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Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense: Spengler

August 10, 2016

Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense: Spengler, Asia Times, , August 9, 2016

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

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Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

Trump responded, “The names on this letter are the ones the American people should look to for answers on why the world is a mess, and we thank them for coming forward so everyone in the country knows who deserves the blame for making the world such a dangerous place.” That is exactly correct. He might have added that they are incapable of learning from their mistakes and doomed to repeat them if given the opportunity.

trumpclubRepublican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks to the Detroit Economic Club at the Cobo Center in Detroit, Michigan August 8, 2016. REUTERS/Eric Thayer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

The Republican Establishment believed with fervor in the Arab Spring. Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol went as far as to compare the abortive rebellions fo the American founding. It backed the overthrow and assassination of Libya’s dictator Muamar Qaddafi, which turned a nasty but stable country into a Petri dish for terrorism. It believed that majority rule in Iraq would lead to a stable, pro-American government in that Frankenstein monster of a country patched together with body parts taken from the corpse of the Ottoman empire. Instead, it got a sectarian Shi’ite regime aligned to Iran and a Sunni rebellion stretching from Mesopotamia to the Lebanon led by ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Trump is vulgar, ill-informed and poorly spoken. He has no foreign policy credentials and a disturbing inclination to give credit to Russia’s Vladimir Putin where it isn’t due. But he has one thing that the fifty former officials lack, and that is healthy common sense. That is what propelled him to the Republican nomination. The American people took note that the “experiment” of which Gen. Hayden spoke so admiringly was tough not only on the ordinary Egyptian, but on the ordinary American as well. Americans are willing to fight and die for their country, but revolt against sacrifices on behalf of social experiments devised by a self-appointed elite. That is why the only two candidates in the Republican primaries who made it past the starting gate repudiated the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Common sense, to be sure, isn’t enough. Trump can’t swap spit with Vladimir Putin and let the witches’ kettle of the Middle East boil along by itself without dire consequences. As Bret Stephens complained Aug. 8 in the Wall Street Journal, some of Trump’s loudest supporters make a motley virtue of their ignorance. “There was a time when the conservative movement was led by the likes of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and Bob Bartley, men of ideas who invested the Republican Party with intellectual seriousness,” Stephens wrote. I knew the late Irving Kristol, who trained and promoted most of the cadre who ran the first Reagan Administration, and Robert Bartley, the late editor of the Wall Street Journal — brilliant men from whom I learned a great deal, some of which I had to unlearn afterwards.

But the Republican Establishment today is guided not by the likes of Irving Kristol, but by his epigonoi. His son Bill Kristol has never published a single essay of intellectual significance, and the same is true of Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz, son of the estimable Norman Podhoretz. To be a “neo-conservative” in the 1970s in the mold of Irving Kristol and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz meant to repudiate the leftist views of one’s youth and make the leap to the Reagan camp. The original neo-conservatives knew how wrong they had been in their youth, and re-learned their politics after forty. Unlike their forbears, today’s neo-cons never have had a self-critical moment. Today’s guardians of the sacred flame of the sacred conservative flame are to the manure born.

The choice, sadly, lies between an unlearned interloper with common sense and an Establishment whose policy response is predictable as the emergence of a gumball from a supermarket machine after a quarter is cranked in. They are mediocre ideologues incapable of learning from past failures, clinging to their careers because they are unsuited for honest work. Trump may not know much but he is capable of learning. That can’t be said for his detractors.

“It isn’t just that the emperor has no clothes,” I wrote in a review of Angelo Codevilla’sbrilliant 2014 book To Make and Keep Peace. “The empire has no tailors.” Three administrations of Bush father and son have produced a monotone Establishment of functional foreign policy morons. One can’t find many prominent national security officials to oppose the signators of the anti-Trump letter because a whole generation of functionaries has been bred from the same stable. America will have to learn foreign policy from scratch. For my money, I’ll take the rough-edged outsider over the recidivist failures.

