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Ruth King

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Palestinians: When Suicide Attacks Are Bad by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on August 21st, 2017

The emergence of ISIS-inspired groups in the Gaza Strip has long been an open known secret. This is the inconvenient truth that Hamas has been working hard to conceal for the past few years.

Obstinately holding on to an imaginary dream, some political analysts and journalists have misinterpreted the Hamas document as a sign of “moderation” and “pragmatism,” and argued falsely that the Islamist movement is ready to join a peace process with Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar could not be clearer on this point.

Hamas, as we all know, is hardly opposed to suicide bombings. Yet when the boomerang returns, suddenly the attacks become “cowardly terror” actions perpetrated by “outlaws” and “intellectually and religiously and morally deviant” terrorists. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and ISIS may disagree on many issues, but targeting Jews and “infidels” is not one of them. On that point, they are in savage agreement.

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas is finally getting a dose of its own medicine — in the form of a suicide bombing targeting its members in the Gaza Strip.

During the past two decades, Hamas was responsible for dozens of suicide attacks that maimed and killed hundreds of Israelis, particularly during the Second Intifada between 2000 and 2006. Hamas is famous for its suicide attacks and hails the perpetrators as “heroes” and “martyrs.”

For Hamas, suicide bombings are a noble deed when they are carried out by its members and the victims are Jews.

In their own words, Hamas leaders and spokesmen continue to defend their suicide attacks against Israel as a “legitimate tool of resistance” against Israel.

Hamas is famous for its suicide attacks and hails the perpetrators as “heroes” and “martyrs.” Pictured: Masked Palestinian members of Hamas dress as suicide bombers during an anti-Israel rally on June 4, 2004 at the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. (Photo by Ahmad Khateib/Getty Images)

Recent events, however, may have left a bad taste for suicide attacks in Hamas’s mouth.

On August 17, Nidal Al-Ja’fari, a member of Hamas’s military wing, Ezaddin Al-Kassam, was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The suicide bomber was identified as Mustafa Kallab, a member of a jihadi group that is affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group.

According to Hamas, Kallab detonated the explosive belt he was wearing as he and another jihadi tried to cross from the Gaza Strip into Egypt. The slain Hamas security officer, Al-Ja’fari, was among a border security patrol that intercepted the jihadis and attempted to stop them from infiltrating into Egypt. It was the first time a suicide bomber had ever targeted Hamas members.

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Target the Nurseries of Terror Indoctrination by Khadija Khan

By on August 21st, 2017

The gutless response of world leaders to so many terrorist attacks suggest that the world has apparently bought into the “victim narrative” of these extremists, who first set their own countries on fire and then entered Europe with the baggage of their totalitarian ideology, aiming to enslave the masses here too.

The free world, if it would like to win this war, will first have to give up its duplicity. It will have to target the nurseries of terror indoctrination without cherry-picking and keeping favorites. If not, the global security organizations will find themselves exhausted running after the individual suspects, but each time looking just at the “minnows”, never the pond they swim in.

Europe bleeds again as terrorists in Spain plowed their vehicles into crowds of pedestrians in tourist areas in Barcelona and Cambrils. The men killed 14 people and injured more than 100.

Spanish police are currently investigating a local imam for possibly having radicalized the terrorists. The imam had apparently been preaching at a mosque in the town of Ripoll for two years, but stopped just a few months ago. The question has arisen if the mosque administration may have found out something about the imam and fired him, but never bothered to report the information to the local police and to clear the mosque of blame.

The day after the attacks in Spain, two people in Finland were hacked to death in another Islamist terrorist attack, leaving some eight injured.

We hear yet again the promises to root out the terrorism, with a warning from security agencies that they cannot stop each and every terrorist attack — words that translate into the admission that terror has gone beyond the control of European governments.

Yes, there were candlelight vigils for the victims; flags of Spain and Finland on social media profiles; there might even be a “Je Suis Barcelona” campaign — and then the long silence as if we are all in a loop, waiting for another terrorist attack..

We have seen — and these are just the recent ones — Islamist-inspired attacks in London, Manchester, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin and Stockholm, all of the violence leaving scores of women, children and men dead, and even more injured and possibly disabled for life.

It does not take much common sense to understand that individuals cannot commit mass murder without any training, support and most importantly, indoctrination.

The gutless response of world leaders to so many terrorist attacks suggest that the world has apparently bought into the “victim narrative” of these extremists, who first set their own countries on fire and then entered Europe with the baggage of their totalitarian ideology, aiming to enslave the masses here too.

