http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/01/13/iran-released-footage-photos-of-us-sailors-held-overnight/ Iranian state-controlled news outlet Tasnim released video Wednesday afternoon that shows a U.S. sailor apologizing for purportedly infringing upon Tehran’s sovereignty. On Tuesday, Iran seized two U.S. naval boats, arguing they illegally entered Iran’s territorial waters. The Pentagon said they encountered mechanical troubles, forcing their boats to go off course. “It was a mistake, […]
Europe has voluntarily begun the process of giving up its liberal and hard-fought-for freedoms. Free speech no longer exists, only — straight out of totalitarian ideologies — “responsible” free speech: “free” only if it does not “offend” anyone.
The desire of many Europeans and other self-declared devotees of “human rights” to cover up, downplay or explain away what is happening in Europe, in fact represents the opposite of respect for others and equality before the law.
Absolving such criminal behavior is not only the very opposite of justice, it is also a kind of “inverted racism” — against its own native Europeans.
The statistics in other countries are similar. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, and chased, for being Jewish. Signs in the street read, “Sale Juif” (“dirty Jew”), “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.” None of these side effects of Muslim immigration seems to concern the liberals, the media, or the purported defenders of human rights — who so loudly claim to be against “racism.” Or, once again in Europe, does “racism” not include Jews?
After the mass sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve in the European cities of Cologne, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Bielefeld, Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Vienna, Salzburg, Zürich, Helsinki and Kalmar, it is clear that something profoundly disturbing has occurred in Europe. By Sunday, in Cologne alone, 516 women had filed criminal charges — around 40% of them relating to sexual assaults.
The initial reactions to the sexual assaults from German authorities, the media, as well as feminists and others have not been less disturbing.
The German police first claimed, in a surreal statement the morning of Jan. 1, that the situation on New Year’s Eve had been “relaxed.” Cologne Police Chief Wolfgang Albers later admitted “this initial statement was incorrect” and, for his role in what appeared as a cover up, has since been forced into early retirement.
“Cultural enrichment” has brought us a new word: Taharrush. Remember it well, because we are going to have to deal with it a lot. Taharrush is the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped, raped. After the Cologne taharrush on New Year’s Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?
A culture that has a specific word for sexual assaults of women by groups of men is a danger to all women. The existence of the word indicates that the phenomenon is widespread. Frau Merkel, Prime Minister Rutte and all the other open-door politicians could and should have known this.
The Islamic world is steeped in misogyny. The Koran explicitly states that a woman is worth only half a man (Suras 2: 228, 2: 282, 4:11), that women are unclean (5:6), and that a man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants (24:31). The Koran even says that men are allowed to have sex slaves (4:24), and that they have the right to rape women whom they have captured (24:31).
The hadiths, the descriptions of the life of Muhammad, the ideal human being whose example all the Islamic faithful must follow, confirm that women are sex objects, that they are inferior beings like dogs and donkeys, and that there is nothing wrong with sexual slavery and raping female prisoners.
At this point, it’s a sad joke — a form of gallows humor shared in times of trouble. When there’s a shooting, and the hours tick by without any identification of the suspect, one can presume that it’s a jihadist. When there’s a riot in Europe, and the perpetrators are described as “youths,” one can presume it’s Muslim men. When an Islamist goes on a shooting spree or stabbing spree or beheads a coworker, authorities will latch onto any explanation but the obvious.
But now even gallows humor is inappropriate. Western denial of Islamic crimes is so common, so systematic, that we can no longer have any confidence that we understand the true dimensions of the jihadist threat. Consider the following:
In Germany, police actively “tried to obfuscate” what happened on New Year’s Eve, when thousands of Muslim men systematically sexually assaulted hundreds of German women — an act that my colleague Andrew McCarthy has aptly termed a “rape jihad.”
The New York Times reported yesterday that Swedish authorities now stand accused of covering up a wave of sexual assaults at a concert last summer. A Swedish newspaper wrote today that national media refused at the time to report factual accounts from the concert assaults, claiming they were nothing but far-right “propaganda.”
Hillary’s Benghazi Stand-Down Order Exposed Benghazi film unlocks the cover-up. Kenneth R. Timmerman
A preview by Benghazi security officer Kris “Tanto” Paronto of 13 Hours, the block-buster Michael Bay film that premieres on Thursday, raises dramatic new questions about the refusal by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to authorize a military rescue of the besieged U.S. diplomatic facility and the nearby CIA Annex on Sept 11-12, 2012.
In a presentation at a conference organized by the Maryland Citizen Action Network last weekend, Paronto revealed that two AC-130H “Spectre” gunships were “on call” that night, both within range of Benghazi.
One of them was a six-hour flight away, co-located with a U.S. special operations team in Djibouti.
The other was at Naval Air Station Sigonella, in Sicily. “That’s a 45-minute flight,” Paronto said.
The Spectre gunship with its 25mm rapid-fire gatling guns, its 40 mm precision Bofors gun, and its 105mm canon is “good in urban warfare because you have little collateral damage,” Paronto explained.
In fact, it was just what the beleaguered security team needed. They could see the jihadis advancing on the Annex compound throughout the night and lit them up with lasers, which the airborne crew could have used for precision targeting purposes. On-line videos of the Spectre gunship in operation show that it can walk its cannons up narrow streets, killing fighters while leaving the surrounding buildings intact and people inside them unharmed.
The hype for the last State of the Union address had been building for months. There was a countdown, special Muslim guest stars and a pre-show featuring a mediocre indie band and Joe Biden.
