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January 2017

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Vetting Keith Ellison By Tabitha Korol

By on January 4th, 2017

The Huffington Post’s headline, Minneapolis Jewish Community Defends Rep. Keith Ellison against Anti-Semitism allegations, indicated that Ellison (D-Minn) was making his bid to head the Democrat National Committee. But are such allegations against Ellison implausible?

Consider that the Democrat Party has been sloping further to the left for some time, relying on a voter base that has been under-informed, spoiled, weakened, and entitled. The ugly result is a nation divided by political party, race, financial success, gender and religion, a society consumed with bigotry and disorder. Therefore, it is not inconceivable that an anti-Semite could take the stage from which liberals abandoned their traditional values of Judaism and Christianity in favor of the creed of multiculturalism and its deceptive liturgy of peace and ecumenism.

Enter ISNA (Islamic Society of North America), an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood that has been diligently marketing a false similarity between the so-called “three great Abrahamic faiths.” Jewish congregations, guided by leaders unaware of the unalterable nature of Islamic dictates and their incompatibility with western values, welcome the interfaith programs, hoping for a dialogue of peace with the Islamic world.

The rabbis are irresponsibly under-informed about Islam’s resolve to dominate the entire world – through violence when in the majority and by deception when not. They are either oblivious or unwilling to acknowledge the history of Islam and, specifically, Jewish history under Islam, and its current bloody manifestation across the globe; therefore, they are unqualified to so advise their congregations. They are the blind leading the blind, both doomed to blunder.

If the rabbis have ever heard of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) or of the Jewish students who must defend themselves across our campuses, they remain silent. Neither do they deliberate the doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The invading Muslim migrants who behead and rape the host populations, create no-go zones, and generate a fear that prevents the innocent from wearing religious symbols are also off the table. I speak from experience; I have attended such events.

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Will Obama become the agitator-in-chief? Melanie Phillips

By on January 4th, 2017

Less than three weeks from now President Obama will leave office. One might assume that, as with his predecessors, he will take a back seat in public life, only surfacing to write his memoirs, rake in a few millions on the lecture circuit and work on his golf handicap.

This may be to misunderstand him as badly out of office as in it. After Donald Trump’s election, Mr Obama promised distraught Democrats that “next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you . . . and we’re going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we’ve been doing all these years before”.

Just vague aspirational waffle? Unlikely. For in his previous life Barack Obama was a community organiser. It sounds benign enough. Organising the community surely means doing good works to alleviate the hardship of the poor and disadvantaged? No.

The term “community organiser” has a specific meaning. It was coined by the radical Chicago activist Saul Alinsky, a Marxist who believed in capturing the culture as the most effective means of overturning western society.

The way to do this, he said, was through “people’s organisations” composed largely of discontented individuals who believed society was fundamentally unjust, and who would take their lead from trained community organisers. These organisers, taught Alinsky, should “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “agitate to the point of conflict” while pretending to be middle-class folk in suits.

Based on the premise that the revolution would come not through institutions but through the masses, the organisers’ role was to galvanise the mob to oppose every institution of the state. In his handbook of sedition, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky describes Lucifer as “the very first radical”.

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MY SAY: MIDEAST DELUSIONS AND UNSETTLING FACTS

By on January 3rd, 2017

Would you go to a doctor who prescribed leeches, told you that in all past medical trials the leeches produced no cure but also had severe side effects and on occasion death? Silly question? Well, among the properly outraged supporters of Israel are the boo-hoo crowd who are shocked, shocked that the infamous UN resolution will impede the two state dissolution…..A “remedy” that has produced more violent side effects and death. Here is a letter published in today’s Wall Street Journal by someone who really gets it:

The U.N. is telling Israel that it must commit suicide.

In reaction to William A. Galston’s Dec. 28 Politics & Ideas “Trump Could Be Even More Wrong on Israel”:

Here’s a two-state solution: How about we carve out a chunk of territory here in the U.S. for ISIS? Oh, that makes us uncomfortable? So why does the West try to jam that same idea down Israel’s throat? Create a country out of your country for your sworn enemies.

