Displaying posts published in

February 2020

Qassem Soleimani: Iran’s Latest ‘King of Martyrs’? by Denis MacEoin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15518/qassem-soleimani-iran-martyrs

Esmail Ghaani, Soleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, has promised: “to continue martyr Soleimani’s path with the same force and the only compensation for us would be us would be to remove America from the region.”

So much terrorism has come from Tehran…. as distant as Latin America.

One might also ask why has the United Nations never held Iran accountable for these violations?

One might also ask if the time has finally come for the UN’s largest donors — read the US — to rethink their generosity? Why not, as Ambassador John R. Bolton long ago recommended: “that we should pay for what we want and insist that we get for what we pay for.”

When news broke on the morning of January 3 that Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who for many years had headed the Quds Force, the powerful extraterritorial operations arm of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), had been assassinated — along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, head of the Iraqi Ketaib Hezbollah militia — in a US drone strike at Baghdad airport, pundits across the globe burst into print, some to condemn, others to praise his killing.

Neither side seems to want an all-out war. On October 7, 2019, US President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

“… it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home. WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.”

One can only hope that this statement is not as un-thought-through as it appears. While in a democracy war is never a first choice — least of all in an election year — the Western fight against Islamist terrorism and territorial predation is far from at an end. As President Trump has already found out in both Syria and Iraq, when it was even mentioned that troops might be withdrawn, evidently that was understood by some countries as an invitation to help themselves, and more troops had to be sent, often within days. The same “misunderstanding” might be now be taking place in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and Libya as well.

Quite often, troop deployment in these areas does not so much mean “endless wars” as forward deployment. While President Trump is indeed a dazzling negotiator, there are sizeable differences between negotiating, say, business deals and geopolitical ones. Business deals tend to be “win-win”: You have the land and I have the money, or I have the land and you have the money. Geopolitical deals can be stickier: You would like to have — nuclear weapons capability? The Middle East? Control of all the sea lanes on the planet? What is supposed to disabuse a despot of his wish? Will a despot cheat? Will a despot take money given to him not to cheat and use it to cheat? Why would a despot not cheat? Or try to?

Coup Plotters Fear the Quickening The Left’s convulsions are warranted, just not for the reasons they now are giving the public. Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/12/coup-plotters-fear-the-quickening/

The mood on the set of MSNBC was grim.

Rachel Maddow fought back tears of rage. Brian Williams struggled to make sense of it all. A former U.S. senator flailed her arms in frustration and indignation.

Their collective panic attack, however, was not caused by the results of the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night. The electoral tie between an aged socialist and a sinister small-town mayor did not alarm the panelists assembled around the colorful set, shoulders stooped in despair, eyes ablaze.

The humiliating fifth-place finish of the former vice president who claimed he would beat Donald Trump “like a drum,” the aviator sunglasses-clad bestie of Barack Obama who allegedly would stomp the president in the Heartland, did not at all concern the network’s gobsmacked hosts.

No, Maddow and company’s hysterics centered around the news that Attorney General William Barr had intervened to reduce an egregious sentencing recommendation against Roger Stone, a former Trump confidant convicted of five counts of lying to Congress, one count of witness-tampering, and one count of obstruction of justice. (Otherwise known as a day at the office for California congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.)

Federal prosecutors, continuing their work from the now-concluded Mueller investigation, told a judge that Stone, who is 67 years old with no prior criminal record, should serve seven to nine years in jail. When Barr heard the news, he appropriately intervened. (Some news outlets reported that the Stone prosecutors had misled the attorney general’s office about their intentions.) The four government lawyers, including two alums from Team Mueller, subsequently resigned from the case.

“Abrahamism” Abets Genocidal Christian Persecution, and Israel’s Destruction Andrew Bostom

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/02/abrahamism-abets-genocidal-christian-per

The embrace of “Abrahamism” as an overarching paradigm for interfaith dialogue, epitomized by the U.S. Department of State-supported Abrahamic Faiths Initiative, is fraught with existential dangers for Christians and Jews.

At its core, Abrahamism is unabashed theological Islamic supremacism—rooted in Koran 3:64 to 3:68, especially 3:67—and the classical-cum-modern authoritative Koranic exegeses on these verses.

