July 13, 2014, the storming of the Bastille was “re-enacted” by enraged mobs shouting Death to the Jews. Trampling the protest march tradition, they stomped down boulevard Beaumarchais, fanned out into the Marais, and massed in front of synagogues, armed with baseball bats, iron bars, rocks, and blood-curdling screams of Slaughter the Jews. They clashed with Jews defending the synagogue on rue de la Roquette and fought with the police that finally arrived to restore order. Six days later, the mobs occupied Place de la République in defiance of a ban against their demonstration. They climbed onto the pedestal of the Marianne statue, symbol of the French Republic and made a mockery of revolutionary iconography. “Pro-Palestinians” proclaimed love for Gaza and unconditional support for la Résistance, burned the Israeli flag, and waved the black flag of jihad.
Israel was fighting back against a constant barrage of rockets launched from Gaza, one more episode in a genocidal war disguised as a national liberation movement. Hamas résistance, Jihad résistance—that’s the program chanted in the heart of the French Republic in the summer of 2014. Demonstrations, banned or authorized, exploded in violence against Jewish shops, synagogues, citizens, and the French police, duty-bound to protect them.
Public opinion was modeled to perceive this unbridled rage as solidarity with civilians in Gaza, victims of “excessive force” and dying in unfair numbers compared to the Jews of Israel protected by an efficient civil defense system. Who thought to warn them of the ominous portent of the jihad flag brandished at the feet of Marianne?
Five months later, in January 2015, the word “jihad” finally took its rightful place in the vocabulary of current events. Jihadis decimated the staff of Charlie Hebdo, executed policemen, assassinated Jews in a kosher grocery store.
In Syria and Iraq, jihadis, more exactly mujahidin, raging under that black flag behead journalists, conquer territory, destroy treasures of humanity, persecute Christians, enslave Yazidi women. “Moderate” rebels armed and trained by Western forces defect to the Islamic State or other jihad factions. European Muslims join the ranks of Daesh, learn the skills of decapitation and plot against the lands of their birth. And the free world snuggles up to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The democracies fight their sworn enemies by pouring oil on the fire. Payback comes in the shape of millions of “refugees” poured into Europe, pounding on its borders, flooding its institutions.
The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Moammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban.
As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better.
The belated entry of the United States into World War I saved the sinking Allied cause in 1917. Yet after the November 1918 armistice, the United States abruptly went home, washed its hands of Europe’s perennial squabbling, and disarmed. A far bloodier World War II followed just two decades later.
It may have been wise or foolish for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to have intervened in Vietnam in 1963–1964 to try to save the beleaguered non-Communist south. But after ten years of hard fighting and a costly stalemate, it was nihilistic for America to abandon a viable South Vietnam to invading Communist North Vietnam. Re-education camps, mass executions, and boat people followed — along with more than 40 years of Communist oppression.
The current presidential candidates are refighting the Iraq war of 2003. Yet the critical question 13 years later is not so much whether the United States should or should not have removed the genocidal Saddam Hussein, but whether our costly efforts at reconstruction ever offered any hope of a stable Iraq.
By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month.
The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s “greatest achievements” — into a nightmarish wasteland.
Russia is eager to arm the ayatollahs
Implementing President Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran has provided about $150 billion for the ayatollahs’ coffers since international sanctions were lifted. By January, even Secretary of State John Kerry had to concede that some of the money would be used to sponsor terrorists.
That shouldn’t have come as a shock even to Mr. Kerry. Iran is the world’s principal state sponsor of terrorism. It also shouldn’t have shocked him that Iran is spending at least $8 billion on arms purchases designed to prevent any nation from successfully attacking its nuclear weapons facilities as well as to strengthen its conventional forces.
About two weeks ago, Gen. Hossein Dehqan, Iran’s defense minister, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to arrange delivery of Russian S-300 missiles Iran purchased previously. Gen. Dehqan also sought to buy new Su-30 “Flanker” fighter jets and T-90 tanks, Russia’s most advanced tanks. (Mr. Putin had no qualms about dealing with Gen. Dehqan, believed to have been the architect of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 220 Marines and 21 other servicemen.)
There’s no reason for Mr. Putin to deny these purchases, especially now that Iran has so much money to spend and because Iran has been a key Russian ally for decades. (There’s a U.N. Security Council resolution that supposedly bars Iran from purchasing weapons, such as military aircraft without U.N. approval. Good luck enforcing that.)
Stephen Kinzer’s 2008 book All the Shah’s Men traces the roots of today’s Middle East terror to when the United States and Great Britain engineered the return of the Shah of Iran to power in Iran in a 1953 “coup.”
The Iranian mullah leadership have embraced Kinzer’s view and repeatedly describe America as “The Great Arrogance.”
And since the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Iran “terror masters” have been the primary terror threat to the U.S., murdering thousands of Americans in Beirut, Lockerbie, Khobar Towers, the African Embassies, the World Trade Center on 9-11, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran is an Islamic revolutionary power seeking to expand its writ by terror. Obviously, the set of standards of international behavior established by the western powers upon the end of World War 2 stand in the way of Iran’s ambitions thus their anger at the U.S. and the West for such “great arrogance.”
