Archive for the ‘2016 elections’ category

Saudis Kept Two Terror Groups Off U.S. List

June 20, 2016

Saudis Kept Two Terror Groups Off U.S. List, Front Page MagazineMatthew Vadum, June 20, 2016

Hillary and friend

Clinton protégé and campaign vice-chairman Huma Abedin, her parents, and her siblings all have intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim World League has reportedly taken in more than $1.3 billion since 1962 from the Saudi government to promote Wahhabism. The League, warns Andrew C. McCarthy, is the Brotherhood’s “principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.”

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The Saudi Arabian government apparently had so much clout with previous U.S. administrations that they refused to designate as terrorist organizations two terror-funding Islamofascist groups linked to Huma Abedin, now the vice-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Abedin is joined at the hip to Hillary. She is to Mrs. Clinton what Valerie Jarrett is to President Obama.

That two deadly terrorist groups avoided proper scrutiny for years is a chilling reminder of how close Mrs. Clinton’s political network is to the brutal Muslim Brotherhood, possibly the Left’s favorite Islamist operation. It also underlines the extent to which Islamist enemies of the United States have infiltrated the American political establishment. And it takes on added importance now that polls show the pathologically dishonest Alinskyite radical who wrote the communitarian manifesto It Takes A Village has a significant lead over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Sifting through archived media reports, Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan discovered it was known in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks that the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and its parent entity the Muslim World League (MWL), both of which are directly funded by Saudi authorities, were financial backers of al-Qaeda.

“The Saudis have probably done more to penetrate Al Qaeda than any other foreign intelligence service, but Al Qaeda in turn has penetrated the Saudi regime,” Newsweek reported the month after 9/11.

Although the IIRO, whose website calls the group the International Islamic Relief Organization of Saudi Arabia (IIROSA), and MWL “have been used by bin Laden to finance his operations,” they were “left off the list of groups sanctioned by the United States last week, U.S. officials hinted … in order to avoid embarrassing the Saudi government.”

The League acknowledges on its website that it is “engaged in propagating the religion of Islam” and “elucidating its principles and tenets.” It also engages in strategic lying, known in the Islamic world as taqiyya. The League “is well known for rejecting all acts of violence and promoting dialogue with the people of other cultures,” its website claims, adding that it does “not intend to undermine, dominate or practice hegemony over anyone else.”

It claims on the site that it has “external centers,” “external offices,” and “Islamic centers” in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Congo, Denmark, Egypt, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Malaysia, Mozambique, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, United Kingdom, and other countries.

IIRO describes itself as “a charity organization emanating from the Muslim World League.”

Its annual report from 2011/2012 indicates that “thousands of mosques have been built with an average of one mosque a day” and that it has “1,222 staff” worldwide. Under its “Holy Qur’an and Da’wa Program” it has “8,044 male and female students memorizing Qur’an and learning Islamic studies in 306 centres and Qur’an circles.” IIRO has “304 Qur’an teachers and supervisors” in “these centres in 29 countries around the world” and sponsors “338 Islamic preachers” in those 29 countries.

Clinton protégé and campaign vice-chairman Huma Abedin, her parents, and her siblings all have intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim World League has reportedly taken in more than $1.3 billion since 1962 from the Saudi government to promote Wahhabism. The League, warns Andrew C. McCarthy, is the Brotherhood’s “principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.”

Abedin, who is married to disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), has never publicly explained her disturbing connections to the people who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 or why, despite those ties, she ought to be trusted with state secrets. And when courageous politicians like former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) have tried to sound the alarm about who Abedin really is, they have been relentlessly mocked by the media and politicians from both parties. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) famously suffered from an acute outbreak of faux chivalry on the Senate floor when congressional colleagues dared to ask legitimate questions about Abedin’s loyalty to this country.

Few recall that when Bill Clinton was president in 1996, the CIA believed the International Islamic Relief Organization helped to underwrite six terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan. Harper’s reported in 2004 that the former head of IIRO’s office in the Philippines, who happened to be Obama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, “had been linked to plots to ‘target the pope and U.S. airlines.’”

The year 1996 was also eventful for Abedin. That year the young Michigan-born woman returned to the U.S. after years of living with her jihadist parents and soaking up the militant Islamic culture of Saudi Arabia. She promptly began working for then-first lady Hillary as an intern in the White House. At the same time Abedin was a member of the executive board of the George Washington University chapter of the Muslims Students Association, which was created by the MWL in the 1960s. In 1996 Abedin also began working as assistant editor at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an Islamist publication of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA).

