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Ruth King

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Intel GOPs to Obama: Stop Putting Lives at Risk by ‘Releasing Increasingly Dangerous Terrorists’ By Bridget Johnson

By on September 1st, 2016

WASHINGTON — All Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee warned President Obama today that he is releasing “increasingly dangerous terrorists” in his rush to fulfill his vow to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Earlier this month, the Defense Department announced the transfer of 15 detainees to the United Arab Emirates, a dozen Yemenis and three Afghans.

The UAE said it plans to send the men and their families through a rehabilitation program launched in November. The program includes psychiatrists, social workers and clergy. Terrorism-related crimes carry penalties up to capital punishment in the UAE. The emirates accepted five Yemeni detainees last year and a UAE citizen back in 2008.

“As you continue to draw down the prisoner population at Guantanamo Bay you are releasing increasingly dangerous terrorists who are more closely linked to al-Qaida and attacks against the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan,” the lawmakers, led by chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), wrote in the letter to Obama. “This largest-ever release includes several who trained in al-Qaida training camps, were bodyguards for Usama bin Laden, and fought at Tora Bora. They were non-compliant with their interrogators and hostile towards the Joint Task Force Guantanamo guards.”

They noted that the Periodic Review Board report for Obaidullah, an Afghan detainee who goes by one name, said he was “mostly compliant” because he committed “less than 100 infractions since his arrival-a low number relative to the other detainees.”

“If 100 infractions is considered a low number, then the bar for acceptable behavior has skewed far from reality,” the Intelligence GOPs wrote. “Obaidullah was part of an al-Qaida-associated improvised explosive device cell that targeted coalition forces in Khowst, Afghanistan, and was captured with 23 antitank landmines and a notebook containing electronic and detonator schematics involving explosives and mines. His lack of stated intent to re-engage in terrorist activities is due to his lack of candor with his interrogators who admit that they ‘lack insight into his current mindset.’ That is no rationalization for his transfer.”

“Your justification for emptying Guantanamo, despite the significant known risks, are not credible,” the letter continued. “Nearly one third of detainees released from Guantanamo have reengaged in terrorist activities; the costs associated with maintaining the facility have not significantly diminished because of the transfers; and the facility does not feature prominently in terrorist propaganda or recruitment efforts.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Why Did Tolkien Care About the Jews? By David P. Goldman

By on September 1st, 2016

In the current issue of Commentary my friend Rabbi Meir Soloveichik discusses J.R.R. Tolkien’s fascination with the Jews, who are of course the Dwarves in the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien himself stated in a 1971 BBC interview. Tolkien was no anti-Semite (not, at least, according to the canonical definition, namely someone who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary). His views in The Hobbit were typical of the philo-Semites of the 1930s: the Jews/Dwarves are “calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people…if you don’t expect too much.”

In The Lord of the Rings, completed after the Holocaust, Tolkien turned more sympathetic, depicting a great Elf-Dwarf friendship, and presaging (as Rabbi Soloveichik points out) a Jewish-Christian alliance against the forces of evil. One might add that in The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s early (but posthumously published) compendium of Middle-Earth mythology, the Dwarves were created before the Elves, just as the Jews came before the Christians–but by mistake, in Tolkien’s account.

In the Dwarves’ quest for their ancient homeland in the Lonely Mountain, Rabbi Soloveichik observes, Tolkien evinces a certain sympathy for Zionism.

But all this begs the question of what put the Jews at the center of Tolkien’s attention in the first place. Part of the answer is to be found in Tolkien’s lifelong effort to undo the pernicious influence of Richard Wagner, whose “Ring of the Nibelungs” is the most influential art work of the past two hundreds years (and in my view also the most pernicious). Wagner plundered the ancient Norse and Germanic sagas in the service of a revived paganism. Tolkien by contrast set out to repurpose the old pagan stories to make them a sounder foundation for the Christianity that would succeed them.

In Wagner’s pageant of gods and heroes, the aristocracy (the gods) establish their rule by treaties (covenants). But in order to maintain their rule they must hire the Giants (capital and labor) to build their fortress Valhalla, and steal the cursed gold of the Nibelung dwarves (the Jews). Wagner made clear in his writings and correspondence that the nasty Nibelungen were the Jews, whom he really, really hated. In one of his last writings he claims that the point of the Eucharist is to purge the communicant of pollutants to Aryan blood, in particular to remove the stain of Jewish blood from Jesus himself. Wagner stole the plot of his breakthrough opera “The Flying Dutchman” from one Jew (Heinrich Heine) and its musical portrayal of the sea from another Jew (Felix Mendelssohn), and then published a pamphlet alleging that Jews could only imitate but not create new art. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hillary at Bay By James Lewis…..

