Blinken defends Afghan withdrawal at testy U.S. congressional hearing

https://news.yahoo.com/afghanistan-blame-game-shifts-u-112954023.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

-Secretary of State Antony Blinken beat back criticism of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan on Monday at a contentious congressional hearing where at least two Republicans called on him to resign.

In five hours of often testy exchanges with lawmakers, Blinken defended President Joe Biden’s decision to pull out and pushed back on accusations that the State Department should have done more to help Americans and at-risk Afghans to be evacuated, blaming the previous administration for lacking a plan.

He repeatedly noted that Republican former President Donald Trump had negotiated the withdrawal agreement with the Taliban, and said Biden’s administration could not renegotiate because of threats from the group to resume killing Americans.

“There’s no evidence that staying longer would have made the Afghan security forces or the Afghan government any more resilient or self-sustaining,” Blinken said.

“We inherited a deadline. We did not inherit a plan,” Blinken said, referring to the Trump administration’s agreement to remove all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by May 1.

Members of Congress – Biden’s Democrats as well as opposition Republicans – have pledged to investigate since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan last month after a rapid advance.

Blinken appeared on Monday before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and was to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first Biden administration official to testify publicly to lawmakers since the Islamist militant group’s takeover.

Fireworks had been expected, given the amount of finger-pointing over how the two-decade-long war ended. Many Republicans, particularly those closely allied to Trump, interrupted or even shouted over Blinken during the House hearing, a departure for a committee known for bipartisan cooperation.

Others offered harsh criticism.

They’re terrorists, not ‘security prisoners’ Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/theyre-terrorists-not-security-prisoners/

 How do news outlets love to portray the recent “great escape” from Israel’s Gilboa Prison? Let us count the ways.
The first is to refer to the six Palestinian terrorists who plotted and carried out the most egregious jailbreak in Israel’s history as “security prisoners.”

The second is to downplay the rap sheets of the four who were apprehended and the remaining two fugitives still on the loose.

The third is to take a pause from the above to blame Israel for the lax conditions that enabled the men to spend months digging the tunnel—from the floor of the shower cubicle in their cell—through which they fled from behind bars. Oh, and, of course, for failing to catch them as soon as they managed to pull off the daring stunt.

It’s a neat trick. Simultaneously sanitizing the terrorists’ blood-stained hands and magnifying Israel’s role in the debacle is precisely how the Palestinian Authority runs its propaganda campaign: at once denying the Holocaust, for instance, while accusing the Jewish state of emulating the Nazis.

The same ostensible paradox applies to Palestinians’ rioting on behalf of the escapees by hurling fire bombs at the “occupation forces” and threatening terrorist attacks if those of their brethren who were captured, or the ones on the run and those still in jail are treated poorly by the Shin Bet, Israel Police and Israel Prison Service. Meanwhile, inmates left behind are warning that if their cushy conditions are altered one iota, they’ll launch a hunger strike.
Israel’s grown so used to the scenario that all its new leaders can do is pat themselves on the back for playing catch-up and vowing to rectify the dereliction of their predecessors. You know, the Cabinet led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Giving the Taliban International Legitimacy Would Be a Disastrous Mistake by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17761/taliban-international-legitimacy

European plans to forge closer ties with Kabul are, though, being severely undermined by the conduct of the new Taliban regime which, rather than living up to its promise to mend its ways, instead appears to be reverting to its old, uncompromising approach.

Recent reports claim that at least four elite Afghan counterterrorism agents have been hunted down and killed by the Taliban during the past three weeks, in one case pulling out all the victim’s fingernails before shooting him.

“We have to stop pretending that the Taliban have changed,” warned Mr McMaster . “Our self-delusion has led many to embrace an Orwellian reversal of morality in which they view jihadist terrorists as a partner…. The Taliban are determined to impose a brutal form of sharia on the Afghan people and are intertwined with terrorists determined to continue their jihad…” — HR McMaster, former US National Security Advisor, The Sunday Times, September 12, 2021.

Naïve attempts by a number of leading Western powers to foster relations with the newly-installed Taliban regime in Kabul are being undermined by the uncompromising attitude the new Islamist regime.

Following the Taliban’s dramatic seizure of control of Afghanistan last month, a number of prominent Western leaders have indicated their willingness to work with the new Afghan regime, following claims by some Taliban leaders that they want to establish a more moderate form of government than the former Taliban regime that terrorised the country in the late 1990s.

In the aftermath of the Islamist movement’s takeover of the country, Taliban leaders were at pains to stress their plans to establish a more moderate approach. In their first press conference after seizing control of the country, the movement’s leaders promised to protect women’s rights, guarantee media freedom, and offered a nationwide amnesty for government officials and military personnel in the former government of President Ashraf Ghani, which collapsed in disarray following US President Joe Biden’s decision to end US military support.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the armed group’s spokesman, also said the Taliban wished for peaceful relations with other countries, and that no group will be allowed to use Afghan territory for attacks against any nation.

“I would like to assure the international community, including the United States, that nobody will be harmed,” Mujahid said. “We don’t want any internal or external enemies.”

Wokeness: An Evil of Our Age Even the Chinese apparat could not invent a more evil, more macabre way to destroy the United States. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/12/wokeness-an-evil-of-our-age/

History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide. 

The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War. 

The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed. 

The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese. 

French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

Mythological

Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students. 

Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.

What Should the World Expect of Gifting Afghanistan to Fundamentalists? by Hamid Bahrami

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17760/gifting-afghanistan-to-fundamentalists

The Taliban, by trying to introduce themselves as “moderate,” also appear to be playing “good cop, bad cop” regarding the IS, presumably to get international support and recognition. The West should be skeptical. As long as the Taliban and other terror groups, whether Shi’ite or Sunni, have not changed ideologically, they will remain a significant threat to the US and the Free World.

Although the Taliban pledged to protect future US economic interests on Afghan soil by vowing that it would not allow other groups to form and organize terrorist attacks against the US and its allies, this promise will probably last only as long as the US keeps complying with the Taliban’s blackmail demands regarding the US hostages and co-workers Biden abandoned.

The newly formed government consists of acting interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has a $10 million bounty on his head , is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and whose family are longtime supporters of al-Qaeda; and four of the senior commanders are terrorists whom former President Barack Obama released from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl.

Reports have also begun questioning if Biden’s surrender of Afghanistan with not a trace of resistance – including the great Bagram airbase and nearly as much military aid as the US has provided to Israel since 1948 — might have been deliberate in view of China’s “investment” of $1.5 billion in Biden’s son, Hunter, when Biden was vice-president, as well as for possible future returns.

A few key questions remain unanswered: Has America, in seeking coordination with a terror group against which it fought for years, ended its own supremacy? Is America about to cap the horror by officially recognizing a state run by known terrorists, armed to the teeth with America’s finest military equipment, and who seem to have every intention of establishing a terrorist state?

Another question is the geostrategic factor, if any, of the West’s position in the future of Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Free World?

So far, the main losers in Afghanistan disaster, apart from the US and the Free World, are the people of Afghanistan, especially those who helped the US and found themselves betrayed, and the women who for 20 years, thanks to the US and its allies, had for the first time known freedom.

The team that assisted former President Barack Obama to destabilize the Middle East in Syria, Libya and Yemen, the instability of Egypt, the surrender of Iraq to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the annexation of Crimea to Russia, apparently wishes to go the same route in Central Asia by gifting this strategic region to Shi’ite and Sunni Islamic fundamentalists.

The election of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris may be giving onlookers around the world a sinking feeling that we could see the same collapse happen again in Afghanistan and, as the Kabul airport suicide attack signalled, that Afghanistan has again become a center for narcotics, violence, terror and hostage-taking

Why Justin Trudeau Does Not Deserve to Lead Canada By Janice Fiamengo

https://pjmedia.com/columns/janice-fiamengo/2021/09/12/why-justin-trudeau-does-not-deserve-to-lead-canada-n1477885

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been a preening, spendthrift, and fundamentally unserious leader throughout his time in office. Recently, however, his calculated vilification of the unvaccinated and his divisive stoking of fear and rage reveal a profound malice that threatens us all.

