ISRAEL Comments turned off

Funding Terrorism to Fight Terrorism Why are we funding Islamic terror in Israel? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Master Sgt. Haiel Sitawe, the father of a newborn baby, and Kamil Shnaan, who was newly engaged, were murdered in an Islamic terrorist attack in Jerusalem. The two Israeli police officers were members of the Druze community in Israel. The terrorists who shot them were killed by other police officers.

While Israel will compensate the families of the dead police officers, the Palestinian Authority will compensate the families of the terrorists. And American taxpayers will compensate both.

This is typical of a foreign policy in which we fund both the terrorists and the terrorized.

Sooner or later, we are going to have to choose a side.

This mad policy is facing its biggest threat with the Taylor Force Act. The bill, named after a murdered Afghanistan and Iraq War veteran stabbed to death in Tel Aviv, would strip funding from the Palestinian Authority unless the terror state stops giving money to terrorists and their families for their crimes.

The Taylor Force Act has plenty of support in Congress. But the Palestinian Authority has made it abundantly clear that it will not stop paying terrorists to kill Israelis. PA terror boss Abbas is gambling that our politicians will blink first rather than stop sending him hundreds of millions of dollars.

And the tragedy of it is that he appears to be right.

Everyone condemns the Palestinian Authority’s policy of funding terrorists. Typical adjectives include “abhorrent” and “abominable”. But don’t expect them to actually cut off the cash.

Senators are scurrying to neuter the Taylor Force Act. There are dire warnings that if we stop funding the biggest Islamic terrorist group in Israel, it will collapse and make way for more terrorism.

If we don’t stop giving Islamic terrorists money to commit terrorism… the terrorists will win.

This sums up the insanity of our foreign policy in which we fund terrorism to fight terrorism, and in which the “moderate” Islamic terrorists of the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood are our best hope for restraining the really scary “extremist” Islamic terrorists of ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Senators have been complaining about the act’s “All or nothing” approach. All or nothing means that the Palestinian Authority would have to stop funding terror or lose funding. And since the Palestinian Authority won’t stop funding terror and they don’t want to cut its funding, they hate all or nothing.

AIPAC hasn’t gotten behind the Taylor Force Act. Instead it’s holding out for some “revised” version that would make it meaningless while attracting bipartisan support. Meaningless pro-Israel measures that pass with huge majorities are AIPAC’s bread and butter. They’re its political Potemkin villages.

The ideal Taylor Force Act, according to AIPAC, most Democrats and some Republicans, would condemn terrorism without cutting a cent in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. It would contain a national security waiver and plenty of gimmicks that would actually increase funding for terror.

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

More Migrant Riots Hit France Flood of migration continues all over Western Europe despite rising dangers. July 18, 2017 Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

The European migration experiment is failing miserably. Self-declared “refugees” and migrants from Africa and the Middle East are importing their violence, chaos and regressive norms of behavior into formerly harmonious countries all over Western Europe. As Seth J. Frantzman wrote in the Jerusalem Post last December, “They hate the very society they have often chosen to migrate to. Their new society tolerated their intolerance and taught them that this new country provided such unfettered freedom that it should be destroyed.”

For example, while many French people were busy celebrating Bastille Day – a year after the tragic Islamist massacre in Nice – riots and violence reportedly broke out on the nights of July 13 and 14 in suburbs of Paris heavily populated by migrants. A policeman was badly wounded and 897 cars were burned. Hundreds of individuals were placed in custody.

There was also a riot in the streets of Paris a few days ago by a mob of angry Congolese. They were infuriated by a scheduled concert at Paris’s Olympia music hall by a Congolese artist thought to be too close to the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo they detest. The concert was cancelled as a result of the clashes and threats of more violence. The Congolese living in Paris brought their tribal hatreds to the land that gave them the opportunity to leave such hatreds behind. They abused the freedoms they were afforded, turning on those freedoms by violently preventing an artistic performance from taking place.

These are far from isolated incidents of migrant violence in Western Europe this year. Indeed, all is not well for the Western traditions of pluralism and individual liberties in the multicultural sewer Europe is fast becoming. The number of vehicular killings, stabbings, shootings, sexual assaults, riots and car burnings has risen exponentially in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Norway, as the tide of migration has intensified. No-go zones have multiplied. Free speech is becoming a casualty of hecklers’ veto and misplaced multicultural sensitivities. Yet Europe continues to admit even more migrants without any adequate vetting.

