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The Bells of Barcelona Toll for Europe By David P. Goldman

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

President Trump got bad advice about the secession crisis in Catalonia. When Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the White House last week, he said that Spain’s northeastern region would be “foolish to secede.” On the contrary, the gutsy Catalans are the world’s poster-boy for populism. Their independence movement is a real revolution. America shouldn’t meddle in Spain’s internal affairs, to be sure, but we ought to recognize a kindred political movement when we see it. Ultimately, the Catalan independence movement is a response to Europe’s demographic cataclysm.

Here’s what I wrote in Asia Times today:

Political analysts are blinking in disbelief at yesterday’s events in Catalonia, trying to recognize the political phenomenon that took the world by surprise over the weekend. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, a revolutionary movement has asserted its power over an important European region. The conduct of the Catalan independence referendum was a thoroughly organized insurgency involving the whole of civil society, from the region’s Catholic Church to the organs of public safety. Unlike the failed independence movements of Quebec or Scotland, it was not a top-down affair promoted by a small political elite with the sentimental support of a popular minority. Unlike Italy’s Lega Lombarda, it was not a regional lobby fighting for more control of tax revenues. Catalan’s independence movement is the genuine article.

Never in postwar European history have tens of thousands of citizens collaborated in a campaign of civil disobedience so well planned that it successfully countered the mass deployment of national police and the paramilitary Civil Guard, and with sufficient grit to take nearly 1,000 injuries requiring medical treatment. The Catalans kept more than 2,000 voting stations open and saved their ballots from seizure, allowing more than 2.4 million of the region’s 7 million residents to vote. Ninety percent of them supported the establishment of an independent Catalan republic.

To frustrate the Madrid government’s attempt to suppress the referendum, the independence movement coordinated the occupation of hundreds of polling stations by ordinary citizens, including families with children. It persuaded the regional police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, to stand off the Civil Guard and National Police, as in this video published by the Catholic-Monarchist newspaper ABC:

It organized the fire brigades of Catalan towns to form human shields between the polling stations and the Civil Guard. It established mechanisms to hide the ballot-boxes from the national police and transport them to a secret site for counting. Where the national police forces broke through, ordinary citizens defended the vote with their bodies, resulting in nearly 1,000 injuries, against roughly a dozen injuries for police, in a display of determined but non-violent resistance.

The Catalans did so with the explicit support of their Church, 400 of whose clerics signed an independence manifesto last week, including some bishops. Unlike the anti-clerical left-wing movements of the past, the Catalan revolutionaries evinced thoroughly bourgeois goals. As a revolutionary movement, the Catalans better resemble the Americans of 1776 than the French of 1789, the Russians of 1917, or the Catalan revolutionary government of the late 1930s that ultimately was crushed by Francisco Franco. They are tired of subsidizing the backward money-sinks of Spain’s southern provinces; they are hard-working and productive, and want to separate from the economically irreparable parts of Spain.
In retrospect, the panic on the part of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is easier to understand. Universally condemned for overreacting to the Catalan independence movement, Rajoy had few choices. He knew that he was dealing not with a few grandstanding politicians but with a movement that reached into the capillaries of civil society. If he failed to kill it in its cradle, he would not have another opportunity to stop it. Thanks to the thorough organization and grit of ordinary citizens, Rajoy failed miserably. His statement yesterday that “there was no referendum” rings hollow. It recalls the famous deathbed statement of the mid-19 th-century Spanish prime minister, the Duke of Valencia; asked if he wanted to forgive his enemies, he said, “I have no enemies. I killed them all.”

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Vegas Gunman’s Girlfriend Back in U.S.; Sheriff Predicts ‘Substantial Info’ Soon By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

The live-in girlfriend of the Las Vegas shooter has landed in Los Angeles hours after the sheriff said that among the questions investigators are probing is “did this person get radicalized unbeknownst to us, and we want to identify that source.”

At an afternoon press conference, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Joe Lombardo said of Stephen Paddock’s companion Marilou Danley, “Investigation with her is ongoing and we anticipate some information from her here shortly.”

