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2016

Meet the Western Charlatans Justifying Jihad by Giulio Meotti

Why has the philosopher, Michel Onfray, become so popular among the French jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq? Journalist David Thomson, a specialist in jihadi movements, explained that “Onfray is translated into Arabic and shared on all pro-ISIS sites.”

Onfray recognizes that we are at war. But this war, to him, was started by George W. Bush. He “forgets” that 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11, 2001. If you remind him that “ISIS kills innocent people”, Onfray will reply: “We have also killed innocent people.” It is the perfect moral equivalence between ISIS and the West. Barbarians against barbarians! With his moral relativism, Onfray opens the door to Islamist cutthroats.

The French intellectual Thomas Piketty, after the massacres in Paris, pointed at “inequality” as the root of ISIS’s success. Another well-known German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, claimed that the September 11 attacks were attacks were just “small incidents”.

Famous representatives of European culture also embraced Adolf Hitler’s dream. Their heirs now justify jihad as the ultimate punishment for Western freedoms and democracy.

After September 11, 2001, the cream of European intellectuals immediately started to find justifications for jihad. They evidently were fascinated by the Kalashnikov assault rifle, “the weapon of the poor”. For them, what we had seen in New York was a chimera, an illusion. The mass killings were supposedly the suicide of the capitalist democracy, and terrorism was the wrath of the unemployed, the desperate weapon of a lumpenproletariat offended by the arrogance of Western globalization.

SHIMON PERES, THE LAST OF ISRAEL’S FOUNDING FATHERS, DIES

SHIMON PERES, THE LAST OF ISRAEL’S FOUNDING FATHERS, DIES

Shimon Peres, the former president and prime minister of Israel, and in recent years the country’s elder statesman, died this morning at age 93, after suffering a severe stroke two weeks ago.

Peres was born in what was then Poland (now Belarus) and escaped to what would become Israel in the 1930s. His family that remained behind were murdered in the Holocaust.

For seven decades (since 1946 when Ben Gurion put Peres and Moshe Dayan in charge of making arms purchases for the Haganah), he held senior positions in Israeli military and political life.

His most important achievement (in my view) was his key role in helping Israel to gain a nuclear deterrence in order to make much less likely the possibility of a second Holocaust of the Jewish people. It is the nuclear deterrence that has helped allow Israel to take significant risks for peace in recent decades, moves that Peres was at the forefront of and for which he was awarded the Nobel peace prize.

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton have confirmed they will attend Peres’ funeral in Jerusalem on Friday.

Holt’s Assist to Hillary By The Editors NRO

It turns out that working the refs is an effective strategy. Hillary Clinton glided through the first of the season’s three presidential debates on Monday night, thanks in no small part to moderator Lester Holt, who spent pretty much the entirety of his evening clearing Secretary Clinton’s way.

If Holt didn’t rappel into the debate Candy Crowley–style, it was because he didn’t need to. Antagonistic questions were directed toward one candidate and one candidate only. Donald Trump was asked about his tax returns, his role in promoting the birther controversy, whether he flip-flopped on the Iraq War, and what he meant when he said recently that Clinton does not have a “presidential look.” Clinton, by contrast, was not asked about her private e-mail server, the Clinton Foundation, Benghazi, or any one of the many topics about which voters have rightly expressed concerns. Instead, she was asked open-ended policy questions and permitted to dilate about renewable energy and the sundry misdeeds of George W. Bush.

The institutional slant of the media being what it is, the Republican nominee is always at a disadvantage when it comes to debate moderators, and should prepare accordingly. It was clear from his performance last night that Trump did not adequately prepare for what were entirely predictable lines of questioning; he also missed several opportunities to go on the offensive against a uniquely vulnerable opponent. Nonetheless, it’s not the job of the moderator to give either candidate a leg up; in fact, it’s the moderator’s job to do the opposite.

Unfortunately, Holt’s performance is the result of growing pressures in liberal media and political circles to treat Donald Trump as a candidate beyond the pale of public life, to deny him legitimacy as a presidential contender. We have our criticisms of Donald Trump, too. But his electoral fate should be up to the voters, not Lester Holt and his colleagues.

