Posted tagged ‘Domestic policy’

Trump Promises American Greatness

July 22, 2016

Trump Promises American Greatness, Front Page MagazineMatthew Vadum, July 22, 2016

(Please see also, FULL SPEECH: Donald Trump Accepts Republican Nomination for President. — DM)

trump flag

CLEVELAND — Republican presidential candidate Donald John Trump gave a masterful acceptance speech last night as he savaged Hillary Clinton for her seemingly congenital corruption, assailed Barack Obama’s failed policies and the civil unrest he has fomented, and optimistically laid out an ambitious roadmap to the future.

Trump did an admirable job staying on-message.

“Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace,” he said. “We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.”

America is being overrun by “violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” he said. “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.”

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty is up nearly 50 percent compared to this point last year, he said. Although 180,000 illegal aliens with criminal records have been ordered deported, they “are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”

Border crossings by illegals are out of control and these aliens “are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.”

Some of these illegals have been murdering Americans and that’s fine with Hillary Clinton, he implied. Clinton supports lawless sanctuary cities and favors open borders, he said.

“I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored. The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

He said he would be “the law and order candidate.”

Americans need a straightforward assessment of the state of the nation, he said. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”

Black unemployment rates are sky-high and Latino poverty rates are higher than when President Obama took the oath of office in 2009, he said, adding that “another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.”

Household incomes have fallen and bad trade policies are hurting Americans, he said.

“President Obama has doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion and growing. Yet, what do we have to show for it? Our roads and bridges are falling apart, our airports are in Third World conditions, and 43 million Americans are on food stamps.”

America is humiliated abroad all the time, he said. “We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.”

And the nuclear nonproliferation pact with Iran gave the mullahs $150 billion “and gave us nothing.” The agreement “will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever negotiated.”

When Trump referenced the Muslim terrorist attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, the crowd went wild. “America is far less safe — and the world is far less stable — than when Obama made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of America’s foreign policy.”

As the crowd chanted “lock her up,” Trump responded, “let’s defeat her in November.”

Clinton set the Arab world on fire, he said. “This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness.”

Trump said he will “defeat the barbarians of ISIS and we’re going to defeat them fast.” He mourned the victims of Islamic terrorism in the U.S., saying the people murdered by a jihadist at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., were “49 wonderful Americans.” The terrorist targeted the “LGBTQ community … and we’re going to stop it.”

Trump said he would “protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology,” and delegates applauded him. He then said, “as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said. Thank you.”

America should not be importing refugees from Syria who cannot be properly screened, he said. “I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.”

Clinton, Trump said, refuses to put America first. But if he becomes president “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.” Those politicians who will not put America first ensure “that other nations will not treat America with respect, the respect that we deserve.”

Powerful special interests have rigged the system, he said. Clinton is the “puppet” of big business, elite media, and major donors, he said.

Clinton doesn’t want change, he said. “My message is that things have to change — and they have to change right now.”

Trump said he is determined to make life better for those who “have been ignored, neglected, and abandoned.” Laid-off factory workers hurt by bad trade deals “are the forgotten men and women of our country,” but “they’re not going to be forgotten long.”

“I am your voice,” Trump said to loud applause.

“When innocent people suffer because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws — or still worse, has sold out to some corporate lobbyist for cash — I am not able to look the other way.”

When Clinton illegally operates private Internet servers, lies about it over and over again, and destroys 33,000 emails “so the authorities can’t see her crime,” and she gets away with it, “I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.”

Trump modified his signature line, promising to make America “strong again,” “proud again,” “safe again,” and “great again.”

He ended his oration with “God bless you! I love you!”

Trump’s 76-minute speech was followed by the traditional dropping of thousands of balloons from the ceiling to the tune of “Alright Now” by the British band Free.

Before that Ivanka Trump introduced her father to delegates in a powerful speech. Her eloquence, intelligence, and charisma were impossible to ignore.

She said her father is the kind of leader who can transcend politics. He is “a political outsider” and “a fighter,” she said, adding “I have seen him fight for his employees. Now, I am seeing him fight for his country.”

“For more than a year Donald Trump has been the people’s champion,” she said. The fact he’s not a career politician is a great strength, she said. “Real change is only going to come from outside of the system.”

Trump is “famous but not well-known,” she said. The “hard-working men and women of this country identify with my father.”

He has spent his whole life doing what others have said could not be done, she said. “When my father says he will make America great again, he will deliver … he is incapable of thinking small.”

Other speakers earlier in the evening pumped up the crowd.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who is worth about $3 billion, said America needs a businessman like Trump. In his view, the country no longer leads the world in technology.

“Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all. That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley and we must not accept it from our government.”

Thiel attacked the financial sector. “Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees,” he said caustically.

He criticized current foreign policy.

“Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don’t need to see Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya and today it’s a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.”

Thiel then made history on the convention stage. “I am proud to be gay,” Thiel said to delegates who applauded him. Some even gave him a standing ovation, something unimaginable at a GOP convention 20 or even 10 years ago.

“I am proud to be a Republican,” he continued. “But most of all I am proud to be an American.”

“I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform,” he said. “But fake culture wars only distract us from economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”

Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio railed against current immigration policies.

“We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of ours,” he said. “We are more concerned about the rights of illegal aliens and criminals than we are with protecting our own country. That must change.”

Arpaio said the long-delayed wall along the Mexican border has to be constructed to secure America’s borders. “Donald Trump will build the wall,” he said to applause and chants of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” and “build that wall!”

NFL great Fran Tarkenton, who said he has known the nominee for years, said “Donald Trump knows how to get the best out of people.”

Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus assailed Hillary Clinton saying that during the investigation into her illegal, hacker-friendly email servers “she lied over and over and over.” Clinton “reads ethics rules as carefully as Americans read their junk mail.”

She used her post as secretary of state and her family foundation for her own enrichment, he said. For Clinton, the Oval Office is just another “cash cow.” Americans, he said, “have had enough.”

Also speaking were Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., televangelist Mark Burns, paralysis survivor Brock Mealer, Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, Colony Capital chairman Tom Barrack, and Korean Americans for Trump founder optometrist Lisa Shin, and actor Jon Voight appeared as narrator in a video about Trump’s business accomplishments that featured commentator Larry Kudlow, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Looking back over the four days of the convention, it was calmer outside the Quicken Loans Arena than many had expected.

The riots and massive protests expected at the convention never materialized. There were relatively few arrests. At most demonstrations near the convention site the angry masses could be measured in hundreds, if that. The massive police presence, drawn from law enforcement agencies across the country, may have deterred some of the would-be troublemakers.

Well-armed bystanders may have also helped to scare the bad guys away.

Throughout the convention there were plenty of citizens with rifles wandering around Public Square and elsewhere in downtown Cleveland, exercising the open-carry rights people enjoy in the Buckeye State. Most, but not all, were pro-Trump. Some showed up to show their support for the nation’s embattled police officers. Firearms were not allowed in the relatively small security zone around the convention site, which was controlled by the U.S. Secret Service.

