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Protesters for Trump The Mexican flag-wavers might as well be voting for the man.

Posted By on May 2nd, 2016

It’s counterintuitive, but we’re beginning to wonder if all of those protesters showing up at Donald Trump rallies aren’t secret supporters. They couldn’t possibly be doing more to persuade millions of Republicans to vote for him, if only to defend the right to free speech and association.

The protests are picking up in volume and disruption as the candidates campaign in California ahead of the June 7 primary. Protesters blocked traffic, punched vehicles and cursed Trump supporters in Costa Mesa Thursday, and hundreds blocked the entrance to the GOP convention in Burlingame on Friday. About two dozen people tried to rush barriers near the Hyatt Regency, and Mr. Trump and his aides had to get out of their cars and walk into the convention.
“I think it’s going to get worse if he gets the nomination and is the front-runner. I think it’s going to escalate,” Luis Serrano, an organizer with California Immigration Youth Justice Alliance, told the Los Angeles Times. “We’re going to keep showing up and standing against the actions and the hate Donald Trump is creating.” CONTINUE AT SITE

BOOKS Comments turned off

UK Labour chief Corbyn rejects call to denounce Hamas, Hezbollah

Posted By on May 2nd, 2016

As senior party members said to mull resignation over handling of anti-Semitism row, leader says he will continue to engage Palestinian groups, declares Labour ‘absolutely against anti-Semitism’

British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn rebuffed calls Sunday to denounce contacts with terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, while declaring that his party is against anti-Semitism, amid a roiling scandal over accusations of widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments among Labourites.

Corbyn used a May Day rally to say the party “is absolutely against anti-Semitism in any form” after a tumultuous week that focused attention on the party’s attitude toward Jews instead of its campaigning efforts ahead of London’s mayoral race.

But as Labour attempted to push back against efforts to label it anti-Semitic, it also came under fire for Corbyn’s past contacts with Hamas and Hezbollah, both sworn to Israel’s destruction.

A statement from Corbyn’s spokesperson said he would continue to engage such groups, while denying that doing so was tantamount to an endorsement.

“Jeremy Corbyn has been a longstanding supporter of Palestinian rights and the pursuit of peace and justice in the Middle East through dialogue and negotiation,” the statement read, according to the Telegraph newspaper. “He has met many people with whom he profoundly disagrees in order to promote peace and reconciliation processes, including in South Africa, Latin American, Ireland and the Middle East. He believes it is essential to speak to people with whom there is disagreement, particularly when they have large-scale support or democratic mandates.”

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Anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism, circa 1946 by Norman Goda

Posted By on May 2nd, 2016

Seventy years ago this month, a committee of 12 scholars and statesmen completed an 80-page report that is all but forgotten today. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry Regarding the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine, consisting of six British and six American members, was a British idea.

Under pressure from President Harry Truman to allow 100,000 Jewish survivors in Europe’s DP camps to emigrate to the British Mandate, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin proposed the joint committee as a way to outflank the White House. Between January and March 1946, the Committee heard testimony in Washington, London, numerous sites in Europe, the Arab capitals, and Jerusalem. Bevin was sure that a sense of Britain’s strategic realities in the Middle East — its dependence on bases and oil for instance — would bring the US members to shy away from antagonizing the Arab world. To ensure the desired outcome, however, the British helped to establish a global anti-Zionist narrative that bled into anti-Semitism, all in the shadow of the Jewish world’s greatest catastrophe.

Jewish witnesses in Washington, London, Europe, and Jerusalem were aggressively cross-examined by British committee members. It was pointless, the British argued, for the Jews to rehash the recent history of pogroms or the Shoah. These were irrelevant. Rather, Jewish speakers had to show how more Jews could be put in Palestine without causing an uproar, and why most could not simply return to Poland, Romania, and so on. Thus in Washington, when Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee discussed the recent Krakow pogrom to demonstrate that the Jewish place in Poland was over, British committee chairman Sir John Singleton laconically countered, “History shows, doesn’t it, that in every country where there has been persecution, the people have come back.” Even in Poland, after speaking with Adolf Berman, a former Warsaw Ghetto leader, British committee members asked “whether friction was being caused by returning Jews asking for restitution of their property.”

