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Ruth King

A Turkish-Saudi Military Offensive on Syria? by Burak Bekdil

Syria’s Scud-C ballistic missiles put several big Turkish cities “within range.”

Half of the Turkish squadrons that would fly over Syrian skies may not be able to return home safely.

Turkey simply does not have a long-range anti-missile defense architecture to counter the Syrian (and/or Iranian) missiles.

On June 22, 2012, a Turkish RF-4E military reconnaissance aircraft took off from an air base in eastern Turkey. It flew at low altitude, as most spy planes do, and violated Syrian airspace before it was hit — most likely — by a missile fired from a Syrian- or Russian-operated air defense system.

Two Turkish pilots were killed. Their bodies were later recovered from the Mediterranean Sea with help from a US ship.

U.S. State Dept. Invites Muslim Leaders, Denies Christians by Raymond Ibrahim

“After the [Christian governor] told them [U.S. authorities] that they were ignoring the 12 Shariah states who (sic) institutionalized persecution … he suddenly developed visa problems. … The question remains — why is the U.S. downplaying or denying the attacks against Christians?” — Emmanuel Ogebe, Nigerian human rights lawyer based in Washington D.C.

“In the same week that the State Dept says it will take the engagement of religious leaders seriously … it refuses a visa to a persecuted Christian nun who has fled ISIS, Sister Diana.” — Chris Seiple, President, Institute for Global Engagement.

Late on the evening of May 8, Newsmax TV announced that pressure from Americans acquainted with Sister Diana Momeka’s visa rejection has just caused the State Department to reverse its decision and permit her entry into the United States. Until then, however, she and others were barred

EDWARD CLINE: ISLAM: AN IDEOLOGY OF LETHAL ABSURDITIES

Daniel Greenfield wrote on FrontPage about the absurdity of the news media in accusing Pamela Geller and Bosch Fawstin of encouraging violence by conducting a drawing Mohammad contest and inviting others to the event:

“The actual attempt at mass slaughter was dismissed as the terrorists ‘take the bait’ from the cartoonists who had been fiendishly plotting to be mass slaughtered by them for the publicity.”

But, this is the actual motive of Islamic terrorists; they are fiends looking for “bait” to take in order to be killed by their intended victims (or by a lone policeman, as in Garland) so their names can be publicized as “martyrs for Allah.” The only time terrorist outfits like ISIS, Al Qaeda, et al. value and recognize such self-sacrificing fools (aka “brothers”) is when they’re dead. This policy reduces the average jihadist to the level of a passive receptor, or a human lemming, who just can’t help himself for wanting to die, of seeking immediate if not eventual death.

But then, Islam is a nihilist ideology, chock full of absurdities.

Cultural Relativism Uber Islam by Diana West ****

Listening to Laura Ingraham’s interview with Pamela Geller, I made some notes on their lines of argument. Geller, obviously, is for the cartoon contest as an exercise of the American right to speech free from Islamic dictates; Ingraham supports Geller’s right to free speech but opposes the contest, nonetheless, as not “helpful.”

Geller opens by taking exception to Ingraham’s earlier comment calling the cartoon contest needlessly provocative. Geller argues that, on the contrary, it is murdering cartoonists that is needlessly provocative, and then says something about the importance of not surrendering to violent sharia enforcement. Once established, she says, we will enforce it again and again and again.

Ingraham replies with a list of her own bona fides regarding freedom of religion, persecuted Christians, the war in Iraq, also professing her own Roman Catholic faith. She then says she doesn’t think the US effort to combat the Islamization of the globe is “necessarily helped” by putting on Mohammed art contests, although she supports PG’s right to do so. She then intimates that PG was merely grandstanding, which PG takes exception to. (PG: Where did I say I was “brave,” LI: I didn’t say you said that — although LI did imply exactly that.)

Yoel Meltzer: Obama is not the Problem

Constant blame being thrown at US president for many difficulties Israel is currently facing is in reality a distraction from fact that Israel itself is not functioning like a full-fledged sovereign state.

Similarly, after more than 20 years of the disastrous Oslo “peace process” and all the carnage and suffering that it brought, as well as in the face of a strengthening international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel, many Israelis are perturbed by Obama’s continued insistence that Israel must work towards the fulfillment of the two-state solution.