By on September 1st, 2016

The sicker Hillary Clinton looks on the campaign trail, the more the Media Left tells us to deny the evidence of our eyes. Mrs. Clinton has suffered two strokes near, if not inside, her brain; but strokes are seldom localized affairs, and behind the scenes her doctors must be telling her to stop any physically demanding campaign activities.

Hillary is in effect suspending her active campaigning to do almost exclusively fundraisers.

We are seeing a woman who should be checking into Walter Reed Hospital to take full-time rest and recovery under intensive medical care, but who has to be physically propped up at some pubic appearances.

The nation is looking at a practice that would not be permitted for a racehorse.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, MD, and a medical colleague have reported that Hillary’s known prescriptions include Coumadin, a useful but out-of-date blood thinner, used to prevent strokes and cardiac events. It is impossible for the public to know, but she may be being treated by an older physician, who is more comfortable using Coumadin. Alternatively, she could have been on that drug for many years.

Democrat politicians are hardly the most likeable characters, but this comes too close to medically sanctioned torture, much more cruel than anything at Abu Ghraib.

The media-political establishment that has ruled America since the Watergate resignation of Richard Nixon is now in deadly crisis. This chaos can no longer be covered up, which is why all the pathetic media donkeys are loudly braying that everything is just hunky-dory, folks, don’t pay no attention, ya’ hear now?

The fact that “50” Bush-era intelligence types signed a statement against Donald Trump and therefore for Hillary’s election, is unprecedented in my memory. The DC Permanents always pretend to be non-partisan, and this is the first public breach of that front that I can remember — at least since FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt came out in public as Deep Throat, the big Watergate leaker.

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Anthony Daniels: ‘ I’m Offended, Therefore Right’

By on September 1st, 2016

How many parents, for example, tolerate their son- or daughter-in-law, and disguise their distaste for him or her, sometimes for decades at a time? Tolerance is (or ought to be) a discipline and perhaps a habit of the heart, but not an ideology.
One always hesitates to say the obvious, but as George Orwell remarked, it is the obvious that intellectuals are most inclined to ignore. There is a good reason for this: there is hardly any point in being an intellectual if you see only what is obvious. An intellectual, almost by definition, is a person who sees, or claims to see, what others do not see, an alternative to which is to be blind to what others do see. It is true that appearances are sometimes deceptive, but more often than not they are very instructive.

Now it seems obvious to me that the notion of tolerance (the queen of the modern virtues, indeed the sole distinctly modern virtue) implies the existence of dislike or disapproval, for surely everyone is able to tolerate what he likes, approves of or is utterly indifferent to. A person who is too inclined to disapprove is censorious, not intolerant; and many a censorious person is in practice tolerant, if only because he has no choice in the matter. How many parents, for example, tolerate their son- or daughter-in-law, and disguise their distaste for him or her, sometimes for decades at a time? Tolerance is (or ought to be) a discipline and perhaps a habit of the heart, but not an ideology.

A tolerant person is one who disapproves of someone or something but does not act as if his disapproval were all that counted in the determination of his conduct towards whomever or whatever he disapproves of. To live and let live is not to approve—much less, in modern parlance to “cele­brate”—all ways of life as if there were nothing to choose between them, or to be glad that some people have adopted a morally reprehensible or disgusting way of conducting themselves. Tolerance, moreover, should not be infinite: for to find nothing intolerable is to accept everything, including the worst evils, and is the ultimate form of pusillanimity. It is the refusal ever to confront anything; toleration can be a vice as well as a virtue. Where to place the boundary between the tolerable and the intolerable is, of course, a matter of judgment, and judgment is always fallible, for there is no hard-and-fast rule to help us decide every case, many cases being marginal. What is tolerable in one circumstance is often intolerable in another.