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When Every Republican Is a Crypto-Nazi The New York Times’ Lindy West is done in by her own monumental bad faith. By Elliot Kaufman

By on August 21st, 2017

The New York Times is engaged in an ongoing effort to rehabilitate Communism. For some inscrutable reason, it has published a series of articles nostalgic for the Soviet Union’s Gulag-filled past, most recently explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”

So when I write that Lindy West — who did not author any of those articles — is becoming the craziest writer at the Times, I understand the gravity of the claim I am making.

A contributing opinion writer covering feminism and popular culture, West has written eight articles for the Times, including six since July. I think the best way to describe her is as the unrestrained id of the Democratic party. She is convinced, as if by impulse, that conservatives are terrible people, and will say so at every opportunity. I can see no evidence of any self-regulating mechanism in her work. No, the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, lets it all out.

On Wednesday, West called Republicans every name in the book. She started off relatively mild: Republicans — aside from Trump — pretend to be “on the side of goodness and rationality and respect. Do not let them off the hook so easy,” she wrote. Apparently, we right-wingers are all on the side of badness, irrationality, and so forth.

For West, this was only the beginning. “Sure, pre-Trump Republicans traded more in dog-whistles and plausible deniability than overt Nazi sloganeering,” she wrote. “But the goal was the same: white men in charge, white women at their elbows. Systematically enforced poverty turning millionaires into billionaires. Bigots may have swapped subtext for the Jumbotron, but what is the substantive difference?”

In her eyes, there is no “substantive difference” between normal, pre-Trump Republican rhetoric and “overt Nazi sloganeering.” Further, what Republicans want, she claims, is to keep women and minorities down, and to perpetuate systemic poverty. That is the goal, she believes, of half the country. That is their vision of success in politics.

Unfortunately, the article would descend further into the mud. After pulling a Gore Vidal — all but calling Republicans crypto-Nazis — she doubled down, rebuking the conservatives who criticized Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. “It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate . . . ,” she wrote, before launching into a list of 18 things that Republicans must disavow — including opposition to abortion, environmental regulations, gun control, reparations for African Americans, Obamacare, and transgender rights — in order to “truly” oppose Nazism.

You might suspect that this was just a one-off, over-the-top column from West in response to President Trump’s outrageous Charlottesville comments. That would be a charitable interpretation — something West has never once offered the Right — but a false one. Pick one of West’s articles at random, and you will almost always discover a clearly stated claim that conservatives are evil.

Just last week, West was criticized for writing, “Abortion is liberty” in the Times. She could have also been mocked for claiming that “contrary to what the pundit economy would have you believe,” the procedure is “not particularly controversial.” But this was just a sideshow to her real theme, sounded at every opportunity: Anyone who disagrees with her has bad intentions. “To legislatively oppose abortion is to be, at best, indifferent to the disenfranchisement, suffering and possibly even the death of women,” wrote West. “At worst it is to revel in those things, to believe them fundamental to the natural order.”

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The Fatuity of Fat Studies It’s purportedly an academic discipline but amounts to group therapy, except worse. By Bruce Bawer —

By on August 21st, 2017

Earlier this month, several websites covered news of an upcoming “fat studies” course that will be taught at Oregon State by Associate Professor Patti Lou Watkins. From the way some reporters wrote about it, you might have concluded that fat studies was some brand-new bit of nonsense. In fact, I wrote about fat studies in my 2011 book The Victims’ Revolution, a critical survey of several academic “disciplines” that fall under the general category of identity studies. Even then, fat studies was a pretty established field.

To be sure, it’s nowhere near as widespread as, say, women’s studies or black studies or queer studies. But it already has its own key founding text, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight (2008), by Linda Bacon, and its own classroom anthology, The Fat Studies Reader (2009), edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. Courses in fat studies have been offered at several colleges, and it’s been accepted with surprising rapidity as a legitimate area of study.

Now, the basic premise of all of these identity-based “studies” is that the members of the groups in question are all oppressed victims. Fat studies is no exception. Fat people are victims of “sizeism,” a.k.a. “fat oppression.” If you’re fat, part of the oppression you experience is constantly being told that you should lose weight for the sake of your health. According to fat studies, when you suggest that a portly pal skip that second slice of cake, you’re not showing concern for his or her well-being; you’re committing a microaggression, expressing bigotry, causing emotional pain. Because — and this, believe it or not, is a central article of faith in fat studies — it’s possible to be healthy at any weight. Of course, as anyone who has ever watched My 600-Pound Life knows, this last claim is not only without medical basis; it’s a breathtakingly irresponsible thing to say to a corpulent person.

