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July 2016

Yup, She’s Crooked: Fred Barnes

Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States. Aaron Burr was corrupt, but his treason didn’t occur until after his presidential possibilities had dried up. Ulysses Grant was a great man whose administration was riddled with corruption, but he wasn’t personally involved. Warren Harding wasn’t a great man, but he wasn’t party to the corruption in his administration either. Hillary Clinton stands alone.

Her corruption has many dimensions. It encompasses her personal, professional, and political life. There are lots of overlaps. Her use of a private email server engulfs all three aspects. With Clinton, one never has to exaggerate. Her malfeasance speaks for itself, loudly. She lies to get out of trouble and fool the press and voters. But she also lies gratuitously—when it’s not required to avoid trouble. Face to face with the parents of CIA commandos who were killed in Benghazi while protecting Ambassador Chris Stevens, Clinton lied. She said an anti-Islam video had prompted the fatal attack, which she knew wasn’t true, when she could have simply expressed her condolences. Clinton has a masochistic relationship with the media. She spurns them. They protect her.

Is there any public figure who lies as routinely as Clinton? Not in my lifetime in Washington. Not Richard Nixon. Not LBJ. Not Donald Trump. Not even Bill Clinton. She skillfully, though probably unconsciously, spreads out her lies to lessen the impact. But when you pack them together, as Rep. Trey Gowdy did while questioning FBI director James Comey at a House hearing, they’re shocking. The Gowdy-Comey exchange went like this:

Gowdy: Clinton said she never sent or received any classified information over her private email. Not true?

Comey: Right.

The Fire Spreads Three cops dead in Baton Rouge, and the analogies to the 1960s deepen. Heather Mac Donald

Perhaps it will turn out that the latest assassination of police officers, this time in Baton Rouge, is unrelated to the hatred fomented by the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the gunmen were members of militia groups aggrieved by federal overreach, say. But the overwhelming odds are that this most recent assault on law and order, taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.

President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to “biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . . across our criminal justice system.”

Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its “bigotry,” but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:

When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir; no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.

When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.

The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other. Of course, Obama also uttered the mandatory praise for officers who “do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally,” and he warned against “paint[ing] all police as biased, or bigoted.” This was self-indulgent hypocrisy. A passing denunciation of stereotyping hardly compensates for the insane accusation that black parents rightly fear that any time “their child walks out the door,” that child could be killed by a cop.

The Islamic State Threat in the Golan Heights Fabrice Balanche

Using both carrots and sticks, Israel has so far managed to prevent attacks against the Golan, but the danger is growing as jihadist movements increase their presence in southwestern Syria amid setbacks on other fronts.

Israeli military forces in the Golan Heights have been in a state of permanent alert for some time, with one officer recently telling the author that the situation on the other side of the ceasefire line has become “incomprehensible and threatening.” Ever since large contingents of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) withdrew from the demilitarized zone separating the Israeli and Syrian portions of the Golan, various radical groups have taken over much of the area, including the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). And while Druze villages in the area remain under the Assad regime’s control, Hezbollah has repeatedly tried to establish its own foothold there. These developments have exacerbated concerns about a potential jihadist or Hezbollah attack on the western side of the Golan, since destroying Israel remains the mobilizing utopia of all of these movements.
ASSAD HAS LOST MOST OF THE GOLAN

On the Syrian side of the Golan ceasefire line, all of the regime’s armored divisions have gradually been withdrawn in order to fight rebels in the Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs areas. Bashar al-Assad has not been troubled about making such redeployments because he knows that Israel will not invade. Yet his army has also lost a large swath of territory along the Jordanian border between the Golan and Jabal al-Druze, leaving only one regime contingent that holds half of Deraa city and the road to Damascus.

Click on map to view high-resolution version.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), about 150 independent rebel groups are now present in southern Syria. Some of these groups have united under the “Southern Front” umbrella, reportedly with substantial support from a U.S.-backed military operations center in Jordan (MOC Amman). Yet this alliance is only temporary and intended for specific, limited purposes. Thus while JN has no more than 1,500 fighters in the area, and IS less than a thousand, they are enough to play a substantial role inside a very fragmented southern rebellion.

