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2016

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Peres’ funeral, Abbas’ hypocrisy : Ruthie Blum

By on October 1st, 2016

On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas requested and was granted permission from the Israeli government to travel to Jerusalem to attend the funeral of elder statesman Shimon Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age of 93.

This gesture on Abbas’ part should make perfect sense to all who knew and loved Peres, much of whose illustrious history was spent singing literal and figurative songs of peace. Indeed, the former president, prime minister and defense minister of the Jewish state, who was honored the world over for his self-proclaimed “dreams” of a new Middle East, has spent decades sympathizing with what he considered to be the plight of the Palestinian people, ostensibly longing for independent statehood.

Peres also shared a Nobel Peace Prize with the late Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat for the signing of the Oslo Accords. Though these agreements were revealed to be an unmitigated disaster for Israel — leading to heightened waves of Palestinian terrorism — Peres never faltered. If anything, his fantasies of friendly economic and cultural ties between Israel and the Palestinian Authority grew with each passing suicide bombing perpetrated against innocent Jews.

Abbas has always known this about Peres, despite his own and other Palestinian officials’ public pronouncements over the years that the long-time Labor party leader was, like all Jews, a liar and a war criminal.

Abbas is also keenly aware that leaders from countries around the world have begun landing in Israel to pay their last respects to the Israel’s most famous peace-monger. And he doesn’t want to be left out, particularly since he has been trying to persuade all of them, individually and collectively, that all he wants is a state he can call his own. Of course, he always fails to acknowledge that he already possesses sovereignty over most of the West Bank, while Hamas rules supreme in Gaza, and that Israel is not to blame for the ills suffered by his people.

Nor has he budged one iota from his assertion that no Jew would be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. And why should he? After all, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused him recently of promoting ethnic cleansing, many of the dignitaries who are arriving en masse to say goodbye to Peres responded very harshly. Not to Abbas, mind you, but to Netanyahu.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Shimon Peres, 1923-1016 Essay: With Peres’ death, two very different men died. BY: David Isaac

By on October 1st, 2016

With the passing of Shimon Peres at the age of 93, two very different men died. The first was young, pragmatic and tough-minded, skilled in negotiation and focused on building Israel’s military strength. The second was older, a dreamer, resolutely focused on a vision of peace that proved stubbornly impervious to reality.

The first Peres was tapped by Ben-Gurion to head Israel’s navy at the tender age of 24, and then became director general of the defense ministry at 29. He helped establish Israel’s arms industry and led the negotiations with France that made it Israel’s chief weapons supplier. He was deeply involved in the planning, with England and France, of the 1956 Sinai campaign and is credited with the construction of Israel’s nuclear deterrent at Dimona.

This Peres reacted to events like a security hawk. When in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wavered between sending a rescue mission to Entebbe or giving in to terrorist demands, it was Peres, as defense minister, who pushed hard for the risky and unprecedented rescue effort. And it was Peres, within a divided government, who supported the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.

But around 25 years ago, Peres was reborn. In 1993, as foreign minister he became the architect of the Oslo Accords. Until then, it had been illegal for an Israeli to speak to PLO representatives. In the blink of an eye, Yasser Arafat went from terror chieftain to world statesman. The new policy led to a Nobel Peace Prize for both Arafat and Peres, along with Prime Minister Rabin, whom Peres carried along with his vision. This is the Peres who promoted the idea of a New Middle East, in which cooperation would replace conflict.

The new Peres would become the most un-Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers. This is not in the sense of religious observance: Peres may have been less alienated from tradition than some of Israel’s other secular leaders. It is in the sense of departing from fundamental Jewish historical values and insights. One of the most central of these is the importance of remembrance. Zakhor—remember, according to former Columbia Professor of Jewish History Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, is invoked 169 times in the Bible. Indeed, Yerushalmi wrote a book entitled Zakhor in which he notes that only in Israel “is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yet Peres repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in the past. Noting the contrast between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on memory in Judaism and Peres’s cavalier dismissal of history, the pro-Israel group Americans for a Safe Israel compiled a pamphlet of statements from Peres on subjects like history, Zionism, and Judaism over nearly a decade following the Oslo Accords. Below is a sampling:

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: NO MORE ” YOU ARE ENTITLED TO YOUR OPINION”

By on September 30th, 2016

Apparently it is universal. Here is a quote from Australia’s premier conservative journal QUADRANT….

