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2016

Election Law Violation Was Hillary’s Idea Orders to use Donald Duck to foment violence at Trump rallies came straight from the top. Matthew Vadum

Democrat Hillary Clinton personally authorized illegal dirty tricks operations against Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, according to top Democrats appearing in undercover video.

In the third Hillary-related video released by ACORN slayer James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas Action Fund this past Sunday (Oct. 23), Clinton is directly implicated in a scheme to use Donald Duck to mock Trump and troll his supporters at Trump campaign rallies.

Among Disney cartoon characters Donald Duck was a natural choice. After all, his name used to appear regularly on voter registration documents when Bill and Hillary Clinton’s favorite community organizing group, the now-defunct ACORN, hired hobos and felons to go on voter-registration drives.

Earlier this year Democrats in Donald Duck costumes started appearing at Trump events across America. Costumed individuals would walk around carrying signs. One said, “Trump ducks releasing his tax return.”

This cutesy publicity stunt isn’t necessarily the problem, though. The problem is that Hillary Clinton ordered it and apparently broke the law by coordinating with a tax-exempt nonprofit group.

Prominent in the video is political organizer Robert Creamer who is very high up in the Democratic Party’s hierarchy. He has reportedly visited the Obama White House 342 times, including 47 meetings with Obama personally.

One of the visits took place in Obama’s personal living quarters.

“It’s a very big deal that Creamer visited the president’s residence in the White House,” a former senior White House employee told FrontPage in an interview. “White House employees can work there for years and never visit the residence.”

They Knew: The End of the Clinton Lies Begins There’s only one lie left. Daniel Greenfield

During Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign, Neera Tanden was described as “the wonk behind Hillary.” A close associate of the Clintons, Tanden helped shape policy for both Bill and Hillary. Then she switched to playing that role for Obama.

While Hillary’s email scandal broke, Tanden was in charge of the Center for American Progress, a radical left-wing group that had been described as “Obama’s Idea Factory.” And she was chatting with John Podesta, the top Clintonite who had founded CAP. Podesta had co-chaired the Obama-Biden Transition Project. Neera Tanden would co-chair the Hillary-Kaine Transition Project under Podesta who headed up Hillary’s presidential campaign. Podesta had helped shape the last eight years of national politics through Obama and Tanden looked forward to shaping the next eight under Hillary.

And what did they think of Hillary? Did they believe their defenses of her wrongdoing?

Podesta and Tanden ridiculed her associates for the cover-up. “Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy,” she wondered. “Unbelievable,” Podesta wrote. “They wanted to get away with it.”

Since the early days of the email scandal, we’ve been treated to the sordid rituals of feigned innocence. The issue was a non-issue, Clinton surrogates were quick to assure us. And even if it was, no one did anything wrong. The flies on the wall knew better though and now we can all be the flies on the wall.

Away from the cameras and the briefings, the Clintonites held their bosses in contempt. Neera Tanden, a supposed close associate of Hillary, blasted her instincts as “suboptimal” and described her as suffering from a character problem. And there was never any doubt as to what was going on.

Tanden ridiculed Cheryl Mills for the mess. Mills fired off an email to Podesta warning that Obama’s denial wouldn’t hold up. “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” she warned.

Obama had offered his usual denial claiming to have only learned about the scandal from the media. The revelation that Hillary had emailed Obama from her illegal address would show that he had lied. But meanwhile his people struggled to reinvent his lie by claiming that while he knew about her illegal address, he didn’t know that it was illegal. This put his lie in line with Hillary’s lie.

