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December 2015

ROBERT SPENCER ON “TO FLOOD AMERICA WITH MUSLIM REFUGEES” — ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/01/robert-spencer-on-to-flood-america-with-muslim-refugees-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

This special new edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Robert Spencer, the Director of JihadWatch.org and the author of the new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to ISIS.

Robert came on the show to discuss To Flood America With Muslim Refugees, unveiling the meaning of the Islamic State threatening to flood Europe with 500,000 refugees in February, 2015.

Don’t miss it!

Bizarro Reality: Richard Baehr

For the past few months, almost every day, Arab terrorists have ‎committed attacks on Israelis — mostly knife assaults, but also cars ‎plowing into Israeli soldiers or civilians, and some shootings. Two dozen ‎Israelis have been killed, and a far greater number have been wounded.

The ‎attacks followed a vicious incitement campaign by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, ‎and other radicalized groups among Israeli and West Bank Arabs blasting out ‎repeated warnings that Israel and the Jews were mounting an assault on the ‎Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa mosque, with a design to change the character of ‎the arrangement that has existed there for nearly 50 years.‎

The warnings are false, of course, but also malicious, since the PA and its allies in ‎the slander campaign fully understand the power of the warnings about the alleged ‎threats to Al-Aqsa and Jerusalem, given the history of the conflict. No propaganda ‎campaign is more likely to incite attacks on Israel and Jews in Israel or elsewhere ‎than one focused on protecting Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa from the infidels ‎threatening it.

Cruz Surges to 2nd Place in New USA Today Power Rankings By Stephen Kruiser

He’s not just sticking around.

Ted Cruz is on the move.

The combative Texas senator has climbed to second place in our GOP Power Rankings, the highest he has placed in the 14 weeks we have been polling political experts on who is the strongest candidate in the Republican field.

“The biggest news of the week was Ted Cruz’s surge in Iowa,” said Emory University professor Andra Gillespie. “One of the interesting features of this cycle has been the crowded evangelical field, where no one candidate has dominated and (Donald) Trump has held his own. Social conservatives may have found their candidate in Ted Cruz.”

Trump remains No. 1 in our survey, with 17 first-place votes. While he has continued to toss out comments that are considered poor taste or inaccurate, he is the unquestioned front-runner.

But Cruz and Marco Rubio are gaining ground. Rubio actually took more first-place votes in our survey (seven) than Cruz (four), but Cruz scored higher in total because 19 of our experts put him in second place.

As Hillary Runs, Marine Will Be Ousted for Emailing Classified Documents By Michael T. Hamilton

A Marine and U.S. Naval Academy graduate who self-reported that he improperly stored classified documents will be separated from the Marine Corps Reserve following a decision by Assistant Navy Secretary Juan Garcia, the Washington Post reported Monday.

Maj. Jason Brezler’s emails warned officials about the corruption, including homosexual pedophilia, of an Afghan police chief named Anwar Jan, whose servant later killed three Marines and wounded a fourth. According to the Post:

Brezler’s case first came to light after he sent an e-mail with a couple classified documents attached to Marines in Afghanistan about Jan. Brezler was deployed to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010, and had worked successfully to have Jan removed from power in another district, Now Zad. Brezler self-reported his spillage of classified information afterward, and the service found that he had been keeping it on an unsecured hard drive.

However unfortunate, the decision to expel Brezler for mishandling classified information is essentially orthodox.

Encryption Debate By Andrew C. McCarthy

Should private companies that provide users with encryption technology be required to assist law-enforcement and intelligence services to defeat that technology? This question is a more pressing one in the wake of November’s Paris terrorist attacks. But it is a very tough question that has vexed both the government and providers of communications services for years.

Part of what makes it so difficult is the new facts of life. As I noted during the debate over the NSA’s bulk-collection of telephone metadata, we are operating in a political environment that is night-and-day different from the aftermath of 9/11. Back then, a frightened public was demanding that the government do a better job of collecting intelligence and thwarting terrorist plots. Of course that sentiment was driven by the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 Americans, coupled with the destruction of the World Trade Center and a strike against the Pentagon. But it also owed in no small measure to the fact that government had done such an incompetent job gathering and “connecting the dots” prior to the attacks. There was a strong public sense that intelligence agencies needed an injection of muscle.

Today, the public’s sense tends in the other direction. There have been spectacular abuses of government power (e.g., IRS scandal), and intrusive security precautions infused by political correctness (e.g., airport searches). Americans understandably suspect that government cannot be trusted with enhanced authorities and that many of its tactics are more about the appearance of security than real security.

The CENTCOM Syndrome Tailoring intelligence to please the president could leave the nation vulnerable By Jed Babbin –

Every member of the military has a personal duty to report the facts they encounter truthfully to their superiors. That goes for everyone from the lowliest private to the four-star generals who report directly to the president.

But what happens when the colonels and generals disagree with the facts their junior officers and civilians report to them, not because they think the facts are wrong but because they want to satisfy their civilian bosses’ political agenda?

That’s exactly what is going on at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), according to the allegations made against CENTCOM senior officers by about 50 intelligence analysts. Several reports say CENTCOM analysts have taken these allegations to the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General, which has determined that there is enough substance to the allegations to compel a major investigation into how CENTCOM’s commanders handle intelligence that doesn’t comply with President Obama’s agenda.

CENTCOM, like other joint commands, has responsibility for an area of the world. CENTCOM’s responsibility includes 20 countries encompassing the entire Middle East and much of western Asia. It is responsible for defending America from whatever emanates from the most dangerous part of the world.

