MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Making Heroes of Muslim Terrorists, Slavers, and Rapists A look at a new Turkish television series. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/making-heroes-muslim-terrorists-slavers-and-raymond-ibrahim/

Unlike their Western counterparts, many Muslims are fond of their heroes of the past — particularly the jihadist types who for centuries thrived on terrorizing the West.

This was recently underscored by Barbaros: Sword of the Mediterranean, a television series written and produced in Turkey that aired late last year, and is dedicated to highlighting the clash between Islam and Christendom — in a way, of course, that demonizes the latter and extols the former.

The highly fictionalized series revolves around four Muslim brothers and their naval exploits and battles against the Christian maritime states of the Mediterranean.

While the series portrays the brothers as great heroes who sacrificed much to “defend” the Ottoman Empire against Christian Europe, history — real, actual, recorded history — has a different tale to tell.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration Provides Still More Money to UNRWA Putting “Palestinian refugees” above all other refugees in the world. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/biden-administration-provides-still-more-money-hugh-fitzgerald/

Hundreds of millions of refugees who have been created by the wars, conflicts, natural disasters, droughts, and famines since the Second World War must share a single U.N. Agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, to look after their wellbeing. But there is one U.N. organization, the UN Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, that is devoted exclusively to the care and feeding of one hugely privileged group of refugees, those known as “Palestinian refugees.” Having their very own agency is not the only distinction that puts “Palestinian refugees” above all other refugees in the world. Uniquely, “Palestinian refugees” include all the descendants – children, grandchildren, and so on without end – of the original refugees; no other refugees in the world are allowed to pass on their refugee status as an inheritable trait.

The Taylor Force Act is an Act of the U.S. Congress to stop American economic aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) until the PA ceases paying stipends through the Palestinian Authority Martyr’s Fund to individuals who commit acts of terrorism and to the families of deceased terrorists. This system of stipends to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of terrorists who were killed while carrying out their attacks is known, pejoratively and correctly, as the “Pay-For-Slay” program. The Act was signed into law by U.S. President Donald Trump on March 23, 2018. Several cuts were made to the aid given to the PA, with the last one made on August 24, 2018, ending all direct American aid to the PA.

Also in August 2018, the United States ended all aid to UNRWA, cutting off $300 million. That ending of aid to UNRWA was made for two reasons. First, it was a way to express American outrage with the UNRWA’s use of schoolbooks that remain full of antisemitic passages, despite repeated promises by UNRWA that it would be revising, or replacing, those texts. It has yet to do so. Second, the Trump Administration was expressing its frustration with the unique treatment of “Palestinian refugee” status as inheritable, which has meant that the UNRWA rolls constantly expand. In ending its aid, the Trump administration was putting pressure on UNRWA to halt this inexorable increase in the number of “Palestinian refugees.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Hillary Hints at 2024 Run Never counted out, because never held accountable. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/hillary-hints-2024-run-lloyd-billingsley/

“Hillary Clinton’s all-encompassing ambition will ensure that she can never be completely counted out for a presidential run as long as she is still drawing breath,” noted Robert Spencer recently. With Biden more addled by the day, and few prospects on the bench, such a run could indeed happen — especially with Hillary’s recent hints on the matter.

But Hillary has a problem.

“If Hillary were held accountable for her actions,” Spencer adds, “there would be no question of her running for president in 2024 or ever.” Those actions include the home-brew server, the Russia Hoax, Benghazi, and the Clinton Foundation, the influence-peddling scheme Peter Schweizer exposed in Clinton Cash. Hillary Clinton has also escaped accountability for actions from her early days as First Lady, when the FBI became an ally.

Bill Clinton was the first presidential candidate to offer a two-for-one deal, and once in office he put Hillary in charge of health care reform. The Yale law alum had served as chair of the legal services corporation under Jimmy Carter. With the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, Hillary performed legal work for the Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan Association, which went bust, leaving taxpayers on the hook. With Hillary in the White House, that became an issue.

Hillary’s choice for deputy White House counsel was Vincent Foster, her colleague with the Rose law firm. The dapper Foster had custody of Hillary’s billing records, a potential problem for the new administration and Hillary in particular. 

On July 19, 1993, President Clinton fired FBI director William Sessions. The next day at approximately 1 p.m., Foster came out of his office, suit jacket in hand, and told White House aide Linda Tripp “I’ll be back.” As it turned out, he would not be back. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Michelle Obama: ‘We Must Give Congress No Choice’ Michelle announces she’s going to be a player in the election. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/michelle-obama-we-must-give-congress-no-choice-daniel-greenfield/

“We must give Congress no choice,” Michelle Obama rants in the latest bulletin from her When We All Vote organization.

That’s how dictators or aspiring dictators talk.

After Democrats spuriously warned of a “threat to democracy” from Republicans, they once again demonstrate that they are the real threat.

And that the party of radicals is projecting its own actions and attitudes onto Republicans.

Michelle Obama’s letter threatens to “organize at least 100,000” people to “contact their Senators, calling on them to do everything they can to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.”

