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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Are Tennessee Church Shootings Jihad? Evidence points to alleged shooter being a Muslim convert. Matthew Vadum

By on October 7th, 2016

The suspect arrested on suspicion of shooting up three Christian churches in Shelbyville, Tennessee appears to be a convert to Islam, a critically important detail that the incurious mainstream media has not been reporting.

Wendell Tobias Buchanan, who turned 36 in August, is being held in the local county jail on $500,000 bond.

Buchanan was taken into custody last Saturday (October 1), Pamela Geller reports,

…shortly after he was seen driving by Horse Mountain Church of Christ on Horse Mountain Road, which was hit on at least three separate occasions by gunfire. Buchanan allegedly fired into two other churches — Philippi Methodist Church and Singleton United Methodist Church — the University of Tennessee Extension office and shot out several Charter Communications cable boxes during overnight hours Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

As part of its ongoing terrorist protection program, Facebook has scrubbed Buchanan’s page of all information except his name. Geller managed to take screen shots while the information on the page was available.

A Facebook post from September 8 indicates Buchanan professed belief in the Islamic deity and seems to radiate the zeal of a convert. “Friends and family of Facebook I’ve been granted knowledge of the unseen world as a mercy from my Lord Allah.”

The social media entry contains several other references to Allah. Buchanan writes that Allah’s “will and word are the ultimate truth,” and “I owe absolutely everything to Allah because he has set me free from my spiritual cage and I feel so much better physically and mentally than I have in months.”

He ended the post with, “Read the Qu’ran because it is the true word of God and seek guidance for a better understanding. Shalom.”

In the comments section underneath the post a Facebook friend wrote “I didn’t know you believed in Islamic book?” Buchanan replied, “I do because I was compelled to do so.”

According to the Times-Gazette of Shelbyville, Buchanan was charged with desecration of a venerated object, vandalism under $10,000, vandalism under $500, 18 counts of vandalism under $1,000, and four counts of destroying/interference with utility lines.

Additional charges may be laid against Buchanan, Bedford County Sheriff Austin Swing (D) has said.

Buchanan doesn’t have much of a criminal record. He entered a conditional plea to a marijuana possession charge in 2000, pled guilty in 2004 to driving with a suspended license, and was convicted of two driving-related misdemeanors, according to publicly available court records.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey Builds 9,000 Mosques, Bans Orthodox Christian Liturgy By Robert Jones

By on October 7th, 2016

A total of 8,985 mosques were built between 2005 and 2015 by the Turkish government over the last decade in Turkey, according to statistics released by Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet).

The Central Anatolian province of Konya contained the highest number of mosques, Dogan News Agency reported on Sept. 16. Ankara, the southern province of Antalya, the Black Sea provinces of Ordu and Trabzon, and the southeastern province of Diyarbakır were among the other provinces with over 2,000 mosques.

While the Turkish government has built so many mosques across the country with state funds, it has banned Orthodox Christian liturgy in the Sumela Monastery, a historic site in Trabzon.

Sumela Monastery, located in the district of Macka — or Matsuka in Greek — in Trabzon province is one of the oldest monasteries in the Christian world. According to records, it was built by two Athenian monks, St. Barnabas and his nephew St. Sophronios, and was inaugurated by the bishop of Trabzon in 386 A.D.

The province of Trabzon, located in the ancient region of Pontos, the northeast portion of Anatolia adjacent to the Black Sea, also has a long Greek and Christian history. The word “Pontos” means “sea” in Greek.

“Trabzon was settled by Greeks probably by the 7th century BC,” writes researcher Sam Topalidis for the website Pontos World. “Trabzon was the ancient capital of the Greek speaking Komnenos Byzantine Kingdom (1204–1461). It survived until 1461, eight years after the fall of Byzantine Constantinople when both localities fell to the Ottoman Turks.”

After the city’s invasion by the Ottoman Turks, the local demographic began to change; but for centuries, Christians were the majority in the city.

