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November 2019

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Truth Is No Defense Against Islam and the Left A book explores one woman’s fight for the truth. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/truth-no-defense-against-islam-and-left-daniel-greenfield/

In the fall of 2009, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff told the truth. The truth cost her much of her normal life. It cost her the realization that Austria, the country she had served, was not run based on law and liberty.

And It left her with a choice between paying a fine and going to prison.

That is the story that she tells in her book, The Truth Is No Defense. The title is taken from her odyssey through the European judiciary, beginning with a trial by the media, then by Austrian judges, by the Austrian Supreme Court, and finally by, the court of last resort, the European Court of Human Rights.

Elisabeth’s crime was famously telling the truth about Mohammed’s rape of Aisha, the little girl whom he “married”, and facing hate speech and then defamation of religion charges after a media hit piece. Even though everything Elisabeth described in her educational forums and in private remarks, secretly recorded by a tabloid hack, was sourced to the Koran, to Hadiths and to Islamic legal texts, particularly, the Reliance of the Traveler, the truth of what she was saying proved to be no defense.

Truth is no defense against charges of blaspheming against Islam, neither in Iran or Qatar, nor in Europe.

Many people know how Elisabeth’s story ended, in tribunal after tribunal, rigged proceedings which determined that Mohammed was not a pedophile because he raped grown women in addition to little girls, that the media inventing a quote by her did not constitute slander, and that protecting Islamic sensibilities was far more of a European value than reactionary notions like free speech or the truth.

Fewer know how it began, not in Europe, but in pre-revolutionary Tehran, where a young Elisabeth saw the Islamic revolution sweep away freedom for women under the black shroud of the chador and vicious cries of, “Allahu Akbar”, and then on to Kuwait, under Islamic law, where she fled Saddam’s invasion, and then, as a diplomat, returning to Kuwait and then onward to Libya.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Menace of LGBTQ Bigots Chick-fil-A caves to cancel-culture jihad. Lloyd Billingsley

By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/menace-lgbtq-bigots-lloyd-billingsley/

Chick-fil-A has “stopped donations to several Christian organizations after receiving backlash from LGBT rights activists over the last several weeks,” Mairead McCardle of National Review reports. The popular restaurant chain will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

In its report, NBC News called these groups “controversial” and the donations “controversial funds.” That might come as a surprise to many Chick-fil-A patrons.

The Salvation Army dates from 1865 and works in 130 countries “dedicated to doing the most good,” and meeting human need “without discrimination.” By its own count, the Salvation Army assists 25 million Americans every year.

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, launched in 1954, works in 84 countries “engaging, equipping and empowering coaches and athletes to united, inspire and change the world through the gospel.” Prominent members have included UCLA coach John Wooden and Los Angeles Rams running back “Deacon” Dan Towler.

The Paul Anderson Youth Home, named after the record-setting Olympic weightlifter, strives to provide, “a Christ-centered, holistic, and therapeutic approach towards transforming the lives of young men ages 16-21.” PAYH tailors individual plans “to meet each young man’s specific needs at the physical, emotional, mental, social, and spiritual level.”

In the founding document of these Christian groups, the Bible, marriage is between a man and a woman. This support for traditional marriage is the source of hostility from LGBTQ groups.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Time to Support the Iranian Protestors Is this our last chance to stop Iran without lethal force? Bruce Thornton

By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/time-support-iranian-protestors-bruce-thornton/

While we continue to waste our attention on the carnival attraction known as the impeachment hearings, protests against the mullahcracy have engulfed major cities in Iran. Rather than repeat Barack Obama’s appeasing silence in 2009, and his ignoring explicit calls for support from the beacon of liberty, we need to be bold in our support for the protestors, and even bolder in actions that will back up our words.

The precipitating event that has intensified long-running protests has been a 50% increase in fuel prices. This blow to everyday people’s budgets comes a year after President Trump withdrew the US from the Iran deal, and imposed tougher sanctions on the regime, reducing revenues from the sale of oil. But it’s the actions of the mullahs that are to blame. They took Obama’s bribes to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and have squandered them on developing missiles, spinning centrifuges, and financing jihadists in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq under the noses of American troops.

For Iran, this geopolitical jihadist adventurism is nothing new. Indeed, for 40 years it has been at the heart of Iranian foreign policy. The architect of the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle,” i.e. jihad.  His successors have been true to that goal, one dismissed by our foreign policy savants who blame Israel or the sins of colonialism instead of recognizing this 14-century-long religious motive documented in Islamic law, doctrine, and long record of invasion, conquest, colonizing, slaving, raiding, and occupation. True to Khomeini’s words, for forty years the mullahs have shed the blood of Americans with impunity.

The JCPOA that opened the road to Iranian nukes has been a disaster, an appeasement whose consequences still may, if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, rival that of the French and British at the Munich conference in 1938. Trump’s withdrawal from that malign agreement was an important first step. But NATO allies like France and Germany, whom the devotees of the “rules-based international order” ritually praise, have been sluggish, if not obstructive, in participating fully in our efforts to rein in the regime.

