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June 2016

Election 2016: Knowns and Unknowns We still have five more months of Trump vs. Hillary. Then four or eight years of – what? By Victor Davis Hanson

The Disaffected. Will stay-home so-called establishment Republicans outnumber renewed Reagan Democrats, Tea Partiers, and conservative independents, some of whom likely sat out 2008 and 2012, but who now are likely to vote for Trump? The latter energized group will probably continue to support Trump even if he persists in his suicidal detours like the legal gymnastics of Trump University, or if he keeps repeating ad nauseam the same stale generalities he has served up throughout his campaign.

And will the ranks of the #NeverTrump holdouts, despite claims to the contrary in the spring, thin by autumn, should Trump change a few of his odious spots and become a more disciplined candidate? Will his populist message be recalibrated to appeal to minorities who, albeit less publicly than their white counterparts, resent illegal immigration and its effects on the poor and working classes, are angry about record labor nonparticipation and elite boutique environmentalism, and appreciate tough, even if crazed, El Jefe talk in place of politically correct platitudes?

If Trump comes up with a detailed, even if clumsily delivered, conservative agenda, and if a now-die-hard-leftist Hillary Clinton continues to deprecate and caricature the entire conservative tradition, will he who seems a buffoon in June prove preferable in November to ensuring a 16-year Obama–Clinton regnum?

Anti-Hillary vs. Anti-Trump. Will Sanders holdouts roughly approximate the number of Republican #NeverTrumpers? For now, it would be more socially acceptable for a Sanders supporter to vote for Hillary than for an anti-Trumper to give in and vote for Trump. Voting for Hillary would not entail the social and class costs for a Sanders supporter that voting for Trump would for a Republican of the “not-in-my-name” Romney or Jeb Bush wing. The Wall Street Journal is more likely to show repugnance for the idea of finishing the wall than an advocate of Sanders’s 70 percent top tax rate is to reject Hillary’s less radical, though radical enough, idea of upping the current 39.5 percent top rate. An oddity of the campaign is that the Republican establishment applies a higher standard to its own candidate than it has applied to either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, who, with a modicum of research, can be proven to have matched Trump, slur for slur.

Criminality. No one knows at this point whether Hillary will be indicted or, if she is not, whether her exemption will trigger outrage in the FBI ranks that will garner headline notoriety even in the liberal media. Almost daily, yet another detail in the e-mail scandal emerges that reinforces the narrative that everything Hillary has said so far about her e-mails has been demonstrably false. More importantly, the Clintons, especially post-2000, became a near-criminal enterprise. Almost weekly over the last few months, we have learned of a new wrinkle to the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play syndicate. Bill Clinton was apparently, at $4 million a year, the highest-paid “chancellor” in the history of American higher education, for steering toward the scandal-plagued Laureate “University” millions of dollars in business from the State Department, which was run by his wife. Because the Clintons became so rich so quickly, and without any apparent mechanism other than leveraging government service, there is a two-decades reservoir of scandals that is largely untapped — suggesting that Balzac’s aphorism should be amended to read in the plural, “Behind every great fortune there are plenty of great crimes.”

The Obama Matrix. Pollsters are still trying to calibrate to what degree Hillary will recapture Obama’s record minority registration, turnout, and block voting — and whether such pandering will in turn spike the white-male anti-Hillary vote to record levels. There is something foreign and uncomfortable about Hillary’s faux-accented performances; perhaps her shrill obsequiousness will strike at least some minority voters as a sort of elite white and repugnant condescension. No one likes a transparent suck-up, especially by someone whose past record of honesty and character is so disreputable. Conventional wisdom suggests that the supposed “new” demography will allow Hillary to replicate the Obama coalition, but that assumes that minority voters, who supposedly vote along ethnic and racial lines, are comfortable with Hillary’s tastes and with her disingenuous career, and will vote as they did in 2008 and 2012, more than making up for new white-working-class converts to Trump.

ISIS Takes Credit for Stabbing Police Commander, Wife Near Paris By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/06/13/isis-takes-credit-for-stabbing-police-commander-wife-near-paris/

Through its same wire service that has claimed credit for Orlando, Brussels and other attacks, ISIS took responsibility for the double murder of a police commander and his wife.

The 42-year-old cop was in front of his suburban home in Magnanville, about 30 outside of Paris, this evening when he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant.

The attacker then took the victim’s wife and 3-year-old son hostage inside their house.

