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Ruth King

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The McCabe March Madness Trump can never let the facts speak for themselves.

By on March 19th, 2018

For a microcosm of the current madness of American politics, look no further than the weekend meltdown after Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe late Friday.

Mr. Sessions acted on a recommendation by the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility, but Democrats and the media ignored that and called the firing part of Donald Trump’s plot to undermine the FBI and steal American democracy. Mr. Trump then seemingly tried to confirm the accusations with a Twitter fusillade hailing Mr. McCabe’s firing and escalating without cause to attack special counsel Robert Mueller. Which triggered another round of claims that Mr. Trump’s days in office are numbered, or should be.

As Mr. Trump and his antagonists drive each other insane, it’s hard to keep your eye on what matters. Start with the obligation of FBI agents to tell the truth. Mr. Sessions’s statement was a straightforward explanation that he fired Mr. McCabe for a serious violation of duty.

The Justice Department’s Inspector General has been examining the department’s handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server—a probe demanded by Democrats on grounds that former FBI Director James Comey’s 2016 intervention cost her the election. The IG uncovered “allegations of misconduct” by Mr. McCabe, Mr. Sessions’s statement said, which it forwarded to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) that is composed of career officials.

Mr. Sessions added that both the IG and OPR reports “concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor—including under oath—on multiple conclusions. The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability. As the OPR proposal stated, ‘all FBI employees know that lacking candor under oath results in dismissal and that our integrity is our brand.’”

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McCabe just made life tough for Comey and the special counsel Jonathan Turley

By on March 19th, 2018

Following his termination late Friday night, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe declared that he was “singled out” after “unrelenting” attacks by President Trump and critics. McCabe’s objections are less than credible, given the virtually unprecedented recommendation of career officials to fire the one-time acting FBI director.

However, McCabe may have rectified his “singled out” status with his long statement criticizing his termination: In the middle of it is a line that could be viewed as incriminating fired FBI director James Comey, not just in leaking sensitive information but also in lying to Congress.

McCabe is accused of misleading investigators about allegedly giving information to a former Wall Street Journal reporter about the investigation of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton family’s charitable foundation. McCabe asserts in his post-firing statement that he not only had authority to “share” that information to the media but did so with the knowledge of “the director.” The FBI director at the time was Comey.
“I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor,” McCabe stated. “As deputy director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter.”

If the “interaction” means leaking the information, then McCabe’s statement would seem to directly contradict statements Comey made in a May 2017 congressional hearing. Asked if he had “ever been an anonymous source in news reports about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation” or whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation,” Comey replied “never” and “no.”

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Seven Days in Entebbe: A Review By Marilyn Penn

By on March 19th, 2018

This version of the famous Israeli rescue of hostages from the hijacked Air France plane should be known for its hard-left slant and its glaring omissions. Written by Gregory Burke and directed by Jose Padilha, its main purpose is to humanize the hijackers and to trace all of Israel’s current problems to ITS failure to negotiate with peace-loving, occupied Palestinians. Here are some of the facts this movie does not contain.

Palestinians began the practice of hijacking planes in 1968 and were the leading perpetrators of this particular form of torture, managing one a month in 1972. The Entebbe event of 1976 was organized by a founding member of the German Revolutionary Cells (RZ) and his female accomplice together with two Palestinian drop-outs from Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Though they appear in the film, we are not given any background into the virulence of these movements. Rather, the German Bose (played by Daniel Bruhl) is seen as a humanitarian who stands up for women and children. His accomplice (Rosamund Pike) is a garden-variety nut bag compelled to save Palestinians who are described by one of the hijackers as the people who were treated just like the Jews in the holocaust once those Nazi-like Jewish survivors came to Palestine to steal land and occupy it Of course many Jews had already emigrated in the 19th century fleeing European pogroms and some had drifted back after much earlier expulsions of Jews from several European countries. Many “Palestinians” were actually Arabs from Syria and other parts of the middle-east who migrated after the Jews began draining the malaria-infested swamps and creating jobs and better living conditions for unskilled labor.

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Nigeria’s Christians Today, Europe’s Christians Tomorrow by Giulio Meotti

By on March 18th, 2018

It is in Nigeria that the balance between Islam and Christianity in Africa will be decided, according to Philip Jenkins, a leading expert of Christianity. That is why the Islamists have been killing the Christians en masse.

“If the Islamists should overrun Nigeria, it will be a steppingstone [sic] to conquering smaller countries. If Nigeria falls to Islamic extremists, all of Africa will be at risk”. — Catholic Bishop Hyacinth Egbebo, Nigeria.

Wole Soyinka’s “horde” will not be confined to the Nigerian borders, but will try to strike Western Europe as well. We are lucky to have survived as many attacks as we have in Madrid, London, Paris and Berlin, to recall just a few. But how many more? And for how long?

Usually, Africa only breaks through to the West when Western targets are attacked by terrorists. First, two US Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Somalia in 1993. Then Al Qaeda attacked US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Then, only a few days ago, Islamic State published a video purporting to show an ambush in Niger in which four US soldiers were killed last October. The West was silent. The West does not seem to care about the ongoing Islamic terrorist genocide on Africa’s biggest Christian population in Nigeria.

