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America Makes a U-Turn in the Middle East By Tony Badran

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

Obama’s long game is a complete restructuring of the balance of power in the region—but with what results?

The administration of President Barack Obama seldom missed an opportunity to insist that the alternative to the Iran nuclear deal was a war with Iran, a prospect that has now presumably been kicked further down the road. Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now.

Where America stands on the question of the wars that Iran is fueling across the Middle East has been obscured to some extent by outdated expectations, diplomatic niceties, and deliberate smoke-screens. But it would be wrong to take pro forma statements about America’s alliances with old friends like Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or Israel at anything like face value. The first thing the Obama Administration did following the recent burning of the Saudi embassy and consulate in Iran by a state-sponsored mob was not to condemn this assault on a longtime U.S. ally. Rather, the White House immediately launched a media campaign pushing the message that the problem was actually Saudi Arabia, and, as anonymous U.S. officials suggested on background, maybe it was time to reconsider America’s regional alliances.

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Obama’s Mosque Visit: Wrong Message, Wrong Venue By:Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

President Barack Obama’s Wednesday speech at the Islamic Society mosque in Baltimore, a venue tainted by a long history of preaching radicalism, summarizes his thinking about Islam and national security. That address has troubling implications and deserves detailed scrutiny.
OBAMA: “[I]f we’re serious about freedom of religion—and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country—we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths . . . We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”

FACTS: The implication is that Islam (with over 3,000 active mosques) is under attack in America, and that Obama’s “fellow Christians” are the culprits who need to listen. Since 9/11 89 Americans have been killed in 48 separate attacks of deadly Islamic terror in the U.S. while one Muslim was killed in an apparent “revenge” attack during the same period. Only Muslims routinely target members of other faiths on American soil. The number of Muslims involved in terrorism in the U.S. rose dramatically in 2015: it more than doubled over 2014. Two-thirds of them were born in America. The resulting public perceptions are not based on prejudice or bias, but on reason and empirical evidence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

At least 10,000 refugee children have ‘vanished into sex work and slavery trade’ after arriving in Europe

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.

At least 10,000 refugee children have vanished after arriving in Europe with many being forced into sex work and slavery, officials believe.

Thousands of young migrants have been targeted by criminals and are now missing, according to the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol.

The news emerged as charity Save the Children estimated that around 26,000 children were forced to travel into Europe alone last year.

Brain Donald, Europol’s chief of staff, told Mark Townsend at the Observer: ‘It is not unreasonable to say that we are looking at 10,000-plus children.

‘We just don’t know where they are, what they are doing and whom they are with.’

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AT THE UNITED NATIONS NOTHING JUSTIFIES TERRORISM, EXCEPT PALESTINIAN ‘FRUSTRATION’

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

The United Nations played the Holocaust game last week so it could play another lethal game this week. The ruse consists of making a big deal about the gas chambers for Jews back then, while stoking the fires of anti-Semitism burning right now.

On January 31, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon penned a New York Times op-ed to say at one and the same time that “people will always resist occupation” and “nothing excuses terrorism.” That follows a statement he gave to the Security Council on January 26, in which he said “Palestinian frustration is growing” and “it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as an incubator of hate and extremism.”

Reaction to the claim that it is human nature to stab pregnant women and mothers in front of their children – as Palestinians had done the week before – has been unanimous across the Israeli political spectrum. In the words of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 26: “The secretary-general’s remarks give a tailwind to terrorism.”

Nevertheless, the spokesman of the secretary-general doubled down in a press briefing on January 27 with these words: “Absolutely nothing justifies terrorism. . . . At the same time, if we want to see an end to this violence . . . we must address the root causes, the underlying frustrations.”

In short, for the United Nations, nothing justifies terrorism except Palestinian frustration.

It is hardly a secret that the UN agenda is to find reasons for treating the Jewish state differently – notwithstanding the UN Charter’s promise of equality for nations large and small. The settlements bandwagon is one of many.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Jason Chaffetz Should Back Off and Let the FBI Investigate Hillary’s E-mails By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

Politico reports that Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has given the go-ahead to House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) to investigate the lack of executive branch compliance with the recordkeeping and records-production provisions of the Federal Records Act (FRA) and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The investigation would include — though purportedly not center on — violations caused by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s maintenance of a private e-mail system that resulted in massive misplacement (and likely destruction) of government records, as well as the State Department’s willful flouting of FOIA production requirements.

