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Ruth King

ISIS Trading in Antiquities and People By Eileen F. Toplansky

With the Jewish holiday of Purim approaching, it is incumbent upon all decent people — whatever their religious persuasion — to fully understand that ISIS jihadists are the lineal descendents of the cruel and ancient Amalekites with their bestial destruction of people.

In fact, “[i]n rabbinic literature, the reasons for the unusual eternal remembrance of Amalek are the following: (1) Amalek is the irreconcilable enemy and it is forbidden to show mercy foolishly to one wholly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Moreover, the attack of the Amalekites upon the Israelites encouraged others. All the tragedies which Israel suffered are considered the direct outcome of Amalek’s hostile act.”

Though the evil may begin with the Jews, it will always encompass everyone else.

Thus, at Jihad Files, one learns that “ISIS is now apparently instructing its followers on the religious protocols of cannibalism.” This follows the nauseating news that 250 children were murdered through bread kneading machinery and men were baked alive. Moreover, jihadists throughout the world offer money to behead Islamic scholars who disagree with them. Yazidi girls are sold as sex slaves and little girls ages 7-9 bleed to death after being raped by ISIS militia multiple times a day.

And such abhorrent ideas are promoted in the West when Georgetown University, Professor Jonathan Brown emphatically states that “consent isn’t necessary for lawful sex.” Thus, “marital-rape is an invalid concept in Islam” and “a male owner of a female slave has the right to sexual access to her.” Rape of the infidel certainly does not merit any concern because “her ‘consent’ would be meaningless since she is his slave.” In fact, Brown asserts that “it’s not immoral for one human to own another human.”

Then one learns that “an estimated 49 percent of individuals indicted for carrying out or conspiring to perpetrate a terrorist attack linked to the Islamic State are ‘from established Muslim countries.'” Equally disturbing is that “the vast majority (83 percent) of ISIS indictees are naturalized U.S. citizens, and 65 percent are born in this country.”

That Trump’s newest executive order mandates government reports on honor killings committed by migrants is a solid first step in stopping the madness of “gender-based violence against women.” Katie McHugh asserts that “like female genital mutilation, [honor killing] is a practice that would not exist in the U.S. without mass immigration bringing its practitioners into U.S. communities.”

On another front, Yaya J. Fanusie and Alexander Joffee published “Monumental Fight: Countering the Islamic State’s Antiquities Trafficking” which was published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This November 2015 report highlights that “although the antiquities trade is considerably smaller than other elements of the IS financial portfolios, it offers the group the prospect of high mark-ups, global demand, a low likelihood for military disruption, and a willing pool of civilians who supply labor for the trade.”

Since 2010 there appears to be a 23% uptick in antiques arriving from the area that the Islamic State controls. IS generates “enough revenue within the territory it controls to cover a payroll of hundreds of millions of dollars in its fighters’ annual salaries.”

Although oil remains the group’s most important commodity, “the role of foreign funders directly through cash or indirectly through Islamic charities” aids IS because it avoids a trail of transactions while also exploiting the Qatari and Kuwaiti banking systems.”

Dozens Killed in ISIS Attack on Kabul Military Hospital The gunmen disguised themselves as doctors to penetrate the hospital’s security cordon By Ehsanullah Amiri and Margherita Stancati

KABUL—Islamic State fighters disguised as doctors fought elite government forces inside Afghanistan’s largest military hospital on Wednesday in a seven-hour battle that left at least 30 people dead and 50 others wounded, Afghan officials said.

Islamic State’s regional affiliate, Khorasan Province, said it carried out the attack, which began when a suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the entrance of the heavily guarded medical facility in the Afghan capital. In a statement, Khorasan Province said four of its fighters armed with suicide vests then entered the compound.

As the gunmen and security forces exchanged fire inside the complex, hospital personnel scurried to protect patients and evacuate them to safety. Among those killed were an unknown number of doctors, the Afghan defense ministry said.

A photo distributed by Islamic State’s official Amaq news agency purportedly taken inside the besieged hospital showed what it said was a militant posing next to an automatic rifle, wearing a surgical mask and holding a dagger. Another photo showed the bodies of unidentified victims. All the gunmen died in the fighting, Afghan officials said.

Getting to the Bottom of a Climate Crusade Are investigations by the ‘Green 20’ an effort to intimidate scientific dissenters? By Rep. Lamar Smith(R-Texas 21) see note please

Mr. Smith, a Texas Republican, is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He is rated a minus 4 by the Arab American Institute for his strong support for Israel.

Transparency for thee, but not for me—that seems to be the motto of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. Last year they led a group of their colleagues—dubbed the “Green 20”—in a sweeping initiative to target dissenting views on climate change. Exxon Mobil, for instance, was asked to turn over decades of documents.

The Green 20 investigations have been criticized as blatantly political. Last year a federal judge overseeing Ms. Healey’s suit against Exxon expressed concern that she may be conducting it in “bad faith.”

For nearly a year, the congressional committee I lead has been trying to understand the effects of these investigations on scientific research. Unfortunately, the attorneys general have obstructed our inquiry at every turn. Last July, after two months of unanswered requests for information, the committee issued subpoenas to Mr. Schneiderman and Ms. Healey.
The subpoenas asked for communications between Green 20 offices and environmental activists. This would show the level of coordination in this campaign to harass and silence scientists who challenge prevailing climate-change orthodoxies. The attorneys general have refused to comply, hiding behind vague excuses.

The committee has not sought information about the investigations of Exxon. Instead, our interest is in discovering how this attempt at intimidation affects federally funded scientific research. Then we may consider changing the law to allow this research to continue.

The hypocrisy of the attorneys general here is evident—though perhaps understandable. Mr. Schneiderman has accepted nearly $300,000 in campaign donations from environmentalist donors, including members of the Soros family. He has also used the investigation as a way to curry favor with anti-Exxon billionaire Tom Steyer for a potential gubernatorial run, according to the New York Post.

McCarthyism at Middlebury The silencing of Charles Murray is a major event in the annals of free speech. By Daniel Henninger

The violence committed against Charles Murray and others at Middlebury College is a significant event in the annals of free speech.

Since the day the Founding Fathers planted the three words, “freedom of speech,” in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Americans and their institutions have had to contend with attempts to suppress speech.

The right to speak freely has survived not merely because of many eloquent Supreme Court decisions but also because America’s political and institutional leadership, whatever else their differences, has stood together to defend this right.
But maybe not any longer.

America’s campuses have been in the grip of a creeping McCarthyism for years. McCarthyism, the word, stands for the extreme repression of ideas and for silencing speech.

In the 1950s, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy turned his name into a word of generalized disrepute by using the threat of communism, which was real, to ruin innocent individuals’ careers and reputations.

=Today, polite liberals—in politics, academia and the media arts—watch in silent assent as McCarythyist radicals hound, repress and attack conservatives like Charles Murray for what they think, write and say.

One of the first politicians to speak against this mood in 1950 was Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. In her speech, “Declaration of Conscience,” Sen. Smith said: “The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as ‘Communists’ or ‘Fascists’ by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Three years later, in 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a famous commencement speech at Dartmouth College. “Don’t join the book burners,” Ike told the students. Even if others “think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn’t America.”

Today, the smear is common for conservative speakers and thinkers. Prior to Mr. Murray’s scheduled talk at Middlebury, a student petition, signed by hundreds of faculty and alumni, sought to rescind the invitation because “we believe that Murray’s ideas have no place in rigorous scholarly conversation.” Such “disinvitations” have become routine.

So let us plainly ask: Why hasn’t one Democrat stood in the well of the Senate or House to denounce, or even criticize, what the Middlebury mob did to Charles Murray and the faculty who asked him to speak? Have any of them ever come out against the silencing of speech they don’t like? CONTINUE AT SITE

A Special Prosecutor . . . For What? There is no crime to probe in the matter of the Trump campaign’s contact with Russians. By Andrew C. McCarthy

So, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. Great!

Just one question: From what?

Yes, yes, Sessions is a good and decent man. He is a scrupulous lawyer who cares about his reputation. Thus, in stark contrast to Obama administration attorneys general, he strictly applied — I’d say he hyper-applied — the ethical standard that calls on a lawyer to recuse himself from a matter in which his participation as counsel would create the mere appearance of impropriety. The standard is eminently sensible because the legitimacy of our judicial system depends not only on its actually being on the up and up but on its being perceived as such.

If it looks like you’re conflicted, you step aside, period. Simple, right? Well . . .

Much as I admire our AG’s virtue (and you know I do), let’s pause the preen parade for just a moment. There’s a tiny word in that just-described ethical standard that we need to take note of: matter. A lawyer doesn’t just recuse himself. He recuses himself from a legal matter — from participation in a case. When we are talking about the criminal law, that means recusal from a prospective prosecution. You need a crime for that. Prosecutors do not recuse themselves from fishing expeditions or partisan narratives.

So . . . what is the crime?