He confirmed that she was in the Philippines. According to ABS-CBN News there, Danley flew from Manila to Hong Kong on Sept. 22, then returned to Manila on Sept. 25. There was no information on when, and from where, she had originally gone to Manila. Paddock reportedly wired $100,000 to an account in the Philippines last week.

“Currently, she is a person of interest,” Lombardo said. She was later met at the airport by FBI agents.

Lombardo said the department was making “progress” on a motive though he didn’t have any answers yet. “I anticipate a substantial amount of information to come in in the next 48 hours,” he said.

The sheriff said an internal investigation has been launched into the leaking of photos from Paddock’s hotel room, showing an arsenal of weapons, stacks of magazines and part of the shooter’s body, that were published in the Daily Mail.

Paddock fired at a “progressive, successive rate” for 9 minutes. The pattern of gunfire was wide, he said, striking some victims outside of the concert grounds.

The shooter had placed cameras outside and inside of the room; Lombardo said the FBI was evaluating all electronic equipment seized, but he was “not aware” of any transmission of video as Paddock conducted the mass shooting. One camera was on a hallway cart holding the dishes from room service that the gunman had earlier ordered.

The sheriff wouldn’t comment on a report that Paddock may have intended to target another, larger music festival, possibly renting several condo units overlooking the three-day Life is Beautiful pop-rap festival held Sept. 22-24.

ISIS persisted in its full-court press effort to claim responsibility for the attack, with its Amaq news agency, official Nashir channel and affiliated al-Batar Media Foundation all insisting Paddock acted on behalf of the terror group.

At a later news conference, Special Agent in Charge Jill Snider of ATF’s San Francisco Field Division said 47 firearms have been recovered from the hotel room and Paddock’s residences in Verdi and Mesquite, Nev.

“They were purchased in Nevada, Utah, California, and Texas. The gunman purchased rifles, shotguns and pistols. At this time, none of the guns recovered appear to be homemade. There were 12 bump fire stocks identified on the firearms in the hotel room,” she said. “…It is still being determined which firearms were used in the shooting. All of the firearms have been traced. We are still awaiting results from some of the firearms that were located at the Mesquite residence.”

The death toll was adjusted from 59 down to 58, not counting the shooter who died at his own hand. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MARK STEYN: THE EMPTY PADDOCK

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

As often in America, it was met with a great deal of heroism by ordinary men and women rising to the occasion: There was, for example, an Englishwoman in a wheelchair who’d been seated on a raised platform so she could get a better view of the concert. If it were every man for himself, it would have been easy to leave her there, trapped on the dais, exposed to the gunman. Instead, as everyone fled, those around her nevertheless carried her to safety and raised her wheelchair over the fence they scrambled over. There were many stories like that throughout the day, far outweighing the grotesque Tweets glorying in the slaughter of presumed Trump voters. Twitter is an idiotic medium, but not, happily, a representative one.

I had thought by last night we would know more about Stephen Craig Paddock. By now the usual social-media non-paper trail and petty-crime police records and mental-health issues have emerged. Instead, nothing has – except some bizarrely distinctive details: He wasn’t a loner, but lived with his girlfriend – an Australian citizen currently in Japan, but planning to return to the US today. He was not the usual loser, but a multi-millionaire. He had no apparent interest in guns and no military training, but he demonstrated remarkably lethal proficiency, either with semi-automatics he modified or with a genuine automatic he somehow acquired, a weapon that has been used in precisely three crimes in America since 1934. He didn’t “snap”, but instead calmly planned his act, identifying and securing the perfect corner suite in a massive hotel and then discreetly moving in dozens of weapons over four days and constructing platforms in front of those two windows.

Some of these quirks do not appear to be particularly consistent, and the Aussie in the adjoining room, for one, says there were “multiple shooters” and “they killed a security guard on my floor”. On the face of it, “multiple shooters” would seem more plausible than Isis’ claim that Mr Paddock had converted to Islam and changed his name to “Abu Abd Abdulbar al-Ameriki”. But, pending any further revelations, it may well be that a wealthy retiree with no interest in guns got sufficiently interested sufficiently quickly to pull off America’s all-time deadliest single-shooter massacre: An old dog taught himself a new trick, on a spectacular scale.