The Institute was founded in 1979 by the entrepreneurial Islamist Abdullah Omar Naseef who at the time was vice president of the prestigious King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. Naseef, who became MWL secretary-general in 1983, hired the late Dr. Zyed Abedin, Huma’s father, as managing editor of the Journal, and the Abedins relocated to the repressive Saudi kingdom. Huma’s mother is the publication’s editor-in-chief and her brother and sister also work there as editors.

The Harper’s article from 12 years ago added that the U.S. intelligence community believed MWL employees took part in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Even though both MWL and IIRO funded al-Qaeda, Newsweek reported in October 2001, the Bush administration “left the two organizations off the list of designated terrorist groups in order to spare the Saudi government from embarrassment.” It’s not clear why the Clinton administration suppressed the truth about the two organizations.

Stranahan is optimistic that despite the frantic lies of the Left, the facts about Hillary and Huma will receive proper attention in the current election cycle.

“Defenders of Clinton and Abedin have attempted to spin concerns about Abedin’s disturbing connections as a crazed right-wing conspiracy theory, but the facts are coming out, and with America focused on the presidential race and terrorism, it is just a matter of time before the truth comes out.”

Meanwhile, even as the nation grieves for the 49 innocent Americans gunned down June 12 by Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., members of the media seem blissfully unaware that for five years Hillary Clinton had a real live jihad-loving terrorist on the payroll at her family foundation.

Gehad el-Haddad, an Islamic terrorist leader who jumped straight from his job at the terrorist-friendly international cash-for-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation to a post with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, received a life sentence back home last year for seditious Islamist activities.

The professional propagandist may have learned about forcing Sharia law on Egyptians while he was “city director,” a senior communications post, at the Clintons’ charity from August 2007 to August 2012. (Note: Gehad is the Egyptian version of the Arabic word jihad.) Haddad was the lead English-language spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood and a frequent apologist for the since-ousted President Mohamed Morsi’s violent crackdowns on civil liberties. He put his spin doctoring skills to use downplaying Brotherhood supporters’ attacks on women and children.

Hillary Clinton, of course, headed the U.S. Department of State during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that ousted longtime U.S. ally and anti-Islamist Hosni Mubarak and cleared the way for Morsi, an Obama ally.

It beggars belief that Clinton didn’t know about Haddad’s employment with the Brotherhood. A mere month after Haddad quit his Clinton Foundation job for full-time employment with the Brotherhood in 2012, Morsi received an invitation to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative, a high-profile project of the foundation.

These things are all just incredible coincidences, Clinton’s defenders will insist.

Hillary is Best Qualified to Finish Imam Obama’s Work

June 19, 2016

Hillary is Best Qualified to Finish Imam Obama’s Work, Dan Miller’s Blog, June 19, 2016

(The views suggested in this post are mine and are not necessarily those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

This may be the only time He has been totally candid: 

Obama death to America

Via e-mail:

In Chaos Theory, the “butterfly effect” is the name given to the sensitive connection between initial conditions in which an insignificant event in one state in non-linear systems, can result in sometimes catastrophic events in the universal state.

In other words, although unlikely, it is possible for a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas to cause a typhoon in the Japanese Sea.

Case in point, in mid-20th Century America, a loose 18-year-old hippie female in a Honolulu college had sex with an older, alcoholic Kenyan man on a student visa, who had a wife and child back in Africa. And this less than significant event started the collapse and dissolution of the United States of America.

Imam Obama has done a masterful job of bringing America’s collapse and dissolution to fruition. He has emasculated the Republican Party (with its bipartisan support) and helped to Make Islamism Great Again. He has worked diligently to bring peace to the entire Middle East by recognizing that the problem is not Islamism but the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He knows that the true objective of the Muslim Brotherhood is universal brotherhood (and sisterhood, of course, provided that they don’t mingle). Although much remains to be done, He has directed Hillary along His path of righteousness. Like Imam Obama, She knows all that any kafir should know about Islam — that we need more of it to calm our violent emotions. No one is half as great as Hillary!

Here’s how She will overcome all obstacles to finishing Obama’s work:

Hillary is a very brave, combat tested foreign policy expert — nay, visionary.

She honed Her foreign policy expertise through heroic efforts with Imam Obama to combat anti-Islamist videos.

blame video

She is always truthful, as She has told us.

She is, like, totally trustworthy.

