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July 2016

UPDATE FROM FRANCE: NIDRA POLLER

Adel Kermiche made his first attempt to join the caliphate in March 2015. Alerted by his family, authorities picked him up in Germany and sent him back to France where he was placed under surveillance. In May 2015, he left again, this time using his cousin’s ID. He was picked up in Turkey, sent back to France via Geneva , and placed in detention awaiting trial on terrorist charges. He reportedly shared a cell with a 32 year-old Salafist. In early March 2016 the investigating judge responded favorably to his request for parole. The higher judicial authority objected, a 3-magistrate appeals panel overruled the authorities and released him on parole with the array of restrictions and requirements detailed above. (correction: he only had to report to the police once a week, not every day.)

One could write in advance the first reports about this jihad attack or the next one. The perpetrator(s) is always a nice guy, maybe a bit rough around the edges but friendly, likes music and partying. Nothing but absolutely really I mean completely totally nothing would have even slightly hinted that he might commit such untold violence. He wasn’t even religious! N.B. Islam is a religion of peace, has nothing to do with jihad, sharia, throat-slitting and other mass murders. But the sign that the suspect wasn’t suspicious is…he wasn’t religious. And what happens, two days later, when reporters get to the ‘hood? A year ago or two years ago, x changed. Grew a beard. Talked about nothing but jihad, sharia, Daesh, the koran, hung around the mosque, acted scary.

The second church killer is almost identified. They say it took this long to verify his identity because his facial features were obliterated by commando gunfire, he has never been fingerprinted because he has no criminal record. Though he was flagged as a security risk. Described as “brilliant,” he just earned his baccalauréat degree in business. He was living with his family in Aix les Bains. His mother swears he is not a terrorist but for some reason the specialized terrorist unit had been frantically trying to locate him a few days before the church attack. The “wanted” bulletins described him as dangerous and likely to go into action. Imminently. He left home on Monday, telling his mother he was going to visit a cousin in Nancy. Called home on the eve of the church slaughter. Then nothing. Named by sources as Abdel Malik P. he is probably the accomplice seen in a video testament sent by the pair to the Daesh agency (AMAQ) and proudly displayed.

Debate, as I said yesterday, is raging, and everything that can be said within the limits of decency is being said. The government is on the defensive, inside information is spilling out on all sides, the president, the PM, and the Interior Minister go from TV studios to church services to stand-up declarations in front of their palatial ministries but nothing will stem the tide.

Hillary’s Never-Ending Reintroductions Democrats are still convinced America just doesn’t know the real Her. By Rich Lowry —

If only we could get to know the real Hillary Clinton.

Unveiling the Hillary we supposedly don’t know has been the perpetual, elusive goal of Clinton’s handlers for decades, with the Democratic convention in Philadelphia the latest stab at it.

On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook hopefully maintained that a lot of Americans simply “don’t understand” Hillary’s devotion to others, and the convention aims to give them this “fuller picture.” Or as a CNN headline put it, “Hillary Clinton prepares to reintroduce herself to America.”

Again. Hillary has made more reintroductions than should be allowed for a person who has never gone away.

Political writer Jonathan Rauch has a 14-year rule that posits no one is elected president more than 14 years after winning election as a governor or senator (the traditional jumping-off points for the presidency). Elected to the Senate from New York in 2000, Hillary is technically only a couple of years past this benchmark for staleness — except this doesn’t do justice to how long she has been around, and especially how long it feels she’s been around.

Bill Clinton announced his campaign for president in October 1991. Hillary has been with us ever since. During that campaign, Bill famously told us we’d get two for one. It’s been more than 14 years since she vouched for Bill Clinton on 60 Minutes after the allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers surfaced (1992), tried to remake American health care (1993), wrote the book It Takes a Village to soften her image (1996) and vouched for Bill in yet another sex scandal (1998).

It has been more than 14 years just from one Hillary scandal with a wholly implausible explanation (her amazingly lucrative cattle trades that were first reported in 1994) to another (her private server as secretary of state that was first reported in 2015).

