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2016

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Kissinger on ISIS: Nobody Was Confused on How to Deal with Hitler in WWII

By on January 9th, 2016

It’s simple, really.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Sky News that there was no question in anyone’s mind on how to deal with Adolf Hitler during World War II and so it should be with ISIS.
“During the Second World War, nobody said, “What is the solution for dealing with Hitler?” Kissinger said. “And this is an organization that has engaged in mass murder on television in the killing of prisoners. So I do not think that the Islamic State as it exists is a group with which we can negotiate.”

Speaking further on the matter, Kissinger said:

I don’t see any possibility of meaningful negotiation with the Islamic State. I think the Islamic State in its present form has a caliphate to dominate the region and indeed any area where Muslims are living that’s incompatible with the international order as we see it. But I can conceive and expect a negotiation taking place between many of the parties in the region to try to create an international order there, minus the Islamic State, that will be more compatible with peace than we’ve had.

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Swastikas at Fieldston By Marilyn Penn

By on January 9th, 2016

During the course of last fall’s semester, swastikas were found at the posh Fieldston School in Riverdale and a sixth grade student drew one in art class, seemingly unaware of its significance. Additionally, a notebook appeared with the cover exclamation “Hitler Rocks.” In response to the protests of Jewish parents, the school convened a special meeting for the sixth grade to discuss these events but apparently stressed the original use of the swastika as a symbol of peace, stating it could also be a symbol of hate but failing to even mention the word Holocaust. To make a second round of amends after this egregious “oversight,” the school made arrangements for the Simon Wiesenthal Center to send its regional director, along with a Holocaust survivor to tell her story to the entire middle school.

Michael Cohen, the Wiesenthal representative, goes into great detail in an article in The Jewish Week (Jan about what short and long term goals the combined organizations developed to enlighten both students and faculty about the Holocaust and tolerance education. At a school whose tuition is $45,000/yr, one would expect this to be part of the regular curriculum in any class of World History, particularly in a city with the largest share of survivors and their descendants, in a school heavily populated with Jewish students. Surely it doesn’t require a visit from the NAACP for Fieldston students to learn about slavery and the Civil war..

Throughout Mr. Cohen’s account, whenever he mentions the Holocaust, he adds tolerance education, as though the phenomenon of the extermination of Europe’s Jews were not a sufficiently large topic in itself. When Black Lives Matter holds a protest, they don’t include qualifiers extending to other groups suffering from intolerance of persecution. When LGBT holds rallies, they similarly don’t include anti-Semitism or racism. Only Jews are forever minimizing their own causes and still trying to prove to mainstream society that what happened to them is important because it can also affect other groups. Intolerance and bullying are school-yard words that have no place in the same sentence as Holocaust. Once you’ve paired intolerance with lactose, it’s forever inappropriate for the industry of mass starvation, torture, medical atrocities, freezing, rape, shooting people into the pit they’ve had to dig or making them watch their babies’ heads bashed against a wall or thrown into the air as target practice.

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Bill de Blasio Cripples NYPD Surveillance of Muslim Terrorism If Jihadists can kill Americans here, they can kill them anywhere. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 8th, 2016

Bill de Blasio has already overseen a few of these stage managed surrenders to criminals and terrorists. So this isn’t by any means surprising. It should however be remembered that if a successful terror attack occurs in New York, it will be because Bill de Blasio crippled the NYPD at the behest of Islamic groups.

The NYPD didn’t admit any wrongdoing, and the city won’t pay any damages other than about $1.6 million for the plaintiff’s legal fees. The department instead agreed to codify civil rights and other protections required under the court-ordered Handschu decree, which was put in place in response to surveillance used against war protesters in the 1960s and ’70s. The decree was relaxed after the Sept. 11 terror attacks to allow police to more freely monitor political activity in public places.

Civil rights groups sued in 2013 in federal court in Manhattan, accusing the NYPD of breaking Handschu rules. A second suit filed that year in Brooklyn federal court by mosques, a charity and community leaders alleged that the department was discriminating against Muslims.

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Muslim Murderers and Christian Victims in Nigeria While the Left screams about ‘Islamophobia’ in America, Christians face martyrdom in Islamic lands. Jack Kerwick

By on January 8th, 2016

As the self-appointed guardians of all that is virtuous and just incessantly berate as “Islamophobic” their compatriots who entertain second thoughts about importing Islamic culture into the West, these same self-avowed agents of “tolerance” utter not a peep regarding the murderous persecution to which Christians and other religious minorities are daily subjected throughout the Islamic world (and beyond).

Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) is one organization that exists to raise awareness of this crisis.

In at least 50 countries around the globe, Christians suffer “severe” oppression. Most of these countries—about 80%–have near exclusively Muslim majority populations.

Take, for example, “Amina.” Amina is a Nigerian woman who, in 2011, was staying with her friend “Charity” and the latter’s children when their village was besieged by Islamic militants firing guns.

