Displaying posts categorized under

WORLD NEWS

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

George Soros: “The Gravedigger of the Left” By Dr. Mária Schmidt*

By on April 27th, 2017

* The full version was posted on April 25, 2017, in English, on About Hungary, and the original Hungarian, A Baloldal Sírásója, on Látószög.http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?m=1101941066390&ca=db7af234-2239-45d6-ae7a-6167894243ce

George Soros, his global Open Society Foundations and the hundreds of other organizations also funded by him are noisily and sometimes violently demonstrating against policies and governments who fail to accede to his agenda. There are lawsuits and Congressional investigations into his activities in the United States. In Hungary, the government is passing new laws to curtail his foundations and his Central European University’s operations.

To balance Soros’s version of what’s taking place in Hungary, read excerpts* from an article written by Dr. Mária Schmidt, the director general of the House of Terror Museum, and the XXI Century Institute, in Budapest:

“When George Soros appeared in Hungary in 1984, the Soviet rule still appeared solid and indestructible. Six years later, in 1990, when the Communists were toppled by God’s grace, Soros had already recruited a broad circle of supporters and proposed to take over Hungary’s complete sovereign debt and, in exchange, asked for Hungary’s industry, that is, the bulk of the country’s national wealth. His offer was turned down by JózsefAntall, our first, democratically elected prime minister.

The pundits, who had by that time been promoted to positions of moral authority by Soros, launched a sweeping media campaign urging the government to repay the substantial debt accumulated by the communists and not even think of requesting a debt waiver or even rescheduling. Meanwhile, keeping debt servicing in mind, those same pundits wanted and urged Hungary to be the only country in the region where no re-privatisation took place. That is, they opposed the idea of returning nationalized property to the original owners. Instead, they favored privatization, a process already launched by communist comrades. That position created a common ground for the former democratic opposition, i.e. SZDSZ and those former comrades who had been the beneficiaries of wild privatization. This is how the fullest and fastest privatization possible became one of the main demands of the post-communist camp. It is an established fact by now that privatization in this wild form, just as in its later incarnations, meant the bargain sale of public wealth.

Continue reading →
MOVIES AND TELEVISION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Defy PC Suppression and See ‘The Promise’ A moving, epic, sumptuous film on the suppressed topic of the Armenian genocide. Danusha V. Goska

By on April 26th, 2017

Powerful people are deploying every trick to prevent you from seeing The Promise, director Terry George’s 2016 film starring Oscar Isaac, Christian Bale and Charlotte Le Bon. Their insistence that you not see the film rouses suspicion. After all, Terry George is a something of a cinematic social justice warrior and critical darling. He’s known for taking on righteous themes, including the English imperial abuse of Irish prisoners in his 1993 film In the Name of the Father, nominated for seven Academy Awards. His 2004 film, Hotel Rwanda, received three Academy Award nominations. The Promise’s script is by George and Robin Swicord, who also has an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination under her belt.

George’s Hotel Rwanda depicted the Rwandan genocide. Rwandans died in that signature African phenomenon: tribal violence. Hutus rose up with machetes and murdered their neighboring Tutsis in the world’s fastest genocide. Hotel Rwanda tells a different story. Rwandans died because white people don’t care about black people. In the film, Nick Nolte, playing a UN general, “explains” the genocide to Don Cheadle, playing the real-life hero and rescuer Paul Rusesabagina. “You’re dirt. We think you are dirt. You’re dung. You’re worthless. You’re black. You’re not even a n – – – – -. You’re an African … They’re not gonna stop the slaughter.”

Hotel Rwanda never explains how white people living thousands of miles away could stop a million killings-by-machete occurring over a hundred days. Rwanda is remote, landlocked, and mountainous. There were no airports, train tracks, or installations to bomb. Getting troops into Rwanda would have taken months and given the volatility of the area, the insertion of American or European troops would have sparked separate conflagrations. Witness the horrific fate of the humanitarian mission in the Battle of Mogadishu in October, 1993 – a mere six months before the Rwandan genocide. No matter. It’s whitie’s fault. That movie, the powers that be want you to see.

The powers that be don’t want you to see The Promise, though it stars Oscar Isaac, previously praised for the box office smash, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the critical smash Inside Llewyn Davis, by the hipster Coen Brothers. What, then, is the problem with The Promise and why don’t powerful people want you to see it?

