RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/arguing-with-sharia-supporting-muslims-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Louis Lionheart, a Christian preacher who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. For information on his ministry visit his web site: TruthDefenders.com.

Louis came on the show to discuss “Arguing With Sharia-Supporting Muslims,” sharing his experience of being told that Islam is peaceful and then being threatened in the same conversation. The dialogue occurred within the context of a focus on “The Battle Over Islam on the Streets of L.A.,” in which Louis discussed his experience of engaging Muslims about their religion on 3rd St. Promenade:

If the weather is too hot or too cold, if there is a natural disaster, if a plane crashes, if crime increases, if crime decreases, if the Ebola virus rampages across of Africa or stays home to read a good book instead, if the price of coffee goes up or if a war breaks out… it will eventually be connected to Global Warming

Even the rise of ISIS has been blamed not on the Koran, but on Global Warming.

Meanwhile a Muslim terrorist can blow himself up at Ground Zero on September 11 while screaming, “I am doing this because I am a Muslim and I hate you all” and those same experts will tell us that it had nothing to do with Islam, but it was caused by the impact of Global Warming on the molecules of his brain.

It’s all a matter of how you connect the dots.

Democrats think that Global Warming is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda. That’s the profitable notion that Al Gore has been selling for some time. When ISIS began making headlines, lefty publications scurried to explain how ISIS had been caused by Global Warming. If you can’t get rid of ISIS, you can always promise to make it go away with another few billion for Bay Area Green Tech liberal donors.

That’s why Homeland Security is focusing on Global Warming. Why bother with Islam when the root cause of Islamic terrorism turns out to be neither Islam nor terrorism, but your failure to buy recycled toilet paper and pay much higher prices for energy. Instead of droning ISIS, we will drone on about sustainable sustainability and how eagles would rather be killed by wind turbines than by oil spills.

Ideas are roads to conclusion and conclusions lead to policies. If you want to control the policy, you have to control where the roads go. The media narratives are roads. If you take them, you can never reach the right conclusions because they just don’t go there. The media’s map of America has highways going from climate change to marriage equality to death panels. The policies we end up with are based on that map and the policies determine where all the money and the power end up.

Disturbed Americans rack up attacks that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State would envy.

Americans are right to be concerned about the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other international terrorist threats.

But in recent days, we’ve seen a sudden flurry of disturbing examples of non-terrorist Americans carrying out terrorist-style attacks against other people.

Let’s stipulate that Alton Nolen, the Oklahoma man who beheaded one of his co-workers, may be a case of “do-it-yourself jihadism” — he had no direct ties to terror groups but behaved as an ally of those groups. Nolen converted to Islam, and a prosecutor said he had “an infatuation with beheadings.”

Then there’s the strange case of Federal Aviation Administration contract worker Brian Howard, who attempted suicide, then allegedly attempted arson of an FAA control center, prompting enormous numbers of delayed flights across the country:

According to an affidavit, first responders found smoke when they arrived in the basement of the control center after a 911 call about 5:40 a.m. Friday.

They also found blood on the floor. They followed the trail and found two knives and a lighter and then Howard, who was in the process of cutting his throat, according to the affidavit.

The paramedics took a knife from him and began to treat Howard, who told them to leave him alone. Howard was taken to a hospital in Aurora.

It’s funny how President Obama is always talking about “I” and “me” whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it’s “they” and “we” when mistakes are made.

For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq War and how he withdrew American troops. “You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama’s decision to pull all our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops].”

On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes noted comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Clapper said, “We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight.”

“That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” Obama replied. “Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a “former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq,” who was, in Lake’s words, “flabbergasted” by the president’s remarks. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls****ing,” the official said.

It’s almost surely the latter. Lake and others have gone on to detail how the intelligence and defense communities were briefing the White House and Congress about the threat even when Obama was still dismissing the Islamic State as the “jayvee squad” of terrorism.

Fort Bliss: Moms at War Myer’s movie offers a satisfying completion of the Long War Trilogy started by The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor. It would be a shame if Fort Bliss isn’t given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience.

America has been at war for over a decade. In that time, Hollywood has managed to make only three films worthy of the people who do our fighting—The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, and Fort Bliss. In one way or another, all three stood apart from mainstream Tinseltown. They reached the big screen more because of the passion and vision of the filmmakers than the Hollywood suits who usually pick and choose what gets released to the corner cinema.

