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December 2017

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THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE DECEMBER 16,1944- JANUARY 25, 1945

By on December 17th, 2017

In late 1944, after the successful Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy, France, many thought that World War 2 in Europe was almost over. On December 16th the Germany launched a final offensive intended to turn the tide for Hiter and Germany. That morning 200,000 German troops and nearly 1,000 tanks attacked and surrounded four exhausted American divisions in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium, Northern France, and Luxembourg. Lt. General George Patton Jr. deployed his Third Army unit to counter attack and thwart the Nazi advance.

American troops slogged through ice and snow in bitter conditions defending crossroads, and sabotaging Nazi gasoline depots. They restored the front and began the final march to victory.On Tuesday, May 8th, 1945 the Germans surrendered.

In that final battle of the Bulge more than 19,000 Americans soldiers died. May God bless their memory.

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Austria: New Government to Resist “Islamization” by Soeren Kern

By on December 17th, 2017

A coalition between the anti-immigration Austrian People’s Party and the anti-establishment Austrian Freedom Party, which will be sworn into office on December 18, is poised to catapult Austria to the vanguard of Western Europe’s resistance to mass migration from the Muslim world.

The massive demographic and religious shift underway in Austria, traditionally a Roman Catholic country, appears irreversible. Austria has also emerged as a major base for radical Islam.

“We have a lot in common [with Israel]. I always say, if one defines the Judeo-Christian West, then Israel represents a kind of border. If Israel fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, Israel fails.” — Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party.

The anti-immigration Austrian People’s Party and the anti-establishment Austrian Freedom Party have reached a deal, creating a new coalition to govern Austria for the next five years. The ground-breaking political alliance, which will be sworn into office on December 18, is poised to catapult Austria to the vanguard of Western Europe’s resistance to mass migration from the Muslim world.

Chancellor-elect Sebastian Kurz, 31, who won Austria’s national election on October 15 after campaigning on a promise to halt illegal immigration, will govern with Heinz-Christian Strache, 48, the Freedom Party leader, who has warned that mass migration is “Islamizing” Austria. Under the agreement, Strache will become the vice-chancellor; the Freedom Party will also take control of the ministries of defense, interior and foreign affairs.

Kurz has been a strong critic of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy, which has allowed more than a million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to enter the country during the past two years.

During his time as foreign minister, Kurz was instrumental in garnering parliamentary approval of a groundbreaking new law that regulates the integration of immigrants. The so-called Integration Law — which bans full-face Muslim veils in public spaces and prohibits Islamic radicals from distributing the Koran — establishes clear rules and responsibilities for recognized asylum seekers and refugees granted legal residence in the country.

The new law requires immigrants from non-EU countries to sign an “integration contract” which obligates them to learn written and spoken German and to enroll in courses about the “basic values of Austria’s legal and social order.” Immigrants are also required to “acquire knowledge of the democratic order and the basic principles derived from it.”

Previously, Kurz was instrumental in reforming Austria’s century-old Islam Law (Islamgesetz), governing the status of Muslims in the country. The new law, passed in February 2015, is aimed at integrating Muslims and fighting Islamic radicalism by promoting an “Islam with an Austrian character.” It also stresses that Austrian law must take precedence over Islamic Sharia law for Muslims living in the country.

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The Jordan Option By Ted Belman

By on December 17th, 2017

There is nothing to stop Jordan from changing its name to Palestine and making Amman its capital city.

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, just tweeted “Jordan=Palestine. So, the capital of Palestine is not Jerusalem but Amman.”

It can’t get any simpler than that.

The primary stumbling block to Israel annexing the land she was promised in the Palestinian Mandate and which she conquered in 1967, Gaza aside, is the fact that 1.6 million Arabs live there. All solutions put forward by the Israeli right take a stab at the problem. They range from offering the Arabs a path to citizenship to incentivizing them to emigrate voluntarily.

Amman, Palestine?

There is great opposition in Israel to the citizenship idea as it would present Israel with an Arab population amounting to 35% of the total population. To have an understanding of how big a problem that would be for Israel, just look at the problems European countries are having with a Muslim minority of only 5 to 10%. Israelis want no part of that nightmare. Paying Arabs to leave is a far more attractive solution.

The leading Israeli voice for offering compensation as an inducement to emigration, is Martin Sherman, the founder of Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He suggests offering $300,000 per family. Such a plan would cost at least $100 billion to get West Bank Arabs to emigrate. This is a mindboggling sum to most Israelis, but Sherman argues that it is affordable.

