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March 2015

NO “KUMBAYA” WITH ISRAEL BUT MILITARY ASSISTANCE TO IRANIAN FORCES: JIM GERAGHTY

Yesterday, President Obama declared that because of his serious differences with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, “this can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
Today, we learn the U.S. military will expand its air-strike campaign into the city of Tikrit in order to assist Iranian military forces in the country fighting ISIS. Under President Obama’s unilateral decisions in foreign policy, the United States is closer than we have ever been to Iran, and more estranged than ever from Israel.

As noted in today’s Jolt, we treat our enemies better than we treat our friends:
Russia’s Making Nuclear Threats, and Obama’s Too Busy for NATO

We’re Losing the War Against Radical Islam : Newt Gingrich

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad.
Congress needs a strategy to defeat both violent and cultural jihad. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security, under the leadership of Chairman Michael McCaul, held the first of a series of very important hearings on the threat of radical Islamism. As I told the committee in my testimony, it is vital that the United States Congress undertake a thorough, no-holds-barred review of the long, global war in which we are now engaged with radical Islamists. This review will require a number of committees to coordinate, since it will have to include Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security at a minimum.

There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation. These three points — which are backed up by the facts — suggest the United States is drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival. First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists.

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad. The violent jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name just some of the most prominent areas of violence.

Turkey: Davutoglu vs. Davutoglu by Burak Bekdil

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is probably the world’s first ever politician demanding votes to end his own rule.

In a speech in parliament on Jan. 28, Turkey’s main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, addressed Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu: “You are not the prime minister. You are [a “photo-op”] kid seated on the prime minister’s chair.”

The weird situation Davutoglu has found himself in is the product of his boss and predecessor, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Last summer, as election season approached, then Prime Minister Erdogan and President Davutoglu tightened their grip on the internet. The duo deliberately limited their citizens’ access to social media and to popular and informative websites. They also increased the government’s power over the courts and the power of the MIT (Turkish intelligence Agency) to spy on people. None of this stopped the AKP from winning at the polls.

Germanwings Pilot was Locked out of Cockpit :Martin Barillas

The mystery deepened today about the circumstances of the crash of a Germanwings flight in the French Alps. Aviation officials were struggling to explain on March 25 how the passenger jet bearing 150 souls on board could have crashed in clear skies. The onboard flight record or black box was recovered today. Evidence from the cockpit voice recorder shows that one pilot left the cockpit before the plane began its disastrous descent. The pilot was unable to re-enter the cockpit. Officials heard a recording of the pilot trying to bash down the cockpit door before the crash occurred.

US Declassifies Document Revealing Israel’s Nuclear Program By Ari Yashar, Matt Wanderman

Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel’s nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.

Saudi Arabia’s Favorite Lawyer (James Baker) Warns Israel is Losing its “Democratic Character” By Daniel Greenfield

Quick! You’re J Street, an anti-Israel lobby pretending to be a liberal pro-Israel lobby. What do you do?

You invite Saudi Arabia’s favorite lawyer famous for saying, “F___ the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway” to your little J Street conference to denounce Israel’s undemocratic character.

Jeb Bush foreign policy adviser James Baker warned that Israel could lose its “democratic character” if it continues to “occupy Arab lands” in a carefully worded keynote address at the J Street conference on Monday evening.

Do Arab countries like Saudi Arabia lose their democratic character that they never had… or is that something that just happens to Israel?

Let’s just flash back to September 11 and see what James Baker was doing then.

ON the day Osama bin Laden’s men attacked America, Shafiq bin Laden, described as an estranged brother of the terrorist, was at an investment conference in Washington, DC, along with… James Baker, the former secretary of state

Challenging Islam’s Warrant to Kill By Mark Durie

Last week the Islamic State’s ‘Hacking Division’ released the names and addresses of one hundred US military personnel. It urged the ‘brothers residing in America’ – i.e. American Muslims – to ‘deal with’ them, which is to say, it wants them killed.

There is much talk these days of radicalization and deradicalization. At the heart of both processes are religious ideas: theological dogmas. What are some of the key theological principles which might cause a Muslim to take this call seriously? What is the Islamic reasoning given by the IS Hacking Division in support of its call to kill non-Muslims?

The Hacking Division quote two verses of the Qur’an:

Sura 9:123 ‘fight believers who are near to you’ and
Sura 9:14 ‘Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them, and satisfy [actually yashfi ‘heal’] the breasts of a believing people’.