Late Al-Azhar University Grand Imam, and seminal modern Koranic commentator, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (d. 2010), illustrates these enduring trends, till now, including their association with canonical Islamic Antisemitism. Tantawi’s authoritative gloss on Koran 3:67 from his magnum opus Koranic commentary, The broad interpretation of the holy Koran,  re-affirms the supremacy of the claim of Islam, and Muslims, to Abraham, and ends with a statement of conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred:

“This noble verse [Koran 3:67] mentions Abraham and exposes those unbelievers from the People of the Book [Scripture] who claimed the Abraham was a Jew or a Christian as it shows that, unlike Abraham, it was they who were polytheists…There is an insinuation here concerning the Islamic nation (Umma) and an acknowledgment that the followers of Muhammad are more worthy of being affiliated with Abraham than the People of the Book because the believers sought the truth and believed in it. Conversely, the People of the Book sought worldly and material things in place of things heavenly and spiritual. They forsook the truth and went after their lusts and desires…After these repeated appeals to the People of the Book, and after all the brilliant arguments and proofs presented to vouch for the validity and truthfulness of this religion [Islam], and after all the reprimands and admonitions hurled at them for turning away from the truth and turning others from it as well, the Koran recounted some of the malicious paths that the Jews embarked upon to deceive and deal with Islam and Muslims with craftiness and cunningness.”

The Democrats’ February Blues By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-democrats-february-blues/

All political parties and candidates have bad days. But the new progressive Democratic Party had four of its worst days in recent memory in a single week in February.

On Feb. 3, the Iowa caucuses imploded for the first time in their history. The new app-driven counting melted down, discrediting the very idea of caucusing in general.

The winner — Pete Buttigieg by two delegates over Bernie Sanders — was not known for days. The mess was ironic in a number of ways.

The Democrats are the party of the Silicon Valley. They pride themselves on being on the cutting edge of youthful computer culture. But the inability to count simple votes was a bitter reminder that they understand the cyber world no better than their Republican opponents.

Voters might remember the 2013 meltdown of the Obamacare website, the abject failure of Hillary Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated 2016 campaign analytics, and the incompetence of supposedly tech-driven 2016 polling.

Four years ago, the Democratic Party found ways to thwart socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary bid. Democratic National Committee interim chair Donna Brazile leaked CNN debate questions to Hillary Clinton, and the party used superdelegates to nullify Sanders’ grassroots surge.

Pelosi’s Biggest SOTU Mistake Wasn’t Tearing Up the Speech

This time around, the release of a pre-caucus Des Moines Register poll was canceled for the first time ever. Rumors swirled that the Democratic establishment was embarrassed over the likely strong showing of Sanders. Such conspiracy theories were only further fueled when it was not known for days who actually won the caucuses.

5 Times Barack Obama Protected His Allies from Justice and Democrats Didn’t Care Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/5-times-barack-obama-protected-his-allies-from-justice/

EXCERPT

5. The New Black Panther Party

You may remember images and video from Election Day 2008, with members of the New Black Panther Party standing outside a Philadelphia polling place wearing military garb making racial remarks and discouraging people from voting. A voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers began weeks before Obama took office. It was an open-and-shut case, and the New Black Panthers didn’t even show up in court to defend themselves, assuring the government’s victory in the case. Then in May 2009, the case was inexplicably dropped by Attorney General Eric Holder.

By the summer of 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department in the New Black Panther Party case. It was quite clear that under Obama and Holder, civil rights cases against minorities discriminating against whites were being systematically ignored. Holder still denied there was a racial motivation during a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in March 2011, justifying the decision not to prosecute the NBPP by bizarrely citing the roadblocks African Americans endured when trying to vote in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws.

4. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder took part in a scandalous, incompetent gun-running project known as “Fast and Furious” from 2009 to 2011, and did everything in his power to protect his boss, Barack Obama, during that investigation. In return for his steadfast loyalty, Obama protected Holder, who was aggressively stonewalling the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee investigation into Fast and Furious. Obama’s asserting of executive privilege was not only to protect himself but also to protect Holder ahead of the Oversight Committee’s vote to declare Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents from the committee. Ultimately it didn’t save Holder from being held in contempt of Congress by a bipartisan vote.

