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2016

Richard Baehr: Trump Pivots Again

Donald Trump is a businessman, television star, and a newcomer to campaigning for public office. Running for president as your first elected office is highly unusual. A few have tried before, but in the last hundred plus years, only Dwight Eisenhower, a highly decorated World War II general, has succeeded. There were 17 Republican candidates who made it to the debate stage this year, and only Trump and Ben Carson had never run for office before. Carly Fiorina, despite having never held office, did run for the U.S. Senate in California.

Trump, with his victory in Indiana, appears at this point destined to be the winner of the GOP nominating process. His campaign over the past year has been an unusual one, to say the least, and could not have been more different than that of his all but certain opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a product of more than 40 years of obsessive political campaigning for herself and her husband on both the state and national level, is one of the most scripted candidates ever to run for president. Clinton holds morning conference calls with as many as dozens of campaign aides to review her talking points for the day. If there was ever a consensus candidate whose themes have been tested with her handlers, and poll tested by her large campaign staff, it is Clinton. Clinton spent most of her two years after leaving the State Department mapping out her future campaign, warehousing future campaign team members at the Clinton Foundation and speaking before likely future campaign contributors and supporters. The lives of both Clintons has been all about politics at every stage.

Clinton’s goal for both the primary and the fall campaign, which she has viewed as a sure victory, has been to stay on message. Despite this, her message has been impacted by the leftist populism of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, who has proved profoundly resilient and therefore extremely annoying to Clinton. Sanders has pushed Clinton leftward, at times even to Sanders’ left (gun control), and she has on occasion made some unusually foolish remarks for someone so experienced in the business of politics. One of these remarks was her promise to put out of business a lot of coal companies and coal miners. Today, she was forced to eat crow and explain to some West Virginians that she can not really explain what prompted her to say something like that:

“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”

Neutering U.S. combat air forces Shrunken budgets and bad planning threaten national security By Jed Babbin

Willfully ignoring the effects of 15 years of combat, President Obama, Congress and Pentagon leaders are causing the readiness of our combat aircraft to sink to so low a level that it clearly endangers national security. It’s a matter of shrunken budgets and awful planning.

Readiness — the ability of a force to accomplish its assigned combat mission — is measured somewhat differently among the services. But when it comes to aircraft the criteria are immutable. They’re objective measures that are based on metallurgical science and the laws of physics.

Our military went into combat a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks when we attacked al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the nearly 15 years since, our air forces have flown almost constantly, attacking the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The burden on them has worn out too many aircraft to the degree that they can no longer be flown in combat.

As reported by Fox News, only a small minority of Marine Corps aircraft — about 30 percent of the Marines’ F/A-18s — are ready to fly and only 42 of their 147 heavy-lift CH-53E helicopters are airworthy. They — like the F/A-18s — are just plain worn out.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mike Groothousen flew A-7 attack aircraft and F-18 strike fighters. He was captain (in combat) of the nuclear carrier USS Harry S. Truman and had four other aviation and surface commands in his career.

Islam by a Thousand Cuts :Edward Cline

Lingchi língchí; ling-ch’ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t’che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts, (shā qiān dāo/qiāndāo wànguǎ), the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. It was also used in Vietnam In this form of execution; a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.

Death, in the context of this column, means Islam. Islam is a death worshipping cult. Death is the end of Islam for anyone who encounters it, Muslim or non-Muslim. One exists and lives for the sole purpose of dying to meet Allah in Paradise. Allah owns your life and it is your duty to obey his every command and whim, even if it means….death.

“Death to America!” is the familiar chant of Muslim demonstrators, from New York City to London to Berlin and Cologne, from Cairo to Gaza to Damascus, from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Kabul. Death is what is intended by the Muslim Brotherhood. It states that quite explicitly in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Brotherhood in North America. Here is what it says:

In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a “Civilization Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

So, how is Islam “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? By working every little gambit to dissolve Western institutions, principles, traditions, and norms, and replace them with Islamic ones, first as “co-equals,” and eventually as the dominant ones

By applying a thousand little, barely noticed and hardly earth-shattering concessions by the West to Islamic demands for “respect” or the enforcement of Islamic religious observation or deference to Muslim sensibilities and prejudices, the Brotherhood agenda is on schedule. There will always be the spectacular, headline-grabbing massacres to remind us that Islam declared war on the West long, long ago and that the bombings and beheadings and stabbings are not forgotten as the end-all of life for infidels and those who do not submit to Islam. Islam means, after all, submission.

