything that is related to Kurdish existence. Turkey’s state authorities, before the AKP came to power in 2002, said that when the Turkish republic was established, there were no Kurds – just “mountain Turks,” and that Kurdish is not a “real” language. Since then, however, thanks to pro-Kurdish parties, the Turkish government can no longer refer to them that way. The problem remains, however, that the government still does not officially recognize the Kurds and still keeps denying them the autonomy they feel is their right.

For decades, that was Turkey’s official policy: There are no Kurds – so there is no problem.