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/09/better-book-burning/

Tim Wilms : Better Than a Book-Burning

“However, we are no longer living in a country where both sides of an argument enjoy equal access to the pulpit of public opinion,…… Conservatives tend to believe that those who disagree are most likely ill-informed and that a civil conversation might change their minds. Those on the left, by contrast, tend to view all who differ as evil and give their arguments no more than a contemptuous dismissal. Rather than argue the point, in this instance they have pitched a narrative that paints opponents as gay-bashing bigots and jackbooted homophobes, further insisting that mass outbreaks of suicide and mental collapse must surely follow if such views are allowed to be freely expressed. When the vocal left turns out in force to oppose something — well, anything, really — respect for free speech becomes an also-ran.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN Demands US Pay Reparations “Human rights” panel accuses American police of being modern-day lynchers. Joseph Klein

By on September 30th, 2016

Just when you thought the United Nations could not sink any lower, a UN panel has issued a report recommending that the United States pay “reparations” to African-Americans for its “legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality.” The report accuses the United States of maintaining “institutional and structural racial discrimination and racism against people of African descent.”

The panel that issued this claptrap is the self-styled Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which reported on the visit of three of its members to the United States from January 19-29 2016. The Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent reports to the UN’s dysfunctional Human Rights Council, which the Obama administration decided to join and American taxpayers are thus helping to pay for.

The Working Group members met with representatives from various federal agencies, including the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency. They also met with officials of the White House working on African-American issues, staff of the congressional black caucus, a member of the United States Senate and various state and local government officials. Finally, they met with hundreds of unidentified “African Americans from communities with a large population of people of African descent living in the suburbs, as well as with lawyers, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations.”

The Working Group’s report channeled the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, the report’s authors went out of their way to praise Black Lives Matter.

The report charged that currently in the United States “a systemic ideology of racism ensuring the domination of one group over another continues to impact negatively on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today.” The fact that the country twice elected an African-American as president and that two African-Americans have served as the U.S. Attorney General during the last seven plus years seems to have eluded the report’s authors.

While acknowledging some progress since the long gone Jim Crow era, the Working Group chose to focus in its report on what it characterized as “alarming levels of police brutality and excessive use of lethal force by law enforcement officials, committed with impunity against people of African descent in the United States.”

The report’s authors shamelessly concluded that today’s “police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.”

Never mind that thousands of innocent blacks have been murdered by black criminals, not by the police who are trying to protect innocent lives in high crime neighborhoods.

Never mind that in many instances of police shootings resulting in the deaths of African-Americans, independent investigations have concluded that the police were dealing with armed perpetrators whom the police had reason to believe posed an imminent lethal threat.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama: ‘There’s No Religious Rationale’ For Jihad Terror Right, and Hillary is honest, too. Robert Spencer

By on September 30th, 2016

Here we go again. This is like having to prove that water is wet or that Hillary Clinton is crooked, but since Barack Obama has once again affirmed that jihad terrorists are twisting and hijacking the Religion of Peace, once again it is necessary to prove that unfortunately that is not the case. Obama is right about one thing: this question matters for what strategy the U.S. and the free world should pursue against the jihadis. That’s what makes his denial and willful ignorance nothing short of catastrophic.

CNN reported Thursday that Obama said the question of whether or not to use the term “Islamic terrorist” was “sort of manufactured” issue. He claimed, yet again, that “terrorist organizations like al Qaeda or ISIL…have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death.”

Warming to his point, Obama said: “These are people who’ve killed children, killed Muslims, take sex slaves, there’s no religious rationale that would justify in any way any of the things that they do.”

Is he right? Of course not.

“Killed children”: “It is reported on the authority of Sa’b b. Jaththama that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him), when asked about the women and children of the polytheists being killed during the night raid, said: They are from them.” — Sahih Muslim 4321

“I was very happy to learn about the relevant hadith. I felt overjoyed when I heard it. [Mus’ab Ibn Juthama] told the Prophet Muhammad that while the Muslims would attack the polytheists at night, women and children would be harmed. The Prophet Muhammad answered: ‘[Their offspring] constitute part of them.’ They are part of them, said our beloved Muhammad. This is not merely someone’s opinion. Thus, killing their women and children is permitted.” — Sudanese Muslim cleric Muhammad Al-Jazouli

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Black Racism Goes Mainstream A movement based on race-hatred gets the thumbs up from the government, the media and the culture-at-large. Matthew Vadum

By on September 30th, 2016

Black racism is getting worse in America because it is being validated, endorsed, and legitimized like never before.

And it’s not just Barack Obama doing this.

This race-based hatred is promoted by America-hating currency speculator George Soros who has been funding the racist, violent Black Lives Matter movement for years.

Instead of urging crime-fighting, Chris Stone, president of Open Society Foundations, supports disarming the police, a move that would make things worse and leave society at the mercy of criminals.

Black criminals aren’t to blame for rising crime rates because trigger-happy cops are on a killing spree in the U.S., he writes. “Those who kill innocents rarely do so sadistically. There are always excuses and explanations, stretching notions of self-defense, exaggerating threats, claiming mistaken identities.”

