War on Terror: Not a Bad Record by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17775/war-on-terror

According to the Global Index of Terrorism, more than 57% of terrorism in the first 15 years of the Global War on Terror happened in four countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. In Syria, since 2011, most of the deaths in that category were the work of state terrorism.

Most of the active terror groups are located in what is known as ungoverned territories. These include Syria, part of Iraq beyond the control of Baghdad, the Sahel region, parts of Horn of Africa and parts of Yemen.

The last terror attacks by Hezbollah in Western Europe and the seizing of Western hostages took place in the 1980s. Even occasional action taken against Israel comes at the behest of Tehran in the form of state-sponsored terrorism.

The crushing defeats suffered by Islamist parties, most recently in Morocco, indicate the end of an era in which reference to faith could justify the worst postures.

Has the war on international terrorism been lost? Have the US and its allies dropped out of the war on terror that they declared two decades ago? These are some of the questions raised by commentators across the globe last week as the US marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Many commentators answered both questions in the affirmative.

Yes, they said, terror groups are still operating in no fewer than 20 countries, while start-up terror outfits have been able to carry out attacks in a number of Western countries, including the United States. At the same time, the US has reduced its footprint in a number of countries that continue to shelter terrorist groups.

In some cases, the “yes” answer came from professional America-bashers who miss no opportunity to portray the “Great Satan” either as an earth-devouring monster or a wet mouse looking for shelter from a hailstorm of unpopularity.

A closer look, however, may offer a different picture.

A Hinge Moment of History by Mark Steyn

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17695/hinge-moment-history

I have lived in countries that have real domestic terrorism movements…. No country blessed enough not to have a domestic terrorism movement should be inventing one.

We are living in a blizzard of lies.

[W]e are more dependent on a handful of woke billionaires to tell us what reality is. They are far more open than ever that they get to determine what are the agreed facts. Google made an explicit announcement about this recently. They said that sometimes they would put warnings on things that are factually accurate because, even though they are true, they do not think it is in society’s interest for people to be seeing it.

[N]ow you will be banned or deleted or blocked or silenced simply for disagreeing with the official version of events. For example, the Great Barrington declaration, which was written by three of the most prominent epidemiologists in the world from Harvard, Oxford, and I think it was Stanford. That was basically deleted from YouTube, banned from Facebook, simply because it contradicted the WHO, CDC official version of events.

It is just groupthink enforced by a cabal of woke billionaires, who have more power than anyone else on the planet.

The other thing that emerged during this year very quickly is that we are at a hinge moment of history. We were told a generation or two back that, by doing trade with China, China would become more like us. Instead, on issues such as free speech, we are becoming more like China.

American companies are afraid of offending China. American officials are afraid of offending China. We are adopting Chinese norms on issues such as free speech and basic disagreements with the government of China.

We’re living in the early stages of a future that is the direct consequence of poor public policy over the last couple of generations. We are not even aware of that….

Right now, we are witnessing a non‑stop continuous transfer of power to a country that is serious about using that power. This is China’s moment. Take it as someone who grew up, in large part, in a great power in decline. There’s no real explicit handover day. People, in hindsight, expect to pinpoint the day that the baton was passed…. My great worry is that actually, the transfer to China has already happened. The baton has already been passed. We just haven’t formally acknowledged that yet.

I’ll say it straight out loud. I do not think that Joe Biden “won the election.” I don’t think it is a question of “widespread fraud.” I think the way the system works with the Electoral College, you only need actually to spread fraud in six key cities in six key states.

I would like some of these genius jurists, including [US Supreme Court Chief Justice] Mr. Roberts and his colleagues, to then give us a figure on what is the acceptable level of fraud in American elections. Denmark, in its history, has never actually had a plausible accusation of any kind of electoral fraud. As we know, in the United States, in cities like Philadelphia, this is a tradition that has long roots and goes back 150 years.

If you have no basic election integrity, essentially, all the other issues are irrelevant.

Big Tech has essentially wrecked the internet.

Now Facebook is working with state power. The first place these Big Tech guys learned to do this was with China…. I’m in favor of breaking these companies up as soon as we can.

Standard Oil was broken up because of its control over the oil business. Facebook and Google and Apple have far more control over their business than Standard Oil did 110 years ago. The difference is that their business is knowledge and the access to knowledge, which is more important even than oil.

