WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Wilders Calls Out The Islam-Fueled Western European Jew-Hatred Speaking the truth about anti-Semitism’s cozy relationship with Islam’s defining text. Andrew Bostom

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/wilders-calls-out-islam-fueled-western-european-andrew-bostom/

The Dutch CIDI (Centrum Informatie En Documentatie Israel) annual report for 2019 just released Monday 2/17/20, recorded 182 anti-Semitic incidents, its highest number ever registered since 1982, when monitoring began. This figure represented a 35% increase from 2018.

Even the CIDI’s full 99 page Dutch language report, however, provided only limited anecdotal information about a select sample of the perpetrators, rendering a quantitative determination of major (and/or relative) group responsibility impossible to assess. This glaring lacuna was “enlarged” by the report’s absence of background discussion of previously published comparative findings revealing disproportionate rates of extreme anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitic violence, or violent threats, among Western European Muslims, including confirmatory data on anti-Semitic attitudes within the Netherlands itself.

Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders—the Netherland’s most informed and intellectually courageous politician on the subject of Islam—inveighed against the denial of what the report’s findings actually substantiated, during a floor debate, Tuesday 2/18/20. Eschewing the craven, vacuous platitudes of his colleagues, Wilders thundered,

[I]t is almost nauseating. We’ve been talking about anti-Semitism, here in the Lower House (of the Dutch Parliament) for ten minutes now. And nobody, really nobody has discussed the biggest cause of anti-Semitism, which is of course Islam, and Islamization. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Philip Haney: Whistleblower and Happy Warrior A tragic loss. Col. Joe Martin

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/philip-haney-whistleblower-and-happy-warrior-frontpagemagcom/

Joe Martin is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel, a graduate of the National Defense University, and served with 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and as a Military Congressional Fellow to the United States Senate Majority Leader. His operational experience includes deployments to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela.

We met at a conference here in Washington DC several years ago, and I knew him from his reputation based on the national reporting after he had been a whistleblower to Congress about malfeasance in the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama Administration. He struck an appearance like Dr. Emmett Brown and his delivery was not unlike Ben Stein’s economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. His appearance, delivery, dry sense of humor and gaiety were disarming, making it deceptively easy to underestimate him. ­­­

An etymologist and self-proclaimed nerd, Phil was relentless in his pursuit of those who were infesting our country and attacking our way of life. Among the enemies this quirky bug hunter pursued were Osama Bin Laden, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation and their offspring – the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) as well as the subversive operatives in the Obama administration… many of whom are still working for the Department of Homeland Security.

 The leaders of those [Muslim Brotherhood] organizations were deliberately and intentionally brought into the [Obama] Administration to help promote and create both domestic and foreign policy and this status continues to this very day.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Terror-Linked Islamic Activists Renew Protests against Free Speech at U.S. Army War College By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/terrorlinked_islamic_activists_renew_protests_against_free_speech_at_us_army_war_college.html

True to form, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) — also known as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the largest terrorist funding case in U.S. history, and a designated “terrorist organization” for nations allied to America — is again protesting my forthcoming appearance to the U.S. Army War College, urging the latter to “reconsider its decision and disinvite Ibrahim,” since my presentation will no doubt be “hypocritical, ahistorical and hateful.”
This, of course, is all déjà vu — a repeat of events from eight months ago. As CAIR itself notes in it new press release, which came out on Feb. 21, 2020:
.Last summer, CAIR and its allies launched an online campaign highlighting Ibrahim’s Islamophobic views and their negative impact.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Even Anderson Cooper’s polite interview with Bernie reveals Bernie’s extremism By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/even_anderson_coopers_polite_interview_with_bernie_reveals_bernies_extremism.html

Anderson Cooper did a decent-ish job challenging some of Bernie’s more extreme positions on Sunday’s 60 Minutes. Despite Cooper’s delicacy, Bernie gave away the fact that he dislikes America and dreams of Marxist socialism.

With Bernie now the frontrunner in the Democrat Party, it was natural that 60 Minutes would interview him. In terms of real journalism, the interview is inadequate. You’ll get more information about Bernie’s lifelong Marxism and love for dictators from the videos at the bottom of this post. Still, there were illuminating moments.

Cooper’s narrative reiterates that Sanders is now claiming Denmark, not Cuba or Venezuela, as his model. It doesn’t matter. Denmark’s reality is strikingly different from the myth.

Sanders, without evidence, calls Trump is a “pathological liar.” Untrue. Trump is an exaggerator; Biden is a fabulist; and Bernie is the pathological liar. Anyone who sells communism, as he has for decades, despite the 100 million dead bodies left behind in the 20th century alone, is lying at an almost incomprehensible scale.

Cooper did note that, in the 1980s, Sanders was a fan of the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas. A brief video from the 1980s, interrupted by Cooper’s voiceovers, has Bernie decrying the “authoritarian nature of Cuba” while lauding its “massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?” Only a Marxist could value literacy over food and freedom.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The ISIS Plot in Kansas City You Heard Nothing About By Robert Spencer

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-isis-plot-in-kansas-city-you-heard-nothing-about/

A few years ago, Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr. of Columbia, Missouri met “several young men who suggested that Islam was a religion that valued men like him.” That was when his troubles began: prosecutors announced Wednesday that they want Hester to serve twenty years in prison and be under supervision for the rest of his life for plotted a jihad massacre in Kansas City. His case shows yet again how politically correct willful ignorance regarding the motivating ideology and magnitude of the jihad threat renders us all vulnerable.

