Paris Attacks Show U.S., Allies Misjudged Islamic State No longer a regional threat, ISIS demonstrates a long and deadly reach By Damian Paletta And Philip Shishkin

The Paris terror attacks suggest that the U.S. and its allies overestimated recent successes against Islamic State while underestimating the group’s ability to strike far from its Middle East stronghold, according to U.S. lawmakers, analysts and former senior intelligence officials.

Islamic State now challenges Western intelligence agencies and policy makers not as a growing regional threat, but as a terrorist group with a long and deadly reach, despite a U.S.-led military campaign in Syria and Iraq.

“With an enemy that has developed a proto-state in the heart of the Middle East with such proximity to Europe and so many foreign fighters, including those from Europe, it is just really a matter of time before something like this happens even with good, or even great, intelligence,” said Hank Crumpton, a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Erdogan’s License to Strangle by Burak Bekdil

In President Erdogan’s mindset, his party’s landslide election victory not only gives him a mandate to rule, but also to crush “the other.”

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, wants to clean up Turkey’s worsening image in the West. But not by upholding universal values, protecting civil liberties and media freedoms and respecting pluralism. He wants to do it by hiring a Western public relations firm.

A recent study found that 80% of minorities in Turkey cannot openly express themselves on social media; and 35% say they are subject to hate speech.

Erdogan cannot “buy” respect or “force” others to respect him. He can only “earn” respect — something he clearly has no intention of doing.

On November 1, nearly half the Turks (49.4%) gave President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist government a ballot box license to strangle the other half. He will be only too happy to use that license aggressively.

Vive la France! Sol Sanders

There are perhaps three all engulfing observations to be made from the horrific events in France this past Friday evening as the Muslim day of prayer and rest ended:

The enemy we face is as barbarous as has been seen in human history, even compared with the terrible atrocities of the 20th century in their contempt for all human values.
Our effort to eradicate them has so far failed – and particularly our intelligence when such a massive and coordinated attack could occur in a major world city without its interception.
We must spare no effort now – no half measures as the Obama Administration has perpetuated against Daesh [ISIS or ISIL] — in crushing them with the kind of all-out war we pursued during World War II when the Nazi foe represented the same kind of all-encompassing evil.

As the French and their allies, most of all the United States, continue to gather information about the attacks, we will no doubt discover interesting and informative details. They must be shared among the allies. We have a suspicion that all sorts of relatively minor considerations have prevented that being done adequately so far.

MIT honors 3 Israelis among its top 35 under 35 scientists David Shamah

A close look at brain cells, new tools for neurological disorders, and a way to treat a mutation that leads to cancer win plaudits for these young researchers.

Three Israelis are among 35 honored this year by MIT with its annual list of young researchers who have had a huge impact on the world – and are expected to go on to do much more.

The three – Drs. Gilad Evrony, Cigall Kadoch, and Rikky Muller – all satisfy the main criteria of the prestigious Boston-based university, as “people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs.”

MIT’s 35 Innovators Under 35 list has since 1999 selected young innovators whose work, the university believes, has great potential to transform the world. The awards, which cover fields such as biotechnology, materials, computer hardware, energy, transportation, communications and the web, were presented last week at EmTech, the annual conference of the MIT Technology Review.

Evrony was recognized for his work developing a new way to look at brain cells – analyzing the DNA of single neurons, in order to understand how they mutate, and how the brain grows and develops. The technology has shown that every person’s brain is sprinkled with countless genetic mutations invisible to prior research, “which may help explain some of the many neurologic and psychiatric diseases whose causes are not known,” Evrony told The Times of Israel.

A graduate of MIT, Evrony completed Harvard Medical School’s MD-PhD program where he worked in the laboratory of Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics and genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital. There he developed a way to read the tiny amount of DNA inside single brain cells, which led to a surprising discovery– that every neuron in a person’s brain contains many genetic mutations that occur as the brain develops in the womb and throughout life.

The Enabler in the White House By Edward Cline

Everything Obama has ever done in the White House – legally, illegally, criminally, in defiance of Americans and in defiance of his oath of office – with the assistance of Democrats and Republicans alike, has fit into his agenda to fundamentally “transform” this country from a semi-free country into authoritarian slave state, and “transform” it racially, economically, and politically.
I concluded “Raping the Swedish Corpse” on November 13th with this observation:

President Barack Obama has made a statement of consolation that sounds more like a sympathetic, almost congratulatory message to ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic terror groups. He sounded almost regretful that the destruction in Paris wasn’t wider and the casualties higher. That’s worth another column.

And here it is.

Obama could just as well have asked for a Garrison Keillor voice-over to deliver the condolences in Keillor’s trademark Minnesotan funereal voice. His manner was listless, insipid, almost as though he had just been awakened from a sound sleep, but still had to rouse himself to make the formulaic sounds of transparently insouciant grief. He stumbled hesitantly over the pronunciation of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, and often seemed to pause as though he had lost his place on the document he was reading from. But, style aside, let’s take a look at what he said.

