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July 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Imran Awan Case Needs Special Counsel 100X More than Russiagate By Roger L Simon

By on July 27th, 2017

Whether it’s Mohammed becoming the most popular baby name, or one in 10 babies in England being Muslim or the fact that halal meat is being served in Pizza Hut, a Muslim story always tends to generate more heat than light. Indeed, Islamophobia is often perpetuated by fear and a sense that Muslims are taking over our jobs, our homes and our lives, thus leading to a polarizing society and the so-called clash of civilizations.

Those words are the lede of a December 2014 opinion piece for CNN entitled “The Muslims Are Coming!’ Why Islamophobia is so dangerous.”

To the embarrassment, more accurately the humiliation, of CNN, Deborah Wasserman Schultz, Nancy Pelosi, not to mention dozens of Democratic congressmen and women — all of whom used the article’s writer for IT help for their government computers — the author, Pakistani-born Imran Awan was arrested Tuesday by the FBI at Dulles Airport for alleged bank fraud. He was trying to flee the country for Qatar. (Yes, that Qatar!)

But that’s just what the shrinks call “the presenting complaint.” There may be a lot more to it — a whole lot more.

At best, Awan is a fraudster who, working with his family, bilked the U.S. taxpayers out of over four million in IT fees and overpriced computer equipment. At worst he’s an agent of Pakistan’s ISI in league with Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, or even ISIS. There are other possibilities in between that are also of a frightening nature, including (although more remote) the mysterious death of Seth Rich.

Hello, what?

To take the worst first, for those who do not know the ISI, if you Google “Which intelligence service is the best in the world?” Pakistan’s ISI is number one, followed by India’s RAW, Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, and MI6. Russia’s FSB doesn’t make the cut. More on the ISI:

After fall of the Soviet Union, the ISI provided strategic support and intelligence to the Afghan Taliban against the Northern Alliance during the civil war in Afghanistan of the 1990s. [2] During more recent times, however, it has come under increasing criticism from both civilian and military circles for not having kept terrorist forces in society in check, especially against harbouring terrorists and acts against military forces, particularly those in neighbouring India. Recent political commentators and journalists, including Seymour Hersh, have noticed how dreaded terrorists like Osama Bin Laden had taken refuge close to military headquarters in Abottabad, Pakistan, and how it would be “impossible for the ISI not to know”.

For years, Imran Awan had access to the secret data and correspondence of many House committees, including foreign affairs. What did he do with it? As I said, that’s the worst case scenario (I guess). But I don’t want to bury my own lede in a welter of ledes, so here it is:

Jeff Sessions should immediately appoint a special counsel in this case whose tentacles are so vast they reach the highest levels of our government. The FBI, working unsupervised, has already been tainted by its heavily-criticized investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, an investigation that actually may turn out to be related to this one. It cannot be trusted to do this by themselves. We need a special counsel. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian application of chutzpah on the Temple Mount By Lev Tsitrin

By on July 27th, 2017

The classic example of chutzpah is to kill one’s parents and then demand clemency in the court on the grounds of being an orphan.

People laugh hearing this example despite its gruesomeness, for no one in his right mind can take it seriously. Yet it is no laughing matter anymore, for recently, Palestinians utilized that very excuse in the court of public opinion.

There is a hill in Jerusalem called by Palestinians the Al-Aqsa compound, by Jews the Temple Mount. After Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the Six-Day War a half-century ago, Israelis and Arabs came up with a simple equilibrium that became the status quo regarding the site: all can visit, but only Muslims can pray there.

Simply put, the status quo is this: the Al-Aqsa compound is a site of Muslim prayer.

On July 14, 2017, three terrorists ran out of it, gunning down two Israeli policemen, and ran back, hoping to escape there. They were shot and killed by the police.

This means that the status quo got changed – by the Palestinians. From the place of prayer, Al-Aqsa was turned into a weapons storage facility and a launchpad for terrorist attacks.

By placing around it metal detectors and surveillance cameras – thus rendering Al-Aqsa unusable for military purposes – Israeli authorities turned the location back into a prayer site.

And yet the Palestinians are unhappy. Instead of being grateful for restoring the status quo, they are accusing Israelis of altering the very status quo they, the Palestinians, themselves murderously altered in the first place, which Israelis restored! Not willing to come back to Al-Aqsa, they cry to heaven, irate at Jewish perfidy!

I don’t think heaven hears them. They are refusing to come pray at Al-Aqsa for several days now, yet somehow the heavens are not falling down.

Perhaps even Allah does not find funny Palestinians’ bizarre claims of victimhood after committing a murder.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

It’s about Sovereignty By Shoshana Bryen

By on July 27th, 2017

The disgusting terror murders of two Israeli policemen (one shot in the back) on the Temple Mount, coupled with the indescribable terror murders of three Israelis (grandfather, father, and aunt) celebrating the birth of a baby at their Sabbath dinner, were met with howls of outrage and threats of retaliatory violence and even religious war –- not by Israelis seeking vengeance, but by Palestinians!

Echoed by Jordanians, al Jazeera, and the UN, Palestinian strongman Mahmoud Abbas claimed he couldn’t be held responsible for escalated violence if Israel maintained the metal detectors on the Temple Mount installed to prevent a recurrence of violence directed at Jews.

Nothing in the Middle East is ever what it looks like. Metal detectors may be metal detectors elsewhere, but on the Temple Mount they are an attack on “Muslim patrimony.” Turkey’s President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan made that clear. “When Israeli soldiers carelessly pollute the grounds of Al-Aqsa with their combat boots by using simple issues as a pretext and then easily spill blood there, the reason [they are able to do that] is we [Muslims] have not done enough to stake our claim over Jerusalem.”