Moreover, MOC Amman seems to have frozen its offensive plans against Deraa and Damascus in recent months, partly because of the Russian intervention in Syria that began last fall, and also because Jordan is straining under the weight of refugees and does not want to encourage heavy fighting that spurs more Syrians to flee across the border. For its part, Russia has not conducted airstrikes in the Golan apart from a brief spate of bombing, respecting President Vladimir Putin’s understanding with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Jihadist groups have been quick to exploit this stalemate, whether by extracting allegiance through force or playing on the sense of betrayal that some local factions feel toward their Western and Arab allies. JN has strengthened its presence in the south and become the dominant player there, just like it did in Idlib province. Its only real competition comes from IS, which exerts local influence through its affiliate, the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade (Liwa Shuhada Yarmouk, or LSY). This is the group that most concerns IDF officials, some of whom believe that LSY could attack Israel with unconventional means such as chemical weapons or suicide attacks.
ISLAMIC STATE AND AL-QAEDA ON ISRAEL’S BORDER

LSY was founded in summer 2012 by a local chief of the Yarmouk Valley, Mohammed al-Baridi. Since his death in November 2015, the group has been led by Abu Obeida Qahtan, a Palestinian Syrian from Damascus and a veteran of conflicts in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where he was close to Osama bin Laden. The group became famous in March 2013 when it kidnapped a group of UNDOF soldiers, later releasing them after extracting ransom from Qatar. Despite this incident, LSY continued to receive military support from MOC Amman until summer 2014, when it became clear that the group had pledged allegiance to IS, according to the Emirati daily the National.

This May, LSY joined together with the Muthanna Islamic Movement and Jaish al-Jihad to create the Army of Khaled ibn al-Walid. From a defined territory protected by the Yarmouk Valley and the Golan ceasefire line, this umbrella group has launched attacks against other rebel factions in the direction of Deraa and Quneitra, including suicide bombings. On July 2, for example, a suicide attack in Inkhil killed 7 Southern Front commanders.

Meanwhile, JN controls the southern areas between IS and the Syrian army, including the ruins of Quneitra city. JN forces in the south first made their presence known in early 2012, launching attacks against Jabal al-Druze. Since then, the group has increased its grip on the rebellion as a whole, cooperating with Ahrar al-Sham to unite various factions on the model of the Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest) coalition in the northwest. But JN was unable to replicate its Idlib successes in the south because MOC Amman actively tried to keep the group away from the Southern Front coalition.

Since last fall, MOC Amman’s priority has been the campaign against IS. Yet fighters supported by the MOC have not been very efficient in that regard, partly because they would prefer to battle the Assad regime, but also, ironically, because their MOC-supplied livelihood depends on a perpetual anti-IS campaign. Thus JN is the only southern player with a genuine interest in eliminating IS, its direct ideological and military competitor.

The Left’s Repulsive Rationalization of Violence against Police There is no excuse for violence against police. It’s time progressive intellectuals said so. By David French

In the hours and days after terrorist massacres of police, one cannot justify violence and remain a member of polite society. Indeed, polite progressive society is even now engaged in the project of propping up Black Lives Matter — of spoon-feeding its activists opportunities to declare that they reject violence in all its forms even as their protests continue to be marked by violence and calls for violence. Anything good and peaceful? That’s Black Lives Matter. Anything violent or destructive? That’s not, even when it’s perpetrated at Black Lives Matter rallies, by people professing the same ideals as Black Lives Matter.

Worse yet, there’s a subset of radicals that refuses to completely disavow violence even when given the opportunity. The trick is to find a way to use the violence without exactly condoning it. How can one condemn it and exploit it?

In a (since-deleted) tweet Think Progress’s Zack Ford wrote: “Given how police haven’t been held accountable for murdering black people, it’s no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.”

What an extraordinary statement. It’s “justice” to kill law-enforcement officers who had nothing to do with any single controversial police killing? If police have been “murdering black people” with no accountability, why not talk about specific cases? Why not deal with specific facts? It is much easier, apparently, to indulge in the crudest sort of moral equivalence, imbued with just enough distance (he’s not explicitly justifying; he’s just not surprised) to ensure you keep your job and your public voice.

