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December 2015

Obama Administration Preparing Fresh Iran Sanctions Nearly a dozen companies and individuals targeted over ballistic-missile program By Jay Solomon

The Obama administration is preparing to impose its first financial sanctions on Iran since it forged a landmark nuclear agreement in July, presenting a major test for whether Tehran will stay committed to the deal.

The planned action by the Treasury Department, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal, is directed at nearly a dozen companies and individuals in Iran, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates for their alleged role in developing Iran’s ballistic-missile program.

Iranian officials have warned the White House in recent months that any such financial penalties would be viewed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a violation of the nuclear accord.

Senior U.S. officials have said the Treasury retained a right under the agreement to blacklist Iranian entities allegedly involved in missile development, as well as those that support international terrorism and human-rights abuses. Officials view those activities as separate from the nuclear deal.

Bursting The Taittinger’s Bubble By Rachel Ehrenfeld

We rarely think about the owners of the wineries when choosing the sparkling wine with which to celebrate. Perhaps we should.

Consider the French champagne house Taittinger, and its California Domaine Carneros estate, which has for the past 15 years sponsored Hollywood’s annual Screen Actors Guild Awards and the SAG Foundation.

In 1943, in Le Journal de Saintes, Pierre Taittinger, the well-known champagne maker and hotelier called for “the creation of a new European order upon which France must work in close collaboration with Germany.” At the same year, papers he owned celebrated both the 10th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and Hitler’s 54th birthday. His papers also carried advertisements proclaiming “Germany will prevail, France will, and Europe will unite through work,” as well as “For a clean France rid of Jews and Freemasons.”

The Vichy government was behind the October 1940 laws, prohibiting Jews from holding public offices and almost all professions; it was behind the laws permitting the “Aryanization” of Jewish property; and was behind the decision to eliminate 30,000 to 60,000 Jewish soldiers from its military ranks, imprisoning them or sending them to labor camps where they were kept until most were deported by the Germans to Auschwitz in August 1942. It was also the Vichy government that turned over tens of thousands of foreign Jews to the Germans and sent tens of thousands more as forced laborers to Germany. Altogether, 90,000 out of 350,000 French Jews were exterminated.

THE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES AND THE WAR WE’RE IN — ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/30/the-presidential-candidates-and-the-war-were-in-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Michael Finch, the president and Chief Operating Officer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Michael interviewed Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

The two discussed The Presidential Candidates and the War We’re In, focusing on: Who dares to say “Sharia” and “Jihad”?

Don’t miss it!

After Paris, a Global Wave of Terror Arrests by Abigail R. Esman

On Nov. 27, exactly two weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in Paris, FBI agents swarmed into a private home in Harrisburg, Pa. Their target: 19-year-old Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, an American citizen and Muslim whom they’d been watching for several months, largely through his postings on Twitter. Using as many as 57 separate accounts, Aziz had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, called for the killing of non-Muslims, aided others to make hijrah to Syria to join the jihad there, and expressed his own wishes to do the same.

And if that weren’t enough, he promised further to continue the attacks against America, posting, for instance, “Know, O Obama, that we are coming to America, and know that we will sever your head in the White House.”

But as the FBI soon discovered, Aziz’s jihadist lust did not end with just words. At the home he shared with his parents in the Pennsylvania capital, according to the affidavit filed in the case, they found a “go-bag,” or knapsack, containing “five M-4 style high capacity magazines loaded with 5.56 ammunition, a modified kitchen knife with the handle removed and wrapped in cloth and string, a thumb drive, a tin filled with various over-the-counter medications, and a head wrap commonly referred to as a balaclava.”

US not Only Spying on Israel, but on U.S. Pro-Israel Legislators and Groups Did the Obama administration win backing of the Nuclear Iran Deal by eavesdropping on private communications between U.S. Congressmen and pro-Israel groups? By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

The publication of several news stories in the Wall Street Journal late Tuesday, Dec. 29, produced a subterranean tremor in the crowd that closely monitors U.S.-Israel relations. The articles, on the surface, revealed information that was not all that astonishing: The Israelis spied to obtain information on the U.S. and the U.S. spied on Israel regarding the recent Nuclear Iran Deal negotiations. Big news for naifs, but not so for close and constant observers.

But just below the words looms a much bigger story, one not quite completely spelled out by the Journal reporters, Adam Entous and Danny Yadron. But that story may well, or at least should, lead to a whole new political firestorm harkening back to the furor that led to the Church Committee hearings in the 1970’s.

Because, really, who did not already know that U.S. President Barack Obama and his team were furious with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to the Nuclear Iran Deal? And wasn’t it already known that the Israelis received information about the presumably “secret” back-door negotiations between U.S. intermediaries and Iran about a nuclear deal? And why would anyone be surprised that such tensions between two traditionally rock-solid allies would create or further encourage less than desirable activity to reveal what the other was doing?

Obama’s Hypocrisy on the Plight of Middle Eastern Christians By:Srdja Trifkovic

“In some areas of the Middle East where church bells have rung for centuries on Christmas Day, this year they will be silent,” President Barack Obama said in a statement on December 23. “This silence bears tragic witness to the brutal atrocities committed against these communities by ISIL.” This is a misleading and hypocritical statement for four main reasons.
(1) Obama singles out the Islamic State (IS, or “ISIL” as he still insists on calling it) as the culprit. He is thus creating the impression that anti-Christian “brutal atrocities” had been absent before the IS made its appearance on the Middle Eastern scene, or that such atrocities are limited to the IS-controlled areas today. This is demonstrably untrue.

