Displaying the most recent of 90433 posts written by

Ruth King

Ten Years After Fort Hood Massacre For Obama, it was “workplace violence.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/ten-years-after-115-lloyd-billingsley/

On November 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas, Major Nidal Hasan, a self-proclaimed “soldier of Allah,” gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. Yelling the familiar “Allahu akbar,” Hasan chased down the wounded and shot them in the back. The major would have killed many more if police officer Kim Munley had not fired on the shooter. For the more than 30 the Muslim major wounded, the troubles were only beginning.

The 11/5 Fort Hood massacre was the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11.

For the president of the United States formerly known as Barry Soetoro, it was only “workplace violence,” not even “gun violence.” That prevented the survivors from getting the medals and medical treatment they deserved. For his part, Major Hasan never should have been in a position to attack them.

As Robert Spencer notes, Maj. Hasan told colleagues infidels should have their throats cut, heads chopped off, and boiling oil poured down their throat. He told students Islamic law trumped the U.S. Constitution and suicide bombings were justified. Hasan’s jihadist tilt was well known but his Army superiors “kept promoting him” even as the FBI tracked his terrorist contacts.

As a 2012 congressional hearing revealed, Hasan openly communicated with Muslim cleric and terrorist mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki. In one email, Hasan told al-Awlaki, “Please keep me in your Rolodex in case you find me useful, and please feel free to call me collect.” Even so, under FBI boss Robert Mueller “the case was dropped until November 5, when the media began circulating reports of the massacre” and at that time the FBI agents “knew exactly who the perpetrator was.”

The Moral Idiocy of Linguistic Segregation A reflection on the brouhaha over Trump’s use of the word “lynching”. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/moral-idiocy-linguistic-segregation-bruce-thornton/

The Race Gestapo pounced on Donald Trump recently for comparing the House’s Constitutionally dicey attempt to impeach him to a “lynching.” Apart from the political motive of damaging Trump, the uproar illustrates once again how illiberal identity politics racializes language, turning words into ideological weapons that serve one faction’s own power and influence rather than the people it supposedly represents.

Much of the criticism of Trump was quickly exposed as hypocritical, morally incoherent, or just plain ignorant. The Associated Press, for example, faulted the president for “stirring up painful memories of America’s racist past.” Seriously? All we’ve been doing for more than half a century is “stirring up” racial grievances in politics, curricula, and popular culture. Historical racial offenses are repeated ad nauseam, even though many of them took place long before the end of legal segregation in 1964. And we know why. The race industry and identity politics are predicated on grievances over racists offenses for which white people must feel guilty.

And if such offenses are lacking, either they will be invented, like the myth that the police target black men for extra-legal assassination; or recycled from history, as in the current outrage over Trump’s use of the word “lynching.” Without grievances and the white guilt they provoke, activists and political factions have no leverage over lawmakers for getting regulations that privilege their interests.

What these ideological ploys actually reveal, though, is not the persistence of racism, but how much black lives have improved since even before the Civil Rights Act, and how discredited and ostracized old-school public expressions of racist attitudes have become. If these views still had widespread political and social power, nobody would have to invent racist hoaxes a la Jussie Smollett, or redefine racism into ever more subtle manifestations, or create psychological fictions like “implicit bias.” As any black man over the age of 60 can tell you, during segregation nobody needed such magnifying glasses to see racism in action. It was brutally obvious.

Will Impeachment Change Opinions of Trump? By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/will-impeachment-change-opinions-of-trump/

Robert Samuelson’s latest column on impeachment brought to mind Lincoln’s remark during his first debate with Douglas: “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”

Samuelson notes that, if the House impeaches President Trump, at least 20 Republican Senators would have to vote with every Democrat to remove him from office. “For now,” he writes, “the Democrats have zero.”

That may be an overstatement. GOP senators criticize the impeachment process, while avoiding extended discussions of the president’s underlying behavior. Fifty of 53 Republican senators have joined Lindsey Graham’s call for the House to authorize its impeachment inquiry.

Republican opinion of Trump has to turn squarely against him for impeachment to succeed. What are the chances of this happening? Not great.

