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Islamic terrorism, the US and the Palestinian issue Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

6-minute-video #10 http://bit.ly/1T5WK2S in a mini-seminar http://bit.ly/1ze66dS

According to President Obama’s worldview the Palestinian issue is a principal Muslim concern and a major source of Muslim animation and frustration, which has fueled regional violence, intensifying Islamic terrorism.

However, irrespective of Obama’s far-reaching gestures to the Palestinian Authority, the number of Muslim terrorist cells in the US has increased, as have Islamic terrorist attacks on the US mainland, such as in San Bernardino (2015), Boston (2013), Times Square (2010), Ft. Hood, Texas (2009), Little Rock, Arkansas (2009), Dallas, Texas (2009), etc.

Moreover, in 1983, while President Reagan brutally pressured Israel to end its offensive against the PLO in Lebanon and withdraw to the international border, Islamic car bombs blew up the US embassy and the Marines’ headquarters in Beirut, murdering 300 US Marines. In 1998 and 2000, while President Clinton pressured Israel to make dramatic concessions to the Palestinians, and made Arafat a frequent foreign visitor to the White House, Islamic car bombs hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, murdering 300 persons, and Islamic terrorists hit the “USS Cole” at the port of Aden, murdering 17 US sailors. Furthermore, “September 11” was planned while President Clinton pressured Israel to repartition Jerusalem, retreat to the pre-1967 lines and accept a limited version of the Palestinian “claim of return” to the pre-1967 area of Israel.

President Obama was right when declaring in June, 2009, at Cairo University: “Islam has always been part of America’s story.” Indeed, Islamic (Barbary) terrorism targeted US ships between 1776 and the beginning of the 19th century. John Quincy Adams, the sixth US president (1825-1929), researched the causes of anti-US Islamic terrorism, concluding that the core cause was Islam’s endemic hostility toward the “infidel” as expressed in the Quran.

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The questions nobody wants to ask about Asad Shah’s murder Douglas Murray

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

On Maundy Thursday a Muslim shopkeeper in Glasgow was brutally murdered. Forty-year-old Asad Shah was allegedly stabbed in the head with a kitchen knife and then stamped upon. Most of the UK press began by going big on this story and referring to it as an act of ‘religious hatred’, comfortably leaving readers with the distinct feeling that – post-Brussels – the Muslim shopkeeper must have been killed by an ‘Islamophobe’. Had that been the case, by now the press would be crawling over every view the killer had ever held and every Facebook connection he had ever made. They would be asking why he had done it and investigating every one of his associates.

But it then appeared that although the Asad Shah murder was being treated by police as ‘religiously motivated’ the suspected killer might in fact have been another Muslim and that, it was speculated, there might also have been a connection with a message on Facebook in which Mr Shah wished a very happy Easter to his ‘beloved Christian nation’ and suggesting people follow in ‘The Real Footstep of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ’.

Mr Shah was an Ahmadiyya (Ahmadi), a member of – against some stiff competition – one of the most persecuted sects within Islam. Persecution against them in Pakistan and elsewhere around the Islamic world is rife. Yet despite that (or perhaps for that very reason) they are probably the most peaceable and indeed admirable sect within Islam. Among other things, Ahmadiyya Muslims formally reject the concept of Jihad that other schools cling to. In Britain whenever there is a vaguely positive news story about Islam it almost invariably involves Ahmadi Muslims. Remember the bus adverts a few years back saying that Islam had ‘love for all, hatred for none’. That was paid for by Ahmadiyya Muslims. Remember the stories of a Muslim group not burning poppies but actually selling them for the Royal British Legion? Ahmadiyyas again.

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TOM WILSON :MAHMOUD ABBAS…OFFERS ANOTHER POISONED OLIVE BRANCH…SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

His birthday was March 26th just a few days ago. Also known as Abu Mazen….an Arafat in a suit….within days of his election his buddies in the Brigades of Al Aqsa killed six Israelis as another “peace”offering….rsk

Last night the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas appeared on Israelis’ television screens to tell them that peace is still possible. He even conceded that there have been some incidents of incitement in the Palestinian media. As for the relentless wave of stabbings that have plagued Israeli cities in recent months, well that is just a matter of Palestinians losing hope in Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution, Abbas explained.

