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Ruth King

The Yanks over There — 100 Years Ago American intervention saved Western Europe in World War I, but the result was a failed armistice. By Victor Davis Hanson

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. The ongoing conflict ended just 19 months later with an Allied victory.

The United States did not win the war alone, given the far earlier and greater sacrifices of Great Britain, France, Italy, and czarist Russia.

But America’s late arrival, with some 2 million doughboys who landed in France less than three years after the start of the war, saved the teetering Allied cause. By late 1917, Germany had knocked Russia out of the war and seemed likely to swarm the sole Western front and finish off the exhausted British and French armies.

On this centennial of America’s entry into the war, debate still rages over the cause and results of World War I in a way not true of the far more lethal World War II (an estimated 60 million dead) just two decades later.

Until World War II, the conflict was initially known as the Great War, on the naïve premise that the “war to end all wars” would never have to be repeated. But World War I did not solve problems as much as it led to even greater ones.

Unfortunately, World War I ended with an armistice — at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 — and not with an unconditional surrender of the defeated. Although Germany and Austria-Hungary clearly lost the war, their countries were not occupied and monitored, as would be true after World War II.

The 1919 Treaty of Versailles that was supposed to bring peace is often blamed for being too harsh on the losers. But it was more complicated than that. The settlement of Versailles combined the very worst of both worlds: blaming the defeated side, but without any means of ensuring that the humiliated losers would not rearm and try their luck again.

The victorious Allies soon hosted conferences outlawing deadly weapons, declaring war obsolete, and calling for collective security through the new League of Nations.

In response, the losing Germans often blamed back stabbers for their defeat and first interpreted such utopianism as Allied guilt — and later as weakness. Under Adolf Hitler, Germany rearmed and began absorbing neighboring borderlands eager to replay the verdict of World War I.

The United States was depressed that World War I seemed to have brought no lasting peace. It returned to its former isolationism during the depression years of the 1930s, disarmed, and was determined to never again become involved in Europe’s nihilistic wars.

Yet that very disengagement weakened the European democracies’ common front. Both European appeasement and American isolationism only encouraged the new Axis Powers to become even more determined to reverse the outcome of World War I.

World War I broke out in 1914 at an age when new offensive technology — machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, mass-produced artillery shrapnel shells, submarines — had vastly outpaced the arts of defense and medical care. It proved far easier to kill than to protect soldiers. And it was the first major war that was truly global, spreading beyond Europe to areas of the Middle East and Africa.

Mass deaths — especially during the great flu outbreak of 1918 — in the trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea over four years of fighting nearly destroyed Europe. The war finished off the German, Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

In time, savage new ideologies — Fascism, Nazism, Communism — filled the void and promised to restore national pride and prosperity.

Democrats: Party of Obstruction The “resistance” remains determined to sabotage the Trump presidency — rather than help the American people. Daniel Greenfield

Forget all the pages of the Democratic Party platform. The only real Democratic platform left is the one sung by Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

The elected Democrats still surviving amid the trendy restaurants of Adams Morgan and the boutiques of Dupont Circle are convinced that the voters elected them and that taxpayers are paying them to get nothing done.

Not one thing.

The ordinary leftist wearing a pink hat and clutching a Resistance sign either has no job or a government job. At the pinnacle of this pathetic movement sits the Democratic member of Congress making $174,000 a year, with Nancy Pelosi and Schumer taking home $193,000, and being paid to do nothing.

Around them circulate a vast network of staffers who are also being paid to do nothing constructive.

Taxpayers are on the hook for over $4 mil for the salaries of Senator Feinstein’s staffers. Schumer needed a $3.5 million staff even before he took power. Franken’s posturing requires a mere $2.8 million in staff salaries. It’s certainly a step up from 5 minutes with a comb on Saturday Night Live.

Alcee Hastings, threw a tantrum during the ObamaCare debate. “I don’t have to be nice to nobody,” he ranted. While Hastings was accusing Republicans of abusing poor people, the former impeached judge was carrying out his own charity work by paying his girlfriend $168,411 a year.

