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WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has largely failed to stop more than 250 Americans who have traveled overseas since 2011 to join or try to join terrorist groups, including the Islamic State group, a new congressional study concluded on Tuesday. It did not provide details on the several dozen who have sneaked back into the United States without being arrested or monitored.

“The findings are concerning; we are losing in this struggle to keep Americans from the battlefield,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Tuesday after his committee released the 65-page report.

The report said the Obama administration lacked a strategy to prevent such travel abroad, identify all who try to return to commit terror attacks, or cope with new recruitment practices and technology that allow extremists to communicate securely.

“Of the hundreds of Americans who have sought to travel to the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq, authorities have only interdicted a fraction of them,” the report said. “Several dozen have also managed to make it back into America.” It noted that several people were identified and arrested this year trying to return to the United States.

A Watershed for America’s Jews? Rael Jean Isaac

Are the years when the United States was a supremely comfortable place for American Jews coming to an end? Thanks to Obama’s polices, the answer may be yes, although most American Jews are not only blind to the dangers but actively promoting those very policies.

Challenged by what Secretary of State Kerry calls Germany’s “example to the world” in opening its borders to 800,000 (overwhelmingly Moslem) migrants this year, the Obama administration now proposes to boost the number of refugees it accepts to 100,000 annually, including 10,000 Syrians.
In practice this means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. Breitbart reports that in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Moslem-majority countries. Of these just under 40,000 were refugees. The rest were divided almost equally into those given permanent resident status and those coming as temporary (in theory) migrants, including students and foreign workers. With Obama more than doubling the number of those admitted as refugees, there is little doubt there will be a substantial rise in the other categories—don’t forget, family unification is a major source of legal immigrants.

There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration. Unlike in Germany, a million more Muslim immigrants will not upend the religious demographics of the United States with its population of almost 319 million. But the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small U.S. Jewish population. There are estimated to be five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, overmatching the number of Jews.

Teenage clockmaker invited to Qatar by an organization linked to the terror group.
The story of Ahmed Mohamed, the Dallas schoolboy made famous by the reaction to his arrest for bringing a homemade clock that resembled a suitcase bomb to school, has taken another curious turn. According to the Dallas Morning News, Ahmed and his family have accepted an invitation extended by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development to visit Qatar. Their sister institution, the Qatar Foundation International (QFI) was founded by Sheikh bin Al Thani, who also created Al Jazeera. QFI has links to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

The trip is another leg on what is best described as a celebrity-like tour. On Monday, Ahmed’s newfound status took him to New York’s City Hall, where he received a proclamation from Public Advocate Letitia James. James referred to Ahmed as a role model and allowed him to sit in her council chamber chair. Ahmed was also given a tour of City Hall by Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, and was presented with framed commendation by city Comptroller Scott Stringer. “All students should engage w/ science and technology – Ahmed Mohamed is a role model for all NYers,” Stringer tweeted after the meeting.

Such enthusiasm for Ahmed’s scientific acumen is belied by some inconvenient realities. In a YouTube video entitled “Ahmed Mohamed Clock is a FRAUD,”
electrical expert Thomas Talbot makes the case that Ahmed’s timepiece is actually a commercial clock removed from its casing.

These policies were fostered by the generally awful doctrines of McChrystal and Petraeus…. Please read: Roe v. The Right To Life Of American Troops by Ruth Kinghttp://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-roe-v-the-right-to-life-of-american-troops#ixzz3nDSPuuUt

War is nasty, brutal and costly. In our latest wars, many of the casualties suffered by American troops are a direct result of their having to obey rules of engagement created by politicians who have never set foot on — or even seen — a battlefield. Today’s battlefield commanders must be alert to the media and do-gooders who are all too ready to demonize troops involved in a battle that produces noncombatant deaths, so-called collateral damage.

According to a Western Journalism article by Leigh H Bravo, “Insanity: The Rules of Engagement” (http://tinyurl.com/p59nlqs), our troops fighting in Afghanistan cannot do night or surprise searches. Also, villagers must be warned prior to searches. Troops may not fire at the enemy unless fired upon. U.S. forces cannot engage the enemy if civilians are present. And only women can search women. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said: “We handcuffed our troops in combat needlessly. This was very harmful to our men and has never been done in U.S combat operations that I know of.” Collateral damage and the unintentional killing of civilians are a consequence of war. But the question we should ask is: Are our troops’ lives less important than the inevitable collateral damage?

The totalitarian mass murderers of Islamic State are hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons and using them against their enemies in the West, a reporter who was embedded with the Salafi jihadist fighters in occupied Syria is warning.

German journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent 10 anxious days living in Islamic State-held Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor in Syria with the jihadists, wants the world to know that the terrorist group is deadly serious about unleashing a “nuclear tsunami” on those who oppose its efforts to create an Islamic caliphate.

“This is the largest religious cleansing strategy that has ever been planned in human history,” he said.

