When “Peace” Means Capitulation to Islam by Giulio Meotti

“We will win because Americans don’t realize… we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the al-Qaeda planners of the 9/11 attacks.

“This Spanish retreat [in 2004] will be perceived as a huge political triumph for Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamic radicals — probably their most important achievement since September 11, 2001.” — James Phillips, Heritage Foundation.

ISIS’s henchmen butchered 90 people at the Bataclan Theater. What did the French government do to avenge them and to destroy the Islamists responsible? Absolutely nothing. The day after an Islamist killed Westerners at a Christmas market in Berlin, no German military flight took off to bomb ISIS.

The next “peace conference” in Paris, on January 15, is where 70 nations will probably agree to another UN Security Council vote, to establish a Palestinian State, presumably with the Old City of Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish people and sacred to the Christian people, as its capital. It is another terrible sign of the West’s soft capitulation to terror.

Like Israel today, the Czechs in the 1930s were accused of being “disturbers of the peace”. “Peace,” as in the inversions of George Orwell — sometimes means capitulation to Islam.

What inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States, according to one of the terrorists, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who helped plan 9/11?

The American psychologist, James E. Mitchell, who crafted the interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives after 9/11, just published a book, Enhanced Interrogation.

In it, KSM is quoted as saying that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as it had to the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut — the United States “turned tail and ran.” In the end, KSM told Mitchell:

“We will win because Americans don’t realize… we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting. … Eventually, America will expose her neck for us to slaughter.”

That is exactly why Islamists are trying to hit the West’s soft underbelly: the office of the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, restaurants and theaters in Paris, a cafè in Copenaghen, a promenade in Nice, a church in Normandy and a Christmas market in Berlin. Islamists perfectly understand that the West’s most exposed flank is its home front. The same lifestyle that we defend by words is the main obstacle to the initiative of the defense against Islamists. Islamists have told us in every way, “we love death more than life”, while we in the West love the expectation of life more than life itself.

EDWARD CLINE: TRIGGER WARNINGS

The ultimate earner of a Trigger Warning is having to read a column that mocks trigger warning addicts and others dependent on post-adolescence pacifiers.
Doxing and dwelling on the progressive gangrene of Western society, the topic here is “trigger warnings.”

There have been so many reports lately of the implementation of “trigger warnings,” especially in universities, that one might well ask oneself: Why bother putting police scene-of-crime tape around a particular animus? Why not declare everything off limits, reality in fact. Everywhere a snowflake turns anymore he seems to encounter something troubling, unsafe, and perilous to his piece of mind – or did I mean “peace” of mind? No sooner is the issue raised, then some industrious guidance counselor or an academic can be heard hammering and sawing as he or she builds a “safe space” for the uninitiated college snowflake.

Cashing in on their prenatal Progressive upbringing, and on their potty-training, modern educators patronize and encourage the bewildering universe of the modern college student, who learn that nothing is real and that therefore reality is anything you want it to be and if you think it’s dangerous or offensive, you deserve a “safe place” from it, and more, that you should be warned of its proximity and that steps should be taken to expel it from reality.

But is there a “safe space” from reality, from facts? From “A is A”? but that statement is racist. “A” standing for a dead white male, Aristotle. Snowflakes must be protected from it.

No. You may as well try to find fresh air on Titan or Mars.

The cultural hypochondriacs have nowhere to hide, nowhere to cower and lick their wounds, hug their puppies, and open their Cry-on Crayons.

Don’t say trigger in front of snowflakes! Guns have triggers, and guns make them nervous, they make them feel unsafe! Trigger was also the name of Roy Rogers’s horse, and they’re against animal exploitation, too; it makes them feel queasy and nauseous!

