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July 2016

San Diego police say officer fatally shot, another wounded

Thomson Reuters BRENDAN O’BRIEN, IAN SIMPSON, W SIMON AND BILL TROTT

A San Diego police officer was fatally shot and another was wounded late on Thursday, the police department said on Friday, adding one suspect was taken into custody.

The officers, members of the department’s gang suppression unit, were shot during a traffic stop at about 11 p.m. PDT (0600 GMT) in Southcrest, a neighborhood in southeast San Diego, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. The officers were taken to hospitals.

“It is with a very sad heart that we announce the death of one of our officers tonight,” the department said on Friday on its Twitter feed.

The second officer underwent surgery and is expected to survive, it said.

The police department said it was searching for suspects in addition to the one in custody.

Leaks, Hacks, and Liberals So now WikiLeaks is bad. by Gabriel Schoenfeld

The facts are by now widely known, if still not nailed down with precision. On Friday, July 22, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, a massive trove of emails purloined from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by hackers was posted on WikiLeaks, the online bulletin board for leaked information founded by the Australian anarchist Julian Assange. Strong evidence rapidly emerged showing that the hackers were connected to or under the control of Russian intelligence. As the press picked through the mildly juicy revelations, the favoritism of the supposedly neutral DNC toward Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders was put before the world to see.

The result has been a continuing maelstrom. Supporters of Sanders, already agitated for having to swallow the bitter pill of defeat, were inflamed. Backers of Hillary, embarrassed and chagrined, decried the apparent Russian interference in party affairs. It did not take long for the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to be unceremoniously purged from her position and for the newly cleansed DNC to issue an apology to Sanders and everyone else it had wronged.

There the story has paused, but it is hardly over. There are grounds to believe that the Clinton Foundation was also hacked and quite possibly Hillary’s vulnerable private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., which housed her official emails during her tenure as secretary of state, including the 33,000 or so that she and her lawyers wiped from the memory because they were deemed “personal.”

The worry, of course, is that Russian intelligence has all of these, and that many more damaging disclosures of Clinton shenanigans are yet to come. Donald Trump, startling the world, has called upon the Russian government, if it did hack Hillary’s emails, to release them, with the obvious aim of injuring Hillary’s campaign and boosting his own. If that is indeed what happens, and WikiLeaks blasts new revelations onto the net on the eve of the elections in an October surprise, it could well propel Trump into the White House. That is exactly what Assange, who publicly favors Trump over Clinton, and who claims to have more of her secrets in his quiver, is threatening. The prospect has liberals wringing their hands.

A case in point is Franklin Foer, the former top editor at the New Republic and now a contributing editor at Slate. To Foer, the DNC email scandal is the sum of all his fears. “A foreign government,” he writes, “has hacked a political party’s computers .  .  . stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure.” It is “trespassing, it’s thievery, it’s a breathtaking transgression of privacy.”

One cannot disagree. But how does this particular data breach, one is left wondering, differ from the leaks that Foer and other liberals routinely celebrate as the stock in trade of American investigative journalism?

Foer has a ready answer: What is especially “galling about the WikiLeaks dump,” he explains, is that it “has blurred the distinction between leaks and hacks.” Hacks, to Foer, are bad, conducted by bad people for bad purposes. The Russian hack, he writes, is the equivalent of Watergate: “To help win an election, the Russians broke into the virtual headquarters of the Democratic Party. The hackers installed the cyber-version of the bugging equipment that Nixon’s goons used—sitting on the DNC computers for a year, eavesdropping on everything, collecting as many scraps as possible.”

Trump’s Unsettling Response to Turkey’s Islamist Tyranny After years of a gradual erosion of the secular state, the Turkish government has been sprinting towards Islamist tyranny since the failed coup attempt. BY Ryan Mauro

After many years of a gradual erosion of the secular state, the Turkish government has been sprinting towards Islamist tyranny since the failed coup attempt. The response of Donald Trump to this new reality is unsettling, to say the least.

He declined to commit a potential Trump administration to opposing the Erdogan government’s crackdown, using the Islamist line that the U.S. lacks the moral authority to criticize other countries’ human rights abuses.