According to Topalidis, Trabzon’s Muslim population increased dramatically under the Ottoman rule due to:

Muslims moving into the city (Most of the Trabzon’s Muslims were involuntary immigrants)
Deportations of Christians out of the city, probably to Istanbul
Christians converting to Islam, probably for fear of deportation

“However, the most important reason for the conversions was probably due to the higher taxes paid by Christians (compared to Muslims), a strong economic incentive for the poorest Christians,” writes Topalidis.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FBI Releases Video, New Details in Minnesota Mall Terror Attack by Somali Refugee Dahir Adan By Patrick Poole

By on October 7th, 2016

The FBI held an unusual press conference today in the case of last month’s terror attack at a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The attacker, 20-year old Somali refugee Dahir Adan, was shot and killed on the scene by an off-duty police officer after stabbing ten mall workers and shoppers.

The press conference was unusual in that the investigation into the matter is still ongoing, but the FBI and local law enforcement felt the need to release graphic video of the attacks in order to shoot down various conspiracy theories circulating in the Minnesota Somali community and perpetuated by Black Lives Matter groups.

The county prosecutor in St. Cloud says an off-duty police officer was justified in fatally shooting Dahir Adan, the mall stabbing suspect.

— Mitch Smith (@MitchKSmith) October 6, 2016

Stearns Co. Atty: Jason Faulkner told Dahir Adan to drop his knives several times, followed him through Macy’s, shooting when Adan charged

— Courtney Godfrey (@courtneygodfrey) October 6, 2016

One of the early conspiracy theories floated by Adan’s family was the claim that he was an innocent bystander who was in the mall to pick up his new iPhone at the mall:

Family of St Cloud stabber tells community leader Dahir Adan was headed to Mall Sat to pick up a preordered iPhone 7 @wcco 5 and 6 pm

— esme murphy – WCCO (@esmemurphy) September 19, 2016

Those false rumors led some in the Somali community to use the incident to circulate claims that the shooting of Adan was unjustified:

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Whereabouts Unknown of Dozen Afghans Who Went AWOL During Military Training in U.S. By Bridget Johnson

By on October 7th, 2016

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Pentagon today said that the U.S. government has pinpointed the whereabouts of most — but not all — of dozens of Afghan troops who came to the United States for training and went AWOL.

Reuters reported today that 44 Afghan troops have gone missing since January 2015, including eight who have left U.S. bases without authorization since last month alone.

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook told reporters today that all Afghan trainees who come to the United States “first of all go through a vetting process to be able to qualify to come here to the United States.”

“In those instances where they have gone missing — and this has been something we’ve had to deal with over the years — we’ve been training Afghans in this country for some time. I think more than 2,000 have been trained even in the last few years alone — there’s a notification process that we go through, of course trying to determine where these people are,” Cook said.

“Of the people who have been missing in — over the last two years or so, I believe the number that was provided to you was somewhere around 40 — more than 40 individuals; 32, we understand the status of those people.”

He added that “every effort’s made to try to determine where these people are going, what the reasons are.”

“In some cases they’ve gone home. In some cases there have been efforts — as I understand it — to go to Canada. Some have sought to legally remain in the United States,” Cook continued. “And so there are different explanations for each one of these circumstances.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

So much for that Nobel Peace Prize By Silvio Canto, Jr.

By on October 7th, 2016

Once upon a time, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? First, he was not President Bush. And second, the silly Norwegians behind the prize fell for “hope and change” as bad as anybody.

It’s a little different today, as we see in this post from Kathleen Hennessey:

Seven years ago this week, when a young American president learned he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize barely nine months into his first term — arguably before he’d made any peace — a somewhat embarrassed Barack Obama asked his aides to write an acceptance speech that addressed the awkwardness of the award.

But by the time his speechwriters delivered a draft, Obama’s focus had shifted to another source of tension in his upcoming moment in Oslo: He would deliver this speech about peace just days after he planned to order 30,000 more American troops into battle in Afghanistan.

The president all-but scrapped the draft and wrote his own version.

The speech Obama delivered — a Nobel Peace Prize lecture about the necessity of waging war — now looks like an early sign that the American president would not be the sort of peacemaker the European intellectuals of the Nobel committee had anticipated.

