Displaying posts published in

2016

Obama’s Conflict Tanked the Clinton E-mail Investigation — As Predicted Hillary couldn’t be proven guilty without proving the president guilty as well. Andrew McCarthy

‘How is this not classified?”

So exclaimed Hillary Clinton’s close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton’s private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system — something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.

Abedin was sufficiently stunned that, for just a moment, the bottomless capacity of Clinton insiders to keep cool in a scandal was overcome. “How is this not classified?”

She recovered quickly enough, though. The FBI records that the next thing Abedin did, after “express[ing] her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym,” was to “ask if she could have a copy of the email.”

Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one. If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.

As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.

To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.

Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.

Debunking the Biggest Immigration Lies Exposing the dangers of the “Mexican Border Deception.” Michael Cutler

Exposing the dangers of the “Mexican Border Deception.”

John Adams famously stated, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Knowledge is power. Nations go to great lengths to steal the secrets of their enemies for a variety of purposes. Conversely, nations seek to protect their own secrets jealously and often provide false information, known as “disinformation,” to confuse and confound their enemies.

A historic example of such disinformation was a military operation launched by the Allies during the Second World War known as “Operation Fortitude” also known as the “Calais Deception,” wherein the Nazis were convinced that the Allies would launch an attack as Pas de Calais when in reality, U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, was planning to attack German forces at Normandy to begin the liberation of France.

The invasion at Normandy was given the code-name, “Operation Overlord” but history remembers it as “D-Day.”

General Eisenhower and his colleagues were concerned that if all of the German forces were assembled in Normandy that Operation Overlord would fail. Consequently General George S. Patton created an illusory “invasion force” consisting largely of inflatable vehicles that, from the air, appeared to Nazi pilots to be an actual invasion force. It was aptly described as “Patton’s Ghost Army.”

By splitting German forces, D-Day succeeded, although the casualties for American, British and Canadian forces were horrific.

Today many journalists and politicians have deceptively focused the attention of Americans on the U.S./Mexican border, to the exclusion of the other dysfunctional components of the immigration system, creating the false narrative that running US/Mexican border is the only way that illegal aliens enter the United States.

This also feeds to bogus and disgusting nonsense about how immigration law enforcement is about race.

Washington Mall Gunman: “Say Glory to Allah” Daniel Greenfield

Washington Mall gunman Arcan Cetin, a Turkish Muslim migrant, reblogged this on his Tumblr.

Subhan Allah means Glory to Allah, the Islamic deity. Jannah is paradise. Ummah is the Islamic nation.

Russia and the West’s Insane Syrian War A war that only Islam can win. Daniel Greenfield

Russia and the West are fighting to decide whether Syria will be run by Sunni Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia or Shiite Islamists backed by Iran. This insane civil war has burned up countless lives, not to mention plenty of dollars, rubles, euros and pounds. The only certain winners of this war, once the dust has settled, will chant “Allahu Akbar” and call for the death of the infidels.

Sadly this is nothing new. Russia got the PLO started before Bill Clinton decided to become its sugar daddy. Smuggling weapons to the Mujahedeen to fight the Russians got us into Afghanistan. Except these days it’s the Russians who, through the Iranians, are funneling weapons to the locals to fight us. Between us and the Russians, we’ve put wagonloads of weapons into the hands of Jihadis in Iraq and Syria. The consequences will be felt in Moscow, New York, London and Paris.

The West and the Warsaw Pact countries used to fuel foreign wars. These days the war is at home.

Russia and the NATO countries suffer from low birth rates and rising Muslim demographics, but are in a senseless competition to determine which emergent Caliphate will be able to draw its borders in territories it can’t populate. It’s a battle over a pittance taking place in a burning building.

Moscow has around 2 million Muslims. London has over 1 million. Both sides are at risk of losing their own capital cities to real invasions. The EU and Putin’s Eurasian dreams are both built on the Roman notion that the barbarians can be integrated and will make good foot soldiers and laborers.

France’s President Hollande has called for the creation of an “Islam of France”. Putin suggests that the Russian Orthodox Church has more in common with Islam than Catholicism. Obama preaches that, “Islam has always been part of America”. But such efforts at integration will always fail.

The popular European excuse is that Islamic terrorism represents a failure to integrate the terrorist. Islamic terrorism is indeed caused by a failure to integrate. The mistake is assuming that integration on a civilizational scale is possible. It’s not. You can integrate a few people. You can’t integrate a civilization.

Abbas to Arab States: Go to Hell! by Khaled Abu Toameh

Abbas and Fatah leaders in Ramallah claim that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (the “Arab Quartet”) are using and promoting Abbas’s rival, Mohamed Dahlan, in order to facilitate their mission of rapprochement with Israel.

