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October 2016

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For Next UN Secretary-General, A Managerially Incompetent Socialist By Claudia Rosett

By on October 6th, 2016

In the race for the next United Nations secretary-general, the Security Council has narrowed the field of candidates from a remaining 10 to precisely one: and the winner is, former Prime Minister of Portugal Antonio Guterres. It could have been worse — but not by much. Guterres brings to the job a record that suggests he is a perfect fit to head a UN that is prone to overreach, mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and government meddling in every aspect of life — provided we all want even more of the same.

That’s not what you’re reading in most press reports right now, where news of Guterres as top pick for the next UN secretary-general seems to consist largely of recycled public relations materials from the UN, related officials, and the Portuguese government. Guterres was roundly praised on Wednesday by Russia’s ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin (“we have a clear favorite”) and America’s Ambassador Samantha Power (who called Guterres “a candidate whose experience, vision and versatility across a range of areas proved compelling”).

So who is this man, Antonio Guterres, who so impressed the UN envoys of both Presidents Putin and Obama?

Along with a stint as prime minister of Portugal from 1995-2002, Guterres also served as president of the Socialist International, from 1999-2005, following a stint as vice-president of the organization from 1992-1999. As the Daily Caller reminds us, the Socialist International is “a global network of national socialist parties seeking to establish ‘democratic socialism’ around the world,” an endeavor that in the late 1980s included funding the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

From 2005-2015, Guterres served as high commissioner of the UN agency for refugees (UNHCR), garnering experience which he and the Portuguese government advertised as one of his chief qualifications to head the UN Secretariat. In nominating Guterres for the post of UN secretary-general, Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa wrote that Guterres throughout his tenure as the UN’s high commissioner for refugees “showed exemplary understanding of and respect for the values of the United Nations,” ushering in all sorts of marvelous “reform and innovation.”

That sounds great, except the UN’s own auditors took a far less laudatory view of Guterres’s performance. This April the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services issued an audit report identifying a series of “critical” lapses by the UNHCR under Guterres’s management. That audit was obtained by Fox News editor-at-large George Russell, who published a story on June 7 headlined “UN refugee agency handed over hundreds of millions to partners without monitoring.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Obama, criticizing Jewish settlements in Middle East, pushes Muslim settlements in US By Ed Straker

By on October 6th, 2016

President Obama criticized Israel for constructing new settlements in what Israel calls Judea and Samaria and what the Palestinians call the West Bank.

In an uncommonly harsh statement, the State Department “strongly condemned” the move, asserting that it violated Israel’s pledge not to construct new settlements and ran counter to the long-term security interests Israel was seeking to protect. …

The new settlement, one of a string of housing complexes that threaten to bisect the West Bank, is designed to house settlers from a nearby illegal outpost, Amona, which an Israeli court has ordered demolished.

Settlements have poisoned the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu from the earliest days of the administration. Mr. Obama demanded that Israel halt construction as a gesture to draw the Palestinians back to the bargaining table. Mr. Netanyahu complained that the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, frittered away most of the 10-month moratorium before sitting down to talk.

Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. In more recent times, the area became depopulated because of repeated pogroms, or massacres, of Jews by the Palestinians. Now Jews are moving back to Judea. They are not taking any homes from Palestinians; rather, they are setting up shop on empty hilltops, turning barren desert into homes, farms, schools, and businesses.

Obama sees that as a threat. He isn’t bothered by Arabs living in Israel, but he wants territory he has unilaterally decided belongs to the Palestinians to be Judenrein, or free of Jewish people.

Curiously, Obama also has no problem with Muslim settlements in America. In fact, he aggressively pushes them. He has given green cards to over a million Muslims in his eight-year presidency. Many of these Muslims live in insular communities one could call “settlements.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Paris Climate Treaty to Take Effect in November President Obama hails chance ‘to save the one planet we’ve got’ By Byron Tau and Amy Harder

By on October 6th, 2016

WASHINGTON—A climate treaty negotiated by more than 200 countries to cap emissions and curb the global rise in temperatures will go into force in November after the United Nations announced Wednesday the pact had reached the threshold necessary to formally take effect.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement the so-called Paris Agreement would enter into force on Nov. 4.

The agreement aims to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels through individualized national limits on greenhouse gas emissions, though the deal doesn’t itself achieve that level of emissions cuts. World leaders hope to make more aggressive cuts within the deal in the years to come through the national plans to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.

The deal doesn’t legally require countries to curb emissions or take other steps on climate change—in the U.S. that would have likely required ratification by the Senate, which President Barack Obama was unlikely to get—but it does require countries to release their targets and report emissions.