The Jordan Option represents a different solution, one which would be far less costly to Israel. It requires changing Jordan from a monarchy to a parliamentary democracy.

After the voluntary or forced abdication by King Abdullah, the Jordan Opposition Coalition, (JOC) led by Mudar Zahran, would form the interim government. Given the fact that 75% of Jordanian citizens are Palestinian, i.e., their grandparents were/are Palestinian, this is only fitting. Besides in the last few years, King Abdullah has alienated both U.S. and Israel for different reasons. They now want him out.

New alliances are forming in the Middle East as the feud between Iran and Saudi Arabia heats up. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Egypt are committed to fighting terrorism and the ideology which fuels it. To this end they have banned the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a terrorist organization and have placed sanctions on Qatar who continues to support them and other terrorist organizations.

Jordan hosts the world headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood and its parliament is controlled by both MB and ISIS members.

The King also supports Palestinian resistance to Israel and from time to time encourages them to start an intifada.

As further evidence of the alliances being formed, it is instructive to look at the Islamic Summit held last week in Istanbul. It was organized as a response to President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Eqypt did not attend. Jordan, on the other hand, did and aligned with Iran, Turkey, and Qatar who dominated the discourse.

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I’m Still Strzok by the “Espionage Machine Party” by: Diana West

By on December 17th, 2017

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3652/Im-Still-Strzok-by-the-Espionage-Machine-Party.aspx Out of a reported 10,000 texts between senior, adulterous Justice Department/FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, Strzok’s “insurance policy” text is naturally attracting considerable attention — although noticeably not in the New York Times and assorted media followers who set course by it. Predictably, neither is Peter Strzok’s mention of the “Espionage Machine Party.” Then again, the “Espionage […]

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The Co-Dependents of the “Independent” Counsel by Mark Steyn

By on December 17th, 2017

Ten quick thoughts on the hideously corrupted “Russia investigation”.

1) Let me start with an immigrant’s observation: My sweetly naïve understanding of an “independent counsel” is that he should be “independent”. For example, even in the presently desiccated condition of the Commonwealth, it’s generally understood that, when you’ve got a problem and you want someone independent to investigate it, “independent” means outsider. Three examples off the top of my head:

~Twenty years ago, after the Good Friday Agreement, some guy was supposed to be appointed to supervise the decommissioning of weapons by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Obviously, if he’d been some hoity-toity English civil servant, the IRA would have said nuts to that. Likewise, if he’d been some Papist republican from Derry Town Council, the UVF would have told ’em to shove it. So they appointed a Canadian general, John de Chastelain …because he was an outsider, and thus independent of the competing interests.

~Likewise, in 2003, when various factions in the Solomon Islands risked tearing the joint apart, the guy brought in to sort it out was Australia’s Nick Warner (who steps down this weekend as head of Canberra’s Secret Intelligence Service) …because he was independent of those factions.

~And in 2009, when the Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands was suspended for corruption, it was after an investigation by the English judge Sir Robin Auld …because he was entirely independent of the various local sleazebags.

I appreciate that all the above is easier to do in the remnants of empire than it is in the American system. But there isn’t even the figleaf of “independence” when you appoint a career swamp-dweller like Robert Mueller, a man who has relationships with every player in Washington going back decades. The parade of hacks infesting the cable shows to inform us solemnly that they’ve known Mueller for years and he’s the very apotheosis of a straight shooter is, in fact, the strongest evidence of why he should never have been appointed: he’s the insiders’ insider. When Mueller decided to stage his pre-dawn swoop on Paul Manafort’s bedroom, for example, he was raiding the home of a longtime client of his own law firm, WilmerHale.

2) As for that “straight shooter” guff, as I wrote last year about the previous “eagle scout”:

Conservative commentators assured us that, when it comes to straight arrows, no arrow is straighter than FBI honcho James Comey – non-partisan, career public servant, will follow the evidence whereso’er it leads…

All bollocks. Bollocks on stilts… A 6′ 8″ gummi worm would be more of a straight arrow.

And so it goes with Comey’s successor as Trump’s Javert. My advice is that, whenever lifelong swampers assure us of the integrity of any individual, assume “straight arrow” is Beltway-speak for “slimey duplicitous permanent-state operator” and you can’t go wrong.

3) One of the first things Mueller did was to appoint FBI counter-intelligence honcho Peter Strzok to his “independent” team. He should not have done that. Not because Strzok is a Democrat (presumably almost everyone at the FBI votes either Democrat or Republican), but because Strzok had been a key player in Comey’s Hillary investigation. The investigators’ comparative treatment of the two candidates was already an issue, and the subject of the Russia investigation had already spent the better part of a year denouncing the investigation of his rival as a sham and a disgrace. In effect, Trump had already, without even knowing of the guy’s existence or his Zelig-like ubiquity, questioned Strzok’s integrity. So why appoint him to a second investigation?

4) Furthermore, why similarly appoint his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, to both investigations? The FBI has over 35,000 employees. Yet the same handful of key players are running both the Clinton and Trump cases, even though the latter is supposed to be “independent”. So the same operatives are meeting with MI6 dossier-concocter Christopher Steele, and going to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants, and entrapping Michael Flynn. The appalling Mueller effectively merged the two investigations into one continuous caper run soup to nuts by the same crowd. Phase One: Get Hillary off the hook. Phase Two: Get Trump on it.

5) Just as the Hillary investigation merged with the Trump investigation, so both merged with Fusion GPS, the oppo-research guys working for the Clinton campaign. The conflicts of interest intertwine so thoroughly that they reach up beyond the FBI into the highest reaches of the Department of Justice. At this stage, it would be no surprise to learn that Mueller and Comey had accidentally failed to disclose that they were the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of Fusion GPS. Am I exaggerating? By maybe a hair. This week it emerged that the Associate Deputy Attorney-General, Bruce Ohr, “failed to disclose” that his wife Nellie was working for Fusion GPS.

Oh, really? On the reception desk? As a security guard? No, she was hired by Fusion GPS to do anti-Trump research.

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Tim Blair Nothing to Lose But Your Brains

By on December 17th, 2017

Said the ardent young socialist to the ABC, ‘I was born when the Soviet Union still existed, but I have no memory of it and it doesn’t inform my politics at all.’ It’s frightening to realise how, even with a universe of fact and history just a click away, the stupid are determined to stay that way.

At the internet’s dawn, some felt the universal availability of historical and current information might lead to a golden time of human enlightenment. After all, with so many facts so easily accessed by everyone’s computers—and now their mobile phones—surely we would quickly reach a point of great shared knowledge and understanding.

Interesting theory.

As it turns out, that hopeful notion did not count on a few things. Like the insatiable human capacity for cat videos. And porn. And, for all I know, cat porn (there’s something for everyone on the net). Then there was the problem of disseminating information itself. It soon emerged that misinformation is far more attractive, which goes some of the way to explaining why socialism and communism are again so remarkably popular among the young.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s rise in the UK and Bernie Sanders’s barnstorming 2016 presidential run in the US were both driven by youngsters who are really into this crazy new socialism thing. For them, far-Left concepts of collectivism and centralisation are original and fresh—although they might have taken a clue as to the vintage of these ideas just by looking at Corbyn and Sanders, who respectively pre-date a US flag with fifty stars (by eleven years) and the Partition of India (by six years).

Absent effective father figures of their own, British and American kids have settled on great-grandfather figures instead. In Australia, too, so-called millennials (those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and destined to be paying off student loans from the 2010s until the 2050s) are swinging to socialism. They might be buying iPhone Xs, but they’re partying like it’s 1917.

Appropriately, our own socialist ABC recently provided an online piece revealing just how it is that children of the information age are so incredibly short of information when it comes to political history. These revelations, pegged to the centenary of Russia’s Bolshevik uprising, were clearly not the ABC’s aim.

“The Bolsheviks’ seizure of power from the Russian provisional government 100 years ago, eight months after the overthrow of the tsarist regime, came at a time of food shortages, collapsing infrastructure and disorder,” the piece initially recalled, accurately enough.

“The revolutionaries’ leader, Vladimir Lenin, had built on the communist theories of Karl Marx to offer an alternative to the liberal democracy supported by the Russian middle class.

“For Osmond Chiu, a 31-year-old unionist and member of the Australian Labor Party, this possibility of an alternative to accepted economics is the key legacy of 1917.”

Young Osmond lives in Australia right now, where you can easily bounce from job to job like a pinball, buy a brand new car with coins scratched up from friends’ couches, fly interstate on bonus points and, if you’re Noam Chomsky fan Lisa Wilkinson, demand a $700,000 raise because you’re a girl. Yet he’s somehow drawing primary socio-financial lessons from a turnip-driven economy some 100 years and 15,000 kilometres away.

“Mr Chiu says the sense that the existing system would deliver for most people, including his generation, was shattered by the global financial crisis,” the ABC piece continued.

“Since then, he says, there has been increased interest in socialism among young people, and that thanks to social media and the availability of information on the internet, the term ‘socialist’ is losing some of its Cold War-era stigma.”

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How Much Does the ‘New York Times’ Hate Donald Trump? By Michael Walsh

By on December 17th, 2017

At this point in the first Trump administration, the Left’s derangement at the election of an NOKD outsider is already well into the red zone. Exhibit A:

At one point during the online streaming of the game last month, two white announcers for a Forest City radio station, KIOW, began riffing on the Hispanic names of some players from the mildly more diverse community of Eagle Grove. “They’re all foreigners,” said Orin Harris, a longtime announcer; his partner, Holly Jane Kusserow-Smidt, a board operator at the station who was also a third-grade teacher, answered: “Exactly.”

For some people, this is as American as it gets.

Mr. Harris then uttered a term occasionally used these days as a racially charged taunt, or as a braying assertion that the country is being taken back from forces that threaten it. That term is, simply, the surname of the sitting American president.

No, really: the surname of the sitting president is now racist.

Last year’s contentious presidential election gave oxygen to hate. An analysis of F.B.I. crime data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found a 26 percent increase in bias incidents in the last quarter of 2016 — the heart of the election season — compared with the same period the previous year. The trend has continued into 2017, with the latest partial data for the nation’s five most populous cities showing a 12 percent increase.

In addition, anti-Muslim episodes have nearly doubled since 2014, according to Brian Levin, the director of the center, which he said has also counted more “mega rallies” by white nationalists in the last two years than in the previous 20. “I haven’t seen anything like this during my three decades in the field,” he said.

One might point on that there have been plenty of Muslim anti-Christian episodes since 2014, including the recent attempted suicide bombing in Times Square, which was “provoked” by the sight of Christmas posters. This creature, an “immigrant” from Bangladesh, was kind enough to confess that he tried to kill Real Americans “for the Islamic State.” Of course, he had to taunt Trump:

The Facebook post, published by his account on Monday morning, read: “Trump you failed to protect your nation.”

Maybe the Times will take that into consideration the next time it’s tempted to run an inflammatory headline like this:

‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer

And what would a Times story be without quoting a couple of its favorite Morning Joe “experts”?

According to several scholars of American history, the invocation of a president’s name as a jaw-jutting declaration of exclusion, rather than inclusion, appears to be unprecedented. “If you’re hunting for historical analogies, I think you’re in virgin territory,” said Jon Meacham, the author of several books about presidents, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson.

Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, agrees. “If you’re looking at modern presidents, fill in the blank and see if it can be used in the same way,” he said. “You will see it has not. Hoover? Or Eisenhower? Can you imagine a situation like that?”

Shortly after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes, published a report called “The Trump Effect: The Impact of the 2016 Election on Our Nation’s Schools.” Based on a survey of more than 10,000 educators, it detailed an increase in incidents involving swastikas, Nazi salutes and Confederate flags.

It is a far cry from wearing a button that says “I Like Ike.”

“The message here,” Mr. Beschloss said, “is ‘Trump is going to come and get you — and we support that.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Into the Hands of the Few by Michael Ordman

By on December 17th, 2017

On the Jewish festival of Hanukah, we give thanks for the victory in Jerusalem in 164 BCE of the tiny Jewish army over the mighty Greek-Syrian empire – for deliverance of the many into the hands of the few. Today, we continue to see tiny Israel rise to the massive challenges in the world and we can be inspired by the few.Israel is one of the smallest nations in the world – yet it has a massive positive impact on global health, food and water security, disaster relief and the economies of developing and developed countries. Here are just a few examples from the last three months.

Israel continues to have a significant effect in the fight against cancer. Europe has now approved Weizmann Institute’s breakthrough Tookad prostate cancer treatment that was featured on the BBC back in January. And Israeli biotech Ayala has joined the many Israeli companies developing personalized cancer treatments targeting individuals rather than specific parts of the body.

