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Turkey: Still among the World’s Worst Jailers of Journalists by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15307/turkey-jailing-journalists

“Scores of journalists remain behind bars or under travel bans as a consequence of an extended, politically motivated crackdown against the media.” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

“A subsequent wide-ranging capture of the judiciary has progressively and severely damaged the rule of law and the public’s right to access information…” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

“Pre-trial detention for hundreds of journalists has lasted for months and sometimes years before investigations are completed and the trials can begin.” — “Turkey’s Journalists in the Dock: The Judicial Silencing of the Fourth Estate”, September 13, 2019.

According to the latest report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Turkey fell below its ranking as the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the first time in four years — dropping behind even China. That rating is not exactly indicative of an improvement in Ankara’s stance towards the media. On the contrary, as CPJ revealed on December 11:

“[T]he fall to 47 journalists in jail from 68 [in 2018] reflects the successful efforts by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to stamp out independent reporting and criticism by closing down more than 100 news outlets and lodging terror-related charges against many of their staff.”

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Iran Shoots Down the University of Windsor Five Justin Trudeau seeks justice — while the American Left parrots Iranian propaganda.Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/iran-shoots-down-university-windsor-five-lloyd-billingsley/

Early last Wednesday, Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Within five minutes, the Boeing 737-800 came flaming down in what the Iranian regime initially claimed was an accident due to engine failure. Before week’s end, the regime admitted the missile launch that downed the aircraft killing 82 Iranians, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three British citizens, and three Germans.

Thirteen of the victims were involved in engineering and scientific research at four universities in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Grieving relatives have cause to wonder about the way the shootdown was brokered to the public.

Victims from the University of Windsor included Zahra Naghibi, 32, a PhD student in engineering, and her husband Mohammed Abbaspour Ghadi, 33, a civil engineer and UW graduate. Samira Bashiri, 29, was a research assistant in biology and her husband Hamidreza Setareh Kokab, 31, was a PhD student in industrial engineering. Pedram Jadidi, 28, was a PhD student in engineering.

According to a January 10 report by Doug Schmidt of the Windsor Star, “Just minutes after takeoff, the Boeing 737-800 crashed, with some news reports on Thursday accusing the Iranian military of an accidental missile strike. Just hours earlier, Iran had launched a missile attack on U.S. military bases in neighboring Iraq in retaliation over the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian general last Friday.”

On January 11, the Star’s Julie Kotsis covered a memorial service for “five University of Windsor colleagues killed Wednesday in a plane crash in Iran,” with no speculation about an Iranian shootdown, and no quest for answers. That marked a stark contrast to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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Duping Americans on Sharia A detailed look at how Islamic apologist extraordinaire John Esposito whitewashes Islamic terror. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/duping-americans-sharia-raymond-ibrahim/

Does Islam itself promote hostility for and violence against non-Muslims, or are all the difficulties between the West and Islam based on secondary factors—from “radical” interpretations of Islam, to economics and grievances?

This is the fundamental question.

Obviously, if “anti-infidel” hostility is inherent to Islam itself, then the conflict becomes existential—a true clash of civilizations, with no easy fixes and lots of ugly implications along the horizon.

Because of this truism, those whose job it is to whitewash Islam’s image in the West insist on the opposite—that all difficulties are temporal and not rooted to innate Islamic teachings.

Enter Shariah: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-authored by John Esposito and Natana J. Delong-Bas.  The authors’ goal is to exonerate Shariah, which they portray as enshrining “the common good (maslahah), human dignity, social justice, and the centrality of the community” from Western criticism or fear, which they say is based solely on “myth” and “sensationalism.”

In their introductory chapters they define Shariah as being built upon the words of the Koran and the Sunna (or example) of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as contained in sahih (canonical) hadiths.  They add: “Shariah and Islamic law are not the same thing.  The distinction between divine law (Shariah) and its human interpretation, application, and development (Islamic law) is important to keep in mind throughout this book…. Whereas Shariah is immutable and infallible, Islamic law (fiqh) is fallible and changeable.”

