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John Kerry’s Reprehensible Charlie Hebdo Comments Perfectly Reflect Obama Administration Policy by Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

I couldn’t agree more with my friend Charlie Cooke that the ineffable John Kerry’s remarks comparing January’s Charlie Hebdo massacre to the November 13 Paris terror attacks were despicable. What I don’t get is why anyone is surprised by Kerry’s sentiments. They perfectly reflect seven years of Obama-administration policy aimed at eroding the First Amendment in order to accommodate Islamic blasphemy standards.

As has been widely reported, Kerry initially said there was a “legitimacy” to the mass-murder of cartoonists and writers who satirized the prophet Mohammed. Instantly realizing he’d gone too far, Kerry watered “legitimacy” down to “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’” By contrast, Kerry claimed, there really was no “this and that” to rationalize what happened in Paris November 13, a terrorist strike he described as “absolutely indiscriminate” and not done “to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong.”

Of course, this contention is as absurd as it is offensive. Both sets of terrorist atrocities were driven by Islamic supremacist ideology.

Kerry distorted the Charlie Hebdo episode as if it had involved only a reprisal over cartoons lampooning Islam. In fact, the jihadists shot and wounded a random jogger (consistent with the call to jihad against non-Muslims), killed a police officer (consistent with the ISIS call to assassinate Western security personnel as part of that jihad), took hostages at a kosher market, killing four of them (consistent with anti-Semitism, a core theme of Islamic supremacism), and took hostages at a printing factory (again, consistent with the call to jihad).

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Entry Without Inspection = Entry Without Vetting The dire threat to our national security and public safety. Michael Cutler

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

In the wake of the horrific November 13th terror attacks in Paris, coming on the heels of the downing of the Russian Metrojet airliner on October 31, 2015 in Egypt, many of America’s political leaders are finally coming to the inevitable realization that we need to be careful as to who we let into the United States because of the clear and present danger posed by ISIS and other terror organizations.

However, even as many of these very same politicians insist that the United States suspend the admission of Syrian Refugees until and unless the vetting process by which these aliens are screened is truly effective and has integrity, they continue to support plans to provide unknown millions of illegal aliens who entered our country surreptitiously without inspection with lawful status.

These “leaders” describe illegal aliens as being “undocumented immigrants,” using language that is “politically correct,” but actually Orwellian and constitutes a deceptive and dangerous example of Newspeak.

To provide a bit of essential clarity, the difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar.

Often the politicians repeat the false mantra, “We are fighting them (terrorists) over there so that we will not have to fight them over here.” In point of fact, we are most definitely fighting them “over here.” The terrorists who attacked our nation on September 11, 2001 carried out those deadly attacks inside the United States. The Boston Marathon bombing was obviously carried out inside the United States, as were other attacks that were perpetrated or attempted by still other terrorists.

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Campus Fascists and the Suppression of Academic Free Speech The anti-Israel Brownshirts want to decide who may speak and who may not. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

Of the many intellectual perversions currently taking root on college campuses, perhaps none is more contradictory to what should be one of higher education’s core values than the suppression of free speech. With alarming regularity, speakers are shouted down, booed, jeered, and barraged with vitriol, all at the hands of groups who give lip service to the notion of academic free speech, and who demand it when their speech is at issue, but have no interest in listening to, or letting others listen to, ideas that contradict their own world view.

This is the tragic and inevitable result of decades of grievance-based victimism by self-designated groups who frame their rights and demands on identity politics. Those who see themselves as perennial victims also feel very comfortable, when they express their feelings of being oppressed, in projecting that same victimization outward on their oppressors.

Of course, the issue that most regularly energizes the moral narcissism of campus ideologues is the Israeli/Palestinian debate, and recent events have confirmed that, if anything, activists have been emboldened by the fact that their misbehavior is rarely addressed by administrations in the same way, for instance, that university officials are so quick to do when minority students feel “unsafe” on the University of Minnesota campus in a drive-by racist rant by an anonymous sociopath.

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The witches of the Ivy League David Goldman

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

The rumpus over perceived racism at American universities, with its demands for “trigger warnings” against possibly hurtful statements, “safe spaces” to protect minority students against felt hostility, and “speech codes” which forbid statements that might offend self-styled victims, has turned into something of a circus. A black female official at Yale provoked demonstrations when she refused to intervene against possibly offensive Halloween costumes, even though no such offensive costume yet had appeared. A University of Kansas professor is suspended after simply using the “n-word” to characterize racism.

