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August 2016

EUROPE’S SUMMER OF TERROR BY JED BABBIN

Foreshadowing what will happen here more and more often.

David Fisher’s magnificent book, A Summer Bright and Terrible, begins with the sentence, “In England the summer of 1940 was the sunniest, driest, most glorious summer in living memory.” But in that summer — the summer of the Battle of Britain — the only things that stood between the death and survival of European civilization were the few fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force and the personal courage of Winston Churchill.

Today there is no Churchill and the battle for civilization can’t be won in the skies over England. The new enemy of European civilization, Islamism and the Islamic terrorism it propels, are as great a threat as that posed 76 years ago by Nazism.

This is Europe’s summer of terror. There have been seven terrorist attacks since June. In France alone, there have been fourteen Islamic terrorist attacks in the past two years killing at least two hundred and forty people. The last one, so far, was the 26 July attack in which two ISIS terrorists killed an 85-year-old priest near Rouen, France.

In Germany, the attacks are increasing and the Germans are hell-bent on ignoring the attackers’ obvious motivations. In late July when a gunman killed nine near a shopping mall in Munich, shouting the Muslim battle cry “Allahu Akbar,” German authorities claimed not to know the motivation of the attacker, a German-Iranian.

EDWARD CLINE: WE DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

Let’s now turn to the deliberate manipulation or obfuscation or suppression of official reporting on crimes committed by “migrants” (aka Muslims) in the U.S. and in Europe,such as the recent rape of a 5-year-old girl in Idaho by “underage” Muslim boys in Idaho.

Davis Odell, a community resident who has been in close contact with the victim’s family said the boys dragged the unnamed girl into a utility room in the Fawnbrook Apartments, a low-income, subsidized housing complex in Twin Falls, and assaulted her in an attack that ended when a neighbor happened upon the scene and called police….

Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury told reporters the suspects are Iraqi and Sudanese. [County Prosecutor Grant] Loebs said he does not know how long they have been living in the United States.

Twin Falls activists say the case and the lack of information from authorities demonstrates the problem with state and federal programs to resettle refugees in cities and towns.

The local police hemmed and hawed about the character of the crime and dragged their feet on the exact identity of the perpetrators. Residents brow-beat the chief of police, but it was clear that the police were under higher authority pressure to not be forthcoming with the truth lest it reflect badly on “migrants” resettled at the behest of the Obama administration. Shades of the Rotherham sex slave and prostitution ring in Britain, a ring that was run for years with impunity by Muslims.IPT reported that “Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.”

At a City Council meeting Monday night, residents demanded answers from law enforcement regarding the crime and the resettlement program, with some calling for the removal of all immigrants in the city.

RUTHIE BLUM: ISIS IS ONLY ONE STRAIN OF JIHAD

On Sunday, the U.K.’s Daily Mirror alerted its readers to the latest edition of Dabiq, the multilingual digital magazine uploaded periodically by the Islamic State terrorist organization. The current issue, the publication’s 15th since its inception in 2014, is titled “Break the Cross,” an apt description of the group’s systematic subjugation and slaughter of Christians.

One of the articles in the latest edition — “Why we hate you and want to fight you” — lists six reasons for the destruction of the West:

1. “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for him in worship; you blaspheme against him, claiming that he has a son; you fabricate lies against his prophets and messengers; and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.”

2. “We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things he has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.”

3. “In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your lord and creator.”

4. “We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.”

5. “We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill and maim our people around the world; and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth.”

6. “We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim.”

Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People By Rod Dreher

I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the white working class, but also its strengths. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, for Americans who care about politics and the future of our country, Hillbilly Elegy is the most important book of 2016. You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading J.D. Vance. His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.

This interview I just did with Vance in two parts (the final question I asked after Trump’s convention speech) shows why.

RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

Communists and Muslims: The Hidden Hand of the KGB! Posted by Jake Martinez

Posted on Lenin and Sharia-By Cliff Kincaid-On July 19, 2012:

These are only excerpts from this eye-opening presentation because of its overall length
Konstantin Preobrazhensky, former KGB intelligence officer and author of several books on Russia. His white paper, Communists and Muslims: The Hidden Hand of the KGB.

“Introduction by

I am pleased to present Konstantin Preobrazhensky’s insightful treatment of the radical Muslim problem, in connection with how the communists, in particular the Russians, are using or exploiting them. Much of this influence stems from the operations of the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, which continues under a different name. A former KGB officer, Preobrazhensky fled to the U.S. in 2003 and received political asylum in March 2006. His bio tells the full story of his efforts to expose the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, and its successor.

In this report, he discusses a peculiar phenomenon – those with Muslim names and communist hearts. Or, as Frank Gaffney has put it, Sharia is “Communism with a God.” This seemingly paradoxical problem is real and has been exported by the Soviet Union as part of the communist world revolution.

I first came into contact with Preobrazhensky when I was writing about the “Arab Spring.” As the leader of Tunisia was forced into exile, I noticed that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist–Leninist organization founded in 1967, issued a statement declaring, “These popular upsurges are shaking the ground in the Arab world and posing a new and powerful challenge to U.S. imperialism, Zionism, and the Arab regimes which have enabled them by trampling upon their own people for decades.” It said that “the Arab masses were capable of making great and revolutionary change, as we are witnessing today, and which has already achieved great results in Tunisia.”

