Displaying posts published in

July 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jim Campbell: Defining the Problem With Allah

By on July 12th, 2016

“The most important task of leaders is to keep their populations safe from harm. This should not only be in respect of physical harm or subjugation but also from moral and spiritual harm. I challenge any politician or would-be leader to outline their plans for eliminating the behaviors itemized earlier in this piece and for ensuring that their children’s grandchildren will not have to contend with an Islamic caliphate and Sharia law. Islamic leaders are also welcome to chime in.”

The revelations Muslims are obliged to believe Muhammad received from his heavenly envoy lay out how the faithful must regulate their lives and relations with non-believers. Prominent among them, the obligation to do “good deeds” — and that is the problem.
In the wake of the recent and horrific Orlando massacre, political leaders, experts, commentators, and letter writers have trotted out just about every rationale they could think of to explain this dreadful incident: gay hate, ISIS, mental instability, terrorism, radical Islam, US gun culture, and loan wolves.

While some or all of the above may have played a part, they are all delusions when it comes to the real issue of resurgent Islam (see Kidding Ourselves About Islam). There was, however, one factor that is common to this and similar terrorist events: the perpetrator is reported to have shouted “Allahu Akbar”.

Yes, we need to talk about Allah.

Who is Allah? Allah is regarded as the spiritual monotheistic god who revealed himself to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel over about a 30-year period around AD 630. These revelations form the Koran, which contains the precepts that direct Muslims in their daily life. It is possible that the following precepts of the Koran may have had a bearing on Omar Mateen’s actions.

You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them—Allah does not guide such wrongdoers. (The Feast 5:51)

The believers should not make the disbelievers their allies rather than other believers— anyone who does such a thing will isolate himself completely from Allah—except when you need to protect yourself from them. Allah warns you to beware of Him: the Final Return is to Allah. (The Family of Imran 3:28)

With these thoughts in mind, Mateen may have been encouraged in his actions by the following or like directives.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Michael Copeman: Brexit and the Camel’s Nose

By on July 12th, 2016

By 2061, the future EU may well be majority Muslim, which appears not to have concerned younger voters steeped since infancy in the official doctrine of relativism and multicultural ‘tolerance’. Older voters recalled that the Channel has been a useful obstacle to invasion and subjugation.
The UN High Commission for Refugees estimates over one million people made their way to Europe last year by boat. Sadly, we are not talking the Queen Mary, nor P&O. In the cold first six months of this year, a quarter of a million more arrived on small boats with unreliable engines. Who knows what numbers — along with tragic losses in the crossing — the current summer will bring.

This level of mass movement of humanity is unprecedented. Even the surging population movements after the Second World War are being surpassed. And Europe, or the EU as the body in charge of migration, has no answer to the problem, only Angela Merkel’s initial, naive response to let them come.

By 2061 (when I hope to be 100) the future EU (including Turkey) may well be majority Muslim. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that half of current EU citizens will be dead by then, and record low birth rates mean next generations will be small, while family reunions of current and future migrants, plus two generations of their own vast progeny, will tip the scales the Muslim way.

The unprecedent immigration to Europe by people largely of Arab background was no doubt a major factor in ordinary Britons recently voting for Brexit. Many average Englanders, interviewed the week after the vote, shyly but firmly implied this to be so. Their second cousins in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted otherwise, but are also unlikely to be home to as many refugees.

Modern Britons — despite their occasional worst examples on TV — tend to be a tolerant people. Alf Garnett was only funny because, already in the 1960s, his views were no longer mainstream. In the lifetime of most British adults, there have seen successive waves of immigration from the Caribbean, from the Subcontinent, and in the past two decades from continental Europe. These waves, with all the cultural changes accompanying them, have transformed urban Britain. London, Leicester, Luton and Slough already have non-white majorities. Birmingham will shortly. All these places are now irretrievably different from fifty years ago.

Did the existing British complain? Yes. That’s a national British pastime, especially if the weather turns unusually mild for a day or two. But, did they turn the waves back? No. Did they integrate all these diverse migrants into the wider British society, bit by bit? Yes, of course they did. To do otherwise would have been unfathomable.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Two Guantanamo Prisoners Moved to Serbia Resettlement of detainees, who are from Tajikistan and Yemen, By Felicia Schwartz

By on July 12th, 2016

WASHINGTON—The U.S. transferred two prisoners from the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay to Serbia, the Pentagon said Monday.

The resettlement of the prisoners, Muhammadi Davlatov of Tajikistan and Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi of Yemen, brings the prison’s population down to 76. Of those, 27 have been approved for transfer to another country.