Merv Bendle :You Say You Want a Reformation …

Those calling for a Muslim reformation are overlooking the consequences of the revolt that Martin Luther prompted against Rome. Were Islam to replicate that upheaval, as many seem to wish, the world would be convulsed for bloody centuries to come.
Martin Luther unleashed his attack on the monolithic Catholic Church exactly 499 years ago on All Saints Eve Now (now popularly known as Halloween) when he nailed his 95 theological theses on the Church door of Wittenberg. Now, as we approach the quincentenary of that momentous event it is possible to gain some long-term perspective on its essential nature and impact on modern history. In particular, it is an ideal time to explore the grim implications of such a religious upheaval for the crisis of Islam, which is engulfing much of the world in the same type of internecine and sectarian violence that characterized the epochal upheaval that convulsed Christian Europe.

Continually there are demands for Islam to undergo its own ‘reformation’ akin to that endured by the West half a millennium ago. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s polemic, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now (2015), exemplifies this campaign, envisaging a reformed Islam akin to liberal Christianity in its capacity to accommodate the modern world. She states the case against the savagery of fundamentalist Islamism in a defiant and optimistic fashion, drawing great encouragement from the various calls for reform that were manifest in the Muslim world during the so-called Arab Spring. Equally optimistic calls come from Muslim intellectuals who imagine that Muslims around the world could band together to overthrow Muslim despots, reject Sharia law, establish new liberal constitutions, and deploy diaspora Muslims living in Western countries like Australia as “ambassadors [to] educate their non-Muslim neighbours about the peaceful, compassionate and sharing nature of Islam in order to bring Muslims and non-Muslims closer together”.

Tragically, much of this is fanciful. In their enthusiasm, these commentators have imposed an idealised vision of the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment upon the brutal religious passions of the 16th century Reformation. Moreover, there seems to be little evidence that the contemporary despots, theocrats, and jihadists that dominate the Muslim world will relinquish their wealth and power or give up on their apocalyptic dreams of global conquest. Moreover, these Muslim leaders and their many supporters are heirs to an ancient intellectual counter-revolution that diverted Islam away from the rationalism that facilitated the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in the West. Instead they embrace a theological obscurantism that Robert R. Reilly has carefully analysed in The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (2010). As I have observed:

“Reilly details how the emerging religion of Islam initially embraced the rationality and scientific orientation of the Hellenic world to which it was a successor before it abruptly turned its back on this heritage and embraced a quite primitive form of theological irrationalism. The resulting world-view fundamentally undermined Islam’s capacity to embrace science, democracy and economic development down to the present day.”

Nothing has changed: Islam remains constitutionally unable to embrace the open society that the West enjoys. Instead Islamists and other devotees of ultra-reactionary Saudi-backed Salafi fundamentalism are vigorously seeking to reassert this medieval theological irrationalism throughout the Muslim world. They are never going to yield to calls for reform.

Nor is there any likelihood that the backward-looking Muslim diaspora exploiting the welfare states of the West will rise to the challenge, contest this obscurantism, and modernize Islam, perhaps transforming it into something akin to liberal Christianity by capitulating abjectly to secular consumerism, political correctness, Green-Left ideology, and becoming a Uniting Church of Islam. Such suggestions are preposterous, as these diaspora are largely funded and controlled by Salafists, as part of the ‘Arabization of Islam’. Consequently, Western Muslims, protected by their political front men and cultural quislings in the media and academia, are far more likely to develop and entrench their enclaves and no-go areas in the cities of the West where they can enforce the more brutal and benighted aspects of Salafist Islam. This is especially the case with their womenfolk, with radical Muslim intellectuals even prepared to defend honour killings. As their reticence to take a stand against jihadism and their eagerness to claim victimhood reveals, they are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution.

In fact, the Reformation that Ali and other commentators want the Islamic world to emulate offers lessons diametrically opposed to their optimism. To begin with, it didn’t establish the separation between church and state: various theocratic Protestant regimes were established in Europe and North America, Henry VIII made the Monarch head of the Church of England, and religious orthodoxy was brutally enforced through capital punishment, including innumerable burnings at the stake. Subsequently, church and state battled for supremacy for centuries after the Reformation.

