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July 2019

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians Assault Mohamed Saud for Embracing the ‘Two-State Solution’ A death cult unveils its heart of darkness. Caroline Glick

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274476/palestinians-assault-mohamed-saud-embracing-two-caroline-glick

Israeli and Arab audiences alike were recently shocked to see footage of Palestinian teenagers in Jerusalem’s Old City assaulting, cursing, and spitting on Saudi blogger Mohamed Saud as he came to pray at Islam’s third holiest site, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and as he toured the Arab market in the Old City.

There was no reason for them to be surprised.

As independent Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh noted in an article for the Gatestone Institute, the assault on Saud was the predictable result of a campaign of incitement spearheaded by the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS). The PJS is affiliated with Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) faction that rules the Palestinian Authority (PA) under Fatah leader and PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Saud was the only member of a delegation of six Arab bloggers visiting Israel at the invitation of Israel’s Foreign Ministry who was willing to be identified by name. His willingness to visit the Jewish state openly made Saud a target for personal incitement by the PJS.

But as Abu Toameh noted, the PJS’s incitement, which involved young people calling Saud a “traitor,” a “dirty Zionist,” a “dog,” and a “normalizer” (that is, an Arab would seeks to normalize the Arab world’s relations with Israel), was part of a much larger campaign to block all relations with Israel.

Abu Toameh explained that the PJS calls for a boycott of Israeli journalists. Palestinian journalists who interview Israelis or work with Israeli journalists are similarly targets for boycott.

Arab regimes that permit Israeli journalists to cover events in their countries – as Bahrain permitted Israelis to cover its economic peace conference last month – are condemned.

When word got out that the delegation of Arab bloggers would be visiting Israel, Abu Toameh wrote, the PJS not only called for the delegation members to be attacked on the ground, but it also called for them to be boycotted and blackballed by their audiences in their home countries, and in the Arab world as a whole.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Donald Trump at the Overton Window By Roger Kimball

By on July 31st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/30/donald-trump-at-the-overton-window/

I shall leave it to the theologians to decide whether it is providential or merely coincidental that it was this very week in 1729, on Tuesday in fact, that the city of Baltimore was founded. I think we can say that, for the genus rattus, the city has been providential, at least since 1967. That was the year Thomas D’Alesandro III—the brother of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and son of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore)—began the city’s 50-plus years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. (If you except the younger Mr. D’Alesandro’s immediate predecessor, you can push the run of Democratic mayors of Baltimore all the way back to 1947.)

Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.

But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”

But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting.

Over the weekend, the president opened up on “King Elijah” in a series of tweets. “Baltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings,” he wrote in one, “has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull . . . Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Border Patrol Chief: 5,800 ‘Fake Families’ Discovered at the Border By Nicholas Ballasy

By on July 31st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/border-patrol-chief-5800-fake-families-discovered-at-the-border/

Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan told a Senate committee on Tuesday that 5,800 “fake families” have been discovered trying to enter the U.S. illegally this year.

“Our laws prevent us from holding people more than 20 days and because we can’t get the information we’re probably releasing them even sooner than that in many cases, correct?” Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) asked Morgan during a Senate Homeland Security hearing on the border crisis.

“With respect to family units, since March of this year, United States Border Patrol has been releasing family units directly so in some cases they’re being released in under 48 hours into the interior of the United States,” Morgan said.

Johnson replied, “Because it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to try and find facilities to hold them for 20 days with this overwhelming flow so instead of border patrol turning them over to ICE for a more thorough vetting process and then ICE releasing them, border patrol is doing it directly?”

“That’s correct,” Morgan, who also served in the Obama administration, responded.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Free Stuff! By John Stossel

By on July 31st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/free-stuff/

Never before have presidential candidates offered voters so much “free” stuff.

Kamala Harris wants you to “collect up to $500 a month.”

Elizabeth Warren says, “We need to go tenfold in our research and development in green energy.”

No one has tracked the cost of all of the promises. So my video team did!

Who will spend the most?

Here are the new spending proposals from the five most popular (according to ElectionBettingOdds.com) candidates.

In my latest video, we break it down by category, education spending first:

Joe Biden wants to “triple the amount of money we spend for Title I schools” ($32 billion) create “universal pre-K” ($26 billion), provide “free community college” ($6 billion per year) and double the number of psychologists and social workers in schools ($14 billion) — $78 billion total.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The 99% Get a Bigger Raise New data show much faster growth in wages and incomes.

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-99-get-a-bigger-raise-11564529382

Political discourse nowadays is enough to depress anyone, and the media don’t help by ignoring good economic news. But buck up, Americans: Worker wages are growing much faster than previously reported.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on Tuesday published its annual revisions to personal income data, and the surprise was the huge jump in disposable income and employee compensation.

The revisions show that employee compensation rose 4.5% in 2017 and 5% in 2018—some $4.4 billion and $87.1 billion more than previously reported. The trend has continued into 2019, with compensation increasing $378 billion or 3.4% in the first six months alone. Wages and salaries were revised upward to 5.3% from 3.6% in May year over year. And in June wages and salaries grew at an annual rate of 5.5%, which is a rocking 4.1% after adjusting for inflation.

This is far more than the 3.1% year over year increase in average hourly earnings that the Labor Department’s jobs report showed for June. One reason for the disparity may be that employers are hiring millions of younger, lower-income workers, which may be depressing average hourly earnings as older, more highly paid workers retire.

The BEA also revised overall personal income up by 1.7% for 2017 and 2018 and transfer receipts down 0.7%. In sum, Americans are earning more and relying less on government. Personal savings estimates were also increased by $217 billion for the last two years and are now $1.3 trillion, which means Americans are socking away more of their earnings.

The personal savings rate was revised upward to 8.1% from 6.1% in May, which is much higher than the roughly 5% before the last two recessions. This should make the current economic expansion more durable since consumption isn’t being pumped up largely by increased household debt. Instead consumer spending has increased as wage growth has accelerated amid a tight labor market.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Joan Swirsky: a Review of ‘Confronting The Deception: Inflamed by 9/11, fired up by eight bad years,’ by Tabitha Korol

By on July 31st, 2019

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/190729

Since 9/11, writes Tabitha Korol in her riveting book, “Confronting The Deception: Inflamed by 9/11, fired up by eight bad years,” the United States, Israel, and cultures that still value our freedoms have been fighting a battle of survival on several fronts.

The primary battle, Korol explains, is with the ideology born out of the Islamic attempt to claim Ground Zero as its Caliphate – and from there, literally to conquer the United States of America.

The religious-political-supremacist system of Islam was invented in the seventh century and has since led a relentless drive to take over the world, establish a caliphate ruled by Shariah Law – the law that mandates cutting off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, throwing homosexuals off roofs to their deaths, engaging in “honor killings” of teenage girls whose behavior they disapprove of, and killing all Jews. That sharia law.

It is no surprise that this megalomaniacal goal has captured the imagination of leftists worldwide, including in our country, who share Islam’s goals, particularly of destroying America – the “Big Satan” – and Israel, the “Little Satan.”

This is a battle being fueled by the Shadow Government of the United States of America, specifically those forces – many from the Muslim Brotherhood – that have been implanted in the highest reaches of our government – including Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the State Department, even the Oval Office – by the Obama regime, many of whom remain quite stealthily in their positions today.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Schadenfreude and the UNRWA scandal

By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/schadenfreude-and-the-unrwa-scandal/

UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl collected money for business-class trips with his mistress, whom he fast-tracked into a role he invented for her so that she could accompany him around the world in style.

Revelations of rampant wrongdoing in the corridors of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) couldn’t have shamed a more worthy organization. Though normally it’s not nice to gloat over the misfortunes of others, the schadenfreude elicited by the news of inappropriate behavior going on behind the walls of this particularly vile organization was warranted.

Oddly, the damning internal UNRWA report dealing with the corrupt and abusive behavior of senior staff was exposed on Monday by Al Jazeera and AFP—media outlets that bemoaned the Trump administration’s cut in funding to the body whose mandate is to “provide relief, human development and protection services” to the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. You know, those Arabs who were displaced in 1948 as a result of the Arab assault on the Jewish state, otherwise known as Israel’s War of Independence.

Of course, only members of the far-left continue to harbor and spread the illusion that UNRWA is anything but what U.S. President Donald Trump called an “irredeemably flawed operation,” whose sole purpose has been to perpetuate a manufactured “Palestinian refugee crisis.”

As a side gig, the U.N. body that placed Palestinians in a fraudulent category all their own—one that enables them to remain “refugees” for generations, rather than helping them resettle quickly—also abets terrorists. It does this does technically, by allowing Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stockpile weapons in and under its schools, and ideologically, through revisionist textbooks and other methods that teach Palestinian children to hate and aspire to kill Jews.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Trump tweets arrests of Somali ISIS sympathizers in Arizona

By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/07/30/trump-tweets-arrests-of-somali-isis-sympathizers-in-arizona/23782684/
DYLAN STABLEFORD

President Trump on Tuesday used the megaphone that is his Twitter feed to draw attention to the arrest of two Somalia refugees in Arizona who authorities say were planning to travel from Tucson, Ariz., to Egypt to join the Islamic State.

Ahmed Mahad Mohamed, 21, and Abdi Yemani Hussein, 20, were charged with providing support to a terror group. They were arrested Friday at Tucson International Airport.

According to federal authorities, Mohamed had told an undercover FBI agent during social-media exchanges that he was “thirsty” for the blood of disbelievers and that “the best wake up call is [for the] Islamic State to get victory or another 911.”

“Somali refugees arresed in Tucson on way to Egypt,” Trump tweeted. “They were in touch with an agent posing as a terrorist. One of them stated, ‘The best wake up call is Islamic State to get victory or another 9/11.’ Get smart people! #MAGA #KAG”

“#KAG” refers to Trump’s reelection slogan, “Keep America Great.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Gruesome Tale of Jihadi John By Kyle Smith

By on July 30th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/jihadi-john-documentary-review/

A new documentary raises important questions about the journey of the Kuwait-born British terrorist to ISIS.

On August 19, 2014, a masked man with a London accent appeared on a video, boasting that he was a soldier for ISIS, and proceeded to behead American journalist James Foley. Security services almost immediately identified the murderer as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born British man of 26. His captives, noticing the British accents with which he and three other captors spoke, referred to the four as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Emwazi’s media nickname became “Jihadi John.”

Built around interviews with MI5 and CIA officials, leading soldiers such as General David Richards of the U.K. and General David Petraeus of the U.S., and survivors of Syrian hostage camps from the era, director Anthony Wonke’s penetrating HBO documentary Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist makes unfortunate, distracting use of cheesy dramatic reenactments in telling this awful story. But it also raises important questions about Emwazi’s journey to terrorism. The documentary is tinged with a sense of regret that the spooks could have done more to give Emwazi an exit ramp from evil.

As a boy, Emwazi immigrated to England at age six, his family winning asylum because they had been, in Kuwait, members of a persecuted minority, the Bedoon. Emwazi attended a Church of England school in London and seemed well-adjusted. As an adolescent, he began to disengage, to seem “slightly strange” in the words of one of his teachers. Footage of his youth shows him constantly covering his mouth; apparently the other boys liked to tease him about his breath. As a teen, he took up drinking and marijuana, but in college he started adopting Islamic dress and habits. Such faith “gives structure where there was none,” says one observer interviewed in the doc.

Online jihadist recruitment tools began to catch Emwazi’s eye, and he went to Somalia and Tanzania for indoctrination in Islamism. In the latter country he was locked up, beaten, and questioned. On the way back to London, he was stopped again in Amsterdam and again in Dover. British spies tried to steer him to be a double agent and threatened to make life difficult for him if he didn’t cooperate. “Whether we contributed to his further radicalization . . . by stopping him from travel is an interesting question,” notes Commander Richard Walton, Scotland Yard head of counterterrorism.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar Suggests Rand Paul Deserved to Be Assaulted, Get 5 Cracked Ribs By Tyler O’Neil

By on July 30th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/ilhan-omar-suggests-rand-paul-deserved-to-be-assaulted-get-5-cracked-ribs/

On Monday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) retweeted a message effectively endorsing the violent 2017 assault against Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), which left him with five cracked ribs. She retweeted deranged actor Tom Arnold, who has incited President Donald Trump to a fight, leading Secret Service to intervene.

“Imagine being Rand Paul’s next door neighbor and having to deal with [Rand Paul] lying cowardly circular whiney bullcrap about lawn clippings. No wonder he ripped his toupee off,” Arnold tweeted.

Omar retweeted this message to her 376,000 followers.

Omar deleted the retweet after conservatives noted it.

Fifty-eight year old Rene Boucher attacked Paul from behind on his own property in Bowling Green, Ky. Paul was wearing headphones. He succeeded at throwing Boucher off, but not before sustaining injuries. The senator suffered five rib fractures, including three displaced fractures, and later required medical attention for pneumonia.

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