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Ideological Jihadist Victory Confounds Experts : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on October 16th, 2015

Over 14 years after 9/11, this is the best various experts can say about fighting the ideological war against groups like Al Qaeda or the the Islamic State. On the one hand, this panel was depressing, but at least there was some honesty.

“We are failing, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise,” stated former American special envoy Farah Pandith concerning the “war of ideas” against global Islamic threats at a September 30 Washington, DC, event. Pandith and her fellow panelists at the McCain Institute presented before a conference hall filled with 50 listeners a depressing picture of this ideological battle over 14 years after the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks.

“The field of Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE), Pandith stated while discussing the current umbrella term for ideological anti-jihadism, “has too few people, it is disorganized, and we do not have enough resources.” By contrast, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and other “bad guys are doing this 24/7” with ample media resources for jihadist messaging. Yet “during the Cold War, we fought an ideological fight” and “put money where our mouth is” in capabilities.

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Censorship Over Here and Over There :: by Edward Cline

Posted By on October 16th, 2015

The American champions of totalitarian management and filtration of the news in America have a lot of catching up to do with their more advanced cousins in Europe (can you imagine a Federal position dubbed the High Director of Public Information Management?).

A false alarm of sorts about censorship in the U.S. introduced via a revision of the U.S. copyright law was raised by Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report. It was reported on The Daily Caller and Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site.

In an October 14th Atlas Shrugs column, “Congressional Review Of Copyright Law Threatens My Website and Every Independent News Site,” Geller wrote:
Congressional review of copyright law threatens independent websites like mine — and every other non-mainstream media news site. Congress is considering “updating” digital copyright law affecting news sites and aggregator sites, like the Drudge Report and Real Clear Politics.
This is the biggest threat to our freedom. For years I have urged readers, Facebook supporters, members of our groups AFDI and SIOA to email, share, tweet our posts. In order to combat the war the enemedia waged on the truth and freedom, we had to establish an alternative means of news dissemination. It was crucial. Our websites, in concert with Facebook, twitter and instagram, were the David against the philistine Goliath media machine.

She also quoted Kerry Picket’s Daily Caller column of October 13th, “Congressional Review Of Copyright Law May Threaten Drudge Report”:

Drudge Report site owner Matt Drudge told Alex Jones of InfoWars last week that copyright laws could very well end his popular site.

“I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge. “They’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re out of there. They’re going to make it so you can’t even use headlines.”

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An “eyewitness” MSNBC journalist claiming Israelis had just shot dead an unarmed Arab is corrected on live television. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on October 16th, 2015

For the second time in less than one week there was violence at the Damascus Gate on Wednesday in Jerusalem. This time, like many others recently, was captured on video or the rampaging terrorist with a weapon would surely have been described as an innocent young man, shot down in cold blood. More on this, below.

The first attack took place on Saturday, Oct. 10. A 19 year old Arab resident of Jerusalem stabbed two members of Israel’s border police. The stabber was neutralized at the scene as he continued attempting to stab other officers.

The second incident took place late afternoon on Wednesday, Oct. 14. A Palestinian Arab male, later identified as Basel Sider, 19, was observed acting suspiciously. The man was wearing a camouflage t-shirt and pants. When Israeli officers approached him, he lunged at them and broke through the Damascus Gate checkpoint line. Israeli police repeatedly shouted for him to halt. As the Arab continued running with what appeared and was later confirmed to be a knife blade in his right hand, he was shot dead by Israeli officers on the scene.

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–Mairbek Vatchagaev: Is Islamic State Operating in Chechnya?

Posted By on October 16th, 2015

A recent special operation in Grozny against suspected militants of the so-called Islamic State (IS) took Chechnya’s residents and analysts who follow the situation in the republic by surprise. Readers of Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov’s Instagram postings were the first to learn about the incident. For several years now, Kadyrov has used Instagram to communicate with the public. An Instagram posting he published on October 8 said that “the forces of the Interior Ministry, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Terek special police unit have neutralized three terrorists at the edge of Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny. We had determined that three militants who had been trained in the camps of the ‘Iblis State’ arrived in the republic” (Ramzan Kadyrov calls the IS the “Devil State”) (Instagram.com, October 8).