Prof. Andrea Quenette merely said, ““As a white woman I just never have seen the racism. It’s not like I see ‘n****r’ spray painted on walls.” Every student in her class signed a petition demanding her termination. It began last month at the University of Missouri, where racial slurs yelled at a black student leader from an unidentified man in a pickup truck led to a strike by the football team, campus demonstrations, and the resignations of the university’s two top officials–for insufficient deal in suppressing racism. The targets are university administrators and faculty who without exception are commited liberals and professed enemies of racism, but who are insufficiently vigilant against “casual, everyday slights and insensitivities,” as a US News commentary noted. It is one thing to revile the student protesters as “college crybullies,” as my friend Roger Kimball did recently at the Wall Street Journal, and another to talk about rope in the house of the hanged

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Syrians are a Nation of Terrorist Supporters 10,000 Syrian refugees mean 1,300 ISIS supporters.

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

Syria is a terror state. It didn’t become that way overnight because of the Arab Spring or the Iraq War.

Its people are not the victims of American foreign policy, Islamic militancy or any of the other fashionable excuses. They supported Islamic terrorism. Millions of them still do.

They are not the Jews fleeing a Nazi Holocaust. They are the Nazis trying to relocate from a bombed out Berlin.

These are the cold hard facts.

ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

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Everything’s Fine Until the Bombs Go Off by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

Last month, French President Francois Hollande ridiculed the idea that the massive numbers of Muslim migrants entering his country were any kind of threat.

“Those who argue that we are being invaded are manipulators and falsifiers, who do this only for political reasons, to scare,” the left-wing politician huffed.

And then the pudgy little Socialist had to be rapidly evacuated from France’s national soccer stadium after one of those refugees blew himself up trying to reach Monsieur le Président, and Merkel’s Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Minister Steinmeier had urged rejecting “barriers, fences” when it came to the Muslim migrants, but it was a barrier and the security in front of it that kept one of his beloved refugees from reaching him.

The ordinary people who didn’t have and don’t have the security measures that protect Hollande and Steinemeier died in Paris, blown up and gunned down where they sat, lay and stood.

Hollande’s rhetoric is familiar. You can hear it from Obama. You can catch it on the news. We have nothing to worry about. At least not until the bombs start going off. There will be a multi-layered vetting process. The same system that let in all the terrorists before won’t let us down now.

At least not until it does.

Everything’s fine until the bombs go off. Then we’re told not to worry about it because there’s no way it could possibly happen again. Not with this new hashtag our brightest brains have cooked up. And then we can let 10,000 potential terrorists into the country while ignoring all the “falsifiers” warning of an “invasion.”

It worked for France. It’ll work for us.

Vetting for Syrian migrants works as well in the real world as it does for left-wing politicians.

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Tablet Tablet Books ‘Ben Hur,’ but Bigger and Better Hungarian writer György Spiró’s newly translated novel ‘Captivity’ powerfully sets the perils of modern Jewry in Early Christian Rome By Adam Kirsch

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

Captivity, the newly translated novel by the Hungarian writer György Spiró, offers a good reminder not to judge a book by its cover. When I first saw this particular cover, with its black background, stark white typography, and surreally floating sculptured bust, the imagery—combined with the book’s Central European provenance, gloomy title, and Jewish focus—made me think that this would be a brooding modernist enigma of a book, perhaps along the lines of Imre Kertész’s Holocaust fictions. In fact, Captivity turns out to be just the opposite—a sprawling (more than 800 pages), picturesque, old-fashioned historical novel about the Roman Empire, in the showy tradition of Ben Hur and I, Claudius. In fact, both Jesus and Claudius, the main characters of those books, make cameo appearances in Captivity, as do other boldface names of the 1st century CE, including Caligula, Pontius Pilate, and Philo of Alexandria. What sets Captivity apart is that it makes the rare attempt to view all these historical phenomena—from the rise of Christianity to the flamboyant vices of the emperors—through a distinctively Jewish lens.