The Chaffetz gambit could seriously interfere with the FBI’s ongoing investigation of the Clinton homebrew-server arrangement, which appears to have resulted in serious violations of laws protecting classified information. From a legal standpoint, that would make the congressional probe pointlessly problematic. Politically, it would be an astonishing unforced error by Republican leadership.

Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy are apparently telling Chaffetz all the right things about the need to proceed cautiously and stay out of the FBI’s way. But what they should be telling him is, “No, now is not the time.”

No one should know this better than Representative McCarthy. He would have Ryan’s job today if a monumental gaffe had not doomed his speakership bid: his brag that the House Benghazi Committee investigation had succeeded in damaging Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. This gifted the Clinton campaign with the powerful claim that the Benghazi investigation is nothing more than a partisan witch hunt — a talking-point Mrs. Clinton repeats, and the press dutifully echoes, whenever damaging evidence of her derelictions arises.

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Richard Baehr Where the GOP and Democrats differ on Israel

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

The Iowa caucuses served their usual function in winnowing down the field of ‎candidates to a more manageable number, and a smaller number of realistic ‎possibilities for the nomination. On the Democratic side, barring an indictment for ‎her private server issues with classified information sent and received, former Secretary of State Hillary ‎Clinton remains the overwhelming favorite to be nominated. It is not, however, a ‎sign of strength that she could only win half the vote in Iowa against Vermont ‎Senator Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old curmudgeonly socialist, who was not even a Democratic Party member until 2015. Clinton appears to lack ‎pretty much all the political skills of her husband and is running a campaign ‎reminiscent of 2008 when she campaigned as if she were entitled to the ‎nomination, and greatly underestimated the threat of Barack Obama. More than ‎half of Americans do not trust her, and she has provided plenty of ammunition to ‎the doubters.‎

The Republican race has settled into a contest between three leading contenders — ‎Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, businessman/reality TV ‎star Donald Trump and a few pretenders — former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New ‎Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich, businesswoman Carly ‎Fiorina and former pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Christie and Kasich have ‎been living in New Hampshire the past few months, much as Ted Cruz did in Iowa, ‎but without gaining the same traction. A Bush super PAC has been blasting ‎Rubio for months, with some damage done to Rubio but no noticeable gain for ‎Bush. The results in Iowa — a win for Cruz, with Trump second and Rubio a closer-‎than-expected third, has shaken up both the state and national polls. A new ‎national poll has Trump at 25%, and Cruz and Rubio at 21% each.‎

In a week, Cruz has stayed where he was, despite the Iowa victory, and Rubio has ‎doubled his share, almost all at Trump’s expense. Trump’s campaign has been ‎largely based on the fact that he is a winner, will make America win again and he ‎is winning in all the polls. When the first actual votes did not deliver a win for ‎Trump, a good bit of the bubble was burst.‎

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‘Pinkwashing’ and traitors to the human mind by Jamie Palmer

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

Since 2010, members of the anti-Israel left have denounced any mention of the Jewish state’s open-minded attitude toward homosexuals as “pinkwashing”: i.e., a cover for Israel’s alleged crimes against the Palestinians. To make sense of this bizarre accusation, Jamie Palmer cites George Orwell’s analysis of the leftist intellectuals of his own day whose blind devotion to Communism led them to defend Joseph Stalin:

“Last week, the neologism ‘pinkwashing’ made an unwelcome return to news headlines. On Friday January 22, protesters bearing placards denouncing Israel disrupted an event organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force as part of its Creating Change conference in Chicago. The protesters, it seems, were upset by the involvement of an Israeli LGBT organisation called Jerusalem Open House and a Jewish LGBT organization called A Wider Bridge that, the JTA reported, “seeks to build ties between gay communities in North America and Israel”.

Over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, law professor David Bernstein was flabbergasted. “Many participants,” he wrote, “describe the demonstration as both anti-Semitic and physically threatening (and the hotel felt obliged to call the police), but we can limit ourselves to the sheer craziness of radical LGBT activists shouting “free Palestine” and anti-Israel slogans to shut down an event involving an Israeli LGBT organization when Israel is a gay rights haven and the Palestinian territories, to say the least, are not.”