David Singer: Obama’s Islamic State Policy Threatens Clinton Election Victory

President Obama’s decision to agree to Iraqi and Peshmerga forces attacking Mosul to degrade and destroy Islamic State just three weeks before the US elections sounds alarm bells for the prospects of Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump on 8 November.

Secretary of Defence Ash Carter confirmed Obama’s decision on 17 October.

The timing of the attack is very concerning. Obama’s decision accords with his policy enunciated as far back as 10 September 2014:

“But this is not our fight alone. American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves, nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region. “

Obama had then further elaborated:

“…we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground…

… As I have said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission – we will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.”

The same day that Carter issued his statement, General Stephen Townsend, Combined Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resolve, reportedly acknowledged the presence of “forward air controllers” amongst the US “advisory” contributions to the battle.

Those American “advisory” contributions now appear to have included an explosive ordnance disposal technician – Jason Finan – working with a Navy SEAL team near Mosul who was killed by an Islamic State bomb on October 20.

Are Canada’s Islamists Calling the Shots? Government Petitioned to Silence Critics by Thomas Quiggin

The discourse of “Islamophobia,” and this petition, are nothing more than a continuation of the efforts of Islamists to silence their critics as they advance their own political agenda.

The Liberal Party of Canada appears to have been infiltrated by a variety of individuals who are supporters of Islamist extremism. This is beginning to look like a classic case of political entryism.

In 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau chose not to observe any official 9/11 memorial ceremony to honour the Canadians who died that day. However, the very next day, he attended the Ottawa Main Mosque which has multiple links to extremism. This despite recent stories in Canada about extremism in mosques and schools in Canada.

It was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Banna, who stated that “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated; to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Samer Majzoub from Quebec has initiated an official Government of Canada petition to the House of Commons. The sponsor of the petition is Liberal Member of Parliament Frank Baylis. The petition calls upon the government to condemn all forms of Islamophobia.

Samer Majzoub self identifies as being part of multiple Islamist (extremist) organization in Quebec, including the (in)famous Al-Rawdaw Mosque[1] and the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC). MAC itself states that they follow the teachings of Hassan Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood. ­­ If there was any doubt, a senior member of MAC, Dr. El-Tantawi Attia, made it clear when he stated: “Here we follow the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Muslim Brotherhood is listed as a terrorist group in many countries in the Middle East, while a recent UK government report states that the Muslim Brotherhood

“have a highly ambiguous relationship with violent extremism. Both as an ideology and as a network it has been a rite of passage for some individuals and groups who have gone on to engage in violence and terrorism.”

The Muslim Association of Canada itself has been identified in Canadian Senate testimony as being a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

Accusations of racism and “Islamophobia” are the sword and shield of extremist Islam in the West. It makes excellent use of the concept of perpetual victimhood. The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is:

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The Mayor of London’s “My Side” by Janet Tavakoli

The number one reason British “Leave” voters backed Brexit was for self-determination. — Mega-poll by Lord Ashcroft.

Every time a social problem arises, one can randomly assign blame to a host country for not providing enough social support to newcomers. That benchmark, however, creates a shifting goalpost: how much is “enough”?

Mayor Sadiq Khan focused only on what Britain should provide to newcomers not on what newcomers should initiate on their own to fit into a country they entered willingly.

Mayor Khan’s presentation seemed designed to pacify Westerners and enable the spread of the rule of Islam.

Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, addressed the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) on September 15. Although his topic was “The Breakdown of Social Integration – The Challenge of Our Age,” some crucial components of that challenge were notably absent from his presentation.

Even though Mayor Khan said he believes that, “London is the powerhouse” for his country and is “proud that London was the only region in England to vote to remain in the European Union” (some boroughs voted 80% “Remain”), when it came to the United Kingdom as a whole, he said that “my side” lost the referendum.

