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December 2015

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Homeland Security Priorities to Watch in 2016 by Chuck Brooks, Federal Times

By on December 15th, 2015

Key homeland security priorities to watch in 2016

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as the vice president for government relations & marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions. He served at the Department of Homeland Security as the first director of legislative affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate.

2015 was a year that brought homeland security back into the limelight, with increased terror threats both domestic and globally, and alarmingly sophisticated cyberattacks against government, its workforce and citizens. Readiness levels are again paralleling the post 9/11 environment.

So where shall the Department of Homeland Security focus its efforts in 2016?

Counterterrorism

A top priority of DHS, along with law enforcement, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community, will be to preempt and monitor potential terrorists. The change in risk environments necessitates greater DHS collaboration with these agencies, and will include more outreach to the private sector stakeholders who owns most of the nation’s vital infrastructure.

Secretary Jeh Johnson already announced that DHS will unveil a new situational awareness terror alert system that will reflect the current security environment when “not having a specific credible piece of intelligence specifying a plot isn’t the end of the story.” All areas of transportation, including maritime, rails, and aviation will received increased monitoring.

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Haaretz buries the lede by Ruthie Blum

By on December 15th, 2015

Defending his decision to address the HaaretzQ-New Israel Fund conference in New York on ‎Monday, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called the left-wing newspaper, which he said he has ‎been reading for the last 70 years, a “beacon of freedom.” ‎

He got that wrong. Israel is the “beacon of freedom” that enables such a publication to grace its ‎pages with content that, when not crossing the line into treason, is merely shameful in its blatant ‎delegitimization of the Jewish state.‎

That its conference was engaged in doing the same came as no surprise. Nor was the fact that ‎organizers removed the Israeli flag from the podium area at the behest of Palestinian Authority ‎chief “peace” negotiator Saeb Erekat.‎

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Trump fails to file as independent in Texas BY Martin Barillas

By on December 15th, 2015

Despite reports that Trump was flirting with a bid to run as an independent, his campaign missed a deadline to file as independent in Texas today. Trump registered weeks earlier to run as a Republican in Texas.

While Trump could embark on an independent run in a handful of other states, he will be locked out of an independent run in Texas until after the Republican and Democratic primary.

Texas is the biggest prize for Republican presidential candidates: Texas has chosen the Republican nominee in every election cycle since 1980. Trump will need to gain the 38 electoral college votes in the state to become President. Without Texas votes, Trump’s bid to become President in a close election are extremely remote.

On September 3, Trump signed a pledge after causing a controversy at the first GOP presidential debate, hosted by Fox News, where he was the only candidate who would not commit to remaining a Republican during the presidential election.

Trump could still run as an independent in Texas. In Texas, independent candidates must gather signatures from 79,939 registered voters by May 9 if they did not already register. Candidates who run as independents can only gather signatures after March 1, the date of the Democratic and Republican presidential primaries in that state. All of the signatures must be from voters who did not cast their ballots in either party’s primary election.

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From Black September to Bloody December Islamic terrorist savagery, then and now. Lloyd Billingsley

By on December 15th, 2015

On December 2, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California. That horrific terrorist attack, the worst since 9/11, overshadowed another story that emerged the same day and on the same theme: the true nature of Islamic terrorism.

On September 5, 1972, during the Olympic Games in Munich, Palestinian terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. They shot weightlifter Yossef Romano when he fought back, and as the December 2, 2015 New York Times noted, “he was then left to die in front of the other hostages and castrated. Other hostages were beaten and sustained serious injuries, including broken bones.”

The Black September terrorists, a branch of the PLO, killed Romano and another hostage at the Olympic village and the others during a failed rescue attempt at an airport. The attack dominated the news but not all the details emerged. The German authorities knew about the mutilation of Yossef Romano and the savage beatings of others but kept this information under wraps.

Twenty years later in 1992, as the New York Times story charted, Israeli widows Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre was a fencing coach, met with their lawyer, Pinchas Zeltzer. On a trip to Munich Zeltzer had gone through hundreds of pages of reports the German authorities had declined to reveal. The attorney gained possession of some photographs which the women, against his advice, insisted on viewing. The lawyer even wanted a doctor present when they did view the pictures.

“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him,” Ilano Romano told the Times. “Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up? They watched this.” For Ankie Spitzer, the mutilation resolved a key issue.

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Academia Abandons Paris Yet Again Why radical professors think the “chickens have come home to roost” for the West. Stillwell

By on December 15th, 2015

The contemptible reaction of Middle East studies professors to the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market massacres in Paris earlier this year was repeated with the brutal ISIS attacks on Paris in November. The deaths of 130 people resulted not in unequivocal condemnation, but in apologias for Islam, dire warnings of “Islamophobia,” and anti-Western equivocation.

Omid Safi, director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center, complained about Western media coverage, given numerous ISIS attacks throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and asked inanely, “What about my pain?” While it’s hardly unusual for the Western media to focus on the West, it is Safi and his academic cohorts who routinely omit or downplay ISIS’s misdeeds so as to avoid addressing its theological underpinnings. Indeed, his hackneyed comments on that front were true to form:

Yes, the members of ISIS come from Muslim backgrounds. No, their actions cannot be justified on the basis of the 1400 years of Islamic tradition. Every serious scholar of Islam has confirmed this clearly, and unambiguously. ISIS is about as Muslim as the KKK is Christian.

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Progressive “Thought-Blockers”: Diversity The grim antithesis to liberal education. Bruce Thornton

By on December 15th, 2015

Encumbered with a fossilized illiberal ideology, progressives must rely on what Robert Conquest called “thought-blockers”––empty words and phrases that comfort and rouse the party faithful, and camouflage the lack of coherent argument, consistent principles, and empirical evidence. More important, these empty words and phrases that lie at the heart of progressivism are the tools for increasing the progressives’ political power and influence, at the expense of everybody else’s freedom.

Here’s a quick catalogue of a handful of such verbal evasions: “Imperialism,” “colonialism,” “racism,” “black lives matter,” “sexism,” “war on women,” “income inequality,” “one percent,” “fair share,” “Islamophobia,” “nothing to do with Islam,” “climate change consensus,” “microagressions,” and “diversity.” Most lack any specific content or connection to historical evidence, and are devoid of consistent principle. They are ideological spells either chanted by the dim-witted or manipulated by the clever who lust for power and influence.

Take “diversity,” an important pseudo-concept that has lain at the heart of race-based college admissions and preferences since the 1978 Bakke vs. University of California Supreme Court case. In that decision, Justice Lewis Powell asserted that an undefined “diversity” could allow taking account of race in college admissions, for it was a “compelling state interest” that justified an exception to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race. In 2003, in Grutter vs. Bollinger the Supreme Court reaffirmed the “compelling state interest” of diversity since it provided, as Justice Sandra Day O’Conner argued, “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.”

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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