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November 2015

Rubio and Cruz: The Two Cubans Prepare for Their Moment By Jonah Goldberg

Politics is a breeding ground for martial metaphors, starting with the word “campaign” itself. Politicians “under fire” “take flak” as their consultants sit in “war rooms” and launch ad “blitzes” in “targeted districts” and “battleground states” to put their clients “over the top” — with the help of their “troops” in the field. When that doesn’t work, the generals sometimes resort to some dreaded “nuclear option.” Even if it succeeds, the pundits often declare it a “Pyrrhic victory.”

Most of us don’t even realize we’re using bellicose language. For instance, I’d guess most people think “over the top” is a term from football, not a reference to First World War trench warfare.

Still, there’s a reason politics lends itself to such language. Watching Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio emerge from the pack after last week’s CNBC debate, I was reminded of my favorite character from Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

“The strongest of all warriors,” Field Marshal Kutuzov explains, “are these two: Time and Patience.”

How Will Trump Handle the Indignity of Second Place? By Charles C. W. Cooke

Of all the presidential aspirants who are at present scrabbling their way up the White House wall, Donald Trump is by far and away the best, the classiest, and the most handsome. He doesn’t pander or kowtow to the special interests. He doesn’t back down or apologize. He doesn’t sweat, or even drink water. Instead, he makes great deals and knows the smartest people. He writes fabulous books and anchors top-rated TV shows. He makes great gobs of hard cash, sleeps on nothing less than the finest sheets, and imports only the most beautiful women to join him under them. He’s richer than Solomon, more elegant than Jackie O, and he has the hair of an exquisite racehorse. (Not Secretariat.) He wins each and every debate with ease and style. Everybody agrees with him, and they tell him so: publicly, privately, and via the most superb online polls. All ethnic groups love him in equal measure, and females up and down the land yearn for his protective hands. He’s number one; a winner; the tops.

What’s that? Ben Carson is now leading the Republican pack, beating Trump by six points nationally? And Carson is ascendant in more than one poll?

Soros: National Borders Are The Enemy The radical billionaire denounces his native Hungary for protecting its borders and culture. Matthew Vadum

The preeminent funder of border-busting campaigns in the U.S. and overseas now openly admits his efforts in Europe are aimed at destroying national borders on that continent.

The unusually frank statement from frequent coup kingpin George Soros comes after Hungary’s prime minister accused him of helping to orchestrate the ongoing invasion of the landlocked nation and the rest of Europe by illegal aliens. Soros is arguably the biggest mass migration-promoting coyote on the planet. He is also an admitted Nazi collaborator, described by David Horowitz as a “deracinated Jew,” who argues that Muslims are treated so badly in the West that they are the new Jews. Soros doesn’t care that these migrants and Syrian war refugees are largely Muslim men and that intelligence agencies fear that many of the new arrivals have connections to Islamic terrorism.

Besieged Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán said the ongoing invasion of his country is “driven, on the one hand, by people smugglers, and on the other by those [human rights] activists who support everything that weakens the nation-state.”

Progressive Lunacy The stupid party unmasked. Bruce Thornton

In the past week we were treated to some spectacular examples of progressive lunacy. Perhaps the manifest badness of the Democrats’ presidential hopeful, coming on top of the disastrous Obama reign, is inducing panic as the progressive claim to superior intelligence and righteousness is rapidly evaporating.

The despicable bias and journalistic incompetence of the Republican debate moderators embarrassed even other progressives, who usually make at least a half-hearted effort to tart up their prejudices in the alluring rhetoric of neutral objectivity. Nor could the moderators practice even basic journalism. Becky Quick brought up the hoary “women earn 77% of what men do,” a phony statistic debunked numerous times. And the New York Times’ John Harwood flat-out lied about the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Marco Rubio’s tax reform plan. Worse, Harwood already had to retract an earlier version of the same lie, but then lied about the retraction. Meanwhile, an hour before the debate,

Harwood’s boss the New York Times was asking people online “who made the most ridiculous comment in the Republican debate.” The Times apparently didn’t anticipate that the answer would be the moderators.

