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The San Bernardino Terrorists Weren’t Radicals — They Were Mainstream A huge tiny minority of extremists. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

After Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook killed 14 Americans in their corner of the Jihad over in San Bernardino, the media began its long laborious search for their moment of “radicalization”.

The assumption that the intersection of terrorism and Islam can only be an aberration lead to the conviction that there was some moment in time at which Malik and Farook became “radical extremists”. Initial reports pegged that moment of “radicalization” as having happened at some point during the twenty minutes after Farook left the party. When the amount of firepower and preparation made the idea of a twenty minute radicalization massacre seem silly, the media tried to stretch it back for weeks.

Now they’ve had to give in and pull back that dreadful moment of radicalization for years.

But what if Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were never “radicalized”? What if neither of them “influenced” the other? What if both were exactly what they appear to be, devout Muslims who hated America and believed that it was their religious duty to kill Americans? What if this attitude did not show up last week or last year? What if it was the way that their culture and religion taught them to live?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

What About Iran’s “JCPOA”? by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

The self-appointed P5+1, elected by no one but themselves, should be embarrassed to find that they have made a deal with no one but themselves.

The media’s emphasis on the JCPOA has sadly neglected any in-depth coverage of Iran’s own comprehensive plan of action, which seems to consist of developing nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and related systems to deliver them.

The IAEA cannot even confirm with certainty that Iran does not already possess a nuclear bomb, and yet is not expected to challenge Tehran’s assertion that it ceased nuclear weapons development more than a decade ago.

Although the U.S. also cannot be certain of Iran’s intentions, it would be advisable to assume that Iran means what it says: “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Iran is cheating already — or is it? Iran has not signed anything, so presumably it cannot be cheating on something it never agreed to – as predicted on these pages half a year ago. The self-appointed P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), elected by no one but themselves, should be embarrassed to find that they have made a deal with no one but themselves.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Affirmative Action May Be Doomed—But It’s Already a Confused Mess by Jay Michaelson

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

This week’s Supreme Court arguments cast a harsh light on the confused jurisprudence of using race as a factor in college admissions. Forty years of compromises have created a gigantic mess.

Everything you think you know about affirmative action is wrong.

But don’t worry, no one else is clear about it either. The fact is, affirmative action is a mess, and the case the Supreme Court heard this week, Fisher v. University of Texas, put the whole hot mess on vivid display. In fact, the oral argument—which ran overlong and featured numerous outrageous statements, mostly from Justice Scalia—turned out to be the perfect mirror for the court’s jurisprudence on the subject: long, sloppy, and unlikely to get better soon.

Affirmative action, as most of us know it, seems pretty straightforward. The best illustration of it is a cartoon that’s been making the rounds lately of three people—one short, one tall, and one in-between—trying to watch a baseball game from behind the outfield fence. In one frame, labeled “equality,” each stands on a crate. That means the tall person can see clearly, the medium-height one not as well, and the short one is blocked.

In the second frame, labeled “justice,” the tall person’s crate has been given to the short person, who now stands on two. Now everyone can see.

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Questions Legitimate Journalists Should Be Asking Hillary Clinton By Michael Barone

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

On September 14, 2012, three days after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi, Libya, Hillary Clinton appeared at Andrews Air Force Base, where she spoke with family members of those slain.

Shortly afterward, Tyrone Woods’s father reported that she told him, “We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.” Sean Smith’s mother recently repeated this, saying, “She said it was because of the video.” Glen Doherty’s sister said she chose “in that moment to basically perpetuate what she knew was untrue.”

In public remarks Clinton said, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.” Those words and her assurances to the family members stand in stark contradiction to what Clinton said in messages she sent over her private e-mail system at the time.

On September 11, 2012, she told her daughter that the “officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group.” On the morning of September 12 she told an Egyptian diplomat, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”

Blaming the Benghazi murders on spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video (whose maker was indeed arrested, on unrelated charges) was apparently part of an Obama administration strategy. On September 15, Susan Rice, then ambassador to the United Nations, after a White House briefing went on five Sunday interview programs and blamed the attacks on the video.

BOOKS Comments turned off

No to the Paris Accord By The Editors —

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama declared with almost classical hubris that his ascent to higher office marked the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” So naturally he went into the Paris global-warming talks with appropriate fanfare and theatricality. In reality, President Obama’s approach to global warming is like his approach to health-care reform: He is willing to put his name to any agreement that lets him declare victory without bothering too much about the details.

The accord reached in Paris fails in three key ways: It cannot satisfy an elementary cost-benefit analysis; it does not serve the national interests of the United States; and the Obama administration is seeking to bind the United States to a treaty while insisting that it is not a treaty and thereby shutting Congress out of its proper role in ratifying such accords. For these reasons, the Paris agreement should be considered dead on arrival, and Congress should make it clear that the United States will not consider itself legally bound by it for the simple reason that it has not been legally adopted.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Climate Make-Believe in Paris By Rich Lowry

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

Saving the planet has never been so easy.

The Paris climate talks concluded in a rousing round of self-congratulation over an agreement that, we are told, is the first step toward keeping Earth habitable. If generating headlines and press releases about making history were the metric for anything, Paris might be as consequential — if misbegotten — as advertised.

The fact is that Paris is very meta. The agreement is about the agreement, never mind what’s in it or what its true legal force is — namely, nil. Paris is a legally binding agreement not to have legally binding limits on emissions. It might be the most worthless piece of paper since the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war — about a decade prior to the outbreak of World War II.