Obama Won’t Fight the Islamic State: Max Boot

It’s been more than two weeks since the terrible attacks in Paris. And what has been the response? French President Francois Hollande has tried to bring the U.S. and Russia into a wider anti-ISIS coalition. That effort, predictably, has gone nowhere because of the stark differences between the U.S. (which sees Assad as part of the problem in Syria) and Russia (which sees Assad as the solution). The fracas over Turkey’s shoot down of a Russian fighter has further splintered any attempt to create international solidarity against the Islamic State.

So where does that leave us? With a slightly intensified air campaign against ISIS that has now been joined by French aircraft and possibly soon by the British, too, assuming that Prime Minister Cameron wins parliamentary approval, as appears likely. In retaliation for the bombing of a Russian civilian airliner, the Russians have already dropped some bombs and missiles on Raqqa, the ISIS capital, although they are saving most of their firepower for more moderate Syrian rebels. And the U.S. has slightly increased the tempo of its air strikes — it is now willing to target ISIS oil tankers (after warning the drivers to leave their trucks) but still not ISIS oil wells, apparently for fear of causing environmental damage!

Unfortunately, there is no reason to think that air strikes alone will defeat ISIS any more than they have ever defeated any other determined foe in the past century.

Yet President Obama, having considered his options, has apparently decided to continue with the present strategy of relying on air strikes and limited advisory assistance to Iraqi and Syrian forces. Instead of confronting the growing ISIS threat, he insists on denigrating it. The onetime “JV team,” which supposedly wasn’t ready for the big leagues of terrorism, is now labeled by the president as “a bunch of killers with good social media,” which is about as accurate a description as calling Barack Obama “a community organizer with a nice airplane.”

Donald Trump’s Big Lies: Max Boot

It can be tiresome and ultimately pointless to fact-check Donald Trump: He and his supporters will believe what they want to believe. But it is nevertheless dismaying the extent to which he plays fast and loose with the facts. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a far greater New Yorker than Trump will ever be) once said. Trump wants to prove Moynihan wrong by showing that he is entitled to his own facts.

Just look at what happened when Trump was confronted by demands for evidence to back up his claim that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City were cheering at the World Trade Center was falling — a claim denied by the mayor of Jersey City, its police chief, and every other responsible individual who has ever looked into this matter.

First Trump claimed that it must be so because he remembered it happening, and “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s one thing everyone agrees on.” (Everyone? Does anyone outside of Trump himself and his paid sycophants actually think so?)

Our Man in Moscow How President Obama turned over control of America’s Middle East policy to Vladimir Putin. Michael Doran

The jihadists struck Paris on November 13. On that Friday the 13th, the band on stage in the Bataclan theater, where 89 people were murdered, was Eagles of Death Metal. The song it was playing was “Kiss of the Devil.” The details sound like something out of Hollywood, but the horror was deadly real. In total, the terrorists would murder 130 people, the vast majority in the prime of their lives.

The multiple massacre left France reeling, vulnerable, and also deeply confused—but not about the nature of the operation. Islamic State (IS) took responsibility for the attacks, which were clearly another spillover from the Syrian civil war. Their so-called mastermind, the Belgian Abdelhamid Abaaoud, had spent time in Syria as the head of an IS unit devoted to dispatching jihadis to Europe. Earlier in the year, in a profile in Dabiq, IS’s propaganda magazine, Abbaoud flaunted the fact that he was planning acts of mass murder. “We spent months trying to find a way into Europe,” he said, “and by Allah’s strength, we succeeded in finally making our way to Belgium. We were then able to obtain weapons and set up a safe house while we planned to carry out operations against the Crusaders.”

So the problem was clear, as was the threat: global jihad enjoyed a safe haven in Syria, which allowed it to build jihadi networks across Europe and the Middle East. French confusion stemmed not from identifying that threat but from figuring out what, practically, could be done about it. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, stepped forward. France, he said, is “in the worst of situations. We are sufficiently prominent to be a target, but not prominent enough to eradicate these barbarians.” His solution: “[T]he Russians must be associated with the work of the coalition to destroy [Islamic State].”

Sarkozy’s proposal was not new. Vladimir Putin himself had first floated the idea of a unified alliance against Islamic State two months earlier, at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. At the time, the government of François Hollande responded tepidly, observing that Russia was less interested in defeating Islamic State than in propping up the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad: a vicious sectarian actor whose wholesale slaughter of Sunni Muslims was IS’s greatest recruiting tool. In the view of the French government, Assad’s barbarism, abetted as it was by the Russians and the Iranians, was thus also the main cause of the refugee crisis plaguing Europe; until he was deposed, a stable new order would never arise.

Russia’s Failed Adventure in Syria by Con Coughlin

Then there is the question of just how long Russia can afford to sustain its expensive military adventure in Syria. The Russian economy already has enough difficulties without having to bear the cost of Mr Putin’s latest act of military aggression.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may well come to regret agreeing to Iran’s request for Moscow to intervene militarily in Syria’s brutal civil war.

The shooting down of a Russian warplane over the Syrian border by Turkey has graphically illustrated the risks Moscow faces after the Kremlin agreed to intervene on behalf of Syria’s beleaguered President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr Putin took his fateful decision to launch military action in Syria after meeting Major-General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, in Moscow last August. Visiting Moscow shortly after the conclusion of June’s deal on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme (JCPOA), Soleimani delivered a blunt warning to the Russian leader that the Assad regime, Russia’s long-standing strategic ally in the Middle East, faced defeat without outside support.