Whether a massive movement of foreign peoples is a migration, an invasion, or a conquest is a matter of perspective. To the ancient Romans and later Romance historians, the migration of Germanic tribes into the empire in the 5th and 6th centuries was a catastrophic foreign invasion. To the Germanic peoples themselves, it was known as the Volkwanderung (the migration of the people). There is a profound irony that as waves of Muslim migrants press into Germanic Europe, that the very civilization they are now undermining was created in a series of migrations seen by the civilized people they replaced as an invasion. And just as Germanic tribal movements proved inexorable against the politically, economically, and morally weakened Roman state (at least in Western Europe), it appears (barring dramatic reversals of policy and will) that the ongoing wave of Muslim migration will inevitably replace European civilization as we know it. Even more worrisome, if history is any guide, this will happen long before Muslims become a majority there.
Bob Woodward: It better bother us that Hillary told conflicting stories on Benghazi By Thomas Lifson
Bob Woodward disagrees with Judy Woodruff of taxpayer funded PBS and most of the Democratic Party, and thinks that it matters when a secretary of state and prospective commander in chief says different things publicly and privately over a major terror attack.
Pam Key of Breitbart reports:
On this week’s “Fox News Sunday,” in discussing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s testimony at the hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week, veteran journalist Bob Woodward said, “It better bother us” that Hillary Clinton different things publicly and privately.
Woodward said, “There are legitimate questions here … here’s the issue. you have inconsistencies. This is a tragedy, and it should be investigated.”
He added Clinton didn’t commit a crime and said, “People say one thing privately and saying something different publicly.” (snip)
Woodward said, “It better bother us. And this is the question we’re going to look at. And, you know, if she’s the nominee, she’s going to get a full field investigation by everyone. So will the Republicans. So we don’t get what we got with Nixon, which we didn’t know about, quite frankly. I mean, this was hidden. So I think there’s a big burden on journalists, on television and in the newspapers, bloggers. so when we get to election day next year, people can say, ‘you know what, I know or I had the chance to know everything possible about these people.’ And so, this hearing is one of the pieces of the puzzle.”
So radical is this proposal that — while Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are arming themselves to the gills and seizing territory — it would reduce America’s nuclear “assets” from over 500 missiles, bombers and submarines to less than a handful of nuclear-armed submarines.
“To my knowledge, our unilateral disarmament initiatives have done little to promote similar initiatives in our potential adversaries, and at the same time, they have reduced our arms control negotiating leverage.” — Admiral Richard Mies (Ret.), former Commander of the United States Strategic Command
America’s nuclear deterrent is roughly 35-40 years old. By the time there has been a complete modernization (by 2020) of the Russian nuclear missile force, the U.S. will not have yet built a single new strategic nuclear weapon for its arsenal.
To help with modernization, Congress and administration needs to get rid of the defense budget caps. Removing them should be America’s #1 arms control and nuclear deterrent priority in the nation.
Despite promises of amelioration from Iran’s current President, Hassan Rouhani, the situation for Christians has not improved at all.
Rouhani, came to power as a proponent of human rights and reform, and has been considered a reformer and moderate in the West ever since. He made countless declarations of his intention to pursue a human rights agenda and guarantee equal rights for all Iranians: Every one of those promises has been broken, yet the U.S. continues to put faith in Rouhani as an honest broker.
“Christians continue to be arbitrarily arrested… [They] disappear for weeks at a time… Detainees are sometimes told they must to convert to Islam or their families will be killed.” — Ruth Gledhill, journalist
Even though many Sufi Muslims are fervently pious in their devotion to the faith of the Shi’a, clerics in Qom declared Sufis to be apostates and attempted to expel them from the town and to take over their religious centre.
“If Jeb Bush’s campaign is struggling to stay afloat, he didn’t show it on Saturday,” CNN reports from Daniel Island, S.C. “A day after slashing salaries and cutting campaign staff, the former Florida governor got an enthusiastic reception and delivered one of his strongest campaign performances to date.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but we have another. Consider the most widely discussed passage from his Daniel Island remarks:
Bush got one of his biggest responses from the crowd when he lamented the state of politics in Washington and argued that [Donald] Trump is not the kind of leader that could break through the gridlock.
“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then . . . I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that,” Bush added.
Thanks to Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony on Thursday, we now understand why the former secretary of state never wanted anyone to see her emails and why the State Department sat on documents. Turns out those emails and papers show that the Obama administration deliberately misled the nation about the deadly events in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012.
Don’t forget how we came to this point. Mrs. Clinton complained in her testimony on Capitol Hill that past Congresses had never made the overseas deaths of U.S. officials a “partisan” issue. That’s because those past deaths had never inspired an administration to concoct a wild excuse for their occurrence, in an apparent attempt to avoid blame for a terror attack in a presidential re-election year.
The early hints that this is exactly what happened after the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans cast doubt on every White House-issued “fact” about the fiasco and led to the establishment of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s select committee.
A 10-year-old Russian boy, Matvei Tcepliaev, recently made an extraordinary discovery in Jerusalem. Working as a volunteer in the Temple Mount Sifting Project, he found a 3,000-year-old seal—engraved limestone about the size of a thimble, with a hole at one end so it could be hung from a string—from the time of King David.
The artifact was nestled in the hundreds of tons of earth and rock that had been illegally excavated from below the Temple Mount in the late 1990s by the Muslim Waqf, a trust that retains authority over the contested site. The Temple Mount is sacred ground for Jews, Muslims and Christians, but Jewish historical claims are denied by many Muslims.
The sifting project in Emek Tzurim National Park in Jerusalem, started in 2005 and has uncovered several historically significant objects, but the seal may be the most important. Dating from the era of King David’s conquest of Jerusalem and the building of the Jewish First Temple by his son and successor, Solomon, the seal confirms the ancient Jewish presence in Jerusalem—more than a millennium before the Muslim Dome of the Rock was built above the ruins of the ancient temples.
If it is ironic that the Muslim excavation, undertaken to build an underground mosque, ultimately confirmed Jews’ historical claims, it is no less ironic than the fact that the Waqf came to rule the site at Israel’s instigation.
Let down by her overconfidence that the homebrew server would remain secret.
No wonder Hillary Clinton feels aggrieved by her congressional grilling on Benghazi. She had the hard luck to be secretary of state in the Internet era, when digital secrets escape despite the best efforts to keep them hidden. Unintended transparency is better than none.
In an earlier era, the American public would never have learned Mrs. Clinton knew during the attack that it was a planned operation by terrorists and not a spontaneous protest as the administration insisted.
Mrs. Clinton kept her more than 60,000 emails off the State Department’s server. They came to light only because the House Select Committee on Benghazi discovered her secret email system. Those emails—not Mrs. Clinton—were the star witness at last week’s hearing, disclosing with precision who knew what when.
Publicly, Mrs. Clinton issued a statement at 10:32 p.m. Sept. 11, 2012, the evening of the attack, blaming the YouTube video. But the committee disclosed that at 11:12 p.m., she told her daughter, Chelsea, by email: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Qaeda-like group.” At 11:49 p.m., according to a State Department email, she told the president of Libya: “There is a gun battle ongoing, which I understand Ansar [al] Sharia”—the local al Qaeda affiliate—“is claiming responsibility for.”
London cemetery charges fee to see late communist’s memorial
HIGHGATE CEMETERY, LONDON—On a summer visit to the grave of Karl Marx, Ben Gliniecki found that he would have to pay £4, or about $6, to pay respects to the man who sounded the death knell for private property.
Mr. Gliniecki, a Marxist, said no.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
“Personally, I think it is disgusting,” the 24-year-old political activist said. “There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it.”
The charity that looks after this cemetery has long taken swipe at a different irony: Karl Marx’s decision to buy a burial plot in a private London graveyard over the then state-provided alternatives. They say their cover fee subsidizes the upkeep of a cemetery where 170,000 other people rest.
The two sides have squabbled since the early 1990s, when the Friends of Highgate Cemetery began charging to fund the conservation of a burial ground whose elaborate gothic tombs and winding paths had fallen into disrepair. Now, the charge is infuriating a new generation of Marxists. Interest in his legacy is gaining fresh legs in Britain following September’s election of Jeremy Corbyn, a self-described Marx admirer, as leader of the opposition Labour Party.
The day after Mr. Corbyn’s victory, Mr. Gliniecki sold 50 copies of the Socialist Appeal newspaper at a rally attended by the new Labour leader. Mr. Gliniecki says he would typically sell 20 to 30 copies at such a rally. This year, the Marxist Student Federation has seen a surge in new freshman members at British university orientation weeks, said Mr. Gliniecki, who helps run the organization.
In 2016, there are 14 Republican presidential candidates for whom Ronald Reagan is both the benchmark for conservative values and the lodestar of conservative ideas. There’s also one who wrote, in the second to last year of Reagan’s presidency, that he had been “so smooth, so effective a performer” that “only now, seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.”
The gadfly was Donald Trump, writing in his book The Art of the Deal. But it wasn’t just a glancing blow; to promote the book, Trump launched a political campaign that tore into Reagan’s record, including his willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union. Advised by the notorious Roger Stone, a Nixon-era GOP trickster, in 1987 Trump took out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and theWashington Post blasting Reagan and his team.
In the text, which was addressed “To the American people,” Trump declared, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” The problem was America’s leading role in defending democracy, which had been fulfilled by Republicans and Democrats all the way back to FDR. Foreshadowing his 2015 argument that would have Mexico pay for an American-built border wall, Trump then said that the United States should present its allies with a bill for defense services rendered.