Trust-More-than-Hillary-copy

Only a racist, misogynist or other bigot would consider Hillary and the other great people and things in the above graphic untrustworthy. Hillary knows better because She is a tolerant woman.

Be not concerned when you hear anything about Her that seems terrible; it isn’t. Everything bad said or written about Her is solely because of a vast right wing conspiracy. Vile Republicans and others are, and long have been, out to get Her and Her beloved Bill; it won’t work because She is a Woman!

She has been vetted by all media which reject the vast right wing conspiracy and its lies.

Media-Assymetry-copy

Propping-Hillary-copy

Because She was often poor – even when She left the White House — and didn’t know where to find her next mortgage payment or meal, She feels the pain of the little people. They love Her.  She is a woman!

Poor Hillary

Lots of very rich folks support her and empathize with the little people because they too know what it means to be poor and hungry.

Billionaires

Arab nations also support Her, for nearly the same reason — they are adherents to the true Religion of Peace and want to share their peace and bounty with the less fortunate.

Hillary Clinton Middle East donors

Pay to play

Misogynist Trump — he of the abominable orange hair — calls Her “Crooked Hillary.” That’s disgusting! There is nothing crooked about her; Somebody needs to pay the Bill bills. She cares! She Is A Woman!

Conclusions

Hillary fighting for us

The election is coming! Vote early and often for Hillary! Down with Hillaryphobia! Save the Religion of Peace! Down with Islamophobia! Down with the vast right wing conspiracy! She is a Woman!

Hillary! Hillary! Hillary Can! Hillary will Win!

She’s our fan; if we can’t do it, nobody can!

On the other hand, er, I mean, but on the other hands,

The ‘Never Trump’ Murder-Suicide Pact

June 17, 2016

The ‘Never Trump’ Murder-Suicide Pact, Front Page MagazineDavid Horowitz, June 17, 2016

Never Trump

[T]he really big problem remains that of the Republican leadership, which thinks that “We’re stuck with Trump but we won’t dump him!” is an appropriate battle cry. As we all know, the Democrats are vicious, unprincipled attack dogs with a kept and unprincipled media in their camp. Passivity in the face of this blitzkrieg is, in practice, no different than a white-flag surrender. Paul Ryan summed up Republican fatuity in his answers to media questions in the wake of Orlando about whether he’s still supporting Trump. Ryan’s answer: he would be defending Republican principles in this election. Well, Paul, principles aren’t running in this election. Candidates are. And unless Republicans rally around Trump, and Trump beats Hillary, Republican principles are going down with him.

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Reprinted from Breitbart.com

Barack Obama delivers nuclear weapons and $150 billion to America’s mortal enemy in the Middle East – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends his betrayal; Hillary Clinton violates the Espionage Act and delivers classified secrets, including information on an impending drone attack, to America’s enemies – and every Democrat to a man and woman defends her. Obama and Clinton lie about matters of war and peace – and every progressive publicly swears they are telling the truth.

But when Donald Trump insinuates the president is a man of uncertain loyalties, Republican leaders back away from him. When Trump proposes fighting “radical Islam,” securing America’s borders, stopping unvetted immigration from Muslim terrorist states, surveilling mosques, and scrutinizing the families of terrorist actors, Republicans join Democrats in denouncing him, or take an uncomfortable distance or maintain a silence that leaves him to fend for himself.

The left is blaming Christians, Republicans, and guns for the Orlando slaughter. The president and Hillary are claiming that ISIS is on the run – a lie flatly contradicted by the CIA director himself. They want to disarm Americans. If Hillary is elected, borders will stay open, and protecting Muslims will take priority over fighting Islam’s holy war against us.

In other words, Democrat betrayers of America are on the attack, while Republican leaders who claim to be patriots are on the run. Where, to take one example, is Ted Cruz? He claims to be a patriot and care about the Constitution, but he is AWOL — sulking like Achilles in his tent over personal slights he can’t get past to fight for his country’s survival. The Republican leader of the Senate and his second-in-command have both announced they will not participate in the presidential election, while the leader of the House makes clear his extreme embarrassment over Trump’s proposals to establish immigration policies appropriate to a nation under siege. This is the sad state of the Republican forces in retreat in an election campaign that will decide the fate of our country.

There are actually two wars we are engaged in– one with the Islamic caliphate and the other with an American left that refuses to recognize the enemy we face or the magnitude and nature of the threat. In this internal war, too many on the right have taken a course whose only practical effect can be seen as a betrayal of their cause. Erick Erickson has summed up the view of the Republican renegades in this succinct phrase: “We are in the midst of a murder-suicide pact that will be our ruination.”

This is, in fact, a precise description of what the #NeverTrump right is up to. But in Erickson’s inversion of reality, it is “the Republican Party [that] intends to murder the nation and commit suicide along the way.” What Erickson and his fellow saboteurs, led by Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol, want is for the Republican Party to block Trump and repudiate the record number of Republican primary voters who nominated him. This would actually be a Republican suicide in November – one that would indeed “murder the nation.”

Although the defection of the Republican leadership from the field of battle is still ongoing, there has been a break in the ranks of the #NeverTrump spoilers. Two of their leading intellectual figures, Hugh Hewitt and Andy McCarthy, have finally come to realize not just the futility of their efforts but their destructiveness as well. For the sake of the nation, let’s hope that there are a lot more such reversals on the way.

Meanwhile, the really big problem remains that of the Republican leadership, which thinks that “We’re stuck with Trump but we won’t dump him!” is an appropriate battle cry. As we all know, the Democrats are vicious, unprincipled attack dogs with a kept and unprincipled media in their camp. Passivity in the face of this blitzkrieg is, in practice, no different than a white-flag surrender. Paul Ryan summed up Republican fatuity in his answers to media questions in the wake of Orlando about whether he’s still supporting Trump. Ryan’s answer: he would be defending Republican principles in this election. Well, Paul, principles aren’t running in this election. Candidates are. And unless Republicans rally around Trump, and Trump beats Hillary, Republican principles are going down with him.

Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam

June 16, 2016

Trump rattles Obama on radical Islam, Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr, June 16, 2016

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

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It has been a while since President Barack Obama was so visibly angry on camera.

When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Obama lost his restrained cool composure for a few seconds. When discussing a few cases in which African-American men or teens were shot by police, he was also a bit enraged, noting that any of those boys could have been his son (as could of course the 6,000 or more African-American men and boys shot by other African-American men on the streets of American cities each year, who go unmentioned by the president except as a prop to support gun control).

Then came the Orlando slaughter of members of the LGBT community over the weekend, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump lost no time tying the attack to the Obama administration’s policy failures. This was simply too much for the president, whose tantrum suggested an inability to accept criticism (especially not from Trump) or admit failure.

Trump’s critique of the Obama/Hillary Clinton policy on immigration, domestic intelligence gathering, fighting the Islamic State group (or ISIL as the president insists on calling the organization) and protecting homeland security clearly struck a nerve. Trump laid out what should be obvious: Radical Islamists despise gays, Jews and Christians. Islam as generally practiced in large swaths of the globe is extremely bigoted and accepting of violence against non-believers. The West has a much bigger problem than 100,000 active jihadis spread around the globe. There are many millions of radical Islamists.

Obama is fiercely protective of his legacy and actions, and seemingly unable to deal with being reminded about parts of his record that are nothing short of abject failures. Has Obama kept the American homeland safer than his predecessor? Has Obama’s withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan led to a more peaceful region? Has Obama contributed to the carnage in Syria, Iraq and Libya by his actions or inactions? Has Obama demonstrated weakness abroad and at home by failing even to identify that we face not just random terrorists, but killers tied to a radical strand of Islam, which has rapidly gained adherents all over the Muslim world the last half century, and whose members now control a significant number of Muslim majority countries, including our newest ally Iran? Are people really stupid enough to buy into an argument that the country will be safer and groups like Islamic State more easily defeated so long as Obama never says the words radical Islam? Is that the key recruiting tool that groups like Islamic State have been lacking so far, hence their failure to attract new holy warriors from the West or the Middle East?

Obama’s temper tantrum on Tuesday was much more about reacting to criticism of his record than Trump’s controversial call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to America. Part of the Obama attack on Trump was also of course a feature of a presidential campaign, in which Democrats now have their presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Full fire on Trump, whether or not he says something new, will be part of the daily news cycle for the next five months, highlighted by a liberal press corps worshipful and adoring of both Obama and Clinton. The press is behaving this year as if it is doing sacred work by preventing Trump from winning.

Trump’s address in New Hampshire on Monday occurred less than two days after the Orlando mass murder committed by an American-born Muslim, who shot people in the head at short range while simultaneously declaring his allegiance to Islamic State and talking to police during the siege. He was married to a Palestinian woman who helped him scout out targets and dropped him off at the club prior to the attack, but never considered alerting authorities, and who may be indicted as an accomplice for the slaughter. His father claims to be the president of Afghanistan and states that his son was angered when he saw two gay men kissing on a street in Miami. The father says his son’s actions were unnecessary, since God will deal with gays. Afghanistan, the birthplace of Mateen’s parents, is one of the many Muslim majority countries where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. Among the family members, the father rates as the “moderate Muslim” — he is O.K. with dead gays, but did not personally kill them or facilitate their murder.

