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President Trump Delivers Another Blow to Iran in White House Address to the Nation Katie Pavlich Katie Pavlich

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/01/08/trump-remarks-white-house-n2559136

President Trump addressed the nation from the White House Wednesday morning less than 24-hours after Iran launched more than a dozen missiles at al-Asad airbase in Iraq. As he spoke Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and the Joint Chiefs of Staff stood behind him.

“As long as I am President of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon,” President Trump said at the start of his remarks. “The missiles fired last night at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the last administration.”

“Our great American forces are prepared for anything. Iran appears to be standing down,” he continued, reporting no casualties from the attack. “The United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.” 

President Trump called on European allies and China to abandon the Iranian nuclear agreement once and for all. He went after the Obama administration, slammed appeasement of the regime and repeatedly noted Iran’s violent behavior. 

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Beclowns Itself Spreading Fake News and Anti-Trump Propaganda During Iranian Missile Attack Debra Heine

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/07/media-beclowns-itself-spreading-fake-news-and-anti-trump-propaganda-during-iranian-rocket-attack/

As Iranian missiles rained down on U.S. military targets in Iraq Tuesday night, two cable news outlets, MSNBC and CNN, spread fake news that suggested that the damage was worse than it was.

The Pentagon confirmed that Tehran fired more than 12 ballistic missiles targeting two military bases used by US and coalition forces in Iraq.

During a broadcast of Hardball on MSNBC, NBC News Tehran bureau chief Ali Arouzi parroted Iranian state media propaganda claiming erroneously that Iranian rockets had killed 30 American soldiers.

“The IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] was saying that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of this country, was in the control center coordinating these attacks,” Arouzi told anchor Chris Matthews. “This bit I’m not sure about but Iran state media says 30 U.S. soldiers have been killed in this attack. This is not confirmed, it’s just coming from Iranian media.”

“This is drawing people from all sides into this what is potentially the beginning of a war, Chris,” Arouzi added. “I don’t know how this is going to go in the coming hours, but it’s not looking good from the rhetoric that came out from President Trump earlier today saying that he will retaliate against any retaliation from Iran. I think we can expect an attack on Iran imminently.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Chinese Students Charged for Photographing U.S. Naval Installations By Zachary Evans

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chinese-students-charged-for-photographing-u-s-naval-installations/

Two Chinese students were charged in federal court in Florida on Monday with entering a U.S. naval installation and taking pictures, the Miami Herald reported.

Yuhao Wang and Jielun Zhang, both 24-year-old University of Michigan students, were arrested on Saturday at the Sigsbee Annex in the Naval Air Station in Key West, Fla. The two drove into the annex after ignoring a guard’s orders to turn back and were apprehended a half hour later. They had cell phones and a camera inside the base.

“U.S. Navy Security Forces obtained consent to look at the devices and observed photographs taken on the Sigsbee Annex property, including U.S. military structures on Fleming Key,” the FBI wrote in its affidavit for the case.

Both students voluntarily showed agents the pictures they had taken, and Wang admitted they had driven into the base against the orders of the guard.

A similar incident took place on December 26, when Chinese national Lyuyou Liao was arrested in the Truman Annex of the Naval Air Station. Liao said he was “trying to take photographs of the sunrise” from the property, and he willingly provided the passcode for his phone to a federal agent. The agent found Liao had taken photos of the facilities in the Truman Annex.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Lost History of Western Civilization Is Coming By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-lost-history-of-western-civilization-is-coming/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

Thirty-two years ago, this country was divided by Stanford University’s decision to ditch its Western Civilization requirement in favor of a multicultural alternative. Claims that Stanford had built a racist curriculum around the likes of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, Marx, Freud, Voltaire, and Darwin made for a sensational cultural side-show. Today, the Stanford dust-up has become our politics.

Expanded accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and generalized bigotry now enter just about every policy dispute. The very act of naming and defining a common American culture, much less a common Western civilization, is now deemed racist. Increasingly, the left half of the country calls the right half racist. The right half objects and takes the accusation itself as proof of extremism, bad faith, or bigotry in reverse. What has brought us to this point?

On the surface, America has divided into name-calling camps organized around powerful and opposed moral certainties. Dig deeper, however, and a lack of faith drives much of the anger. The campus culture that energizes our national conflicts blends radical doubt with overbearing moralism. Deconstructionist scholars paint our national and civilizational narratives as delusions, yet with certainty that those narratives are designed to oppress. Academics portray the Founders’ belief in natural freedom and equality as a Western prejudice, or a ruse of the powerful, while drawing on those same classically liberal beliefs to fuel their outrage.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Time Magazine’s Iran Guide For Parents Refuses To Call Soleimani A Terrorist January 8, 2020 By Tristan Justice

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/08/time-magazines-iran-guide-for-parents-refuses-to-call-soleimani-a-terrorist/

Time Magazine’s “Time for Kids” publication issued a guide Tuesday for parents on how to talk with their children about the situation unfolding in Iran riddled with biased omissions.

