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2016

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Iran’s Chess Board How the Islamic Republic is strategically dominating the Middle East — and the U.S. is assisting. Caroline Glick

By on June 3rd, 2016

Early this week it was reported that after a two-year hiatus, Iran is restoring its financial support for Islamic Jihad.
Strategic thinking has always been Israel’s Achilles’ heel. As a small state bereft of regional ambitions, so long as regional realities remained more or less static, Israel had little reason to be concerned about the great game of the Middle East.

But the ground is shifting in the lands around us. The Arab state system, which ensured the strategic status quo for decades, has collapsed.

So for the first time in four generations, strategy is again the dominant force shaping events that will impact Israel for generations to come.

To understand why, consider two events of the past week.

Early this week it was reported that after a two-year hiatus, Iran is restoring its financial support for Islamic Jihad. Iran will give the group, which is largely a creation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, $70 million.

On Wednesday Iranian media were the first to report on the arrest of a “reporter” for Iran’s Al-Alam news service. Bassam Safadi was arrested by Israel police in his home in Majdal Shams, the Druse village closest to the border with Syria on the Golan Heights. Safadi is suspected of inciting terrorism.

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What Happened to One Air Force Veteran Threatened by ISIS First Edward Cline was terrorized by the Islamic State. Now he’s being terrorized by his landlord at Lawson Enterprises. by Daniel Greenfield

By on June 3rd, 2016

Cyrus Skeen, Edward Cline’s fictional detective, has survived countless brushes with death and danger across eighteen novels, the latest of which, Exegesis, is coming out just now. Its author, a 70-year-old Air Force veteran, has lived a life that in some ways has been as difficult as that of his fictional protagonist.

But while Cyrus Skeen brushes off threats with witty quips and a keen intellect, his creator’s keen intellect and wit have come up against the harsher reality of ISIS terror and the willingness of some in our country to appease that terrorism by turning on its victims.

The Islamic State has been publishing lists of thousands of names of those it claims will be its targets. One such list included 3,600 New Yorkers. Another contained the names of 43 government employees and yet another listed 70 members of the military. But many of those on the hit lists were ordinary people, like Julie, a dogwalker living in Brooklyn. They received calls from FBI agents and then they went back to living the routine of their ordinary lives.

For the most part.

Edward Cline will not go back to his ordinary life. After he was visited by the FBI, his landlord, Lawson Enterprises, chose to kick a 70-year-old Air Force veteran threatened by ISIS into the street.

According to Cline, Lawson Enterprises informed him that he posed a “risk” to the safety of the other tenants. It is not ISIS that poses the risk, but its target and its victim, who must be put out on the street. Cline has no means of moving and nowhere to move to. After initially being ordered to leave by July 1st, he was offered a “courtesy” extension to July 19th, which was later rescinded, leaving the elderly writer with few options and less time. Cline described the experience as taking “years” off his life.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Is Anti-Semitism Growing in France? By David Pryce-Jones

By on June 2nd, 2016

Some inexplicable response seems to take hold of the French when the subject concerns Jews in general, and Israel in particular. Whatever has induced the French government to choose this moment to hold a conference in favour of a Palestinian state? The absence of Palestinians and Israelis is confirmation that the self-importance of the French is the sole subject here. Secretary of State John Kerry has already proved that the peace process is dead for the time being; perhaps the Quai d’Orsay wanted only to rub the American nose as usual deep into humiliation.

Contempt for Jews and their state is the other side of France’s continuous pro-Arab policy. When a French ambassador a few years ago called Israel “a shitty little country,” he was only voicing ingrained institutional prejudice. Since the days of Yasser Arafat, France has always supported the cause of Palestine unconditionally, in spite of, or because of the harm to Israel. It is the sole Western country, for instance, to allow its financial subsidies to be paid without supervision, so that the money finishes in the hands of terrorists. Muslim immigrants numbering in the millions are on the edge of lawlessness. France has suffered more Islamist violence and murder than every other country except the United States. In response, Jews are leaving in their thousands for Israel. This has prompted Christophe Barbier, editor of the prestigious magazine L’Express, to accuse them of a cowardly failure to stand their corner. This in a country from which in the last world war at least 75,000 Jews were deported to be murdered — and this in a magazine once edited by Raymond Aron who polemicized against General de Gaulle for observations about Jews as “dominating people.”