The PFLP is part of the PLO and has a long-time association with the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB. The group earned a reputation for spectacular international attacks, including airline hijackings, which killed at least 20 U.S. citizens. The statement by the PFLP about turmoil in the Middle East was a reminder that a terrorist group associated with the Soviet Union is still in existence, active, and prepared to take advantage of world unrest and troubles.

Because of our work in exposing the Al-Jazeera television network, we found it interesting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which effectively controls the network and brags about it, gave rise to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, officially designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department. However, the Muslim Brotherhood is not an officially designated FTO. This has enabled the Obama Administration to literally embrace the organization, which has taken power in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood wants Egypt to unilaterally open the border with Gaza, a move that would facilitate arms shipments to Hamas and increase military pressure on Israel. A Congressional Research Service report noted, “Egypt sealed the border out of concern for the possibly destabilizing effects of Hamas’s relations with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which the government of President Mubarak considers a threat.” President Obama encouraged the overthrow of Mubarak, a long-time American ally.

The Theological Compromise For Terror By Herbert London

President, London Center for Policy Research

In a commonly told Israeli joke or aphorism, two taxi drivers come to an impasse on a single road. The first driver says move aside so I can pass; the second driver says the same. Emotions explode. After hurling insults, the first driver leaves his cab with fists flailing. He sees a Jew seated in the back of his rival’s taxi and proceeds to beat him up. The second driver upset by what he observed, gets out of his cab and heads for his rival’s taxi. Quite coincidentally, there is also a Jewish passenger in the back seat and he too is beaten up. What is the moral of this story?

Assume for a moment, the drivers are Sunni and Shia. In the story they are rivals, but most notably they are united in their hatred of Jews. The Middle East assumption that religious differences will lead to fragmentation and a stalemate between Sunni and Shia is a fiction since both sides have a common enemy and a common goal: Removing the U.S. and Israel from the Middle East.

Recently the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned members of al Qaeda who are based in Iran. What journalist Armin Rosen pointed out is that the Shia dominated regime doesn’t care about sectarian differences with Sunnis as long as al Qaeda bogs down the U.S. on every battle front in the Middle East.

Iran’s ties with al Qaeda have been well known and documented since 2011. According to the 9/11 Commission report, “Eight of the fourteen Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives (in the attacks) traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.” After the 9/11 attacks, several members of bin Laden’s family sought sanctuary in Iran.

For Iran, terrorism comes first. It has been known for a considerable period that Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah (a Shia terrorist group) and has assisted Hamas (a Sunni terrorist organization). The common principle they share is inflicting violence on and in Israel.

MY SAY: THE HIGH DUDGEON OF MR. KHIZR KHAN

This is not a defense of Trump’s oafish response to the Khans….

I totally understand and empathize with the grief of parents who lose their children in war or sickness or violence. There is, however, something that rankles, when their grief is used for dirty politics. So it was when the mothers of young black men killed by police and the Khans were highlighted at the Democratic convention as shills for Hillary Clinton. Where were the mothers of innocent cops killed in Dallas? Where were the mothers of the soldiers of Fort Hood who died at the hands of an enlisted American Moslem soldier on a jihad? And where is Mr. Khan on the record speaking against jihad against Americans in San Bernardino or Orlando. His gratuitous offer of his copy of the constitution was theater. Who scripted him?

Robert Spencer makes the point exactly in his column listed below:

Khizr Khan, Servant of the Global Umma ​His son died in service of the U.S. military; now his father is using his memory to advance a different cause. Robert Spencer

Lashing and Flogging: Islam and Iran Vicious and inhumane punishments are on the rise in the Muslim world. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

The ruling clerics of Iran are increasing their reliance on public flogging not only for punishing people, but also for threatening those who are violating minor Islamic and Sharia laws.

Public lashing is orchestrated for several reasons, including to punish the person who has violated Sharia laws, impose fear in the society, humiliate the victims and cause psychological harms to the individuals.

Holding a girlfriend/boyfriend’s hand, kissing in public (even for a married couple), listening to music, drinking alcohol and wearing non-Islamic dress can all be grounds for flogging under the Islamic law of Iran. As an Iranian prosecutor, Esmail Sadeghi Niaraki, who recently arrested people for “dancing and jubilating,” said, “We hope this [flogging] will be a lesson for those who break Islamic norms in private places.”

Yesterday, according to Iran’s state-owned news agency, Tasnim, Iranian officials arrested 150 young people for being at a mixed-gender birthday party in the city of Islamshahr, close to the capital of Tehran. Young people who are arrested for attending mixed-gender parties are often fined, flogged, beaten and sometimes raped.

According to Colonel Mohsen Khancherli, Iran’s police commander for the west of Tehran Province:

“After we obtained a report about a mixed-gender party in a garden in the vicinity of Islamshahr in the west of Tehran Province, an operation was carried out by the police and another organization, leading to the arrest of dozens of boys and girls.”

