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Paris Climate-Conference Deal: The West Will Commit to Paying Billions to Developing Nations By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

‘Too many people, too many ideas, too little progress,” was the verdict of one veteran climate negotiator on the first week of the conference convened to save the planet. Unlike the Copenhagen climate conference six years ago, when presidents and prime ministers were present at the conference’s disastrous denouement, bets were hedged this year in Paris. Presidents and prime ministers addressed the start of the Conference of the Parties (COP) last week. “I can’t separate the fight with terrorism from the fight against global warming,” the leader of the free world and COP host said in the COP’s opening address. “These are two big global challenges we have to face up to,” François Hollande added.

“I believe we can act boldly and decisively in the face of a common threat,” President Obama declared. “I just want to say to this plenary session that we are running short on time.” Oops, that wasn’t President Obama in Paris in December 2015 but President Obama in Copenhagen in December 2009. It might have done equally well for Paris. When it’s always one minute to midnight to save the planet, speakers can recycle words and sentiments from one COP to the next without anyone noticing or caring. If it feels as if the Obama presidency is taking forever to end, the climate talks have been dragging on for more than two decades since the United Nations climate-change convention was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 — and there’s no end in sight.

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Trump, the Anti-Constitutional Authoritarian — Liberty Lovers, Beware Charles Cook

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

What has become of the “constitutional conservatives”?

For seven years now, President Obama’s opponents have shouted righteously outside the White House. This president, they have argued, does not care about the law; his Democratic party, they have charged, has adopted a “will to power” approach to politics; and the media . . . well, the media has been complicit in the ruse.

Offenses both small and great have been catalogued in horror. Obama has not only undermined the separation of powers, but he has arrested inconvenient video-makers, just like a fascist. He has not only unilaterally rewritten congressional law, but he has attempted to circumvent the right to bear arms, just as Adolf Hitler might. He has not only claimed powers that the Constitution clearly does not give him, but he has laid out plans to kill Americans without due process on their own soil. No departure has been too slight to invite protest. As Edmund Burke put it all those years ago, conservatives in the Obama years have not always waited for despotism before making their appeals, preferring instead to “augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”

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Why I Changed My Mind about Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israelism I once thought it possible to address the world’s turn against Israel without bringing in anti-Semitism. No longer. Joshua Muravchik

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

The seven weeks of war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014 occasioned the greatest outpouring of raw anti-Semitism since the demise of Nazism. Ironically, relatively little of this, or at least less than usual, occurred in the Arab world: Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad were quieter than during any earlier wars between Israel and its neighbors. But across Europe and here and there in Latin America, Africa, and even in the U.S. and Canada, incident followed upon incident of vicious Jew-baiting and occasional violence.

By odd coincidence, my 2014 book, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel, had been released on the very day that Israeli forces moved into Gaza in response to a wave of Hamas rockets. In it, I wrote much about anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism but little about anti-Semitism, a point on which I was repeatedly challenged when I spoke before Jewish audiences. Given that the world’s current hostility to Israel is manifestly unreasonable, many assume that its source must lie in the world’s most ancient hatred. So why did I neglect it?

The main reason is that I was aiming to explain change. No nation other than Israel has ever experienced such a dramatic reversal in the way it is perceived and treated by the rest of the world. On the eve of the Six-Day War, polls showed French and British publics favoring Israel over the Arabs by near-unanimous ratios (28 to 1). In recent years, in contrast, those same publics have registered intense hostility to Israel. But surely the world was not devoid of anti-Semitism in 1967. If “Israel” is a stand-in for the real target—Jews—would that not have been manifest back in 1967 as well?

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Trump’s Muslim Immigration Ban Should Touch Off a Badly Needed Discussion By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

Donald Trump’s rhetorical excesses aside, he has a way of pushing us into important debates, particularly on immigration. He has done it again with his bracing proposal to force “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

I have no idea what Mr. Trump knows about either immigration law or Islam. But it should be obvious to any objective person that Muslim immigration to the West is a vexing challenge.

Some Muslims come to the United States to practice their religion peacefully, and assimilate into the Western tradition of tolerance of other people’s liberties, including religious liberty — a tradition alien to the theocratic societies in which they grew up. Others come here to champion sharia, Islam’s authoritarian societal framework and legal code, resisting assimilation into our pluralistic society.

Since we want to both honor religious liberty and preserve the Constitution that enshrines and protects it, we have a dilemma.

The assumption that is central to this dilemma — the one that Trump has stumbled on and that Washington refuses to examine — is that Islam is merely a religion. If that’s true, then it is likely that religious liberty will trump constitutional and national-security concerns. How, after all, can a mere religion be a threat to a constitutional system dedicated to religious liberty?

But Islam is no mere religion.

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ISIS Pilots Training in Lybia Thank you, Hillary! Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

ISIS is now training pilots for future terrorist missions on an imported flight simulator in Libya, according to Arabic media reports citing Libyan and Egyptian military officials.

The flight simulator, apparently imported in October, is now located in the former Qaddafi stronghold of Sirte, about halfway between Benghazi and Tripoli.

“It’s a modern simulator, which apparently arrived from abroad,” the officials told the London-based Arabic daily, Al Sharq al Awsat. The simulator is the size of a compact car and includes a steering wheel, radar and communications gear, so student pilots can practice take-off and (crash) landing.

For now, it would appear that ISIS is “merely” training pilots to fly small aircraft, not military jets. “We’re talking about very basic, rudimentary pilots who can take off in a light plane and crash themselves into the Vatican, for instance,” Colonel Jacques Neriah, a retired Israeli military intelligence official, told FoxNews.

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Answering John Kerry Unfortunately, the Secretary of State’s presented options are fantasies. Caroline Glick

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

On Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech before the Brookings Institute’s Saban Forum.