The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the view of Asia Times. 

Categories: 2016 elections, Arab Spring, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Islamist "democracy", Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Never Trumpers
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Islam’s “Quiet Conquest” of Europe

August 10, 2016

Islam’s “Quiet Conquest” of Europe, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, August 10, 2016

♦ “Islam is a French religion and the French language is a language of Islam.” — Tariq Ramadan.

♦ In 1989, Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, justified the persecution of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini. Last year, Boubakeur called for the conversion of churches into mosques.

♦ In Britain, mainstream Muslim organizations are “justice” through more than 85 sharia courts attached to mosques.

♦ Civil war in France is what the Islamic State is looking for: unleashing a blind repression so that the Muslim population will show solidarity with the revolutionary minority. Yet, there is still worse possible outcome: that nothing happens and we continue as is.

♦ Real “moderate Muslims” are silenced or murdered.

Last month, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with France’s director of domestic intelligence, Patrick Calvar. “The confrontation is inevitable,” Mr. Calvar said. There are an estimated 15,000 Salafists among France’s seven million Muslims, “whose radical-fundamentalist creed dominates many of the predominantly Muslim housing projects at the edges of cities such as Paris, Nice or Lyon. Their preachers call for a civil war, with all Muslims tasked to wipe out the miscreants down the street.”

These Salafists openly challenge France’s way of life and do not make a secret of their willingness to overthrow the existing order in Europe through violent means, terror attacks and physical intimidation. But paradoxically, if the Islamists’ threat to Europe were confined to the Salafists, it would be easier to defeat it.

There is in fact another threat, even more dangerous because it is more difficult to decipher. It has just been dubbed by the magazine Valeurs Actuelles, “the quiet conquest“. It is “moderate” Islam’s sinuous project of producing submission. “Its ambition is clear: changing French society. Slowly but surely”.

That threat is personified in the main character of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission:Mohammed Ben Abbes, the “moderate” Muslim who becomes France’s president and converts the state to Islam. And from where does President Ben Abbes start his Islamization? The Sorbonne University. It is already happening: Qatar recently made a significant donation to this famous university, to sponsor the education of migrants.

In France, the quiet conquest has the face of the Union of the Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), which a Simon Wiesenthal Center report charged with “anti-Semitism, advocacy and financing of terrorism and call to Jihad… ”

Not only does UOIF not encourage the integration of Moslems in France,” the report states, “it actually provides a nursery for the most radical Islamist positions.”

In Italy we have just witnessed the strategy of this “moderate Islam.” The largest and most influential Islamic organization, l’Unione delle comunità ed organizzazione islamiche in Italia (Ucoii), sponsored Milan’s first Muslim councilwoman, Sumaya Abdel Qader, a veiled candidate of the center-left coalition. Qader’s husband, Abdallah Kabakebbji, openly called for the destruction of the State of Israel: “It is a historical mistake, a scam”, he wrote on Facebook. His solution? “Ctrl + Alt + Delete”.

Qader won the race over a real moderate Muslim, the unveiled Somali activist, Maryan Ismail. I met Mrs. Ismail at a pro-Israel forum in Milan. After losing the election, she broke with Italy’s Democratic Party in an open letter: “The Democratic Party has chosen to dialogue with obscurantist Islam. Once again, the souls of modern, plural and inclusive Islam were not heard”.

Take two “stars” of this French “moderate Islam.” The first one is Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the motto of which is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Ramadan does not hide in Raqqa or shoot at French citizens. By applying for French citizenship, he would like to become one of them. His office is in the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis; he has written 30 books and he has two million Facebook followers. Ramadan has academic chairs all over the world, he is the director of the Research Center for Islamic Law in Doha (Qatar) and the president of the European Muslim Network. He publicly campaigns for Islam along with Italy’s former prime minister, Massimo D’Alema. Ramadan recently explained his vision for Europe and France: “Islam is a French religion and the French language is a language of Islam”.