He added:

“Some 150 boys and girls had gathered at the mixed-gender party under the guise of a birthday party in this garden which is situated next to a studio where unlawful music was produced and recorded. Upon arrival of the police, all those present were arrested and sent before the judiciary.”

A few weeks ago, more than 30 college students were arrested, and within 24 hours the judge ordered each to receive 99 lashes for attending a graduation party. In the last two months, approximately 600 people have been arrested, fined and lashed for celebrating.

In this video, a teenager is being lashed for helping a girl whom the moral police were attempting to arrest for wearing bad hijab. He can be heard begging for mercy.

According to Ismaeil Sadeqi Niaraki, a top Iranian cleric, Iran will not tolerate “freedom” or “having fun.” He praised the moral police for arresting and punishing those who break the Islamic laws: “Thanks [sic] God that the police questioning, investigation, court hearing, verdict and implementation of the punishment all took place in less than 24 hours.”

According to Chapter III of the Iranian Islamic constitution, Enforcement of Sentences of Flogging, Article 27: “Flogging will be administered by a woven leather belt of approximately one meter in length and one-and-a-half centimeter in width.” The penal code goes on detailing how one should be flogged:

Article 32: Enforcement of hadd for female convicts will be carried out while the convict is in a sitting position with her body fully covered by clothing.

Hungary Blasts EU with Common Sense on Islam The writing was on the wall a long time ago. Raymond Ibrahim

In “an astonishingly savage tirade”—to quote from the UK’s Express—Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban recently tore into the European Union “over [Muslim] migration and taunted Angela Merkel for failing to protect German people from Islamist terror.”

(Click here to learn why central and eastern European nations, Hungary chief among them, are wary of Islam.)

In the course of his speech, Orban made two important points that I habitually make, and which explain the true reasons behind the unprecedented rise of terrorism in EU nations: 1) Islam’s Rule of Numbers; 2) Western enablement of Islam.

In regards to the first point, Orban

issued a stunning rebuke to Mrs Merkel on migration, blaming recent terror attacks on the mas[s] influx of refugees… Migration, he argued, “increases terrorism and crime” and “destroys national culture” in a thinly-veiled swipe at Mrs Merkel’s decision to roll out the red carpet to millions of people from the Middle East.

This is as simple as it gets. Over three years ago, in May 2013, I explained why a Muslim man decapitated a British solider in the middle of a busy street in London as follows:

It reflects what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers,” a rule that expresses itself with remarkable consistency: The more Muslims grow in numbers, the more Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, brazen violence against “infidels”—appear….

Thus as Muslim populations continue growing in Western nations, count on growing, and brazen, numbers of attacks on infidels—beheadings and such.

The Month That Was – July 2016 Sydney Williams

“Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men, and so it must be daily earned and refreshed –else, like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die. Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969)

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” So wrote Thomas Paine, in the aftermath of the Continental Army’s defeat at Brandywine Creek, on September 12, 1777. Freedom is not free, and Paine’s message to General Howe was filled with the patriotism that inspires us to this day. He added toward the end of his essay: “We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free.” They did; though it took four more years. It is fitting that the month that celebrates the birth of our nation is also a time to look back and remember those who died at Gettysburg, a battle that was fought over the three days preceding the 87th birthday of the United States – a battle in a war that ensured our country would be slave-free and would stand undivided. It is a month we remember the 19,240 British soldiers who were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the single worst day in British military history – one battle in a war to ensure that freedom would flourish on the European Continent.

Democracy is neither free nor easy. It is a constant struggle, against those from the outside who would defeat it and from those on the inside who would impede it. At the moment, freedom’s greatest external threat are the fanatics who comprise Islamic extremists – be they ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force, the Haqqani Network, Hezbollah, the Taliban or Hamas. To defeat them, we must identify them, and then puncture the ideology that has caused a religion to become a cauldron of hatred. Obviously, our greatest ally in this fight should be peace-loving Muslims. Unfortunately, they have not stepped to the plate in the numbers necessary. In the meantime, Mr. Obama’s refusal to name the enemy is reminiscent of the failure of Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Party in Britain, in the mid and late 1930s, to acknowledge the evil embedded in Nazism and Fascism. His not doing so only emboldened the Axis. Dictators and fanatics see democracy as mushy, as it depends on the will of the people rather than on an all-powerful leader. We are seen as soft by the barbarians who lead these Islamic terrorist groups. But, what those philistines miss is that when aroused a free people fight more resolutely than others. But first, we must be aroused.

Internally, democracy is at risk when citizens become complacent, more interested in their well-being than in recognizing the fragility and rarity of liberty – when people become blindly obedient to their leaders. Democracy and freedom are also at risk when the media serves as lap dogs rather than watch dogs.

The two conventions consumed the last two weeks of the month. In both cases, the establishment circled their wagons, Democrats more successfully than Republicans, though help from the DNC failed. Politics has become less about service and more about being served. The purpose of government should be to enact and uphold laws; to protect the lives and inalienable rights of its citizens, and to do those things individuals cannot do for themselves. Instead, it has become a path to personal wealth and power for the chosen (and corrupt) few.