The US needs an anti-IS playbook:Harold Rhode and Joseph Raskas

Harold Rhode served for 28 years as an analyst covering Middle Eastern affairs at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Joseph Raskas is a combat veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and currently a Fellow participating in The Public Interest Fellowship.

Western refusal to confront radical Islam has created the climate in which Islamists on all sides have proceeded ruthlessly and efficiently – without disturbance.
It would appear the Islamic State (IS) has set its sights on the United States. But still, the Obama administration remains shrouded in denial about the roots of radical Islamism.

Unfortunately, the contemporary intellectual climate has blinded policymakers to the reality that the marauding Sunni militia is but the latest chapter in a longer saga of cataclysmic violence – uniquely Islamic.

Pennsylvania students want name change for Lynch Hall because of racial overtones By Martin Barillas see note please

Oh sweet irony….will they also demand that the incompetent Attorney General Loretta Lynch who shares all their “sensitivity” change her name?????rsk

Students at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania are demanding that administrators change the name of a building on campus that they find offensive. Lynch Memorial Hall, which bears the name of the institution’s Depression era president, should have a name change because of “racial connotations” associated with the term “lynching.”

The students, most of home belong to the campus Black Student Union, wish to expunge the name of Dr. Clyde A. Lynch who served through the Great Depression and the Second World War. He raised $55,000 to build a physical education facility that was later made into classrooms. Adjusting for inflation, the money Lynch raised would now surpass $725,000. Lynch died in 1950.

Lebanon Valley College is a private institution. Among the demands on the part of the Black Student Union are racial sensitivity training for faculty and staff, as well as diversity workshops. Other demands include: surveys of the racial climate on campus, facilities for different gender identities and disabilities, in addition to protocols for officials in responding to allegations and acts of bias. The demands were made on December 4 at the predominantly white institution.

Iran’s Fellow Travelers at the New York Times By James Kirchick

On Nov. 23, the New York Times published its latest of more than half-a-dozen articles pleading for the Iranian government to release Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent who was imprisoned on charges of espionage more than 16 months ago. “Western officials hoped that the nuclear agreement would usher in a new era of broader cooperation with Iran,” the editorial board wrote. “But as they begin taking steps to ease economic sanctions on Iran, as called for in the deal, the treatment of Mr. Rezaian has intensified their concerns about whether Iran can be trusted to fulfill its nuclear commitments.”

The editorial’s most recent admonishment, like those that preceded it, managed to elide some relevant details about the newspaper’s relationship to the subject matter. First, the Times editorial board would clearly count as a member of any group looking forward to “a new era of broader cooperation with Iran.” Second, the Times has done far more than merely “hope” for such cooperation. While the newspaper has been demanding the release of an American journalist — one now facing a prison sentence of indeterminate length — some of its own journalists, under the auspices of their employer, have been engaging in a commercial enterprise that benefits his captors.

College quotas are actually destroying lives of minorities By Betsy McCaughey

Today the US Supreme Court hears a constitutional challenge to racial preferences in college admissions. These preferences obviously hurt whites and Asians turned down to make room for less qualified minorities, but ironically, the preferences also harm many Hispanics and African-Americans — the very students they’re supposed to help.

No wonder campuses are roiled with racial tension. It’s high time the court put a stop to racial preferences entirely.

Abigail Fisher, a white woman who sued the University of Texas for rejecting her in 2008, claims the university’s admissions process unconstitutionally favored minority applicants, violating her right to equality under the law. Like affirmative-action programs everywhere, the school claims it judges each applicant “holistically.” Don’t buy it.

New Stephen Coughlin Moment: The “Countering Violent Extremism” Deception.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/09/stephen-coughlin-moment-the-countering-violent-extremism-deception/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Stephen Coughlin Moment with Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

Stephen discussed The “Countering Violent Extremism” Deception, unveiling how the CVE narrative was fostered by the Muslim Brotherhood -– and how it negates countering terror.

Don’t miss it!

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

‘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.

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

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.”

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

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?

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

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.

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

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.