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What’s Putin’s big worry? By James Lewis

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

Vladimir Putin is putting up spectacular aggressive displays these days, making near-miss air attacks on our recon planes, expanding his military bases in Syria and Iran, and probably helping the Yemeni Houthis launch cruise missiles perilously close to our naval vessels in the Straits of Hormuz.

Putin is strategic in his thinking, and a lot of his anti-American posing is phony, simply because the West poses no genuine threat to Mother Russia. Certainly not compared to jihad.

The question is, therefore, why Putin is stirring up the biggest post-Soviet fuss ever. What does he stand to gain from Western scare headlines?

Russia is not interested in nuclear confrontations, where everybody loses and nobody wins. Instead, he is putting on his war dance to gain Obama concessions that most Americans may never see, like tactical retreats by U.S. forces in the Gulf, oil price concessions from the Saudis, and a free hand against Chechen ISIS terrorists who would love to go back to kill Russian infidels in Moscow.

Because Obama is the weakest U.S. president in history, Putin may see the coming months as the best time to squeeze out the last American concessions. He may also calculate that Hillary wants to stop the email leaks so badly that she might promise concessions if she is elected.

Obama can no longer hide his secret support of Muslim jihad in Syria, in Libya, and here at home, while Hillary’s closest aide is Huma Abedin, who received lifelong indoctrination in an activist Muslim Brotherhood family.

Like it or not, Huma fits the profile of an M.B. agent to perfection. The Moobers could wish for nothing better than high-level loyalists at the top of the U.S. government. That is why many millions of M.B. dollars are flowing through the Clinton Foundation into Democratic (and maybe Republican) pockets.

Jihadist infiltration is a humongous political scandal, and only Donald Trump seems to be willing to talk about it.

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A Guest Post: Islamization Planned : Machteld Zee

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

Machteld Zee Ph.D. is a Dutch scholar who investigated Sharia courts in the UK for her Ph.D. thesis. This interview was published in the Algemeen Dagblad, a nationwide Dutch newspaper, on October 4, 2016.

This post will feature Zee’s discoveries and conclusions about how Islamization is carried out in Sharia courts, without anyone else hearing anything about it.

Sharia law is the Islamic legal system, derived from the Koran and the rulings of Islamic scholars, known as fatwas. As well as providing a code for living – including prayers, fasting and donations to the poor – Sharia also lays down punishments as extreme as cutting off a hand or death by stoning for adultery. Critics of Sharia law – such as Ms Zee, after conducting her research – say it downgrades women and is incompatible with European human rights legislation. Men need only say the word to have a religious divorce (uttering “I divorce you” three times), but women need the sanction of clerics. Without it, they risk being called adulterers if they do remarry. T

The Islamization of Europe follows a strategy, according to Machteld Zee in her book Holy Identities, which was published today. ‘Once you have knowledge of it, you understand what is going on.’

‘I discovered a comprehensive system of law that contradicts our secular laws.’

Investigating Sharia courts

Machteld Zee (32), a Dutch political scientist from the University of Leiden, studied Sharia courts in the UK and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on it in 2015.

She was one of the few outsiders who gained access to the sessions of these Islamic courts. 95% of the cases before these courts are divorce cases. Her investigations resulted in a pamphlet, Holy Identities.

‘If you compare the Netherlands in the 1980s with today,’ says the political scientist and law school graduate Machteld Zee, ‘you will see an increased influence of Islam everywhere. Saudi Arabia and other countries flooded the world with thousands of imams, Islamic text books, mosques and tons of money.’

Machteld Zee needed barely 150 pages to describe the background of Islamic fundamentalism, which is gaining ground in Western countries. Her book Holy Identities: On the Road to a Sharia State is an analysis of the problems of the multicultural society.

You say that conservative Muslims want to convince their fellow Muslims to embrace Sharia, the religious law of Islam. These fundamentalists are being helped by ‘useful non-believers’, non-Islamic intellectuals, politicians and opinion leaders who don’t want to offend Muslims.

