Displaying posts published in

2016

Targeting Farage A hate group with an Orwellian name threatens to sue the Brexit hero. Bruce Bawer

“They go low, we go high.” “Love trumps hate.” The left, as we learned from the recent presidential campaign, is all about love. And hope. And, naturally, fighting hate.

Thus the name of the British organization Hope Not Hate. I’ve written about it before. It describes itself as an anti-fascist monitoring group, and the mainstream media, with few exceptions, routinely echo this self-description. In fact, however, HnH, founded in 2004, is far from what it pretends to be. Think of it as Britain’s answer to the Southern Poverty Law Center: a vicious smear machine masquerading as a virtuous anti-hate group.

It was Hope Not Hate that successfully campaigned to have Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller banned from the U.K. because of their criticism of Islam. It was Hope Not Hate that slandered me and several dozen other critics of Islam in an outrageously mendacious “Counter-Jihad Report” that actually juxtaposed photos of David Horowitz and Geert Wilders with one of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik (complete with gun). It was Hope Not Hate that spent the run-up to the Brexit vote demonizing UKIP, the anti-EU party, which it routinely treated as racist, xenophobic, and neo-Nazi scum.

HnH’s modus operandi is always consistent: instead of engaging the arguments of its ideological opponents in a fair, factual way, it maligns us, misrepresents us, and does its damnedest to destroy our reputations. The ultimate goal, plainly, is to try to make us shut up and go away.

Now they’re at it again. Their latest target: none other than former UKIP head and Brexit hero Nigel Farage. After the December 19 attack in Berlin, Farage tweeted that such events “will be the Merkel legacy.” Merkel, he wrote, had “blood on her hands.” Farage was hardly alone in this opinion: perhaps the most common Facebook meme during the hours after the attack was a picture of Merkel with, yes, blood on her hands.

But at least one prominent Brit considered Farage’s remarks wildly inappropriate. On his own Twitter account, Brendan Cox warned Farage that “blaming politicians for the actions of extremists” would lead him down a “slippery slope.”

Who is Brendan Cox? He’s a professional left-wing activist who once served as an adviser to Gordon Brown. He’s held well-paid positions at groups with names like Crisis Action and was chief strategist at Save the Children, from which he resigned in 2015 after accusations of “inappropriate behavior.” But he’s best known as the widower of Labour MP Jo Cox, a vocal Remain advocate who was murdered last June by a right-wing fanatic. Following her death, her family encouraged contributions in her memory to three groups that had been “close to her heart.” One of them was Hope Not Hate.

Trump’s Israel Ambassador Will Drain the Two-State Solution Swamp It’s time to end the “Palestinian” hijacking of the US-Israel relationship. Daniel Greenfield

Ten years ago, a guy from Queens made a trip out during a snowstorm to pay a condolence call to a guy on Long Island on the passing of a Rabbi who was also his father. The guy from Queens is now President-elect and the man he was visiting became his close adviser and his choice for ambassador to Israel.

Last week, Trump gave his pro-Israel Jewish supporters an early Chanukah gift. He picked an ambassador who actually likes the Jewish State and hates Islamic terrorists.

It’s supposed to be the other way around.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro, Obama’s emissary to the country he hated almost as much as America, had denounced Israel on the day that a Jewish mother of six who died protecting her children from an Islamic terrorist encouraged to kill Jews by the Palestinian Authority, was being buried.

Shapiro has warned that our backing for Israel is contingent on Israel’s support for a PA-Hamas Islamic terror state inside its own borders and that Netanyahu’s lack of enthusiasm for that terror state “raises questions about Israel’s real intentions.”

But Trump has decided to go with David Friedman, a friend of Israel, instead of an enemy. And the enemies of the Jewish State are united in their fury against Ambassador David Friedman.

“J Street is vehemently opposed to the nomination of David Friedman to be Ambassador to Israel.” the Soros funded anti-Israel group declared. Friedman has been a longtime critic of the hate group, comparing its support for Islamic terror against Israel to its key funder’s Nazi collaborating past.

