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U.S. Airstrikes on Syria Divide Middle East Saudi Arabia and Israel cheer the missile strikes; Iran condemns them By Rory Jones and Margherita Stancati

Syria’s staunchest foes in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and Israel—cheered the U.S. missile strikes on a Syrian air base early Friday, saying they sent a clear message that the international community wouldn’t tolerate chemical weapons.

However, Iran, which is a key military and financial backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, condemned the attack as a move that would deepen the chaos in Syria and strengthen armed opposition groups.

“Tehran considers using this excuse to take unilateral measures dangerous, destructive and a violation of international laws,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

The U.S. military launched dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles overnight against the Shayrat air base near the city of Homs in Syria, following this week’s suspected chemical weapons attack on a rebel-held town. The U.S. strikes were intended to cripple the base’s airfield and other infrastructure, and to indicate that the chemical attack was unacceptable to the U.S.

Saudi Arabia, which an important ally of the Syrian anti-government opposition, declared its full support for Washington’s operation.

“The Syrian regime brought this military operation upon itself,” said a statement attributed to a foreign ministry official and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. “The brave decision taken by the U.S. president in response to these crimes should be hailed at a time when the international community has been unable to put a stop to such actions by the Syrian regime.”

Riyadh and other Gulf monarchies have long pushed for more decisive U.S. action against forces loyal to Mr. Assad, who is backed by Tehran—Saudi Arabia’s rival for regional influence.

“Everyone was waiting for the U.S. to act against Bashar al-Assad,” said Ibrahim al-Marie, a retired Saudi colonel and security analyst based in Riyadh. “The Trump administration is also saying: we will be a big player in Syria, not like the Obama administration.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Shows He Is Willing to Act Forcefully, Quickly President demonstrates comfort with military action in ordering missile strikes in Syria By Carol E. Lee and Louise Radnofsky

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—President Donald Trump’s decision to order military strikes in Syria sets his presidency on a new and unpredictable course that is likely to shape his time in office.

Faced with his first major foreign-policy test—a moment that confronts every new president—Mr. Trump demonstrated a comfort with military action and a flexibility in approach that saw him change course not only on comments he made in the campaign but also on his policy toward Syria in just 48 hours after seeing gruesome photographic evidence from the Asssad regime’s chemical-weapons attack Tuesday.

His decision drew support from Republican and Democratic lawmakers who have long called for stronger U.S. action in Syria.

But with his message delivered both in missiles and in a presidential address from behind a podium at his private resort in Florida, Mr. Trump faces the difficult choice his predecessor and other world leaders have grappled with for years: Now what? It’s the question that repeatedly led President Barack Obama to decide against deeper military involvement in Syria.

Just three months into his presidency Mr. Trump will have to find his own answer. He has to confront a litany of risky unknowns.

It is unclear how the Assad regime, or its allies Russia and Iran, will react. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump intends to move the U.S. more forcefully into the Syrian conflict—committing the U.S. military to greater engagement in the Middle East—or whether he plans to hold back beyond sending a signal that the use of chemical weapons won’t be tolerated by the White House.

One message was clear: Mr. Trump is willing to use force and to make decisions swiftly when he is moved to act.

“Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow, brutal death for so many,” Mr. Trump said in a national address. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” CONTINUE AT SITE

French Presidential Campaign: Part 2 Nidra Poller

Part 1 can be found here – click.

The Interior Minister sniffles, Valls gives Macron a peck on the cheek, France 2 throws Fillon into the lion’s den, a book spills the beans on Hollande… And: whither the Jewish vote

Sniffles

The last time we saw acting Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux he was at Orly airport, solemnly declaring the “suspect had tried but failed” to get the soldier’s gun. This was followed shortly by a photo in the Figaro of the dead suspect lying on the floor with the Famas assault rifle still slung across his chest. Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/french-presidential-campaign-part-1#ixzz4cpgeSljr Deliberately misleading? Honestly misinformed? No one seemed to care publicly. But LeRoux was forced to resign last week…for a different reason.

How, in the absence of any discernible competence, did the deputy get to be Interior Minister? Musical chairs. François Hollande waited to the last minute to announce he would not be running for re-election, Prime Minister Manuel Valls could finally resign and throw his hat into the Primary ring, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was bumped up to the PM slot, and Le Roux became a low-key Interior Minister in the twilight Hollande government.