We need to ask this question because, rest assured, this does not end with Jeff Sessions. No more than it ended with Mike Flynn. No more than it would end if the media-Democrat complex were to obtain the much coveted scalp of Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Seb Gorka, or one of the other Beltway gate-crashers we’ve come to know over the last six improbable months. The objective is President Trump: preferably, his impeachment and removal; but second prize, his mortal political wounding by a thousand cuts just in time for 2018 and 2020, would surely do.

As I tried to explain in my book Faithless Execution (2014), impeachment cases do not just spontaneously appear. They have to be built over time, and with vigor, because most Americans — even those who oppose a president politically — do not want the wrenching divisiveness and national instability that impeachment unavoidably entails. The reluctant public must be convinced that there is urgency, that the president’s demonstrated unfitness has created a crisis that must be dealt with.

But remember: Democrats are from Mars and Republicans are from Venus.

In the matter of Barack Obama, the GOP had an actual case based on systematic executive overreach and the empowering of America’s enemies, the kind of threat to the constitutional framework that induced Madison to regard the impeachment remedy as “indispensable.” Yet agitating for upheaval is against the Republican character (a generally good trait, though paralyzing in an actual crisis). Plus, President Obama’s personal popularity always insulated the unpopularity of his agenda and bathed even his most lawless actions in a glow of good intentions. Republicans had no stomach for mentioning impeachment, much less building a case.

Hmm: Obama Officials Set Up Jeff Sessions’ Meeting With the Russian Ambassador By Debra Heine

It should already be obvious that the fake media firestorm over Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ meetings last year with the Russian ambassador is nothing more than the Democrat Media Complex — led by Obama’s shadow government — trying to take down a key member of the Trump administration. Their game is to find some minor issue (Sessions could have been more forthcoming during his confirmation hearing) and turn it into a major impeachment-worthy scandal.

It’s a tried and true strategy that Democrats and their friends in the media were able to pull off with amazing success during the Bush years. But the playing field is completely different in 2017 — more people are on to their games, and we have a president who loves to fight. President Trump doesn’t crouch in a defensive posture — he goes on the offense. Good luck with that, Dems.

Now, new information has come out that throws cold water all over their phony “RussiaGate” scandal.

It turns out the senator spoke to the Russian ambassador in one of the allegedly scandalous “meetings” on the invitation of the Obama administration.

Hans A. von Spakovsky of Fox News reports (emphasis added):

So what are the two meetings that Sessions had? The first came at a conference on “Global Partners in Diplomacy,” where Sessions was the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, The Heritage Foundation, and several other organizations, it was held in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.

The conference was an educational program for ambassadors invited by the Obama State Department to observe the convention. The Obama State Department handled all of the coordination with ambassadors and their staff, of which there were about 100 at the conference.

Apparently, after Sessions finished speaking, a small group of ambassadors—including the Russian ambassador—approached the senator as he left the stage and thanked him for his remarks. That’s the first “meeting.” And it’s hardly an occasion—much less a venue—in when a conspiracy to “interfere” with the November election could be hatched.

Sessions also apparently met with the Russian ambassador in September. But on that occasion, Sessions was acting as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, not as a surrogate for the Trump campaign. That’s why the meeting was held in his Senate office. His DOJ spokesperson, Sarah Isgur Flores, says they discussed relations between the two countries – not the election.

There was nothing unusual about this: Sessions met with more than two dozen ambassadors during 2016, including the Ukrainian ambassador the day before the meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Violent Student Mob in Vermont Shuts Down Charles Murray Lecture, Injures Professor By Debra Heine

Controversial author and scholar Charles Murray and a Middlebury College professor were attacked by an angry mob Thursday night as they left a campus building following an attempt at a lecture.

Professor Allison Stanger’s neck was injured when someone pulled her hair as she tried to shield Murray from 20 to 30 violent agitators who attacked the pair outside the McCullough Student Center at Vermont’s traditionally liberal Middlebury College.

According to Bill Burger, vice president of communications at the college, the crowd was made up of students and “outside agitators,” some of whom wore masks as they screamed at Murray. He described their behavior outside as “incredibly violent and said that “it was a very, very dangerous situation.”

Charles Murray is a political scientist and author who is best known for his 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, co-written with Richard Herrnstein. The New York Times bestseller is controversial for linking social inequality to genetics. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels Murray a white nationalist on its website.

Via Vermont’s “Independent Voice” Seven Days:

“The demonstrators were trying to block Mr. Murray and Professor Stanger’s way out of the building and to the car,” Burger said. “It became a pushing and shoving match, with the officers trying to protect those two people from demonstrators — and it became violent.”

“This was an incredibly violent confrontation,” added Burger, who described the crowd a “mob.”

On Friday afternoon, Middlebury College president Laurie Patton sent a statement to all students, faculty and staff describing how “deeply disappointed” she was by the incident.

“I know that many students, faculty, and staff who were in attendance or waiting outside to participate were upset by the events, and the lost opportunity for those in our community who wanted to listen to and engage with Mr. Murray,” she wrote, later adding: “I extend my sincerest apologies to everyone who came in good faith to participate in a serious discussion, and particularly to Mr. Murray and Prof. Stanger for the way they were treated during the event and, especially, afterward.”

Murray had been invited and scheduled to speak at Wilson Hall earlier in the day. But a jeering and booing crowd of students turned their backs on him and shouted down his attempts to speak. After about 25 minutes, administrators resorted to plan B: moving Murray to a private room and streaming the video of his speech online. CONTINUE AT SITE

Shattering the State Department’s Echo Chamber By Sarah N. Stern

Most Americans would like to believe that certain ethical qualities are in the mix when shaping American foreign policy, such as intellectual honesty and moral integrity. These qualities, whether part of an individual’s nature or those of national policy, often require some difficult introspection.

Sometimes it even involves the painful admission that one has been wrong. Even if one has been wrong for an extremely long time. And it is human nature that the longer the time, the deeper the resistance to change.

So it is with certain theories that our State Department has clung to for generations now, such as “land for peace.” What we have seen through decades of empirical, and often heartbreaking experience, is that this formula simply hasn’t worked. If the objective is “peace”, one must honestly ask oneself if any of the politically gut-wrenching and internally divisive land withdrawals from the Sinai, Gaza, southern Lebanon and parts of Judea and Samaria, has actually brought us any closer to that objective of peace.

But rather than challenge the premises of this formulation, those in the State Department’s echo chamber simply dig their feet in further and rationalize its failure. Each time there is another excuse. “Israel hasn’t given enough land”, or “Gaza was without a negotiating partner”.

All of the State Department apparatchiks who stubbornly cling to this mantra were one hundred per cent in favor of each of these withdrawals. Then, when those land withdrawal did not bring us closer to the designated objective, they came up with convenient post facto rationalizations.

On Wednesday February 15, five former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, Thomas Pickering, Edward Walker, James Cunningham, William Harrop, and Daniel Kurtzer wrote a letter to the U.S. Foreign Relations Committee casting doubts upon the ability of President Trump’s selection of David Friedman for the position of ambassador to Israel because he has not demonstrated than he has bought into their paradigm, which has proven to be an abject failure, time and time again.

Nigeria: At least three killed in Maiduguri bomb attack

Multiple bomb blasts hit Maiduguri early Friday with many feared dead.
The News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, said the attacks were carried out by suspected suicide bombers around the NNPC depot on Damboa Road, Maiduguri.

The police command’s spokesman, Victor Isuku, confirmed the blasts on Friday.
“Our men are still working at the scene,” NAN quoted Mr. Isuku as saying.
He promised to supply details later.

A witness, Abubakar Kaumi, told journalists at the scene that the blast occurred around 3 a.m.

“A woman suspected to be a suicide bomber walking alongside two girls came round the depot.

“They detonated their explosives near some petrol tankers parked there, and destroyed the three vehicles.

KATIE HOPKINS: The Swedish town where migrant gangs have killed multiculturalism stone dead and laugh at laws they despise and defy

A reader is very angry because I suggested the child raped by a 45-year-old migrant (posing as an unaccompanied minor) was 14.

In fact, he was 12.

This is the state of liberalism today. So determined to prove I am wrong, my observations erroneous, the stories I have on tape inaccurate, that it has lost all sight of the raped migrant child crumpled in the corner.

Similarly, the ‘we know better brigade’ are so puffed up with smug self-importance as they point out Trump got his dates confused over the troubles in Sweden, they can’t see past their own chest to the riots in Rinkeby.

Where cars were set alight, shops looted and shopkeepers beaten while youths went on the rampage.

I asked Mattias Karlsson, leader of the Swedish Democrats – currently leading in the polls – why other politicians refuse to acknowledge the problems right in front of their eyes.

He explained that to accept there is a problem would mean accepting nearly 80 years of liberal thinking was wrong. That multiculturalism doesn’t work, that mass immigration does not lead to integration, that Sweden has made a big mistake.

A stranger came up to me in a coffee shop to say much the same thing. She had read my first report. She implored me to shout louder.

She said Sweden cannot go on pretending it is some kind of utopia. That it is on a path to fail, that her friends fear Sweden is being overwhelmed.