Many Palestinians were surprised to see veteran Palestinian official Ahmed Qurei, a former Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister and one of the architects of the Oslo Accord, come out in favor of the Arab plan, which basically envisions ousting Abbas from power.

This, and not Israeli policy, is Abbas’s true nightmare. After all, he knows that without Israel’s presence in the West Bank, his regime would have long fallen into the hands of Hamas or even his political rivals in Fatah.

The “Arab Quartet” plan shows that some Arab countries are indeed fed up with Abbas’s failure to lead his people towards a better life. These states, which have long been politically and financially supportive of the Palestinians, have had enough of Abbas’s efforts to secure unending power — at the direct cost of the well-being of his people.

In his speech last week before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas trotted out his usual charges against Israel, citing “collective punishment,” “house demolitions,” “extrajudicial executions” and “ethnic cleansing.” However, Abbas’s thoughts seem to be elsewhere these days. He is facing a new challenge from unexpected parties, namely several Arab countries that have come together to demand that he reform his ruling Fatah faction and pave the way for the emergence of a new Palestinian leadership.

Yet this was not included in the UN speech. Indeed, why would Abbas share with world leaders that his Arab brothers are pressuring him to introduce major reforms in Fatah and end a decade-long power struggle with Hamas that has resulted in the creation of two separate Palestinian entities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Abbas, his aides admit, is today more worried about the “Arab meddling” in the internal affairs of the Palestinians than he is about “collective punishment” or “settlement activities.” In fact, he is so worried that he recently lashed out at those Arab countries that have launched an initiative to “re-arrange the Palestinian home from within” and bring about changes in the Palestinian political scene.

Meet the Western Charlatans Justifying Jihad by Giulio Meotti

Why has Onfray has become so popular among the French foreign fighters? 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 was started by George W. Bush. He “forgets” that there were 3,000 American deaths on September 11, 2001. If you remind him that “Isis kills innocent people”, the philosopher will reply: “We have also killed innocent people”. It is the perfect moral equality 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’ success. Another well known German philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, claimed that the September 11 attacks were attacks have been just “small incidents”.

Someone should have explained to him that all the terrorists were well integrated in the French and Belgian democracies, and living with welfare subsidies.

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, “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 disperate weapon of a lumpenproletariat offended by the arrogance of Western globalization. These intellectuals have sown seeds of despair in a large Western echo-chamber. From 9/11 to the recent massacres on European soil, the murdered Westerners were just the collateral victims in a war between “the system” and the damned of the earth, which only claim a place at the table.

One of these intellectuals is Michel Onfray. It is a while since we heard the expression: “Useful idiot”. It was cynically invented by Marshal Tito to designate Western sympathizers who justified the horrors of Communism. The French magazine L’Express used it for Onfray: “The useful idiot of Islamism”.

“Christian Girls are only Meant for One Thing, the Pleasure of Muslim Men” by Raymond Ibrahim

Recently in Iraq, 19 Yazidi girls were placed in iron cages and burned alive in front of a crowd of hundreds, for refusing to copulate with jihadis.

“Religious minority women under IS [Islamic State] control are often repeatedly sold from jihadi to jihadi. Once militants get tired of raping and abusing one particular girl, they usually sell them off to one of their militant buddies so they can rape and abuse them at their own pleasure.” — Samuel Smith, The Christian Post.

After their children were abducted by the Islamic State, a couple answered their door to find the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being tortured and raped.

“Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war.” — Local residents, Pakistan.

Islamic law, always harsh, is still harsher for women. According to the Koran, men have “authority” over women and may beat them if they are “disobedient” (4:34). According to Mohammad, the prophet of Islam, women are less intelligent than men — two women are needed to equal one man’s testimony — and the majority of hell’s population is made up of women, who are likened to donkeys and dogs in their ability to distract a man from his prayer and thereby annul it.

What, then, is Islam’s view of women who are “infidels”? They are at best “meant for one thing, the pleasure of the Muslim man,” as one Muslim told a group of young Christian girls in Pakistan before terrorizing and murdering one. In the Koran, (see 4:24), non-Muslim women seized in a jihad can be bought and sold as sex slaves for Muslim men, as the Islamic State has been doing.

Emily Fuentes, communications director for Open Doors, a human rights organization that advocates for persecuted Christians, said:

Unfortunately, more and more women are the target of [Muslim] terrorist groups. There are numerous international incidents of women being kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert from Christianity to Islam by radical extremist groups…. Many are also sold on the open market. This brutality is not only occurring in the Middle East but in Africa and in many other places. In many of these countries, women are subject to persecution because they are considered second-class citizens because of their gender. As minorities in both gender and faith, Christian women face double the persecution. Although we don’t have an exact number, we know that millions of women are being persecuted…. In these Muslim-dominated countries, Christian women are systematically deprived of their freedom to live and are denied basic human necessities.