On Tuesday there was a shouting match and some pushing and shoving between anti-Trump demonstrators and radical libertarian radio host Alex Jones of Infowars.

Police broke up clashes between various activist groups. Members of Black Lives Matter, Ku Klux Klan, and Westboro Baptist Church reportedly threw urine at each other.

The anti-American so-called peace group Code Pink tried to swarm Sheriff Arpaio at one point and chanted “shame.” The Revolutionary Communist Party was also on-site.

On Wednesday a protester inadvertently set himself and others on fire while trying to burn an American flag. Firefighters promptly extinguished the flames. There were no serious injuries, according to Cleveland Police.

Leftist groups built a fake wall to protest Trump’s plans to enforce immigration laws and secure the border. Among the organizations participating in the “Wall Off Trump” action were the Ruckus Society, Mijente, Iraq Veterans Against the War, The Other 98 Percent, and the ACORN-affiliated Working Families Party, according to Democracy Now.

The New Black Panther Party and other radical groups took part in demonstrations.

Meanwhile, presumptive Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton has reportedly selected Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) as her running mate. Kaine is a Harvard-educated lawyer. He previously served as governor and lieutenant governor of Virginia and as mayor of Richmond. He is also a previous Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman.

Also rans reportedly included Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Labor Secretary Tom Perez, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.

The four-day Democratic National Convention gets underway Monday in Philadelphia.

Trump said in his speech that some people really ought to attend the Democrats’ confab.

“If you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully-crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week.”

“Go there,” Trump said.

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic

May 30, 2016

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic, Front Page MagazineMark Tapson, May 30, 2016

Enemies

Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: A SEAL’s Story is a new book by former Navy SEAL Carl Higbie. Higbie was on the Navy SEAL assault team that in the summer of 2007 captured the most wanted man in the Middle East (apart from Osama bin Laden) – Ahmed Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, known as the Butcher of Fallujah. But afterward, Higbie and others in his unit were charged with prisoner abuse when Al-Isawi alleged that they had bloodied his lip.

Suddenly, the “mission accomplished” became a much more challenging ordeal as Higbie et al were threatened with courts-martial over supposedly roughing up a ruthless terrorist. When he went public with his account of what happened, the Navy pushed back hard to save face and protect careers. But Higbie pushed back harder.

Higbie, also the author of Battle on the Home Front: A Navy SEAL’s Mission to Save the American Dream, became a SEAL in 2003 and deployed twice in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is now a political commentator in national media including the Fox News Channel, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Daily Caller, and Breibart. He graciously agreed to answer a few questions for FrontPage Mag about his lates book, Enemies, Foreign and Domestic.

Mark Tapson:         About the mission to capture and extract this high-value target, the Butcher of Fallujah. You and your unit accomplished the mission, handed him over, and all seemed good – but then what happened afterward?

Carl Higbie: After turning over custody to the Master at Arms (MP), the MP admittedly left his post. During this time the prisoner bit his lip (as testified by an oral surgeon) and spit blood on his clothing. Out of fear for his own career, the MP concocted a story that he saw many of us abuse the prisoner. This story was fabricated, as was apparent from his numerous changes in his official statement.

MT:     The accusation should have been cleared up quickly, but instead, the Navy did its best to break you and the other suspects down and get confessions out of you. Tell us what happened.

CH:     Initially we were investigated by NCIS and their investigation made the recommendation to not charge us. It was our Commanding officer along with General Cleveland that decided to proceed despite the facts. Because of the lack of evidence, they wanted to proceed “general’s mast” where there is no need for evidence and a punishment can be issued arbitrarily. They were doing to his to save face and “make an example” out of us.

We all requested a courts-martial so we would have a fair trial and be able to present evidence in our favor. The command tried to talk us out of this because they knew they would lose. They separated us and threatened us with all kinds of punishments, but we held strong and forced the courts-martial.

MT:     Why do you think this guy made such a serious accusation about some of his fellow soldiers, and why do you think the higher-ups weren’t more supportive of the accused, especially considering that the so-called victim was a terrorist?

CH:     The higher-ups were afraid of simple allegations, how that would affect their careers. They lost sight of the mission and their duty to their men. They put politically correct public image in front of their oath. They had us pegged for guilty from day one despite ALL the evidence. So much for “innocent until proven guilty.”

MT:     What’s your opinion of the Rules of Engagement our warriors were bound by which were so strict that merely bloodying a terrorist’s nose could get you court-martialed? Do you think those ROE are proper or are they hindering our men in the field and perhaps even endangering them?

CH:     Rules of engagement are different from guidelines for treating prisoners. I think the Rules of Engagement are atrocious. You cannot have one side playing by a set of rules that does not apply to the other side. War is not a moral endeavor, it is people killing each other; therefore you must be willing to be as ruthless as your enemy.

As for prisoner handling, we should never have stood any discipline after NCIS cleared us and recommended not going forward. This is what investigations are for and they should not be overstepped by a commander who has no knowledge of the situation. Moreover, who cares if a terrorist that we had legal authority to kill had a bloody lip?

MT:     After you were eventually cleared, you wrote a book – as a private citizen, not as a SEAL – called Battle on the Homefront based on your experiences, in which you complained about various ways in which Americans are failing to live up to our country’s own exceptionalism. But the Navy brass gave your manuscript the runaround and did their best to suppress publication. Why do you believe they did that, particularly since many of them privately agreed with what you wrote?

CH:     I spent almost two years, 24 times the length of time the DOD has allowed by their own standards for the review. At every corner, they stonewalled me, refusing even to conduct a review. I had been consulting an attorney throughout the process who was dumbfounded, as we had continuously jumped through hoops to accommodate their ever-changing requirements.

The book was controversial and no one wanted to review it because they were concerned about how it would affect their careers if they were the ones with the approval stamp on it. The military spent more resources trying to bury it than it would have taken to conduct the review. After a review from NCIS on security, and under advice from my attorney, we published without command approval since they had failed to comply with their own rules.

MT:     Since leaving the Navy, you’ve pursued a path as a political commentator in the media. Is that another way you feel you can best serve your country? Do you have political ambitions in the future as well? Tell us about what you’re doing to help reinvigorate the American Dream.

CH:     I have pursued the political route because I believe that to be the root of the problem today. I am unsure whether I will run again but I am heavily involved with this presidential race and many other races as well. If we want to fix this nation we have to start at the top.

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious

May 30, 2016

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious, Front Page MagazineDavid Horowitz, May 30, 2016

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Reprinted from Breitbart.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”

“Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier a Never Trump diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right.Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a leftwing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

Obama’s most consequential domestic legislation is the Affordable Care Act, which he had no part in writing. It was the work of leftwing think tanks and the congressional Democrats. So it will be with Trump, which is why all the blather about his vagueness or impracticality on policy issues is beside the point. Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so.  Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.

