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2016

Andrew Browne :For China, ‘Clouds Are Fading Away’ in the Philippines Duterte’s abrupt diplomatic and military shift from Washington heartens Beijing, threatens U.S. alliance

With the exception of the Vietnam War, America’s alliance system in East Asia has helped keep the peace for more than half a century.

Now it is in trouble. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s progression from abusive name-calling to a more broadly articulated anti-American hostility has been swift and stunning. It threatens one of Washington’s crucial Asian alliances and sets back U.S. President Barack Obama ’s signature “pivot” to the region.

China is jubilant over Mr. Duterte’s cooling relations with Washington after it clashed for years with the Philippine leader’s predecessor.

“The clouds are fading away,” China’s ambassador to Manila, Zhao Jianhua, said at a Chinese National Day reception. “The sun is rising over the horizon, and will shine beautifully on the new chapter of bilateral relations.”

At first it looked like a fit of pique: One month ago, Mr. Duterte called Mr. Obama a “son of a whore” over U.S. criticism of his war on drugs that has strewn the country with thousands of corpses. His rage quickly hardened.

A few days later Mr. Duterte proposed removing American military advisers from the troubled southern region of Mindanao. Then he declared he was shopping in China and Russia for military supplies readily available in the U.S. Mr. Duterte will lead a Philippine business delegation to Beijing this month.

The FBI’s Defense of How the Clinton Interview Was Conducted Is Full of Holes The Bureau was clearly hamstrung by the Obama administration’s goal of avoiding prosecution. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.

But just as Director Comey rightly objects to being regarded as a weasel, I don’t much like being regarded as an idiot . . . which is what I’d have to be to swallow some of this stuff.

The FBI absolutely has control over who may be present at an interview with a subject of an investigation. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the most basic one is that an interview never has to happen unless the FBI consents to it.

In his testimony, Comey kept stressing that Mrs. Clinton’s interview was “voluntary” — contending that since she was not required to submit to it, she could impose any conditions on her agreement to do so. That is nonsense. The interview was voluntary on both sides. The FBI is never required to indulge conditions that make a mockery of its serious business.

In this regard, Comey is like a guy who ties his own hands behind his back and then says he was powerless to defend himself. If Clinton declined to submit to an FBI interview unless Mills (or the similarly situated lawyer Heather Samuelson) was permitted to be present, the investigators could simply have handed her a grand-jury subpoena. They could then have politely directed her to a chamber where she would be compelled to answer questions — under oath and all by her lonesome, without any of her lawyer legion in attendance.

But, you see, in this investigation — unlike every other major criminal investigation in which the government tries to make the case rather than not make the case — the Justice Department declined to convene a grand jury.

Howard Dean: It’s Trump’s Fault That I Lied About Him Using Cocaine Daniel Greenfield ???!!!

This deranged rant has been brought to you by the human scream.

Dean then launched into a critique of the media saying, “I would like the media of this country to apologize.” He went on to suggest that his cocaine tweet was really a bid to teach the media a lesson. “I’m not unwilling to apologize for using innuendo. Donald Trump has used innuendo from the day he got into this campaign and you, media, have not called him on it.” Asked why he would want to “go low” like Trump Dean replied, “Stephanie, I did that on purpose so I could say just exactly what I said.”

So Howard Dean lied and accused Trump of using cocaine. Then he claimed that the media didn’t call out Trump for using innuendo. This occurred in some imaginary world because the media has been doing exactly that. Then Dean claimed that his lie had been an effort to expose this burning issue.

It was all a brilliant plan to critique the media. And it would have worked too if Howard Dean weren’t a deranged leftist with slightly fewer brain cells than Gary Johnson.

But the media is guilty of jumping up and down with outrage over things Trump says, but not when Hillary or Howard Dean say the same sorts of things.

France: The Ticking Time Bomb of Islamization by Yves Mamou

The last group, defined as the “Ultras”, represent 28% of Muslims polled, and the most authoritarian profile. They say they prefer to live apart from Republican values. For them, Islamic values and Islamic law, or sharia, come first, before the common law of the Republic. They approve of polygamy and of wearing the niqab or the burqa.

“These 28% adhere to Islam in its most retrograde version, which has become for them a kind of identity. Islam is the mainstay of their revolt; and this revolt is embodied in an Islam of rupture, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism,” according to Hamid el Karoui in an interview with Journal du Dimanche.

More importantly, these 28% exist predominantly among the young (50% are under 25). In other words, one out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type, even if he does not belong to a mosque.

It is unbelievable that the only tools at our disposal are inadequate opinion polls. Without knowledge, no political action — or any other action — is possible. It is a situation that immeasurably benefits aggressive political Islamists.