Ramadan’s project is not the hoped-for Europeanization of Islam, but the not-hoped-for frightful Islamization of Europe. He opposes the assimilation of Muslims into French culture and society. A few days before the election in Milan, Ramadan was in Italy to endorse the candidacy of Sumaya Abdel Qader.

The second French “star” is Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. In 1989, Boubakeur justified the persecution of Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini. In 2002, he testified for the prosecution against the writer Michel Houellebecq. In 2006, he sued Charlie Hebdo in court, after the publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Last year, Boubakeur called for the conversion of churches into mosques and asked to “double” the number of mosques in France.

1772Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, last year called for the conversion of churches into mosques and asked to “double” the number of mosques in France. (Image source: TV5 Monde)

In the United Kingdom, mainstream Muslim organizations are dispensing “Islamic justice” through more than 85 sharia courts attached to mosques. Divorce, polygamy, adultery and wife-beating are only some of these courts’ matters of jurisprudence. In Germany, vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel criticized Saudi Arabia for financing Islamic extremism in Europe. It is the same kingdom which last year offered to build 200 new mosques in Germany.

Qatar, with its Al Jazeera television megaphone, is also very active in sponsoring Muslim Brotherhood Islamic radicalism all over Europe. The Qatari royal family, for example, in 2015 donated £11 million to Oxford’s St. Anthony’s College, where Tariq Ramadan teaches. Qatar also announced that it was willing to spend $65 million in the French suburbs, home to the vast majority of the six million Muslims in France.

Today in Europe, several scenarios are possible, including the worst. Among them, there is a civil war, which many are beginning to talk about, including Patrick Calvar, the director of domestic intelligence. This is what the Islamic State is looking for: unleashing a blind repression so that the Muslim population will show solidarity with the revolutionary minority. Yet, there is still worse possible outcome: that nothing happens and we continue as is.

The end is more important than the means. The Islamic State has the same goal as most of the members of so-called “moderate Islam”: domination under the sharia. Many supposedly “moderate Muslims”, even if they do not commit violent acts themselves, support them quietly. They support them by not speaking out against them. If they do speak out against them, they usually do so in coded terms, such as that they are “against terrorism,” or that what concerns them about violent acts by Muslims is the possibility of a “backlash” against them.

Violent jihadis, however, are not the only means of transforming Europe, and perhaps are even counterproductive: they could awaken the nations they attack. Soft and more discreet means, such as social pressure and propaganda, are even more dangerous, and possibly even more effective: they are harder to see, such as the West’s acceptance of dual judiciary and legal systems; sharia finance (if there had been a “Nazi finance” system, in which all financial transactions went to strengthening the Third Reich, what effect might that have had on World War II?), and the proliferation in the West of mosques and extremist Islamic websites. Although there are indeed many real “moderate Muslims”, there are also still many who are not.

To conservative Muslims, however, any Muslim who does not accept every word of Allah — the entire Koran — is not a true Muslim, and is open to charges of “apostasy”, the punishment for which is death. According to a leading Sunni theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, based in Qatar, “If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy, Islam would not exist today.”

That is why the late writer Oriana Fallaci once said to The New Yorker: “I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam”. That is why real “moderate Muslims” are silenced or murdered.

This might summarize the current Islamic mainstream mentality: “Dear Europeans, continue to think about a shorter working week, early retirement, abortion on demand and adultery in the afternoon. With your laws, we will conquer you. With our laws, we will convert you”.

Categories: Britain, Europe, Islam and conquest, Islamic integration, Islamic invasion, Islamic supremacy, Islamisation, Sharia law
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Iran-Backed Rebels Use Hospitals as Human Shields

August 10, 2016

Iran-Backed Rebels Use Hospitals as Human Shields, Gatestone Institute, Con Coughlin, August 10, 2016

The revelation that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are deliberately using civilian institutions for their war effort inevitably will draw comparisons with the tactics used by other radical Islamist groups such Hamas, which regularly uses institutions such as hospitals to launch attacks against Israel.

