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February 2016

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The Post-Constitutional Election, 3: The Cruz-Carson Timeline by: Diana West

By on February 5th, 2016

Dr. Ben Carson calls it “dirty tricks,” “blatant lying” and wants someone fired. Donald Trump calls it fraud, a stolen victory, and wants a redo. Ted Cruz calls it a “mistake” and clearly hopes to move on, as they say, after apologizing to Carson.

What is “it”? The false rumor that Carson was suspending his presidential campaign which Cruz campaign people used to urge Carson supporters to support Cruz on caucus night in Iowa.

Evidence includes the email (image above) that CNN, Huffington Post, the Daily Mail and other media outlets have reported that the Cruz campaign sent to Iowa precinct captains.

As super op Karl Rove explained it, there are 1500 precincts in Iowa. If only 4 Carson voters per precinct decide to vote for Cruz, Cruz wins.

Where did the rumor come from in the first place?

Cruz supporters say it came from CNN. It seems more accurate to say the Cruz campaign took CNN reporting about Carson’s immediate, post-Iowa itinerary and, in effect, turned it into a political weapon to use during the whole night of caucusing — despite numerous real-time corrections from a CNN correspondent, plus protests from the Carson campaign on Twitter (reproduced below).

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French appeasement déjà vue Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger,

By on February 5th, 2016

The French intent to recognize Palestinian statehood in Judea & Samaria, if the Israel-Palestinian negotiations fail, reflects the French policy of appeasing Palestinian terrorism (since the 1960s) and Islamic terrorism (since 1978). Rather than sheltering France from terrorism, France’s appeasement policy – more than any other European country – has fueled anti-French and anti-Western terrorism. French policy has rewarded the 100-year-old systematic Palestinian hate-education, incitement and terrorism. It prejudges the outcome of negotiations and minimizes Palestinian incentive to negotiate.

While the November 13, 2015, and the January 7, 2015, combined slaughter of 147 people in Paris were committed by Islamic terrorists, much of the responsibility for enticing these heinous acts lies at the doorstep of French policy-makers, who have appeased Palestinian and Islamic terrorists, with the former facilitating the penetration of Europe for the latter.

Since the 1960s, France has tolerated the presence, on French soil, of Palestinian terror organizations, operationally, logistically and diplomatically. Notwithstanding – and due to – French hospitality and support of pro-Palestinian proposals at the UN General Assembly and Security Council, many acts of terrorism against French, Arab, American and Israeli citizens have occurred on the French mainland: the July 31, 1975 PLO hostage-taking at Iraq’s Embassy in Paris, the April 3, 1982 murder of an Israeli diplomat, the August 9, 1982 murder of six patrons (including two Americans) at the Chez-Goldberg Restaurant, etc.

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The End of the Multiculturalist Consensus in Europe by Michel Gurfinkiel

By on February 5th, 2016

In 2009, the American journalist Christopher Caldwell famously characterized the changes that a massive non-European, non-Judeo-Christian, immigration was forcing over Europe as a “revolution.” We may now be on the brink of a counter-revolution, and that can be as violent and far-reaching as revolution itself.

Last year’s massacres in Paris (the attacks on satirical cartoonists and a kosher supermarket’s customers in January 2015, then the November 13 killing spree) were a tipping point : the French – and by extension, most Europeans — realized that unchecked immigration could lead to civil war.

Then there was the Christmas crisis in Corsica, a French island in the Mediterranean. On December 24, a fire was activated at an immigrant-populated neighborhood in Ajaccio, the capital of Southern Corsica. As soon as the firemen arrived, they were attacked by local youths, Muslims of North African descent. Such ambushes have been part of French life for years. This time, however, the ethnic Corsicans retaliated; for four days, they rampaged through the Muslim neighborhoods, shouting Arabi Fora! (Get the Arabs out, in Corsican). One of Ajaccio’s five mosques was vandalized.

Then, there was the New Year’s crisis in Germany and other Northern European countries. On December 31, one to two thousand male Muslim immigrants and refugees swarmed the Banhofvorplatz in Cologne, a piazza located between the railway Central Station and the city’s iconic medieval cathedral. As it turned out during later in the evening and the night, they intended to “have fun”: to hunt, harass, or molest the “immodest” and presumably “easy” German women and girls who celebrated New Year’s Eve at the restaurants and bars nearby, or to steal their money. 766 complaints were lodged. Similar incidents took place in other German cities, like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, as well as in Stockholm and Kalmar in Sweden, and Helsinki in Finland.