The Mixed Legacy of Nuremberg by Alan M. Dershowitz

This year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi racist enactments that formed the legal basis for the Holocaust. Ironically, it also marks the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which provided the legal basis for prosecuting the Nazi war criminals who murdered millions of Jews and others following the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws.

There is little dispute about the evil of the Nuremberg Laws. As Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was America’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, put it: “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”

There is some dispute, however, about the Nuremberg trials themselves. Did they represent objective justice or, as Hermann Göring characterized it, merely “victor’s justice?” Were the rules under which the Nazi leaders were tried and convicted ex post facto laws, enacted after the crimes were committed in an effort to secure legal justice for the most immoral of crimes? Did the prosecution and conviction of a relatively small number of Nazi leaders exculpate too many hands-on perpetrators? Do the principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials have continued relevance in today’s world?

Following the Holocaust, the world took a collective oath encapsulated in the powerful phrase “never again”, but following the Nuremberg Trials, mass murders, war crimes and even genocides have been permitted to occur again and again and again and again. Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and now Syria. Why has the promise of “never again” been so frequently been broken? Why have the Nuremberg principles not been effectively applied to prevent and punish these unspeakable crimes? Will the International Criminal Court, established in 2002, be capable of enforcing the Nuremberg principles and deterring future genocides by punishing past ones?

Whether the captured Nazi leaders — those who did not commit suicide or escape — should have been placed on trial, rather than summarily shot, was the subject of much controversy. Even before the end of the war, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed that a list of major war criminals be drawn up, and as soon as they were captured and identified, they would be shot. President Roosevelt was initially sympathetic to such rough justice, but eventually both he and President Truman were persuaded by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that summary execution was inconsistent with the American commitment to due process and the rule of law.

It was decided, therefore, to convene an international tribunal to sit in judgment over the Nazi leaders. But this proposal was not without considerable difficulties. Justice must be seen to be done, but it must also be done in reality. A show trial, with predictable verdicts and sentences, would be little better than no trial at all. Indeed, Justice Jackson went so far as to suggest, early on, that it would be preferable to shoot Nazi criminals out of hand than to discredit our judicial process by conducting farcical trials.

The challenge of the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, was to do real justice in the context of a trial by the victors against the vanquished — and specifically those leaders of the vanquished who had been instrumental in the most barbaric genocide and mass slaughter of civilians in history. Moreover, the blood of Hitler’s millions of victims was still fresh at the time of the trials. Indeed, the magnitude of Nazi crimes was being learned by many for the first time during the trial itself. Was a fair trial possible against this emotional backdrop?

Even putting aside the formidable jurisprudential hurdles — the retroactive nature of the newly announced laws and the jurisdictional problems posed by a multinational court — there was a fundamental question of justice posed. Contemporary commentators wondered whether judges appointed by the victorious governments — and politically accountable to those governments — could be expected to listen with an open mind to the prosecution evidence offered by the Allies and to the defense claims submitted on behalf of erstwhile enemies.

Famed Writer Howard Jacobson: European Opposition to Zionism Amounts to ‘Chutzpah With Blood In It’ (VIDEO) Lea Speyer

European opposition to the right of Jewish people to live in Israel amounts to “chutzpah with blood in it,” an award-winning British journalist and novelist declared in a recent BBCinterview.

In conversation with correspondent Chris Cook for a “Newsnight” film on anti-Zionism, antisemitism and Israel — which aired April 29 — Jacobson condemned the continued audacity of certain Europeans in telling Jews they have no claims or rights to Israel.

Jacobson said:

When I hear people in European cultures attacking Zionism, I think, ‘What a nerve.’ We [Europe] kick you out, we say, ‘Go to hell and we don’t care where you go.’ And you’re lucky if you’re kicked out. You’re lucky if you get out. And then we [Jews] go somewhere. We go to what for a long time was considered home and what in the Jewish imagination has been home for a few thousands years. And this begs many questions I accept about the indigenous population [in Israel]. I accept all that. But the idea that we [Europe] would then say to the Jews, ‘Get the hell out of here,’ and now we’re going to tell you where you can go? I mean there’s a Jewish word for that. That’s chutzpah. That’s chutzpah with blood in it.

During the interview, Jacobson explained his understanding of Zionism and said that the Left in Britain must reeducate itself on core Zionist ideology. “Zionism was a liberation movement. It wasn’t a movement of oppression. It wasn’t a movement of colonialism,” he said. “It was the beginning of a Europe-wide movement of liberation of the Jews from themselves…and some of the [European] countries.” This movement of liberation among Jews began “long before the Holocaust” and “the Holocaust just then confirmed the need for that,” Jacobson said.