What’s even more illogical to me, the only reason there’s a debate about settlements is because Arab coalitions from all sides twice—1967 and 1973—tried to wipe Israel out and failed so badly that they lost territory to the victor. Under exactly what Geneva protocol is the winner required to give the loser a country? To cap the absurdity, the Palestinian state—which does not exist—is a voting member of the U.N. Security Council. If the Palestinians want a state so badly, how about the losers of the wars get together and provide some territory? If that’s not acceptable, the West should shut keep quiet and stop trying to govern Israel from abroad.

Tim Quast

Denver

http://www.wsj.com/articles/steadfast-refusal-to-negotiate-in-good-faith-1483397728

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Obama and Kerry aren’t done yet — they have a big date coming up in Paris on January 15. Jed Babbin

By on January 3rd, 2017

Last week many of us ink-stained wretches proclaimed Obama’s abstention in the vote on the December 23 anti-Israel UN resolution his last betrayal of our only real ally in the Middle East. We were wrong. Obama isn’t done yet.
Obama is going to use his last three weeks in office to damage Israel in at least one more UN Security Council resolution.

Obama believes that he has accomplished great things through his diplomacy and exercise of our military power. His list includes his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, his military intervention in Libya, the near-emptying of the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and much more. The fact that the world is almost literally on fire — from the South China Sea to Iraq and Afghanistan, from North Korea to the streets of Europe where terrorists run free — doesn’t diminish his belief that he has succeeded almost everywhere.

Everywhere, that is, except in dictating peace terms in the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That conflict began almost as soon as Islam became a religion. It began when Mohammed wrote in the Koran his vision that he had ascended to heaven from the site of the ruined Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The mosques on what is now the Temple Mount were literally built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple as symbols of permanent conquest. It is the holiest site in Judaism and had been for about three thousand years before Islam was established.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is one in which the Palestinians (of which there were none before Israel was declared a nation in 1947) are merely a weapon used by others. Making peace with the Palestinians won’t make peace with the Sunni nations surrounding Israel that use the Palestinians as a tool against Israel or with the Shiite nation of Iran.

Leaders of the Sunni nations learned from the efforts of Anwar Sadat, who signed a peace agreement with Israel and was subsequently assassinated by Islamic terrorists, that peace with Israel is a religious impossibility. Iran has so often proclaimed that it will wipe Israel off the map that it has become a mantra of its kakistocracy.

Those nations — and their Palestinian surrogates — have for almost seven decades made it impossible for Israel to be what the UN created it to be: a Jewish homeland. When Israel was established by a series of UN resolutions, it was established as a Jewish state and other areas around Israel were established as an Arab zone, which became the “Palestinian” territories.

Obama and many European leaders believe that a peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the only way to drive peace in the Middle East. In furtherance of that comprehensively mistaken belief, they will convene a meeting of foreign ministers in Paris on January 15 without Israeli representation. The purpose of the meeting will be to craft another UN resolution to be offered and passed before Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20. Obama and Kerry are heavily engaged in formulating the resolution to be passed in Paris and then in the UN Security Council.

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It’s Still a Mad, Mad California Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 3rd, 2017

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas.

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.

Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.

Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California’s bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era’s fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.

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Empty Heads of State In this time of crisis, some European leaders are braver than others. Bruce Bawer

By on January 3rd, 2017

It’s been hard to keep track of all the acts of jihadist terror that have struck Western Europe in 2016, let alone the sundry smaller-scale atrocities – from gang rapes of children to stabbings of defenseless old women – that have been committed by Muslim men and boys. And then, of course, there’s the rise in dhimmitude that has accompanied all these developments – the public events scaled back or canceled, the churches that have removed crosses, and the other efforts on every imaginable front to appease the Prophet’s followers by gradually erasing Europe’s cultural traditions. From Bradford to Brussels, from Malmö to Marseilles, fear and anger have soared; in the face of a pusillanimous political establishment, more and more voters in a range of countries have been looking elsewhere for true leadership.