At some point, if we’re not prepared to stand up… My whole thing, in all the years, is that Western civilization is sliding off a cliff and most citizens of most Western nations are not even aware of it.

There is a moral component that we are overlooking. We live in an insane world where moral narcissism attaches to whether or not you rampage around some statue of a Confederate general who died 150 years ago. The fact that you’re rampaging around the Confederate general while wearing shoes made by child labor somehow does not impact on your moral virtue at all.

We are the civilization that built the modern world. If you do not like us, we can go back to what it was 500 years ago. Basically, the world functions because of the world we built.

I take Iran seriously. Not so much because of the Iranians, but because of the promises and the expectations in places like Sudan that Iranian nuclear technology will basically be shared with some of the most lethal basket-case states on Earth. Iran is in some sense like Russia and China. These are all, in a certain sense, great civilizations that have become perversions of themselves in a relatively short time.

What we ought to be trying to do is connect the Iranian people with their great glorious past, which actually is a platform on which you can build a future.

MY SAY-JERUSALEM

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. “Psalm 137

There was once a political power house known by both advocates and antagonists as “the Jewish vote and lobby.” It was respected and courted by legislators and politicians of both parties. How did their agenda get derailed into supporting only left-wing causes? Why has their right hand lost its cunning? Why do their tongues cleave to the roofs of their mouths instead of loudly denouncing a growing State Department push to roll back the American Embassy move to Jerusalem and reduce American presence there to consular status?

There is an old saw that states “silence is golden.” It is so when speaking offends and hurts. But silence is immoral when it fails to confront growing and increasingly violent anti-Semitism even when it is disguised as “tough love” on Israel.

RSK

Moral Authority and Survivor Creep by Anthony Daniels

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/survivor-creep/

“It is not necessary to have suffered personally to claim the moral authority of suffering and sufferers. It is only necessary that you should belong to a group that, historically, has been wronged and suffered as a result. The glory of this, apart from the status victimhood is taken to confer, is that you can claim to have suffered enormously while leading a very privileged existence.”

The use of words tells us much about the temper of the times, and the use to which the word survivor is now frequently put tells us much about our modern scale of values.

At one time, survivors were those who escaped death from such events as shipwrecks, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and battles in war. To be counted, or count oneself, a survivor, it was necessary to have encountered death close-up. Now, however, it is necessary only to have had an unpleasant experience to be given, or to award oneself, the title of survivor, for example of sexual abuse.

What lies behind this semantic fungation? I suspect that there is a certain competitive envy of suffering at play. This is not to deny that survivors in the modern sense may really have suffered, but it is not enough merely to have suffered: one must have suffered mightily, if possible as much as anyone has ever suffered. This is because suffering by itself now confers moral authority like nothing else, certainly not knowledge or good behaviour.

Of course, there is no indisputable yardstick by which suffering, or for that matter pleasure, can be measured, which is why the felicific calculus is so fatuous an idea. On the other hand, to compare one’s suffering caused by, say, the late arrival of a train with that of a victim of Pol Pot would be not only absurd, but unseemly and even disgusting. This is not to say (as I know from experience) that the lateness of a train may not fill one’s mind with chagrin and rage, but even when they are at their height one knows, or ought to know, that what one is suffering is inconvenience rather than tragedy. This was once very forcibly brought home to me in a literal sense when once I was waiting for a delayed train in a state of considerable irritation, only later to learn that the train had crashed and the only person to be killed on it was the literary editor of a publication for which I sometimes reviewed books. I then felt ashamed of my exaggerated emotional state on the platform. Delay and death are not to be equated.

Biden’s Afghanistan Mistakes by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17766/biden-afghanistan-mistakes

Trump’s Doha Agreement only bound the United States to a “complete withdrawal of all remaining forces” with the “commitment and action” of the Taliban on its obligations as laid out in the accord. Those terms bound the Taliban not to “allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qaeda, to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies,” as well as “not to cooperate with groups or individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies,” and to “prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan from threatening the security of the United States and its allies.”

Even prior to the final assaults on Kabul and the suicide bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport, it was clear the Taliban was neck-deep in a proxy relationship with al-Qaeda via its relationship with the Haqqani network. Once again, the information that should have led to a pause and a hard-nosed assessment of how to complete the withdrawal in an orderly, safe way was ignored to meet a political deadline.

