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December 2015

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Obama and Friends’ Incredible Malfeasance on Iran By P. David Hornik

By on December 19th, 2015

It’s official: on October 10, Iran tested an Emad ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. A panel of experts commissioned by the UN Security Council reported that the launch violated Security Council Resolution 1929, which says “Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons…”

Iran is also known to have tested yet another nuclear-capable missile on November 21.

That’s one development on the Iran front — continuing to develop potential nuke-carrying missiles in blatant breach of U.N. resolutions.

And the other development is that the board of directors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has voted to close the books on ten years of Iran’s illegal nuclear-weapons work, thereby helping open the path — as the Obama administration and its allies devoutly hope — to the lifting of sanctions on Iran in January.

The IAEA’s board of directors gave Iran a clean bill of health even though, earlier this month, the agency’s own investigators released a report that in no way confirmed that Iran hadn’t already been working on nuclear weapons or had stopped working on them. As the Chicago Tribune noted in an editorial, the report — based on the meager information Iran did provide — established that Iran had “secretly worked on weapons design, testing and components needed for a bomb until 2009.” Iran was otherwise brazenly evasive, simply not answering 3 of the 12 questions that the investigators asked, and giving only partial answers to some of the others.

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Has the U.S. Government Finished Investigating CAIR for Terror Ties? By Johanna Markind

By on December 19th, 2015

Consider this syllogism:

Muslim Brotherhood membership = a possible indicator of extremism.

CAIR = a Muslim Brotherhood organization.

∴ CAIR = “possibly” an “extremist” i.e. terrorist organization.

A recently-published British government report concludes that “membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism,” according to Prime Minister David Cameron. The report also notes that the British government was mistaken in believing it shared a common agenda with the Muslim Brotherhood against al-Qaeda and militant Salafism in general. Cameron said the government would be more careful in the future not to provide legitimacy or a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The study is particularly noteworthy given that CAIR, a widely-quoted organization which poses as a civil-rights group, is a Muslim Brotherhood entity. A federal district court found it to be so, listing it under the heading “The following individuals/entitles who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” CAIR is number 11 on the list. CAIR was started with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation, a terrorist organization prosecuted by the aforementioned court for aiding the terrorist group Hamas. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Muslim Brotherhood is “Hamas’ parent organization.”

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The End of the Arab Spring Dream Disorganized urban liberalism couldn’t compete with the politics of tribe—or Islamism.By Sohrab Ahmari

By on December 19th, 2015

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

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EPA Awards $542M To Colleges That Watchdog Never Audits by Ethan Barton

By on December 19th, 2015

EPA officials gave $542 million to colleges and universities in grants to study everything from pollution caused by backyard grilling to hotel shower use, but those funds have never been audited by a government watchdog.

EPA awarded the funds to 341 schools in more than 3,100 grants from 2009 to 2014, according a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of more than 100,000 agency awards compiled by Open The Books.

The last audit by EPA’s inspector general of any of those grants, however, was 10 years ago, and then was only conducted in response to a specific complaint.

“The last time that the OIG did a review … was in December 2005 on a hotline complaint for the University of Nevada,” EPA IG spokesman Jeffrey Lagda told TheDCNF. “In the past 10 years, the OIG has not conducted any reviews of grants awarded to colleges and universities.”

Instead, the IG relies on single audits – audits of the each university as a whole – though Lagda did not say who conducts those inspections.

Officials with Open The Books – a non-profit government accountability group that is digitizing billions of dollars of spending at all levels of government – think change is needed.

“How is the EPA supposed to protect the environment when it can’t even protect its own grant-making system from mis-allocation of resources and taxpayer abuse,” Open The Books Founder Adam Andrzejewski told TheDCNF. “It’s time for a deep, line-by-line forensic audit of EPA disbursements.”

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The EPA’s Secret Staff Emails show the agency took dictation from green lobbies in possible violation of the law.