As 2016 ended, then, Western Europe’s current leaders had a lot to answer for. And because most of their countries have a tradition of broadcasting a brief year’s-end address by the head of state or government – which a remarkable number of Western Europeans are in the habit of watching – those leaders also had a golden opportunity to speak directly to their people about the events of the past year and about hopes and concerns for the year to come. So what did they have to say for themselves?

Speaking on New Year’s Eve, Angela Merkel got right down to business, stating at the outset that at present Germany’s #1 challenge is “undoubtedly Islamic terrorism.” Of all the leaders whose year-end speeches I read or watched, I’m pretty sure she was the only one who actually used the words “Islamic terrorism.” Full points for that. Alas, Angela was quick to proclaim that the way to oppose the terrorists’ hate was by turning the other cheek – and keeping the borders open. Echoing Hillary Clinton, she affirmed: “We’re stronger together.” François Hollande followed much the same formula, lamenting the year’s “terrible attacks” in Nice and elsewhere but saying that while the terrorists “wanted to divide” France, the French people had refused to engage in “stigmatization” and shown that they were (guess what?) “stronger together.” Hollande closed with a warning: if Marine Le Pen’s National Front wins this year’s election, France will “no longer be French.” Hey, look around you, M. Hollande: thanks to you and your crowd, France is becoming less and less French every day.

Then there were the European royals, whose speeches were likely written (or at least vetted) by their respective governments but who do have some personal leeway in deciding what to say. These are people whose job it is to serve as living symbols of their respective nations and of those nations’ histories, cultures, and values. And what did they have to say in this time of deepening anxiety?

Most admirable, perhaps, was Queen Elizabeth, who, speaking on Christmas Day, actually mentioned Jesus Christ and described herself unashamedly as a follower of Christ “because Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love.” Of course the Queen is famously tight-lipped – and, in any case, no Prime Minister would ever let her openly express apprehension about the Religion of Peace – but she managed to communicate something important, I think, simply by referencing her personal religious belief and reminding viewers of her role as Head of the Church.

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Gov. Cuomo Commutes Sentence of Radical Leftist Terrorist Judith Clark Cuomo forgives her role in a triple murder — for which she has never shown genuine remorse. Joseph Klein see note please

By on January 3rd, 2017

from 2012 http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2012/01/15/the-sad-story-of-judith-clark-ron-radosh-oh-puleez-see-note/

THE SAD STORY OF JUDITH CLARK: RON RADOSH…..OH PULEEZ!….SEE NOTE | RUTHFULLY YOURS

THIS “DAMNEDSEL” IN DISTRESS IS NO ONE TO CAPTURE MY COMPASSION. SHE GOT GOOD TRAINING FROM THE PLO IN LEBANON….

READ:http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/impediments-to-effective-counterintelligence-and-counterterrorism

“The clearest example of this is the Brink’s robbery on October 20, 1981, in which three people were murdered. Remnants of 1970s terrorist groups, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Republic of New Africa, banded together as the May 19th Communist Organization and attempted to rob a Brink’s truck in order to finance an expansion of their activities. In early 1979, more than two years before the murders, this terrorist group issued a document called Principles of Unity of the May 19th Communist Organization. The document pledged support to terrorists in the United States, South Africa, and Puerto Rico, as well as to terrorists in the Middle East.This was not enough to alert the FBI. Nor was the fact that Judy Clark, a member of the group, had attended an international conference organized by the PLO in Lebanon in September 1981, shortly before the abortive terrorist “expropriation.” Five hundred supporters of the PLO and other international terrorist groups were in attendance. Clark remained in Lebanon with the PLO for a time after the conference.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to commute the sentence of a domestic terrorist, Judith Alice Clark, who willingly participated in a bloody robbery that led to the deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Clark, who pleaded not guilty, but was convicted of felony murder, had been sentenced to such a long prison term that she had no real hope for parole during her lifetime – until now. Cuomo’s decision to commute Clark’s sentence will not immediately result in her release, but the steep reduction in her sentence will make her eligible for parole early this year. The loved ones of the three men killed during the robbery and getaway in which Clark took an active part will have to continue to experience their hellish losses for as long as they live. Unless all the family members of the slain are ready to forgive what the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” and “freedom fighter” did, and they do not object to Clark’s release on parole, she should continue to experience her own hell in jail for as long as she lives.