In some senses Abbas is right. Peace, like many eventualities, is certainly possible. But not while Abbas is around. Because while Abbas might graciously concede that some of his state controlled media outlets may have regrettably dabbled in the occasional anti-Semitic terror incitement, such a lamenting tone would suggest that all this has been going on contrary to his own wishes.

The Palestinian Authority’s mandateless president has always cut a pretty disingenuous figure – the quintessential phoney moderate – but if he expects Israelis to believe that he hasn’t been at the forefront of the incitement that has already got so many of them killed, then he must think Israelis are as gullible as he clearly believes his own people to be.

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China’s Win-Win Regional Strategy By:Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also urged increased cooperation with China to discourage Pyongyang.

As world leaders gathered for the fourth Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, Obama first met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye. He then had a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at which both leaders urged North Korea (DPRK) to give up its nuclear arsenal. Xi also agreed to fully implement the latest economic sanctions against the regime of Kim Jong-un which were imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on March 2. The wording of that resolution was stronger than initially expected, primarily due to China’s displeasure at Pyongyang’s tendency to take Beijing’s support for granted even when its actions run contrary to China’s strategic interests.

China’s longstanding priorities of “no war, no instability and no nukes” on the Korean Peninsula—in that order of priority—have produced ambiguous policies over the past decade. Two influential power centers in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department and the International Department of_the_Communist_Party, continue to regard North Korea as an important geopolitical buffer between China and South Korea. They see the stability of the DPRK regime as more important than its compliance with non-proliferation strictures. Following North Korea’s second nuclear test (June 2009) China initially supported a sharply worded UN Security Council resolution, but in October of that year reversed its approach and effectively became North Korea’s protector and enabler, with former prime minister Wen Jiabao saying it was necessary to “put all our efforts without fail to boost peace and stability in Northeast Asia.”

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SUNY Buffalo campus graffiti threatens to ‘kill all’ Jews While police are calling it an ‘isolated incident,’ Jewish students worry it signals an increase of anti-Jewish sentiment at university By Eric Cortellessa

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

WASHINGTON — Police have stepped up security for Jewish students at a major state university in upstate New York after graffiti threatened to “kill all kikes,” using a derogatory term to refer to Jewish people.

A picture of the vandalism, scrawled on a men’s bathroom at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was obtained by The Times of Israel.

University police were notified of the incident last week, after a Jewish student noticed the inscription and told the school’s Hillel director, Dan Metchnik, who then informed university officials.

Police ordered university facilities to remove the language from the bathroom stall and opened an investigation. They further specified that they believe it to be an isolated incident.

The university put out a statement condemning the hate crime and confirmed that, in response, university police had increased patrols near the Hillel office and elsewhere on campus where students were celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Metchnik, an Israeli, was shocked to learn of what happened. “We’ve had some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist expression on this campus in the last few years,” he told The Times of Israel. “But we haven’t seen this kind of vicious and explicit anti-Semitism, not for awhile.”

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DHS’s ongoing challenge: Securing soft targets :Chuck Brooks,

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as the vice president for government relations & marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions. He served at the Department of Homeland Security as the first director of legislative affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate.

In response to the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said there is “no credible or specific intelligence regarding a similar plot that has been uncovered” in the U.S.

Regardless, the Brussels attacks have certainly brought a new focus by DHS, the intelligence community and law enforcement to mitigate future threats to soft targets.

Security is based on increased vigilance and layering elements of intelligence, surveillance technologies and trained personnel to guard vulnerabilities. The real challenge has always been deciding how much security to allocate to what, where and when.