As I said on stage at the Guthrie Theatre, I had intended to talk about other matters – about the weekend’s latest “vehicle attack” in Edmonton, Alberta, by a Somali immigrant (with an Isis flag on the seat of his car), who stabbed one policeman and ran over four people at Commonwealth Stadium; and about the two young women fatally stabbed (one with her throat slit) at the main rail station in Marseilles, by an illegal immigrant from the Maghreb; and the seventeen-year-old from the northern Caucasus who’s just gone on trial in Oslo after being found with a bomb the day after the Stockholm jihad-motorist struck. But all these events, by fiercely committed ideologues in multiple jurisdictions in service of a global civilizational struggle, were all but forgotten, banished to the in-brief sidebars at the foot of page 37 by one apparently non-ideological American retiree who, unlike the aforementioned, was extremely good at killing large numbers of people.

I confess to a certain resentment at this. I regard the Albertan, French and Norwegian stories as far more relevant to where our world is heading. It is not a small thing when a young Frenchwoman can have her throat slit in broad daylight at a major public venue in a European metropolis, notwithstanding that the Mayor of London and others tell us we have to accept that it’s now part and parcel of life in a big city. Yet in a certain sense these events are ineffectual – as the corpse count of a Stephen Paddock reminds us. And every Stephen Paddock makes it easier for all those who want to brush off Islamic supremacism and retreat to all those lame-o lines about how you’ve got more chance of being killed by a toppling household appliance than by a terrorist, and anyway, even when the shooting starts, half-a-dozen Isis cells can’t match one white-male gun nut. Why didn’t the Somali guy, the North African, the Caucasian jihadist figure out what one 64-year-old from a Nevada retirement community did? That all over the map there are soft targets with large numbers of people penned into small, tight, open-air spaces – and right across the street tall hotels whose upper floors offer easy opportunities for a bloodbath.

We have been, for the most part, very lucky. The foot-soldiers of the jihad are mostly dimwit Mohammedans: they have youth and energy and ideological fervor, but they are also largely stupid and unimaginative. The old guys are less energetic, but also less stupid: if Isis were right and there really were Islamic Stephen Paddocks – 40-50-60-somethings, worldly and full of low cunning – things would be very different.

Consider this year’s two pop-concert atrocities: at Ariana Grande’s in Manchester, 23 people died – in the cause of the new global caliphate; at Jason Aldean’s in Vegas, 59 died – for no reason at all. It is a glum thought, but Paddock’s all-time record will likely not stand for long. America’s four deadliest single-shooter mass murders occurred in the last decade. Only one of them – the Orlando nightclub massacre – can be said to have a political or ideological component. The rest seem to be a peculiarly contemporary form of narcissism – that, when my life heads south, the only way to give it meaning is to take large numbers of people with me. There is no cause, no fealty, no “Allahu Akbar!” – because pointless slaughter is the supreme triumph of amoral will: Who needs Allah? You’re your own Allah. Unlike Manchester or Nice or Paris or Berlin or Brussels, there is no meaning: Indeed, the only meaning is the meaninglessness; that is the point – the black void at the heart of the act.

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Israeli technology saving American lives and equipment By Russ Vaughn

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

One of the huge problems in fighting asymmetric wars such as America has been doing now for decades is that the advantage a major power has in expensive, sophisticated weaponry can be negated in seconds with an inexpensive, primitive weapon, with the rocket-propelled grenade being the classic example. RPGs have taken out everything from helicopters to heavy tanks. Now, according to Global Security.org, the Army is doing something about it by doing a test refitting its main battle tank, the M1A2 Abrams, with a new advanced Israeli defensive system.

The US military will be installing the Israeli-built Trophy Active Protection System (APS) meant to intercept and destroy incoming missiles or rockets on their M1A2 Abrams tanks. This will make the US military the only other besides the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to use the defensive system.

The Trophy system consists of a quartet of radar antennae and fire-control radars that detects incoming projectiles, such as anti-tank guided missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and then destroys them with a blast like that from a shotgun.

