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The Savagery of ISIS By Douglas Murray

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/isis-brutality-nazi-like-cruelty-yazidis/

“They took us to pits on the farm that were supposed to be our graves . . . They threw us down there in shifts. Every fifteen minutes they would lower down about a dozen men . . . and open fire on them. They arranged us into rows, telling us to line up next to each other so it would be easier for them to shoot us. My brother was in the first shift. My other brother was in the second shift. I was in the third. I knew everyone down there with me; they were my neighbours and friends.”

Up to this point, I imagine most readers will assume that the above passage is a quotation from a survivor of the Nazi atrocities. Only the end of this passage identifies that it is a more recent testimony that we are hearing.

“After they shouted Allahu Akbar, the sound of gunfire rang out, and once they had finished shooting us one by one, I was swimming in a pool of blood. They shot at us again, then a third time. I shut my eyes and prepared to die, as one must.”

“How long did you stay like that?”

“I was bleeding there for almost five hours.”

“Where were you shot?”

“In three different places. Once in my foot and twice in my hand.”

“And did everyone else die?”

“All except for one other man, Idrees, a childhood friend of mine. His feet were injured. I tried to drag him out of the pit with me but I couldn’t because half my body — the left side — was bleeding. I couldn’t lift him with just one hand. Idrees, I said to him, climb up on my bank, get on. But he couldn’t move. He was still alive but I wasn’t able to save him. I struggled to get out of the pit and walked away from the school. As I crossed the farm road, I heard the nonstop rattle of gunfire, and I dropped down onto the ground, which is where I stayed, hidden under the wheat and barley until the sun went down.”

The above is the account of a man called Khalid, a resident of the Nineveh plains who like many thousands of others tried to flee ISIS in August 2014 but was captured by them. His testimony is one of many collected in a remarkable new book by the poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail titled “The Beekeeper of Sinjar.”

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The Unserious Face of an Unserious Movement By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-socialist-face-unserious-movement/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the Great Young Hope progressives deserve.

When, last Thursday, she was asked an elementary question about spending, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez struck her best Cobra Kai pose. “I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week,” she exclaimed, contorting her face into Jack Nicholson’s and attempting to shoot webs from her fingers. “I can’t believe I can say that,” she added. “It’s really weird!”

Alas, nothing from this brush with greatness appears to have worn off on her. Mere seconds elapsed between the boast and the disaster that followed. Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. If anything, she was worse this time than she had been during her appearance on Firing Line a few days earlier, on which newly revamped show she demonstrated her obliviousness to the fact that the United States economy exploded during the 1990s, to the manner in which unemployment numbers are calculated, and to even the most obvious facets of the Israel–Palestine question about which she has assured her supporters she is so passionate.

“It’s really weird!”

It is, yes. Especially given that, before her two interviews aired, Ocasio-Cortez had taken to exhibiting that jealous penchant for credentialism that so stains the world’s wannabe socialists, and to boasting about her intellectual prowess. At the beginning of July, she tweeted with self-satisfaction — and a noticeably premature use of the word “other” — that she was “Wondering how many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?” Two days later, she upgraded that claim: “If you think the GOP is terrified of my politics now,” she threatened on Twitter, “just wait until they find out about public libraries.” Just wait, indeed! From a BA from BU to the embodiment of all human knowledge in just 48 hours! At this rate it can’t be long before she gives it all up and becomes an honorary Krassenstein Brother: “We are the way, the truth, and the light. Retweet if you love Love and hate Trump!”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Americans Need Clear Answers on FISA Abuse By Ned Ryun|

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/americans-need-clear

The Department of Justice last week released copies of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications that James Comey’s FBI used to begin electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor. While much of the FISA warrants were heavily redacted, it’s clear the FBI used the politically motivated Steele dossier as the primary basis for their applications.

Understand what that means: a piece of partisan propaganda funded by the Democrats, compiled by an ex-British spy, filled with “intelligence” that has never been corroborated, let alone sourced, was used to justify spying on a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. This behavior has more in common with Communist Russia and KGB tactics than with anything traditionally associated with our constitutional republic—though this shouldn’t be surprising with Commie-lover John Brennan’s fingerprints all over this entire process.

Understand, too, that James Comey admitted under oath that in January 2017, when he was briefing President-elect Trump on the truly sensational parts of the dossier, the FBI director described the document to Trump as salacious and unverified. Yet the Steele dossier was used three more times to justify continued surveillance of Page.

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The Facts Behind The Trump Tower Meeting Are Incriminating, But Not For Trump The real colluders with Russia are the Democrats, intelligence agencies, and corporate media. The facts about the Trump Tower meeting only reinforce that.By Willis L. Krumholz

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/30/facts-behind-trump-tower-meeting-incriminating-not-trump/

According to “sources with knowledge” talking to CNN—whatever that means—Michael Cohen is prepared to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Donald Trump knew in advance about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr. and Russians. The president still denies knowing about that meeting beforehand.

Don Jr. was emailed by a British music promoter, Rob Goldstone, who promised that the Russian “crown prosecutor” had information that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” When the meeting took place, in walked two Russian nationals, Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, who proceeded to talk to Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and others about how Americans could once again adopt Russian children, if only the Magnitsky Act were repealed. Eyes surely rolled, and the meeting was ended. Kushner even messaged his assistant to try to come up with an excuse to leave the meeting early.

For those who belong to the religious cult of Trump-Russia collusion, this meeting is prima facie evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to rig the 2016 election. One of the sacraments of this cult is that its adherents wake up every morning and hope that on this day, just maybe, Trump will finally be done away with. CNN is of course central to this practice.

BOOKS, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

WHAT’S DEADLIER? JIHAD OR JIHAD DENIAL? (VIDEO)

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270892/whats-deadlier-jihad-or-jihad-denial-video-daniel-greenfield

To paraphrase, when is Jihad not Jihad, when it prospers. And Jihad is certainly prospering in the multicultural murder cities of the West.

The attacks are often swept under the rug as misunderstandings or mental illness. That’s what happened in Toronto. And Jihad Denial is the subject of Jamie Glazov’s topic on the latest episode of the Glazov Gang.Jihad Denial is all around us and in some ways it’s even deadlier than the terrorist attacks themselves. And part of that phenomenon is also the topic of Jamie’s latest book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Child Brides in Turkey by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12766/child-brides-turkey

According to Turkish Philanthropy Funds, 40% of girls under the age of 18 in Turkey are forced into marriage.

“Low education” means almost all of Turkey: The average schooling in the country is a mere 6.5 years.

In January 2018, a government body under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s jurisdiction suggested that, according to Islamic law, girls as young as 9 and boys as young as 12 could marry.

In Turkey you may abuse a 13-year-old and walk free, but you may not tease the president.

Where would you like your daughter to be when she is 13? In school, or in bed with a grown man? The answer to this question is largely beyond argument in much of the world. In Islamic societies, however — including non-Arab and theoretically secular Turkey — the answer is anyone’s guess. Usually in such states, the police power of the government does not fight the patriarchal tradition; instead, it supports it.

Turkey’s former president, Abdullah Gül, incumbent Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s former ally and co-founder of the party that has ruled Turkey since 2002, was a 30-year-old man when he married his wife Hayrünnisa when she was 15. Gül, nominated for the presidency by Erdoğan, was Turkey’s first Islamist president.

Conservative Turks, instead of questioning Gül’s marriage to a child, cheered his rise to the presidency. This author was privately — but not politely — warned several times by senior politicians against bringing up the issue in his column in another newspaper.

According to Turkish Philanthropy Funds (TPF), 40% of girls under the age of 18 in Turkey are forced into marriage. TPF found that the Turkish national average of female high school dropouts was 56%. It further found that early marriage is seen in families with a low education level. “Low education” means almost all of Turkey: The average schooling in the country is a mere 6.5 years. In 45 Turkish provinces, the schooling rate is below the national average.

The Islamist rule in the once secular country has added to the problem of child brides instead of combating it. In November 2017, President Erdoğan signed the “mufti law,” which allows state-approved clerics (or simply imams) to conduct marriage ceremonies, “despite concerns from civil society that this could have an impact on child marriage.”

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In Iran: The Past is a Foreign Country by Amir Taheri

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12772/iran-international-agreements

Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors branded all accords that Iran signed under the Shah as “a Zionist conspiracy against Islam.” Now they are trying to eat humble pie in the hope of regaining some of the privileges Iran lost when they seized power.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” This is how English writer L.P. Hartley, in his novel The Go-Between, comments on the ambiguity of our relations with a past that fascinates and confuses us. I was reminded of Hartley’s enigmatic phrase last week as I skimmed through a series of news stories indicating the discovery by the Khomeinist establishment in Tehran of Iran’s past.

There was Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani advising US President Donald Trump not to ignore Iran’s “7,000-year old civilization” in stark contradiction to Ayatollah Khomeini’s claim that the whole of Iranian history before his seizure of power should be classified as “jahiliyah” (darkness).

Then there were the so-called “reformist Khomeinists” who took US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to task for expressing support for what is reported as a national uprising in Iran. They invited Pompeo to remember Mohammad Mosaddeq, the man who served as Prime Minister of Iran in the early 1950s and, so his supporters believe, was overthrown in a putsch backed by the United States. “Mussadeq was the hero of Iranian national uprising,” one Khomeinist apologist commented. He forgot that according to the propaganda of the regime he has served for almost four decades, Mussadeq was “a traitor and enemy of Islam” and that he had become a non-person in the Islamic Republic.

You may also remember the recent brouhaha made about the discovery of mortal remains reportedly belonging to a mummy of Reza Shah the Great. According to the governor of Rey, the place where the remains were discovered, the mummy was quickly reburied “with full respect” on orders from Iran’s Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei. What a contrast with the campaign by Ayatollah Sadeq Giwi (alias Khalkhali), one of Khomeini’s key associates, to have the Pahlavi king’s mummy burned in public.

BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Switch That Never Happened: How the South Really Went GOP By Dinesh D’Souza

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/29/the-switch-that-never-

This article is adapted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book Death of a Nation, out July 31 from St. Martin’s Press. His movie of the same title opens nationwide on Friday, August 3.

An interesting phenomenon in politics is the flip flop. What would cause a politician who takes a stand on an issue to reverse himself and take precisely the opposite stand on the same issue? Even more interesting is the about face or volte face. The volte face goes beyond the flip flop because it represents a total and usually lasting shift of course, as when Reagan abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican.

More interesting even than the volte face is when a whole group or party makes this shift. Perhaps the most dramatic example in our lifetime is when the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 abolished itself. It’s one thing for an individual to undergo a wrenching conversion but what would cause a whole party to reverse itself in that way? Could it be a transformation of the collective conscience, or a new perception of group interests, or what?

Our exploration of the subject is deepened by a new possibility introduced by Winston Churchill, who in one of his essays takes up the subject of consistency in politics. Himself accused on more than one occasion of reversing himself and taking inconsistent positions on issues, Churchill defends himself by invoking the apparent volte face, the change of tactics that is not a change of goals or values.

Churchill writes, “A statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other. His arguments in each case, when contrasted, can be shown to be not only very different in character but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction. Yet his object will throughout have remained the same . . . We cannot call this inconsistency. In fact, it can be claimed to be the truest consistency. The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.”

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Springtime for Snowflakes A professor’s memoir of the closing of the American mind. Mark Tapson

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270828/springtime-snowflakes-mark-tapson

In the fall of 2016, New York University professor Michael Rectenwald created an anonymous Twitter account to critique the alarming spread across campuses of an “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology. Before long he was outed as the man behind the controversial @antipcnyuprof account, and despite being a leftist himself, became the target of shunning and harassment from his colleagues and the NYU administration. But instead of caving in to the campus totalitarians as so many academics do, Rectenwald declared himself done with the Left, and though still not a conservative, began appearing often in right-wing media to defend free speech and academic freedom, and to expose the “bilious animosity and unrestrained cruelty” he endured from his former compatriots.

I previously interviewed Prof. Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag here back in January. At the close of that interview he mentioned a book he was working on about the experience, and it is now available in paperback and on Kindle: Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage. Short but dense with insights about postmodern theory, social justice ideology, and academic conformity, the book is a must-read for understanding the intellectual collapse of the American university under the weight of a totalitarian ideology.

Rectenwald begins the book by relating his experience of “becoming deplorable” and being pushed toward political apostasy, which forced him to reexamine the herd with which he had formerly run. “I didn’t leave the left,” he writes. “The left left me” – echoing Ronald Reagan’s famous declaration, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party. The Democratic Party left me.” “In trying to correct me,” Rectenwald writes about his fellow academics, “they did indeed correct me – but not as they’d hoped. They corrected my vision by forcibly dislodging the scales of their ideology from my eyes.” He realized that the “institutions of North American higher education have taken a hairpin turn, and a wrong turn at that. They have surrendered moral and political authority to some of the most virulent, self-righteous, and authoritarian activists among the contemporary left.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Blasts “Strongman Politics”— While Hyping Man Who Worshiped Castro The totalitarians Nelson Mandela celebrated and admired. Humberto Fontova

Posted By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270853/obama-blasts-strongman-politics%E2%80%94-while-hyping-man-humberto-fontova

True to form, Obama whined over the rise of “strongman politics” and of “the utter loss of shame among political leaders who repeatedly lied” during a recent tribute to the late Nelson Mandela in yet another performance of his blame America — and Trump especially — first for the world’s supposed ills.

But speaking of “strongmen” and of “liars,” let’s survey some of the murderous dictators who inspired Nelson Mandela’s most quotable nuggets:

“Che Guevara is an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom.”

“The cause of communism is the greatest cause in the history of mankind!”

“There’s one place where Fidel Castro stands out head and shoulders above the rest – that is in his love for human rights and liberty!”

Now, just for fun, let’s review some observations by the man who so “inspired” Nelson Mandela:

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent…The Negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of avoiding baths.” (Che Guevara.)

“Mexicans are mostly a rabble of illiterate Indians.” (Che Guevara)

Just for fun, let’s now review some observations by the man who so inspired Barack Obama:

“If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America! They don’t care for human beings! (Nelson Mandela, 2003.)

The man Nelson Mandela hugs in this clip (Fidel Castro) jailed and tortured political prisoners at over TEN TIMES the rate as South Africa’s apartheid regime.