Democratic societies by their nature are open and accessible, which poses a difficult challenge to secure all soft targets in public places such as airports, trains, buses, malls, schools, stadiums and hospitals. Or, for that matter, to secure any place where many people like to socially or commercially gather. The emergence of new capabilities could enable DHS to address these vulnerability issues, and there are protocols and systems that can make a difference.

DHS is exploring futuristic checkpoints that integrate the intelligent fusion of sensor components. The set-up could consist of behavioral sensors that try to measure hostile intent with micro facial and auditory sensors. Other physiological sensors could monitor respiratory, cardio, thermal and iris reactions of passengers who may mean harm.

These checkpoints could be combined with high-definition thermal cameras equipped with facial recognition software that feeds into real-time databases of suspected terrorists. The checkpoints could also use millimeter wave or 3-D imaging with stand-off abilities to detect bombs at a distance.

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Chuck Brooks: Vigilance, Shared Intell, Tech Key to Protect ‘Soft Targets’

Posted By on April 2nd, 2016

Chuck Brooks, vice president for government relations and marketing at Sutherland Global Services, believes the U.S. should exercise vigilance, adopt intelligence and surveillance technologies and deploy trained security personnel to prevent attacks on soft targets.http://www.executivegov.com/2016/03/sutherlands-chuck-brooks-vigilance-shared-intell-tech-key-to-protect-soft-targets/

He wrote in a guest piece published Monday on Federal Times the recent terror attacks in Brussels have brought a new focus to the U.S. government’s national security efforts.

“While no plots have been recently uncovered directed at our soft targets, it does not mean that such plots do not exist,” he noted.

“Increased vigilance, shared intelligence, continued specialized training, and more investments in security technologies, canine detection capabilities, and dedicated security personnel to patrol common spaces will all serve to make us safer.”

The Department of Homeland Security is eyeing a potential integration of physiological and behavioral sensor systems into checkpoints, according to Brooks.

He recommended that DHS checkpoints adopt facial recognition software designed to feed real-time data into a database of suspected terrorists as well as three-dimensional imaging tools that can work to detect bombs.

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Integration Is Not the Answer to Muslim Terrorism It’s not cultural integration, but religious disintegration. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on April 1st, 2016

There is a famous photo of Anjem Choudary, the head of multiple banned organizations calling for imposing Sharia law on the UK whose follower was responsible for the Lee Rigby beheading, getting drunk as a young law student. Friends recall “Andy” smoking pot and taking LSD, sleeping around and partying all the time. Andy was really well integrated, but he still turned back into Anjem.

While the proliferation of segregated Muslim areas, no-go zones in which English, French or Dutch is the foreign language, is a major problem, it is a mistake to think that “integration” solves Islamic terrorism.

It doesn’t.

The Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings seemed integrated. Nobody noticed anything wrong with Syed Rizwan Farook, the San Bernardino shooter, or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber. They weren’t lurking in a no-go zone. They had American friends, an education and career options if they wanted them. They didn’t want them. And that’s the point.

Bilal Abdullah was a British-born doctor who tried to carry out a terrorist attack at Glasgow International Airport. He wasn’t marginalized, jobless or desperate. He had a cause.

Quite a few converts have become Muslim terrorists. If integration were the issue, white converts to Islam wouldn’t be running off to join ISIS or plotting terrorist attacks like Don Stewart-Whyte, who converted to Islam and planned to blow up planes headed from the UK to the US. Along with his friend Oliver Savant, the son of a secular Iranian father and British mother, they are the reason why you can’t carry liquids onto a plane.

Muslim terrorism is not caused by failed integration, but by a conscious disintegration. What is often described as “radicalization” is really a choice by “integrated” Muslims to become religious and to act on their beliefs. Muslim men who formerly dressed casually begin growing beards and wearing Salafist garb. They consciously reject what Western society has to offer because they have chosen Islam instead.

