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November 2015

Heroic Israeli Soldier Neutralizes 3 Terrorists in 2 Separate Attacks in Single Week :David Daoud

An IDF soldier who foiled a terrorist attack near Hebron on Thursday succeeded in thwarting an earlier attack and neutralizing a total of three terrorists in the course of the past week alone, the Israeli news site Walla reported.

The 19-year-old corporal, referred to in the piece by his first initial (“T”), recounted: “When I’d secured the… junction, we noticed the suspect. We told him to cross the road and head towards us, and as he did, he pulled out a knife to stab a fellow soldier. At that moment, I cocked my rifle and fired at him.”

Commenting on last week’s foiled attack, he added, “I shot the two terrorists in order to eliminate the threat they posed.”

“T,” a combat infantry soldier in the IDF’s Kfir Brigade, is a resident of central Israel, who was only drafted into the army eight months ago.

David Singer: Security Council Permanent Members Herald Armed Action Against Islamic State

An international conference in Vienna on 30 October – attended by all five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council – America, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom – has made an important breakthrough towards defeating Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
Together with Egypt, the EU, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Nations – the Permanent Members reached a mutual understanding that

“Da’esh (Islamic State), and other terrorist groups, as designated by the U.N. Security Council, and further, as agreed by the participants, must be defeated.”

This is the first time the five Permanent Members have reached such a consensus – acknowledging that prior measures not involving the use of armed force under Security Council Resolutions 2170 and 2178 have failed to defeat Islamic State and other designated terrorist groups – a prerequisite before there can be any hope of restoring stability and reaching lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq.

International co-operation to defeat Islamic State through a Security Council Resolution authorising the use of armed force had previously risked being vetoed by either Russia or America in the face of earlier American objections against co-operating with any armed force which included President Assad’s troops. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had declared as recently as 29 September.

Tony Thomas The King Canutes of Climate Science

The monarch of old ordered the tide to recede as a lesson to his courtiers that no mere human, not even a king, can make the world to do as it’s told. Will Steffen, the CSIRO and other grant-fed warmists face a similar problem: while modern enablers still profess to believe them, actual sea levels pay no heed
When climate scientists have a choice to peddle facts or forecasts, they go for forecasts every time. Especially on sea level rises. Let me explain. Tim Flannery’s Climate Council, ruminating last year on supposed CO2-caused sea rise, was keen to crank up the scariness. So it included a couple of art photos in its report “Counting the Costs” on our allegedly fast-rising oceans.

One pic shows a frolicking humpback whale, with the remains of a dual lane highway visible below the waves. The other photo shows an old coot (about my vintage) slumped in his lounge chair, which is floating in the sea. Alongside bobs an empty chair, with a dinghy is anchored nearby. I think the elderly gentleman must have loaded the armchairs and his vintage wife onto the dinghy to escape the sea pouring through his front door, but the wife fell overboard and that’s why he looks so sad.[i]

Where Genocide Meets Fashion: Gaza City’s Hitler 2 Store Has Knife-Wielding Mannequins By Bridget Johnson

At a clothing store called Hitler 2 in Gaza City, mannequins welcome shoppers with knives and Palestinian flags in their hands.

The International Business Times reports on why Hitler 2′s shoppers think that rocks:

Hijaz Abu Shanab, a 20-year-old shopper, said: “The name of the shop is Hitler and I like him because he was the the most anti-Jewish person. They have done us wrong, they took our rights in this land and they left us with nothing. It is better for us now to go and die, we are living like the dead. I like the clothes and the name, it is fantastic.”

Immad Mharib, 20, said: “I saw an advertisement on Facebook so I wanted to pass by the shop because of the knife, the koufeyeh and the mask are now symbols for the intifada of al-Aqsa. I want to buy from this shop; I like the idea as it is supporting our people in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”

The Obama Administration Debuts Its Latest Euphemism By Debra Heine

President Obama likes to use euphemisms to obscure his unpopular and destructive agenda.

The latest politically correct language to emanate from his administration is the term “justice-involved youth” in place of “juvenile delinquents.” The non-judgemental phrase was debuted by Attorney General Loretta Lynch earlier this week in a news release about a DOJ initiative to give people with criminal convictions “a second chance.”

Via CNS News:

“The Department of Justice is committed to giving justice-involved youth the tools they need to become productive members of society,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a news release on Monday.

Lynch said the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are launching a $1.7-million initiative to help Public Housing Authorities and legal assistance groups “reduce barriers for justice-involved youth.”

“Justice-involved youth” is just the latest in a long line of PC terms used by members of the Obama administration to avoid inconvenient truths.

Just last week, we saw the term “boots on the ground” transmogrify into “direct action on the ground” to mask the embarrassing fact that Obama promised there would be no American boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria about 4,200 times. (Fifteen times on tape.)

MANPADS Threats To Civilian Aviation By Rachel Ehrenfeld

What crashed the Russian Airbus A321 in the Sinai Peninsula is yet to be determined. At the time of this writing the British Telegraph reported an ISIS “bomb plot was uncovered by British spies,” and ISIS’s claim it downed the Russian plane flying at 30,000 feet with a MANPAD (Man Portable Air Defense System), was dismissed outright by counterterrorism and aviation experts. Strangely there seems to be a consensus that “Terrorist groups cannot have such capacities by definition.”