‘Yes, leading multiculturalists actually believe that Muslims should be shielded from criticism because it would inflict psychological damage on them. Although many Muslims consider this an idiotic point of view, others use it to call those who criticize Islam ‘Islamophobes’ and ‘racists’.

You described yourself as left-leaning liberal when you started your investigation on Sharia courts in the UK. Now you warn against a lack of knowledge of and a lack of resistance against the advancing radical Islam.

‘I discovered a comprehensive system of law — far more systematic then I had expected — that contradicts our secular laws. Many Muslim women are locked into a religious marriage because their community thinks a divorce according secular law is insufficient. In these communities — Muslim communities — Sharia law trumps secular law when it comes to marriage. Women have to ask a Sharia judge or an imam to dissolve their marriage, for example when the husband physically abuses her. Even Dutch Muslim women travel to the UK to appear before Sharia courts. It is a parallel society. I object to it because these practices go against women’s rights.’

You have analyzed the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a political and religious movement that aims for world domination, and is supported by lots of money from fundamentalist circles. The Sharia courts are part of this project, you wrote.

‘That is why it is so important that we know what is going on. Authors that I studied for my investigation were generally benevolent towards Sharia courts. It turned out, however, that none of them ever attended a session of such a court. They don’t know what is going on in these courts. Now they ask me to tell all about it. Women are advised by these courts to accept polygamy and to not file criminal complaints in case of domestic violence. Physically abusive fathers are given custody of their children. I have the impression that the tide of the public debate is turning now that these facts are becoming public. I hardly hear anyone pleading in favor of Sharia courts anymore.’

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Refugees À-Go-Go :Edward Cline

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

Barack Obama has not said it so openly. He relies on his allies in malice to enunciate it. If there is any “negative” reaction to such racism, then it would redound on his proxies, not on him. But, Hillary agrees and wants to continue his policy. America’s “white” population electorate must not only be disenfranchised or rendered null with a massive influx of Muslim “refugees,” and also with South American illegals, all of whom will suddenly and magically be endowed with the vote, but, if

possible, be “replaced” with the preferred races and rendered a powerless, unrepresented “minority.”

This was Ted Kennedy’s fondest legislative dream. In 1995, the Center for Immigration Studies opined on the consequences of the The Hart-Celler Act of 1965:

The unexpected result has been one of the greatest waves of immigration in the nation’s history — more than 18 million legal immigrants since the law’s passage, over triple the number admitted during the previous 30 years, as well as uncountable millions of illegal immigrants. And the new immigrants are more likely to stay (rather than return home after a time) than those who came around the turn of the century. Moreover, this new, enlarged immigration flow came from countries in Asia and Latin America which heretofore had sent few of their sons and daughters to the United States. And finally, although the average level of education of immigrants has increased somewhat over the past 30 years, the negative gap between their education and that of native-born Americans has increased significantly, creating a mismatch between newcomers and the needs of a modern, high-tech economy…..

The liberalization of immigration policy reflected in the 1965 legislation can be understood as part of the evolutionary trend in federal policy after World War II to end legal discrimination based on race and ethnicity — essentially, the immigration bill was mainly seen as an extension of the civil rights movement, and a symbolic one at that, expected to bring few changes in its wake. [Bolding the report’s]

And, there were a number of noteworthy foot-in-mouth predictions, this one by Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY), a sponsor of the bill:

“With the end of discrimination due to place of birth, there will be shifts in countries other than those of northern and western Europe. Immigrants from Asia and Africa will have to compete and qualify in order to get in, quantitatively and qualitatively, which, itself will hold the numbers down. There will not be, comparatively, many Asians or Africans entering this country. .. .Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate [sic] from those countries because they have no family ties in the U.S.” (Congressional Record, Aug. 25, 1965, p. 21812.)

Ted Kennedy then assures everyone that there won’t be deleterious consequences of the new immigration bill. But, being a Kennedy, he could not help but lie:

Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same … Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset … Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia … In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.”

Sen. Kennedy concluded by saying,

“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Feb. 10, 1965. pp. 1-3.)