Considering the violent results of past leftist pressure campaigns on the Senate and House, leading to surges of death threats, and the aggressive harassment of even moderate Senate Dems like Manchin and Synema during the recent coup efforts, there’s little doubt that mobilizing 100,000 leftist extremists for a campaign that falsely accuses opponents of being a threat to democracy risks more death threats, harassments, and even possible acts of violence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DAVID GOLDMAN: IMPORT AMERICANS

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/import-americans/

A skills-based immigration system is a possible answer to American demographic decline.

Now that Elon Musk has tweeted that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” it must be true. America’s total fertility rate fell in 2020 to just 1.67 births per female, the lowest in history, and well below the replacement level of 2.1. Ten years ago, when I published How Civilizations Die), the United States still made babies at the replacement rate, though (as I noted) this depended on high fertility among two groups of Americans: Evangelical Christians and Hispanics.

Now demographic winter has descended on America, and there is no obvious path to recovery. The only medium-term solution lies in immigration of skilled adults, and the only two prospective sources of large-scale immigration of skilled adults are China and India.

Civilizations die because they want to. Nations that live for the present and eschew a vision of their future do not take the trouble to raise children. Today’s demographic decline has precedents in the hollowing-out of Hellenistic Greece after the Alexandrian conquests, and the decline of Rome several centuries later.

In the modern era, religious commitment has been the strongest predictor of the desire to bring future generations into the world; other writers, notably the British demographer Eric Kaufmann, have made parallel arguments. What demographers call the great fertility transition occurred with urbanization and the end of child labor. In agricultural societies and early modern industry children were cheap labor and considered (as in wrongful death lawsuits) a resource with a definable monetary value. Once national pension systems replaced family care for the aged, and children no longer were expected to work until early adulthood, children offered spiritual rather than monetary value.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Smash-and-Grab Retail Rising store crime now plagues many communities. Steven Malanga

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/smash-and-grab-retail

When police busted a shoplifting ring operating out of a liquor store last spring, they calculated that the dozen or so people involved had swiped at least $375,000 worth of goods from retailers such as Walmart, Lowe’s, and Walgreens. The pair heading the ring relied on small-time thieves, including several with drug arrest records, to launch brazen “grab-and-go” operations in which they snatched expensive goods and then raced out of stores and fled in cars with phony license plates. Though police and prosecutors often categorize shoplifting as a nonviolent crime, the gang’s sprees resulted in several physical confrontations, including one in which a gang member assaulted a store employee with a stun gun. This may sound similar to the organized smash-and-grab lootings that have plagued high-end retailers in San Francisco and other Northern California communities recently, but this gang was operating out of Daytona Beach, Florida—and had done so for nearly two years.

In fact, retail crime has been rising throughout the U.S. for the past five years, with organized criminal rings targeting stores everywhere from Woonsocket (Rhode Island) to Greensboro (North Carolina) to Grafton (Wisconsin). The National Retail Federation reported that store losses mounted from $453,940 per $1 billion in sales in 2015 to $719,458 in 2020. The biggest increase over that period happened not during the pandemic but in 2019, when total losses from shoplifting surged to $61 billion, up from $50 billion the previous year. The Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and early 2021 moderated losses, largely because stores were closed or had curtailed operating hours. Now that retailing has resumed, crime has spiked again.

Even more troubling, shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal. Corie Berry, CEO of Best Buy, recently said that store crime had become so pervasive that it was depressing profits and traumatizing staff. Like retailers, top law-enforcement officials place some of the blame for the crime surge on a widespread lessening of penalties for shoplifting. “As we’ve witnessed brazen smash and grabs, consequences are key,” Laura Cooper, head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said before Thanksgiving. “Without deterrents and accountability, communities will be victimized, and businesses terrorized.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is the tide finally turning? By Mark Landsbaum

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/is_the_tide_finally_turning.html

Yours truly has been pretty down in the mouth for quite a while, for good reasons.  I mean, look around.  Mask mandates.  Experimental drug mandates.  De facto quarantines.  Literal quarantines.  Destroyed small businesses.  Large businesses unable to fill their shelves.  Men pretending to be women.  Joe Biden in the White House.  Not a lot of happy-face material there. 

I’m getting a sense the tide may be turning.  It sure seems that the super-insulated bureaucratic Deep State is beginning to understand that it is not invincible.  Ironically, there may also be new hope politically if Democrats don’t correct course and remain blind to how self-destructive their Trump obsession will be.

On the COVID front, suddenly we see a rash of what we used to call in the news business “skin-backs.”  In plain English, that would be corrections.  In journalism and politics, that’s particularly painful, so skin-back captures it pretty well.

I think the Covidians have already begun The Big Skin-Back.

