Israel vs. the Mob By Jonah Goldberg

Politics is in large part a numbers game, and Jews are at a numerical disadvantage.

In the wake of the terrorist attack on a kosher market in Paris, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked French Jews to come home.

I don’t particularly like that advice. I think it would be a tragedy if centuries of Jewish French culture had to die out because Jews were chased out by Islamist thugs. The French government agrees — for now at least — and has posted armed soldiers everywhere Jews live and gather.

Still, what Netanyahu understands is that there is strength in numbers. The more Jews there are in Israel, the stronger Israel will be. The flip side is that the fewer Jews there are in France — or Europe or America — the weaker Jews as a whole will be.

REP. CURT CLAWSON (R-TEA PARTY-FL-DISTRICT 19) RESPONDS TO OBAMA: ANDREW JOHNSON SEE NOTE PLEASE

FOR MORE ON REP. CLAWSON PLEASE VISIT http://www.curtclawson.com/economicplan/
Curt Clawson, Straight ShooterA tea-party favorite steps into the limelight.
By Andrew Johnson

Representative Curt Clawson (R., Fla.) wanted a chance to face off against President Obama one-on-one. While it’s not in the setting he initially proposed, Tuesday night may be as close to that match-up as he will get.Last week, it was announced that Clawson, a former college basketball standout and retired auto-parts executive, will deliver the Tea Party’s response to Obama’s State of the Union. Like Joni Ernst, the Iowa freshman senator picked to give the official Republican rebuttal, Clawson is a fairly new face on Capitol Hill: He was just elected to his first full term in Congress, after five months in the seat he captured in a special-election last June. With newcomer status and limited name recognition, Clawson is just as “shocked” as anyone to get the speaking slot, but feels he’s up to it.

“When they called us up, we were pretty surprised,” he tells National Review Online, admitting that he was initially hesitant to accept the invitation since he wasn’t looking for the limelight.

“Coming to Washington, you learn to have a thick hide,” Clawson explains in his consistently brash-but-upbeat tone. “You do something like this, you’re going to get whacked, and that’s not particularly pleasant, but we come to serve and put ourselves out there.”

Death of a Prosecutor By Kenneth R. Timmerman

Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean prosecutor who indicted top Iranian regime officials for the July 1994 AMIA Jewish Center bombing in Buenos Aires, was found dead by gunshot in his apartment on Sunday night, in what initially was called a suicide.

Nisman was scheduled to address members of parliament the next day to reveal new information about alleged efforts by Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her foreign minister, Hector Timerman, to cover up the responsibility of the Iranian regime in the AMIA bombing that killed 86 people some twenty-one years ago.

Just days before his murder, Nisman publicly accused the President and her foreign minister of taking “the criminal decision to fabricate Iran’s innocence to save Argentina’s commercial, political and geopolitical interests.”

Police found arrayed on a desk in his apartment documents relating to his allegations, but no suicide note.

Nisman issued his initial 801 page indictment in the AMIA case in on October 25, 2006. He asked Interpol to issue international arrest warrants against eight current and former Iranian government officials, including then president Hashemi-Rafsanjani, his foreign minister, the intelligence minister, and the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Inside the Fight against ISIS in Iraq By Victor Soehngen

Amongst the wheat fields of Iraq’s Fertile Crescent, the battle for the nation’s future and the safety of the Kurdistan regional capital of Erbil, continues to rage.

In this sector of the 650-mile Kurdish front Against ISIS (or its Arabic acronym- DAESH, as it is referred to locally) the fight is close quarters, intimate, and fought between relatively small groups of men. The terrain is wide, open, and grassy with features Americans would associate more with the state of Nebraska than with Iraq.

Just a few days ago this area was completely under the control of DAESH militants. They had taken over peoples homes, held local women captive for months, and implemented their own brand of Sharia Law. That just changed due to the brave actions of the Kurdish Peshmerga (with the help of closely coordinated US airstrikes) who liberated the town of Makhmour and several neighboring villages.

I met with the commander of Peshmerga forces in the area, General Najad, who candidly explained the situation from the Kurdish point of view. Holding a BA in political science and his masters in Foreign Policy, the general spoke (in English) with an air that was as much statesman as it was field commander. He was understandably busy; men under his command just retook 6 villages each with 25-30 ISIS fighters in them over the last 48 hours.