Last week Le Roux went out in a sniffle. Looking like the fall guy meant to knock over François Fillon. Deputy Le Roux hired his teenage daughters as parliamentary assistants over a 7-year period with 24 different temporary contracts for a total salary of €55,000. Cross-checkers produced damning evidence. Not only were the teenies overpaid, they were apparently moonlighting for their father while simultaneously holding other jobs, studying, traveling, etc. Of course le Roux was allowed to deny any wrongdoing before resigning. The Greek chorus media chanted “Le Roux resigned why not Fillon?”

Valls pecks Macron on the cheek.

Defeated in the primaries, the former PM, who has shown integrity and valor in some of the worst moments of jihad violence, had nowhere to go. He could not decently respect the good sport promise to defend the victor, Benoît Hamon, one of the “frondeurs,” an informal caucus of far Left deputies that persistently hounded the Hollande-Valls government. Hamon’s last ditch socialism is outplayed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s eloquent extravagance. The centerpiece of Hamon’s primary campaign was a shiny universal salary promise, based on a post-employment theory: in our modern economy, jobs don’t need people, people don’t need jobs, so the government will give them salaries and their purchasing power will boost the economy. No one ever asked him why a small businessman or a CEO would work days, nights and weekends to produce the wealth that would be distributed like Care packages.

Hamon had gadflied the socialist party; Mélenchon opted out years ago and created a far Left conglomerate that repeatedly splinters and regroups. Today he runs on his personal ticket -La France Insoumise. The “insoumise [= that does not submit] has nothing to do with the Islamic concept of submission; it’s about the 99% not submitting to the 1%. Reeking of authenticity, dressed in corduroy casual, the earthy showman makes outworn class struggle rhetoric seem new. But pollsters say he gets only 13% of the working class vote, with 51% going to Marine Le Pen. Mélenchon delights in punishing the privileged classes. Under his regime, doctors won’t be allowed to apply surcharges (paid, it should be noted, by the patient). The GP that takes €50 for a consultation today would have to be satisfied with the health system rate of €25. (

Mélenchon’s solution for world peace is to exit NATO and the “logic of war.” The people’s army he intends to create by reestablishing the draft is more a public works project than a defense measure. Awkward attempts by Hamon to create a united Left by swallowing up Mélenchon’s candidacy have failed miserably, as Mélenchon’s fortunes rise and Hamon’s sink

Be Very Careful Before Beating the War Drums in Syria Russia’s involvement in the conflict raises the stakes of any U.S. action. By David French

War has consequences. Callous incompetence has consequences. The world is watching those consequences unfold in Syria today. No one can look at images of children dead from gas attacks and not be moved.

Let’s stipulate two things: First, there were never any easy American choices in Syria. Second, the Obama administration got virtually every hard choice wrong. Or, to be more precise, the choices it did make did nothing to either stop the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the new century or block our enemies and rivals, Iran and Russia, from exerting their will in Syria.

The result is the Syria we have today, a patchwork quilt of competing zones of control that in some ways looks more complicated than it is. Let’s make sense of the map below:
syria-battle-map.jpg

The red, government-controlled areas represent the most populated and economically consequential sections of the country. This is where Russia and Iran have asserted their will, and this is where Assad is spilling the blood of innocents to expand and maintain his grip on power. Yes, he’s still opposed by rebel groups, but they’ve been decimated, and many of the groups that remain are dominated by jihadists.

In the north, our Kurdish allies are on the move, but not against the regime — against ISIS. In other words, Assad has beaten his main foe and is leaving the United States, the Kurds, and assorted other allies to deal with our main foe, ISIS. After the battle for Raqqa, Syria is likely to be effectively partitioned, with American-backed forces controlling the north, the Russian-backed regime controlling the west, and some small forces still battling it out on the borders.

As we confront the Assad regime’s gas attack — which is just one of its countless violations of the law of war, and hardly its most deadly — we also have to confront this core reality: Our leading geopolitical rival — a traditional great power and a nuclear superpower — has quite obviously decided that the survival of a friendly regime in Damascus is a core national interest. It acted decisively while we dithered, and it has boots on the ground.

Thus, we now face a quandary. Retaliate against Syria so strongly that it truly punishes and weakens Assad, and you risk threatening Russia’s vital interests. Respond with a pinprick strike that Russia effectively “permits,” and you do nothing important. Assad has demonstrated that he cares little about his own casualties and may (like many other American enemies before him) actually feel emboldened after “surviving” an American strike.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Told-You-So Moment The Israeli leader could be opportunistic and vulgar in pressing his case against the Iran deal. He was also right. By Sohrab Ahmari

Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.

