NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FBI—for Burying Information The bureau seeks “to prevent disclosure” in Orlando. James Taranto

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

The FBI is trying to control what the public learns about the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, the Orlando Sentinel reports:

A June 20 letter from the FBI, attached to the City [of] Orlando’s lawsuit over withholding 911 calls and other records from 25 media outlets including the Orlando Sentinel, was also sent to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office with instructions pertaining to how they should respond to records requests.

The letter requests that agencies deny inquiries and directs departments to “immediately notify the FBI of any requests your agency received” so “the FBI can seek to prevent disclosure through appropriate channels, as necessary.”

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office sent the Sentinel the letter Tuesday night in response to a request for documents, video and audio recordings from the early morning hours of June 12.

A spokeswoman for the Sheriff’s Office said the FBI sent them the letter Monday night and “instructed us to forward it to anyone requesting records.”

Seminole County is to the north and east of Orange County, which includes Orlando. On Twitter, Sentinel reporter Gal Tziperman Lotan posted the full letter, signed by Tampa-based Special Agent Paul Wysopal. “He refused comment Wednesday,” according to the Sentinel report.

The FBI’s position here is not without logic. The investigation of a terrorist attack is primarily a federal responsibility, so one might expect decisions related to the case, including about public disclosure of information, would be made centrally. The Sentinel notes that the lawsuit—which seeks a declaratory judgment as to what documents should be released—was moved from Orange County Circuit Court to federal court after the city named the U.S. Justice Department as a defendant.

But one is inclined to view the FBI’s actions with suspicion, in light of last week’s hamhanded nondisclosure. As we noted, the bureau released a transcript of one of the attacker’s calls to 911 with his declarations of fealty to the Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, censored. (He made other calls, whose content has yet to be made public.)

After enduring several hours of ridicule, the FBI released the transcript. It was surely no coincidence that the nondisclosure was consistent with the Obama administration’s agenda, both political (playing down terrorism during an election year) and ideological (denying that Islamic terrorism is Islamic).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Obama’s Climate Policy Is a Hot Mess The president hails the Paris Agreement again—even though it will solve nothing and cost trillions. By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

When President Obama flew to Ottawa, Canada, on Wednesday to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, promoting their climate-change policies was near the top of the agenda. “The Paris Agreement was a turning point for our planet,” the leaders’ joint statement said, referring to the climate pact signed with fanfare in April by nearly 200 nations. “North America has the capacity, resources and the moral imperative to show strong leadership building on the Paris Agreement and promoting its early entry into force.”

Attracting rather less attention than the Ottawa meeting was a June 22 hearing on Capitol Hill. Testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy extolled the Paris Agreement as an “incredible achievement.” But when repeatedly asked, she wouldn’t explain exactly how much this treaty would actually cut global temperatures.

The Paris Agreement will cost a fortune but do little to reduce global warming. In a peer-reviewed article published in Global Policy this year, I looked at the widely hailed major policies that Paris Agreement signatories pledged to undertake and found that they will have a negligible temperature impact. I used the same climate-prediction model that the United Nations uses.

First, consider the Obama administration’s signature climate policy, the Clean Power Plan. The U.N.’s model shows that it will accomplish almost nothing. Even if the policy withstands current legal challenges and its cuts are totally implemented—not for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century—the Clean Power Plan would reduce temperatures by 0.023 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

President Obama has made grander promises of future carbon cuts, beyond the plan’s sweeping restrictions on the power industry, but these are only vaguely outlined now. In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. In other words, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the very ambitious Obama rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.

Or consider the Paris Agreement promises from the entire world using the reduction estimate from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organization responsible for the Paris summit. The U.N.’s model reveals a temperature reduction by the end of the century of only 0.08 degrees Fahrenheit. If we generously assume that the promised cuts for 2030 are not only met (which itself would be a U.N. first), but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop by 0.3 degrees—the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years at the end of the century. A cut of 0.3 degrees matches the finding of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis of the Paris Agreement last year.

The costs of the Paris climate pact are likely to run to $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually throughout the rest of the century, using the best estimates from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and the Asia Modeling Exercise. Spending more than $100 trillion for such a feeble temperature reduction by the end of the century does not make sense.

