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January 2017

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scare Pollution: A Review By Charles Battig

By on January 14th, 2017

Steve Milloy is one persistent gentleman. Combining his legal and statistical education, he has spent most of his years ferreting out the false use of statistical techniques in the field of epidemiology. He continues the same quest in his latest book Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA (2016) Bench Press. This is his sixth such book since Science-Based Risk Assessment: A Piece of the Superfund Puzzle (1995).

Just what is epidemiology? One definition: “the science concerned with the study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of disease, injury, and other health-related events and their causes in a defined human population for the purpose of establishing programs to prevent and control their development and spread.” Milloy notes that “The key to the value of epidemiology as an investigative tool is that a researcher must be looking for a relatively high rate of a relatively rare event in a human population… Epidemiologic results are essentially correlations and, as we all learn in Statistics 101, correlations do not equate to causation.” The “devil is in the details” aphorism comes to life as Milloy exposes the EPA’s use of any minute level of correlation as evidence of statistically significant correlation to justify its definition of Clean Air standards.

Milloy’s latest book documents his multiple attempts in multiple formats to hold the EPA to basic standards of ethical epidemiologic theory and practice. His book details the quixotic nature of that quest.

An executive order by President Richard Nixon in 1970 unified federal environmental activities into a single new organization, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Though the EPA was never officially organized by Congress as a presidential cabinet-level department, Nixon’s new federal bureaucracy undertook the writing and implementation of Clean Air Act (1970) laws. This unique status of the EPA as an all-powerful federal agency lacking cabinet-level status continues to the present. It has developed itself into a self-perpetuating rogue agency which defies congressional oversight attempts, as Milloy documents. From its $1 billion annual budget and 4,000 employees in 1970, the EPA expanded into a $6 billion annual budget with 16,000 employees by 1991.

Milloy began working on a variety of environmental issues involving the EPA in 1990. However, his quest for truth in statistics in identifying such impacts on human health has identified one issue at the top of the pile of EPA “malfeasance” actions. That is the matter of air quality standards.

Milloy: “When EPA began regulating PM in 1971, it regulated relatively large pieces of dust and soot that were anywhere from 25 to 45 millionths of a meter (one to two thousandths of an inch) in diameter. In 1987, EPA revised its rules to focus on smaller bits of dust and soot that were 10 millionths of a meter in diameter (about half the width of a human hair) — so-called PM10 (pronounced P-M-ten). In November 1996 under Administrator Browner, EPA proposed to regulate even smaller bits of dust and soot, particles that were 2.5 millionths of a meter in width — so-called PM2.5 (pronounced P-M-two-point-five).

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Dr. Kenneth Levin :The Radical-in-Chief’s war on Israel ensues unabated.

By on January 14th, 2017

At the Camp David talks in July, 2000 hosted by President Clinton, Yasser Arafat rejected the proposals for a final status agreement put forward by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and offering Arafat virtually all the territories beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines. He rejected as well Clinton’s suggested amendments to Barak’s offer. Nor did Arafat submit any alternative proposals.

The reason for Arafat’s tack was not difficult to discern for anyone who had been paying attention to what the Palestinian leader had been saying and doing since the inception of the Oslo Accords in 1993. It was not that he was unwilling to take control of more territory and add to the forty percent of the West Bank and most of Gaza already handed him by Israel. Rather, the problem for Arafat was that the Camp David talks were cast as “end of conflict” negotiations. It was understood that any territorial agreement would be accompanied by Arafat signing away all further Palestinian claims against Israel, and this was something Arafat had no intention of doing.

Arafat had made clear his goals for the Oslo process at its very inception. On the night of the signing of the initial Oslo agreements on the White House lawn in September, 1993, he was on Jordanian television from Washington explaining to his fellow Palestinians and to the wider Arab world that Oslo was the first phase of the Palestine National Council’s 1974 program. This was a reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, according to which the Palestine Liberation Organization would acquire whatever territory it could gain by negotiations, then use that land as a base for pursuing its ultimate goal of Israel’s destruction. Arafat made at least a dozen references to this perception of Oslo within a month of that broadcast, and he and his associates referred to it many times thereafter. Once established in Gaza in July, 1994, Arafat also became involved in promoting the increased terror to which Israel was subjected in the ensuing months.