The Promise dramatizes the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide. An estimated 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Ottoman Turkey and its successor, the Republic of Turkey.

The victims of the Armenian genocide were Christians. The perpetrators were Muslims.

Continue reading →
HOMELAND SECURITY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EMP Threat From North Korea Is Real, and Terrifying By John R. Moore

By on April 26th, 2017

Fifty-five years ago, the U.S. tested a nuclear weapon high above the atmosphere over the Pacific. At the time, my father — a nuclear weapons engineer — was listening on our ham radio.

When the device exploded, we heard nothing in Albuquerque. But, in Honolulu, 1000 miles from the detonation, the sky turned red as streetlights and telephones went out. EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) effects from the distant nuclear explosion had struck.

Today we hear concern that cities might be destroyed by North Korean nuclear tipped missiles, but Starfish Prime should alert us to a more imminent danger: EMP. North Korea can launch an EMP attack before it has developed nuclear missile technology, and EMP may be far more deadly.

An EMP disaster from a high-altitude blast seems like science fiction: There is a silent flash high in the sky, and everything using electricity just … stops. Cars stop, power goes out, the Internet dies, satellites quit working, landline and mobile phone systems go out, and computers are destroyed. In a moment, we are back to 1850, as was dramatized in William Forstchen’s 2009 novel One Second After.

While the total wipeout depicted in One Second After is probably exaggerated, the effects could knock out our power grid for months, and destroy critical communications and computer systems. As former CIA chief James Woolsey recently said:

If you look at the electric grid and what it’s susceptible to, we would be moving into a world with no food delivery, no water purification, no banking, no telecommunications, no medicine. All of these things depend on electricity in one way or another.

In such a situation, there simply is no way to rule out the possibility that hundreds of millions could die.

To nuke one of our cities, the North needs to master ICBM construction, nuclear weapons miniaturization, precision long-range guidance technology, atmospheric re-entry vehicles, and fusing to trigger detonation at the right time after the hazardous re-entry. In contrast, an EMP attack requires only a small, light nuclear weapon and the ability to launch it as a satellite. Once over the U.S., it is detonated.

Already, two satellites launched by North Korea cross the U.S. every day.

Do they contain nuclear weapons? Probably not, but how can we know? Nuclear weapons don’t emit much radiation until they go off, so they are hard to detect. I used to fly in a nuclear bomber with the weapon station just a few feet from my station with no shielding — no need.

Meanwhile, North Korea continues striving to miniaturize its nukes — and may have already succeeded. They have released pictures of a miniaturized bomb, although that may just be propaganda.

Starfish Prime used a thermonuclear weapon, a “hydrogen bomb,” which was very powerful but which the North is still striving to build — a difficult task. But only a fission weapon or “atomic bomb” is needed for an EMP, and North Korea has tested several. The yield would probably need to be increased over their latest test, but getting there is only a matter of time. Fusion boosting the weapon to higher yield is not a difficult step. The North recently restarted its Yongbyon reactor, which can produce the necessary tritium.

The EMP danger isn’t only from North Korea. Iran has the capability to launch missiles from ships at sea — the EMP attack depicted in Forstchen’s novel.

We currently have little defense against this threat. Our land based anti-ballistic missile systems are oriented towards warheads coming across the North Pacific, while North Korea launches satellites to the south, which later cross the U.S. from the south or north. The anti-satellite ability of the Navy’s AEGIS ships is unclear — one satellite in a very low orbit has been intercepted, and ships need to be positioned within range of the orbit. Shooting a satellite down before it reaches orbit is another possibility, but AEGIS has a very limited window for such a “boost phase” intercept. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien How to Get Ahead as a Celebrity Scientist

By on April 26th, 2017

There will be plenty of ABC seats and microphones awaiting US astrophysicist, fact-challenged warmist and tireless self-promoter Neil de Grasse Tyson when he tours Australia this year. That’s the way it works if you hold little respect for actual science and a lucrative contempt for those who do.
At first we had Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). That was a pretty specific threat. It spelled out the crime, the perpetrator and the result. But when it started to become clear, after 20-odd years of research, that there wasn’t actually a great deal of warming, that the Earth was greening and worldwide crop production continued to increase, something had to be done. Changing the mantra to Beneficial Anthropogenic Global Warming wasn’t going to cut it for the trough-snouters at the IPCC, so we got Climate Change and, more recently, Climate Disruption.