Taxpayers are spending a fortune to subsidize a corrupt bunch of clowns who spend all their time trying to bring down the government. The Democrats are not the opposition. Opposition parties oppose, but they also work for the common good. The Democrats only oppose for the sake of opposition. Their likeliest nominees burnish their presidential credentials by voting against everything.

The Democrats are not an opposition party, but an obstructionist party.

New presidents traditionally have a honeymoon period in which to assemble their administration and put forward an agenda. As David Horowitz has frequently pointed out, President Trump was denied any space in which to assemble an administration. Instead Democrats openly and covertly worked to prevent him from assembling an administration, let alone enacting an agenda.

The distinction is an important one.

The Muslim Brotherhood: Peddling Sharia as Social Justice by Judith Bergman

Human Rights Watch, an organization that is supposed to look out for victims of human rights abuses, not abusers of human rights is begging US decision makers not to designate the Muslim Brotherhood — which, if it had its way, would take away everyone’s human rights and substitute them with sharia law — a foreign terrorist organization.

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope”. — Muslim Brotherhood motto.

Conveniently, Hamas — which according to article two of its charter, is “one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine” — is, it seems, working on a new charter. The new charter would declare that Hamas is not a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, despite its always having been so. That way, is the Muslim Brotherhood’s “narrative” of newfound “nonviolence” suddenly supposed to become believable?

Gehad el-Haddad, official spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), is on a mission to rewrite the terrorist and radical history of the MB. He seems to be doing this for the consumption of naïve Americans. These seem only too willing to believe — in the name of tolerance, diversity and trying to be non-judgmental — that an organization whose ultimate goal is the supreme reign of Islamic sharia law everywhere — if necessary through violent jihad — could possibly value anything even approximating equality and the rule of (non-sharia) law.

“We are not terrorists,” wrote a political activist for the MB, Gehad el-Haddad, in a recent article in the New York Times.

“The Muslim Brotherhood’s philosophy is inspired by an understanding of Islam that emphasizes the values of social justice, equality and the rule of law… We believe that our faith is inherently pluralistic and comprehensive and that no one has a divine mandate or the right to impose a single vision on society… Nothing speaks more to our unequivocal commitment to nonviolence than our continued insistence on peaceful resistance, despite unprecedented state violence”.

The “faith”, which el-Haddad avoids naming, is Islam. The very essence of Islam, as sanctioned in the Quran and the hadiths, however, seems to be the belief in a divine mandate to impose the single vision of Islam on the world — if necessary, through violent jihad. Its motto is:

“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope”.

Even dawa, the Islamic call to conversion, or proselytizing — as explained by the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, host of one of Al Jazeera’s most popular programs, Sharia and Life, which reaches an estimated 60 million viewers worldwide — is an Islamic summons for the non-violent conquest of non-Muslim lands. As Qaradawi told a Muslim Arab Youth Association convention in Toledo, Ohio, in 1995, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wa.”

Qaradawi, in a recording from 2007, says that the aim of this “peaceful” conquest consists mainly of the introduction of Islamic law, sharia. According to Qaradawi, sharia should be introduced in a new country gradually, over a five-year period, before implementing it in full. Sharia includes the end of free speech under “blasphemy laws”; the oppression of women, including women being worth half as much as a man in court and inheritance; polygamy, and the persecution of Jews (Qaradawi advocates killing all of them). Qaradawi has explained in TV recordings how sharia also includes chopping off hands for theft, killing apostates and homosexuals, as well as beating women as a means of “disciplining” them.

The New York Times, ostensibly concerned with “fake news”, evidently has no qualms about lending its pages to such straightforward propaganda as El-Haddad’s piece on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to a recent report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the MB recently launched a lobbying offensive in the United States to charm decision-makers in the Trump administration and Congress to give up on the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2017, re-introduced on January 9, 2017, by Senator Ted Cruz.

According to the MEMRI report, the Muslim Brotherhood’s lobbying efforts include:

“Launching a widespread informational media campaign, including the hiring of U.S. lobbying and legal firms, outreach to the press in the U.S., and dissemination of informational content aimed at improving its image in the West, particularly in the U.S.”