In 1965, there was no ISIS, Muslims were all but invisible, and so were Mexican and South American illegals, and Syria and Iraq may as well have been on the moon. But, knowing how little Kennedy valued any truth, one cannot but imagine that he was hoping for the worst: he, too, wanted to destroy America. He got what he wished for, in the person and policies of Barack Obama.

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The Myth of ‘The Age of Humdrum Terror’ Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

In response to the continued acts of terror in Europe and the U.S., the English weekly news magazine Economist recently opined that “it seems likely that much of Europe and America will have to get used to acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism becoming, if not routine, at least fairly regular occurrences.” Israel is cited as an example of where terrorism has become a part of daily life.

In this “age of humdrum terror,” the paper warned of the risk of overreacting to these acts of terrorism, since as President Obama observed, the likelihood of drowning in a bathtub is far greater than being murdered by terrorists. Though statistically the danger of being killed or maimed by a terrorist attack might be limited, this recklessly obscures the real objectives of this assault against the West, which is to undermine our way of life and substitute it for Islamic rule. Should the Islamic terrorists succeed in conquering the West through warfare or demographics, this will mean the end of the rule of law, evenhandedness, religious freedom, human dignity and the rights for women, minorities and non-Muslims.

The notion of accepting terror as a way of life in the West or in Israel is outrageous and suicidal. In December 2014, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) conducted a survey in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip that revealed the degree of support for an “armed intifada remains high; indeed support for armed struggle has increased compared to … previous findings three months ago, particularly in light of the dangerous tension in Jerusalem and the holy places.”

Twenty-nine percent of the Palestinian Arabs are concerned about the “occupation and settlement activities,” while 25 percent contend the increasing corruption in some public institutions is the most troubling; 23 percent view poverty and unemployment as the most serious issues; and 18 percent assert the siege of the Gaza Strip and the closure of its crossings are the most problematic.

Another survey found 48 percent support a two-state solution and 51 percent oppose one. Two thirds oppose renewal of negotiations in the absence of a settlement freeze. Eighty-one percent fear being harmed by Israelis or their land would be appropriated or homes destroyed. Without a real peace process, 57 percent support an armed intifada.

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The Gathering Storm Clouds: FBI Director Comey Warns Terrorists Heading Our Way One mission of our armed services is to work with our allies to locate, engage and eliminate. Michael Cutler

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

One mission of our armed services is to work with our allies to locate, engage and eliminate terrorists overseas, while domestically our law enforcement agencies are tasked with protecting America and Americans within our borders. In the wake of the deadly terror attack in San Bernardino, California, I wrote an article, “Fighting the War on Terror Here, There and Everywhere,” in which I took on the false argument that by fighting the terrorists overseas we won’t have to fight them here.

On September 26, 2016, “Business Insider” warned, “FBI director: ISIS’ loss will create a ‘terrorist diaspora’ like we’ve never seen before,” while a day later NBC reported, “FBI’s Comey: Officials Worry About ‘Terrorist Diaspora’ from Syria, Iraq.”

FBI Director Comey is predicting that simply defeating ISIS and other terror organizations overseas, while an achievable objective, would likely have unintended consequences. He warns that as greater pressure is brought to bear against the terrorists on their turf, they will head for the West, including the United States, to create as much death and destruction as possible.

America’s borders are our first line and last line of defense against these terrorists and transnational criminal organizations. Our borders, however, include far more than the U.S.-Mexican border. Our nation has 50 “Border States.” Any state that lies along the northern or southern borders of the United States is a border state, as are those states that have access to our nation’s 95,000 miles of coastline. Finally, any state that has an international airport must, of necessity, be deemed a border state.

The official report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the U.S. and ultimately embed themselves here as they went about their deadly preparations to carry out an attack. The preface of this report begins with the following paragraph:

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Unesco Draft Resolution Raises Israel’s Ire The resolution, up for formal approval next week, criticizes Israel’s actions toward some holy sites in Jerusalem By Rory Jones see note please

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

There is not a single issue associated with the UN- a tribunal for tyrants and war criminals- that does not bash Israel. rsk

TEL AVIV—The United Nations’ cultural agency on Thursday passed a draft resolution that played down Jewish ties to religious sites in Jerusalem, in a decision Israel called “absurd.”