I remember a Canadian friend, who did not support President Bush, sending me an email after the Nobel announcement. He said in so many words: this is silly and it certainly proves the Messiah thing that you’ve talking about.

Well said, Canadian friend.

Obama, the so called man of peace, has actually set the table for more conflicts and wars than any recent U.S. president. The Russians are flying MiGs over our aircraft carriers. Iranian boats bully U.S. warships. President Obama is not welcomed by Raul Castro in Havana and then has to go out what the Chinese called the “you know what” hole of the airplane. And let’s not talk about Iraq, Syria, etc.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Obama sacrificed over 1,600 lives to the global warming religion in 2016 By Ed Straker

By on October 7th, 2016

The New York Times had an article stating that vehicular deaths jumped 10% in the first half of 2016. The Times was very careful, however, not to speculate on the cause.

Traffic deaths in the United States rose 10.4 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period in 2015, maintaining a steady climb … to 17,775 in the first six months of 2016 from 16,100 in the same period in 2015

The dire statistics were the latest bad news from the traffic safety administration. Beginning in the final months of 2014, the rate of fatalities has increased for seven consecutive quarters compared with the corresponding quarters of previous years.

Officials have not identified a specific cause for the most recent increase.

“It is too soon to attribute contributing factors or potential implications of any changes in deaths on our roadways,” the agency said.

No, it isn’t. It’s called CAFE standards. Automakers are under obligations to make cars more and more fuel-efficient. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Everyone wants his car to be more fuel-efficient – until he realizes that fuel-efficiency is achieved not with some kind of engine out of Star Trek, but simply by making cars lighter and lighter. Every year there are tighter and tighter targets, and cars have to become lighter and lighter.

When you are in a car crash, the less your car weighs, the less protection you have and the more likely you are to be injured or killed. Obama bullied car companies into agreeing to make cars less and less safe. Why?

Partially out of the erroneous fear that gasoline is a non-renewable resource, and we will run out of it. We actually have enough proven reserves of gasoline for several hundred more years, longer than we have been using gasoline as a source of fuel.

The other reason for fuel efficiency mandates is fear of imaginary global warming. The high priests of the imaginary global warming religion fear that car exhaust causes global warming. Even though it hasn’t been getting warmer in recent years. Even though most carbon dioxide emissions are produced naturally, not by cars or manufacturing.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Why Environmentalism Became Both a Religion and a Con Game By Chet Richards

By on October 7th, 2016

I am a Conservationist. I am not an Environmentalist. What? Aren’t the two the same thing? No, they are not. In fact the two movements are diametrically opposed.

John Muir was a Conservationist, not an Environmentalist. He saw the wilderness as a “primary source for understanding God: The Book of Nature.” Muir did not worship Nature, as modern environmentalists do. Muir worshiped God, the Judeo-Christian God. So, here is the difference: Conservation derives from the Hebrew Bible. Mankind is to be Stewards of the Land. We are charged to husband God’s creation.

Environmentalists, for the most part, believe that the Earth’s biosphere is God. And, that human beings are destructive parasites, eating away at the life of their deity. In effect, most environmentalists are atheists searching for something larger than themselves to worship. But environmentalists see themselves as not being the riff-raff parasites that the rest of mankind are. Environmentalists believe they are the elect, the knowing, the superior beings, the priests, the Gnostics.

This notion that people are parasites really got started in the 1960’s. A couple of highly promoted bad actors started this environmental heresy. The first was Rachel Carson with her hysterical polemic about DDT and its purported harm to birds and other wild life. Her ideas proved to be, at best, problematic, but millions of people have died as a consequence of the resulting international banning of DDT. The second, and even more dangerous, problem child was Paul Ehrlich. This curmudgeon has even greater responsibility by amplifying environmental hysteria. Ehrlich should have known better. After all, he is a biology professional. But his mistakes suggest that he may not be all that professionally gifted.