Democrats’ Hysterical Rhetoric Could Help Make Donald Trump President They’ve cried wolf so many times they don’t know how to fight a real beast. By David French

Faced with a GOP nominee like no other in modern political history, the Democrats have a problem: They lack the words to describe him. Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy? That’s how they describe every Republican nominee. He’s divisive, racist, and plutocratic? Ditto.

The Democrats have cried wolf so often that they don’t know how to effectively attack Trump, an actual beast growling at the door. Doubt me? Consider this infamous NAACP campaign commercial from 2000. The ad is directed at that notorious racist monster George W. Bush. Its voiceover is done by Renee Mullins, daughter of murder victim James Byrd:

On June 7, 1998 in Texas my father was killed. He was beaten, chained, and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black.

So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.

Call Governor George W. Bush and tell him to support hate-crime legislation.

We won’t be dragged away from our future.

The images accompanying Mullins’ narration were dark and disturbing, showing the back of a pickup truck with chains leading off the screen. A radio version of the ad was even more vivid, with Mullins describing her father’s death: “I can see skin being torn away from his body. I can hear him gasping for air. I can feel the tears in his eyes.”

It’s horrifying stuff. And reading or hearing it could easily give you the impression that Bush let white supremacists get away with murdering a black man. In reality, two of the three perpetrators in the Byrd case were sentenced to death, and one was sentenced to life in prison.

The NAACP flogged Bush with the most inflammatory language imaginable. Never mind that the hate-crime legislation at issue could not possibly have punished Byrd’s killers more, because they were already receiving the law’s ultimate penalty. There was an election to win, and that meant boosting black turnout. If that meant painting Bush as a monstrous racist, so be it.

Such inflammatory dishonesty is a common Democratic campaign tactic. Remember this, from “Uncle” Joe Biden in 2012?

Yep, Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney — was going to put black Americans “back in chains.” Even worse, Romney would kill those same Americans without compunction:

Media Have a ‘Cry Wolf’ Problem with Trump Decades of smearing decent Republican candidates leaves them without credibility on Trump’s demagoguery. By Jonah Goldberg

Dear Mainstream Media and Democrats: It’s your turn. Now that Donald Trump has been formally nominated, the formal responsibility to stop him passes from the Right to the Left, from Republicans to Democrats and the journalists who amplify their values.

You’re going to find it a very tough slog. And it’s your own damn fault.

During the primaries, the task of exposing the true nature of the Trump takeover fell disproportionately to a few conservative magazines, columnists, renegade radio hosts, and behind-the-scenes activists. We all failed. There will be plenty of time for recriminations and “we happy few” speeches later. (If you detect a note of bitterness on my part, I’m not being clear enough: I contain symphonies of bitterness.)

We failed in part because the mainstream media were having too good of a time to help. Last spring, Stop Trump operatives told me they brought damning stories to mainstream outlets. The response was usually: “We’re not interested in covering that — right now.”

By May, Trump had already received roughly $3 billion worth of free media, thanks to ratings-hungry TV networks. CBS chief Les Moonves summarized it well at an investor conference in February: Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Many in the media were so willing to put clicks and ratings before country because the conventional wisdom was that Trump would fade or implode eventually. Why not gawk at the spectacle? And if Trump did get the nomination, many journalists calculated, all the better. What fun it will be to watch Hillary Clinton destroy Trump and Trump destroy the GOP.

Only slowly have the media come around to the realization that Trump is an actual threat, but now it may be too late because they have a serious “cry wolf” problem. Millions of Americans firmly believe that journalists are water carriers for the Democrats and will tune out much of what they have to say about Trump now that he’s the nominee.

You can start the timeline as far back as the World War II era. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt told the country that if Republicans were returned to power, “even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.” The press nodded along.

In 1964, CBS News’s Daniel Schorr claimed that Barry Goldwater’s planned post-convention vacation in Europe was really an effort to coordinate with “right-wing Germans” in “Hitler’s one-time stomping ground.”

In recent years, as the distinctions between news and opinion, analysis and advocacy, reporting and click-baiting has blurred, the problem has only gotten worse.

Every election cycle, the GOP nominee is smeared as a racist by the Democrats or the press — or both. Representative John Lewis of Georgia trades in a bit more of his hard-earned moral authority each time he insinuates that the GOP nominee is like George Wallace or wants to bring back Jim Crow, and political columnists relinquish a bit more of their claim to objectivity each time they let his comments pass without condemnation or criticism.