These latter euphemisms for something that isn’t happening are much easier to defend when Mother Nature provides an inexhaustible supply of disasters to draw upon as proof of the coming apocalypse, notwithstanding that the evidence is that these events are not increasing in either frequency or strength. And now, as the highly contrived warming predictions that are the IPCC’s stock in trade deviate ever more from its lurid modeling, yet another fresh mantra has emerged.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, for those of you who don’t know of him, is a celebrity astrophysicist. Like his British counterpart Brian Cox, is a fervent believer in CAGW. Only, of course, he now doesn’t talk about CAGW or even Climate Change. He talks about — drum roll, please — “Science!” CAGW is now, er, science. What were formerly mere “climate change deniers” are now full-blown “science deniers”. What more evidence could you possibly need to conclude that those who question the extent of global warming are, at best, deluded fools or, at worst, Gaia’s eager rapists?

Tyson argues his case in a four minute video that, as we have come to expect from warmists, relies heavily on the strawman argument. At one point he states that, up until now, he “doesn’t remember any time when people were standing in denial of what science was” – whatever that means. To back up this rather vague proposition the video refers to anti-vaxxers, anti-GMers and then, of course, climate change deniers. Oh, and he also throws in a clip of now Vice President Mike Pence arguing that evolution should be taught as theory rather than fact. (To be fair to Pence, that’s not quite the point he made in the full address to Congress, arguing that Charles Darwin’s view is but one perspective, that evolutionary theory is subject to constant and ongoing tweaking and that, as a Christian, he prefers to believe mankind and all the world were brought to their current state by Divine guidance. In this he differs not much from the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Pope Francis cited with approval in his recent dark-green plea for the planet, Laudato si, which, funnily enough, Tyson endorsed to the fullest. Then again, why take anything Tyson says without a grain of salt? A famous mis-quoter, he also has trouble recalling his own past. But enough of Tyson, at least until he arrives in Australia later this year for a series of lectures, when someone might ask him a few pointed questions.)

The interesting thing about this line-up of ‘denialism’ is that of the four examples chosen, three come down to individual choice – you can choose to vaccinate or not, you can choose to eschew GM foods and you can reject evolution if you think that it is incompatible with creationism. These are the views of fringe dwellers which have marginal impact on society. But CAGW affects everyone; you can’t opt in or out of the theory’s consequences, as evidenced by your latest electricity bill and the rent-seekers who make it o much larger than it should be. What Tyson is doing is an example of trying to impose guilt by association. According to Neil, science never gets anything wrong.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter Smith Islam’s Covergirls

By on April 26th, 2017

One doesn’t expect too much from the latest iterations of Western feminist thought, least of all thought itself, and the defence of the male-imposed burka and hijab makes the point. With “friends” like that, perhaps it’s time for lawmakers to protect Muslim women from misogynist coercion.
The new citizenship test for intending migrants will probably be window dressing. Clearly it is aimed at Muslims, which is entirely appropriate. They are the ones who have problems fitting in; wherever they go in the West. But asking people to commit to certain values and eschew others is close to worthless, unless combined with a lie-detector test. And I doubt the ABC would agree to that, if you get my meaning.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider something tangible like dress standards. My club has them and they work well. You always have the choice of staying out. It’s a question of how the matter is approached.

To be clear, within the confines of prevailing standards of decency, people should have the freedom to dress as they wish in purely public places. But the key phrase is ‘as they wish’. Our values are not consistent with any group of women being forced to wear what they would not freely choose to wear. The intolerant cannot be tolerated when it bears down on a vulnerable group of our fellow citizens.