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL: MICHAEL ORDMAN

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

BBC finally admits prostate cancer treatment is Israeli. BBC Radio 4’s Today Program omitted the fact (as newsletter readers know) that the TOOKAD prostate cancer treatment being praised globally, was developed at Israel’s Weizmann Institute. After protests, BBC News interviewed co-developer Professor Avigdor Scherz.
https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/prostate-cancer-soft-boycott-1.429694
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di3M4asNzRE

Treatment for tremors is also Israeli. (TY Hazel) Yet another example. The BBC radio broadcast itself didn’t mention that the Exablate Neuro ultrasound machine for treating tremor is produced by Israel’s Insightec. They then buried that fact deep in their report on their website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38157770

Food supplement can treat FD disorder. Tel Aviv University researchers have discovered that a popular food supplement called phosphatidylserine can reverse the effects of the debilitating neurodegenerative disorder Familial Dysautonomia (FD). It improves the supply route to neurons by reducing levels of enzyme HDAC6.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israeli-scientists-say-food-supplement-may-help-reverse-familial-dysautonomia-fd/2016/12/21/
http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.1006486

Life-saving treatments from Kamada. Amir London, CEO of Israeli biotech Kamada, was interviewed on ILTV Daily about Kamada’s protein purification treatments for lung disease and rabies. Kamada’s Glassia is also being tested for treating Type 1 diabetes, GVHD and the rejection of bone marrow and lung transplants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX609il_5FU http://israelactive.com/?s=kamada

The first kidney dialysis for Sierra Leone. In 2012, MASHAV – Israel Foreign Ministry’s agency for international development cooperation donated the first-ever dialysis unit to Sierra Leone. Due to the Ebola outbreak, the African country’s first dialysis treatment took place on Dec 15 this year, and a life was saved.
http://www.israel21c.org/israeli-dialysis-unit-saves-lives-in-sierra-leone/

Dual action treatment for aggressive breast cancer. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have made a breakthrough in treating triple negative breast cancer. This cancer lacks three receptors that serve as targets for anti-cancer drugs. However, inhibiting molecules EGFR and PYK2 significantly reduces the size of tumors.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israeli-research-produces-new-hope-for-breast-cancer-patients/2017/01/01/

Blood warmer prevents hypothermia. Two thirds of sufferers of blood loss trauma experience hypothermia. Blood and fluids used in transfusions must be warmed from storage temperatures (4 degrees C) to body heat (37 degrees C). Israeli startup QinFlow’s Warrior portable system does just that – faster than any alternative system. It recently received US FDA approval. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdelVHvOqBE
http://www.israel21c.org/treating-life-threatening-hypothermia-just-got-easier/

Needle-free scar removal. Israel’s PerfAction Technologies has developed EnerJet (Airgent in the US) – a non-thermal, no-needle, high-pressure jet stream to introduce any kind of healing agent or skin-enhancement material. It removes acne scars, surgical scars etc. Available in 22 countries including Indonesia and Malaysia.
http://www.israel21c.org/needle-free-facelift-skin-remodeling-and-scar-repair/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eABNq6UUV5k

Don’t Defund the U.N., Just Say ‘Go!’ The organization of crooks and dictators needs us much more than we need it. By Andrew C. McCarthy

