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Has the U.S. Government Finished Investigating CAIR for Terror Ties? By Johanna Markind

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

Consider this syllogism:

Muslim Brotherhood membership = a possible indicator of extremism.

CAIR = a Muslim Brotherhood organization.

∴ CAIR = “possibly” an “extremist” i.e. terrorist organization.

A recently-published British government report concludes that “membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism,” according to Prime Minister David Cameron. The report also notes that the British government was mistaken in believing it shared a common agenda with the Muslim Brotherhood against al-Qaeda and militant Salafism in general. Cameron said the government would be more careful in the future not to provide legitimacy or a platform for the Muslim Brotherhood.

The study is particularly noteworthy given that CAIR, a widely-quoted organization which poses as a civil-rights group, is a Muslim Brotherhood entity. A federal district court found it to be so, listing it under the heading “The following individuals/entitles who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” CAIR is number 11 on the list. CAIR was started with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation, a terrorist organization prosecuted by the aforementioned court for aiding the terrorist group Hamas. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Muslim Brotherhood is “Hamas’ parent organization.”

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The End of the Arab Spring Dream Disorganized urban liberalism couldn’t compete with the politics of tribe—or Islamism.By Sohrab Ahmari

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

Thursday marks a bitter anniversary in the Arab world. On Dec. 17, 2010, a Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after the authorities confiscated his goods and beat him. The incident sparked an uprising that within weeks would topple Tunisia’s venal autocracy. Protests spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. Despots from Morocco to Mesopotamia felt the heat of popular anger. Many couldn’t withstand it.

Yet today the Middle East is less stable, and less hopeful, than it was before the Arab Spring. Five years ago, the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab liberal became the region’s avatar. Now the knife-wielding jihadist and the refugee have risen to prominence instead.

Each Arab Spring country is unhappy in its own way. Tunisia is the only success story among the bunch, having adopted a secular constitution and completed several peaceful power transfers. As Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamic Ennahda party, recently told me, “We’ve remained on the bridge of democratic transition while others have fallen off.” True, but the birthplace of the Arab Spring is also the world’s top exporter of fighters for Islamic State, or ISIS.

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EPA Awards $542M To Colleges That Watchdog Never Audits by Ethan Barton

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

EPA officials gave $542 million to colleges and universities in grants to study everything from pollution caused by backyard grilling to hotel shower use, but those funds have never been audited by a government watchdog.

EPA awarded the funds to 341 schools in more than 3,100 grants from 2009 to 2014, according a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of more than 100,000 agency awards compiled by Open The Books.

The last audit by EPA’s inspector general of any of those grants, however, was 10 years ago, and then was only conducted in response to a specific complaint.

“The last time that the OIG did a review … was in December 2005 on a hotline complaint for the University of Nevada,” EPA IG spokesman Jeffrey Lagda told TheDCNF. “In the past 10 years, the OIG has not conducted any reviews of grants awarded to colleges and universities.”

Instead, the IG relies on single audits – audits of the each university as a whole – though Lagda did not say who conducts those inspections.

Officials with Open The Books – a non-profit government accountability group that is digitizing billions of dollars of spending at all levels of government – think change is needed.

“How is the EPA supposed to protect the environment when it can’t even protect its own grant-making system from mis-allocation of resources and taxpayer abuse,” Open The Books Founder Adam Andrzejewski told TheDCNF. “It’s time for a deep, line-by-line forensic audit of EPA disbursements.”

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The EPA’s Secret Staff Emails show the agency took dictation from green lobbies in possible violation of the law.

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

States and businesses are suing to stop the Obama Administration’s anticarbon Clean Power Plan, and now they have new evidence to seek a preliminary injunction.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute has obtained government emails that show the EPA secretly worked with environmental lobbyists to craft its Clean Power Plan regulating greenhouse gases. The emails show this secret alliance designed a standard that would be impossible or economically ruinous for existing coal plants to meet—in order to force their closure.

The New York Times first reported that in 2014 environmentalists Dan Lashof, David Doniger and David Hawkins—all with roots at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)—drafted a “blueprint” that “influenced” the greenhouse gas rules. That wasn’t the half of it.

The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, show that this trio and other environmentalists essentially wrote the rule. Their inside man was Michael Goo, who worked at the NRDC before becoming the EPA’s Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy. The emails show intense 2011 communications between Mr. Goo and high-level officials at the NRDC, the Sierra Club and the Clean Air Task Force. Mr. Goo used a private Yahoo email account to send multiple drafts of his options memo to these outside groups, which returned them with draft instructions.

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Obama Well Knows What Chaos He Has Unleashed : Victor Sharpe

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

Not content with creating havoc in the U.S. economy, setting Americans against each other, and forcing through a health reform act which has nothing to do with health but everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and an immense increase in governmental interference, President Obama opened a Pandora’s Box in the Middle East. He ushered in a catastrophe not seen since World War 2.

From his notorious Cairo speech to the present time, President Obama speaks and disaster follows. Some commentators still believe that Obama is utterly naïve, which was why he could not understand what would happen in Egypt as a result of his undermining the Mubarak regime. But it is increasingly apparent, even to the most diehard Obama supporter, that there is something truly troubling about President Obama’s mindset.

Obama is not naïve at all. He is an ideologue and knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West and Israel, irrespective of how much innocent blood flows as a result.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Terrorism: Where to Turn? by Richard Prasquier

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

Richard Prasquier is President of Keren Hayesod France and Honorary Chairman of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France). This article first appeared in a slightly different form in French. Gatestone thanks the author for his kind permission to publish it in English.