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♦ “While the West urges the Saudi-led coalition to use all means possible to avoid civilian casualties, we must also be aware of the tactics the Iranian-backed rebels are using as part of a deliberate policy to discredit the coalition war effort.” — Senior Western official.

♦ Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are using hospitals as military command posts, thereby deliberately putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk, according to a new report into Yemen’s long-running civil war.

Hostilities in the Yemeni conflict resumed at the weekend following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait. The talks came after Houthi fighters, who are backed by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards, rejected a U.N.-sponsored peace plan and announced the establishment of a 10-member governing body to run the country.

Within hours of the peace talks ending, the Saudi-led military coalition, which is backed by both the U.S. and Britain, had resumed air strikes against Houthi rebel positions in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. Initial reports said that at least 21 people, the majority of them civilians, had been killed, including a number of workers in a potato chip factory in Sana’a. In addition, the international airport at Sana’a was shut down by the airstrikes after Saudi coalition officials notified airlines that incoming flights would be barred for 72 hours.

1774A factory in Sana’a, Yemen, burns after an airstrike on August 9, 2016. (Image source: Al Jazeera video screenshot)

It is the first time in five months that Sana’a has been bombed by warplanes from the coalition, which also includes the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Sudan and other Middle East countries.

Human rights groups, which have repeatedly raised concerns about the high number of civilian casualties, will be particularly concerned by the resumption of hostilities. The U.S.-backed Saudi coalition is seeking to restore the democratically-elected government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who was forced to flee Sana’a in February by Houthi rebels. The Houthis are being supported by elite units from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). More than 6,000 people have been killed in the civil war, including around 3,000 civilians.

Both sides in the conflict have been accused of causing unnecessary civilian casualties, with the Saudis, who have suffered significant casualties of their own, being singled out for particular censure over the way they have conducted coalition air strikes.

But an investigation conducted by coalition officials into claims that Saudi warplanes have directly targeted civilians found that the air strikes had been justified, because the Iranian-backed rebels had been using civilian institutions, such as hospitals, as command posts to launch attacks against coalition forces and their allies.

A report issued earlier this week by the coalition’s Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) refuted earlier claims by the French-based charity, Doctors Without Borders, that the Saudi coalition had deliberately caused civilian deaths by bombing Haiden Hospital in Yemen’s Saada province. Instead, investigators found that at the time of the attack, Houthi rebels were occupying the hospital, making it a legitimate target.

In all, JIAT investigated eight high-profile bombings where the UN or humanitarian organisations have accused the coalition of killing civilians or bombing hospitals and humanitarian structures. In each case, it concluded that all “safety procedures implemented by coalition forces adhered to international humanitarian law.”

The revelation that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels are deliberately using civilian institutions for their war effort inevitably will draw comparisons with the tactics used by other radical Islamist groups such Hamas, which regularly uses institutions such as hospitals to launch attacks against Israel.

“It is clear that the tactics used by the Houthis, where they are using places like hospitals for their military campaign, has contributed significantly to the heavy civilian death toll,” said a senior Western official. “While the West urges the Saudi-led coalition to use all means possible to avoid civilian casualties, we must also be aware of the tactics the Iranian-backed rebels are using as part of a deliberate policy to discredit the coalition war effort.”

Categories: civilian casualties, Iran in Yemen, Iranian proxies
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controlled opposition pays well, special if you endorse hillary !

August 10, 2016

Socialist Bernie Sanders spends more than his reported net worth on his third home

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/08/socialist_bernie_sanders_spends_more_than_his_reported_net_worth_on_his_emthirdem_home.html

By Thomas Lifson
August 10, 2016

The great thing about being an avowed socialist is that you get to posture as a self-righteous man of the people without foregoing the benefits of wealth. Take the case of Bernie Sanders, whose self-reported net worth was $528,014, yet who just spent a reported $600,000 on a summer “vacation home” with 500 feet of lake frontage on gorgeous Lake Champlain.