Ireland: Undermining Academia, Implementing Anti-Semitism by Denis MacEoin

It has from the beginning been designed to denounce Israel as an illegal state, all under the cover of supposed neutral academic inquiry.

It is not, however, in the least surprising that an Irish government would pass a motion like that so wholeheartedly. After all, links with the PLO and other terrorist groups were connived at or even encouraged by the Irish government itself.

The conference put itself in the welcoming hands of the city council, a body thoroughly in agreement with the aims of the event, to find spurious legal arguments for the delegitimization and eventual destruction of Israel.

Readers may remember a controversy reported in January. It was proposed that an international “academic” conference about the legitimacy of Israel would take place in University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. There have been several developments in this sorry enterprise since then.

What the conference, which goes under the revealing title, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism”, was about may be summed up in a few sentences. It has from the beginning been designed to denounce Israel as an illegal state, all under the cover of supposed neutral academic inquiry. The organizers had previously tried to hold the event at Britain’s Southampton University and, reportedly, other European universities, each time without success.

Michael Galak The Right to Offend…and be Offended

Let’s give 18C the benefit of the doubt and allow, for argument’s sake, that it was conceived with the very best of intentions. OK, that’s my concession, but I also expect any reasonable person on the other side of the argument to acknowledge it has become a handy weapon, often a lucrative one.
Ah, this evergreen topic of insult and offence. What a maze to skip through, this business of not “insulting and offending” anyone! There’s such a rich and wondrous variety of reasons why people might dislike, sometimes intensely, anything you say or do that it boggles the mind. Even if you manage to avoid contentious topics — race, religion, money, politics, immigration, abortion, drugs, Section 18C, ABC, environment, elections, Trump, Hillary, women, sex, discrimination, human rights, terrorism, victims, Aborigines, carbon footprints, homosexuality, prostitution, conscription, vaccination, coal, renewables, oppressed sharks and pot-bellied parrots — you might yet trigger a warning of some kind.

Table conversations become more and more like valedictory dinners in a minefield. Step back from the table and its thin fare of acceptable opinion and topics for discussion and one false move detonates the big kaboom! So, rather than rile the table, you wear the standard-issue solemn face as steaming servings of politically correct tripe are dished up for general consumption. Beg to differ and, well, it could be the end of a beautiful relationship. Risqué jokes? None of those, please, unless the punch line is aimed at conservatives, which is always acceptable and necessarily so. There are now so many subjects and identity groups the Left has declared off-limits, Liberals are about the only free-range prey left.

Where would we be if anyone could tell a joke about anyone and anything? Dragged before the tax-hoovers of the Human Rights Commission, like poor Bill Leak, that’s where. An appropriate deference — indeed, a secular adoration — for the paraded virtues of the Fitzroy, Brunswick and Balmain set is required to avoid a public shunning and, once Dr Tim Soutphommasane has touted for “victims” on Facebook prepared to keep him busy and in the headlines, there will be no escaping the substantial legal costs. These morally superior, specimens struggle mightily to bring us mugs into the bright, brave future they envision for all humankind, whether the rest of us like it or not! Solemn agreement, meek acquiescence and, for those who wish to get ahead, a fawning deference that would shame Uriah Heap is what they (and their taxpayer-funded legal departments) expect and demand. They are, by their own estimation, the sole custodians of human rights’ eternal flame. Place your unfettered sense of humour before the altar of PC rectitude and surrender it as an offering to what they imagine is the greater good.

Very soon there will be no permissible topics for pointed jocularity, not unless they are the sort based on Pavlovian stimulus and response. If you have been to one of those “comedy” festivals, you will know what I mean. The stand-up guy or gal says “yada yada yada … little Johnny Howard” and the audience roars with laughter because, well, that is what good groupthinkers are supposed to do — respond on cue. Like the screamers in 1984‘s Two Minute Hate, they know and enjoy the satisfaction of howling with the mob at those they love to hate, be it howling with derisive laughter or old-fashioned, flat-out contempt.