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A tale of 2 young women: Ruthie Blum

By on February 5th, 2016

This week, a beautiful young Israeli woman lost her life serving her country. Hadar Cohen, the 19-year-old heroine killed in the line of Border Police duty, died from wounds she sustained in a terrorist attack on Wednesday afternoon. Two weeks earlier, her parents had beamed with pride at the swearing-in ceremony that marked the successful completion of her basic training. On Thursday, they were weeping over her freshly dug grave at a military cemetery.

In spite of being new to the job — made particularly daunting by the surge in Palestinian terrorism that has swept the Jewish state since September — Hadar acted both professionally and swiftly. Not only did she literally and figuratively take a bullet for her unit and the innocent Israeli civilians whom the three terrorists had come to slaughter with knives, guns and pipe bombs, but she also managed to shoot at them in the process. It was this, apparently, that saved a fellow female Border Police officer, who was wounded in the attack, from certain death.

Though Hadar will be remembered for her special bravery, her story is not unique. It is the common course that the life of her peers takes after high school. We only hear about those individuals who become unwittingly famous for being buried before getting a chance at life, enabling countless civilians to go about their business in peace.

Comparing this late-teen-early-adulthood reality with that of Hadar’s American counterparts requires a stretch of the imagination and a sense of satire. Take the case of Yale University student Jencey Paz, whose own fame was gained through having her feelings hurt by an associate master at her college. Right around the time when Hadar was going over a checklist of items she’d need to pack before entering the IDF, Jencey was gearing up for Halloween.

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America Makes a U-Turn in the Middle East By Tony Badran

By on February 5th, 2016

Obama’s long game is a complete restructuring of the balance of power in the region—but with what results?

The administration of President Barack Obama seldom missed an opportunity to insist that the alternative to the Iran nuclear deal was a war with Iran, a prospect that has now presumably been kicked further down the road. Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now.

Where America stands on the question of the wars that Iran is fueling across the Middle East has been obscured to some extent by outdated expectations, diplomatic niceties, and deliberate smoke-screens. But it would be wrong to take pro forma statements about America’s alliances with old friends like Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel at anything like face value. The first thing the Obama Administration did following the recent burning of the Saudi embassy and consulate in Iran by a state-sponsored mob was not to condemn this assault on a longtime U.S. ally. Rather, the White House immediately launched a media campaign pushing the message that the problem was actually Saudi Arabia, and, as anonymous U.S. officials suggested on background, maybe it was time to reconsider America’s regional alliances.

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Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on February 5th, 2016

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preaching radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny.
OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country—we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths . . . We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”

FACTS: The implication is that Islam (with over 3,000 active mosques) is under attack in America, and that Obama’s “fellow Christians” are the culprits who need to listen. Since 9/11 89 Americans have been killed in 48 separate attacks of deadly Islamic terror in the U.S. while one Muslim was killed in an apparent “revenge” attack during the same period. Only Muslims routinely target members of other faiths on American soil. The number of Muslims involved in terrorism in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2015: it more than doubled over 2014. Two-thirds of them were born in America. The resulting public perceptions are not based on prejudice or bias, but on reason and empirical evidence.

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At least 10,000 refugee children have ‘vanished into sex work and slavery trade’ after arriving in Europe

By on February 5th, 2016

While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.

At least 10,000 refugee children have vanished after arriving in Europe with many being forced into sex work and slavery, officials believe.

Thousands of young migrants have been targeted by criminals and are now missing, according to the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol.

The news emerged as charity Save the Children estimated that around 26,000 children were forced to travel into Europe alone last year.

Brain Donald, Europol’s chief of staff, told Mark Townsend at the Observer: ‘It is not unreasonable to say that we are looking at 10,000-plus children.

‘We just don’t know where they are, what they are doing and whom they are with.’

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AT THE UNITED NATIONS NOTHING JUSTIFIES TERRORISM, EXCEPT PALESTINIAN ‘FRUSTRATION’

By on February 5th, 2016

The United Nations played the Holocaust game last week so it could play another lethal game this week. The ruse consists of making a big deal about the gas chambers for Jews back then, while stoking the fires of anti-Semitism burning right now.