In this case it is plain that the face of intolerance puts many women in unattractive clothing they would not freely choose to wear. We know this by applying self-reflection. We personally, would find it intolerable to dress from head to toe in black serge (or in any other colour) when walking on a hot Australian summer’s day. We also know this from looking at pictures of the way women chose to dress in Egypt, or in Afghanistan, or in Iran in earlier times when free of Islamic religious strictures. Empathy and common observation tells the tale. (editor: the picture below is of Cairo University students in 1978. Not a hijab to be seen.)

cairo university 1978

It is an affront to our value of gender equality to acquiesce to a particular group of women being forced, pressured or cajoled into wearing dowdy coveralls. We owe it to Muslim women in Australia to do something about it.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel’s Prime Minister Scraps Meeting With Germany’s Top Diplomat Cancellation was response to foreign minister’s decision to meet a group critical of Israel’s armed forces, Netanyahu’s spokesman says By Andrea Thomas in Berlin and Rory Jones in Tel Aviv

By on April 26th, 2017

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel scrapped a meeting with Germany’s top diplomat hours before they were to meet on Tuesday, the latest sign of tension between Israel and one of its oldest Western allies.

A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu said the decision came in response to the plan by German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to meet representatives of Breaking the Silence, a nongovernmental organization critical of the conduct of Israeli armed forces in the Palestinian territories.

“Imagine if foreign diplomats visiting the United States or Britain met with NGOs that call American or British soldiers war criminals,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “Leaders of those countries would surely not accept this.”

Mr. Gabriel, who is vice chancellor in Germany’s government and was on his first official trip to Israel since his appointment as foreign minister this year, said the snub would have no lasting impact on bilateral relations but expressed surprise at the Israeli premier’s decision.

“Imagine we were to invite Mr. Netanyahu to Germany and he wanted to meet with NGOs that also exist here and we were to say, ‘If you do that we will abort the visit.’ People would call us crazy.”

Later in the day, Mr. Gabriel declined to take a telephone call from Mr. Netanyahu, an Israeli official said. In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry said it couldn’t confirm that account.

Mr. Gabriel was expected to meet later Tuesday with representatives of Breaking the Silence, which collects testimony, often anonymously, from members of the Israeli military on its operations in the territories.

A spokesman for the organization couldn’t be reached for comment.

Postwar Germany has been among Israel’s most steadfast allies for decades. Chancellor Angela Merkel once described protecting the security of Israel as part of Germany’s “raison d’être.”

But the relationship has been put under strain recently, with Berlin becoming more critical of the lack of progress in efforts to reach a negotiated settlement in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Germany sharply criticized Israel’s retroactive legalization of thousands of settler dwellings in the West Bank in February. The Palestinians said all Israeli communities in the territory are illegal under international law.

That same month, Berlin postponed for a year a joint German-Israeli cabinet meeting planned for May in Jerusalem because of what it called “scheduling difficulties” caused by Germany’s presidency of the Group of 20 largest economies. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Nukes + Nuttiness = Neanderthal Deterrence Acting crazy has worked for rogue regimes, but Western appeasement is not a long-term solution. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 25th, 2017

How can an otherwise failed dictatorship best suppress internal dissent while winning international attention, influence—and money?

Apparently, it must openly seek nuclear weapons.

Second, the nut state should sound so crazy and unpredictable that it might just use them, regardless of civilization’s deterrent forces arrayed against it.

Third, it must welcome being “reluctantly” pulled into nonproliferation talks to prolong the farce and allow its deep-pocket enemies to brag of their diplomatic “strategic patience” and sophistication.

The accepted logic of the rogue state is that the Westernized world is so affluent and leisured, and life is so good, that it will understandably grant almost any immediate geostrategic or monetary concession to avoid serious disruptions of the international order. The logic of appeasement is always more appeasement — especially in the one-bomb nuclear age.

North Korea sounds as if Pyongyang is an expendable hellhole, but not so Seoul, one of world’s great commercial and industrial powerhouses that exports Hyudais, Kias, Samsung, and LG appliances.

The logic is that of the proverbial crazy country neighbor, whose house and yard are a junkyard mess, whose kids are criminals, and who periodically threatens to “mess you up” unless you put up with his antics, give him attention, and overlook his serial criminality.

The renegade neighbor’s logic is that you have lots to lose by descending into his world of violence and insanity, while he has nothing to forfeit by basking in it, and that such asymmetry allows him to have something on you. And it makes him something other than just the ex-con, creep, and failure that he otherwise is.

Short-term appeasement of unhinged monsters is always felt to be a safer and less dangerous choice than solving the problem once and for all, which one might do by calling the bluff of a rabid entity believed capable of inflicting grave damage on the civilized order.