The West has “no concept of the threat it faces” from Islamic State and “dramatically” underestimates the threat posed by the group, said the former German politician who was allowed to embed with the group because of his high-profile criticism of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

The second Hebrew novelist was the first to imagine the pageantry and passion of life in ancient Israel—and thereby excited the dreams of emergent Zionists.

This essay is the second in a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at East European Zionist or proto-Zionist writers and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first, on the Galician Hebrew writer Joseph Perl, is available here.

I.

Avraham Mapu (1808-1867): the first Hebrew novelist.

Actually, not. That honor, we have seen, rightfully belongs to Joseph Perl. Yet it has almost always been accorded to Mapu. This was how he was read by his early readers, many of whom had never opened a novel in any language before discovering him. Such was the Hebrew poet and literary critic Ya’akov Fichman. At the age of twelve, as a pupil in ḥeder, the Jewish schoolroom of Eastern Europe, Fichman stole into the room of his teacher’s absent son, reputed to be a reader of secular Hebrew literature, and found there a copy of Mapu’s The Love of Zion. In a memoir penned long afterward in Tel Aviv, he wrote:

I looked at the book and was caught up from the first page in its bright, visionary net. I don’t know whether I grasped everything I read intellectually or emotionally. I only remember a blissful, wondrous day. The light in the room was rose-colored, and rose was the color that lit the pages of the book—the whole world was bathed in its freshness. . . . I sat in the room holding my breath for fear someone might notice I was missing, devouring its pages one after another. I was like a man lost many days in a wilderness who suddenly comes across a pure mountain spring. My heart stopped beating; my eyes saw only the book; the sounds of the world no longer reached me. . . . I read all day from morning to night, and when I stepped out of the room the sun was setting and the people around me were all strangers, as if I had returned from a distant land.

Many believe that wind and solar energy are essential, when the world “runs out” of non-renewable fossil fuels. They also believe that wind and solar are unique in providing energy that’s carbon-free, inexhaustible, and essentially without cost. However, a closer look shows that all three special features are based on illusions and wishful thinking. Nuclear may be the preferred energy source for the long-range future, but it is being downgraded politically.

Fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, are really solar energy stored up over millions of years of geologic history. Discovery and exploitation of these fuels has made possible the Industrial Revolution of the past three centuries, with huge advances in the living standard of an exploding global population, and advances in science that have led to the development of sustainable, non-fossil-based sources of energy — assuring availability of vital energy supplies far into the future.

Energy based on nuclear fission has many of the same advantages and none of the disadvantages of solar and wind: it emits no carbon dioxide (CO2) and is practically inexhaustible. Nuclear does have special problems; but these are mostly based on irrational fears.

A major problem for solar/wind is intermittency — while nuclear reactors operate best supplying reliable, steady base-load power. Intermittency can be partially overcome by providing costly “stand-by” power, at least partly from fossil fuels. But nuclear also has special problems (like the care and disposal of spent fuel) that raise its cost — and inevitably lead to more emission of CO2. Such special problems make any cost comparison with solar/wind rather difficult and also somewhat arbitrary.

Via The Telegraph:

Islamic State-linked terror plots are increasing with attacks on the West foiled or taking place at a rate of more than two a month, according to a new study.

Since the declaration of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (Isil) “caliphate” last year, nine attacks unfolded out of a total of 32 Isil-inspired plots, or 2.3 a month, the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) said.

The think tank’s latest study of Isil-related terror found that the extremist group’s slick media operation is contributing to the radicalisation and inspiring attacks in Europe and elsewhere.

Although the US is under greater threat of attacks, countries in Europe have seen a higher number of deaths resulting from attacks.

A disturbing new report obtained by Judicial Watch shows that the Obama administration has granted residency or asylum to 1,519 foreigners who supported terrorism at one time. Apparently, Obama’s Homeland Security chief determined that the recently admitted Islamists only participated in terrorist activities “while under duress.”

The Obama administration unilaterally eased restrictions on asylum seekers with loose or incidental ties to terror and insurgent groups in 2014. Prior to that, the foreign nationals would have been banned from the country for supporting terrorist causes.

Judicial Watch obtained the numbers from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) annual report to Congress on the DHS secretary’s application of discretionary authority.

The United States Army has created a new patch for soldiers who are fighting ISIS in Iraq.

USA Today reports that “the Army’s patch features crossed scimitars, a palm wreath and stars. The scimitars, short swords with curved blades, are meant to symbolize the twin goals of the U.S.-led coalition: to defeat the Islamic State, also referred to as ISIL, and to restore stability in the region, according to Army documents. The palm wreath is symbol of honor. While the stars and the buff-and-blue colors on the patch indicate the three-star command and the land, air and sea forces involved in the fight.”

Sure. Whatever.

AT readers, you be the judge. As featured at Atlas Shrugs, here is an image of the new patch on the right, next to an image of a Muslim Brotherhood symbol on the left.