The resolution from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, heavily criticized Israel’s actions toward holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The resolution omitted the Jewish name for a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims. Instead, it referred to what Jews call the Temple Mount as the Haram Al-Sharif, as it is known to Muslims.

A 58-member committee passed the draft resolution, put forward by Arab states at meeting in Paris, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the resolution isn’t official yet.

It will be referred to Unesco’s executive board for formal approval next week and isn’t expected to be challenged, the person said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the failure to acknowledge the Jews’ connection to the Temple Mount was “absurd” and called the U.N. and Unesco a “moral farce.”

“What’s next? A Unesco decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?” he said in a statement posted to Facebook.

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Obama’s Iran Missile War He doesn’t want to talk about America’s new proxy war in Yemen.

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

The White House doesn’t want Americans to notice, but the tide of war is not receding in the Middle East. The Navy this week became part of the hot war in Yemen, with a U.S. warship launching missiles against radar targets after American vessels were fired on this week. Just when President Obama promised that American retreat would bring peace to the region, the region pulls him back in.

The destroyer USS Nitze fired Tomahawk cruise missiles to take out three radar sites on the Yemen coast believed to be manned by Houthi rebels. Though the Houthis deny it, the Pentagon believes they were responsible for the multiple-missile attack on Sunday against the USS Mason, another destroyer patrolling in international waters. This was no mere warning shot. The Mason had to use active defenses, including interceptor missiles, to prevent a strike that could have killed dozens of sailors.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook called the USS Nitze’s response Thursday “limited self-defense strikes [that] were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships, and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway.” That’s another way of saying this was the minimum the U.S. could do to defend our sailors and get the Houthis to stop firing, and we hope it works.

But there’s more to this story because the Houthis are one of Iran’s regional proxy armies. They are fighting to control Yemen against a Saudi-led coalition that is trying to restore the former Sunni Arab government in Sana’a. The U.S. has been quietly backing the Saudis with intelligence and arms, though the Saudi coalition has been fighting to a draw with the Houthis, who are supplied by Iran. The cruise missiles used against the USS Mason are also used by Hezbollah, another Iran proxy army.

Don’t expect the White House to acknowledge this because the ironies here are something to behold. Mr. Obama is backing the Saudis in Yemen in part to reassure them of U.S. support after the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal that the Saudis opposed. Mr. Obama’s Iran deal was supposed to moderate Iran’s regional ambitions, so Mr. Obama could play a mediating role between Tehran and Riyadh. But the nuclear deal has emboldened Iran, and fortified it with more money, so now the U.S. is being drawn into what amounts to a proxy war against Iran. Genius. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Press Buries Hillary Clinton’s Sins As reporters focus on Trump, they miss new details on Clinton’s rotten record. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on October 14th, 2016

If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.

But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.

It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”

A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”

Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.

A senior FBI official involved with the Clinton investigation told Fox News this week that the “vast majority” of career agents and prosecutors working the case “felt she should be prosecuted” and that giving her a pass was “a top-down decision.”

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Medieval America Free thought was not prized at universities, and wealthy lords ruled over their inferiors. Are we talking about then or now? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 13th, 2016

Pessimists often compare today’s troubled America to a tottering late Rome or an insolvent and descending British Empire. But medieval Europe (roughly A.D. 500 to 1450) is the more apt comparison.

The medieval world was a nearly 1,000-year period of spectacular, if haphazard, human achievement — along with endemic insecurity, superstition, and two, rather than three, classes.

The great medieval universities — at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford — continued to make strides in science. They were not unlike the medical and engineering schools at Harvard and Stanford. But they were not centers of free thinking.

Instead, medieval speech codes were designed to ensure that no one questioned the authority of church doctrine. Culturally or politically incorrect literature of the classical past, from Aristophanes to Petronius, was censored as either subversive or hurtful.