“When people lose hope, they risk crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean because it is worse to stay at home, where they run enormous risks,” Antonio Tajani, president of the European Parliament, said. “If we don’t confront this soon, we will find ourselves with millions of people on our doorstep within five years. Today we are trying to solve a problem of a few thousand people, but we need to have a strategy for millions of people.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Organizing for Anarchy His party may be falling apart, but Obama’s community organizing group is going strong. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Former President Obama’s army of community organizing thugs shows no signs of slowing down efforts to protect Obama’s policy legacy and undermine the Trump administration.

Obama directs Organizing for Action, a huge, well-funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit with more than 30,000 volunteers nationwide that doesn’t have to disclose its donors and that is at the head of Obama’s network of left-wing nonprofit groups. OfA, which grew out of Obama’s electoral campaigns, has upwards of 250 offices across America. His other nonprofit, the Barack Obama Foundation, is building Obama’s $675 million presidential library in Chicago. The library is slated to be a hub of left-wing activism.

Obama now owns and lives in a $8.1 million, 8,200-square-foot, walled mansion in Washington’s Embassy Row that he is using to command his community organizing cadres in the war against President Trump. Obama’s alter ego, Valerie Jarrett, has moved into the house to help out. Jarrett also resided in the White House when Obama was president.

No ex-president has ever stuck around the nation’s capital to vex and undermine his successor. Of course, Obama is unlike any president the United States has ever had. Even failed, self-righteous presidents like Jimmy Carter, who has occasionally taken shots at his successors, didn’t stay behind in the nation’s capital to obstruct the policy-making of the new administration.

OfA, which functions as a kind of shadow government, has been on the front lines attacking President Trump in order to defend the Obama administration’s awful legacy. Both OfA and George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have been leading the way in packing town hall meetings with unruly protesters. Many protests OfA has been involved in have turned into riots.

In 2013, Michelle Obama appeared in a video introducing the group to the public. She said OfA was “the next phase of our movement for change,” and that it would help Obama supporters “finish what we started and truly make that change we believe in.” She congratulated supporters for having “already begun to change our politics,” and declared that “the mission of Organizing for Action” is to “change our country” in accordance with her husband’s vision of how to “bridge [the] divide” between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, Organizing for Action activists organized protests across the country. After President Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning visitors from seven terrorism-plagued Muslim countries, OfA organized “spontaneous” demonstrations at airports.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton Donors Have Picked Their 2020 Democratic Presidential Nominee By Michael Sainato •

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Since Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss to Donald Trump, her donors have strategized with Democratic leadership about how to revive the failing party. Billionaire George Soros held a closed door conference with wealthy donors in November 2016 that addressed how to “take back power” and was attended by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. On the weekend of Trump’s inauguration, David Brock hosted a retreat for the most prolific Democratic donors to figure out how to “kick Donald Trump’s a–.” On July 15, Page Six reported that Sen. Kamala Harris, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, met with top Clinton donors in the Hamptons. Many figures in Clinton’s inner circle attended, including Clinton’s 2008 Campaign National Finance co-Chair Michael Kempner, donors Dennis Mehiel and Steven Gambrel, and Democratic National Committeeman Robert Zimmerman. Harris also attended a separate luncheon hosted by one of Clinton’s top lobbyist bundlers, Liz Robbins. http://observer.com/2017/07/donors-george-soros-steve-mnuchin-kamala-harris/

Harris’ meetings with Clinton’s donors signal that they are rallying behind her as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. Harris has emerged as a leading figure in the Trump Resistance; Politico reported that the hearings regarding Trump’s connections to Russia have enabled the Democratic Party to frame her as Trump’s most aggressive critic. In response to one of the hearings she was involved in, she launched the slogan “courage not courtesy.” However, despite this catchy slogan, Harris has historically lacked the courage to hold her donors accountable when they have broken the law.

The nomination of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin provoked criticisms over his tenure as CEO of OneWest Bank. In 2013, California prosecutors claimed to have discovered over 1,000 foreclosure law violations, but the California Attorney General’s office failed to file any action against the bank. At the time, Kamala Harris was California’s attorney general. Many questioned why Harris didn’t take any action given the evidence her office uncovered.

“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris told The Hill. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”

Harris’ vague defense is insufficient. The Democratic Party has branded her as a leader of the Trump Resistance without addressing why Harris avoided a criminal investigation that involved donors to her campaign.