Commenting on the antisemitism scandal currently plaguing Britain’s Labour party — specifically comments made by Labour MP Naz Shah calling for Israel to be relocated to America — Jacobson said he would like to hear more officials renounce antisemitic views and reeducate themselves. Remarks like those of Shah, Jacobson said, remind Jews of the importance of Zionism.

“The reason why Jews get so upset when they hear Zionism denounced is because for a Jew, for most Jews, it still is a liberation movement and not only in the mind,” he stated. Reflecting on 1930s Europe, Jacobson said, “Where were Jews going to go? They were being kicked out everywhere… ‘Go to your own country,’ they were told. Okay. And now they’re in their own country and now get out of that. And now Naz Shah says, ‘Get out of your own country and go to America.’ Not only do we remember Zionism for the liberation movement it was, it’s a liberation movement still.”

While Jacobson readily admitted he wasn’t brought up a Zionist, he said, “I was just brought up to believe whatever you think about Israel, don’t forget you might need it one day. There isn’t a Jew living — no, there are very few Jews living — that won’t feel in some way or another that they might need it one day.”

Watch highlights of Jacobson’s interview below:

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Antisemitism Remains a Scourge By Michael M. Rosen —****

There was a time — a blessedly long one, stretching across the second half of the 20th century — when anti-Semitism was, as Norman Podhoretz put it, “the hate that dare not speak its name,” a rare, suppressed, sub-rosa sentiment unacceptable to serious people in the Western world.

Alarmingly, though, as the world marks Holocaust Remembrance Day this year, the hate has returned above ground with a vengeance. Anti-Semites are once again making themselves heard throughout the Western world — on college quads, in parliament halls, in presidential campaigns, online, and offline, from the usual corners of the Middle East to Continental Europe and the U.S.

Consider all that’s happened just in the last few months:

Up to 50 members of Britain’s Labour Party have been suspended for anti-Semitic comments in recent weeks. It’s not just notorious Jew-baiter Ken Livingstone, who claimed last week that Hitler “support[ed] Zionism,” but Member of Parliament Naz Shah, who called in 2014 for Israel to be relocated to the United States and has likened Zionists to al-Qaeda.

Anti-Semitism, of course, is nothing new for Labour. There was Shah Hussain, a councilor in a northern English town, who in 2014 accused an Israeli soccer player of “doing the same thing that hitler [sic] did to ur race in ww2.” There was Nottingham City Councilman Ilyas Aziz, who in 2014 called on Jews to “stop drinking Gaza blood.” And let’s not forget Salim Mulla, a councilor in Blackburn with Darwen, who in 2015 wrote that “Zionist Jews are a disgrace to humanity.”

The epidemic of racism on the British left has proven so virulent that Labour’s sister party in Israel is considering suspending ties. The best response Labour’s far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn has been able to muster is the dubious claim that only a “very small number of people . . . have said things that they should not have.” Corbyn, it bears noting, once called Hamas and Hezbollah his “friends,” and even today refuses to renounce that stance. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that anti-Semitic attacks in England spiked by 60 percent last year.

Florida Synagogue Bomber Plotted to Kill Jews for “Glory of Allah” “And whatever happens, it’s for the glory of Allah.” Daniel Greenfield

The last time I was in Los Angeles, there were guards at every synagogue. In New York, there are police officers in front of every synagogue. But the media won’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism. Instead it’ll pretend that we face a grave Islamophobia threat. Two days from now this story will be buried beneath a deluge of “Muslims fear backlash” stories. And Jews will have to pray in synagogues under assault.

And so we turn to James Gonzalo Medina aka James Muhammad, who converted to Islam, threatened a church and then plotted to bomb a synagogue for Islam.

Medina has a number of prior arrests, including one in August 2012 when he was accused of sending violent threats via text message to a Coral Springs family.

One text read: “By next week, Ima bomb ya [curse word] … Bring him! I will buy a gun [off] the street and rampage [family member’s] church. Murder she wrote,” according to the 2012 affidavit.

And at some point, Muhammad/Medina prioritized killing Jews.

One of Medina’s associates informed the FBI source that Medina was planning to martyr himself in a firearms attack on the Aventura synagogue, using AK-47 assault rifles — then, the affidavit said, the conversation turned to claiming responsibility for it. Medina said he liked the source’s idea of using the name of a notorious terrorist group — ISIS or al-Qaida-linked Shabaab — to assume responsibility.