Having already helped West Africa defeat the Ebola virus, Israel is now running training courses on how to fight epidemics. Meanwhile, as a recent addition to the dozens of Israeli research projects to solve global threat from antibiotic resistance, Hebrew University researchers are calculating optimum treatment procedures to avoid the under / over-treatment of infections.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KaxB3bHuKUY?rel=0

An Israeli-developed space laboratory is currently orbiting our planet on the International Space Station. It allows scientists here on Earth to perform unique medical research by remote control. Back on the ground, Israel’s Regional Cooperation Ministry has been funding surgeons from Israeli charity Save a Child’s Heart to perform life-saving surgery on 500 Kurdish children from Iraq, the PA, Syria and Jordan. So perhaps it is not surprising that Israel Medical Association chairman Professor Leonid Eidelman has been elected President of the World Medical Association (WMA) – an umbrella body representing national medical associations with more than nine million members.

With all the latest tantrums at the United Nations, readers may have missed the recent Israeli resolution promoting the utilizing of agricultural technology for sustainable development. It was passed by the UN Second Committee by 141 to 1. One specific project is that of Israeli companies Evogene and Rahan Meristem which have developed non-GMO bananas resistant to the Black Sigatoka fungus which has been threatening world-wide crops. Finally, I highly recommend this article on Israeli water conservation and this video about Israeli food technologies.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PRKw8Mt101U?rel=0

You probably already know about the IDF rescue unit of 71 specialists that saved lives following the earthquake in Mexico. President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico certainly was grateful. Regarding other disasters, Israeli NGO IsraAID sent an emergency response team to help victims of Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico. And the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with the South African branch of Magen David Adom sent medical aid to Madagascar to help combat what the World Health Organization described as the worst outbreak of bubonic / pneumonic plague in 50 years.

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CNN, WaPo, NYT Ignore Top Democrat’s $220K Sexual Harassment Settlement Peter Hasson

By on December 17th, 2017

CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times have ignored sexual harassment allegations against Democratic Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings, whose alleged sexual harassment of a staffer resulted in a $220,000 taxpayer-funded settlement in 2014.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/15/cnn-wapo-nyt-ignore-top-democrats-220k-sexual-harassment-settlement/

The three outlets have yet to report on the massive settlement to Hastings’ accuser, former committee staffer Winsome Packer, which Roll Call first revealed a week ago on December 8. Packer accused Hastings of making sexual advances, touching her legs and threatening her job. The former staffer said she was “blackballed” for speaking out.

Hastings claimed that he was unaware of the settlement and called the sexual harassment allegations “ludicrous” on Friday.

Two Florida Democrats, Rep. Frederica Wilson and Rep. Lois Frankel, have said they are standing by Hastings, who was cleared by an ethics committee investigation in 2014. Democratic New York Rep. Kathleen Rice previously said that ethics committee investigations are not “real” accountability.

Other Democrats have been able to avoid talking about Hastings’ allegations, thanks to a lack of interest from news organizations like WaPo, the NYT and CNN.

Hastings is one of four congressmen (including three Democrats) who have indicated that they will remain in Congress, despite allegations that they engaged in or covered up sexual harassment or assault.

Democratic New York Rep. Gregory Meeks has similarly avoided scrutiny from the establishment media after The Daily Caller revealed that he allegedly fired a staffer in retaliation after she reported being sexually assaulted at a campaign donor’s business.

Meeks fired the staffer just weeks after she filed a complaint with the Office of Compliance. Meeks admitted that Payne’s firing was unrelated to the quality of her work, according to her lawsuit. The staffer, Andrea Payne, settled with Congress in 2006 after suing over her firing.

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Growing Evidence Of A Politically Tainted Clinton Investigation Peter Hasson

By on December 17th, 2017

A series of new revelations about the FBI under James Comey has provided more evidence that partisan agents may have abused their agency positions for political purposes during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and 2016 presidential campaign.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/14/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-peter-strz

Top FBI agent Peter Strzok, the public now knows, was removed from the Mueller investigation after a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (IG) investigation revealed damning text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The messages show Strzok and Page praising Clinton, discussing whether Strzok could use his position to protect the country from Donald Trump — whom they described as “that menace” — and referring to an unnamed “insurance policy” in case Trump beat Clinton.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” Strzok said of Trump in one message to Page. “Andy” referred to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has close ties to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Strzok is reported to be the agent who officially signed into existence the Russia investigation that now plagues the Trump administration.

During the Clinton investigation, Strzok led the interviews of top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin — neither of whom faced consequences for making false statements in those interviews.

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