At which point, I happened to read a book with the title “The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks la République.” The author, Nidra Poller, is an American living in France. She is the researcher who exposed that photography of a small boy supposedly killed by Israeli gunfire in battle, and therefore a symbol of Palestinian victimhood, was merely a “lethal narrative,” her term for propaganda designed to generate hatred of Jews and Israel. Israel’s self-defense in the recent campaign against Hamas in Gaza gave rise to plenty more lethal narratives that is classic anti-Semitism in a contemporary expression. As if it wasn’t enough to be misled by its government and its media about the reality of Islamism, France also has to endure Socialism. Strikes and riots are already bringing the whole country to the edge of lawlessness. Nidra Poller is in the role of Cassandra.

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School Forbids Students from Wearing National Honor Society Stoles So Others Won’t Feel Left Out God forbid we recognize academic achievement and community service. By Katherine Timpf

By on June 2nd, 2016

Students at Plano Senior High School in Texas will not be allowed to wear National Honor Society stoles at their graduation because, apparently, that might make kids who were not in NHS feel left out.

In order to earn membership in the National Honors Society, students must not only maintain a high GPA, but also perform regular community service each semester. (Clearly, two accomplishments too controversial to deserve recognition.)

Now, according to local news source WFAA, students with a 3.6 GPA or higher will be allowed to wear stoles signifying that they earned a high GPA. But one NHS member, Garrett Frederick, said that that’s kind of missing the point.

“I’m not just an honor student — I’m an NHS student,” said Frederick, a graduating senior who has been a member of NHS since his sophomore year. “I worked hard.”

“I put in the hours,” he continued, referring to the 20 hours of community service he did to maintain his membership.

Frederick’s mom, KellyAnn, told WFAA that she contacted the school on behalf of her son and was told that graduates would not be wearing regalia associated with any club or organization — and that an NHS sponsor told her that school administrators wanted, as WFAA put it, “everyone to feel included in graduation and not single students out.”

But here’s the thing: Some students should be singled out, because they did accomplish more than other students.

Now, of course, the school did state that it would not allow regalia associated with any club or organization. Why should NHS be any different? Well first of all, if it were up to me, I’d say that stoles and cords should be allowed for all kinds of different involvement and achievements.

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Walls and Immigration — Ancient and Modern The Roman empire faced a challenge similar to what the EU faces. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 2nd, 2016

When standing today at Hadrian’s Wall on the border between Scotland and northern England, everything appears indistinguishably affluent and serene on both sides.

It was not nearly as calm some 1,900 years ago. In A.D. 122, the exasperated Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of an 80-mile, 20-foot-high wall to protect Roman civilization in Britain from the Scottish tribes to the north.

We moderns often laugh at walls and fortified boundaries, dismissing them as hopelessly retrograde, ineffective, or unnecessary. Yet they still seem to fulfill their mission on the Israeli border, the 38th parallel in Korea, and the Saudi-Iraqi boundary: separating disparate states.

On the Roman side of Hadrian’s Wall there were codes of law, habeas corpus, aqueducts, and the literature of Cicero, Virgil, and Tacitus — and on the opposite side a violent, less sophisticated tribalism.

Hadrian assumed that there was a paradox about walls innate to the human condition. Scottish tribes hated Roman colonial interlopers and wanted them off the island of Britain. But for some reason the Scots did not welcome the wall that also stopped the Romans from entering Scotland.

The exasperated Romans had built the barrier to stop the Scots from entering Roman Britain, whether to raid, trade, emigrate, or fight.

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Muslim Refugees Sexually Assault 26 Women at German Concert Daniel Greenfield

By on June 2nd, 2016

Refugees welcome.