Some Paris Agreement supporters defend it by claiming that its real impact on temperatures will be much more significant than the U.N. model predicts. This requires some mental gymnastics and heroic assumptions. The group doing climate modeling for the U.S. State Department assumes that without the Paris Agreement emissions would be much higher than under any realistic scenario. With such an unrealistically pessimistic baseline, they can then magically show that the agreement will cut temperatures by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit—with about 1.5 degrees of the drop coming from a reduction of these fantasy carbon emissions. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary’s Strange Security Adviser How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists? By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forced to acknowledge over the past week that the former secretary of state did not, as she had claimed, turn over all her work-related email to the State Department. The new story is that her deletion of these emails was an oversight. Team Clinton is hoping therefore that you won’t hear the story of Rajiv K. Fernando, which would suggest the oversight tale to be yet another untruth.

Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of Mr. Fernando, because you arguably never should have. Mr. Fernando is a one-time Chicago securities trader who in July of 2011 somehow found himself sitting on the International Security Advisory Board, with the ability to access the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.

Mr. Fernando had no background that would have qualified him to sit on the ISAB alongside the likes of former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry, a United Nations chief weapons inspector, members of Congress, and nuclear scientists. That Mr. Fernando didn’t belong was apparent. “We had no idea who he was,” one board member told ABC News. So how exactly did he get there?

We now finally know, thanks to State Department internal emails that the government was forced to turn over to the watchdog group Citizens United. And thanks to ABC News, which began digging into Mr. Fernando’s bizarre appointment when it first happened.

In August 2011, ABC requested a copy of Mr. Fernando’s resume from the State Department. This, the internal emails show, sent a press aide reeling to find answers to how a trader had ended up on the ISAB. Even the aide noted that it was “natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”

The response came only a few hours later in an email from Wade Boese, chief of staff for an undersecretary of state: “The true answer is simply that S staff ( Cheryl Mills) added him,” Mr. Boese wrote. “Raj was not on the list sent to S; he was added at their insistence.”

S, in this situation, stands for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ms. Mills, a longtime aide, was her chief of staff. Why would Hillary want to entrust the nation’s secrets to a man with no intelligence experience?

Here’s what we do know: Mr. Fernando, before his plum appointment, had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation. He had been a top bundler for Mrs. Clinton in her 2008 presidential run, and later a major Obama fundraiser. He gave tens of thousands more to a political group that helped Hillary pay off her 2008 campaign debt by renting her email list.

The 2011 emails reveal that the State Department knew it had a problem on its hands. “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name,” the press aide warned. Ms. Mills, the messages say, asked staff to “stall” the news organization. Damage control came in the form of Mr. Fernando’s quick resignation, on grounds of “additional time needed to devote to his business.” Uh huh. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Some of Erdogan’s best friends are terrorists by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

Following Tuesday’s multiple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the world — the West in particular — to view the event as a “milestone for the joint fight against terrorist organizations, a turning point.”

He also said the attacks, “which took place during the holy month of Ramadan, show that terrorism strikes with no regard for faith and values.”

If 42 innocent people had not been brutally killed, along with hundreds of others seriously wounded, his words would be cause for a global guffaw on the part of friend and foe alike.

In the first place, as an authoritarian leader of a previously modern and democratic Muslim country, which he has spent the 14 years since his election turning into an Islamic state where critics in the press and political system are thrown in jail for any hint of opposition, he has more nerve than sense to pretend that he is in the same boat as the United States and Europe.

Secondly, as someone who is strongly tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, he has shown that it is only certain terrorists he wants eradicated; the others are his allies, who do the dirty work he welcomes and supports.

It was thus ironic that, on the morning after the airport attack, the Israeli security cabinet approved the reconciliation agreement it had reached with Turkey the day before. As is typical of any deal Islamist leaders ultimately sign with the Jewish state, this one is much more advantageous to the undeserving party.

According to the agreement, which has been negotiated since 2010 — when Turkey sponsored and dispatched a flotilla of armed, pro-Hamas activists to provoke an international incident by violating Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip — Israel will hand over $20 million to the families of the perpetrators killed and injured on the Mavi Marmara ship by IDF commandos who shot at their assailants in self-defense. In exchange, Turkey will cease its legal proceedings against Israeli forces connected in any way to what happened on that ship six years ago.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A Bad Iran Investment The Obama administration’s promotion of Iran’s economy has prompted no change in Iranian behavior. by Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

Stretching appeasement to the breaking point, Washington is working overtime to convince global institutions, nations, banks and companies to dismiss their well-founded concerns and do business with the America-hating, terror-sponsoring, nuclear weapons-pursuing regime in Tehran.