Career-wise, it was suicidal for, say, a medieval professor of science at the University of Padua to doubt the orthodoxy that the sun revolved around the earth.

Similarly, at Berkeley or Princeton, few now dare to commit the heresy of expressing uncertainty about whether man-caused global warming poses an immediate, existential threat to human civilization.

Today, a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth. The shrinking middle classes struggle to service trillions of dollars in consumer and student debt to big banks — in the manner of medieval peasants.

In the medieval world, impoverished serfs pledged loyalty to barons in exchange for their food and housing on the manor. In the modern world, progressive government is the bastion that distributes entitlements on the expectation that the masses show their political fealty at election time.

In medieval Europe, widespread literacy disappeared. Superstition reigned in place of reason.

Despite spending some $11,000 per student each year, are we all that much different? In many polls, more than a quarter of Americans believe in astrology. A quarter think aliens have visited Earth. More than 40 percent can’t name their own vice president. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have no idea what the Cold War was about.

The ruling cliques of the medieval court were full of insider knaves and scoundrels, plots and intrigue. Compare the current scandals, lies, and hypocrisies of our Beltway cloister in Washington.

Closeted scholiasts wrote esoteric treatises that no one read. These works were sort of like the incomprehensible “theory” articles of university humanities professors who are up for tenure.

To talk to the masses, the Latin-speaking elite spoke localized slang that would centuries later become English, French, and German — the medieval version of our electronic grunts and made-up words on Twitter and e-mail that are forming a new popular language.

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What Is Paul Ryan Thinking? The House speaker could have left Trump alone rather than stab him in the back. By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on October 13th, 2016

Having suffered the political equivalent of a blown tire while driving along an icy mountain road on Friday night, GOP nominee Donald J. Trump stabilized a seemingly fatal situation by Sunday evening. Through his commanding, issue-driven performance against Hillary Clinton in the second presidential debate, Trump steered his vehicle into a turnout. He replaced the flat with a new steel-belted radial and readied himself to return to the challenging road ahead.

But on Monday morning, House speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) raced in, slashed Trump’s tire anew, and nudged him toward the closest cliff.

Ryan could have left things alone, with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape receding in the rear-view mirror. Instead, Ryan donned his peacock feathers for an especially flamboyant display of moral preening.

Ryan erased the gap that Trump had placed between his candidacy and this controversy. Rather than let it be, Ryan dragged this whole episode back into the middle of the road.

During a conference call with GOP House members on Monday, Ryan reportedly announced that he neither would defend Trump nor campaign with him between now and Election Day. Naturally, pro-Clinton journalists (forgive the redundancy) fanned this hot coal into a forest fire.

Ryan could maintain his perch atop the moral high ground and do so quietly. He simply could go about his business and avoid Trump’s events. He could respond to journalists’ questions about the GOP nominee with bromides such as “I wish Donald Trump well and look forward to winning a larger House Republican majority on the night he wins the White House.”

This would have maintained peace on the right.

Instead, the day after Trump’s solid debate effort became the new narrative, Ryan needlessly fathered the unprecedented phenomenon of a Republican standard-bearer and a Republican speaker in open warfare with each other — just four weeks before a general election.

More than merely foolish politics, this episode exposes the reputedly level-headed Ryan as truly, deeply morally warped.

Everyone agrees that Trump’s comments about women (including references to female genitalia) were disappointing and inappropriate. Trump apologized for them twice before the latest debate and did so again at Sunday’s face-off against Clinton.

“This was locker-room talk,” Trump told a town hall in St. Louis. “I am not proud of it. I apologized to my family. I apologized to the American people. . . . I am very embarrassed by it, and I hate it, but it’s locker-room talk.”

(Remember: Trump’s words from 2005 are at issue here, not his actions. Conversely, Bill Clinton’s actual behavior somehow is no big deal. Journalists, feminists, and Democrats seem utterly uninterested in his sexual shenanigans with Monica Lewinsky, his widely acknowledged sexual harassment of Paula Jones, his alleged sexual assault of Kathleen Willey, and even a very credible accusation of rape by Juanita Broaddrick.)