Kerry focused on the Palestinian conflict with Israel and sought to draw a distinction between the two-state policy model, which he supports, and the one-state policy model, which he rejects.

To justify his rejection of a policy based on Israeli sovereignty over areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, Kerry raised a series of questions about what a one-state policy would look like.

I answered all of his questions, as well as many others, in great detail in my book The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. I will do so again here, albeit with the requisite brevity.

But before discussing the specific questions Kerry raised with regard to the one-state model, it is important to discuss the nature of the policies Kerry described in his speech.

Kerry argued Israel should deny civil and property rights to Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and ignore the building and planning laws of both Israel and the military government in Judea and Samaria in order to allow unrestricted Arab construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Such steps, he argued, will advance the cause of peace because they will pave the way for an Israeli withdrawal from the vast majority of these areas. Such a withdrawal in turn will bring about the desired two-state solution.

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Putin has checkmated himself into a lose-lose Syrian debacle Mark Langfan

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

There is no way Putin can come out a winner in the situation he has created for himself.

When Putin first teamed up with Iran and Assad, the two greatest state sponsors of terror in the world, to commit unabashed genocide against the Sunnis of Syria, there was breathless talk that “Putin Checkmated Obama.” It was as if Putin was playing against Obama. Then, after Turkey shot down Putin’s Mig and the Saudis openly declared that they would continue arming their Syrian proxies, the Syrian ground war got even uglier. For all Putin’s bluster, the very ugly reality of Syria has begun to set in.
Putin has never been fighting Obama; he’s been fighting and will have to come to fight hundreds of millions of Sunni Muslims who are coming to see Putin and Russia as the ultimate evil. What’s worse, whether Putin loses, or Putin “wins,” Putin will ultimately lose, lose big, and lose everything.

Let’s look at Putin’s problem objectively. On the one hand, if Putin “loses,” it will be clear he will have militarily lost, and it will be a truly ugly military loss like Afghanistan. If Afghanistan brought down the great and mighty USSR, Syria will bring down little Putin. For, despite Russia’s virtually infinite raids on the Syrian rebels with no limiting rules of engagement, Russian-Iran ground progress has been, at best, severely challenged. Additionally, with Iran’s soon-in-coming introduction of its own fighter jet squadrons into the Syrian theater to genocidally massacre even more Sunnis, the Saudis and Turks will be forced to deliver shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to take down the Assad barrel-bombs, and the Iranian fighter jets. With those anti-aircraft missiles in Rebels’ hands, Russia will start to suffer catastrophic losses.

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Paradigms Lost: The U.S. How utopian fantasies destroy. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

In Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide, a 2007 book about the dysfunctions of the EU, I often emphasized the problems of Europe by contrasting it to the US. Our economy was more open and dynamic, with GDP growth higher, regulatory regime less onerous, unemployment lower, and ease of doing business greater. We had problems with entitlement spending and high taxes, but nothing like the EU drunken-sailor governments, or the regressive VAT tax that helps subsidize social welfare transfers. We had problems with immigration, but nothing like those caused by the dangerous mix of unassimilated Muslims with jihadist proselytizing. We still had a vigorous presence of faith in the public square. And despite the costs, mistakes, and setbacks in the Middle Eastern wars, our military and its prowess were feared, and respected; the US was the dominant and indispensible power in the region and beyond.

Yes, there were ominous signs––expanding entitlements, excessive deficit spending, internal opposition to vigorously waging the war against militant Islam; a culture, media, and schools dominated by an ideology of national self-loathing and guilt; and the incessant assault on public faith. But despite all that, in the 2004 election, at the height of the bloody insurgency in Iraq, George W. Bush defeated John Kerry–– a “European at heart,” as French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy called the French-speaking Senator––who like his party looked longingly at the EU model of distrust for national identity and penchant for technocratic rule. America clearly was not interested in following the EU paradigm.

And then came Barack Obama.

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Meet the Farooks: The Modern Jihad Family How did this anything-but-moderate family not attract any law enforcement attention? Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

When Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered fourteen people and wounded twenty-one at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, Farook’s family, having lawyered up, instructed its legal representatives to tell the world how shocked – shocked! – they were by the massacre. However, just as Captain Renault is handed his winnings immediately after telling Rick Blaine of his shock that gambling was going on in Rick’s Café Americain, so also in this case did the family’s shock seem increasingly less genuine the more that became known about them.

Initially, however, the lie was fed easily to a credulous mainstream media. One of the Farook family lawyers, David Chesley, immediately found the nearest microphone and declared: “None of the family members had any idea that this was going to take place. They were totally shocked.”

Even in stories that reported this, however, the story started to unravel. No sooner had the Associated Press quoted Chesley that it noted that he and another Farook family lawyer, Mohammad Abuershaid, said that “Farook’s mother lived with the couple but she stayed upstairs and didn’t notice they had stockpiled 12 pipe bombs and well over 4,500 rounds of ammunition.”

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Turkey Murders Greatest Kurdish Lawyer by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on December 9th, 2015

For decades, it was impossible to bring Turkish military personnel or other state authorities to Turkish courts. Before the negotiation process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began around 2009, Turkish military personnel had full immunity for the crimes they committed against the Kurds. No one could bring them to account. Those who even sought help from the police or gendarmerie could also be exposed to torture, rape or even murder.

It was for that reason so many violations of human rights in Kurdistan could be brought to court only decades after they were committed. To this day, no one has ever been punished. The immunity of state authorities, including “security” officials in Turkey, continues. Human rights cases are dismissed by the courts, one by one.

“We told the court that they did not have the intention of restoring justice, that we had lost our trust in them, and that they were not impartial. And we demanded they change the judge.” — Human rights lawyer Tahir Elci, who was killed by police.