By on December 19th, 2015

States and businesses are suing to stop the Obama Administration’s anticarbon Clean Power Plan, and now they have new evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The New York Times first reported that in 2014 environmentalists Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins—all with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—drafted a “blueprint” that “influenced” the greenhouse gas rules. That wasn’t the half of it.

The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that this trio and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule. Their inside man was Michael Goo, who worked at the NRDC before becoming the EPA’s Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy. The emails show intense 2011 communications between Mr. Goo and high-level officials at the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Task Force. Mr. Goo used a private Yahoo email account to send multiple drafts of his options memo to these outside groups, which returned them with draft instructions.

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Obama Well Knows What Chaos He Has Unleashed : Victor Sharpe

By on December 19th, 2015

Not content with creating havoc in the U.S. economy, setting Americans against each other, and forcing through a health reform act which has nothing to do with health but everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and an immense increase in governmental interference, President Obama opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. He ushered in a catastrophe not seen since World War 2.

From his notorious Cairo speech to the present time, President Obama speaks and disaster follows. Some commentators still believe that Obama is utterly naïve, which was why he could not understand what would happen in Egypt as a result of his undermining the Mubarak regime. But it is increasingly apparent, even to the most diehard Obama supporter, that there is something truly troubling about President Obama’s mindset.

Obama is not naïve at all. He is an ideologue and knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West and Israel, irrespective of how much innocent blood flows as a result.

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Terrorism: Where to Turn? by Richard Prasquier

By on December 19th, 2015

Richard Prasquier is President of Keren Hayesod France and Honorary Chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France). This article first appeared in a slightly different form in French. Gatestone thanks the author for his kind permission to publish it in English.

Our reaction should be directed not against the terrorists, but against those who indoctrinate, train and finance them — and on working to eradicate this virus of the mind.

Where are the demands to boycott those who fund ISIS? Their names are well-known.

The “Crusaders” now seem exhausted. They simply do not want enemies.

These attacks — like those before them — were simply meant to sow terror: go kill as many people as you can.

The Pope can insist all he likes that we have entered a Third World War; it is so much more comforting to repeat that the main problem is “Israel’s occupation” is the problem.

After the November 13 attacks in Paris, there were concerns in the media that Europe did not fully understand the gravity of the threats posed by radical Islam. Frances’s Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, however, certainly did not hide his prediction that, this year, a large scale attack would take place in France. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when” and “where.”

Thoughts first were for the victims, for those who will suffer all their lives — young people who went out just to enjoy some music or eat with friends.

Next came the questions: about the claim of responsibility by ISIS, and how the coordinated attacks would nullify the “lone wolf” theory — a hypothesis largely refuted anyway. These were commandos trained to kill, and to kill themselves too.

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Oberlin Students Demand Payment for Protests They also demand “segregated black-only ‘safe spaces.’” By Katherine Timpf

By on December 19th, 2015

The Oberlin College Black Student Union has released a list of 50 “Institutional Demands” for the school, including one that orders it to pay black students who organize protests $8.20 per hour for doing so.

The 14-page (!) document opens with this nice buzzword salad:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision.

“This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” it continues.

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Closing Guantanamo Bay Will Only Empower Our Enemies By Andrew C. McCarthy — December 19, 2015

By on December 19th, 2015

There are 107 jihadists remaining at Guantanamo Bay. President Obama sees that as a huge problem and, for once, I agree with him. But there the agreement ends. The president is hell bent on shuttering the detention camp. I think the problem is that there are only 107 detainees.

Heading into his eighth year as commander-in-chief, Obama seems increasingly detached — inevitably so, as reality relentlessly distances itself from the president’s fantasies about Islam and terrorism.

Impervious to the bitter irony, the president waxed idiotic at his final White House press conference of 2015 about the need to close Gitmo — and about his imminent release of 17 jihadists to speed that process along — while the engines revved up to jet him to San Bernardino, Calif. There, he’ll find time for a quickie meeting with family members in mourning after the jihadist mass-murder of their loved ones two weeks ago.

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