HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FLASHBACK: Comey’s FBI Embraced American ISIS Terrorist, Helped Him Get DOJ Job By Patrick Poole

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/flashback-comeys-fbi-embraced-american-isis-terrorist-helped-him-get-justice-department-job/

One of the biggest questions for Western governments that has played out in recent days in the American media is what to do with Western ISIS recruits who are now in the custody of U.S.-backed forces as the Islamic State’s geographical military presence collapses into nothing.

At least one previous case involving disgraced former FBI Director James Comey — where the FBI under his direction welcomed back an American ISIS terrorist from Syria and gave him a job working with the Justice Department — may be an example of how *not* to handle such cases.

The American media are now rallying around the plight of Alabama ISIS bride Hoda Muthana, who left the U.S. for Syria to marry an ISIS fighter in 2014.

The script that Muthana and her attorneys appear to be following is the case of Brooklyn ISIS terrorist Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, who joined the terror group in Syria in June 2014 and defected back to the U.S. with FBI assistance later that same year.

Bhuiya was charged with material support for terrorism upon his return and faced 25 years in prison, but a federal judge last June sentenced him to supervised release with no jail time thanks to the intervention and recommendation of his Justice Department co-workers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now works with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vandals Attack Wrong Statue of General Lee — Deface World War II Hero, Not Confederate By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vandals-attack-wrong-statue-of-general-lee-deface-world-war-ii-hero-not-confederate/

William C. Lee led black paratroopers in fighting the Nazis.

Earlier this week, vandals targeted the statue of General William C. Lee, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II — a unit made famous by the show Band of Brothers. Following a spate of vandalism targeting statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, this seems a disgusting case of mistaken identity.

“I think it was a big mistake,” Mark Johnson, the curator of the General William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn, N.C., told ABC 7 News. “Why would you do something like this? It really just irritates people.”

Police told the local outlet that a suspect doused the statue in an unidentified flammable liquid and set it on fire.

Johnson said he was familiar with the spate of vandalism directed against Robert E. Lee statues but never suspected a case of mistaken identity would direct people to his museum’s statue.

“Never even thought it would affect us in any way at all,” he said. “This is a hometown grown boy here that turned out to be an international hero of World War II so to come and try to destroy his statue is just an insult to everybody.”

The curator suggested the vandals wanted to make a statement about slavery and racism and were sorely mistaken.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-timess-islamic-flimflam-man/

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Last November, the Times published a piece by Akyol entitled “True Islam Does Not Kill Blasphemers.” Anyone who is even a patchy awareness of Islam knows just how dishonest a claim this is; as Robert Spencer dryly observed at the time, “if Akyol denied the death penalty for blasphemy in any Sharia state, he could end up being executed for blasphemy himself.”

In keeping with his practice of blatantly lying about his faith and its adherents, Akyol’s latest Times piece was headlined “The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam.” It began as follows:

Since 9/11, a recurrent theme in the far-right circles of America has been “creeping Shariah.” It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death.

Implicit here is that such concerns are outrageous and that only an extremist – a member of the “far right” – would profess them. Never mind that as the number of Muslims in Western Europe has proliferated, so have burkas. Never mind that it’s a core tenet of Islam that adulterers – like blasphemers – must be put to death. Akyol continues:

In this scenario, American Muslims, who make up only 1 percent of the population, will pursue this grand scheme because they are here not for freedom and opportunity, but to form a fifth column in it, as Steve Bannon seriously claimed in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Why Don’t Democrats Want The Census To Find How Many Noncitizens Live In The United States? Democrats have found a sneaky way to tilt the political playing field in their favor without having to reform the immigration system. by Ben Weingarten

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/dont-democrats-want-census-find-many-noncitizens-live-united-states/

Democrats’ unwillingness to secure our borders is evidenced in their grimaces during the immigration portion of President Trump’s most recent State of the Union and scores of their members hocking superficial “smart walls,” calling to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and supporting sanctuary cities. This all underscores their antipathy toward national sovereignty and citizenship.

Yet to the left’s credit, they persistently push such policies until they achieve victory, which means more political power, territorial integrity, and fidelity to Americans and legal immigrants be damned. Exhibit A, which has flown largely under the radar, is Democrats’ opposition to the Trump administration’s plan to reinstate a citizenship question in the 2020 census.