It is not a coincidence that from 1945 through the end of the Cold War, the rise in prosperity around the world, along with the parallel spread of free and relatively democratic nations, was in historical terms breathtaking.
Especially as the West was simultaneously defending against the Soviet empire and its terrorist accomplices – from cross border invasions as on the Korean peninsula; to guerilla wars in Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua; to terrorism from FARC, the FMLN, the Sandinistas, the Castro and Kim regimes in Cuba and North Korea, respectively, as well as from Iran and Syria and its ally Hezbollah.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-snooping-1456184621 EXCERPTS FOR FULL REVIEW GO TO SITE
“Playing to the Edge” offers a full excursion through the contemporary challenges facing American intelligence, including cyber warfare, Russian aggression, and armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it also presents an intimate personal portrait—an account of how its author came to be the man he is, someone who entered the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps while in college in the late 1960s, who reveres his hometown of Pittsburgh (and its Steelers), and who prays weekly in church for the souls of his twin sisters, who died at birth when he was a boy of 10.
The lesson that Gen. Hayden takes from the Syrian affair is sobering. “We chalked this one up as intelligence success, after a fashion,” he writes. But he strongly intimates that it was really Israel’s success—and America’s failure. More broadly, he says, Syrian behavior “went beyond our understanding.” Extrapolating from this mixed record, Gen Hayden is pessimistic that American intelligence will fare well in tracking covert Iranian nuclear activity. If his pessimism is well-founded—and there are few people more qualified to judge—the surprise we experienced on 9/11 may be a prelude to a catastrophe of far greater dimensions.
“The radical transformation of America continues thank to all of you who voted for me, but above all, I want to thank the befuddled voters who abetted, enabled, and supported Donald Trump. I could not have won without you.”
I ask on behalf of Raul Castro–because Barack Obama seems infatuated with him. Seems that every time the Stalinist terror-sponsoring dictator (who craved to nuke the U.S.) looks over his shoulder, there’s the President of the U.S. making goo-goo eyes at him.
“People characterized as stalkers,” explains Wikipedia, “may be accused of having a mistaken belief that another person loves them (erotomania) or that they need rescuing.”
As announced just yesterday by his spokespersons, the possible “erotomaniac” twice elected U.S. President even found a way to get himself invited to his stalk victim’s fiefdom. Yes, President Obama will visit Cuba next month. The meet-up is scheduled for March 21st.
There’s a famous scene in the movie Scarface where the late actor Robert Loggia makes an urgent request of Cuban gangster Tony “Scarface” Montana. I’m betting that Robert Loggia will look gallant, powerful and dignified in front of the Cuban shown in that scene compared to Obama in front of the Cuban he’ll visit next month. See here for details.
I say “stalker” because Obama’s meet-up and handshake (warm abrazos too, perhaps?) with Raul Castro next month will mark the fourth such meet-up between Obama and Castro in 26 months. FDR and Churchill certainly matched this frequency and timeline for chummy handshakes. But have any other U.S. Presidents matched it with foreign “leaders”?
“Funnier” still, when Benjamin Netanyahu−president of a “close U.S. ally”−supposedly visited Capitol Hill, in Feb. 2015, Obama pointedly snubbed him. But when it came to the terror-sponsor who craved to nuke his nation, who burglarized, tortured and murdered U.S. citizens without the slightest remorse–when it comes to the unrepentant Stalinist Raul Castro−U.S. president Obama somehow found a way to buttonhole and shake hands with him, everyplace, from Johannesburg South Africa, to Panama City, Panama, to New York City. Film clips of this “bromance” here.
President Obama will be visiting Cuba in March.
I guess that he needs to go to a place where people will be happy to see him.
Frankly, there aren’t too many of those places left in the U.S.: his job approval is 45% in the RCP average of polls. A whopping 63% believe that the country is in the wrong track. Only 38% approve of how he is handling foreign policy.
So let’s go to Havana and let Raul Castro stage a nice welcome party. He will close the government offices and fill the streets with Cubans.
Let’s hope that President Obama finally calls for change in Cuba rather than play the role of Raul’s new American friend. He will be speaking to a skeptical Cuban audience who thought that “los Americanos” would bring prosperity and change. So far, the only thing that most Cubans have seen is repression and more of it.
He should start by calling for multiparty elections in Cuba, as Roger Noriega said “Let the Cubans vote”:
“Let Cubans vote.” Those three words, spoken by President Obama on his planned trip to Cuba, could unite all Americans — including those Americans in neighboring countries — behind a worthy cause. Will a man elected promising “hope and change” advance those objectives in a country where they are genuinely needed?
We shouldn’t have to ask.