Willful blindness is the mother of the civil war to come — unless the French people choose to submit to Islam without a fight.

Recently, two important studies about French Muslims were released in France. The first one, optimistically entitled, “A French Islam is Possible,” was published under the auspices of Institut Montaigne, an independent French think tank.

The second study, entitled, “Work, the Company and the Religious Question,” is the fourth annual joint study between the Randstad Institute (a recruiting company) and the Observatory of Religious Experience at Work (Observatoire du fait religieux en entreprise, OFRE), a research company.

Both studies, filling a huge knowledge-deficit on religious and ethnic demography, were widely reported in the media. France is a country well-equipped with demographers, scholars, professors and research institutes, but any official data or statistics based on race, origin or religion are prohibited by law.

France has 66.6 million inhabitants, according to a report dated January 1, 2016 from the National Institute of Statistics (Insee). But census questionnaires prohibit any question about race, origin or religion. So in France, it is impossible to know how many Muslims, black people, white people, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, etc. live in the country.

This prohibition is based on an old and once-healthy principle to avoid any discrimination in a country where “assimilation” is the rule. Assimilation, French-style, means that any foreigner who wants to live in the country has to copy the behavioral code of local population and marry a native quickly. This assimilation model worked perfectly for people of Spanish, Portuguese or Polish descent. But with Arabs and Muslims, it stopped.

Now, however, despite all good intentions, the rule prohibiting collection of data that might lead to discrimination, has become a national security handicap.

Which Nation is (Still) the Number One Sponsor of Terrorism? by Peter Huessy

The June State Department report also lists 58 “Foreign Terrorist Organizations,” of which over a dozen are allied with Iran. One Iranian Al Qaeda agent was specifically sanctioned by the US Treasury for distributing cash to the same al-Nusra Front the Iranian Foreign Minister complains is a terrorist organization.

Even more chilling has been Iran’s joint missile and technology cooperation with North Korea, making the potential use of weapons of mass destruction against the US a growing possibility.

On September 14, the Iranian Foreign Minister wrote in the New York Times that, “coordinated action at the United Nations to cut off the funding for ideologies of hate and extremism” is needed along with “a willingness from the international community to investigate the channels that supply the cash and the arms” to terrorists. He concluded with an appeal to “join hands with the rest of the community of nations to eliminate the scourge of terrorism and violence that threatens us all.”

Given that in 2015 alone there were some 11,774 terrorist attacks in 92 countries, killing 28,300 people, one can agree that such action is needed. The irony, of course, is that the US Department of State released its annual report in June on state sponsors of terrorism, and Iran was the gold medalist for the world’s number one terrorist nation — an honor it has held since 1984. Only two other countries were listed as state sponsors of terror: Syria and Sudan.

Having Iran’s Foreign Minister call for an end to terrorism is like having Bonnie and Clyde call for law and order.

The report makes clear, along with other available evidence, that much of the terrorism in the world is Iran’s handiwork — especially the terrorism directed at America.

The report emphasized that Iran “remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2015, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to [terror] groups around the world.” Iran provided arms and cash to terrorist groups and to nearly 30 Shia terrorist militias in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Shia militias in Bahrain.

Hillary and Negan: Parallels in Evil : Edward Cline

An alternative title for this article could also be: Negan and Hillary: Partners in Tyranny and Terror.

An intriguing and I think apt parallel exists between Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, overall career, goals, and character, and the goals and character of Negan. And the parallels are so simpatico, they seem to feed on and off of each other. They are mutually symptomatic of the state of the culture. The parallel even extends to Hillary’s supporters in the electorate and to the MSM, and to Negan’s loyal gang of marauding “Survivors.” It all should be explicated. I make no apologies for drawing readers’ attention to the parallel.

The cartoon Negan and the TV Negan

Who or what is “Negan”? He is the new archvillain of The Walking Dead (TWD) a villain who, unlike other villains in the series, does not try to rationalize his evil. He is thoroughly evil, and knows it, boasts of it, and revels in it. He is the “king” of the Survivors, who obey him and do his bidding. There is no saying “No” to him. Negan is perfectly portrayed by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, formerly of “Grey’s Anatomy” and is a veteran dozens of films and TV shows. I have watched none of his other films or TV series. So I can’t gauge or assess his true character, or even his acting abilities from other shows. But he is overwhelmingly convincing as Negan, so convincingly evil that you want to smack him and wrest the baseball bat from him and give him a taste of his own medicine. The trailer here should give readers unfamiliar with the series a taste of Negan.