Instead, the Afghan men who helped the U.S., the women who breathed freedom for the first time, the military veterans from the U.S. and its allies who fought and died there all feel a sense of abandonment and frustration at this endgame incompetence. Those in the government who continue to hunt terrorist jihadis have lost their sources, bases of operation, and ability to quick-strike military targets that a resurgent al-Qaeda will now present there.

The details of the Biden administration’s inner planning prior to the pullout from Afghanistan are beginning to emerge, and they are not comforting. “Failure is an orphan,” as the old saying goes, but a paternity test is in order to explain a failed effort that will haunt the administration for years to come.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, appearing before congressional panel recently, tried to defend the rationale for the hasty withdrawal, claiming, “We made the right decision in ending America’s longest war.” This, of course, dodges the question of how the withdrawal was conducted.

Joe Biden’s Political Prisoners BLM rioters, Antifa thugs, and anti-Kavanaugh protesters are off the hook while Trump-supporting, anti-Biden protesters suffer in jail for months, charged with obstruction and other silly crimes. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/17/joe-bidens-political-prisoners/

The latest “conspiracy theory” consuming the political Right, our media betters warn, is the idea that the Biden regime is creating a class of political prisoners stemming from the January 6 protest on Capitol Hill. Scoffing at accusations that January 6 protesters are treated differently from other protesters, columnists and talking heads insist it’s nothing more than right-wing media spin.

A rally scheduled this weekend for January 6 defendants has official Washington apoplectic. Dozens of Americans remain locked up in a D.C. jail and at facilities across the country as they await trials that won’t begin until at least mid-2022,.

“The idea that people are languishing unfairly in grim detention facilities, though, fits neatly with a broad narrative that the Biden administration is rounding up and jailing political opponents,” Philip Bump, national correspondent for the Washington Post, wrote on Thursday. “This weekend’s rally is called ‘Justice for J6,’ implying that those still held are being detained unjustly for punitive reasons.”

All of that, of course, is true. More than 600 Americans have been rounded up by Joe Biden’s Justice Department with new arrests coming every week. Federal prosecutors have requested pre-trial detention for at least 100 defendants; 60 Capitol protesters are now in jail and denied bail. For months, January 6 detainees have suffered under solitary confinement conditions, were allowed out of their cells only one hour per day, and have been denied access to lawyers, exercise, personal hygiene, and religious services.

But Bump, like the rest of the national news media, not only downplays the detention of dozens of January 6 protesters including those charged with no violent crime, he justifies the unequal treatment under the caveat that the accused participated in an alleged “insurrection” to overthrow the government.

At the same time, the American people are supposed to deny what they see with their own eyes and believe that the 630 or so Americans arrested and charged for mostly misdemeanor offenses related to January 6 are being treated the same way as Antifa or Black Lives Matter activists. 

‘Death To America’ tweets Kansas University student body president By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/death_to_america_tweets_kansas_university_student_body_president.html

“Death to America.”

Shout the Iranian mullahs? No, so says the University of Kansas student body President, Niya McAdoo. And she has no plans to apologize.

Both the @KUPresident and the student senate Twitter account retweeted a September 3rd post reading, “Happy Friday everybody. Death to America.” Replete with a laughing emoji. Because there’s nothing funnier than that.

Ms. McAdoo sent out a follow-up tweet saying, “The more you read American history, the more the whole ‘Death to America’ line sounds less like a terrifying, chaotic sentiment, and more like a perfectly rational, if anything remarkably reserved, statement.”

Yes, death to unborn babies, the unvaccinated, infidels, and America. Who could disagree? (Outside of maybe unborn babies, the unvaccinated, infidels, and Trump-loving troglodytes.) 

Although I do wonder what she’d say if conservatives and patriots pledged, “Death to pro-abortionists, the vaccinated, those who disagree with us, and America-haters?”

Incredibly, the university has no plans to investigate McAdoo for her comments. Nor will Twitter ban her. Its moronic—and vile — thought arbiters are too busy banning folks who still believe in freedom and personal autonomy, i.e. “hate speech.” (Like, for example, me. I’ve been banned for months now. And for a post I didn’t even make and know nothing about.) Threaten to stand up to leftist thugs and Twitter will ban you, possibly for life. Vowing “Death to America,” however, is perfectly okay.

Bringing Somalia to Minnesota By Michael Letts

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/bringing_somalia_to_minnesota.html

Unless voters in Minneapolis wish to find their city and homes receiving warnings like the State Department’s against Omar’s home country, they might want to reconsider whom they entrust with power.

Imagine an agitated person who forms a career railing against doctors after learning of a surgeon who committed gross malpractice. That non-medically trained agitator uses questionable means to eventually become a hospital administrator to implement her radical policies of slashing budgets for medical care and personnel. To appease her, everyone in her hospital must follow her rage and ideology rather than proven medical science.

Who would go to that hospital?

Yet, this principle is what Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) seeks to inflict upon the law-enforcement community. This principle is in play in the wake of the recent ruling by the Minnesota Supreme Court. When voters head to the polls, they will decide whether to eliminate the Minneapolis charter requirement of police department, and replace it with a public safety department that “employs a public health approach.”

As Omar weighs in on this topic, she brings her considerable inexperience to the world of law enforcement. Once again weaponizing the power provided to her by Minneapolis voters and a sycophantic media, she accelerates as the bus careens off the cliff. 

Firmly protected by the shields of others, Omar seems to enjoy a perverse pleasure in tarnishing precinct shields across her district and beyond. Why the people in Minnesota’s fifth district elected this woman remains a mystery, but the majority of citizens in her district evidently approve of her rhetoric, behavior, and agenda. Yet, despite her problematic rise to power and anti-Semitic controversies, the media and a woke-obsessed culture allow Ilhan Omar free to spew hateful ideologies with little pushback or consequences.

The Real Story in Durham’s Indictment of Democratic Lawyer Michael Sussmann By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/the-real-story-in-durhams-indictment-of-democratic-lawyer-michael-sussmann/

“Meantime, having orchestrated the creation of all this smoke, the Clinton campaign exploits it to tell the media and the American people, “See, Trump is a Kremlin mole!”I suddenly think the eventual Durham report could be very interesting reading.”

The special counsel’s final report on the Clinton campaign’s manufacturing of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative will be very interesting reading.

T here is a long game and a short game going on in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann on a false-statements count.

The short of it is this: A false statement was allegedly made by Sussmann to the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, on September 19, 2016. In federal law, the false-statement crime has a five-year statute of limitations, meaning it had to be charged by this Sunday (September 19, 2021). Consequently, even if Durham would probably have preferred to wait until his full investigation was concluded before filing indictments, by delaying beyond Sunday, he would have lost what appears to be an eminently provable felony charge. If he was going to indict Sussmann on this conduct, it was now or never.

Now, more critically, the long game.

It is unusual for a one-count false-statement charge, which can be alleged in a paragraph, to be presented as a 27-page speaking indictment. But Durham wrote a highly detailed account of the facts and circumstances surrounding the false-statements charge. It is significant in that it tells us far more about his investigation.

Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going: The Trump–Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf, and that they did not actually believe there was much, if anything, to the collusion narrative. It was serviceable as political dirt but would not amount to anything real for criminal or national-security purposes.

Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Violates Fundamental Freedoms Chris Talgo

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/18/bidens-vaccine-mandate-violates-fundamental-freedoms/

On September 9, President Joe Biden announced that nearly 100 million Americans will be forced to get vaccinated, or else they could lose their livelihoods.

According to Biden, “the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”

He added, “all nursing home workers who treat patients on Medicare and Medicaid” and “those who work in hospitals, home healthcare facilities, or other medical facilities – a total of 17 million healthcare workers,” must all get vaccinated.

And, for good measure, Biden declared, “I will sign an executive order that will now require all executive branch federal employees to be vaccinated — all.  And I’ve signed another executive order that will require federal contractors to do the same.”

So, per the president, all the health care workers who literally put their lives on the line treating COVID-19 patients over the past 18 months, have no choice but to get vaccinated.

First, does the federal government have the authority to mandate vaccines? In a word, no.

The Constitution grants no such power to the national government. In fact, several officials in the Biden administration, including the president, have articulated that the federal government is not capable of forcing Americans to get vaccinated.

The states, per the 10th Amendment, do possess the power to implement vaccine mandates. In 1905, the Supreme Court ruled that states can enforce compulsory vaccination laws based on the police powers granted to the states in the Constitution. However, in that ruling, as well as subsequent vaccine-oriented rulings, the Court has made it clear that this power belongs to the states, and the states alone.