The head of J Street is so upset that he appears to have found religion. “Lord help friends of Israel if someone like David Friedman is making US policy on Israel rather than John Kerry,” Jeremy ben Ami whined.

The Lord just might be helping Israel by sending Kerry back to Nantucket and David Friedman to Jerusalem. The anti-Israel media was already sputtering early this month when Friedman skipped Kerry’s rant against Israel to attend an event for the Israeli town of Beit El (Bethel or House of God) where Judah Maccabee had his command center in the battle against Antiochus IV that gave us Chanukah.

Our next ambassador chose the House of God and the Maccabees over John Forbes Kerry.

EDWARD CLINE: THE MADNESS OF QUEEN ANGELA

I take the title of this column from a 1994 British film, “The Madness of King George,” which dramatizes the enveloping insanity of George III, the monarch who lost America and was losing his mind. George kept committing actions that were “embarrassing” to the nation, but most of all, to the dignity of his station. Doctors were at a loss to diagnosis and possibly correct the king’s bizarre behavior and eccentricities. Given the primitive state of mental and physical science of the time, they were reduced to examining his stool for clues to a remedy. The only doctor to make a semblance of progress was one who insisted that all regal niceties be dropped and the King be put through a régimen of what only could be called, in certain military circles, “square bashing.” George would be put in a straight jacket every time he “misbehaved.”

But George III’s madness was a low-level one compared to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of madness. She cannot help but be aware of the insanity and the suicidal consequences of her policies, but she chooses them. George’s madness could not be corrected with rational persuasion or introspection. He was not capable of conscious irrationality. His mind careened in its own world of causo-connections.

As does Merkel’s.

Merkel’s madness, seeks to reduce her nation to being a deferential caliphate of Islam against the will of the non-Islamic population, which is expected to meld peacefully without complaint with the savages, rapists, thieves and welfare parasites. It is based on the madness of her brand of collectivism, Marxism.

Marxism itself is a system of madness that defies or denigrates human volition and goes against any measure of rationality. If you were born in a certain “class,” preferably a poor one, then you were destined to become a communist, or at least a socialist, and resent anyone better off economically than you. Dialectical Materialism brands you from the beginning and you have no choice about what you are and what you condition is. Your economic condition or circumstances indelibly “condition” how you think and behave.

Wikipedia has this description of Marxism:

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. It originates from the mid-to-late 19th century works of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Marxist methodology originally used a method of economic and sociopolitical inquiry known as historical materialism to analyze and critique the development of capitalism and the role of class struggle in systemic economic change.

To Merkel’s mind, immigrants who rape, murder, or turn into bloody jihadis are just that way, through no fault of their own, it’s their cultural heritage, and they must not be judged according to Western measures of civil conduct, they were just born that way, and extraordinary efforts must be made to persuade them to be nice, and not commit crimes. They are blameless because that was how they were born.

The Grand Mufti reviewing Muslim troops in Bosnia

On the other hand, native Germans must make an effort to accommodate migrants and Muslims, and form a societal union with them until all conflict between Western and Muslim culture ceases. Unfortunately, the only “dialect” Muslims practice and understand is force. “Peace” in Islamic “dialectics” means your submission, or your death.

Obama set to back a boycott of Israel: A Wake-up Call to American Businesses and Taxpayers: Anne Bayefsky

This article by Anne Bayefsky originally appeared on Washington Examiner.

U.S. companies are in for a shock as President Obama takes aim once again at Israel in the final month of his presidency. In the coming days, he is expected to direct his team at the United Nations to vote for U.S. funding of “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign aimed at financially ruining Israel and smearing the companies with which it does business.

The vote concerns the U.N. budget that is currently being negotiated and scheduled to be finalized this week. One of the line items provides funding for the implementation of a Human Rights Council resolution adopted in March. The resolution calls for the creation of a blacklist of companies around the world doing any business, directly or indirectly, connected to Israeli settlements. In effect, it launches a U.N.-sponsored BDS movement. Since the General Assembly holds the purse strings for the Human Rights Council’s operations, the time has come to allocate the money to pay for it.

With Obama’s U.N. diplomats sitting on their hands while the funding scheme is being hotly debated, American taxpayers can expect to find themselves funding BDS in the very near future, with American businesses caught in the crosshairs.

Israeli settlements consist of Jews living peaceful, productive lives on disputed territory whose ownership, by existing agreement, is to be determined through negotiations. This Jewish presence on Arab-claimed territory is offensive to a deeply anti-Semitic enemy that seeks to guarantee that land swapped in an eventual deal to create a Palestinian state will be Jew-free.

In the context of a Palestinian policy of ethnic cleansing, these Jewish farms, enterprises and schools are an “obstacle to peace,” to use the preferred verbiage of the United Nations and the Obama administration. The fact that Jews have repeatedly been moved in advance of a negotiated end to hostilities by their own government for the sake of peace, only to have those hopes dashed time and again, is simply dismissed.

Tunisian Migrant Investigated for Suspected Terror Ties Is Sought in Berlin Truck Attack Revelation that authorities sought and failed to deport asylum seeker stokes criticism of Angela Merkel’s refugee policy By Anton Troianovski and Ruth Bender see note pleaser

OH PULEEZ! ASYLUM SEEKER??? JIHAD SEEKER IS MORE LIKE IT…..RSK

BERLIN—Anis Amri, a Tunisian migrant whom authorities previously investigated for suspected terror ties and tried to deport, became Germany’s most wanted man as the new prime suspect in the capital’s deadly truck attack.

The revelation that the asylum seeker had been able to remain in Germany despite efforts to expel him stoked a furor over what many politicians called dangerous gaps in the country’s immigration policy and escalated the political crisis facing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

The federal police issued a rare international wanted notice for Mr. Amri—who arrived in Germany last year after time in an Italian prison—and offered a €100,000 ($104,000) reward, warning that he could be armed and dangerous.

Officials cautioned that they weren’t certain that Mr. Amri had, in fact, committed the crime and that it was possible someone else had planted the man’s residency permit in the truck. It was discovered in the cab of the semitrailer Tuesday, the day after it rammed into a Berlin Christmas market, leaving 12 dead and dozens injured. But, they said, the man was currently their No. 1 suspect.

Details emerging about Mr. Amri’s biography showed the case’s potential to boost critics who have argued that Ms. Merkel wasn’t taking Germans’ safety seriously enough in her open-door refugee policy. It also raised questions about the effectiveness of Germany’s security apparatus and, more broadly, Europe’s, particularly since the onset of the continent’s migration crisis.

On Wednesday, it appeared that critics’ predictions had come true: Despite German authorities’ earlier suspicions that the suspect had links to Islamist extremism, they said they had been unable to deport him because he lacked documentation proving he was from Tunisia. Officials said Germany finally received the new papers from Tunisian authorities on Wednesday—two days after the Christmas market attack.

“There is clearly a connection between the refugee crisis and the elevated terror danger in Germany,” conservative lawmaker Stephan Mayer said after a closed-door briefing in parliament on the investigation.

Trump’s Opportunity: Saving Coptic Christians Egypt’s minorities, long persecuted, are counting on the U.S. president to defend religious freedom. By Samuel Tadros

Islamic State’s local affiliate in Sinai claimed credit for the bombing of St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Cairo earlier this month. The group could not have chosen a more symbolic target. Erected in 1911, St. Peter’s was an architectural marvel built and decorated by Italian architects and mosaic artists.

It stood for a cosmopolitan Egypt that welcomed thousands of foreigners as its rulers sought to make it the Paris of the East. It captured the dreams and pains of the Boutros-Ghali family, which rose to power and financed the church’s construction after being emancipated from the shackles of dhimmitude. It represents what is now a bygone era.

Twenty-five worshipers, mostly women, died in the St. Peter’s blast. It is part of an ominous trend. Twenty Copts were killed by their neighbors during the 2000 New Year massacre in El Kosheh village. The Dec. 31, 2010, bombing of a church in Alexandria left 23 dead. The 2013 burning of more than 50 churches by Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators was the worst violence on Coptic churches since the 14th century. And the February 2015 beheading of 20 Coptic workers by Islamic State on the shores of Libya was the most horrifying incident for Copts in memory.

Persecution has never been alien to the Copts. Roman and Byzantine emperors, along with Arab and Turkish caliphs and rulers, have each claimed their share of Coptic blood. A church that stood as one of the pillars of Christianity in late antiquity was reduced to a small minority struggling for survival. Even during Egypt’s proto-liberal age (1923-1952), the Copts weren’t spared incitement and attacks.

Egypt’s generals were no better, but one thing had changed—the possibility of emigration. The slow flow of Coptic emigrants from Egypt in the 1950s has turned into a tsunami. Based on my research, I estimate that more than a million Copts have found new permanent homes in the West, where their more than 500 churches now flourish.

The Egyptian revolution of 2011 accelerated the process. The security vacuum, the empowering of Islamists in villages, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to the presidency pointed to the coming doom. At their moment of desperation, many Copts placed their hopes, like those of other non-Islamist Egyptians, in army general Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. Those hopes were misplaced.

President Sisi may be personally sympathetic to the Copts, but his government has done little to protect them. Deadly bombings capture the world’s attention for a moment, but daily life for Copts in Egypt is a struggle. Discrimination is rampant—from government appointments to soccer teams.

Mob attacks on churches and homes occur frequently and are increasing, and security forces fail to prevent them. Anti-Copt attackers escape punishment as the government forces Copts into reconciliation sessions that sidestep the legal process and often reward the mob by acquiescence to their demands. A new law for building churches that every Egyptian ruler since Hosni Mubarak has promised was passed by parliament this year, but the law retains the role of state security in the approval process and ties approval of churches to the size of the community in the area. CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama’s ‘Permanent’ Drilling Freeze He claims his latest executive order can’t be repealed—ever.

The White House is attempting to overload the bandwidth of its successor with a surge of new regulation, and the latest is a ban on oil drilling in much of the Arctic and Atlantic. This rule even purports to be “permanent,” unchangeable by any future President for all time. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime spare us the liberal panic about Donald Trump’s supposed authoritarianism.

The last-gasp executive action prohibits federal offshore drilling and mineral leases on some 3.8 million acres from Virginia to Maine and 115 million acres off the coast of Alaska, including some of the world’s great untapped repositories of hydrocarbons. President Obama rolled out the rule in concert with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the greens are cheering that still more fossil-fuel regions will be walled off from exploration.

For years federal regulators have obstructed oil production on already leased lands. Royal Dutch Shell holds the sole drilling permit in Alaska and in 2015 suspended operations in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas despite $7 billion of sunk investment. So in a sense the new rule is merely truth in advertising.

But the press corps is rushing to euphemize Mr. Obama’s “creative” interpretation of a “rarely used” provision of the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Ocsla allows that the President “may, from time to time, withdraw from disposition any of the unleased lands of the Outer Continental Shelf.” Because the law does not explicitly give the President the power to un-withdraw lands, the White House touts the rule as a forever condition. In other words, this is Mr. Obama’s typically illegal M.O.

Congress passed Ocsla, as the law’s preamble states, in order to make the “vital national resource reserve” that is the continental shelf “available for expeditious and orderly development.” The power to lock is also the power to unlock. Bill Clinton used Ocsla to withdraw 300 million offshore acres from an area that was already a designated marine sanctuary, but George W. Bush reinstated about 50 million.

Political Revolution Is Brewing in Europe by Geert Wilders

The German authorities are dangerously underestimating the threat of Islam… They have betrayed their own citizens.

Let no-one tell you that only the perpetrators of these crimes are to blame. The politicians, who welcomed Islam into their country, are guilty as well. And it is not just Frau Merkel in Germany, it is the entire political elite in Western Europe.

Out of political-correctness, they have deliberately turned a blind eye to Islam. They have refused to inform themselves about its true nature. They refuse to acknowledge that is all in the Koran: the permission to kill Jews and Christians (Surah 9:29), to terrorize non-Muslims (8:12), to rape young girls (65:4), to enslave people for sex (4:3), to lie about one’s true goals (3:54), and the command to make war on the infidels (9:123) and subjugate the entire world to Allah (9:33).

