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July 2022

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

After the Oslo Bloodbath Oslo warns gays not to inflame terrorists further by marching – then permits terrorists to build a mosque. Bruce Bawer

By on July 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/after-oslo-bloodbath-bruce-bawer-0/

On the night of Friday, June 24, a 42-year-old Muslim named Zaniar Matapour shot up the city’s largest gay bar, London Pub, and the tiny watering hole next door, Per På Hjørnet (Per on the Corner). He killed two and wounded twenty-one. But even though Matapour kicked off his evening of mayhem by shouting “Allahu akbar” and was later shown to belong to a radical Islamic clique, don’t think for a moment that his offense had anything to do with Islam. And even though he committed his dastardly deeds on the eve of Oslo’s scheduled Pride parade, a week after his buddy Arfan Bhatti, a convicted terrorist, posted a note on Facebook calling for the murder of gays, don’t dare suggest that the crime might have been rooted in Islam’s deadly view of homosexuality.

After all, as I reported here on June 27, no less eminent a figure than Masud Gharahkhani, the 39-year-old president of the Norwegian parliament who is (after the king) the country’s highest-ranking person – and who, like Matapour, came to Norway as a child refugee from Iran – was quick to deny that this was an Islamic act. “Hate is hate,” Gharahkhani told a reporter for VG, “and has nothing to do with religion or background.” (Why, then, did his parents flee Iran after it became an Islamic theocracy?)

Norway’s leading Muslim organizations agreed with Gharahkhani. The Islamic Council (IRN), which for years refused to take a position on punishing homosexuality with the death penalty,  condemned the atrocity and denied any Islamic connection. Ditto Senaid Kobilica of the Muslim Dialogue Network (MDN). Ditto, too, Fahad Qureshi of IslamNet, who asserted, in total contravention of the Koran, that “Islam does not permit taking the life of an innocent person, no matter gay or straight.”

You had to go into the archives to discover just how hypocritical Qureshi’s statement was. He’s on the record as saying that all Muslims support the death penalty for gays. (For obvious strategic reasons, he’s since announced that gays who abstain from sex need not be executed.)  As for Kobilica and IRN, get a load of what happened in 2009 when Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the world’s leading Islamic scholar, praised the Holocaust. Asked for a comment, IRN’s then Secretary General, Sultan Shoaib, referred reporters to Kobilica, who was then IRN’s head. Kobilica, in turn, passed the buck to the Islamic Association’s Basim Ghozlan, who declined to comment on Qaradawi’s remark because, he said, it was a “political statement.”

So the same Muslim leaders who now pretend to be appalled by two murders chose to stay mum on the Shoah.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Does Iran Have a Hit Team in the US? Former U.S. and Iranian intelligence officials tell a haunting tale. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on July 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/does-iran-have-hit-team-us-kenneth-r-timmerman/

Iran’s Quds Force, which the Biden White House has reportedly discussed removing from the terrorism list, has more than a hundred active agents operating inside the United States, according to former U.S. and Iranian intelligence officials.

Their current goal is to penetrate the security perimeter surrounding former President Donald J. Trump and to kill him.

The Iranian plot is not a secret: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’I, boasted in January that Iranian agents inside the United States were tracking the former president’s movements, and could penetrate the security systems protecting him.

That boast appeared in the form of a chilling video, posted to the Khamenei’s website and to Twitter by regime sympathizers and intelligence analysts, showing Quds Force operatives targeting the president on the tee of his West Palm Beach golf club. It ended with a photograph of Qassem Soleymani, the Quds Force commander killed by a U.S. drone strike outside the Baghdad airport on Jan. 2, 2020, and a black screen: “Revenge is Definite.”

They have also threatened to kill former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and CIA Director Gina Haspel in retaliation for their role in the drone strike that killed Suleymani and 17 others on Route Irish at the Baghdad airport. “Ironically, that’s the same road where Suleymani had killed dozens of Americans,” said John Maguire, a former CIA deputy station chief who worked in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, have known for over a decade about Iranian programs to recruit and train Quds Force operatives – preferably non-Iranians – capable of penetrating Western countries.

“The Quds Force started creating this capability in Baghdad in 2004,” Maguire said. “They wanted educated candidates; ideally, candidates with foreign travel documents and experience traveling in the West. The Quds Force organized, controlled, trained and supported this capability.”