His or theirs?

The question comes to mind as Western governments confront this week’s chemical atrocity in Syria, and as footage of children’s bodies convulsing in agony once more unsettles the world’s conscience. Even President Trump, who generally lacks a moral language, was moved, though whether he will act remains to be seen.

His predecessor had a rich moral vocabulary and a coterie of award-winning moralizers like Samantha Power on staff. But President Obama refused to act when Bashar Assad crossed his chemical red line. He wanted to extricate Washington from the region, and he saw a nuclear deal with Mr. Assad’s Iranian patrons as the exit ramp.

Such a deal came within grasp when Hassan Rouhani launched his presidential campaign in Iran four years ago this month. The smiling, self-proclaimed “moderate” was the Iranian interlocutor the Obamaians had been waiting for. Mr. Netanyahu posed the main obstacle.

The Israeli prime minister warned that Mr. Rouhani didn’t have the power to moderate the regime even if he had the will. He reminded the world of Mr. Rouhani’s role in Iran’s repressive apparatus and his history of anti-American rhetoric. He insisted that Iranian regional aggression wouldn’t relent if sanctions were removed. Iran, he predicted, would pocket the financial concessions, then press ahead in Syria and elsewhere.

The Israeli could be opportunistic, given to hyperbole and not a little vulgar in pressing his case. He was also right.

It’s instructive now to compare his account of the regime with the baseless euphoria in the Western media that greeted Mr. Rouhani’s election in June 2013 and marked coverage of the nuclear deal over the next four years.

Start with Iran’s role in Syria. Writing in September 2013, the New York Times editorial board suggested that Iran’s intentions “could be tested by inviting its new government to join the United States and Russia in carrying out the recent agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons. It seems like a natural convergence: Iranians know well the scourge of poison gas.”

Well, apparently they didn’t know the scourge well enough to restrain their chief Arab client from systematically gassing his own people, even after the Russian-brokered chemical deal. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDWARD CLINE: AN UNNECESSARY DICHOTOMY

Even for someone who has experienced – nay, endured the rigors and brutality of Islamic “culture,” such as Ayaan HIrsi Ali – it may be difficult for that person to condemn the ideology-cum-religion of Islam and disown it as thoroughly and finally as one can Nazism or Communism, regardless of how Islam affected that person’s life, publicly and personally. However, one can “disown” Islam yet some emotional connection to it may linger, like a virus that may lay dormant for decades and then begin to affect one’s thinking and actions.

That state of lingering belief is utterly alien to me; I have been a committed, conscious atheist since my mid-teens. I dismiss all religious systems, dogmas, and tracts. Having been raised in the Catholic religion, I have never been tempted to find a replacement or substitute for it. Paraphrasing the American patriotEthan Allen, reason, then and now, has been to and for me the only “Oracle of Man,” not Christ or Moses, and certainly not Mohammad. Allen’s arguments against superstition are not mine; I rejected God and other ethereal deities, regardless of their names, for two reasons: their metaphysical impossibility, and for moral reasons of rejecting the power and influence of a “higher” authority over my existence and mind.

The lingering need of a person for a “higher” authority will cause him to sooner or later embark on a project of reclamation of, say, Islam, that will be at dramatic odds with a past record and stature as a critic of Islam, failing to realize that to criticize Islam is not enough. It must be repudiated wholesale; as in Nazism and Communism, there are no “redeeming” features in Islam.

I have said it many times before, in past columns over the years; Islam must be refuted and repudiated “root, branch, and twig.” There is no middle, reconciliatory ground to be advanced, argued, and promoted; the whole ideology must be tossed onto an intellectual bonfire with no regrets or personal recriminations or sense of loss. As an active “religion,” it must be reduced to ashes.

It doesn’t matter that, as an ideology, Islam is somewhat schizophrenic, exhibiting on one hand a “nice,” laid-back, wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly persona among the rank-and-file, non-jihadist Muslims, and on the other a mean, vile, vindictive, homicidal, and consistently destructive persona in actions dedicated to conquest and destruction for the sake of destruction among the “fundamentalists.”