Charity was ill and Amina was nearly seven months pregnant when the militants began raining down gunfire. Since their home was surrounded by a “high wall,” the women lead the children out of the house toward the back and helped them climb over it. Unfortunately, however, given their own respective conditions, neither Charity nor Amina were capable of climbing the wall themselves.

“I was six months then, going on seven, and my stomach was big,” Amina recalls. She proceeded to search out a room in which to hide when she took a bullet to her leg.

Her sick friend dragged Amina into the house and found her a hiding space before finding one herself.

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Hezbollah’s Dangerous Game The fate the next Lebanon war spells for Iran’s troublesome regional proxy. Ari Lieberman

By on January 8th, 2016

On January 4, Iran’s Shiite Lebanese mercenary force, Hezbollah, detonated a large explosive device on the Lebanon-Israel border in the Mount Dov region. Their target was a pair of Israeli D-9 armored bulldozers clearing the area of brush and other obstructions. There were no Israeli casualties.

Israel had anticipated an attack from Hezbollah following its liquidation of Samir Kuntar – the notorious child-killer turned Hezbollah commander – and other senior pro-Assad mercenaries in a Damascus suburb on December 19, 2015. Israel’s Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot warned Hezbollah of “harsh” consequences if the group decided to initiate a terror attack to avenge Kuntar.

The attack itself accomplished nothing. The heavily armored D-9 bulldozers were able to withstand the blast. In an effort to bolster its image and play to a demoralized constituency, Hezbollah claimed that the attack targeted a senior Mossad official and wounded some Israelis. The claim of course was false but demonstrates Hezbollah’s desperation.

In July and August of 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a 33-day war. Hezbollah propagandists tried to spin the war as a Hezbollah victory but the reality on the ground was quite different and the war in fact, represented a major strategic victory for Israel. Hezbollah lost between 600 to 1,000 fighters and much of its infrastructure, painstakingly constructed with Iranian and North Korean assistance, was destroyed. Most importantly, the war established Israeli deterrence and imposed new rules on Hezbollah. The group could no longer rely on a predictable, measured Israeli response to border provocations. Instead, the new rules meant that Israel could and would respond with overwhelming force to any provocation.

The most telling account of the conflict came from none other than Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, who noted that he would have never initiated the terror attack that preceded the conflict had he known of the Israeli response beforehand. Indeed, since 2006 Israel’s Lebanon border experienced a quiet not witnessed since the early 1960s.

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It’s a Bad Day for the Clintons When Vox Fairly Explains the Rape Allegation Against Bill By David French —

By on January 8th, 2016

I must admit, when I clicked this morning on Vox’s ”explainer” of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegation against Bill Clinton, I expected a whitewash. I was wrong. Not only did Dylan Matthews do an excellent job laying out the story, he reminded me of a number of details I’d forgotten.

Her story is infuriating, painting a picture of casual, callous brutality. Broaddrick, then a Clinton gubernatorial campaign volunteer, claims that Clinton asked to switch a planned meeting from a hotel lobby to her hotel room. After a few minutes of small talk, Broaddrick says that Clinton began kissing her. She resisted Clinton’s advances, but he “pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her.” During the alleged attack, he bit her lip. When he saw that it was bruised and swollen, she claims he said, “You better get some ice on that.” Then he “put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.”

I’d forgotten, however, how many people Broaddrick told after the incident:

Several friends of Broaddrick’s backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was the director of nursing at Broaddrick’s nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place and “found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in ‘a state of shock.’ Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit.” Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, “She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse.”

In the Dateline show, Broaddrick’s friends Louise Ma, Susan Lewis, and Jean Darden (Norma Rogers’s sister) all told NBC News that Broaddrick told them Bill Clinton raped her at the time. David Broaddrick — with whom Broaddrick was having an affair at the time; they both eventually left their spouses to marry each other — also told NBC that Broaddrick’s top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him “that she had been raped by Bill Clinton.”

Then there are Broaddrick’s allegations that Hillary not-so-subtly thanked her for her silence:

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U California System Encouraging Students to Formally Report ‘Unwanted Jokes’ By Katherine Timpf

By on January 8th, 2016

The University of California system is encouraging its students to report everything from “unwanted jokes” to “teasing” using its online “intolerance report form.”

If you hover your mouse over a subsection of the form labeled “hostile climate,” it states that “examples include unwanted jokes or teasing, derogatory or disparaging comments, posters, cartoons, drawings, or pictures of a biased nature.”

It also has a section for “Other Campus Climate Issues,” which it defines as “any intolerant behavior not specified above.”

Of course, any student who is being harassed at school in a way that, as the form puts it, is “severe or pervasive enough to affect campus or academic life,” should be able to contact the administration for help.

But here’s the thing: Even without this form, students would still have plenty of ways to report these kinds of issues. You know, like, these things called “e-mails” and “phone calls,” for example. What’s more, you’d think that if a student was facing discriminatory behavior “severe or pervasive enough” to “affect campus or academic life,” he or she would want to use one of these more direct options for communication to get it handled rather than dump it into a system-wide mass portal.

So . . . why the form? Maybe UC is hell on earth, and these kinds of serious incidents are so common, and were making up so much of administrators’ received e-mails, that it was necessary to have an entire online space devoted to them — and there really should also be an entire staff to sort through them and a task force ready to be deployed to handle the tragedies. Or maybe the point is to encourage students to report incidents (and/or annoyances) that they would not have considered serious enough to report without this kind of prompting.

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Cruz, Rubio, and National Security A rejoinder to Ramesh Ponnuru. By Roger Zakheim

By on January 8th, 2016

Ramesh Ponnuru claims on Bloomberg View that Marco Rubio is trying to “turn Ted Cruz into Rand Paul,” and that attempts to label Cruz as weak on national security won’t work. I disagree. Ponnuru admits that his friendship with Senator Cruz could cloud his judgment, so I’ll state at the outset that I am biased too, inasmuch as I support Senator Rubio’s candidacy.

Setting aside for the moment whether this line of argument will resonate politically, there are at least three issues on which Senator Cruz clearly “stands with Rand.” Each of these raises serious questions about Senator Cruz’s true national-security views and his viability as a candidate for Commander-in-Chief.

The first instance was when Senator Cruz entered the Senate chamber to literally “stand with Rand.” Many will recall Senator Paul’s filibuster, in which he stirred up a frenzy over the possible targeting of U.S. citizens in the United States by U.S. military drones. In a bizarre attempt to suggest that a U.S. citizen sitting in a Starbucks café is at risk from the threat of U.S. Hellfire missiles, the senator from Kentucky held up Senate business until the attorney general certified that the president does not have the authority “to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil.” What a revelation!

Instead of focusing the Senate on the threat posed by radical jihadists, Senator Cruz chose not only to stand with Rand, but to join him in attempting to stir up libertarian passions and create a false choice between liberty and security. This may have been good politics and a great way to increase his Twitter followers (Senator Cruz, in fact, spent part of his time on the Senate floor reading tweets praising Senator Paul), but it certainly wasn’t the conduct of a credible would-be Commander-in-Chief.

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Ruthie Blum: Indyk’s preposterous lie about Netanyahu

By on January 8th, 2016

Former U.S. envoy to the Middle East Martin Indyk should title his next book “The Art of Defamation,” and dedicate it to the Palestinians and the Israeli Left.

On a PBS Frontline documentary about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that aired Tuesday evening, Indyk dropped a stink bomb, and the stench has not yet dissipated.

Reminiscing about times past — 20 years ago, to be precise — Indyk said, “Netanyahu sat next to me when I was ambassador in Israel at the time of [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s funeral. I remember Netanyahu saying to me: ‘Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone down in history as a failed politician.'”

On Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s office immediately issued a denial, asserting that the conversation Indyk recounted “never happened.”

By Wednesday afternoon, a video of the funeral was circulating on social media, showing Netanyahu, who was head of the opposition at the time, seated next to a number of people, but Indyk was not among them.

His lie now exposed, Indyk instantly took to Twitter to change his story. “The conversation with Bibi took place on Nov 5, 1995 when we sat together at the Knesset ceremony to receive Rabin’s coffin to lie in state,” he tweeted.

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Rubio or Cruz: Who Will Emerge as the Hero of Common Core Moms? By Maggie Gallagher

By on January 8th, 2016

‘Common Core, the set of education standards that were adopted by 46 states five years ago but have since become toxic with the conservative base, has not been at the center of the Republican primary debate, which has so far been dominated by national security and immigration,” according to an article in The Hill just a few weeks ago. How quickly things change.

In the final four weeks before the voting begins, Senator Marco Rubio is making opposition to Common Core a key part of his final pitch, featuring it in a new television ad: “One high-tax, Common Core, liberal-energy-loving, Obamacare Medicaid-expanding president is enough,” the voiceover says.

And in Cedar Rapids a few days ago, Rubio brought Common Core up again: “This country cannot afford a president that’s not going to reverse the direction Barack Obama’s taken our country. We can’t have another president that supports Common Core or gun control or expanding Obamacare.”

It’s a smart move for Rubio, first and foremost because Common Core is an issue that deeply moves voters, especially important in a caucus state such as Iowa. Second, it distinguishes Rubio from Chris Christie, who was an early supporter of Common Core but who has changed his position to oppose it more recently, at least in part.

Common Core is a policy failure as well. The state of Kentucky has been implementing Common Core for four years, the longest of any state, and certainly long enough that one would expect to see some positive results. Instead, Ed Week reports, the proportion of Kentucky elementary and middle-school students who are proficient in reading and math dropped by one-third.

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