In an interview with the New York Times after the coup failed, Trump said he “give[s] great credit to him [Erdogan] for being able to turn that around” and marveled at the scenes of protestors stopping the involved military personnel. Hillary Clinton opposed the coup while standing by criticism of the Turkish government.

The reporter pointed out to Trump that Erdogan has used the coup as a pretext for a massive crackdown, arresting 50,000 people, removing major elements of the judiciary and suspending thousands of teachers.

Clarion published a stunning accounting of the purge. Now, the regime just shut down another 130 media outlets and kicked out 1,700 members of the military.

Trump did not speak out against these purges and said that opposing the Islamist tyranny in Turkey would not be a part of his administration’s agenda. He did, however, say there “may be a time when we can get much more aggressive on that subject…We’re not in a position to be more aggressive. We have to fix our own mess.”

Taken To Saudi Arabia And Locked in a Cage British-Saudi dual citizen Amina al-Jeffrey was taken to Saudi Arabia by her father after she kissed a boy at 16. She is desperate to return to the UK.

Amina al-Jeffrey was born in Swansea, UK, and taken at age 16 to Saudi Arabia by her father, who disapproved of her Western lifestyle.

Now 21, she is fighting a court battle in the High Court in London against her father to be allowed to return to the UK.

She alleges that her father, Mohammed al-Jeffrey, put “metal bars” on her bedroom and described being a “locked-up girl with a shaved head.”

Still a judge in the High Court, Justice Holman, has asserted, “We have to be careful about asserting the supremacy our cultural standards.”

Holman also said that it is unclear whether or not Britain had jurisdiction in the matter since al-Jeffrey was an adult with dual Saudi and UK citizenship.

Al-Jeffrey said her father hit her, deprived her of water and forced her to urinate in a cup.

Although “metal bars are no longer in her room” according to her lawyers, “she is still locked up in the house” and “not allowed to use the phone or internet.”

“Steps need to be taken to ensure Ms. Jeffery is returned to the UK where her safety can be guaranteed,” the Foreign Office Forced Marriage Unit said in a statement.

“Her treatment has extended to depriving her of food and water, depriving her of toilet facilities, physical assault and control of her ability to marry who she wishes and creating a situation in which she feels compelled to marry as a means of escape,” Henry Setright, a lawyer acting on behalf of al-Jeffrey said in a statement.

Being a priest has become a dangerous job Ed West

Fr Jacques Hamel, murdered today by Islamists in Normandy, was 84, and in his life would have seen his country transformed, from the Occupation to the Thirty Golden Years and through to this modern unhappy age. I can’t imagine that a young priest in the age of the Piuses would have expected to end his life in such a manner, near to where Joan of Arc was martyred, but then Europeans are getting used to things that a few decades ago would have been absurd.

After the war, Europeans thought they could escape history, and retire to a secular, progressive world in which historical conflicts of identity would be a thing of the past. But instead of fascism and communism, even older, more retrograde ideologies have sprung up, and history goes on.

Christianity might be dying of indifference in western Europe but elsewhere it remains a living part of history, and that story includes persecution. Being a priest or a religious remains a dangerous task – earlier this year four nuns in Yemen were murdered, while a number of priests and bishops have been killed in Syria; likewise in Iraq, where some 60 churches were bombed during the conflict, the worst incident being the 2010 Our Lady of Salvation massacre where 52 men, women and children were slaughtered by a then little known outfit called the Islamic State of Iraq. The survivors were given asylum in France, which has always been especially generous towards eastern Christians.

In recent years the most dangerous place to be a priest has been Mexico, where the endless drug wars have put different types of bad guys in positions of power; but there is no doubting that Islamic intolerance remains the greatest threat to churchmen worldwide, as it does to Christians. Islamists have previously concocted plots to attack churches in France, but now that it has finally happened the future seems daunting.

France has several thousand churches still functioning to some degree or other (it has 40,000 in total, but population decline and secularisation put pay to many long ago) so it would be physically impossible to guard them in the way synagogues are now sadly protected in that country.

It’s hard not to be extremely pessimistic about the situation in Europe, for identity-based violence has a momentum of its own, and it is difficult to imagine we’ll get through this summer without more horror in France or Germany.

