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September 2016

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Donald Trump Speaks Out Against Iranian Ships Harassing U.S. Sailors Republican candidate has emphasized his support for the armed services at campaign stops in swing states By Beth Reinhard

By on September 10th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-speaks-out-against-iranian-ships-harassing-u-s-sailors-1473477999

PENSACOLA, Fla.– Donald Trump said in this military-friendly town that Iranian sailors who make inappropriate gestures at American sailors would be “shot out of the water” if he were president, apparently referring to an incident about two weeks ago when four Iranian ships harassed a U.S. destroyer near the Persian Gulf.

The Republican candidate’s remarks were followed by roaring applause from the nearly sold-out crowd at the 12,000-seat Pensacola Bay Center and chants of “USA! USA! USA!”

As he spoke about building up the armed forces, Mr. Trump added: “By the way, with Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.”

On Aug. 23, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer was in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz when four ships from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps approached at high speed and failed to respond to numerous warnings, according to a military spokesman. After two of the Iranian vessels came within 300 yards of the destroyer, the four ships departed. The incident was one of many interactions between Iranian and American ships in and around the Persian Gulf in recent months but one of the few that the U.S. Navy has deemed unsafe and unprofessional.

At Friday’s rally, minutes after Mr. Trump made the hawkish comments about Iran, he described Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as “trigger happy.” He said, “Personally, I think she’s an unstable person.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Taking Nuclear Korea Seriously The rogue regime will soon have an arsenal that can hit Chicago.

By on September 10th, 2016

North Korea conducted its fifth nuclear test Friday, following three missile tests on Monday and about 20 so far this year. The accelerating pace of the Kim Jong Un regime’s nuclear and missile testing shows its determination to threaten Japan, South Korea and the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons. The question is whether the West is capable of a more determined response.

Every nuclear test leaves forensic clues, and analysts are suggesting this was Pyongyang’s most successful, with an apparent yield of 10 kilotons. This is the North’s second test this year, suggesting it has an ample supply of nuclear material from its restarted plutonium reactor and enriched uranium.

The North said it tested a miniaturized nuclear warhead that could be placed on a missile. True or not, we know its scientists had access to a Chinese design for a partially miniaturized weapon through the proliferation network of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The U.S. believes the North already has small enough warheads to fit on short-range missiles aimed at South Korea.

The North’s workhorse Nodong missile now has a range of more than 600 miles. In June it launched a medium-range Musudan missile from a road-mobile launcher, which makes it hard to detect and destroy. North Korea recently launched a missile from a submarine into the Sea of Japan at a range of 300 miles. This means Pyongyang now has a second-strike capability if the world tried a preventive attack to destroy its nuclear weapons.

A growing worry for the U.S. is the North’s new KN-08 intercontinental missile with the range to hit Chicago. In February the North used a similar rocket to launch a small satellite into space. Significant challenges remain, including a warhead that could withstand the vibration and temperature changes of a long-range missile flight. But the North has repeatedly solved technical problems more quickly than expected.

All of this means the window to prevent the North from becoming a global nuclear menace is closing while the proliferation risks are growing. The North has cooperated with Iran on missile development in the past and may share its nuclear secrets.

Right on cue, the world’s powers condemned the missile launch. And President Obama promised “additional significant steps, including new sanctions to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions.”

Yada, yada, yada. Why should Kim and company fear such words?

Sanctions get passed as a ritual but are never enforced enough to matter. Earlier this year China began to enforce new sanctions, but Beijing let trade with the North resume after Seoul decided in July to deploy the U.S. Thaad missile-defense system. Only sanctions that imperil the regime will force the North to freeze its nuclear program, and Beijing has never been willing to risk undermining its client state. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Coming full circle on 9/11: Ruthie Blum

By on September 9th, 2016

Sunday will mark the 15th anniversary of 9/11. On that fateful day in 2001, the “land of the free and home of the brave” was brutally violated on its own soil. Americans, previously insulated from war and terrorism within the confines of their country’s borders, were suddenly faced with the realization that their sense of security had been false for quite some time.