It is a “hard kill” system, meaning it protects the vehicle by destroying the projectile; this is opposed to a “soft kill” system that interferes with the missile’s guidance and redirects it. Soft kill devices are useless against the simple RPGs popular with militant groups such as Daesh.

Jointly developed by two Israeli-owned state corporations, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Trophy is the only combat-proven APS in the world.

The Pentagon made this decision after an “urgent material” request, they said in a press release on Thursday. Each system costs an estimated $350,000, and it will be first deployed to one of the US Army’s 14 Armor Brigade Combat Team’s squadron of 28 M1A2 SEPv2 variants, a nearly $10 million contract. It may then be added to other squadrons later on if it impresses, the Pentagon said.

Anti-materiel weapons such as RPGs have been a perennial thorn in the side of the US military and its allies. A $2,000 RPG launcher firing a $500 grenade can destroy or disable a $9 million Abrams tank. Over the course of 2014, the Iraqi Army lost 100 of the 140 Abrams the Americans had sold them in the fight against Daesh.

That last paragraph explains exactly why this is a good economical move by the Army. Even a disabled tank can cost millions to retrieve from the battle area and return to a maintenance depot capable of making the necessary repairs, so just a few such “saves” can more than justify the cost of this program. Other active protection systems, like the Iron Curtain, are being used to protect other military vehicles. Let us hope more and better protection systems are in the works to protect these vehicles and their crews.

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‘You Have Gone Too Far’: Vets Respond to the NFL By Elise Cooper

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

After seeing the latest football games, Americans should play Monday-morning quarterbacks and not stand on the sidelines while the players are kneeling. The players are making a sham of the National Anthem by insulting the flag, the nation, those serving, and those who have served, as well as the police, who run into a crisis instead of away from one.

A recent CBS poll reports that approximately 60% of Americans are against kneeling. In another poll, 34% said they are less likely to watch NFL games because of the Anthem protest. Ned Colletti, the former Dodgers general manager, in his recent book, The Big Chair, said it best. Although he was speaking of the troubled summer of 1968 and about baseball, the quote could easily be applied today while substituting football for baseball. He said, “Baseball remained my bed-rock, my refuge from the real-world realities that were all-too-uncomfortably closing in.”

American Thinker also asked those who have served how they felt about the players kneeling.

William was in the U.S. Navy and wants the athletes “to stand and place their right hand over their heart during the anthem, not raising their fist in the air. They act as overpaid and pampered prima donnas.”

Mike, who works for the VA, wants “everyone to watch this link. Few of the participating NFL players can articulate their grievances and willingly or unwittingly promulgate a false narrative about American societal injustices. This is residual from the Obama-Holder years. Incontestable. Incontrovertibly. Privileged athletes must find more constructive ways to express grievances without offending those who support them with dollars, especially those who served and families who paid the ultimate price.”

Val, a retired Air Force colonel, is against the player’s actions. “This is not the time to protest. It is a time to show respect for the nation. Generally, employers do not allow their employees to protest during working hours, and it should be the same in the NFL. Besides, it violates the NFL rules, and players should be fined for this.”

Val has a good point, considering that the NFL’s Game Operations Manual specifically states, “The National Anthem must be played prior to every NFL game, and all players must be on the sideline for the National Anthem. During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking[.] … It should be pointed out to players and coaches that we continue to be judged by the public in this area of respect for the flag and our country.”

Michael, a Marine combat veteran who fought in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, feels that the National Anthem “should not be used as a tool and the athletes should find another way. I want the athletes to understand that you signed for millions before you even played a single down of professional football. But someone who enlisted in the Army, as a combat-tested sergeant, will be paid $32,000 per year. You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South Beach. They will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with ten other combat-loaded soldiers. You will sleep at the Ritz. They will dig a hole in the ground and try to sleep.”

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The Time Factor and Active Shooter Incidents By Stephen Bryen

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

It took 72 minutes for Las Vegas police to respond to the shooter. How can response time be cut?

Terrorists, whether domestic or foreign, organization-based or truly lone wolf and unconnected, all have important advantages favoring the success of their attacks: they can exploit the multiple vulnerabilities that exist in civil society (notwithstanding whether the terrorists operate in democratic or authoritarian states), and time is on their side.