Washington’s efforts – which are coming despite no discernable change in Iranian behavior – extend a familiar script of recent years, in which the Obama administration kowtows to the regime, ignores the concerns of America’s regional allies and breaks its promises to monitor Iranian activities closely and act accordingly.

It’s an embarrassing spectacle that diminishes U.S. leadership and credibility in the region and beyond.

Nevertheless, the U.S. effort is having an impact. The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, which sets global standards for fighting money laundering and terror financing, responded to U.S. pressure by deciding last week to suspend for a year its measures to combat Iranian terror sponsorship because Iran has adopted a plan to address the problem – even though Tehran hasn’t actually implemented it. And the plan is meaningless to begin with because it excludes from “terrorism” any group that Iran says is “attempting to end foreign occupation, colonialism, and racism,” as Iran surely would say of its terrorist proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Egyptian author Sayyid Al-Qemany: Islam in Its Present Form Is a Threat to the World, All Scorpions Sting See video

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/5542.htm
Egyptian author Sayyid Al-Qemany, speaking at the first convention of the
Adhoc organization, a London-based “secularist, modernist, pluralist”
international NGO, warned about the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism,
saying: “Any Muslim who believes that his religion is suited to all times
and places is a terrorist by definition.” Al-Qemany said that “all scorpions
sting” and that the only difference is that some have not yet had the chance
to perform “the best act that brings you close to Allah” by carrying out the
duty of Jihad. The convention, titled “The Roots and Causes of Islamic
Violence,” was held in Brussels on May 22, and Al-Qemany’s address was
posted on the YouTube account of the “I Think” Magazine.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

APPARENTLY BREXIT ISN’T THE “RIGHT” KIND OF REVOLUTION : BEN WEINGARTEN

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

Popular democratic revolutions are all the rage, until they aren’t.

Remember the (inherently) progressive Establishment’s glee around the globe at the prospect of the Arab Spring?

Contrast its favorable reaction to the “democratic” jihadist takeover of the Middle East with the chaos and cringing that has ensued in the wake of Brexit.

What is clear is that regardless of the substantive impact of Great Britain’s referendum, its symbolic effect has been extraordinary.

Irrespective of #Leave’s implications on economics, immigration and national security, #Brexit is a direct rebuke to the bipartisan Establishment’s most cherished values and principles, and an indictment of its rule.

Too, by challenging the progressive status quo, Brexit has exposed some delicious double standards.

Here are just a few of them:
National Sovereignty and Self-Determination

As mentioned, recall that the Arab Spring was viewed by the global political class as an unalloyed good. Further, the political class always claims to be against meddling in the affairs of other nations, lest the West creates a 21st century wave of neo-colonialist blowback. And anyway, we are supposed to be non-judgmental. Who are we to tell others what is right and wrong?

The angered reaction of Western elites to #Brexit shows that the above is a farce. The Establishment believes in forcing its values and principles on others when it is in its political interest, in particular when it gives the Establishment more power and control. It is highly judgmental of those who do not toe its line and submit, as reflected in the stern warnings of Democrats and Republicans who lobbied for Brexit, and the talking heads exploding today.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DAVID GOLDMAN: DEMOGRAPHICS AND SOVEREIGNTY IN THE BREXIT VOTE

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

Britain’s “Leave” camp argues that the deciding issue in the Brexit vote was sovereignty, not immigration. The two issues, though, inevitably will become linked. The continental members of the European Community, especially Germany, are on a slippery slope which will lead to mass absorption of migrants and eventually the free movement of many of those migrants within the European Community. Britain’s interests in the matter of migration differ markedly from Germany’s, and that divergence is the most pressing reason for Britain to leave the EC.