Ehrlich predicted the death of the oceans due to insecticides and other chemicals washing into the sea. He did not account, as he ought to have, for the rapid evolution of plankton to adapt to these foreign substances. (The smaller the organism the faster its evolution – witness antibiotic resistance.) It was a bonehead mistake that no competent evolutionary biologist should make. More famously, Ehrlich predicted mass famine and hundreds of millions of deaths within a few years because of the so-called “population bomb.” He completely ignored the 1960’s technological “Green Revolution” which today has China and India exporting food. And, he completely missed the natural reduction in birth rates, and the consequent leveling of population, as the standard of living of Third World countries increased. Again, that process was something that population experts already knew and understood.

And then came James Lovelock with his “Gaia Hypothesis.” This is the notion that the biosphere is an environment-regulating ensemble of living organisms. In the large, the biosphere, together with its non-organic matrix, could be considered an organism, itself. The idea is interesting. Indeed, it has proven to be scientifically fruitful.

But other people latched onto the biosphere and made Gaia a god. And, with it, made environmentalism a religion. A religion, which Lovelock himself rejects as misinformed – if not dangerous. Lovelock went through his hysteric period in the early years of the ecology mania, but he has since moderated his outlook now that his predictions of imminent environmental doom have proved unfounded.

Why do people do it? Why do they fall into these overblown quasi-religious enthusiasms? I speculate that there are three complementary reasons: Ignorance, Insecurity and Hubris.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: Abbas “The Jew” by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 7th, 2016

The unprecedented outcry over Abbas’s participation in the funeral of an Israeli leader is further proof of the degree to which Palestinians have been radicalized.

This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. In light of this brainwashing, how do you expect your people to respond when you, in any way, associate with an Israeli leader?

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

Even if the current condemnation eventually dies down, it will have sent a message to future Palestinian leaders: “No peace with Israel, not in our time, and not in any time.”

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a barrage of criticism for attending the funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem. The fury directed towards Abbas comes as no surprise to those who are familiar with the unrelenting campaign of anti-Israel incitement that has been taking place for many years in Palestinian society.

If attending the funeral of an Israeli leader, especially one who devoted the past two decades of his life to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, draws such condemnation, it is easy to imagine the result of a Palestinian leader making a peace overture to Israel.

President Abbas is now receiving a dose of his own medicine. This is what happens when you unleash a tidal wave of hate against Israel and its leaders in the media, mosques and public rhetoric. This is what happens when you inform your people that Israeli leaders are “war criminals” who ought to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court. This is what happens when you drive into your people that Jews are desecrating with their “filthy feet” Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem. This is what happens when you accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”, “extra-judicial executions” and “poisoning” Yasser Arafat.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Steve Kates Razing Kaine

By on October 7th, 2016

Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice-president, Jack Garner, described the office as “not worth a quart of warm spit”. Yesterday’s debate between GOPer Mike Pence and Democrat Tim Kaine suggests there’s more to it than that: a worthy and solidly conservative successor if Trump wins.
The most interesting thing about yesterday’s US vice-presidential debate was that there was not a dime’s worth of difference between the arguments put by Republican Mike Pence and the views of running-mate Donald Trump. The difference was entirely in presentation. Pence has a professional politician’s skills in knowing how to phrase what he says and how to craft his arguments just so. But so far as what they amount to, they are exactly the same as Trump’s.

Kaine, on the other hand, was a much worse version of Hillary. She was more polished in the first presidential debate, understood her position and how to present it. By contrast, I found Kaine both irritating and shallow to a startling degree. I have always recognised that anecdote is the replacement for analysis when you are dealing with people unused to complex ideas. But if, underneath anything Kaine said, there actually was a complex idea of any sort, I missed it.

Pence described how a Trump administration would deal with national defence, illegal immigration, economic revival and racial tensions. He defended removing illegals, along with stop-and-frisk policing. What surprised me most about Kaine was the extent to which he repeated Trump’s policy proposals over and over – under the assumption, I imagine, that merely hearing what Trump wishes to do is automatically to oppose it. That’s what comes from locking oneself in the media’s echo chamber, where the prevailing wisdom of the chattering classes is the only acceptable position. My suspicion, however, is that for those who like what Trump has to offer, it is exactly what he proposes that they like. Kaine did no more than reinforce in the minds of Trump’s supporters the reasons to vote as they will on November 8.

