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Raheel Raza Hopes To Be The Muslim Extremists Hate Most

February 6, 2017

Raheel Raza Hopes To Be The Muslim Extremists Hate Most, Investigative Project on Terrorism, Abigail R. Esman, February 6, 2017

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Just a month into 2017 and America’s hot-button issues are already clear: women, radical Islam, and the civil rights of Muslims in the West. The Trump presidential campaign, fraught as it was with controversy over his comments about women, sexual harassment, immigration and Muslims, has been followed, in his presidency, by protests, political debates, executive orders, and above all, confusion.

Sorting out that confusion requires profound understanding of the issues. And the irony here is that few people understand them better than do Muslim women – particularly the Muslim women who stand up against radical Islam and who denounce the abuse and oppression of women in Muslim countries. They, best of all, know what it means to be the victim of sharia laws that deny them even the most basic of human rights. They, best of all, recognize the portions of the Quran that can be – and are – manipulated by extremists to suit their needs. They, too, best recognize those areas of their faith that must be modernized, that need to be reformed, to suit modern understanding of basic human rights, human dignity, democracy, and justice.

Yet these are the people who also are most virulently attacked. Muslim fundamentalists accuse them of not being “really” Muslim. They are called apostates, and their lives and families threatened. Some non-Muslims accuse them of lying, of being part of an underground “stealth jihad” conspiracy aimed at Islamizing the West. Their work takes selflessness, determination, and extraordinary courage.

Among those leading that fight is writer-activist Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Canadian and author of Their Jihad, Not My Jihad: A Muslim Canadian Woman Speaks Out. As a human rights leader, she has spoken out loudly against gender inequality in Muslim families, called for a ban on the hijab and burqa in Canada, and condemned groups that support the introduction of sharia law in the West. In 2012, she founded Muslims Facing Tomorrow, an organization with a core mission “to reclaim Islam for, as the word itself means, securing Peace for all people, and to oppose extremism, fanaticism and violence in the name of religion” while supporting Enlightenment ideals of free speech and democracy.

Most notably, she participated in Paula Kwestin’s award-winning documentary “Honor Diaries.” Described as a “movement to expose women’s rights in the Middle East,” the film exposes hard truths about honor violence and the oppression of women in the Muslim world. In a discussion with other female Muslim leaders in the film, Raza minced no words: “We need systematic change in the Muslim world.”

The Investigative Project interviewed Raza about her views, her courage, her work, and her vision for both Muslims and the West in the years ahead.

(This transcript was edited lightly for style and clarity.)

Abigail R. Esman What made you first feel you needed to speak out as a Muslim woman on the issues you now champion?

Raheel Raza: While I was growing up in Pakistan, I lived in a culture that considered women should be seen and not heard. There was also an honor based environment where everything was about “what others will say.” I rebelled against this and gender discrimination at a young age (for which I was always in trouble). I left Pakistan when I was very young to embrace the West for its values of gender equality, freedom of expression and a liberal democracy. I found my voice and have never stopped speaking out for those who do not have a voice.

ARE: What was the initial response like? Did it cause you to doubt what you were doing?

RR: The initial response was more against my gender, i.e. how can a Muslim woman speak out? Not against the content because deep down people know that I am speaking from within my faith and also addressing a compelling issue that affects Muslim majority society in a deep way. I never doubted what I am doing because the intention is to reform the way Muslims interpret and implement the faith.

ARE: When and why did you create Muslims Facing Tomorrow? Do you feel you are meeting your objectives?

RR: We launched Muslims Facing Tomorrow in 2012 with an intent and vision to be an alternate narrative to the voices of extremists. We are about ideas, as it is a violent ideology that we have to defeat. We are slowly but surely meeting our objectives because the world is hearing our voice to understand that there are Muslims who are the largest victims of radical Jihad and that we are concerned citizens who are speaking out.

ARE: Have you faced threats from radical Muslims for your work? If so, how have you handled them?

RR: Yes, of course – how else would I know that they are listening? I am the proud recipient of a fatwa, death threat and hostile emails. I am also listed as number six on the website of the world’s most hated Muslims, and I plan to become number one.

ARE: “Honor Diaries” was an extremely important project – but a controversial and difficult one. What made you want to get involved?

RR: I have always been committed to women’s rights and have worked on this my entire adult life. Three years ago I was approached by the producer of “Honor Diaries” about the idea of having ‘voices from within’ – Muslim women speaking on the issue. I agreed, with one condition: that this would not be scripted because for too long we (Muslim women) have been scripted, so they agreed, and [the] rest is history.

ARE: Do you feel the film has been successful in influencing change?

RR: “Honor Diaries” has been very successful in implementing and influencing change because it is more than a film. It’s a movement which has picked up traction globally. In Canada we sent copies of the film to each Member of Parliament and as a result, we have Bill S-7, which is a bill about zero tolerance for barbaric cultural practices. Similarly in [the] UK, a law was passed making female genital mutilation and forced/underage marriage a criminal offence. I gave testimony in the Swedish Parliament about Honor Based Violence and also addressed the UK House of Lords as a result of which there is a bill which is being tabled. We screened “Honor Diaries” at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, so overall it has won awards and was the first documentary to openly address these issues.

