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MY SAY: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

December 8, 2016 A federal judge on Wednesday halted Michigan’s recount of its 4.8 million presidential ballots, effectively ending a longshot attempt to challenge President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith, who had ordered the state to start the recount to meet a federal deadline, said he had no reason to go against a state court ruling that Green Party candidate Jill Stein had no standing to demand the recount because she had no chance of winning and therefore was not an “aggrieved” candidate. Stein requested recounts in Michigan, where Trump won by just 10,000 votes, as well as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three states would have had to flip to Democrat Hillary Clinton to change the election result.

Dec 24, 2016 – The United States on Friday allowed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to be adopted, defying … vote, which represented perhaps the final bitter chapter in the years of antagonism between President Barack Obama’s administration and Netanyahu’s government.

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Trump Puts Fact Ahead of Fiction in Israel The only reason recognizing Jerusalem as the Jewish State’s capital is controversial is that the world has been pretending it’s not for decades. By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

The most exhausting thing about the Middle East — except for the bloodshed, poverty, tyranny, etc. — is that it refuses to conform to how it’s described in the West.

It’s like journalists, diplomats, and politicians want to announce a football game, but the players keep insisting on playing rugby. The field looks similar. The scoring isn’t all that different. It’s just a different game. But don’t tell the gang in the booth. They get furious when you point out that the facts don’t line up with the commentary.

Consider President Trump’s momentous (though for now mostly symbolic) announcement that the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Before you can debate whether this was a good move, you must acknowledge one glaring fact that the chatterers want to ignore or downplay: It’s true. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, convenes there. Israelis call it their capital for the same reason they claim two plus two equals four. It’s just true.

What makes the decision controversial is that everyone had agreed to pretend it wasn’t the capital in order to protect “the peace process.”

That’s another term that doesn’t quite correspond with reality. There is no peace process. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president finishing the twelfth year of his four-year term, has refused to meet with the Israelis to discuss anything since early in the Obama administration.

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GLAZOV MOMENT: TOP 10 FACTS ABOUT FLYNN’S PLEA VIDEO

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

http://jamieglazov.com/2017/12/07/glazov-moment-top-10-facts-about-flynns-plea/In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie shares the Top 10 Facts About Flynn’s Plea, unveiling what the establishment media doesn’t want you to know. Don’t miss it!And make sure to watch Jamie’s stirring speech delivered at a recentAmerican Freedom Alliance conference in Los Angeles. where he focused on United in Hate: The Left’s Romance With Jihad,reflecting on how: “I thought we escaped the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union came to us.”

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Trump Recognizes Jerusalem As Israel’s Capital Finally, the ancient Jewish city can take its place among world capitals. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

President Donald Trump made history yesterday officially recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel, almost 70 years after the United States became the first country in the world to extend diplomatic recognition to the Jewish state.

“Jerusalem is not just the heart of three great religions, but it is now also the heart of one of the most successful democracies in the world,” President Trump said in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

Over the past seven decades, the Israeli people have built a country where Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and people of all faiths are free to live and worship according to their conscience and according to their beliefs. Jerusalem is today, and must remain, a place where Jews pray at the Western Wall, where Christians walk the Stations of the Cross, and where Muslims worship at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted thanks to Trump for the “historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Jewish people and the Jewish state will be forever grateful.”

Of course the usual suspects were broken records, apoplectic on cue.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned there would be “dangerous consequences.” His office issued a statement declaring that “East Jerusalem is the key to war and peace and any solution must guarantee East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state.” Palestinian politicians are calling for “days of rage” in the streets to protest Trump’s decision, and are hoping the violence goes global.

Predictably, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Trump’s move was a “red line” for Muslims, whatever that means.

Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Trump’s proclamation could “trigger anger across the Arab and Muslim world, fuel tension and jeopardize peace efforts.”

These are the same tedious things Islamists always say whenever the United States does anything perceived as supportive of Israel.

In making the proclamation about Jerusalem, Trump honored a campaign promise, one to which plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle have given mere lip service over the years.

