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4 Dead and 8 Wounded in Christmas Carol Festival Attack By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

On Friday, a gunman opened fire at a Christmas carol celebration, killing 4 people and injuring 8 others. The attack in Nindem — a village in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna — cast a pall on a historic Christmas celebration recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. The attack may be connected to Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist group that has formally allied itself with the Islamic State (ISIS).

“Nobody should be allowed to truncate the right of citizens to live in peace and enjoy safety, or thwart their legitimate expectations of celebrating Christmas and the New Year in peace,” Samuel Aruwan, senior special assistant on media and publicity to Governor Nasir El-Rufai, said in a statement on Sunday.

The attack took place while the village took part in the 2017 Akwa Ibom State Christmas Carol Festival on Friday. About 10 million people from over 45 countries across the world were expected to follow the festival, which made the Guinness Book of World Records in 2014 for being the largest choir ever assembled for a Christmas carol, with 30,000 participants.

The 2016 edition had more than 9 million people from 38 countries who logged on to the program’s official website and Twitter handle in the first four hours of the event, according to the state’s commissioner for information and strategy.

“The government condemns this incident, and calls on all stakeholders to help uphold peace by working to avoid escalation and by supporting the security forces,” Aruwan added. He said the office of the governor “commiserates with the families of the victims in this sad moment.”

“It is important that all communities stand firm against any threat to peace, and reject those who might want to reprise the terrible events of December 2016,” the spokesman said.

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A closer look at the searing evil of Ted Kennedy By J. Marsolo

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

Teddy’s description of the Chappaquiddick “accident” was enough to convict him of involuntary and voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Today you can add homicide by vehicle while intoxicated, a mandatory three-year prison term in most states.

The facts are simple. Kennedy drove fast, probably drunk, off a bridge at about 11:30 P.M. The pond was only about six feet deep. The front end of the car was angled down.

Kennedy walked away, went to his hotel, and waited until the next morning to report to the police. The car was discovered by two boys fishing in the morning. The boys, unlike Teddy, went to a nearby house to report the car in the water. Had Teddy done this instead of leaving, Mary Jo Kopechne probably would have been saved.

Kennedy spent the night at his hotel room drying out so there would be no alcohol in his system, and to fabricate with his fixers the statement he gave the police. During the time Kennedy was at his hotel with his fixers, Mary Jo died from suffocation.

It was negligence to drive too fast and off the road while drunk, which is involuntary manslaughter. But it was far more criminal to leave her in the car for eight or more hours, without calling for help, which may get into voluntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment. Kennedy had to explain why he waited almost eight hours to report to the police and had to explain why he left Mary Jo in the car.

The substance of the statement concocted by Kennedy and his fixers is that it took him until morning to realize what happened, and he did not know that Mary Jo was in the car when he left the pond.

This is Teddy’s statement to the police:

On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11:15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dike Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile [800 m] on Dike Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary Kopechne, a former secretary of my brother Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the backseat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.

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RACHEL EHRENFELD: TURKEY IS NOT AN ALLY

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

On December 25, millions of Christians in countries whose leaders voted against the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, as well as Pope Francis, who joined in the condemnation, will be celebrating the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, in the Holy Land of Israel. We wish them and our readers a Merry Christmas!

Growing numbers of Christian-majority countries seem too willing to rewrite history by adopting the newly invented Palestinian state’s lies, which include the denial of more than two millennia of Jewish presence in the Holy Land, even claiming that Jesus was not a Jew, but a Palestinian, and a Muslim!

The Christian identity of Europe has been eroded not only by growing secularism, but also by the threat of Islamist terrorism. And it all started with the Palestinians who from the beginning were in the business of extorting concessions from the West. They did it again on Thursday. Only this time, they didn’t even have to hijack passenger planes of any of the 128 countries that voted against the U.S. at the General Assembly. By now, most of the 128 countries that endorsed the Palestinians condemnation of President Donald Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem have learned to dread violence committed by the growing numbers of radicalized second-generation Muslims and refugees who often cite Palestinian lies – about Jerusalem, Israel, and the Jews – as a motive for terrorists’ attacks. Besides, their leaders oppose U.S. president Donald Trump and are mostly anti-Israeli. Then there is the financial motive. How can they justify spending billions of dollars on aid to the terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank? Moreover, they are greedy. They would rather do business with the mullahs in Iran, Turkey’s Muslim brother President Erdoğan, Qatar, and other Islamist entities.