A few days ago, the Coliseum in Rome was lit up red to protest the persecution of Christians. Italy’s most famous landmark was illuminated at the behest of “Aid to the Church in Need” to draw attention to the intense and enormous massacres Christians are suffering.

Writing for The Spectator, Douglas Murray rightly asked: “Who will protect Nigeria’s northern Christians?”. In the last attack, 15 Christian villages were ethnically and religious “cleansed”. First, extremist Muslims ransacked Christian towns and cleared them of Christian religious symbols, and then murdered 19 Christians . In just one month, more than 80 Christians have been murdered, often hacked to death with machetes.

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Erdogan’s Unrequited Arab Love by Burak Bekdil

By on March 18th, 2018

Apparently for Turkey’s extremist Muslims, this is a war between “us good Muslims” and “those infidels.”

First, Turkey is running a military show in Arab Syria: targeting Muslim Kurds who it claims are terrorists. Erdogan has vowed that after Syria, the military campaign will target northern Iraq.

In the meantime, Erdogan’s “Arab friends” are showing signs of hostility, one after the other.

The events in the last couple of weeks seem to confirm that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions for a Turkey-led ummah (Muslim community) are not welcome in the Arab world. This emerging divide among Sunni Islamists — Turkey, Saudi Arabia et al — is important for the West.

In Turkey, a hysteria has set in. It appears a national competition of patriotism that has captured the Turkish imagination. Screams of martyrdom and jihad can be heard echoing across the country. Even children are not spared from the ugly “death talk.”

There is a story behind this jihadist euphoria. In 2016, Turkey’s Religious Affairs General Directorate (Diyanet), the ultimate religious authority in the country, issued comic books to the nation’s children telling them how glorious it is to become an Islamic martyr. One cartoon was a dialogue between a father and his son. “How marvelous it is to become a martyr,” the father says. Unconvinced, the son asks: “Would anyone want to become a martyr?” “Yes” the father replies, “one would. Who doesn’t want to win heaven?”

Students, including kindergarteners, have been asked to conduct military marches and recite ultranationalist poems at schools . Some state schools have replaced their recess bells with Ottoman military marches.

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THE ERA OF MALICE: EDWARD CLINE

By on March 18th, 2018

Whatever happened to those friendly, blue pith- helmeted British “constables on patrol” of yore? The stolid ones who walked the foggy streets armed only with nightsticks, and gave you some visible assurance they were on the lookout for bad guys, and not you?

They’ve been long buried, or retired, or have been replaced by PC-friendly, PC-compliant nonentities who’ll take orders and harass or arrest advocates of the freedom of speech, rather than risk dismissal and a pension for calling a Muslim a Muslim. They’d prefer to arrest Winston Churchill for bad-mouthing Nazis or Muslims than blow a whistle in pursuit of criminals. Paul Weston, a British libertarian, was arrested and silenced for reading excerpts from Churchil’s The River War. The “constables” are now on the lookout for you and for any evidence of “hate speech” against especially Muslims.

It’s evidence of Britain’s capitulation to Islam that it persecutes the advocates of the opposition of such capitulation that three individuals were barred from entering Britain because they allegedly posted a threat to “public safety” by holding their views. Lauren Southern, and Austrian activist Martin Sellner of Génération Identitaire and his girlfriend, American author and YouTuber Brittany Pettibone. Southern was detained in Calais, while Sellner and Pettibone were imprisoned for three days after being grilled on their political beliefs and speeches in Islamized Europe.

Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, and determined to “transform” the City into a Sharia-compliant center of Islamic triumph, has called for the tech companies to sift out and crush free speech, as though the tech companies weren’t doing enough already. Do not defame Islam with “Islamophobia” or you will “spend a night in the box” or worse. Khan makes Oliver Cromwell look like a Quaker. The American Thinker has his number. On March 14th it ran this article, “Sadiq Khan Squelches Freedom of Thought and Expression”:

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A New Entebbe Movie, Hijacked by Bad Ideas Neither psychologically astute nor fun, ‘7 Days in Entebbe’ fails to take off By Liel Leibovitz

By on March 18th, 2018

Sternly, one character tells another that the fight must go on, for the sake of the hostages. Just as sternly, the other character replies that if the fight must go on, then we are all hostages. The latter is being metaphorical, maybe even metaphysical, musing about a future marred by perpetual hostilities. The former is being a bit more literal: There are 246 men, women, and children held at gunpoint in Uganda who need saving.

How to resolve this breakdown in communication? You can’t, which makes 7 Days in Entebbe, a new movie adaptation of what may be history’s most audacious rescue operation, particularly vexing to watch. One moment it’s Ziv, a hardened young commando about to report for duty, bickering with his girlfriend, a peaceable dancer. The next, it’s Shimon Peres, the operation’s chief cheerleader, bickering with his quivering frenemy, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. No matter who’s doing the talking, the question pondered is the same: How long must we fight?

The answer, to all but high-minded screenwriters intent on making serious movies about moral conundrums, is not too complicated: as long as there are bad guys with guns trying to kill us. In 7 Days, however, the bad guys aren’t that bad—they’re German intellectuals, which means that, periodically, they must put aside their AK-47s and debate the dialectical nature of history.