Monday’s announcement followed a transfer on Sunday of a Yemeni detainee to Italy and comes as U.S. and Latin American officials are trying to locate a former Syrian prisoner who was resettled to Uruguay in 2014 but who has recently disappeared.

“The United States appreciates the generous assistance of Serbia as the United States continues its efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” Secretary of State John Kerry said.
Officials have said the Obama administration hopes to whittle the prison’s population down by the end of the summer by moving all of those prisoners who have been cleared for transfer. That number has grown as the administration has sped up the periodic review process that determines whether those who have been detained without charge can be sent to another country and resettled. Therefore, moving all of those cleared for transfer could take longer.

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to close the prison but has struggled to do so as he faces opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. He presented a plan to lawmakers in February that would involve moving those who can’t be released, including those who are facing military commissions or are deemed too dangerous for transfer, from the facility to the U.S., which is now barred by law. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Truth Catches the Iran Deal Obama trumpets an agreement that Tehran violates at every turn. Bret Stephens see note please

By on July 12th, 2016

Bret Stephens has endorsed Hillary, calling her the “Conservatives Hope”…..( http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-the-conservative-hope-1462833870)she supports the Iran Deal …..” rsk
What diplomats call the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—known to the rest of us as the Disastrous Iran Deal—was agreed in Vienna a year ago this week. Now comes a status update, courtesy of our friends at the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV.

In its fascinating 2015 annual report, published late last month, the German domestic intelligence service reports a “particularly strong increase” in the number of Salafists, describes the reach of Russian and Chinese espionage efforts in Germany, and notes a growing number of right-wing extremists.

Then there’s this:

“The illegal proliferation-sensitive procurement activities [by Iran] in Germany registered by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution persisted in 2015 at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level. This holds true in particular with regard to items which can be used in the field of nuclear technology.”

The report also notes “a further increase in the already considerable procurement efforts in connection with Iran’s ambitious missile technology program which could among other things potentially serve to deliver nuclear weapons. Against this backdrop it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.”

The BfV report arrived days before Germany arrested a Pakistani national, identified as Syed Mustufa H., accused of spying for Iran. It also corroborates another German intelligence report, this one from the intelligence service of North Rhine-Westphalia, that Iran’s nuclear procurement efforts have increased dramatically in recent years, from 48 known attempts in 2010 to 141 in 2015. Seven other German states have reported similar Iranian procurement efforts. This violates Iran’s explicit commitment to go through an official “procurement channel” to purchase nuclear- and missile-related materials.

All this was enough to prompt Angela Merkel to warn the Bundestag last week that Iran “continued to develop its rocket program in conflict with relevant provisions of the U.N. Security Council.” Don’t expect German sanctions, but at least the chancellor is living in the reality zone.

As for the Obama administration, not so much. For the past year it has developed a narrative—spoon-fed to the reporters and editorial writers Ben Rhodes publicly mocks as dopes and dupes—that Iran has met all its obligations under the deal, and now deserves extra cookies in the form of access to U.S. dollars, Boeing jets, U.S. purchases of Iranian heavy water (thereby subsidizing its nuclear program), and other concessions the administration last year promised Congress it would never grant.

“We still have sanctions on Iran for its violations of human rights, for its support for terrorism, and for its ballistic-missile program, and we will continue to enforce those sanctions vigorously,” Mr. Obama said in January. Whatever.

The administration is now weighing whether to support Iran’s membership in the World Trade Organization. That would neutralize a future president’s ability to impose sanctions on Iran, since WTO rules would allow Tehran to sue Washington for interfering with trade. The administration has also pushed the Financial Action Task Force, an international body that enforces anti-money-laundering standards, to ease pressure on Iran, which FATF did last month by suspending some restrictions for the next year.

And then there’s the Boeing deal to sell $17.6 billion worth of jets to Iran, which congressional Republicans led by Illinois’s Pete Roskam are trying to stop. Iran uses its civilian fleet to ferry weapons and fighters to its terrorist clients in Syria and Lebanon.

“The administration is trying to lock in the Iran deal and prevent a future president from doing anything, including pushing back on Iran’s malign behavior,” says the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz, who knows more about Iran sanctions than anyone in Washington. “Instead of curbing Iran’s worst behavior, the administration effectively facilitates it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Worst President? I nominate Barack Obama, the anti-Lincoln. Myron Magnet

By on July 12th, 2016

After Thursday’s terrorist slaughter of policemen in Dallas, it’s fair to say that Barack Obama might well be the worst president in U.S. history. Here’s why.