The General Assembly’s condemnation of the U.S. for declaring the relocation of its Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the capital, came after several resolutions passed earlier by the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian U.N. purportedly cultural body, UNESCO. Last May, as Israel was celebrating its 69th Independence Day, 22 of the 58 member-countries in UNESCO passed a resolution denying the Jewish State of Israel’s legal and historical rights anywhere in Jerusalem or at any other Jewish holy sites that have repeatedly been documented for more than 2,000 years as belonging to the Israelites. Twenty-three countries that lacked the courage to openly resist the Palestinian-led Arab-Muslim initiative abstained. Most of the ten countries that opposed UNESCO’s deplorable resolution lacked the courage to oppose the General Assembly’s resolution. Why?

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Catalan elections: the ghosts that won’t go away Nationalism is an idea whose time has come, gone, and come back again David Goldman

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

Yesterday’s election victory for Catalan separatists, including
humiliating losses for the ruling center-right Partido Popular,
denotes yet another setback for the grand project of European
unification and a challenge for a continent divided between a strong
north and a lagging south. The Catalan separatists won a thin majority
in the regional parliament, leaving them precisely where they were
before the Oct. 1referendum on secession from Spain – with a small
plurality in favor of breaking away and a large minority determined to
stay. The election result, though, has dire implications for Partido
Popular leader Manuel Rajoy’s minority government, and for European
cohesion in general.

Nationalism is a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. As Annette
Prosinger wrote in a front-page commentary in the conservative German
daily Die Welt. “This election was in reality a referendum on the
independence movement. The result will astonish all of those who bet
on the disenchantment of the Separatists. The magic is more tenacious
than people thought: It has overcome everything: The drop in tourism
and economic investment, the flight of enterprise from Catalonia, and
the rejection that the independence movement received from the EC. The
supporters of the independence movement were not unsettled by the fact
that none of the glorious promises of Carlos Puigedemont and his group
came true, and that prospering Catalonia has become a crisis region.”

The term “disenchantment” (in German, Entzauberung) is deeply fraught
in the German language: it was the watchword of the Romantic movement
that incubated European nationalism during the 19thcentury, calling
for the “re-enchantment” of a world left disenchanted by the
Enlightenment.

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Obama’s Alternative Facts on the Iran Nuclear Deal We’re getting a glimpse of what the U.S. gave away in order to win Tehran’s pledge of cooperation. by Eli Lake

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

When the Obama administration sold its Iran nuclear deal to Congress in 2015, one of its primary arguments was that the agreement was narrow. It lifted only nuclear sanctions. America, President Barack Obama told us, would remain a vigilant foe of Iran’s regional predations through sanctions and other means.

Thanks to stunning new reporting from Politico’s Josh Meyer, we can now assess these assertions and conclude that they are … well, “alternative facts.”

Meyer reports that while the U.S. and other great powers were negotiating a deal to bring transparency to Iran’s nuclear program, top officials in Obama’s government dismantled a campaign, known as Operation Cassandra, intended to undermine Hezbollah’s global drug trafficking and money laundering network.

A few months after the implementation of that bargain in January 2016, Operation Cassandra was ripped apart. Agents were reassigned. Leads and sources dried up. Bad guys got away.

Hezbollah is many things: a Lebanese political party, a militia and a Shiite religious movement. It is also an arm of Iranian foreign policy. Hezbollah shock troops fight alongside Iran’s Revolutionary Guard commanders in Syria and Iraq. Iran uses the group’s operatives for international terror attacks in Latin America. Hezbollah’s advanced arsenal is supplied by the Iranian state. Hezbollah’s drug trafficking provides the revenue it needs to spread mayhem. To curb that trafficking is to starve Iran’s primary proxy.

The Obama administration believed cracking down on Hezbollah’s trafficking would undermine nuclear negotiations. As David Asher, a former Pentagon illicit finance analyst and a key player in Operation Cassandra, told Meyer: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The details are troubling. One example involves Ali Fayad, whom DEA agents suspected was the Hezbollah operative who reported directly to Russian president Vladimir Putin as a weapons supplier in Iraq and Syria. In 2014 Fayad was arrested by Czech authorities. Meyer reports that even though Fayad was indicted by U.S. courts for planning the murder of U.S. officials, “top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.” Fayad eventually found his way back to Lebanon, and is believed today to be back at his old job, supplying Russian heavy weapons to Iranian-backed militants in Syria.