There are some swamps that we have to drain because they’re our swamps. Washington is our swamp. The lesson of the 2016 election is that people across the ideological spectrum are furious at Washington. Our incoming president won because he convinced enough people that, while Hillary was a swamp creature, he — the self-styled outsider non-politician — would make like a big, shiny Trump colander. But Washington is not going away; once the ooze seeps out, the idea is to build something better — like how New Jersey keeps building new stadiums on the marshy Meadowlands.
Well, good luck with that.
But look, even if we’re not very good at cleaning up our own messes, the fact that we know we should, that we know our messes sully us, is a sign of mental health.
So let’s see if that healthy instinct can help us grasp a principle that ought to be easier to apply: When it’s not your swamp and yet you’re being sullied by it, you don’t drain it. You leave it.
That’s what we ought to be doing about the United Nations.
Republicans are irate over the latest U.N. outrage, the Security Council resolution orchestrated by the Obama administration to reward Palestinian jihadists with territory while rendering Israel a pariah. In truth, the resolution is just business as usual at the U.N. It is also not nearly the worst use our post-American president has made of this ersatz global government.
As usual, though, the GOP response is a hollow gesture, couched in hot rhetoric. Congressional Republicans want to defund the U.N., a 193-nation boondoggle for which the United States alone pays well over a quarter of the freight — about 22 percent of the regular operating budget, and close to 30 percent of the much larger peacekeeping budget (for which we get more scandal than peace).
At best, denying our annual $3 billion payment would accomplish nothing. Defunding measures are called for periodically, whenever the U.N. induces a congressional tantrum over one or another of its obscenities. Even as one lawmaker fumes about shutting off the spigot, another is already saying, “Well, we don’t need to defund everything — after all, the U.N. does a lot of good.”
“A lot of good,” by the way, is an exaggeration. Sure, some U.N. officials are just as well-meaning as any other preening progressive. But the institution stinks, even in its humanitarian aid work. As Heritage’s Brett D. Schaefer notes, citing a 2012 academic study on best and worst practices among aid agencies, U.N. agencies consistently rank “among the worst and least effective performers.”
More important, if $3 billion seems like chump change to you in an age of unfathomable $20 trillion national debt, that’s the way Turtle Bay’s grubby globalists see it, too. They continue to plot international tax schemes (on carbon emissions, financial transactions, etc.), as well as the lucrative skim from redistributionist rackets like the “Green Climate Fund” and the new “Sustainable Development Goals.” The real goal, naturally, is a sustainable fund for the U.N., relieving it of reliance on finicky donors.

The Two-State Solution is a Zombie It can’t be dead because it never lived. Daniel Greenfield

“Is the two-state solution dead?”

The two-state solution, a perverse euphemism for carving an Islamic terror state out of the land of Israel and the living flesh of her people, is in trouble. The solution, which has solved nothing except the shortage of graves in Israel and Muslim terrorists in the Middle East, is the object of grave concern by the professionally concerned from Foggy Bottom to Fifth Avenue.

Obama set up his betrayal of Israel at the UN to “save” the two-state solution from Trump. The media warns that David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador, is so pro-Israel that he’ll kill the “solution.”

But you can’t kill something that was never alive.

The two-state solution is a zombie. It can’t be dead because it never lived. It was a rotting shambling corpse of a diplomatic process. If you stood downwind of the proceedings, it looked alive.

Up close there was only blood and death.

Like the Holy Roman Empire, the two-state solution didn’t solve anything and it wasn’t in the business of creating two states. Not unless you count a Hamas state in Gaza and a Fatah state in the West Bank.

What problem was the two-state solution solving?

It wasn’t the problem of terrorism. Turning over land, weapons and power to a bunch of terrorists made for more terrorism. It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorism worldwide shot up around the same time.

The consequences of giving terrorists their own country to play with were as predictable as taking a power drill to the bottom of a boat or running a toaster in a bubble bath. The least likely outcome of handing guns to homicidal sociopaths was peace. The most likely was murder. And that was as intended.

The problem that the two-state solution was solving was the existence of Israel; the Jewish Problem.

Spray the two-state solution over an irritating country full of Jews who managed to survive multiple Muslim genocides. Apply and wait for as long as it takes until the Jewish Problem is solved again.

UnCorked: Ireland’s Pseudo-Academic Anti-Israel Hate-Fest by Denis MacEoin

This will not be an academic conference in any real sense of the word. It is, from the outset, a hate-fest of international anti-Zionist, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric and distortion. It is totally without balance.

Some of those 45 participants will be more vehement in their criticism of Israel, but none, so far as is known, is wholly without some degree of association with bias. How do we know this? First, because a significant majority of the participants have made no secret of their support for the boycott of Israeli academics.

