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Still Blaming Israel First Old habits die hard, even after the attacks in Paris. By Daniel Mandel

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

One hundred and thirty-two people have been slaughtered in Paris and hundreds more wounded, to say nothing of smaller incidents that followed, victims of a well-coordinated, multi-pronged massacre devised by jihadists owing allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). The French government of François Hollande has responded with air strikes and statements about a new war that has actually been in progress in Europe for quite some time.

But old habits die hard: Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström declares that it’s really about the war that entwines the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“To counteract the radicalization we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which not at the least the Palestinians sees that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Her remarks were echoed by Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen, who opined that the terrorists’ behavior “eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” which he described as “the growth medium for such an attack.”

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Another White House Scandal: Dumbed Down Intelligence By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

“Where intelligence starts and stops is at the White House,” Lt. General Michael Flynn gruffly exclaimed in response to a question posed by Megyn Kelly on The Kelly File. “The president sets the priorities, and he’s the number-one customer. So if he’s not getting the intelligence that he needs, and if he’s not paying attention to what else is going on, then something else is wrong there between them and the advisers that he has.”

With that, General Flynn, the personification of a bald eagle, is discussing an issue that’s near and dear to his heart: military intelligence and how it’s being manipulated. It’s the latest Obama administration scandal, and it’s being whisked along on an assembly line chock-full of them. The nature of this one, however, is far worse than “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Dumbed down intelligence at the insistence of someone in the military or the administration is a clear and present threat to our national security.

Flynn, a no-nonsense, intensely bright, and “ground-truth” general, has been an intrepid and stormy critic of the Obama administration, its “whack a mole” air campaign against ISIS, and its mealy-mouthed narrative about terrorism in general. He is the tip of the spear of a growing vanguard of those in the intelligence sector who fiercely defend their craft and the solid information they provide. Top-notch analysts have been appalled to learn that the intel they’ve been supplying has been watered down like a glass of cheap wine in a cheesy bar.

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Clowns on Parade By Charles Battig

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

It is unfortunate that Charles Mackay is no longer alive to add yet another chapter or two to his insightful book of human follies, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. First published in 1841, his book chronicles in sixteen examples of crowd psychology with some of the notable economic and social foibles of the past. The preface includes his observation that “[w]e find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit: that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it, til their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

Chapter headings include The Mississippi Scheme, The South-Sea Bubble, The Tulipomania, Fortune-Telling, The Magnetisers, The Crusades, and The Witch Mania. These and the other chapters were chosen by Mackay to illustrate recurring but transient moral and economic epidemics, and to “show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes.” The foreword by Bernard Baruch in the 1932 edition references Schiller’s dictum: “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.”

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Obama and Israel: Nothing Has Changed, Nothing Will Change By Abraham H. Miller

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Amid the hoopla of the 2008 election campaign, when much of the world saw candidate Barack Obama as the very incarnation of the messiah, and some even openly proclaimed him so, the Israelis were not buying the narrative. Neither have they since.

Their skepticism was not to be disconfirmed. If Candidate Obama’s embrace of the anti-Israel narrative of Rashid Khalidi or Edward Said was insufficient, there was President Obama’s speech in Cairo, to which he insisted the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood be invited.

In this speech, Obama conveniently ignored the historic Jewish ties to the land of Israel and invoked the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. Even the left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper found this sufficiently objectionable to call for Obama to rectify his misleading statements.

This narrative, fashionable throughout the Islamic world and one that denies there were ever Jews in the land of Judea is now orthodoxy among the mindless, atheistic Left, with whom Obama shares ideological kinship.

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More Security Lapses by Secret Service Disclosed Congressional committee says incidents show agency is ‘in crisis’ By Devlin Barrett

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

A congressional panel said it has uncovered an array of previously unknown security lapses by the Secret Service showing the agency is “in crisis’’ and needs major changes.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report, set to be released Wednesday, documents what it says are widespread problems at the Secret Service. The committee, led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), has been probing the agency since a 2012 scandal over agents bringing prostitutes back to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, Colombia.

The newly revealed security breakdowns cited in the report include:

Security at Vice President Joe Biden’s home in Delaware was breached in 2013 when four young adults went fishing in his backyard. The Secret Service learned of their presence from neighbors of Mr. Biden, according to the report.

A previously disclosed incident in which a man pretended to be a lawmaker to get backstage at a Congressional Black Caucus event was worse than initially thought. The man managed to speak directly to President Barack Obama at the 2014 event before being removed, the report says.