The sophisticated approach comes (of course) from white-progressive America’s favorite black intellectual, MacArthur Genius Grant-recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates. Writing in The Atlantic after the Dallas massacre, Coates called the murders an “abhorrent act of political extremism,” but then immediately added this:

A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable.

According to Coates, the son of a Black Panther, the police represent nothing but force, and are thus just another “street gang.”

For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.

Democrats Ignore Inconvenient Math on Nuclear Power The party’s platform ignores the reality that wind and solar aren’t enough. By Robert Bryce

The Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, doesn’t start until July 25, but a look at the party’s draft platform reveals one fact: Democrats remain hopelessly unserious when it comes to greenhouse gases and climate change.

To be sure, the platform contains plenty of phrases that aim to inspire voters, including references to income inequality, “greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street,” and the need to protect civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, LGBT rights, and so on.

While the Democrats are right to favor voting and civil rights for everyone, including women, transgendered people, and homosexuals, they are intolerant of any heterodoxy on the issue of nuclear energy and its pivotal role in the effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

The draft platform includes 24 mentions of the word “nuclear,” but that word is never followed by “energy” or “power.” Instead, it’s followed by words like “annihilation,” “weapon,” and “warhead.” It’s as though the Democrats have pledged to ignore America’s single largest and most reliable source of low-carbon electricity.

Alas, this isn’t new. In the party’s 2012 platform, the phrase “nuclear energy” appears just one time, and that mention occurs in reference to nuclear proliferation. The 2008 platform mentions “nuclear power” only once, and again, refers to nuclear weaponry. This years-long conflation of nuclear energy with nuclear weapons comes straight out of the green Left’s anti-nuclear playbook.

In the draft platform, the Democrats claim that “America must be running entirely on clean energy by mid-century.” The phrase “clean energy” — which is enviro-speak for wind and solar energy (and only wind and solar) — appears 18 times and is regularly followed by words like “jobs,” “economy,” “superpower,” and “leadership.”

What makes the Democrats’ see-no-nuclear-energy, speak-no-nuclear-energy stance so astounding is that the party’s leaders continually claim that anyone who dares differ from the orthodoxy about catastrophic climate change is a “denier.” Furthermore, high-profile climate activists insist that we should “do the math.”

Okay. Let’s do some math.

In 2015, America’s nuclear plants produced 839 terawatt-hours of electricity. (That’s nearly twice as much energy as was produced last year by France’s reactors.) America’s fleet of nuclear reactors is now producing about four times as much low-carbon electricity as all domestic wind projects (193 terawatt-hours last year), 21 times as much as all U.S. solar (39 terawatt-hours), and three times as much as all U.S. hydropower facilities (253 terawatt-hours).

Big Green groups continually claim that we don’t need nuclear because wind and solar are getting cheaper. That might be so, but how soon could wind and solar replace nuclear? Over the past five years, domestic wind-energy capacity has been growing by about 7 gigawatts per year. Each gigawatt of capacity produces about 2.6 terawatt-hours per year. Therefore, at current rates of growth, it will take about 46 years for wind energy to replace the electricity we are now getting from nuclear.

Ten Reasons Why Trump Could Win With four more months until Election Day, be prepared for chills and spills. By Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary Clinton has outspent Donald Trump in unprecedented fashion. Her endorsements bury Trump’s. The Obama administration is doing its best to restore her viability. The media are outdoing their 2008 liberal prejudices. And yet in John Connally delegate fashion, Clinton’s vast expenditures of $100 million plus have so far earned her only a tiny, if any, lead in most recent polls. If each point of approval is calibrated by dollars spent, Trump’s fly-by-night campaign is ahead.

Nor has Trump matched Clinton’s organization or voter-registration efforts. He certainly has blown off gifts from a number of Clinton gaffes and misfortunes, usually by gratuitously riffing on off-topic irrelevancies, from the Trump University lawsuit to the genocidal Saddam Hussein’s supposedly redeeming anti-terrorist qualities. Pollsters, gamers, insiders — everyone, really — have written his political epitaph for over a year. Rarely have conservative voices at mainstream-media outlets vowed not to support the Republican nominee. And yet the longer he stays viable, the more likely it is that Trump has a real chance at winning the presidency, which may already be a veritable 50/50 proposition. So why is the supposedly impossible at least now imaginable?