The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.

Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms – was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.

This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.

The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals

May 20, 2016

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals, Gates of Vienna, May 20, 2016

(A good, strong and highly relevant analysis of our “Global War on Terrorism.” — DM)

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Ten Arabic Words: A challenge to national security professionals engaged in the Global War On Terror

by Matthew Bracken

If you are a politically-correct bliss-ninny with a coexist bumper sticker slapped on the back of your Subaru, and you don’t have the slightest clue what the following ten words mean, then this essay is not meant for you. You are excused.

dawah, dhimmi, hijra, jizya, kafir, shaheed, shariah, takfir, taqiyya, ummah

But if you are a national security professional, senior military officer or political leader involved in any aspect of the “Global War On Terror,” AKA “Countering Violent Extremism,” these are ten words that should already be a part of your working vocabulary. If you can’t readily discuss their meaning, significance, and relationships, then you are worse than a fool, you are disgrace to your office and a danger to your country.

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If you don’t already have a firm grasp of the meaning of these words, then you are as prepared to conduct the GWOT as President Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is prepared to fight a heavyweight MMA champion in a no-quarter steel-cage death match.

If you couldn’t accurately define at least eight out of the ten directly from your personal knowledge base, then as a national security professional, you are an abject failure. You are as dangerously ignorant as a parent who would send his ten-year-old son to a NAMBLA summer camp, because a friendly self-identified “Namblan” neighbor said it was like Boy Scout Camp, but even more fun, and completely free of charge.

In effect, you sent your innocent and vulnerable young son to a summer camp run by perverts, pedophiles and predators, and you didn’t even know it, because you couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual meaning of NAMBLA independently from your helpful Namblan neighbor. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? Nobody could be that stupid, right? Wrong. That level of stupidity is official Obama administration policy when it comes to fighting the GWOT.

So, if you are an Army general or Navy admiral who, right here and now, without looking at your smart phone, cannot discuss how a kafir becomes a dhimmi, and what a dhimmi’s rights and options (if any) are under shariah, then you are as ignorant of your job as an European-theater Army general circa 1942 who did not know a panzer from a pancake, or a schutzstaffel from a schnitzel. A person as ignorant as you should be kept away from any responsibility for protecting our nation. You are incompetent, and you are a fool.

If you don’t know how to determine when a Muslim suicide bomber is ashaheed and when he is a terrorist according to the shariah, then you are as dangerous to our national safety as a North Atlantic ship captain who believes that icebergs are a fairy tale concocted by conspiracy theorists. Full speed ahead, Captain Smith!

If you don’t know takfir from taqiyya, and can’t discuss the meaning and importance of both, you are as useless as a WW2 intelligence officer who didn’t know the Kriegsmarine from the Luftwaffe, (but who thought that one of them was a private flying club, based on conversations that he overheard among his ever-helpful German cleaning staff).

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If you cannot, right now, intelligently discuss the global ummah and its relationship to the OIC in the context of the GWOT, then you should be working for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and not the Department of Homeland Security. If you don’t know what the OIC refers to in this context, put on a dunce cap, and go stand in the corner. And if you don’t know whether your office is in the Dar al Islam or the Dar al Harb, please jump out of an upper-story window, and when you hit the sidewalk, ask any immigrant who is engaged in hijra. He’ll know the answer, even if you do not.

If you don’t know how dawah relates to jihad when faithful Muslims are engaged in long-term hijra, you should turn in your official credentials and take early retirement. You are as oblivious as a WW2 U.S. Army general who thought that the Geheime Staatspolizei were German motorcycle policemen much like our American state troopers, because a helpful German passer-by told him so.

If you don’t know what the three options are for a kafir who violates the shariah when living in the dar al Islam, then please get out of the national security business. If you don’t know why a dhimmi would care about jizya, please retire, and hand your duties over to someone who has the natural curiosity and personal integrity to conduct his own study of our actual enemies and their actual strategies. But in the meantime, you must immediately stop lapping up the false narrative being spoon-fed to you by hostile foreign agents, domestic traitors, useful idiots, and cowards who know better—but who won’t make waves while their pensions are beckoning.

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If your job is national security, and you didn’t score at least an eighty on the ten-word quiz, then you have obviously swallowed the big lie that we can safely delegate the understanding of our Islamist enemies to the WW2 equivalent of “moderate Nazis.” Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But under President Obama, this is indeed our national policy for fighting the GWOT: allow a range of Muslim Brotherhood front groups to conduct America’s narrowly limited analysis of so-called “radicalized Islam,” and thereafter guide our policies toward Islam and Muslims in general.

Here is an important example straight from current events. Please tell us, oh national security professional, whom has the United Nations delegated the critical task of selecting and “screening” the Muslim “refugees” who are currently arriving in the USA at the rate of thousands per month? Any guesses? It is the same organization that the Obama administration has also optimistically granted the authority to choose our new Muslim “refugee” immigrants. If you don’t know the answer, please get out of the national security business.

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So who is it? It’s the fifty-seven-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which I referenced above. The mission of the OIC is to promote the spread of Islam across the globe until there is no moredar al harb, and all of the kafirs have either been converted to Islam, killed, or forced into submission as dhimmis. If you didn’t know, dhimmis are formally and legally subjugated second-class citizens who must pay the specialjizya tax as the price of their being allowed to live under shariah in theummah.

But this special offer is only extended to Christians and Jews: all others must choose between conversion to Islam, and the sword. That is, if their Muslim conquerors grant them the option of conversion. According to the Shariah, the defeated kafirs may also be killed or enslaved, if either of these two outcomes would be considered more beneficial to the ummah, based on local conditions and needs. (Of course, the captured women and girls may be taken as sex-slaves.) Mohammed did all of the above, and he commanded that these practices be continued in perpetuity, and they are.

The charter of the OIC puts Islamic shariah law ahead of secular law. This means, for example, that the official position of the OIC is that Muslims who leave the faith should be killed, and that any faithful Muslim who kills an apostate ex-Muslim has done no sin, but instead should be thanked and congratulated for the deed. It’s the same with adulterers: they should die, and killing an adulterer is no crime.

Yes, that really is their position, and they really do believe it, and much more than that. The OIC is made up of fifty-seven Muslim nations, united by a common belief in the supremacy of Islam, and their mutual obligation to conduct both dawah and jihad until the Dar al Islam covers the globe, and Allah’s eternal and immutable shariah has supplanted godless democracy and all manmade laws. This dawah includes the practice of using taqiyya when making arrangements or having negotiations with as-yet unsubmitted kafirs in the dar al harb.

So it’s no wonder that ninety-nine percent of the “refugees” being “screened” by the OIC and transported into the USA are Muslim, even though the Christians and other non-Muslims (who until recently made up over ten percent of the populations of Syria and Iraq) are suffering a brutal genocide and holocaust at the hands of Islamic State kidnappers, mass-rapists and mass-executioners.