The facts above are all pretty well known, including that Mateen was on the FBI radar as a possible threat twice earlier. But these facts have been utterly ignored as part of the ferocious pushback from the Obama administration and the Left to explain what happened. This is a troublesome attack for the Left — a group of individuals, mostly Latino members of the LGBT community in Orlando, were gunned down by a Muslim. Muslims and gays are two core constituency groups for the Democratic Party, the party that invented identity politics and believes it can win campaigns now and in the future by stroking the various racial/religious/ethnic/nationality groups that lean their way.

The pushback has been designed as a misdirection strategy, to make this horrible attack about anything but radical Islam. The killer was gender-confused. He was a lone wolf. He was deranged. Christians hate gays too (Sally Kohn) and their rhetoric probably inspired the killer (the ACLU). All religions have violent members (Julia Ioffe). This could not have happened had there been stricter gun controls in place in Florida (everybody in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media). This was gun violence, no different than Sandy Hook or Columbine.

So far, the pushback seems to be working. Unlike the primary campaign, when Trump seemed to have the airwaves to himself (good for audience size and advertising rates), now his critics are getting plenty of time and exposure to blast him, with favorable comments by major media personalities always preceding or following the political attacks on him by Obama or Clinton. Trump noted yesterday that Obama seemed angrier at him than he ever has been at terrorists who killed Americans. That is undoubtedly true. After every prior attack before San Bernardino last December, the president could show up at the funeral ceremony, express his sympathies, call for all of us to love one another and heal, and bash the National Rifle Association and Republicans for resisting commonsense gun laws. San Bernardino upset the pattern: The killers were Muslims, and the victims were not a core Democratic constituency, but really a cross-sample of the community. Obama skipped an appearance after this attack.

Americans feel less safe today than they did eight years ago. It is likely that Israeli-type security measures to guard public places will be far more prominent in years to come, especially given that there may be liability exposure for negligence if such places do not hire guards and attacks then occur.

But Israel’s lesson is more than just the need for security — it is that vigilance is a permanent feature of our modern, open societies. A few killers can do immense damage, and in America there is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.

Are Democrats Winning the Political Battle over Islamic Terror?

June 15, 2016

Are Democrats Winning the Political Battle over Islamic Terror?, Power LineJohn Hinderaker, June 15, 2016

In the wake of the terrorist attack in Orlando, battle lines were clearly drawn. Donald Trump claimed credit for sounding warnings about Islamic terrorism and called, once again, for a suspension of immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton expressed outrage at Trump’s reaction and doubled down on the claim that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. That, together with the assertion that being selective about immigration is “not who we are.”

My instinct was that Trump decisively won the political battle. (I also think he is right as a matter of policy, of course.) However, early poll results suggest that assessment may be wrong. A CBS News poll out this morning says that most Americans agree with Barack Obama, not Trump:

A CBS News poll conducted in the days since the attack finds 51 percent of those surveyed said they did not like the way Trump was handling the shooting. … Just 25 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Trump’s reaction.

Ouch.

The numbers for President Barack Obama’s handling of the shooting are much better. Forty-four percent of Americans gave Obama high marks for his response, while 34 percent gave him an unfavorable rating.

I find that rather shocking, given that Trump was right when he said Obama was more angry at Trump than he was at the terrorist.

For whatever reason–perhaps merely the fact that her statements weren’t as widely covered as Trump’s and Obama’s–voters have a less clear reaction to Hillary’s response to the attack:

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s response rating was split, with 36 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable and 30 percent of respondents saying they did not know or did not answer.

These results are disturbing. Maybe they confirm, once again, that America is now a center-left country, rather than center-right. Maybe the cause is narrower: the Democrats have succeeded in demonizing Trump to the point that most people will disapprove, no matter what he says. Maybe the problem is partly due to the fact that a number of prominent Republicans have joined in the attacks on Trump, thereby isolating him. In any event, the fact (assuming this CBS poll is representative) most Americans’ first instinct is to side with Obama’s view of terrorism rather than Trump’s is discouraging. This should be Trump’s strongest suit.