Now of course there are many others, which gives us hope. “Honor Diaries” also empowered the victims of honor-based violence to speak out because they felt the solidarity, so we have activists on the ground all over the globe who are working on these critical issues.

The movement has now become even more important because it has led to a yearly event called CWFF — the Censored Women’s Film Festival — in which Honor Diaries hosts films by not-yet-known film makers on taboo topics that have had pushback.

ARE: More recently, many of your fellow modern Muslim activists [such as and Shireen Qudosi and Asra Nomani] supported Donald Trump for president. You, I gather, did not. What would you say to them?

RR: In a way I do support Mr. Trump, although he is brash with his words. However when I look at eight years of the Obama administration, nothing was done to defeat a radical jihadist ideology. In fact Mr. Obama could not even articulate the words! So the radicals felt empowered and grew in numbers and action as we have seen with the slew of terrorist attacks last year. Mr. Trump (for all his faults) has addressed the issue head on and has also put out feelers to say that he will dialogue and sit with reform minded Muslims around the table to find solutions. This has yet to happen but I am hopeful that change will come to this global threat.

ARE: You had at one time called for a stop on immigration to Canada from countries with high terror rates. Now President Trump has issued his executive order in the U.S. against specific countries, but also not including other, obvious sponsors of terrorism like Saudi Arabia. What are your thoughts on this move?

RR: President Trump is implementing his election promises so no surprise here. I had suggested a temporary moratorium in Canada from countries that fund and promote terrorism because the safety and security of my country is paramount to the future of my children and grand children.

On not including some countries, I can’t comment on the inner workings of the U.S. political system as I am not American but we should wait and watch where this goes.

ARE: Still, the work you do is not easy, and often misunderstood. What keeps you going?

RR: Activism is never easy – you go against the flow and the status quo. It’s doubly challenging if you happen to be a woman. I do this work for the future of the next generation. This is for a better world for my children and grandchildren. In a way I am very spiritual and I believe that each one of us is answerable to the creator about what we did when the world was burning. I can sleep at night knowing I am doing my part. The backlash against me is a very small drop in the ocean of work that has to be done, so I continue despite the challenges.

Categories: Islam and females, Islam and human rights, Islam and terrorism, Islamic honor, Islamist freedom, Islamist objectives, Muslim Reform Movement, Raheel Raza
Tags: Islam and females, Islam and human rights, Islam and terrorism, Islamic honor, Islamist freedom, Islamist objectives, Muslim Reform Movement, Raheel Raza

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PM Netanyahu Meets British PM May – YouTube

February 6, 2017

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To Fix Counterterrorism, End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Strategy

February 6, 2017

To Fix Counterterrorism, End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Strategy, PJ Media, Andrew C. McCarthy, February 5, 2017

(Please see also, Trump Seeks to End Obama’s ‘Countering Violent Extremism’ Scam. — DM)

grief

Last June, the jihadist terrorist Omar Mateen opened fire at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 and wounding several other revelers. It quickly became clear that Mateen was yet another “known wolf” – the term popularized by my friend and colleague Patrick Poole to describe the frequent phenomenon of terrorists who manage to plot and strike against the West notwithstanding that their patent radicalism has put them on the radar screen of law-enforcement and intelligence agents.

I have long argued that the cause of this phenomenon is the restrictions on common sense placed on our agents by political correctness, which essentially blind them to the well-known but rarely acknowledged progression from Islamic scripture to sharia-supremacist ideology (what we call “radical Islam”), to enclaves populated by adherents and sympathizers of this ideology, and inevitably to jihadist terror. This iteration of political correctness has been the backbone of Obama administration counterterrorism strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE). Shortly after the Orlando attack, I delivered a speech at the Westminster Institute – entitled, “Defenseless in the Face of Our Enemies” – in which I addressed CVE. The new Trump administration is in the process of formulating its own counterterrorism strategy. Below, for what it may be worth, is the portion of my speech that addressed CVE:

Of the nearly 36,000 people who work for the FBI, fewer than 14,000 are investigative agents. National security is a crucial part of the Bureau’s portfolio, but the FBI is statutorily the lead investigative agency in virtually every category of criminal offense in federal law. At most, there are a couple thousand agents assigned full-time to counterterrorism. Those numbers are multiplied somewhat by joint federal-state efforts — the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in several metropolitan areas across the nation. Even so, because the Bureau is an intelligence agency as well as a law-enforcement agency, there are over a thousand terrorism investigations ongoing at any one time. The FBI director indicates that there is activity that must be monitored in all 50 states. Unless there are flashing neon signs of imminent attack, the small number of investigators can only spend so much time on any one suspect.

Of course, that time can be maximized, or wasted, depending on whether investigators know what they’re looking for . . . and whether they are permitted to look for it.