But then, fat studies isn’t about facts. To a large extent — and it has this in common with other identity studies, although in this regard fat studies may well outdo them all — it’s about group therapy. When I attended a fat-studies panel at the 2010 National Women’s Studies Association convention in Denver (overwhelmingly, fat studies is a female-dominated discipline), I heard professors and graduate students moan and groan about insensitive doctors who had told them that their BMI was too high; about TV ads that push sugary foods on them; about ads for diet products that make them feel bad about themselves; about the slim models in women’s magazines, who also make them feel bad about themselves; and so on.

Everything, in short, was someone else’s fault. Or capitalism’s. What it all came down to — and I’m not making this up — was a horrific phenomenon called healthism. You see, encouraging people to watch their health is (as I put it in The Victims’ Revolution) “a coercive and potentially fascist act linked to capitalism, racism, and Nazi-style eugenics.” That’s healthism.

Yes, they’re serious. If you don’t buy it, dig this, first reported at Campus Reform. In a talk given on August 3 at this year’s convention of the American Psychological Association, Joan Chrisler, who teaches psychology at Connecticut College, accused doctors of “fat shaming” when they propose that their plump patients drop a few. Such conduct by physicians, charged Chrisler, is “mentally and physically harmful.”

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‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals The U.S. Civil Rights Commission refuses to condemn antifa violence. By John Fund

By on August 21st, 2017

One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. There was a clear asymmetric outcome to the violence: A white nationalist mowed down protestors with his car, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But that didn’t mean there were no victims of left-wing violence. Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

As the New York Daily News reported, among antifa’s victims were journalists:

Taylor Lorenz of The Hill was punched in the face by an antifa for recording a fight between the two groups; she tweeted that her assaulter told her not to “snitch, media bitch.” A videographer from Richmond’s WTVR covering a counter-protest got a concussion from head blows with a stick.

In addition, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times tweeted from Charlottesville:

The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park.

Nor is Charlottesville the only place that antifa activists have crossed the line. Peter Beinart has a piece in this month’s Atlantic magazine noting that rioting by antifa forces forced University of California at Berkeley officials to cancel speeches by Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopolous earlier this year.

In April, threats by antifa supporters convinced the Portland, Ore., police department that they couldn’t guarantee security for the annual Rose Festival parade. The parade’s sin? Allowing the local Republican party to have Trump supporters march under the GOP banner in the parade. The parade was canceled, to the delight of many in the hob-nailed boot Left that makes Portland, well, such a special place.

But most of this has been swiftly swept under the rug or underreported by liberals and much of the mainstream media. On Friday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held its monthly meeting in Washington. A liberal member introduced a stirring denunciation of the Nazi, KKK and white-nationalist participants in the Charlottesville rally.

But then Commission member Gail Heriot introduced an amendment that would have added the following:

Though we support peaceful protest and note that most of the counter-demonstrators were peaceful, we condemn violence by anyone, including violence by so-called antifa demonstrators.

Heriot, an independent, was supported in her amendment by Peter Kirsanow, a Republican appointee and African American from Cleveland. But they received no other support from the five commission members appointed by Democrats. Chairwoman Catherine Lhamon complained that Heriot’s amendment would “water down” the main resolution, when all it did was make clear that the commission wished to condemn violence of any kind.

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Thousands of Leftists Converge on Boston to Protest Nazis By Debra Heine

By on August 21st, 2017

They end up protesting free speech advocates instead.

Tens of thousands of left-wing activists converged on Boston Saturday to protest “white supremacism” during a “free speech” rally in which organizers disavowed white supremacism. The counter-protesters were under the impression that the free speech rally would be similar to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week that became violent and left a woman dead. But they were wrong. The rally was organized by a free speech group with no connection to white nationalists or Nazis. The protest on Saturday seemed to be either a result of mass hysteria fanned by a rabidly anti-Trump MSM, or a massive astroturf effort funded by the usual suspects on the organized left. Or a combination of the two.

An organizer for Boston Free Speech, the group behind the rally, told Boston.com that the group is not associated with the white supremacists and wrote in a Facebook post prior to the event that hate groups were not welcome.

John Medlar said his group is mostly comprised of Boston-area students in their mid-teens to mid-20s.

While Medlar defined Boston Free Speech as “intentionally neutral libertarians,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a blog post Monday that the rally “has been organized under the auspices of the alt lite,” also known as the New Right, a “loosely-connected movement whose adherents generally shun white supremacist thinking, but who are in step with the alt right in their hatred of feminists and [ illegal] immigrants, among others.”