That strikes one as an odd way for the mayor of any city to talk. Isn’t he the Mayor of all of London? Aren’t the Londoners who voted for Brexit included on his “side”?
Brexit Voters Want Self-Determination

Mayor Khan claimed that for “Leave” voters, “immigration was the number one issue.” However, Lord Ashcroft’s mega-poll says otherwise. According to it, the number one issue for “Leave” (pro-Brexit) voters across Britain was “the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK.”

Iran Takes More Hostages: What Did the US Expect? by Majid Rafizadeh

Another question raised is that while the State Department has long warned American citizens against traveling to Iran, why do some dual nationals, primarily Iranian-Americans, continue to travel to Iran for business or other reasons?

The Iranian government has learned that arresting dual nationals and Iranian-Americans not only can lead to the flow of billions of dollars to Iran, but also can ratchet up Iran’s political leverage against the US and Western allies.

President Obama is dangerously encouraging the Iranian leaders’ detaining and arresting dual nationals to extort money and play hardball.

Iran is not only detaining and arresting more Iranian-Americans, but also boasting about it and publicly asking for more money to release them.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) pointed out recently: “We should wait and see, the U.S. will offer … many billions of dollars to release” two particular Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi and his father Baquer Namazi.

According to Alex Shirazi’s nuanced profile, Siamak Namazi was one of the intellectual architects of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been accused of lobbying for the Iranian regime and pursuing policies that benefit themselves and the Iranian regime. Accordingly, the organization was founded “as a way to continuously lobby for the removal of sanctions against Iran and to promote Iran’s foreign policy, while combating the pro-Israel sentiment in America, according to documents from a Cyprus convention that featured the two men.”

Mr. Namazi worked for Iran’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning from 1994 to 1996. He also joined a company in Tehran called Atieh Bahar Consulting (AB), which was founded by Pari Namazi and her husband, Bijan Khajehpour.

The Tehran-based Atieh Bahar Consulting “offered a range of legal and industrial services to foreign enterprises, most importantly the access it provided to the [Iranian] regime, and the advice it dispensed on how best to navigate the vagaries of the regime’s entrenched factions and competitive interests.”

Palestinians: Jihadi-Style Child Abuse Where are the “Human Rights” Groups? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Children in this world do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers; an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other radical groups see children as future “soldiers” in the war to eliminate Israel. They raise children to regard to suicide bombers and jihadis as role models.

This form of child abuse does not seem to bother human rights organizations or UNICEF, whose declared goal is to “work for a world in which every child has a fair chance in life and a right to survive, thrive and fulfill their potential…” UNICEF apparently does not believe its mandate extends to Palestinian children, who are exploited to serve the interests of Islamist groups.

In the view of human rights organizations, recruiting Palestinian children to the ranks of Islamist terror groups does not constitute child abuse.

What is the world prepared to do in order to combat this child abuse? UNICEF and other international bodies may not have time to deal with such issues at present, because they are too busy thinking about the next resolution to condemn Israel.

Children have long become an integral part of “military” parades held in the Gaza Strip by various Palestinian groups. But this form of child abuse does not seem to bother human rights organizations or the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), whose declared goal is to “work for a world in which every child has a fair chance in life and a right to survive, thrive and fulfill their potential — to the benefit of a better world.” It seems that UNICEF does not believe that its mandate extends to Palestinian children, who are exploited to serve the interests of Islamist groups.

In the Gaza Strip, children are taught not only to hate Israel, but also to prepare themselves for jihad (holy war) against the “Zionist enemy.” Hamas, the Islamic Jihad Movement, and other radical groups see children as future “soldiers” in the war to eliminate Israel. They raise children to regard suicide bombers and jihadis as role models.

Children in this world do not dream about becoming doctors, pilots or engineers. Rather, they dream of destroying Israel and “liberating Palestine.” In fact, an entire generation of Palestinians, particularly those in the Gaza Strip, has been raised on the glorification of suicide bombers and anyone who kills a Jew. With enough sacrifices, they are taught, the destruction of Israel is not a far-fetched dream. They alone embody the future hope of the Palestinians to see Israel removed from the face of the earth. Forget becoming a physician: their job is to continue what their fathers failed to achieve.