The keynote of America’s domestic politics for the last 60 or 70 years—from sometime between the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act—has been the nation’s effort to undo the heinous wrongs that slavery and Jim Crow perpetrated on black Americans ever since the first slave was brought here in the 1640s. I am old enough to have had friends who were Freedom Riders, white college kids who went to Mississippi to register black citizens to vote. One I’ll never forget returned with tales of old people, whom legal chicanery had blocked from voting all their lives, marveling in almost Biblical language that such a miracle could be occurring in their own lifetimes, in their own towns. I remember how Sherriff Bull Connor turned the fire hoses and German Shepherds on those civil rights protesters, black and white, in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and how that same year governor George Wallace stood at the door of the University of Alabama to prevent the enrollment of two black students, proclaiming himself Jefferson Davis’s spiritual heir and vowing “segregation forever!” But what I most remember is skinny Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach walking heroically down that hostile Alabama street—alone, but followed by federal marshals—to force Wallace to stand aside and let the two students enter. It was as heart stopping as Gary Cooper walking toward the showdown on Main Street in High Noon.

I also remember how civil rights zeal turned into zealotry. We made the integration of our schools, and then the closing of the black-white achievement gap, our principal educational goal for half a century, with the unintended consequence that we neglected actual education and turned urban schools into machines for perpetuating black failure. Judge-ordained busing in Boston, completely contrary to the terms of the Civil Rights Act, made the schools more segregated than ever. A judge-ordained Kansas City school-funding-equalization order, forcing local taxpayers to shell out $2 billion over a decade, including building a bizarrely unnecessary Olympic swimming pool, produced no educational gains whatsoever and proved to anyone with eyes to see that money was not the key to racial equality in education.

Then, the colleges turned to affirmative action in admissions, the ed schools taught their students not how to teach or what facts they needed to transmit but only “social-justice” ideology, and deans of diversity began to outnumber actual teachers on college campuses. The professors themselves brought the stupendous achievements of Western culture under the suspicion of creating nothing but racial inequality (and later an unimaginably broad smorgasbord of inequity). They replaced Plato with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Believing that welfare payments constituted well-deserved reparations for 300 years of slavery and oppression, we New Yorkers created a come-and-get-it dole that ended up with one in eight of our neighbors on the welfare rolls—paid for by the rest of us and resulting in a multi-generational underclass. We entertained the foolish notion that black crime was a manly revolt against oppression—that black criminals were only protesting against the closure of all avenues of honest advancement for their race, as well as against the daily humiliation heaped on African-Americans.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In Common Occurrence, Iranian Boats Veer Close to U.S. Warship Top U.S. general in region voices concern about how quickly such an encounter could turn lethal By Gordon Lubold

By on July 12th, 2016

ABOARD THE USS NEW ORLEANS—Boats from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maneuvered dangerously close to a U.S. military vessel in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, part of a pattern that the top American general in the region—who was on the ship at the time—said risked grave miscalculation.

“What concerns me is our people don’t always have a lot of time to deal with those interactions,” said Gen. Joe Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, as he stood on the bridge of the amphibious ship later in the day. “It’s measured in minutes to really have the opportunity to make the right decision.”

The five Iranian boats included four small patrol craft and a larger boat called a Houdong fast-attack craft. At least one of the patrol boats was equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun and what is known as a multiple rail rocket launcher. They came within several hundred yards of the American ship.

The series of encounters on Monday took place as the New Orleans sailed in international waters through the strait. Gen. Votel, on a swing through the Middle East this week, voiced concern about how quickly such an encounter could turn lethal for the ship, which was carrying about 700 Marines.

In the case of Monday’s incident, U.S. officials didn’t consider the Iranian ships to be technically harassing the American warship, but said they came unacceptably close to doing so. Iran officials couldn’t immediately be reached to comment.

The encounters might have been considered more dramatic if they weren’t so common. American Navy ships reported about 300 incidents with Iranian vessels during 2015, according to data provided by the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Most of those “interactions,” as the Navy calls them, are considered safe or don’t rise to the level of harassment, according to Navy officials.

Navy officials essentially grade Iranian naval behavior on a curve. They said that the way the Iranians behave typically, even when they don’t actually harass American warships, is still not the way most professional navies behave at sea.

About 10% of all incidents are of greater concern, Navy officials said. These may entail Iranian craft crossing the bow of an American warship, approaching at a high rate of speed, or training weaponry on a U.S. vessel.

The IRGC’s routine actions in the region force American warships to have to determine just what their intent is, said one officer here.