This shock was not exclusive to citizens of the United States. The entire world watched the unfathomable footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers from television sets at home and in shop windows with shock. Even those who celebrated the humiliation of the world’s only superpower at the hands of rogue actors were incredulous.

Indeed, for that moment, there was universal global consensus that a seismic shift had occurred in one fell swoop, and that life as we knew it would never be the same again. It was like witnessing a chapter — or prediction — of the Bible.

But it was a very different book that became the focus of heated public debate, even before the dust in lower Manhattan had settled. Was the Quran behind such evil, or had it been hijacked, like the planes-turned-bombs? Were all Muslims to be held accountable for the act of a few radicals, or would they join in the fight to root out their bad seeds?

Israelis were just as horrified as everyone else by the scale and scope of the mass murder. We also understood the significance of the targets of the meticulously planned atrocity — key symbols of American financial and military prowess.

But we were not surprised by the event itself. Nor did we concern ourselves with the extent to which the tenets of Islam were to blame. We were in the throes of our own suicide-bombing war, which had been launched against us a year earlier by the Palestinian Authority. The only casus belli for what came to be called the Second Intifada was our utter and repeated capitulation to the demands of PLO chief and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat. The more we groveled, the more empowered the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose aim all along was to annihilate the Jewish state, became.

Yes, we Israelis were spending our days trying to calculate which buses might blow up on our way to school or work; which cafe, restaurant or discotheque was too risky to frequent; and which packages, backpacks and sidelong glances were suspicious. As heads were literally rolling in seas of Jewish blood on the streets, our concern was not with the Quran, but with our leaders’ ability to put a stop to the carnage perpetrated by enemies in our midst.

We did not care whether Islam had been “hijacked.” We just wanted to eradicate the phenomenon, by any means necessary. Those naive enough to have believed that the way to do this was through diplomacy were provided with a wake-up call, courtesy of Palestinians wearing and detonating explosive belts. The rest of us already knew that, in the language of Fatah and Hamas, “peace” is a code name for “death and destruction.”

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VICTOR SHARPE: GONE WITH THE WIND

By on September 9th, 2016

Perhaps we should replace Winston Churchill’s warning to the British Nation, which he delivered six months before that terrible and fateful act of appeasement towards Hitler at Munich, and apply it to our own American Nation today; particularly during these last eight years under Barack Hussein Obama.

We soon will mark the 15 year old anniversary of that other fateful day in September, 2001; the day when a horrific atrocity in the name of Allah was perpetrated against two of America’s icons: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Churchill’s words ring eerily true for all of us now as we face the rising peril of Islamic supremacy. They ring unnervingly true as we witness the appalling political correctness and appeasement by the Obama regime – and by so many Western democracies – towards the barbaric Islamic scourge of jihad and terror that threatens to destroy what is left of freedom and Judeo-Christian civilization.

It is desolating to witness the descent of the United States of America; a victorious nation that truly has been a shining beacon in an often dark and frightening world and now is fundamentally being changed for the worse by a foreboding presence in the White House.

The atrocity of 9/11 was an act of utter evil. But how an enfeebled world, shackled by the unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity, has failed to confront that evil will haunt us for years to come and give historians bafflement and much to contemplate.

Here are Churchill’s words that now can so sadly be applied to America:

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Behind the Outrageous ‘ISIS Backs Trump’ Smear Whom does ISIS really love, Trump or Hillary? Daniel Greenfield

By on September 9th, 2016

When Trump called Hillary a founder of ISIS due to her role in the destructive Arab Spring, the media underwent one of its ritual paroxysm of outrage. Heads spun around 360 degrees at CNN. The New York Times spit split pea soup clear across the office. NPR began crawling up the walls. And everyone who was anyone in the media agreed that Trump had been completely out of line in saying such a thing.

Never mind that Hillary Clinton had previously accused Trump of being an ISIS recruiter. There are different rules for your team. And now that the fifteen minutes of media outrage over Trump’s line passed, she’s free to do it again. And so, as a dog returns to its vomit, Hillary declared that ISIS is “essentially throwing whatever support they have to Donald Trump.”

That would be news to ISIS which focuses more on mass murder than getting out the vote in Illinois.