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Rex Murphy: The real fake news of 2017 There has always been fake news. But the Fake News that we heard about for most of 2017 was something new and altogether more sinister

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

Contempt for Trump serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment

The antipathy to Donald Trump, which in its keenest manifestations is fierce and relentless, is a disabling set of mind, nowhere more so than in the reporting on or about him.

Contempt for Trump—the conviction that he is some sort of dangerous historical “accident” in the presidential office—serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment and analytic neutrality. To those who oppose him, particularly those in the news media, Trump is regarded as just SO bad that standards can be virtuously abandoned, and neutrality and dispassion set aside, so long as it helps (such is the hope) to hurt Trump, and, maybe, get rid of him.

The new rule is: anything that can weaken Trump’s standing, sever his connection with the populist base, and help to bring him down is fair game. Hence the sloppiness and one-directional nature of most Trump news. In just the last few weeks, Brian Ross at ABC, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN each had to correct or deny major stories that had all been wrong in the same direction. They hurt Trump.

Stories, however, that might hint at some aspects of competency or adroitness in Trump’s handling of affairs are either passed over or given the most desultory treatment. How many tins of Pepsi Trump drinks gets more coverage than the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, which has occurred under his watch. Under Obama that would have generated skyscraper headlines; under Trump you can search for it in the back pages and fine print.

When the majority of the American media failed in their coverage of the presidential election, they had to find some excuse for their massive incompetence. The New York Times, with all their resources, and after two full years of daily coverage of the campaign, was nonetheless projecting Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at a full 92 per cent on election night itself. That was at least better than the pathologically anti-Trump HuffPost, which had Hillary’s chances set at a modest 98 per cent! Such was the state of American journalism, these companies barely allowed for the mere possibility that Trump could win. Under their professional eye, he was just a sideshow, even in the very hours before he actually won.

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Faced with libel lawsuit, dossier drafter Christopher Steele hedges on linking Trump to Russia

Posted By on December 25th, 2017

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who fueled an ongoing investigation into President Trump’s administration, was a lot more confident of his charges when he wrote his now-notorious 2016 dossier than he is today in defending it in a libel lawsuit.

While Mr. Steele stated matter-of-factly in his dossier that collusion between Mr. Trump and the Russian government took place, he called it only “possible” months later in court filings. While he confidently referred to “trusted” sources inside the Kremlin, in court he referred to the dossier’s “limited intelligence.”

In recent weeks, the dossier of opposition research has taken on added importance in the debate over the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into suspected Russia coordination and whether it is biased against Trump people. Congressional Republicans are demanding that the FBI explain how the deeply contested, Democrat-financed document took on such importance in a major government investigation.

Mr. Steele wrote 35 pages of memos in which he said Trump aides were part of a vast conspiracy with Moscow to interfere in the election against Hillary Clinton. The unverified charges were spread by Fusion GPS, the Washington-based political research firm that first commissioned the report. Mr. Steele bragged to Mother Jones magazine that he started the Mueller investigation by convincing FBI agents that summer about the credibility of his dossier.

It was later revealed that the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton helped fund the dossier, meaning that in essence her paid agent was spreading unsubstantiated charges to get to the FBI to investigate her opponent, critics say.

Now that Mr. Steele must defend those charges in a London courtroom, his confidence level has shifted down several

In the dossier, he stated without reservation that an “extensive conspiracy between Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin” existed.

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HOLIDAY GREETINGS FROM RUTHFULLY YOURS