Police surrounded the property, evacuating nearby residents, and attempted to negotiate for a few hours before storming the home and fatally shooting the attacker. The wife was found dead inside the house; the toddler was rescued.

Le Parisien newspaper reported that a neighbor heard the attacker yelling “Allahu Akbar.”

The paper said the police commander had been stabbed nine times in the abdomen and the assailant announced the wife’s murder on social media after he killed her.

The ISIS-linked Amaq Agency later issued a breaking news alert stating an “Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife with blade weapons near Paris.”

Kerry on Orlando: ‘We Try to Undo Hate’ at State Department By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry weighed in on the Orlando terrorist attack today as “an act that obviously was — is profoundly filled with hate as well as a desire to sow terror in people.”

Appearing with the Cypriot foreign minister at the State Department today, Kerry called the attack in which Omar Mateen killed at least 49 people “horrific in every — every sense of the meaning of that word.”

“Everyone has spoken to the strength of Orlando, and I have no doubt that the citizens of Orlando, as its papers declared today very clearly, will get through this,” he said. “But all of us will continue in every way possible here at the State Department where we are deeply engaged every single day in this fight against ISIL.”

“We will continue to stand up for our values, which are the antithesis of what drove yesterday’s horrible events. We try to undo hate, and we try to show the value of people coming together working through differences and I think are profoundly driven by a sense of love for other people.”

Kerry added that “the worst thing you can do is engage in trying to point fingers at one group or one form of sectarianism or another or one division or another.”

“Those are not the values of our country. What we need to do is to bring people together and work to forever prevent this kind of hate and terror from playing out as it has so horribly in the last day,” he said.

“So we here at the department are going to continue in every way that we already are to fight against ISIL and any other terrorist group in the world that seeks to impose its will or carry out its hateful ideology against other people. And I’m proud of the actions of this department as we continue to do that.”

Kerry is scheduled to break the Ramadan fast at an iftar dinner with visiting Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman this evening. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama, Clinton Say ‘Disarm’ While Failing to Protect They really believe they deserve to be trusted with your security. By Richard Fernandez,

The mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub that claimed 50 lives has once again revived the question of how the authorities could have missed warning signs from a perpetrator.

The FBI first became aware of Omar Mateen in 2013 when he made comments to coworkers “alleging possible terrorist ties.” The feds interviewed Mateen three times in connection with his remarks — which may have assumed more than casual importance in light of his employment by a security company that guards government buildings, and Mateen’s ambitions to become a police officer.

Mateen was later removed from a terror watchlist after it was determined that he had broken no laws. The rest is history.

It joins abundant precedent. The father of the so-called underwear bomber warned by U.S. authorities of his son’s intentions to attack America, but they fell through the cracks.

The Russian government warned U.S. authorities the Boston Marathon bombers were radical Islamists more than a year and a half before they killed many and maimed more. As with Mateen, the feds found that no laws were violated. The brothers were sent on their way until they reappeared with a blast.

The Pentagon failed to recognize numerous signs that Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan was up to no good and communicating with terrorists.

The extensive arsenal, recent Middle East travel, and correspondence with Islamist extremists of Syed Rizwan Farook did nothing to alarm the FBI before he and his wife massacred 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino.

The famous complaint of Admiral David Beatty at Jutland — “something is wrong with our bloody ships today” — surely must apply to the State Department after 600 requests for security upgrades from the Benghazi consulate failed to rouse Secretary Clinton to action. When asked how she could fail to see a telegraphed punch, Clinton could only say: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

The most disturbing aspect of recent terror attacks is that the authorities were taken by surprise each time despite advance warning. This serial failure undercuts the administration’s claim to competence.

This is something the non-expert public understands. Suppose someone came to you claiming he was a brain surgeon. Even if you were not a doctor but had questions only a brain surgeon could answer correctly, you could evaluate the “brain surgeon” by giving him one exam and another to the cleaning person in the hallway. If they scored the same, you would begin to suspect the brain surgeon might be fake.

If the cleaning person continually outscored the “brain surgeon,” a rational employer would consider hiring that person as head of surgery, which possibly explains the rise of Donald Trump.

