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2016

Is there a backstory about Khizr Khan and Donald Trump? By Eileen F. Toplansky

What is one to make of the Democratic Convention speech of Khizr Khan, a Pakistani-born Virginia lawyer whose son Humayun was killed in action in Iraq in 2004?

According to Byron York:

Khan’s brief speech wasn’t a finely-detailed case. But he suggested that Trump’s Muslim ban and Mexican border wall proposals are unconstitutional. Specifically, Khan cited the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ in suggesting that Trump’s policies violate the Constitution.

But, in fact, “there’s simply no sense in which a border wall violates the Constitution.” There is also “nothing unconstitutional about deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”

York emphasizes that “[a]s far as a Muslim ban is concerned, Trump … amended his proposal to focus on immigration from countries ‘compromised by terrorism.’ But assume that Khan was addressing Trump’s original, more extensive, proposal: a temporary ban on foreign Muslims from entering the United States.”

In fact, the 14th Amendment of the Constitution applies to “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States. It does not refer to foreign persons in foreign countries. Trump made it clear that this ban “would not apply to U.S. citizens, members of the U.S. military and others with a legal right to be in the United States.” Whether one approves or disapproves of Trump’s building a wall, deporting illegal immigrants, and temporarily banning the entry of foreign Muslims, the fact is that Trump’s proposals are not unconstitutional.

In an effort toward clarification, Donald Trump released a statement:

Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honor all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe. The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm. Given the state of the world today, we have to know everything about those looking to enter our country, and given the state of chaos in some of these countries, that is impossible.

Moreover, Trump reiterated that “Captain Khan, killed 12 years ago, was a hero, but this is about RADICAL ISLAMIC TERROR and the weakness of our ‘leaders’ to eradicate it!”

A Free People Erasing Their Own Freedoms By Matt Patterson and Lindsey DePasse

The erosion of loyalty to the Constitution by large sectors of the populace and those charged with protecting and preserving it.
The Greek city-state of Athens had no constitutional protections for people who advocated notions radically at odds with prevailing wisdom.

The result: Socrates was put to death for “corrupting” the youth.

Four hundred years later, the Roman province of Judea contained no constitutional protections for wild-eyed preachers who advocated radical alternatives to established political and religious orthodoxies.

The result: Jesus was crucified for claiming to be “King of the Jews.”

Sixteen hundred years later in Italy, there were no constitutional protections for thinkers who discerned profound restructuring of metaphysical realities.

The result: Galileo Galilei was tried and sentenced to house arrest by the Catholic Inquisition for advocating views contrary to Church doctrine.

Four hundred years later, the United States of America did provide constitutional protections of speech and assembly, allowing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead a movement that changed laws and expanded liberty for millions.

Socrates, Jesus and Galileo lacked governmental protection to say crazy things. As a result, they were put to death or imprisoned by the government for saying crazy things.

True, Dr. King also met with an untimely end, slain by a fellow citizen who denied him his constitutionally protected freedoms. But the others were killed or imprisoned by the government because they had no constitutionally protected freedoms.

That is all the difference in the world. And it is a difference that Dr. King died for.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution allowed Dr. King to spread his liberating and glorious message. But let us not forget that for many in the 1960’s South, Dr. King’s message was considered offensive “hate speech.” And so it was — hatred for the established order that kept millions of Americans locked in a horrible caste system. Hatred for an oligarchy that denied them essential freedoms.

Why the Establishment Can’t Grasp the Nature of Islam By Selwyn Duke

The media and effete powers-that-be have been twisting themselves into Halal pretzels Islamsplainin’, rationalizing how a given Muslim terrorist attack isn’t really “Islamic” or isn’t significant. These contortions can become quite ridiculous, such as suggesting that recent Allahu Akbar-shouting Munich shooter Ali Sonboly might somehow have had “right-wing” motives because, among his violent passions, was an interest in Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

A more common (un)intellectual contortion is the minimizing tactic of claiming, as is politically correct authorities’ wont, that a given jihadist attacker “has no ties to IS” (the Islamic State), as if there’s nothing to see here if a man doesn’t provide notarized evidence of allegiance to the boogeyman du jour. Yet this is much as if we’d claimed during the Cold War that a Marxist terrorist attack wasn’t really a Marxist™ terrorist attack because we couldn’t find a connection to the Soviet Union. The issue and problem wasn’t primarily the Soviet Union but communism (Marxism birthed the USSR, not the other way around), an evil ideology that wreaks havoc wherever it takes hold. Likewise, the IS didn’t birth Islam; Islam birthed the IS.