Together these point to Obama’s unwavering belief that the source of all the instability in the region is not Arab/Islamic terror or Arab/Islamic hatred of Israel and the West, but rather previous western injustices that need to be rectified. In the case of Iran, this means the fostering of positive relations after years of America treating Iran like a pariah state while in the case of Israel this means the ending of its supposed unlawful occupation of Judea and Samaria in order to help bring to fruition the creation of yet another Arab state in the region.

Now For the Bad News by Paul R. Hollrah

An article by Christopher Carson in the April 27 edition of Daily Mailer.FrontPage, titled, A Mad Max Nation with No Electrical Grid, is enough to scare the bejabbers out of anyone.
In predicting what America would be like during a major outage of our electrical grid, Carson tells us: “It’s been one year since a white-hot study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was leaked to the Wall Street Journal. The government study concluded that coordinated attacks on only nine electrical transmission substations in the United States could bring down the entire trinity of grids (called interconnections) that supply electricity to America. Terrorists would have to physically destroy only four in the East, three in the West, and two in Texas, plus one large transformer production plant, and ‘the entire United States grid would be down for at least 18 months, probably longer.’

Lynch to Lawmakers: DOJ Responsibility to ‘Help Prevent Circumstances’ That Led to Baltimore Riots By Bill Straub

WASHINGTON – Appearing before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce-Justice-Science on Thursday to discuss the Justice Department’s funding request, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told lawmakers that Baltimore police had made some progress in dealing with the public but acknowledged that “more may need to be done.”

“We’re currently in the process of considering the request from city officials and community and police leaders for an investigation into whether the Baltimore City Police Department engaged in a pattern or practice of civil rights violations,” she said. “And I intend to have a decision in the coming days.”

That decision came quickly. She announced [1] Friday that the Justice Department should commence an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department amid claims that the agency has employed excessive force and violated individuals’ civil rights in carrying out its duties.

CIA-Backed, ‘Vetted Moderate’ Syrians … Now Openly Working with Al-Qaeda By Patrick Poole

As I have reported extensively here at PJ Media over the past year, a growing mountain of evidence confirms that the “vetted moderate” Sunni groups that the U.S. has backed in Syria — backing which includes CIA-provided heavy weaponry – have always been working with the very same jihadist groups that the Obama administration and the Washington, D.C. foreign policy “smart set” have consistently claimed they would counter.

Now, a new report establishes that even more CIA-backed “vetted moderate” groups are collaborating with groups designated by the U.S. as terrorist organizations. Specifically, they are collaborating with al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, though at times they have also operated jointly with the Islamic State.

Reuters reported last Thursday that two Free Syrian Army (FSA) units — Division 13 and Fursan al-Haq — are fighting side-by-side with the Nusra Front in northern Syria:

Social-Justice Warriors Are Worrying about White Male Privilege on Mars Oh, Okay. By Katherine Timpf (??????!!!)

Despite the fact that we’re clearly pretty far from colonizing Mars, the social-justice crowd is already freaking out that it’s going to be an oppressive, white-male dominated society and that we must act now to stop it.

“The last thing we need is to wake up in 50 years and find that a bunch of #gamergate nobheads are running Mars,” Martin Robbins writes in a piece for the Guardian titled, “How Can Our Future Mars Colonies Be Free of Racism and Sexism?”

Robbins explains that part of his concern comes from the fact that humans’ colonization of new lands has traditionally been oppressive.

“Destiny is rarely great for the people already at the destination,” Robbins explains.

Um, just one thing about that: As far as we know, there are no people on Mars.

Robins acknowledges that “the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers,” but explains that his freakout is still totally justified because “no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery and oppression. It’s just what we do.”

No, Mrs. Obama, America’s Museums Aren’t Racially Discriminatory by Ian Tuttle

The dedication of New York City’s new Whitney Museum — a $420 million, nine-story behemoth, under construction in Manhattan’s meatpacking district for the past five years — was an occasion for celebration. Leave it to an Obama to employ the occasion for racial scolding.

The Obama in this case was Michelle, who has long shared her husband’s constitutional inability to refrain from racializing a public occasion: “You see, there are so many kids in this country who look at places like museums and concert halls and other cultural centers and they think to themselves, well, that’s not a place for me, for someone who looks like me, for someone who comes from my neighborhood,” she said at the dedication ceremony. “In fact, I guarantee you that right now, there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself.”