As a reflection of how big of a priority this is for Democrats, Sens. Bob Menendez, Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono, and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with a coterie of presidential contending cosponsors, reintroduced the deceptively dubbed “Every Person Counts Act” as one of their earliest actions in this new congressional session. This bill dovetails with leftist activist groups’ ongoing litigation against the Trump administration on the citizenship question, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) has successfully asked be fast-tracked to the Supreme Court.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Epidemic Of Anti-Jewish Hate Crimes In Brooklyn Is No Hoax While the nation was focused on a hoaxed hate crime, Brooklyn’s Jews have been repeatedly and actually attacked. Are we not discussing it because most of the perpetrators are black? By David Marcus

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/21/the-epidemic-of-anti-jewish-hate-crimes-in-brooklyn-is-no-hoax/

As much of the country was transfixed by a hoaxed hate crime in Chicago over the past month, a very real wave of hate crimes in Brooklyn has been taking place. In New York City overall there have been 36 hate crimes against Jews so far this year, according to The New York Times, compared to only 21 last year. In the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn alone, ultra-orthodox Jews have been violently attacked at least 15 times since October of last year.

In most of these cases there is no apparent motive beyond anti-Semitism. No robbery occurs, and often the attackers — generally black men — and their victims are complete strangers. State and local government, as well as the New York City Police Department, have stepped up measures to protect the community, but the incidents have continued apace.

The spate of anti-Semitic attacks raises some significant questions. First and foremost, why is this happening and how can it be stopped? But also, why have the news media and the nation’s politicians been so quiet about an epidemic of hate crime in our country’s largest city? Why isn’t this a big story?

To get at an answer to the first question, we have to peer back through some troubling Brooklyn history. In 1991, the Crown Heights riots exploded in the Brooklyn neighborhood shared mainly by black and ultra-orthodox New Yorkers. Tensions between the two groups had existed for years. Then, a Jewish driver killed a black child. The crash was clearly shown to be an accident, not intentional or negligent, but deadly violence was the result nonetheless. In the years since, tensions have calmed, but never truly disappeared.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Thiessen: The Left Jumps To Believe Anti-Trump Stories Due To Contempt For Trump, Trump Supporters Posted By Ian Schwartz

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/21/thiessen_the_left_jumps_to_believe_anti-trump_stories_due_to_contempt_for_trump_trump_supporters.html

Conservative columnist Marc Thiessen opined on the pattern of news organizations and the political left rushing to judgment on stories that reflect poorly on President Trump and his supporters. From Wednesday’s edition of ‘Special Report’ on FOX News:

MARC THIESSEN, COLUMNIST: There is a pattern here. First, it was the Covington kids that everyone jumped to believe because they were wearing MAGA hats they were some sort of racists and now they are suing some of the news organizations who falsely reported the story.

Now there is this rush to believe Jussie Smollett because he said he was attacked in Chicago by people yelling this is “This is MAGA country” because we all know that Chicago is MAGA country. You had Cory Booker and Kamala Harris who both said this is a modern day lynching. Pelosi who said it was an attack on humanity.

These people jumped to believe him. And why is that? Because it exposes the fact that the political left in Washington has contempt not just for Donald Trump, but for Donald Trump’s supporters. They assume that Donald Trump’s supporters are racist even though 7 to 8 million Trump voters voted twice for Barack Obama.

What happened in the 2016 election is that millions of Americans who are not being listened to by the establishments of either party asserted themselves through the democratic process and instead of listening to them and taking them seriously, they continue to believe that these people are racists and bigots and have to be shunned. And that’s what we’ve seen in both of these cases.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jussie Smollett’s Hate By E.W. Jackson

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/jussie_smolletts_hate.html

Conservative pundits have pointed out that Democrat elites and the so-called “mainstream” media were quick to accept actor Jussie Smollett’s story of being assaulted by two Trump-supporters.

It is clear now that he lied. Smollett said his attackers were white and that he would have been believed without question if his assailants had been “Muslim,” “Mexican,” or “black.” They were black.

When asked why he thinks this happened, Smollett answered, “I have gone hard against 45, I have gone hard against this administration.” The mainstream media were all too happy to embrace any story that promotes their belief that President Trump and his supporters are racist and “homophobic.”

However, Smollett and the leftist media have a broader focus for their hatred than this president. They hate America. The alleged Smollett attack was designed not merely to prove that this president and his supporters are bigots, but to demonstrate once again that America is a hateful place where racism and homophobia run rampant.