If the Islamic State is throwing its support to anyone, it’s the woman who helped get it off the ground. CAIR’s poll showed majority Muslim support for Hillary. But never mind the facts, ma’am.

Hillary Clinton claimed that ISIS said that it wants Trump to win “because it would give even more motivation to every jihadi.” Apparently Jihadis won’t be sufficiently inspired to murder Americans if Hillary is in the White House. They’ll just sit around eating Cheetos and playing Call of Duty.

But if Trump wins, they’ll finally start an exercise program and then blow themselves up.

ISIS got its biggest start under Hillary. It’s actually doing less well now that Hillary is out of office. Maybe the nation’s greatest living diplomat is underestimating how motivating she can be to Jihadis?

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How the Third World was Ruined And why “colonialism” had nothing to do with it. Spyridon Mitsotakis

By on September 9th, 2016

Academic discussions of the reasons for Third World poverty usually sound similar to something Communist Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who lived in luxury while his people starved, declared at a UN conference in 1974: “The division of the world into developed and underdeveloped countries is a result of historical evolution, and is a direct consequence of the imperialist, colonialist, and neo-colonialist policies of exploitation of many peoples.”

That same year, a French professor wrote in a UN publication that “the rich white man, with his overconsumption of meat and his lack of generosity toward poor populations, acts like a true cannibal, albeit indirect. Last year, in overconsuming meat which wasted the cereals which could have saved them, we ate the little children of the Sahel, of Ethiopia, and of Bangladesh. And this year, we are continuing to do the same thing, with the same appetite.”

However, what really destroyed the Third World had nothing to do with the West. The Third World was irrevocably harmed by the scorched-earth economic campaign that was waged against Israel by the oil producing nations.

Bayard Rustin wrote in the NAACP journal The Crisis in April 1974 (and reprinted in Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin):

And yet in raw economic terms, it is the world’s developing nations that will suffer most severely from the oil embargoes and price increases which have been imposed by the Arabs. The Development Forum, which is published by the Centre for Economic and Social Information of the United Nations, notes that prior to the energy crisis the poorest countries were already paying 20 percent more for imported fuel than the industrialized world. The Forum further observed:

“The recent price rises have greatly aggravated their [the underdeveloped nations’] plight. Unless the upward spiral in the price of oil is halted, or some measure of relief provided, it could bring development of the Third World to a dead halt…. Industrial countries are also affected, but they have fallback positions: e.g., rich coal deposits that can be reactivated, and the technology to speed up the development of new resources from nuclear to geothermal and, eventually, solar energy. Above all, they have the financial means to meet the rising price of oil. No such escapes are open to the poorer nations…. Oil, which flows so easily from well to pipeline into tanker, refinery and pump, and eventually, into furnace or generator, is a convenience for the industrial countries. For the developing world, it is a lifeline which is essential to their survival.”

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Fifteen Years after 9/11, and America Still Sleeps How much worse will the destruction and death have to be to wake us up? Bruce Thornton

By on September 9th, 2016

Fifteen years after the carnage of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its fossilized dogmas and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious retreat from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran’s improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, bullies its neighbor Ukraine, consolidates its take-over of the Crimea, and relentlessly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, and ISIS, al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens.

So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that “this changes everything.” The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the “end of history” and a “new world order” had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, “a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak,” as George H.W. Bush said in 1990. The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn’t we quickly slap down the brutal Saddam Hussein and stop his aggression against his neighbors? Didn’t we punish the Serbs for their revanchist depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the U.N. Security Council would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such boons as individual rights, political freedom, leisure and prosperity, tolerance for minorities, equality for women, and a benign secularism.

The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn’t get the memo about history’s demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been serially warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. “It is the nature of Islam,” al-Banna wrote, “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet.” So too the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” which is why “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers.” The kidnapping of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Tehran by a group called “Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]” sent us a message that we were engaged in the religious war the jihadists warned would come. But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see.

Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, which killed 241 servicemen, was supported by Iran and executed by its proxy terrorist group Hezbollah. Our refusal to respond reflected our failure to take seriously Khomeini’s vow to spread his revolution to the whole world. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, followed by our withdrawal, was exploited by Osama bin Laden in his sermons as signs that America had “foundations of straw.” That same year came the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six and wounded 1,042, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. In 1995 five Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives at a training facility in Riyadh. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded in front of a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran, killing 19 Americans. In 1998 al Qaeda bombed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twelve Americans died in Nairobi. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Seventeen sailors died and 39 were wounded.

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Honor Killing Your Own Sister for Islam — Anni Cyrus’ “Unknown” Will Hillary stand up for the memory of Farideh and tweet about her?

By on September 9th, 2016

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/08/honor-killing-your-own-sister-for-islam-anni-cyrus-unknown/

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Obama: See No Evil, See No Enemies by Elliott Abrams

By on September 9th, 2016

Two almost simultaneous events in recent days have shed even more light on the Obama administration’s treatment of America’s enemies.

In Cuba, a Marxist, pro-Russian, anti-American tyranny, the administration pressed hard to abandon decades of policy in exchange for nothing. Human rights conditions there are awful, but the United States did not bargain to end the embargo in exchange for improvements. And since Obama’s announcement of a new policy, which was a simple free gift to the Castros, human rights conditions have deteriorated further.

The most recent event was the first commercial flight to Cuba in decades, from Fort Lauderdale to Santa Clara. Santa Clara is the residence of Guillermo Farinas.

Who is he, and why does he matter? He is one of Cuba’s bravest human rights advocates, a recipient of the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2010.

The citation says among other things this:

A Cuban doctor of psychology, independent journalist and political dissident, Guillermo Fariñas has over the years conducted 23 hunger strikes with the aim of achieving peaceful political change and freedom of expression in Cuba….For his activism, Fariñas has in recent years been threatened with death and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, beaten and hospitalised, and repeatedly arrested and detained, including at the funeral of Oswaldo Payá, another Sakharov Prize laureate and Cuban dissident.

Farinas is in the 48th day of hunger strike right now and was hospitalized on September 5. I write of all this because last week when that Jet Blue flight landed, the Obama administration celebrated it– but has not said one word about Farinas nor has any American diplomat sought to visit him. (And by the way, that flight was chock full of journalists, as the web siteCapitol Hill Cubans points out, and not a single one of them or of the foreign correspondents from Havana who went to Santa Clara sought to visit and speak with him. They were too busy celebrating, it seems. Capitol Hill Cubans quotes Martin Luther King: “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”)

Meanwhile, half a world away the Iranian Navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. Navy, taunting it with small boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. Reuters reported that

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after a fast-attack craft from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf on Sunday, U.S. Defense Department officials said on Tuesday. It was at least the fourth such incident in less than a month. U.S. officials are concerned that these actions by Iran could lead to mistakes.

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Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet Ghosts Caroline Glick

By on September 9th, 2016

Channel 1’s report Wednesday that in 1983, current Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas served as a KGB agent is hardly the story of the year, but it does remind us of certain half-forgotten facts about the Cold War that are becoming ever more relevant today.

The PLO’s close and servile relationship with the KGB was first exposed in a systematic way in 1987, with the publication of Red Horizons: Chronicles of a Communist Spy Chief, the exposé of Soviet and Romanian Cold War operations written by former Romanian intelligence chief Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa. Pacepa, who defected to the US in 1978 after serving as the head of the DIE – Romania’s KGB – was the highest ranking intelligence officer from the Soviet bloc to ever defect.

In his book, Pacepa revealed that “the PLO was dreamt up by the KGB.”

Pacepa explained how Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, at the direction of Moscow, convinced Yasser Arafat to employ political warfare, centered on phony protestations that he had abandoned terrorism, to weaken the West’s resolve to defend itself and to cause Israel to doubt its own legitimacy.

Wednesday’s Channel 1 report on Abbas was based on new revelations from the Mitrokhin Archive. Vasili Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB who surreptitiously copied KGB documents for many years and hid his copies in his home. In 1991 Mitrokhin defected to Britain and took his archive of 25,000 copies of documents with him.

In 2004, the second volume of his edited archive was published. The volume, titled, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, focused on the KGB’s efforts to use the Third World as a strategic weapon in its battle against the West. The volume devotes two chapters to the KGB’s campaign against Israel.

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