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THE UNKNOWN: NIGHTMARE OF BEING A WOMAN UNDER ISLAM JAMIE GLAZOV

Posted By on October 16th, 2015

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/10/15/the-unknown-nightmare-of-being-a-woman-under-islam/

In this new episode of The Unknown, Anni Cyrus shares a Nightmare of Being a Woman Under Islam, telling a heart-wrenching true story.

Don’t miss it.

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Vandals at the Gates of Rome: Pay Attention to History, Obama By Jerry Hendrix

Posted By on October 15th, 2015

In the third century a.d., external pressures from competing powers along the periphery of the empire, along with growing weakness and incoherence within the imperial government, began to undermine the power of Rome. Externally, the Goths, Franks, and Vandals rose and began to roll back the Roman system of governance and trade. Internally, the Senate became impotent and a series of weak emperors led first to the geographic division of the empire and ultimately its demise. The period of history that followed came to be known as the “Dark Ages” and lasted nearly a thousand years, during which human progress was truncated until the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Today, all along the perimeter of the current global system of governance, the combination of external pressures from authoritarian regimes and a series of questionable internal strategic choices have weakened the defenses of the rule of law, individual liberty, and free trade. These actions have allowed Russia to carve out territorial gains in the Crimea and Ukraine, China to assert sovereignty over a vast area of the ocean through the uncontested creation of artificial islands, Iran to inflate an expanding sphere of influence through acts of terrorism in the Middle East, North Korea to gain nuclear weapons, and Cuba to reemerge as a normal nation within the Western hemisphere despite its long and unapologetic support of Communism and terrorist activities.

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Bernie Sanders’s Denmark Comments Show He Doesn’t Even Understand His Own ‘Socialism’ By Kevin D. Williamson —

Posted By on October 15th, 2015

It had to be Denmark, didn’t it?

If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.

Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.” ) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.

Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.

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Are Sanctuary Cities the New Confederates? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 15th, 2015

There are now 340 sanctuary cities in the United States — and the list is growing. All of them choose to ignore federal immigration law by refusing to report detained undocumented immigrants to federal authorities under most circumstances.

Partly as a result, deportations of those who entered the U.S. illegally are at a 10-year low — even according to the Obama administration’s new rigged redefinition of deportation as also occasionally preventing illegal entry at the border.

Some of the 1,000 undocumented immigrants who go unreported to federal authorities each month and are thereby shielded by sanctuary cities from deportation have been accused of violent crimes. According to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, more than 2,000 of the immigrants released have used their freedom to commit crimes.

Last year, San Francisco alone released from its custody 252 undocumented immigrants whom federal authorities had asked the city to hold, according to the report. Most notoriously, the city protected Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — five times previously deported, seven times previously convicted of felonies — who once free allegedly murdered 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in front of witnesses.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Nuclear Deal’s True Purpose Obama selects his fall guys. Caroline Glick

Posted By on October 15th, 2015

It works out that US President Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, his nuclear deal with Iran, has nothing to do with preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or even with placing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities.

Just weeks after Obama led the international community in concluding the nuclear pact with Iran, the Iranian regime filed a complaint with the UN Security Council accusing the US of committing a material breach of the agreement.

The US action that precipitated the complaint was a statement by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest claiming that if Iran violates the deal, “the military option would remain on the table.”

In making the statement, Earnest was responding to a hypothetical question regarding what the US would do if the Iranians breached the deal.

Earnest explained that not only would the US then consider attacking Iran’s nuclear installations militarily, but that its “military option would be enhanced because we’d been spending the intervening number of years gathering significantly more detail about Iran’s nuclear program.”

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Blaming the Victims of the Palestinian Death Cult The international community’s response to unabashed slaughtering of Jews. Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 15th, 2015

Vicious attacks by Palestinians, using knives, guns and vehicles as weapons of choice against Israeli civilians, are escalating to an alarming degree. In response, the so-called “international community” is siding with the Palestinian killers and blaming the Jewish victims, despite the clear source of the violence. Spurred on by hate-filled social media postings exhorting Palestinians to go out and kill as many Jews as possible, would-be Palestinian martyrs – including women and teenagers — set out to do just that. In two dozen violent incidents since October 1st, at least seven Israelis have been killed and scores more have been wounded.

As just one example of the incitement to violence appearing on social media, the following tweet was posted last week under the hashtag “The Intifada Has Started”: “There is no greater reward in Islam than the one given for jihad, and there is no greater reward than the one given for #Slaughtering_the_Jews… Kill them wherever you find them.” (Source: The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI))