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December 2015

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David Singer: Israel – European Union In State Of Disunion

By on December 17th, 2015

Hungary and Greece have broken ranks with the European Union in signalling they want nothing to do with the recently introduced EU labelling laws requiring Jewish products originating in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to have special labels and not be marked “made in Israel”.

These decisions follow hard on the heels of European Parliament delegation for relations with Israel chairman – Fulvio Martusciello – warning:

“The decision to label products was a mistake. Europe is loud about Israel, but quiet about 200 other conflicts around the world.”

Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced Hungary’s decision:

“We do not support the decision to make a special mark on products coming from the West Bank or the Golan Heights. This step is inefficient and illogical. It would only hurt attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Greece’s decision was communicated by letter from its Foreign Minister to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after a visit by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to Israel – when extensive bilateral cooperation in economic matters, technology, science, education, trade, energy, and agriculture were concluded.

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Back from the ‘Caliphate’: Returnee Says IS Recruiting for Terror Attacks in Germany By Hubert Gude and Wolf Wiedmann-Schmidt

By on December 17th, 2015

Islamist extremist Harry S. wasn’t in Syria for long. But during his stay there, he claims, Islamic State leaders repeatedly tried to recruit him to commit terror attacks in Germany. Security officials believe he could be telling the truth.

It was an early summer morning in the Syrian desert, with not a cloud in the sky, when Mohamed Mahmoud asked those gathered around him: “Here are some prisoners. Which of you wants to waste them?”

Not long before, Islamic State (IS) had taken the city of Palmyra, and now jihadists from Germany and Austria were to participate in the executions of some of the prisoners taken in the operation. They drove to the site of the executions in Toyota pick-ups, bringing along an IS camera team in order to document the atrocity in the city of antique ruins. Even then, Mohamed Mahmoud was known to German security officials for his repeated propaganda-video calls to join the jihad. On that early summer day in Palmyra, though, he didn’t just incite others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov himself and began firing. That day, Mahmoud and his group of executioners are thought to have killed six or seven prisoners.

The story comes from someone who was in Palmyra on that day: Harry S., a 27-year-old from Bremen. “I saw it all,” he says.

Harry S. returned to Germany from Syria and is now in investigative custody. He has told security officials everything about the brief time he spent with Islamic State and has also demonstrated his readiness to deliver extensive testimony to German public prosecutors. He stands accused of membership in a terrorist group. His lawyer Udo Würtz declined to offer a detailed response when contacted, but said of his client: “He wants to come clean.”

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Our Timid Military Leaders Will political correctness threaten national security? Walter Williams

By on December 17th, 2015

This month, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton Carter, decreed that there will be 220,000 combat military jobs offered to women — including in Army special operations forces and the Navy SEALs. He said, “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat … and everything else that was previously open only to men.”

Technological changes since the time of the M60 Patton, embodied in the M1 Abrams tank, mean that a woman can probably drive a tank. But what if track pads or a tank track has to be repaired in the field and under enemy fire? Such repairs pose a significant physical challenge to men, who generally have far greater strength than women. Will our military leaders relieve women from such a task, claiming that demanding equal performance creates a “disparate,” sexually discriminatory impact?

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Taking Failures of the Immigration System to Task When will America get serious about immigration law enforcement? Michael Cutler

By on December 17th, 2015

For many years, politicians, attempting to ram “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” down the throats of Americans, insisted we should provide unknown millions of illegal aliens, who have circumvented the vetting process conducted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) inspectors at ports of entry, with lawful status once we secured the U.S./Mexican border. They claimed that this was the only way to deal with millions of illegal aliens, since they could not deport them all.

They blithely ignored the fact that most terrorists did not enter the United States by running our borders and that the only way to adjudicate millions of applications filed by illegal aliens would be to process their applications without any face-to-face interviews and without any field investigations. In essence, they put millions of illegal aliens on an “honor system,” including transnational criminals and international terrorists. They ignored the obvious question, “What could possibly go wrong?”

Disclosures of the lack of integrity to the vetting process of Syrian refugees and the terror attacks conducted in Paris and within the United States over the past few years, provide incontrovertible evidence that the entire immigration system is failing to protect America and Americans.

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Why Syria Can’t Be Fixed The root cause of the conflict is Islam. Daniel Greenfield

By on December 17th, 2015

Obama is betting the last of his foreign policy cred on beating ISIS by fixing Syria through a peace process that brings together Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and just about everybody who is anybody in the international terrorism and regime change racket to fight the ISIS war that he doesn’t want to fight.

There’s just one little problem. Nobody on the guest list wants to fix Syria. They want to control it.

The reason that ISIS exists is the same reason that Syria can’t be fixed. ISIS didn’t get so big because Muslims are angry about our foreign policy. It got huge because Sunni Muslims hate Shiite Muslims.

Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t become popular because it killed American soldiers, but because it suicide bombed Iraqi Shiites. It really took off once there was a civil war underway between Syrian Shiites and Sunni Islamists.

Osama bin Laden wanted Al Qaeda in Iraq to focus on Americans, not Shiites. Zarqawi knew better. Al Qaeda’s base in Iraq was a Sunni population that hated their Shiite and Kurdish neighbors even more than they hated the American soldiers trying to keep the peace between them. By massacring Shiites, Al Qaeda in Iraq stopped being another franchise of a goofy Saudi rich kid making snuff videos for Qatar’s fake Al Jazeera news network and instead became the protectors of the Sunni minority.

