Displaying posts published in

January 2018

Leftists and Islamists: Strange Bedfellows By Eileen F. Toplansky

It cannot be repeated enough that the Marxist-anarchist radical left Antifa and Islamic jihadists have joined forces to destroy Western civilization. Known as the Red-Green Axis, this unlikely alliance of leftists with Islamic groups is actually a means to an end by Islamists.

Inexplicably, left-wing forces do not comprehend that they are merely one of the tools by which Islamists wish to impose a global caliphate. In his searing documentary Killing Europe, producer Michael Hansen makes the following cogent points.

The Islamic jihadists have found willing partners in the left for a number of reasons.

Particularly in Europe, the left’s traditional voting bloc was the workers or proletariat. But as communism produced only mass misery and the deaths of millions, those who had invested 20-30 years in left-wing ideology soon found themselves without an identity once the proletariat saw the true nature of communism.
Enter Muslim refugees, and the left now sees a new voting base. The fact that these migrants come from a culture completely at odds with the West does not faze the left, since leftists have never accepted historical facts and, even more telling, now tout a multicultural paradise, notwithstanding the irrevocable differences that an Islamic religious-based system contains. In essence, the left has found a new base to promote its own identity.
That sharia law permits the stoning of gays, endorses gender apartheid, and advocates rape and murder of the infidel seems not to have registered in the leftist mind. Although the left abhors religion, leftists cannot fathom that their reliance on Islamist partners will not end well. This was borne out when the communists and Islamists joined to overturn the shah of Iran; the Islamic fundamentalists took the reins, eliminated the communists, and imposed draconian sharia law to maintain control.

As Ayn Rand wrote, “[r]eason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.” But as Kevin J. Johnston at Freedom Report explains, we need to be informed and realize that what is occurring is not to be denied even when political leaders reject the facts.

How, indeed, can a secularist or atheist even consider siding with a religiously mandated system that absolutely abhors secularism and atheism? How can leftists who are ostensibly concerned with women’s rights and gay liberation partner with a system that mandates the murder of gays and the dehumanization and killing of women?

Canada’s Carbon Taxes, Other Boondoggles Add Pain to Record Cold Winter By David Solway

I returned the other day from a shopping expedition — gas, groceries, pharmaceuticals — with an empty wallet and a troubled mind. Prices for everything had spiked almost overnight, it seemed, and in some cases had nearly doubled. What was formerly a $70 grocery bill was now $107. A standard $75 for a tank of gas now set me back $100. A $30 bill for various pharmaceutical items now topped $40.

On the same day, we had our monthly heating oil delivery, a partial fill-up leaving us $500 poorer, not counting the Hydro One electricity bill of $140. Prices in my overtaxed home province of Ontario were always stratospheric, with many people having to choose between heating their homes and stocking their larders, a condition called “energy poverty.” Industry has fled the province to avoid the crushing tax burden.

Kangaroo courts called Human Rights Tribunals drain the public treasury of increasingly scarce resources while bankrupting unfairly accused defendants. Automobiles require special stickers at a hefty annual sum. Wind turbines rotate their blades lazily — that is, when there is any wind to speak of — defacing the landscape, slaughtering birds by the hecatombs, and producing little in the way of reliable power, albeit at enormous cost to businesses and homeowners. The situation may not be appreciably better in other parts of the Socialist Republic of Canada — Alberta, for example, has also been hard hit; nevertheless, when one factors cost and weather into the domestic equation, Ontario must be near the bottom of anyone’s habitation wish list.

Aside from near-unaffordable living expenses, the mercury has plunged dramatically. We are now in the midst of the coldest winter in living memory, with temperatures plus wind-chill hovering in the minus 40 area. The news channels warn us that merely two or three minutes outdoors without adequate protection — gloves, warm boots, balaclavas — can lead to frostbite.

Cars, trucks and rigs line the icy 401 autoroute at precarious angles. (Indeed, even parts of comparatively balmy British Columbia have endured huge traffic tie-ups and power loss owing to “weather events.”) At the same time the snowfall is relentless, heaping berms three feet high. There is no place remaining to shovel snow off our deck. We have had to hire diggers, snow plows and sanders to clear the steep entrance lane and driveway, adding another strain to the rapidly shrinking budget.

The two elements I’ve focused on of living costs and weather come together both practically and conceptually. Apart from a bevy of new taxes hitting doctors, farmers and small businesses, our pretty boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, ostensibly to fight global warming, imposed an onerous carbon tax on the country, a tariff which has kicked in with a vengeance. This explains in large part why I came home with an empty wallet — prices reflect the new fiscal burden.

Hold the Fire, Hold the Fury People can’t stop talking about Donald Trump. Imagine how pleasant lunch would be if they did. By Joseph Epstein

I met a friend last week for a 90-minute lunch and, mirabile dictu, the name Donald Trump did not come up. I say that this was miraculous because it is rare to go more than an hour without Mr. Trump’s name cropping up in conversation, just about any conversation. In the lobby of my building, in our elevators, neighbors bring it up. The news—television, print, internet—is riddled with it. In front of the Whole Foods where I sometimes shop, a man in baroque sunglasses wearing a blue-and-white striped cape collects money he claims is for anti-Trump rallies.