For example, they have tried to create financial work-arounds to lessen the effectiveness of the sanctions. Just this July, our Treasury Department had to warn the Europeans to stop developing Instex, “designed to avoid using international financial institutions that could be vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. Instead, it avoids sending money to Iran by using a virtual ledger to match imports and exports. Thus, a European company wanting to import Iranian oil would pay a second European company exporting a product to Iran, such that dollars need never be sent to Tehran,” according to the Washington Examiner. Even more despicable, France has talked about giving Iran a “$15 billion line of credit to allow Iran to sell its oil abroad despite US sanctions,” the AP has reported.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Strange media silence after Vindman testified he was offered job of Ukraine Minister of Defense 3 times By Thomas Lifson

By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/strange_media_silence_after_vindman_testified_he_was_offered_job_of_ukraine_minister_of_defense_3_times.html

How is this not the major story coming out of the House Intelligence Committee “impeachment inquiry” hearings yesterday? A United States military officer serving in the White House with responsibilities for relations a foreign country being offered the post of minister of defense of that country is shocking.

Yet, yesterday’s testimony by Lt.Col. Alexander Vindman that he was offered the position of Minister of Defense of Ukraine is not the subject of banner headlines today.

Vindman duly reported the offer up his chain of command, as any such offer must be reported. The fact that 2 other embassy staffers witting with him when the offer was made, as he subsequently noted, made that report inescapable. He says that he did not take it seriously, calling it “somewhat comical” and “funny.” And the former Ukrainian official who made the offer, Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, now claims it was made in jest. Erin Banc of The Daily Beast:

[A]  former top national security official in Ukraine told The Daily Beast that he was “joking” when he offered Vindman the post and never actually had the authority to make such an offer.

Oleksander Danylyuk, the former Chairman of the National Security and Defence Council in Ukraine, said he only remembers speaking with Vindman once about the defense minister position. He said it he and Vindman had engaged in a light-hearted conversation about how the two used to live close to one another in the former Soviet Union. It was then that Danylyuk jokingly told Vindman that he should take the defense minister job in Ukraine. 

“We both smiled and laughed,” Danylyuk said. “It was clearly a joke.” Danylyuk said he wouldn’t have been able to seriously offer Vindman the position without direct sign off from President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Pompeo Busts the ‘Occupation’ Myth The claim that Israeli settlements are illegal was flimsy in 1978 and is ridiculous in 2019. By Eugene Kontorovich

By on November 20th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeo-busts-the-occupation-myth-11574207220

Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law. That is now America’s official view, announced Monday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The historic decision repudiates the conclusions of a 1978 State Department memorandum.

For decades, Israel’s detractors have appealed to consensus, asserting that settlements are illegal because the entire international community agrees they are illegal. As with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the Trump administration has refused to be cowed by a hollow consensus. By dissenting, the U.S. has destroyed both the consensus and the frail arguments that relied on it.

The four-page 1978 memo, written by legal adviser Herbert Hansell, was hardly a thorough study. It painted with broad strokes across several issues and cited no precedent for its key conclusions. Most important, its legal analysis of occupation and settlements has never been applied, by the U.S. or anyone else, to any other comparable situation.

Hansell’s memo took two analytic steps. First, it concluded that Israel was an “occupying power” in the West Bank. Next, it invoked an obscure provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which says the “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Hansell concluded that Jews who have moved past the Green Line into disputed territory have somehow been “deported or transferred” there by the state of Israel.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel strikes Iranian military targets in Syria

By on November 20th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/israel-says-it-struck-iranian-military-targets-in-syria/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=vwo_notification_1574240011&vwo_powered=1

“The attack took place in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory,” says the IDF. 

Israel Air Force fighter jets attacked in Syria overnight, striking “dozens of military targets” belonging to the Iranian Quds Force and Syrian army, according to the Israeli army spokesman on Wednesday.

“The targets included surface-to-air missiles, command headquarters, weapons depots, and military bases,” said the Israeli military in a statement on Twitter.

“The attack was carried out in response to the launching of rockets by an Iranian force from Syrian territory into Israeli territory and an intent to cause damage in Israeli territory,” the statement added.

“We, as a military, will not allow Iran to entrench in Syria. We will not put up with Iranian entrenchment on our border and will stand up against it,” vowed the IDF spokesman.

The Israeli military also released a map which illustrated the locations of the targets which the Israeli jets struck, most near the Syrian capital of Damascus, but also close to the Syrian-Israeli border.

The IDF said that the attacks from Syria had come on Tuesday morning.

“Four rockets were fired at us,” said the statement on Twitter, adding that they were “intercepted by Iron Dome [air defense] batteries.”

The Israeli military says that it is “prepared for an attack and any scenario,” but that in the meantime, Israeli citizens living in the northern part of the country near the Syrian border could proceed with their daily routines.

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