The same OIC which is choosing our Muslim “refugees” is also strong-arming the European Union, the United States and the United Nations into acceptingshariah-compliant religious blasphemy laws, which will turn criticism of Islam into illegal “hate speech.” It’s worth noting that Bill and Hillary Clinton have collected millions of dollars in “speaking fees” and “donations” from OIC members, and perhaps unremarkably, Hillary Clinton also supports outlawing criticism of Islam, if the criticism leads to violence by Muslims.

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In light of this, it’s particularly sad to see disgraced former General David Petraeus heap even more shame upon himself, with his recent call for a mindless capitulation to Islamic extortion threats, extortion threats which have been ongoing against kafirs for 1,400 years. With fourteen centuries of history to examine, “Don’t make the Muslims angry, or they’ll run amok like uncontrollable sub-human savages, and kill lots of innocent people” is a wretched strategy for a former American general and intelligence agency director to espouse.

His call for the end of free speech rights anywhere and anytime that they “offend” Muslims is no different than warning a beaten wife not to anger her chronically abusive husband again, lest he give her yet another violent thrashing—which would then be entirely her fault. In fact, she should be punished again, just for provoking him after being warned not to!

This is not merely the heckler’s veto, which we are, sadly, familiar with today on the American college campus. This is the Muslim terrorist’s veto, and it means forced submission to Islam’s shariah law as the price of temporarily forestalling Muslim violence. Shame on David Petraeus for siding with the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, and not the victims. But at least his motives are transparent: pure greed. Petraeus, who has no background in finance or economics, is making millions of dollars by hustling in Muslim nations for the multi-billion-dollar global hedge fund KKR. They want something for their money, and he gave it to them in his recent Washington Post column. (Read “Why David Petraeus really wants you to shut up about Islamism,” TheFederalist.com, May 18, 2016.)

Let me offer you another simple test that you may apply to your own national security work space and mission. If you have been ordered to purge the ten listed Arabic words (and others) from your official GWOT lexicon, and instead to hand over the task of analyzing “Islamic radicalism” to alleged “moderate Muslims,” then you are being played for a fool by our nation’s most implacable and devious enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Fifteen years after the twin towers came down, you have no excuse for such obliviousness. After the next 9-11, you will not be able to plead ignorance yet again. As a national security official, you have a duty to perform your own due diligence. You must educate yourself, and reject the politically-correct blindfold that you have been ordered to wrap around your own mind.

Sun Tzu wrote: “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Today, we are literally outsourcing our intelligence analysis in the GWOT to the OIC and various Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Simply do a search for “Holy Land Foundation, Hamas, CAIR, and FBI” to begin your overdue education. Is it any wonder that the official “Countering Violent Extremism” narrative holds that there is utterly no connection between Islamic terrorism and Islam? That the Islamic State, which quotes chapter and verse of the Koran as justification for its every decision, is not Islamic? That Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of ISIS, who holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, knows less about Islam than President Obama and his American-trained national security staff?

In 2016, ignorance of the reality of the Islamist threat is no longer an excuse. Many resources are readily available if you are willing to look unblinkingly at the light of truth. I would suggest the online video lectures given by Stephen Coughlin and Dr. Bill Warner as starting points. Those who need or desire to read an exhaustively researched (over a thousand footnotes) academic treatise on the present Islamist threat should carefully study Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.”

After 9-11, Mr. Coughlin was an acclaimed subject matter expert and frequent high-level lecturer at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, until 2008 when he was made persona-non-grata on federal property as an unwelcome “Islamophobe.” And who made the determination of Mr. Coughlin’s “Islamophobia?” The same Muslim Brotherhood front groups that our intelligence agencies now rely upon for their understanding of “violent extremism,” which, of course, we are assured has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

We know this must be true, because President Obama has told us so. Unless, of course, he is practicing taqiyya on behalf of the ummah. Taqiyya is a bedrock principle of Islamic shariah, a ready tool for Muslims to use when they are dealing with kafirs. And not only radical Muslims, but ordinary, everyday, “moderate” Muslims. According to the shariah, it’s not a sin when a Muslim lies to a kafir in order to promote Islam. In that case, taqiyya is just a very clever form of dawah, helping to prepare the kafirs for the final Islamic jihad victory.

Now, go look up the Arabic words that you didn’t know, and read the article again, with fuller understanding. Then, go ask your colleagues how they did on the quiz. In the current threat environment, when mistakes are punished with passenger jets falling out of the sky, seventy is a failing grade for a trained and educated national security professional.

Please strive to do better. Your country is depending on you. Don’t let us down again. Educate yourself, and then prepare to stand firm against the prevailing winds of political correctness. Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Remember your core values, and stand tall against America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic.

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Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com. For his previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives.

Trump taps climate change skeptic, fracking advocate as key energy advisor

May 13, 2016

Trump taps climate change skeptic, fracking advocate as key energy advisor, ReutersValerie Volcovice, May 13, 2016

U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer (R-ND) speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, United States on January 8, 2015. REUTERS/Larry Downing/File Photo

U.S. Representative Kevin Cramer (R-ND) speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, United States on January 8, 2015. REUTERS/Larry Downing/File Photo

Republican presidential contender Donald Trump has asked one of America’s most ardent drilling advocates and climate change skeptics to help him draft his energy policy.

U.S. Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota – a major oil drilling state – is writing a white paper on energy policy for the New York billionaire, Cramer and sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Cramer was also among a group of Trump advisers who recently met with lawmakers from western energy states, who hope Trump will open more federal land for drilling, a lawmaker who took part in the meeting said.

Cramer said in an interview his paper would emphasize the dangers of foreign ownership of U.S. energy assets, burdensome taxes, and over-regulation. Trump will have an opportunity to float some of the ideas at an energy summit in Bismarck, North Dakota on May 26, Cramer said.

A spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign did not comment.

While the ultimate size and makeup of Trump’s energy advisory team is unclear, Cramer’s inclusion suggests the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s oil policy could emphasize more drilling, less regulation and taxes, and curbs on efforts to combat climate change.

Cramer has said he believes the Earth is cooling, not warming, and he has opposed efforts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump has been light on details of his energy policy so far, though he recently told supporters in West Virginia that the coal industry would thrive if he were in the White House. He has also claimed global warming is a concept “created by and for the Chinese” to hurt U.S. business.

Trump only recently started building up teams of advisors on the economy, foreign policy and other issues to flesh out his platform for the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Cramer, North Dakota’s only congressman and an early Congressional Trump supporter, encountered Trump when they were guests on a radio show last month and Trump spoke about relaxing regulation and expanding drilling. Trump’s political team later asked Cramer to write the energy policy paper, the lawmaker said.