They say the personal political, so let me ask if Section 18C protect me? As a Jew, I am sensitive to anti-Semitic insults, and 18C is presented as protecting me from this scourge. As far as an open assault, whether physical or verbal, it is not a foolproof protection as far as my safety and my family’s is concerned. For example, consider the variety of organisations declaring themselves to be “anti-Zionist” that are, in effect, no more nor less than anti-Semitic. Did 18c inhibit the mobs of chanters and bullies who, week after week, invaded the Max Brenner chocolate shops? Watch the video below if you are groping for an answer.

Graham Culver The Incompatibility of Islam and the West

There is a vast gulf in Arab societies between an elevated self-esteem based on an alleged superiority in religion and civilisation and, on the other hand, the constant denial of this superiority by the grim reality of curtailed liberties, intellectual atrophy and institutionalised corruption.
Islam today, specifically in the Middle East, can be described as being in a state of anomie. The history of the Arab-Islamic civilisation since the ascendancy of the Ottoman Empire has served to bring the Arabs to a state of physical and philosophical distress. Given the present state of the Middle East—the internal and murderous sectarianism now largely centred on Iraq and Syria, though necessarily affecting their neighbours; the peril and harm befalling, in different parts of the Islamic world, non-Muslim peoples; the mass murder being inflicted upon major European centres to cause random deaths and create civil panic; and the political chaos in many Islamic countries causing armies of displaced people to seek refuge in the West—clearly something is seriously amiss. As a consequence, concern in the receiving countries grows at the evident difficulties many of Islam’s refugees experience adjusting, or failing to settle in, to a Western culture which is almost ontologically opposite the faith refugees bring with them. For faithful Muslims, shrouding themselves in their faith is their only way forward; but necessarily a separate forward.

Modernity, now set firmly in the West upon the continued unfoldings of science and technology, has little place in the Muslim doctrine of the complete transcendence of God. Muslims believe “man is neither autonomous nor free and only God has the power to make decisions. God has sovereign control over humans and this control is exercised through Islamic law.” This simple but demanding liturgy describes the different historical trajectories that have been followed by the Western-Christian and the Arab-Islamic civilisations from their beginnings. Though following a similar early trail, their different histories have produced radically different human experiences.

Many events shaped the beginnings of both Christianity and Islam. Without the long and eventful life of the Roman Empire, Western Europe and the nations and peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea would have a substantially different shape today. Without Rome, Christianity might have remained as blown sands among the passions and poetry of what is now known as the Middle East. Without Christianity, with its simple liturgy and potent narrative, the peoples of Europe would have fought and died for different gods and kings among their landscapes. The beginnings of Western civilisation emerged as these three historical strands connected. Islam began and remains in the life of its founder, Mohammed (570–632).

The early evolution of both faiths overlapped in time. Following the death of Mohammed, Islam, inspired by religious fervour, the anticipation of booty and the martyrdom rewarded to a death in battle, spread by conquest to Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, North and West Africa, Armenia, Georgia, eastern Khurasan, Sind, much of Transoxiania and most of the Iberian peninsula. The Arab-Islam empire, at its height during the period 700 to 850, absorbed and was influenced by classical literature, Hellenist thought, Byzantine institutions, Roman law, Syriac scholarships and Persian art. In addition, architecture and the sciences were enriched by Muslim research and practice. But Islam in substance was selective and discriminating, excluding all ideas and materials which offended the nature and ends of Islamic society. The early intellectual promise of Islam stuttered and a long decline in Arab power commenced. In the thirteenth century the Ottomans filled this void and established what was to become one of history’s great empires.

The Western world

Once Upon a Time in the West by Edward Cline

Imagine my surprise when I learned that many British government buildings are being subsidized by Sharia finance, and therefore come under Sharia law. The Daily Mail ran this revealing story just after the London-Westminster Bridge attack. This is an instance of abject submission to Islam.

Will the Royal Coat of Arms give

Way to the Islamic Crescent?