Nonetheless, moderns will often use the misdirection of focusing inordinately on national or group associations when discussing terrorism. This is a dodge, one designed to help us avoid uncomfortable truths, and which relegates us to playing an eternal game of whack-a-mole. The USSR is gone but communism is still a problem (witness North Korea and Cuba), and insofar as it’s less of a threat, it’s largely because its ideas have been discredited. Bad ideas’ standard bearers will change. But as long as the bad ideas remain tolerated and credible, they’ll always win converts.

In fact, the reality that today’s terrorists are diverse makes the point. They may be Iranian, Afghani, American, Albanian, German or from any nation whatsoever; they may be part of Hamas, IS, al Qaeda, the U.S. Army (Maj. Hassan), some other organization or no organization; they may be of any race or ethnicity, be rich or poor, and male or (occasionally) female. They only have one truly common thread: being Muslim.

The point is that, ultimately, this is a battle not of nations or organizations but of ideas, and ideas are powerful. Beliefs matter. Every action begins with a thought — or, at least, with a reflex response reflecting a worldview that has shaped one’s thoughts and emotions.

Trump on Offense The Republican nominee is the Kevin Kelley of politics: He never punts. By William McGurn

“The truth is that Mr. Trump’s offense is in good part a creature of the campaigns Democrats have run against Republicans for decades. Sooner or later it was inevitable that voters, tired of both political correctness and playing defense, would opt for a Republican nominee who would give as ugly as he got. ”

For Donald Trump’s critics, it’s not just that they disagree with the man and his policies. It’s more that they find him offensive.

There’s a reason for this: Mr. Trump is a man who is perpetually on offense.

Think of him as the Kevin Kelley of politics. Mr. Kelley coaches football for Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Ark. He’s gained national fame as the coach who almost never punts. Coach Kelley believes that remaining on offense (keeping possession of the ball) is more important than defense (trying to deny an opponent field position).

So he goes for it on fourth down even in his own territory. As a result, Mr. Kelley gives his offense four plays to gain 10 yards instead of three. Just as important, his all-offense approach gives his Bruins a psychological edge.

The strategy is not without its risks. Though Mr. Kelley says the math bears him out, his approach means opponents will sometimes score or intercept when they might not have otherwise. Backfires can be messy.

Mr. Trump is playing the same game. Not only is he always on the attack, he hardly ever backs down—even when he’s demonstrably wrong. The result has been a number of busted plays, whether it’s declaring that John McCain was not a hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese, questioning the impartiality of an Indiana-born federal judge because the jurist has Mexican blood or his campaign team’s initial denials that Melania Trump had cribbed some lines in her convention speech from Michelle Obama when the theft was clear and obvious.

Mr. Trump’s critics are quick to suggest these kind of things make him unfit for the Oval Office. Especially on the right, they frequently go on to add that any Republican or conservative who does not publicly pronounce him anathema will forever bear the mark of Cain.

It should be noted that his critics on the right are also invested in a big GOP defeat. If Mr. Trump loses by two or three points, they will be blamed for contributing to that defeat. If, by contrast, Mr. Trump loses by a landslide, they will look like prophets.

For the larger Republican Party, however, there’s a catch. If it turns out Mr. Trump loses by a narrow margin, Republican senators and congressmen still have a chance of keeping their seats. A blowout defeat for Mr. Trump, on the other hand, would likely translate into massive Republican losses in both the Senate and House. Even so, it’s a price the NeverTrump movement appears more than willing to pay to make their point.Hillary Clinton’s dilemma is somewhat different. And it points to the great X Factor of the 2016 election: Never before have Democrats faced a Republican nominee who is so relentlessly on offense. CONTINUE ON SITE

The Donald J. Trump Referendum Democrats figure they can bait the Republican into blowing himself up.

With the party conventions wrapped up, the contours of the final 100 days of the general election are becoming clearer. The country wants change, which should help Republicans. But Democrats are confident that Hillary Clinton will win if they can make the election about Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump seems happy to oblige.

Democrats revealed in Philadelphia that they’ve decided not to make the campaign a typical left-right ideological battle. Instead, they will try to disqualify Mr. Trump as temperamentally and morally unfit for the Presidency. From now until November, expect to hear a lot about three-a.m. phone calls and nuclear winter—and on the occasional lighter note, Mr. Trump’s well-documented vulgarity.

President Obama put this strategy crisply when he noted that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican—and it sure wasn’t conservative.” For eight years the worst thing Mr. Obama could say about somebody is that he’s a Republican. So calling Mr. Trump worse than a conservative Republican is, for him, really harsh.