And so for nearly the last half century we have found new and creative ways of feeding our pre-civilized dragons in fear that otherwise they will immediately scorch civilization. The logic, in other words, has been “let the next administration handle this temporarily placated monster when he gets hungry again.”

For nearly the last half century, the logic has been ‘let the next administration handle this temporarily placated monster when he gets hungry again.’

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, Saddam Hussein sounded and acted murderously unhinged: He preemptively attacked Iran, issued threats against most of his neighbors, gassed thousands of Kurds at Halajba, bragged about his human flesh-chipper, ran a gestapo police state that murdered hundreds of thousands of its own, invaded Kuwait, sent missiles into Israel, violated U.N. resolutions, and all the while slyly suggesting that Iraq had a huge arsenal of WMD.

A crazy, dangerous Iraq was all over the front pages — in a way that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and other oil-exporting Arab countries were not.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas: The New Charter That Isn’t by Bassam Tawil

By on April 25th, 2017

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel.

The document goes on to clarify that even if Hamas accepts a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines, “this would not mean recognition of the Zionist entity or giving up any of the Palestinian rights.”

Hamas and the PLO now have crucial common ground: sweet-talk the Western donors while laying stealthy plans to destroy Israel.

Yasser Arafat may have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his PLO officials and he really deserve the prize for the art of deception. For decades now, the PLO has spearheaded one of history’s biggest scams, and now it seems that Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood movement, is about to join the bandwagon.

According to unconfirmed reports in the Arab media, Hamas is about to publish a “political document” in which it “accepts” the “two-state solution.” The purported document is already being hailed by some Western and Israeli analysts and Hamas apologists as a sign of the radical Islamic movement’s march toward moderation and pragmatism.

It is worthwhile to note that, contrary to what is being published in many media outlets, Hamas is NOT changing its Charter, which explicitly calls for the elimination of Israel. The new Hamas document is intended for outside consumption and is directed to the ears and eyes of Americans and Europeans only. The original Hamas Charter in Arabic will remain in effect even after the new document is made public and seemingly official. In fact, it does not have to do that. The New Charter, while mouthing all sorts of human rights bromides over which Westerners and the media can be counted upon to swoon, such as:

“Hamas believes that the message of Islam came with morals of justice, truth, dignity and freedom, and is against injustice in all its shapes, and criminalizes the criminals whatever their sex, color, religion or nationality,” and so on. (New Hamas Charter, Article 9).

It is, nevertheless, the same Old Hamas Charter as before. It does not even bother to renounce jihad as an acceptable means of “resistance.” This is Hamas talking in code; pursuing “resistance” against Israel means: We plan to continue launching terror attacks against Israel.

“Hamas confirms that no peace in Palestine should be agreed on, based on injustice to the Palestinians or their land. Any arrangements based on that will not lead to peace, and the resistance and Jihad will remain as a legal right, a project and an honor for all our nations’ people.” (New Hamas Charter, Article 21)

The PLO bluff began with the signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993, and reached its peak three years later, when PLO leaders managed to convince President Bill Clinton and the international community, including many Israelis, that they had changed the PLO Charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel. The truth, however, is a far cry from that.

Back in 1996, the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council (PNC), held a session in Gaza City where its members decided to “entrust a legal committee with re-formulating the Palestinian Charter.”

No one knows if the committee made any of the proposed changes. It is also unclear whether two-thirds of the PNC members (the required majority) actually voted in favor of changing the PLO Charter.

To this day, some Palestinians maintain that the charter was never officially amended or revoked — and it certainly was not ratified — and that the whole performance was a lie to mislead the international community and Israel into believing that the Palestinians had abandoned their dream of destroying Israel through “armed struggle.”

The PLO Charter question, like the PLO’s pledge to work towards a two-state solution, is murky. What is clear is that many in the international community swallowed the scam and began to believe that Arafat and his cohorts were finally leading their people toward real peace, beginning with recognition of Israel’s right to exist.

