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80 Islamist Terrorist Plots: The U.S. Needs to Redouble Its Counterterrorism Efforts By David Inserra and Riley Walters

Posted By on January 29th, 2016

It is less than a month into 2016, and two terrorist plots have occurred, one foiled and the other successful. Additional information has become available regarding a case from December 2015, resulting in another addition to The Heritage Foundation’s list of terrorist plots and attacks. The FBI’s release of more information in December about the shooting at two Chattanooga military facilities in July 2015 also adds to the list, bringing the total number of Islamist-inspired terrorist plots and attacks against the U.S. since 9/11 to 80.
Chattanooga, No. 74

The Heritage Foundation is now adding the July 16, 2015, shooting at two military facilities in Chattanooga that killed four Marines and a sailor to its list of Islamist terrorist plots. While there were news reports pointing to an Islamist motivation, Heritage preferred to wait for the outcome of the FBI’s investigation before making a final determination.

In December 2015, FBI Director James Comey announced that the shooter, Mohammad Abdulazeez, “was inspired, motivated by a foreign terrorist organization’s propaganda.”[1] Comey further claimed that it was difficult “to untangle which particular source,” as there “are lots of competing [terrorist] poisons out there.”[2] The FBI, however, certainly knows the general kind of terrorist poisons to which Abdulazeez was attracted: They were of a violent, Islamist nature.

The FBI’s failure to provide the American people with this information means that other sources need be relied upon. Multiple news organizations reported that Abdulazeez attacked these facilities for Islamist reasons. Counterterrorism sources for ABC reported that Abdulazeez searched the Internet to learn how such violence could remove his sins and found justifications and guidance on violent Islamist websites.[3] Reuters reported that Abdulazeez was inspired by the general propaganda of violent Islamists.[4] Sources for NBC reported that Abdulazeez had downloaded audio recordings of al-Qaeda cleric and propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.[5] The FBI conclusion, added to varied news reports is enough evidence to add the Chattanooga attack to the list of Islamist-inspired attacks.
Mohamed Elshinawy, No. 77

Over the course of 2015, Mohamed Elshinawy conspired with others to support ISIS. Starting in February 2015, Elshinawy discussed with a co-conspirator the possibility of attacking the U.S., being careful to avoid discussing specific plans because he feared that he was being monitored. Elshinawy and his co-conspirator regularly took precautions to avoid detection by using false names and different phones, lying to authorities, and concealing connections to ISIS and to each other.[6]

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Israel’s Wrong Public Relations: By Ruth King

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

Israel’s supporters in America from the top to the lower community organizers and from left to right agree on one subject, namely that Israel needs better public relations and there is a need to disseminate positive information to portray Israel and its policies in a glowing light.

Unfortunately most of these efforts sound more like the complaints of poor relations rather than good public relations. Even Israel’s staunchest protagonists fall into the trap of thinking that listing Israel’s numerous concessions to its enemies will soften or convince hardened anti-Semites.

As a matter of fact, enumerating Israel’s serial appeasements and the catastrophic results only show a weak, forlorn, and desperate nation begging to be liked by the wrong people at the wrong time. It also displays a nation unable to learn from history which has lost the will to assert its historic and legitimate rights. And, worst of all, it shows political leadership which cravenly puts the escalating demands of its adversaries before defense of its citizens.

Furthermore, too much of this propaganda hints that “recognition of its right to exist as a Jewish state” is what is to be negotiated. A disproportionate number of post-colonial era nations have disintegrated into swamps of famine, chaos, genocide, jihad and tyranny, and only Israel has to plead for “recognition of its right to exist?” That is both idiotic and morally depraved.
A good public relations policy starts with the declaration that Israel will not reward enemies with jihad as their agenda. The nation’s priority is to defend its citizens and the state’s remarkable accomplishments.

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Principle over Politics in Iowa By The Editors

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz both have been described as “insurgency” candidates, but it is important to ask: Insurgents on behalf of what, exactly? An excellent example of what this means in real terms is the question of ethanol, the useless gasoline additive that the federal government inflicts on American consumers at the behest of corn growers, processors, and related special interests.

Ethanol is, inevitably, dear to many hearts in corn-producing Iowa, which makes it a tender subject for presidential candidates of both parties facing the early test of the Iowa caucus. It presents a test of principle. One of the basic problems of American governance is the interaction of what is known in political-economy terms as “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” A manufacturing tax credit that subsidizes Starbucks as a “manufacturer” to the extent that it puts beans into bags doesn’t mean very much to the average taxpayer or member of Congress, but it may mean a lot to Starbucks. Special-interest groups will fight very hard for their perks, and no one has as strong an incentive to fight against them.

RELATED: Refusing to Kiss King Corn’s Ring in Iowa

The ethanol program is pure corporate welfare. It is marketed as an environmental initiative to the Left and a hedge against filthy “foreign oil” to the Right, but it is simply a mandate, a federal rule that says gasoline producers must buy ethanol and mix it into their product. It’s nice to have a marketing department with nuclear weapons and an IRS, so the corn-juice guys are very defensive about their mandate.