Clearly, the FBI spent a lot of time on Mateen. It sent confidential informants to interact with him, conducted physical surveillance, covertly monitored some of his phone calls, and interviewed him face-to-face three separate times. It concluded that his bark was bad, but his bite was non-existent. Honoring guidelines imposed on terrorism investigations, the FBI closed its case. That is, in addition to concluding that no charges should be filed, the Bureau further decided that additional monitoring of Mateen was not warranted.

In retrospect, this seems reckless. But the FBI is not incompetent, far from it. The agency knew Mateen was worth a heavy investigative investment. The problem is that the FBI answers to the Washington political class. The bipartisan Beltway has long ruled that advocacy of radical Islam is protected by the Constitution. It has long instructed its investigators, preposterously, that seditious beliefs and agitation are immune, not just from prosecution, but even from mere inquiry.

What passes for Obama’s national-security strategy, known as “Countering Violent Extremism,” exacerbates this problem. CVE delusionally forbids the conclusion that radical Islamic ideology has any causative effect on terrorist plotting. The FBI is in the impossible position of trying to conduct investigations that follow the facts wherever they lead, while fearing that such investigations — by illuminating the logical progression from Islamic scripture to sharia supremacism to jihadist terror — will enrage its political masters.

Understand: Nothing in the Constitution mandates this suicidal betrayal of national security. It flows from Washington’s lunatic concoction of an imaginary Islam — a belief system the sole tenets of which are peace and anti-terrorism. President Obama and the counsel he keeps (many of whom are connected to insidious Islamist organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood) insist this “anti-terrorist” “Religion of Peace” is the only viable interpretation of Islam. We are not just to believe, we are pressured to endorse, the fantasy that sharia supremacism is a “false Islam.” Its palpable mainstream status in the Middle East and elsewhere is not to be spoken of.

The FBI is bound by guidelines promulgated by the Justice Department, most of which have been in place since the administration of President George W. Bush. They impose a caveat on every investigation:

These Guidelines do not authorize investigating or collecting or maintaining information on United States persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of other rights secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States.

On its face, this admonition should not be problematic. It instructs that agents may not investigate for the sole purpose of monitoring activities protected by federal law. Consequently, if agents have other legitimate purposes for investigating — such as preventing terrorist attacks or probing terrorism conspiracies — the Justice Department guidance is no bar to conducting an investigation in which a mosque or a protest rally may foreseeably come under scrutiny.

Political dissent and the exercise of religion are protected by the First Amendment. But this is a protection against being prosecuted merely for one’s words or religious observance. It is not a shield against investigation for criminal activities that are motivated by religious or political belief.

Not only may one be investigated and prosecuted for criminal offenses that are motivated by one’s beliefs or speech; it has long been the law that evidence of one’s beliefs and speech, which is often highly relevant to proving criminal intent, may be admitted in a prosecution for such offenses.

Simply stated, if you are a Muslim who believes sharia law must be imposed on society, and you tell people that Allah commands the commission of violent jihad to impose sharia, that belief and statement are admissible evidence if you are charged with bombing or terrorism conspiracy crimes. You are not being prosecuted for what you believe or what you said; you are being prosecuted for the crimes. The beliefs and statements are evidence of your state of mind — just as they are in all kinds of criminal cases beyond terrorism.

That being the case, there is nothing inherently wrong with, much less constitutionally offensive about, the concept that radical religious or political beliefs should trigger investigations. That is especially the case if those beliefs are conveyed by aggressive language, or by association with other radicals or mosques known to endorse jihadism.

Here’s an important principle we must get right: It cannot be that evidence an investigator may use to prove guilt of terrorism offenses is somehow insulated from an investigator’s suspicions about potential terrorism offenses. The goal of counterterrorism is supposed to be the prevention of jihadist attacks, not the hope that there may be a living terrorist or two still around to be indicted and tried only after Americans have been murdered.

In law enforcement, however, what matters most is not what the law allows investigators to do. It is what the investigators’ superiors allow them to do.

That brings us to “Countering Violent Extremism.” In essence, CVE holds that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, or even with Islamist ideology that reviles the United States. President Obama has conclusively proclaimed: “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — end of discussion . . . as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.

Thus, the administration narrative continues, the real threat to our security is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims. By the Obama administration’s lights, our national-defense measures following the 9/11 attacks have conveyed the misimpression that America is at war with Islam.

Remember, we’re in Fantasy Land, so we’re not supposed to pause at this point to ask: What, then, prompted the 9/11 attacks in the first place? What prompted the increasingly audacious series of attacks from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole — all during those sensitive, Islamophilic Clinton years when, we’re to believe, jihadists didn’t think America was “at war with Islam”?

Instead of asking such impertinent questions, we are simply to accept the president’s say-so that the key to our security is to “partner” with the leadership in Muslim communities — much of which just happens to be tied to or heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood.

