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President Canute and Orlando Barack Obama discovers too late that he cannot order the tide of war to recede. Bret Stephens

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.

All of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

King Canute of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede. President Canute stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end. Neither tide nor war obeyed.

In 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the result of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.

But then the Obama Doctrine kicked in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before ISIS declared its caliphate. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Islam’s Jihad Against Homosexuals The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened an institutionalized Muslim homophobia. By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

The Orlando massacre is a hideous reminder to Americans that homophobia is an integral part of Islamic extremism. That isn’t to say that some people of other faiths and ideologies aren’t hostile to members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. Nor is to say that Islamic extremists don’t target other minorities, in addition to engaging in wholly indiscriminate violence. But it is important to establish why a man like Omar Mateen could be motivated to murder 49 people in a gay nightclub, interrupting the slaughter, as law-enforcement officials reported, to dial 911, proclaim his support for Islamic State and then pray to Allah.

I offer an explanation in the form of four propositions.

1. Muslim homophobia is institutionalized. Islamic law as derived from scripture, and as evolved over several centuries, not only condemns but prescribes cruel and unusual punishments for homosexuality.

2. Many Muslim-majority countries have laws that criminalize and punish homosexuals in line with Islamic law.

3. It is thus not surprising that the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are homophobic and that many people from those countries take those attitudes with them when they migrate to the West.

4. The rise of modern Islamic extremism has worsened the intolerance toward homosexuality. Extremists don’t just commit violence against LGBT people. They also spread the prejudice globally by preaching that homosexuality is a disease and a crime.

Not all Muslims are homophobic. Many are gay or lesbian themselves. Some even have the courage to venture into the gender fluidity that the 21st century West has come to recognize. But these LGBT Muslims are running directly counter to their religion.

In his 2006 book “Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law,” the Dutch scholar Rudolph Peters notes that most schools of Islamic law proscribe homosexuality. They differ only on the mode of punishment. “The Malikites, the Shiites and some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites are of the opinion that the penalty is death, either by stoning (Malikites), the sword (some Shafi’ites and Hanbalites) or, at the discretion of the court, by killing the culprit in the usual manner with a sword, stoning him, throwing him from a (high) wall or burning him (Shiites).”

Under Shariah—Islamic law—those engaging in same-sex sexual acts can be sentenced to death in nearly a dozen countries or in large areas of them: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, the northern states of Nigeria, southern parts of Somalia, two provinces in Indonesia, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates. Death is also the penalty in the territories in

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Saudi Arabia’s New Oil Policy by Sabah Khadri

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world.

The prince has already received negative blowback from conservative members of the Al Saud clan. They have been resistant to change in the past and may not appreciate new reforms which might threaten their authority in the country.

The status quo is that Saudis are raised with the conviction that the state will always provide for their needs, healthcare and security, in exchange for their loyalty to the ruling Al Saud clan. However, the recent oil crisis has witnessed many luxuries stripped away from the Saudi people, as the state prepared to deal with a growing budget deficit. The move to impose taxes, a concept alien to the country, is sure to create discontent among ordinary Saudi people.

Saudi Arabia, long associated with oil wealth and extravagance, has decided that time has come for it to revamp its image. Last year, King Salman, 80, ascended the Saudi throne, and since then has unleashed major reforms, introduced a more assertive domestic and foreign policy, and handed over the reins of some of the most significant posts of the Saudi leadership to a younger group of Saudi leaders.

The driving force behind these reforms is the 30-year-old deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS. Prince Mohammed’s vision for Saudi Arabia, the way he puts it, is as a country no longer dependent on oil; with a growing economy and transparent laws, which will consequently give it a strong position in the world. All of this may come across as appealing, but the ability of Prince Mohammed to deliver these reforms depends on several variables. To succeed, Prince Mohammed, although he enjoys a broad mandate, still needs the support of the rest of the country.

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RUTHIE BLUM: IT’S GLOBAL JIHAD STUPID

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

Shouting “Allahu akbar,” a 29-year-old American citizen with roots in Afghanistan entered a Florida nightclub at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning and committed what is being called “the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.”

Prior to slaughtering at least 50 people and seriously wounding dozens of others, Omar Mateen phoned 9-1-1 and pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Mateen had planned the massacre in advance, purposely targeting a venue known to be frequented by lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders — the perfect personification of liberal Western values considered abhorrent to radical Muslims, regardless of their specific jihadist affiliation.

The FBI promptly launched an investigation into the now-dead Mateen, who had been working as a security guard at G4S Secure Solutions since 2007. It quickly emerged, however, that Mateen was already on the FBI’s radar for having various ties to Islamic radicalism.

About 10 hours after the massacre, with bodies still inside The Pulse — Orlando’s self-described “premier gay nightclub” — President Barack Obama addressed the nation to condemn the horrific incident, which, surprisingly, he referred to as an act of terror. Not the least bit surprisingly, he refused to utter the word “Islamist.” Instead, he declared the perpetrator a person “filled with hate.”

