http://jamieglazov.com/2016/02/05/but-isis-kills-muslims-too-on-the-glazov-gang/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.
Daniel discussed “But ISIS Kills Muslims Too!”, analyzing Obama’s favorite and specious mantra that ignores how totalitarian entities eat their own. (See Raymond Ibrahim’s article on this issue here.)
Don’t miss it!
Having annexed Crimea as well as swaths of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin casts a menacing eye at the Baltics. His new favorite ally, Iran, violated President Obama’s ballyhooed nuclear arms deal before the ink was dry, testing a new class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles designed to be tipped with the very nuclear warheads the mullahs deny coveting. Meanwhile, China flouts international law by constructing artificial islands to bolster its aggressive South China Sea territorial claims. In Europe, a Middle Eastern diaspora wreaks havoc on the continent, exploiting its generous laws on immigration and travel between countries while overrunning communities with Muslim settlers notoriously resistant to Western assimilation.
Rarely in modern history has the inadequacy of law to manage the jungle that is international relations been more starkly illustrated. Yet, according to the United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, it is precisely law, as divined by judges, that can tame our tempestuous times. That the judiciary is the institution least competent and least politically accountable for the task is evidently no more an obstacle than the impotence of law itself.
Appointed to the High Court by President Bill Clinton twenty-one years ago, Justice Breyer has been a stalwart liberal—which is to say, a political “progressive” on a court that is increasingly political. He is refreshing nonetheless, even for those of us who recoil from his ideological bent, for his willingness to depart from the Court’s custom of avoiding public debate. Like his colleague and philosophical counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia, Breyer is a frequent public speaker and occasional author on jurisprudential approaches to contemporary challenges. His newest book is The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.1
The work has much in common with Active Liberty, Breyer’s offering of a decade ago, which the Hoover Institute scholar Peter Berkowitz perceptively pegged as a rationalization of “judicial willfulness masquerading as judicial deference” to democratic self-determination. The Court and the World is similarly a call for judicial supremacy, this time under the guise of international “interdependence.” The courts are once again pitched as an enabling agent of democratic choice, but on a supra-national scale.
The world, though, is a very undemocratic place—though perhaps no more undemocratic than Supreme Court diktats that remove controversies like abortion and “same-sex marriage” from democratic resolution.
How to explain the difference between progressive pretensions to “activate” liberty—i.e., to vouchsafe “the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy vaporously put it in imposing same-sex marriage on the nation—and progressive judging’s actual affect of curtailing our freedom to live as we choose? This inversion of democracy, it turns out, flows naturally from Breyer’s inversion of the judicial role—a philosophy of judging shared by a working majority of his Court, the bloc of five unelected jurists whose edicts control ever more of what was once democratic space.
“[O]ur American judicial system,” he contends, should “see itself as one part of a transnational or multinational judicial enterprise.” Inconveniently (but, alas, not insuperably), the only “judicial enterprise” licensed by the Constitution, from which federal judges derive their authority, is the protection of Americans from overreach by our government and the remediation of other harms inflicted by third parties in violation of laws enacted by our elected representatives.
Interpreting the law as written—an intellectual challenge that is vital to the rule of law even if not sufficiently stimulating for many a robed social engineer—is not so much an enterprise as a discipline. In our system, it is supposed to be the politically accountable branches that get to do the enterprising. Nor does the discipline of judging take on a “transnational or multinational” character merely because some small percentage of the parties implicated in legal disputes is of foreign extraction—even if, as Breyer rightly observes, modern technology has made the percentage larger by making the world smaller.
What does Breyer see as the objective of this global judicial enterprise? The advancement of “acceptance of the rule of law itself.” This “rule of law,” you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, bears an astonishing resemblance to the rule of lawyers—in particular, the judges along with the army of equally unelected transnational progressive lawyers who urge them on.
With this week’s caucus in Iowa, speculation finally has finally given way to actual voting results in the presidential campaign. That makes it as good a time as any to observe that the Clintons have done it again: They have so degraded our politics that criminality rather than unfitness for office appears to be the only potential disqualifier for Democrats.
Sadly, we must say “potential” because we cannot be confident that even an indictment would cause Hillary Clinton’s supporters to abandon her. They’d rather have the Oval Office run out of Leavenworth than have a Republican occupy it in Washington.
The evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information is mounting. In just the past few days, we’ve learned that several emails communicated through and stored on the private email system Clinton improperly used to conduct government business contained the most closely guarded categories of national-defense intelligence. They cannot be disclosed even in redacted form without endangering (I should say, further endangering) vital intelligence methods and sources.
Moreover, there is so much classified information strewn through Clinton’s thousands of emails that the State Department claims it cannot comply with a federal court’s disclosure schedule. Translation: State is carrying water for the Clinton presidential campaign, ensuring that, for the next several weeks, primary voters will go to the polls not knowing what other damaging information may compromise the Democrats’ frontrunner before the November election.
The former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said with the “body of evidence” against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey “really has no choice but to refer this for indictment.”
“It does appear as though the administration continues to push for, if you will, double and triple and quadruple measuring,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), now chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told Fox Business Network. “But as you know, we have communications back and forth, the president from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail. We have 1,300 sensitive documents, 22 classified at the highest level.”
“This is well past anyone claiming that they didn’t know.”
Clinton told ABC on Sunday that her email scandal “is very much like Benghazi… the Republicans are going to continue to use it, beat up on me.”
“I understand that. That’s the way they are,” she said.