In 2011, Mnuchin’s wife at the time, Heather Mnuchin, gave $8,750 to Harris’ 2011 campaign. OneWest Bank donated $6,500 to Harris’ 2011 election. Heather Mnuchin also donated $850 to Harris’ 2014 election for California attorney general.

In 2014, the Center for American Progress graded California’s campaign donor recusal laws a “C.” The state’s lax laws allowed Harris to decide not to recuse herself from deciding whether or not to prosecute OneWest Bank.

Mnuchin donated to multiple Republicans’ campaigns in 2016, but Harris was the only Democrat he donated to.

Harris also has ties to billionaire Democratic Party donor George Soros, who was one of the two owners of OneWest Bank at the time. Coincidentally, before Harris passed on the opportunity to file action against OneWest Bank, Soros was pouring money into California criminal policy initiatives that Harris was pushing.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professors Want Academia To Stop Citing Straight White Men By Tom Knighton

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

If you’re writing an academic paper on any given subject, you need to do your research and get your facts straight. No, I don’t mean about the topic you’re writing about. You see, you’re not a good academic if you don’t discover who the authors referenced in your footnotes like to sleep with.

Think I’m making this up? I wish:

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that [citing the work of straight, white men] perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others.

“This important research has drawn direct attention to the continued underrepresentation and marginalization of women, people of color. … To cite narrowly, to only cite white men … or to only cite established scholars, does a disservice not only to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism …,” they wrote in the paper published recently in the journal Gender, Place and Culture.

These two individuals actually want people to count up their citations, and then to calculate if “too many” reference white men who like women.

Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr. would get booted off campus as an oppressor for saying this today:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Of course, academia has most assuredly been trending Left towards this type of authoritarianism for decades, so watching these institutions destroy themselves with their own idiocy is kinda fun for me.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jerusalem’s Temple Mount Shut Down After 5 Dead in ‘Allahu Akbar’ Terror Attack

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Early Friday morning, three Arab citizens of Israel attacked Israeli police on the Temple Mount, killing two. This led Israeli security forces to close Jerusalem’s holiest site for Jews and Muslims, sparking outrage as Muslims intended to worship there on their holy day, Friday.

“We cannot allow for agents of murder, who desecrate the name of God, to drag us into a bloody war, and we will deal with a heavy hand against all the arms of terror, and its perpetrators,” Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement. “The state of Israel will defend its sovereignty and its citizens with a strong hand, and will not allow anyone to provoke the region into a bloody war.”

A video of the scene captured an assailant yelling “Allahu Akbar!”

Israeli police said the armed attackers had been spotted around 7 a.m. local time approaching the gateway from within the sacred compound which Jews revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, The New York Times reported. Police pursued the assailants inside the compound and both groups opened fire, killing two police and three assailants.

Police identified the slain officers as Hayil Satawi, 30, from the northern Israeli Arab town of Maghar, and Kamil Shnaan, 22, from another northern town, Hurfeish. Officials said both officers were Druze, members of an Islamic sect which most Muslims consider outside of Islam.

Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, identified the attackers as Muhammad Ahmed Jabarin, 29; Muhammad Hamid Jabarin, 19; and Muhammad Ahmed Mufdal Jabarin, 19. All three were residents of Umm el-Fahm, a large Arab town near the border of Israel and the West Bank. It was not known if they were related, but their names indicate membership in the same large clan.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Report: Anti-Israel Textbooks Turning Young Americans Against Israel What does it mean for the U.S.-Israeli alliance long term? By P. David Hornik,

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Are American college students turning against Israel? A report on the JNS (Jewish News Service) site says that they are — and “according to some experts,” their high school textbooks are the reason for it.

“According to the Brand Israel Group,” says JNS,

only 54 percent of U.S. college students lean more toward Israel than the Palestinians, down from 73 percent in 2010. The decrease was even sharper among Jewish college students, dropping from 84 percent to 57 percent.

The Brand Israel Group, described by The Times of Israel as a “loose consortium of volunteer marketing and advertising executives,” has been sounding the alarm about the problem.

Dr. Sandra Alfonsi, who runs Curriculum Watch for Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization, told JNS that:

The problem starts in high school. … There’s no doubt the lack of sympathy for Israel on college campuses today is at least partly the result of several generations of teenagers being educated with textbooks that are slanted against Israel.

Among the most prominent of those textbooks is the Arab World Studies Notebook. It was authored by Audrey Parks Shabbas, a convert to Islam who, according to this site, “often tells her audience that she is both a Muslim and a Mayflower descendant who has lived nearly all her life in the United States.”