For most of his political career, the Bollywood-jiving, “Because it’s 2015” feminist was too busy burnishing his progressive image to worry about such dull political matters as ethical conduct (two ethics violations and a major charity scandal); energy policy (plans to “phase out” the western petroleum industry); or the federal debt (with highest debt to GDP ratio in Canadian history). Trudeau has never shown much interest in those who do not qualify for, or desire, the largesse-with-strings his government has doled out to academics, journalists, Quebec francophones, feminist organizations, labor unions, and a multitude of other special interest groups.

But his inadequacy might not have been deadly if his “sunny ways” mask had not slipped so decisively in recent weeks. True, some observers were alarmed when, even before being elected PM, he expressed admiration for Communist China’s ability to “turn their economy around on a dime,” but the statement seemed to express less a dictatorial yearning than a youthfully idealistic zeal (Trudeau has always seemed younger than his actual age, an advantage he has assiduously cultivated). When he paraded his family around India in traditional dress, hands clasped in the Hindu Namaste tradition, the burlesque performance was written off as forgivable over-enthusiasm, and drew attention away from the presence at Liberal events of a convicted Sikh terrorist. Even multitudinous gaffes don’t necessarily signal a politician’s end—at least, not immediately—if their purveyor can maintain public good will.

Recently, though, Trudeau hasn’t even tried to seem to care for all Canadians, and his expressed contempt (or worse) for the minority who object to his policy of mandated Covid injections has at last revealed his true bullying, authoritarian nature. During the election campaign, Trudeau has been unabashedly coercive, threatening “consequences” for federal workers who choose not to be injected and characterizing opponents as rabidly unhinged. After a campaign stop in London, Ontario, where he faced one of many angry crowds, Trudeau described the protesters as “a mob” who were “practically foaming at the mouth.” On other occasions, he referred to the “far right, anti-vaxx fringe” and said, with almost laughable predictability, that they were “lashing out with racist, misogynistic attacks.” 

Medical Mandates: A Hideous Strength By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/09/12/medical-mandates-a-hideous-strength-n1477878

One recalls C.S. Lewis’ dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a longtime favorite of mine, where he speaks of “false writings” and “men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries.” Lewis held to an apocalyptic vision of moral and intellectual surrender to the idols of mere self-sufficiency and hedonistic indulgence, of a time characterized by the death of meaning and the weakening of belief in a just and merciful God. “The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus,” the human spirit is being progressively “enclosed,” as he describes it. There is not much of the Rapture here, little indication of the new Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation.

David Marshall, also a devoted reader of Lewis, regards the novel as “a profound and prescient vision of institutional evil, of a sort that is all too recognizable in our time…fus[ing] political power, technology, and the occult.” Of course, Lewis was not thinking of a biovirus closing down the planet but of the relentless slide toward totalitarian governance everywhere he looked, especially in the democratic West, much as Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and José Saramago forecast in their signature works. Lewis was more preoccupied with the eclipse of faith, which he saw as undermining the integrity and cohesion of the great Judeo-Christian experiment to establish a system of individual liberty and rule of law, grounded in natural and divine justice. 

The belief in such principles ensured and sustained a viable culture, which was inevitably fragile and always susceptible to the incursion of the “demonic” in one form or another. He would not have been surprised at the current pandemic of lies, political demagoguery, and the recruitment of a public devoid of the moral strength to resist an orthodoxy of deception—the sway of the sons and daughters of the Father of Lies.

For COVID has provided the pretext to inaugurate precisely such a declension as Lewis feared. Our public institutions are engaged in establishing a virtual medical dictatorship mandating masks, lockdowns, contact tracing, curfews, business closures, excessive police powers, and more. And now we have the vaccine passports, predicated on a quasi-theological division between the saved and the damned, or in current terms, the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. 

Glazov Gang: Taliban Inaugurates Al-Qaeda on 9/11 All brought to you by Joe Biden.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/taliban-inaugurates-al-qaeda-911-frontpagemagcom/
This new Glazov Gang episode features Jeff Crouere, author of America’s Last Chance.