The administration’s demand for more gun control crucially rests on the claim of competence. CONTINUE AT SITE

Daryl McCann Hillary’s Nocturnal Omissions

In the light of day she mouths the pablum and platitudes her supporters want to hear. It’s not the Islamist holding the gun that is the problem, she says, but the gun itself. And the crowds cheer, which is no less than her due. All that midnight work erasing an inconvenient record deserves some acclaim.
In the aftermath of December 2, 2015, San Bernardino massacre, Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton paid careful attention to her PC-observant supporter base: “I refuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now.” However, she did begin to speak more frequently about the perils of terrorism, especially after the March 22, 2016, Brussels carnage. Clinton presented herself as the sensible alternative to Donald Trump and his fellow Republican presidential candidates, who she disparaged for using inflammatory terms such as “radical Islamic terrorism”, rather than her less jarring descriptor, “radical jihadist terrorism”.

After the horrific Orlando atrocity, in the early hours of Sunday, June 12, Hillary Clinton has again depicted herself as the presidential candidate with the no-nonsense, effectual wherewithal to combat both domestic and international terrorism.

Politicians are frequently casual with the truth. Maybe it goes with the territory of wanting to appear sincere about an issue in the glare of the media spotlight, only to be caught out when the situation changes and public opinion shifts to a different position. Hillary Clinton is not the only candidate for high office who could be embarrassed by a visual record of policy reversals, as in this awkward collection, and yet is there not something disturbing about the high-handed manner in which she relentlessly insists that day is night?

In the same vein, a new paperback edition of Clinton’s memoir, Hard Choices, omits passages containing views that are no longer expedient. In the hardback Hard Choices (2014), Hillary Clinton supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and wrote favourably about his 2011 military intervention in Libya. However, to neutralise Bernie Sanders’ left-populist (or “democratic socialist”) challenge during the Democratic Party primaries, Clinton jettisoned these and a range of other, suddenly unhelpful opinions championed in the hardback version of her memoirs. The expurgation visited upon the new edition of Hard Choices is, according to publisher Simon & Schuster, “to accommodate a shorter length” – or, more accurately perhaps, the disposing of inconvenient truths in the memory hole.

Is there a pattern here? Take the case of the relatives of three of those killed in the second 9/11, the 2012 Benghazi bloodbath, C.I.A. contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty and Foreign Services officer Sean Smith. Most of them are emphatic that in their various encounters with Hillary Clinton, the then-Secretary of State blamed an online video made by an Egyptian Copt living in the U.S.A. for the murder of the men. For instance, Tyrone Woods’ father, who took notes at his meeting, said this: “I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand. And she said we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of my son.” Hillary Clinton continues to deny this.

Peter Smith Eeny, Meeny, Miny but Never Mo’

Another massacre and where to sheet the blame? Polite convention precludes making more than passing mention of the killer’s creed, while ‘too many guns’ and ‘mental illness’ are getting tired. So let’s settle on a non-specific strain of homophobia and leave the Prophet out of it
Another barbaric Islamic terrorist massacre, killing 49 people and injuring over 50 in an Orlando gay nightclub; and the heart searching begins among the mentally challenged. What drove American-born, Afghani-parented, frequent-mosque-attending, prayer-mat-toting, Omar Mateen? It is a mystery.

His ex-wife said he was mentally unstable. He apparently beat her and kept her housebound. CNN after flirting as best they could with all kinds of possibilities, including white supremacism, had a get out. Of course, it makes sense now; he was around the bend. Well, wife-beating and keeping women secluded might just be the way devout male Muslims go about their lives. Sounds crazy to us but not to an Afghani or, say, Saudi-Arabian, I dare say.

President Obama couldn’t bring himself yet again to mention Islam as being complicit, though he did manage to blame guns. Expect the gun laws in the US to get most emphasis by Democrats who are clearly oblivious to the zero correlation between worldwide terrorist attacks and gun laws. There is no accounting for sheer wilful blindness and imbecility.

Mind you it is likely that Mateen was unbalanced. I tend to think that anyone who would deliberately gun down people in a nightclub is probably deranged. But where does that get us when clearly there are so many deranged people inspired by Islamic scripture.

Wikipedia lists 220 worldwide Islamic terrorist attacks in the six years 2010 – 2015, which have received “significant press coverage.” So far 29 are listed for 2016, including the Orlando attack. Countless other less significant attacks have occurred. It is quite easy to see online estimates of over 20,000 Islamic attacks since 9/11.

These are numbers of plague proportions carried out by people who are apparently mentally unbalanced. Is it something in the water? In fact, it is something in the book. And more of us better start comprehending that before we are buried as a civilisation – the LGBT crowd among them.