The US Didn’t Create ISIS — Assad and Saddam Did Dictators pay a price for allying with Islamic terrorism Daniel Greenfield

The Russia-Iran-Assad axis and its useful idiots in the West claim that the United States created ISIS. Some of the loonier conspiracy sites that gleefully repost Russian propaganda allege that the Caliph of ISIS is a Jewish Mossad agent named Elliot Shimon or a CIA agent named Simon Elliot.

Elliot doesn’t exist, but ISIS’ Deputy Caliph Abu Ali al-Anbari, who was Saddam’s major general and a Baathist member, does. The Caliph’s right hand man, Abu Muslim al Turkmani, was also a Baathist and a lieutenant colonel in Saddam’s military intelligence organization before being killed by a drone strike.

Considering the history between Saddam and the USSR, it is likely that one or both of the Caliph’s deputies received training from Russian intelligence advisers during their careers. Turkmani’s DGMI in particular was closely entangled with the KGB. One of the reasons ISIS is much better than its Sunni Islamist opponents is that its top people had been trained by Soviet experts.

The ISIS blowback doesn’t lead to America, but in a completely different direction.

The Hizbees’ shade of green

Monday night’s Paul Murray Live on the Sky News channel treated viewers to footage of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s latest celebration of the endless injustices and indignities visited upon innocent Muslims, a presumptive expectation that they might like to sing the National Anthem the latest amongst them. At that same Muslims-as-victims powwow in Bankstown women were consigned to the purdah of seats at the rear of the auditorium, which prompted Murray to wonder at the lack of outrage from the sorts who cannot spot a sausage in the butcher’s window without being overcome by the urge to rail against the patriarchal phallocracy.

Murray might also have noted other of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s sins against progressive orthodoxy. After all, the Hizbees’ guest list was decidedly short on homosexuals, transsexuals and same-sex marriage activists. It is not as if their invitations were lost in the mail, as the organisation makes no bones about its disdain for anything other than carnality the way Allah prefers it.

Had the screed at the link above been penned by a Christian, much screaming and hissing would have ensued. Why the distinction?

Here’s a clue. Like the left, Hizb ut-Tahrir is none too keen on capitalism:

Muslim Environment Watch A Blog About Environmental Issues, Projects, and Developments in the Arab and Muslim World (???!!!)

The Environmental Problem: Its Causes & Islam’s Solutions – Hizb ut-Tahrir Denmark (In English
This booklet has been issued by Hizb ut-Tahrir – Denmark
The Reality and Problem …………………………………………………………13

The Solution according to Capitalism

From the Kyoto Agreement to COP15……………………………………….15

Part One…………………………………………………………………………….15

The Issue turned into a question of Supply and Demand …………15

Exaggeration in the Assessment of Quotas…………………………….18

Part Two…………………………………………………………………………….19

”Clean Development”………………………………………………………….19

Constraints imposed on the developing countries…………………..21

Capitalism causes environmental crisis……………………………………..22

The Islamic view …………………………………………………………………….26

Islam’s view on the environment ……………………………………………..29

Islam prohibits harm and that which leads to the forbidden………..38

Preservation of the Environment in the Islamic State………………….41

Qadi al-Hisbah (Supervisory Judge) ……………………………………….42

John Slater Sick Trans Gloria

Have you noticed that men in frocks and women with whiskers are making the news all over the place? Well one thing you probably won’t read in all the adulatory coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s “bravery” is that the US hospital which pioneered sex-change surgery now refuses to perform it
Among the issues guaranteed to draw a volcanic eruption from the politically correct is the free and open discussion than transgenderism. Indeed, to talk these days about transgenderism other than lavish and unqualified praise for those who abandon the gender of their births is to invite the label of mean-minded bigot.