Posted By on December 24th, 2017

T’WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND ALL THROUGH THE NATION,
THERE IS HOPE AND OPTIMISM BUT GROWING FRUSTRATION.
I TOSSED AND TURNED WITH INTERRUPTED SLEEP
THINKING ABOUT A PRESIDENT WITH PROMISES TO KEEP.
WHEN OUT ON THE LAWN THERE AROSE SUCH A CLATTER
I SPRANG FROM MY BED TO SEE WHAT WAS THE MATTER.
T’WAS GLORIA ALLRED ON A BROOM WITH MUCH ADO
TOWING A GAGGLE OF DAMSELS WEEPING #ME TOO!
PUSSY HATS STOWED AND WHIPS DEPLOYED TO TRASH REPUTATIONS
NO DUE PROCESS OR BURDEN OF PROOF OR STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS.
SOME MAY DESERVE IT BUT WHERE IS PROBABLE CAUSE?
HAVE WE BECOME A NATION OF SELECTIVE LAWS?
AT THE FBI ALL THE LIGHTS BURNED LATE
AS MUELLER AND COHORTS STOKED PARTISAN HATE.
WHILE THE INTERNET BURNS WITH CLINTON TRANSGRESSIONS
THERE IS NOT A PEEP FROM RECUSED AG SESSIONS.
STATUES WERE TOPPLED IN THE LATEST RAGES
AND IGNORANT TANTRUMS OF THE MILLENIAL AGES.
AND PRONOUNS ARE NOW THE EDUCATIONAL WHIM
NO MORE HE OR SHE, NOW IT IS “HIR”-“ZEY” OR “SHIM.”
THESE ARE CAVILS BUT THERE ARE REASONS FOR ELATION.
EMBASSY MOVE, TAX REFORM, NO GRATUITOUS REGULATION.
A PRESIDENTIAL CALL FOR SECURITY AND GROWTH IN OUR LAND,
IN FOREIGN POLICY A POWERFUL AND PRINCIPLED STAND.
FAKE NEWS, CLIMATE FRAUD AND JUNK SCIENCE TOOK A DIVE
AND THE SPIRIT OF 1776 IS STILL VERY MUCH ALIVE
SO WITH RENEWED OPTIMISM AND CHEER
I WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR! RSK

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MY SAY: EUPHEMISM, POLITICS AND REPORTING AND ORWELL

Posted By on December 24th, 2017

Of all the words in the barrage of reporting on Israel or terrorism, “moderate” is a great example of euphemism. Thus, PalArabs who invoke murder and faith driven jihad against Israeli civilians; who praise the memory of Hitler; who reward terrorists financially and honor them by naming streets and schools for them; who indoctrinate their acolytes with blatant anti-Semitism in school books, lectures and sermons; …..in Arabic are called “moderates” because in silky English they speak of a two state (dis)solution of Israel.

George Orwell phrased it well and he is quoted by By Howard Husock in an article:

Orwell Is Alive at HHS On politics and euphemism https://www.city-journal.org/html/orwell-alive-hhs-15615.html

It all comes down to the importance of euphemism as a way to minimize opposition. Orwell saw it clearly in 1946:

“Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.”

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Europe: The Islamization of Christmas “An unbearable, involuntary submission to Islam” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on December 24th, 2017

Exalting Mohammed in churches effectively proclaims that Mohammed is greater than Jesus — The “Archbishop Cranmer” blog.

A school in Lüneburg postponed a Christmas party after a Muslim student complained that the singing of Christmas carols during school was incompatible with Islam. Alexander Gauland, the leader of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), said the school’s action was “an unbearable, involuntary submission to Islam” and amounted to a “cowardly injustice” toward non-Muslim children.

“The word ‘Christmas,’ a symbol of our faith and our culture, does not discriminate against anyone. Striking the emblems of Christmas does not guarantee anyone’s respect, does not produce a welcoming and inclusive school and society, but fosters intolerance towards our culture, our customs, our laws and our traditions. We firmly believe that our traditions must be respected.” — Milan politician Samuele Piscina.

This year’s Christmas season has been marked by Islam-related controversies in nearly every European country. Most of the conflicts have been generated by Europe’s multicultural political and religious elites, who are bending over backwards to secularize Christmas, ostensibly to ensure that Muslims will not be offended by the Christian festival.

Many traditional Christmas markets have been renamed — Amsterdam Winter Parade, Brussels Winterpret, Kreuzberger Wintermarkt, London Winterville, Munich Winter Festival — to project a multicultural veneer of secular tolerance.

More troubling are the growing efforts to Islamize Christmas. The re-theologizing of Christmas is based on the false premise that the Jesus of the Bible is the Jesus (Isa) of the Koran. This religious fusion, sometimes referred to as “Chrislam,” is gaining ground in a West that has become biblically illiterate.

In Britain, for instance, the All Saints Church in Kingston upon Thames recently held a joint birthday celebration for Jesus and Mohammed. The “Milad, Advent and Christmas Celebration” on December 3 was aimed at “marking the birthday of Prophet Mohammed and looking forward to the birthday of Jesus.” The hour-long service included time for Islamic prayer and was followed by the cutting of a birthday cake.