Every scribbler must be secretly relieved that there is no shortage, and never will be a shortage, of the intolerable in this world: for while I do not claim that the intolerable is the only subject worth writing about, literature would be much impoverished without it. What would Richard III be like, for example, if it reflected the real Richard III as the Richard III Society says he was. Somehow the following lines are not as compelling as the original:

“I, that am curtailed of fair proportion,Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,And that so lamely and unfashionable.

That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—Why I, in this weak piping time of peace. Have no delight to pass away the time,Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on promoting social justice. And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a righteous king And hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Economic plans have I laid, social reforms,By good administration, redistributive taxation,To reconcile the social classes with one another,While promoting trade and economic growth.

Such a Richard III would no doubt have been a much better man that Shakespeare’s moral monster, but I doubt that a play about him would long have stayed in the repertoire.

My attitude to the intolerable, then, is akin to my attitude to suffering: each individual instance of it is to be eliminated as far as possible, while being under no illusion that, in the abstract, suffering and the intolerable are not an inevitable concomitant of Man’s earthly existence. Indeed, the attempt to reduce them is what gives many people their sense of purpose in life: a utopia in which “the idle pleasures of these days” are all there were to life would bore them, and they would soon start to make trouble. Man is a problem-creating animal.

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“Liberal” Turkey Claims Europe Is Racist by Burak Bekdil

By on September 1st, 2016

“There is no such religion as Christianity … In reality, Jesus Christ was a Muslim coming from Jewish tradition … The name of the religion revealed to Christ was Islam …” — Abdurrahman Dilipak, columnist, Yeni Akit.

In Turkey, not even the smallest village of a few hundred inhabitants has a non-Muslim mayor.

Against this embarrassing background, Turkey is accusing Europe of being racist. That would be like North Korea accusing Europe of being a rogue state.

It’s not a bad joke; it’s a very bad joke. Turkey, where all variants of ethnic and religious xenophobia are a national pastime, is accusing the West of being racist.

Speaking after a spat with Austria and Sweden over news reports and tweets from those countries that accused Turkey of allowing sex with children under the age of 15, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed that the behavior of European countries reflected the “racism, anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish (trend) in Europe.”

He is talking about the same Europe where the inhabitants of one of its biggest cities, London, recently elected a Muslim as its mayor. In Turkey, not even the smallest village of a few hundred inhabitants has a non-Muslim mayor.

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Daniel Pipes: Trump’s Muslim Immigration Policy Is Evolving for the Better

By on September 1st, 2016

Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes joined Breitbart London Editor Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM to talk about Republican nominee Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration policy.

Kassam opened the discussion by mentioning Trump’s announced trip to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, which Pipes described as “a very high-risk undertaking.”

“The sides begin so far apart that unless they have some kind of groundwork in place, some kind of preliminary draft agreement on what they’re going to say, it could work out to the detriment of Donald Trump,” Pipes explained.

Kassam quoted Nigel Farage’s observation that Trump was approaching politics with a “businessman’s strategy of trial and error,” which doesn’t work in politics, because “people always hold you to your previous positions.” Pipes offered a similar observation in a Washington Times article several weeks ago, concluding that Trump was learning “slowly and erratically from his mistakes.”

“There clearly was a learning curve,” Pipes told Kassam on Wednesday morning, adding:

I focused not so much on the Mexican question, but on the Muslim question. He came out with this extraordinary statement that there should be a complete shutdown and closure to Muslims entering the United States. He said that back in December, and he doubled down on it, repeated it, elaborated on it.

And then, starting in the middle of June, he started walking away from it, and he started talking about extreme vetting, and then he started talking about not taking in people from certain territories, which he implied would include places like France and Germany where there is a lot of political violence.

And finally he settled on his formulation – which is in fact, I think, the only workable one – which is that you keep out the Islamists. You keep out the nasties. You keep out the people who want to do you harm.

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U.S. Appeals Court Dismisses Ruling Against Palestinian Authority, PLO Second Circuit says U.S. courts don’t have jurisdiction to hear case brought by terrorism victims By Nicole Hong

By on September 1st, 2016

A federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday threw out a multimillion-dollar judgment awarded to a group of U.S. terrorism victims, ruling that the U.S. lacked jurisdiction over a lawsuit brought by the victims against the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization.

The ruling is a significant setback for the 10 American families who sued over terrorist attacks in Israel in the early 2000s that left 33 dead and more than 400 injured. After a trial in Manhattan federal court last year, jurors found the PLO and Palestinian Authority liable for the attacks and ordered the groups to pay the families $218.5 million, which was automatically tripled to $655.5 million under a U.S. antiterrorism law.