Seventy-three of 197 parties to the convention have ratified, including the U.S. and China, the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters. This week, a number of European countries voted to join the pact, and the European Union voted to move forward as well. Russia, Japan and Australia are among the countries that haven’t.

Mr. Obama, whose administration helped negotiate the agreement and pressed for its ratification, said Wednesday the world had arrived at a “historic moment.

“If we follow through on the commitments that this Paris agreement embodies, history may well judge it as a turning point for our planet,” he said in the White House’s Rose Garden.

Mr. Obama hailed the pact as a key tool in the world’s attempts to mitigate the damage from man-made climate change.

“This gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got.”

Though major parts of Mr. Obama’s energy agenda, such as a tax on oil and a cap-and-trade system, have been stymied by Congress, the president has made climate and energy issues major priorities in his final term in office, issuing environmental regulations to circumvent congressional inaction. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Germany Imports Child Marriage by Soeren Kern

By on October 6th, 2016

The true number of child marriages in Germany is believed to be much higher than the official statistics suggest because many are being concealed.

In May, an appeals court in Bamberg recognized the marriage of a 15-year-old Syrian girl to her 21-year-old cousin. The ruling effectively legalized Sharia child marriages in Germany.

“Religious or cultural justifications obscure the simple fact that older, perverse men are abusing young girls.” — Rainer Wendt, head of the German police union.

“This is not a question of tolerance and openness, but a question of the protection of children and minors. We therefore need a clear rule: Assessing the marriageable age of a person … will in the future always be determined by German law.” — Bavarian Justice Minister Winfried Bausback.

German authorities are debating the contours of a new law that would crack down on child marriages after it emerged that some 1,500 underage brides are now living in the country.

The married minors are among the more than one million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who entered Germany in 2015.

The German Interior Ministry, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request, recently revealed that 1,475 married children are known to be living in Germany as of July 31, 2016 — including 361 children who are under the age of 14.

Most of the married children are from Syria (664), Afghanistan (157) and Iraq (100). Nearly 80% (1,152) are girls. The true number of child marriages in Germany is believed to be much than the official statistics suggest because many are being concealed.

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Iran’s Massacre and Rising Crimes Against Humanity by Majid Rafizadeh

By on October 6th, 2016

“You [Iranian officials] will be in the future etched in the annals of history as criminals. The greatest crime committed under the Islamic Republic, from the beginning of the Revolution until now, which will be condemned by history, is this crime [mass executions] committed by you.” — Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Intriguingly, all those people whom Montazeri is addressing and warning in the audio, currently appear to enjoy high positions.

Iran’s massacre of more than 30,000 people was recently disclosed by Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri’s son, Ahmad, a moderate cleric, who posted a confidential audio of his father on his website but was ordered by Iran’s intelligence service to remove it.

Born in Esfahan, Iran, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri was one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He is a human rights activist, an Islamic theologian, and was the designated successor to the Islamic revolution’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, until the very last moments of Khomeini’s life. His pictures were posted next to Khomeini’s in the streets.

In the recording, Montazeri states:

“You [Iranian officials] will be in the future etched in the annals of history as criminals. The greatest crime committed under the Islamic Republic, from the beginning of the Revolution until now, which will be condemned by history, is this crime [mass executions] committed by you.”

While some international human rights organizations, the Obama Administration and the United Nations appear to have turned a blind eye this massacre and other crimes against humanity, several officials have taken steps. A U.S. House of Representatives Resolution condemning the massacres and other executions was introduced by the House Homeland Security Chair, Mike McCaul, and cosponsored by Chairman Ed Royce, Ranking Member Eliot Engel, and Rules Committee Chair Pete Sessions. The resolution was introduced when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who heads a government that is ranked number one in the world for executions per capita, was addressing the 71st Session of the United Nation General Assembly. During his speech, according to the Associated Press, an unprecedented number of protesters gathered in Dag Hammerskjold Plaza outside the UN — including Senator Joe Lieberman, and Sir Geoffrey Robertson, former Head of the UN war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone, who wrote a report on Iran’s 1988 massacre that was published on the United Nations Arts Initiative website.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s “Good Terrorists”: Because They Might Destroy Israel? by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 6th, 2016

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri would like the Europeans to understand that they need not worry about terrorism by the Islamist movement because the attacks will be directed only against Israel.

The European Court of Justice (EJC) is sending the message to Hamas that Europeans see no problem with Hamas’s desire to destroy Israel and continue to launch terrorist attacks against Jews. This message also undermines those Palestinians who still believe in a peace with Israel.

The EJC recommendation to remove Hamas from the EU’s terrorism blacklist comes at a time when countries such as Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and even Saudi Arabia, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are doing their utmost to weaken Hamas.