“Shabbas,” says JNS, “heads Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services, a curriculum publisher that seeks to promote a positive image of Arabs and Muslims in U.S. schools.”

And, one might add, a negative image of Israel. Back in 2004, after parents in Anchorage, Alaska, complained about the Arab World Studies Notebook, the American Jewish Committee

found it to be riddled with “overt bias and unabashed propagandizing,” such as depicting Israel as the aggressor in every Arab-Israeli war and praising Muslim conquerors throughout the ages for their “gentle treatment of civilian populations.”

Shabbas has said that the Notebook has gone out to more than 10,000 teachers, and “if each notebook teaches 250 students over 10 years, then you’ve reached 25 million students.”

That’s a lot of students reading that Israel “tortur[es] and murder[s] hundreds of Palestinian women.” In 2011, parents of students at Newton South High School (in the Boston suburb of Newton) complained about a passage from the Notebook that makes that charge. The book was supposedly pulled from the curriculum, but an investigation found it was “still being used in Newton as late as the 2013-2014 school year.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Qatar, Saudi Arabia to Islamize One of Europe’s Greatest Cathedrals by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

In Islamic symbolism, Córdoba is the lost Caliphate. Political authorities in Córdoba dealt a blow to the Catholic Church’s claim of ownership of cathedral by declaring that “religious consecration is not the way to acquire property”. But this is how history works, especially in the lands where Christianity and Islam fought hard for dominion. Why are secularists not pressing Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to give Christians back the Hagia Sophia? No one has raised an eyebrow that “Christendom’s greatest cathedral has become a mosque”.

The Spanish left, governing the region, would like to convert the church into “a place for the meeting of faiths”. Nice ecumenical words, but a death trap for the Islamic domination over other faiths. If these Islamists, supported by the militant secularists, will be able to bring Allah back inside the Cathedral of Córdoba, a tsunami of Islamic supremacism will submerge Europe’s decaying Christianity. There are thousands of empty churches just waiting to be filled by the voices of muezzins.

The Western attempt to free Jerusalem in the Middle Ages has been condemned as Christian imperialism, while the Muslim campaigns to colonize and Islamize the Byzantine Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, Egypt, the Middle East and most of Spain, to name but a few, are celebrated as a season of enlightenment.

Muslim supremacists seem to have fantasies — as well as a long history — of converting Christian sites to Islamic ones. Take, for example, Saint-Denis, the Gothic cathedral named for the first Christian bishop of Paris who was buried there in 250, and the burial place of Charles Martel, whose victory stopped the Muslim invasion of France in 732. Now, according to the scholar Gilles Kepel, this burial place of most of France’s kings and queens is “the Mecca in Islam of France”. The French Islamists are dreaming of taking it over and replacing the church bells with the call of the muezzin.

In Turkey’s greatest cathedral, Hagia Sophia, a muezzin’s call recently reverberated inside the sixth-century church for the first time in 85 years.

In France, Muslim leaders called for converting abandoned churches into mosques. thereby echoing The late writer Emile Cioran once predicted of Europe: “The French will not wake up until Notre Dame becomes a mosque”.

Now it is the turn of Spain’s greatest Catholic site, the Cathedral of Córdoba. Spanish “leftists” and secularists would now, it seems, like to convert to Islam the cathedral of Córdoba, the symbol of a time when “Islam was on the verge of turning the Mediterranean into a Muslim lake”. Now that Islam is again conquering large swaths of the Middle East and Africa, is it not a coincidence that this campaign is gaining ground?

In 550 the Cathedral of Córdoba was a Christian basilica, dedicated to a saint; then, in 714, it was occupied by the Muslims, who destroyed it and converted it into the Great Mosque of Córdoba during the reign of Caliph Abd al Rahman I. The site was returned to Catholic worship by King Ferdinand III in 1523 and became the current great Cathedral of Córdoba, one of the most important sites of Western Christianity. Now an alliance of secularists and Islamists are trying to turn the church back to Islamic worship.

The Wall Street Journal called it deconquista, playing with the word reconquista, the time when Spain was returned from Islam to Catholicism. “The Great Mosque of Córdoba” is what UNESCO — also torturing, upending and turning history on its head to rewrite the past of Jerusalem and Hebron — calls it. In the last six centuries, however, only Catholic mass and confessions have been officiated there. The WSJ charges “left-wing Spanish intellectuals” with trying to “de-Christianize” the site.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tired of Being Wrong, Climate Alarmists Move Doomsday to Next Century By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

If the climate alarmists weren’t still so politically powerful and represented in Congress by their devoted cult members, it would almost be easy to pity them. Why? Because they’re so spectacularly wrong about so many things.