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Trump had Soleimani in his crosshairs for a long time By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/trump_had_soleimani_in_his_crosshairs_for_a_long_time.html

Following the terrorist Qassem Soleimani’s death on President Trump’s orders, the media and the Democrat party have been like trapped rats, desperately rushing around to show that Trump is the bad guy in all this. They’ve played up WWIII, shared the Mullahs’ grief over the loss of their pet terrorist, and blamed Trump for the Iranian decision to shoot down a passenger plane that had left Tehran minutes before and only four hours after Iran sent 15 ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases housing American troops. With all those stories falling flat (and with Iranians in an uproar against their government for shooting down the plane), the media narrative is shifting to denigrating Trump’s decision-making.

One of the first lies the media told was that Trump totally flummoxed his national security team when he elected to order a strike against Soleimani:

When President Donald Trump’s national security team came to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, they weren’t expecting him to approve an operation to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had gone to Palm Beach, Fla., to brief Trump on airstrikes the Pentagon had just carried out in Iraq and Syria against Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia groups.

One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to talk about the meeting on the record.

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When it comes to the ‘news’ media, their anti-Trump narrative is relentless By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/when_it_comes_to_the_news_media_their_antitrump_narrative_is_relentless.html

The media is all a’flutter about a report saying that the Russian military has been attempting to hack Burisma. It’s unclear to me and to the media whether this is a newsworthy story or just the same old news we’ve seen since 1921, about Russia spying on and making trouble for the West and its allies. For the media, though, any story that can impugn Trump is headline stuff, and that fact is on perfect display in the media’s reporting about the suspected hacking.

Here are the facts: The Russian military has apparently tried to hack Burisma’s computers. That’s it. That’s everything the media knows, as can be seen from this New York Times article:

It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for.

On the basis of known facts, this is a story that ought not to have been published at all or, at the very least, should deserve a single paragraph on the last page of the main section.

But that’s not how the Times is spinning it. Instead, for the Times this is just more evidence that (a) Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election (never mind that Obama and Hillary had the slobbering love affair with Putin) and (b) that Trump coerced the Ukrainian president into investigating Burisma.

Regarding the first point, the one about Russia collusion, keep in mind as you read the following the fact that the Times knows absolutely nothing other than that there apparently was a hacking attempt. Nevertheless, it manages to spin out a whole saga:

But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.

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Why Is the Gay Presidential Candidate Silent about Iran Hanging Gays? By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/why_is_the_gay_presidential_candidate_silent_about_iran_hanging_gays.html

Mayor Pete, as he likes to be called, who has led the cry that Iran’s shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner using a Russian missile is somehow the fault of an American president, Donald J. Trump, is among those who say it was “collateral damage” resulting from Trump trashing the flawed and unworkable Iran nuclear deal and his zapping of terrorist Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

Knowing that Democrats obey Rahm Emanuel’s famous observation that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, Mayor Pete wasted no time attaching his name to the slander that the 176 innocents aboard the Ukrainian plane would be alive today were it not for Donald Trump’s insistence that Iran not get a nuclear weapon with which to annihilate the Jewish state of Israel:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg suggested Thursday that the United States bears some of the blame for the Iranian military shooting down a commercial airliner while it was at the same time firing ballistic missiles at an Iraqi military base that houses American troops.

“Innocent civilians are now dead because they were caught in the middle of an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat,” Buttigieg tweeted.

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Freedom Stages a Comeback Even when officials push realpolitik, the U.S. remains a beacon of liberty to the world. Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/freedom-stages-a-comeback-11578956042?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Pity the world’s struggling despots. Just when everything seemed to be going their way, life got messy.

China appeared poised to tighten its grip on Hong Kong last summer with the infamous extradition bill. That hasn’t quite panned out. Not only have the protesters kept their movement alive in the face of relentless hostility from Beijing; they humiliated the Chinese Communist Party in local elections in November by taking majorities in 17 out of 18 district councils. Meanwhile in Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, whose re-election prospects seemed doubtful last summer, swept to a landslide victory Saturday as voters embraced her party’s determination to defend Taiwanese freedom from an increasingly menacing mainland.

In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s thuggish regime had enjoyed some success in repressing Juan Guaidó, who is recognized as the legitimate president of Venezuela by more than 60 countries. But last week regime pressure failed to keep the National Assembly in line and 100 of its 167 members defied Mr. Maduro to support Mr. Guaidó’s re-election as the assembly’s president.