Our reaction should be directed not against the terrorists, but against those who indoctrinate, train and finance them — and on working to eradicate this virus of the mind.

Where are the demands to boycott those who fund ISIS? Their names are well-known.

The “Crusaders” now seem exhausted. They simply do not want enemies.

These attacks — like those before them — were simply meant to sow terror: go kill as many people as you can.

The Pope can insist all he likes that we have entered a Third World War; it is so much more comforting to repeat that the main problem is “Israel’s occupation” is the problem.

After the November 13 attacks in Paris, there were concerns in the media that Europe did not fully understand the gravity of the threats posed by radical Islam. Frances’s Minister of the Interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, however, certainly did not hide his prediction that, this year, a large scale attack would take place in France. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when” and “where.”

Thoughts first were for the victims, for those who will suffer all their lives — young people who went out just to enjoy some music or eat with friends.

Next came the questions: about the claim of responsibility by ISIS, and how the coordinated attacks would nullify the “lone wolf” theory — a hypothesis largely refuted anyway. These were commandos trained to kill, and to kill themselves too.

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Oberlin Students Demand Payment for Protests They also demand “segregated black-only ‘safe spaces.’” By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

The Oberlin College Black Student Union has released a list of 50 “Institutional Demands” for the school, including one that orders it to pay black students who organize protests $8.20 per hour for doing so.

The 14-page (!) document opens with this nice buzzword salad:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision.

“This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” it continues.

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Closing Guantanamo Bay Will Only Empower Our Enemies By Andrew C. McCarthy — December 19, 2015

Posted By on December 19th, 2015

There are 107 jihadists remaining at Guantanamo Bay. President Obama sees that as a huge problem and, for once, I agree with him. But there the agreement ends. The president is hell bent on shuttering the detention camp. I think the problem is that there are only 107 detainees.

Heading into his eighth year as commander-in-chief, Obama seems increasingly detached — inevitably so, as reality relentlessly distances itself from the president’s fantasies about Islam and terrorism.

Impervious to the bitter irony, the president waxed idiotic at his final White House press conference of 2015 about the need to close Gitmo — and about his imminent release of 17 jihadists to speed that process along — while the engines revved up to jet him to San Bernardino, Calif. There, he’ll find time for a quickie meeting with family members in mourning after the jihadist mass-murder of their loved ones two weeks ago.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Turkey’s ill-deserved deal with Israel

Posted By on December 18th, 2015

Israel’s Channel 10 broke a story Thursday night that is the kind of scoop journalists celebrate. Unfortunately, however, this one is very bad news.

According to sources in the Prime Minister’s Office, Israel and Turkey are on the verge of restoring full diplomatic relations. Translated into plain English, this means that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is about to make a deal with the devil.

The demon in question, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had already hinted on Monday that he was sniffing around his Jewish nemesis when he said that renewed ties between the two countries would have “a lot to offer to us, to Israel, to Palestine and also to the region.”

So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise to learn that a secret meeting was held on Wednesday in Switzerland between Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu and newly appointed Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, accompanied by Netanyahu’s long-time special envoy to Turkey, Yossi Ciechanover, for the purpose of reaching an agreement.

Nor is Erdogan’s timing due to a gradual change of heart. Rather, it is because the Ankara Islamist with hegemonic fantasies has become a pariah in the Muslim world he dreamed of ruling, while Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready, willing and able to pummel him into oblivion.

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Military Strategist Explains Why Donald Trump Leads—And How He Will Fail By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on December 18th, 2015

Air Force fighter pilot John Boyd’s theory about confounding opponents with a constantly shifting battlefield applies to Donald Trump and all GOP aspirants.

No matter how much you dislike Donald Trump and his effect on the Republican presidential primary race—and there are many, many good reasons to do so—you have to spare a little grudging admiration for the sheer madcap genius of Trump’s ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system.

We can better understand what Trump has done successfully, as well as his ultimate limitations as a candidate and why he would be such a terrible president, using the ideas of military strategic theorist John Boyd. Trump has been, thus far, the true Boyd candidate in this race, yet he is already exhibiting symptoms of precisely the flaws that Boyd saw as fatal in combatants.

Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot, Vietnam and Korea veteran, and fighter design engineer, is best known for the “OODA Loop” or “decision cycle,” a concept he developed as part of a broader study of “patterns of conflict” in the 1970s and 1980s later widely adopted in the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, and refers to the process by which soldiers in combat—or humans engaged in any form of conflict—absorb information, make decisions, and act on them. Boyd illustrated this with a graph:

OODA1

Boyd’s theories were complex, constantly evolving, and never formally written down in one place in his lifetime—he preferred to play Socrates, and let others be Plato—so they are often oversimplified. But for present purposes, four generalizations will do.

First, operational tempo—speed—lies at the core of Boyd’s theory of conflict, and has been the most influential element of his thinking, both in the military and in how the concept of a “decision cycle” has seeped into our popular vocabulary. (Indeed, Boyd first made his name in the Air Force as “40-Second Boyd,” a fighter jock with a standing bet that he could get on any opponent’s tail in 40 seconds. Many took the bet; he never had to pay up.)

Boyd’s core insight was about the interactive and disruptive nature of speed on human decision-making: success in conflict can be rapid and dramatic if one can “operate inside the OODA Loop” of the opponent. Operating inside the opponent’s OODA Loop means presenting him with a constantly shifting battlefield that keeps him off-balance and disoriented so he is unable to process information and make and implement sound decisions before the situation changes again.