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U.K. Joins Airstrikes in Syria Against ISIS Move comes hours after British lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of expanding the country’s bombing campaign By Robert Wall

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

LONDON—The U.K. has begun airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, only hours after lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of extending Britain’s bombing campaign into the war-torn country.

“Four British Tornados were in action after the vote last night attacking oil fields in Eastern Syria,” British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon told the BBC. All four jets have arrived back at their base in Cyprus, with an assessment of the strikes now ongoing.

“Our initial analysis of the operation indicates that the strikes were successful,” the British Defense Ministry said in a statement hours after the raid.

U.K. lawmakers voted 397 to 223 in favor of a government motion to extend airstrikes to Syria from Iraq, where the U.K. military has been conducting bombing campaigns for more than a year.

“The vote last night freed the [Royal Air Force] up. They have been able to attack these terrorists from one side of the border, now they’ve been able to attack some of their key targets on the other side of the border as well,” Mr. Fallon said.

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Obama’s Illegal Guantanamo Power Play The president plans to close the facility and ship detainees to U.S. soil, despite a ban by Congress. By David B. Rivkin Jr. And Lee A. Casey

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Two days after terrorists rampaged in Paris, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred five prisoners—including a former Osama bin Laden bodyguard—from the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United Arab Emirates.

In the past several days, the White House has signaled that a more significant step is coming soon: the complete shutdown of the facility and the transfer of the remaining detainees—there are 107 at the moment—to sites on the U.S. mainland. Obama-administration surrogates say the president will effect the change by using his favorite tool, an executive order. But this would be utterly illegal, since Congress has specifically prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to U.S. soil.

Although the president’s war powers are broad and formidable, so are those of Congress. In particular, the Constitution specifically vests the legislative branch with the powers to “declare War”; to “raise and support Armies”; to “make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”; to “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces”; and to appropriate funds for all of these purposes.

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Tony Thomas: Third World Kleptocrats Do Paris ****

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

If you want to make a big noise and rattle a bigger cup at the latest climate fest, it pays to be a dictator with a history of bloodshed, oppression, graft and ballot-rigging. Just ask Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Maldives’ Abdulla Yameen Gayoom
Two important blocs posturing at the Paris climate talks are the Alliance of Small Island States bloc ( AOSIS, 44 countries) and the African bloc (54 countries). The island-states’ representative since January is the strongman president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, whose democracy-friendly predecessor, Mahomed Nasheed, is now doing a 13-year term in an insanitary Maldives prison. The African bloc’s spokesman is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who needs no introduction.

It’s hard to plumb the depths of the hypocrisy involved, especially about the proposed $US100 billion annual green handouts to Third World despots and kleptocrats. But I’ll give it a try.

Maldives President Yameen has sent a message to Paris describing AOSIS as the “moral voice” of the UN Paris talks, and he has called for the $US100 billion per annum to be “scaled up in the years to come”. And that not all that he and his AOSIS team want. In 2013, the Warsaw climate conference waffled about an extra fund for the likes of Maldives, called “an international mechanism on Loss & Damage”. This will require further ratification in 2016 and Yameen is very keen on it.

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Hubris with a computer model

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, but as 20,000-or-so warmists congeal in Paris for their latest round of posturing and room service, it remains difficult to grasp in full the means by which a trace gas has come to prompt so much fear on the part of fools and so many climate dollars for the settled scientists and their hangers-on. In his latest post at the Black Jay blog, physicist John Reid sheds some light:

So the fluid dynamics people, who already used fluid dynamic computer models to make weather forecasts, told everybody they could do the same thing for climate. Obviously, they thought, if you can predict the weather a week ahead, with a bit of tweaking you can predict the climate centuries into the future and so estimate the effect that CO2 will have on the planet.

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Fatah Knives and ISIS Knives: Palestinian Child-Sacrifice by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Instead of educating our children, as they do in the West, to be part of the Startup Generation, we follow the lead of darkest Africa, where children are armed with assault rifles and sent out to kill other children.

If the Palestinians really want to pick a fight with Israel, why do they send children to fight a “holy war” instead of fighting it themselves, like men?

The only difference is that the members of ISIS go out themselves to kill; the Palestinians send their young. Why are these not “war crimes”?

We sacrifice our sons and daughters in the name of Allah, as though Allah were a pagan statue with an altar and had to be appeased with the blood of children.

Here, the Islamists want to “liberate” Jerusalem from the infidel Zionist-Crusader occupation. Next, they want to “liberate” occupied Spain, once Muslim Andalusia, and return it to the bosom of Islam. After that, they want to occupy the Vatican and establish the Islamic Emirate on the ruins of Christianity.