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Ruth King

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Trial of Four West London Terror Suspects Opens Islamic State-inspired attack was to target soldier or police officer By Alexis Flynn

By on January 19th, 2016

—The trial of four men from west London who were allegedly poised to carry out an Islamic State-inspired gun attack in the U.K. capital opened on Monday.

Prosecutors say British Muslims Tarik Hassane, 22, Suhaib Majeed, 21, Nyall Hamlett, 25, and Nathan Cuffy, 26, were planning to murder a police officer or soldier with a silencer-equipped pistol, but the plan was foiled when authorities arrested them in 2014.

The case underscores the growing number of Islamic extremist plots in Europe targeted at police or military personnel.

Potential targets may have included the Shepherd’s Bush police station in West London and the nearby Parachute Regiment barracks, prosecutors alleged, after a forensic examination of Mr. Hassane’s electronic device found he had used Google Street View to case their locations.

“If the plot had been allowed to run its course, it would have resulted in a terrorist murder or murders on the streets of London, according to the warped ideology of the defendants, in the cause, and for the sake, of Allah,” lead prosecutor Brian Altman said

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A Terror State in Libya Islamic State is advancing with too little Western opposition.

By on January 19th, 2016

Islamic State fighters launched a naval assault in northern Libya last week, dispatching three boats that fired on an oil terminal at Zueitina. Local guards repelled that attack, but it was a reminder of Islamic State’s growing capabilities and reach beyond its heartland in Syria and Iraq. Too bad Western capitals seem unprepared to stop it.

The Zueitina episode was the latest in a string of Islamic State attacks in Libya since the new year. On Jan. 8 an Islamic State truck bomb hit a police academy in Zliten, western Libya, killing 65 people. The same week Islamic State arson attacks ignited two other Libyan oil terminals. Islamic State draws much of its revenue by marketing oil from captured fields in Iraq and Syria.

Following the Zletin truck bombing, the European Union—300 miles across the Mediterranean—offered $108 million in security assistance to Libya. The aid is supposed to take the form of technical and logistical support to the newly formed Libyan unity government, currently based in neighboring Tunisia.

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Normalizing Iran Why are liberals campaigning to make this most illiberal regime acceptable? Bret Stephens

By on January 19th, 2016

In Syria, Bashar Assad is trying to bring his enemies to heel by blocking humanitarian convoys to desperate civilians living in besieged towns. The policy is called “starve or kneel,” and it is openly supported by Hezbollah and tacitly by Iran, which has deployed its elite Quds Force to aid Mr. Assad’s war effort.

So what better time for right-thinking liberals to ask: “Is Iran really so evil?”

That’s the title of a revealing essay in Politico by Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter now at Brown University. “The demonization of Iran is arguably the most bizarre and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,” Mr. Kinzer begins. “Americans view Iran not simply as a country with interests that sometimes conflict with ours but as a relentless font of evil.”

Mr. Kinzer’s essay was published Sunday, as sanctions were lifted on Tehran and four of America’s hostages came home after lengthy imprisonments. The Obama administration publicly insists that the nuclear deal does not mean the U.S. should take a benign view of Iran, but the more enthusiastic backers of the agreement think otherwise. “Our perception of Iran as a threat to vital American interests is increasingly disconnected from reality,” Mr. Kinzer writes. “Events of the past week may slowly begin to erode the impulse that leads Americans to believe patriotism requires us to hate Iran.”

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America’s Nuclear Power Plants Vulnerabilities By David J. Stuckenberg and Hershel C. Campbell

By on January 19th, 2016

A year-long study found that the present legal and regulatory approach to EMP/Space weather threat to America’s nuclear power plants are inadequate and dangerous. This sorry state is anchored in the industry efforts to maintain safety regulations dating back to the 1980s, and a national security mentality relevant at the end of the Cold War.
This has been successful, in part, due to a campaign to brand nuclear power as a clean, safe source of energy. To their credit, the NRC and industry have demonstrated a commitment to safety where design basis events are concerned. However, EMP and GMD are beyond design basis events. Once these occur, there are no guarantees and few strategies with which to cope.

There has only been a handful of nuclear disasters in history, and only one in the U.S. – TMI. It is, therefore, understandable from an economic standpoint that industry is resistant to change. However, this inertia has given rise to a complacent regulatory climate absent adaptive and progressive analysis. More than 30 years have elapsed since this topic was last openly addressed.

Unfortunately, the assumptions borne of the highly controversial 1982 report continue to misinform decision makers even as recent as 2015. Despite these challenges and an NRC and industry galvanized to maintain the status quo, there are signs of progress. Some push for increased standards and regulations has occurred since Fukushima.

However, these efforts have been met with a tepid response from the nuclear industry. To stave off costly infrastructure updates, the industry responded by holding out the FLEX, a plan that is both impractical and dangerous due to an over-reliance on a functioning national infrastructure. Congress recently found, “The current strategy for recovery leaves the United States ill-prepared to respond effectively to an EMP attack that would potentially result in damage to vast numbers of components nearly simultaneously over an unprecedented geographic scale.”

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“ISLAMOPHOBIA” IS HOW ISLAMIC LAW COMES TO AMERICA — ON THE GLAZOV GANG

By on January 19th, 2016

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/19/islamophobia-is-how-islamic-law-comes-to-america-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was guest-hosted by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

His guest was Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know. The discussion focused on: “Islamophobia” is How Islamic Law Comes to America, unveiling how the accusation of “racism” is installing Sharia on our shores.

Don’t miss it!

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Lost worlds of Joseph Roth by Frederick RaphaelL

By on January 18th, 2016

Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.

By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.

Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print, as far back as 1923. The view from the street, if not yet the gutter, allowed him to see it all coming. The Radetsky March (1932) – named after “the Marseillaise of reaction” – is now recognized as a classic elegy for Emperor Franz Josef’s vanished supremacy. During its author’s lifetime, however, a lack of fame was always the spur. Without his prodigious facility for writing feuilletons for the liberal press, Roth would have been unable to make a living from his pen.

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For Europe, the Only Way Forward Is Together Can a collection of nation-states whose populations loathe each other hang together? Who knows, but it’s that or hang separately. Claire Berlinski

By on January 18th, 2016

I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates. He writes, for instance, that the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris mark a culmination so far in “a concerted campaign directed mainly at Europeans.” Those attacks are certainly the ones Europeans noticed, because they were the victims, but they are largely irrelevant to the main “campaign”: a vicious Islamic civil war and a superpower conflict by proxy. In that war’s real theaters, the death toll dwarfs, to say the least, anything directed mainly at Europeans.

As for the other reasons why Europe’s future could well be bleak, I would list several. The United States is now the Sick Man of the Globe, and when a hegemonic power falls into desuetude, disorder is inevitable. The Eurozone crisis and Europe’s moribund economies have exacted a steep price in public trust of Europe’s institutions. The world has not naturally adopted liberal democracy as a form of government (as many had hoped at the end of the cold war), and the rise of illiberal democracies, particularly in Russia and Turkey, is a great danger—both directly in that Russian forces now openly threaten European countries and indirectly in that the authoritarian contagion has spread to Europe’s own southern and eastern flanks.

This is hardly to deny that the catastrophic breakdown of states and social order in much of the Islamic world—leaving a quarter-million dead in Syria alone — is a threat to Europe. But 800,000 asylum-seekers provoking a clash of civilizations on Europe’s soil, plunging it into chaos on the scale of the Middle East? Not so fast.

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Welcome to the Banana Republic With a wave of his wand, Obama defies the law. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on January 18th, 2016

In case you were just enjoying the weekend with your family and not listening to the news, the world changed over the past 48 hours.

The United States has now officially become a Banana Republic.