The president’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is interpreted as code language for “make America white again.” His opposition to illegal immigration is depicted as a racist ploy to keep nonwhite people out of the country. They know that President Trump is not the originator of what they see as America’s sordid legacy of hatred and bigotry, but in their minds, he is its latest and best representative.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: “The Slap of the Century” by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13787/palestinians-slap-of-the-century

Under the current circumstances, when Arabs are being widely shamed and condemned for sitting in the same room with an Israeli prime minister, it is hard to see how the Trump administration will be able to convince Arab states and leaders to normalize their relations with Israel. Some of these Arab leaders may be privately telling US administration officials things they like to hear about peace and coexistence with Israel. The very same leaders, however, are fully aware of the opposite sentiments, not only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but throughout the Arab world.

All that is left for the Trump administration to do is to try and persuade the Arab states to abandon the Palestinians, and to continue focusing on the regional threat from Iran. If the US completes its pullout from Syria, Iran will successfully complete its long-desired “land-bridge” to the Mediterranean through Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. This encirclement of the area will position Iran, via its proxies, to be the hegemon controlling the region, as it has clearly been trying to bring about. Russia, of course, is standing in the wings, thanks to the gift that then US President Barack Obama handed Putin in 2011 by pulling American troops out of Syria.

For decades now, not only Palestinian leaders but Arab ones as well, have been radicalizing their people against Israel. Using every available platform, including mosques, media outlets and United Nations organizations, these leaders, with the collaboration of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have demonized Israel. They have poisoned the hearts and minds of their people with the hate that exists towards Israel all over the Arab world. To promote normalization with Israel, a leader must prepare his people for the possibility of peace with Israel. Meanwhile, Arab leaders are doing the exact opposite — which is why some of them are currently being denounced as traitors and pawns in the hands of Israel and the US. It would be wise for President Trump’s advisers, if they wish to grasp what is really going on in the Arab world, to listen to the voices of the Arab street.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Uniting an “Army of Islam” to Defeat Just One Country by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13559/turkey-army-of-islam

At the conference, Adnan Tanriverdi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s top military advisor, delivered a speech detailing the inner workings of the “Islamic Confederal State” that Tanriverdi’s Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM) aims to establish with 61 Muslim countries.

Judging by an article Tanriverdi penned in 2009, the purpose of this joint Islamic force is to defeat Israel, which “should be made to get engaged [in war] and the length of the war should be extended.”

Erdogan and his chief military advisor are obviously engaging in projection. It is Turkey that has ethnically cleansed itself of Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, and that is now targeting Syrian Kurds. It is the Turkish government’s continued aggression against various peoples in Israel, Syria, Iraq, Cyprus and other countries that is a threat to world peace; not Israel. It is Turkey, not Israel, whose destabilizing foreign policy needs to change.

Istanbul recently hosted the second “International Islamic Union Congress,” sponsored mainly by the Strategic Research Center for Defenders of Justice (ASSAM), which is headed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief military advisor, Adnan Tanriverdi, a retired lieutenant general and an Islamist .

At the conference, Tanriverdi delivered a speech detailing the inner workings of the “Islamic Confederal State” that ASSAM aims to establish with 61 Muslim countries. In his address, Tanriverdi said that a “rapid deployment force” should be created. Judging by an article Tanriverdi penned in 2009, the purpose of this joint Islamic force is to defeat Israel, which “should be made to get engaged [in war] and the length of the war should be extended.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Changing Reality With Words By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 21st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/changing

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy “wetlands.” Fetid “dumps” are often rebranded as green “landfills.”

Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles.

Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle?

Substitute “climate change” for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather could be perceived as symptomatic of too much climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Suddenly, blizzards, deluges and subzero temperatures meant that typically unpredictable weather was “haywire” because of affluent Westernized lifestyles.

Affirmative action originated as a means of making up for past prejudices against the African-American community, which comprised about 12 percent of the population.

By the late 1960s, slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation were finally considered unique stains on the American past, to be redeemed in the present by set-aside programs in college admissions and hiring predicated on racial considerations.

The problem with affirmative action is that the very name implied redress for historical wrongs that could be “affirmed” by compensatory action for a particular minority of the population. But lots of other groups wished to be included in an ever-expanding catalog of the oppressed.