Andrew Bieszad has an MA in Islamic Studies from Hartford Seminary with concentration in the Islamic equivalent of Dogmatic Theology. He is the author of Lions of the Faith: Saints, Blesseds, and Heroes of the Catholic Faith in the Struggle with Islam. He is a sought after writer and speaker on Islamic topics.
It has been fourteen years since Muslim terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the religion of Islam was made visible to the American public. At the time, there were already many small and medium-size Muslim-only enclaves in many major western European cities – places where if a non-Muslim entered, he would most likely not return. The Internet was still young and far from ubiquitous. YouTube did not exist. Neither did Facebook or Twitter. Cell phone video was still a few years off, which is why we have so little footage of the actual events of that morning. Considering the blood-drenched deluge of social-media driven ISIS propaganda we face today, it’s hard to believe how minimal our exposure to Islamic terror actually was on that fateful day. But as we watched the planes crash into the World Trade Center, as we watched the towers fall again and again on cable news, then-president George W. Bush declared that America “saw evil” and would hunt down terrorists wherever they could be found.
http://jamieglazov.com/2015/11/03/stephen-coughlin-on-catastrophic-failure-on-the-glazov-gang/
This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.
He came on the show to discuss his book and How American Leadership is Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.
Don’t miss it!
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Columbus Day and Halloween are in the past; Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving are in our future. October is the subject at hand. While the month is renowned for financial debacles, it was human tragedies that took center stage this past month. October began with nine students shot at a community college in Oregon. Two other campuses, one in Texas and the other in Arizona, were the venues for two students being shot and killed. A car plowed into a homecoming parade in Stillwater, Oklahoma, killing four and injuring forty-seven. Nineteen people were killed when a doctors-without-borders hospital in Afghanistan was mistakenly hit by U.S. forces. Two suicide bombers at a peace rally in the Turkish capital of Ankara killed at least a hundred. The month ended with a Russian passenger airliner, an Airbus 221, crashing in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard.
Mother nature, not wanting to be out-done, did her own damage. Hurricane Joaquin, an Atlantic storm that missed mainland USA, sank the U.S. based cargo ship El Faro, drowning all 33 aboard, including 28 Americans. At least 17 people died in South Carolina, as drenching rains temporarily wiped out 75 miles of I-95. A mudslide in Guatemala killed at least 240, with dozens missing. Hurricane Patricia, the largest storm to ever hit the Western Hemisphere with winds of over 200 miles per hour, slammed into Southwestern Mexico with sustained winds of over 165 miles per hour. Luck and prior evacuation plans limited deaths and damage. Remnants caused intense flooding in Houston and Galveston a day or so later, with rainfalls of over an inch per hour. At least 340 people were known dead from a 7.5 earthquake that hit remote sections of Afghanistan and Pakistan. No matter hand-wringing claims of those on the Left, man has limited ability to prevent natural disasters. Nature heeds her own drummer.
Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that’s because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I’ve never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities.
Ten years ago, Front Page Magazine writer Danusha Goska went to heckle David Horowitz.
Then he said something about the minority cities of New Jersey that changed her whole way of thinking. “He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.”
“That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city,” she writes.
On Fox News Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina echoed the case that David Horowitz has been making for decades.
Here is what is undeniable, women have been hurt under this administration policies, the extreme poverty rate among women is the highest ever record. The poverty rate among women, 16.1% is the highest in 20 years. Women have been harmed by this administration’s polices just as African Americans have, just as the poor have been.
“Progressive polices are bad for the people they have claimed to help. That is true of women as well as men,” she said.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) will continue to work against having cameras in the hope of preventing the world from seeing what is really happening at the site and undermining Jordan’s “custodianship” over Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem.
Another reason the Palestinians oppose King Abdullah’s idea is their fear that cameras would expose that Palestinians have been smuggling stones, firebombs and pipe bombs into the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the past two years.
The cameras are also likely to refute the claim that Jews are “violently invading” Al-Aqsa Mosque and holding prayers on the Temple Mount. The cameras will show that Jews do not enter Al-Aqsa Mosque, as Palestinians have been claiming. Needless to say, no Jewish visitors have been caught trying to smuggle weapons into the holy site.
It remains to be seen how Secretary Kerry, who brokered the camera deal between Israel and Jordan, will react to the latest Palestinian Authority escalation of tensions. If Kerry fails to pressure the PA to stop its incitement and attempts to exclude the Jordanians from playing any positive role, the current wave of knife attacks against Jews will continue.