Tehran’s attempts to gain greater regional hegemony haven’t gone smoothly either. In Iraq, anti-Iranian protests shook up the political system late last year. Iraqi security forces and Iranian-backed militias killed hundreds of demonstrators but failed to quell protests in the strongly Shiite south against political corruption and Iranian influence. Lebanon has seen its own wave of protests also aimed at a corrupt political elite and Iranian influence.

In Iran itself, where authorities hoped the American killing of Qasem Soleimani would unite ordinary Iranians behind the regime, the opposite has come to pass. Waves of antigovernment protests spread across the country as authorities first launched an awkward and unconvincing effort to cover up Iran’s shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet—killing 176 people—then tardily admitted it. Cities all over Iran witnessed spontaneous demonstrations with crowds chanting, “America is not our enemy,” ripping down posters of Soleimani, and calling for death to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

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We Can’t Trust the Media to Report Honestly on Iran By David Harsanyi

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-cant-trust-the-media-to-report-honestly-on-iran/

It’s hard enough watching journalists blaming the United States for the Islamic Republic’s perniciousness or exaggerating the importance of “revered leader” Qasem Soleimani while minimizing the actions of the courageous Iranians who oppose the mullahs. Even before a pro-Iranian regime bias infected much of the institutional media, conservatives were reading outlets like the New York Times through a prism of skepticism. In general, though, one could trust that the underlying facts and framing were basically correct. The past four years have made even that impossible.

Take the Soleimani killing, for example.

In the newest iteration of the story from NBC News, we learn that after Iran shot down a U.S. drone this summer, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump’s then-national security adviser, tried to persuade Donald Trump to kill the Iranian terrorist leader. Trump, instinctively uneasy about escalating Middle East conflict, resisted the pressure. According to “current and former senior administration officials,” NBC News states, the president instead drew a red line: He would authorize the killing of Soleimani only “if Iran’s increased aggression resulted in the death of an American.”

Trump even tweeted, warning the mullahs that further violence would have repercussions.

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‘Moderate’ Michael Bloomberg Is an Authoritarian Nightmare By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on January 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/moderate-michael-bloomberg-is-an-authoritarian-nightmare/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Throughout his career, he has repeatedly shown blatant disrespect for individual rights and civil liberties.

While discussing the Texas church shooting last week, Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg said that we “just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”

“It may be true — I wasn’t there; I don’t know the facts — that somebody in the congregation had their own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people, but it’s the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot,” Bloomberg said in Montgomery, Ala., on December 30, as reported by Conservative Review. “You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”

Bloomberg is, of course, correct. Although the shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement tragically took two lives, it could have been much worse had an armed, trained volunteer security guard not been there to shoot the gunman dead before he could do even greater damage.

This incident was about as clear an example as you could get for how maintaining our Second Amendment rights can save lives — and, therefore, it might seem like a pretty odd thing to reference when you’re arguing against gun rights. The Second Amendment, after all, worked in this case; people are alive because of it, and Bloomberg is going to say that he wished the situation had been different?

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The Threat of Terrorism at Home avatar by Ronn Torossian

Posted By on January 13th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/13/the-threat-of-terrorism-at-home/

I recently finished reading a new book, Terror in the Cradle of Liberty by Ilya I. Feoktistov, and found it simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of America, and the dangers that we face as a society.

Terror in the Cradle of Liberty details the background of the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB), including their links to the Muslim Brotherhood. The ISB is the Muslim organization that the Boston marathon bombers — the Tsarnaev brothers — were involved with, and since 9/11, 14 leaders and members of the ISB have been imprisoned, killed by law enforcement, or declared fugitives for their involvement in Islamic terrorism.

That alone should generate mass headlines — is there any other synagogue or church with such a record anywhere else in this country?

And yet, as the book details, Boston’s liberal media was hesitant to cover ISB’s apparent extremism. As Feoktistov writes, “The ISB invested a massive amount of energy into press conferences and outreach efforts led by articulate and sympathetic figureheads.” They also “promoted to the media the idea that those making claims about the ISB were bigots who spread lies due to hatred of Muslims.”

The book details the fight by Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a Boston-based organization — of which the author is Executive Director — against the ISB, and their years of battles through the court system, lobbying efforts, and intense media and PR battles.