WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdogan’s Turkey Is a Dubious Ally By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

— Turkey often appeals to the West for support, given its longtime membership in NATO. Now, Turkish leadership is in a shouting match with Russia’s provocative president, Vladimir Putin, over Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet in probable Turkish airspace. Each country has accused the other of helping terrorists in Syria.

The problem with Turkey and the West, however, is that their relationship is decades out of date. What was once an alliance is now nothing special at all.

Barack Obama used to lecture reluctant Europeans about why they should accept Turkey into the European Union as its first Islamic member. Obama boasted of a “special friendship” with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As president, Obama suddenly forgot the promise he made as a senator to formally acknowledge the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks in the early 1900s.

Turkey has become a favorite stop abroad for Obama to lecture his fellow Americans about their ethical shortcomings, from past treatment of Native Americans to their present supposed xenophobia over not accepting Syrian refugees en masse.

BOOKS Comments turned off

False Utopias and Their Victims The eco-utopians want to eliminate fossil fuels. Michael Finch

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

World leaders are currently meeting in Paris to discuss the issue of climate change and propose solutions to, well, we aren’t exactly sure what. To keep the world’s climate from changing? To stop “warming,” if indeed that is happening?

Their target, of course, is fossil fuels; the eco-utopian elites claim that their use must be curbed and ultimately stopped. Coal, gas, and oil are all causing the earth to warm and will result in the destruction of the planet, so we are told. So sayeth the prophets of a new religion. The science is settled, the debate closed. Naysayers and doubters and skeptics need not utter a word; in fact, the response of the believers is to silence all “deniers” – indeed, to punish them.

But let’s pull back. In a century that saw tens of millions die as a result of the twin great utopias, Nazism and Communism, the single greatest achievement in the 20th century, outside of defeating those utopian ideologies, was the lifting out of poverty of millions of people around the globe. There is much we take for granted in the West – nothing more so than the simple act of being able to turn on a light. Yes, electricity.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Terror Strikes San Bernardino County And how we must protect ourselves. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

When the Redlands Tea Party Patriots objected to the resettling of Syrian Muslim migrants in their community, CAIR accused them of “paranoia and phobia is rooted in a combination of ignorance and bigotry.”

But “paranoia and phobia” are the modern condition that the free world has found itself living in. Islamic terrorism can strike anytime and anywhere from a Paris concert hall to a San Bernardino County facility where disabled children were being helped. It’s ignorance to ignore that and bigotry to defend it.

“What will be done to ensure the safety of our community? Our biggest concern is the safety of our family, our children and our grandchildren,” Victoria Hargrave of Redlands Townhall had asked.

It was a good question. As the country watched police charge towards a home in the Redlands, it has become an even better question.

The shooter has been named as Sayeed Farouk. His father described him as a religiously devout Muslim. “He was very religious. He would go to work, come back, go to pray, come back.” Co-workers say that he “grew a beard and started to wear religious clothing. The long shirt that’s like a dress and the cap on his head.”

And at some point his “religiosity” took him down the familiar path of Jihad.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Analysis: Cruz-Rubio Race Likely By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Donald Trump is not the favorite to win the Republican primary in 2016. National polls can be misleading — there is no day or time when Republicans across the nation will pick their presidential candidate. Instead, there will be multiple elections in all 50 states, on multiple days, and some states will matter more than others. This explains why so many pundits have predicted a Cruz-Rubio race.

In order to make this contest easier to understand, RealClearPolitics authors Sean Trende and David Byler created an interactive tool called the GOP Race for Delegates (you can find it here). Any reader can enter the polling results from each state’s primary and see how these results would affect the overall outcome. For convenience, Trende and Byler integrated each state’s rules into the program, and loaded the RealClearPolitics polling averages for the early states as a guideline.

Using this tool, Trende and Byler discovered many important features of the Republican primary to come. While conservative southern states will likely winnow the field, more liberal northern states will play a huge role in actually determining who will become the nominee. Some traditional wisdom is proven false, and there is a strong likelihood of a final battle between Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Marco Rubio (FL).
Cruz-Rubio

While Trende and Byler emphasize that “there are an almost infinite number of possibilities,” they did tend to find one much-discussed outcome kept showing up in their simulations — a struggle between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada Awaits a Pair of Impending Catastrophes By David Solway

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

There are two countries that I once regarded as home: Canada, where I have spent most of my life, and Greece, where I lived for five years. Both are now lost to me. Governed by a leftist administration and effectively submitting to the adhan—the call of the muezzin—each is now under siege.

Greece has become a way-station for a vast press of Muslim refugees sowing disorder and mayhem in their wake. Fishermen on the island of Lesbos, which I know well, have seen their livelihoods disrupted, and are unable to navigate through the filth and garbage littering their shores. Elsewhere the migrants reward their hosts by going on rampages. A graphic video shows what lies in wait for this once anti-Islamic country, which endured over 400 years of Ottoman oppression. As one Greek respondent says, “We are under occupation.”