To stand against the ethanol mandate in Iowa is a test of political character.

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Media Elites Slam Charlie Hebdo for Mocking the Marginalized — Then Do the Same Themselves By Brendan O’Neill —

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

One year after the slaughter of its staff, Charlie Hebdo still stands accused of committing what liberals have decreed to be the worst crime in comedy: “punching down.” Satire is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, chants every Charlie-phobic cartoonist, novelist, and hack, seemingly having confused drawing vulgar pictures for a living with being a Pope Francis–style warrior against injustice. The problem with Charlie Hebdo, they say, is that it mauls the marginalized — it obsessively pokes fun at Muslims. In a shameless act of victim-blaming and back-stabbing, Doonesbury drawer Garry Trudeau wrote in The Atlantic magazine, in April 2015, that the scabrous French mag committed “the abuse of satire” and was always “punching downward.”

It’s time to put this myth of punching down to bed. For two reasons. First: If Charlie Hebdo does sometimes punch down, then it’s far from alone. Many of the American and European liberals who clutch their pearls over Charlie’s mocking of Mohammed frequently engage in a punching-down of their own, ridiculing what they view as the Neanderthal white trash who lurk in the dark heart of America or in run-down bits of Europe. And second: It simply isn’t true that Charlie’s assault on Islam (the thing it’s most famous for) is “punching down.” In fact, its ridicule of Mohammed is a clear case of punching up — up against Europe’s vast system of censorship that seeks to strangle “hate speech” against belief systems.

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Katrina Pierson: Donald Trump’s Consistently Inconsistent Spokeswoman By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

In April 2009, Katrina Pierson was a disappointed Obama voter and, she emphasized, “just a mom,” when she made her first foray into politics: a seven-minute speech at the Dallas Tea Party Tax Day Rally. “No president is going to change your life circumstances,” she reminded the crowd. “No government, no friends, no family, but most certainly no president is going to change your life circumstances.”

How things change.

In November, Donald Trump handpicked Pierson, a Texas tea-party activist, conservative pundit, and erstwhile Republican candidate for Congress, to be his national spokesperson, assigning her a seemingly superhuman task. In fact, it has proven an inspired choice. In Pierson, Trump found someone whose relationship to conservatism, and to the truth, is as elastic as his own.

Start with Pierson’s professional history. Ironically, it was as a volunteer for Ted Cruz’s insurgent campaign for a Senate seat in Texas that Pierson first found the national spotlight, becoming a regular guest on cable news (including and especially Fox News). A review of appearances from Pierson’s early political career reveals no particular trenchancy, but certainly a dose of that inimitable and inborn quality: “media savvy.”

Perhaps that is what she brought to the Cruz campaign, since the actual work she did remains a point of contention among the Cruz faithful. An activist involved in both Cruz’s senatorial and presidential campaigns told Politico, “My 8-year-old did more work for Ted than she ever thought about doing,” and Cruz insiders added that the senator never considered bringing Pierson in on his national efforts. (He did describe her as an “utterly fearless principled conservative” when she launched an unsuccessful primary bid against Texas congressman Pete Sessions in 2013.)

In any event, Pierson became a prominent Cruz supporter and even appeared on stage with him the evening of his general-election victory. And she continued to support Cruz long after Election Night: In January 2015, Pierson introduced him at a tea-party event in South Carolina, and in March she told Megyn Kelly that Cruz was “a walking testament to immigrants who have fled their countries to seek freedom and achieved the American dream.”

But since joining the Trump campaign, Pierson has been eager to suggest that it is Cruz himself who is the immigrant. “There’s a ton of voters who are a little uncomfortable voting for someone outside of the country,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month, insinuating that Cruz’s birth makes him ineligible for the presidency. Oddly, Pierson had no such concerns when she was campaigning for him — or when, in March 2015, just after Cruz’s presidential announcement and shortly after her comments on The Kelly File, she wrote on Facebook: “Repeating your wishes as facts isn’t going to make them so. Ted Cruz is a natural citizen by BIRTH and is eligible to be President,” adding: “For those constantly citing otherwise is plain whiney and the most unintelligent way to prop up your choice. So, your candidate is just going to have to bring it in the debates. Good luck!”

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Charlie Hebdo, One Year Later By Douglas Murray

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

It is one year since the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, and one year since much of the free world proclaimed itself to “be Charlie.” It is also a year since it became obvious that almost no one really was Charlie and that, if people had been, then the people shot for being Charlie might still be alive to publish Charlie. As it was, after the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy the staff of one small-circulation secularist French magazine were just about the only people in the world willing to treat Islam in the same way satirists and cartoonists across the world treat every other religion. Left out so far in front of a culture which prides itself on fearlessness and bravery, while being rife with fear and self-censorship, it made what happened in Paris a year ago seem almost inevitable.

Perhaps it is for that reason that the first reaction to the killings seemed not only over-compensating but slightly guilt-tinged in its posthumous solidarity. In any case, it wasn’t long before a backlash to this occurred. At first it came only from Islamist pundits who insisted that although the cartoonists might not have deserved death, they did in some sense “have it coming to them.” Naturally the smarter Islamists sensed that excusing murder for the crime of “blasphemy” is still not presently the fastest way to the Western heart. So they lobbed an even more untrue and toxic claim into the mix: Charlie Hebdo, they said, was “racist.”

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Yes, It Was Fair for Ben Sasse to Question Donald Trump About His Many Affairs By David French

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

Earlier this week, Senator Ben Sasse launched a barrage of questioning tweets at Donald Trump. Most dealt with policy. Unsurprisingly, the tweet that got personal is getting most of the attention: Low blow? Only if you think voters shouldn’t consider character and personal integrity when evaluating a president. Here’s what Sasse is talking about: Trump engaged in a highly publicized affair with actress Marla Maples while he was married to his first wife, Ivana Trump, and has written about having relationships with married women. “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller,” Trump wrote in his book “The Art of the Comeback.”

Trump also wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass” that he’s been with married women: “Beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names.” I don’t think affairs — by themselves — disqualify a person from the presidency, but the combination of infidelity and boastfulness is particularly damaging.

Indeed this kind of braggadocio is more reminiscent of professional wrestlers or third-world strongmen than an American president. I’m reminded (with apologies to Jonah for borrowing one of his favorite references) of the Congolese dictator Joseph Desiré-Mobutu, who changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, meaning “the all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” Perhaps for Trump we could find the equivalent translation for “the all-dealmaking mogul who because of his wealth and will to win goes from conquest to conquest leaving divorce in his wake.” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

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The Obama Administration Needs to Abandon Its Petraeus Obsession See note please

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

I admire V.D. Hanson and agree about the hypocrisy of Obama on the general’s amatory transgressions, but this statement about David of Surgeistan is ridiculous: “Petraeus was not just any four-star general. He was the most effective and talented American general since General Matthew Ridgway, who saved what appeared to be a lost Korean War. Petraeus and his team promoted the so-called surge of troops into Iraq, and enlisted tens of thousands of Iraqis to join the American effort to defeat radical terrorists and insurrectionists.” Huh? The rules of engagement enforced by General Petraeus put our soldiers in harm’s way to respect the sensibilities of barbarians and avoid “collateral damage”….As a result, soldiers responding to attacks by armed “civilians” in religious garb were punished for their response….rsk

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired General David Petraeus.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is now thinking of retroactively taking away one or two of Petraeus’s four stars. The potential demotion in rank, opposed by the Army, is intended as further punishment for the misdemeanor to which he pleaded guilty last year. Petraeus accepted two years of probation and paid a $100,000 fine for allowing his mistress, Paula Broadwell, to read classified information for research on the biography she was writing about Petraeus.

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Another Environmentalist Doomsday Clock Expires, When Can We Laugh? By David French

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988. A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ’s return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself.

I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian preachers more than irreverent Christian college students, and we couldn’t stop dividing the student body between the saved and the damned.

When the alarm clock rang the morning after the scheduled rapture, I hit snooze, and said, triumphantly, to my roommate, “We’re still here!” There was no response. “Hello?” Still no response. I looked down at his bed, and no one was there. For about nine seconds I was gripped by sheer panic. I’d been left behind. The lake of fire awaits! Then my roommate walked in from the shower, and the crisis passed.

I thought of this story as I watched Rush Limbaugh’s Al Gore “armageddon” clock expire. In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.” Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

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Donald Trump: Thin-Skinned Tyrant By Andrew C. McCarthy —

Posted By on January 28th, 2016

Is Donald Trump the sharia of American politics? I’m having trouble finding much daylight between Islamic law’s repressive blasphemy standards and the mogul’s thin-skinned sense of privilege.

None of us wants to be insulted or smeared. But sharia forbids not only ridicule or slander against Islam; it bans any examination that casts Islam in an unflattering light. Worse, truth is not a defense: Even if one’s questions are based on undeniable past actions or verbatim quotes from scripture, tough questioning is considered blasphemous. Retribution, moreover, is often completely out of proportion to the scale of the perceived “offense.”

How is Trump different?

They say politics ain’t beanbag: People in and around it eventually get slammed by opponents and other critics. But to Trump, the mildest criticisms are “vicious” attacks.

Let’s take the exchange last summer with Megyn Kelly that prompted Trump to whine that he was unfairly treated and to heap abuse on Ms. Kelly in the aftermath. (Before I go on, note that I support Mr. Trump’s rival Ted Cruz, and that I am on friendly terms with Megyn Kelly, on whose program I periodically appear.)

Given the limited time, the slew of candidates to engage, and the grave problems faced by the country, could Kelly have made a better choice than to grill Trump on his derogatory remarks about women? As they say in the debate biz, that’s debatable. But the questions she asked were hardly irrelevant.

Presidential temperament is often a decisive electoral consideration. Furthermore, the “war on women” meme is a bread-and-butter Democratic attack: regrettably effective against Republicans in the last presidential election and certain to be reprised if Hillary Clinton is the Dems’ nominee. How do we gauge Trump as a prospective nominee if we don’t get a sense of what ammo can be fired at him and how he is apt to handle it?