In a major 2007–08 prosecution (the Holy Land Foundation case), the Justice Department proved that the Brotherhood financed the Hamas terrorist organization to the tune of millions of dollars. That same Muslim Brotherhood is the main subject of my 2010 book, The Grand Jihad. The title is lifted from an internal Brotherhood memo seized by the FBI and presented at the Holy Land trial — a memo in which Brotherhood honchos stationed in the United States explained that their mission here is a “grand jihad” to “eliminate and destroy Western Civilization from within” — by “sabotage.”

Under CVE, we are to let our Islamist “partners” train the police, and let them be our eyes and ears in Muslim communities. Because we all share the same interests, you see, we should rest assured that these Islamist leaders will alert us if there is any cause for concern.

Makes perfect sense, right?

If it is possible, the practice of CVE is even more of a national-security disaster than the theory. This is probably best documented by my friend Stephen Coughlin in a recent and essential book: Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.

Apart from being an exceptional lawyer, Steve is a trained military intelligence officer who has studied our enemies’ threat doctrine, Islamic supremacism. Again, to be precise, it may be best to call it “sharia supremacism” because it reflects the classic sharia-based Islam that is mainstream in the Middle East. Catastrophic Failure is about how the United States government has systematically stifled the study of this doctrine since before 9/11. CVE is the paragon illustration of how the Obama administration has exacerbated this catastrophic failure — a failure that I have branded “willful blindness” since first encountering it as a prosecutor two decades ago.

As Coughlin demonstrates, CVE is no secret. For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — which is every bit as radical as the infamous Civil Rights Division in the Obama Justice Department — has worked with the National Counterterrorism Center to develop government-agency training programs that “bring together best [CVE] practices.”

One product of this effort is a handy two-page instruction document of CVE “Do’s and Don’ts.” The “Don’ts” tell agents to avoid, among other things, “ventur[ing] too deep into the weeds of religious doctrine and history” or examining the “role of Islam in majority Muslim nations.” The guidance further admonishes:

Don’t use training that equates radical thought, religious expression, freedom to protest, or other constitutionally protected activity, with criminal activity. One can have radical thoughts/ideas, including disliking the U.S. government, without being violent; for example, trainers who equate the desire for Sharia law with criminal activity violate basic tenets of the First Amendment.

As we’ve already observed, this interpretation of the First Amendment is patent rubbish. Again, there is no free-speech protection against having one’s words examined for intelligence or investigative purposes. Free-expression principles protect Americans against laws that subject speech to penalty or prosecution — a protection, by the way, that the Obama administration seeks to deny to speech unflattering to Islam, under a UN resolution it jointly sponsored with several Islamic nations.

In sum, Obama’s CVE strategy expressly instructs our investigators to consider only violent or criminal conduct. They are told to ignore radical ideology, particularly if it has the patina of “religious expression.” They are directed to turn a deaf ear to anti-Americanism and the desire to impose sharia, which just happens to be the principal objective of all violent jihadists, and of the Obama administration’s oft-time consultants, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Our agents, furthermore, are cautioned to avoid doing anything that smacks of subjecting particular groups to heightened scrutiny. After all, that might imply that terrorism committed by Muslims has some connection to Islam — specifically, to the undeniable, unambiguous commands to violent jihad found in Muslim scripture.

Obviously, this CVE guidance is exactly what our investigators follow when they consciously avoid scrutinizing jihadist social-media postings by visa applicants from Muslim-majority countries — such as Tashfeen Malik. She was the Pakistani immigrant who joined her jihadist husband, Syed Farook, in carrying out last December’s mass-murder attack in San Bernardino (in which 14 people were killed and dozens wounded).

There is nothing secret about CVE. Willful blindness is right there in black and white.

Categories: Countering violent extremism, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Islamic terrorism, Islamists in America, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama and law enforcement, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia law
Tags: Countering violent extremism, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Islamic terrorism, Islamists in America, Obama and Islamic terrorism, Obama and law enforcement, Obama and Muslim Brotherhood, Sharia law

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16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won

February 6, 2017

16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won, The Federalist, Daniel Payne, February 6, 2017

mediaandtrump

Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”

The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.

How we will get out of this is anyone’s guess. We might not get out of it, not so long as Trump is president of these United States. We may be up for four—maybe eight!—long years of authentic fake news media hysteria. It is worth cataloging at least a small sampling of the hysteria so far. Only when we fully assess the extent of the media’s collapse into ignominious ineptitude can we truly begin to reckon with it.

Since Trump’s election, here’s just a small sampling of fake news that our media and our journalist class have propagated.

Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates

After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.

Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.

At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.

At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”

She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.

November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory

On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New YorkMagazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”

The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.

It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.

At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.

December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure

At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Wellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Wellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”

The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.

The problem? The central scandalous claims of Wellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”

Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.

January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball

On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.

January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’

Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.

To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.

January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy

On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”

January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter

During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.

How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).

The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.

Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.

January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department

On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.

The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.

There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).

More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.

As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.

January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair

On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.

The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.

January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax

Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.

January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake

Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for a theoretical justices Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.

Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.

January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie

On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”

Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.

The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.

There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.

February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico

On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”

Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Lurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.

February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions

Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.

A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.

At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.