True to form, federal prosecutors are already busily ignoring the possibility that Hester was inspired to try to kill non-Muslims by Qur’anic exhortations such as “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89; cf. 9:5). According to the Columbia Tribune, they claim that “mental health issues combined with a mockery of his race and intellect by fellow soldiers led him to extremists ideologies.” Federal public defender Troy Stabenow also notes that Hester suffered from an “abusive childhood” and engaged in “drug use at an early age.” He “wanted to feel accepted and do something to make others proud, so he joined the Armed Forces,” but he didn’t stick.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada: A Dead Country Walking By David Solway

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/canada-a-dead-country-walking/

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Worst Side Story Anyone expecting a standard revival of ‘West Side Story’ is in for a surprise. By Terry Teachout

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-side-story-11582246801?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

My sentiments exactly. If the P.C. crowd wants a P.C. musical, let them compose their own music and lyrics and not defile a classic….rsk

Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the hit parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity. As for Broadway, this fourth revival of “West Side Story” had been in previews since December and is selling out nightly. Nor is anyone buying tickets to see the big names in the cast, because there aren’t any: This is a starless production. No, they’re going to see “West Side Story” because it’s “West Side Story.”

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. Van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’s finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. Van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage. Instead, the upstage wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway Theatre has been replaced with a proscenium-size projection screen on which are alternately shown scenes of the mean streets of New York and giant live-TV images of the cast in action.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lawyers Cast a Stone at William Barr Former officials urge current officials to defy their supervisors. That’s an affront to the rule of law. By Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey

Posted By on February 24th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-cast-a-stone-at-william-barr-11582477289?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Whatever the outcome of a case, then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940, “the government . . . has really won if justice has been done.” It’s worth keeping that truth in mind as we consider the dispute over Attorney General William Barr and Roger Stone.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson last week sentenced Mr. Stone to 40 months in prison—a term within the range Mr. Barr had suggested when he overruled prosecutors who recommended a term of seven to nine years. The attorney general’s move generated accusations that he was doing President Trump’s bidding by showing leniency to Mr. Trump’s friend and former political adviser. It even prompted a petition, signed by more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees, demanding Mr. Barr’s resignation.

Before we address these attacks directly, we think it useful to consider a few data points in Mr. Barr’s recent tenure. Notwithstanding his own skepticism about aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he allowed that probe to run its course. Mr. Barr supported the decision not to prosecute Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. McCabe not only lied when he denied leaking information about an investigation but also berated others for the leak to deflect suspicion from himself.

Mr. Barr has said publicly that he believes Mr. Stone’s prosecution was warranted, and that, given his conviction, so is a prison sentence. And the attorney general has pointedly criticized the president—rightly, in our view—for commenting publicly about cases pending in court and before the Justice Department. That is not the behavior of someone doing the president’s bidding.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Philip Haney, a genuine Obama whistleblower, found dead at age 66 By Peter Barry Chowka

Posted By on February 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/philip_haney_a_genuine_obama_whistleblower_found_dead_at_age_66.html

Philip Haney, an expert on Islamic extremism who was a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and who became a prominent critic of President Obama’s questionable management of the agency after he retired in 2015, died from a single gunshot wound on February 21. Haney’s body was found lying on the ground outside his car in the small California town of Plymouth, east of Sacramento.

On Saturday afternoon, as the news of Haney’s death began to be reported, initially in social media and the new media and then more widely, the local Sheriff’s Office of Amador County issued a statement based on the local “Coroner’s Investigation:”

On February 21, 2020 at approximately 1012 hours, deputies and detectives responded to the area of Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth to the report of a male subject on the ground with a gunshot wound.

Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound.

A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Can Bloomberg ever recover from his disastrous debate debut? By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on February 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/can_bloomberg_ever_recover_from_his_disastrous_debate_debut.html

Michael Bloomberg is at the crux of a battle of clichés. America may be the land of second chances, but you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

The level of saturation of Bloomberg’s television advertising actually is working against him now. Few are potential voters who have not been bombarded with the theme that “Mike can get it done,” featuring a candidate who appears strong yet accessible, powerful but caring. However in Las Vegas, Bloomberg pulled back his own curtain, having bribed the DNC to change its rules and allow him onstage, and Americans saw an uncertain-yet-imperious, cold, little man being bullied and out-talked by Elizabeth Warren, mumbling excuses for non-disclosure agreements that lasted just a few days until the mighty oligarch capitulated to the fake Native American.

The stark contrast between what the ads promised and what the reality delivered will take roughly forever to fade from memory. Bloomberg provided his own gotcha, debunking his marketing thrust as a strong man of action.  

Americans instinctively distrust politicians, and they instinctively distrust manipulative advertising.  We love to scorn the pretentious, the high and mighty brought down from their lofty perches.

Even worse for Bloomberg, television advertising is not a welcome interruption of the programming that attracted the eyeballs in the first place. Why do you suppose so many ads these days use humor? It’s as if insurance companies are in the comedy business, not selling a product whose necessity is unpleasant to contemplate. They will happily settle for a  vague association with a cute talking animal or a working class heroine, sold with a sugar coating of humor.

When those television interruptions are all for the same product – a politician – and come with stirring music and visuals, but no humor, resentment starts to kick in, and more ads produce more resentment. The only humor related to Bloomberg ads now is scornful laughter directed at him.