Caitlyn Jenner’s apotheosis from suffering patriarch of the Kardashian clan to the newly inaugurated Queen of the trans movement marks a fresh high-water mark for trans-mania. At the start of April this year, Caitlyn was a father, former Olympian and sordid reality TV star. Now, just over eight months later, Caitlyn has been crowned ‘Woman of the Year.’ Should you want to offer anything other than gushing adulation for Caitlyn’s putative heroism, expect to be exiled from polite society.

This is why it was so amusing when last week Germaine Greer, normally a stalwart of the left, bluntly confront the First Commandment of transgenderism: Thous shalt not deny that gender is ‘fluid.’

Here’s what she said:

Just because you lop off your d— it doesn’t make you a woman… a man who get his d*** chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat, but that won’t turn me into a f***ing cocker spaniel.

Merv Bendle Tolerate Intolerance, Demean Democracy

Hizb ut-Tahrir uses a public building to preach intolerance and draws nothing more stringent than hedged and guarded reactions from our political class. The Australian Liberty Alliance, meanwhile, is harassed and denounced. Something is wrong here, and the voting public knows it
There is a clear double-standard operating in Australia concerning the two sides of the political debate over Islamist extremism. This is exemplified by the wildly contrasting political and media treatment of Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Australian Liberty Alliance. However, as the strong public reactions to last week’s National Anthem scandal and Sunday’s Hizb ut-Tahrir conference demonstrate, this duplicity is becoming increasingly obvious and is now galvanizing the growing resistance to Islamist extremism and the appeasement policies of federal and state governments and the mainstream media.

To begin with, the coordinated and systematic Muslim assault on Australia’s national identity continues. On cue, speakers at the Islamist activist group Hizb ut-Tahrir conference in Bankstown on Sunday followed up on the attack launched last week at a Victorian primary school, where some 40 Muslim students were allowed to walk out on the national anthem because their religious allegiance was adjudged by school staff and the Victorian Education Department to have priority over their allegiance (if any) to Australia.

Singing the Australian national anthem or pledging support for democratic values in the citizenship oath was part of a state campaign of oppression and “forced assimilation” directed at Australian Muslims, Hizb ut-Tahrir leaders declared. According to media spokesman, Uthman Badar, the federal government “claims to afford freedom, but seeks to impose values and beliefs” on Muslims, specifically in the citizenship oath when new citizens were required to pledge allegiance to the democratic values upon which Australian society is based.

Timothy Snyder: The Newton of the Holocaust? The Yale historian’s much-lauded new book promises a revolutionary view of the Holocaust. But it misleads more than it enlightens. by Walter Laqueur

“In the end, one can say this: Snyder’s obfuscating and half-baked “discoveries” about the Holocaust do further harm to a field of study already disfigured by the work of emissaries of one school or another, not to mention outright deniers. His book will not be the last such venture in misguided interpretation—the varieties are unlimited—but it will lengthen the time needed to repair the damage.”

No author of books on Eastern Europe during the period of World War II and the Holocaust has been more widely reviewed and discussed in recent years than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. In Bloodlands (2010), Snyder presented what might be termed a Polish-Ukrainian version of the Holocaust, highlighting the brutality of Nazi rule over the countries of Eastern Europe—the “bloodlands” between Germany and Soviet Russia—and the horrific toll in lives, especially Polish lives, taken by the two battling powers.

Now, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder deals mostly with the mass murder of Jews, ascribing greater responsibility than have other historians to the early work of the Nazi SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) operating in occupied Eastern Europe, but also memorializing those who helped to save Jewish lives in Poland after the 1939 invasion and partition of that country by the twin forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR. Indeed, the book, which is based to a considerable extent on the stories of individual survivors, centers like the previous one mainly on Poland, and to a lesser extent on the three Baltic states. There is little here on the fate of Jewish communities in other European countries, most of whom were transported to their deaths in Poland. Nor, despite its subtitle—“The Holocaust as History and Warning”—is Black Earth properly seen as another history of the Holocaust. It is instead a new interpretation, and one with some startling arguments to advance.