Hillary’s Debate Lies With her comments about crime, policing, and race, the candidate helps push a false—and dangerous—narrative. Heather Mac Donald

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton also complained that “too many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses.” In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered New York State’s prison population by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony. Even as misdemeanor arrests increased in the city, felony arrests and felony incarcerations dropped. The number of jail inmates and convicts under parole and probation supervision in New York City dropped as well. Hillary Clinton may think that low-level public-order enforcement (otherwise known as “broken windows” policing) is racist, but law-abiding residents of high-crime communities beg the police to enforce public-order laws because they know that out of street disorder erupts gun violence and other forms of predation.

Boko Haram Leader Pops Up Again After Purported Death By Bridget Johnson

The leader of Boko Haram is apparently pretty hard to kill.

Abubakr Shekau was reported to have been killed by forces fighting the Nigerian terror group in 2009, 2013, 2014 and 2015 — all followed by audio or video of the terror leader proclaiming he was still alive.

Last month, the Nigerian Air Force said they mortally wounded the terror leader in airstrikes.

On Sunday, Shekau released a new video declaring, “I am alive and healthy.”

“But you should know that were my days of living over, you wouldn’t have seen me here,” he added. “So many people live even when they are wanted dead, and so also people die when they should have lived. Prophet Muhammad had been tested with similar hatred because of the religion of Allah.”

He told the Nigerian government to “keep doing all your evil planning” and stressed “we are not sociologist, we are Quranists, and we follow the Hadith and those who came before us.”

“We are fools as people but the Quran is what is guiding us and that is why you couldn’t defeat us and we are sure of that.”

Shekau accused Nigerians of thinking “democracy is a religion” and said President Muhammadu Buhari is “worshipping cows.”

“What we believe in is the Quran and we do not know anything apart from that. Anytime we say Allah, all of you will not live in peace,” he said.

The terror leader warned the Muslim president, “Continue and see, one day you will not even be able to go to the toilet …but if you repent, then you are a brother. Repent and follow the Quran.”

Shekau added a dig at the 898-day Bring Back Our Girls campaign focused on the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram.

“People of Chibok, let me tell you today, you still have to prepare for a longer Bring Back Our girls campaign,” he said. “If you want your girls, bring back our brothers.”

FBI Docs: Hillary Deleted Nearly 1,000 Emails With David Petraeus By Debra Heine

A potentially explosive nugget from the FBI’s Friday document dump of investigatory notes from the Clinton email probe has been all but ignored by the media. And that is the revelation that Hillary Clinton deleted 1,000 work-related emails between herself and General David Petaeus from his time as the director of the United States Central Command.

Via the Washington Examiner:

In Aug. 2015, the Pentagon called the State Department and informed an unnamed official there that “CENTCOM records showed approximately 1,000 work-related emails between Clinton’s personal email and General David Petraeus.”

The FBI noted that “[m]ost of those 1,000 emails were not believed to be included in the 30,000 emails” that Clinton turned over to the State Department in Dec. 2014.

Hillary has long maintained that the emails her lawyers unilaterally deleted were personal emails pertaining to “yoga routines, family vacations” and other matters that had nothing to do with government. She repeated the same nonsense to Congress while under oath. In August of 2015, she signed a statement to a federal judge declaring “under penalty of perjury” that she turned over all work-related emails.

Now we find out that 1,000 emails between Clinton and General Petraeus were not turned over. This should be a bigger story. Petraeus started out as the leader of U.S. Central Command and then became the director of the CIA during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State, so not only were those emails obviously work related, they very likely were highly classified. The implications here are staggering.

But it gets worse. CONTINUE AT SITE

Schumer Has ‘Not Regretted’ Vote Against Iran Nuke Deal ‘a Single Day Since’ By Bridget Johnson

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he’s never regretted — not “a single day” — voting against the Iran nuclear deal and ripped Mideast peace efforts that didn’t recognize the Palestinians’ true aims.

The senator likely to replace retiring Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as the leader of Democrats in the upper chamber even called for an education campaign that teaches Americans about the anti-Semitism and violent rhetoric contained in Palestinian children’s textbooks.

In his speech Sunday at the Israeli American Council National Conference in D.C., Schumer spoke forcefully against allowing the United Nations to “ever” impose terms for a Mideast peace agreement.

The senator mocked Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for claiming at the UN General Assembly that “Zionist pressure groups” were behind anti-Iran sentiment and legal action.

Schumer gave exaggerated air quotes to emphasize the “Zionist pressure groups,” adding, “I think he’s talking about us.”