In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”

February 2: Renaming Black History Month

At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.

The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.

February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures

On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.

The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).

Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).

The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)

As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.

The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.

As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”

Maybe It’s Time to Stop Reading Fake News

Surely more incidents have happened since Trump was elected; doubtlessly there are many more to come. To be sure, some of these incidents are larger and more shameful than others, and some are smaller and more mundane.

But all of them, taken as a group, raise a pressing and important question: why is this happening? Why are our media so regularly and so profoundly debasing and beclowning themselves, lying to the public and sullying our national discourse—sometimes on a daily basis? How has it come to this point?

Perhaps the answer is: “We’ve let it.” The media will not stop behaving in so reckless a manner unless and until we demand they stop.

That being said, there are two possible outcomes to this fake news crisis: our media can get better, or they can get worse. If they get better, we might actually see our press begin to hold the Trump administration (and government in general) genuinely accountable for its many admitted faults. If they refuse to fix these serial problems of gullibility, credulity, outrage, and outright lying, then we will be in for a rough four years, if not more.

No one single person can fix this problem. It has to be a cultural change, a kind of shifting of priorities industry-wide. Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.

Most of us are hoping devoutly for the former. But not even a month into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the outlook is dim.

Categories: Faked news, Media and Donald Trump, media bias, President Trump
Tags: Faked news, Media and Donald Trump, media bias, President Trump

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European Conservative Parties Are Not ‘Far Right’

February 6, 2017

European Conservative Parties Are Not ‘Far Right’, American Thinker, James Lewis, February 6, 2017

I keep reading in the European fakestream media that the new upsurge in conservative democratic parties in Europe all comes down to fascists and paleo-Nazis. They are not – any more than Republicans are fascists and Nazis.

Euro-conservatives sound just like you, me, and Donald Trump. They talk about freedom and democracy. They talk about tolerance for democratic parties but not for totalitarian killers. They talk about taking control of their borders again. Their college campuses have been subverted and turned upside-down, just as ours have. Their police forces often turn against normal people on behalf of murderous barbarians, just as ours are being pushed to do.

But normal people in Europe have finally gathered the courage to call the enemy by name.

Europe’s media constantly smear democratic conservatives as “extreme right” or “fascist.” That is a vicious lie, as you can hear for yourself by listening to video speeches on the web by European conservatives.

If you don’t happen to understand their languages, you can listen to Nigel Farage, who sounds just like Trump.

But notice that the Fakestream in Europe can never allow conservatives to speak, not without smearing them in the same sentence. Trump is a madman according to the media elites in Europe. But then their own democratic populists are also ready to go for a new Hitler, if you listen to the establishment media.

I’ve just listened to one of the heroic figures of the resistance, Geert Wilders, who has twice been arrested and convicted of “hate speech” by the neo-fascist establishment in the Netherlands. Over there, the “mainstream media” have lost all credibility, just like the Washington Post and the New York Times. Over there, normal people are sick and tired – and scared – of the pile of lies they have to listen to every day. They no longer believe a word of it.

Before Trump was elected, European conservatives were forbidden to speak out, accused of Nazism or racism. Today, they are finding their true voices.

Democratic conservatism has gone international – not as a centralized ideology, but as a commonsense revolt by ordinary people for their ordinary freedoms. Patriotism is coming back over there as well, and no, that doesn’t mean a return to the Kaiser’s militarism in Germany, or Napoleonic grandeur in France. It means a return to normalcy.

When Euro-conservatives give speeches, Donald Trump gets tremendous applause. Trump’s victory in the U.S. has given courage to tens of millions of Europeans, who have been afraid to speak out. Some have been jailed, and all have been smeared in the public media. But they are not going to take it anymore.

You’ll never, ever read this in the New York Times. Or in the WaPo. Or in the highly concentrated “news” cartel that controls what most Americans hear.

Marxo-jihadist globalism is always the same, here and there. And just like here, ordinary people are outraged and ready to take to the streets. They are not fascists, and they are certainly not Nazis. They are not totalitarians of any kind at all. They are true democrats with a small d.

Ordinary, healthy patriotism is in. Sensible talk is in. Crazy fascism can be heard coming only from the totalitarian left, just as in our country.

The treacherous establishments in Europe are closely allied to the corrupting forces of jihad and the Soros left. Young, empty-headed kids are being indoctrinated there, just as they are here. Trained ruckus-makers in black masks are taking the side of jihad over there, just as here.

Everyday Europeans are very scared, because their governments no longer protect them from thugs and rapists. Women are afraid to show their blond hair (or any other color hair, for that matter).

The same fascist smear tactics we see in Berkeley today are being used in Europe. And no wonder: The sources of political poison are the same left-jihadist Axis of Evil we see in this country. These are people who have been told by Alinsky types like Obama and Hillary that the American middle class is “the enemy.” And today, when they run the Organs of Propaganda, they are persuading airheads on colleges around the country that their parents and grandparents, normal Americans, are indeed their enemy.