All the while, both local and international human rights organizations look the other way. In their view, recruiting Palestinian children to the ranks of Islamist terror groups does not constitute child abuse.

Yet not only human rights groups turn a blind eye to this child abuse. The Palestinian Authority (PA), which relies heavily on Western donors for its survival, has also chosen to bury its head in the sand regarding this disturbing practice, which has become widespread in the Gaza Strip in recent years.

Americans Are Not a ‘Folk’ and Bob Dylan Is Not Our Poet By David P. Goldman

Phony identities are a commonplace in cultural history. In musical history, the most remarkable example remains so-called Gregorian chant, as “rediscovered” through “source-critical” research by the Benedictine monks of Solesmes in the early 19th century. Reeling from the French Revolution which had nearly annihilated their order, the Benedictines sought an authentic medieval Catholic culture, the musical expression of a mythical Age of Faith, and thought they founded it by reconstructing an Ur-chant from the welter of different styles that infested ecclesiastical practice. It was all a scam, a hoax, a goof, as later scholars were to demonstrate, for example Katherine Bergeron in her 1998 study Decadent Enchantments, which I discussed here. Gregorian chant in the Solesmes theme-park version has such a strong association with Catholic worship, though, that many Catholics refuse to believe that they were scammed.

And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he’s been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a “folk,” not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse. We have a distinct culture, but it is a self-created culture, a riff on Pilgrim’s Progress that became Poor Wayfaring Strangers, pilgrims pursuing freedom on a raft down the Mississippi, avenging Western gunmen, hard-boiled private eyes, and–yes–a young man in work shirt and jeans carrying a guitar. I tried to define what uniquely formed American culture earlier this year in a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, published by Tablet magazine here.

We are not a folk but a church, and our native music is church music–the Battle Hymn with its quotation of Isaiah 63, for example, or “The Year of Jubilo,” whose hymnal roots I analyzed here. Our popular poetic language is that of our national epic, the King James Bible. We sang the go-to-meeting songs of the Methodists and other Protestant denominations. This informed the spirituals of black slaves who gave us our first original art form. American folk music? Gospel is as close as we get to such a concept.

Term Limits for the Media? They’re not “hacks.” They’re “flacks.” By Roger L Simon

Now that Donald Trump has reopened the subject of term limits for Congress in his Gettysburg speech, it’s time to turn to the subject of term limits for a group that may need them even more — the media.

The moment couldn’t be more auspicious since WikiLeaks has just exposed 65 “journalists”–coming from such august names in the field as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC– who were at some level in cahoots with the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign.

Does anyone doubt this number will grow? Of course not, although it already encompasses almost all the prominent brands in the mainstream media.

But, you might ask, just because many of the reporters, broadcasters and pundits involved have worked, in many instances, for the same organizations for decades, far longer than most politicians have been in office and certainly longer than even two-term presidents, how can we “term limit” them? They are not, after all, government workers employed by the taxpayer and this is a capitalist country, at least for the moment.

Well, it’s quite simple, really. We simply call them what they are. They are not journalists in any real sense. They are public relations people — sometimes known, pejoratively, as flacks.

Now having spent a fair number of years writing books and movies, I am quite familiar with how PR people work, having had more than a few of them, some quite good and some not.

Thus reading through the WikiLeaks emails, the behavior of these PR folks (formerly known as journalists) was quite familiar to me. For example, when Glenn Thrush of Politico sent his article about Clinton to her campaign manager John Podesta in advance of publication, he was acting in the grand tradition of the public relations man, submitting his copy to his client for approval. In one of his emails to Podesta, Thrush goes so far as to call himself “a hack.” But he is not. He is a flack.