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Colonel Kemp et al: Israel’s Vital Defensible Borders (video)

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

“The Middle East is imploding in waves of violence whose impact has reached Israel.

To the north, radical Islamists in Syria linked to both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda are approaching Israel’s border on the Golan Heights and threatening Jordan as well. At the same time, Iran is sending thousands of rockets with increasingly accurate guidance systems to Hizbullah in Lebanon to again attack Israeli cities.

To the east, Israel faces an array of potential threats from hostile forces that include Iranian Revolutionary Guards, pro-Iranian Shi’ite militias, and radical Islamist terror armies.

To the south, the Islamic State is in Sinai, threatening both Israel and Egypt. At the same time, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza are working feverishly, with Iranian assistance, to rebuild their rocket capabilities to enable renewed attacks on Israel.

Israel must have defensible borders to protect itself against a broad range of current and future threats from radical Islamist forces.”

A compelling video from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, in which that doughty student of war and defender of Israel Colonel Richard Kemp features, inter alia:

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Who Actually Represents American Muslims? by Samuel Westrop

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Activists participating in CAIR’s lobby day included Abdullah Faaruuq, a Muslim cleric, who, in response to the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Aafia Siddiqui, told Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword and go out and do your job.”

“[CAIR] is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization. It works in the United States as a lobby against radio, television and print media journalists who dare to produce anything about Islam that is at variance with their fundamental agenda. CAIR opposes diversity in Islam.” — Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Muslim cleric and secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly.

Very few American Muslims seem to feel that CAIR is a legitimate voice for American Islam. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, about 88% of American Muslims said that CAIR does not represent them.

CAIR has been denounced by anti-racism groups, the federal government and by other Muslims. When legislators meet with CAIR, they help CAIR impose itself upon Muslim communities as a self-declared representative.

On November 12, 2015, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), with the support of a number of local Islamic groups in Boston, organized a lobbying day at the Massachusetts State House, ostensibly to advocate on behalf of local Muslims.

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“Somebody’s Lying. Who Is It?” by Mark Steyn

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

On December 29th Hillary Clinton sat down for an interview with the editorial board of The Conway Daily Sun. (I’m on the western border of New Hampshire, Conway is down the other end of the Kancamagus on the eastern border.) As you can see from the photograph at right, the occasion lacks the glamour of her sit-downs with court sycophants like George Stephanopoulos, but it did provide a glimpse of the kind of day Mrs Clinton would be having every single day if the US media were journalists rather than Hillary’s palace guards. Tom McLaughlin is a member of the Sun’s editorial board, and, unlike most of the bigshots at The New York Times, he knows the facts on Benghazi.

Just by way of background, three months ago, the latest crop of email releases from Hillary’s secret server reveals that she knew even as the Benghazi attack was unfolding that it was terrorism and not, as I put it back in September 2012, a spontaneous class-action movie review. As I said to Hugh Hewitt in October:

She chose to politicize it from the moment it was happening, even as it was underway. In other words, in the afternoon of September 11th, when it was 9:00 in the evening in Benghazi, she was already politicizing it. And I think it was damaging that on September 12th, she told not only the President of Libya and the Prime Minister of Egypt, but also her own family members that it was a terrorist attack. And yet, there she was on September 14th at Andrews Air Force Base over the coffins of the dead lying to Tyrone Woods’ family when she told them we’re going to get that guy who made the video, and we’re going to have him arrested and prosecuted… She tells the truth to the Government of Libya. She tells the truth to the Government of Egypt. But she lies to the people to whom she is meant to be a public servant, the American people…

At a critical moment on a critical date in American history, she opened her mouth and vomited forth a sewer of lies that everybody else is supposed to just try and swim their way through to find out the reality of what went on. And if you’re a foreign government leader, you know the truth. If you’re the American people, you get lied to.

Once you know the timeline of her communications with the Libyans, the Egyptians and with Chelsea Clinton, it becomes harder and harder to accept that the video distraction was anything other than a consciously constructed official lie.

Now listen to Tom McLaughlin at the Conway editorial meeting. He has the facts, and she has a lot of generalized evasions about the “fog of war”:

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The Ghosts of Charlie Hebdo by Mark Steyn

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

“What happened on January 7th 2015 was terrible. But our response to it made it more terrible, and emboldened civilization’s enemies. With respect to the late Charb, the choice is not between dying standing up or living on our knees – for those who choose to live on their knees will die there, too, cringing and craven. As I said a year ago:

The weepy passive candlelight vigils – the maudlin faux tears and the Smug Moral Preening overdose – aren’t enough. If you don’t want to put out the fire, it will burn your world to the ground.”

One year ago today – January 7th 2015 – two Muslim fanatics burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people, including the bulk of the senior editorial staff and some of France’s best known cartoonists. I heard about the attack shortly before I went on that morning’s John Oakley Show in Toronto. Throughout the very bad year for free speech that followed, I have thought often of Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo and a great cartoonist in the French style. Two years before his death, he said:

It may seem pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.

He did. He was an heroic figure, and he paid for it with his life. One reason for that is because, when everyone else is on their knees, the guy standing up kinda stands out. And Charb & Co had been standing out for almost ten years. As I said to Megyn Kelly at Fox News later that night:

STEYN: Yes, they were very brave. This was the only publication that was willing to publish the Muhammad — the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006 because they decided to stand by those Danish cartoonists. I’m proud to have written for the only Canadian magazine to publish those Muhammad cartoons. And it’s because The New York Times didn’t and because Le Monde in Paris didn’t, and the London Times didn’t and all the other great newspapers of the world didn’t – only Charlie Hebdo and my magazine in Canada and a few others did. But they were forced to bear a burden that should have been more widely dispersed…

We will be retreating into a lot more self-censorship if the pansified Western media doesn’t man up and decide to disburse the risk so they can’t kill one small, little French satirical magazine. They’ve gotta kill all of us.

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How Panama and Mexico Help Potential Terrorists Reach the U.S. Border By Todd Bensman

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

The State Department’s April 2015 “Country Report on Terrorism” no doubt came as sweet music to the ears of Special Interest Alien (SIA) smugglers. These are the smugglers of migrants from the spawning grounds of Islamic terrorism that, as I have been arguing, American homeland security leaders must strategically target with much greater aplomb to reduce the prospect of a Paris-like border infiltration attack here.

The April 2015 report noted that Latin American nations had only made “modest improvements to their counterterrorism capabilities and their border security” from the previous year(s). It noted corruption, weak government institutions, weak or non-existent legislation, and lack of resources as primary causes for little counterterrorism progress.

Conditions like those are, to SIA smugglers, pretty much a free pass to move their human contraband — and terrorist travelers posing as asylum seekers — from the Middle East through Latin America to the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s how so many of the Paris attackers did it in Europe: their smugglers took advantage of the same advantageous institutional weaknesses in Turkey, Italy, the Balkans, Hungary, Greece, and other countries.

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Epiphany: What Was Cruz or Rubio Is Now Cruz or Trump By Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

With the next Republican debate scheduled for later this month, I thought it might be worth stepping back to ask about the state of play on the political field. The first item of business is

TRUMPERY. I last wrote at any length about The Donald at the end of July when he was first really soaring in the polls. “I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016,” I wrote then, and I still believe that.

But I also continue to believe, as I said then, that Donald Trump “has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder.” Sure, Trump is the walking epitome of vulgarity, a veritable Platonic Form of the gilded comb-over. But what repels the Volvo-driving, Ivy-League-aspiring, SNL-watching, post-Christian, gun-hating, illiberal liberal elite often plays well in flyover country where, mirabile dictu, many folks who still possess

the franchise reside. They kind of liked it when Donald Trump said, à propos John McCain, that he preferred war heroes who did not get captured by the enemy. They liked it when he called Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig”: between us, they think she is a fat pig, too. The mot about the dishy Megyn Kelly bleeding from “the eyes or wherever” was kind of gross, but CNN got it exactly wrong when they said that Trump’s comment “draws outrage.”

