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January 2019

New Delhi Must Uphold “Zero Tolerance” for Terrorism by Jagdish N. Singh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13537/india-tolerance-terrorism

Engaging in “dialogue” with the separatists and the Taliban makes little sense. Neither group has demonstrated any faith in the values of modern civilization and democracy. Contrary to claims on the part of Jammu and Kashmir separatists and Pakistan — that India never offered “unconditional dialogue,” and has been rejecting Islamabad’s peace overtures — it is actually Pakistan’s propaganda against Indian society that is responsible for the violence in Kashmir.

In fact, according to a 2017 Indian Intelligence Bureau report, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence paid separatist leaders Rs 80,000,000 (approximately $1.2 million) to fuel unrest in Kashmir. These leaders include Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Asiya Andrabi, both of whom are reported to have links to Hizbul Mujahideen, a J&K separatist group that in August 2017 was designated by the U.S. State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

New Delhi’s soft approach to the J&K separatists can only serve to embolden extremist forces. The Modi government also needs to refrain from extending any goodwill gestures to the Taliban — a junior partner of Qaeda that aims to establish an Islamic caliphate in the Indian subcontinent, including in Jammu and Kashmir.

The current administration in Washington, like that in Jerusalem, grasps that all of the above radical groups have “common political targets — the United States, India and Israel.” Rather than risk being seduced by the false notion that it is possible to negotiate with terrorists, India would do well to reach out to its main democratic allies: the U.S. and Israel.

When the Narendra Modi-led government came to power in India with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in May 2014, the public hoped that a peaceful resolution would be reached over the strife-torn northern state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).

A key element of the BJP’s platform had been a policy of “zero tolerance towards terrorism.” Yet, since Modi’s election, the situation in J&K — which has been the focus of a long-standing conflict between India and Pakistan, with minority Hindus fleeing Islamist violence in 1990 — has worsened. No Hindu has returned to the Kashmir Valley during Modi’s premiership, and the number of Indian civilians and security personnel killed in attacks by Pakistani militants has increased. In fact, during the four-year period between 2014 and 2018, 75 more Indian soldiers and other security personnel were killed in J&K than during the previous five years (219, compared to 144).

Making It As Norman Podhoretz turns 89 today, he looks back on the long journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/

The most famous first line in 20th-century American literature set in Kings County, New York, must be incomprehensible to many current residents of that highly literary territory. “One of the longest journeys in the world,” writes Norman Podhoretz in the opening of his 1967 autobiography, Making It, “is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”

Podhoretz was of course speaking figuratively, referring to cultural and class differences separating the two boroughs that were infinitely wider than the East River. Today’s Brooklyn is different—apartment hunters are likely to find it less expensive to live off Park Avenue than in Williamsburg, Cobble Hill, or Fort Greene, where rents have soared due to the constant influx of tech-savvy millennials.

But back in the day, the price you paid to get from a working-class Jewish enclave in Brownsville to Columbia University and then the literary salons of the Upper West Side was constant re-invention, repeatedly shuffling off old selves and girding on new ones. That journey, as well as Podhoretz’s political transformations, from liberal to leftist to conservative, maps the last six decades of American society and culture and the Jewish community, and where and how they intersect. Today, he turns 89.

We’ve met several times over the last few years, first at lunch close to his home on the Upper East Side. “Here’s where Madonna lives,” he told me on the sidewalk, pointing to a large fortress-like structure, as if to note how the neighborhood of white-shoe lawyers and Wall Street financiers had morphed into something from Page Six.

I wanted to speak with Podhoretz for the same reason I’ve read and reread his work over the years—especially, in addition to Making It, Why We Were in Vietnam, The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet, and his two other autobiographies, Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends. He seemed to me to hold the keys to the vault that contains the blueprint for how we as Americans, how I as an individual, got here, and where we’re going.

Questions Mount as Kenyan Hotel Siege Ends More than a decade of military campaigns against al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab have failed to quell militant group’s threat By Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Gabriele Steinhauser

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kenyan-forces-in-standoff-with-militants-after-attack-on-hotel-complex-11547620051

NAIROBI, Kenya—Islamist militants’ deadly 18-hour siege of an upscale complex here jolts a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and raises questions over how the Somalia-based insurgents have survived more than a decade of international military campaigns.

On Tuesday afternoon, unmasked attackers carrying AK-47s and explosives shot their way into the 14 Riverside hotel and office complex in the capital—a favorite hangout for foreigners and upper-class Kenyans—detonated at least one suicide bomb and barricaded themselves in with hundreds of hostages overnight. It took until late Wednesday morning for Kenyan special forces to kill five gunmen and free the remaining captives.

By then, at least 20 people, among them a Kenyan accountant for Colgate-Palmolive Co. and an American who specialized in development finance, were dead. A police officer later succumbed to his injuries in hospital.

The foyer of the DusitD2 hotel, an emblem of Nairobi’s emergence as East Africa’s business hub, was covered in blood and debris; parked outside were the skeletons of several incinerated cars.

Al-Shabaab, a Somali extremist group affiliated with al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the assault. Kenyan police said it had arrested two people it believes helped facilitate the attack. CONTINUE AT SITE

At Least Four Americans Killed in ISIS-Claimed Attack in Syria By Raja Abdulrahim in Beirut and Nancy A. Youssef in Washington

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-least-three-u-s-troops-killed-in-isis-claimed-attack-in-syria-11547651818

A bombing in Syria claimed by Islamic State killed at least four Americans on Wednesday, according to the Pentagon, reigniting a debate in Washington over President Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from the country.

Allied fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces and a number of civilians were also among the 19 dead in the attack in the northern city of Manbij, which is under the control of the U.S.-backed SDF, according to local media and the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Other Americans may have been among the wounded, U.S. officials said.

Two of the Americans killed in the blast were U.S. service members while a third was a civilian Defense Department employee, the Pentagon said. The fourth American killed was a contractor supporting the U.S. effort in Syria, it said. Officials earlier believed three Americans were killed and that all were military service members.

The White House expressed “sympathies and love” to the families of those killed. “Our service members and their families have all sacrificed so much for our country,” the White House said.

The bombing comes a month after Mr. Trump announced a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria and said on Twitter, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”

Secretary Pompeo 2019 vs. President Obama 2009 Amb. (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2AOjVey

The January 10, 2019 Cairo, Egypt speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – which was cleared by the White House – was a course-setting presentation of the US role in the Middle East.

Pompeo’s ideological and operational speech was aimed at bolstering the US’ posture of deterrence and reassuring pro-US Arab regimes. It was diametrically opposed to President
Obama’s vision of the Middle East, which was presented in Cairo, Egypt on June 4, 2009.

In 2009, in Cairo, President Obama introduced his own vision of rejuvenated US relations with Islam and Muslims, highlighting the following guidelines:

“Islam has always been a part of America’s story…. Since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights….

“Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace….

“America and Islam are not exclusive… they overlap and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings…. The interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart…. Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality….

“More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam….

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance….”

In 2019, in Cairo, Secretary of State, Pompeo, introduced his own assessments of Middle East reality and bluntly recommended policy guidelines:

“When America retreats, chaos often follows. When we neglect our friends, resentment builds. When we partner with enemies, they advance….

The FBI Has Become Too Dangerous By Sebastian Gorka

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/16/the-fbi-has

If you’re not the first lady, being alone in the Oval Office with the president of the United States is a rare occurrence. Even visiting heads of state will be accompanied by an interpreter, or an official notetaker, when they meet privately with the most powerful man in the world.

So I will never forget the day, in June 2017, when I found myself in front of the Resolute Desk, with just President Donald Trump in the room with me.

I was there for something that pertained to my job as strategist to the president—if memory serves, it was to discuss our plan to undo the 44th president’s disastrous Iran Deal—when the topic of Russia came up.

Suddenly the president stopped, looked at me, and said: “They will find nothing because there is nothing.”

Since he shared that declaration with me, good men like General Mike Flynn have been charged with process crimes, shady characters like Paul Manafort have been convicted of wire fraud, and young men such as George Papadopoulos have served time in federal prison as a result of their foolish self-aggrandizing. Yet, none of the charges made or convictions brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller have linked the activities of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin, which of course, was Mueller’s mandate.

Two years later, at a reported cost of well over $25 million, not one charge or conviction has proven the original allegation of “Russian collusion.” At any other time, this would have led otherwise reasonable people to say: Enough! Time for Mueller and his team—a dozen of whom are registered Democrat donors—to close shop and for the former FBI director to end what President Trump justifiably has called a “witch hunt.”

Instead, the Left, and the Left’s domesticated media, have escalated their attacks.

Monday, as the president was preparing to board Marine One on the North Lawn, Kristen Welker, a member of the White House Press Corps working for NBC, actually asked him whether he is working for Russia.

How the Left Turned Free Speech into Hate Speech Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/how-the-left-turned-free-speech-into-hate-speech/

Postmodernist theory, with its emphasis on subjectivity and relativism, became the mechanism—more by happenstance than good planning—by which Marxism’s anti-bourgeois hostility reconciled itself with the anti-bourgeois sentiment of bohemianism. From there it was a short step to PC gags and censorship.

The Sixties Revolution has gone the way of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution and every other left-wing revolution that comes to mind. The radicalism of yesteryear somehow turned into PC orthodoxy or what we might call Correctism. Another revolution that was meant to be about emancipation has become humanity’s nightmare. The heirs to the 1960s Free Speech Movement have taken it upon themselves to play the role—as Google Inc put it—of “the Good Censor”.

Why did fashionable libertarians give up on libertarianism? When did the ideological successors to the do-what-you-want-to-do-be-what-you-want-to-be movement stop defending free speech in order to prosecute hate speech? The late Timothy Leary, were his mortal remains not spinning in the stratosphere, would be turning in his grave. To make sense of it all we must, as Chairman Mao would counsel us, seek the contradictions within the revolution itself.If the Sixties Revolution had an accepted theme it was freedom, and the Beatles might have encapsulated that more than anyone. They employed to great effect the anarchic, truth-telling style of the Marx Brothers in their 1964 movie A Hard Day’s Night. The Beatles were irreverent and amusing enough on screen to be applauded by the youth magazine of the Communist Party of the United States for their “refreshing, light-hearted contempt for the society that made them what they are”. Leary might have said it best when he bestowed upon the Fab Four the ultimate 1960s accolade: “I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

SAS soldier hailed as a hero after charging into gunfire to take down terrorists in Nairobi hotel

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/16/15-killed-islamist-attack-kenya-hotel-complex-continues/

A member of the SAS helped save hundreds of lives when he charged into gunfire to rescue civilians trapped during a terrorist attack in Nairobi.

A mission mounted by Kenyan forces on Wednesday ended a 20-hour assault on 14 Riverside, a luxury hotel and office complex in one of the city’s most affluent districts, killing at least some of the perpetrators.

Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan president, said that 14 civilians were killed before the attack was ended in one of the biggest military operations ever mounted in the capital.

At least one Briton was killed and one other badly wounded, amid fears that the true death toll could be higher after the Kenyan Red Cross disclosed that as many as 50 people remained unaccounted for.

The unidentified SAS soldier, reportedly in Kenya to train and mentor local special forces, often appeared to be at the forefront of the operation, frequently pictured bringing civilians to safety.

Although on non-combat deployment, he raced to the scene within the first hour of the attack, wearing body armour over civilian clothes and a balaclava to cover his face.

In one photograph from the scene, he carries the limp, bleeding body of a victim. Another shows the soldier bursting into the hotel complex with his special forces issue C8 Diemaco rifle drawn.

He reportedly worked with US Navy Seals, operating under Kenyan command, during the mission.

British special forces, who regularly train the equivalent troops of foreign nations, are not meant to engage in any direct combat on such missions.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Presidential Candidacy Exposes Huge Democratic Party Rifts A 2020 presidential run by this foreign policy realist and socially-not-too-liberal combat veteran would definitely shake things up.Sumantra Maitra By Sumantra Maitra

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/16/tulsi-gabbards-presidential-candidacy-exposes-huge-democratic-party-rifts/

Tulsi Gabbard is an odd Democrat candidate to run for president, and that is perhaps the understatement of the century, even for someone writing from Britain. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an Indian nationalist, visited the United States after his election, Gabbard was one of the few to personally meet him, and reportedly gift her personal copy of “Bhagavad Gita,” the Hindu sacred text, famous in the East as a war sermon and philosophy of destiny, famous in the West for being notably quoted by Robert Oppenheimer after the first atomic test.

Indian diplomats were mildly bemused, but Gabbard has always maintained that India is a vital partnership, regardless of who’s ruling the country, because the twin domestic and foreign threats facing the United States include radical Islam and a militaristic China, and New Delhi has experience dealing with both for far longer than Washington. She was vocal in opposing House Resolution 417, which was about to condemn India’s religious record in a tone similar to UN critiquing Israel.

In her statement she said, “Throughout history, India as a nation has been home to many religions, and has protected many as well, including Tibetan Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” not unlike how Israel is the only multi-ethnic democratic country in the entire Middle East surrounded by mono-ethnic and often fundamentalist Islamic nations. This was not well received in her Democratic Party.

This non-traditional position makes her a paradox to the left, since on political issues, Gabbard is hardly an inch right of Leon Trotsky, Venezuelan socialist Nicolas Maduro, and newly instated Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Gabbard was a prominent Bernie Sanders backer who went on to diss Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for rigging the primary, when no one was daring to do that, earning her the wrath of liberal media.

She supports Medicare for All, wants to legalize marijuana, favors a non-interventionist foreign policy, and would like urgent state intervention in opioid treatment, as well as clean environment legislation. She’s a minority, half Caucasian and half American Samoan. She’s a practicing Hindu, like her mainlander mother, and a member of the semi-pacifist Vaishnavas, an esoteric sect that has more in common with Buddhism than hardcore Hinduism in practice.

ISIS Claims Credit for Syrian Bombing that Left Americans Dead By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/isis-claims-credit-for-syrian-bombing-that-left-two-americans-dead/

Reuters, citing a “U.S. official,” reported Wednesday morning that four American officials were killed and three were wounded in the bombing. A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition confirmed that American troops were killed in the incident but did not specify as to the number of casualties.

The Islamic State claimed credit Wednesday for a suicide bombing that left at least two U.S. troops dead in the coalition-controlled city of Manbij in northern Syria.

The blast, which ISIS claimed credit for on their official propaganda website Amaq, killed at least nineteen people in total, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The ISIS propaganda website indicated that a single suicide bomber wearing a bomb vest targeted a patrol of U.S.-led coalition forces. It’s the first time ISIS has claimed credit for an attack on coalition forces since President Trump announced all U.S. troops would withdraw from Syria.

“The President has been fully briefed and we will continue to monitor the ongoing situation in Syria,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

The decision to withdraw from Syria, which Trump reportedly made last month during a call with the Turkish president, led to the resignation of former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Critics of the decision have pointed out that while ISIS has been cleared from the vast majority of its former territorial holdings, roughly 30,000 fighters remain in the region.