3. Senator Robert Menendez

In 2012, just days before the November election, ICE agents were ready to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender, but were ordered by the Department of Homeland Security to wait until after the election. Why? The suspect was a volunteer intern for Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and there would be “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations about the arrest. Menendez was seen as vulnerable in the 2012 election, and the delay of the arrest saved him from a potentially politically damaging scandal on the eve of voting. All the while letting a sexual offender avoid justice for six weeks.

2. Sexual Predator Kevin Johnson

In 2009, Barack Obama illegally fired Gerald Walpin, the inspector general for the Corporation for National and Community Service. Walpin’s only crime was that he was investigating Obama’s friend and donor, Kevin Johnson. Johnson had misused federal grant money for AmeriCorps by funneling it to his personal nonprofit group, paying for political activity, and using it to pay hush money to underage girls he’d sexually abused. When Walpin recommended charges against Johnson, Obama, in violation of federal law, fired him.

An investigation by Congress into the illegal firing was met with stonewalling by the Obama White House, and the withholding of documents. The Obama White House also deliberately misled Congress about the reasons for the firing.

1. Hillary Clinton

It’s hard to think of anyone who has managed to avoid accountability more than Hillary Clinton, and her response to the Stone sentencing story was her latest example of a lack of self-awareness.

Meghan Markle: A Disaster for the British Monarchy Like a spider eating her mate, we are now watching His Royal Redback get gobbled up alive. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/meghan-markle-disaster-british-monarchy-katie-hopkins/

‘Tell us about Megxit!’

It’s the question I am most asked when I open the floor for questions after giving a speech about Brexit and the state of Britain.

And my answer is a straight one: Meghan Markle has been an absolute disaster for the British monarchy. Like some gangster, she has committed a smash-and-grab on the Palace, snatching what can be easily sold, trashing anything of sentimental value.

Her latest stunt – pocketing an alleged $500K for ratting out her husband’s mental health issues in front of a crowd of deep-pocketed JP Morgan bankers – is proof of what many of us suspected from day one: that she was only ever in this for the publicity and the cash.

Markle saw an opportunity for stardom and she pounced on it, like a black widow spider eating her mate, the male redback, when she is done. In nature the male spider has a taste for sacrificial sex, flipping his bare abdomen into the hungry female’s mouth during mating. So too at the Palace, where the Prince-Formerly-Known-as-Harry has been consumed by the woman he was desperate to be loved by.

Kweisi Mfume’s Return to Congress A leftist radical prepares to replace the late Elijah Cummings.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/kweisi-mfumes-return-congress-discover-networks/

Last week, Kweisi Mfume — who served as a Democratic member of Congress from 1987-96, and as president of the NAACP from 1996-2004 — defeated 23 opponents in a special primary to determine who will represent the Democratic Party in the upcoming general election on April 28, when the voters in Maryland’s Seventh Congressional District will pick someone to serve out the remaining months of the late Elijah Cummings’ uncompleted term in the House of Representatives. In his acceptance speech, Mfume dedicated his victory to the memory of his longtime friend, Mr. Cummings: “This is for him. This is for him!”

In light of the fact that the population of District Seven is overwhelmingly Democratic, Mfume’s victory in the general election is all but assured. And that triumph will represent the closing of a circle: Cummings filled Mfume’s vacated congressional seat when Mfume resigned from the House in 1996, and now Mfume, nearly a quarter-century later, has come back to succeed Mr. Cummings in that very same seat. Embracing a political orientation that he describes as “very, very progressive,” Mfume is prepared to promote the same leftist policies that Rep. Cummings advanced for 23 years – policies that helped turn Maryland’s Seventh District into a high-crime, high-poverty basket case.

During his first go-round in the U.S. House, Mfume was a highly prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), where he served a stint as chairman. A highly noteworthy tidbit about the CBC is the close relationship it has long had with the legendary Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In September 1993, Mfume, in his role as CBC chairman, proudly announced that his Caucus was entering into a “sacred covenant” with Farrakhan’s NOI, meaning that the two organizations would consult with one another on legislative issues and political strategies.

What Happened When a Jewish Activist Confronted Tlaib’s Jew Hatred at Rutgers A Jew hater at a Jew-hating university. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/what-happened-when-jewish-activist-confronted-daniel-greenfield/

On Sunday, Rutgers University hosted the 14th Annual Interfaith Prophet Muhammad Conference.