On a Fox News panel in the aftermath of the bloodbath, counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka stressed the need for the White House and the world to acknowledge the clear connection between this attack and all the others with the same ideology. Linking the Fort Hood, Boston, San Bernardino, Paris and Brussels massacres, Gorka — author, most recently, of “Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War” — was the only one who mentioned Israel. The point he was making, and has been trying to hit home in his writings and lectures, is that the Islamist assault on the West is not a series of individual lone-wolf attacks, but rather a global movement, whose “propaganda by deed” is terrorism. And, he said, these recent acts, unlike the 9/11 attacks, are relatively small in scope and cheap to carry out, but nevertheless terrorize and paralyze whole cities. In other words, they get a lot of bang for their buck, both literally and figuratively.

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Ripping Apart the Second Amendment Jed Babbin

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

In the wake of Orlando, “good cause” suddenly takes on new meaning.http://spectator.org/ripping-apart-the-second-amendment/
“Last week’s decision in Peralta v. San Diego County attacked the Second Amendment directly. And now, of course, Obama is blaming the Orlando massacre on everything except Islamic terrorism. Imagine how the Supreme Court will look – and how the Bill of Rights will be destroyed — by an Obama/Clinton court.”

Last week, in the case of Peralta v. County of San Diego, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the California law that requires applicants for concealed carry permits to show “good cause” — i.e., a need specific to the person — in order to obtain such a permit. The law leaves to county sheriffs how to define the term “good cause.”

California law doesn’t bar home ownership of firearms, but it does prohibit transporting loaded firearms even when going to or from a target range. It also exempts security guards and the like.

Sustaining a lower court’s decision upholding the California law, the Ninth Circuit could have limited its ruling by finding, as some other courts have, that the “good cause” requirement is reasonable. But it didn’t. The Ninth Circuit (the most liberal in the nation, and the most reversed by the Supreme Court), went far beyond to create a direct challenge to the Second Amendment. It held that “…the Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public.”

Most of us thought that this matter was disposed of by the late Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller.

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The Orlando Jihad Carnage, and A Mainstream, Authoritative U.S. Muslim Fatwa on “Atrocious” Homosexuality and Its Lethal Punishment by Andrew Bostom

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

The late Taher Jaber al-Alwani (d. March, 2016), trained at Al-Azhar University, founded in 973 C.E., and Sunni Islam’s most prestigious religious teaching institution since the mid-13th century, till now. Receiving his Ph.D in Islamic Law from Al-Azhar in 1973, al-Alwani subsequently taught Islamic Law at the Imam Muhammad b. Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Al-Alwani participated in the founding of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in the United States in 1981. He was also a founding member of the Council of the Muslim World League in Mecca, a member of the international Organization of Islamic Cooperation Islamic Fiqh [Islamic Jurisprudence] Academy in Jeddah, since 1987, and President of the Fiqh Council of North America from 1988, till his recent death. In short, al-Alwani was a highly trained, greatly respected, mainstream Muslim authority on Islamic Law, internationally, and within the US.

Al-Alwani’s June 18, 2003 “fatwa” on homosexuality—an Islamic “legal” ruling per Islam’s theo-political totalitarian “legal” system, the Sharia, merits careful consideration in the wake of pious Muslim jihadist Omar Marteen’s mass murderous attack on an Orlando gay night club early yesterday, Sunday, June 12, 2016.

Citing precedent from the Koran itself, and the most trusted hadith or “traditions” of Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, and human behavior prototype, al-Alwani makes plain homosexuality is a “moral atrocity,” punishable by death in the corporeal world, and eternal torment in the hereafter.

[I]t should be clear that homosexuality is sinful and shameful. In Islamic terminology it is called ‘Al-Fahsha’ or an atrocious and obscene act. Islam teaches that believers should neither do the obscene acts, nor in any way indulge in their propagation. Allah says, “Those who love (to see) obscenity published broadcast among the Believers will have a grievous Penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: Allah knows, and you know not.” (Al-Nur [chapter 24]: 19)

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Highways to Hell Paved With Utopian Dreams Book Review by By Andrew Harrod, PhD.

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.

The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”

Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.

Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”

Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the

emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

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Occupied Orlando To them, we are all infidels, but our president keeps inviting them in. And Trump is getting it right. JackEngelhard

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

Last Wednesday it was Tel Aviv, and only a few days later it was Orlando when Muslim hotheads came to kill.

Everything about it was the same, except that in one place, Israel, the world blamed it on the victims.

“It’s the occupation.” Thus spoke voices from among the Palestinian Arabs beginning with Mahmoud Abbas.

No wait. He also said that “both sides” share the blame.

The Left agreed. From CNN, from the BBC, from The New York Times, from TheWashington Post, from the leftist mayor of Tel Aviv and others, we heard that the Tel Aviv killer was “enraged” because of the “occupation” — to have us believe that this particular Muslim Arab murderer was NOT under the influence of mandatory Jihad.

He was not crazed by calls from the mosques to slaughter nonbelievers.

Nope. He got up one morning and said to himself, what troubles me today? Ah, yes. The occupation.

So who is occupying Orlando, U.S.A?

Must be the same reason that caused the atrocity in Orlando, the occupation…the good old convenient occupation.