It just might have been no accident that Mateen targeted a gay nightclub at the start of Ramadan. There is plenty of support in the Hadiths for killing homosexuals, including by throwing them from high buildings. Of course Islamic apologists are fond of quoting Old Testament condemnation of sodomy. I too would think this relevant if there were bodies of Jewish or Christian religious zealots who went around giving life to these passages by encouraging the killing of homosexuals. As it is, it is totally and completely irrelevant and, I suspect, deliberately deceptive and distracting.

Trump Plays the Radical Islam Card The GOP candidate forces Hillary Clinton to address language she has avoided.By William McGurn

On Sunday morning, the nation awoke to the news that nearly 50 innocent people had been murdered by a gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. Soon they would learn the shooter was 29-year-old Omar Mateen, born in America to parents of Afghan origin.

In other words, a heavily-armed man with Afghan parents and a Muslim name had targeted a gay nightclub for his bloody rampage. And yet as the American people watched those Sunday press conferences on their TV sets, they were treated to a parade of officials, including the obligatory imam, all reluctant to connect the killer with anything suggesting Islam.

At 1:59 p.m. it was the president’s turn.

Though he did call the slaughter at Pulse an “act of terror,” anyone relying on Barack Obama for a read of the situation would have had no idea that the killings at a Florida nightclub might have been inspired by the same ideology behind the forces still confronting American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now ask yourself: Does this undermine the Trump message or fuel it?
On Monday, after a security briefing, President Obama conceded the shooter was “inspired by various extremist information” online. His sole reference to what this might be was a line about the “perversions of Islam that you see generated on the internet.”

Characteristically Monday found Mr. Trump repeating his call for a temporary ban on Muslims. Let’s stipulate this call is all his critics say it is: overly broad and not well thought out, given, for example, that to defeat the Islamists making war on America we will need the full assistance both of Muslim nations and individual Muslims, not least Muslim Americans.

But Mr. Trump’s comments are not received in a vacuum. They come in the context of an Obama administration and a Hillary Clinton campaign that, 15 years after al Qaeda hijackers flew civilian airliners into buildings in New York and Washington, still have trouble acknowledging radical Islam as a motivating force. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Canute and Orlando Barack Obama discovers too late that he cannot order the tide of war to recede. Bret Stephens

In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.

All of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

King Canute of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede. President Canute stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end. Neither tide nor war obeyed.

In 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the result of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.

But then the Obama Doctrine kicked in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before ISIS declared its caliphate. CONTINUE AT SITE

Islam’s Jihad Against Homosexuals The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened an institutionalized Muslim homophobia. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

Not all Muslims are homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly counter to their religion.

In his 2006 book “Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law,” the Dutch scholar Rudolph Peters notes that most schools of Islamic law proscribe homosexuality. They differ only on the mode of punishment. “The Malikites, the Shiites and some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites are of the opinion that the penalty is death, either by stoning (Malikites), the sword (some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites) or, at the discretion of the court, by killing the culprit in the usual manner with a sword, stoning him, throwing him from a (high) wall or burning him (Shiites).”

Under Shariah—Islamic law—those engaging in same-sex sexual acts can be sentenced to death in nearly a dozen countries or in large areas of them: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the northern states of Nigeria, southern parts of Somalia, two provinces in Indonesia, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. Death is also the penalty in the territories in

Saudi Arabia’s New Oil Policy by Sabah Khadri

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world.

The prince has already received negative blowback from conservative members of the Al Saud clan. They have been resistant to change in the past and may not appreciate new reforms which might threaten their authority in the country.

The status quo is that Saudis are raised with the conviction that the state will always provide for their needs, healthcare and security, in exchange for their loyalty to the ruling Al Saud clan. However, the recent oil crisis has witnessed many luxuries stripped away from the Saudi people, as the state prepared to deal with a growing budget deficit. The move to impose taxes, a concept alien to the country, is sure to create discontent among ordinary Saudi people.

Saudi Arabia, long associated with oil wealth and extravagance, has decided that time has come for it to revamp its image. Last year, King Salman, 80, ascended the Saudi throne, and since then has unleashed major reforms, introduced a more assertive domestic and foreign policy, and handed over the reins of some of the most significant posts of the Saudi leadership to a younger group of Saudi leaders.

The driving force behind these reforms is the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS. Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world. All of this may come across as appealing, but the ability of Prince Mohammed to deliver these reforms depends on several variables. To succeed, Prince Mohammed, although he enjoys a broad mandate, still needs the support of the rest of the country.