A Tale of Two Rapes by Mark Steyn

Yesterday, the Police Chief of Charlottesville, Virginia gave a remarkable press conference, the upshot of which was, as the New York Times headline put it:Police Find No Evidence Of Rape At University Of Virginia Fraternity

Not only was there “no evidence” that the horrific gang rape at the frat house party took place, there was “no evidence” that the party took place. Indeed, there was “no evidence” that the man “Jackie” described as her date that night even exists.

And yet last fall Rolling Stone ran a 9,000-word story on the “horrific gang rape” that spurred a media frenzy about the alleged “epidemic” of campus rape across America. Even as the story disintegrated, the feminist lobby took the view that “Jackie” was a brave woman who had performed a useful service. As I wrote last year:

That’s the purpose of “news” as social engineering. The great, messy, contradictory, complexities of reality have to be streamlined and organized into the half-a-dozen approved narratives of the age. At its most absurd, you wind up with “Jackie”, the “victim” of the University of Virginia “gang” “rape”, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for having the courage to come forward and raise awareness by “pulling back the curtain on rape” – even if behind the pulled-back curtain there was no actual rape going on.

Death to America! Death to the Jews! Death to Me! by Mark Steyn

“Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse upon the Jews. Victory to Islam. Allahu Akbar,” the worshipers recited en masse. Then a terrorist roaming among the mosque’s patrons detonated himself…

Don’t you hate it when you’re raining down death-curses on people hither and yon, and then some guy blows you up? In this case, the pro-Houthi Shia victims were killed by a pro-ISIS Sunni terrorist. Some 140 dead, over 350 injured.

This was in Yemen, one of those Obama success stories he was bragging about only six months ago:

This weekend the last US forces in the country hot-tailed it outta there, leaving half-a-billion bucks’ worth of state-of-the-art weaponry in the hands of the blood-soaked loons.

Who do you side with in the ISIS/Iran Sunni/Shia split? Back when Michael E Mann, PhD (Doctor of Phraudology) first decided to sue me, I had a conference call with a bigshot DC lawyer auditioning for my business. Not stinting on the braggadocio, he began the conversation with: “So. Do you wanna win fast? Or do you wanna win slow?”

That’s the choice Iran and ISIS are offering the west: Do you wanna lose fast? Or do you wanna lose slow? The mullahs are happy to nuke us; the Islamic State reckon it’s more fun to behead us one by one.

~So how’s that Iranian nuclear deal coming along? First, John Kerry:

The Israeli Left and Its Captive Media Get Clobbered By Steven Plaut

By far the most important aspect of the recent Likud victory was that once and for all everyone in the world could see how biased and unrepresentative the Israeli media are. With the exception of the freebie Israel Hayom, almost the entire print media in Israel are leftist, and with no exception at all the television and radio stations are also. The media in Israel operated a naked jihad against Netanyahu in the months before the election, candidly promoting a victory for the Labor Party’s Herzog team and his day camp staff.

The media made no attempt to disguise their partisan agenda. The bias in the Israeli media rivals that in the Soviet media before perestroika. Almost every page in Haaretz and Yediotwas an anti-Likud propaganda sheet. Channel Ten Television, propped up by state subsidies and handouts from the Likud government, was at least as biased and at least as open about campaigning for the Left. The bias extended down into the countless “polls” of voters that invariably showed Herzog with a strong lead over Netanyahu. When the media awoke from their wet dream after the poll booths closed, they reluctantly reported that “Netanyahu had made a comeback from behind.” Bullfeathers. Netanyahu was never behind. The media had invented a myth about Herzog being in the lead and they stuck to it.

By the morning after the election the entire media Titanic had sunk beneath the waves, after striking the iceberg of reality. It turns out that Israelis ignored the media seeking to “educate” them and instead they voted their own consciences. The media moguls will never forgive them for this. If anything, the arrogant insults hurled at voters for the “Right” just before the election by journalists and by artsy folks helped turn out the Likud vote.

The Left believed its own media fabrications. The Labor Party had reserved the large Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to hold its victory celebrations for the night after the voting. Labor Party activists had put out their own special newspaper, “Israel Tomorrow,” to outline the agenda they would pursue after their victory. It is now being used to wrap fish. The Israeli stock market bounced up 1.5% the day after the election.