George W. Bush revived for the Left the paranoid style in American politics, and if you google “John McCain, racist, 2008” you’ll see he was lazily demonized too.

How the Clintons Got Rich Selling Influence While Decrying Greed Peddling access and elite status, the Clintons have turned progressivism into a lucrative global venture. By Victor Davis Hanson

Most presidents, before and after holding office, are offered multifarious opportunities to get rich, most of them unimaginable to Americans without access to influential and wealthy concerns. But none have so flagrantly circumvented laws and ethical norms as have Bill and Hillary Clinton, a tandem who in little more than a decade went from self-described financial want to a net worth likely over $100 million, or even $150 million.

The media had been critical of former president Jerry Ford’s schmoozing with Southern California elites, with Ronald Reagan’s brief but lucrative post-presidential speaking, and with George W. Bush’s youthful and pre-presidential windfall profits from his association with the Texas Rangers. And all presidents emeriti glad-hand and lobby the rich to donate to their presidential libraries, but with important distinctions. One can argue that Jimmy Carter sought donations to his nonprofit Carter Library and Center out of either ego or a sincere belief in doing good works. The same holds true of the libraries of the Bushes and Reagan. No president, however, sought to create a surrogate nonprofit organization to provide free private-jet travel for the former first family while offering sinecures to veteran operatives between campaigns. The worth of both the Clinton family and the Clinton Foundation (augmented by a recent ten-month drive to raise $250 million for the foundation’s endowment) is truly staggering, and to a great extent accrued from non-transparent pay-for-play aggrandizement.

What, then, makes the Clintons in general, and Hillary in particular, so avaricious, given that as lifelong public officials with generous pensions and paid expenses they nevertheless labored so hard to accumulate millions in ways that sometimes bothered even friends and supporters? Wall Street profiteering aside, why, while decrying soaring tuition and student indebtedness, would Hillary Clinton charge the underfunded University of California, Los Angeles, a reported $300,000 — rather than, say, $50,000 — for a 30-minute chat?

Israeli Flag Set on Fire Outside DNC By Liz Sheld

Protestors outside the Democrat National Convention burned an Israeli flag, chanting “intifada” and “go home, F*** Hillary!”

Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal tweeted pictures from the crowd of protestors.
Byron Tau

✔ @ByronTau

Protesters are burning an Israeli flag now in front of the secure perimeter and chanting “intifada”

Other protestors were holding signs in support of Bernie Sanders.

US media reported that nearly 2,000 demonstrators, predominantly supporters of Sanders, marched on the convention to vent their anger over recent controversies that have embroiled the Democratic party.

Fox News reported that police had detained dozens of people, however authorities said no arrests were made, but more than 50 people were cited for disorderly conduct.

White House Stresses ‘Religious Liberty’ Commitment After Normandy Attack, Doesn’t Mention ISIS By Bridget Johnson

The Obama administration’s response to the church attack in Normandy, France, framed it as a religious liberty issue without mention of ISIS.

During morning Mass today in the town of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, two armed men took five people hostage: two nuns, two parishioners and a priest. They slit the throat of the priest, Rev. Jacques Hamel, 86. One of the hostages was critically injured.

The two terrorists, one who tried to go fight in Syria after the Charlie Hebdo attack but was stopped and briefly imprisoned, were shot dead by police. Another man suspected to have a connection to the attack was arrested.

ISIS’ Amaq news agency quickly claimed responsibility for the attack: “The two executors of the attack on a church in Normandy, France, were soldiers of the Islamic State. They executed the operations in response to calls to target countries belonging to the crusader coalition.”

French President Francois Hollande sent out a tweet “to the families of the victims and to all the Catholics of France” with “the solidarity and compassion of the nation.”

“Daesh has declared war on us,” Hollande told reporters, using the pejorative Arabic acronym for ISIS. “We have to win that war.”

“Terrorists will not give up on anything until we stop them,” the French leader added.

One of the nuns, identified as Sister Danielle, told France’s BFM TV of Father Hamel’s murder: “They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened. They recorded themselves. They did a sort of sermon around the altar, in Arabic. It’s a horror.”

