BOOKS Comments turned off

Why the Palestinians Are Calling to Overthrow Abbas by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Abbas has used the dirtiest words: Peace with Israel. Abbas, of course, was speaking to the Israeli public, and not to his own people. He has always sent a conciliatory message to Israelis, but this is the same Abbas who whips his people into a frenzy by telling them that Jews are “defiling the Aqsa Mosque with their filthy feet,” and the same Abbas whose media and officials glorify Palestinians who murder Israelis.

Abbas has only himself to blame for this morass. Like other Palestinian leaders, Abbas has become hostage to his own anti-Israel poison.

Perhaps this time, the international community can hear the truth: the Palestinian leadership does not educate the Palestinian people for peace with Israel. That is the real obstacle to peace.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is reaping what he has sown. He is facing a firestorm calling for his resignation or overthrow.

The Palestinians are not up in arms about Abbas’s eleventh year of a four-year term in office. They really do not seem to care about that, especially as long as he is paying salaries.

Most Palestinians are not objecting to his dictatorial rule, or staunch refusal to bring democracy and public freedoms to the Palestinians. Nor is he under attack for failing to implement reforms in the Palestinian Authority, or to combat financial and administrative corruption.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Pro-Palestinian protesters crash US speech by Jerusalem mayor Demonstrators in San Francisco demand ‘liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea’ as Barkat addresses students By Sue Surkes

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat addressing students at San Francisco University on April 6, 2016, as pro-Palestinian demonstrators protest in the background. (Jerusalem Municipality)

Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters, calling for the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea,” disrupted a lecture being delivered by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat at San Francisco State University on Wednesday.

Carrying Palestinian flags, they called for the continuation of the current wave of violence and an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, labeling Israel a terrorist and apartheid state.

They demanded that Barkat be expelled from the campus.

The Jerusalem Municipality said the mayor continued his speech and even descended from the podium to answer questions from the audience while the demonstration went on.

“Whoever thinks that calls to violence and wild incitement will succeed in silencing us or deflecting us from our positions is seriously mistaken,” said Barkat, who is touring American campuses to talk about Jerusalem and to explain official Israeli positions.

Barkat recently registered as a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, and there has been ongoing speculation that he will challenge him for the premiership.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DANIEL GREENFIELD; CASTRO’S AMERICAN VICTIMS

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

In 1972, Ishmael Muslim Ali LaBeet and four other killers walked into the Fountain Valley golf club in the Virgin Islands. They rounded up four Florida tourists and four employees, forced them to kneel on the ground, and opened fire.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cQKm8Jg-p8w/VwR8mQTRyuI/AAAAAAAAPu8/mmAbIUaMxMkFSGaU3AdDs8mLH5VxpxE3g/s1600/56f17bb9c46188125d8b45ae.jpg
That was how the Fountain Valley Massacre began.

Afterward LaBeet and his fellow murderers were swarmed by civil rights attorneys eager to claim that their clients had been tortured into confessing. But the claims of torture were undermined by LaBeet.

At his trial, Ishmael LaBeet yelled, “I killed them all. I don’t give a f__. I killed them all.”

The killers were found guilty and sentenced. But LaBeet hijacked an airplane to Cuba. Today he is still there, north of Guantanamo, calling himself a Communist.

LaBeet is one of many terrorists who have killed Americans and who are being harbored by the Castro regime. The pain of the victims of these left-wing terrorists under the protection of the Castro crime family have not been mentioned in the rush to celebrate the “opening” of Cuba.

They are Castro’s American victims even though they have never set foot in the Cuban dictatorship

Even though Obama illegally and falsely delisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terror, the Communist dictatorship still remains a haven and a hub for terrorists from around the world.