The public desire for change is nonetheless real and growing, and Democrats know that Mrs. Clinton is the least convincing “change maker” in American politics, to quote her husband’s phrase. But they have built formidable money and organizational advantages, and they figure they can win with even a candidate as flawed as Mrs. Clinton as long as 2016 is a referendum on Mr. Trump, not on the Clinton-Obama agenda or the last eight years.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems thrilled that Democrats are trying to make the election about his favorite subject—Donald J. Trump. Were he as shrewd a politician as he claims to be a businessman, he’d explain how Clinton-Obama policies have failed and why his would be superior. Above all, he’d work overtime to reassure undecided voters that he is a risk worth taking. He can’t tap into dissatisfaction with the status quo if Americans can’t imagine him sitting in the Oval Office.

Kashmir: New Islamic State Backed by New York Times, BBC by Vijeta Uniyal

Jihadis, trained and armed by Pakistan, are purging Kashmir of its native Hindu and Sikh population, and waging a terrorist campaign to carve out a separate Islamic country in that part of India.

What New York Times did not say is that these ‘boys with guns’ are members of Hizbul Mujahideen, a group designated as terrorist organisation by both the European Union and the United States.

After being at the forefront of gun control campaign in U.S. for decades, the New York Times finally supports ‘open carry’ – but only for terrorists waging Jihad against “infidels”.

India is not ‘occupying’ Kashmir, which is already part of India. India is waging a war against Islamic terrorism which has claimed the lives of more than 4,800 Indian civilians and more than 2400 Indian security personnel.

The mainstream media, quick to blame India for the ongoing unrest, will not tell its readers how the province of Kashmir became the Islamist hellhole that it is today.

The minarets of the mosques, reserved in times of peace for prayer calls, were proclaiming armed jihad against Hindus in towns and cities across the province. Kashmiri Hindus were given three option; either to convert to Islam, leave their ancestral homes, or face certain death.

“We order you to leave Kashmir immediately, otherwise your children will be harmed — we are not scaring you but this land is only for Muslims, and is the land of Allah. Sikhs and Hindus cannot stay here. If you do not obey, we will start with your children”. – Notice to Hindu Sikhs in Kashmir

In an ultimate act of humiliation, Hindu men were told to move out of Kashmir without taking their property or women.

Arming the police with BB guns — regardless to how dangerous the BBC or the New York Times editorial staff might consider them — is not going to put an end the aspiration of turning Kashmir into another ‘Islamic State’.

Indian security forces are again waging pitched battles with violent Islamists on the streets of the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir. Mobs began congregating in towns on July 9, after the customary Friday prayers to protest the killing the previous day by Indian security forces of a prominent Islamic terrorist, Burhan Wani. The protestors waved black ISIS flags and pelted stones at riot police. The riots have so far claimed 49 people, including 2 policeman.

UPDATE ON FRANCE BY NIDRA POLLER

UPDATE AUGUST 1

Why does it matter to get things straight, even seemingly small details? Why does it matter to say, again, that Abdelmalik Petitjean was not a flagged security risk when he got hired, through an interim employment agency, as a baggage handler at the Chambery airport? It was not a full-time job. He worked weekends. He was finishing his studies. It matters because he is not an example of flagrant negligence in the hiring of airport personnel; he’s an example of a nearly undetectable risk that was to all intents and purposes smoothly integrated into French society. He’s one more element of proof against the sociological argument about discrimination breeding resentment and sharpening the slaughterer’s knife. So, if you don’t think the free world will live or die on the toss of a coin, then you might agree that we are in the early stages of a process. And it matters how we present the facts. Democracies will learn, improve, and defend themselves. There is no reason for despair.

Abdelmalik Petitjean wasn’t an ex nihilo jihadist with nothing but the Net for inspiration His cousin, identified as 30 year-old Farid K., has been charged and imprisoned; preliminary investigations have concluded that he knew a murderous attack was imminent. Jean-Philippe J. a twenty year-old who had tried to reach the caliphate with Petitjean in June has also been charged and jailed.

Charitable Christianity

We didn’t get news this weekend, we got preached at: We will not answer hatred with hatred and violence with violence. They wish to divide us, we will stick closer together than ever. We always loved, respected, admired and hung out with our fellow men of the cloth. Now we are inseparable. The media surfed on giant waves of peace & love. We drowned in it, suffocated, strangled, choked and nothing could stop it. We were like geese stuffed to make foie gras. You would think the entire French population that would normally be reeling from an unending series of attacks and atrocities (I don’t have time or space to list the “minor” incidents that have occurred over the past month) has only one wish in its collective mind: Christian-Muslim communion. Correspondents stood in front of little churches, big mosques, majestic cathedrals, swooning over fraternity in the pulpit, in the congregation, on the doorsteps, and in the churchyards. Muslim and Christian spokesmen stood shoulder to shoulder, outdoing each other in interfaith devotion, overflowing with kindness in their hearts and in their places of worship. Some Catholic clergy went as far as merciful forgiveness for the executioners.