It is a matter of historical record that the 75 years preceding the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 witnessed a more thorough destruction of the Christian communities in the Middle East than any period following the seventh century Islamic conquest. Thousands of Assyrians were murdered in the province of Mosul in 1850, and in 1860 some 12,000 Christians were put to the sword in Lebanon. Successive slaughters of Armenians in Bayazid (1877), Alashgurd (1879), Sassun (1894), Constantinople (1896), Adana (1909) and Ottoman-ruled Armenia itself (1895–1896) claimed a total of 200,000 lives. They were but rehearsals for the slaughter of 1915-1918, which claimed at least a million lives. Two million Armenians lived in what is now Turkey in 1914; some 3% (ca. 60,000) remain today. The proof of the genocide is in the numbers.

A Walk in Jerusalem By Matti Friedman

Much that is important in Jerusalem right now was visible during a short walk I took around the Old City on a rainy Tuesday in November: Four Border Police officers in riot gear, two men and two women, eyeing their smartphones and Arab passers-by with the same casual interest. Muslim women coming from the al-Aqsa Mosque, eyeing the officers. A blue-and-white flag on a wall declaring one apartment to be a Jewish island inside the Muslim Quarter. A gleaming Arabic sign announcing a new Israeli health clinic serving Palestinian clientele. Palestinian men at a traffic light outside the walls, crossing the invisible line between east and west Jerusalem on their way to work.

I waited at the light-rail stop outside Damascus Gate and boarded a train of Jewish and Arab passengers, fewer of both than usual. I got off downtown, and within an hour there had been a Palestinian stabbing attack on another train and a second attack at Damascus Gate.

The city of Jerusalem is subject to great and contradictory forces, some pulling its 830,000 residents apart and some pushing them together. The forces of disintegration have been evident in the spate of stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians and policemen this fall. In the six weeks beginning October 1 there were two dozen attacks or attempted attacks by Palestinians in Jerusalem alone, most involving knives. They persist, in Jerusalem and elsewhere, as I write. Jerusalem in crisis mode doesn’t resemble an American city during or after a race riot, for example, or a natural disaster. There aren’t burned-out neighborhoods or looted streets. There is no large-scale breakdown of public order. Instead there are small incidents of murderous violence, some localized rioting, and a cloud of unease.

EDWARD CLINE: THE ABSENCE OF FACTS IN THE WAR ON TERROR

Except that any fashioner or overseer of military and civilian threat analysis could never swear to anything in a court of law or during a Congressional committee hearing, because he would invariably perjure himself. So he would hedge behind a well-rehearsed litany of presuppositions and assumptions.

Continuing a column on “Our Ignorance” from Stephen Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad (pp. 443-484), from Institutionalized Ignorance of Islam, I will focus here on the rendering of language and words to meaninglessness by Army writing guides discussed by Stephen Coughlin in “Our Ignorance.” I thought a Socratic exposition of the subject would better drive home the point over a straight narrative.
________________________________________________________________________

In a fictive, imaginary setting, a House or Senate committee hearing member, identified here as the Interrogator, in full possession of his faculty of reason, might challenge the “expert witness” about what he knows and what he claims he knows – or doesn’t know. The hearing has been convened to examine the reason why the nation’s “War on Terror” has not prevented the commission of terrorist acts in the U.S., and is in general ineffectual.
The Witness, a captain in a U.S. Army counter-intelligence unit, has just finished delivering an opening statement about how his unit conducts threat analyses and contributes to the government’s ability to fight the “War on Terror.” He reads the conclusion of his statement:
Witness: Our recommendations and conclusions are then forwarded to the next echelon of threat assessment evaluation with the best assumptions and presuppositions underscored and emphasized, which subsume all possible likelihoods and scenarios concerning the enemy’s next activity. Our highly combed assumptions and presuppositions have played no little role in projecting anticipated enemy activity, and enabled us to counter hypothetical but very significant threats. Often, facts play a role in the final assessment.

Progressive “Thought-Blockers”: Islamophobia A deadly belief-system. by Bruce Thornton

A few days before the San Bernardino shootings, President Obama reacted to Donald Trump’s proposal to bar Muslims entry into the U.S. by saying, “It is the responsibility of all Americans––of every faith––to reject discrimination. It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country . . . Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes.” Attorney General Loretta Lynch went even further. In an address at the Muslim Advocates dinner, she commented,

“Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone . . . lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric, or, as we saw after 9/11, violence against individuals who may not even be Muslims but may be perceived to be Muslims . . . When we see that, we will take action”––or as she warns, “They will be prosecuted.”

How is that Muslims have become “snowflakes” like those pampered college students so traumatized by opposing points of view that they need “safe spaces” from speech they don’t like, and demand scrapping the First Amendment? For an answer, look to another progressive “thought-blocker,” “Islamophobia.”

End the Anti-Cop Witch Hunt The Obama-#BlackLivesMatter cases have fallen apart, it’s time to tell the truth. Daniel Greenfield

The dirty alliance between Obama and #BlackLivesMatter has torched cities, goosed crime rates, killed cops and suppressed law enforcement with the Ferguson Effect. But the lies about “police murders” fall apart when they come up against even the most basic evidentiary standards of the justice system.

The refusal of a grand jury to indict the police officer in the Tamir Rice case buries yet another of BLM’s banner cases. The Tamir Rice case joins the Michael Brown case, the Sandra Bland case, the Eric Garner case and the faltering Freddie Gray case in the litany of failed police lynchings by BLM and the DOJ.

In four out of five of these cases, the DOJ-BLM pro-crime lobby couldn’t even get an indictment.

What does it say about a movement when its claims repeatedly fail evidence-based tests? Angry racist protesters scream about justice, but the justice system has spoken. Racist activists have tried to blame individual prosecutors, jurors and judges, but a consistent pattern has emerged, no matter what the race and political orientation of the prosecutors or jurors, BLM’s cases just don’t hold up in court.