Granted, that religion, as a measure of moral guidance, has had a grip on man since the dawn of history, and even before when man first began carving or painting symbols and ideograms on stone tablets or on cave walls. Religion, as author/philosopher Ayn Rand has put it, is a primitive form of philosophy. She wrote that religion demands:

“…blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy.

A clinging fealty to or respect for some religious belief, then, in spite of the outrages to which Ayaan Hirsi Ali was subjected by Islam in her life, including a perpetual death fatwa on her, drew her to attempt to salvage Islam in a Hoover Institution paper published in March 2017, “The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam Ideology and Movement and How to Counter.” It is in three versions: a printable, closely packed version; a longer PDF of it; and a shorter, excerpted version published on March 20th in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Islam Needs a Reformation.” A byline at the end of the Wall Street Journal article reads:

ISIS Tells Muslims to Go Steal, Send the Caliphate 20 Percent of the Loot By Bridget Johnson

The newest issue of ISIS’ English-language Rumiyah magazine released today encourages old-fashioned theft and looting to help fund the Islamic State, with target suggestions including an armored truck full of cash or an electronics superstore.

The article declares that the wealth of kafir, or disbelievers, is “halal,” so Muslims should “take it” — as long as they remit one-fifth to the caliphate.

The article cites a hadith to show “the clear permissibility of spilling their blood and taking their wealth until they accept Islam… all kuffar who are not under the contract of dhimmah are enemies from whom ghanimah [booty] is taken.”

The writer argues that aside from istijarah, or a safe passage covenant, and the jizyah tax, “the only relationship the Muslim has to the kuffar is that of the sword, i.e. physically waging jihad against them. And any attack on the kuffar, including that which is financial, is jihad. In this regard, any wealth taken from the kuffar through deception or defeat is considered ghanimah.”

“Whether the financial damage is on an individual kafir or the cause of perpetual loss to a business, the Muslim in Dar al-Kufr [land of disbelievers] has the opportunity to follow this blessed sunnah, striking terror by stalking the kuffar and causing them economic harm. There should be no misunderstanding about the excellence of this deed, as taking this wealth is in accordance with the command of Allah.”

Of this stolen wealth, ISIS directs, 20 percent “should be set aside and given to the Khalifah or to an official representative of the Khalifah for those who are able.”

But “whoever kills a kafir – for which he has proof of his killing him” gets to keep all the loot. Or, specifically, “whatever the kafir possesses at the time and place he is killed.”

“This includes his clothing, jewelry, all kinds of weapons, gold, silver, currencies, as well as the vehicle he was using, and so forth,” ISIS adds.

And there’s another loophole: “The one who kills a kafir on a dark street or in an alleyway, while no one else is around, does not need evidence of his kill in order to take the salab [personal belongings].”

The New Pecking Order: Muslims Over Gays By Bruce Bawer

Last month, when Marine Le Pen refused to put on a headscarf for a meeting with Lebanon’s “Grand Mufti,” a friend of mine, whom I’ll call Dave, commended her for it on Facebook. Dave, as it happens, is a Manhattan liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, despises Donald Trump, and thinks Le Pen is a fascist. But he’s also a gay man who’s very clear-eyed about the danger of Islam, especially to gay people, and who is angry at the left, both in the U.S. and Europe, for appeasing the Religion of Peace. And so he gave Le Pen a thumbs-up for her gutsy action.

Since Dave’s own friends list consists almost exclusively of other big-city liberal types, he was immediately savaged for his post on Le Pen. One of them wrote that just because Muslim women decide to cover their hair or body doesn’t mean they’re oppressed, and added that Le Pen, by refusing to wear a headscarf, wasn’t standing up for women but simply “trying to spread hate” towards Islam. Another of Dave’s friends agreed: Le Pen “didn’t behave properly.” So did another: “This woman is not a feminist, she is a fa[s]cist.” Several more comments were along the same lines. Many of Dave’s friends were livid at him for even daring to compliment Le Pen and criticize Islam.

In response to his friends’ complaints, Dave tried to play the gay-rights card, explaining to them that if they accepted the Muslim rule that women need to don a veil to meet a mufti or enter a mosque, they also had to accept the Muslim requirement that gay people – people such as himself – be stoned to death. Plainly, Dave expected that this argument would win the day with his oh-so-liberal, oh-so-gay-friendly friends. But it didn’t. On the contrary, their responses made it clear that they’d fully accepted the current progressive pecking order among officially recognized oppressed groups: gays (especially affluent gay American males such as Dave) are at the bottom of the ladder; Muslims are at the very top. Which means that when gays criticize Islam, a decent progressive is supposed to scream “Islamophobe”; but when Muslims drop gays to their deaths off the roofs of buildings, one is expected to look away and change the topic.

Of course, plenty of gays don’t share Dave’s critical attitude toward Islam. They’ve bought into the idea that they and Muslims are fellow members of the oppression brigade. Either they’re unaware that sharia law prescribes execution for gays and that a large majority of Western Muslims are totally okay with that, or they’ve allowed themselves to be convinced that Muslims today don’t care any more about Islamic law than most Christians or Jews do about Leviticus. Or, even more worrisome, they’ve worked out some Orwellian way of knowing the truth while at the same time not knowing it. So it is that we end up seeing grotesquely absurd pictures of gay people waving banners that decry Islamophobia or that declare gay solidarity with Palestine. CONTINUE AT SITE

Why Did Assad Use Nerve Gas? By Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen

It is hard to explain why Bashar Assad used nerve gas — probably Sarin — in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s northern Idlib province. On the surface, at least, it would seem to be a totally counterproductive and reckless move likely to anger the Europeans, the Americans, and even his patrons the Russians. Then why would he do it?

It was a surprise, coming as it did immediately after U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced that “regime change” in Syria was no longer a priority and the U.S. focus would be on ISIS. This was a major change from the Obama administration and should have reassured Assad that he could hang on as ruler of Syria. But some pundits saw the U.S. policy shift as a perverse incentive for Assad, making it possible for him to believe he could use highly lethal chemical weapons without fear of retaliation. The Sarin would thus be a test of whether the new policy was real. To some degree, the announcement by the British prime minister that the UK had no retaliatory plans despite the attack might seem to be evidence for this argument.

It is a considerable stretch, though, to think Assad would use chemical weapons to test an American policy shift, particularly because this particular shift would have helped Assad and the Alawite minority cut a final deal that preserved their domination. It is doubtful that is the explanation.

The more likely truth is that Assad was deeply afraid that the U.S. policy shift was part of a secret deal with the Russians, one that he had to head off.

In 2014, after the first documented government use of chemicals against the Syrian population, Russia and the United States struck a deal for the removal and liquidation of Assad’s Sarin and other chemical stocks. Part of the importance of the deal lay in the fact that it was negotiated directly between Russia’s foreign minister and America’s secretary of state, making Russia and the United States the high-level guarantors of Assad’s compliance. There was not much compliance, actually — UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said chemical stocks remained and 5 of 12 chemical plants were still operating months after the disposal was supposed to have occurred. But regardless of what they knew (and regardless of Assad’s use of chlorine gas), the deal was considered a success until Khan Sheikhoun. This first use of Sarin since the agreement poses a direct challenge to both countries, but especially to Russia.

Europe’s Out-of-Control Censorship by Judith Bergman

If Facebook insists on the rules of censorship, it should at the very least administer those rules in a fair way. Facebook, however, does not even pretend that it administers its censorship in any way that approximates fairness.

Posts critical of Chancellor Merkel’s migrant policies, for example, can be categorized as “Islamophobia”, and are often found to violate “Community Standards”, while incitement to actual violence and the murder of Jews and Israelis by Palestinian Arabs is generally considered as conforming to Facebook’s “Community Standards”.

Notwithstanding the lawsuits, Facebook’s bias is so strong that it recently restored Palestinian Arab terrorist group Fatah’s Facebook page, which incites hatred and violence against Jews — despite having shut it down only three days earlier. In 2016 alone, this page had a minimum of 130 posts glorifying terror and murder of Jews.

Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

“This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

“Criminal” content? Statements that are deemed illegal under German law are now being conflated with statements that are merely deemed, subjectively and on the basis of entirely random complaints from social media users — who are free to abuse the code of conduct to their heart’s content — to be “hate speech”. “Hate speech” has included critiques of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s migration policies. To be in disagreement with the government’s policies is now potentially “criminal”. Social media companies, such as Facebook, are supposed to be the German government’s informers and enforcers — qualified by whom and in what way? — working at the speed of light to comply with the 24-hour rule. Rule of law, clearly, as in North Korea, Iran, Russia or any banana-republic, has no place in this system.