On October 20, 1981, Clark joined members of the violent radical group known as the Weather Underground, who robbed a Brink’s armored truck in Nanuet, New York. Clark, who did not pull the trigger herself, was the driver of one of the getaway cars. Her partners in crime killed a Brinks guard, Peter Paige, in the course of the robbery. They also killed the two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, who had attempted to stop the getaway vehicles on the highway. Clark was captured after she crashed one of the getaway vehicles. Just before her arrest, according to the 2008 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denying Clark’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, “police saw Clark reach for a nine-millimeter pistol on the floor of the car.”

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The PLO’s zero-sum game The time has come for the Israeli government to make some bold moves. Caroline Glick

By on January 3rd, 2017

Since its inception in the late 1970s, the Israeli peace movement has been based on one thing: hope.

Members of the peace movement hoped the PLO’s war with Israel could be resolved through compromise. Proponents of peace with the PLO hoped that Yasser Arafat and his terrorist minions weren’t truly committed to Israel’s destruction.
The two-state formula was based on the hope that Israel could reach an accommodation with the PLO. To wit, in exchange for parts of Judea and Samaria and Gaza (no one was talking about Jerusalem), Israeli peaceniks, who over time came to encompass all factions of the Left in Israel, hoped the PLO would bury the hatchet, build a state, or federate with Jordan, and that would be that.

In 1992, the peace camp took over the government. Under the leadership of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then foreign minister Shimon Peres, hope became the basis for Israel’s national security strategy. That strategy was followed by every Israeli government since. The basic idea was clear enough. In exchange for land and guns and legitimacy, Arafat and his goons would be domesticated.

The peace camp’s hope was never based on evidence. Indeed, it flew in the face of the PLO’s track record. By the time the Israeli peaceniks began negotiating with Arafat and his deputies in the late 1980s, the PLO had already controlled two autonomous areas. In both Jordan and Lebanon, Arafat and his terrorists transformed peaceful areas into bases for global terrorism and launching points for massacres of Israelis and of victims from Africa to Europe to the Americas.

The secret of the PLO’s success was that it didn’t simply kill people. It combined murder with political warfare. The PLO’s political war had two goals. First, it aimed to make killing Jews politically acceptable a mere generation after the Holocaust.

Second, the PLO devoted great resources to wooing the Israeli and Western Left. It sought to convince a sufficient core of leftists that the PLO wasn’t really committed to its goal of eradicating Israel. It actually was a peace movement in terrorist disguise.

Arafat and his deputies whispered in the ears of their gullible Israeli “partners” that they weren’t an implacable foe. They were partners for peace just waiting to be convinced that they could make a deal.

The success of both political warfare strategies has been on prominent display of late. On December 23, the ambassadors of state members of the UN Security Council broke out in spontaneous applause after they unanimously passed Resolution 2334, which declares Israel an outlaw state populated by criminals and bereft of all rights to its capital and its historic heartland.

A week later, the PLO’s largest terrorist faction Fatah celebrated its founding day. The largest celebration this year reportedly took place in Bethlehem.

Fatah was actually founded in 1958. But Arafat chose December 31, 1964 as its founding day because that was the day his terrorists carried out their first terrorist attack against Israel.

In Bethlehem Saturday, thousands of Palestinian youths – starting at the age of four or five – marked the day with a march through town.

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UN Human Rights Council Welcomes Saudi Arabia to Its Ranks By Michael van der Galien

By on January 3rd, 2017

You’ll never believe which states joined the United Nations Human Rights Council. Or, well, if you know anything about the UN, perhaps you will believe it:

That reads like a who’s who of human rights abusers. Nowadays, however, these regimes — which routinely oppress women, and jail, torture, and even kill critics — are somehow deemed to be the protectors of our universal human rights. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

But wait, the UNHCR says, don’t criticize Saudi Arabia! According to Sharia they have “fair gender equality”!

Satire, right? Nope, the UNHCR is dead serious.

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Is Islamic Cash Keeping Daniel Silva’s Books Out of Hollywood? By David Solway

By on January 3rd, 2017

Daniel Silva is among the finest and most compelling writers in the suspense/intrigue/espionage/thriller genre in modern fiction, which has its share of brilliant or engaging practitioners—Ian Fleming (of course), John LeCarré, David Baldacci, Jo Nesbo, James Rollins, Kathy Reichs, Steve Berry, Donna Leon, Tom Clancy, Jonathan Kellerman, Mons Kallentoft, Louise Penny, P.D. James, Michael Gruber, John Burdett, Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) and, yes, Dan Brown, to name a few of the most prominent. Silva is a charter member of this elect fraternity, one of the genre’s best-selling authors, whose area of expertise is the Middle East, the Palestinian terror machine, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Russian involvement in the region, the ambitions of Islamic jihad around the globe, and, of course, the efforts of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, to counter these manifold threats.

Indeed, Silva’s knowledge of the Middle East imbroglio is second to none and his plots are invariably timely, impinging on the cultural, political, and military realities of the present day. His most recent offering, The Black Widow, may well be his most topical and profoundly analytical work. All the salient elements of the international arena, real and imagined, are there: ISIS and the caliphate; drone warfare; the dissolving border between Iraq and Syria; the disintegration of Lebanon; the collusion of Turkey; a succession of catastrophic attacks in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, the latter on the scale of 9/11; a feckless and narcissistic American president plainly inadequate to the burden of high office; the dysfunctional character of American and European national security; and the comparative effectiveness of the Mossad. The book and the world intersect at every point.

It is interesting to note that Silva’s novels are tailor-made for the Hollywood film industry, yet not one has appeared in the theaters. It is not difficult to see why. As in real life, his terrorists are Muslims, members of a socially protected species. When it comes to the entertainment industry, a toxic amalgam of abject pusillanimity and leftist sympathies, along with dark infusions of Arab cash, has had its predictable effect on filmic integrity and patriotic sentiment. One recalls that the movie version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears transforms the novel’s villains, a sect of actual Palestinian terrorists known as the PFLP, into a collection of Austrian fascists—safe, acceptable bad guys. Given their inseparable interweavings with geopolitical reality, Silva’s plots are thankfully immune to such deceptive meddling. Timorous and morally compromised, Hollywood will not violate the shibboleths of the day or offend its twin masters: progressivist culture and Islamic money. As usual, the iron grip of political correctness is, well, iron.

The same wariness is true of our literary critics who are often careful to hedge their bets. Robert Fulford, for example, a belvedere eminence for the National Post, penned a laudatory review of The Black Widow, but could not help pressing the right virtue-signaling buttons. Silva’s fascinating hero, Israeli operative and future head of the Mossad Gabriel Allon, may be “the James Bond of Israel.” Nevertheless, though sympathetic with Allon’s fight “for his country’s future existence,” Fulford considers it necessary to comment in passing that we “see everything from the standpoint of the Israelis,” as if we didn’t see everything from the standpoint of the British in the Bond novels, or from the perspective of the Americans in Berry’s works, or of the Thai in Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep series, and so on. He plainly would not have felt obliged to qualify his approval had there been any other national polity in play.

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