1. Not a Typical Populist

When critics are not slurring Trump as Hitler or Mussolini, they write him off, in sloppy fashion, as a dangerous populist — at worst an hysterical, demagogic Huey Long, at best a quirky Ross Perot: in other words, a flash in the pan who capitalizes on occasional but brief surges of Neanderthal isolationism, protectionism, nativism, xenophobia, and collective insecurity among the lower middle classes.

That diagnosis is rehashed groupthink. By any definition, Trump is not a classical populist. His traction derives from opposing unchecked and cynical illegal immigration, not diverse and measured legal immigration. And he is rebelling not so much against a flabby, sclerotic status quo as against a radical, even revolutionary regime of elites who are now well beyond accustomed norms. It is hardly radical to oppose the Confederate doctrine of legal nullification in more than 300 sanctuary cities, or a de facto open border with Mexico, or doubling the national debt in eight years, or ruining the nation’s health-care system with the most radical reconstruction in the history of American health-care policy, or systematically running huge trade deficits with an autocratic China that does not adhere to international norms of free trade and predicates expanding political and military power in the South China Sea on its commercial mercantilism. Trump seemed incendiary in the primaries, but as he is juxtaposed to the official Clinton extremist agenda, he will likely be reinterpreted increasingly as more mainstream — a probability enhanced by his selection of Mike Pence as his running-mate.

2. Obama Nihilism

Do not underestimate the volatility of Barack Obama’s popularity. As long as Obama keeps silent and out of the limelight, he nears 50 percent in approval ratings. The moment he returns to the fray (and he always does, as a June bug to a patio light), he instinctively reverts to his natural divisive and polarizing self, as evidenced in his disastrous reactions to the Dallas police shootings, and his politically suicidal post-Dallas courting of Al Sharpton (who used to call on supporters to “off” police) and of the architects of Black Lives Matter. It is likely that Obama, to cement a hard progressive legacy in the next four months, will only double down on his gratuitous pandering, and therefore will see his poll numbers return to the low or mid-40s. That may help Trump seem an antidote rather than an obsequious continuance.

3. Two Sorts of Elitists

Both Trump and Clinton are elitists in an anti-elitist year. But elitism is not all the same. The popular furor is not directed at the rich per se, but rather at the perception of cultural snobbishness and hypocrisy among those who romanticize the always-distant poor, as they favor the always-proximate rich, and caricature the despised middle class that lacks the taste of the latter and the appeal of the former. Trump’s in-your-face tastes and brashness are vulgar in the pure Roman sense, and his accent and demeanor are not those of the cultural elite, or even of the dignified Mitt Romney–type moneyed bluestockings. In contrast, Hillary, like Obama, talks down to Americans on how they ought to think, speak, and act. Trump seems to like them just as they are. In turn, middle-class hatred of the elite is not aimed at Trump’s garish marble floors or the narcissistic oversized gold letters plastered over the entrances to his buildings, but rather at the rarified self-righteous. Like it or not, Trump can square the ridiculous circle of a raucous billionaire as man of the people far better than Hillary can handle the contradictions of a Wall Street–created crony multimillionaire pandering to the Sanders socialists.

How the Media Covers Up Muslim and #BlackLivesMatter Terrorism Every Muslim and #BlackLivesMatter Terrorist is just a “troubled loner.” Daniel Greenfield

No sooner are the bloodstains and bits of human flesh hosed off the concrete from the latest Muslim or #BlackLivesMatter terrorist attack and the grieving families ushered through the cold metal doors of impersonal morgues to identify the bodies of their loved ones that the vultures of the media rise above a wounded city and begin spinning the same old lies.

The propaganda, the artful selection and deselection of facts, have become as familiar to us as they were to any of the residents of the Soviet Union or North Korea. Anyone who pays attention knows not only that they are being lied to, but can easily predict the lies that they will be told on the evening news even before they actually hear them being spoken out loud.