So many lies for so long are becoming so obviously lies that they need to get ahead of the story.  Otherwise, their only option is to continue to defend the lies in the face of overwhelming mounting evidence of their duplicity and, after losing battle after battle, completely destroy their credibility, even with mainstream media.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Let’s not have a path to citizenship for illegal aliens By Anony Mee

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/lets_not_have_a_path_to_citizenship_for_illegal_aliens.html

In recent days I’ve been happy to read that Biden’s Budget Busting Bill may be on its last gasp if not completely dead in the water. That’s because section 60001 of H.R. 5376 grants lawfully admitted permanent resident (LPR) status to the DREAMers. They are essentially illegals brought here as children who have done relatively well since then.

I understand the “compassionate” argument, that they did not choose to come here and they’ve done the best they can. However, many, if not most, of them have engaged in federal felony identity theft. To enroll in school, obtain employment, get a bank account, and have credit cards, they would have needed to provide a social security number. Given that they have no legal access to their own SSN, they used someone else’s. That’s a crime, and it was a deliberate one.

Professor Jan Ting, a Board Member over at the Center for Immigration Studies, has written an exquisite piece about the absolute harm this identity fraud has caused Americans, and how the Obama Administration quietly made it immeasurably worse by prioritizing illegals over citizens, thereby drastically increasing the risk that citizens would not receive their Social Security benefits.

The same perspective applies to all other pending legislation attempting to normalize the status of illegal immigrants in the United States.

Though I believe that enforcement should come before legalization efforts and was thoroughly disgusted decades ago working in the environment created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, I am not entirely opposed to amnesty programs. Sometimes, it just makes sense.

However, the benefits of citizenship should never accrue to those who applied for temporary visas claiming they were coming for a limited time and then never left—the bulk of illegals currently in the country. Nor to those who were never lawfully admitted to this country in the first place.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Mistakes Fed Putin’s Ukraine Temptation At the rate he’s going, Biden will be making concessions to Russia for the rest of his term. By Ric Grenell and Andrew L. Peek

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-fecklessness-fed-putin-ukraine-troops-border-russia-energy-gas-poland-western-europe-germany-france-invasion-biden-11641832674?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

America’s current crisis with Russia over Ukraine is a logical outcome of the Biden administration’s failed European policy and misguided focus on consensus. This standoff, which may culminate in January with concessions to Moscow, is the product of five basic problems.

First and most glaring, the administration has treated diplomacy with Western Europe as an end in itself. America’s current fetish for agreement with Berlin and Paris, rather than transactional diplomacy, means that on issue after issue the Germans and French can insist on their own policy views in exchange for consensus. For countries that don’t view Russia’s military buildup with sufficient alarm, consensus means words rather than action. The European Union has failed to draft sanctions on Russia even as the crisis enters its third month. The Germans are reportedly blocking the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from selling lethal aid to Ukraine. And Germany was insistent on completing Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will effectively isolate Ukraine.

Moscow can be sure that the U.S. won’t act on its own militarily to help Ukraine, because the Biden administration has promised it won’t. Credible uncertainty about the likelihood of U.S. action would have been a genuine deterrent to Moscow’s escalation of this crisis. If Ukraine is a vital American interest, Washington must leave the Russians guessing whether America will commit its own forces, especially since European diplomacy has borne so little fruit.

Second, American deterrence has collapsed in the wake of the Afghanistan fiasco, which demoralized our friends and energized our adversaries. There is no reason Russia should believe that Mr. Biden’s administration credibly threatens military action. Afghanistan cheapened every promise the U.S. has made, including those to NATO and the European states in Russia’s shadow.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How Adversaries Size Up Biden’s Foreign Policy He slaps vanity sanctions on would-be friends, playing into China’s hands. Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on January 11th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-adversaries-size-up-biden-worldview-russia-china-south-asia-sanctions-xi-democracy-taiwan-hong-kong-asean-india-11641846956?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Last week Russian troops fanned out across Kazakhstan; the Myanmar junta sentenced Aung San Suu Kyi to four more years in prison; and China transferred a senior official from Xinjiang to lead the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. Two things are clear. First, America’s geopolitical adversaries aren’t impressed by the Biden administration. Second, the administration’s attempts to make a priority of human rights and democracy have so far failed to reverse or even to slow the retreat of democracy around the world.

The Biden administration’s political fragility at home is partly to blame. But adversaries are watching more than American domestic politics; they see incoherence in American policy. The administration has signaled that balancing China in the Indo-Pacific, the promotion of democracy and climate policy are its overriding foreign-policy priorities. Our adversaries—and some of our friends—think that these goals can’t be pursued successfully at the same time. They conclude that American policy focused on incompatible objectives will ultimately fail.

Take Asia. There is no way to counter China’s regional ambitions without solidifying the American position in Southeast Asia. Yet here President Biden’s prime geopolitical goal of balancing China runs counter to his goal of democracy promotion. So far, there aren’t many signs that the administration is handling this tension effectively.

Case in point: As work on what looks like an important Chinese naval base in Cambodia continues, the U.S. is busy slapping sanctions on Cambodia’s armed forces and politicians. American sanctions of this type typically irritate their targets without producing the desired changes in behavior. Cambodian Premier Hun Sen seems unmoved by American sanctions and lectures. He is using his country’s one-year presidency of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, to undercut America’s policy of isolating the junta in Myanmar.