What kind of elderly couple spends more than their net worth on a vacation home? Certainly, at a minimum, we can say a couple with no financial worries.

Local Paper Seven Days Vermont broke the story Monday that Senator Sanders:

is the proud new owner of a summer home in the Champlain Islands, Seven Days has confirmed.

The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero. [What a perfect name for a New Englander seeking to lead a movement! – TL]

Sanders’ new crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally. (snip)

Last Tuesday, the day of the closing, a relaxed-looking Bernie Sanders posed for a photo at Hero’s Welcome General Store on Route 2.

The new home marks the third Sanders residence.

The Sanders [sic] also own a row house on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and a house in Burlington’s New North End.

I suspect that Bernie and Jane’s current net worth is about to be supplemented by a huge publisher’s advance, just as with “dead broke” Hillary Clinton. In fact, there is a very decent chance that people will actually buy a book by Sanders, sot he publisher will not have to mentally write-off the advance as a political donation.

The fact is that politics can be a hugely lucrative business, and that when a socialist politician claims to be a pure small-d democrat, more likely thab not, ruches lie ahead, no matter whose name the property is in. Remember that Al Sharpton, the moral center of the Democrats, evaded paying a court judgment against him for libel by claiming he didn’t even own the suits he wore.

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US Warning Israel Not to Demolish Mythical Arab Village

August 10, 2016

By: David Israel Published: August 10th, 2016

Source: The Jewish Press » » US Warning Israel Not to Demolish Mythical Arab Village

Downtown Susiya
Photo Credit: Trocaire

The US Administration has warned Israel against demolishing the Arab village of Susiya in south Mt. Hebron, according to a story in Ha’aretz this week. Both Israeli and American senior officials have warned that should Israel go ahead and demolish the village, US response would be harsh.

Susiya is a legitimate archaeological site in the southern Judean Mountains that bears the archaeological remains of a 5th century CE enormous synagogue, one of the largest and most magnificent ever discovered, which was turned into a mosque by the Arab invaders in the 8th century.

The name has bee usurped by Bedouins who have stayed in area caves during grazing season. It is also the name of a religious Jewish community established in 1983 under the jurisdiction of Mt. Hebron Regional Council. In 1986, the area of Susiya claimed by the Bedouin shepherds was declared an archeological site by Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), and the IDF expelled the Bedouins, who then moved a few hundred yards southeast of the original location.

The Zionist Regavim movement, whose goal is to reclaim areas of the land of Israel from Arab occupiers, has been conducting a bitter court battle to declare Bedouin Susiya illegal and to remove its structures, which are, for the most part, tents and lean-tos. It should be noted that since 1994 the Arabs have been establishing illegal settlements in the entire area between Jerusalem and Susiya, which Israeli governments have failed to challenge for more than two decades. Susiya is only the tip of the sand dune (somehow using the iceberg metaphor in August, just doesn’t work).

As Jewish Press Online reporter Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu wrote back in 2013 (The Saga of Ancient ‘Palestinian Susiya’ – The Town That Never Was), “None of the land was ever registered as owned by anyone. During the Ottoman Empire, and under the British Mandate, the rulers of Hebron would sit in their living rooms and parcel out lands arbitrarily. That was the extent of ‘ownership.’

“When Jews came to Beit Yatir, the Arabs followed. Three families from Yatta, a city adjacent to Hebron, fled because of family crimes, such as rape, and set up camp on a hill adjacent to Yatir, Their village quickly became known as the ‘Thieves’ Village,’ for obvious reasons. They claim, of course, that they have been living there from time immemorial.”