For more than 3,000 years, the “original ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants” were the Jews” – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoeneicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea. An Arab “Palestine”, bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.

Prominent at Southampton, and again planning to address the conference, were some of the leading academic activists working both in the universities and outside for the destruction of Israel, regardless of whether that means the expulsion or genocide of the country’s Jewish population.

In “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” Richard Falk compared some Israeli policies with regard to the Palestinians to the Nazi record of collective punishment, warning (unbelievably) that Israel may be planning a Holocaust in the same way Nazi Germany did. It is arguable that he has done more than any other figure to inspire loathing for Israel worldwide.

This conference is an outright attack on everything academic work is about. Many are already protesting in the hope that UCC can be persuaded to recognize the threat to scholarship that such a conference poses for academic teachers and researchers everywhere.

The passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 on December 23 2016 has upset more than one apple cart.[1] By declaring that Israeli settlements have no legal validity and are a “Flagrant Violation of International Law”, the resolution has handed the Palestinians a weapon as powerful as any they have used against the Jewish state in their many physical attacks upon it for more than a century. Lawfare has for many years now replaced warfare (although not terror) as the Palestinian method of choice for the long-term elimination of Israel; this new resolution, even if only advisory, is a major step along the way to declare, not just the settlements but the entirety of Israel itself as illegal.

Almost all countries in the world, along with the UN, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Arab League and the Socialist “Left” now consider the Zionist project to create a living space for Jews to be a colonialist conspiracy against the “aboriginal” inhabitants of a legendary state of “Palestine”. They are conveniently “forgetting” – with a significant dose of anti-Semitism – that for more than 3,000 years, the “original ‘aboriginal’ inhabitants” were the Jews – along with Ethiopians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, and eventually the Romans, Christians and eventually several Arab Muslim imperialists, culminating in the Ottoman Turks. The Jews were the people who inhabited Canaan; the Jews are why Judaea is named Judaea.

An Arab “Palestine”, bluntly, never existed. If the Jews do not belong in Israel, then the Europeans do not belong in New Zealand, Australia or North and South America.

It seems that US President Barack Obama, along with the UN, the OIC and much of Europe – especially France – would like to destroy Israel, and in its place create yet another mangled Syria out of whatever is left, fought over by a mixture of sects, terrorist organizations and political factions.

UN Security Council Res. 2334: A Victory of Jihadism by Bat Ye’or

Led astray from their primary mission, these international organizations have become tools of corruption or terrorism, reinforcing global Islamic power. Those who vote are heads of state, motivated by interests and ideologies that are often criminal, and not all of which represent the opinions of their people whom they tyrannize, including those from European “democracies”.

In 1948-49, Egypt seized Gaza, Syria stood their ground on the Golan, and Transjordan colonized Judea, Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem. Their Jewish inhabitants were killed or driven out by the Arab colonists, who seized their homes and destroyed their synagogues and cemeteries. Fighting ceased on armistice and cease-fire lines, there was no peace and no international borders were recognized.

Europe rushed to adopt the French position in 1973 and, along with the OIC, planned political measures designed to destroy the Jewish State by denying its sovereign rights and its cantonment on an indefensible territory. Resolution 2334 is now the icing on the cake of this policy, which forms the basis for a Euro-Islamic policy to merge in all EU political and social sectors, as well as in promoting globalism and the enforcement of the UN’s supranational decision-making powers.

In 1967, once again, the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan invaded Israel to destroy it, but this time Israel took back all the land that had been lost in 1949, that had become Judenrein [free of Jews], Arabized and Islamized. These were areas from which the Palestinian Jews had been driven out, and that Europe referred to as Jewish colonies. They are called Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

No European nation protested against the Islamic colonization of Jewish-Palestinian areas, the expulsion of their Jewish inhabitants and the seizure of their belongings, or against the persecution of Jews in Arab countries.