A glance at PLO actions over the past two decades will show that this tiger has certainly not changed its stripes. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the PLO and its leaders, first Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas, have consistently and stubbornly rejected all Israeli peace offers, some of which were exorbitantly generous.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Women’s rights oppressor elected to UN’s women’s rights commission By Ethel C. Fenig

By on April 25th, 2017

Ah, the UN. Spewing poisoned hot air with all its hateful talk, thus contributing to the oh-so-feared climate change while polluting the planet and endangering it even further with its corrupt and harmful actions, it really should be abolished for the safety of humanity, new sheriff in town, Nikki Haley, notwithstanding.

Consider the latest Alice-In-Wonderland, reverse film negative (remember those?) where black is white and white is black (calm down sensitive, safe-space culture appropriation victims) oxymoronic action: Saudi Arabia has just been elected to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), reports Hillel Neuer of UN Watch. Yes, you read that correctly, Saudi Arabia, the country where women can’t drive or be seen in public without a man, among other repressive restrictions, has been elected to a commission which is, according to their official statement “the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women…established 21 June 1946 ”
For some reason terrorist enabler Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the recent so-called Women’s March and her committee didn’t complain about this insult to women while the so-called mainstream media did not highlight this farce.

(I warned you it was Alice in Wonderland, reverse film negative.) From the UN’s own claptrap, read about all the good and progressive stuff Saudi Arabia is going to enforce on the CSW. NOT!

The CSW is instrumental in promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

In 1996, ECOSOC in resolution 1996/6 expanded the Commission’s mandate and decided that it should take a leading role in monitoring and reviewing progress and problems in the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and in mainstreaming a gender perspective in UN activities. Following the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, the Commission now also contributes to the follow-up to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development so as to accelerate the realization of gender equality and the empowerment of women (ECOSOC resolution 2015/6).

During the Commission’s annual two-week session, representatives of UN Member States, civil society organizations and UN entities gather at UN headquarters in New York. They discuss progress and gaps in the implementation of the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the key global policy document on gender equality, and the 23rd special session of the General Assembly held in 2000 (Beijing+5), as well as emerging issues that affect gender equality and the empowerment of women. Member States agree on further actions to accelerate progress and promote women’s enjoyment of their rights in political, economic and social fields. The outcomes and recommendations of each session are forwarded to ECOSOC for follow-up.
UN Women supports all aspects of the Commission’s work. The Entity also facilitates the participation of civil society representatives.

Got that? But wait…there’s definitely more hypocrisy with Saudi Arabia and the UN that Neurer illuminates!

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Two Faces of Qatar, a Dubious Mideast Ally Doha undermines U.S. security by sponsoring Islamic radicalism. By Charles Wald and Michael see noteMakovsky

By on April 25th, 2017

THE COGNOSCENTI PRONOUNCE THIS CASH REGISTER POSING AS A NATION…..AS “GUTTER” WHICH IS VERY APPOSITE…RSK

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited several of America’s Middle Eastern partners last week—including a dubious one. Qatar hosts an important air base but also undermines American security by sponsoring Islamic radicalism.

Nearly all coalition airstrikes against Islamic State are commanded from America’s nerve center at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base, which also supports missions in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force stations many of its larger aircraft there—refueling tankers, advanced surveillance and early-warning aircraft, and heavy bombers. Al-Udeid also houses the Combined Air and Space Operations Center, which commands all coalition air operations in the region. With all these key assets in one place, the Pentagon expects to stay through 2024.

But the host nation supports some of the groups the base is used to bomb. According to the State Department, “entities and individuals within Qatar continue to serve as a source of financial support for terrorist and violent extremist groups,” including al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. Qatar has also supplied advanced weaponry to militants in Syria and Libya.

Doha poured billions into the radical Muslim Brotherhood government of former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who urged supporters “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews.” The Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, has called jihad against Israel and America “a commandment of Allah that cannot be disregarded.”

After Mr. Morsi’s government fell in 2013, Qatar offered safe harbor to many Brotherhood leaders. Pressure from neighbors eventually forced Doha to eject them, but Qatar still hosts Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Brotherhood-affiliated preacher who once declared, “Those killed fighting the American forces are martyrs.” Qatar is also a key financier of Hamas, a Palestinian spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has repeatedly attacked Israel with rockets.

Qatar wields tremendous soft power on behalf of radical Islam through its state-funded Al Jazeera news channel. Mr. Qaradawi has a weekly show, and the network became notorious in America for broadcasting Osama bin Laden’s videos, repeatedly and uncut, far exceeding their news value. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →