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Ruth King

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Geert Wilders Rallies Protests in Holland against Muslim Migrant Influx: “Islamic testosterone bombs”

By on January 24th, 2016

The New York Times covered a protest rally Saturday by Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom Party in The Hague Parliament in the Dutch community of Spijkenisse handing out cans of pepper spray. That was a send up on the Muslim male migrant misogyny in Cologne Germany and other German and European cities by what he calls: “Islamic testosterone bombs”. As if to verify this threat the Imam in Cologne, Germany said the women who suffered sexual assaults and worse on New Year’s Eve by upwards of 1,000 Muslim males gathered at the main railway station brought upon themselves: “they were half naked and wore perfume.” Absurd! They were attired in warm clothing. Doubtless, the Imam thought they should have been immured in tip to toe niqabs. We had posted on the threats facing Dutch and other European women when Wilders and a fellow PVV Hague parliamentarian raised questions of the ruling coalition led by PM Mark Rutte were doing to protect Dutch women.

The New York Times report chronicled this latest protest rally by Wilders, “Dutch Lawmaker Wilders Gaining Support Amid Migrant Crisis:”

Wilders, surrounded by bodyguards and police, visited a market in the largely blue-collar town of Spijkenisse on Saturday to hand out the sprays, which contained red paint. Amid stalls selling vegetables, fish, flowers and bicycle parts, Wilders got a rock-star welcome from dozens of supporters, while a small group of protesters chanted and waved placards including one that read, “Refugees are welcome, racism is not.”

The publicity stunt fits into Wilders’ uncompromising anti-immigrant, anti-Islam rhetoric that has propelled him to the top of Dutch opinion polls, just over a year away from parliamentary elections.

In between shaking hands and posing for selfies with supporters, the Freedom Party leader said that, if elected, he would, “close the borders immediately and have no more asylum seekers. We just cannot afford to have more. The Dutch people in a big majority don’t want it and we cannot afford it and it makes our people and women only more unsafe.”

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DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS PRESIDENT: JEWS WEARING KIPPAS ARE FAIR GAME FOR MUSLIMS

By on January 24th, 2016

Can we start calling the Hate Israel crowd anti-Semitic yet? Because between the boycotts of Jewish businesses, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and overt justification for anti-Jewish violence, whatever distinction may have existed in the past is gone.

Case in point, Rony Brauman, the former president of Doctors Without Borders suggesting that Jews wearing Kippahs, a Jewish religious garment, are bringing violence on themselves by pledging allegiance to Israel.

Rony Brauman, a former president of Doctors Without Borders, made the statement last week during an interview on the Europe1 radio station about the Jan. 11stabbing of a devout Jew in Marseille, allegedly by a 15-year-old boy who told police he assaulted the victim as part of the jihad of the Islamic State terrorist group.

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Pessin Affair Exposes Connecticut College Antisemitism Noah Beck

By on January 24th, 2016

A pro-Israel professor won’t be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.

Andrew Pessin “requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel studies,” Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an email last week. “He has been and continues to be a valued member of the Connecticut College faculty.”

The vague and misleading response glosses over the intensity of the campaign against Pessin — he first took a medical leave last spring as a smear campaign against him was at full throat. The controversy exposed an administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.

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Why the Justice Department Won’t Work with the FBI on Clinton’s E-mail Case By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 23rd, 2016

Another day, another double-take reading the New York Times.

The latest shoe in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s scandalous mishandling of classified information dropped heavily this week. It had already been reported that, contrary to her denials, hundreds of secret intelligence communications were transmitted over the private, unsecured e-mail system on which the former secretary of state recklessly conducted government business. It is now clear that some of these contained “top secret/SAP” information. (SAP is “special access programs.”) This indicates defense secrets of the highest order, the compromise of which can destroy vital intelligence programs, get covert agents killed, and imperil national security.

Yet, in reporting the story, the Times’ Mark Mazzetti took pains to stress: “The government has said that Mrs. Clinton is not a subject of the investigation.”