Hundreds Killed in Aleppo in Fresh Fighting Powerful bombs have shaken the Syrian city since a cease-fire collapsed last week, as the Assad regime pursues a new offensive against rebels By Raja Abdulrahim in Beirut and Farnaz Fassihi at the United Nations

Syria and its Russian allies pressed an assault on Aleppo amid what the United Nations called the most intense bombing in years of warfare there, and residents said hundreds of civilians have been killed since a cease-fire fell apart last week.

The surge in deaths came as a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over the weekend cited reports of “bunker buster bombs.” The bombs have left large craters in the rebel-held part of the divided city, Aleppo residents said, and caused shock waves felt blocks away from the point of impact.

The U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told the Security Council on Sunday that he had seen videos and pictures of incendiary bombs “that create fireballs of such intensity that they light up the pitch darkness in eastern Aleppo, as though it was actually daylight.”

Rebels and opposition leaders blamed Russia, Syria’s key ally, for the bunker-buster bombs. The Russian Defense Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The first time one struck, everyone thought there was an earthquake,” said Muhammad al-Zein, who helps oversee hospitals in the rebel-held part of Aleppo. “But the next day another one hit and we realized it was not an earthquake.”

Much of the death toll came in the four days since Thursday when the Syrian regime announced the start of a new offensive against Aleppo’s rebel-controlled neighborhoods.

President Bashar al-Assad has vowed to retake all of Aleppo and the offensive was the latest indication that he aims to win the war militarily despite repeated efforts by the U.S. and Russia to reach a lasting cease-fire and a diplomatic solution. Syrian state media reported that the army on Saturday seized control of an area north of Aleppo city called Handarat Camp. Within hours, rebels said they had retaken the territory.

The U.N. Security Council held an emergency meeting on Sunday over the bombardment of Aleppo. The meeting, which lasted about three hours, was called jointly by the U.S., France and the U.K. Ambassadors of all three countries walked out when Syria’s representative began speaking. CONTINUE AT SITE

Terrorism, refugees and Donald Trump Finding a sensible (and safe) way to move forward By Harold Rhode and Richard Kemp –

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Hilary Clinton’s refugee plan is an open invitation for Radical Islam’s unyielding nature to run roughshod over American culture.

It’s by now clear that at least some the perpetrators of last weekend’s spate of attacks harbored extremist views and sought inspiration in the work of Islamic State and al Qaeda (ISIS praised the Minnesota stabber, and the New York bombing suspect traveled to jihadi hotbeds in Afghanistan and Pakistan).

This is a clarifying reminder that the presidential election must be a referendum on Hilary Clinton’s failed approach to the struggle of radical Islam, and specifically a pressing matter at hand: her plan to admit 65,000 Syrian refugees — a 550 percent increase from the 10,000 Syrian refugees supported by the Obama administration.

It pains us greatly to see the crush of humanity fleeing the violence engulfing the Middle East. We’re also concerned about the security and stability of key American allies. Germany — a country roughly half the size of Texas — has already taken in some 1 million asylum seekers. America must find ways to help. The Clinton proposal, however, is naive and dangerous.

Of course, President Obama bears some responsibility for the turmoil. Some of this started with his hasty withdrawal from the region. It spread with Secretary Clinton’s refusal to punish the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, and her failure to intervene effectively in the subsequent collapse of that country. Filling the vacuum, terrorists have targeted ethnic and religious minorities they consider apostates, destroyed archaeological and sacred religious sites, and advanced a form of Islam whose cruelty knows no bounds.

So what do about refugees?

It’s arguably harder in Europe than in the United States. From an Islamist perspective, immigration has become a mechanism to transform a national entity into a political minority through territorial displacement and the undermining of values — guerrilla warfare by another name. Where Muslim immigrant communities have settled, an increasing number — France and Britain immediately come to mind — have insisted on enacting Islamic customs, legislation and social behavior. Whether grown organically or by design, parallel societies have taken hold — often resulting in a sense of helplessness for the indigenous population, especially women.

America’s tradition has been a different one. Its track record of assimilation has been strong, and the numbers of refugees presently being discussed is small. But none of this should speak against vigilance, wisdom and common sense.

Why Leftists Fear ‘Law And Order’ Talk More Than Terror — a Nonie Darwish Moment

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

Nonie discusses Why Leftists Fear ‘Law And Order’ Talk More Than Terror, unveiling the destructive leftist agenda vis-à-vis Sharia.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch the special edition of The Glazov Gang that presented the Lejla Colak Moment with Lejla Colak, a brave Bosnian journalist who survived Islam.

Lejla discussed My Escape From Islam’s Rape and Death Sentence and sent her gratitude to Anni Cyrus and all others for snatching her out of the hell that Sharia’s guardians had planned for her.