Terrorists exploit shock and time.

There is not much that can be done to remove shock from the equation. A terrorist with a gun, a bomb, a knife or a truck can wreak a lot of havoc. Shock can paralyze potential victims and make it hard for law enforcement to go after the perpetrator.

In Israel, practically every adult has military training, and many Israelis are armed. While successful attacks have occurred (bombings, shootings, vehicle attacks, and knifings, to name some), the advantage Israel generally has is rapid reaction based on the simple fact that armed citizens know what to do when a terrorist attacks.

Most of the rest of the world is different. A police presence can help, but even then, in certain scenarios terrorists can be effective. Security guards can also help, but very often they are the first target of an intruder in a building or facility. In June 2009, a white supremacist 89-year-old James Wenneker von Brunn entered the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC with a rifle and killed Museum Special Police Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns. Other guards shot at von Brunn, who was wounded and apprehended.

A very important component in terrorist incidents is how long it takes for law enforcement to react and to neutralize the attacker. In Las Vegas from the time 911 was sounded to the SWAT team destroyed the hotel room door where the shooter was took 72 minutes. This gave the shooter ample time to use his ten guns, even reloading some of them while killing 59 people and wounding some 500 others.

Las Vegas has well-trained SWAT teams. Why then did it take 72 minutes?

The same question can be asked in countless other examples, whether the Bataclan night club in Paris, the 2002 Nord-ost siege in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, the Virginia Tech Massacre in 2007, the Washington Navy Yard attack in the NAVSEA building in September 2013, the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, or the Pulse Nightclub shooting in June, 2017.

In almost every case the problem amounted to a “time” problem.

The time problem consists of the following issues: (a) trying to locate a shooter and (b) attempting to reach the shooter and neutralize him (or her).

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Trump’s Katrina? Try the Media’s Waterloo By Mike Sabo

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

President Trump took on the Left’s politicization of the NFL last week. This week, he is taking on their appropriation of natural disasters and human caused horrors for political gain.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/03/trumps-katrina-try-the-medias-waterloo/

The Left and its accomplices in the press couldn’t pin the blame on Trump for the administration’s responses to the hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast states and U.S. territories early last month. But in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico especially hard, they thought they finally got their story.

Instead of focusing on the myriad logistical challenges of reaching an island more than 900 miles away from the U.S. mainland, or on how FEMA has worked with the Puerto Rican central government and most municipalities, or the ins-and-outs of federal disaster management, the media pounced on Trump.

They couldn’t wait to allege that Trump’s response was akin to George W. Bush’s Hurricane Katrina performance. CNN ran an article with the headline, “‘Trump’s Katrina?’ No, it’s much worse.” A piece at The Daily Beast authored by noted Trump-hater Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC was titled, “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina.” The Leftist fever swamp Salon ran an article, “‘We are doing a great job’: Is this Trump’s Katrina moment?”

From the media’s lips to God’s ears.
The most transparent response came from the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. Earlier last week, Cruz described FEMA as “wonderful” and doing an all-around “great job.” She noted further that federal officials “have been here since last week—helping us and setting up logistics.”

But at a morning press conference on Saturday, Cruz completely changed her tune. As she stood in front of pallets of water bottles and other supplies, she shouted, “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency, and the bureaucracy!” Cruz claimed if Trump didn’t do something quickly, “we are going to see something close to a genocide.” The irony of this scene, of course, was completely lost on the press.

Trump, understanding exactly what was taking place, fired back:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

Trump’s refusal to serve as a Republican punching bag for Cruz, a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, and other Democrats sent shock waves through the media. In marked contrast with previous Republican presidents, Trump understands the Democratic-Media complex’s playbook when it comes to natural disasters when Republicans are in office: shame them into submission for their errors—real or imagined. And for the coup de grace, hint in not so subtle language that race was the deciding factor in how the disaster was handled.

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Palestinians: A State Within a State? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

The “reconciliation” accord they reached in Cairo paves the way for creating a state within a state in the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian-sponsored deal does not require Hamas to dismantle its security forces and armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam. Nor does the agreement require Hamas to lay down its weapons or stop amassing weapons and preparing for war.

This is a very comfortable situation for Hamas, which has effectively been absolved of any responsibility toward the civilian population. Hamas could not have hoped for a better deal. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be permitted to maintain its own security force, while Abbas’s government oversees civilian affairs and pays salaries to civil servants.

Offloading this responsibility frees up Hamas to fortify its military capabilities. Hamas is not being asked to recognize Israel’s right to exist or accept any peace process.

The latest “reconciliation” deal between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas brings the Palestinians closer to creating a state-within-a-state in the Gaza Strip. The PA and Hamas will now have two separate mini-states of their own in the Gaza Strip.

This arrangement is similar to the situation in Lebanon, where Hezbollah maintains a separate mini-state of its own there.

In state-like fashion, Hezbollah in Lebanon has its own army and territory. This situation, which has gone on for decades, has enraged many Lebanese politicians.

Earlier this year, when dozens of masked Hezbollah militiamen launched a nighttime raid to arrest drug dealers in Beirut, Lebanese politicians accused their government of giving up its authority in favor of Hezbollah’s “tiny state.” The militiamen belonged to Hezbollah’s “social security department,” a police force that operates independently of the Lebanese security authorities.

“This is what a country that has given up its authority in favor of the ‘tiny state’ (of Hezbollah) looks like,” said Ashraf Rifi, Lebanon’s former justice minister. Rifi said that the pictures of the Hezbollah militiamen conducting the raid testify for the umpteenth time how the very existence of Hezbollah goes against the state and its institutions.

Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority are now headed, willingly or unwillingly, towards plunging the Palestinians into a similar scenario as in Lebanon. The “reconciliation” accord they reached in Cairo paves the way for creating a mini-state within a mini-state in the Gaza Strip. These two “states” will be added to the mini-Palestinian Authority “state” that already exists in parts of the West Bank.

The Egyptian-sponsored deal does not require Hamas to dismantle its security forces and armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam. Nor does the agreement require Hamas to lay down its weapons or stop amassing weapons or preparing for war.

All that is known thus far is that the agreement allows Abbas and his Palestinian Authority to resume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, while security remains in the hands of Hamas.

This is a very comfortable situation for Hamas, which has effectively been absolved of any responsibility toward the civilian population. Hamas could not have hoped for a better deal.

Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be permitted to maintain its own security establishment and security force in the Gaza Strip, while Abbas’s government oversees civilian affairs and pays salaries to civil servants. It would be difficult in the extreme to imagine Hamas agreeing to relinquish security control or permit Abbas’s security forces to return to the Gaza Strip.

The Lebanon case seems better than the one shaping up in Gaza for several reasons. There, the government at least has its own army and police force. In the Gaza Strip, however, Hamas is unlikely to return to the pre-2007 era, when the Palestinian Authority had multiple security forces that maintained a tight grip and kept Hamas on the defensive by regularly arresting its leaders and members.

And, despite the hugging and kissing on display during the visit of PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and his delegation to the Gaza Strip on October 2 — the first of its kind since the violent and bloody Hamas takeover in 2007 — much bad blood remains between the two sides.

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More Jihadists in the West – Why? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

Western countries are much more lenient toward the jihadists and Islamists. In the Middle East, there are severe consequences if they preach against their own political system. They are permitted to grow only if they teach antagonism towards the West, Christianity, Judaism, and Western values.

In Iran, when the Islamist party of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, it did not embrace all other Islamist and jihadist groups. It supported and promoted only those jihadist groups that agreed to focus on promoting two major issues: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Other Islamist groups, which turned against the regime itself, were immediately removed from society even though they were practicing Khomeini’s version of radical Islam.

The issue becomes: Where do you draw the line? When a radical imam in the US or Europe is publicly inciting anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western hate, should they be allowed to continue? When many radical Muslim centers in the West preach jihad and terrorism, should you still let them enjoy freedom of speech and assembly? Their preaching is the major factor behind the increasing terrorism we have currently spreading throughout the West. If we allow them to continue, the vicious trend will only ratchet up exponentially.