The irony is that many angry young Islamists are especially hostile to Christianity, yet this new wave of violence is a product of the very openness that Christianity brought to Europe. As Tom Holland explained in this magnificent essay:

‘Even today, with pews across Europe increasingly empty, the attempt to fashion an inclusive and multi-faith future for the continent remains shadowed by a paradox: that it has patently been grounded in Christian doctrines. The inheritance of Christendom, even when most assertively repudiated, has proven a hard one to buck. The Bible, for all that it might be deployed to mandate the violence of warrior-kings and crusaders, was not only a tool of the mighty. It served as well to endow the weak, the poor, and the needy with a value that they had never before possessed. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies . . .’” Such a command, like many that Jesus gave, might seem so counterintuitive as to appear impossible to fulfill; and yet for all that, and however little many may have paused to contemplate its ultimate derivation, it has provided elites across Europe, in their efforts to accommodate immigrants from outside the Christian tradition, with their moral lodestar.’

The Islamist Enemy Within, & Christians Without

On learning that 86-year-old Father Jacques Hamel had murdered in his own church in a village near Rouen by Islamist demons who stormed in during Mass and slit his throat, the president of the World Jewish Congress issued a heartfelt message of condolence:

“This morning, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims of yet another atrocious attack, and with the good people of France who sadly have become so familiar with the reality of terrorism in recent months.

Alas, there is no respite. Every day, these terrorists make it abundantly clear to the world that nothing is sacred to them, that they will not shy away from any execrable affront to the most basic values of our society.

Let’s be clear: this is not a war between religions, but between good and evil. We must stand as one in the face of this great threat. We must not be intimidated, but cherish our freedom, including the freedom to worship. We must speak out and not be silent. We must defend each other, and we must look after one another: one religious community after the other, one country after the other. This evil scourge won’t be defeated unless we are united in our resolve to defeat it.”

“Not a war between religions”.

Many might disagree.

Though perhaps not this chap Sutherland.
He’s one of the political elites who wants Europe to be ever more f*cked culturally enriched.

Remember this?:

And clearly not the Pope:

‘Pope Francis has warned that a recent wave of jihadist attacks in Europe is proof that “the world is at war”. However, he stressed he did not mean a war of religions, but rather a conflict over “interests, money, resources”. He was speaking ahead of his visit to Poland to reporters seeking his comments on the murder of a Catholic priest by French jihadists on Tuesday….’

He’s now at work on Polish youth, urging them to welcome “migrants”.

Or the repellent Merkel, who has dug her heels in regarding her asylum policy, despite conceding the other day what should have been obvious from the start:

The Lawless Anti-White Identity Politics of the Democratic Party Is on Full Display in Philly The convention so far has featured a blatant racialist play for votes. By Jeremy Carl

If George Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door and received the rapturous applause of thousands, slobbery encomiums from the mainstream media, and the blessings of one of the two major party nominees for president of the United States, you would have had something approximating what occurred in Philadelphia over the first two days of the Democratic convention.

Because, like Democrat Wallace’s dangerous rhetoric in 1963, the Democratic Party Convention of 2016 has, at times been a celebration of lawlessness and racial mythology that has led to violence – but the 2016 Democrats lack a President Kennedy to come in to restore order and demand the rule of law be followed. Instead, they’ve got Hillary Clinton, who is perfectly willing to take a blowtorch to truth and to light brushfires of racial conflict at a tense time if that will help her return to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Witness what we have just seen: One candidate for president has been the first-ever candidate for president endorsed by the union of Border Patrol agents. The other candidate proudly features, on the first night of her convention, illegal aliens up on the main stage, while Democrats nationwide cheer. On the next night, we heard from “Mothers of the Movement” a sort of Black Lives Matter placeholder group that offers a fundamentally false racial narrative, which may do for racial tensions in 2016 what Wallace’s did in 1963.

If you wanted to understand the hold that Donald Trump has on a large swathe of conservatives and even fed-up Democrats and independents, the Democratic convention is pretty much a living explanation.

At this point, we’ve become so accustomed to the Democrats’ immigration lawlessness that too many of us accept it. We think there is simply nothing strange about one of our two political parties happily parading lawbreakers in a forum where they are celebrated for their law-breaking. To be fair, there’s nothing new with the Democrats celebrating lawbreakers – after all, they nearly nominated Ted Kennedy in 1980 just eleven years after Chappaquiddick – but to be honoring the lawbreakers specifically for their illegal conduct is something else entirely. One almost expected Bill Clinton to receive an award from Elizabeth Banks for perjury and sexual misconduct. I would have liked to see that acceptance speech rather than his tedious tribute to his longtime partner-in-crime.