We always knew that the Muslim terrorist, even before he was identified, would turn out to be a secular loner who was depressed over his family life. All the media had to do with Mohammed Bouhlel, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 84 people in Nice, France was to replay the same exact narrative as the one that they had fed us with Omar Mateen, the Islamic terrorist who murdered 49 people in Orlando.

Irreligious, depressed loner with family problems. Check. No connection to Islamic terrorism. Suggestion of mental illness. Check and check. Insistence on his lack of interest in religion? One final check.

Mohammed shouted “Allahu Akbar,” the ancient Muslim battle cry that originated with Mohammed’s murder of Jews whose meaning is that Allah is greater than the deities of non-Muslims, but the media persists in its dedication to burying the truth in a shallow unmarked grave at midnight behind CNN headquarters.

Gavin Eugene Long aka Cosmo Setepenra, who murdered three police officers in Baton Rouge, was also unstable. Much like Dallas cop-killer Micah Johnson, who was also another “unstable loner.”

What do Mohammed and Gavin, Micah and Omar all have in common? They’re inconvenient killers.

The left supports the ideologies, black nationalism and Islam, in whose name they carried out their crimes so the media has to redirect attention away from the ideology to the individual.

It doesn’t matter that the killers were very clear about their motives. What matters is hiding the truth.

The 28 Pages that Damn Saudi Arabia by A.J. Caschetta

More puzzling than the elusive pages from the Congressional 9/11 inquiry is why Obama released them, and specifically, why now.

The president apparently believes it will burnish his legacy, embarrass his enemies and make permanent his diplomatic “accomplishments” with Iran. Reminding Americans of Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qaeda connections, shortly after the one-year mark of the Iran nuclear deal and before the 15-year mark of 9/11, might also continue to desensitize us to the dangers posed by Iran.

Americans suddenly flush with a renewed indignation against the Saudis might not run into the arms of the Iranian mullahs, but some might get distracted from their equally-deserved indignation about Iran’s ongoing missile tests, the steady progress Iranian scientists are making at the nuclear plant in Parchin, and their anger at having been lied to again and again.

After keeping them secret for 14 years, the White House has finally released the 28 pages that were removed from the 2002 Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks and withheld from the final 9/11 Commission Report. More puzzling than the elusive pages is why Obama released them, and specifically, why now.

The administration claims that the 28 pages clear the Saudis because they provide no conclusive evidence of their involvement in 9/11. The media echo chamber followed the administration’s lead: Time, Al Arabiya, NBC, the Associated Press and many others reported that the pages contained “no smoking guns.” But there are smoking guns. Those smoking guns expose the Saudi government as a sponsor of terrorism, and, by proxy, improve Iran’s standing in the Middle East.

Author Paul Sperry writes that the 28 pages “show the hijackers got help from Saudi diplomats and spies.” And while the evidence might not meet the threshold that the current Department of Justice requires for an indictment, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) described it as

“a chilling description of Saudi ties to terrorists, Saudi payments to terrorists, and Saudi obstruction of U.S. antiterrorism investigations” and found “more than enough evidence to raise serious concerns.”

Obama had to know, despite his administration’s tepid affirmation of Saudi innocence, that the information in the 28 pages would inspire a wave of negativity towards Saudi Arabia from the American public. He also knows that anything that hurts Saudi Arabia’s reputation helps Iran. What weakens Saudi Arabia tips the scales in Iran’s favor, as the two nations compete for dominance in the region.

Hezbollah’s Massive Arms Build-up in Lebanese Civilian Areas While new evidence unveils Iran’s bankrolling of Hezbollah. Joseph Klein

Every calendar quarter the United Nations Security Council holds an extensive debate on the Israeli-Palestinian “situation.” The Israeli and Palestinian UN representatives make speeches following the Secretary General’s report on the current status, which are normally predictable restatements of their respective positions. This time, however, Israel’s ambassador Danny Danon, addressing the Security Council at its July 12th meeting, presented new graphic evidence of Hezbollah’s alarming arsenal of rockets and missiles located in civilian areas of southern Lebanon.