The speakers were Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who had just falsely accused Jews of a blood libel, Craig Considine, a Catholic apologist for Islam who supports BDS, and Imam Sayed Moustafa Al-Qazwini, an Iranian-trained Shiite cleric who had accused Israel of being behind ISIS.

This panel of Jew hatred was a project of Muslims 4 Peace promoting Islamic migration. But the founder of Americans Against Anti-Semitism instead showed up to ask them some tough questions about hate.

“What about your anti-Semitism?” Dov Hikind, a former elected Democrat official who now takes on anti-Semitism in his former party, challenged Rep. Tlaib as she declaimed about racism in America.

Hikind was immediately confronted by a man in a keffiyah. Rutgers police officers surrounded the founder of Americans Against Anti-Semitism and escorted him out of the room for asking an elected official about anti-Semitism at a state university funded by the taxpayers of New Jersey.

The “Interfaith” Mohammed conference had consisted of two Muslim panelists and one token Christian who spends much of his time promoting Islam and bashing Israel.

There had not been a single panelist of another religion.

The agenda of the conference was promoting migration “from Syria, Afghan, Somalia, Sudan, Myanmar, and Latin America”. All but the last region on the list produces Muslim migrants.

Trump Battles the Progressive ‘Fear Society’ Fighting for an America where individuals aren’t terrrified to express their opinions in the ‘town square’. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/trump-battles-progressive-fear-society-bruce-thornton/

“Fear Society” is Natan Sharansky’s term for a socio-political order that flunks the “town square” test: People are too frightened to speak their mind in public spaces because they fear retribution. A victim of Soviet tyranny before emigrating to Israel, for Sharansky the consequences of free expression could be arrest, imprisonment, torture, and death. For us, the regime of political correctness, “cancel culture,” “microaggressions,” and “woke” commissars reinforces a similar repression, a “softer” one, as Tocqueville called it, but effective nonetheless in silencing dissent and promoting an illiberal progressive ideology.

Sharansky goes on to describe the consequences of living in a fear society, which typically comprises three groups: “true believers,” those who sincerely believe in the regime’s ideology; “dissidents,” those who oppose the regime and speak out against it; and “doublethinkers,” the majority who oppose the regime yet do not publicly express their opposition, particularly to outsiders.

Donald Trump’s political success has emboldened the conservative and Republican “doublethinkers” to express their opinions in the “town square” and challenge the domination that for several decades the progressives have enjoyed over political speech.

In Europe, hate speech laws and the absence of the legally recognized natural right to free speech that we enjoy allow the state to legally sanction or punish speech the EU doesn’t like. In contrast, here in the U.S. indirect methods of enforcement are more typically used. One method is to discredit and ostracize any alternative to progressive doctrine: “The most successful tyranny,” Harold Bloom wrote, “is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable.”

VINDMAN-

https://civildeadline.com/bombshell-report-alexander-vindman-

Bombshell Report: Alexander Vindman Admits He Made Up Parts Of Trump’s Call Summary!

Democrats are trying to spin yet another false narrative that the President would have been impeached if they were allowed to call witnesses. As time goes on, however, it’s become painfully evident that Democrats built their entire motion to impeach off of a flat out lie.

Previously, the public knew that Democrats based what they claimed was ‘abuse of power’ by the President on hearsay. We now know that it far more sinister than that.

According to a report done by Breitbart, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman admitted he made up elements of President Donald Trump’s call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an official summary.

Prior to the call, Vindman included a discussion about corruption in the talking points provided to the president but Trump did not use them in the call.

The Vindman Caper: Lee Zeldin and Victor Davis Hanson Nail the Obama-Fomented Subterfuge in the National Security Council

https://www.redstate.com/stu-in-sd/2020/02/12/the-vindman-caper-lee-zeldin-and-vd

The Democrats and the legacy media continue to propagate the false narrative that the firing of the Vindman twins – and now the projected reassignment of at least 70 other staffers – from the National Security Council is either witness retaliation, retribution, part of the “ongoing cover-up,” or just “pure cussed orneriness” on the part of the President in the aftermath of his acquittal-for-life.