“The real opportunity for prosperity in this country has been to produce more because you have access to more markets,” Cramer said, referring to the recent lifting of a decades-old ban on oil exports. “The last thing we need is more rules.”

On foreign ownership of U.S. oil assets, Cramer said: “One-third of refining capacity is owned by OPEC countries. How does this fit into his (Trump’s) America first policy?”

OPEC members Saudi Arabia and Venezuela both have large stakes in U.S. refining capacity.

Cramer said he expected energy policy to be a vulnerability for Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, in an election year where energy companies are going broke.

Clinton has advocated shifting the country to 50 percent clean energy by 2030, promised heavy regulation of fracking, and said her prospective administration would put coal companies “out of business.”

Off Topic | Deserve Hillary? Then vote for her

March 3, 2016

Deserve Hillary? Then vote for her, Dan Miller’s Blog, March 3, 2016

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

Democrats have done a bang up job for their people for the last fifty years. Want more of the same? Vote for Hillary.

 

 

 

How about Mit Romney? Surely, he must be right. After all, the proud godfather of ObamaCare did so well in 2012. His part of the video starts at 23:00.

 

 

So, all of you RINOs who prefer Hillary to Trump, have at it. Heck, with the RINOs and the Dems in charge, the country will stay in the very best of hands.

 

Immigration or an IPhone

February 25, 2016

Immigration or an IPhone, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 25, 2016

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The public argument between Apple and the FBI over cracking the encryption on an iPhone used by the San Bernardino Muslim terrorists is one of those ongoing civil liberties debates that negotiate the terms on which we are asked to sacrifice our civil liberties for the sake of Muslim immigration.

We have already made a thousand accommodations and we will make a thousand more. There will be more databases, naked scanners, eavesdropping, vans that can see through walls, backdoors to every server, registrations, warrantless searches, interceptions and regulations. There will be heavily armed police on the streets. And then curfews and soldiers. These things exist in Europe. They’ll come here.

Some libertarians will argue that we should have none of this and no restrictions on immigration. That we should just shrug off each terror attack and move on with our lives.

Eventually though there will be a terror attack that we can’t shrug off and that can’t be minimized by using the cheap statistical trick of comparing Terror Attack X to the number of people who die every year from cancer. Or there will just be an endless parade of daily attacks, bombings, stabbings or shootings, as in Israel, which create a constant climate of terror that will preclude any hollow rhetoric about the number of people falling off ladders each year or getting struck by lightning.

Some hawks will cheer every terror fighting measure short of closing the door on the root cause of the problem. They would rather see every American wiretapped, strip searched and monitored every hour of the day then just stop the flow of Muslim terrorists into this country.

The encryption methods of an iPhone, like the question of how many ounces there are in your tiny bottle of mouthwash, would not be much of an issue, if Muslim migration did not make it one.

Terrorists adapt to the terrain. They use the native population as protective coloration. They can find a way to transform a shoe, a tube of toothpaste or instant messaging on a game console into a terror tool. Just as the left can ‘politicize’ everything, Muslim terrorists can ‘terrorize’ everything. When everything is a potential terrorist tool, then there can be no such thing as privacy or civil rights.

Muslim immigration is forcing us to constantly choose between our lives and our civil liberties. It’s a Catch 22 decision with no good choices. Terrorists push governments toward totalitarianism so that their own alternative totalitarian state starts to seem like a less terrible alternative. But the refusal to fight terrorism also makes the totalitarian state of the terrorists more viable.

With every Muslim terror attack, successful or only attempted, they win and we lose. The pressure of terror attacks discredit Western ideologies and worldviews, both on the right and the left. Each attack helps generate new converts for Islam and more political influence for Islamist organizations.

Vociferous debates over the choice between civil liberties and security make it seem as if we have to choose between our worldviews because something in our society is the problem. It isn’t.

We do not have an American terror network problem. The Amish aren’t using iPhones or obscure apps to coordinate terror attacks. We have a Muslim terror network problem. It’s not because of the Methodists that we have to weigh our mouthwash or take our shoes off and put them in a greasy plastic tray at the airport. It’s because 19 Muslims entered this country, hijacked our airplanes and murdered thousands of Americans. Guantanamo Bay is not an issue because Buddhists are at war with America. It’s an issue because Muslim terrorists are at war with America.

We do not have an iPhone encryption problem or a shoe problem or a mouthwash problem. We have a Muslim terror problem.

Whatever decision is made about iPhone encryption will not be the last word. The simple reality is that privacy carries too high a price as long as we have large numbers of people in this country who want to kill us in equally large numbers. If we want our privacy back, it’s not the FBI that is standing in our way. It’s the religious organizations that are paid to bring Muslim “refugees” to this country. It’s the liberal, libertarian and even conservative voices that think there is something wrong with pausing the mass migration of the group that is disproportionately responsible for our terror problem. It’s the media that would rather discuss anything and everything than discuss the problem we are really dealing with.

The source of this problem is not whether the FBI handled the iPhone correctly or whether Apple should be obligated to build a way for law enforcement to access its devices. These arguments would exist even without Muslim terrorism, but they would lack the same level of life and death urgency.

This is not an iOS problem. It’s an immigration problem.

The San Bernardino massacre by Muslim terrorists would not have happened without Muslim immigration. The security flaw here was not in the work of FBI agents or of Apple programmers, but of our immigration laws. Just as we cannot and will not intercept every single Muslim terrorist who finds a way to hide explosives in his underwear, shoes, soda or laptop, we will not ever be able to crack every single encrypted Muslim terrorist device. And their underwear bombs and encrypted iPhones would not be an issue if we did not have Muslim terrorists in America in the first place.

Instead of discussing the Islamic root cause, we put stress on our own competing institutions, technology providers face off with law enforcement, hawks and civil libertarians berate each other as if they were each part of the threat. But we are not the problem here. They are the problem.

The only backdoor that should be at issue here is the one that Muslim terrorists use to enter America. We don’t need to violate everyone’s rights to close it. We just need the political will to do the common sense thing and shut down the source of the threat. Either that or give up on our privacy.

Our choice is very simple. We can have external security or an internal police state. But neither of the above is not an option. We can have open borders that fill our country with criminals, but that means that eventually any livable middle class neighborhood will have a cop on every corner. We can have airport security for the people coming into this country. Or we can have airport security for everyone.

Ongoing Muslim migration makes a police state inevitable. But to avoid the perils of profiling and the appearance of discrimination, it will be a universal police state that will strip away rights from everyone without regard to guilt or innocence in the hopes of averting the next Muslim terror attack.

The only way to protect our lives and our freedoms from Muslim terrorism and its consequences is by shutting down Muslim immigration. If we fail to do this, then we will lose our lives and our liberties.

Our Good Islam/Bad Islam Strategy

February 11, 2016

Our Good Islam/Bad Islam Strategy, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 11, 2016

Behead them

There is no Good Islam. There is no Bad Islam. There is just Islam.