In the wake of abandoning Camp David, Arafat undertook a two-pronged strategy to advance his objectives. He unleashed a still more intense, indeed unprecedented, terror war against Israel, both to weaken Israeli resolve and, potentially, to win world sympathy as Israel’s response, against assailants imbedded within the Palestinian civilian population, would inevitably – he anticipated – cause large-scale civilian casualties.

He also undertook a diplomatic campaign to win international, particularly European, support for recognition of all lands beyond the pre-1967 lines as “Palestine”; in effect, granting it all to the Palestinians without the bilateral negotiations and agreements called for in the Oslo accords and without the Palestinians having to foreswear future, additional claims against Israel culminating ultimately in her dissolution.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Homeland,’ Season 6 Review: A Politically Correct Carrie Gone is the series’ original vitality, replaced with predictable politeness.By Dorothy Rabinowitz

By on January 14th, 2017

It’s a far from familiar Carrie, bipolar scourge of terrorists, who shows up in season 6 of “Homeland,’’ set in that destination strivers around the world dream of living in—namely, Brooklyn. She’s there having abandoned any further service to the CIA, because—she makes clear in the show’s opening episodes—she’s become increasingly dismayed by America’s policies in the Middle East. Not to mention at home, where she’s appalled to discover that the U.S government has been taking the threat of homegrown terrorism seriously and going so far as to investigate enthusiasts of jihad, creators of websites for the dissemination of messages from Islamic State, devotees of suicide bombers, and even charging some suspected of connection with terror networks abroad.

So it is that we find an even more chronically infuriated Carrie than the one of previous seasons. Instead of chasing around the capitals of the world hunting down terrorists about to set off explosions intended to take the lives of tens of thousands of unbelievers, she’s now spending her days in her Brooklyn offices devoted to legal defense of Muslim males she considers unjustly charged victims of the U.S. government. Unjustly charged in many ways, in Carrie’s view—the most remarkable aspect of which is her complaint that the government investigators aiming to prevent the next mass murder of Americans never stopped to consider the emotional factors driving these subjects, or to take into account the fact that the efforts of some of the would-be perpetrators bent on grand-scale terror assaults turned out to be ineffectual anyway. It’s around about this point in her reasoning that you begin to miss the other Carrie who used to pop pills by the handful, and to wish she’d go and find that bottle she used to keep handy.

In episode 1, awash in introductions to Carrie’s new views, she’s furious about the fate of one man convicted of trying to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, using a blowtorch. “He’s doing 20 years essentially for being an idiot,” she broods. She goes into action in the case of a young Muslim, of Nigerian background, arrested as an online fan of jihadists and celebrator of suicide bombers, with a busy website—a possible material supporter of terror networks abroad. But in Carrie’s assessment, “just an angry kid.” In the unlikely event anybody has, within the first five minutes, not grasped the re-education mission of the series’ new season, the writers once given to obliqueness in the interest of mystery and style have Carrie hammering the messaging home. “Law enforcement,” Carrie declaims, “has to stop harassing and demonizing an entire community.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Climate Intelligence Agency Democratic CO2 obsessions reach new comic heights.

By on January 14th, 2017

Democrats must have concluded that climate change will defeat Donald Trump’s nominees, or perhaps the subject’s omnipresence at the confirmation hearings merely reflects their own political preoccupations, or their rich donors’. Whatever the reason, no job is too irrelevant for global warming to intrude.

Perhaps you think Mr. Trump named Mike Pompeo to the Central Intelligence Agency because of his spycraft expertise, or to defeat terror groups. Kamala Harris has other ideas. The new California Senator burned her question time on Thursday cross-examining Mr. Pompeo about “the scientific consensus” on global warming.