Similarly, British committee members lost patience with Jews who insisted that Palestine had the space and economic potential such that Arabs and Jews could live at peace. Economist Robert Nathan argued that a properly developed economy in Palestine could accommodate up to a million Jews, thus raising the living standard of everyone. “Is it your view,” Singleton asked, “that the acquisition of more land by the Jews would increase the friendship between Arabs and Jews? . . . [It] doesn’t seem that it would tend toward a solution.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sponsoring Hamas Indoctrination to Murder By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on May 2nd, 2016

Hamas needs cannons and cannon-fodders to attack Israel. Hamas cannons came from a variety of sources, some as contributions from other Islamist regimes, such as Iran and Sudan. Smuggled weapons come through the Sinai and are sometimes hidden in containers of goods allowed into Gaza. Hamas has also taken advantage of building materials delivered for the endless reconstruction of Gaza and has been developing its own rockets and tunnels into Israel.

The local talent needed to produce the rockets is found in the Hamas-controlled Gaza school system. So is the fodder for Hamas attacks against Israel, Gaza’s school children, who receive growingly violent indoctrination and detailed instructions on how to attack and murder Israelis.

The Western media has been shocked shocked by ISIS videos showing how it trains children wearing the terrorist group’s black uniforms to sever heads of infidels. But, Hamas training of Gaza’s children wearing Hamas uniforms to slit the throats of Israelis, did not lead to the condemnation of Hamas.

Last month’s celebrations of the annual Palestine Festival for Childhood and Education in Gaza, offer a good example.

The Festival was celebrated throughout the Gaza school system, most of which are operated and funded by UNRWA, and most of the teachers are members of the Hamas Teachers’ Union. The events included young veiled girls and boys wearing military uniforms simulating stabbing attacks on Israelis, killing IDF soldiers and releasing Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails.

Sponsors of these events included the Ramallah-based Bank of Palestine, the Hamas-controlled University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, whose funders include the World Bank and the European Commission, sponsored the events, as has the London-based, Interpal Fund, which has been designated as terrorist by Israel and US, but not in Britain.

“The displays put on by the children during the Annual Palestine Festival for Childhood and Education show that the sponsorship and support Interpal allegedly provides for worthy causes, is in reality also used to increase hatred for Israel and to indoctrinate violence (in both the formal and informal educational systems in the Gaza Strip). Moreover, funds donated by countries and various groups in Western Europe to further formal educational are also exploited to encourage hatred and terrorism.”

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Meet Huma Abedin, Mysterious Clinton Confidante and Long-Suffering Spouse of Anthony Weiner By Nina Burleigh

Posted By on May 2nd, 2016

Abedin handles everything for her boss, from classified emails to booking hair appointments and answering her cellphone.

In 1996, two young, ambitious women worked at the Clinton White House. One was assigned to the West Wing—the presidential wing—and became known for her stained blue Gap dress, a sordid manifestation of Bill Clinton’s baser appetites. The other served in the East Wing, where the first lady’s offices are situated. This is the story of the second one, whose selfless servility and uncanny knack for predicting what the boss wants have put her closer than almost anyone to the most powerful woman in American politics.

For most of the past 20 years, Huma Mahmood Abedin, now a vice chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has served as Clinton’s “body-woman”—basically a glorified lady’s maid. But she has also expanded her role and now monitors all access to Clinton. According to her many fans in Hillaryland, Abedin possesses a skill set that cannot be taught: the emotional intelligence to keep big-ego VIPs and other “clutches” (in the argot of Washington, civilians and celebs who overstay their face time with the boss) at bay without making them angry. Also, she wields a black-belt organizing talent that enables her to toggle between directing classified emails to the right people, keeping an eye on how weather is affecting the D.C.-LaGuardia shuttles and knowing which donors need a photo op—all while monitoring Clinton’s meals and hair appointments and cellphone. The perpetually lipsticked and soigné Abedin is elegant and gentle—qualities Clinton sometimes lacks—but also relentlessly obedient, a quality her boss treasures.

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Media starting to come together on Saudi 9-11 involvement By James Lewis

Posted By on May 1st, 2016

Under cover of 2016 election headlines, the liberal media have finally confessed that the Saudi ruling clan is directly responsible for the 9/11/01 mass terror attack on the Twin Towers in New York City and on the Pentagon fifteen years ago.

These facts have been widely rumored, because the 17 attackers followed Saudi (Wahhabi) war theology, along with thousand-year-old suicide-murder tactics against infidels.