The legacy outlet first refers to Qasem Soleimani, the recently slain Iranian general responsible for hundreds of American deaths, as a “top military leader in Iran,” rather than a terrorist. In the next line, the guide explains that President Donald Trump took action on Soleimani simply because Trump said Soleimani was a terrorist.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump Wins His First Sanctuary City Fight Just before Christmas, the Ninth Circuit rejected Los Angeles’s petition to reconsider its ruling upholding the administration’s COPS rules.

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://spectator.org/trump-wins-his-first-sanctuary-city-fight/

Imagine, for a moment, that you or someone you know has become a crime victim. The perpetrator, you learn, had been incarcerated before this offense, and federal immigration officials, discovering that he was in the country illegally, wanted to pick him up for deportation. The jail, however, sits in a “sanctuary city,” so it refused to hold the suspect for immigration officials or even notify them before releasing him back into the community — thus allowing him to harm you or your loved one.

This scenario, which has played out numerous times, illustrates why many Americas are angry about sanctuary cities.

Donald Trump, of course, promised to end them. Beginning in 2017, however, his administration lost a series of legal battles with sanctuary cities. In each case, courts prevented the administration from using its grant-making authority to disincentivize sanctuary policies.

Sanctuary cities were having their cake and eating it too — thumbing their noses at the federal government’s request for basic law enforcement cooperation yet taking in federal law enforcement grant funds.

So last July’s ruling in City of Los Angeles v. Barr must have felt like a gut punch. Reversing a lower-court judgment for Los Angeles, a three-judge panel of the famously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld scoring factors used by the administration in awarding Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants — scoring factors that handicapped sanctuary cities.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did the Media Force a False Narrative on the Trayvon Martin Case? A new lawsuit claims Trayvon’s defense used a false witness — and the mainstream media refuses to look into it. Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://spectator.org/did-the-media-force-a-false-narrative-on-the-trayvon-martin-case/

There has been widespread reporting of the civil lawsuit for $100 million being brought by attorney Larry Klayman on behalf of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin almost eight years ago. At the core of the lawsuit is the claim that the key witness against Zimmerman at his trial, Rachel Jeantel, was a fake witness pretending to be Diamond Eugene, the 16-year-old girl who was on the phone with Trayvon in the last minutes before his death.

The lawsuit, based on investigative reporting by documentary producer Joel Gilbert, targets Trayvon’s parents, their lawyer Benjamin Crump, both Jeantel and the real Diamond Eugene, prosecution lawyers and the state of Florida, all of whom, according to the lawsuit, knew or should have known of the witness substitution. The Martin case had far-reaching implications, poisoning race relations and resulting in the creation (by its own account) of Black Lives Matter. For Klayman, setting the record straight in this case and imposing high damages “has the potential to break the back of the race-baiting industry, to set a precedent that you can’t get away with this stuff anymore.”

Not on the list, but, as Gilbert points out, “a main culprit in this story,” are the mainstream media. Zimmerman was taken into custody by the Sanford, Florida police following the shooting and released without charges. This was because their investigation found his claim that he had acted in self-defense convincing. According to Zimmerman’s story, he was a member of Neighborhood Watch in his housing complex, which had experienced a wave of robberies. He had called the non-emergency number of the police when he saw a suspicious person hanging around in the rain. He left his car briefly when he was asked in which direction the person had gone, but returned to it and did not see Trayvon Martin until the latter jumped him, broke his nose, and pummeled his head on the concrete path while he cried for help. His story was supported both by his injuries and eyewitness testimony. But the media fastened on the alternative narrative promoted by the Martin family and their attorney, Crump, of a white racist vigilante who willfully gunned down an unarmed black child buying snacks for his younger brother.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Nigerian Mafia by Judith Bergman

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15398/europe-nigerian-mafia

Italian intelligence has named the Nigerian mafia “the most structured and dynamic” of any foreign crime entity operating in Italy, according to the Washington Post…. What distinguishes the Nigerian crime networks is their severe brutality…

Black Axe has also spread to Canada, where a 2015 report by the Globe and Mail described it as a “death cult”… linked to “decades of murders and rapes…. In the US, the FBI recently linked a series of financial frauds to Black Axe.

“…traffickers tell victims of human trafficking to apply for asylum and then get a status to be able to stay here in Germany, but they continue to be exploited in prostitution.” — Andrea Tivig, Terre des Femmes, Infomigrants.net, March 15, 2019.