Samuelson acknowledges that public opinion is sticky. People don’t like changing their minds. “People define themselves by their beliefs. It’s who they are and want to be.” Their views of Trump are like hardened concrete. “At least for his core supporters, Trump has seemed remarkably adept at controlling the narrative of his presidency.”

Samuelson offers two examples of shifts in public opinion: same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization. The public changed its mind about both. But advocates of impeachment shouldn’t get their hopes up. The comparison between cultural issues and political figures is misguided.

The timeline for cultural change is much longer than the political calendar. It took decades for the public to accept same-sex marriage and pot. The rising generation is responsible for much of the difference in attitude.

House Democrats hope to vote on impeachment by the end of 2019. Absent some technological breakthrough, there is not enough time for a pro-conviction GOP youth movement to be born, come of age, and displace Senate Republicans.

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The Democratic strategy, Samuelson writes, “is premised on the hope that further shocking revelations will alter the political climate. Trump’s image will be so shattered that Republican senators will feel free to join the revolt against him.” This assumes the aim of the Democratic strategy is Trump’s removal, and not simply weakening him ahead of reelection while putting at-risk Republican senators like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner in difficult positions.

The record is clear that not much Donald Trump does shocks conservative Republicans. They are prepared to tolerate a high degree of instability and dysfunction simply to prevent the Democratic left from gaining power. They would have to reject this bargain rapidly, wildly, stunningly, and decisively for the Senate to remove the president from office. As Lincoln said: Public sentiment is everything.

Nancy A. Youssef U.S. Recovered Valuable Intelligence in Baghdadi Raid Defense officials say data on Islamic State and its leaders will likely lead to more operations against militant group

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-recovered-valuable-intelligence-in-baghdadi-raid-11572301388?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=6#cxrecs_s

The U.S. military raid resulting in the death of Islamic State founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi also yielded an array of valuable intelligence concerning the militant group and its top leaders, defense officials said, providing details that likely will lead to future operations.

The Defense officials and Pentagon leaders on Monday wouldn’t detail the intelligence recovered on Saturday, but said it consisted of data-storage devices and other files that will add to the understanding of Islamic State as the U.S. and allies continue pursuing its leaders and operatives.

In a sign of the continuing nature of the operations, a senior State Department official on Monday said a second U.S. raid closely following the operation against Baghdadi resulted in the death of Islamic State’s top spokesman.

The senior State Department official described the spokesman, Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, as “kind of No. 2” in Islamic State. The operation was first announced by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which worked with U.S. troops in fighting Islamic State before President Trump ordered a U.S. withdrawal.

Walter Russell Mead: A Battle Won in the War on Terror Killing Baghdadi won’t ‘fix’ the Middle East, but ISIS’ failure is a crucial victory. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-battle-won-in-the-war-on-terror-11572302844

The Washington Post may have hastily changed its embarrassing headline for its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—“austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State”—but that won’t be the end of the West’s difficulties in understanding and responding to the multifaceted crisis in the Middle East.

Movements like ISIS don’t spring from nowhere. It took centuries of decline, serial humiliations at the hands of arrogant European imperial powers, and decades of failed postcolonial governance to produce the toxic mixture of bigotry and hate out of which Baghdadi and his adherents emerged. That toxic brew won’t quickly disappear. Angry, alienated and profoundly confused people—many young and at best half-educated—will continue to find the message of ISIS and similar groups seductive. Baghdadi’s death isn’t the end of ISIS, and the collapse of the U.S.-backed order in northern Syria could provide conditions for its re-emergence as a serious military force.

Yet Baghdadi’s death was more than a meaningless episode in an endless game of Middle Eastern Whac-A-Mole. The fall of his so-called caliphate brings the U.S. a little closer to the end of its longest war.

Baghdadi’s reign of terror began with prophecies, visions and dreams. He and his lieutenants promised their followers paradise. They crafted a god in their own image—a god of genocide, violence, rape, enslavement—and claimed that this god was powerful enough to give victory in battle. It turned out they were wrong.

Baghdadi’s fate makes the task of recruiting fresh jihadists a little harder. The next “austere religious scholar” seeking recruits will face a bit more skepticism in the marketplace of ideas.