They keep the hype coming regardless, as in this article that cites the fact that it’s hot in the desert in the summertime to say that air travel may be doomed.

But science, or something.

The cult’s leader — Al Gore — said in 2009 that there was a 75 percent chance that the entire arctic polar ice cap would melt by 2014.

It’s still there.

The year before the North Pole was supposed to be gone, noted climate scientist Hans von Storch went against cult orthodoxy in an interview with Spiegel Online in 2013 and had some interesting things to say about the climate prediction models so revered by the alarmists.

After noting that “climate change seems to be taking a break,” von Storch had this to say about the models:

“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

He followed that up with this after being asked what might be wrong with the models:

There are two conceivable explanations — and neither is very pleasant for us. The first possibility is that less global warming is occurring than expected because greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have less of an effect than we have assumed. This wouldn’t mean that there is no man-made greenhouse effect, but simply that our effect on climate events is not as great as we have believed. The other possibility is that, in our simulations, we have underestimated how much the climate fluctuates owing to natural causes.

After so many swings and misses while attempting to predict doomsday as being just around the corner, the alarmists have decided to provide themselves a little cover:

Climate alarmist James Hansen’s prediction of Manhattan being underwater by 2018 seems to not be happening, so he’s moving his own goal posts and saying “50 to 150 years” now.

That’s the beauty of being one of the “we believe in science” people: there’s never any penalty for being wrong. Every prediction that doesn’t come true isn’t a cause for reflection about perhaps adjusting the conclusion; it’s merely an opportunity to pull a new prediction out of thin air.

Perhaps they are finally getting embarrassed, though. Tossing all of the predictions a century down the road at least saves them from having to be around when those are proved wrong.

Unless, of course, the real scientists who are working on aging and extending life have some big success soon.

This is a commentary piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Al-Aqsa Fraud By Mike Konrad

Posted By on July 18th, 2017

Martin Luther, in his criticism of Catholic pilgrimages, once said, “There are 12 apostles, and 18 of them are buried in Spain.” He probably would not be pleased that Protestants have resumed journeying on the Camino (Road) to Santiago (Saint James) de Compostela. But, the Camino to Santiago will not start a war. The Temple Mount will.

A new $5 million Anglican Centre is to be built in Spain in Santiago de Compostela, the end of the world-famous Catholic pilgrimage route the Way of St James. — Christianity Today

Putting aside all arguments about whether Israel should be in Judea and Samaria, whether Israel should be in Jerusalem, or even whether Israel should be in the land itself, one thing is clear: Mohammed never set foot in Jerusalem. That is incontestable. Absolutely beyond debate, even from accepted Muslim history.

Mohammed died in 632 A.D. Arab forces did not besiege Jerusalem until 636 A.D. They did not enter the city until 637 A.D. No one doubts this. No one denies this.

It follows that if Arab forces did not enter Jerusalem until 637 A.D., then Jerusalem did not have a mosque before that date. The present structure for Al Aqsa — the Furthest (Mosque) — was built around 690 A.D., possibly using materials from an earlier destroyed church. There is a possibility that an earlier mosque had been built soon after the Arab conquest.

But all of this, whenever or if ever it occurred, took place after Mohammed died.

Therefore, whenever Mohammed made his supposed night journey – the miraj – it could not have been to a mosque in Jerusalem that did not exist. The whole Islamic claim to Al-Aqsa is a historic fraud.

One can argue whether Muslims originally faced Mecca in their prayers (as Muslim tradition demands), or whether Muslims originally faced Petra, as new scholarship shows; but even that does not affect the very real fact that Mohammed never set foot in a mosque in Jerusalem.

The present crisis over Al-Aqsa – two Israeli Druze policemen were killed last Friday by Muslim terrorists– is based on an absolute lie. The Muslims are fighting for a mosque that is a demonstrable fraud, and that can be shown so in five minutes.

Returning to Spain for some insight: even Catholic scholars now admit that the Saint James – of Santiago de Compostela fame – is probably not buried in Spain. James seems to have been buried in Jerusalem. Luther was right after all.

Numerous scholars suggest that the cult of St James in Spain has not been around longer than the 9th century A.D. this suggests that it is unlikely that the remains belong to the apostle from the times of Jesus. There is also no record connected with his grave from a period before early medieval times. — Ancient Origins