What it drew were titters, partly of admiration (in the old sense), partly of relief. At a time when politicians, like academics, like journalists, are enjoined to walk about on a field of eggshells, worried about offending feministsblackscripplesgaysmexicansinjunsmuslimsweirdosofalldescriptions, Trump’s bravado was . . . refreshing. “He can’t say that” screamed the Minders: “But he just did say it” chortled the insensitive masses. “What are you going to do about it?”

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New Black Panthers with Guns, Lots of Them By J. Christian Adams

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

I remember the good old days when President Obama and his Justice Department weren’t so worried about nasty racists and felons having guns. I remember when President Obama and his Justice Department refused to do anything about New Black Panthers with guns, even New Black Panthers with criminal records possessing firearms and others threatening to kill cops.

This week President Obama announced legally dubious plans to force private citizens to behave as if they were federal gun dealers and threatened to place the names of certain Americans on a list to prevent them from obtaining firearms. He sought to expand background checks to gun transactions that Congress has long exempted from federal interference.

President Obama claimed he was very concerned about the wrong people having guns.

He wasn’t always so concerned about the wrong people having guns.

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NRA Wisely Refuses Obama’s Invite to Gun Control Publicity Circus By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Good for them.

The nation’s largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence — just days after the president reignited a discussion over this controversial topic.

“The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,” NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN, which is moderating the live town hall Thursday evening in Virginia. The NRA strengthened its comment after initially saying the White House had “organized” the event.

The NRA, the most influential gun rights group in terms of political persuasion and financial contributions, boasts a membership of about five million people.

While the world burns around him, The Idiot King is maintaining a laser-like focus on an incremental abrogation of the Second Amendment rights of law abiding American citizens. In conjunction with executive action that will do nothing to stop criminals, he’s using his press monkeys to give him a forum to pontificate on gun control, disguised as a town hall event.

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TransCanada Sues Obama Administration Over Keystone Pipeline Rejection By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

The company behind the Keystone XL pipeline has taken legal action against the U.S. government for the Obama administration’s shootdown of the cross-border project.

The permitting process was delayed for years by the State Department. When they finally rejected the application in November, President Obama said the pipeline was nixed because it “would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy,” “would not lower gas prices for American consumers,” and “shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security.”

TransCanada responded today by filing a Notice of Intent to initiate a claim under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the basis that the denial was arbitrary and unjustified, the company said today. The company seeks more than $15 billion in damages.

They’ve also filed a lawsuit in federal court in Houston alleging that Obama overstepped his constitutional authority in blocking pipeline construction.

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Hillary’s Watergate Looms By Roger L Simon

Posted By on January 7th, 2016

Of all the welter of predictions for 2016, by far the most dramatic seems to have been given short shrift or swept under the rug — the possible indictment of Hillary Rodham Clinton while running for the presidency. Were such an event to occur, it would dominate our culture as nothing since Watergate. Yet most of us put it in the back of our minds, thinking it could never happen and focusing on the latest back and forth with Trump.

Nevertheless, as pointed out on PJM by Debra Heine, it very much could happen. Heine cited Laura Ingraham’s Tuesday radio interview with former U. S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe DiGenova, some of which went as follows in verbatim transcription (you can listen to the full interview here):

DiGenova: Hillary Clinton’s going to have problems because of what’s in the emails, but also the classifications. Her biggest problem right now is the FBI. They’re not going away. They have reached a critical mass in their investigation of the Secretary and all of her senior staff. And, it’s going to come to a head, I would suggest, in the next sixty days. And, I predict Hillary will not make it to the finish line. She’s not going to be able to complete her campaign. The criminal investigation must focus on her and all the people around her. And, if Jim Comey, the FBI director, is doing his job, which I expect him to do as an honorable man, she cannot be the nominee of the Democratic Party. She’s going to have to be charged with the crime. It’s going to be a very complex matter for the Department of Justice, but they’re not going to be able to walk away from it. She and her staff have committed numerous federal crimes involving the negligent and improper handling of classified information. They are now at over 1,200 classified emails. And, that’s just for the ones we know about from the State Department. That does not include the ones that the FBI is, in fact, recovering from her hard drives. (1:08)