Although the U.S. is the least racist nation on the face of the earth there is a discernible shift underway. Too many black Americans and their radical non-black allies feel comfortable routinely spewing anti-white sentiments in public. Their crude, sometimes genocidal statements are becoming increasingly mainstream in the Obama era. In a case of defining deviancy down, antisocial anti-white sentiments are accepted by the media as normal, even admirable. The universities, strongholds of radical leftism and kooky identity politics, cleared the way for this.

American culture used to do a better job organically marginalizing racism. Until Barack Obama began running for president it can be argued racism barely existed at all in the United States.

Sure, the racial grievance industry with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and groups like ACORN, used to stir up trouble and use racial antagonism to shake down corporations, but these activities never had the feel of legitimacy about them. They were dirty and quite properly looked down upon by most normal Americans but today such activism wins praise from and invitations to the White House.

Recent events seem to confirm this trend in which the public expression of anti-white racist sentiments and violence against whites is being destigmatized.

As Breitbart News reported yesterday:

In an assault captured on video, Feras Jabro, a Donald Trump supporter wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, was harassed, chased, thrown to the ground and beaten by Black Lives Matter activists at a protest in El Cajon, California. […]

A longer video, shot from the victim’s perspective, shows the man standing in the crowd then being hit from behind, running from an angry mob, and then being beaten on the ground simply for wearing his MAGA hat.

The vicious attack happened on the second night of protests in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, where Black Lives Matter protesters are angered about the police shooting death of Alfred Olango, 38. El Cajon police say they shot and killed Olango after responding to a call from his sister that he was acting erratically. Olango refused to comply with police orders, then “assumed a shooting stance” with what appeared to be a gun, but later turned out to be a vape cigarette electronic device.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ron Pike Runnymede on the Murrumbidgee?

By on September 30th, 2016

King John prevented his subjects using the rivers, forests and the fauna for their sustenance. That particular despot is long gone, replaced with green bureaucrats restricting access to the tools of production and commerce that are the very foundation of prosperity. It is past time they, too, were brought to heel.
Citizens of Western democracies accept that the state, via its law-making and -enforcement processes, is charged with deterring and punishing criminal activity — a category in which theft and extortion most definitely figure. But who holds the state to account when it makes those crimes its stock in trade? Numerous recent events lead me to believe that, if justic is to be served, it should be possible to sue the state and its officers for the felony of “extortion”. Bear with me as I explain, first by detailing the essence of those particular crimes.

The noun “extortion” is defined as oppressive or illegal exaction — the obtaining of money or goods under colour of office being one manifestation. Bear that in mind as you look back to 2002, when the last big drought was dragging on and there was insufficient water for NSW irrigators to grow their crops. The state hounded those food producers, flinging charges of water wastage and environmental damage. Low river flows were said to be their fault even when they had no access to water from those same rivers. It wasn’t long before the state took 15% of entitlements from irrigators with general security licenses and 5% of entitlements from irrigators with high security licenses. No compensation has ever been paid, and promised reviews of those edicts have not eventuated. Those hardest hit, the folk who produce our food, had a basic input to their businesses exacted by the state without compensation. Surely that is extortion.

Not satisfied with this abuse of power, the NSW government next legislated to introduce water-delivery charges, regardless of the its ability to actually deliver that water as and when required. These charges apply not just to the remaining 85% of irrigators’ entitlements, but also to the 15% resumed by the state. Yes, the state is actually charging irrigators for water it has exacted and is now asininely flushing to the sea. Al Capone’s business plan and methods cannot hold a candle to such brazen theft! How long before we are paying for the air we breathe?

Not content with allowing NSW to humble regional communities by removing basic inputs to production and forcing higher costs on all producers and manufacturers, Malcom Turnbull — then the relevant minister under John Howard — introduced the Water Act. This legislation, later passed by the Rudd government, has led to further extortion in relation to water for productive use and clearly contravenes Section 100 of our Constitution:

The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade, commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of the rivers for conservation and irrigation.

This Commonwealth legislation spawned the Murray Darling Basin Plan, which gave Canberra bureaucrats the right to buy irrigation entitlements from license holders across the Murray-Darling Basin. At that time, many irrigators were in dire financial straits, with no crop income for several years because of the drought. Many had to borrow to pay water charges, as detailed above, while others, desperate to care for their families, sold their entitlements to the Commonwealth.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FBI Director Comey Said ISIS Fighters Welcome Back From Syria in 2014, Now Warns of ‘Terrorist Diaspora’ By Patrick Poole see note please

By on September 30th, 2016

Comey’s reputation is unraveling……..rsk
Earlier this week FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about a looming “terrorist diaspora” that would come from the eventual defeat of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and yet in October 2014 he told 60 Minutes that any American with a passport who fought with the Islamic State was welcome to return to the U.S.