Medlar disagreed with this characterization of the rally’s organizers and said he wished the league had reached out to his group directly instead of rushing to judgment.

“We are a grassroots coalition of local progressives, libertarians, and conservatives,” he wrote in an email to Boston.com. “… The topic of our event is free speech itself, and issues related to free speech. [Every] speaker at this event was invited to speak about issues related to free speech, not their other personal politics.”

Medlar, a 23-year-old Newton native, said Boston Free Speech is not associated with any of the groups from the Charlottesville rally, echoing statements put out by the group on Facebook Tuesday, Saturday, and June 17.

Medlar told Boston.com that most of the groups that are involved with his organization are currently “right wing” because they are the ones who “feel their free speech is mostly under threat.” In response to a report in the Boston Herald Friday alleging that members of the Massachusetts Ku Klux Klan were planning to attend the free speech rally, he said on Facebook that his group “reserves the right to dismiss anyone” at their event.

“If we are made aware, at any time, that hate groups are attending our rally we will ask them to exercise their free speech elsewhere,” the post said. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Media contortions protect their established narrative in Boston By Thomas Lifson

By on August 21st, 2017

Something dramatic and important happened yesterday in Boston, but the mainstream provided a counternarrative to mask the shame of it all. The media violated the normal rules of the TV news game – if it bleeds it leads and find a victim — in order to protect the sacred resistance narrative’s presumptive good guys.

The real story of yesterday is that the Boston Police there advised a small crowd of free speech advocates – nary a white supremacist among the speakers – to stop the program early and [I paraphrase] “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!” I am sure they said it a bit more diplomatically, that the group’s safety could not be guaranteed as a mob of 20,000 approached. The crowd had warmed up and psyched up by marching and chanting their way 2.4 miles from Roxbury Crossing. Antifa, with a record of violence was on hand. The police advised evacuation. To protect them from the throngs already assembled, they put them into police wagons and ferried them to safety.

The only violence and arrests (“dozens” according to ABC News) were on the left, including a disgusting attack on an elderly woman that pushed her and Old Glory to the ground.

Boston police were even attacked with bottles of urine and tweeted out a plea for “individuals” to stop it.

Absolutely no groups are ever to be associated with this vicious act, and none were in the major media that did manage to cover the attack, so far as I saw. But I am reasonably sure that none of the free speech crowd threw urine at the police as they were being sheltered from a hostile throng and given safe haven. But that sort of thing is best left to inference in the media’s view. You can find many of the bare facts in the narrative mentioned above and none of the finger pointing in the statement and answers to reporters made by Boston Police Commissioner William Evans. It is well worth the minute and half it takes. Hat tip: Jim Hoft.

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The tanks rolled into Prague August 21, 1968 By Silvio Canto, Jr.

By on August 21st, 2017

As kids, we heard the stories of Cuban political prisoners. Our family dinner table was a classroom with my parents telling us about communism or reading the latest letter from Cuba.

I grew up admiring the men and women who risked their lives to fight for freedom.

Among these men were Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, the heroes who tried to cross the Berlin Wall, the guerrillas who fought Castro in the Escambray Mountains in the forgotten war of the 1960s that Enrique Escinosa wrote about, and those who tried reforms inside the Soviet bloc.
Back in August 1968, the Rascals were riding high with a song called “People got to be Free”.

It was a pop hit in the U.S. It was reality in the streets of Prague:

“On August 21, 1968, more than 200,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact crossed into Czechoslovakia in response to democratic and free market reforms being instituted by Czech Communist Party General Secretary Alexander Dubcek. Negotiations between Dubcek and Soviet bloc leaders failed to convince the Czech leader to back away from his reformist platform. The military intervention on August 21 indicated that the Soviets believed that Dubcek was going too far and needed to be restrained. On August 22, thousands of Czechs gathered in central Prague to protest the Soviet action and demand the withdrawal of foreign troops. Although it was designed to be a peaceful protest, violence often flared and several protesters were killed on August 22 and in the days to come.”

Alexander Dubcek’s mistake is that he called for reforms:

“On January 5th 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no confidence in Novotný.

What happened next must have come as a great surprise to the communist leaders in Moscow. Dubček announced that he wanted the Czech Communist Party to remain the predominant party in Czechoslovakia, but that he wanted the totalitarian aspects of the party to be reduced. Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia were given the right to challenge party policy as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience”. In what became known as the ‘Prague Spring’, he also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticise the government. Newspapers took the opportunity to produce scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.