RIGHT ANGLE: Political Correctness Kills 49 in Orlando

June 15, 2016

RIGHT ANGLE: Political Correctness Kills 49 in Orlando via YouTube, June 14, 2016

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise?

June 14, 2016

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise? Front Page MagazineCaroline Glick, June 14, 2016

tdy_gosk_mateen_160613.nbcnews-ux-1080-600

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.

Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.

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Is Islamic State opposed to gay marriage? Was anger at the US Supreme Court’s decision mandating recognition of homosexual marriage what prompted Omar Mateen to massacre fifty Americans at the gay nightclub in Orlando on Saturday night? What about gun control? Is Islamic State, to which Mateen announced his allegiance as he mowed down innocents like blades of grass, a libertarian group that abhors limitations on private ownership of firearms? In other words, are Islamic State and its fellow jihadists from Iran to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and al Qaida adjuncts of the Republican Party? Is Omar Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph at the helm of ISIS a social conservative, a libertarian and a card carrying member of the GOP, or just one of the three? Because President Barack Obama seems to think that this is the question most Americans should be asking. In his statement on the massacre on Sunday, Obama placed Mateen’s action in the context the partisan debate on gay rights and gun control.

With regard to the former, Obama said that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which was the site of the attack was more than a mere nightclub. It was, “a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds and to advocate for their civil rights.” In other words, Obama intimated, the victims were murdered because Mateen opposed all of those things, specifically.

Turning to gun rights, Obama said, “The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.” So as the president sees things, if you oppose limitations on firearm ownership, then you’re on Mateen’s side.

To say that Obama’s behavior is unpresidential is an understatement. His behavior is dangerous. It imperils the United States and its citizens.

Adolf Hitler did not go to war against Great Britain because he opposed parliamentary democracy. Hitler went to war against Britain because he wanted to rule the world and Britain stood in his way.

Just so, Islamic jihadists are not sides in America’s domestic policy debates about gun ownership and gay rights. Islamic jihadists like Mateen, the Tsarnaev brothers from Boston, Nidal Malik Hassan at Ft. Hood, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi at Garland, Texas, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino didn’t decide to slaughter innocents because of their passionate opposition to the liberal takeover of the US Supreme Court.

They killed Americans because they thought that doing so advances their goal of instituting the dominion of Islamic totalitarians across the world. They oppose freedom and democracy because democracy and freedom stand in the way of their goal to subordinate humanity to an Islamic caliphate.

Maybe Obama is right that more limitations on gun ownership would have limited Mateen’s ability to acquire the means to slaughter fifty people. Then again, maybe if guns were easier to come by, Mateen’s victims would have stopped him as soon as he started firing.

There are data supporting both views. A learned exchange about whether or not restrictions on gun ownership would advance or detract from the fight against Islamic violence would be worthwhile.

But to his disgrace, Obama is not remotely interested in having that debate. To the contrary, he has silenced it for nearly eight years. And as he made clear on Sunday, he has no intention of enabling such a discussion now.

The same Obama who was quick to blame permissive gun laws and anti-gay discrimination for the bloodbath, refused to mention the fact that Islam was Mateen’s expressed motive for committing the carnage.

While unforgivable, Obama’s silence on the cause of Mateen’s bloodbath was predictable. From the outset of his first term Obama has studiously avoided discussing the Islamic motivation that stands behind most of the terrorism in the US and throughout the world.

The most devastating outcome of Obama’s behavior is not necessarily the policies he has adopted to counter Islamic violence. Some of those policies are reasonable. Some of his policies are dangerous and destructive. And it is important to discuss each of them on its merits.

The most devastating, and at this point clearly premeditated, outcome of Obama’s refusal to name the cause of the violence is that he has made it illegitimate to discuss it. He has made it controversial for Americans to talk about Islamic supremacism, extremism, violence and war for world domination.

He has made substantive criticism of his policies tantamount to bigotry. And he has rendered the public debate about the most salient strategic threat to American lives, liberty and national security a partisan issue.

Today in Obama’s America, only Republicans use the terms Islamic terrorism or radicalism or jihad. Democrats pretend those things don’t exist.

Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.

Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.

This sort of talk, which makes opponents of leftist policies and ideology illegitimate, is arguably Obama’s dangerous legacy.

Obama’s efforts to render discussion of Islamic violence an illegitimate topic of debate is part of his larger policy of Europeanizing American politics.

For more than a generation, the Left’s policies have reigned supreme in Europe. For leftist ideologues and politicians, controlling policies was never sufficient though. To truly rule, they set out to control the public discourse in order to delegitimize their opponents.