On January 31, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon penned a New York Times op-ed to say at one and the same time that “people will always resist occupation” and “nothing excuses terrorism.” That follows a statement he gave to the Security Council on January 26, in which he said “Palestinian frustration is growing” and “it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as an incubator of hate and extremism.”

Reaction to the claim that it is human nature to stab pregnant women and mothers in front of their children – as Palestinians had done the week before – has been unanimous across the Israeli political spectrum. In the words of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 26: “The secretary-general’s remarks give a tailwind to terrorism.”

Nevertheless, the spokesman of the secretary-general doubled down in a press briefing on January 27 with these words: “Absolutely nothing justifies terrorism. . . . At the same time, if we want to see an end to this violence . . . we must address the root causes, the underlying frustrations.”

In short, for the United Nations, nothing justifies terrorism except Palestinian frustration.

It is hardly a secret that the UN agenda is to find reasons for treating the Jewish state differently – notwithstanding the UN Charter’s promise of equality for nations large and small. The settlements bandwagon is one of many.

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Jason Chaffetz Should Back Off and Let the FBI Investigate Hillary’s E-mails By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 5th, 2016

Politico reports that Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has given the go-ahead to House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) to investigate the lack of executive branch compliance with the recordkeeping and records-production provisions of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The investigation would include — though purportedly not center on — violations caused by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s maintenance of a private e-mail system that resulted in massive misplacement (and likely destruction) of government records, as well as the State Department’s willful flouting of FOIA production requirements.

The Chaffetz gambit could seriously interfere with the FBI’s ongoing investigation of the Clinton homebrew-server arrangement, which appears to have resulted in serious violations of laws protecting classified information. From a legal standpoint, that would make the congressional probe pointlessly problematic. Politically, it would be an astonishing unforced error by Republican leadership.

Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy are apparently telling Chaffetz all the right things about the need to proceed cautiously and stay out of the FBI’s way. But what they should be telling him is, “No, now is not the time.”

No one should know this better than Representative McCarthy. He would have Ryan’s job today if a monumental gaffe had not doomed his speakership bid: his brag that the House Benghazi Committee investigation had succeeded in damaging Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. This gifted the Clinton campaign with the powerful claim that the Benghazi investigation is nothing more than a partisan witch hunt — a talking-point Mrs. Clinton repeats, and the press dutifully echoes, whenever damaging evidence of her derelictions arises.

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Richard Baehr Where the GOP and Democrats differ on Israel

By on February 5th, 2016

The Iowa caucuses served their usual function in winnowing down the field of ‎candidates to a more manageable number, and a smaller number of realistic ‎possibilities for the nomination. On the Democratic side, barring an indictment for ‎her private server issues with classified information sent and received, former Secretary of State Hillary ‎Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to be nominated. It is not, however, a ‎sign of strength that she could only win half the vote in Iowa against Vermont ‎Senator Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old curmudgeonly socialist, who was not even a Democratic Party member until 2015. Clinton appears to lack ‎pretty much all the political skills of her husband and is running a campaign ‎reminiscent of 2008 when she campaigned as if she were entitled to the ‎nomination, and greatly underestimated the threat of Barack Obama. More than ‎half of Americans do not trust her, and she has provided plenty of ammunition to ‎the doubters.‎

The Republican race has settled into a contest between three leading contenders — ‎Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, businessman/reality TV ‎star Donald Trump and a few pretenders — former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New ‎Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich, businesswoman Carly ‎Fiorina and former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Christie and Kasich have ‎been living in New Hampshire the past few months, much as Ted Cruz did in Iowa, ‎but without gaining the same traction. A Bush super PAC has been blasting ‎Rubio for months, with some damage done to Rubio but no noticeable gain for ‎Bush. The results in Iowa — a win for Cruz, with Trump second and Rubio a closer-‎than-expected third, has shaken up both the state and national polls. A new ‎national poll has Trump at 25%, and Cruz and Rubio at 21% each.‎

In a week, Cruz has stayed where he was, despite the Iowa victory, and Rubio has ‎doubled his share, almost all at Trump’s expense. Trump’s campaign has been ‎largely based on the fact that he is a winner, will make America win again and he ‎is winning in all the polls. When the first actual votes did not deliver a win for ‎Trump, a good bit of the bubble was burst.‎

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