On Wednesday, three judges for the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case, saying there wasn’t enough of a connection between the U.S. and the Israel attacks. There is no U.S. jurisdiction in this case, “no matter how horrendous the underlying attacks or morally compelling the plaintiffs’ claims,” wrote Judge John Koetl.

One test of jurisdiction was whether the Palestinian Authority and the PLO could be considered “at home” in the U.S. Despite the groups’ office and lobbying efforts in Washington, the appeals panel said that was insufficient to establish a substantial presence in the U.S. The groups are clearly “at home” in Palestine, the opinion said.

The victims who brought the lawsuit were U.S. citizens, but the judges said that during the Israel attacks, the shooters “fired indiscriminately” at large groups of people, meaning they weren’t expressly targeting Americans. Lawyers for the plaintiffs had argued that the attacks were aimed at the U.S. and intended to influence U.S. foreign policy.

Gassan Baloul, a Squire Patton Boggs partner representing the Palestinian groups, said in a statement: “We are very gratified that the court fully accepted our clients’ consistent position that the PA and the PLO are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States courts in these matters.”

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, the Israel-based lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Congress and the State Department should intervene to “ensure that these families are compensated by the PA and PLO for these crimes.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Australia to Step Up Airstrikes on Islamic State Government has agreed to new rules of engagement, amending laws that restrict strikes to front-line units By Rob Taylor

By on September 1st, 2016

CANBERRA, Australia—Australia will step up airstrikes against Islamic State, allowing its military for the first time to attack support facilities as well as militant fighters.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in a major security speech to Parliament on Thursday, said the conservative government had agreed to new rules of engagement requested by the military, amending domestic laws that restricted strikes to only front-line Islamic State units.

“We must combat all of Daesh, including its financiers and propagandists,” Mr. Turnbull told lawmakers, using the government’s preferred term for Islamic State extremists. “It is why we must give our agencies the powers they need. To detect. To disrupt. To arrest. And to target,” he said.
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Australia, a close U.S. ally, has since 2014 committed combat aircraft and army special-forces advisers to the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as refueling, early warning and control aircraft.

But U.S. warplanes have been attacking a wider range of ISIS targets because of restrictions in Australian domestic laws than created some ambiguity around who could be defined as a militant fighter. That meant airstrikes weren’t being carried out against so-called “Mad Max technicals”—armed sport-utility vehicles not clearly identified as belonging to militant groups—and supply dumps.

“The government has reviewed its policy on targeting enemy combatants,” Mr. Turnbull said. “This means ADF [Australian Defence Force] personnel will be supported by our domestic laws. They will be able to target Daesh at its core, joining with our coalition partners to target and kill a broader range of Daesh combatants.”

In April, U.S. commanders redrafted rules of engagement to allow airstrikes on ISIS even when there was some risk of civilian casualties, as coalition allies tried to capitalize on air and ground offensives that have seen Islamic State lose territory.

Mr. Turnbull said Islamic State and the inspiration it provided for homegrown terrorism was the greatest strategic threat faced by Australia, which has begun a A$200 billion modernization of its military to counter a buildup of weapons in Asia and increasing territorial assertion by China.

‘We must give our agencies the powers they need. To detect. To disrupt. To arrest. And to target.’
—Australia Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull

“We live in an uncertain and complex strategic environment, from territorial disputes in the South China Sea, to Middle East conflicts, tensions on the Korean Peninsula and instability in parts of Africa, broken borders in Europe,” he said.

But he said that Australia—one of the largest coalition military contributors—was confident the “tide had now turned” in the Middle East fight against Daesh after Iraq’s military defeated Islamic State in the key city of Fallujah, in the strategic Anbar province, on June 26. Coalition strategists, he said, believed Islamic State had lost close to half of the territory it once held in Iraq and about 20% of its territory in Syria, as well as losing around a third of its front-line fighters. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Limits of Trumpism Candidates who run on his agenda are losing in Republican primaries.

By on September 1st, 2016

Is Donald Trump’s presidential nomination the vanguard of a new political movement in the Republican Party or an accident of circumstance in this odd election year? The answer won’t be clear at least until November, but the evidence in recent GOP primaries suggests it may be the latter.