Therefore, at any moment we should be hearing about a “peace process” to “bring both sides together.”

From that logic, the United States must be prepared to make “painful concessions” for the sake of peace and security. Orlando must be divided.

After all, what’s good for Tel Aviv must be just as good for Orlando. In their eyes we are all equal, equally guilty for occupying Muslim territory.

We are all infidels, only under different skies.

To Jihadist Islam everything belongs to them and we are all targets. BDS thinks so and on nearly every campus they won’t let anyone forget.

They use every beer hall tactic available to stomp home the message.

The FBI is on the job and the rest of our law enforcement officers are likewise on alert for more of the same. They are monitoring Jihadist terror cells in every state throughout the U.S.A. We are not at the end of this war against Islamic terrorism, which is not “workplace violence,” Mr. President.

We are at the beginning as I’ve been prophesying since this book went to print.

It’s Islamic Terrorism and the 72 virgins awaiting a job well done.
Nor is it generic terrorism, like the kind that keeps killing people in Chicago. No, it’s Islamic Terrorism and the 72 virgins awaiting a job well done.

That’s the imperative that’s got these people “enraged.”

Our cops can’t keep up with them because as soon as they’ve got the ones in the house squared and tabulated, here’s what happens: Obama brings more of them into our homes, and by the boatload from Syria and elsewhere. Hillary keeps asking for more. There are not enough minarets to satisfy her.

She likewise won’t say what IS is. Nor will Bernie, and from a leading spokesman on the Radical Left, something else is bothering him. Immediately after the event, The New Yorker’s David Remnick took to the pages of his own magazine to express his outrage…not against Radical Islam, but against Donald Trump.

Radical Islam is too hot to handle. For Radical Leftists like Remnick, Trump is a far more convenient target. He barks, but he won’t bite.

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Barry Shaw: Liberal progressive values meet Muslim terror Israel is a case in point. Palestinian terror conflicts with Israeli liberal progressive values as well of those of the rest of the West.

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

When Israel displays so-called “liberal progressive values” to people intent on attacking our state and killing Jews the direct and immediate result is Palestinian Arab terror and the murder of Israelis.

When the Israeli government lifted restrictions on Palestinians as a gesture during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan Palestinian Arabs, particularly those belonging to Hamas, exploited the gesture by disguising themselves, arming themselves, traveling into the heart of Tel Aviv, perhaps the most liberal progressive city in Israel, to kill and injure Israelis, including many who have supported their cause.

When the terrorists entered the busy Sarona entertainment center they entered the soft underbelly of Israel and mingled with the part of Israeli society who have bought into the notion that Israel should not“occupy” the Palestinians, that it is wrong to “oppress” them. In other words, they have adopted the language of the Palestinians without understanding that, by living in Israel, according to the killers and those who motivated them, they are illegally occupying Palestine, even if they live in Tel Aviv.

These Israelis, including Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv, think that the terror outrage was a result of “Israeli occupation.” They have blinded themselves to the fact that both side of the Palestinian Arab political divide look on Israel as “Palestinian occupied territory.”

To the Palestinian Arab leadership, both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, there is no such thing as an Israeli Arab. They are, in their language “Palestinians of the Interior” or “Palestinians of “48” symbolizing the Arabs that remained when five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish state of Israel in 1948 in order to destroy it.

That is why Mahmoud Abbas, the undemocratic Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, elected to a four year term nine years ago, cannot, and will not, recognize Israel as the Jewish state. To do so would put an end to the final solution of the Jewish problem in the Middle East, namely the establishment of a Palestine on all the land they desire. Accepting a Palestinian state on what are called “1967 lines” is simply a temporary stage on the way to completing the task of eliminating Israel.

Just look at Palestinian maps, read what they are teaching their children. Their “Palestine” includes Jaffa, Haifa, Acre and the Galilee. They have even turned the wandering Bedouin of the Negev into Palestinians.

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The 1300 year old Muslim origins of hate Islam’s hate does not stop with Jews, but Jew-hatred is one of its malignancies Victor Sharpe

Posted By on June 14th, 2016

Islamists hate Jews, gays, Christians – and the world ignores this at its peril.

This resistant and malignant infection of hate is able to evolve and poison human beings generation after generation.

One of its most virulent infestations of Islamic Jew-hatred today takes the form of the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) scourge, which targets the only true and vibrant democracy – Israel – in the hellish Muslim dominated Middle East.

The areas of the world, which are perpetrating hideous crimes against humanity, are ignored by the myrmidons who support the anti-Jewish bigotry and prejudice of BDS.

For the indoctrinated supporters of BDS, there is no apparent interest whatsoever in the horrors taking place daily in N. Korea, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Mali, Guinea-Bissau or in so many of the countries that make up the 197 members of the United Nations.

For the BDS rabble only the Jewish state is the target. Proof, if ever it was needed, that BDS is primarily and demonically anti-Jewish.

Ask the BDS supporters about the continuing illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the native Greek population of northern Cyprus by Turkey, or the decades of illegal occupation of Tibet by Communist China,and they remain ignorant of or deathly silent about those crimes against humanity, thus exposing their deplorable hypocrisy.