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http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/u-s-israeli-arms-deal-aimed-at-iran/print/

U.S.-Israeli Arms Deal a Warning to Iran

On Monday in Tel Aviv U.S. defense secretary Chuck Hagel and Israeli defense minister Moshe Yaalon announced the finalizing of a major U.S.-Israeli arms deal. At a reported cost of $10 billion, Israel gets Bell Boeing V-22 transport helicopters (known as Ospreys), Boeing KC-135 in-flight refueling planes, advanced radar systems for fighter planes, and anti-radiation missiles.

It’s part of a larger deal, first reported in the New York Times last week, that also involves Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. A U.S. official calls it “one of the most complex and carefully orchestrated arms sale packages in American history.”

And its focus is Iran. As far as Israel is concerned, all the hardware it’s getting enhances its ability to carry out long-range operations.

Hagel, for his part, was explicit about it. On the way to Israel, he told reporters that “Israel will make the decisions that Israel must make to protect itself, to defend itself.” He also called the sale a “very clear signal to Iran.”

Aharon Lapidot, a veteran Israeli military analyst and now deputy editor of popular conservative daily Israel Hayom, notes that “Israel will be the first country in the world to get the Osprey outside of the U.S.” and that it will “give the Israeli Air Force an advanced, modern aircraft….”

Lapidot also describes the Boeing KC-135 refueler as “of the utmost tactical importance” and as allowing Israel’s fighter jets “to partake in operations far from the country’s borders…. There is no doubt this is a force multiplier for the IAF.”

Or as Hagel himself put it, the sale will “ensure Israel’s air superiority in the future and allow the Israeli Air Force long-range capabilities.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/when-america-is-weak-its-enemies-attack/

On September 12, 2012, Obama stepped out into the Rose Garden and told the millions of Americans watching at home, “We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.”

More than half a year has passed since then and justice is nowhere in sight. The perpetrators of the attack openly walk the streets of Benghazi long after the FBI team sent there has gone home.

It may well be a coincidence that the first major successful terrorist attack comes as the administration plots a withdrawal from its second lost war. The Boston marathon massacre may have succeeded by a simple roll of the dice. Or it may have inaugurated a new series of terrorist attacks on the homefront.

For over a decade, Islamic terrorists who wanted to kill Americans headed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Obama’s grand security plan was to replace boots on the ground with drones carrying out pinprick strikes and then flying away again. It was a comfortable technocratic vision but it doesn’t account for what happens to all those fighters on the ground with no one left to fight and no reason to stick around except to act as drone targets.

Some have headed for Syria and others for North Africa. But the big question is how long will it be until they make another serious pass at the United States? Or have they made it already?

In Libya, Obama tried to avoid casualties by bombing from the air under the guise of a No Fly Zone. But once Gaddafi was dead and the zone was down, nothing protected the Americans in Benghazi. Obama had used the United Nations to sanction regime change, but without its sanction or the sanction of the Arab League, he refused to use air power to scare away the Salafist militias besieging the trapped Americans.

The new soft power strategy was big picture. It had nothing to offer the Americans fighting and dying while waiting for help to arrive.

Al Qaeda understood soft power as a weakness. Unlike the decrepit Clinton policy wonks, it was not impressed by the old strategy of refusing to engage while hiding behind the drones that were standing in for Bill Clinton’s favorite terrorist-fighting cruise missiles. It understood that limited engagement was not some bright and new philosophy, but an unwillingness to take casualties and inflict collateral damage.

“We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people,” Obama announced in the Rose Garden and the terrorists laughed. They laughed because they had support from within the Libyan government. They laughed because the Libyan government had obstructed the arrival of rescue teams and denied the use of armed drones over Libyan airspace.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Terrorism, like urban crime, is one of those things that you’re not supposed to think about too much. It’s fine to talk about your emotions after a bombing or a mugging. You can even share stories and eventually learn to laugh about it. What you cannot do is talk about where it comes from except in the vaguest terms of social conditions. Like pollution from industry or corruption from government, it’s one of those toxic spinoffs of our modern society. It’s just there and we don’t much talk about it.

Islamic terrorism is considered a social problem in Europe. Ask an expert and they’ll talk your ear off about unemployment, racism, overcrowded housing and the same long list of reasons used to explain urban crime. The United States is slowly coming around to that same point of view.

Forget the great debate between whether people kill people or guns kill people. The conclusion reached by most governments before your grandfather was born is that social conditions kill people.

The Tsarneav brothers are being talked about in the same way that most serial killers are. “They were so nice. What made them do it?” It’s the empty repetition of a question to which no one really wants to hear the answer. “What could have made them do it?” isn’t a genuine question, it’s a ceremonial washing of the hands. A ritualistic statement that we couldn’t have known anything was wrong. How could we? They were so nice.

Tamerlan Tsarneav slapped around one girlfriend, dragged another into a barefoot, pregnant and veiled arrangement, and went around telling everyone they were infidels. Sure he might have settled down at some point, picked up his membership card in the requisite front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood and limited his terrorist activities to donating to Islamic charities that just happen to do business in the middle of war zones. He could have stuck to beating his wife in the privacy of his home and told his neighbors that America would one day be destroyed knowing they would only nod and walk away humming, “But he’s so nice”.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boston-and-the-drone-debate-why-rand-paul-et-al-will-probably-lay-low-for-a-while?f=puball So, will Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Dianne Feinstein go to bat for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? In December, with many conservatives cheering him on, Paul (R., Ky.) railed against the “abomination of designating American citizens as enemy combatants” e.g., detaining them indefinitely outside the civilian criminal-justice system. Mike Lee (Utah), a conservative favorite, was his […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/boston-the-msms-exploded-journalism

Over the years, I have watched via Internet video countless IED (Improvised Explosive Device) explosions detonated on American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, when I read the news of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th, and watched the videos of the incident, I was certain that it was a terrorist bombing that killed three people and injured over 170, some losing their limbs, and not an exploding fire hydrant or propane-fueled hot dog stand.