Take the The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s story tracing the harrowing experiences of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Iraq. Big studios were not that interested in it. As Bigelow noted in a 2009 New York Times interview, “I’ve never made a studio film.” But audiences loved this movie. The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008.

Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013) performed equally well at the box office, but was snubbed by Oscar. Although Berg has made his share of standard Hollywood fare, this film was anything but mainstream cinema. The director struggled to find support and financing to bring the story of an ill-fated Special Operations mission in Afghanistan to the screen. “Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you do something,” Berg said in one interview, “It’s just better when you care.” Audiences cared. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Less well-known is Claudia Myers’ Fort Bliss. It recently opened with only a very limited theatrical release. The movie follows an Army medic—a single mom who returns home and struggles to reconnect with her young son only to be confronted with the possibility of being deployed once again.

In addition to the fierce commitment of their creators, the films have something else in common. They are all small movies about long, difficult wars. Yet each is virtually devoid of the politics of war. They aren’t films for the right wing or the left wing. They are smart enough to recognize that, for the people who fight our wars, politics are left at the war’s edge. It is not possible to make an authentic American war film and wrap it in a political agenda.

Further, each of these movies could have been transported to any American war, and the stories would have worked just as well. They each focus on the quintessential and timeless experience of Americans at war. They are studies rooted in why we fight and the impact that service has as it ripples through the lives of men and women in uniform and their families.

This summer saw an eruption of anti-Semitism across Europe that included firebombs thrown at synagogues and cries of “Jews to the gas!” Now the European Parliament has named an Egyptian activist notorious for violent rhetoric against Israel to the list of nominees for its annual Sakharov Prize, named after the great Soviet dissident.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a Web developer and blogger, was among the secularist leaders of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak . He was sentenced to 15 years in prison earlier this year for violating the restrictive new protest law enacted by the regime of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. He is out on bail, pending a retrial.

Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. “One should only debate human beings,” he tweeted in 2009. “Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.” In late 2010 he tweeted: “Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians.”

“My heroes have always killed colonialists,” Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: “Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.”

Mr. Abdel Fattah’s nomination is part of a pattern of subverting the Sakharov Prize to embarrass certain unpopular supporters of global freedom, such as the U.S. and Israel. The Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, or GUE/NGL, the parliamentary bloc that put forth Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name, nominated Edward Snowden for last year’s prize.

Such stunts sully the legacy of Andrei Sakharov who, according to his wife, the dissident Yelena Bonner, once said that “all wars that Israel has waged have been just, forced upon it by the irresponsibility of Arab leaders.” The European Parliament should uphold this distinction and remove Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name from the list.

Double Trouble Carbon Regulation
The D.C. Circuit will hear an important challenge to EPA abuse.

President Obama prophesied at the United Nations last week that climate change is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” and perhaps this vision of Apocalypse explains why he thinks he can disregard the law to regulate carbon. Whatever they think about warming, the courts may pay more respect to statutes.

This month a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new climate rules under the Clean Air Act. The order was unusual because the courts generally review rules only after they are finalized, which could take another year or more. The Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy and a dozen states are suing under the All Writs Act of 1789.

Murray drew a D.C. Circuit panel including a liberal (Judge Sri Srinivasan ), a moderate (Judge Thomas Griffith ) and a conservative (senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg ). Murray also happens to be correct on the legal merits.

The EPA wants to reorganize U.S. electric power generation and drive coal and eventually natural gas out of the energy mix under a rarely used backwater of the Clean Air Act called section 111(d), whose mandates apply state by state. The problem is that the law also includes a clause meant to prevent double regulation: Air pollutants that are controlled at the national level under the act’s section 112 are therefore specifically excluded from section 111 control. Carbon emissions, under a separate 2012 rule, are already subject to 112, but the EPA wants to have it both ways.

In a legal memorandum, the EPA claims that “a literal reading of that language would mean that the EPA could not regulate any air pollutant from a source category regulated under section 112,” and thus such a reading is “not reasonable.” In other words, obeying the law would not let the agency do what it wants to do, so the law must go.

In 40 years of covering national elections, I’ve never seen anything like this effort to keep Senate control.

In Kansas, Democrats persuaded their Senate candidate, Chad Taylor, to drop out of the race against incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. Mr. Taylor was running third in polls behind Mr. Roberts and independent Greg Orman. Soon after Mr. Taylor’s early-September withdrawal, Democratic lawyers went to court to keep his name off the ballot.