“In addition to a common fondness for crime, the culture of immigrant gangs is a cocktail of religion, clan affiliation, honor, shame and brotherhood… The harder and the more brutal [you are], the stronger you are, and then you create awareness of yourself and attract more [people]”. — Naser Khader, member of the Danish Parliament for the Conservative Party and co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement, Jyllands-Posten, November 22, 2018.

In policy debates, the detrimental effects of migration on crime, particularly gang crime, do not receive nearly the attention — if any — they deserve. They should.

One of the fastest growing criminal networks in Europe is now the Nigerian mafia, which is spreading its criminal activities across the continent. It consists of rival groups such as Black Axe, Vikings and Maphite. Most recently, authorities in Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Malta conducted an international operation directed at two of the major Nigerian mafia groups. Police accused the gangs of human-trafficking, drug trafficking, robbery, extortion, sexual violence and prostitution.

According to a June 2019 report by the Washington Post on the Nigerian mafia in Italy:

“They hold territory from the north in Turin to the south in Palermo. They smuggle drugs and traffic women, deploying them as prostitutes on Italy’s streets. They find new members among the caste of wayward migrants, illicitly recruiting at Italian government-run asylum centers.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Turning on Washington to Benefit Moscow by Stephen Blank and Peter Huessy

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15380/turkey-washington-moscow

“Turkey and [Libya’s] Government of National Accord reached an unusual agreement to essentially carve up much of the energy-rich eastern Mediterranean between them — threatening to cut out Greece and Cyprus from the coming bonanza.” — Foreign Policy, Keith Johnson, December 23, 2019.

Turkey’s confrontations with the US and NATO, of which it is a member, have served Russia well, giving Putin huge returns on a relatively small investment — returns that are likely to grow in 2020.

Turkey’s often seeming contradictory relations with the United States and Russia — such as, for instance, Ankara’s boosting of cooperation with Ukraine, on the one hand, and defending the Libyan government against General Khalifa Haftar’s insurgency on the other — likely stem from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s apparent drive to become a leading regional and global power.

To this end, Erdoğan has steadily constructed a repressive authoritarian regime resembling that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. However, as the March 31, 2019 municipal elections in Istanbul demonstrated, Erdoğan’s domestic base, including within his own Justice and Development Party has narrowed in favor of the Turkish nationalist right.

To counter his weakened position at home, Erdoğan evidently thinks he needs to demonize America and resist US policies in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean.

In addition, on its economic front, in May 2019, Turkish ships invaded Cyprus’s Exclusive Economic Zone and started drilling for gas. Turkey interposed its navy there, to deter any resistance, and now is not only increasing its drilling force, but is even talking about drilling in the Aegean or Black Sea.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Austrian People’s Party and the Greens – A Successful Coalition for the Future? by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff

Posted By on January 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15397/austria-peoples-party-greens

They [the Austrian Greens Party] now enjoy unprecedented attention not afforded to other small political parties. Moreover, the European Union has always viewed coalition governments with a Greens participation as “sexy and future-oriented”, with German chancellor Angela Merkel having had her eyes on a coalition with the Greens for a long time.

European media outlets are hailing the new and “future-oriented” Austrian government as a “model for Germany”, “the only chance to combat [right-wing] extremism”, and “a model that could be worth copying”. Criticism, even in its slightest form, has been virtually non-existent.

Whereas the Austrian Greens Party is eco-socialist, capitalizing on the current worldwide trends purportedly to save the planet from extinction due to “climate change”, the People’s Party champions an eco-social market economy, developed by former Austrian vice-chancellor Josef Riegler. It calls for the balance of a free market economy, social fairness and the protection of natural resources. How these seemingly conflicting views were reconciled in a coalition agreement will be discussed in the near future.

After the end of a popular coalition government between the Austrian People’s Party and the Freedom Party — as well as snap elections on September 29, 2019, and extensive exploratory talks among all political parties — coalition negotiations between the allegedly center-right People’s Party and the far-left Greens Party reached their conclusion on January 2, 2020. Austrians had to exercise patience for more than 100 days until they would once again be governed by an elected administration. Since the previous government’s crash and the following parliamentary no-confidence vote against then-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, an unelected, appointed, technocratic caretaker government had been in charge.

The People’s Party under the leadership of Sebastian Kurz together with the Greens under the leadership of Werner Kogler garnered 53% of the vote in 2019, the hitherto smallest support for a coalition government. In 2017, when the People’s Party and the Freedom Party entered their government, they could count on the backing of 62%, a percentage that remained stable in polls until the Chancellor Kurz called for snap elections following the emergence in May 2019 of the Ibiza-video. which showed the Austrian vice-chancellor in a shady meeting with a woman claiming to be the niece of a Russian oligarch on the island of Ibiza.