Then came the avalanche of hastily-written bulletins and aired news reports with earnest-looking reporters, half-thought-out educated guesses, “expert” speculations, and plain “yellow” journalism and words and images strung together just to fill print space and air time.

Shortly after the Boston bombings flung bodies and limbs and shrapnel over a Boylston Avenue sidewalk, the Mainstream Media itself exploded to reveal the debris of modern journalism.

Certain that it was indeed a terrorist act, and once the authorities had confirmed that two pressure-cooker IEDs had been set off, I began researching and writing a column about it, and attempted to sift through all the cascading hysteria and hair-pulling and come up with some solid facts and conclusions. I found it virtually impossible to compose a coherent article on the subject. The haphazard stories of who was responsible or not responsible for the bombings, and whom the authorities had arrested or not arrested, or whom the authorities were looking for, kept flickering in the news and my mind like a badly edited silent movie whose last nitrate frames had disintegrated. My mind shut down, and refused to function as it usually would when addressing an important topic.

I gave up on the effort and decided to wait it out. That patience paid off, for the terrorists turned out to be two Chechen brothers who “inexplicably” turned jihadist. They were Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26. But in the meantime, some distracting but interesting developments also caught my attention, and none of them reflect well on either the MSM or the Obama administration or on the FBI.

There was the episode of the “running man” seen in a security camera video fleeing the scene of one explosion. He was reportedly tackled by a civilian and somehow turned over to the police. Whether or not he was the same 20-year-old Saudi student who suffered burns and was taken to a local hospital, or someone else entirely, hasn’t been confirmed. His name and that of the civilian who apprehended him remain unknown.

The student was Abdul Rahman Ali Al-Harbi. Photographs of a smiling, geeky-looking kid in a hospital gown were published. He looked like he wouldn’t hurt a fly. It turned out that he was definitely a “person of interest” because his family has terrorist ties. Not long after the bombing, both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John “Swift Boat” Kerry, he of the bogus combat film, combat medals, and French pedigree, met with Saudi officials in Washington and arranged for the kid to be deported back to Saudi Arabia.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346349/radical-islam-once-again We are in the midst of the least-suspenseful investigation ever launched by American law enforcement. Hundreds of investigators are seeking leads around the world to discover the motive of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This probe is considered a foray into the unknown, and perhaps the unknowable. “Do you have any […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346317/obama%E2%80%99s-psychodramas

Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration.

Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events — and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School were cited as reasons for rapid enactment of new gun-control laws — even though the proposed tougher registration rules would not have prevented either mayhem.

Tightening up the process for legal acquisition of firearms would not much hinder the mentally ill from getting their hands on guns. And the various measures needed to stop a crazy Adam Lanza or Jared Lee Loughner would be mostly intolerable for liberal or conservative civil libertarians — incarcerating far more of the mentally unhinged, censoring the depiction of gratuitous and violent use of guns in video games and films, confiscating the vast pools of semi-automatic rifles and handguns owned by private citizens. No matter. Sandy Hook and the shooting of Gabby Giffords were still arguments to shame opponents — in the president’s words, “lying” opponents — into accepting the administration’s proposals.
Furthermore, the politically driven distortion of recent gun violence was aimed not just at passing gun-control legislation, but also at demonizing opponents for the 2014 elections. That is why President Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, almost immediately floated the idea that the catalyst for the Boston violence was “tax day,” in a not-so-subtle insinuation that just maybe some right-wing tea-party types had set off the bombs. That theme soon metamorphosed among the Left into charges that right-wing-inspired sequestration had curbed law-enforcement vigilance and that right-wing opposition to laws against acquiring explosives had enabled the bombers.

In President Obama’s State of the Union Address this February, he cited current inclement weather to argue for renewed efforts to implement some type of cap-and-trade taxes and to grant more subsidies of “sustainable energy” (e.g., wind and solar): “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.”

Such weather hysteria brings to mind candidate Obama’s bizarre claim in May 2007 that the tornado in Greensburg, Kan., killed 10,000 people. (“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.”) The tornado actually killed ten or eleven people. In that particular abuse of current events, Obama was not trying to hype global warming; he was trying to blame incumbent president George Bush — as if the supposed dearth of Kansas National Guardsmen (you see, according to Obama, most of them had been sent off to Iraq) meant that 10,000 innocent people had perished for want of emergency attention.

Note that despite the psychodramatic “before it’s too late” reference to Superstorm Sandy, recent weather data show that the planet has not heated up in the last 15 years, despite a vast increase in the worldwide levels of carbon releases into the atmosphere. Moreover, the fact that the United States, almost alone among industrial countries, is beginning to cut its rate of carbon emissions is due almost entirely to the transition from coal to natural gas for generating electricity. Yet natural gas is a sort of politically incorrect fuel not usually seen as green enough for environmentalists.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/04/22/recognizing-that-radical-islam-is-our-enemy-lessons-from-the-cold-war/?print=1 Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/04/mosque-related_violence.html President Obama has done all he can these past five years to manipulate language and facts in order to exonerate Islam and Moslems from terrorist attacks committed in the U.S. by Moslems in the name of Islam and jihad. After Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood mowed down numerous innocents while chanting “Allahu Akbar,” Mr. […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/tamerlan_tsarnaev_and_a_lesson_to_the_inhabitants_of_the_world.html What’s in a name? In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an understanding of the man after whom he is named is essential to grasp to historic forces on whose behalf he allegedly embraced cruel terror, bringing along his kid brother Dzhokhar.   The late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen Muslim, […]