An artificial Palestinian Arab “people” was created in order to replace the people of Israel. A European army of forger-historians and Arab Christian dhimmis transferred the historic characteristics of the Jews onto them. Names of towns and regions were Islamized: Jerusalem was called Al-Quds and “the West Bank” replaced Judea and Samaria.

Israelis, guilty of existing, were expected to apologize for that, humbly to maintain their enemies and suffer their terrorism without protesting or defending themselves. Their crime? They refused to mingle with and disappear into dhimmitude by giving up their rights and their history to the people created by the Euro-Arab alliance to replace them.

It is the turn of Europeans to see a replacement population be created in their countries, with all the rights that are being taken away from them. It is their turn to be forced to renounce their national, historic, cultural and religious identity, to apologize and take the blame for existing. It is their turn to be forced to monitor their borders and guard their airports, their schools, their trains, their streets and their cities with soldiers. European governments that contemplated the destruction of Israel worked together with the enemies of Israel to destroy their own people, their sovereignty, their security and their freedoms.

The recognition of the legitimacy of Israel’s return to its homeland is the essential condition of Islamic peace with the world, because it will abolish the jihadist ideology.

‘Hidden Figures’ Review: Breaking Barriers of Space, Race and Gender How three black women in the segregated South helped put a man into orbit By Joe Morgenstern

‘Hidden Figures” brings news that keeps you thinking with amazement, “Who knew?” Its larger subject, set in the early 1960s during the height of the Cold War, is a story that had already been told definitively, or so we may have thought, by Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” and the movie based on his book—Project Mercury and America’s race with the Soviet Union to put a man into space. But who knew that NASA depended, at that pioneering time, on flesh-and-blood mathematicians (they were called computers) to calculate flight trajectories until sufficiently powerful transistor-and-punch-card computers came on line; that many of those gifted people were black women, working together in a segregated unit at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; and that one member of the unit played a crucial role in the flight that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth?

This remarkable story within a story focuses on three of the women: Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), whom Glenn considered indispensable to his Friendship 7 mission; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), who mastered computer language early on and eventually—meaning ever so belatedly—became NASA’s first black supervisor; and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who, by way of becoming a graduate engineer, had been forced to petition the city of Hampton in order to take extension courses she needed, since they were being given in an all-white high school.

As is inevitably the case when a fiction film is based on a nonfiction book, events have been telescoped and dramatic liberties taken. (Theodore Melfi directed from a screenplay that he and Allison Schroeder adapted from the book by Margot Lee Shetterly. The cinematographer was Mandy Walker.) The tone is earnest, with dialogue that sometimes plods when you want it to fly—a running time of 127 minutes doesn’t help the pacing—and a couple of pieces of casting are infelicitous: Jim Parsons gives a flat performance as the fictional Paul Stafford, NASA’s lead engineer, and Glen Powell is years too young to play John Glenn, who looks like a gung-ho frat boy. (Kevin Costner, by contrast, brings a dry wit and some needed bite to another fictional role, that of NASA manager Al Harrison.)

A Prison Bigger Than All of Western Europe Without the Russian exile system, perhaps the greatest machine of evil in human history, we’d have no ‘Crime and Punishment.’ Bartle Bull reviews “The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars” by Daniel Beer.

In late December 1849, in the brief hour of midday winter light, 28 young Russian gentlemen were marched up the steps of a wooden platform in St. Petersburg’s Semyonovsky Square. The platform had been hung with black cloth; the prisoners were given peasant cloaks of white. Soldiers lined the snowy plaza.

It took a czarist official half an hour to read out the death sentences. At last a firing squad raised its weapons. And then, hoofbeats muffled in the snow, a young officer came galloping across the square bearing an order of clemency from Czar Nicholas.

Stripped of rank and possessions, their clothes swapped for tattered prisoner garb, the convicts were sent off in fetters on carts to Siberia. One of the young men was Fyodor Dostoevsky. With “Crime and Punishment,” “The Brothers Karamazov” and other works, he would inaugurate an extraordinary phenomenon: the glorious contribution to world literature of the Russian exile system, the greatest sustained machine of evil in human history.