Jeff focuses on Taliban to Inaugurate Al-Qaeda on 9/11, revealing how it is all brought to you by Joe Biden. [The show is credited to Daniel Greenfield’s article HERE.]

Don’t miss it!

The Greatest Existential Threat to America Black Lives Matter’s ignorant racist attacks on America’s Founding. David Horowitz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/greatest-existential-threat-america-david-horowitz/

Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin – a leader who presided over the worst, most incompetent, most humilitating military defeat in the history of our nation – is black. Of course, he’s black. He was appointed by Biden to display the wonderful diversity of the most progressive president in history. He wasn’t chosen because he was a brilliant military leader (obviously). He was chosen because he was a political hack ready and willing to embrace even the most suicidal left-wing policies. (Note: Left-wing policies are by their very nature suicidal because the defining characteristic of the left is that it hates America and wants to “dismantle” it and replace it with the left-wing fantasy of a socially just future.)

In February 2021 – with the deadline for withdrawal in Afghanistan a bare three months away – General Austin was not ordering a military alert to prepare for what was going to be a major humanitarian and military reckoning. Instead, he was ordering a military “stand down” to indoctrinate all America’s troops in Black Lives Matter hate white people and hate America propaganda.

In passing may I note that 85% of the troops who gave their lives in Afghanistan to protect the American homeland and to give the Afghan people and especially women the right to breathe free – were white. So much for real diversity.

Diversity Training as it is practiced, is a racist scam whose promoters have the hateful mentality and low I.Q. level of the Jim Crow bubbas of the past. Their goal is to demonize white Americans and (white) America, and to promote an anti-American agenda that strikes at the heart of a soldier’s military oath to defend the Constitution and the nation it created.

Here is a dose of the beliefs that our soldiers were being indoctrinated in during the two-month stand down during the run-up to the Afghanistan debacle:

“that the country was founded by racists, that the country has always been racist,

“that the Constitution’s ratification codified white supremacy as the law of the land,

“that whites are inherently racists (whether they realize it or not), and that the country must transform and become something altogether different than what it was and is.”

Americans and Jews are Fighting World War III Survival lies in remembering their mission. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/americans-and-jews-are-fighting-world-war-iii-don-feder/

Before Rosh Hashanah, I was re-watching “Band of Brothers,” the docudrama on the 101 Airborne in World War II, based on the book of the same title by Stephen Ambrose.

The episode I saw just before Erev Rosh-Hashanah (“Why We Fight”) was about the men of Easy Company stumbling across a camp where Jews were literally worked and starved to death.

These paratroopers were the toughest of the tough. They fought from Normandy to Bastogne to the Ardennes and into Germany. When the episode begins, the war is all but over. Hitler will commit suicide three days later. Shortly thereafter, the German Army will surrender.

At first, the men of Easy Company couldn’t understand what they were looking at behind the barbed wire. The GIs who discovered the camp couldn’t find the words to describe it to their officers.

Easy Company had taken everything the Germans could throw at them. They’d seen buddies blown apart and others with severed limbs, gushing blood. They’d frozen in stinking foxholes and had food that barely kept them alive.

Now that the fighting is all but over, they’ve become cynical. “What the hell were we fighting for?” they ask. (Capt. Nixon, the Company XO, sings “Gory, gory, what a helluva way to die!”) Then came Kaufering Lager IV.

The prisoners who can still stand are walking skeletons. The soldiers can only stare in dumb disbelief. They’re told that the retreating SS guards set several buildings on fire. Prisoners too weak to flee were burned alive. When asked why they were there, the prisoners replied: “Juden,” “Juden” (Jew, Jew).

In a poignant scene, a middle-aged man falls into the arms of a paratrooper. He hugs the soldier, caresses his face, kisses his cheek reverently and collapses in tears.

It was an encounter between two peoples bound by eternity. America was at its highpoint. We had just saved humanity from the twin horrors of Nazism and Japanese imperialism.

The Jewish people were at their low point. In the space of a few years, one out of every three Jews on earth was murdered.

The liberation of the death camps was the latest chapter in a story that went back to America’s beginnings as a nation.