A Dissident Outlives Soviet Communism His book documenting Western complicity didn’t find a U.S. publisher for almost 25 years. By Juliana Geran Pilon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dissident-outlives-soviet-communism-11572302952

Only death could silence Vladimir Bukovsky. His crusade against the Communist system in Russia and beyond, before and after the Berlin Wall’s fall, was unequaled. He died Sunday at age 76 at his home in Cambridge, England, where he’d lived since the Soviet Union expelled him in 1976.

He didn’t seem to know fear. He was kicked out of high school for creating a satirical magazine. He took night classes and managed to enter Moscow University, where he held unofficial poetry readings and disseminated underground literature. He was expelled from university after denouncing the Young Communist League as useless and later arrested for possessing anti-Soviet literature. In prison he met other dissidents, was “diagnosed” as schizophrenic, read Dickens in English and studied Soviet law. After his release, he protested and was detained again. Altogether he spent 12 years in psychiatric hospitals, prisons or labor camps.

He realized that to make a difference, he had to get his message out to the West. He succeeded, but at the price of additional torture, which he described in his best-selling autobiography, “To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter.” He staged hunger strikes aimed at improving medical treatment in prison and encouraged others to do the same. The authorities force-fed the prisoners through the nose.

The book was published in 1978. By then Bukovsky had been in the West for two years, studying biology at Cambridge University and continuing to defend freedom. In 1983 Bukovsky and Armando Valladares, a Cuban dissident, co-founded the anticommunist Resistance International. His influence grew as he informally advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan.

There Is No Basis for Barr to Recuse Himself Over Ukraine By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/there-is-no-basis-for-barr-to-recuse-himself-over-ukraine/

“Senator Feinstein’s claim, on behalf of Judiciary Committee Democrats, that Attorney General Barr should recuse himself is nonsense, both factually and legally. He should ignore it.”

Even if he did what the Democrats claim (which he didn’t), it would contain nothing to justify recusal.

Here’s a question: If Dianne Feinstein didn’t recuse herself from the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, why should anyone ever be recused from anything?

Senator Feinstein is in the news, making the characteristically hyperpartisan and frivolous claim (on Twitter) that Attorney General Bill Barr should

recuse himself from matters related to Ukraine because of concerns about his role in President Trump’s efforts to damage a political opponent and undermine the Russia investigation.

Feinstein says she is speaking for Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, all of whom have signed a letter to the AG.

There is no basis for Barr to recuse himself.

First, before we ever get to the law, the Democrats’ claim is factually vacant. The AG has no role in President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. Barr did not ask the president to intercede with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for the purpose of seeking assistance with the ongoing Durham probe of the Russia investigation. Despite the president’s reference to Barr in the July 25 Zelensky phone call, Barr did not communicate with Trump about Ukraine before the call. Barr did not follow up with the Ukrainians, nor did he discuss Ukraine with the president or the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Being mentioned on a phone call is not a basis for recusal.

Europe: Cooperative Free Nations or Overly Controlled by Brussels? by Josef Zbořil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15050/eu-freedom-control

” We are not ‘citizens of the world’… ; we are also not citizens of Europe. We are inhabitants of Europe, but citizens of our nation states…” — Václav Klaus; MCC Budapest Summit on Migration; Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“The European elites understood that to succeed in their ambition to get rid of the nation-states and to create a State of Europe… they have to dissolve the old existing nations by mixing them with migrants from all over the world. By means of this procedure they want to create a new, truly European man, a Homo bruxellarum. This is the main reason why they are – without paying attention to all kinds of negative and destructive side-effects – supporting and promoting mass migration.” — Václav Klaus, MCC Budapest Summit on Migration, Hungary; March 23, 2019.

“Multiculturalism is not a manifestation of Europe’s generosity, or some noble embodiment of love and truth. [It] is what remains after mass migration reveals itself as a threat, rather than a benefit, to the economies of European countries.” — Jan Keller, Czech sociologist, October 16, 2018.

“The [European] community must rely fully on the spiritual, intellectual, and political values that in recent decades have been maintained, cultivated, and practiced in the democratic countries of Western Europe. I mean values like political and economic plurality, parliamentary democracy, respect for civil rights and freedoms, the decentralization of local administration and municipal government, and all that these things imply…It does not mean adaptation to something alien…” — Vaclav Havel, “Summer Meditations”, 1991.

Europe is in the throes of an internal debate between those who continue to view it as a constellation of free nations and those who see it as an entity controlled by Brussels.

Although the Brexit controversy may highlight this split, the conflict — as the former Czech President (and former Prime Minister), Václav Klaus, pointed out 13 years ago — has been raging for decades:

In his 2006 book, What is Europeism, Or, What Should Not be the Future for Europe?, Klaus wrote:

“For half a century there has been an ongoing dispute in Europe between the advocates of the liberalization model of European integration – which was based primarily on intergovernmental cooperation of individual European countries (which kept significant majority of parameters of their political, social and economic systems in their own hands) and on the removal of all unnecessary barriers to human activities existing on the borders of states – and the advocates of the harmonization (or homogenization) integration model, which is based on unification from above, orchestrated by the EU-authorities, with the ambition to level-out all aspects of life for all Europeans …

Sweden: What to Do About Gang Violence? by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15090/sweden-gang-violence

In Sweden, crucial societal issues, such as who is behind the current crime epidemic, are a public taboo.

“With the exception of three people in the survey, all have been offered help since they were boys. Some of them were already registered with the police as ten-year-olds… They have undergone programs… far from the criminal environment in Malmö…. It has not worked. In many cases, social services use the same words: all resources have been exhausted. Put another way: what the social services have done so far does not help, and there are no more measures to try out”. — Sydsvenskan, September 21, 2019

The government therefore recently presented a new initiative, which seeks to tackle the gang violence. The government proposal, however, never specifically mentions who is mainly behind the gang violence and that its own migration policies have in large part created the situation in which Swedish society now finds itself.

These are facts that mainstream politicians have avoided discussing openly for years. The question is: How do you solve a critical societal problem… without talking about it openly?

It does not seem likely that any of these hardened criminals will be swayed much by “increased investments in schools and social services in ‘vulnerable areas'”, as one of the government proposals suggests.

“Since 2015, 32 people have been shot dead in 30 separate acts in Malmö’s latest murder wave. Our survey of the murders shows that more than 120 young men are linked to them in different ways”, according to a recent series of reports about gang violence in the Swedish mainstream newspaper, Sydsvenskan.

“There is much talk about ‘gang wars’ in Malmö,” the report relates.

“Nothing indicates that there are fixed groupings with hierarchical structures and regulated activities in Malmö’s crime world. Rather, on the contrary — everything can be seen as one single gang. And there is civil war [within the gang]. We have mapped 200 criminals in the city. Most of them know each other – they have grown up together, been schoolmates, shared housing and moved in the same circles. Of these, we have selected 20 men for closer examination. Either because they are suspected of having shot, planned or otherwise contributed to the murders. Or that they themselves have fallen victim. And for being identified… as central people in Malmö’s crime world in recent years. At least 18 of the murders have, according to our review, occurred within the relatively narrow circle of these 20 men”.

Boot, meet mouth… again By J.R. Dunn

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/boot_meet_mouth_again.html

Kneejerk #NeverTrumper Max Boot monopolized the bottom of the cesspool in his response to the successful raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, easily edging out Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and the rest  of his media peers.

In his response to the death of al-Baghdadi, a vicious cult leader who specialized in the murder of helpless civilians (particularly young women), Boot chose to concentrate on a single statement made by President Trump in his speech announcing the successful mission: “[al-Baghdadi] died like a coward… whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” 

Not so, insists the judicious Boot:

Trump could not possibly have heard “whimpering and crying” on the overhead imagery because there was no audio, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointedly refused to confirm those details. The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.

Well, now we do have a complete description of al-Baghdadi’s last moments. It seems that he fled into a tunnel while being chased by a dog. A very fierce, well-trained, and courageous dog, yes, but still a dog. Not a Terminator or a Predator. Al-Baghdadi dragged three children along with him, said to be his own. When he reached the dead end of the tunnel, he triggered the suicide vest he was wearing, killing, in a last act of nihilistic viciousness, all three of the children.