There are many differences between the UK and Germany, but the most important difference is that at present fertility rates the UK will be there at the end of the present century and Germany will not. That does not mean that Germany will disappear: it means that Germany requires many millions of immigrants to compensate for the fact that German women average 1.3 to 1.4 births over their lifetime. The chart below (from UN Population Program data) shows that during the present century, the number of German women in their childbearing years will fall by half to two-thirds, while the number of British women of childbearing age will remain stable or decline about 20%.

In my view, the best comparison is between the UK medium fertility scenario and the German low fertility scenario, because German fertility has consistently undershot the “Low” scenario in the United Nations forecasts.

The UK, in short, can cherry-pick immigrants by whatever criteria it adopts (education, professional qualifications, wealth), the way Australia’s point system does. It has time and leisure to decide what sort of immigration population it needs. Germany needs 5 to 10 million females of childbearing age, which implies an overall immigration of 10 to 20 million individuals. Where will they come from? Most of the immigrants to Germany during the past fifty years have come from Southern and Eastern Europe and Turkey. But those sources are drying up, for southern Europe suffers from fertility rates about the same as Germany’s, and Eastern European fertility is even lower.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Guess who’s coming to Iftar? Offensive Islamic views are not personal, they are religious Mark Durie

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

A widely-publicised Iftar dinner, intended to show that Malcolm Turnbull gets what it means to be inclusive, ended badly after he was advised that one of his guests, Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, had taught that Islam prescribes death for adulterers, and homosexuals spread diseases. No rogue maverick, Australian-born Alsuleiman is the elected national president of the Australian National Imams Council.

Although insisting that ‘mutual respect is absolutely critical’, Turnbull subjected this prominent Muslim leader to public humiliation. He regretted inviting him to dinner and counselled the sheikh ‘to reflect on what he has said and recant’. In the middle of an election, wanting to limit fallout from the dinner-gone-wrong, held only days after the Orlando massacre, Turnbull stated that his no-longer-welcome guest’s views are ‘wrong, unacceptable and I condemn them’.

Well may Mr Turnbull deplore Alsuleiman’s teachings, but the real challenge is that these were not merely his personal views. The sheikh’s teachings on homosexuality and adultery reflect the mainstream position of Islam, preached by many a Muslim scholar around the world today, and telling a sheikh to reject the sharia is like telling a pope to get over the virgin birth.

Many Australian Muslims will be disappointed at the treatment meted out to Sheikh Alsuleiman. An event designed to honour the Muslim community ended up providing a platform to denigrate one of their most respected leaders for promoting Islamic doctrines. Several Australian Muslim leaders have since dug in their heels to affirm support for the sharia position on homosexuals. So much for recanting.

While Turnbull refused to pass judgement on Islam itself, saying ‘there are different views of different issues, as there are in all religions’, he also sent a message that he is prepared to disparage Australian Muslims’ religious beliefs. It was a bitter pill for Muslims to swallow that this came in the form of a humiliating invite-to-disavow game of bait-and-switch, conducted during a pre-election media storm.

The cognitive dissonance is startling.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MARILYN PENN: A REVIEW OF “THE SEPTEMBERS OF SHIRAZ”

Posted By on July 1st, 2016

The Septembers of Shiraz is not only a compelling movie but an important one to see. Based on the book by Dalia Sofer which recreated the experiences of her own family, the film is the only one I can recall dealing with the plight of Iranian Jews after the fall of the Shah and the takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini. Its contemporary importance is heightened by the recent agreement between the US and Iran and the threat that this poses to Israel and to the many middle-eastern Jews persecuted by Muslims in countries that were formerly hospitable to them. They all learned first-hand how brutal that persecution was – confiscation of wealth and property, imprisonment, torture, expulsion or death.

In a searing performance by Adrien Brody, the character of Isaac goes from that of a successful gemologist and jeweler to the Empress to a bewildered man imprisoned summarily and beaten into submission in an attempt to force him to divulge the whereabouts of his shady brother and his own fortune. His family is never told of his whereabouts or whether he is still alive and part of the story concerns their own travails. The faithful housekeeper who has been with them for many years begins to be influenced by her militant son who believes the propaganda that anyone with money has gotten it by stealing what rightfully belongs to the common, less fortunate man. In this case, forgetting the paternal kindness exhibited by Isaac when the housekeeper and her son were homeless and poverty-stricken, the son steals the jewels and furnishings of the business and threatens to further blackmail Isaac in a way that could prove fatal.