Considering how little we know about the ancient world in general, the first century CE is a surprisingly well-documented era. In creating his pageant of Jewish Rome, Spiró can draw on the Roman histories of Tacitus and Suetonius, the Jewish writings of Josephus and Philo, and the Christian New Testament—in addition to the Talmud, which preserves many features of Second Temple-era Jewish life. These sources tell us about three distinct Roman cultures, each focused on a different metropolis: the grand politics of imperial Rome, the religious fervor of Jerusalem, and the ethnic strife of commercial Alexandria. Accordingly, these are the cities in which Captivity is set, in the period roughly spanning the death of Jesus, in 33 CE, and the destruction of the Temple, in the year 70.

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Quiet Capitulation: Merkel Slowly Changes Tune on Refugee Issue By Melanie Amann, Horand Knaup, Ralf Neukirch and René Pfister

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

After announcing that Germany would not place limits on the number of asylum-seekers it accepts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now considering a quota system. The turnaround wasn’t her choice.

In early September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued an order to bring thousands of refugees who were stranded in Hungary to Germany. Germany’s basic right to asylum has no upper limits, she said.

It was a moment of unaccustomed conviction from a chancellor who had become notorious for her ability to avoid making decisions until the last possible moment. But she went even further. She equated the refugee issue with other significant turning points in the history of her party, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Issues such as West Germany’s integration into Western alliances and Kohl’s commitment to keeping nuclear weapons stationed in West Germany in the 1980s. It was as though she were elevating her refugee policy into the pantheon of Christian Democratic basic principles.

And she didn’t even bother to inform the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), before doing so.

Now, though, Merkel is in the process of preparing a reversal of her refugee policy. At the G-20 summit in Antalya, Turkey at the beginning of the week, she spoke of quotas — fixed numbers of refugees that Europe is willing to accept. On the one hand, of course, introduction the idea of quotas is a concession to reality, because the chancellor knows that the ongoing arrival to Germany of up to 10,000 refugees every day is not sustainable.

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Rational Monster: How Terror Fits into Islamic State’s Plan By Christoph Reuter

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

Analysts falsely believed Islamic State was too weak to carry out terror attacks abroad. But IS views terror as a means to an end — and will launch attacks as long as they continue to serve its broader strategy.

“It was a terrible night. We heard the roar of the jets, the detonations. Then, the power suddenly went out and everything sunk into darkness,” the young woman on the phone says. She said that she could only see the flashes from the explosions, with one bomb landing right near where she was. “But I don’t want to die after all that we have already gone through here.”

The woman is from Raqqa, where Islamic State has its headquarters in Syria. She lives there together with her parents and brothers. Still. As do so many other civilians. On the phone, she was describing the first wave of attacks in the “war” that French President François Hollande declared against Islamic State following the attacks in Paris. The bombs dropped by French fighter jets hit both used and abandoned IS bases, the former army camp of Bashar Assad’s Division 17, the polyclinic, the horse racetrack and a main power cable. The woman’s brother is a taxi driver, and he witnessed numerous injured fighters being brought to the hospital, which had been closed to civilians.

Still, the raid isn’t likely to have hit any Islamic State leaders. The air strikes over the weekend were apparently an attempt to kill Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who is thought to have been a key figure behind the Paris attacks and who the French initially thought might be in Raqqa. He was ultimately killed in Wednesday morning police raids in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis.

But the upper echelons of IS have been living for months in the city’s densely populated residential areas and are careful to keep their movements inconspicuous. As such, they have likely been able to escape the US-led coalition’s airstrikes, which have been ongoing for 15 months.

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Peter Smith The Madness of a Raving Realist

Posted By on November 24th, 2015

It seems the world — the Western part of it at least — has been infected with a galloping derangement that insists on viewing events, motives and one particular creed not as they are but as so many would wish them to be. Get that straitjacket ready! I must be a suitable case for treatment.

Visiting an asylum for people who, to put it delicately, have intellectual deficits is a salutary experience. I entered a large open space where the inmates were gathering for communal recreation. It was hard to take it in at first, until my mind became more focused. Let me give you a taste of this delusional world inside the asylum.

A tall, careworn chap was plaintively explaining to anyone who would listen that there was a rationale for the Charlie Hebdo murders. The pen is mightier than the sword, he said with a grimace, as though this cliche were decisive and proved his point beyond all doubt. It’s a setback is all, his buddy euphoniously intoned when told of the latest massacre in Paris. He broke into song and a soft-shoe shuffle. ♫ You say Islam and I say ISAL. You say Muslim and I say peaceful. Islam – ISAL, Muslim – peaceful, let’s call the whole thing off, I needs me a round of golf.♫. It was completely unnerving.