Appeasing terrorists is a dangerous game: it has already backfired on its foolhardy players and will continue to do so. This is exactly how Muslims conquered Iran, Turkey, North Africa and much of Europe, including Hungary, Greece, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans — countries that still recall a real “occupation,” an Islamist one, and abundantly want none of it.

The EU and the ECJ need to be stopped before they do any more harm to Palestinians, Christians and Jews — or to Europe.

Once again, the Europeans seem to be in Alice’s Wonderland when they consider Palestinian affairs in particular and the Middle East in general. The renewed attempt by the European Union to remove the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas from its terrorism list is a case in point.

Recently, an advisor to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) recommended that Hamas be removed from the EU’s terrorism blacklist. In 2014, the EU’s second-highest court ruled that Hamas should be taken off the list on “technical” grounds. It argued that Hamas’s listing was not based on evidence, but on “factual imputations derived from the press and the internet.”

However, the European Council then appealed this judgement, arguing that Hamas should remain on the terrorism blacklist, citing a 2001 decision by the UK and the US that designated both Hamas and the Tamil Tigers as terrorist groups. But the recent opinion by the ECJ advisor dismisses this argument. “The council cannot rely on facts and evidence found in press articles and information from the internet,” Advocate General Eleanor Sharpton said. She explained that the council could not rely on terrorist listings by countries (the UK and US) outside the EU.

This latest highly dangerous European attempt to strike Hamas from the terrorism blacklist will, as the EU knows perfectly well, only serve further to embolden the Islamist movement to replace Israel with an Islamic empire.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Islam Upside-Down and Inside-Out Part One Edward Cline

By on October 6th, 2016

There can’t be too many books like this one. The Impact of Islam, by Emmet Scott, is one of many books that deflate the whole history, provenance, and character of Islam. At first glance, as an atheist, I thought that reviewing a book written by a Christian with an obvious Christian bias against Islam would be difficult, mainly in segregating the bias from the truth-telling and facts. But Scott’s book, while it has a demonstrable bias in favor of Christianity, doesn’t lay it on too thickly. Scott’s arguments are very well structured and made, and he doesn’t beat one over the head. There is history and information in it that I have not encountered elsewhere, not even in Robert Spencer’s masterful and comprehensive Did Muhammad Exist? An Enquiry into Islam’s Origins, in which little or no Christian bias is evident.

For starters, Scott visits the rather shocking argument that the Islamic Koran was probably an early Jewish-Christian (or Ebionite) devotional manual (Scott labels Ebionitism as a “proto-Islamic creed”) because so much in it was cadged or plagiarized by Islamic “scholars” over the centuries (Having had a nose or sixth sense for fakery, I’ve always contended that both the Koran and the Hadith were works in progress with numerous editors and compilers over the centuries adding to them or redacting portions from them to make the works consistent and complementary and too “holy” for later scholars and believers to correct or question.) There are just too many similarities in the texts, argues Scott, and the Jewish-Christian work, if Islamic history is to be accorded any credibility, predated the birth of Mohammad by centuries. Christians of various sects existed long before Islam. When Christianity first appeared, it would be nearly half a millennium before the Islam we’re familiar with allegedly made its destructive appearance.

The Koran itself, writes Scott, is an incomprehensible mess. Written and read in its “original” Arabic, and translated into modern non-Arabic languages, it often makes no sense, not even to Islamic scholars charged with the task of interpretation. There seems to be more rhyme and reason in a chimpanzee’s random hunt-and-peck on a typewriter keyboard . In his compelling Appendix, he notes:

Among the numerous titles which have appeared recently we may cite in particular The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, by Christoph Luxenberg (2007)and The Hidden Origins of Islam: New Research into its Early History, a series of essays edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R Puin (2009). Upon the publication of Luxenberg’s book, the popular media…focused on his claim that the 72 virgins promised to Islamic martyrs was a mistranslation, and that what was actually an offer of 72 raisins, or grapes. Yet this was the very least of what Luxenberg was saying, , the full import of which was ignored in the newspapers. In fact, he was claiming that the original language of the Qur’an was not Arabic (where the questionable word is read as “virgins”) but Syriac or Aramaic, where the same word would translate as “grapes.” He was furthermore claiming, sensationally enough, that the Qur’an was originally a Syriac Christian devotional text and had nothing to do with Muhammad or Islam. (p. 174)

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Islam Upside-Down and Inside-Out: II Edward Cline

By on October 6th, 2016

I opened “Islam Upside-Down and Inside-Out” with “There can’t be too many books like this one. The Impact of Islam, by Emmet Scott, is one of many books that deflate the whole history, provenance, and character of Islam. At first glance, as an atheist, I thought that reviewing a book written by a Christian with an obvious Christian bias against Islam would be difficult, mainly in segregating the bias from the truth-telling and facts.”