Her appearance came after 22 emails the State Department originally planned to release with Friday’s batch were withheld because of top-secret classification.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to oversee the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as the nation’s top diplomat.
Cornyn said the investigation should be as “far removed from White House politics” as possible.
“In light of the unprecedented nature of the case and the multiple conflicts presented to the Department of Justice, I can see no other appropriate course of action than for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to pursue this matter wherever the facts may lead,” he said on the Senate floor. “That need is underscored by the apparent inability by the White House to try to influence or at worst obstruct the current investigation.”
The State Department categorized at least 22 emails found on Clinton’s server as “Top Secret.” The agency recently announced it would not release them. In response, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said an indictment does not seem to be the direction in which the White House is heading.
“Either the White House has information that they should not have about the status of this ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI, or they’re sending a signal to the FBI and the Department of Justice that they want this to go away,” said Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee.
“It’s hard for me to interpret these comments both by the president or his press secretary as anything other than trying to influence the FBI or the Department of Justice on the outcome the administration prefers.”
The US and others, while suggesting they are strong supporters of Israel and its need for security, in reality are not promoting peace. Their policies are actually sustaining and rewarding terror.
Let me explain…
President Obama for example has repeatedly stated throughout his administration America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable. No doubt these are reassuring words to Israel and its friends around the world. However, his actions contradict his words.
How so? It has been the policy of the US and others to condemn the “settlements” and the “occupation” as the main obstacles to achieving peace with the Palestinians. For those who subscribe to said view, where were the occupation or settlements in 1948 or 1967? They did not exist.
However, in order to see the folly of blaming the lack of peace on these issues, we must look at what the statements imply.
They suggest the US is attempting to be balanced. This is meant to appeal to the Arab world, which believes the US has been too supportive of Israel for many years.
They allow the US to avoid tackling the real issues which are preventing peace.
WHAT will it take for many in the Left to openly condemn the Islamic State? Why this silence in the face of evil?
In January, the Islamic State threw two men off a tall building in Iraq for the “crime” of being gay.
In February, they threw another gay man off a building, this time in Syria and, when he somehow survived, had a crowd stone him to death.
IS is in a war against gays — not just against Jews, Christians and any Muslim thought insufficiently devout.
But what have our main gay representatives — largely Left-leaning — said in response to such savagery against gays?
The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Silent.
Victoria’s Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby? Not one press release.
Labor frontbencher Penny Wong, openly lesbian? Nothing.
Former Greens leader Bob Brown, our first openly gay senator?Also nothing.
” To begin with, it is highly unlikely that feminists, gays, etc., are going to flock to the Liberals, Turnbull or not. Even more obviously, it is absurd to claim that there is a powerful global trend against traditional conservative values when the most powerful form of militant political activism on the planet is Islamism, an arch-reactionary creed being systematically imposed on 1.5 billion Muslims (and the rest of the world where possible!). Similarly, both China and India, accounting for nearly 3 billion people, are drawing upon traditional belief systems to sustain their national identities as they undergo accelerated modernization. In Europe, there is an increasing move to the right and far-right as the technocratic progressivism of the central EU powers, such as Germany, France, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, proves to be utterly impotent in the face of the mass Muslim insurgency presently overwhelming their meagre border defences. In America conservatism continues to be an extremely powerful force, as the present presidential campaign is demonstrating. Of the other continents, Africa and Latin America are home to innumerable dictatorships, kleptocracies, and failed or semi-failed states where jihadists and crime syndicates run amok and talk of a conflict between progressivism and conservatism would be not only beside the point but bizarre.”
Philosophically, historically, and economically, progressivism is bankrupt, sustained only by the very capitalist system and productive middle-class it reviles. As the gargantuan costs become utterly unsustainable, it is this chimera in which Turnbull and his supporters invest their hope and rhetoric.
With Islamic State gaining ground in Libya, another Western intervention there looks increasingly likely. The key question is whether it will happen at the request of a Libyan unity government, once rival factions endorse it, or if the West will be compelled to go to war first.
The U.S. and other Western countries helped topple Moammar Gadhafi in 2011 but then turned their attention elsewhere.
By 2014, the country fell into a civil war between an Islamist-led administration in Tripoli and an internationally recognized government based in the eastern city of Tobruk.
Local affiliates of Islamic State took advantage of that division to grab the coastal city of Sirte, Gadhafi’s hometown, last year. They later seized some other areas and inched closer to critical oil fields, damaging vital infrastructure.
With lawless Libya also serving as a springboard for migrants to Europe, European nations—particularly Italy and France, but also the U.K.—have long pushed for a stronger effort to stabilize the country. The U.S., too, has come to view continuing mayhem in Libya as a threat.
PARIS—The presumed leader of the Islamic State operatives who attacked Paris in November boasted that he slipped into Europe among refugees from Syria as part of a team of dozens of militants, according to a key witness.
If true, the testimony adds urgency to a continentwide effort by security services to track down people with links to the extremist group. Authorities fear that Islamic State smuggled many of its fighters into Europe among the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled Syria and Iraq in recent years, officials say.
The investigation into the Paris attacks has raised questions about Europe’s ability to screen those refugees for potential threats. At least two people involved in the Paris attacks had registered as refugees on a Greek island in the months before they surfaced in Paris.
The latest testimony, which was reported by French media Thursday, came from a woman who provided information that led French police to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian who is believed to have orchestrated the Nov. 13 killing spree in Paris that left 130 dead and hundreds injured.
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