And now, apparently, the future of the Middle East depends on those few dozen shepherds getting to graze their flocks on rightfully owned Jewish land, and so, following intense propaganda from the Palestinian Authority, the US, the UK and the EU, as well as several international NGOs have been threatening that should Susiya be wiped off the map, they, Israel’s friends in the world, would find it difficult to continue defending it in international forums.

Israeli senior officials have told Israel’s many friends that at this point it has no intention to demolish the Susiya “homes” (a term that is being used generously), and that Israel would act based on the expected ruling of the Supreme Court. While Regavim has been pushing the case against the Bedouin enclave, a group called Rabbis for Human Rights (RHR) has appealed the pending evacuation and demolishing of Susiya in the high court.

RHR is a foreign agent representing anti-Zionist entities in Europe and the US. Its annual budget of $1.6 million (most recently reported in 2014) is funded by AECID (Spain), European Commission, Misereor (Germany), Trocaire (Ireland), Norwegian Church (Norway), Kerk in Actie (Netherlands), Church of Sweden, Foundation for Middle East Peace (US), New Israel Fund, Social Justice Fund, and Moriah Fund (source: NGO Monistor).

Yigal Dilmoni, Deputy Director-General of the Yesha Council, told Tazpit last year that “fifteen-year-old aerial photos clearly show that there was no Arab village at this site… The Arabs have come from the village of Yatta, and… repeatedly disseminate lies.”

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British Man Reportedly Convicted Of Making Offensive Comments About Muslims On Facebook

August 10, 2016

British Man Reportedly Convicted Of Making Offensive Comments About Muslims On Facebook, Jonathan Turley’s Blog, Jonathan Turley, August 10, 2016

England is a tragic example of how speech regulation can become insatiable with ever widening areas of prohibited speech.

brit flag


 freedom_of_speech

England has seen the rise of calls for speech prosecutions, including calls frompowerful politicians for crackdowns on insulting or offensive comments. We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). The rapid decline of free speech in England has been both chilling and frightening for civil libertarians as the country appears to have abandoned this once defining right of Western Civilization. Now, a Manchester man reportedly has been arrested and sentenced for making “grossly offensive” comments about Muslims on Facebook. Stephen Bennett, 39, (who has a Muslim mother-in-law and sister-in-law) has been sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work and a 12-month community order for expressing his views.

Bennett reportedly went on to the Greater Manchester Police’s Facebook page and posted comments like “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.” The next thing the father of seven knew, there were police at his door. He was accused of violating a law pushed through by former Prime Minister Tony Blair that makes it a crime to “send by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character” or “cause any such message or matter to be so sent.” It is a ridiculously ambiguous and vague law that seems calculated to chill speech. One has avoid speech that others might find offensive or menacing.

There is no shortage of people who want to shutdown the speech of others and claim such offense. Various people complained to the police about Bennett’s comments and one Muslim witness at his trial warned that his comments could be a “potential tool for radicalization.” (It was an ironic point since this law is itself a form of extremism in the denial of a core civil liberty). Another witness claimed that a remark about Asian women was “offensive to all women.”

Recorder Andrew Long at sentencing readily adopted the tone and authority of the public censor. He noted that it is “impossible to believe” that such comments did not reflect his personal views or that he was “at least a sympathizer” with those who expressed such views. He denounced Bennett for risking the “stirring up racial hatred in the present climate” and “playing into the hands of the enemies of this country.” Really? Criminalizing speech plays in the hands of our enemies. ISIS and extreme Islamic countries like Iran seek the denial of free speech, particularly in criticizing religion. I am not afraid of ISIS, which remains on the wrong side of history in resisting liberty. I am far more afraid of those in the West who are rolling back on civil liberties in the name of defending them. Long was “fighting” extremism by yielding to it. The risk of “stirring up” people sounds like another example yielding to the “heckler’s veto” in silencing those with whom we disagree. Long condemned Bennett for expressing his views and said “Your remarks damaged the community in which you live, and it’s the community that you must repay.”

I am not particularly interested in Bennett’s views. While I find many views to be offensive, I believe that the cost to criminalizing speech is a far greater danger for free countries. England is a tragic example of how speech regulation can become insatiable with ever widening areas of prohibited speech. What is incredible is that people exercised their right to denounce Bennett’s views on Facebook, but that was not enough. Some of these people wanted him arrested for uttering views with which they disagreed. It appears that you are allowed to hold unpopular views but you are not allowed to utter them in Great Britain.

Categories: Britain and freedom of speech, Britain and Islam
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Julian Assange: Murdered DNC staffer was Wikileaks’ source, Offers 20K Reward

August 10, 2016

Julian Assange: Murdered DNC staffer was Wikileaks’ source, Offers 20K Reward

By Pamela Geller on August 9, 2016

Source: Julian Assange: Murdered DNC staffer was Wikileaks’ source, Offers 20K Reward | Pamela Geller

The party of treason blamed the DNC email dump on Russia, on a Trump-Russia alliance and other tales spun out of pure fiction in order to distract voters from the contents of those bombshell DNC emails.

WikiLeaks is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich’s death In an Aug. 8 interview with Dutch TV (scroll down), WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke about the Rich murder case.

The plot thickens.

A couple of Items:

 NBC Channel 4 in Washington says that Seth’s mother, Mary Rich, said police “told her family her son may have been the victim of an attempted robbery.”

Rich’s father told The Washington Post that Seth’s watch, wallet and credit cards were not taken, but he thinks Rich was “killed after resisting a robbery in which the assailant got nothing.”

 

 

 

“BREAKING: Murdered DNC staffer was Wikileaks’ source, Assange admits in interview,” CTN, August 9, 2015:

In July, a Democratic National Committee staffer named Seth Rich was gunned down in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of northwest D.C.  The police said his murder may have been the result of a robbery.
Now, however, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is saying there is more to the story.

In an interview with a Dutch media outlet known as Nieuwsuur on Tuesday, Assange admitted that Rich, a staffer in the voter data department of the DNC, was Wikileak’s source within the organization.

In recent weeks, Wikileaks has released a torrent of information from inside the DNC — from emails to memos to voicemails — that has resulted in the resignation of top party officials, including Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  According to Assange, Rich arranged a large portion of this information.

After Rich’s murder, Assange announced that Wikileaks was offering a $20,000 reward for anyone who could provide information leading to an arrest and conviction in Rich’s murder case.

Assange’s interview with Nieuwsuur on Tuesday was the first time that the Wikileaks founder ever has revealed one of their sources.

The video of Assange’s encounter with the Dutch media outlet can be found at

http://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2124316-assange-belooft-nieuwe-onthullingen-over-clinton.html?title=assange-belooft-nieuwe-onthullingen-over-clinton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9rzk9PH9zk

 

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The Real Reason the Mainstream Media Hates Trump

August 10, 2016

The Real Reason the Mainstream Media Hates Trump, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, August 9, 2016

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In a much talked about August 7 piece—“Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism”—New York Times “mediator” Jim Rutenberg takes the mainstream media out of the closet and publicly declares them in the tank for Trump.

As front page news this is not exactly man bites dog, but he goes further actually to excuse this bias because, after all, Trump is Trump:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

How’re you supposed to cover a woman whose family foundation helped Putin corner the uranium market? Oh, never mind. Rutenberg’s point is that the barbarian Trump has put those Fourth Estate idealists in a quandary as never before. The poor dears always try to be neutral, but The Donald is just too many bridges too far. They just can’t be even-handed anymore. (Please stay clear of your computer screen if you start to sputter.)

But the truth is that—although he can be a loudmouthed blowhard with poor impulse control—Trump is not remotely  what they say he is: a racist, sexist demagogue. In fact, if you bother to look it up, he was more than a decade ahead of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on one of the most “sainted” of all liberal issues—gay marriage.  But don’t expect to see that covered by Gutenberg, et al.