“It’s very common for them to come up to within 300, 500 yards of us, and then they’ll turn, or parallel us and stop,” said Lt. Forrest Griggs, the New Orleans’s operations officer. “We try not to become accustomed to that because we don’t want to become complacent.”

Navy officials maintain they always navigate through the international waters of the strait—through which a third of all seaborne oil and other energy products are shipped—and Gen. Votel said the U.S. isn’t trying to provoke Iran with such operations.

Tensions at sea have been high since an incident in January in which two U.S. Navy riverine boats slipped mistakenly into Iranian territorial waters and became stranded before IRGC forces surrounded and boarded them and detained 10 American sailors at gunpoint.CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump and the Delegates A court ruling gives an impetus to unbinding GOP convention-goers. Joe Rago…please see note

By on July 12th, 2016

This is not a “conscience vote”….It is a petulant vote that disrupts democracy and causes chaos and hands Hillary the election…..even the article acknowledges:
“Then again, denying Mr. Trump the nomination could also be futile at this stage. Defeating him would inflame party divisions, and no Republican can win without the support of Mr. Trump’s core voters. This is why even a conscience vote is opposed by the Republican National Committee.” rsk

A federal judge on Monday issued a permanent injunction that overturns a Virginia law requiring that delegates to this month’s party conventions vote based on the results of the primaries. The thunderclap ruling is right on the legal and constitutional merits, but the larger political question is whether Republicans should adopt a conscience rule to unbind the delegates in Cleveland next week.

The case was brought by Beau Correll, a Ted Cruz supporter who doesn’t want to vote for Donald Trump as Virginia law says he must. Federal Judge Robert Payne’s opinion makes a persuasive case that the Virginia law—and by implication any state’s law—that binds delegates violates First Amendment rights of free speech and association. Political parties are private institutions that exist to advance their common beliefs and to nominate candidates without state interference, and delegates must be unconstrained in their choices.

“First Amendment rights for parties and their adherents are particularly strong in the context of the nomination and selection of the President and Vice President,” Judge Payne writes in Correll v. Herring.

The ruling applies only to Virginia’s delegates to both party conventions, but it may give an impetus to Republicans in other states who are pushing for a “conscience clause” that would unbind all delegates. That question will be put this week before the Republican National Convention’s 112-member rules committee. Merely one-quarter of the rules committee, or 28 members, can send a minority report to the floor for a debate that would be followed by an up-or-down vote by the full convention.

How a vote to unbind would shake out is anyone’s guess, but there is nothing illegitimate about it. Republicans should respect the preferences of primary voters, though not automatically. Political parties exist to win elections—in other words, nominating the candidate with the best chance in November. If the delegates are unbound to exercise their judgment, and a majority concludes that is someone other than Mr. Trump, the GOP has the right to do so.
Mr. Trump carried 36 states and secured about 1,450 pledged delegates, more than the 1,237 who make a majority under current GOP rules. By the time all the ballots were cast, he received 44% of the popular vote. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SEE VIDEO: PAT CONDELL “WE SAVED OUR DEMOCRACY”

By on July 12th, 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THWPJE4xaJM

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘ISIS-inspired’ Plan to Blow Up Jewish, American Institutions in South Africa Revealed

By on July 12th, 2016

Twin brothers, 24, intended ‘to cause and spread terror’ in South Africa’s Jewish community in what a Johannesburg court calls an attempted act of terrorism.

Twin brothers have been charged with conspiring to blow up various Jewish institutions and a U.S. mission in South Africa, a police spokesman said Monday, in what a Johannesburg court has called an attempted act of terrorism.

Spokesman Hangwane Mulaudzi said that Brandon-Lee Thulsie and Tony-Lee Thulsie, 24, and two other people, identified as siblings Fatima and Ibrahim Mohammed Patel, who are yet to be charged were arrested in Johannesburg on Saturday. The brothers are accused of intending “to cause and spread feelings of terror,” particularly in South Africa’s “Jewish sector,” the court’s provisional charge sheet said, News24 reported.

The Patel siblings appeared in a separate court Monday after a stun grenade and live ammunition were confiscated during a raid on their home outside Johannesburg on Saturday night, said Phindi Louw, a spokeswoman for the National Prosecuting Authority.

The Thulsie brothers’ planned attack may have been “to further the … motives and objectives” of ISIS, according to the court. The four were arrested before boarding a flight to Syria and had been under surveillance for nearly a year. “The allegation is that after the training, they would come back to South Africa,” Malaudzi said.

Continue reading →