Obama is an expert Alinsky ruckus-maker. The term “community organizer” used to be called “Communist agitator,” when Communists were not afraid to be labeled accurately, and agitation-propaganda is exactly what they do. The anti-Trump riots are organized by neo-Stalinists, who have never given up their quest for total power. They are not subtle about it.

The U.S. media are now completely corrupt, united in their goal of destroying Donald Trump. The Euro-media are exactly the same. But normal people don’t speak in a single voice. They speak in many voices. Democracy is unpredictable, and power cults around the world are starting to finally see it.

Categories: "Far right", Europe, European "democracy", European populism, Media and Donald Trump, President Trump, Protesting Trump, Trump agenda, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump effect
Tags: "Far right", Europe, European "democracy", European populism, Media and Donald Trump, President Trump, Protesting Trump, Trump agenda, Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump effect

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IDF fires at Hamas targets in response to Gaza rocket attack on Israel

February 6, 2017

Source: IDF fires at Hamas targets in response to Gaza rocket attack on Israel – Arab-Israeli Conflict – Jerusalem Post

ByJPOST.COM STAFF

06 February 2017 09:2

Projectile lands in southern Israel; none hurt.

Gaza Strip

Light streak trail is seen as a rocket is launched from the northern Gaza Strip towards Israel July 29, 2014. (photo credit:REUTERS)

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council in southern Israel on Monday morning.

Security forces were sweeping the area for remnants of the projectile. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in the attack.

The IDF fired tank rounds at Hamas targets in northern Gaza in response to the rocket fire, the military said. It was not immediately clear if any injuries were caused by the reprisal fire.

A senior IDF official told Channel 2 last week that Hamas has fully replenished its military capability it had lost following 2014’s Operation Protective Edge.

During an interview with the Israeli broadcaster, the official said that the terror organization had used the proceeding years since the 2014 offensive to work on its tunnels and shore-up its missile programs.

Self-made weapons from inside the Gaza Strip comprise a large part of Hamas’s missile stockpile. The official said the material for making of the weapons came through the Egyptian-controlled Rafah border crossing following peace talks between Hamas and Cairo.

The military assumption, the official noted, is that Hamas is not looking for a confrontation with Israel in the near future.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Hamas’s military wing said Tuesday that Israel’s concern with the organization’s network of clandestine terror tunnels was proof of Hamas’s success during the 2014 war.

The Hamas spokesperson sighted an anticipated report on Operation Protective Edge that is expected to contain scathing criticism of Israel’s military and political leadership.

“In the near future, there will be even larger forces that will fall,” the Hamas spokesperson said.

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Al Qaeda back in the crosshairs–and with good reason

February 6, 2017

Al Qaeda back in the crosshairs–and with good reason, Terror Trends Bulletin, Christopher W. Holton, February 5, 2017

map-al-qaeda-2015

There is growing evidence that, not only did Barack Obama allow the Islamic State caliphate to become established and metastasize on his watch, but he also looked the other way while Al Qaeda became resurgent.

Sean Durns over at the Washington Examiner has an article that summarizes how Al Qaeda has spread in recent years…

Al Qaeda, the group responsible for the worst terrorist attack in United States history, never really left. Instead, while news media coverage inordinately focused on the Islamic State, al Qaeda re-tooled and re-established itself for a new age.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of al Qaida’s death were greatly exaggerated. Anticipatory obituaries appeared after the death of al Qaida founder Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011. Then-President Barack Obama, for instance, said on Sept. 10, 2011 that al Qaeda was “on a path to defeat.” Similarly, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in July 2011 that the U.S. was “within reach of strategically defeating al Qaeda.”

But as terror analysts Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Bridget Moreng pointed out in an April 2015 op-ed, “The Islamic State’s offensive through Iraq and Syria last year has dominated the headlines, but the jihadist group that has won the most territory in the Arab world over the past six months is Al Qaeda.”

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/al-qaeda-is-back/article/2613929

As a result, not only has Donald Trump inherited the Islamic State caliphate, he has also inherited an Al Qaeda that is rebounding.

As Trump promised in his campaign, he is taking the war to the enemy. U.S. Special Operations Forces carried out a raid on an Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a raid that has been the subject of much partisan bickering.

The Leftist news media is predictably celebrating the raid as “botched,” which is typical of their ignorance of military operations. They have evidently grown used to drone strikes which kept national command authority’s image squeaky clean, but also failed to achieve much of anything, given the growth of both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. To put it mildly, the media is overeager to see the new administration fail and will report everything as a failure.

Nevertheless, the raid reportedly killed two senior AQAP Jihadists, Sultan al-Dhahab and Abd-al-Ra’uf al-Dhahab. It was sufficiently successful to prompt the leader of AQAP, Qasim Al-Raymi, to issue a call for revenge against the U.S.

The media is also all-too eager to buy into the enemy propaganda that the U.S. raid killed civilian women and children. There is no evidence either way and there is sufficient precedent for women and even children to act as combatants for Jihadist organizations, so if they were killed, they are simply casualties of war.