We will have to de-islamize our societies…. But it all begins with politicians with the courage to face and speak the truth.

More and more citizens are aware of that. This is why a political revolution is brewing in Europe. Patriotic parties are rapidly growing everywhere. They are Europe’s only hope for a better future.

Yesterday, the Islamic State claimed the Berlin terror attack of Monday evening, in which twelve people were killed with a truck at a Christmas market.

The killer managed to escape. However, in the truck the police found identity papers belonging to Anis A., a Tunisian who came to Germany as an asylum seeker in 2015.

(Image source: RTL Nieuws video screenshot)

When last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to almost one million refugees and asylum seekers, she invited the Trojan horse of Islam into her country. Among the so-called refugees were many young men of Islamic background, filled with hatred for the West and its civilization. One of them was Anis A.

It took almost a year for the German authorities to reject his asylum request, but meanwhile the man had disappeared. The police are now looking for him as a prime suspect of Monday’s attack in Berlin.

The German authorities are dangerously underestimating the threat of Islam. They signs are there for all to see. In October, an Afghan asylum seeker raped and murdered a 19-year old German girl in Freiburg. And a 12-year old Iraqi boy was caught before he could explode a nail bomb at a Christmas market in Ludwigshafen.

Change Is Coming and Change Can Be Good by Shoshana Bryen

Palestinian statehood demands should be taken seriously only within the context of bilateral negotiations with the Government of Israel. American attention should be paid to the non-democratic excesses of Palestinian leadership – and U.S. economic support and general support for the PA should be attached to improvements in press freedom, human rights and economic opportunity supported by the PA government.

President-elect Trump’s choice of David Friedman as Ambassador to Israel appears to be an excellent decision. It has already brought howls of protest from people invested heavily in the Oslo and subsequent accords, the “peace process” and the concept of the United States as an “evenhanded” broker between Israelis and Palestinians. Friedman, an Oslo-skeptic, has said he believes that, “Notwithstanding ‘agreements’ reached at Camp David, Oslo, Wye Plantation and elsewhere, neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas ever had any intentions to observe the minimal conditions required of a two-state solution.”

On the other hand, he said of Israel that he would work “tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries,” correcting the relationship between two democratic, transparent, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, free market, countries — one large and one small. Israel goes from an impediment to American interests in the Middle East to a partner in a vital region — innovative, experienced, and successful.

It is worthwhile to review the parameters of the Oslo Process, negotiated in 1993 without the participation of the U.S., but adopted formally by President Clinton, because its underlying assumptions are about to be challenged.

Are Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait Funding German Salafism? by George Igler

The Sheikh Eid Bin Mohammad al-Thani Charitable Association and the Saudi Muslim World League are coordinating a “long-running strategy to exert influence” by Gulf States in Germany, according to a report authored by Germany’s security agencies.

“This is about war, about children being indoctrinated, they are only in primary school and already fantasize about how when they grow up, they want to join the jihad, kill infidels.” — Wolfgang Trusheim, Frankfurt State Security office.

“For quite some time we’ve had indications and evidence that German Salafists are getting assistance, which is approved by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait, in the form of money, the sending of imams and the building of Koran schools and mosques.” — Rolf Mützenich, German MP and Middle East expert.

Declining to assimilate in the West continues with the apparent, religiously mandated, preference to have the host countries become Islamic.

Salafism — from salaf, “ancestors” or “predecessors” in Arabic — urges the emulation of the first three generations of the Islamic prophet Mohammad’s companions, and Mohammad himself. It is often deemed the most fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

Security agencies in Germany claim that 9,200 such Islamic extremists currently call the country home. Another intelligence briefing cited by Süddeutsche Zeitung, warns that “the ideology already has 10,000 followers” and growing, in the country.

“Almost all of the German nationals who have travelled to Syria to fight for Islamic State became radicalized by Salafis, who target low-income Muslim youths in German cities,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, adding that it is proving increasingly challenging for German intelligence officials, “to differentiate between those who identify intellectually with Salafism and those who espouse using violence to realize a radical version of Islam.”