All the complainants said they were “surrounded” by their tormentors before being “touched and fondled” improperly at the annual free Schlossgrabenfestes music festival.

The three arrested men are aged between 28 and 31 and are Pakistanis seeking asylum in Germany. All have been charged with sexual crimes as the hunt continues for their accomplices.

Media reports said that at least 15 more women are expected to come forward to file criminal complaints after they were groped at the festival on Sunday where around 100,000 people were in the crowds over the four-day event.

Officers say the victims are receiving counselling while authorities try to cool rising tensions between migrants in the area.

The tensions aren’t between migrants. The tensions are caused by migrants.

The Pakistanis will face deportation to their homeland if found guilty when brought before the courts.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

John Kerry, the Islamic Republic’s New Lobbyist The administration urges foreign financial institutions to fund the Iranian terror machine. Ari Lieberman

By on June 2nd, 2016

Iran, the nation that has built a well-deserved reputation as the world’s premier state-sponsor of terrorism has a new lobbyist and he is none other than U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Since the Obama administration inked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in January, Kerry has been busying himself with ensuring that European banks start doing business with the Iranians. Yes, you read that correctly. Not only has the United States and its European allies agreed to lift sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the administration is now encouraging the private banking sector to do the same. It appears however, that their intense lobbying efforts are being received with a healthy dose of skepticism.

HSBC’s chief legal officer, Stuart Levey confirmed that Kerry had requested that HSBC start opening its banking doors to the Iranians and transact business with them. Levey criticized Kerry’s misguided initiative noting that the U.S. still maintains other non-nuclear related sanctions against the Islamic Republic and that doing business with Iran runs the risk of running afoul of those sanctions. HSBC has had prior negative experience with the U.S. Treasury and Justice departments. In 2012, the bank was forced to fork over $1.9 billion to U.S. authorities to settle allegations involving money laundering for Mexican drug barons.

Levey also noted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which controls large swaths of the Iranian economy, has been slapped with sanctions by both the U.S. and Europe because of the central role it plays in illicit regional and international activities. Doing business with Iran will almost certainly result in facilitating IRGC operations. Adding to the uncertainty, Iran has over the years developed a penchant for hiding money, engaging in shady deals and money laundering thus making it difficult, if not impossible for banking institutions to engage the Iranians in legitimate business transactions without being complicit in their illegal dealings.

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An Immigration Reality Check for Former Telemundo Chief Nely Galan Illegal aliens who evade inspection are “more American” than anyone? Michael Cutler

By on June 2nd, 2016

On Tuesday, May 31, 2016 Fox & Friends conducted an interview with the former president of Telemundo Nely Galan and posted a video of that segment with the title, “What can Donald Trump do to win back Hispanic voters? – Former president of Telemundo Nely Galan weighs in on the race for the White House, talks new book ‘Self Made’.”

I have decided to address Nely Galan’s five minute segment on Fox & Friends and the statements she made because, although she is not a particularly significant person, the theme of the claims she made have also been made by far too many other people and have been broadcast frequently on news programs for years without being properly challenged.

Furthermore, while it took Donald Trump to move immigration to center stage for this presidential election, immigration has been the most significant issue confronting our nation and our citizens for decades because of how it impacts virtually every challenge and threat we face from national security, public safety and public health to the economy, unemployment, healthcare, education and the environment.

Today we will examine the position that Ms Galan took on the issue of immigration and how this issue, she claims, adversely impacts the candidacy of Donald Trump.

To begin with, let’s consider what transpired during the segment.

Galan said that immigrants make up half of all entrepreneurs in the United States and dismissed the statement by Brian Kilmeade that Donald Trump’s problem is illegal immigrants not legal immigrants. She responded by saying that this is like saying, “I like this minority but not that minority.”