Israel, to the relief — and kind words — of the White House, has removed the metal detectors, but far from resolving the problem, the retreat encouraged Fatah to announce it would “intensify the struggle” because the “campaign for Jerusalem has effectively begun, and will not stop until a Palestinian victory and the release of the holy sites from Israeli occupation.”

Two important issues have to be sorted out here: first, the political and religious rights of Jews in their indigenous space; and second, the right not to be murdered for the “crime” of being Jewish, or Israeli, or non-Jewish and non-Israeli but being in Israel. Among the recent victims of Palestinian terror are Druze Muslim police officers Kamil Shnaan, 22 and Haiel Sitawe, and American Vanderbilt University student and U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force, as well as American and Israeli Jews.

Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people — the restoration of Jewish sovereignty to even part of the historic homeland was prayed for since the end of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and celebrated since 1948. In the 20th century, Jews and Israelis accepted various suggestions and commands for borders of a reconstituted State — everything from the lopping off of 75% of the British Mandate for a Judenrein Arab state (1917) to the split-state Peel Commission Partition Plan (1937) to the British Partition Plan (1938) to the Jewish Agency plan (1946) to the much smaller UN Partition Plan (1947).

The Arab states agreed to none of those and declined to say where Jews might then exercise sovereignty — because there was no such place. The 1949-67 lines were unacceptable and so were the post-67 lines. Israel and the U.S. posited new lines after the Oslo Accords, and in 2008 when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed 93% of the West Bank plus political rights in Jerusalem for the Palestinians (the Gaza Strip already being 100% in Palestinian hands). Mahmoud Abbas said no.

“No” was the necessary answer because the Palestinians agree there is no legitimate place for Jews to exercise sovereign authority. This goes directly to the question of the Temple Mount and metal detectors.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Missing Weapon at Dunkirk By Steve Feinstein

By on July 27th, 2017

Although most people under 40 are astonishingly ignorant about it, a great worldwide armed conflict known as World War II took place from 1939-1945 in the European and Pacific regions. It is relevant and important to know and understand because the outcome of World War II put into place the political, economic and geographical conditions and relationships that make the world what it is today. An understanding of the ramifications of WWII is central to comprehending how today’s world came to be. People under 40—heck, even under 60—would do themselves a huge favor if they learned some history and saw how that history affected today’s world.

The 1939 war in Europe was caused mostly by the consequences of the unresolved complications and volatile conditions that persisted following the end of World War I in 1918. World War I took place from 1914 to 1918 and was a struggle for the control of Europe, primarily between the Germans on one side against the French and British (aided by America after 1917) on the other side. Germany remained particularly unstable in the years after the end of the Great War (as WWI came to be known) and in retrospect, many historians now feel that another war in Europe was inevitable.

The inevitability of another European war after 1918 became reality on Sept. 1, 1939 when Germany turned eastward and attacked Poland. Having built up its military forces in direct contravention to post-WWI treaties, Germany overwhelmed Poland in a matter of a few short weeks, using their newly-developed blitzkrieg tactics. Unlike the ponderous, static, slow-motion trench warfare that dominated World War I, Germany saw the potential of combining fast-moving armored forces with close-support air power (dive bombers and fast low-altitude bombers) to deliver a decisive, overpowering blow to their enemy’s critical targets in the very early stages of the action. (Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics were so successful that the term has now become part of the popular lexicon, meaning any quick, overwhelming action, whether in sports or business or some other endeavor.)

Following a relatively uneventful 1939-1940 winter (a time period that came to be known as the “Phony War”), Germany resumed its hostilities against Europe in the spring of 1940, turning its attention westward. German forces blasted through the “Low Countries” of the Netherlands and Belgium and swung around to invade France from a point behind its main defensive eastern border with Germany. Following World War I, France fortified its eastern border with Germany with a massive wall of concrete and armament called the Maginot Line in an effort to prevent any future invasion by Germany. But Germany attacked the Netherlands and Belgium to the north and west of Germany, through the supposedly impenetrably dense Ardennes forest and then swung into France from behind the Maginot Line. France’s expensive, foolproof defense against German aggression proved to be a worthless folly.

As German forces poured into France, the French military was disoriented, confused and demoralized. Despite having numerical superiority over Germany in planes and equipment, the French utterly failed to mount an effective defense of their homeland. Desperate and panicked, France pleaded with Britain to send men and materiél to their aid.

The British did so, in the form of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), consisting of several hundred thousand troops along with tanks and aircraft. It was a wasted effort, as the British could not buttress the listless and disorganized French forces against the brilliantly trained, highly motivated German army. Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics decimated the allied formations, inflicting severe losses and taking great swaths of French territory.

Sometimes, what might seem to be a small decision at the time can have huge long-range consequences, with repercussions that last decades into the future, even to the point of altering the course of history. Such was the case in the battle for France in May of 1940. British Air Marshal Lord Hugh Dowding made the decision to not send any of Britain’s valuable Spitfire fighter aircraft to France for the fight against the Germans. The Spitfire was generally regarded as the best fighter plane in the world at the time (narrowly edging out Germany’s BF-109). Dowding correctly recognized that Britain would soon be in a one-on-one fight for survival against Germany and any hope Britain had of fighting off the German air force (the Luftwaffe) rested squarely on the shoulders of their small contingent of Spitfires.

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