One of the strategies of these groups is to tap into communities where young people are facing problems — financial difficulties, family hardship, maybe psychological issues. The imams superficially embrace them as fathers, as if embracing his children. Then, they create explanations for why these young people are faced with such problems. They teach them that the problem lies in their society, their government, their own people, even their own families.

Growing up under Sharia law and in Islamist schools, we were taught that the highest level a person can reach is to be a mujahid. A mujahid is a person that God truly loves. Once, I dared to ask what exactly the term mujahid meant. The imam said that a true mujahid is a person who does not just die defensively for protecting Allah’s values. A true mujahid, one who is most loved by God, is a person who acts offensively, including through violence, when he or she sees our religious values are being violated in any part of the world. That person is a true holy warrior, he explained.

That description has been echoed through the halls of schools, and whispered into the minds of children. It has followed me throughout my life. Now, as I reflect on the first time this thirst for violence was explained to me, an eerie reality comes into focus. If the teachings of these radical imams are accurate, then the rate of mujahidin in the West appears to be increasing far higher in the West than in the East.

As some clamored to reach this ideal, we were told that one major indicator of whether the number of mujahdin is increasing or decreasing in a society is to look at the rate of those who are becoming martyrs. The higher the rate, the more mujahidin are there, and the more satisfied God is. It was a powerful message delivered to young, impressionable minds, that were eager to please and learn.

Growing up in the Middle East, within Muslim-majority nations, I rarely heard of radical Islamists committing terrorist acts in the region. But in the few years that I have lived in the West, I have regularly heard of bombing and suicide missions committed by radical Islamists. Their targets have been Americans and Europeans, including attacks in London, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Boston and San Bernardino — and often one another.

Information about these attacks is splashed across the media, discussed between concerned citizens, and echoed throughout global politics. This situation prompted me to ask: Why do there appear to be more Islamist terrorists in the West, even though the homeland of their religious teaching is on the other side of the world?

It would seem implausible that the West, with freedom of education, would become a hotbed for these violent minds, and yet the numbers are clear.

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Obama Too Conservative for Democrats? The Sandernista attack on a leftist. James Freeman

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

Leftist Jonathan Chait reports in New York magazine that he’s under rhetorical attack from other leftists. It seems that Mr. Chait has made some of his ideological comrades angry by admitting that the evidence does not exist to call President Trump a white supremacist.

Mr. Chait is being lampooned as some kind of squishy moderate. This has sparked a larger debate about how radical the Democratic Party should be and whether it has already moved well to the left of Barack Obama. Unlike Mr. Chait, many readers of this column probably don’t consider the nation’s 44th President to be a man of the “center-left.” But as Democratic Party leaders continue to lurch toward Bernie Sanders’ brand of Marxism, they are clearly making Mr. Obama appear more moderate.

The question is whether Democratic voters as well as independents who tend to vote Democratic are all coming along for the ride leftward. According to Mr. Chait:

Political activists and writers can get the impression that the Democratic Party is riven by conflict between leftists and liberals. But social media is deeply unrepresentative. On Twitter, which is swarming with communists and Nazis, every day feels like the 1932 German federal elections. The massively elevated concentration of political extremists of all varieties creates a deeply misleading portrait of the public. (This is why libertarians have managed to portray themselves as a significant proportion of the electorate, when practically speaking, they don’t exist.)

The actual Democratic Party is not divided between liberals and leftists. It’s divided between liberals and … moderates and conservatives.

Mr. Chait then marshals a variety of polling data to show that most of the party’s voters don’t consider themselves leftist or even liberal. For example, he notes Pew Research data showing that in 2016, a full 36% of Democratic voters described themselves as moderate, and another 15% called themselves conservative.

Of course such survey results can be misleading because political or philosophical labels mean different things to different people. For example, observing so many potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsing Mr. Sanders’ single-payer health plan, Mr. Obama might also be calling himself a moderate.

But it is striking, given that Mr. Sanders won 22 states and nearly 1900 delegates in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, that even among Democratic voters almost nobody will cop to being “far left” and just 16% call themselves “very liberal.”