Testifying on Tuesday in the wake of the NY-NJ bombings by Ahmad Rahami just over a week ago, Director Comey issued this ominous warning:

The number of Americans traveling to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State group has slowed to a trickle in the last year, but as the so-called caliphate is “crushed,” many militants from Western nations who are already there will stream out of the region and create new security threats.

“There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before,” Comey said.

This is identical to his warning in late July, when he told a cybersecurity conference about the “terrorist diaspora” threat:

At some point, there is going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we’ve never seen before. Not all of the Islamic State’s killers are going to die on the battlefield. Hundreds and hundreds of them, when the coalition succeeds and I’m confident they will in crushing the Islamic State–through the fingers of the crush–are going to come hundreds of really dangerous people and they’re going to flow out primarily towards Western Europe, but we might as well be right next door to Western Europe given the ease with which people can travel.

And this is an order of magnitude greater than any diaspora we’ve seen before. A lot of terrorists fled out of Afghanistan in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. This is 10 times that or more.

But in an interview with 60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley in October 2014, Comey said that any American with a passport who had fought with the Islamic State (and presumably with any other designated terrorist organization operating in Syria) was welcome to return:

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Surprise! Administration does not vet refugees for extremist ideological views By Rick Moran

By on September 30th, 2016

How screwed up is our vetting policy for admitting refugees? In April, the administration cut the refugee vetting process that would ordinarily take 18 to 24 months down to 3 months. They won’t pore over social media sites used by refugees to ferret out radicals.

Now we learn from the agency in charge of bringing refugees to the U.S. that no effort is made to discover radical ideological leanings of the potential newcomers.

Lifezette:

The United States runs the names of potential refugees through terrorism and law enforcement databases and conducts health screenings but makes no effort to learn whether they harbor extremist views, an administration official acknowledged Wednesday.

Simon Henshaw, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, made the admission during testimony at a Senate hearing on President Obama’s Syrian refugee program.

Republicans on the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest have expressed concerns that Obama’s decision to admit more than 10,000 Syrian refugees over the past 12 months and his plan to increase that number in the coming 12 months is reckless in light of the threat posed by Islamic extremism.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who chairs the subcommittee, grilled Henshaw about the procedures for screening refugee applicants. “Do you make any inquiry about practices that we reject in the United States, like female genital mutilation?” he asked. “Do you say, ‘Do you believe in that and when you come to the United States will you comply with the laws of the United States on that kind of question?’”

Henshaw said U.S. officials explain American law and customs but do not inquire about refugees’ political beliefs.

“On all questions, we make it clear to refugees that we’re a nation of laws and that they need to comply with our laws,” he said.

Sessions pointed to a Justice Department report indicating that the United States last year experienced 27 “honor killings,” a practice that wins widespread approval in some Muslim-dominated countries that practice Sharia Law.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France: ‘The Jungle’ Migrant Camp “Plan will proliferate a multitude of mini-Calais throughout the country.” by Soeren Kern

By on September 30th, 2016

In 2001 alone, 54,000 people “attacked” the Channel Tunnel terminal in Calais and 5,000 had gotten through.

Migrants evicted from Calais moved to Paris and established a massive squatter camp at the Jardins d’Eole, a public park near the Gare du Nord station, from where high-speed Eurostar trains travel to and arrive from London. The area has become a magnet for human traffickers who charge migrants thousands of euros for fake travel documents, for passage to London.

The President of the Alpes-Maritimes region, Eric Ciotti, criticized the government’s “irresponsible” plan to relocate migrants in Calais to other parts of France. He said the plan would “proliferate a multitude of small Calais, genuine areas of lawlessness that exacerbate lasting tensions throughout the country.”

A whistleblower reported that volunteer aid workers at “The Jungle” were forging sexual relationships with migrants, including children. “Female volunteers having sex enforces the view (that many have) that volunteers are here for sex,” he said.

French President François Hollande has vowed “definitively, entirely and rapidly” to dismantle “The Jungle,” a squalid migrant camp in the northern port town of Calais, by the end of this year.

Hollande made the announcement during a September 26 visit to Calais — but not to the camp itself — amid growing unease over France’s escalating migrant crisis, which has become a central issue in the country’s presidential campaign.

The French government plans to relocate the migrants at the camp to so-called reception centers in other parts of the country. But it remains unclear how the government will prevent migrants from returning to Calais.

Sceptics say the plan to demolish “The Jungle” is a publicity stunt that will temporarily displace the migrants but will not resolve the underlying problem — that French officials refuse either to deport illegal migrants or else to secure the country’s borders to prevent illegal migrants from entering France in the first place.

The decision to demolish the camp came just days after construction work began on a wall in Calais, a major transport hub on the edge of the English Channel, to prevent migrants at the camp from stowing away on cars, trucks, ferries and trains bound for Britain.

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