Bill Roggio at Long War Journal has a good report on the renewed campaign against Al Qaeda…

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2017/02/us-military-says-aqap-leaders-killed-in-raid.php

Categories: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Obama and Islamic terrorism
Tags: Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Obama and Islamic terrorism

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Climate “Science” Rocked by Another Scandal

February 5, 2017

Climate “Science” Rocked by Another Scandal, Power Line, John Hinderaker, February 5, 2017

A just-retired scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has blown the whistle on a scandal of epic proportions involving fake news ginned up by climate “scientists.” Dr. John Bates, who until the end of 2016 was one of NOAA’s top scientists, told the story to the Daily Mail:

The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

NOAA violated its own rules by publishing the report without subjecting it to required verification procedures–procedures that were designed by Dr. Bates himself.

His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.

Of all the “fake news” stories that emerged in the last two years, this is undoubtedly the most important. More:

NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.

Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.

The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.

This is just one of the tricks the NOAA “scientists” employed to exaggerate warming:

The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade. Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error was an upwards ‘adjustment’ of readings from fixed and floating buoys, which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so affecting temperature readings.

Dr Bates said: ‘They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.’

The Earth’s surface temperature record has been so hopelessly corrupted by “adjustments” made for political purposes by NOAA and other agencies that it likely can never be accurately reconstructed. This is a great loss to science. The Mail story suggests that evidence may have been destroyed to cover the tracks of NOAA’s activists:

Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: ‘I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.’

The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.

Sounds like they borrowed the computer from the IRS.

NOAA is a rogue, politicized agency, like so many others. It has defied a Congressional committee’s subpoena, and apparently lied to the committee:

NOAA not only failed, but it effectively mounted a cover-up when challenged over its data. After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.

Heads need to roll. Donald Trump has his work cut out for him, to put it mildly.

Categories: Climate change, Faked news, NOAA, Obama administration, Obama and climate change, Paris climate change agreement
Tags: Climate Change, Faked news, NOAA, Obama Administration, Obama and climate change, Paris climate change agreement

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Build, but shut up about it, says Trump

February 5, 2017

Build, but shut up about it, says Trump, Israel National News, Jack Engelhard, February 5, 2017

(“Not helpful in promoting peace. . . .” What, beyond the evacuation of all Jews from Israel, would be “helpful?” Israel has tried just about everything short of that. With every concession the Palestinians demand more; if they get it, they demand even more. The “peace process” is dead and Israel did not kill it. — DM)

Already a rift? No. Not exactly. But Israel needs to get some gambling smarts.

Trump is Trump and he already knows what he’ll do but keeps his cards folded. That’s the art of his deal.

For Trump the winning move is the element of surprise.

Israel’s leaders sometimes take their cue from the lovable fools of Chelm. No surprises. They tell the enemy every move ahead of time which is bad poker and bad politics, so wrong that it’s got Trump and his team rattled and irked. Now we hear that Trump is unhappy about more homes being built within “the settlements.”

Earlier the settlements were okay. Why the mixed signals?

Most likely, Trump is bothered that Israel keeps announcing each and every plan weeks in advance, which allows the entire world to gear up in protest.

Rather, Trump says, shut up and build. That sounds more like Trump who is asking Israel to play smart and to move only when the table is in your favor.

“Not helpful in promoting peace,” said his White House spokesman today – and where have we heard that before?

Never from Trump. So something’s gone wrong and I don’t think it’s entirely Trump’s fault, nor do I think here we go again. He’s Obama all over again.

That won’t happen. But over the years some of us have noticed Israel’s habit of going public each time it hires an architect. As for me, it’s been an astonishment how Israel telegraphs every move, particularly when it comes to housing in Judea and Samaria. Who asked?

What other country does this? What other country stops the presses to announce — Hello World, We’re Building More Homes.

Got a problem with that? – and in unison the world says yes.

That IS the wisdom of Chelm if you expect any other outcome, and that has to be the cause of Trump’s annoyance. Immediately Israel’s High Court gets into the act along with the “peace groups” and Haaretz and The New York Times and a day later France invites 70 countries for a Paris summit to denounce the Jewish State.

That leaves Trump boxed in and he says so himself, that it cramps his style and his space to maneuver.

How many times a day can he take on the entire world, as he’s been doing, and now must carry Israel on his back – as he has it figured.

All for no good reason except that Israeli leaders do not know when to keep quiet. Instead they keep rubbing it in and keep asking for trouble.

The trouble comes when they speak loudly and then expect the United States to carry the big stick…like stopping the UN from another 2334.

Have we forgotten that personally Trump owes us nothing? The overwhelming majority of American Jews voted against him. He knows this.

The same majority protests his partial travel restrictions, which means that while he wants to keep anti-Semites out, we want them in.

Even pockets of Israelis were shown on television protesting Trump’s immigration pause. That hurt and it sure wasn’t “helpful” in terms of friendship.

Now we hear that Trump favors a two-state solution and where did he get that if not from Benjamin Netanyahu who keeps promoting that dangerous nonsense.