President Trump’s courageous, unprecedented proclamation finally ends the long-running charade that Jerusalem is legally or politically different from or somehow not legitimately a part of sovereign Israeli territory. And it confers on Israel as a whole a special kind of political legitimacy well beyond what President Harry Truman provided May 14, 1948 when he extended U.S. diplomatic recognition to the nascent State of Israel.

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President Trump’s Jerusalem Move Deals a Blow to Terror We won’t let Islamic terrorists decide where we put our embassies. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

Hamas has announced that President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has opened the “gates of hell.” Its Muslim Brotherhood parent has declared America an “enemy state.”

The Arab League boss warned that the Jerusalem move “will fuel extremism and result in violence.” The Jordanian Foreign Minister claimed that it would “trigger anger” and “fuel tension.”

“Moderate” Muslim leaders excel at threatening violence on behalf of the “extremists”.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) warned that recognizing Jerusalem will trigger an Islamic summit and be considered a “blatant attack on the Arab and Islamic nations.”

The last time the OIC was this mad, someone drew Mohammed. And wasn’t stoned to death for it.

According to the Saudi ambassador, it will “heighten tensions”. The Deputy Prime Minister of Islamist Turkey called it a “major catastrophe”. And the leader of the largest Muslim country in Europe, France’s Emmanuel Macron “expressed concern” that America will “unilaterally recognize Jerusalem.”

PLO leaders and minions meanwhile made it quite clear that now the dead peace process is truly dead.

The Palestinian Authority’s boss warned that recognizing Jerusalem will “destroy the peace process”. The PLO’s envoy in D.C. threatened that it would be the “final lethal blow” and “the kiss of death to the two-state solution”. A top PA advisor claimed it “will end any chance of a peace process.”

A day later, the peace process is still as alive and as dead as it ever was.

Since the chance of a peace process is about the same as being hit by lightning while scoring a Royal Flush, that “chance” doesn’t amount to anything. The peace process has been deader than Dracula for ages. And even a PLO terrorist should know that you can’t threaten to kill a dead hostage.

The only kiss of death here came from Arafat.

Peace wasn’t killed though. It was never alive. Because a permanent peace is Islamically impossible.

“The world will pay the price,” warned Mahmoud Habash, the Palestinian Authority’s Supreme Sharia judge.

Habash isn’t just the bigwig of Islamic law, he’s also the Islamic adviser to the leader of the Palestinian Authority. And Abbas, the terror organization’s leader, was there when Habash made his remarks.

Previously Habash had declared that the Kotel, the Western Wall of the fallen Temple, the holiest site in Judaism, “can never be for non-Muslims. It cannot be under the sovereignty of non-Muslims.”

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Islamist Regimes Take Over UNESCO by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

The UN agency is currently dominated by the most oppressive regimes on education and culture. There is China, which recently let writer, poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo die an agonizing death in prison, where he was serving an 11-year jail sentence for his support of human rights and democracy. Then there is Iran, where a dean of journalism, Siamak Pourzand, committed suicide to avoid more persecution by the regime.

“UNESCO has been hijacked and abused as a tool for the persecution of Israel and the Jewish people, while concocting fake facts and fake history, meant to… rewrite global history.” — Carmel Shama Hacohen, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO.

If UNESCO is really serious about reforming itself, it should immediately issue a statement against the Islamization of Turkey’s Hagia Sophia Cathedral, a UN World Heritage Site.

Hit by the departure of the United States and Israel, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recently welcomed its new Director-General, former French Minister of Culture Audrey Azoulay. Those who care about cultural diversity and Western civilization hailed her election, because the representative of Qatar’s Islamist regime had come close to winning UNESCO’s leadership race. But the real problem is that UNESCO has been abandoned to Islamist dictatorships. A battle to save the organization has begun.

Among the critics of UNESCO there is a tendency to dismiss this agency as “irrelevant”. Yet, so long as UNESCO exists, the West cannot allow repressive regimes to dominate the world’s highest body supposedly in charge of culture, science and education. Richard Hoggart, the British scholar who served as UNESCO’s assistant director general from 1970 to 1977, once asked: “Should Unesco Survive?”.