But I left out some of the goriest parts of Scott’s opus, parts which explain in some respect the title of his book, parts which indict Islam as a psychopathic movement, an “illness” which spread to the rest of Europe.

Islam, for example, invented the “Inquisition,” not the Catholic Church, which adopted the institution as a way of identifying and persecuting heretics. Islam’s original purpose, however, was to test the sincerity of the conversion of Jews and Christians to Islam. Untold numbers of Jews and Christians were made an offer they could not refuse: convert or pay the exorbitant jizya or die. Jizya was a poll tax, or a head tax, on anyone not a “true” Muslim. Theoretically, the tax offered the infidel, or the dhimmi ,“protection” from theft, persecution, or death by Muslims and others, much as racketeers centuries later would extort “protection money” from individuals and businesses; the extortion was simply the criminals refraining from murder or dynamiting one’s business.

As Scott and others have described the workings of jizya, this did not, as a rule, work out as expected, resulting in massacres of Jews and Christians, or their deportation from Spain across the Mediterranean to Morocco. Which leads us back to the Inquisition.

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Withstanding A Second Muslim Invasion By Herbert London

By on October 6th, 2016

After two months of an onslaught by troops of the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy along with the Polish Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire under the command of King John Sobieski rose to defend Christianity at Kahlenberg Mountain near Vienna in September 1683. The battle marked the turning point in the 300 year Ottoman-Hapsburg wars with Christianity. In this instance Christianity prevailed on the European continent.

Three hundred and thirty years later Europe is once again being called on to defend its civilization against Muslims swarming into the continent at a record rate. This time two of Europe’s most affluent nations, Sweden and Germany have laid out the welcome mat. More than a million migrants will end up in Germany alone by the end of this year. But not everyone is so welcoming. The request for firearms in Europe has been overwhelming as people are seeking the means to defend themselves against rampaging and often criminal migrants. Self-defense – which for decades were words that connoted “out-of-control” – is now widely accepted. In Austria gun sales are at record levels.

ISIS trained jihadists, returning as European citizens are infiltrating the ranks of the migrants. They are the vanguard in this civilizational war. But resistance is building. Most Italians are opposed to new arrivals. The British passed Brexit in large part to oppose the EU mandated migrant quota. Swedes have observed baseball bat wielding teenagers beat up Muslims at the Stockholm train station. President Orban of Hungary foresees the “destruction of Europe” in this migration push and argues it is time to push back.

This, of course, is merely the thin edge of the wedge. From an electoral standpoint, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel was soundly defeated in local elections. Political change is just over the horizon in France, Spain, Austria and Italy. Every incidence of reported rape, beating, and honor killing generates thousands of voters for stability at any price.

A Turkish man kicked a woman in the face leaving her severely bruised because she was wearing shorts. But in this increasingly Islamicized nation, a court released the assailant saying that he hadn’t committed any crime.

After the New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne and 17 other cities, fears were heightened in every European capital. But Cardinal Rainer Woelki of Cologne reserved most of his concern for the threats from right wing circles that were intent on retaliation. Other cardinals raised the specter of Islamophobia and the return of “new nationalism” – a euphemism for neo-Nazis. But what the Church could not do and has not done is condemn in unequivocal language the damage to European civilization of a borderless continent that has allowed the free flow of migrants from worn torn Syria. Clearly compassion has its place, but so too do the limits of compassion.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

LAWRENCE HAAS: COLLAPSE OVER IRAN’S MISSILES

By on October 6th, 2016

The revelation of recent days that, back in January, President Obama agreed that the United Nations should lift its sanctions against two Iranian state banks which financed Iran’s ballistic missile development puts the lie to Washington’s claims – stubbornly maintained for more than a year – that it was determined to rein in the Islamic Republic’s expanding missile program.

In fact, the president’s decision reflects a larger pattern of U.S. backtracking over Iran’s ballistic missiles – one that dates back to well before the landmark U.S.-led global agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in July of 2015.

During the U.S.-led negotiations over that agreement, the president decided they should focus squarely on Iran’s nuclear program and not cover such related issues as Iran’s development and testing of long-range ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads – despite the obvious tie between nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

With an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program in place, U.S. officials argued, they could then pressure Iran over not only its ballistic missile program but also its sponsorship of terror, its efforts to destabilize Sunni nations in the region and its increasingly grotesque human rights record at home.

But the public record – of which the new revelation about sanctions relief is now a part, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal – reveals something far different: While negotiating and implementing the nuclear agreement, Washington took multiple steps that not only legitimized Iran’s missile program but actually helped Tehran make further progress.

First and foremost, the United States agreed to soften the global prohibitions directed against that program.

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