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Antifa Is Un-American By James Lewis

By on August 21st, 2017

The week before Charlottesville, Liz Warren, the newest and biggest fraud from the left, came out against a more centrist Democratic Party. The N.Y. Times op-ed page had actually allowed some Democrat moderates to publish a piece pleading for moderation on the left, and Liz instantly struck back. She thereby outsmarted Hillary, and a lot of what is happening today is a fight between left and lefter in the party.

Charlottesville followed a week later, and Liz earned Antifa brownie points for pushing back against moderation.

But the trouble with turning hard left too many times is that you end up in the same place you started, as in the classical French observation that “les extrêmes se touchent” – roughly, “the extremes meet each other.”

The left works hand in hand with the Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Hitler’s time), and it’s no surprise at all that CAIR (the U.S. front for the Brothers) immediately endorsed the leftist mob response to the murderous provocation battle in Charlottesville.

The Swastika is the perfect symbol for Antifa, because anyone with only a smidgen of history will recognize Antifa as another neurotic repetition of the worst moments in history. The people who pay for, recruit, and organize ruckus-makers teach radical street theater, and hey, if somebody gets killed, you just blame the innocent.

This is the whole purpose. Innocent people getting killed are a small price to pay for the glorious revolution, as Obama taught in his ACORN Alinsky trainings.

What is more un-American than calling for the assassination of our legally elected POTUS Trump? Wanting to kill a political enemy is the very definition of all the tyrannical war cults in history. Now that liberals have found their inner Stalinist again, they have become what they claim to hate. Calling for a presidential assassination is an open confession of totalitarian murder fantasies, the same nightmare fantasies that drove actual assassins – against JFK, against Pope John Paul II, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and against Abraham Lincoln.

What we are seeing today is not just talk of assassination. It has already resulted in a near fatal assault on Republican congressmen. It drove that mad young man in Charlottesville to panic, and in due course, we will find out what actually happened, through the court system. Only fools jump to instant conclusions, but then we are governed and preached at by fools every single day. Republicans have happily jumped into the public dirt pool along with all the other fools. Just keep track of who said what at this critical moment, and dig it out at election time.

These are dark, very dark signs of bad trouble to come, and there is no reasonable doubt that our jihadist enemies are working hand in hand with the likes of Antifa.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-time network of violence-prone Muslim radicals, also called Salafists. Barack Hussein Obama, Code Pink, and Bill Ayers provoked the so-called Arab Spring rebellions at the start of the Obama years, including the Ikhwan in Egypt, all of them in alliance with other bad characters, including child-killing terrorists like Hamas, Hezb’allah, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the rest.

Obama’s Arab Spring fraud led to tens of thousands of deaths in Arab countries – a point very widely understood in places like Egypt. The methodology of the Arab Spring is identical to Antifa, because mob agitation is the same all over the world.

After the Arab Spring crashed into slaughter, Obama just laughed it up in his public appearances, but no sane observer doubts his lifelong links with the murderous left. He wrote about it in both autobiographies, and it will no doubt show up in his third autobiography that’s now coming up.

The American Thinker has long pointed out massive evidence for direct collusion between the left and Muslim terrorism, because it’s been plain for anybody with the guts to see it. We have not been the only ones to call them out, but you can easily search AT’s archives to verify that.

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Gao Zhisheng Disappears The Chinese human-rights lawyer has vanished again.

By on August 21st, 2017

The death of Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in state custody last month briefly focused world attention on Chinese repression under President Xi Jinping. Now human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has disappeared, perhaps into the state-security maw that presided over Mr. Liu’s death.

Family members in exile in the U.S., who talk to him regularly on the phone, say Mr. Gao disappeared from his home in remote Shaanxi province earlier this month. Mr. Gao has been living under house arrest since 2014, surveilled by Chinese security forces. Local police say they don’t know where he is.

Mr. Gao has been incarcerated, tortured and released several times since 2006, when he was charged for “inciting subversion” for defending such clients as Falun Gong worshippers and factory workers. Yet Mr. Gao remained unbowed, thanks in part to his Christian faith. He went public with gruesome details of his torture, called for the removal of the Communist Party and advocated for a democratic China.

Mr. Gao may have been detained because he recently gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine reiterating his political beliefs. Or the regime could be rounding up dissidents before the Party Congress this fall to avoid dissent about corruption or the lack of freedom during what is supposed to be a celebration of Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power.

Human-rights lawyers like Mr. Gao have been a particular target of state suppression, perhaps because they make their case by citing the words of Chinese law that embarrass the regime’s claims to legitimacy. The world should keep shining a light on these Chinese patriots, not least during the Party Congress.

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