Medina, who told the source he had converted to Islam four years ago, said the planned synagogue attack would inspire other Muslims. Medina would later express his “current hatred for the Jewish people,” the affidavit said.

Tale of Two Tribes: ‘Climate Refugees’ vs. EPA Victims The victims that Obama won’t help. Michelle Malkin

The left has concocted a lucrative category of politically correct victims: “climate refugees.” It’s the new Green racket.

U.S. taxpayers will now be forking over untold billions to ease the pain allegedly inflicted on “carbon’s casualties” by industrial activity. By contrast, those who have suffered as a direct result of government incompetence by federal environmental bureaucrats continue to get the shaft.

Consider the plight of two tribes: the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Louisiana and the Navajo Nation in New Mexico.

The New York Times splashed a viral story on its pages this week spotlighting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s $48 million grant to Native-Americans who live in the flood-ravaged coastal community of Isle de Jean Charles. About 60 residents, the majority of whom belong to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, will be resettled to drier land.

That’s a whopping $800,000 per “climate refugee!”

Never mind that the Times’ propagandists themselves admit that erosion on the island began in 1955 as a result of land-use and land-management factors that had nothing to do with climate change.

“Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island,” the paper reported, “and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments.”

The Campus Hate Crime Hoax Epidemic Fed by leftist mass hysteria, a radical academic vanguard, and an increasingly greedy racial-grievance industry. Matthew Vadum

A hate crime aimed at black students at Maryland’s Salisbury University has been revealed as just the latest high-profile race-related hoax to hit the groves of academe in the race-obsessed Obama era.

Except for acknowledging that the two perpetrators are African-American students at the school that is located on the Delmarva Peninsula in eastern Maryland, the university is engaged in a cover-up. If the perpetrators were white, a cynic might say that the school would find a way to leak out the pertinent details in order to make a political statement.

Of course, there certainly are racist incidents on university campuses, but blacks are rarely the targets or the victims. Blacks are more likely to be the instigators or beneficiaries of racist acts. Racially discriminatory admissions policies are a kind of reverse apartheid and part of what David Horowitz has termed “black privilege.” Such policies help unqualified African-Americans get into some institutions of higher learning, while keeping academically qualified Caucasians and Asians out.

As Americans have seen in the Obama era, the cultish, Democrat-endorsed Black Lives Matter movement, whose members openly urge the murder of cops, is built on the Big Lie that police routinely use black Americans for target practice. This evil movement draws many of its activists from college and university campuses.

This makes sense. The academy is a logical enough home for modern-day racists, especially those with dark skin, a condition that makes them more or less immune to serious scrutiny. In the professorate there is no shortage of supporters of racist cop-killing black radicals like Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur.

The universities are filled with pseudo-intellectual black academics like Kwanzaa inventor Maulana Karenga, Marc Lamont Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West, as well as malevolent radicals like Angela Davis, Julianne Malveaux, black liberation theology creator James Cone, and Obama’s late legal mentor and critical race theory originator Derrick Bell. They, along with plenty of pseudo-intellectual radical white academics, consider it their life’s mission to indoctrinate students in order to eventually force unwanted change on American society.

The Great Western Retreat by Giulio Meotti

Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools.

This massive deployment of armed forces in our own cities is a departure from history. It is a moral disarmament, before a military one.

Why does anyone choose to fight in a war? Civilized nations go to war so that members of today’s generation may sacrifice themselves to protect future generations. But if there are no future generations, there is no reason whatever for today’s young men to die in war. It is “demography, stupid.”

On March 11, 2004, 192 people were killed and 1,400 wounded in a series of terrorist attacks in Madrid. Three days later, Spain’s Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was elected prime minister. Just 24 hours after being sworn in, Zapatero ordered Spanish troops to leave Iraq “as soon as possible.”

The directive was a monumental political victory for extremist Islam. Since then, Europe’s boots on the ground have not been dispatched outside Europe to fight jihadism; instead, they have been deployed inside the European countries to protect monuments and civilians.

“Opération Sentinelle” is the first new large-scale military operation within France. The army is now protecting synagogues, art galleries, schools, newspapers, public offices and underground stations. Of all French soldiers currently engaged in military operations, half of them are deployed inside France. And half of those are assigned to protect 717 Jewish schools. Meanwhile, French paralysis before ISIS is immortalized by the image of police running away from the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo during the massacre there.