Good evening, everybody. I just want to make a few brief comments about the attacks across Paris tonight. Once again, we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.

Paris was attacked by whom? And which values are “universal”? Those values can’t be so “universal” that the attackers also shared them.

We stand prepared and ready to provide whatever assistance that the government and the people of France need to respond. France is our oldest ally. The French people have stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States time and again. And we want to be very clear that we stand together with them in the fight against terrorism and extremism.

Whose “terrorism” and whose “extremism”? Has Obama’s fight against Islamic terrorism had any effect on ISIS or Al-Qaeda? To put it bluntly, Obama’s foreign policy overall resembles the plot from Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, with Hillary Clinton in the role of the Vampire Girl.

The Litman Murders: The Untold Story Of An Empty Wedding Hall By Varda Epstein

The media is a heartless and fickle lover, capable of dismissing the heartache and drama of one story over another, because of the way the winds of opinion blow this way and that, or because the scale of one story is enough to eclipse the smaller one. Those are actually two really good scenarios, relatively speaking. It would explain, for instance, why the world is looking at the tragedy that happened in France and not at the smaller tragedy that happened in Israel. It would make it seem less heartless.

Yes. A coordinated attack on three places in which over one hundred people are killed is going to trump a story in which only two people are killed in a place where terror is de rigueur, par for the course, the dues Jews pay, for living in their ancestral homeland.

And yet, it is a terrible thing that happened here in Israel and in a way, the intimate story of what happened to two, could and would grab the heart in way that the death of over one hundred anonymous people never could, if only the facts were known. If only the media chose to broadcast what happened on a late Friday afternoon on the roads of Judea to one Jewish family.

But they never would.

Which is why it falls to me to try and convey the details to you, dear Reader, and to the world, if only the world would listen for the short time it will take me to tell this story.

This is the story of the heinous double-murder of Rabbi Yaakov Litman and his 18 year-old son, Netanel. The car was filled with various members of the Litman family, seven all told. They were on their way to Metar, where their daughter Sarah’s groom to be, Ariel Biegel, the rabbi’s son, would be called to read from the Torah on his last Shabbat as a single man. Candies would be thrown at him by the joyous congregants, wishing him a long and sweet life with his bride. There would be singing, and two families getting to know each other over shared meals, and lots and lots of mazal tovs.
Ariel Biegel and Sarah Yechiya Litman at their engagement party, just a short time ago.
Ariel Biegel and Sarah Techiya Litman at their engagement party, just a short time ago.

But it was not to be.

The car was set upon by Arab terrorists who laid in wait for Jewish prey, in a car by the side of the road. The terrorists sprayed the car filled with Litmans, taking out father and son, leaving a mother and various other family members wounded and grieving.

Europe should label terrorists, not tomatoes by David Suissa

On Nov. 11, while Islamic terrorists were preparing for their Friday night massacre in Paris that would leave 129 people dead and 352 injured, one of the big news items was the European initiative to put special labels on Israeli goods that originate from disputed Israeli-occupied territory.

As the European Commission explained in a fact sheet, this is not new legislation but a clarification of existing legislation dating back to 2012. In other words, the European obsession with singling out Israel for special punishment didn’t just start last week. It’s been an ongoing affair.

How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed — on The Glazov Gang ****

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/16/how-rules-of-engagement-get-u-s-soldiers-killed-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed, unveiling the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

[See also Stephen on the two previous Glazov Gang specials: [1] Muslim Brotherhood: Above the Law in America and [2] How American Leadership is Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.]

Don’t miss it!

Rachel Ehrenfeld: Islamist Terrorism and European Amnesia

Politicians and the media in Europe and the United States are talking about the latest terrorist attacks as if they are a new phenomenon. They are not. Israelis have been confronting similar terrorist attacks, including shooting at and blowing up innocent diners at Pizzerias and coffee shops in Jerusalem, restaurants in Tel-Aviv, stabbing passengers at bus and train stations, or running over them with a car.

However, European and other governments, including the Obama administration, look upon Palestinians killing Israelis with a rather sympathetic eye. They, like Palestinian leaders justify the attacks as expressions of frustration with Israeli real or fictional occupation. And as the latest wave of Palestinian killing of Israelis increased, the European Union decided to support the Palestinians by declaring an economic warfare against Israel. Anything produced in territory “occupied by Israel” is now subject to special labeling and often banned altogether (per the demands of the BDS movement and the Palestinians).

Dartmouth Protesters Assault Students While Screaming Racial Threats

A group of Black Lives Matter protestors at Dartmouth College led a violent protest Thursday, hurling racial insults at students and pushing them up against a wall as they tried to study in the library, The Dartmouth Review reports.

“Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!” “Fuck you and your comfort!” “Fuck you, you racist shit!” they reportedly yelled.

About a 150 Dartmouth protesters shouted as they marched through Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College. Students who didn’t join in on their protests were harassed, one woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who shouted, “filthy white bitch!” in her face. Students who were seated were told to, “Stand the fuck up!” “You filthy racist white piece of shit!”