Really? Well, to put it in Clintonian terms: It all depends on what the definition of “subject” is.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Times, “subject” is a term of art in criminal investigations. It refers to one of the three categories into which prosecutors fit every relevant actor. Subjects are people whose conduct is being scrutinized and who, depending on what evidence turns up, may or may not be charged. This distinguishes them from targets, who are suspects virtually certain to be indicted for an obvious crime; and from mere witnesses, whose interaction with a suspect suggests no criminality on their part (e.g., the teller in a bank hold-up, or the neighbor awakened by a fatal gunshot next door).

For law enforcement, targets and mere witnesses are easy to deal with. Targets usually decline to be interviewed (as is their right under the Fifth Amendment). Even if they are not guilty, it is often prudent for them to wait to see what the government alleges before they answer questions. Witnesses tend to speak freely because there is no reason not to.

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King’s College London: where being pro-Israel is a risky business : Tom Slater

By on January 23rd, 2016

The police were called to the Strand campus of King’s College London last night after an Israel Society event was protested by pro-Palestine student activists. Fire alarms were pulled and a window was smashed after student group KCL Action Palestine (KCLAP) attempted to disrupt the meeting, providing further proof, if it was ever needed, that anti-Israel student politics has taken an ugly and illiberal turn.

Ami Ayalon, politician and former head of the Israeli secret service, was giving a talk on Israeli security, as part of a tour organised by the group Yachad, which advocates the two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a statement, KCLAP called Ayalon a ‘war criminal’ and suggested his support for a two-state solution was only a cover for his desire for Israeli racial purity. The group said it was ‘unacceptable’ that KCL Israel Society had invited Ayalon. ‘To whitewash apartheid is not academic freedom’, it went on, ‘it is complicity with oppression’.

Footage from the event shows KCLAP banging on the windows of the room in which the talk was taking place, chanting ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and holding Palestinian flags and banners up against the glass. Meanwhile, footage taken inside the building shows Ayalon persisting with his talk, to a packed room of about 50 students, as chanting and fire alarms blare in the background.

There are some reports of chairs being thrown outside the meeting, and around 20 police officers were said to have appeared at Norfolk House after the three KCL security officers brought in to guard the event were overwhelmed. While one KCLAP activist seemed to suggest the group intended to enter the meeting only to ‘ask the questions that need to be asked’, the group’s denunciations of KCL Israel Society’s decision to hold the event at all seemed to suggest otherwise.

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Sarah Palin’s Disgusting Excuse for Her Son’s Violence against His Girlfriend By Maggie Gallagher

By on January 23rd, 2016

It’s the political season, and I want to cut Sarah Palin some slack. She and her family have endured disgusting, unjust verbal abuse over the years, and I like her, personally.

But some things cannot be overlooked. I would not be discussing her son’s arrest this week except that, in the highest-profile way, at a Tulsa rally, she did something grotesque and disturbing: She blamed President Obama for the fact that her 26-year-old son beat up his girlfriend this week.

Allegedly, I must say, since he hasn’t yet been convicted. But Palin did not claim that her son was innocent; she instead said that, because he served in Iraq, post-traumatic stress disorder was responsible for his behavior: “I can talk personally about this. I guess it’s kind of the elephant in the room — because my own family, going through what we’re going through today with my son, a combat vet having served in a Stryker brigade fighting for you all, America, in the war zone. But my son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened,” Palin said.

As Politico reported her speech:

“They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top,” she continued, touting Trump as the best choice for president. “It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?’”

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Can We Stop Homegrown Terrorists? Law enforcement is making progress against ‘lone-wolf’ jihadists, but the threat will persist for years to come—and remain relatively modest By Peter Bergen

By on January 23rd, 2016

At 11 a.m. on Dec. 2, some 60 miles east of Los Angeles, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, stormed into a Christmas party for employees of the San Bernardino county public-health department, where Farook worked. Wearing military-style clothing and black masks, the couple unleashed a barrage of bullets. They killed 14 people, and minutes after the attack, Malik pledged an oath of allegiance to Islamic State on her Facebook page. It was the most lethal terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11.
Farooq and Malik were married parents and college graduates. They were solidly middle-class, without criminal records or documented mental-health issues. He was a native-born American, she had recently emigrated from Pakistan, and there was nothing in the basic details of their backgrounds to suggest that they were any special threat.