To Rouhani, Schumer replied: “Look no further than your own borders. You’ve earned the condemnation of the United States and the world when you have the human rights record that Iran has… when you harass the U.S. Navy, when you export weapons to Hezbollah to rain down on civilians, when you conduct ballistic missile tests and write ‘Israel must be wiped out’ on side of the missile.”

“You earn the condemnation of every decent human being when there are homosexuals hanging from cranes in your cities. Oh, no: ‘Zionist pressure groups’ are not responsible for anti-Iran sentiments in the U.S., or rulings against Iran from independent judiciaries.”

Schumer received a standing ovation for reiterating his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and stressing, “I have not regretted that vote a single day since.”

“Many of us who opposed the agreement did so because we did not believe that Iran would moderate, and from all early indications the Iranian regime is not moderating — not if it continues its nefarious behavior in the region,” the senator added.

He said Congress should renew Iran sanctions “immediately” to keep the regime’s feet held to the fire. “Keep the sanctions act in place. Strengthen it!” he declared.

Schumer called the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel a threat to the Jewish state’s existence on par with the threat posed by Iran.

The senator recalled his college days fighting a “radical, militant, left-wing” Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)/Progressive Labor Party (PLP) anti-Israel alliance. Inviting the Israeli UN ambassador to come to Harvard to confront the SDS/PLP as anti-Semites, Schumer said, was one of his first political actions.

“Those who call for boycotts of Israel… are practicing, whether they know it or not, a modern form of anti-Semitism,” Schumer told the IAC crowd, stressing the BDS proponents’ goal “has nothing to do with this settlement or that settlement,” but “the elimination of the state of Israel.”

“We need to make that argument loudly and strongly and go against the BDS movement and call it for what it is — an anti-Semitic, not just an anti-Israel, movement,” he said.

He called for anti-BDS legislation in all states, like bills passed in New York and California.

While bad enough in the United States, Schumer emphasized that the BDS movement abroad is more virulent. “Europe has shown how anti-Israel and anti-Semitic the BDS movement really is,” he said. “Far-right parties are experiencing rebirth, and far-left parties like the Labour Party under Corbyn are increasingly anti-Israel. Terrorism and violence against Jews is on the rise, from vandalizing synagogues to the horrible attack on a Jewish grocery in Paris.”

“It is no wonder that last year France, home to the largest Jewish population in Europe, set a record for migration of their Jewish population to Israel. Unfortunately, anti-Semitism seems to be in far too many European homes.”

Schumer underscored that “when we look at foreign policy, we must remember one thing, as I have: the Jewish people can never put the fate of Israel in the hands of Europe in any way.”

On Mideast negotiations, Schumer said Palestinians must recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

He panned the suggestion that Israeli settlements stand in the way of a peace deal, reminding all what happened after Israeli forces evicted settlers from Gaza.

“What was the response of the Palestinian people? Rockets in Sderot three weeks later. Oh, no. It’s not the settlements that’s the reason there’s no peace.”

The Obama administration has consistently insisted that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are an impediment to the peace process. CONTINUE AT SITE

Stiffening the American Spine Denmark’s former prime minister exhorts Americans to resist retreat. ‘Leading from behind’ may work with grazing sheep. It doesn’t in wolf country. By Josef Joffe

When you chance on a book by a former NATO chief, your eyes glaze over. Please, not another “Whither NATO?” or a compendium of boilerplate, stitched together by a ghostwriter. Yet crack open “The Will to Lead” by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who also served as Denmark’s prime minister for eight years, and the glaze will vanish.

This book reads like a letter to an American friend, written by a “European classical liberal who has always counted on American leadership.” On the cusp of a new administration, this European doesn’t pine for yet another pledge of American allegiance. Instead he exhorts the U.S. “not to abandon its vital role as champion of freedom and guarantor of the global order.”

He sees the “global village” burning while its inhabitants bicker. So “we need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.” That sums up the role the U.S. ditched after World War I—and brilliantly reclaimed after World War II.

Why the alarm? Because, as Mr. Rasmussen writes, neo-isolationism, economic as well as strategic, is on a roll on both sides of the ocean. TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is on the way to the morgue, as may be TPP, the Pacific version. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has pulled out of Iraq while downscaling in Afghanistan. He has turned away from old allies in the Middle East, working hard to secure a nuclear deal with the theocrats of Iran. He has given the Russians an all but free ride in Ukraine and in Syria.