We can’t ask Trump to be more Jewish than the Jews or more Israeli than the Israelis.

Our only claim on Trump is that we are family. The United States and Israel share the same values.

Only Israel can be counted on through thick or thin throughout the region and he needs Israel as much as Israel needs him.

Trump knows this. But he’s asking Israel to play by new rules, which is to shut up and deal only when the time is right.

Categories: Israeli settlements, Trump and Israel
Tags: Israeli settlements, Trump and Israel

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A Strange Ruling From a Strange Judge

February 5, 2017

A Strange Ruling From a Strange Judge, Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, February 4, 2017

Jerome Woehrle at Liberty Unyielding provides a revealing look at James Robart, the federal judge who enjoined President Trump’s executive order temporarily restricting entry to the U.S. from seven highly problematic nations. Scott has observed that Judge Robart’s opinion is nearly devoid of legal analysis. Woehrle expands on this criticism:

Judge James Robart’s order has no legal basis, and barely pretends to. [The] order against Trump sheds little light on his thinking.

But at an earlier hearing on Washington State’s motion for a temporary restraining order, he asked what rational basis the government had for restricting entry from the seven violence-wracked countries covered by Trump’s order: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

As NPR notes, these seven countries were previously singled out by Congress for milder restrictions on visas. Congress did so after terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, in a 2015 law tightening up the Visa Waiver Program that was signed by President Obama.

Critics argue that there was no rational basis for restricting travel from these countries but not other countries in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. This argument is silly, since America has deep economic links and security ties with Saudi Arabia that it lacks with the seven countries subject to the 2015 law and Trump’s executive order. America need not antagonize a key ally when it takes steps to increase border security.

Perhaps for this reason, Judge Robart’s order in State of Washington v. Trump does not even make this argument, simply suggesting that for some unexplained reason the executive order may violate the “Constitution.”

The seven countries at issue are: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Iran. The first six are all failed, chaotic states that have produced terrorists. The problems with effectively vetting people from these countries are obvious.

The seventh country is Iran. It exports terrorism. Though not a failed state, our relations with the mullahs are such that effective vetting may be well nigh impossible.

Saudi Arabia is neither a failed state nor a nation with which we have essentially no relations. Same with Pakistan. We can expect, or at least plausibly hope for, meaningful assistance from the government in vetting potential entrants to the U.S.

I’m not saying that this provides the assurance we need, but it does provide a higher level of assurance than we have with the seven nations on the list. Or so it rationally can be argued.

Thus, even apart from what Congress did in the 2015 law tightening up the Visa Waiver Program, there is a rational basis for picking the seven countries and not states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Woehrle continues:

To cover up the embarrassing weakness of Judge Robart’s temporary restraining order, reporters at the Washington Post and elsewhere have trumpeted the fact that Robart was nominally appointed by President George W. Bush. They have done this to suggest that his ruling must have merit, because otherwise he would not have ruled against a President of the same party as the man who appointed him.

But this is misleading, since Robart is a staunchly liberal judge whose appointment was effectively forced on Bush by liberal Senator Patty Murray in 2004, when Washington State had two liberal Senators.

How did this happen? Woehrle explains:

Robart’s appointment as a federal judge was championed by liberal Senators like Patty Murray, who used Senatorial custom allowing senators to veto Presidential appointments of trial judges to obtain the appointment of liberal trial judges like Robart in Washington State. An April 13, 2005 press release by Murray touts Robart’s appointment as the “bipartisan” result of using a state commission to select federal trial judges in Washington, whose appointment Bush then rubberstamped.

This Senatorial veto power, known as the “blue slip,” is an old tradition, dating back to at least 1917, that lets senators have a say on which trial judges are appointed to courts in their home state.

On the bench, Robart has lived up to Patty Murray’s expectations. He has a history of not just liberal rulings, but oddball ones. Woehrle quotes one observer who said this about the judge:

Judge Robart. . .is the same guy who issued [a] bizarre college sexual assault ruling. . .He ruled a falsely-accused male student could not depose or obtain relevant documents from the female student who got him expelled because that would traumatize her (never mind that it was SHE who performed a sex act on him when he was blacked out, meaning that if anyone was guilty of sexual assault it was HER). Reason’s article about it can be found here.

Robart also bellowed “Black Lives Matter” in open court, as the Daily Caller noted (in a context in which it made little sense).

Robart’s ruling on Trump’s executive order doesn’t even attempt to make sense. It is basically ipse dixit.

Unfortunately, the left-wing Ninth Circuit is unlikely to disturb anything Robart does on this matter. And in the Supreme Court, there are probably four votes (minimum) in favor of stopping the Trump order.

Four votes would be enough to affirm the Ninth Circuit right now. That’s why Scott’s immigration lawyer friend was wise to say “Get on with the Gorsuch confirmation. Fast.”

Categories: "Muslim ban", Executive order, Refugees, Trump and refugees, Trump presidency, U.S. courts
Tags: "Muslim ban", Executive order, Refugees, Trump and refugees, Trump presidency, U.S. courts

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