Admiralty House is one of two more public buildings that are revealed today to operate under Islamic law following the revelations that government properties were quietly transferred to finance an Islamic bond scheme in 2014.

In addition to two Department of Health buildings and the Department of International Development property on Whitehall, the bond scheme also covers Admiralty House and an unidentified building at 4-26 Webber Street in Southwark, south London.

It takes the total number of government buildings that were transferred to fund the £200million Islamic finance scheme to five.

But no imbibing of alcohol will be allowed, per Sharia . Doubtless down the road, criticizing Islam will not be permitted or you’ll be fined or attacked. No pork products to be sold or consumed on the “new’ premises. No British beef will be served unless it’s halal.

Under the terms of the lease, the sale of alcohol is one of the activities banned on the premises because they must conform to Sharia law.

George Osborne announced the move in June 2014 as part of an effort to make the UK a global hub for Islamic finance.

But critics said the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain’s financial and legal systems by imposing Sharia law onto government premises.

Due to the Islamic bond scheme – known as Sukuk – the ownership of the leases on the five government buildings have been switched from British taxpayers to wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks.

The money raised will be repayable from 2019. But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the Government offices because interest payments are banned in Sharia law…..

Submission to Islam will be painless if you’re willing to lease your property (or the British taxpayers’ property) to the government per the “generous” terms established by wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks.

The money raised will be repayable from 2019. But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the Government offices because interest payments are banned in Sharia law.

Leave it to the British government to sell out its own citizens. And also to the Canadiangovernment to sell out its real citizens, not the “refugees” in whose name the Parliament there seems to legislate Specially targeted: “Islamphobic” speech.

Will the Maple Leaf be replaced

with the Islamic Crescent?

for, and against freedom of speech.

Politicians in Canada moved forward a motion, with a vote of 201 to 91, that gives Islam special protections under hate speech laws. (M103)

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on board with the motion.

In Praise of Paranoia by Tom McCaffrey

“Deep-state holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump.” So said Sean Hannity recently, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal took him to task for it. Stephens accused Hannity of right-wing paranoia. He quoted Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and asked whether Hofstadter’s description applies to the right wing mindset of today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesman who are at the very centers of American power.”

By the time Hofstadter wrote these words, progressives had already gone a long way toward transforming the political system of the United States. As the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood it, a primary purpose of government is to secure the property rights of individuals, which they believed are the foundation of all other rights. (Try to imagine freedom of the press without privately owned newspapers, or freedom of religion – in a country that is expelling religion from the public square – without privately owned church buildings on privately owned land.) This purpose manifested itself most broadly in the structure of the Constitution, which was intended to limit the power of democratic majorities, correctly regarded by the Framers as the greatest threat to private property and, thus, to individual liberty.

But in the early 20th century, the progressives set out to make America more democratic – through the 17th Amendment, for example, which substituted popular election of U.S. senators for their selection by the respective state legislatures. Their purpose in democratizing America was not to empower the people, but, rather, to “democratically” abolish the Constitutional barriers that had kept property rights secure for a century, thus freeing governments at all levels to intervene in the economic affairs of the nation, legislating wages, working conditions, hours of employment, and countless other matters.

Two Netanyahus Meet Two Trumps by Rael Jean Isaac

One of the most widely accepted misconceptions concerning the Arab-Israel conflict (a subject awash in misconceptions) is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hard-core right winger.” There is nothing in his behavior as Prime Minister during his first years in that role (1997-99) or in his more recent period in office, beginning in 2009, to support this belief. On the contrary, like his predecessors, he has made repeated dramatic territorial and other concessions, including acceptance of the so-called “two state solution.”

In Jan. 1997, still in the first year of his first term, he signed the Hebron Protocol with the Palestine Authority, turning over most of Hebron, after Jerusalem the most important city in Jewish history, to the PA. Netanyahu did so little to change Labor’s disastrous post-Oslo policy that erstwhile supporter Benny Begin (Menachem’s son) derided him at a Likud Party meeting in March of that year. “Arafat releases terrorists and so does Israel. Arafat smuggles in weapons and we give him assault rifles to round off his stores….We have government offices in Jerusalem [supposedly the unified capital of Israel] and so do they.” The following year, under President Clinton’s prodding, Netanyahu signed the Wye River Memorandum in which he promised to turn over 40% of Judea and Samaria to Arafat, a safe corridor between these areas and Gaza, even an airport in Gaza. It is true Wye was not implemented, but that’s only because (predictably) Arafat promptly reneged on his commitments under the agreement.