Cuba is best known for its ties to the Marxist narcoterrorists of FARC who have kidnapped and murdered Americans. But the Iran-backed Islamic terrorists of Hezbollah, who carried out the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, have a home in Cuba. As do members of the left’s former terrorist networks in America.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

RACHEL EHRENFELD: NEEDED US CYBER-DEFENSE POLICY

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Two years have passed since the Obama administration was tasked by Congress to develop cyber countermeasure policies. But in response to Sen. Joe McCain (R-AZ) question “Is it correct that these are policy-decision that have not been made?” U.S. Cyber Command Commander Adm. Michael S. Rogers responded: “The way I would describe it is, we clearly still are focused more on” an “event-by-event” approach to cyber incidents,”

If one follows the Obama administration has been dragging its feet when it comes to cyber threats that increasingly threaten the U.S. defense capabilities and the country’s economy, it is not difficult to see that even more than other national security related matters, the administration has adopted a slow-knee-jerk policy.

Rogers’ testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as his responses to questions from the members, revealed that the U.S. military cyber defense, deterrence, and offense capabilities are also lacking, as is the staffing of Cybercommand. He urged to “accelerate debate on how to balance security and privacy in the ever-changing digital realm.” Otherwise,Rogers warned, “an enemy could change and manipulate data — rather than enter a computer system and steal — that action would be a threat to national security.

Rogers repeated previous warnings that Russia’s cyber capabilities presented the biggest threat to the U.S. China is not far behind.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Beware of The Black Flag Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin*Review of Nidra Poller’s The Black Flag of Jihad Stalks La République

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Reporting from Brussels on March 18, after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, the Belgian ISIS operative who participated in the November 13 attacks in Paris, the Associated Press commented:
“His capture brought instant relief to police and ordinary people in France and Belgium who had been looking over their shoulder for Abdeslam since Nov. 13 when Islamic extremist attackers fanned out across the French capital and killed 130 people at a rock concert, the national stadium and cafes. It was France’s deadliest attack in decades.”
On March 22, ISIS attacked Brussels.

Had people read Nidra Poller’s powerful book The Black Flag Stalks La République, they would have known better and could have been less surprised and possibly better prepared for ISIS’s terror attacks.
Poller skillfully and painstakingly details how the Islamic State has targeted France and Belgium. None of this would have happened, she argues, had these countries honestly and forthrightly confronted the rapidly escalating Islamic anti-Semitism. But both Belgium and France have mostly ignored Islamic anti-Semitism – often dressed as anti-Israel attacks – since the 1960s and 70s, by accommodating PLO terrorists.
Poller’s The Black Flag traces the interlocking links of Islamic terrorism, how the accommodation and often support of Palestinian terrorists prepared the ground for today’s Islamic State. Islamic aggression breeds terrorism. The names of the Islamist terror groups, with or without territorial aspirations changes – Palestinian, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hezbollah and, of course, the Mother of all terrorist states – the Islamic Republic of Iran, but their modus operandi of extreme violence remains the same. They feed off each other creating shocking, tragic and sensational headlines after suicide bombings, stabbing and more, targeting Europeans cities like in a Russian Roulette.These punk jihadis, as Poller aptly calls them, aim to kill us en masse.
Poller, the consummate analyst, author, and translator of the philosophical works of Emmanuel Levinas has zeroed in on the dynamics of Islamic terrorism – paranoia with its emblematic stalking. If you have ever wondered why we spend so much money on ‘surveillance’ for counterterrorism, this is because it is our political “counter-transference” to their psychosis
The jihadis make a psychological imprint of their accusatory eye projected into us – quite literally and concretely through assassinations, knife intifadas, crucifixions, severing heads, bombing, etc. Hence, we have had to develop “the eye in the sky” among other tactical tools in our counterterrorism toolbox to foil the terrorists.
The Belgians, the French and the rest of Europe should have realized that jihadis have to be monitored at all times. Paranoia arises out of the culture in which there is no sense of individual self – only the dysfunctional group dominates in a brutal, violent manner.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DOUGLAS MURRAY: FACING UP TO THE FANATICS

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Six years ago Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali were on opposite sides of a debate in New York titled “Islam is a religion of peace.” I was on Ayaan’s side in arguing “not so much” and the audience ended up by triumphantly agreeing with us. Not least among the debate’s memorable aspects was that it was conducted so freely. For once we dived straight into all the tricky stuff — Muhammad’s personal life, the Koran, and so on. Three years later Ayaan and Maajid discussed the same matter on another stage in America and found some common cause. Six years later they were sitting here in London for a one-on-one discussion as colleagues in the same fight against the fanatics.

The audience included Islamic clerics, making the evening’s final appeal from Ayaan all the more pertinent. We don’t study Nazism without studying the teachings, writings and beliefs of Hitler, she pointed out. We don’t teach our children about Communism without reference to the writings of Karl Marx. Likewise, she stressed, you cannot understand Islam or Islamism without looking at the teachings, behaviour and writings of Muhammad. Including the bad bits. Admittedly the venue was once again very well guarded, but nobody stood up and started screaming. Here was an actual discussion. There are problems in the tradition and rather than skirt around them or pretend they are not there, it is better for everyone — Muslims and non-Muslims — to face up to them.

Afterwards I found myself reflecting on how people’s minds change. It never does happen just there and then, with someone saying, “Yes — I see, I was quite wrong and you’ve changed my mind.” But over time the bits of your own argument that have become unsupportable simply crumble away, usually without you even acknowledging it. But one thing of which I am quite certain is that in order to stand any chance of change or progress on the subject of Islam, the facts and opinions have to be confronted frankly. Our decent desire to be polite, combined with our indecent concessions to fear, make the possibility of reform less likely. But for one night at least one saw the fruits of progress in action.

***There wasn’t so much progress the week before when I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate on taking action against IS alongside General John Allen and against Ken Livingstone and Rula Jebreal. Aside from talking over her opponents incessantly, the strangest thing about Ms Jebreal was that she began her case by complaining about having to listen to “two white men” on our side. She seemed to have fewer problems with the other person on her own side, who was not just white and a man, but also — crime of all crimes today — old. I hope that in my lifetime the use of someone’s skin pigmentation will become unacceptable as a means of attack. But for now it appears to remain fine so long as it is in one direction. It leads me to wonder if there are things I would not say against an opponent. I think so. For instance Ms Jebreal is married to an American multi-millionaire, a fact some people might suggest undermines her strident pose as a poor suffering Palestinian. But — as when debating left-wing heirs and heiresses far richer than I shall ever be — I always think this too personal a point to make.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Did the Associated Press Cooperate with the Nazis? By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

A paper published Wednesday in the journal Studies in Contemporary History alleges that the Associated Press had a close relationship with the Nazi propaganda office in the 1930s. Historian Harriet Scharnberg writes that the AP was able to continue operating in Germany long after most other media outlets had been booted out.

USA Today:

The AP agreed to abide by the Nazi “editor’s law,” forbidding any publication “calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home,” according to The Guardian, which first reported on the research Wednesday. The news agency also hired reporters who worked in the Nazi party’s propaganda division, including photographer Franz Roth, who was in the propaganda unit of the SS and whose photos were approved by Hitler himself.

Scharnberg also contends the AP allowed the use of its photographs in antisemitic propaganda, including the publications “The Sub-Human” and “The Jews in the USA.”

By working with the Nazis, the AP helped that totalitarian regime “portray a war of extermination as a conventional war,” the historian said in the interview with The Guardian. For example, Roth’s photos following the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lviv in western Ukraine focused on the atrocities carried out by Soviet troops before the arrival of the Nazis, and ignored the violence of the German forces against the Jewish residents.

“The pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans,” Scharnberg said. “Which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP’s supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war.”

The Associated Press said in a statement that Scharnberg’s research “describes both individuals and their activities before and during the war that were unknown to AP.” The news agency says it is conducting a review “to further our understanding of the period.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Will ISIS Drive U.S. Forces Out of Sinai? By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

A defense official confirmed today that high-level discussions are under way to decide whether U.S. forces will be pulled out of the Sinai peninsula because of the danger posed by ISIS.

About 700 troops are currently part of the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) mission in the region established by the 1979 peace deal.

Joint Staff Vice Director for Operations Rear Adm. Andrew Lewis told reporters at the Pentagon today that reports stating two outposts outside the northern camp in the Sinai had been closed were incorrect.

“Operationally, we have people there that are committed to the mission. And my focus is making sure that they have the force protection measures in place and we have increased the force protection measures in MFO Sinai, to ensure their maximum safety,” Lewis said.

The admiral said there are no plans in place, but “those discussions are happening…whether to pull them out or not” within the U.S. government and the governments of Israel and Egypt. “And on those discussions are happening at the very highest levels,” he added.

ISIS claimed responsibility for taking down a Russian airliner over the desert on Halloween, and later published in Dabiq magazine photos of what ISIS says was the bomb — constructed out of a soda can.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boko Haram to ISIS: We’ve Got Your Backs By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Boko Haram reinforced their year-ago pledge of allegiance to ISIS, urging self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to have “steadfastness, steadfastness, and patience, patience” to achieve victory.

The video opens with pickups driving through the brush carrying masked jihadists wielding an ISIS flag. Front license plates were also replaced with ISIS flags.

A few more camera angles are used of the jihadists than the usual single, straight-on shot frequently seen in Boko Haram statements. The terrorist in the center juggles a couple pieces of paper as he reads the statement.

“The enemies of Allah the Almighty hold conferences and meetings to come up with a solution for the hole into which they fell, thinking that they can rescue their proxies and allies from the assault of the soldiers of the Caliphate,” the speaker says.

“They gave statements and threatened on television screen that they will defeat the monotheists who proved, by the grace of Allah the Almighty, the extent of their firmness and the harm they inflicted upon their enemies and the losses in terms of lives, wealth, and weapons, whether in Nigeria, the Niger border, Cameroon, or Chad,” he continued.

“Those people were shocked by what they saw, and they were surprised by the steadfastness of the monotheists in front of their Crusader campaigns, despite their alliance and cooperation with their henchmen from among the apostates and the Rafidhi [Shi’ite] militias. The monotheists have realized that victory is from Allah.”

“The march,” they vowed, will continue until jihadists “purify the land from the filth and defilement of the polytheists.”

“As usual, the disbelievers and apostates have for ages, when they feel hopeless to stop the spread of the truth, rush to scheme and sow rumors and lies against the mujahideen,” the speaker lamented.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A School Board President Who Homeschools? How Dare You! By K. Daniel Glover

Posted By on April 7th, 2016

Bonnie Henthorn and her husband spent their formative years in Tyler County public schools. Between them, their two children spent at least 15 years in that school system. The family has paid taxes that support the schools for decades.

With deep roots and a historical perspective like that, Henthorn is an ideal choice for president of the Tyler County school board, a role she has filled since 2014. But none of that matters now because in January she committed the unpardonable sin of public education: She started homeschooling.

Henthorn announced the family decision at the Jan. 4 school board meeting, citing two reasons that had nothing to do with Tyler County schools. “One is that I want them to have a more Christian-based education,” she said. “… Number two is I no longer feel that the state leadership has the best interest of the students at heart.”

That very personal decision, designed to benefit Henthorn’s sophomore son and seventh-grade daughter, quickly became the topic of a very hostile public debate.

At the meeting, board member Linda Hoover peppered Henthorn with questions. She implied that Henthorn couldn’t lead an education system if her children weren’t part of it and that pulling them from it is “a slap in the teachers’ faces.” Another board member, Jimmy Wyatt, called it a “questionable decision” that might show a lack of faith in the county school system.
Bonnie Henthorn (Twitter) Bonnie Henthorn (Twitter)

The outrage escalated over the next few weeks. A Tyler County native created a Facebook group and a Change.org petition demanding Henthorn’s resignation. The Charleston Gazette-Mail published an editorial decrying the “sad mess” in Tyler County and calling Henthorn “unsuited for public school leadership.”