As for Canada, the future augurs poorly. Under the partisan and incompetent administration of Justin Trudeau—like Barack Obama the most unqualified and dangerous person ever to occupy his nation’s highest office—we are witnessing the importation of a veritable Muslim army that will ultimately change the face of the country beyond recognition. Trudeau, who has ended Canada’s military contribution to the war against ISIS and vowed to weaken anti-terrorist Bill C-51, is opening the gates with intemperate haste to 25,000 Muslim refugees, aka “Syrians,” a number proportionately equivalent, as author Howard Rotberg points out, to 225,000 Muslims flooding in short order into the U.S. CTV News reports that up to 900 Syrians a day are set to land in Montreal and Toronto, starting December 1.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Police Chief: San Bernardino Shooting Well-Planned, Wasn’t Spontaneous By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

San Bernardino’s police chief confirmed that the mass shooting at a county Christmas banquet did not look like a spontaneous attack due to the amount of planning, devices, weapons and tactical gear involved.

Chief Jarrod Barguan told reporters in a late-night press conference the shooting suspects, both killed in a gunbattle with some 20 officers at the end of a pursuit, have been identified as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27. Farook was a U.S.-born citizen; the chief wasn’t sure of Malik’s background. He said he had no information on whether either had a criminal record.

Barguan said there was a relationship between the two; CBS News reported that the pair had been married for two years. CAIR said earlier that Farook and his wife have a 6-month-old baby.

Farook was an environmental specialist at the county health department. He had attended the Christmas party last year, and this year left the party early “angry” under circumstances that led police to the Redlands residence. The Daily Beast reported that Farook’s mother lived there.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A “Powerful Rebuke” by Mark Steyn

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

On Wednesday, 14 Americans were shot dead and another 17 injured at a Christmas party in San Bernadino. The temptation to retreat instantly to one’s tropes is very powerful – and Sam Stein, who is “Senior Politics Editor” of The Huffington Post, surrendered in a nano-second:

Planned Parenthood is about 1.3 miles from site of shooting. CNN, however, is reporting that the shooting didn’t take place there.

In fact, the slaughter appears to be the work of one Syed Farook, a US-born county employee described by his father as a “devout Muslim”, assisted by a woman who may or may not be a wife or girlfriend. They had body armor and sophisticated weaponry. One male is dead, as is a female, Tashfeen Malik – apparently one of those harmless Muslim “women and children” the President was sneering at scaredypants Republicans for being such bedwetters about.

Responding to the carnage in Paris, Barack Obama said that the most “powerful rebuke” you could send to the terrorists was to go ahead and hold the big climate conference as scheduled and show the killers that the world would not be deflected from talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century. The President spoke at the conference yesterday. Today can be seen as a “powerful rebuke” to the fatuities of Obama.

BOOKS Comments turned off

David Singer: Israel Ensures European Union Swallows Poison Pill

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

The European Union’s (EU) discriminatory and racist labelling requirements for Jewish goods and products originating from Judea and Samaria has now seen Israel effectively label the EU as “persona non grata” in the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

The EU finds itself in this sorry position following Israel’s decision to reassess the involvement of EU bodies in that diplomatic process and to suspend contacts with the EU and its representatives until that reassessment is completed.

The labelling requirements reflect the EU’s political position that settlement by Jews in Judea and Samaria is illegal in international law. This claim has never been the subject of any binding authoritative legal decision.

The International Court of Justice decision on 9 July 2004 was only an advisory opinion sought by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and not a legally binding precedent.

That opinion was itself deficient since the Court was never asked by the Secretary-General to consider the legal effect of two territory-specific pieces of international law applicable to Judea and Samaria. Those provisions – article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter – vested and preserved the legal right to “close settlement by Jews” in Judea and Samaria for the purposes of reconstituting the Jewish National Home

BOOKS Comments turned off

Still Blaming Israel First Old habits die hard, even after the attacks in Paris. By Daniel Mandel

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

One hundred and thirty-two people have been slaughtered in Paris and hundreds more wounded, to say nothing of smaller incidents that followed, victims of a well-coordinated, multi-pronged massacre devised by jihadists owing allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). The French government of François Hollande has responded with air strikes and statements about a new war that has actually been in progress in Europe for quite some time.

But old habits die hard: Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström declares that it’s really about the war that entwines the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“To counteract the radicalization we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which not at the least the Palestinians sees that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Her remarks were echoed by Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen, who opined that the terrorists’ behavior “eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” which he described as “the growth medium for such an attack.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another White House Scandal: Dumbed Down Intelligence By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

“Where intelligence starts and stops is at the White House,” Lt. General Michael Flynn gruffly exclaimed in response to a question posed by Megyn Kelly on The Kelly File. “The president sets the priorities, and he’s the number-one customer. So if he’s not getting the intelligence that he needs, and if he’s not paying attention to what else is going on, then something else is wrong there between them and the advisers that he has.”

With that, General Flynn, the personification of a bald eagle, is discussing an issue that’s near and dear to his heart: military intelligence and how it’s being manipulated. It’s the latest Obama administration scandal, and it’s being whisked along on an assembly line chock-full of them. The nature of this one, however, is far worse than “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Dumbed down intelligence at the insistence of someone in the military or the administration is a clear and present threat to our national security.

Flynn, a no-nonsense, intensely bright, and “ground-truth” general, has been an intrepid and stormy critic of the Obama administration, its “whack a mole” air campaign against ISIS, and its mealy-mouthed narrative about terrorism in general. He is the tip of the spear of a growing vanguard of those in the intelligence sector who fiercely defend their craft and the solid information they provide. Top-notch analysts have been appalled to learn that the intel they’ve been supplying has been watered down like a glass of cheap wine in a cheesy bar.