An Italian politician called on Pope Francis to “immediately proclaim him St. Jacques” as a “martyr of the faith.”

Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, said in a statement, “We are particularly shocked because this horrible violence took place in a Church, in which God’s love is announced, with the barbarous killing of a priest and the involvement of the faithful.”

The White House reaction, issued after the ISIS claim of responsibility, came from National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.

“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the horrific terrorist attack today at a Catholic church in Normandy, France. We offer our condolences to the family and friends of the murdered priest, Father Jacques Hamel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the other victims of the attack as well as the parishioners and community members of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray,” Price said.

“France and the United States share a commitment to protecting religious liberty for those of all faiths, and today’s violence will not shake that commitment,” he added. “We commend French law enforcement for their quick and decisive response and stand ready to assist the French authorities in their investigation going forward.”

An ISIS-linked Telegram account posted in French after the attack that “Hitler took 10 years to shake the French… but our state shook France in a hour north to south. Allah bless you o Soldiers of the Caliphate.”

ISIS has had a special target on the Vatican since the inception of their caliphate, detailing in an ebook how critical the sacking of Rome is in their plans for apocalyptic conquest.

The 2015 book predicted “recruits” sympathetic to their cause “will give intelligence, share weapons and do undercover work for the Muslims to pave the way for the conquest of Rome.”

They’re also counting on ethnic minority soldiers defecting from European armies and passing their skills on to others as they raid weapons caches, while “lone wolves from within the community will rise” including “especially ex-gang members who also have access to weapons.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump and NATO A sober look at “the alliance.” Bruce Thornton

“Trump’s critics continue to search for dubious reasons to justify sitting out the election or even voting for Hillary. There may be many reasons not to vote for Trump, but criticizing NATO isn’t one of them.”

The Never Trump crowd has found another example of The Donald’s disqualifying ignorance: comments he made about NATO. He has said that our contributions to NATO are “unfair,” that they are “costing us a fortune,” that we are “getting ripped off,” and that they are “getting a free ride.” By the way, Obama in his Atlantic interview also called the Europeans “free riders,” but I don’t recall a lot of sneering at the president for his “alarming” and “dangerous” remarks, as one critic put it.

Trump also implied that he would put the European NATO members’ feet to the fire about meeting the 2006 requirement that they spend 2% of GDP on their militaries, and suggested he would negotiate a new contribution schedule. Few NATO members have met that requirement, which is a violation of Article 3 that requires member states to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” According to NATO’s own report, only five countries are estimated to meet the 2% requirement in 2016. France, Germany, Italy, and Spain­­––the first, third, fourth, and fifth largest economies in the EU––are not among them. The richest, Germany, is expected to remain at 1.19%. In contrast, the US will spend 3.9%. As Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General from 1999-2004, put it, European nations are “military pygmies.”

Critics of Trump are technically correct to say that he exaggerates when he claims that the US pays the “lion’s share” of NATO funding. In fact, the US pays under a fifth (22%). But the complaints about European NATO members, which predate Trump by decades, take into account more salient deficiencies. “Common funding,” of which the US covers a fifth, is “used to finance NATO’s principal budgets: the civil budget (NATO HQ running costs), the military budget (costs of the integrated Command Structure) and the NATO Security Investment Programme (military capabilities),” according to NATO. In other words, mostly institutional bureaucratic infrastructure.

“Indirect spending” covers what each nation voluntarily contributes to an operation. NATO acknowledges the greater share the US spends on indirect spending: “there is an over-reliance by the Alliance as a whole on the United States for the provision of essential capabilities, including for instance, in regard to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-air refuelling; ballistic missile defence; and airborne electronic warfare.” We could also mention transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and other matériel that the European countries simply don’t have much of. For example, in the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, there were 246 cruise missiles launched. The US fired 228 of them. At $1.5 million apiece, that adds up to $342 million taxpayer dollars spent to destabilize a country and get four of our citizens killed.

This discrepancy in indirect spending and military capability was already obvious in the 1990’s when NATO intervened in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop a vicious war. During the 1999 crisis in Kosovo, the Europeans had to make “heroic efforts” just to deploy 2% of their two million troops, according to the British foreign secretary. Historian William Shawcross writes of the bombing campaign, “The United States flew the overwhelming majority of the missions, and dropped almost all the precision-guided U.S.-made munitions, and most of the targets were generated by U.S. intelligence.”