Citing NASA and “most of the leading scientific organizations world-wide,” Ms. Harris repeatedly asked about the human contribution to climate trends. “Do you have any reason to doubt NASA’s findings?” Mr. Pompeo replied that “I, frankly, as the director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science. It just seems—my role is going to be so different.”

When Ms. Harris kept pressing, Mr. Pompeo dryly replied, “I do know the agency’s role. Its role is to collect foreign intelligence.”

Meanwhile, in a nine-page questionnaire to Ben Carson, who is being sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Elizabeth Warren wanted to learn what the doctor thought about “C0 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,” because extreme weather like flooding poses “a significant risk to public housing.”

“What other actions will you take to adapt to or prevent climate change while you are HUD Secretary?” Ms. Warren wondered. Maybe Dr. Carson’s tenure will be the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.

At least Rex Tillerson would have some relation to climate policy at the State Department, such as the Paris carbon deal. But Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wanted to know about the mountain pine beetle, an invasive forest species he claimed was expanding as a result of warming.

Mr. Tillerson called warming a “serious risk” and added that “the facts on the ground are indisputable in terms of what’s happening with drought, disease, uh, insects, all the things you cite,” though he also mentioned “uncertainty” about the scientific models and the economic cost of a response. That was too much for Mr. Merkley, who said he’d oppose the nomination.

The real meltdown is scheduled for next week, when Scott Pruitt will be grilled about leading the Environmental Protection Agency. Washington’s Patty Murray has called the Oklahoma Attorney General “a climate change denier,” New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen claimed the nomination was “a capitulation to polluters,” and Bernie Sanders said on CNN that “it is rather ironic that Mr. Trump has nominated somebody to head the EPA who doesn’t much believe in environmental protection.”

Mr. Pruitt has a scrappy legal background, including a constitutional challenge to the EPA’s abusive Clean Power Plan, but the real irony is that his environmental record, as traditionally understood, is strong. As AG, he negotiated a state compact with Arkansas to clean up phosphorous pollution in the Illinois River, lobbied for the federal 2016 Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, and sued poultry farms that didn’t control waste runoff as well as oil companies with leaking underground storage tanks.

That these achievements no longer count as environmental protection shows how far the progressive carbon panic has gone.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump May Herald a New Political Order Seldom does a presidential election mark a permanent shift. The last time it happened was 1932. By John Steele Gordon

By on January 14th, 2017

For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.

Denied the presidency in 1824 by what he called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson swept to a landslide four years later. He was the first president from west of the Appalachians—indeed, the first from anywhere other than Virginia or Massachusetts. Born dirt-poor, Jackson was also the first president to rise to affluence solely by his own effort.

It soon became clear that the country had entered a new political era. “Jacksonian democracy” moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.

Jackson created the modern Democratic Party, and the intense opposition to his policies coalesced into the Whig Party, establishing the two-party norm that prevails to this day. No wonder the great 19th-century American historian George Bancroft considered Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers.

The next great shift came with Abraham Lincoln. By the 1850s, slavery had become the dominant issue in American politics. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an expressly abolitionist party, grew rapidly as the Whigs collapsed. When Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the presidency in 1860, the Union quickly came apart. South Carolina seceded barely a month after the election. Six more states were gone by Feb. 1, 1861, with a month still to go before Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration.

It would take the greatest war in American history to reunite the country. By the time the Civil War was over, the nation had been transformed. The South, impoverished and politically crippled, would be effectively a Third World country inside a First World one for 100 years. The North, with its rapidly expanding industry and growing population, was politically dominant. More than half the antebellum presidents had been Southern. In the century after the war ended, only two Southerners were elected to the White House: Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native who made his career in New Jersey, and Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson.

Presidential elections in the decades after the Civil War tended to be close. Grover Cleveland barely beat James G. Blaine in 1884. Four years later, Cleveland earned a popular-vote plurality while losing to Benjamin Harrison. In an 1892 rematch, Cleveland narrowly beat Harrison, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms.