Every Friday I meet for lunch with three or four friends from high-school days. Some while ago I instituted at these lunches what I called the No Trump Rule: “No” not in the sense of being against Mr. Trump’s politics but against talking about him at all, for doing so seems to get everyone worked up unduly. The rule, I have to report, has been broken more than the Ten Commandments. No one, apparently, can stop talking about our president.

The problem, for me, is that most of the talk isn’t highly intelligent. Instead it is vituperative, though cloaked in astonishment. Many sentences begin, “Can you believe . . .” Liberals wish to demonstrate their superior virtue by attacking Mr. Trump; conservatives wish to show their strong sense of reality in defending him. Neither are very convincing. Meanwhile the conversation, like flies in the soup, tends to spoil the lunch. CONTINUE AT SITE

Previous presidents have attracted mockery, disgust, hatred. At a brief meeting more than 50 years ago, Mort Sahl joked to me that a planned meeting between President Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson had to be canceled because the translator didn’t show up. I’ve known people who loathed Jimmy Carter, others who have long thought the Clintons irrevocably tainted by scandal. I was once at a dinner party of 12 where everyone at the table had something derisive to say about George W. Bush, until the woman seated at my right remarked that it seemed to her a sadness that the country couldn’t come up with more impressive people than the Clintons and the Bushes to lead the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

These Iranian Protests Are Different From 2009 Then, the cause was a rift within the regime. Now, the people are demanding an end to the regime.By Maryam Rajavi

The protests in Iran send a cogent message: The clerical regime stands on shaky ground, and the Iranian people are unwavering in their quest to bring it down. Slogans against velayat-e faqih, or absolute clerical rule, called for a real republic and explicitly targeted the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. This dispels the myth, still harbored by some governments, that Iranians distinguish between moderates and hard-liners in Tehran. It also undercuts flawed arguments depicting a stable regime.

Millions of Iranians live in poverty. Yet Tehran has spent upward of $100 billion on the massacre in Syria, according to reports obtained by the National Council of Resistance of Iran. The chants of “Death to Hezbollah” and “Leave Syria, think about us instead” clearly demonstrate the people’s opposition to the regime’s belligerent regional schemes.

The country’s official budget this year allocates more than $26.8 billion to military and security affairs and the export of terrorism. This is in addition to the $27.5 billion in military spending from institutions controlled by Mr. Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The budget for health care is a mere $16.3 billion. Weak and vulnerable, the regime spends such astronomical sums on regional meddling as part of its strategy for survival.

Skeptics might point out that Iran has faced protests before. What makes the current uprising different from the 2009 protests?

Iranians Turn to Tech Tools to Evade Internet Censors A crackdown aimed at helping stamp out protests could weaken Tehran’s control of information online By Sam Schechner

Iran’s new offensive against social media is showing signs of backfiring.

Authorities in Tehran have ratcheted up their policing of the internet in the past week and a half, part of an attempt to stamp out the most far-reaching protests in Iran since 2009.

But the crackdown is driving millions of Iranians to tech tools that can help them evade censors, according to activists and developers of the tools. Some of the tools were attracting three or four times more unique users a day than they were before the internet crackdown, potentially weakening government efforts to control access to information online.

“By the time they wake up, the government will have lost control of the internet,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, executive director of NetFreedom Pioneers, a California-based technology nonprofit that largely focuses on Iran and develops educational and freedom of information tools.

An official at Iran’s United Nations mission didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In recent days, Iran has said it has contained days of public demonstrations against the regime. Protesters used social media to spread the word about, or bear witness to, the protests, as people did during the Green Movement in 2009.

Iran blocked major social-media sites, such as Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., in 2009. CONTINUE AT SITE

Glazov Gang: The Antifa-ISIS Romance Unveiled. A disturbing glimpse into the Left’s heart of darkness.

On this new edition of The Glazov Gang, we feature Jamie Glazov discussing The Antifa-ISIS Romance Unveiled, where he offers a disturbing glimpse into the Left’s heart of darkness.

Don’t miss it!And make sure to watch Jamie’s stirring speech at the recentAmerican Freedom Alliance conference in Los Angeles — from which the above clip is taken. Jamie focused on United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Jihad, reflecting on how: “I thought we escaped the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union came to us.”http://jamieglazov.com/2018/01/07/glazov-gang-the-antifa-isis-romance-unveiled/

Who are you going to believe, Michael Wolff or your own eyes? David Goldman

Hatchet job should be seen for what it was from its inception: an attempt to show Trump couldn’t win office and that, if he did, it could only have been due to some awful accident.

read as much of Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ as my stomach lining could stand, and then I watched Donald Trump’s last rally of the 2016 presidential election. Groucho Marx’s old line came to mind — “Who are you going to believe; me, or your own eyes?”