And they succeeded. Today it is impossible for Europeans to openly debate the policies and social forces that affect their lives.

For instance, Islamic immigration is the most pressing public policy issue in Europe today. But due to the Left’s destruction of free speech through criminal statute and social pressure, in Europe today you cannot mention the word “Islamic” in the context of the public discourse on Islamic immigration without risking social exclusion and even criminal prosecution.

Many Americans have expressed alarm, surprise and dismay at Donald Trump’s success in winning the Republican nomination. They note, angrily and to a degree, justifiably, that Trump’s policies of nationalist isolationism and economic protectionism are antithetical to the pillars of the Republican Party.

But what this storm of protest misses is that Trump’s rise to power, and his prospects for defeating Hillary Clinton in November are not fueled by popular opposition to Obama’s foreign policies, or his economic policies per se. Trump’s supporters are attracted to the outspoken businessman for reasons that eclipse the partisan discussions of those issues.

Trump’s main attraction for his supporters – millions of whom voted in the Republican primaries for the first time process — is his willingness to attack Obama’s efforts to delegitimize his political opponents. Obama’s success in making his opponents toxic has caused millions of Americans to feel shut out from the national discourse and national life.

Trump’s supporters object to Obama’s Europeanization of American politics far more than they object to his health care policies or his counter-terror policies. They see in Trump a leader who is willing to “tell it like it is,” and they are captivated by this aspect of his personality. In Trump they see a means to regain their own voice in the public square.

Trump’s supporters understand that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando didn’t become slaughterhouse because Americans disagree on gun control or gay rights. They know that it became the scene of the largest mass murder in US history because Mateen, like his fellow jihadists believed that Allah wants his followers to kill innocents to advance the cause of Islamic world domination.

Trump’s supporters are angry that Obama has made stating the obvious illegitimate. And they are right to be angry.

America must not become Europe. And the most urgent step that must be taken to preserve America as America is to make discussing reality legitimate again.

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans

June 14, 2016

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, June 14, 2016

(Please see also, Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) — DM)

Trump on Jihad

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us? 

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We’ve gotten so used to politically correct obfuscation about Islam being a religion of peace that preaches tolerance and non-violence that Donald Trump’s words in his address Monday were startling: “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American. I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”

Trump continued: “This is not just a national security issue. It’s a quality of life issue. If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans — women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now.”

One may quibble about whether jihad violence and Sharia oppression in Islam are really “radical,” but the fact is that Donald Trump has become the first nominee of either party since 9/11 to reject the usual nonsense about how jihadis believe in and preach a twisted, hijacked version of the religion of peace. Even more importantly, Trump is now the first presidential candidate since maybe John Quincy Adams to recognize that the problem posed by Islam is not just restricted to the specter of violent jihad attacks, but is, given Sharia oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, very much, as Trump put it, a “quality of life issue.”

Trump declared his determination to prevent more jihad attacks such as the one in Orlando Saturday night above all by reiterating his proposal temporarily to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” CNN huffed: “Critics of Trump’s policies, however, have pointed out that the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in the U.S.”

Those critics are not being honest. What Trump actually said was that the Orlando jihad mass murderer was born “of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” He noted, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here,” and pointed out, quite rightly, that “we have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly….We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president. Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we’re letting into America. ”

Can any truthful person seriously dispute that? Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December 2, had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. government agencies. If the U.S. did not have a “dysfunctional immigration system,” she would never have been in the country in the first place. And neither would her husband, about whom Trump noted that he was “the child of immigrants from Pakistan and he brought his wife, the other terrorist from Saudi Arabia through another one of our easily exploited visa programs.”

Trump skewered Hillary Clinton for having “repeatedly refused to even say the words radical Islam until I challenged her yesterday.” He quoted her fatuous words: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” and opined “she’s in total denial, and her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world — true weakness.” Clinton wants, he said, “to take away American’s guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us. Let them come into the country, we don’t have guns. Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want….The bottom line is that Hillary supports policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into American and allow it to grow overseas, and it is growing.”

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us?

Trump declared: “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to really to screen.” Again, his point his sound: all those, including Hillary, who are busy excoriating Trump for the “racism” and “bigotry” of his immigration proposal have not bothered to suggest any alternative plan for preventing jihadis from entering the country. The bottom line, to borrow one of Trump’s pet phrases, is that Hillary and the rest of the political and media elites would rather see Americans subjected to jihad mass murder on a huge scale than do anything that is politically incorrect.