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Turtle dove reporters cooed over the presence of “many” Muslims in the cathedral but the camera didn’t find the right angle to prove the point. A bit of truth slipped into an article in the Journal du Dimanche: the Christians at Ste. Thérèse Church in St. Etienne du Vouvray didn’t quite make it into the neighboring Yahya mosque for Friday prayers as planned. They were put off by “all those women in long black robes and the men with long beards.” The service was led by Abdellatif Hmito, the imam from Oissel, known for his eloquence in French, in the absence of the mosque’s regularly officiating imam, who does not speak French at all.

Adel Kermiche was the black sheep of a respectable family. His older sister is a surgeon, all his siblings have degrees and successful careers. His mother is a teacher. There has been no mention of a father. Though the family does not worship at the mosque, the mother sought help for her radicalized son. Mosque president, Mohammed Karabila, regrets that he had to curtail his deradicalization efforts because of a lack of subsidies.

EUROPE’S SUMMER OF TERROR BY JED BABBIN

Foreshadowing what will happen here more and more often.

David Fisher’s magnificent book, A Summer Bright and Terrible, begins with the sentence, “In England the summer of 1940 was the sunniest, driest, most glorious summer in living memory.” But in that summer — the summer of the Battle of Britain — the only things that stood between the death and survival of European civilization were the few fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force and the personal courage of Winston Churchill.

Today there is no Churchill and the battle for civilization can’t be won in the skies over England. The new enemy of European civilization, Islamism and the Islamic terrorism it propels, are as great a threat as that posed 76 years ago by Nazism.

This is Europe’s summer of terror. There have been seven terrorist attacks since June. In France alone, there have been fourteen Islamic terrorist attacks in the past two years killing at least two hundred and forty people. The last one, so far, was the 26 July attack in which two ISIS terrorists killed an 85-year-old priest near Rouen, France.

In Germany, the attacks are increasing and the Germans are hell-bent on ignoring the attackers’ obvious motivations. In late July when a gunman killed nine near a shopping mall in Munich, shouting the Muslim battle cry “Allahu Akbar,” German authorities claimed not to know the motivation of the attacker, a German-Iranian.

EDWARD CLINE: WE DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW

Let’s now turn to the deliberate manipulation or obfuscation or suppression of official reporting on crimes committed by “migrants” (aka Muslims) in the U.S. and in Europe,such as the recent rape of a 5-year-old girl in Idaho by “underage” Muslim boys in Idaho.

Davis Odell, a community resident who has been in close contact with the victim’s family said the boys dragged the unnamed girl into a utility room in the Fawnbrook Apartments, a low-income, subsidized housing complex in Twin Falls, and assaulted her in an attack that ended when a neighbor happened upon the scene and called police….

Twin Falls Police Chief Craig Kingsbury told reporters the suspects are Iraqi and Sudanese. [County Prosecutor Grant] Loebs said he does not know how long they have been living in the United States.

Twin Falls activists say the case and the lack of information from authorities demonstrates the problem with state and federal programs to resettle refugees in cities and towns.

The local police hemmed and hawed about the character of the crime and dragged their feet on the exact identity of the perpetrators. Residents brow-beat the chief of police, but it was clear that the police were under higher authority pressure to not be forthcoming with the truth lest it reflect badly on “migrants” resettled at the behest of the Obama administration. Shades of the Rotherham sex slave and prostitution ring in Britain, a ring that was run for years with impunity by Muslims.IPT reported that “Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.”

At a City Council meeting Monday night, residents demanded answers from law enforcement regarding the crime and the resettlement program, with some calling for the removal of all immigrants in the city.

RUTHIE BLUM: ISIS IS ONLY ONE STRAIN OF JIHAD

On Sunday, the U.K.’s Daily Mirror alerted its readers to the latest edition of Dabiq, the multilingual digital magazine uploaded periodically by the Islamic State terrorist organization. The current issue, the publication’s 15th since its inception in 2014, is titled “Break the Cross,” an apt description of the group’s systematic subjugation and slaughter of Christians.

One of the articles in the latest edition — “Why we hate you and want to fight you” — lists six reasons for the destruction of the West:

1. “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for him in worship; you blaspheme against him, claiming that he has a son; you fabricate lies against his prophets and messengers; and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices.”

2. “We hate you because your secular, liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited while banning many of the things he has permitted, a matter that doesn’t concern you because you separate between religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the legislators you vote into power.”

3. “In the case of the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your lord and creator.”

4. “We hate you for your crimes against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion.”

5. “We hate you for your crimes against the Muslims; your drones and fighter jets bomb, kill and maim our people around the world; and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims oppress, torture and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth.”

6. “We hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal obligation on every single Muslim.”