The real reason the MSM disdains, even loathes, Trump is that he threatens what I call The Big Wink, which means he threatens them

Qu’est-ce que c’est The Big Wink?

We saw it writ large during the (media pronounced) highly successful Democratic National Convention—the key topic of which, beside the excoriation of Donald Trump, was the rescue of the middle class, a middle class, no one admitted, that has done surpassingly poorly during the Obama administration. Improving the situation of minorities was also, as always, invoked, even though minorities, particularly blacks, have done even more wretchedly over the last eight years.

Unspoken, not surprisingly, was a truly uncomfortable truth—the people who have done best under the Obama administration are the rich. No one said or did anything for eight years as the labor participation rate declined to new lows and stocks rose to new highs. The rich profited at the expense of the poor (somewhat) and the middle class (a lot). The Democrats have become the secret—or not so secret—party of the rich.

The media are, for the most part, those rich people, the most successful of them ensconced well up into the higher reaches of the one percent. They also are people who like to think good of themselves, that they are “doing good.” For the older ones, now in control, this comes from their “fight the power” college days, only now they are the power. How do you resolve such a contradiction? By making morally narcissistic pronouncements  on behalf of the disadvantaged while privately hoping for, even working for, the status quo.

No more perfect candidate of the status quo has ever come along than Hillary Clinton. She personifies the status quo. Nothing will change under Hillary—for the country or the media. It’s all downhill from here.

Her lifetime reputation as a serial liar and crony capitalist only amplifies this. It’s hard to believe she really means it when she makes such outrageous proposals as her confiscatory capital gains plan that could cause a Depression. Wink, wink, she’s a Wall Street girl—and everybody, especially the media, knows it. She won’t do anything the slightest bit extreme.  And they like it that way, even if they don’t admit it to themselves. Better for the old 401K and property values in the Meatpacking District. No one really believes Hillary will follow through with those dopey leftwing proposals—not that she has anything else to offer, but that doesn’t matter. Nor will she put more than a slight delay in the TPP trade agreement. It’s all a Big Wink, designed to fool the Sanders supporters and, of course, the always handy minorities. Power and money are everything.

Donald Trump is a wholly different matter. No one, especially the media, knows what he really intends to do.  The media doesn’t like this because if there’s one thing they don’t like, no matter what they profess, it is change. Or loss of control.

No wonder they don’t like Donald and seize on his every miscue or aside as if he were the second coming of Attila bent on overrunning our nation and quite possibly the world. (Compare that to how they shrug their shoulders at Hillary’s actual misdeeds.) What they hate most of all is the temerity of the vulgar Queens billionaire in exposing the haute bourgeois lifestyle of the Upper West Side for what it is—fake and self-serving.  The way things look now, they won’t let him survive it.

Categories: 2016 elections, Hillary and media, Trump and media
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Hillary Calls for Obama’s Assassination

August 10, 2016

Hillary Calls for Obama’s Assassination, Power Line, Steven Hayward, August 9, 2016

(Please see also, Hillary Clinton Campaign Spins Trump 2nd Amendment Comments as ‘Threat’ — DM)

People seem to have forgotten this story from May 28, 2008:

Clinton Remark on Kennedy’s Killing Stirs Uproar

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

BRANDON, S.D. — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defended staying in the Democratic nominating contest on Friday by pointing out that her husband had not wrapped up the nomination until June 1992, adding, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” . . .

Friday was not the first time Mrs. Clinton referred to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in such a context. In March, she told Time magazine: “Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A.

Let’s see whether the typical media double standard kicks in with Trump’s comments today.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Categories: 2008 Democrat nomination contest, Hillary Clinton

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Julian Assange on Seth Rich – YouTube

August 10, 2016

 

Julian Assange seems to suggests on Dutch television program Nieuwsuur that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks-exposed DNC emails and was murdered.

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