When Mr. Obama trumpeted the “audacity of hope,” he forsook the first rule of statecraft: It is better (and cheaper) to man the lines than to return. Being there deters; pulling out suggests indifference, if not an invitation to rivals. “Leading from behind” may work with grazing sheep. It does not in wolf country.CONTINUE AT SITE

Transcripts Show ISIS Influence on Orlando Gunman Omar Mateen cited the death of an Islamic State leader as a motivation for the June massacreBy Dan Frosch and Nicole Hong

Holed up in an Orlando nightclub and surrounded by police, Omar Mateen told a hostage negotiator that he was angry about the death of a top Islamic State operative, according to recently released transcripts of their phone conversations during Mateen’s massacre earlier this year.

The new details of the conversations, released by Orlando Police last week, show Mateen had more than a passing interest in Islamic State, counterterrorism experts said. He specifically singled out the death of Abu Wahib, one of the more visible leaders of the terror group, as one of the main motivations for his attack. Abu Wahib was killed in an airstrike in Iraq just weeks before Mateen opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in June in an attack that killed 49 people and wounded 53. Mateen died in a shootout with police.

“Yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago—That’s what triggered it, okay?” he told the police negotiator, an apparent reference in the transcript to the Islamic State commander.

Abu Wahib, whose real name is Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi, was known as one of the group’s more Internet-savvy leaders, often appearing in propaganda videos.

Only an “avid consumer” of Islamic State propaganda would know when Abu Wahib was killed, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“This isn’t somebody who decided that night he was going to wrap his personal grievances around ISIS,” Mr. Hughes said.

Islamic State supporters in the U.S. more commonly cite as inspirations people like Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born al Qaeda recruiter who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. While talking to the 911 operator the night of the Orlando shooting, Mateen also pledged allegiance to Mr. Baghdadi, according to a partial version of transcripts released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in June.

It is unclear when precisely Mateen, 29, was radicalized, though he had aroused the FBI’s suspicion after making claims of ties to terrorists in 2013.

At a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday defended his agency’s handling of probes into Mateen, as well as into Ahmad Khan Rahami. Mr. Rahami is awaiting trial on charges he placed bombs around New York and New Jersey earlier this month that injured 31 people.

Mr. Comey was repeatedly pressed by lawmakers about whether the FBI should have investigated longer before closing its probes into Mateen and Mr. Rahami, which took place well before their deadly attacks. Mr. Comey acknowledged that in the case of Mateen, agents had not searched his online activity for indications of radicalization.

In the series of phone calls with the negotiator during the Orlando massacre, Mateen also railed against U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, saying they were killing women and children.

“What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there. You get what I’m saying?” he said.

Mateen’s constant references to U.S. airstrikes are a “basic regurgitation of the propaganda he’s consuming,” said Brig Barker, a retired FBI special agent who focused on counterterrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Fact-Checking Lester Holt Here’s the legal back story on that stop-and-frisk ruling.

We told you Tuesday that Donald Trump was right when he pushed back on debate moderator Lester Holt over “stop and frisk” policing. But the story deserves a more complete explanation, not least because the media are distorting the record.

Mr. Trump invoked stop and frisk as a way to “take the gun away from criminals” in high-crime areas and protect the innocent. That provoked Mr. Holt, who said that “stop and frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York.” Mr. Trump then noted that the ruling in the case came from a “very against police judge” who later had the case taken away from her. Mrs. Clinton then echoed Mr. Holt.

Here’s what really happened. The federal judge in the stop-and-frisk case was Shira Scheindlin, a notorious police critic whose behavior got her taken off the case by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court put it this way:

“Upon review of the record in these cases, we conclude that the District Judge ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges . . . and that the appearance of impartiality surrounding this litigation was compromised by the District Judge’s improper application of the Court’s ‘related case rule’ . . . and by a series of media interviews and public statements purporting to respond publicly to criticism of the District Court.”

The court then remanded the case to another judge who would not present an appearance of bias against the police. In a follow-up opinion, the appellate judges cited a New Yorker interview with Judge Scheindlin that included a quote from a former law clerk saying “what you have to remember about the judge is that she thinks cops lie.”

This is an extraordinary rebuke by a higher court and raises doubts that the merits of her ruling would have held up on appeal. As Rudolph Giuliani makes clear nearby, the judge’s ruling of unconstitutionality applied only to stop and frisk as it was practiced in New York at the time. Such police search tactics have long been upheld by higher courts.