That same year Netanyahu embarked on secret negotiations with Syria in which he offered to return the Golan Heights. Was Netanyahu prepared to go back to the 1967 border (which Clinton and Dennis Ross assert in their respective memoirs) or did Netanyahu, according to other reports, hold out for several kilometers beyond the international border line? Although Assad backed out, according to widespread reports in the Israeli press, in 2010 Netanyahu tried again, this time with Bashar Assad, offering to return to the June 4, 1967 lines. Fortunately the negotiations collapsed with the onset of the rebellion against the Syrian ruler. (One shudders to think what “success” would have meant for Israel, with Hezbollah and/or ISIS embedded on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.)

That near miss with disaster has not prevented Netanyahu from continuing to offer major concessions. In the wake of Obama’s Cairo speech, Netanyahu agreed to adopt the “two state solution” as his government’s policy. Moreover, retired Brigadier General Michael Herzog (brother of Israeli Labor Party head Yitzhak Herzog), who has participated in almost all Israel’s peace negotiations since Oslo in 1993, writes in The American Interest that Netanyahu in the Obama years offered such large withdrawals that he could not admit their scale to the Israeli public or his coalition partners.

And contrary to the widespread perception, fostered by the media, that Netanyahu has peppered the landscape of Judea and Samaria with Jewish settlements, Israel has not built a new settlement in 25 years. The much publicized on and off settlement freezes to which Netanyahu has agreed applied to existing communities, the “freezes” meaning there was no building even to accommodate natural population growth within them.

So what accounts for Netanyahu’s reputation as an unbudging hawk? The reason is that he knows better than he acts with the result that his rhetoric differs from his policies far more than has been the case with other Israeli leaders. Prime Minister Shimon Peres seems clearly to have believed in the mirage he concocted of a New Middle East. Prime Minister Olmert appears to have genuinely felt the emotions which in 2005 (in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum) he attributed to the people of Israel as a whole: “We are tired of fighting; we are tired of being courageous; we are tired of winning; we are tired of defeating our enemies.”

ISIS Shows French Jihadist Raising 9 Young Kids in Terror Group By Bridget Johnson

A new ISIS video shows a French jihadist raising his nine small children to follow the terrorist group, the little girls cloaked in black abayas and the young boys dressed in military garb and ISIS caps.

The video released from Raqqa — the ISIS capital in Syria slowly being besieged by tens of thousands of fighters from the multiethnic, multisectarian Syrian Democratic Forces — is titled “The Islamic State: The Trustworthy Religion” and also chides Muslims enjoying Western life.

The Syrian citizen journalist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently identified the French ISIS member, who spoke his native tongue in the video, as Abu Yaqoub al-Fransi.

The Frenchman is shown pushing some of the kids on a swing and taking the boys to school, the 14-minute video painting his life as virtuous while slamming the Middle East version of “The Voice” reality show singing competition.

ISIS also mocks the YouTube-popular Arab desert pastime of surfing atop cars balanced on two wheels as an un-Islamic amusement.

ISIS also announced the launch of a new TV network in Raqqa, Al-Bayan, and showed a sample programming lineup. The group already had its Al-Bayan radio station, which is still broadcasting in Raqqa, including in English, but has been seized by Iraqi forces in Mosul. ISIS has long confiscated satellite dishes in occupied areas to try to control the media narrative, and the new video shows the ritual stomping and ax-hacking of broken satellite dish equipment.

Another foreign fighter is shown playing with his young kids in a park before teens are seen being sent off in armored vehicles to conduct suicide bombings. A boy at the end of the video breaks down in tears after describing his allegiance and singing a nasheed. CONTINUE AT SITE