In sweeping moves that gave the lie to repeated assertions by Secretary of State John Kerry that there would be no “comprehensive” deal with Iran, the United States on Saturday gave Iran a clean bill of nuclear health, lifted sanctions on more than 400 Iranian government entities and individuals, and swapped U.S. citizens held hostage by Iran for Iranian nationals convicted of violating U.S. export control laws.

There was so much news over the weekend that the media has had a hard time keeping up. But not your government, which has been beavering away so they could trade away our sovereignty, our legal system, and our national security interests at the stroke of a pen.

The Treasury Department has been working for months to draft a package of implementing regulations for Obama’s ill-conceived nuclear deal. The thicket of U.S. sanctions on Iran has become so dense over the years that Treasury had to post a separate web page with a guide to sanctions relief, which was split among eight separate statements.

My favorite was a list of 400 Iranian state entities now removed from U.S. sanctions. I had been tracking many of those companies for years.

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Obama’s ‘Novel’ Approach to Reporting on the State of the Union Facts are, indeed, stubborn things. Michael Cutler

By on January 18th, 2016

On January 13, 2015 President Obama delivered his last State of the Union Address. His assessment of the state of the union was nothing less than astonishing.

As I listening, incredulously, to his address laden with fabrications, boasts and accusations, I found myself thinking back to my days as an INS agent (when I would question individuals who were suspected of committing crimes and being frustrated that they not only lied but that they would often dodge and weave to avoid directly answering my questions).

I recalled interrogating criminals who seemed delusional, providing supposed justification for committing crimes that ignored the facts or reality or reasonableness. They lived in a parallel universe.

One of my fellow agents- with whom I worked regularly for many years, would listen to such an individual we were questioning, turn to me as say, “I wonder what the color of the sky is in this guy’s world- because it sure as hell isn’t blue!”

On Tuesday night, I found myself wondering at the color of the sky in Mr. Obama’s world.

Within minutes of beginning his speech he said:

Our unique strengths as a nation — our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law — these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it’s that spirit that made the progress of these past seven years possible. It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

Under his administration’s executive orders that undermined our immigration laws, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were provided with employment authorization- often displacing American workers and undermining our national security by providing these illegal aliens with official identity documents without interviewing them or conducting field investigations.

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Spike Lee’s ‘Chi-Raq’ Tells Black Community to ‘Wake Up’ His latest movie addresses Chicago gun violence. Mark Tapson

By on January 18th, 2016

From the opening image of Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq – a red, white, and blue map of the United States composed entirely of the silhouettes of a variety of guns – it is clear that the filmmaker intends to take on the volatile issue of blacks and gun violence in war-torn Chicago, nicknamed Chi-Raq by its black inhabitants after the Middle Eastern war zone. Lee has a habit of provoking racial controversy, and that is no less true of this darkly humorous satire (“not a comedy,” he insists) set in the murder capital of the United States. True to the director’s form, Chi-Raq provokes and dissatisfies those on both sides of the debate.

Spike Lee has attacked both white and black fellow filmmakers in the past for reasons related to race. As noted in his profile at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site, Lee excoriated Tyler Perry for the stereotyped depictions of black characters in his hugely popular comedies, and Woody Allen for not featuring enough black characters in his movies set in Manhattan. From his perspective that racism is deeply entrenched in American culture, the enormously wealthy Lee has railed against such issues as interracial couples, Charlton Heston and the NRA, NASCAR, the war in Iraq, the shooting of Michael Brown, and the gentrification of New York. He suspects the government of having engineered the AIDS epidemic and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has supported Barack Obama and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has stated that blacks can’t be racist, because they don’t have the political power to impose racism.

But interestingly, Chi-Raq doesn’t take an entirely expected position about blacks and gun violence. Lee could have made a movie about a white cop shooting an unarmed black man, which is the supposed epidemic ravaging the black American community; instead, he made a film that lays the responsibility for the high rate of black deaths annually from gun violence largely on the black community itself. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, Lee is willing to face the harsh reality of young black males perpetrating violence against other blacks.

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