The system that reached its apotheosis under Stalin in 1937-53 had its origins in the late 17th century. In 1708, the bishop of the city of Tobolsk, western Siberia’s gateway to the penal continent to the east, explained that diseased elements of the body politic had to be excised and discarded “in the same way that we have to remove harmful agents from the body.” For the next 250 years, Siberia, one and a half times the size of western Europe, would be the cesspit for Russia’s human excreta. Penal labor camps would kill at least 12 million exiles in Stalin’s time alone, according to the historian Robert Conquest.
The House of the Dead

By Daniel Beer

Knopf, 464 pages, $35

The exile system’s czarist heyday in the long 19th century (1801-1917), under the last five Romanov rulers, is the focus of “The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars,” by British academic Daniel Beer. Mr. Beer’s excellent book will for some time be the definitive work in English on this enormous topic.

The members of Dostoevsky’s rebellious circle were romantic socialists partly inspired by the memory of an earlier, more famous and far more romantic band of true rebels, the Decembrists. Well-bred young officers who mounted an amateurish putsch against Czar Nicholas I in December 1825, the Decembrists earned history’s love with their sincere if foolhardy reformist idealism. It did not hurt their cult that they were followed to Siberia by beautiful wives renouncing forever the soirees of Petersburg. Eventually the Decembrists settled around Lake Baikal to found libraries and establish string quartets long after the czar had cut short their sentences. CONTINUE AT SITE

Detained in Turkey: A Journal Reporter’s Story Foreign correspondent Dion Nissenbaum describes being jailed at a detention center for 2½ days, with no contact with his wife or colleagues

The knock on the door of our third-floor apartment, not far from Istanbul’s historic Taksim Square, came shortly after dusk on Dec. 27. Three plainclothes Turkish policemen stood by the winding marble staircase in the hall with a letter, under orders from the Interior Ministry.

“You are under investigation,” a polite young officer told me (through a translator he’d called on his cellphone) as my wife and 7-month-old daughter looked on. “You are going to be deported, so pack a bag. We don’t know how long this is going to take.”

In the 14 months that I’d been based in Istanbul as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, I had covered a dizzying series of events, including the failed July 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We were preparing to move back to Washington in early January. But I knew that a visit from Turkish police was an ominous development.

More than 80 Turkish writers, journalists and editors are now behind bars under the country’s counterterrorism laws, which have grown more expansive since the coup. Turkey has sent high-profile journalists to maximum-security prison and shuttered more than 140 media outlets since the failed coup. Turkish authorities say that journalists often cross the line into promoting terrorist propaganda in stories about Turkey’s fight against Kurdish separatists or its campaign against those accused of links to the alleged coup plotters.

Western reporters aren’t immune. In 2015, two Vice News reporters from the U.K. were detained for a week after being accused of working with a terrorist organization while reporting on Kurdish insurgents in southern Turkey. An Iraqi colleague of theirs was held for 131 days. All three could face 50 years in prison after being charged with aiding Kurdish separatists—a charge that they deny.

My own case seems to have been in reaction to a tweet. Three days before Christmas, Islamic State released a gruesome 19-minute video that showed two men whom the jihadist group said were captured Turkish soldiers being burned to death. It instantly struck me as major news, likely to trigger a storm of outrage in Turkey. As I began to report on it, I retweeted a still image from the video that showed the shackled men in their military fatigues as the flames crept toward them.

My retweet set off a torrent of Twitter rage. “Do not forget this son of a whore’s face Istanbul,” one man wrote above a screenshot of my profile picture. The editor of a prominent pro-Erdogan newspaper (who has 72,000 Twitter followers) called for me to be deported. Angry Turkish nationalists accused anyone who spread the story of helping to promote Islamic State’s twisted agenda. Within minutes, I undid the retweet, but the damage was done. CONTINUE AT SITE