Ten years ago, when Security Council Resolution 1701 was adopted, ending the war that had broken out between Israel and Hezbollah, the terrorist group was estimated to have had about 7000 rockets. The resolution called for Hezbollah and other armed groups not officially a part of the Lebanese government’s armed forces to relinquish their weapons. Instead, precisely the opposite has happened. Hezbollah never stopped its arms build-up, which has been funded and supplied principally from the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, Iran.

Hezbollah now has approximately 120,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israeli civilian population centers. By way of comparison, Ambassador Danon said that “more missiles are hidden underground in 10,000 square kilometers [of Lebanon] than the above-ground 4 million square kilometers” of the European North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries.

Referring to aerial satellite imagery, based on the latest Israeli intelligence, Ambassador Danon demonstrated to the members of the Security Council the location of rocket launchers and arms depots that Hezbollah had placed in civilian areas. “The village of Shaqra has been turned into a Hezbollah stronghold with one out of three buildings used for terror activities, including rocket launchers and arms depots,” Ambassador Danon said. “Hezbollah has placed these positions next to schools and other public institutions putting innocent civilians in great danger.”

Hezbollah, aided and abetted by Iran, was “committing double war crimes,” the Israeli ambassador charged. “They are attacking civilians, and using Lebanese civilians as human shields,” he said. “We demand the removal of Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon.”

Not surprisingly, Ambassador Danon’s presentation of irrefutable evidence of Hezbollah’s clear and present danger to Israeli and Lebanese civilians, and his demand for Security Council action, fell on deaf ears. In her own statement that followed Ambassador Danon’s remarks, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power said not a word about what was just presented regarding Hezbollah. Instead, she stuck to her canned talking points that continue to draw a moral equivalence between acts of Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense. “In recent months, there’s been a steady stream of violence on both sides of the conflict,” she said. Then Ambassador Power proceeded to criticize the building of Israeli settlements, as if again to draw a moral equivalence between housing construction and terrorism. She assailed what she called Israel’s “systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalizations of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution.” All that Ambassador Power said about Lebanon was to decry the political stalemate in electing a new president and to state that “the United States is helping the Lebanese armed forces build the capabilities necessary to counter violent extremism and protect the Lebanese people.” If the Obama administration were truly interested in countering “violent extremism” in Lebanon and protecting the Lebanese people, it would start by doing everything possible to eliminate the violent extremist threat posed by Hezbollah’s massive rearmament. That, in turn, would require the Obama administration to reverse its appeasement course towards Iran and tighten, not loosen, the financial screws on the regime.

Immigration and the Terrorist Threat How our leaders are spawning catastrophe. Michael Cutler

The most recent horrific terror attack, this time in Nice, France on Bastille Day, is the latest of a string of attacks overseas as well as inside the United States. It has shaken people around the world, causing them to question what their governments need to do to protect them.

Our leaders are forever reacting to the latest attack, placing us on an elevated defensive posture, whenever and wherever it may occur. Often news reports are aired that show video clips of heavily armed police officers patrolling our airports and other venues in response to the latest attack no matter where the attack was carried out, to create the illusion of protecting us.

This perspective can most generously be called folly. The terror threats we face do not go up and down like the stock market. While it makes sense to marshal snow plow drivers and those that drive the trucks that spread salt on highways when a blizzard is forecast for the region, in preparation for the impending storm to quickly clear the roads, terrorism presents a constant threat.

The only questions are how, when, where, and how many will be killed or injured. We are in this battle for the long haul and failure is not only not an option but would spell the catastrophic demise of our nation.

While some have simplistically said that our military alone, combatting ISIS overseas can protect, the reality is that we must fight this war on two fronts- overseas and within our borders. Domestically this battle must be waged by many elements of the law enforcement apparatus- including, especially, immigration law enforcement authorities.

This was my focus in my recent article, “Fighting The War On Terror Here, There and Everywhere.”

The 9/11 Commission was created to determine how terrorists were able to carry out deadly attacks in the United States to make certain that it would never happen again. This is comparable to the way that the NTSB and the FAA investigate plane crashes to make the appropriate fixes.

The preface of the official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” begins with this paragraph:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”