So Trump’s complaints, as blustering and exaggerated as they may be, are legitimate. Operations conducted by NATO are overwhelmingly American funded and directed, and NATO is a diplomatic fig-leaf for American power.

Oust Western Traitors, Beat Islamic Jihad Who is ultimately responsible for the slaughter of an 84-year-old Christian priest in France? Raymond Ibrahim

Muslims around the world—especially in Europe where their numbers have burgeoned in recent times—are wreaking havoc.

The newest atrocity—assuming another one hasn’t already occurred since this writing—is the barbaric slaughter of an 84-year-old Christian priest in France. Yesterday (7/26) morning, “Allahu Akbar” shouting Muslims stormed his church in Rouen during morning Mass, slit the throat of the octogenarian priest (named Jacques Hamel), and “critically injured” a nun, before being killed by police—the same police who knew that that church was being targeted and had been monitoring one of the murderers for at least one-and-a-half years.

Days earlier in France and Germany, Muslims, mostly migrants, committed terrorist acts in Nice (84 dead), Munich (9 dead), attacked people in train stations (one dead, several injured), killed a pregnant Polish woman, and attacked a mother and her three adolescent daughters (puncturing the lungs of an 8-year-old).

Those who seek to reverse this situation must begin by embracing one simple fact: Islam is not terrorizing the West because it can but because it is being allowed to.

To be sure, that was not always the case: for over a millennium, Muslims repeatedly invaded and conquered portions of Europe—terrorizing, massacring, raping and enslaving in the name of Allah—and were only repulsed by great force of arms.

Indeed, invading and destroying churches, slaughtering priests, even raping nuns is as old as Islam’s first entry into Christian territory in the seventh century, and has played out countless times since. (Watch this brief video for an idea of how many jihadi campaigns were undertaken against Europe.)

Today, Muslim terrorists, rapists, criminals are not entering the West against its will but because of it.

Europe’s Glaring Hypocrisy on Terror and Israel Adopting measures that—when used by Israel—it vilifies.

Western Europe is now being hit by a wave of terror. Israel has expressed sympathy to the governments and peoples, and is helping or has offered to help the hardest-hit countries—France, Germany, and Belgium—fight the terror.

It has been different when terror has pounded Israel. Even during the five-year onslaught known as the Second Intifada (2000-2005), Europe was sharply critical of Israel and denounced all its terror-fighting methods as immoral.

The contrast is particularly striking in light of some disparities. From the Charlie Hebdo attack on January 7, 2015 to Tuesday’s attack in a church, 239 have been killed in France (pop. 67 million). In the Brussels bombings on March 22 this year, 32 were killed in Belgium (pop. 11 million). Since September 15, 2015, terror attacks (counting the Munich shooting late last week) have killed 15 in Germany (pop. 82 million).

During the five years of the Second Intifada, however, 1000 were killed in Israel (current pop. 8.5 million; even smaller then)—a much higher rate even than France has endured since the start of 2015.

Yet, in the course of those intifada years—and since then as well, including, of course, the Gaza wars—Europe’s criticism of Israel’s fight against terror has been unremitting.

The irony is deepened by the fact that some of the Israeli measures that Europe has most fiercely condemned are now used routinely by European countries themselves—without, of course, having to put up with criticism from Israel or anyone else.

For instance, there was once a time when targeted killings—if practiced by Israel—stirred world outrage. On April 17, 2004, with the Second Intifada still seething, an Israeli airstrike killed Hamas terror master Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in Gaza.

Condemnations followed like clockwork. From the European direction, they were voiced, among others, by then-EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, then-Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, and then-British foreign minister Jack Straw, who said: “The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called targeted assassinations of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counterproductive.” Only a U.S. veto saved Israel from UN Security Council censure for the killing.

Today, of course, drone strikes on terrorists by the U.S. and European countries are so routine that they can hardly compete for attention with weather forecasts. On November 26, 2015, the Daily Mail reported that “British drone strikes have killed 305 ISIS targets in the last year….”