When asked if US airstrikes were helping his forces on the ground, his leathered and serious face produced a child like grin. “They have taken out their heavy weapons.” He went on to explain that DAESH has proven to be deadly accurate with artillery, armor, and mortars alike. Is that because some of its members had specialized military training or had experience from foreign armies? He simply replied, “I don’t know, no prisoners have been taken.”

The President’s Address of Lies By Daniel Greenfield

A speech made up of shameless lies, crazy lies and evil lies.
Obama’s previous State of the Union address claimed last year would be a “breakthrough year.” In this year’s State of the Union address he announced that he would turn the page.

Turning the page on last year’s grandiose and dishonest claims is what Obama does with each new address. Each year terrorism has been permanently defeated and the economy has recovered; Al Qaeda is on the run, unemployed dentists from Poughkeepsie are learning to install solar panels and illegal aliens from Los Angeles are teaching sex ed to kindergarteners.

And then next year he comes out to announce once again that the country has recovered from the crisis that he had already announced that it had recovered from last year.

And everyone applauds.

What exactly is Obama turning the page on? Two lost wars and the lowest employed population since 1977… under his predecessor Jimmy Carter?

Bill O’Reilly: Killing The Truth About Muhammad and Global Jihad By Andrew G. Bostom

About mid-way through a desultory conversation [7] with two Muslim apologists for jihad [8], Bill O’Reilly opined (beginning at 3:34 [7]), emphatically:

I don’t believe the prophet Muhammad wanted a world war to impose Islam on everybody. I don’t believe that.

This Islamophilic sentiment was endorsed by the two apologetic mediocrities O’Reilly hosted, and the thoroughly unenlightening January 16, 2015 discussion [7] soon drew to a merciful end.

But O’Reilly’s entirely counterfactual statement [7] about Islam’s prophet and prototype jihadist—no matter how self-assuredly believed—demands a corrective if there is any hope of restoring rationality and clarity to the public airwaves’ discourse about the impetus for the murderous contemporary global scourge of jihad [8] (i.e., nearly 25,000 jihadist attacks [9] since 9/11/2001, and counting).

GARRY KASPAROV: THE GLOBAL WAR ON MODERNITY

Islamists set the time machineto the Dark Ages. Putin dreams of czarist Russia. A common enemy: America.

The recent terror attacks in Paris at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and at a kosher supermarket, leaving 17 people dead, represented the latest offensive in a struggle that most people, even many of its casualties, are unaware is even taking place.

Globalization has effectively compressed the world in size, increasing the mobility of goods, capital and labor. Simultaneously this has led to globalization across time, as the 21st century collides with cultures and regimes intent on existing as in centuries past. It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these “time travelers” to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society.

West Africa’s Islamic State: No Offensive Cartoons or Videos Here to Blame for Boko Haram.

Boko Haram on Sunday killed three people and kidnapped 80, many of them children, in a raid on villages in northern Cameroon. After years of rampaging unchecked across its home base in Nigeria, Africa’s version of Islamic State is now terrorizing neighboring countries.

By the next day Cameroonian troops had freed 24 of the captives in a counterattack, pursuing Boko fighters back to Nigeria across the porous frontier, according to Cameroon’s Defense Ministry. Troops from Chad are also assisting in the anti-Boko fight.

The insurgency launched by Boko Haram—the name means “Western education Is forbidden”—is stretching into its sixth year, and the group has distinguished itself as a resilient fighting force. Its kidnapping of some 300 Nigerian school girls triggered an international campaign last summer. The girls weren’t brought back, and many are believed to have been married off to Boko’s jihadists. Does anyone remember Michelle Obama ’s #BringBackOurGirls?

Climate Reporting’s Hot Mess : Holman Jenkins, Jr.

AP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

Paris Mayor: ‘We Will Sue Fox News’ for Shaming the Honor of Our City By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

The mayor of Paris is threatening to sue Fox News for segments she claims have insulted her city.

The mayor of Paris told CNN on Tuesday that she will sue Fox News.

Why?

Mayor Anne Hidalgo told CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour that she must sue to preserve the honor of her fair city.

“The image of Paris has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced,” Hidalgo said. “I think we’ll have to sue, I think we’ll have to go to court, in order to have these words removed.”

Hidalgo was responding to some segments on Fox News in which various commentators stated that there are parts of Paris and other European cities where Muslims predominate and where there is so much uncontrolled violence that police are afraid to venture. These areas have been referred to as “no-go zones” for non-Muslims.