The prospective agents learned how to make improvised explosive devices out of common materials, how to identify concealed fire positions for a sniper attack, and how to conduct surveillance and counter-surveillance, among other operational skills. Many went to Lebanon for a full year’s paramilitary and martial arts training with Hezbollah.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Confirmed Again: The Green Agenda Is Taking Us Backward

By on July 5th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/05/confirmed-again-the-green-agenda-is-taking-us-backward/

All the cool kids say humanity has to abandon fossil fuels and rely on wind and solar for our electricity and battery-operated cars (which remind us of the toys we played with as kids) to get around. It’s the future, they say. So why does it seem more like the past?

Let’s begin with a fascinating “fer instance”: 

“Classic Cars,” says a Motorious headline from late last  month, “Are Greener Than Electric Vehicles.” The story below the headline refers to a study from ​​British insurance company Footman James, which is “refreshing,” says the article’s author, “because it doesn’t talk emotional rage, sticking  instead to the inconvenient facts.”

And what are those facts?

“A classic car notching up the national average of 1,200 miles emits 563kg of CO2 a year. By comparison, a new Volkswagen Golf has a carbon footprint of 6.8 tonnes of CO2 the day it leaves the factory, a figure it would take our average classic 12 years to match.”
“For an electric vehicle, the footprint is even greater. A battery-powered Polestar 2 creates 26 tonnes of CO2 during its production, emissions that would take a typical classic more than 46 years to achieve. By which time, the EV’s cutting-edge lithium-ion battery would have long since lost its ability to hold a charge and been consigned to the nearest recycling facility.”
“Footman James rightly points out that within that 46-year period, the Polestar 2’s battery will need to be replaced, maybe even swapped for a new one twice or more,” writes Steven Symes for Motorious. “And what happens to the battery? Can it really be recycled? The answer for now is no. Meanwhile, the classic car keeps running without contributing significantly to a landfill. But you should feel bad for driving such an awful pollution machine, or so we’re told.”

The narrative says EVs are greener but that’s because the true-believers “just look at tailpipe emissions, behaving as if that’s everything in the equation. They don’t consider pollution generated by the manufacturing process,” says Symes.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Has to Choose: Climate Change or Human Rights in China Electric-car batteries and solar panels rely on raw materials produced with forced and child labor. By William Schneider Jr.

By on July 5th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-climate-change-human-rights-china-lithium-batteries-electric-vehicles-solar-energy-uyghur-forced-labor-11656946537?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

President Biden’s ambition to phase out fossil fuels is at odds with his human-rights objectives in China. Last month the U.S. started enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, “ensuring goods made with forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China do not enter the United States market.” Mr. Biden advocated intensely for this legislation and signed it in December.

But the administration is no less committed to using solar energy, batteries and electric vehicles to meet its commitments under the Glasgow Climate Pact. The technologies that underpin these climate-change commitments depend on Chinese forced and child labor.

The lithium-based battery is the only currently available technology that permits the early electrification of transportation at scale. China has vertically integrated its supply chain to produce this product. China has acquired mining properties throughout the world to produce lithium, which it processes to manufacture batteries. China also became the dominant producer of cobalt after its acquisition of mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produces 60% of the world’s supply. Cobalt is a critical material for lithium battery anodes, and Congo’s cobalt mining industry is notorious for the use of child labor.

This vertically integrated approach is aligned with China’s aspirations to dominate the global electric-vehicle market. This goal was established by the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017 as an aim of “Made in China 2025” policy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bidenomics 101 The President doesn’t appear to know anything about how the private economy works.

By on July 5th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidenomics-101-joe-biden-tweet-gas-prices-refiners-markets-jeff-bezos-11656892820?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Business leaders have chalked up President Biden’s attacks on oil companies to political cynicism, but maybe they’re too generous. His tweet over the weekend ordering gas stations to lower prices betrayed a willful ignorance about the private economy.

“My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril,” Mr. Biden tweeted Saturday. “Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.” Had Donald Trump issued such a command as President, the left would have cried “authoritarian.”

It’s embarrassing for the leader of the free world to sound like he’s channeling Hugo Chávez. A Chinese state media flack praised Mr. Biden’s tweet: “Now US President finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation. He didn’t believe this before.” Or maybe he did, and nobody wanted to believe it.

You’d think that the President’s Ivy League-educated economic advisers would have informed him that large refiners own fewer than 5% of all gas stations in America. More than 60% are operated by an individual or family that owns a single store, and the rest are independently owned chains or grocery stores that sell fuel. Many license brands from refiners.

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