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JOHN PODHORETZ: CHRISTIE JUST MADE THE GOP DEBATE MORE INTERESTING

By on December 17th, 2015

After being in the minors for the last debate, Chris Christie graduated to the main stage of the Republican clash for the presidential nomination Tuesday night. And he made the most of it.

The governor of New Jersey was on the periphery of the debate’s dramatic fireworks — with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul trying to blow up Marco Rubio on foreign policy and immigration while Jeb Bush tried to elevate himself by going directly at Donald Trump as the “chaos candidate.”

So Christie played to his own strengths, talking tough on ISIS and terror while making the key point that the signal responsibility of the president is to keep the citizenry safe.

Christie’s future in the Republican race rests entirely on his ability either to win or place a very strong second in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary (after the Iowa caucus) Feb. 9.

He’s in the mix there, and his confident bearing and fluent presentation might well have the effect of solidifying his soft support in the state and causing others to take a renewed interest in him.

Certainly, this was the most important and substantive debate so far because the candidates finally began airing out their real differences. No one had yet laid a glove on Marco Rubio, but Tuesday night, Cruz and Paul went for his jugular on policy — and Rubio did everything he could to lay into them in response.

The divisions on foreign policy were stark. Rubio is the hawk of the race, advocating without apology for the use of ground troops against ISIS in Syria. Cruz talks about destroying ISIS in its territorial stronghold in Syria and Iraq from the air, which almost certainly cannot be done.

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The Iran Nuke Deal Is Not Even Signed! When is an agreement not an agreement? When Obama negotiates it. By Deroy Murdock

By on December 17th, 2015

Deal or no deal?

As Fox News Channel business commentator John Layfield recently suggested, I googled a November 19 State Department letter to U.S. Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kans.). And then, as happens too often these days, my jaw dropped.

Referring to Obama’s vaunted Iran-nuke deal, Julia Frifield, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, wrote: “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

So atop its multifarious pitfalls and Trojan horses, the Iran nuke deal is not even signed.

No American adult would buy a used Chevy without securing a signed contract from the car salesman. And yet Obama — the all-wise alumnus of Columbia University and Harvard Law School — rests the future of Iran’s atomic-bomb program on a sheet of paper that is not even signed?

Iran did not fail to sign the ObamaNuke deal because someone forgot to hand some mullah a pen. This was a deliberate act of omission.

“If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said last August, as NRO’s Joel Gehrke recently noted. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

No problem, Assistant Secretary Frifield insists: “The JCPOA reflects political commitments between Iran, P5+1 (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) and the European Union.”

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Rubio Scores a Direct Hit on Obamacare The Florida senator has exposed the vulnerability in the president’s signature law. By Mario Loyola —

By on December 17th, 2015

Since it fell into GOP hands, the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal Obamacare, in whole or in part. The exercise was worthwhile, because political theater is sometimes worthwhile. But with the Senate in the way, and a presidential veto as certain as night follows day, there was never much hope that a “frontal assault” on the fortress walls would succeed.

As Senator Marco Rubio has shown, a careful study of how Obamacare works suggests a much better strategy: Besiege the program until it surrenders. Establish a cordon around Obamacare so that it can’t expand, cut it off from its main sources of support, and use sappers to undermine the defenses.

Obamacare has the same congenital weakness as every other law that seeks to “guarantee” issuance of health insurance to all who apply for it: It starts by imposing huge losses on insurance companies that are absolutely vital for the law to function properly. Any program of guaranteed issuance must therefore find a way to subsidize the participation of insurance companies, or they will exit the market altogether. Once insurance companies exit the market, the jig is up, and there is no choice but to repeal the law.

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The Families and Friends of the Terrorists Know about Their Radicalization By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 17th, 2015

Amid all the furor over Islamic terrorism in the United States, a few themes are ignored: the role of friends and family of terrorists, and how well the U.S had treated many of those who went on to kill Americans.

Take, for example, the family members of Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook, who recently murdered 14 people and wounded 21 in San Bernardino before being killed by police. The New York Times recently contacted Malik’s sister in Pakistan, Fehda Malik, who insisted that her sister was not an extremist, “She knew what was right and wrong,” Fehda Malik said.

The Times then noted of Fehda herself: “In 2011, on the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, she posted a remark on Facebook beside a photo of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center that could be interpreted as anti-American.”

Farook’s father gave an interview to the Italian newspaper La Stampa shortly after his son’s murderous rampage. He matter-of-factly remarked, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

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Tensions high in British town after “Muslim youths” attack “white girls” A video from earlier this week claims to show a gang of “Muslim youths” attacking “white girls” in the town of Ashton-under-Lyne

By on December 17th, 2015

Tensions are running high in the northern English town of Ashton-under-Lyne after a video circulating online showed a gang of what is reported as British-Pakistani youths attacking young “white girls” at a bus stop.

The incident, which occured in the town just outside of Manchester, has led to a number of groups calling for a ‘march’ or ‘rally’ in the town this coming Saturday, with the English Defence League quickly setting up an ‘Ashton-Under-Lyne’ branch of the group.

The video, which has been removed from YouTube but can still be found on LiveLeak, describes the incident last night as, “This is a video that has been taken in Ashton Under Lyne, England that shows a gang of Muslim youths attacking a group of white kids. Just before the filming had started one of the muslim youths had punched one of the white girls in the face. This is becoming a regular occurence on the streets of the UK.”

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