They were, in short, very much in the social mainstream of American life—and that, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be typical of homegrown jihadists, whose numbers have been increasing in recent years. In 2015, the FBI investigated supporters of Islamic State in all 50 states, and more than 80 Americans were charged with some kind of jihadist crime, ranging from planning travel to Syria to plotting an attack in the U.S. It was the peak year since 2001 for law-enforcement activity against Americans who had chosen to join a group or accept an ideology whose goal is to kill fellow Americans.

Working with a research team, I have assembled an exhaustive data set of the roughly 300 jihadists indicted or convicted in the U.S. for some kind of terrorist crime since 9/11. Those crimes ranged from the relatively minor—sending small sums to a terrorist group—to murder.

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MORE ON JOHN BUCHAN

By on January 23rd, 2016

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916!

In his delightful book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia” Roger Kimball has a chapter “Rereading John Buchan. He writes” Buchan, who described himself as “high- low brow” was author of a spy thriller “Greenmantle” in 1916 which describes a German effort to manipulate a radical Islamist group in Turkey. Kimball quotes a protagonist in the book: “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”

There’s more. Kimball mines this from another character in the book. “There is a great stirring in Islam, something moving on the face of the waters….Those religious revivals come in cycles, and one is due about now. And they are quite clear about the details. A seer has arisen of the blood of the Prophet, who will restore the Khalifate to its old glories and Islam to its old purity.”

Goodness gracious! Islamophobia in 1916! rsk

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Simon Caterson :A Century of The Thirty-Nine Steps

By on January 23rd, 2016

Before Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Wilbur Smith and all the other authors who have made the wrongly accused rogue male their hero, there was John Buchan’s urbane and gentlemanly Richard Hannay, still the most endearing of the lot
A century after publication, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps remains the quintessential spy thriller. There is no need to rediscover this novel, since it has never gone away. No work of fiction published during the Edwardian period is more widely available in bookstores in as many mass-market and scholarly editions. The presence of The Thirty-Nine Steps in popular culture has spread even further—the book’s title has a life of its own.

It is one of the first adult adventure novels I can remember reading, part of an early teenage thriller binge that included Jack Higgins, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth and Wilbur Smith, and a phase followed by a lasting engagement with the likes of Eric Ambler, Joseph Conrad and John le Carré.

The writing career of John Buchan, who died in 1940, predates all of the other authors I have just mentioned except Conrad. The Thirty-Nine Steps is the forerunner to countless subsequent spy thrillers and action movies where a lone hero is pitted against the forces of darkness, which is the scenario used by virtually all of them.

The Thirty-Nine Steps has spawned four feature-film adaptations, the first and best-known of which was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1935. The novel has also been adapted many times for radio, most notably for broadcast by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in 1938. In recent years a comic stage version based on the Hitchcock film has been performed in many countries throughout the world, including South Korea, Russia, Israel, Poland and Australia, as well as enjoying a long run on the London stage that, at the time of writing, continues.

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Islam and Islamism in America in 2015: Part I January-March 2015 by Soeren Kern

By on January 23rd, 2016

Representative André Carson (D-Indiana), a convert to Islam, was appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Carson has extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Officials at the Rocky Heights Middle School in Littleton, Colorado, ignited controversy when they told female students to dress according to Sharia law while visiting a mosque during a field trip.

Islamic politics “advocates the world’s greatest double standard: if you come to our country, we won’t let you worship the way you want, we won’t let you say what you want to say… However, we have come to your country, therefore we have the right to do whatever we want to do, including kill you if you make us mad.” — Former US President Bill Clinton.

Fouad ElBayly, an Egyptian-born imam who in 2007 said that Somali-born activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali should receive the death penalty for her criticism of Islam, is now a Department of Justice contractor hired to teach classes to Muslims who are in federal prison. – The Daily Caller

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under Allah….” – Arabic rendering of the Pledge of Allegiance, Pine Bush High School, New York.

Breitbart News revealed the existence of what is believed to be the first official Sharia law court in the United States, in Irving, Texas. The so-called Islamic Tribunal settles civil disputes among the growing Muslim population.

The Muslim population of the United States surpassed 3.5 million in 2015, according to demographic projections compiled by the Pew Research Center. In percentage terms, Muslims currently comprise roughly 1% of the US population.

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