Another foray into political incorrectness in Trump’s speech was his insistence that the Muslim community in the U.S. has “to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith….The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was furious. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper claimed that “law enforcement authorities have repeatedly stated that they have tremendous cooperation from the Muslim community.” CAIR’s hypocrisy is astounding, as it has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal.

Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

This is the group criticizing Trump for noting that Muslim communities have not been any significant help in rooting out jihadis from among them?

Trump’s most revolutionary proposal was for an overhaul of our entire foreign policy establishment and the assumptions upon which it rests – assumptions that have led us into numerous blind alleys and failed initiatives. He said: “The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow like nobody has ever seen before. These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region. That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism not nation building. No more nation building. It’s never going to work.”

Indeed. It didn’t work in Iraq. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan. We have poured billions into Pakistan since 9/11 to help them fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Pakistani government has funneled a good deal of that money to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Trump said it: “And by the way we’ve spent almost $5 trillion over the years on trying to nation build in the Middle East and it has been complete and total disaster.” Yet despite the fact that its policies have failed again and again and again, the foreign policy establishment keeps reappointing and promoting those responsible for those failures, allowing them to make more mistakes in ever-larger arenas. But no candidate has ever challenged that establishment – until now.

Trump offered one more common sense that no establishment politician has thought to or dared to make: he suggested that there needs to be a reconfiguration of our alliances, which are still based on the Cold War. “NATO,” he said, “needs to change its focus and stop terrorism….America must unite the whole civilized world in the fight against Islamic terrorism.”

Indeed. The world is on fire courtesy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If America votes in November for more of the same, we will soon be engulfed in those flames as well. On Monday, Donald Trump outlined an unprecedentedly realistic plan for putting out the fire.

Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16)

June 13, 2016

Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) via YouTube

(Trump’s remarks begin at about eleven minutes into the video. — DM)

The Persistence of Mendacity (2)

June 12, 2016

The Persistence of Mendacity (2), Power LineScott Johnson, June 12, 2016

(Have we sunk so far that often repeated lies morph into truth, or simply don’t matter? — DM)

When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Dick Morris polled possible responses for Bill Clinton. Morris determined that truth was not an option if Clinton wanted to remain in office. “Well, we just have to win then,” Clinton concluded. Thus Clinton’s finger-wagging denial of what proved to be the facts of the case.

When Clinton was finally questioned under oath by one of the lawyers working in the office of the independent counsel operating under Kenneth Starr, Starr’s office had obtained and tested Monica’s blue dress. The lying was over, but Clinton nevertheless prevailed in the court of public opinion.

Clinton’s lying bought him the time he needed to survive. With the time public opinion came around to the new line he had adopted about the whole thing being a private matter. Clinton succeeded in lowering public opinion to meet his gargantuan needs.

The missus was instrumental in helping Clinton buy the time he needed to sway public opinion. In her infamous interview on the Today show after the scandal broke (transcript here), Hillary decried the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that she asserted was the real story of the scandal. That helped, of course, but the key point she asserted twice in the course of the interview was this. The charges against the Big Dog would not be “proven true.”

The missus took a similar tack in her FOX News Special Report interview with Bret Baier last week. Clinton persisted in the falsehoods and evasions have reflected the order of the day in the matter of her private server for official State Department business (video below at about 4:15).

Clinton’s response offered no subtlety. It did not depend on the meaning of “is.” The lying was rampant and obvious. It is the verbal equivalent of brute force.

“You said you sent or received nothing that was marked classified,” Baier notes, but she had signed a non-disclosure agreement providing that markings don’t matter. Classification inheres in the information, not the marking.

She purports not to recall that, but “the fact is, nothing that I sent or received was marked classified and nothing has been demonstrated to contradict that.”

Where have we heard that before? Ah, history!

We have seen every assertion of fact Clinton has made about the use of her private server fall by the way. As Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne now report, this one is no exception. Austin Bay has more here.

Does it make a difference at this point? As always in the scandals of Bill and Hillary, time allows us to accommodate ourselves to their lies. The best defense is the persistence of mendacity.

Today the editors of the New York Post take a look back at the week that was in Clinton emails. They have plenty of developments to review without even getting to the latest report from Herridge and Browne. The editors declare: “Hillary’s final email defense: Mass amnesia.” The Post editors ask whether anyone will hold the lady to account and provide this answer: “We strongly doubt the Obama Justice Department will indict the woman the president just endorsed to be his successor. Any ‘law enforcement’ action is up to the voters.”

I’ll take that as a “no.”