Negan is a vile, evil character who debuted in April at the end of Season Six of The Walking Dead. Negan is a brutal tyrant who lords over an enclave of plague survivors and likes to smash victims’ heads with a baseball bat sheathed in barbed wire. He has a policy of extortion that requires other, productive enclaves to give him half of what they have in exchange for his not raiding, raping, enslaving, and killing their inhabitants and trashing their communities.

As one of their spokesmen said to others in an earlier teaser scene: “Everything you have now belongs to Negan.” gang are also dedicated nihilists.

Negan could be taken as a metaphor for the Obama administration, for Hillary’s dreamed of administration, or for Islamic jihadists. All three entities are looters, plunderers, and destroyers.

Hillary’s Greatest Nightmare is Coming True No one likes her. Daniel Greenfield

Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to lure young voters into her artisanal fair trade GMO-free gingerbread house. And they just aren’t interested.

In a desperate effort to get out the youth vote, Hillary Clinton dragged her former nemesis, 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, to New Hampshire to campaign for her. When your best bet for winning over the kids was born during WW2, you have a major problem. But whatever millennial pixie dust the senile Socialist had been wearing before had worn off. “Is anyone here ready to transform America?” he croaked.

Not with Hillary. Not even the most naive college freshman believes in Hillary as an agent of change.

“Bernie’s campaign energized so many young people,” Hillary Clinton insisted. But adding Bernie to her campaign of the living dead didn’t energize it. It slowed it down even more.

Hillary Clinton has the backing of less than half of young voters. And the news only gets worse for the Evita of Arkansas.

Only 47% of adults 18 to 34 are certain that they will vote this year. That’s down from 74% in 2008. Only 17% of voters under 30 are enthusiastic about voting this year. And, just to make things worse, Gary Johnson is pulling in 14 percent of younger voters. In Virginia, Hillary gets only 34% of the under 34 crowd. That’s not just an entertaining coincidence. It’s also an entertaining catastrophe.

That’s why the “Aleppo Moment” is suddenly getting so much media coverage. Johnson is attracting too many of the voters whom Hillary needs. And so the media is targeting the latest threat to Her Highness.

It’s also why Obama and Bernie are both warning about the perils of voting third party. But neither of them seem to be able to shift their following over to Hillary. And the celebrities aren’t doing any better.

Trying to make Hillary seem cool by surrounding her with celebrities only highlights her blandness. That’s what went wrong at the DNC. But surrounding her with Obama and Bernie, the candidates that younger voters chose over her, just reminds them of why they rejected her.

Hillary’s Achilles heel is an older electorate. An older electorate is least likely to be influenced by celebrity tweets and pop culture peer pressure. It is most likely to consist of adults with life experience who have actually worked for a living and understand that everything has to be paid for.

Iranian Fatwa: Women May Not Ride Bicycles Another surreal turn in the Islamic Republic’s war on women. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

Iran’s Supreme Leader and autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an Islamic fatwa regarding officially banning women from riding bicycles. This is only the latest in a growing multitude of activities that the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared haram (religiously forbidden).

A mullah from the Islamic Republic once described the reasoning behind this fatwa to me. He explained that if a male sees a woman in the act of riding a bicycle he would be exposed to her body physique, which will cause him to become aroused. In other words, Iran’s clerics believe that a man cannot control his sexual desires when he sees a woman on a bicycle even when she is fully covered.

Merely for engaging in an activity that millions of women around the world participate in, many women across Iran have recently been arrested. Signs declaring the new law have been installed on the streets reading, “Bicycle riding for women is prohibited.”

This is not the only absurd restriction that the women of Iran must endure. They are also prohibited from watching men’s volleyball games. A British-Iranian woman, Ghonche Ghavami, was detained and jailed in solitary confinement in Evin, notorious political prison, for attempting to watch a men’s volleyball game.

Iran’s President, the so-called moderate, has not raised any objection to this law or similar ones. In fact, under his presidency, the repressive and restrictive laws against women and their inalienable rights have increased.

Comey Predicts Tsunami of ISIS Terrorists Heading for U.S. An administration ignores the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. Michael Cutler

Huge sums of money are spent by our government and the governments of other countries to enable meteorologists to more accurately predict the weather.

For decades the United States has orbited fleets of ever more sophisticated weather satellites that circle the globe, taking measurements and tracking storms from orbit, while super-computers on the ground create models to predict when hurricanes or tornados may form and then predict the areas that will likely be endangered.

Courageous storm-hunters on the ground, who seek to observe and measure tornados “up close and in person,” drive heavily armored vehicles with a wide array of instruments in efforts to get a front-row view and develop a better understanding of how tornados form and better predict their destructive paths.

Heroic pilots and their crews of intrepid meteorologists fly into the hearts of violent hurricanes for similar purposes.