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MARCH THE MONTH THAT WAS: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Posted By on April 1st, 2016

You know you live in New England when you awake on the morning of the vernal equinox and the ground is covered with snow! But as Mark Twain (who lived in Hartford, Connecticut for seventeen years) once said: “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”

It wasn’t only the weather that was out of sorts in March: The Republican race for President took a nastier tone, as the wives of Trump and Cruz were invoked in petty and mean ways. Not to suggest that wives have ever been immune from the scurrilous behavior of their husband’s opponents. Rachel Jackson was called an adulteress and a bigamist. She died of a heart attack, after her husband was elected but before he was inaugurated. Florence Harding was accused by the press of poisoning her husband. Eleanor Roosevelt was reamed by southern newspapers for associating with Blacks. Life magazine referred to Mrs. Truman as “payroll Bess.” It was widely believed that Mamie Eisenhower had a drinking problem. Nonetheless, one hopes for civility; unfortunately, rudeness sells better than decency.

But it was the persistence of Islamic terrorism – seen most vividly in the horrific bombings in Brussels, where the dead were so mutilated that identification was difficult – that defined the month. Brussels received the most attention in our West-centric world, but Islamic attacks in the Middle East and North and Sub-Saharan Africa occurred, literally, daily – including the killing of 70 on Easter, near a children’s swing in Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park in Lahore, Pakistan. Slipping in bathtubs may kill more Americans than terrorists, but that is effectively a tautological argument used by an Administration that refuses to put the qualifier “Islamic” before the noun “terrorist.” According to a report recently out from the nonprofit Investigative Project on Terrorism, the number of people killed annually by terrorists has increased eight-fold since 2010. While Mr. Obama took pride in the killing of ISIS financial chief Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli (and I would rather him dead than alive and free), one cannot help but think how much better it would have been had he been captured, made to talk and then executed. Collateral damage would have been less and we might have learned something that could help prevent future attacks.

In an attempt to divide further an already fractured Republican Party, President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court. Judge Garland would seem qualified for the position, but he is no Antonin Scalia. He is a moderate. He is a man who interprets the Constitution more liberally than did Justice Scalia. It would be like replacing a Mastiff with a Golden Retriever. It is not that Mr. Obama prefers moderates like Judge Garland – Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are better examples of his leftist leanings – but he would prefer to trap Republicans in the quagmire he has concocted. In a closely watched case concerning First Amendment rights (a re-hearing of Abood v. Detroit Board of Education), the Court split evenly 4-4. They therefore left in place a decision by a lower court that stated public sector workers had to pay union fees for collective bargaining and political support, even if they chose not to join the union and/or disagreed how their dues would be spent. It was a win for unions and a loss for First Amendment advocates. The decision would have been 5-4 in favor of the appellants had Antonin Scalia been alive.

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Pat Leahy’s Israel Obsession The Vermont senator’s fixation with the Jewish State turns ugly. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on April 1st, 2016

Vermont, the state that gave us unrepentant socialist, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is home to another radical liberal breed named Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Along with Sanders, Sen. Leahy represents the left flank of the Democratic Party and often finds himself at loggerheads with its more centrist members.

Not unsurprising, Leahy is also a visceral critic of Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy and stalwart U.S. ally. In 2011, citing alleged human rights violations, he proposed a bill that would have cut funding to three elite Israeli units that conduct counter-terror operations in Judea/Samaria and Gaza, prompting intervention by Israel’s then defense minister, Ehud Barak.

In 2012, Leahy employed veiled anti-Semitic rhetoric to oppose an amendment proposed by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that called for the State Department to provide a more accurate accounting of which actual Palestinian refugees were being serviced by U.S. tax dollars. In opposing Kirk, Leahy implied that those who favored the amendment had other interests and not those of the U.S. in mind thereby invoking the blatantly anti-Semitic “Israel firster” canard, which implies divided Jewish loyalties.

Leahy now seems to have set his sights on obtaining “justice” for Arab terrorists neutralized by Israel while conducting terror attacks against Israelis. He recently sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to investigate “gross violations of human rights” alleged to have been committed by Israel’s security forces. The letter, which also names Egypt as an offender, claims that Israel may have engaged in extrajudicial killings and torture.