This was, as I hope to explain, to miss the point about what really irritates these people. And while I share Bernstein’s dismay, he needn’t have been shocked by their apparent perversity. It is only the most recent manifestation of a peculiar malady that has disproportionately afflicted the Left for decades.

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Why Obama is acting with such urgency in his hostility to Israel and attachment to Islam. Caroline Glick

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

On Wednesday the U.S. media interrupted its saturation coverage of the presidential primaries to report on President Barack Obama’s visit to a mosque in Maryland. The visit was Obama’s first public one to a mosque in the US since entering the White House seven years ago. The mosque Obama chose to visit demonstrated once again that his views of radical Islam are deeply problematic.

Obama visited the Islamic Society of Baltimore, a mosque with longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. During Operation Protective Edge, the leaders of the mosque accused Israel of genocide and demanded that the administration end US support for the Jewish state.

According to The Daily Caller, the mosque’s former imam Mohammad Adam el-Sheikh was active in the Islamic American Relief Agency, a charity deemed a terror group in 2004 after the US Treasury Department determined it had transferred funds to Osama bin Laden, Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.

El-Sheikh left the Baltimore mosque to take over the Dar el-Hijra mosque in northern Virginia. He replaced Anwar al-Awlaki as imam after Awlaki moved to Yemen in 2003. In Yemen Awlaki rose to become a senior al-Qaida commander.

Awlaki radicalized many American jihadists both through direct contact and online. He radicalized US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, and inspired him to carry out the 2009 massacre of 13 US soldiers and civilians at Fort Hood in Texas. Awlaki was killed by a US drone strike in 2011.

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On the ‘Tikkun Olam’ Fetish Are Jews commanded to “repair the world” or to repair the Jews? Steven Plaut

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

“The central mitzvah or commandment for our era is the mitzvah of Tikkun Olam. It is the defining mission of Jews to strive for the repair of the world by making society more just, fair, egalitarian, and sensitive. Judaism demands that we repair the world by striving for social justice. It is the mission of Jews in the Divine Plan for the universe to repair the world by repairing man, by improving and advancing mankind.”

The above paragraph is a fair representation of what has become the defining raison d’etre of Judaism as conveyed by non-Orthodox liberal Jewish organizations and synagogues in America. It is not a direct citation from any of them, but is an accurate paraphrase of what has become the canon of non-Orthodox Jewish liberalism in our time.

It is the “modernized” and contemporary “reinterpretation” of “Jewish ethics” as defined and inculcated by much of the Reform and Conservative movements. It is also the “theology” of Jewish radical leftist groups operating at the fringes of the Jewish community, including the “Renewal/ALEPH” movement, the “Eco-Judaism” groups, the “Tikkun community” of people and groups that are satellites to the magazine by that same name published by tikkun-activist Michael Lerner, and what remains of the “Reconstructionists.” Lerner, it should be added, discovers “repair of the world” even in LSD consumption.

What are we to make of “Tikkun Olam” proclamations?

POLITICS Comments turned off

When Advisers Hate Israel The dark narrative in Hillary’s emails. Joseph Klein

Posted By on February 5th, 2016

Hillary Clinton has tried to portray herself as a steadfast friend of Israel. “I have stood with Israel my entire career,” she wrote in an article appearing last November in The Forward. “As president, I will continue this fight.” She promised that she would “invite the Israeli prime minister to the White House in my first month in office.”

Hillary Clinton’s steadfast support for the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran calls into question her stated “personal commitment” to “fighting for Israel.” Peace and security in the region are not enhanced by a loophole ridden deal with a fanatical Islamist regime sworn to Israel’s destruction and to exporting its self-described “Islamic revolution” around the world.

Perhaps even more disturbing is what we have learned so far from the disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail system, which she recklessly used while serving as Secretary of State. Certain e-mails from her closest advisers that have been made public reveal the barrage of anti-Israel counsel she was receiving.

“These emails seem to demonstrate that a huge segment of her close advisers and confidantes were attacking Israel, condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and strategizing how to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria at all costs,” the Jerusalem Post concluded after reviewing the e-mails.