That news has now been confirmed by the major media, which colluded in fifteen years of cover-up.

Media sources confirming Saudi guilt include the New York Post, CNN (reporting Saudi threats of reprisals against the disclosures), the New York Times, The Independent (U.K.), and numerous other media outlets (see here). However, we have not seen the kind of organized, single-headline media campaign that we have seen so many times when all the liberal establishment media want to make a major splash. The most likely reason is that the media will have to explain their own fifteen years of cover-up very soon. Their mendacious answer will be but we already told you so. That will be another lie, of course.

Strategically, the electoral success of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz is likely to have forced the disclosure of the massive U.S. and EU establishment cover-up since 9/11/01. A de facto Radical Left-Radical Jihad alliance is now faced with a choice of gradually revealing the truth to the public or staging a public coup d’état both here and in Europe. The political-media establishment has therefore been forced into a checkmate by the popular success of political candidates it could not control, and who may be prepared to reveal Saudi criminal responsibility for the Jihad War that started with 9/11/01 and continues to this day.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Daryl McCann :Our Age of Conflict A Review of “Blood Year” by David Kilcullen

Posted By on May 1st, 2016

Author David Kilcullen “Blood Year” is scathing of Barack Obama’s deer-in-the-headlights response to the rise of ISIS. The last thing Vladimir Putin had to fear on the eve of his bold intervention in the Syrian civil war, was the reaction of a supine US president

Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror
by David Kilcullen
Black Inc, 2016, 304 pages, $29.99

The United States will remain in a kind of purgatory until it unlocks the full meaning of 9/11. Without the right understanding of what that terrorist attack signified, there cannot be an effective response to it. David Kilcullen’s Blood Year makes the case that the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have badly misjudged the nature of the challenge to America and the wider world in general. As a direct consequence of this, asserts Kilcullen, the power and reach of militant jihadism appear much stronger now than when President Bush first launched the Global War On Terrorism (GWOT) in 2001.

The Australian David Kilcullen has been, amongst other things, senior adviser to General David Petraeus during the Surge (2007-08) and chief strategist in the Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the US State Department. He currently runs a private agency that has advised everyone from the UK and Australian governments to Nato. Blood Year is that rare thing, an insider’s knowledge of Western policy-making in the twenty-first century combined with the frankness of an independent-minded questioner. Yet even Kilcullen—a veritable expert on counter-terrorism—appears, at times, not to grasp in its entirety the genesis of Islamic militancy and the comprehensive nature of its war against modernity.

Kilcullen contrasts George W. Bush’s second term in office (2005 to 2009) with his first (2001 to 2005). Stung into action by the destruction of the Twin Towers and the strike on the Pentagon, the forty-third President launched “Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan”. On the hundredth day of his GWOT—some time after the initial success in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and more than a year before the commencement of the Iraq War—President Bush could not unreasonably make the claim: “We are supported by the collective will of the world.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: The Left’s Little Antisemitism Problem by Douglas Murray

Posted By on May 1st, 2016

Within a week, Britain’s Labour party leadership was forced to suspend one of its newest MPs and one of its oldest grandees — and both for the same reason.

Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone both say that they condemn anti-Semitism. They always tend to add that they also condemn “Islamophobia and all other forms of racism,” a disclaimer that always seems a deliberate attempt to hide a hatred of Jews under the skirts of any and all criticism of Islam. What is most fascinating is that all the while they are saying this, they stoke the very thing they claim to condemn.

They pretend that the Jewish state does such things for no reason. There is no mention of the thousands of rockets that Hamas and other Islamist groups rain down on Israel from the Gaza Strip. The comment turns a highly-targeted set of retaliatory strikes by Israel against Hamas in the Gaza Strip into a “brutal” attack “on the Palestinians” as a whole. While mentioning those death-tolls, Livingstone has no interest in explaining that the State of Israel builds bunkers for its citizens to shelter in, while Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields and useful dead bodies for the television cameras, to help Hamas appear as an aggrieved “victim.”

It is the narrative of the “left” on Israel that is causing the resurgence of anti-Semitism. It is not coming from nowhere. It is coming from them. If the left wants to deal with it, they first have to deal with themselves.