But, of course, the Democrats have an advantage. They know that the media is so in the tank for them that their delusional fantasy narratives on racism and immigration will not be seriously challenged no matter what they do. Hillary Clinton could be escorted onstage by an armed contingent of the Fruit of Islam with a just-released illegal-immigrant murderer leading the way and the media would find a way to show that it means that Trump=Hitler. As the Geico commercial says: It’s what they do.

Even more breathtaking is the fact that the GOP, in response to this assault on both law and reason, will only whimper in response, because too many of them, even in the wake of a full-on populist revolt, are in the tank for Paul Ryan–style open borders and for accommodating the racial arsonists of the Black Lives Matter movement. One can only suppose they fear that otherwise they might be called “racists” by the media and have to sit in the corner wearing their collective dunce caps.

These blatant racialist plays by the Democrats are put out in hopes of getting a massive turnout of bloc-voting African Americans and Hispanics that they believe they will need if they are going to overcome Trump’s populist army. Given the media’s penchant for calling anything the GOP does that might serve the legitimate interests of its white base voters “white nationalist,” one might expect them to call the presence of some of the speakers “black nationalist” or “Hispanic nationalist” dog whistles – but that would assume we had a mainstream media more interested in equal treatment than leftist agitprop.

Last night audiences were treated to a standing ovation for Mothers of the Movement, a collection of women who, in the wake of admittedly tragic personal losses, have often been busy consorting with the likes of Al Sharpton in order to turn personal tragedies into national ones. With the camera spotlight on brightly, and in the wake of recent shootings of police officers, Mothers of the Movement were on their best behavior all week, one even giving a shout-out to police. But their polite rhetoric yesterday doesn’t dissolve their records of incitement. And the frequent chants of “Black Lives Matter” by the audience, left no doubt where the audience’s sympathies lay.

Islamic fundamentalists have a special loathing for Christianity Now the persecution of Christians is coming to Europe Damian Thompson

On Tuesday morning, an 85-year-old man was forced to his knees while his throat was slit by Islamic fanatics. The murder of Father Jacques Hamel in the church at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen, has been recognised by western public opinion as an act of unspeakable barbarity. One could say that the facts speak for themselves. But for Catholics, this atrocity possesses a special horror.http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/islamic-fundamentalists-have-a-special-loathing-for-christianity/

Father Hamel was killed while re-enacting the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. That is the essence of the Catholic Mass, which — unlike Protestant commemorations of the Last Supper — is presented to the faithful as the same sacrifice offered by Jesus.

To kill a priest who is saying Mass is therefore an act of unique desecration. You do not need to be a believer to grasp this point. Enemies of the church have understood it since the beginning: an early pope, St Sixtus, was beheaded during Mass in 258 ad by agents of the Emperor Valerian.

Islamists, who reach back to the Dark Ages for so many of their actions, have rediscovered this crime. Their intense (and very successful) campaign to cleanse the Middle East of Christians reached its symbolic peak on 31 October 2010, when Father Thaer Abdal was shot dead at the altar of the Syrian Catholic church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. Fifty-seven other innocent people, many of them worshippers, died with him.

The gunmen who broke into the church during Sunday Mass were heard to scream: ‘All of you are infidels… we will go to paradise if we kill you and you will go to hell.’ They were members of an Iraqi faction of al-Qaeda that had declared war on churches, ‘dirty dens of idolatry’, and in particular ‘the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican’.

The motives of Islamic terrorists are sometimes hard to disentangle from their personal biographies and factional infighting. But sometimes they are obvious, and the only thing obscuring them is the politically correct preciousness of the liberal western media and commentariat.

Many Islamic fundamentalists, including those who don’t participate directly in violence, loathe Christianity with a poisonous passion reminiscent of medieval Christian anti-Semitism. Its practice must be suppressed — either without violence, as in Saudi Arabia, or amid carefully staged scenes of bloodshed, as in Baghdad or Rouen.