However, in October 2011, after rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, some 20,000 MAENADS went missing. Months later only 5,000 were reportedly destroyed. Where the remaining 15,000 missiles went is unclear. This however, did not stop then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from issuing a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including MANPADS, had been secured. But NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that the missing MAENADS could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan],” subsequently materialized. Especially so, since ISIS has captured sophisticated MANPADS in Iraq and Syria.

Ben Carson now leading in NC, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin By Ed Straker see note please

Political beauty (Carson) and the beast (Trump)…..one is civil and ill equipped and the other is a bufoon and cur…..When they cancel each other out as they should and will, a rea; candidate will emerge and garner their votes…..Rubio and Cruz? rsk

It’s hard to say who’s leading on the national level because some polls show Ben Carson ahead while others show Donald Trump ahead, with wide differentials between polls. But on the state level, Ben Carson is beating Donald Trump in too many state polls to be ignored. He is leading in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, and Iowa. That’s impressive. It’s well-known that he’s doing well with religious conservatives in Iowa, but now it looks as though he has appeal throughout the South and other Midwestern states.

In North Carolina, Carson has a huge 31% base of support, while Trump has only 19%. In Iowa he has a whopping fourteen-point lead over Trump according to one poll and leads of various sizes in other polls. He is one point ahead in Texas, six points ahead in Oklahoma, and two points ahead in Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Carson is neck and neck with Trump, only 2% behind him in a recent poll. In Pennsylvania he is only 1 point behind Trump.

It looks as if Trump is slowly losing voters to Carson.

Obama’s Middle East Escapism The region is descending into disorder while John Kerry holds talk in Vienna that will achieve little.By Robert B. Zoellick

Secretary of State John Kerry’s new diplomatic process for dealing with Syria’s harrowing civil war involves convening a series of talks in Vienna. The effort is probably well-intentioned. But I cannot conceive of what he expects to accomplish.

Does anyone really believe that Syria can be put back together again and then revived through democratic elections? The danger is that the all-purpose diplomatic resort to “process” will lead the United States to ignore realities and even make them worse.

America faces two interconnected perils in the region: the expansion of Islamic State and the breakdown of the Middle East’s century-old security order. The Obama administration’s fear of involvement and denial of the fundamental struggle for dominance in the region increases the risks for the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. The conference in Vienna last week—involving at least a dozen interested parties, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia—was escapism, not a serious strategy. The next gathering in a week or so will be more of the same.
The old state borders and authorities of the Middle East, established during and after World War I, are disintegrating. The Arab lands are now the scene of a terrible contest for power. As former U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus explained to Congress in September, “almost every Middle Eastern country is now a battleground or a combatant in one or more wars.”

The Quakers, No Friends of Israel A benign reputation masks a tough campaign to boycott the Jewish state. By Alexander Joffe And Asaf Romirowsky

American religious history is filled with examples of faiths whose public perceptions defy deeper realities. The Quakers, for instance, are known as peaceful and supremely benign. Few suspect that one central mission is promoting the boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, movement that opposes Israel’s existence.

The commitment of the Quakers through their primary organization, the American Friends Service Committee, is unmistakable. It is a leading member of the BDS umbrella group known as the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and provides support to BDS efforts on numerous college campuses. The AFSC works alongside the Students for Justice in Palestine and the rabidly anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace. Its representatives have even helped write Israel divestment resolutions for student governments.

One Quaker group describes the BDS movement as “the transforming power of love and nonviolence, having faith that enmity can be transformed and that oppression can give way.” How much of the AFSC’s almost $160 million annual budget is devoted to BDS isn’t known, as the Internal Revenue Service classifies the organization as a church.

Quakers, who tremble or “quake” before God, began as dissenting Protestants in England during the 17th century. Adherents rejected traditional sacraments—baptism and the Bible’s inerrant authority—and instead bore witness through “spirituality in action” and followed the “inner light,” which founder George Fox described as “spirit, and grace, by which all might know their salvation, and their way to God.”

Bernie Sanders Takes Gloves Off Against Hillary Clinton in Interview Democratic presidential candidate draws sharper distinctions with front-runner, casting her policy reversals as a character issue By Peter Nicholas

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing sharper distinctions with front-runner Hillary Clinton, casting her policy reversals over the years as a character issue that voters should take into account when they evaluate the Democratic field.

Sen. Sanders of Vermont, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, also said the federal investigation of the security surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s private email account is appropriate.

In the Democratic debate last month, Mr. Sanders said voters were “sick and tired” of the focus on Mrs. Clinton’s “damn emails.” Afterward, many Democrats and political analysts said that he had appeared to dismiss her use of a private email account and server in her four years as secretary of state.
Mr. Sanders rejected that assessment on Wednesday. If her email practices foiled public-records requests or compromised classified information, those are “valid questions,” Mr. Sanders said.