Who knows if any of the more difficult parts of the Trump agenda can be done? But there is little doubt that most Americans want a stronger military, the defeat of ISIS, renewed border security, the revival of the economy, a tax system that promotes economic growth and a more cohesive community.

And then there were the two personalities on display. Kaine had no presence and seemed a man of little substance. Pence came across as a deeper thinker, someone whose ideas have been forged in the fires of debate with those who disagree with many of the things he says. As a conservative, even in a party of the right, he would be a lonely presence. It was a positive pleasure to hear him.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Peter Smith: He Will Fight Them on the Beaches

By on October 7th, 2016

Lord Halifax might have made a good PM if not for Hitler. As it happened, a man of singular talent, though not to everyone’s taste, was required. Now it’s true that Trump is no Churchill, but he’s also the only hope in these, our latest, current and unforgiving times.
People have strong feeling about political leaders. They love ‘em or hate ‘em, so to speak. I, too, suffer from partisan-political feelings.

Donald Trump isn’t the very model of a modern PC gentleman. Nonetheless, I am inclined to believe that beneath his unrefined exterior he is fundamentally decent. I struggle to see how you can raise such accomplished and loving children if you are an outright jerk. On the other hand, I find Hillary Clinton thoroughly disagreeable. I believe that her actions rank with those of infamous liars, shysters and carpetbaggers of yesteryear.

Do you see what I mean? I am hopelessly compromised. And so are those in the other camp. When it comes to Clinton and Trump the gap between opposing views, as the Donald might say, is huge. I regularly correspond on politics with an American lady I met on a trip to Israel. This is what she wrote in the course of a recent exchange.

I’m simply flummoxed that someone as [over-kind compliment deleted out of modesty] as you would find a bloated, thoughtless, mendacious, self-aggrandizing playground bully “the only candidate for the times… the best candidate by far, not the least worst.”

Here is Jody commenting on QOL on a recent piece of mine:

Trump is a dangerous narcissist of the type the Phillipines people are dealing with right now; he’s every bit as vulgar, offensive and unstable as Duterte.

There will no meeting of minds on the character of the two candidates. There seldom is when it comes to presidential politics, but this time the order of disagreement is on a different scale. Trump is uniquely polarizing. For the sake of the argument let us say that he has some worrisome personality traits. The question is whether his foibles are fatal to being a good president.

I don’t know for sure. No-one knows exactly how a potential leader will perform until they assume leadership. Bill Clinton, for example, had a foible or two and seemed to do OK, particularly after his ‘pivot’ towards the conservative side. What is clear to those paying attention is that the times are crying out for ‘a disrupter’ not someone who offers more of the same.

Dwelling on personality must be put in context of the perilous situation facing America and, by extension, Western civilization. American voters face two starkly different futures. Here is just a taste.

Islam inside and out has to be confronted. Trump will do that. Clinton won’t. Allowing in job lots of tens of thousands of Muslim refugees is a never-ending recipe for bringing the European problem to America. Once done it can’t be undone. It will metastasize and bring misery. No matter what how peaceful you know your Muslim neighbour or workmate to be, the goal of their creed is to take over. If you don’t get that, you don’t get anything — and your granddaughters will get what they don’t deserve.

The Third World’s population is rising rapidly as the West’s is static or declining. Strong and secure borders are required to keep out hordes of political and economic refugees. Trump will build strong borders. Clinton won’t. Don’t get that? Then face being inundated by welfare recipients and seeing neighborhoods change in ways that you won’t like. Keep your daughters indoors after that.

The US economy is in a mess, as are most Western economies. Even without a moment’s study of economics, or even with the dubious benefit of a course of study delivered by some left-wing economics hack, do you really believe that raising taxes and doubling down on environmental regulations will rescue the economy? Lowering business taxes and reducing regulatory obstacles, including on fossil fuel development, are the only effective tools left in the locker. Trump will use them. Clinton can’t. Don’t get that? Then you will see more industrial wastelands, more unemployment, more inner-city disenchantment and violence.

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