The president’s visit to Cuba comes as the winds of change have shifted toward freedom, away from the authoritarian populism promoted by the Castro brothers for 60 years. Voters in Argentina recently elected a pro-free-market conservative who has pledged to seek a positive relationship with the United States. In December, Venezuela’s democrats won congressional elections in a landslide and now represent a majority that opposes the Cuban-backed regime that has brought the country to political and economic ruin.
This is a column posted by someone named “bookworm”….my sentiments expressed perfectly….rsk
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/02/turning_against_trump.html
Dear Trump supporters: There was no shame in your offering him your support in 2015 when he appeared as a brave, fun, and energetic conservative. Now, though, there’s no shame in your backing away from that support in the face of new information showing he’s not the man you thought he was.
People who pride themselves on rational thinking know there are few feelings worse than being wrong about something, especially something that they made a big noise about at the time. What helps lessen this intellectual humiliation is understanding that, given the information available at the time, the decision was a rational one at the time. The remedy for the initial error is to use the newly available information to reach a more reasoned decision.
As the campaign season goes forward, we’re learning more about Donald Trump’s politics and seeing his initial ebullient puckishness too often give way to self-referential arrogance and venomous hubris. Now is a good time for Trump supporters to use this new information to revisit their original conclusion about him and to realize, with no shame attached, that he’s not the candidate they thought he was.
When Trump first appeared on the 2015 political scene, he was a breath of fresh air. Most conservatives enjoyed his irreverence in tweaking the media rules favoring Progressives and demonizing conservatives — rules before which Republicans had long bowed down. It was galvanizing to hear Trump state in plain English that we need to address the holes in immigration that allow Islamic terrorists easy entry, even if doing so meant temporarily stopping all Muslim immigration until we figure out how to separate the moderate wheat from the murderous chaff.
Likewise, Hillary’s opponents enjoyed his refusal to allow Hillary’s double-X chromosomes to stifle the fact that the only woman Hillary supports is Hillary. To that end, she enabled her husband’s predatory, misogynistic sexual misbehavior for more than thirty years. Trump was the first Republican to remind everyone how appalling and hypocritical Hillary’s behavior has been.
Early on, Trump was loud about conservative positions: Securing our borders; supporting Israel; ending the abortion culture, and protecting Second Amendment rights. It therefore seemed as if the dream conservative candidate was presenting himself. Here was a man who bulldozed the political correctness that stifles conservative thought and who openly, and in simple language, embraced conservative positions. Based upon that information, it was eminently reasonable to support Donald Trump.
The media also encouraged Trump’s candidacy. He was good for ratings and they considered him un-electable. Given the media’s overwhelming progressive bias, they wanted to advance a Republican candidate they were sure would lose. They therefore gave him 25 times more coverage than the rest of the GOP field combined. That’s a lot of free advertising in a nation that appreciates colorful characters.
For months, then, for someone bewildered by the exceptionally crowded Republican field, Trump seemed like the answer to seven years of Obama’s efforts to turn America into another saggy, flabby semi-socialist country; to hand the Middle East over to Putin; and to tear down our national security by destroying America’s borders and having our military focus obsessively on climate change and social re-engineering.
That was then. This is now. Now the opposition research is finally coming to light, and it seems that Trump (shame on him, not shame on you) has been lying to America’s conservatives. Up until he threw himself into this election cycle, Trump was the very model of a modern elite Progressive. Moreover, as the campaign progresses, his current statements give the lie to his past promises.
What is it about politicians and fibs that can easily be shown false?
On the campaign trail in 2008, Senator Barack Obama told black audiences stories about his parents’ involvement in the civil rights protests of 1960s that were not even remotely true. Over the years, Hillary Clinton has made preposterous claims about everything from being named after the conqueror of Mt. Everest to having been under sniper fire in Bosnia.
We all know that Trump constantly proclaims he is the greatest at just about everything. Add eyesight to the list.
“Because I had a view – I have a window in my apartment that specifically was aimed at the World Trade Center, because of the beauty of the whole downtown Manhattan. And I watched as people jumped and I watched the second plane come in. … I saw the second plane come in and I said, “Wow that’s unbelievable”.’
Trump’s apartment, in the penthouse of iconic Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, is 4.1 miles away from where the twin towers once stood.
An object the size of a human body cannot be discerned by the human eye at that distance. Now, maybe there is a telescope or pair of binoculars in Trump’s penthouse. However, on that day, Donald Trump was apparently not in the penthouse. At the time the Twin Towers were struck on the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Trump was reported to be at a business meeting in downtown Chicago, Illinois, almost 800 miles from Manhattan.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Adrian D. Smith, a well-known architect in the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, was in a meeting with Donald Trump. The hyperbolic New York City developer was in Chicago to go over the design of a proposed Trump residential tower in that city that he had decided should be — what else — the tallest building in the world, around 2,000 ft. In the midst of that meeting, the two men got word of the first plane that hit the World Trade Center. “When the second plane hit, we all rushed to the television to see what was happening,” says Smith. “That was the end of the meeting.” And also the end of the 2,000 ft. tower. A few weeks later, Trump’s people came back with a revised proposal – at 900 ft. or so.