But William McKinley’s decisive victory in 1896 marked the dawn of an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than a generation. McKinley ran on a platform of “Sound Money, Protection, and Prosperity,” a doctrine that suited the interests of the nation’s fast-rising affluent classes. His opponent, the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, was one of the great orators of American politics. Bryan railed against the gold standard and called for an inflationary monetary policy, which would have benefited debtors, including most farmers in the West and South.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: A Strategy of Lies and Deception by Bassam Tawil

By on January 14th, 2017

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations.

Abbas’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow….Indeed, Abbas had “earlier” voiced his readiness to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. But Abbas once again outlined his preconditions for such a summit… This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat’s announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict Israel as the party opposed to the resumption of the peace talks.

Abbas has in the past reluctantly condemned some of the terror attacks against Israel. But these statements were made under duress, after being pressured by the US or EU.

In fact, his “condemnations” are nothing but political pablum, a sop to the West.

The Palestinian terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of young Israeli soldiers last week was doing exactly what his president urged Palestinians to do.

The Germans and French should not believe Abbas when he says that he condemns truck terror attacks in their countries. The scenes of Palestinians celebrating carnage in Jerusalem should serve as a wake-up call to the international community. The message of the call? That the overall Palestinian strategy – like the jihad strategy – is built on lies. Both continue to feature terror as one their main pillars.

What members of the international community do not seem to understand is that… [t]he terrorist who rammed his truck into a German Christmas market did not carry out his attack in outrage at a German settlement or a checkpoint. The terrorist who mowed down French people celebrating Bastille day was not protesting French “occupation.” Abbas and his cohorts, like the terrorists in Europe, are part of just one big global jihad against all “infidels” – including them.

The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, still believe that they can fool all of the people all of the time. This has always been the Palestinian strategy: nothing new here. Yet one likes to think that world leaders and decision-makers in the West will eventually – perhaps today? – wake up to the fact that the Palestinians are playing them for fools.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary’s E-mails and the Justice Department The DOJ Inspector General’s review will focus on the FBI, not DOJ. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 13th, 2017

The Justice Department’s inspector general has announced that his office will conduct a review that will focus principally on FBI director James Comey’s public statements regarding the Clinton e-mails investigation during the 2016 campaign.

These were the three highly unusual announcements describing the status of the investigation in which no charges were filed: (1) the detailed presentation on July 5 of: the evidence uncovered against Hillary Clinton, a legal analysis of the applicable criminal statute, Comey’s determination that an indictment was not warranted, and his opinion that no reasonable prosecutor could disagree with his assessment; (2) the October 28 letter to Congress indicating that the Clinton e-mails case was being reopened owing to newly discovered evidence (derived from the separate investigation of disgraced former representative Anthony Weiner [D., N.Y.], and specifically from a computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin); and, finally, (3) the announcement on November 6 – virtually the eve of the election – reaffirming Comey’s decision (announced July 5) not to seek an indictment.

It is undoubtedly appropriate for Michael Horowitz, DOJ’s inspector general, to consider whether these actions departed from law-enforcement protocols – as I have previously explained. But it is worth noting what the IG will not be reviewing: the Justice Department’s conduct.

The IG’s press release makes no mention of the Justice Department’s decision not to open a grand-jury investigation, despite significant concrete evidence of criminal wrongdoing – the decision that deprived the FBI of the use of subpoenas to compel the production of evidence. Neither will the IG be reviewing the multiple irregular immunity agreements granted by the Justice Department in a case in which no criminal charges were filed, including agreements that reportedly called for the destruction of evidence (laptop computers of top Clinton aides) after a strangely limited examination of their potentially incriminating contents.

There will similarly be no inquiry into why the Justice Department allowed subjects of the investigation (who had been granted immunity from prosecution) to appear as lawyers for the main subject of the investigation – despite ethical and statutory prohibitions on such conduct. Nor, evidently, will the IG be probing why the attorney general furtively met with the spouse of the main subject of the investigation – the spouse who just happens to be the president who launched the attorney general to national prominence by appointing her as a district U.S. attorney in the Nineties – on an airport tarmac just days before Mrs. Clinton submitted to a perfunctory FBI interview, after which came Comey’s announcement that charges would not be filed.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama’s Transparent Presidency: Caroline Glick

By on January 13th, 2017

Obama and his followers in the US and around the world refuse to see the connection between the policies borne of that ideology and their destructive consequences.

President Barack Obama promised that his would be the most transparent administration in US history.

And the truth is, it was. At least in relation to his policies toward the Muslim world, Obama told us precisely what he intended to do and then he did it.

A mere week remains of Obama’s tenure in office.

But Obama remains intent on carrying on as if he will never leave power. He has pledged to continue to implement his goals for the next week and then to serve as the most outspoken ex-president in US history.

In all of Obama’s recent appearances, his message is one of vindication. I came. I succeeded. I will continue to succeed. I represent the good people, the people of tomorrow. My opponents represent the Manichean, backward past. We will fight them forever and we will prevail.

Tuesday Obama gave his final interview to the Israeli media to Ilana Dayan from Channel 2’s Uvda news magazine. Dayan usually tries to come off as an intellectual. On Tuesday’s show, she cast aside professionalism however, and succumbed to her inner teenybopper. Among her other questions, she asked Obama the secret to his preternatural ability to touch people’s souls.

The only significant exchange in their conversation came when Dayan asked Obama about the speech he gave on June 4, 2009, in Cairo. Does he still stand by all the things he said in that speech? Would he give that speech again today, given all that has since happened in the region, she asked.

Absolutely, Obama responded.

The speech, he insisted was “aspirational” rather than programmatic. And the aspirations that he expressed in that address were correct.

If Dayan had been able to put aside her hero worship for a moment, she would have stopped Obama right then and there. His claim was preposterous.

But, given her decision to expose herself as a slobbering groupie, Dayan let it slide.

To salvage the good name of the journalism, and more important, to understand Obama’s actual record and its consequences, it is critical however to return to that speech.

Obama’s speech at Cairo University was the most important speech of his presidency. In it he laid out both his “aspirational” vision of relations between the West and the Islamic world and his plans for implementing his vision. The fundamentally transformed world he will leave President-elect Donald Trump to contend with next Friday was transformed on the basis of that speech.

Obama’s address that day at Cairo University lasted for nearly an hour. In the first half he set out his framework for understanding the nature of the US’s relations with the Muslim world and the relationship between the Western world and Islam more generally. He also expressed his vision for how that relationship should change.

The US-led West he explained had sinned against the Muslim world through colonialism and racism.

It needed to make amends for its past and make Muslims feel comfortable and respected, particularly female Muslims, covered from head to toe.

As for the Muslims, well, September 11 was wrong but didn’t reflect the truth of Islam, which is extraordinary. Obama thrice praised “the Holy Koran.” He quoted it admiringly. He waxed poetic in his appreciation for all the great contributions Islamic civilization has made to the world – he even made up a few. And he insisted falsely that Islam has always been a significant part of the American experience.

In his dichotomy between two human paths – the West’s and Islam’s – although he faulted the records of both, Obama judged the US and the West more harshly than Islam.

In the second half of his address, Obama detailed his plans for changing the West’s relations with Islam in a manner that reflected the true natures of both.

In hindsight, it is clear that during the seven and a half years of his presidency that followed that speech, all of Obama’s actions involved implementing the policy blueprint he laid out in Cairo.

He never deviated from the course he spelled out.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama Feeds Cuba’s Firing Squads The Radical-in-Chief kills hope for Cubans fleeing their totalitarian hellhole. Matthew Vadum

By on January 13th, 2017

As a final sop to his friends and fans in Communist Cuba, President Obama yesterday abruptly ended the two decade-old compassionate immigration policy that allowed any Cuban who made it to U.S. soil to remain in this country and become a legal resident.