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Our only hope of defeating Islamic terrorism is Islam. That’s our whole counterterrorism strategy.

But Islamic terrorism is not a separate component of Islam that can be cut off from it. Not only is it not un-Islamic, but it expresses Islamic religious imperatives. Muslim religious leaders have occasionally issued fatwas against terrorism, but terrorism for Muslim clerics, like sex for Bill Clinton, is a matter of definition. The tactics of terrorism, including suicide bombing and the murder of civilians, have been approved by fatwas from many of the same Islamic religious leaders that our establishment deems moderate. And the objective of terrorism, the subjugation of non-Muslims, has been the most fundamental Islamic imperative for the expansionistic religion since the days of Mohammed.

Our strategy, in Europe and America, under Bush and under Obama, has been to artificially subdivide a Good Islam from a Bad Islam and to declare that Bad Islam is not really Islam. Bad Islam, as Obama claims, “hijacked” a peaceful religion. Secretary of State Kerry calls Bad Islam’s followers, “apostates”. ISIS speaks for no religion. It has no religion. Which means the Islamic State must be a bunch of atheists.

Our diplomats and politicians don’t verbally acknowledge the existence of a Bad Islam. Even its name is one of those names that must not be named. There is only Good Islam. Bad Islam doesn’t even exist.

This isn’t just domestic spin, which it is, but it’s also an attempt at constructing an Islamic narrative. Our leaders don’t care what we think. They just want us to keep quiet and not offend Muslims. They do care a great deal about what Muslims think. And so, in their own clumsy way, they try to talk like Muslims.

They are attempting to participate in an Islamic debate without the requisite theological credentials. They want to tell Muslims that they should be Good Muslims not Bad Muslims, but they’re too afraid to use those words, so instead they substitute Good Muslims and Not Muslims. All Muslims are Good Muslims and Bad Muslims are Not Muslims is their Takfiri version of the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Our counterterrorism strategy has been constructed to convince Good Islam to have nothing to do with Bad Islam. And any of us who criticize Good Islam or argue that the artificial distinction between Good Islam and Bad Islam, between Saudi Arabia and ISIS, between Iran and Hezbollah, between Pakistan and the Taliban, is false are accused of provoking Good Islam to transform into Bad Islam.

Nothing so thoroughly proves that the difference between Bad Islam and Good Islam is a lie as the compulsive way that they warn that Good Muslims are capable of turning into Bad Muslims at any moment. Offend a Good Muslim, criticize his religion, fail to integrate him, accommodate his every whim and censor what he dislikes and he’ll join ISIS and then he’ll become a Bad Muslim.

After every terror attack, the media painstakingly constructs a narrative to determine why former moderates like Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Tsarnaevs or the San Bernardino killers turned bad without resorting to religious explanations. Their efforts at rationalization quickly become ridiculous; Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, contracted airborne PTSD, Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, became an “extremist” because he was afraid the FBI had found out about his prostitutes and the Times Square bomber turned into a terrorist because his “American Dream” was ruined.

Nobody, they conclude, becomes an Islamic terrorist because of Islam. Instead there are a thousand unrelated issues, having nothing to do with Islam, which creates the Muslim terrorist. Even the term “Radical Islamic Jihadist”, an absurd circumlocution (is there a moderate Islamic Jihadist), has become a badge of courage on one side and a dangerous, irresponsible term that provokes violence on the other.

But what is the distinction between Good Islam and Bad Islam? It isn’t fighting ISIS. Al Qaeda and the Taliban do that. It isn’t terrorism. Our Muslim allies, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar, are hip deep in the terror trade. It isn’t equality for non-Muslims. No Muslim country under Sharia law could have that. Equality for women? See above.

What are the metrics that distinguish Good Islam and Bad Islam? There aren’t any. We can’t discuss the existence of Bad Islam because it would reveal that Bad Islam and Good Islam are really the same thing.

Our Good Islam allies in Pakistan fight Bad Islam’s terror, when they aren’t hiding Osama bin Laden. Bad Islam in the Islamic State beheads people and takes slaves and Good Islam in Saudi Arabia does too. Qatar is our Good Islam ally helping us fight Bad Islam terrorists by arming and funding Good Islam terrorists who sometimes turn out to be Bad Islam terrorists so we can’t figure out if the Islamic terrorists the CIA is routing weapons to are Good Islam terrorists or Bad Islam terrorists.

The moderate Muslim Brotherhood wins democratic elections. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood then burns down churches. The moderate Palestinian Authority negotiates with Israel and then the extremist Palestinian Authority cheers the stabbing of a Jewish grandmother. The moderate Iranian government signs a nuclear deal and then the extremist Iranian government calls for “Death to America”.

Like the saintly Dr. Jekyll and the mean Mr. Hyde, Good Islam and Bad Islam are two halves of the same coin. When Dr. Jekyll wanted to act out his baser nature, he took a potion and turned into Mr. Hyde. But the nasty urges were always a part of him. When a moderate Muslim pulls a Keffiyah over his face and starts stabbing, bombing or beheading, he doesn’t become an extremist, he just expresses his dark side.

Good Islam borrowed all sorts of noble sentiments from Judaism and Christianity. But when non-Muslims didn’t accept Islam, then Mohammed stopped playing nice and preached murder. Bad Islam is not something ISIS invented on a website. It’s always been a part of Islam. We attempt to separate Good Islam and Bad Islam because we don’t like being beheaded. But Muslims don’t make that distinction.

Our counterterrorism strategy is based on empowering Good Islam, on building coalitions with Muslims to fight terrorism and enlisting their cooperation in the War on Terror. But we’re trying to convince Dr. Jekyll to help us fight Mr. Hyde. And Dr. Jekyll might even help us out, until he turns into Mr. Hyde.

Our moderate Afghan Muslim allies, when they’re aren’t raping young boys (one of their cultural peculiarities we are taught to ignore), sometimes unexpectedly open fire on our soldiers. The Muslim migrants who arrive here to “enrich” our societies sometimes start shooting and bombing. The head of Al Qaeda was hanging out near the West Point of Pakistan. The mastermind of 9/11 was saved by a member of the Qatari royal family. The call is coming from inside the house. Mr. Hyde is Dr. Jekyll.

When we “empower” and “build coalitions” with Good Islam, we’re also empowering and building coalitions with Bad Islam. Just ask all the Muslim terrorists running around with our weapons.

Our leaders want Good Islam to shield us from Bad Islam. If Good Islam is out front, then Muslims won’t see a clash of civilizations or a religious war, but a war between Good Islam and Bad Islam. But the Muslim understanding of Good Islam and Bad Islam is very different from our own.

Sunnis see their Jihadis as Good Islam and Shiites as Bad Islam. Shiites look at it the other way around. The Muslim Brotherhood, that our elites were so enamored with, saw secular governments as Bad Islam. To win them over, we helped them overthrow more secular governments because our leaders had adopted an understanding of Good Islam in which giving Christians civil rights was Bad Islam.