Every time anyone thinks Britain’s Labour party has reached a new low of anti-Semitism, entirely new depths seems to open. In September, I wrote here about how the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour party constituted a “mainstreaming” of racism in the UK. Although Mr. Corbyn claims he does not have any tolerance for any hatred of anyone, he is a man who has spent his political life cosying up to anti-Semites and terrorist groups that express genocidal intent against the Jewish people. He has worked closely with Holocaust deniers, praised anti-Semitic extremists and described Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends.

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“It Is My Dream to Behead Someone” — American Muslim Muslim Persecution of Christians: February, 2016 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 1st, 2016

“Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth.” — Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, Syria.

Federal authorities arrested Khalil Abu-Rayyan of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, an ISIS supporter who had planned to carry out an attack on a 6,000-member Detroit church. Abu-Rayyan allegedly had guns and a large knife, and told an undercover FBI agent that he “tried to shoot up a church one day … If I can’t do jihad in the Middle East, I would do my jihad over here. … It is my dream to behead someone.”

In Pakistan, a disabled Christian man sentenced to death for blasphemy said that he was forced into admitting to the charges in order to stop his wife from being tortured… Emmanuel and his wife were found guilty of insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in text messages to a local imam in 2013, and sentenced to death. The conviction came despite the fact that the poor Christian couple are illiterate.

As opposed to their Western counterparts, Christian leaders who live in the Middle East continued expressing their frustration at the West’s indifference and worse. Jean-Clément Jeanbart, the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Aleppo, during an interview, asked “Why are your bishops silent on a threat that is yours today as well? Because the bishops are, like you, raised in political correctness. But Jesus was never politically correct, he was politically just! The responsibility of a bishop is to teach, to use his influence to transmit truth. Why are your bishops afraid of speaking? Of course they would be criticized, but that would give them a chance to defend themselves, and to defend this truth. You must remember that silence often means consent.”

The archbishop also criticized the migration policies of Western countries: “The egoism and the interests slavishly defended by your governments will in the end kill you as well. Open your eyes, didn’t you see what happened recently in Paris?”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

‘The Speech’: When Reagan Electrified America, and Transformed It By Gene Kopelson

Posted By on April 30th, 2016

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the introduction to Reagan’s 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan’s Emergence as a World Statesman, which was published earlier this month.

Ronald Reagan turned over in bed the night of October 27, 1964, to kiss his wife Nancy good night, but he was worrying about the speech, “A Time for Choosing,” he had given on behalf of the Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. It had been recorded in advance and was aired on national television earlier that evening. “I was hoping I hadn’t let Barry down,” he wrote in his autobiography. The Reagans had returned home after watching the speech at the home of some friends (who later became his political supporters).

A scant two hours after going to sleep, shortly after midnight, Reagan was awakened by the shrill ring of their telephone. It was the operator from Citizens for Goldwater headquarters in Washington, D.C. She could barely contain herself, yelling, “The switchboard has been lit up ever since you signed off. It’s 3 a.m. and there’s been no letup!” Political operative Clif White, running the office, was amazed by the speed and intensity of the popular response to Reagan’s speech.

Some politicians didn’t watch it. George Romney was on a speaking tour in Michigan. Robert F. Kennedy, running for the Senate as a New Yorker and busy campaigning on Long Island, was conversing with President Johnson. Former vice president Richard Nixon, however, the losing 1960 presidential nominee, did tune in. Nixon was grateful to Reagan for campaigning on his behalf two years earlier, when Nixon ran for governor of California and lost.

Nixon had keen political insight and knew political talent when he saw it. He could spot a potential political competitor as well. Immediately after the speech, Nixon noted that the one Republican winner emerging from the Goldwater debacle was not even on the presidential ballot: Ronald Reagan. Nixon likely started to mull the ramifications of the speech. He may have begun to appreciate that Reagan’s clear call for individual freedom, coupled with his emergence into the political limelight, could threaten, from the conservative right, Nixon’s own ambitions: He was musing whether to seek the Republican nomination for president once again.

And of course many other, ordinary citizens also listened to Reagan’s speech and were deeply impressed. Like America as a whole and, for that matter, the world, the lives of those touched that evening by Reagan’s speech would never be the same. A few of these men and women would would become political operatives at the heart of Ronald Reagan’s first campaign for the presidency in 1968. Each of them had been transformed by the inspiring words they heard that October evening from Ronald Reagan four years earlier.