He spoke in Michigan, a swing state where Hillary Clinton didn’t bother to campaign, and he hammered on the issues that decided the vote: more jobs, no Obamacare, Washington corruption. Trump was focused, confident, and ruthless. “Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the Presidency of the United States… We are finally going to close the history books on the Clintons, and their lies, schemes and corruption… My contract with the American voter begins with a plan to end government corruption and to take our country back from the special interests… We’re going to win today and we’re going to Washington D.C. to drain the swamp.” The crowd of 18,000 chanted “Drain the swamp!” back at him.

That’s the man who neither expected nor wanted to win, according to Wolff. There stood Donald Trump on the day before the election, declaring that he would win, in the middle of the state whose votes would make him win, talking about the issues on which he would win. More pertinent than what it is, goes the adage about Southern cooking, is what it was, and the caveat applies to Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury.’

How much of Wolff’s supposed insider account of the Trump campaign and White House is true, how much invented, and how much cribbed from other reports — some real and some invented — will keep the pundits busy for weeks. What it was from inception was an attempt to show that Donald Trump couldn’t win the 2016 election – and that, if he did, it could only have been the result of an awful accident.

The dead possum in Wolff’s farrago is his unsupported claim that Trump had no intention of winning the election, did not expect to win the election, and was shocked to find out that he had won the election. In fact, I called the election for Trump on September 11, 2016, after Hillary Clinton offered her now-infamous crack about the “deplorables” supporting her opponent. A political upheaval was in progress like nothing I had seen in my lifetime, propelled by economic stagnation, popular revulsion at political correctness, and a deep sense of wounded dignity at the arrogance of the political elite.

Treat ‘Mental Health’ Talk Against Trump Like The Coup Attempt It Is by Mollie Hemingway

In the second season of the TV show “24,” President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is removed from office for failing to launch a war against three Middle East countries purportedly behind a nuclear attack on U.S. soil.

Palmer has reason to doubt his intelligence agencies’ assurances of who was behind it, and it turns out the attack was orchestrated by a cabal of business and military leaders who want to launch a war for personal gain. The means by which Palmer is removed from office during the 4:00-5:00a hour on Day 2 is the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a portion of which reads:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide… to the Senate and the…House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Palmer’s chief of staff explains, “it seems there are people, cabinet members, who question whether you’re fit to continue as chief executive.” The conniving vice president says in the cabinet meeting putting the president on trial, “What I intend to show is a pattern of erratic behavior since this crisis started.” Using half-true innuendos and rumors as well as deliberately false information, he convinces enough of the cabinet to depose Palmer. In other words, Palmer is the victim of a bloodless coup.

Now, “24” was so over the top that its dramatic twists became something of a punch line. How preposterous to imagine that a president’s handpicked cabinet would vote to oust him in a palace overthrow! But that fantasy land is precisely what some of the mostly unelected opposition hopes to see happen with President Trump as part of the more-than-a-year-long temper tantrum against the results of the 2016 election.

In the last debate of 2016, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would accept the election results, and he said “I will tell you at the time.” Hillary Clinton responded to Trump by calling his remark “horrifying.” The general media environment was to react with unabashed horror for at least 72 hours.

Trump’s comments were wrong — undermining confidence in the electoral process is unbecoming of a political leader of this great nation. But it’s doubtful that even Trump would have done a tiny fraction what his unelected opposition has done to undermine and overturn the results of the election had he lost. Even if he had thrown a year-long temper tantrum, he would not have been aided and abetted in it by a majority of the media or other members of the establishment.

The Senators’ Criminal Referral of Dossier Author Steele We should want to know if our intelligence agencies were being fed misinformation. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Two influential Judiciary Committee senators have referred Christopher Steele to federal law-enforcement officials for criminal investigation. Steele authored the salacious and unverified anti-Trump dossier commissioned by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The referral was made by Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who chairs Judiciary’s Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee. It is set forth in a brief letter written to the leadership of the epartment and the FBI. Appended to the letter is a non-public classified memorandum.

As our David French outlined on Friday, there has been misguided speculation about what the referral means. This includes rabid claims that it is a stunt intended to delegitimize congressional and special-counsel investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and supposed Trump-campaign collusion therein. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York also had an excellent column over the weekend that did much to clear up the confusion.

Here, in the first of two columns, I address what may be going on regarding representations Steele made to American intelligence officials. In the follow-up, I take up representations those officials made regarding Steele’s dossier.

Let’s start with what a referral is. It’s a request by a peer branch of government that the executive branch conduct a criminal investigation. Lawmakers in their oversight capacity, and judges presiding over legal proceedings, often come across conduct that may violate federal criminal law — particularly, obstructive behavior. Congress and the courts have no power to conduct criminal investigations and prosecutions; in our system, that is solely an executive function. So, members of Congress and judges will refer suspected criminal conduct to the Justice Department and FBI. These referrals are given respectful attention, but they impose no obligation on the executive agencies to investigate.