To win over Good Islam, we censor cartoons of Mohammed and criticism of the Koran, open our borders, Islamize our institutions and then wait to see if we’re on the good side of Good Islam. We adapt our societies and legal systems to Islamic norms and hope that it’s enough to let us join the Good Islam Coalition. If we go on at this rate, the experts will tell us that the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism is for us to become Muslims. Only then will we become members in good standing of Good Islam.

There is no Good Islam and no Bad Islam, as Muslim leaders occasionally trouble to tell us. The distinction that our leaders make between Good Islam and Bad Islam is not theological, but pragmatic. They dub whatever is shooting at us right now Bad Islam and assume that everything else must be Good Islam. That is the fallacy which they used to arrive at their Tiny Minority of Extremists formula.

There is no Tiny Minority of Extremists. Behind the various tiny minorities of extremists are countries and billionaires, global organizations and Islamic banks. Outsourcing our counterterrorism strategy to the countries and ideologies behind the terrorists we’re fighting isn’t a plan, it’s a death wish.

Islamic terrorism is just what we call Islam when it’s killing us.

The Jihad isn’t coming from some phantom website. It’s coming from our Muslim allies. It’s coming from Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It’s coming from the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups. It’s coming from the moderate Muslim leaders that our leaders pose with at anti-extremism conferences. And it’s coming from the mosques and homes of the Muslims living in America.

There is no Good Islam. There is no Bad Islam. There is just Islam.

Off Topic | Trump, Conservative Ideolgues and Populists

January 24, 2016

Trump, Conservative Ideolgues and Populists, Dan Miller’s Blog, January 24, 2016

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

Conservative ideologues want to keep things essentially as they are, making only marginal and generally ineffective changes. Populists want to change things to be more consistent with what “we the people” want. Often, what we the people want is better than what our “leaders” want or try to provide. Under these definitions, Trump is a populist, not a conservative ideologue. That’s good.

According to Dictionary. com, these are attributes of “conservatives:”

Disposed to preserve existing conditions, restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

According to the same source, “populism” means:

Any of various, often anti-establishment or anti-intellectual political movements or philosophies that offer unorthodox solutions or policies and appeal to the common person rather than according with traditional party or partisan ideologies.

Grass-roots democracy; working class activism; egalitarianism.

National Review recently published an entire special edition devoted to attacking Trump on the ground that he is insufficiently conservative. Whom did National Review support in 2008 and 2012? Guess or go to the link. He did not win.

NR - Trump

Writing at PJ Media about National Review’s special issue, Roger L. Simon argued that 

Many of their arguments revolve around whether Trump is a “true conservative.” Instead of wading into the definitional weeds on that one — as they say on the Internet, YMMV [Your Milleage May Vary] — allow me to address the macro question of what the purpose of ideology actually is. For me, it is to provide a theoretical basis on which to act, a set of principles. But that’s all it is. It’s not a religion, although it can be mistaken for one (communism). [Insert and Emphasis added.]

Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say. For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road.  All we have is our theories. They are the road for us. If we’re lucky, we’re paid for them.  In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.

Trump’s perspective was the reverse. The rubber was constantly meeting the road. In fact, it rarely did anything else. He always had to change and adjust. Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers. [Emphasis added.]

When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action. The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action. It’s not hard to see why. The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people. It doesn’t go anywhere and hasn’t for years. I’m guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people — left and right — are drunk on ideology. [Emphasis added.]

Were the “old White men” who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, and those who fought for the colonies in the Revolutionary War, conservative ideologues? Did they want to preserve existing conditions under the King of England, his governors and military? Or were they pragmatic populists, as well as men of action, who opposed the King’s establishment and offered unorthodox solutions appealing to the “common” people? It took a lot of pushing from such revolutionaries as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, but the pragmatic populists won.

I don’t want to suggest that Donald Trump is this generation’s George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin. Times are now sufficiently different that doing so would be frivolous. Among other differences, there should be no need to go to war now because we still have an electoral process, flawed though it may be. Nor are we ruled by an unelected, hereditary king; we are ruled by an elected president who considers Himself a king, ignores or twists the Constitution to fit His needs, often ideological, and acts by royal executive decree when the Congress declines to do His bidding or goes about it too slowly to suit Him.

Be that as it may, what’s wrong with the populist notion encouraging members of the governed class — the “vulgarians” — to have greater voices in how they are governed than those who govern them, often to their own benefit, while mocking those whom they govern? Sometimes we the people make mistakes and sometimes we get it right. Ditto our dear leaders. Why not give us a chance for a change?

Into which category — conservative ideologue or populist — if either, does Donald Trump fit, do we need him now and, if so, why?

Here’s the 2012 video Whittle referred to in the video above:

Which of the current Republican candidates has taken, or is the most likely to take, positions comparable to those suggested in the above video?

In September of last year, I wrote an article titled To bring America back we need to break some stuff. There, I quoted Daniel Greenfield for the following proposition:

What we have now is not a movement because we have not defined what it is we hope to win. We have built reactive movements to stave off despair. We must do better than that. We must not settle for striving to restore some idealized lost world. Instead we must dream big. We must think of the nation we want and of the civilization we want to live in and what it will take to build it. [Emphasis added.]

Our enemies have set out big goals. We must set out bigger ones. We must become more than conservatives. If we remain conservatives, then all we will have is the America we live in now. And even if our children and grandchildren become conservatives, that is the culture and nation they will fight to conserve. We must become revolutionaries. [Emphasis added.]

I also suggested that if we don’t seek real — even revolutionary — change we might as well try to join the European Union. That would keep things pretty much as they now are and would, therefore, be more the “conservative” than the populist thing to do.

Our unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy could merge with that of the EU and our Congress could merge with the impotent EU Parliament.

Here’s a new Trifecta video about a proposal by the Governor of Texas to amend the Constitution which, he contends, has been broken by those who have improperly increased the power of the Federal Government while diminishing that of the states.

The Constitution is not broken. It’s just been poorly interpreted, twisted and otherwise ignored. In recent years Obama — who claims to be a “constitutional scholar” — has done more to ignore, twist and misinterpret it than any other president I can remember. Depending on what amendments might be adopted and ratified, an Obama clone (Hillary Clinton?) might well do the same; perhaps even worse. A president can personally stop that process by not doing it. A president can halt poor judicial interpretations only by nominating judges unlikely to make them.

Conclusions

Trump is not perfect; nobody is. However, he says what he thinks rather than spew multiculturally correct pablum. Few are sufficiently thick-skinned to do that. A “vulgarian,” he is not politically correct. Others are because they don’t want to offend. Trump recognizes that Islam is the religion of war, death and oppression and does not want the further Islamisation of America, which is already proceeding apace. Few leaders of either party are willing to take that position, mean it and act on it effectively if elected.