However, the purpose of all of these efforts is not simply garner information as a matter of academic curiosity, but to make certain that those who may be at risk are warned about the risks they face. Once the likely track of dangerous storms are established, those who live within the path of the storms are warned to take appropriate action.

Such action may require residents of low-lying areas or those areas along threatened coastlines to evacuate their homes and head for higher ground. It may require that homeowners and store-keepers board up windows and doors and remove anything from their property that could become a dangerous flying projectile.

Those in the path of such monstrous storms might be advised to stock up on food, water, batteries and other supplies to help them ride out the storm.

Those in the path of tornados are alerted to head for their storm cellars to maximize their likelihood of surviving the onslaught of winds and destruction.

Storms of course, are not the only threat we face, especially in this turbulent and volatile era. Increasingly terrorists have gone on bloody rampages around the world and here, within the borders of our nation.

Huge sums of money and Herculean efforts are being expended by various elements of our military and intelligence and law enforcement agencies to develop effective intelligence about the activities of these terrorist organizations that, not unlike major storms, are on the move around the world. The intelligence reports that these agencies produce forecast threats America and Americans face- not from natural events but from threats posed by America’s adversaries.

London Chronicle: Brexit & Free Speech By Roger Kimball

The last time I was in London, in June, I was witness to the amazing populist recovery of sovereignty the world now knows as Brexit. I reported on it several times in this space (here, for example, and here, here, here, and here). It was amusing, back then, to observe the evolution of respectable sentiment about Brexit. On the run-up to the vote on June 23 almost everyone who was anyone agreed on two things: 1) those supporting Brexit were ignorant, xenophobic yobs and 2) Brexit would never pass.

The smug certainty that, of course, Brexit could never happen yielded first to incredulity, then to rage when it was clear that not only had the referendum passed, but also that it had passed handily, 52% to 48%. It was partly amusing, partly alarming to watch the flailings of the politically correct mandarins attempting to explain to each other what happened. Some called for a new referendum, since the one that delivered Brexit was impossible, while others warned of imminent financial collapse and British isolation from the light-giving fish of EU dispensation.

In the event, nothing happened. Or, to be more precise, the British stock market stabilized and then shot up, the pound lost a small percentage of its value, making British exports more attractive, and life went on as usual.

The immediate question was, would Theresa May, the new prime minister, really pursue Brexit? She was known to be a mild “Remainer” but otherwise was something of a cipher.

In the event, her declaration that “Brexit means Brexit” turns out to have been in earnest. At the Tory Leadership Conference in Birmingham, which is ongoing as I write, Mrs. May just announced that she would trigger Article 50, which would formally initiate Britain’s exit from the tentacles of the EU, “before March next year.” That alone should console supporters of Brexit, as should her otherwise straightforward, no-nonsense tone. Negotiations would be complex, she acknowledged, but her administration would work tirelessly to get “the best deal” for Britain.

A preliminary step, she explained, is replaying the 1972 European Communities Act, which “enshrined” Britain’s new relationship with Europe. “It’s an important step we are taking,” Mrs. May said, “because first of all it makes clear to those who voted to leave the EU, that is exactly what we will be doing.”

That’s the news, and it is good news, as of a few minutes ago.

I came to England a few days ago in order to participate in a conference in Winchester on the fate of free speech in the academy, U.S. as well as British editions. We’ll be publishing the papers for that conference in The New Criterion come January, but I can reveal now one thing that struck me about our deliberations. Two years before, we had held a conference on a similar topic (which you can read about here): “Free Speech Under Threat.” To some extent, what transpired in Winchester a few days ago comes under the rubric of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called “déjà-vu all over again.”

But there are differences. In the couple of years since we last considered the issue of free speech, blatant assaults on free speech have grown much more common to the point where they are less scandalous than simply business as usual. People are harassed, shunned, sacked, fined, even jailed in some Western countries for expressing an unpopular opinion.

It is difficult to maintain a perpetual sense of emergency, however, and it’s my sense that many incursions upon free speech are now met more with a weary shrug than the outrage they would have occasioned even a few years back. Novelty is the handmaiden of outrage, and there is, alas, nothing novel about the assaults against free speech on campus today.

One of the most conspicuous strategies to limit free speech on campuses in the United States these last few years has been via the weaponization of victimhood. This is where the demand for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and the anxiety over “micro aggressions” makes common cause with political correctness to curtail free speech and establish the reign of politically correct orthodoxy.

It’s my impression that this latest gift of American academia has yet to be fully transplanted to England. The toxic rhetoric of “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and “micro aggressions” is beginning to catch on here and there but has not, so far as I can see, really taken root here.

I’m sure that will change before long. It’s just too potent a weapon to ignore.