In Montana, after Democratic Sen. Max Baucus announced that he would not seek re-election in 2014, Democrats feared that an open seat would be an easy win for Republican Steve Daines. So Mr. Baucus resigned and went to China as U.S. ambassador. Lt. Gov. John Walsh was appointed senator. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, pressured another Democrat to drop out and allow Mr. Walsh to win the primary without a challenger. Mr. Walsh later quit the race in a plagiarism scandal.

All that maneuvering only begins to suggest the lengths to which Democrats are going to retain control of the Senate in the midterm election on Nov. 4. Candidate switches have happened before. Democrats replaced New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli, who had won the primary, with Frank Lautenberg as their candidate in 2002. But that pales next to Democratic machinations in 2014.

Republicans aren’t above ruthless tactics, but in 40 years of covering national elections I’ve never seen anything like the extraordinary efforts of Democrats to prevent Republicans from picking up the six seats to gain Senate control.

Mr. Reid is the leading architect of the Democratic campaign and its unprecedented tactics. He has sought to protect incumbent Democrats from votes that might imperil their re-election. And he is determined to keep Republicans from demonstrating that they’re not opposed to every Democratic initiative. To manage this, he has slowed Senate business to a near halt.

When POTUS Is Among Us
White House security might be lax, but when Obama comes to New York, much of the town goes into lockdown.

Maybe President Obama should move to New York. A guy with a knife can jump the White House fence, sprint across the lawn and get all the way to the East Room before anyone stops him? In New York last week, as I can attest, this guy with a dog couldn’t walk down the street in his own neighborhood because Mr. Obama happened to be in the vicinity.

How do I know the president was on the Upper West Side? The rooftop snipers were a giveaway.

Sharpshooters were only one sign that POTUS was among us, for a fundraiser at the home—as I later learned from three people in the building—of a private-equity investor who lives in the Eldorado co-op on Central Park West.

The streets surrounding the turreted building were blocked off, with sand-filled sanitation trucks parked at both ends. Rows of blue NYPD barriers extended for a 10-block stretch. Helicopters buzzed overhead and fire-department ambulances idled conspicuously nearby. Residents of the Eldorado and nearby apartments were locked down for hours—and instructed not to look out their windows.

The police presence on Columbus Avenue and Central Park West rivaled what you see for the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, with dozens of cops milling about, neither confirming nor denying the guest of honor’s identity. A couple of people I chatted with verified seeing the president go into the Eldorado, but all I saw was a white tent erected over the building’s West 90th Street entrance, the kind of tent you see during Fashion Week. It was quickly dismantled after the affair was over, around 7:30.

It’s hard to begrudge a presidential security detail, but I remember the days when Bill Clinton would mingle freely whenever he came to New York in the 1990s. I ran beside him twice at the Central Park Reservoir, with Secret Service agents trotting alongside. As maddening as President Obama’s visits to the U.N. can be, with traffic flows stymied to let his motorcade move without interruption, at least those expeditions have an official purpose.

I understand Isis being your idol, but this is ridiculous. Maybe the girls below were just confused? I mean, the goddess Isis was Egyptian, not Syrian:

Austrian teenage girl jihadist ‘killed in Syria’ (Telegraph, Sept. 15)

One of a pair of Austrian [ahem, Bosnian] teenage girls who left Vienna homes in April to join Syrian jihadists reportedly killed

Sabina Selimovic, 15, (left) and Samra Kesinovic, 16, travelled to Syria Photo: INTERPOL

One of two young Austrian women who travelled to Syria to fight with Islamic extremists has reportedly been killed just months after arriving in the country.

[No!]

Sabina Selimovic, 15, and Samra Kesinovic, 16, both the daughters of immigrant families from Bosnia, left their homes in Vienna in April with the apparent intention of fighting for Syrian rebels.

They are thought to have travelled to Turkey and then to have crossed the border into Syria, having become radicalised after attending a local mosque in Vienna and reading about jihad on the internet.

[Vienna? You don’t say!]

They posted on social media photographs of themselves handling assault weapons and wearing black, full length burkas.

But Austrian authorities now think one of them – they have so far refused to divulge which one – may have been killed during fighting.

Refused to divulge which one. Does it really make a difference?