We are mad, not insane. We want to give we the people a bigger and stronger voice in how and by whom we are governed. If, by voting to make Trump our President, we make a big mistake so be it. Worse candidates with fewer qualifications have been elected and reelected. During His first and second term as President, Obama has gone far in His quest to transform America fundamentally and in the wrong directions. If Trump does not come sufficiently close to correcting course to meet our expectations during his first term, we won’t vote to reelect him. In the meantime,

Opps. I almost forgot this

Off Topic | Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year: America’s Sheriff

December 24, 2015

Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year: America’s Sheriff, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, December 24, 2015

(And Time’s Person of the Year is Frau Merkel. Oh well. — DM)

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There is a war on police.

It’s the post-Ferguson truth that every cop knows, but there is one man who has emerged as a passionate and articulate spokesman for law enforcement and is willing to call it a “war on police.”

“War had been declared on the American police officer led by some high profile people, one of them coming out of the White House, and one coming out of the United States Department of Justice,” he said. “And it’s open season right now.

For decades, Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr. put his life and his energies into protecting and serving the people of Milwaukee County. Though always a man of strong opinions, it was when the White House cheered a war on police and pushed through pro-crime policies, freeing drug dealers while locking up police officers that he emerged as a national figure of unquestionable moral authority.

When Attorney General Eric Holder met Sheriff Clarke he sneered, “What’s up with the hat?” Political opponents have mocked Sheriff Clarke as a “big cowboy.” And indeed, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County wears a cowboy hat and he can be seen riding a horse. He also preaches “cowboy values” like speaking frankly and telling people that they have to be ready to stand up to criminals.

“You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed or you can fight back,” he told his constituents. “You have a duty to protect yourself and your family.”

The meeting between Holder and Clarke was a clash of worldviews. In Holder’s social justice worldview, fighting crime only feeds the root causes of crime. The criminal is the victim. The crime victim is the perpetrator. Every arrest, whether of a drug dealer or a terrorist, only causes more crime.

Under Holder and Lynch’s social justice policing, the Ferguson Effect has crippled cops and juiced up crime. Cities are returning back to the bad old days when social justice reformers passed their pro-crime policies and some neighborhoods became nightmarish territories where the violence never stopped.

Sheriff Clarke started his career as a patrol officer. He was a Homicide Detective. Crime isn’t a theory for him. It’s a fact. Its victims aren’t faceless statistics. They’re mothers and daughters, fathers and sons.

Underneath that cowboy hat is a law enforcement professional with a degree in Criminal Justice Management¸ who has passed through training and leadership programs at Harvard and Quantico, the former Commanding Officer of the Intelligence Division of the Milwaukee Police Department, who knows both the theory of law enforcement and its grim reality at every level. Along the way, Clarke had earned a reputation for standing up for the men and women in law enforcement under his leadership.

When he fought back against the White House’s war on police, he was doing what he had always done.

“In the early days of this cop hating we didn’t have a voice to counter that message: we are racist, blood-thirsty. We didn’t have a counter narrative which is why I stepped up and tried to be that counter narrative,” Clarke explained. “I realized once I started taking on the attorney general and the president of the United States I was in the deep end of the pool. It is dangerous in the deep end of the pool.”

And Sheriff Clarke has stood up to smears of the White House and its billionaire allies and survived.

Michael Bloomberg threw six figures worth of ads at him and lost every dime of that money.  “I trust the voters. The voters can’t be bought,” Clarke said. The voters of Milwaukee County picked the big cowboy over the big city billionaire. They chose a man who would stand up for them over the powerful progressives who are determined to walk all over them and tell them that it’s for their own good.

Many police officers fear for their jobs and their lives while appointed urban police brass pander to radical leftists in public office. Police officers are being wrongly arrested to appease mobs while violent drug dealers and gang members are freed by the order of the White House. Meanwhile children are shot by gang members and ordinary people are beaten, raped and robbed on formerly safe streets.

Just as in his days as a patrol officer, Sheriff Clarke came running to the rescue as the courageous face of a beleaguered law enforcement community. In interviews and speeches, he spoke the hard truth without a hint of political correctness, fighting to keep Americans safe well beyond his own jurisdiction.

As he had always done.

Sheriff Clarke’s conservative worldview was formed by the influence of his father who was an African-American Airborne Ranger in Korea and guided him to law enforcement. As a boy, he lived in a housing project. He worked his way up through perseverance. He has seen a city where crime was a rarity take a turn toward the terrifying statistics of Detroit. And he is equally blunt about the causes.

“Parents have turned over their duty to raise their kids to federal and state government programs,” Clarke says. “These kids suffer from a lot of emotional baggage spawned by ineffective parenting, which is worsened by white bleeding-heart liberals who use these troubled kids for their liberal agenda. Social liberalism is a sadistic ideology.”

“White liberal social policies have become the new racism in America.”

Sheriff Clarke has been speaking out against the disease of government dependency for a long time. Ten years ago, he wrote, “Liberal elites and their interest groups have continued to deal with their own guilt of the legacy of slavery by pursuing the flawed strategy of creating more social service programs with little or no accountability and nothing other than anecdotal evidence of results.”

“Keeping alive programs that do nothing more than keep minorities mired in a culture of dependency is self-defeating and hurts the very people that liberals profess to want to help,” he had warned.

The pro-crime theorists of the left prefer to think of men like Sheriff Clarke as thoughtless proponents of brute force who are unwilling to consider root causes, but Clarke understands root causes far better than they do. When he warns that it’s the ghetto rather than the police that needs fixing, he can back the argument up with a wealth of statistics. When he shoots down the lies of #BlackLivesMatter about “genocide” or the ACLU’s false claims about “racial profiling,” he does it with hard numbers.

Sheriff Clarke is the left’s worst nightmare, a dedicated cop and a relentless thinker who can take apart their political and social failures with the same methodology that he used at crime scenes.

The left likes to castigate black conservatives as alien to the community, but Sheriff Clarke has proven them wrong by winning election after election. When he asks, “How do we go from Rosa Parks to Mike Brown as symbols of the Civil Rights Movement,“ he is speaking as the voice of a true civil rights movement which meets dependency with responsibility and victimhood with courage.

The war on police is really a debate about personal responsibility. And personal responsibility is the new and final civil rights movement. As weeping community organizers sell t-shirts decorated with photos of criminals, Sheriff Clarke rides tall with a call for personal responsibility and individual freedom.

That is why Sheriff Clarke is FrontPage Magazine’s Man of the Year.

While the media celebrates whining crybullies, we stand with the courage and commitment shown by one man. By taking a stand, Sheriff Clarke has become more than the Sheriff of Milwaukee County.

He has become America’s Sheriff.

His leadership is an inspiration to all of us to take a stand in our profession and in our community for our values, our freedom and our country.