Pete Hegseth, one of the co-hosts of the program, then asked if it was not a fair and important distinction to differentiate between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. Galan said it was not fair and adamantly rejected the use of the term illegal alien saying, “We don’t like that word- illegal immigrant,” she never defined who “we” was and insisted that aliens who enter the United States without being lawfully admitted are simply “undocumented.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Bernie Sanders’ War Against the Jews Forget Wall Street. Israel is where it’s at. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 2nd, 2016

Bernie Sanders started out by running against Wall Street. These days he’s running against Israel.

Running against Wall Street was hard. The Sanders campaign had to produce actual numbers. Americans were shocked to learn the higher taxes they would be facing in the People’s Republic of Bernie. Prominent economists on the left and the right tore his economic plans to shreds. The Sandernistas responded by touting the support of the country’s most prominent Marxist economist, the son of the Rosenberg Stalinist atom bomb traitors and an instructor at Chemeketa Community College.

Bashing Israel is a lot easier and appeals to the same conspiratorial bigoted contingent of the left.

And the facts don’t matter.

Bernie Sanders lied and claimed that Israel had killed 10,000 innocent people in Gaza. That statement was false in every possible way. As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word… is a lie including the ‘and’ and ‘the’.” But the Sanders base, which had gleefully eaten up his conspiracy theories about Goldman Sachs, loved every minute of it.

Like the Manchurian Candidate’s Senator Iselin, Senator Sanders gleefully threw around false numbers in the fashion of a cheap bigoted demagogue knowing that the resulting debate would not be about whether Israel had killed innocent people in Gaza, but how many innocent people it had killed in Gaza.

Bernie’s ugly pandering to left-wing anti-Semitic bigots lost him the Jewish vote from Massachusetts to New York. By the time he got to New York, polls showed that Catholics were more likely to vote for the “son of a Polish immigrant” than Jews. And that was before he appointed radical anti-Israel activist Simone Zimmerman, from anti-Israel hate group If Not Now, as his Jewish outreach coordinator.

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Antwerp (Belgium) Terror Arrests Underscore Growing Threat to Europe and America Abigail Esman

By on June 2nd, 2016

Last Wednesday, just two years and a day after the deadly terrorist attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, and barely more than two months after the twin attacks on the Brussels airport and metro, Belgian police arrested a group of Muslim youth planning yet another attack, this time in Antwerp. Aiming “to kill as many kufar,” or non-Muslims, as possible, the group is believed to have been planning to bomb Antwerp’s Central Station. The group also is believed to have made previous plans to assassinate right-wing politician Filip Dewinter, the leader of the Vlaams Belang party. Those plans were put on hold, however, in favor of a larger-scale attack.

The suspects were members of a group of radicalized Muslim teens believed to have kept contact with Antwerp native Hicham Chaib, who is now a high-ranking leader of the Islamic State. It was Chaib who informed the public that the March 22 attacks on Belgium’s Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station “were just a taste of what’s to come.” And it is Chaib, the former second-in-command of Shariah4Belgium who left Antwerp for Syria in 2012, who now actively recruits other Antwerp-based youth to join ISIS or to execute terrorist attacks in their homeland.

The four arrests followed a series of raids by Antwerp police into the homes of several suspects in the Borgerhout district. Two suspects have been released, but other members of the group, some arrested previously, remain in custody. All suspects are said to be between the ages of 16 and 19, confirming earlier Dutch reports that European Muslims under the age of 20 are increasingly becoming involved in Islamic State activities and jihadist plots.

According to some accounts, the Antwerp group is comprised of nine youths, at least five of whom are minors. At least two members tried to join the Islamic State in Raqqa in March, but were stopped by officials en route and sent back to Belgium.

With security and counter-terror investigations heightened in Brussels after the March 22 attacks there, it is unsurprising that jihadists might be moving their activities and focus to nearby Antwerp. The city has a long history of Muslim unrest, with riots as early as 2002 and the founding, by Hizballah-linked Lebanese immigrant Dyab Abou Jahjah, of the Arab European League (AEL) in 2000. An organization with pan-Arab aspirations, the AEL aimed to create what Jahjah called a “sharocracy” – a kind of combination of democracy and sharia – that would eventually become European law.

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