When will our politicians accept the reality of Islamic terrorism? We are enduring a summer of terror, but our leaders are in denial Douglas Murray

How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and our justified scepticism of the undiscriminating ‘open borders’ brigade mean that we have so far been spared the delights of what Angela Merkel’s growing army of critics refer to as her summer of terror.It is now a fortnight since Mohammed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ploughed a truck along the Nice seafront, killing 84 people. The following Monday Mohammed Riyad, who said he was from Afghanistan but almost certainly came from Pakistan, screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while hacking with an axe at his fellow passengers on a Bavarian train. The next day another Mohammed, this time Mohamed Boufarkouch, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and stabbed a Frenchwoman and her three daughters (aged eight, 12 and 14) near Montpelier. Mixing things up a little, that Friday’s shooter in Munich was a child of Iranians called Ali David Sonboly. Skip forward a couple of days and a ‘-Syrian asylum seeker’ with a machete was hacking a pregnant woman to death in Stuttgart. The next day another ‘Syrian asylum seeker’, Mohammad Daleel, carried out a suicide bombing outside a bar in Ansbach, Bavaria. And a little over 24 hours later two men shouting the name of Isis entered a church in Rouen during Mass, took the nuns and congregation hostage and slaughtered the priest with a knife.

Although the public know what is going on, the media seems loath to find any connection between these events. Indeed, the same papers that blame an exaggerated spike in ‘hate crime’ on everyone who voted for Brexit seem unwilling to put the blame for these real and violent attacks on the individuals carrying them out. ‘Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast’ was the Reuters headline on the Ansbach story, neatly turning the suicide bomber into the victim and the German asylum system into the perpetrator. As Reuters went on: ‘A 27-year-old Syrian man who had been denied asylum in Germany a year ago died on Sunday when a bomb he was carrying exploded outside a music festival.’ How terrible for him to lose his bomb in such a way.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Challenger, Tim Canova, Visits Radical Mosque IFSF brings al-Qaeda web designer to speak; mosque Youth Joe Kaufman see note pleaseDirector calls Israelis ‘demonic.’

Tim Canova is an uber left Democrat and Wall St. basher and “progressive” Sanders supporter…..even Debbie is better….At present, in District 23, there is no Republican challenger…..rsk

It is election season here in the US, and candidates are clamoring for votes. A problem arises, though, when those seeking votes look for them from those who would wish America harm. That was the case, when politicos, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz primary challenger Tim Canova, showed up to the Islamic Foundation of South Florida, an extremist mosque located in Sunrise, Florida, for an event sponsored by the organization Emerge USA.

Emerge USA is a radical Muslim group which tries to mask its Islamist agenda by claiming to be a political advocacy organization. The main individual behind Emerge is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda and financiers of the Taliban. The group holds events at mosques tied to terrorism. They include Tampa’s al-Qassam Mosque, which was founded by Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, and Pembroke Pines’ Darul Uloom, which has served a number of al-Qaeda operatives and which is headed by an anti-gay imam, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed.

On June 8th, Emerge organized an event – its annual Ramadan Iftar dinner – held at another extremist mosque, the Islamic Foundation of South Florida. Attending the affair were elected officials Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness, Coconut Creek Mayor Mikkie Belvedere, School Board Member Robin Bartleman, State Representative Hazelle Rogers, Broward County Clerk of Courts Howard Forman, and United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Wifredo Ferrer. Many candidates attended as well, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz primary challenger Democrat Tim Canova.

Formerly named the School of Islamic Studies of Broward, the Islamic Foundation of South Florida (IFSF) has been incorporated since September 2009. The Registered Agent for the group’s corporation is Emerge USA’s Khurrum Wahid.

One of the co-founders and current director of IFSF is Mohammed Javed Quereshi. Quereshi was the Manager of the Taco Bell where “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, worked before Padilla met with al-Qaeda leaders and plotted to set off a radiological bomb in the US. According to Padilla, Quereshi gave him his first Quran and invited him to attend mosque. Following Padilla’s conversion, Quereshi would see him at IFSF and the Islamic Center of South Florida in Pompano Beach. Padilla also spent much time at Darul Uloom and Masjid Al-Iman in Sunrise, which was then-headed by imam and Hamas fundraiser Raed Awad.