This middle finger to the Cuban community is likely part of a series of last-minute policy changes Obama makes on his way out of office. In addition to an expected avalanche of eleventh-hour executive orders and regulations, media reports indicate the White House is seriously considering commuting the 35-year prison term handed out to traitor Bradley Manning for leaking classified documents. Other possible clemency recipients include Hillary Clinton, Bowe Bergdahl, Edward Snowden, and terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as the Blind Sheikh.

Cubans remain desperate to escape their miserable, impoverished nation and get into the United States. Since October 2012, more than 118,000 Cubans have shown up at border ports of entry, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The 118,000 figure includes more than 48,000 people who presented themselves at the border between October 2015 and November 2016.

Obama moved after reportedly reaching an agreement with Cuban officials Thursday.

Cuban officials praised Obama’s action, calling the new agreement “an important step in advancing relations” between the U.S. and Cuba that “aims to guarantee normal, safe and ordered migration.” Ordered migration is apparently a Cuban euphemism for no migration.

“For this to work, the Cubans had to agree to take people back,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser who both lied about the loophole-ridden Iranian nuclear nonproliferation pact and worked with journalists to generate fake news stories about it to win support for it.

Fleeing Cuba is a crime. Whether the Cubans sent back to Cuba under Obama’s new fiat will be tortured, jailed, or executed is an open question but not one that Obama cares about.

After all, Cuba can’t afford to be losing the native-born slaves that it needs to feed its precarious economy and move forward, Rhodes may as well have argued.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Return of Islam’s Child-Soldiers Kidnapped, enslaved, beat, and indoctrinated in Islam. Raymond Ibrahim

By on January 13th, 2017

Past and present, Muslim militants continue relying on the same inhumane tactics to terrorize “infidels.” The devastating effects of one of these occurred last August in Turkey: a child “recruited” by the Islamic State blew himself up in a suicide attack that left at least 51 people—mostly fellow children—dead.

This child was one of countless, nameless, faceless children seized, beat, and indoctrinated in Islam, until they become willing “martyrs” and executioners. Known as the “cubs of the caliphate,” they are graduates from “schools [established by ISIS] to prepare hundreds of children and teenagers to conduct suicide attacks.” The Islamic State is fond of showcasing these abducted children turned criminals.

A few days ago, it posted a video of its “cubs,” most who appear to be about 10 years of age, walking around an abandoned amusement park, where they savagely execute hostages tied to rides. One child, reportedly only four years old, shoots five rounds into a tied up victim while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” Another little boy slits the throat of his victim next to a kiddie train before planting the knife in his back. Last November ISIS posted another video of four children—one Russian, one Uzbek, and two Iraqis, aged between 10 to14—executing civilians.

One Christian clergyman explained the Islamic State’s strategy: “They dislocate the families, they take the newborn babies, and they put them in Islamist families,” where they are indoctrinated in jihad, or what is called in the West, “terrorist activities.”

Children who managed to escape ISIS say they were repeatedly beat and fed “endless propaganda,” including that they must kill their non-Muslim parents: “We weren’t allowed to cry but I would think about my mother, think about her worrying about me and I’d try and cry quietly,” one little boy said.

Seizing and indoctrinating children for the jihad is hardly limited to ISIS. Over the last three years, Boko Haram, the Islamic jihadi group terrorizing Nigeria, has kidnapped, enslaved, beat and indoctrinated more than 10,000 boys—some as young as 5 years of age, and many from Christian backgrounds—into becoming jihadis/terrorists.

“They told us, ‘It’s all right for you to kill and slaughter even your parents,’” said a former captive who witnessed a beheading on the day he was enslaved. Other boys held down the victim and explained: “This is what you have to do to get to heaven.”

Girls were kept in a separate camp and raped, often by captive boys, as a way to show the latter the boons of becoming warriors for Allah (the deity that permits his slaves to enslave and rape “infidel” women). An escaped girl, Rachel, now 13 and pregnant by rape, told of how dozens of boys from her village tied up a kidnapped man and beheaded him. They told the younger children watching not to “have feelings about it.” “If you go there [Boko Haram training camps], you can see 12-year-olds talking about burning down a village,” said another escaped girl, adding “They have converted.”

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