Why is the Palestinian Authority (PA) opposed to Jordan’s proposal to install surveillance cameras at Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount), sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews?
The VA Solved Its Disability Backlog by Putting Other Veterans in a Jam
It has been a frustrating semester for veterans trying to get their education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“Still waiting on checks from August, September, October and now November,” one man wrote in a comment on the VA’s Facebook page for beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. “What do you expect people to do? How do you expect people to survive?”
That complaint has been festering for months, even as the VA struggled to resolve another problem: the disability-claims backlog that emerged as a national scandal last year. As it happens, the two issues are related. As the longstanding deadline for resolving the disability-claims backlog approached, Veterans Benefits Administration officials shifted manpower from the education claims to the disability crisis — thereby making progress on one logjam by creating another.
In July, a VA spokesman acknowledged that the department was going to miss the September 30, 2015, deadline for clearing the disability-claims backlog that had been set in 2013. Officials now hope to solve the problem by the end of 2015.
Marco Rubio’s recent habit of missing votes in the Senate is suddenly an issue in his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.
The kerfuffle started with a question from CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, one of the moderators running last Wednesday’s third Republican primary debate. Quintanilla asked Rubio about a Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that sternly criticized Rubio’s lack of attendance in the Senate as he runs for president, and called on him to resign his seat. Rubio turned his answer into a complaint about “the bias that exists in the American media today,” which won the audience to his side — and allowed him to beat back the ill-advised attack that followed from rival Jeb Bush.
“Jeb, I don’t remember . . . you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” Rubio said, to more applause. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
If you’re going to call on Marco Rubio to resign his Senate seat, you’ll have to do better than that.
Yes, Rubio has missed a lot of votes this year — 99 out of 294, to be exact. But running for president requires an intense travel schedule, and there’s no indication that Rubio regularly missed votes before launching his campaign. Prior to this year, Rubio had missed only 77 of 1143 votes — 6 percent of them — as a senator. Even with this year’s spotty attendance record, Rubio’s overall attendance rate remains high — he’s only missed 176 of 1,437 votes in almost five years in the Senate.
They came for Feng Jianmei without warning. She was seven months pregnant. They kidnapped her, strapped her down, and killed her unborn child because she and her husband could not pay their fine. “They” were Chinese government officials, and their tactics were standard practice in China since the implementation of the one-child policy in 1979. Unlike so many instances of this practice, which typically occur in shadows, this one, committed in 2011, broke into international news after a photo of the distraught mother holding her dead baby was posted on a popular Chinese blog.
When China announced the end of its one-child policy last week, the general response from the mainstream media was positive, with many articles appropriately and unequivocally condemning the policy and praising its demise (though not enough stories noted that the Chinese government will continue to control the basic reproductive status of its citizens who wish to have more than two children).
But amid the general approbation, several stories in the mainstream media have partially and in some cases wholly justified the coercive and Orwellian policy, which caused millions of forced and sex-selective abortions, almost 200 million sterilizations, an epidemic of child kidnapping, and the abandonment of girl babies. Furthermore, to judge from both mainstream media sources and the most-recommended-reader views expressed at some top liberal websites, many liberals, when freed by the anonymity of Internet commentary, actually endorse China’s barbaric policies, in the name of their alleged environmental and climate benefits.
Writing with uncharacteristic acidity in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan offered up an explanation as to why Jeb Bush has thus far failed to deliver on his promise. “Reporters,” Noonan proposed, have tended to assume without cynicism that Bush must be a “national candidate” because he is part of a “national family.” The last few weeks have served to disabuse us of that notion.
We have learned, Noonan records, that Jeb is “only a governor” — no more guaranteed success or assured of greatness than any aspirant with a less recognizable surname. Certainly, his pedigree has ensured that the supply side of his campaign would be taken care of: For almost half a century now, America has been furnished with an ample supply of ambitious, well-funded Bushes. On the demand side, however, things have been far less rosy. If, as I consider likely, Bush eventually recognizes that his overtures have been met with jaded indifference, he will have struck an inadvertent blow for meritocracy and demonstrated an age-old truth, to boot: However much polish and gold the masters of the universe can dispense, there is no easy way to sell a superfluous product. Surveying the present scene, critics of both the “establishment” and that protean supervillain “money” should be breathing a touch more easily.