The UN agency is currently dominated by the most oppressive regimes in regard to education and culture. There is China, which in July let writer, poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo die an agonizing death in prison, where he was serving an 11-year jail sentence for his support of human rights and democracy. Then there is Iran, where a dean of journalism, Siamak Pourzand, committed suicide to avoid more persecution by the regime. Last week, the assistant director for Education of UNESCO, Qian Tang, was in Iran to advance “cultural cooperation” with the Islamic Republic, but the issue of cultural freedom in the Iran was not even raised by the envoy of the UN agency. There is also Pakistan, a country that has sentenced to death essentially for being a Christian mother of five, Asia Bibi, whose condition has never even been questioned by UNESCO. There is Qatar, where a poet, Rashid at Ajami, was sentenced to three years in prison for a poem critical of the emir Hamad bin Khalifa at Thani.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Zeroes in on ‘Catastrophic’ New Year’s Eve Plot ‘Where Christians Meet’ By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

The Islamic State notably highlighted an Australian New Year’s Eve terror plot in their weekly newsletter, noting that the would-be attacker would have caused “catastrophic” casualties in “one of the most important centers where Christians meet” to ring in the holiday.

The focus on New Year’s by an official ISIS publication follows several Christmas threats circulated by ISIS supporters.

Ali Khalif Shire Ali, 20, of Werribee was arrested Nov. 27 in southwest Melbourne and charged with preparing to commit a terrorist attack and gathering documents to facilitate a terrorist act.

According to police, the Australian citizen and computer company employee started planning an attack back in March and was arrested when he moved to the stage of face-to-face meetings about acquiring a gun. His intended target was reportedly Melbourne’s Federation Square when it would be packed with New Year’s Eve revelers.

Police said he was using attack instructional guides produced by al-Qaeda. He had been under scrutiny by counter-terrorism officials for at least two years, though did not attend a specific mosque.

“This is a person who would become particularly energized, for a lack of a better word, when overseas events occurred and would express a great deal of interest in committing an attack himself,” Deputy Commissioner Shane Patton said. “…This is a person who’s expressed an intention to try and kill as many people as he could through shooting them in the Federation Square area on New Year’s Eve. Horrendous.”

Just a few days after his arrest, in ISIS’ weekly al-Naba newsletter, the Aussie arrest was included in the terror group’s news briefs — a section where they’ve previously updated ISIS followers on the Las Vegas mass shooting and California wildfires.

The ISIS article noted that “the young man” was planning “to carry out a major attack on a gathering of Christian communities to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Melbourne.” CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Polar bears all over the place now, Native Alaskans say By Monica Showalter

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

To climate change fanatics, polar bears are the eye candy for the worldwide call for action on global warming. There have been news reports about the sad shape they are in, with their coats going brown, their food supplies drying up, and their ice floes melting. Conclusion: The bears are set to starve.

Welp, turns out there are too many of them now.

According to Marc Morano’s Climate Depot:

2 New Papers: 92% Of Polar Bear Subpopulations Stable, Increasing – Inuit Observe ‘Too Many Polar Bears Now’

…and…

Inuit observations of polar bear ecology: “Last year he said that there’s more bears that are more fat … they rarely see unhealthy bears… back in early 80s, and mid 90s, there were hardly any bears … there’s too many polar bears now.”

So, instead of furtive bears withering away on ice floes and starving due to loss of habitat, rising sea levels or whatever the global warmers claim, what we actually have here is a bear explosion, with bears so well fed that they’ve gotten fat.

It’s more than just anecdotal – the bear populations are exploding everywhere.

In Russia, near its Chukotka peninsula, AFP reports:

MOSCOW: A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.

“It was a completely unique situation,” said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. “We were all gobsmacked, to be honest.”

Several years ago, we were warned that bears were starving due to global warming and would be irretrievably lost.

I recall the first interview I did with Alaska’s then-governor, Sarah Palin, about the polar bear situation in 2008, before she got famous. I asked her if the news reports were right that polar bears were starving. I only have a reference to the link, unfortunately, but I vividly recall her most memorable quote: “Our bears are healthy bears!”

She added that maybe that could be the situation in Canada, but it certainly wasn’t in Alaska.

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The Arc of History Bends Toward . . . What, Exactly? By Michael Walsh

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

One of the most dishonest and pernicious phrases in the cultural-Marxist lexicon—much favored by Barack Hussein Obama during his eight years in office—goes like this: “The arc of history bends toward justice.” The former president borrowed the phrase from Martin Luther King, Jr., who lifted it from the abolitionist Theodore Parker; attached to the moral struggle of the civil-rights movement, it has become a club with which to beat troglodyte conservatives into submission.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/07/the-arc-of-history-bends-toward-what-exactly/

But this is arrant nonsense. As I observe in my forthcoming book, The Fiery Angel:

This fantastic notion derives from the Hegelian-Marxist belief in history as an abstract, almost sentient, force akin to the old notion of Destiny, but with a bastardized Christian teleological impulse. Indeed, the entire Leftist notion of “progress” and its political expression, “progressivism,” stems from it. An “arc of history” that “bends toward justice” is the next best thing to God.

The obvious derivation of this concept, from both the spirituality of Christianity and the rationalism of the Enlightenment—a Deity as the great Watchmaker in the sky, overseeing the orderly ticking of the universe—should be at once obvious. Given the Leftist fondness for Darwin’s theory of natural selection and of the origin of species, this is an odd, contradictory theory for atheists to hold. But, to quote the Emperor in Amadeus, there it is.

The problem, of course, is that they don’t believe in God—the “invisible man in the sky,” to use one of their choice terms of derision. They consider almost any form of religious belief—except Islam!—to be little better than prehistoric superstition, as outmoded as Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, and Wotan. That the concept of a Deity established itself at the origins of humanity and is found in every culture and civilization is to them simply proof of how widespread this confederacy of dunces really is.

But they do believe in something very like God, which they call by various names, including “justice” and its political corollary, “independence.”

Which brings us to the FBI.

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Promise Keeper Column: Why President Trump is right to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital

Posted By on December 8th, 2017

Not only is President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and begin the process of moving the U.S. embassy there one of the boldest moves of his presidency. It is one of the boldest moves any U.S. president has made since the beginning of the Oslo “peace process” in 1993. That process collapsed at Camp David in 2000 when Yasir Arafat rejected President Clinton’s offer of a Palestinian state. And the process has been moribund ever since, despite multiple attempts to restart it.

That is why the warnings from Trump critics that his decision may wreck the peace process ring hollow. There is no peace process to wreck. The conflict is frozen. And the largest barriers to the resumption of negotiations are found not in U.S. or Israeli policy but in Palestinian autocracy, corruption, and incitement. Have the former Obama administration officials decrying Trump’s announcement read a newspaper lately? From listening to them, you’d think it would be all roses and ponies in the Middle East but for Trump. In fact, the region is engulfed in war, terrorism, poverty, and despotism; Israel faces threats in the north and south; its sworn enemy, Iran, is growing in influence and reach; and the delegitimization of the Jewish State proceeds apace in international organizations and on college campuses. I forget how the Obama administration advanced the cause of peace by pressuring Israel while rewarding the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Maybe someone will remind me.

One of the reasons the Middle East persists in its decrepit condition is that it has been, for decades, a playground of magical thinking. Whether it is believing that poverty is the cause of terrorism or that the Ayatollah Khamenei is a good-faith partner, whether it is imagining that Assad will go just because we tell him to or that ISIS is akin to a terrorist “JV team,” liberal internationalists have all too eagerly accepted an alternative picture of the Middle East that is much more flattering than the actuality. A similar form of doublethink is present in our discussions over Jerusalem. Every Israeli knows Jerusalem was, is, and will remain his capital. Every recent president has agreed with him. And the U.S. consensus has been bipartisan. The last four Democratic platforms have said the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. The Senate voted 90-0 only six months ago urging the embassy be moved to the ancient city. Were we to take seriously neither these platforms nor that vote? Was it all virtue-signaling, a bunch of empty gestures in the kabuki theater of U.S. diplomacy?