That message came through Tuesday with the thumping primary victories by Senators Marco Rubio in Florida and John McCain in Arizona. Mr. Rubio received more than 70% of the vote in a multicandidate field that included businessman Carlos Beruff, who campaigned as a Trump clone on trade and immigration. He spent $8 million of his own money but didn’t get a fifth of the vote.

Mr. McCain defied predictions of a close primary in Arizona by whipping former state senator Kelli Ward by double digits. Ms. Ward was backed by Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund operator who financed Ted Cruz. Ms. Ward ran hard against immigration and tried to portray the five-term Senator, who turned 80 years old Monday, as a tainted fixture of Washington.

The impact of immigration is especially intriguing in these primaries. Messrs. Rubio and McCain were members of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” Senators who negotiated the 2013 immigration reform. That bill passed the Senate but never made it to the House floor amid a conservative panic. Their opponents tried to make those Senate votes disqualifying, but GOP primary voters seem to have put immigration well down the list of priorities.

These races follow the defeat of businessman Paul Nehlen, another Trumpian, who received less than 16% against House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin in early August. Mr. Nehlen received lots of out-of-state money and publicity from the Trump network, especially Breitbart.com.

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ISIS ON THE COUCH IN GERMANY SEE NOTE PLEASE

By on August 31st, 2016

How ridiculous… try some shock and awe therapy and closing the borders first….rsk
Therapy and Prevention: The Race to Stop Youth from Radicalizing Germany Tries New Strategies to Keep Men from Islamic State –
The recent spate of deadly attacks in Germany have highlighted the need to intervene with angry young men before they turn to extremism or violence. But the country has a lot of catching up to do — and the work can be controversial.

André Taubert used to feel pretty forsaken when he drove his old Mercedes through northern Germany every day.

He and one other colleague were the only ones dealing with Islamists in four German states: Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein. They were constantly getting phone calls from worried mothers, women whose sons or daughter were in the process of discovering jihadism. The women were desperate and concerned that they were losing touch with their own children, who suddenly seemed like strangers.

From 2012 to 2015, Taubert’s schedule often meant visiting as many as three different cities in a single day: Kiel in the morning, for example, Göttingen in the afternoon and Bremen in the evening. “We had to set priorities, make lists and think about where we could still have an impact,” he says. “They were kamikaze missions.”

Prevention was not an important topic at the time, at least not for lawmakers. There was only one counselling center for the family members of Islamists in all of northern Germany — with only one position paid for with public funds, which Taubert and his co-worker shared.

The working conditions have improved since then. In July 2015, 39-year-old Taubert became the head of Hamburg-based Legato, an “office for religiously motivated radicalization.” A team of nine employees now operates in Hamburg alone, where they have already handled 130 cases in only one year. None of these young people has traveled to Syria yet, says Taubert, and he is not aware of any of them having become terrorism suspects.

“I’m annoyed by statements that we can’t do anything about terrorist attacks, just because the security authorities don’t recognize everything. This is a disregard for the power of civil society.”

People like Taubert — social workers, therapists, psychiatrists and educators — are what Germany depends on now. They are expected to do what the police and intelligence services cannot achieve on their own: step in when parents run out of options, friends look the other way and neighbors fall silent.

In the bloody summer of 2016, this is perhaps the most important insight: A life without new attacks, and without fear of terror, can only exist if we begin to understand the rage of unstable young men — and find answers to it.

A Dire Need for Initiatives

There is a lot of catching up to do, as the findings of a SPIEGEL survey taken in all of Germany’s states demonstrate. The number of men prepared to use violence who are traveling to Syria and Iraq has risen over the years, but in Bavaria, for example, four relevant state ministries didn’t begin cooperating closely to foster a network against Salafism until 2015. An initiative in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg began operations shortly before Christmas. An office titled “Salafism in the Saarland” was opened in the southwestern state on January 1 of this year. There has been little funding for these efforts to date. The eastern state of Thuringia, for example, spent exactly €16,005.76 euros ($17,889.64) on Islamism prevention in 2015.

At a time when terrorism is becoming more and more of a threat, the government and German society have been oddly disinterested in helping at-risk youth or bringing young radicals back from the fringes of society. But appealing to their hearts and minds could be a successful strategy. The biographies — and possible pathologies — of perpetrators of violence are often similar in terms of their infractions, whether they are on the left, the right or extremists.

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