Politico reported that the talks were almost derailed at the last minute by the accidental insertion of the word “shall” deep in the text, which, by implying a legal obligation, was to be avoided at all costs (the U.S. Senate would never give its assent to a legally binding treaty). The U.S. scrambled to change the offending word to “should.”

The Paris summit operated on the principle of CBDRILONCWRC, or “Common but Differentiated Responsibility in Light of National Circumstances With Respective Capability.” That means nothing was actually mandated on anyone because that proved — understandably enough, dealing with all the countries in the world — completely unworkable.

Instead, countries came up with so-called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. That’s climate bureaucratese for “You make up your emissions target, whatever it is, and we will pretend to take it seriously.” Thus, do the waters recede and Earth is saved from looming climate catastrophe.

Even if you believe the extremely dubious proposition that somehow the climate “consensus” perfectly understands perhaps the most complicated system on the planet, and can forecast with certitude and in detail what the global temperature will be a century from now, Paris is a charade. The best estimates are that, accepting the premises of the consensus, the deal will reduce warming 0.0 to 0.2 degrees Celsius.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Playing into the Hands of ISIS’? American elites take a perverse view of what ISIS is really after. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

‘Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims.

Never mind that FBI statistics show that Jews in this country are the objects of hate crimes at nearly four times the rate of Muslims. It is mysteriously never reported who are the main perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews. In any case, when the administration alleges Islamophobia, it assumes that if it did not, ISIS might announce to Muslims worldwide, “We told you so,” to confirm its suspicions of American prejudices toward Islam.

But according to Obama’s own logic, his constant suggestions that Americans are prejudiced against Islam would themselves strengthen ISIS by providing them a rationale or justification for their anti-American terrorism. Would they not think, “If President Obama himself is constantly worried that his own people are anti-Muslim, then surely they must be — even though statistics do not support that charge”?

Or are we to think that ISIS reasons along the following lines: “Even after 9/11, Americans let in hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and yet hate crimes against them are far rarer than against Jews. Therefore Americans are our friends, and we will refrain from attacking them”?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The New Normal Douglas Murray….see note please

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

This is a pithy comment left by a reader of Standpoint “But Israel’s normal has become Europe’s normal — a fact that is difficult to accept.” Difficult to accept, but easy to understand. Both regions are enriched by the Religion of Peace. That was inevitable in Israel’s case, but came about in Europe because of the treachery of our politicians, media and academics, who ignored the wishes of the electorate and insisted that only ignorant racists and xenophobes could object to huge numbers of people moving to Europe from the Third World. What could possibly go wrong, you plebs?”

This is how it happens these days, isn’t it? Last February it was during an interval at the theatre, turning on my mobile phone to find a text from a friend in Copenhagen saying the bullets had just missed her but that she was alive. A few weeks earlier, it had been a broadcaster asking for reaction on Paris before I had heard anything about it or whether any friends had been killed. This time it was a text from a close family member at a dinner in Paris I had chosen to miss in order to try to finish my book on Islam and Europe. They said there had been shooting nearby but they were fine. I texted back that perhaps they should get the bill and go home. Soon the phone began to ring and snapshots of the horror in Paris began to flood in.

The crazy ring-arounds have become a feature of modern European life. Then the lucky ones have the stories of the near-misses: friends who left before the attack, those who survived because they chose to drop their bag off at home before heading to the restaurant. Facebook has a new feature where people can signal themselves “safe” after a major incident anywhere. There is something comforting and horrifying about this. It’s not a surprise to me because I know this is normal life in Israel. But Israel’s normal has become Europe’s normal — a fact that is difficult to accept.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

London Must Learn From Paris Daniel Johnson

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

New York and Washington 2001; Madrid 2004; London 2005; Mumbai 2008; Toulouse 2012; Brussels 2014; Paris 2015; Copenhagen 2015; Sousse 2015; Sinai 2015; Beirut 2015. And now Paris again. Last month’s attack, even more devastating than January’s, has not broken French resistance: reports that Parisians were “gripped with fear” were false. But President Hollande’s declaration of war may be just an escalation in rhetoric.

How much havoc do the jihadis have to wreak before Europe and America resolve to tackle the source of the evil: the ideology of Islamism itself? How many have to die or be maimed — some 500 people in the Paris atrocity alone — before Western leaders recognise that the self-proclaimed Caliph Ibrahim, alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his butchers of Islamic State wish to kill us — all of us, “Jews and crusaders” alike — not because of what we do but because of who we are?

BOOKS Comments turned off

Michael Danby The Kurdish Antidote to ISIS

Posted By on December 15th, 2015

Sentiment in the West remains opposed to putting ‘boots on the ground’, which is understandable. Much harder to comprehend is the civilized world’s tardiness in supporting the forces that have beaten ISIS and continue to do so
The Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine of sending a heavy American army (then backed by Australia) to drive Saddam out of Iraq is now widely seen as a mistake. But more than that, it has become a convenient straw man for the isolationists who support passivity in the Middle East. Opposition to ‘boots on the ground’ is the catch cry of both those on the isolationist right and what might be termed the Mike Carlton/John Pilger left, which leverages the West’s understandable weariness of military involvement in the Middle East.

But the question is not ‘boots on the ground’. The real question is, ‘whose boots on the ground?’

In the last few weeks Turkey has supposedly sealed its borders against ISIS infiltrators going backwards and forwards. Ankara’s Islamist leadership has a lot to answer for the backing of fundamentalists in Syria and Iraq, the resultant disasters, and concomitant refugee outflows of millions of desperate Sunni Muslims.