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November 2018

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Return of the Taliban Five Another legacy item for the ex-Radical-in-Chief.

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271930/return-taliban-five-lloyd-billingsley

In the run-up to the November election, five Taliban commanders freed from Guantanamo in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl rejoined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar. That development calls for a look at the back story.

“One big concern is that the U.S. will be releasing five Taliban commanders in exchange for Bergdahl,” the Washington Post explained in 2014. “So who are these men? And what might they do when released?” The Post weighed in on both counts.

Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhw helped to create the Taliban movement in 1994 and once served as its interior minister. According to his Guantanamo case file, he was known to have close ties to Osama Bin Laden of al Qaeda, prime mover of the 9/11 attacks.

Mullah Mohammad Fazl had served as a senior commander in the Taliban army during the 1990s, rising to chief of staff. He likely supervised the killing of thousands of Shiite Muslims near Kabul and was present during a prison riot that claimed CIA operative Johnny Spann. According to his file, if released Fazl would likely rejoin the Taliban and resume hostilities against the United States and coalition forces.

Mullah Norullah Noori was one of the Taliban’s provincial governors and rumored to be a player in the massacre of Shiites. According to his file, he is a significant figure who encourages acts of aggression.

Abdul Haz Wasiq, deputy intelligence chief for the Taliban, used his office to support al Qaeda. Wasiz also forged alliances between the Taliban and other Islamic militants.

For his part, Mohammed Nabi Omari was a member of a joint al Qaeda-Taliban cell, and one of the most significant Taliban leaders detained at Guantanamo. All five Taliban bosses were high risk and posed considerable threat to the United States and its allies. Even so, POTUS 44 pushed for their release, which came as a surprise to Senate Intelligence Committee boss Dianne Feinstein, a left-leaning San Francisco Democrat.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Presidential Proclamation Addresses Massive Illegal ‘Migrant’ Caravan A dire national security threat.Michael Cutler

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271910/presidential-proclamation-addresses-massive-michael-cutler

The United States is about to be inundated with thousands of foreign nationals heading up through Latin America to the U.S./Mexico border. The media, nearly unanimously, have described them all as “migrants” purportedly fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries in Central America. The President, however, has stated that among them are criminals and individuals from other than Latin America.

President Trump is determined to discourage as many of these individuals from entering the United States illegally as a matter of national security.

As I have noted in previous articles about this “Caravan of Migrants,” talk show hosts and others have blatantly accused the President of being a liar who does not care about poor migrants. Of course, they are blithely ignoring that the President has access to intelligence that is not made available to anyone else.

They have also failed to make any effort to do a bit of research, to determine if perhaps there is evidence that is available in the public domain that would support Trump’s assertions.

My article “Trump Connects The Dots On Dangers Of Illegal Immigration” contains compelling evidence about the potential for Iranian involvement in large-scale human trafficking and hence the potential that they and other adversaries of the United States would be eager to inundate the United States with huge numbers of aliens that would overwhelm the already beleaguered immigration system.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

A Melancholy Centennial, by S. Trifkovic

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/a-melancholy-centennial-/
After four years and three months of unprecedented carnage, the Great War—the most catastrophic event in all of history—ended one hundred years ago, on November 11, 1918. That war destroyed an effervescent civilization, unmatched in its fruits and vigor. A decent and on the whole well-ordered world was wrecked for ever, thrown into the abyss in which we live now.

“The summer was more wonderful than ever and promised to become even more so, and we all looked out on the world without any cares,” Stefan Zweig wrote long after it was all over. “That last day in Baden I remember walking over the vine-clad hills with a friend and an old vine-grower saying to us: ‘We haven’t had a summer like this for a long time. If this weather continues this year’s wine is going to be beyond compare. People will always remember the summer of 1914.’”

We will always remember that summer indeed, and not for the exquisite Spätburgunder. The final verses of Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV summed it up:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

On the centennial of the Armistice, it is not uncommon to hear, from poorly educated members of the postpodern commentariat, the assertion that the Guns of August were the result of unintended blunders in various courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries. In what passes for the academe these days, one notable example is Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwakers, an audaciously revisionist whitewash of the Central Powers published in 2014. Clark rehashes the old claim that the decision-makers were swept into a maelstrom by malevolent forces beyond their control. The European balance was supposedly so volatile that two shots fired by a young Serb in Sarajevo could fatally disrupt it, with a revanchist France and an ever-malevolent Russia goading the hapless Kaiser and his officials into a trap.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

MOST HAMAS ROCKET ATTACKS EVER IN A SINGLE DAY TOM GROSS

By on November 13th, 2018

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001807.html

Yesterday at least 20 Israelis were injured in the largest ever number of rocket attacks in a single day by the Hamas terror organization. And yet there has been very little reporting of this in the international media, and even where there has been coverage it has often been inaccurate. (Serious reporting will only start when Israel finally starts to defend itself, in order to then portray Hamas as the victims.)

Over 400 rockets have been fired into Israel in the last 24 hours. Houses, buses and shops have been hit all over southern Israel. One man was killed by a rocket that partially destroyed an apartment building. An Israeli 19-year-old is in critical condition. Other Israeli children were injured as rockets slammed into homes. An elderly woman was also seriously injured. One dog in Israel died of injuries from a Hamas rocket. Prime Minister Netanyahu is being criticized in Israel for his weak response.

Israeli casualties have not been far higher, thanks to the technologically amazing Iron Dome system shooting down many incoming rockets and people sheltering in underground bomb shelters. Schools in southern Israel are closed today as children are being told to stay in bomb shelters.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mullah Terror in Europe Why Europe should heed Trump’s counsel. Joseph Puder

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271899/mullah-terror-europe-joseph-puder

The Trump administration has been urging its European allies to adopt a tougher stance on Iran, emphasizing in particular the Islamic Republic’s terrorism on European soil. To corroborate the administration’s point, on October 30, 2018, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) announced that a Norwegian nationalized citizen of Iranian decent was arrested on suspicion of attempting the assassination of Iranian Arab separatists.

Lest we forget, the Iranian regime has masterminded and carried out the destruction of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, on March 17, 1992, as well as the Jewish Community Center called Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) on July 18, 1994, in the same city. The embassy bombing took the lives of 29 people and injured 250, including Israeli diplomats, children and clergy from a nearby church. The AMIA bombing killed 87 people and over 100 were injured. In 1998, an intercepted call from the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires proved conclusively that Iran was involved in the bombing. In 2006, Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused top Iranian officials of orchestrating the bombings in Argentina’s capital. Nisman, an Argentinian Jew, was murdered on January 15, 2015. It is more than likely that the Iranian regime had a hand in it.

While Iranian terror is worldwide, Tehran’s operations in Europe at a time when the Ayatollah regime seeks European help in thwarting U.S. sanctions is most revealing. Weakened by internal dissent, it has resorted to assassinations which reveals the murderous nature of the regime. The target this time for the Iranian regime was the exiled leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA). According to Israeli media reports, the Mossad (Israel’s Intelligence agency) provided information to Denmark’s PET on the plot that helped prevent the assassination attempt.

Denmark, however, was not the only target for Iran’s murderous regime. The BBC News headline on October 2, 2018, proclaimed “France Blames Iran for Foiled Paris Bomb Plot.” According to the BBC, “On June 30th, Iranian opposition supporters gathered in Paris for a meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Guests included U.S. politicians Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, and Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer. The NCRI is considered to be the political arm of dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which Iran has designated as a terrorist organization. It later emerged that two Belgian nationals of Iranian origin – a husband and wife known as Amir A. and Nasimeh N. – had been arrested by Belgian police in possession of half a kilogram (1.1lb) of explosives and a detonator.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe opting for submission to Islam By Alex Alexiev

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/europe_opting_for_submission_to_islam.html

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939. “Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

The gist of Merkel’s speech was less about the commemoration of a dreadful historical event than a warning of the new wave of virulent anti-Semitism washing across Western Europe and assuming pandemic proportions in Muslim diaspora communities. For this, she should be congratulated, though she was less than candid in forgetting to mention that a good part of this explosion of anti-Semitism was caused by her in letting in two million mostly Muslim migrants, who get their anti-Semitism with their mothers milk. Nor did she mention that she had done her level best to perpetuate her awful policies by trying to force Eastern Europe to take migrants who have proven unwilling to integrate. Though Merkel is on her way out, it won’t be long before synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany will have to be guarded by soldiers, as they already are in France.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Hanging Chads, the Sequel The Democrat who won the 2008 recount for Al Franken is in Florida.

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanging-chads-the-sequel-1542068804

Florida’s Secretary of State on Saturday announced statewide recounts in the elections for Senate and Governor, but don’t think this ends the counting if Republicans Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis continue to lead. Democrats have dispatched their prize election litigator Marc Elias to the state, so look for this to go as far as his lawsuits will take them.

After Florida’s 67 counties submitted unofficial results Saturday, Mr. Scott led Democratic Senator Bill Nelson by about 12,600 votes and Mr. DeSantis led Andrew Gillum by some 33,600. Those margins are under 0.5% of total votes cast, triggering an automatic machine recount under Florida law.

This isn’t likely to change the outcome. The nonprofit FairVote—which supports structural voting changes—analyzed 4,687 statewide elections between 2000 and 2015. There were 27 statewide recounts and only three resulted in an election reversal—Democrat Al Franken’s 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, a 2006 auditor race in Vermont, and Washington’s gubernatorial contest in 2004. The recounts resulted in an average change in the margin between the two lead candidates of 282 votes.

Florida’s infamous presidential recount in 2000 backs up these findings. George W. Bush ended election night 1,784 votes ahead of Al Gore. An automatic recount dropped that lead to 327 votes. Even after Democratic shenanigans involving selective hand recounts, Mr. Bush ended with a 537 vote lead. Florida still used punchcard ballots in 2000 while today it mostly uses electronic voting systems.

This explains why Mr. Elias is talking up what he calls an “undervote” in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold where some 25,000 more votes were cast for Governor than for Senate. Mr. Elias claims that a “tabulation” error is denying Mr. Nelson thousands of votes.

The undervote is more likely the result of poor ballot design. The box for the Senate race was on the bottom left corner of Broward ballots, underneath the voting instructions—which may have confused some voters. The Tampa Bay Times reports that MIT political scientist Charles Stewart III found that “the Broward undervoting rate was about the same for early voting, vote by mail and Election Day voting—which would seem to suggest that undervoting should be attributed to humans, not machines.”

Mr. Elias is hoping to turn up enough ballots during the machine recount to hold Mr. Scott within the 0.25% margin necessary to trigger a recount by hand. That would give him the ability to contest the “undervote” ballot by ballot in Democratic strongholds. Mr. Elias said Saturday that a hand recount will cause Mr. Scott’s lead to “evaporate entirely.” This could be hanging chads, the sequel. Mr. Gillum can’t claim a tabulation error to account for his deficit, but he has also withdrawn his election-night concession in hope of his own deus ex Marc Elias.

Mr. Scott has already won two legal judgments requiring election supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties to open their vote-counting process to campaign lawyers. This may reduce the chance that they suddenly discover boxes of supposedly uncounted votes, in the Lyndon Johnson tradition. On Monday the Nelson team nonetheless filed a lawsuit demanding that even mail-in ballots that had arrived 10 days after election night be counted.

Florida has given counties until 3 p.m. Thursday to finish the machine recount, and the state needs to insist on that deadline. The longer this stretches on, the more opportunity for mischief, and the less confidence voters will have in the integrity of Florida’s election.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Massive Missile Attack on Israel after Qatar Funds Hamas by Bassam Tawil

By on November 13th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13297/hamas-missiles-qatari-money

The renewed Hamas attacks on Israel serve as a reminder that the terrorist group is not interested in a real truce. Hamas wants millions of dollars paid to its employees so that it can continue to prepare for war with Israel while not having to worry about the welfare of its people.

Qatar’s $15 million cash grant has failed to stop Hamas from launching hundreds of rockets into Israel. On the contrary, the money has only emboldened Hamas and increased its appetite to continue its jihad to eliminate Israel. All the money in the world will not convince Hamas to abandon its ideology or soften its position toward Israel.

What the international mediators need to understand is that there is only one solution to the crisis in the Gaza Strip: removing Hamas from power and destroying its military capabilities. They also need to understand that there is only one language that Hamas understands: the language of force. The assumption that if you pay terrorists millions of dollars, they will stop attacking you — rather than using the funds to build up their forces — has proven to be false.

Last week, as efforts were underway to achieve a new truce between Hamas and Israel, this author asked a legitimate and straightforward question: Can Hamas be trusted?

The conclusion was that a real truce between Israel and Hamas can be achieved only after the Palestinian jihadi terrorists are removed from power, and not rewarded for violence and threats.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World by Claire Lehmann

By on November 12th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time

“I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.” Camille Paglia

I discovered Camille Paglia’s work when I was pursuing my undergraduate arts education at The University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 2000s. I was deeply disillusioned with the courses in my arts degree and their monomaniacal focus on social constructionism, and was looking for criticism of Michel Foucault on the internet. I stumbled across a 1991 op-ed written by Paglia for The New York Times, in which she described the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, as “fossilized reactionaries,” and “the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality.” I was hooked.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that my university’s library contained each of her books, including the essay collections Vamps and Tramps and Sex, Art and American Culture. For the final year of my arts degree, (before pursuing my studies in psychology) I spent the bulk of my time at the university reading Paglia in the library. She was like a revelation. Her work was subversive but erudite, and she synthesized insights made in the realm of the arts, ancient history and folk biology—something that no other scholar of the humanities had attempted to do. Thirteen years later, it is an honour to be able to interview Camille Paglia for Quillette.

Paglia is an essayist, author, and professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She completed her PhD at Yale under the supervision of Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was listed by David Bowie as one of “100 books we should all read.”

Her other books include Break, Blow, Burn, a close-reading of 43 classic poems, and Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. In recent years, her essays have been collected and published in new editions, including Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender and Feminism (February 2018) and Provocations: Collected Essays on Art, Feminism, Politics, Sex and Education, which was released by Pantheon in October 2018.

I interviewed Paglia over email for Quillette. What follows is an unedited reproduction of that interview.

* * *

Claire Lehmann: You seem to be one of the only scholars of the humanities who are willing to challenge the post-structuralist status quo. Why have other humanities academics been so spineless in preserving the integrity of their fields?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Broward’s Ballots Voters are right to be suspicious about vote-counting in the Florida By James Freeman county.

By on November 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/browards-ballots-1542062920

Continuing irregularities related to voting in Florida’s Broward County have inspired a local judge to require more oversight of the recount of ballots from last Tuesday’s election. But the overseers are unlikely to inspire confidence among voters in south Florida or anywhere else in the United States.

The Miami Herald reports:

A Broward judge on Monday turned down Gov. Rick Scott’s request to “impound and secure” all voting machines in Broward’s elections headquarters when they’re not being used to recount ballots.

But Circuit Judge Jack Tuter offered a compromise: Add three Broward Sheriff’s deputies to the current lineup of [Broward Sheriff’s Office] officers and private security guards overseeing the recount under way at the county’s election’s center in Lauderhill.

Tuter stopped short of granting the Scott campaign’s request for an injunction to impound the machines, but agreed with his lawyers that “there needs to be an additional layer of confidence” in the vote-recount system in Broward. The votes in the U.S. Senate race between Scott and incumbent Bill Nelson are part of the recount.

The judge is correct about a lack of confidence that Broward officials will conduct a fair and competent count. A Journal editorial on Saturday summarized the jurisdiction’s disturbing recent history of legal violations. This morning Politico’s Marc Caputo wrote that a change in leadership is imminent:

Counting unlawful votes. Destroying ballots. Sunshine Law violations. Busted deadlines.

So many controversies have bedeviled Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes — culminating in her office’s troubles in the aftermath of Florida’s chaotic 2018 elections — that her days in office are now numbered, insiders and lawmakers say.

She’s losing support from fellow Democrats and faces the increasing likelihood of an embarrassing suspension from office at the hands of either Gov. Rick Scott or his likely successor, Ron DeSantis.

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