And all Iran had to do to steal the show was take two Navy boats and ten sailors hostage.
Then, when Obama puffed out his chest and declared, “No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin”, it took good manners not to laugh.
That would come as news to Iran which three days ago fired rockets near the USS Harry S Truman and then decided to seize two American naval vessels, or to North Korea, which celebrated the State of the Union early with a major nuclear test, or to China, which threatened us with war in October.
Never mind Russia, which invaded and annexed part of one of our allies. Or all the Islamic terrorists.
College campuses nationwide are treating fat people as a new protected class, launching “fat studies” courses that teach that being fat isn’t unhealthy and awareness groups that fight so-called “fatphobia” and “weightism.”
Yes — “fatphobia” and “weightism” are apparently things now. And it’s apparently a big (sorry) deal.
The University of New Hampshire now has a student organization called “People Opposing Weightism (POW!)” that “will create events that will help people to think about weightism and fatphobia.” There are countless pictures of clearly obese people posted on what appears to be the group’s page.
What’s more: Actual, for-credit courses on fatness are becoming a trend — and as Peter Hasson of The Daily Caller points out, they “typically advocate against the position that obesity is unhealthy or undesirable” and treat the issue as a social-justice problem instead of a health one. After all, we all know that sensitivity is more important than science!
For example, Oregon State University currently has a “Fat Studies” course that “frames weight-based oppression as a social justice issue, exploring forms of activism used to counter weightism” and “examines” fatness “as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression.”
If you knew nothing about Barack Obama’s presidency and how he has conducted it, you could be forgiven for thinking this was a reasonable, albeit liberal, and even uplifting State of the Union Address. But after seven years of unrelenting presidential condescension, insults and cynicism, it’s very difficult to take his sermons against cynicism and incivility seriously. Cut through the rhetoric and the message was the same as ever: If you agree with me, you’re reasonable. It was all so tediously familiar and grating I couldn’t wait for it to end (much like Obama’s presidency).
I lost track of the straw-men and false-choices. I particularly enjoyed his “big question” of how to keep America secure “without either isolating ourselves or trying to nation-build everywhere there’s a problem.” Ah, yes, those are the only choices other than Barack Obama’s enlightened third way — a third way so enlightened he actually touted Syria policy as a success. I’m sure the quarter million dead Syrians and the Europeans awash in refugees agree that the Obama Way is so much more enlightened.
Probably the most interesting thing about the speech tonight was how it differed from his prepared remarks and what those differences said. Several times I heard him say things that sounded politically ill-advised and so I checked the prepared remarks thinking that maybe I misheard. But I didn’t.
One subplot of the Republican presidential-nomination battle has been an increasingly vicious and personal contest between two first-term senators, both of Cuban descent and separated by just a few months in age.
Florida senator Marco Rubio (44) and Texas senator Ted Cruz (45) are both men of superhuman ambition who have put their personal advancement over virtually everything else, including, many would argue, loyalty, wealth, and family. Both were at least thinking about running for president from the time they arrived in the Senate. Their talent and their years-long focus on reaching the White House are reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s, and it’s entirely possible that the only thing standing between each and it, aside from another Clinton, is the other.
“You interview hundreds of candidates and a few stand out, and Rubio and Cruz stood out,” says Chris Chocola, the former president of the Club for Growth, the free-market group that endorsed both Rubio and Cruz in their Senate primaries. “They knew what they believed, they knew why they believed it, and they could articulate those beliefs.”
Their ascent to the top tier of the presidential field, where they have been trading barbs, is, for conservatives, a mark of astonishing success. Cruz is now viewed as the most conservative viable candidate, while Rubio is widely considered the most viable establishment choice (although he still has major competition from Chris Christie, among others). Yet this is a simplistic and somewhat misleading way to look at a prospective match-up between the two. Rubio was born of the tea-party movement and, during his Senate race, drove the liberal Charlie Crist out of the Republican party. That he is now considered a part of the Washington establishment says a lot about the transformation of the Republican party in the Obama era. “It’s a tremendous testament to what conservatives have been able to achieve,” says Mike Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action for America, a leading conservative-activist group.
Well, it’s that time of year again – the State of the Union! Here are my traditional thoughts on the occasion – after which we’ll deal with the peculiar circumstances of tonight’s festivities:
Strange how the monarchical urge persists even in a republic two-and-a-third centuries old. Many commentators have pointed out that the modern State of the Union is in fairly obvious mimicry of the Speech from the Throne that precedes a new legislative session in British Commonwealth countries and continental monarchies, but this is to miss the key difference. When the Queen or her viceroy reads a Throne Speech in Westminster, Ottawa, or Canberra, it’s usually the work of a government with a Parliamentary majority: In other words, the stuff she’s announcing is actually going to happen. That’s why, lest any enthusiasm for this or that legislative proposal be detected, the apolitical monarch overcompensates by reading everything in as flat and unexpressive a monotone as possible. Underneath the ancient rituals — the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod getting the door of the House of Commons slammed in his face three times — it’s actually a very workmanlike affair.
The State of the Union is the opposite. The president gives a performance, extremely animatedly, head swiveling from left-side prompter to right-side prompter, continually urging action now: “Let’s start right away. We can get this done. . . . We can fix this. . . . Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done.” And at the end of the speech, nothing gets done, and nothing gets fixed, and, after a few days’ shadowboxing between admirers and detractors willing to pretend it’s some sort of serious legislative agenda, every single word of it is forgotten until the next one.
